Our Father (50 page)

David will want to invest it, put it away for the kids’ future, but there’s too much, they don’t need that much, that much money isn’t good for people. Especially for kids. No. I can’t let him do that. Some of it, yes, but not all. But I’ve never opposed David about anything. How can I do it now? This damned money is going to wreck my marriage, this inheritance, why did he have to do that to me?

What I’d like to do, he probably won’t want me to do it, is give it to the nuns—they could use it for something worthwhile. Maybe if I gave him half to help the Ethiopian Jews settling in Israel. He had tears in his throat when we were talking the other night, I could hear them in his voice, so proud of Israel for taking in those poor people, homeless, with nothing. Even though Israel is so small, and has so many problems of its own, it always makes room for Jews in the Jewish homeland, the state as it should be but almost never is, he said, a state that exists not just for the men who rule it but that is concerned with its people. Funny to hear him so emotional. Most of the time he’s angry at Israel, thinks it’s militaristic. But maybe the tears just meant he misses me more than he says.

Drying her hair with a towel, she walked naked into her bedroom and threw open the window. Cold air blasted in, but she stood there as if she were trying to bring herself back to consciousness.

Drunk, it’s as if I’m drunk. Isn’t that what they do to drunks? Toss them into cold showers? She wrapped the towel around her shivering body, pulled the window shut and went for her pajamas.

I need to get sober. Drunk on money am I? On the promise of money. On words that mean money. Nothing’s really different, is it? I’m still the same person I was this morning, aren’t I? Why couldn’t I call David and tell him? Sat there for almost an hour but couldn’t bring myself to pick up the phone.

That time in Jerusalem, when David attended that conference of chemical engineers. We stayed at that wonderful guesthouse, Mishkenot Sha’ananim. I couldn’t sleep the first night and from there I could watch the sun come up over the walls of the Old City. First time I ever heard of the Shechinah, she-who-dwells-among-us, really means the neighbor-woman, but also the spirit indwelling, Esther said, the spirit in us that reaches out to others, who forms community. Esther, a rabbi in spirit but not allowed to be one, she’s a woman, spoke like a prophet, a healer, she sold potions, secret teas and herbs. Lived above a potter’s shop in the Old City, stone walls, stone streets, voices echoing, quiet in the Jewish Quarter, the Muslim and Christian quarters clamorous like bazaars, brilliant-colored silks hanging across the passageways to cool them from the sun, everyone pulling at you, come, come in, buy buy. But the street the pottery shop was on, Yoel Moshe Salomon, was only a narrow passage like an alley, the sidewalks so narrow you had to walk single file.

The tiny shops opened onto the street, their doors wide open. The potter’s shop had a door leading to a courtyard where he kept his wheel. Esther tended the shop when he went for clay or to make a delivery or worked his wheel in the yard. I visited her while David attended the conference, sat and drank tea with her in the cool beautiful shop full of things made of earth, made by a man’s hands. I’d like to go back, see if she’s still there. She told me to walk around outside the walled city, just walk.

Out the Damascus Gate, brown hills spreading across the visible world, like an entire hemisphere baking under a merciless sun, a few trees dotting the terraced mountains, tall thin shapely cypresses, the olive groves, a few eucalyptus trees. Once long ago, plum trees grew in Jerusalem, she said. Gone now. I blotted out the ugly new buildings, Brigham Young University, the Hyatt, the Hilton. I tried to see it as I remembered it, I knew how it used to be, I knew I’d been there before in another life.

I stood on a mountain like that, the goats were running around my legs. I stood for hours with my arms folded staring out across the red-brown hills, there were more trees then, I remember olive trees and a few domed stucco houses. Only a few then. The sky was the same, the huge blue spread of it, I could see for miles, the dry red hills, the merciless land that everybody fought for, why I wonder? Did I know then? Watching for something, an army maybe, a horde of men, I was planning something, leading something, I had a heart of steel, I was a fighter, a leader of fighters. Hard land, scraping food from the earth with your fingernails, hard life, but I didn’t question it, didn’t question anything then, just tried to survive, one knew in those days what constituted survival. We all knew.

Tall I was for a woman and very thin, with a hawk face and long thick straggly black hair. The wind blew it around my face. I stood with folded arms, watching. Five thousand years ago maybe. And when I spoke, people listened; I uttered words and people attended to them, acted on them. Maybe I was a prophet.

Dawn rose over city walls ancient as tortoises, gilded and pocked and softened by time, but I remember when they were new. I knew this place better than my own name, yet standing there I didn’t know my own name, didn’t know my history, my past.

But I knew what I was, what I had been, what I had to do, something I never knew before. But I forgot it when I came home. How could I do that? Blanked out memory. Until now. What does ten million dollars have to do with that? All it will do is cause a breach between David and me, I can’t stand that, I hate that. I wish he’d left me out of his will. I wish he’d forgotten me completely. I wish Ronnie would take it. It isn’t what I wanted from him, it’s not what I can use, what I need.

She pulled down the covers and got into the cold bed, still shivering.

And the worst part is there really isn’t anyone I can talk to about this. Elizabeth and Mary won’t understand, I know they won’t. David won’t understand. The nuns won’t understand why I don’t just give it to them. But how could I be sure it wouldn’t go to pay for some anti-abortion action or something like that. And if I gave it to Israel, how could I be sure they wouldn’t use it to buy weapons? And that isn’t what I want, not at all. To talk to Ronnie would be insulting: she
was
left out. God: I wonder how that must feel. Even worse than I feel now.

Ronnie lay naked on her bed staring at the ceiling, her arms thrown out to the sides. A bitter taste wouldn’t leave her mouth, must have been the strawberries they’d had at dinner, strawberries in December, probably been picked unripe, flown up from California or Costa Rica. Sour, lingering taste. Everything had happened as she had expected. She hadn’t expected anything different. What, after all these years he was going to remember something in her that touched him once, some little gleam of eye or run or jump that had caught at his heart? Insert some sweet little clause about my unacknowledged daughter …? He never even looked at me until he raped me, of course he must have, under his eyes, when I wasn’t aware, otherwise why would he … how would he even have known? No, if he’d been going to do it at all, he’d have done it to my face, in life; he’d never put evidence of his peccadillo on paper, in his will for all the world to know, remember, to be read and stamped and sealed in some court, to go down in the history books, the great statesman Stephen Upton. …

I didn’t expect acknowledgment for one minute.

Not ever, never, not for one instant.

So why does it seem so bitter?

Money is shit, Freud said didn’t he? Most people think money is love. Maybe I do too? Not love exactly, but giving it or not giving it does seem some kind of measure of feeling. Food too, Momma, her face flushed from cooking, laying out our dinner on the kitchen table so pleased, so pleased at there being enough food for us, for me, good food too, so happy that my eyes lit up at the smells, the heat rising, Momma’s good food, I was so happy to eat it, made her happy too. Holding a hand, embracing, is sort of like that too. Only money is different, I don’t know how, maybe because it’s such a weapon. But so is food, look at the Ethiopians, the Somalians, withholders of food during war … the Nazis in their death camps making people work while starving them.

Nothing is pure.

Love he didn’t know about but he knew about giving and withholding. Surely he must have been loved once, held by his nanny, probably even his mother and father, rich kid in a house filled with luxury and ease, why not? Not like poor Rosa, grabbing up one kid under the waist while she stirred a pot with the other hand, a screaming toddler grabbing her around the legs. …

But he loved Momma. I know he did. She knew it too. Only he didn’t know it.

Maybe Mary’s right, maybe I should look through her things, maybe there is something, a note, a letter, a valentine. It would have meant so much to her even though she couldn’t read it, she’d have known what it was … maybe he slipped once and put something on paper, gave it to her.

What crap. Why would he write a note to a woman who couldn’t read?

Everything is exactly as I expected. Even them, the way they were different after Hollis left, you could see it, rich women suddenly, withdrawn, already planning how to spend it. Their whole world changed, Mary saved. Didn’t I predict that this sisterhood wouldn’t last? Is sisterhood possible only in hardship? Does it inevitably fall apart when things get easier, softer? Lilah and I were closer when we were having a hard time, trying to get by on our teaching assistant’s pay, living in that awful room in Roxbury, crack addicts on every corner. Living on rice and beans and lettuce, we had such laughs, we made a wonderful joke out of our poverty. But once that damned Professor Witlow we called him Witless discouraged her so cruelly, she fell apart, left school, went and got a job as a secretary and moved out, didn’t want me with her, probably resented the idea of supporting me. …

Not that the brothers are any better. Brotherhood too seems hard to sustain once one person is coopted, that’s the secret, make it better for one and unity dissolves, stratification it’s called. Destroys union, community.

They’ll each go their own way now, back to the way they were in the beginning. Still, it was nice while it lasted. I liked it.

Her eyes moistened.

So if everything is exactly as I expected, why do I feel so alone suddenly? Alone in this house, in the world, in the universe, like a fragment broken off from a star that long ago whirled eons away, a tiny fragment whirling in orbit, alone in the dark cold silence forever and ever and ever. Or did I feel this way before and just not recognize it?

You are alone. You have neither mother nor father and your half siblings live in different worlds. You have no blood kin that accepts you.

She gazed out her window at the night sky, barely perceptible above the trees, then got up and stood there looking up. Dark tonight dark dark no stars. Sometimes the heavens are peopled with stars, dotted so heavily you imagine stars living on top of each other like street folks looking out the windows, sitting on stoops, standing in the shops, working at their sinks. …

Go back where you came from. Better there than here. Why should you stay here as their caretaker? Noradia’s daughter, occupation passed down in the family, while they go off to their penthouses and forget they ever knew you.

What about the dissertation?

Fuck it.

Find a job somewhere, any kind of job, something to get you by, live decently, why aim for anything in their kind of world. There is nothing you can do, ever, that will make them recognize you as a full person, will force them to acknowledge you. The most you can ever be is part of a power bloc of the marginal, detested, feared, mocked, one more illegitimate trying to blast open the doors. Concentrate on what will make you happy: find a lovely warm woman, someone kind who will hold you, will understand you, someone you can let yourself cry with. …

Cry with?

Jesus, Ronnie. Someone to laugh with is more like it girl!

You’re just depressed tonight. Left out. You let yourself come to love them. And believe they loved you.

What a fucking fool you are.

22

“Y
OU HAVE TO COME,”
Elizabeth said quietly but with an almost threatening edge in her voice. “You must.”

Ronnie shook her head.

“We need you,” Alex wailed. “I’ll feel so alone without you!” Then swiveling toward Elizabeth and Mary, reaching her hand out toward Mary’s arm, she added swiftly, “Not
alone
alone.
You
know. But you all know these famous people and you know how to act with them and I don’t and”—she turned back to Ronnie—“I need Ronnie to hold my hand.”

“On the assumption that I don’t know how to act with them either,” Ronnie said dryly.

Distant and stiff again, Elizabeth thought. She’s changed. She’s been different since the will was read, Father’s split us again. She garnered all her energy.

“We have to be together,” Elizabeth insisted, “all four of us! We’re sisters! We need each other! We need you! And you need us! Tell the truth, how will you feel sitting here alone while we go off to Father’s funeral? Sitting in your room in front of your computer, you’ll be miserable and lonely, you’ll feel left out. And so will we!” She stood and put her hands on the sides of her head. “Don’t let Father win again!” she cried.

Jesus H. Christ. Is she really that upset? Ronnie’s face softened and she spoke quietly. “Look, Lizzie, Mary’s right. If I’m with you, the press might make a scandal of it, might ask questions, investigate, write articles, print pictures of my mother, of me. … I don’t want to be known as his bastard for the rest of my life!”

Elizabeth took her hands away from her head and shook it hard. She turned to Mary in despair. “Say something,” she begged.

“We don’t
know
they will,” Mary mused. “It’s possible they won’t pay any attention to you. At all. Or to us, for that matter. Especially with the president coming to the funeral.”

“Don’t act mealymouthed with me!” Ronnie cried. “You know you’ll be photographed in the limo, getting out of the limo, sitting in the pew together, shaking the president’s hand, all that. You in your fancy black dresses and hats, and I’m supposed to follow you in my grubby jeans.”