Our Father (42 page)

Ronnie, embarrassed, looked away from Alex, but Elizabeth, amused, picked up the subject. “Yes, she keeps us all on our toes. She’s a feminist, card-carrying. She certainly challenges me.”

“You, Elizabeth!” cried Christine. “I always think of you as the intellectual.”

“Oh, she is,” Mary said fervently. “But Ronnie gives her a run for her money.”

“Really.”

“So that’s what the four of you do all day? Argue about … intellectual matters?”

“No, we work,” Elizabeth answered. “Ronnie on her dissertation, me on my book, Mary on her poetry, Alex … on her soul, I guess,” she finished, smiling.

“Oh, that’s nice, I like that, Elizabeth.” Alex’s face was radiant.

“You work.”

“I didn’t know you wrote poetry, Mary.”

“I’m not very good. Not good enough. But I’m working on it.”

“You put us to shame,” Eloise said, without a shred of shame showing. “I myself do nothing. I just enjoy life. Except of course we all work to help various charities, give luncheons and balls and that sort of thing, which is some sort of contribution I suppose. But mostly,” she shrugged at her own irresponsibility like a delightful child, “we have fun.”

“So tell me,” Francine said to Ronnie, “are you converting them to feminism?”

Ronnie shrugged, unsmiling. “I’m not trying.”

“Well, she’s set me thinking about things in a different way. Her view of history. …” Mary let it hang.

“I don’t know if it’s feminism …,” Alex began tentatively. “A lot of the things Ronnie believes in, I believe in, but I never knew they were feminist ideas.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, I don’t know. What’s really important in life, what matters more than other things. You know, like love and community and well-being. As opposed to, well, power I guess. Worldly power. Which is such an illusion, but people take it for reality, you see. As if it were something you could hold on to forever, that would protect you.”

Three pairs of eyes glazed over as Alex continued in this vein until, to the guests’ relief, lunch was announced. Mary gracefully steered the conversation back to gossip and acquisitions, trips and parties, and Ronnie crept back into silence, grateful to be ignored for the rest of the lunch.

Still, when it was over and the guests had left, she wandered back to her room feeling a sense of harmony in herself, with her sisters. They had wanted to include her, wanted her to be accepted, had put her forward. She had not, herself, much helped in this effort, and did not regret that. Those women were not her kind, would never be her kind. They would not recognize her, she thought, if she ran into them on a Boston street, or if they did, would not want to linger. But neither would she. Was it necessary, for sisterhood, that all women love and fully accept all other women? If so, sisterhood was impossible. But somewhere, under the surface conversation, they had thought about the serious matters that had been mentioned, and while they were all dependent on rich men—at least to some degree—and accepted the values of that world, they also had sympathy and a kind of guilt for not being, not supporting, something else. And that was something, wasn’t it? They weren’t enemies. They just weren’t quite friends.

She sat down at her computer feeling full of energy and worked well for the rest of the afternoon.

The sisters gathered in the playroom Tuesday night after dinner to discuss strategy. Elizabeth and Mary scrawled lists or outlines on lined yellow pads; Alex stood at the glass doors communing with the stars. Ronnie listened to their ideas, agreed, disagreed. Eventually, after a discussion in which voices were raised, they discarded their original strategy and decided that each sister would be both prosecutor and defender, that Alex would be the final judge but they would each have a voice in the judgment.

Wednesday they were tense and silent, each of them—you could almost see it, Ronnie thought—arguing with herself in her head, preparing her argument with him, the silent man. They picked at the cold dinner Mrs. Browning had left for them, but forced themselves to remain at the table for the usual amount of time. While Doris cleared the table, they went into the playroom and turned on the television set, whose blare and glare passed by them: they barely saw or heard it.

“We have to disconnect the intercom,” Elizabeth said.

“Why? That makes it seem as if we’re planning a crime!” Alex shuddered. “Like breaking and entering.”

“You want him summoning Doris, buzzing constantly while we talk? He will. It will buzz all over the house. She’ll come running, she’ll see that something’s wrong.”

“I’ll do it,” Ronnie said.

It was nine-thirty when they went up. Stephen’s television set was on but his eyes were closed. Ronnie bent and pulled out the plug connecting his intercom. Mary unplugged his telephone. Elizabeth slid the remote control from under his limp left hand, blipped the television set off, and put the remote on a dresser across the room. Alex pushed back the swivel table holding the television set and placed three straight-backed chairs at the foot of the bed and another near the window, facing the bed but at some distance from it.

Stephen’s eyes popped open the moment the sound stopped. His left eye widened in alarm and he reached for his remote control. When he saw it was missing, he reached for the intercom. He pressed it wildly, but no one came running up the stairs. Unmoved by the contortions on Stephen’s face, his wild hitting of the intercom button, his raised fist, his bared teeth, his rage, the sisters stood and gazed at him. He looks like the villain in a silent movie, Mary thought.

All four of them stood together on one side of the bed. The alarm on Stephen’s face was patent, it looked like …

I’ve never seen him afraid, Ronnie thought.

I never imagined Father afraid, Mary thought.

God, Elizabeth thought, he’s terrified.

Oh poor man, so frightened, Alex thought. He must think we’re going to kill him or something.

Elizabeth began. “Father, you have unfinished business with all of us. You know that, don’t you?”

He glared.

“We thought of turning you in,” Mary said sadly. “You know, bringing charges, telling the district attorney, or whomever it is one tells in these cases. We understand that there is no statute of limitations in these cases—or that it begins only after the victim remembers what happened.”

“Not that
we
ever forgot,” Elizabeth said. “But Alex did. She’s just remembered.”

The left side of his face twisted, the left side of his body writhed in rage, his arm rose, his fist threatened them, his mouth worked, his eye stormed. They stood close together, their shoulders almost touching.

“But it seemed—well, they would hardly indict you now, would they? You can’t even speak in your own defense. And years ago, when it was happening, they wouldn’t have indicted you then either, would they? They wouldn’t have believed us. Such an important man you were. …” Elizabeth moved back and walked to one of the straight-backed chairs and sat down. She lighted a cigarette. “My mother—you do remember my mother?—she always said you were above the law. You framed her and got away with it. God knows what else you got away with. We can’t have been your only victims.” She blew smoke toward the door, crossed her legs, waggled her foot, the only sign of her nervousness.

Was he smiling? Could it be he was smiling?

“I’ve been reading your papers, you know,” she continued. “Sitting down there in your office reading thirty-year-old memos packed away in cardboard cartons. You were a vicious bastard weren’t you. Someday someone’s going to write quite a nasty biography of you, Father. Of course, someone else will probably write an idolatrous one. The one thing you can count on is”—she turned back to face him—“it won’t be one of us.”

Insofar as one could read his expression, he seemed to be sneering.

Elizabeth sighed. “I know, I know what you believe: women don’t understand Realpolitik. Don’t know how the game has to be played to win.”

“Let’s not get into this, Lizzie,” Mary urged. She turned to the old man. “The point is, Father, what you did to us. We have never had any recourse for your terrible crimes against us. We were children. Even if you hadn’t been who you are … it would have been close to impossible. And we still don’t really have legal recourse. But we do have power. Over you. And this gives us moral recourse. We’re going to put you on trial ourselves.”

One side of his mouth cracked wide, a noise emerged from his throat.

The old bastard is laughing, Ronnie thought. But his left hand was searching for the telephone. It scrabbled around the side table, searched the bedclothes.

“We’re going to try you for incest, pass judgment, and enforce that judgment, Father,” Mary said.

Alex’s light sweet voice intervened. “At first, we thought one of us would act as prosecutor, one as defender, one as accuser, and one as judge. But we couldn’t decide who could defend you or who should accuse … since we’re all your accusers. And since none of us is really impartial enough to be the judge.”

She spoke quietly, reasonably, turning her sweet face as if she were arguing a matter of principle with someone who was bound to understand.

His mouth was still cracked in that queer smile.

“So each of us is going to speak against you and for you. Doesn’t that seem fair? It’s the best solution we could come up with, Father. And we are all going to vote together on the judgment.”

“But Alex alone will determine the penalty,” Elizabeth put in coldly. “Because she is the kindest of us and because she seems to have some sense of higher things,” she explained adding dryly, “At least she believes she does. And since none of the rest of us feels we have such a sense, we’re willing to leave that to her.”

The crack broadened. He was finding this hilarious.

“Okay,” Ronnie said abruptly, “let’s get on with it. Elizabeth, you’re the oldest. You go first.”

Elizabeth sat up erectly. Ronnie and Mary sat down on either side of her. Alex took the chair by the window. She held a pad and pen loosely in her hand.

“If at any time you wish to speak, just …”—Elizabeth peered at his hand—“just hold your hand up and I’ll stop. Then you can write on your cellophane pad. We’ll listen to anything you care to say. Or write.”

Elizabeth too had a yellow pad lying on her lap, but she did not glance at it. Nor did she look at Stephen. She looked at her hands, folded loosely over the pad in her lap. She said: “In August 1942, when I was ten years old, you entered my bedroom in this house during the night and raped me. You told me that this was how fathers showed their love for their daughters and that you loved me. I will not detail the acts you performed, made me perform.” She turned her head sideways, catching her breath, clearing her throat.

Ronnie stared at him incredulously. Was he smiling?

“Afterwards, you threatened that if I told anyone what you had done, you would cut my mother and me off and leave us penniless. You also said no one would believe me. You raped me again after that, many times, every summer until I was seventeen and stopped you forcibly.”

She finally looked at Stephen. “Do you have anything to say? Do you deny any of what I’ve said?”

Ronnie gasped silently. He
was
staring at her, smiling.

Elizabeth stared back. Ronnie had never seen that expression on her face: numb, helpless, appealing, like a young girl. He did not drop his eye. She dropped hers. This time, she glanced at her pad.

“It wasn’t difficult to frame your defense. Because I feel certain—and seeing your expression now, more certain than ever—that you and generations of men before you felt that incest was their prerogative, their right—that fathers own the bodies of their daughters as they do those of their wives and slaves. And that they believe they have the right to own other human beings, to control them, that indeed, they define manhood as the ability to control others. Knowing your heart as I believe I do, I believe this is what you too think. And so I spent all day yesterday and today reading in history and myth and philosophy, trying to frame these charges in a way you would understand and accept.”

The lips narrowed; the eye narrowed.

“And I think that to do that, I must discuss the nature of fatherhood itself. But I believe to define fatherhood, we must first define motherhood. Now, traditionally motherhood means carrying a child within one’s body to term and giving birth to it. Some mothers feed the baby from their bodies, some take responsibility for its daily care until it is adult. But that responsibility is made impossible by societies in which economic forms are such that mothers cannot carry their children with them while they find or grow the food to feed them, as they do in gathering-hunting and horticultural societies. So motherhood is not a given natural role, but a role partly given by nature, and partly defined by the economics of society.”

Elizabeth whispered to Ronnie, who poured a glass of water for her from the pitcher Alex had placed on a side table. Alex glanced at Stephen, offering him one: he merely glared at her. The room was charged with silence as Elizabeth sipped her water. Alex watched solemnly. Ronnie and Mary stared straight ahead. Stephen tried to stare at the wall to his right. Elizabeth cleared her throat and continued.

“And men determine the economics of society. Fathers traditionally have avoided the hands-on responsibility for babies. Mothers have traditionally taken it, but especially after the child is weaned, they bear no special obligation to do so: since both parents are genetically represented equally in the child, both have an equal investment in fostering the child’s survival.

“Moreover, it is clear that different acts are required to foster the child in different economies. While in gathering-hunting societies one parent alone can maintain a child—especially if she or he lives in a village society—this is more difficult in horticultural societies unless the maintaining parent, which is usually the mother, owns the right to use of land. In an industrial economy such as ours, two or more parents are necessary to maintain a child. Does that seem clear?” she asked Stephen sharply.