Our Father (13 page)

“Yes. I was born on Christmas Day, 1947,” Alex said urgently.

She’s doing a jigsaw puzzle on which her life depends and has just fitted in a piece, Ronnie thought.

“I was at Concord. I picked up the paper one night and there was Father—right on the front page. Walking down the steps of some church with this young woman with a headline, ‘CABINET MEMBER WEDS SECRETARY.’ I had to read well into the first paragraph to find out that her name was Amelia.”

Alex leaned farther forward. “But you knew her later on, didn’t you?”

“I told you he loved her! What do you want from me?”

Alex stared at her. “Please.”

Elizabeth gave her a long sober gaze. She stood up and walked to the bar, poured scotch into a glass halfway up.

“Please,” Alex begged. She was almost whimpering.

“I remember the first summer they spent up here. He was still working in Washington, they lived in Georgetown, in the same house he’d lived in with Laura. Mary’s mother. She—your mother—was very pretty—she looked like you, same golden hair but her face was softer, not so … fierce,” she concluded in surprise. “And she transmitted … a great sweetness. It enveloped him. His face changed when he looked at her, he softened. He was always touching her, putting his hand on her arm or her back or stroking her face. And she’d look up at him so adoringly. It made me sick.” She sipped her scotch. “I hated her.”

Alex stared at her. “Why?”

Elizabeth considered. “She’d been a loved child. Like Mary. You could see it. Loved children expect everyone to love them and they do. They radiate that expectation, it’s self-fulfilling. They get love everywhere. I wasn’t loved. By anyone.”

Ronnie studied Elizabeth.

“I
wasn’t
a loved child,” Mary muttered. “I just
appeared
to be a loved child.”

“I’m sorry, Elizabeth,” Alex said sadly.

Elizabeth flared, “Don’t feel sorry for me! I’m okay, I’ve done just fine, I’m doing fine.”

Alex ignored this. Relentless as a hunting dog on the scent, she turned to Mary. “Do you remember her? The way she was then, the way he was? Do you remember me?”

“I was ten in 1946, at Peabody School. Father was living in the Georgetown house, my mother’s house, she’d furnished it, decorated it. … I went there holidays. I was probably there the Christmas after they got married, Father and Amelia, maybe Thanksgiving too, I don’t remember. … I don’t really remember her then. Maybe they went away on a honeymoon?”

“I don’t know.” Alex kept staring, concentrating on Mary, who shifted uncomfortably.

“It was so many years ago!” Mary protested. “I remember your mother was pretty, very pretty. Pretty hair. I was just a girl, taken up by my own affairs,
you
know. There were always so many parties at the holidays. I had my own room, my books, my radio, my phonograph, I had a huge record collection, and my own maid.”

“I remember your room,” Alex breathed, her eyes shut. “It was all white.”

“She’s spent her adult life trying to recover her virginity,” Elizabeth snorted.

“She was only ten,” Alex demurred, gently. “She
was
a virgin.”

They were all silent.

“Your room was white,” Alex recalled, leaning forward as if her posture alone could exert pressure, could extract whatever it was she wanted.

Mary sank back. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I was upset and Father was trying to calm me down. He let me redecorate my room. He let me make it all white. The housekeeper helped me, called in decorators, took me shopping. …”

“Why were you upset?”

Mary’s body stilled utterly. “Your mother …”

Alex’s posture was a pressure.

Mary threw out a hand. “I don’t
know
! I
don’t
know! Maybe I was jealous. Maybe I felt he was betraying my mother.”

Alex sagged.

Mary sat up angrily. “What do you want from me! They were in their own world! I can’t remember! Yes, I guess he loved her, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Alex prodded. “And what about me?”

“You like mainly white food too,” Elizabeth murmured, chuckling with pleasure. “Fish, potatoes, cauliflower, cake, cake, cake …”

“SHUT UP, ELIZABETH!” Alex cried, silencing all of them. She stood suddenly, went to the bar and poured wine into her glass without offering anything to anyone else.

“What about here,” she began again, “do you remember her here?”

“Jesus Christ, you’re impossible!” Mary cried. “Your mother is alive, why don’t you ask her whatever it is you want to know!”

“I want to know what you remember.” Patient but tense.

Mary sighed. “Look, she was nice to me but she was only a kid herself, nineteen or twenty, she couldn’t help. But she was kind—to both of us.” She turned to Elizabeth. “Remember? She went swimming with us and played checkers with me and every afternoon she’d gather us for lemonade and cookies on the porch.” Her face soft, she turned to Elizabeth. “Remember, Lizzie?”

Elizabeth shrugged.

“But after you were born,” Mary continued, “she was busy, I didn’t see so much of her or if I did she had you in her arms or was nursing you or something.”

Alex cried out in pain, “Do you remember
me
?”

The sisters stared at her.

“She was always fussing over you, talking to you, holding you, carrying you around. You had hardly any hair, just fuzz, golden fuzz. Like a halo. You were a good kid, though, you weren’t a brat,” Mary conceded.

“All kids are cute, aren’t they?” Elizabeth snarled.

Alex glared at Elizabeth.

“Look, I went to England to graduate school when I was twenty-one. You were still only five or six. I didn’t come back for four years and then I got a job in Washington and lived there. I never lived here again, I just came for the family parties and after a while you weren’t at them. I saw very little of you after you were five or six. And I never paid that much attention to you. Little children bore me.”

Mary studied her rings, recalling. “You went to England after the Fourth of July party in 1953. Father had been made under secretary that spring. How old were you then?” she asked Alex.

She counted back. “Summer of ’fifty-three I would have been five. Six that Christmas.”

“I went away to college in ’fifty-four and got married the next June. I never lived here again either.”

Alex subsided.

“What are you trying to figure out?” Mary challenged her.

“I don’t know exactly. What happened. Why we left. How he felt.”

“How he felt
about you
,” Elizabeth corrected her.

“Yes.” Faint voice. “I guess so.”

“What does your mother say?”

“She doesn’t want to … she won’t talk about it. She just says they weren’t getting along and she decided to leave. That’s all she’ll say. But …”

“But?” Mary picked it up.

Alex shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“She remarried, didn’t she?”

Alex smiled, shifted into another gear. “Yes. Charlie really was my father. He and my grandfather, they played with me, took me places—the playground, the zoo, ice skating, the circus. They were great. Charlie’s dead now. Gramp too of course. Mom really misses them. Between Charlie and me and her parents, she was filled up, she didn’t need any other life so she didn’t make a lot of friends or anything. She has no one now.”

She has you, she waited for them to say. She has your children, your nice family, she waited to hear.

“Your childhood was probably a hell of a lot more pleasant than ours,” is what Elizabeth did say finally, “so don’t envy us Father. There was nothing enviable about our childhoods, however it may seem.”

“It’s just … you wonder why your father doesn’t care about you,” Alex said, her voice thickening. “You wonder if you did something—or
were
something—that made him abandon you.”

They sat in silence watching the fire wane and die. No one got up to poke it back to life.

After dinner, exhausted, they watched TV in the playroom. As they separated to go to bed, Alex stopped them. “Ronnie’s staying,” she said. “I want her to.” No one argued, not even Ronnie.

Stupid cow, feeling sorry for herself because Father abandoned her. Doesn’t know how lucky she is. All that love her family lavished on her for no reason, just given. All the luck of who you’re born to. Jesus loves me that I know cause the Bible tells me so. Hah! Enough to make you want to go to church. Not the way Mother’s religion tells it. That bitch, even though she’d left the church she sent me to a fucking church school because she couldn’t get Father to spring for private school. Hell and damnation, sin all over the place. The damned nuns: the Catholic way to brush your teeth, the Catholic way to fucking sit and walk. No patent leather shoes because they reflected up your skirt. Until I complained to Father about my education. Heard the word Catholic and in a fury had me transferred to Concord. Mother gloated, she’d gotten him to pay for it without begging. Didn’t matter what it cost me. Made me complicit in her games.

Father never did anything until he was forced. When Mary suddenly refused to eat red meat, poking around at the food on her plate, pushing the meat aside, trying to dam up the juices, keep them from running into her potatoes, crying if the juices stained her potatoes. Ate nothing stained by blood. Father shouted at her to eat it, sent her from the table when she got hysterical. She never became a vegetarian, she became a blancomaniac! Hah! Took Father years to give in.

We’re all peculiar in this family. Look at Alex. I thought she was so normal. But she’s indefatigable, a driving pushy little thing, she wouldn’t let Mary off the hook, me either. Is our family abnormal well of course it is how could it not be, so are the Callahans, what a heritage I have, Grandpa Callahan always drunk or getting there, always brawling his arm always raised ready to hit, Grandma always cowering, the sons skinny and pale and scared-looking but full of bravado the daughters always trying to make nice act cheerful how ludicrous what a bunch except Mother, she had spirit, you have to hand it to her, she didn’t let them dominate her.

Maybe that’s what being a society lady meant to her, a way out. Every day puts on a suit or a silk dress, red red lipstick, eye makeup, blonded hair, high heels, sits there in that apartment working her wrinkled upper lip, waiting for the phone to ring. “My dear! So glad you called, yes, me too, so busy, mad isn’t it? Oh how nice, I’d love to come, I do have another party that afternoon, they pressed me so I promised, but perhaps I could stop in afterwards. …” Then sit around all afternoon and show up late. SEE: I AM WANTED.

Still she’s better off than her sisters, worn out by forty with six, eight kids and husbands who know what it is to raise a hand to a woman. Just like dear old dad. Without a pot to piss in except Geraldine, who married a man with enterprise, five-truck fleet, lords it over all of them. Hah! The things that make people proud.

Better not to marry. Helena, the nun, at least has peace and quiet in her life. And the brothers are losers, replications of the old man. Wouldn’t mind seeing them all, actually. See how they are now, how life has carved their faces. But they would probably look at me with pity, a dried-up spinster, ugly duckling. …

Mother’s maybe a little proud of me. My daughter, a career woman, assistant secretary of the treasury, very important, works in Washington like her father did, you know, years ago. An economist, travels around the world arranging economic policy. She is met at the airport by three-star generals in a limousine she meets regularly with heads of state drinking perfumed tea from delicate porcelain cups. …

Elizabeth lay on a pyre, aflame. From forehead to toes her body burned in shame.

The things that make people proud …

What have I become.

She sat up, pulled herself out of bed and walked across the room. In the dark, she found her cigarettes on the dresser, lighted one, stood there inhaling deeply.

She made me come here, summer after summer, year after year. No matter how I begged.

Someday I’ll tell her.

She walked to the window, pulled the drapes open, stared out. At nothing. Blackness.

Nothing.

Wouldn’t you think this pain would end someday?

6

M
ONDAY MORNING EARLY, BEFORE
the others were up, Elizabeth was off, taking the Alfa. She left a note: “Packing the car, I saw some bicycles in the back of the garage. They need to be cleaned up and oiled but Aldo can get them in shape. ECU.”

“What’s ECU?” Alex asked Mary.

“Her initials, of course, what do you think. Elizabeth Catherine Upton. Her mother’s name is Catherine.” Mary moved away from Alex with a petulant jerk. “I like that! She takes the car and leaves us the bicycles.”

“She said she was going to. Anyway, I thought you couldn’t drive,” Alex said. “She signs notes with her
initials
?” she asked Ronnie.

“You think we correspond?” Ronnie snapped.

“No but both of you drive, don’t you?” Mary said. “Suppose I want to go into Boston, I’ll need Aldo to drive me, and you won’t be able to get around.”

Alex and Ronnie looked at each other. “You’re concerned about
us
, Mary?” Ronnie asked.

“I just don’t want any arguments if I need the limo.”

She got no arguments. After the three of them visited Stephen in the morning, Ronnie and Alex vanished. Mary had to face the gray overcast day alone in the house. When she finally went in search of Aldo to ask him to drive her into town, she found Alex in the garage, pumping air into the tires of a bicycle. Aldo drove her to Concord, where she wandered through a few shops. She found a bookstore and in a move that would have surprised Elizabeth aimed not for the romances but for the poetry. She bought a volume of Anne Sexton and a notebook covered in Italian paper swirled with crimson, silver, and turquoise. On the way home, she stopped at the DeCordova Museum, but it was closed. Of course, Monday.

Disheartened, she entered the dim silent house. So big, so empty. Such a bleak feeling it had this house. Memories like a bad smell lingering. Would the Georgetown house feel this way?