Our Father (51 page)

“Well, we could fix you up a bit, you know,” Mary said haughtily. “You could be very attractive if you tried. Unless you consider it a badge of honor to wear nothing but jeans.”

“Thanks a lot. I don’t own anything else,” Ronnie said between her teeth. Three pairs of jeans, some tops, two pairs of high-tops, a raincoat, a jean jacket and a down jacket: that’s my wardrobe. I travel light.

“Well, maybe we could cut something down for you. Teresa has a gift with a needle. I have a black silk I don’t wear anymore,” Mary said, and almost thinking aloud, allowed her glance to travel to Ronnie’s feet and legs, imagining them encased in black satin slippers and hose. …

Then saw Ronnie’s face.

Mary sat back. “Maybe,” she said, “you could come separately. You could drive yourself in the Alfa, sit in the back of the church. We’d make special arrangements for you …”

“What would that accomplish!” Elizabeth shouted. “That defeats the entire purpose! It’s us—the four of us—in the face of him, don’t you see?”

Alex stared at her. Ronnie gazed at the ceiling. Mary rearranged her face sympathetically and turned to Ronnie. “I understand how you feel. And I want you there too, I truly do, I feel it will be wrong if you’re not.” Her voice changed, as if suddenly she was feeling what she was saying. “Without you we feel incomplete, missing a link … part of our heart.”

Ronnie met her eyes for the first time. She stood up and walked to the bar, set down her Coke glass and poured a scotch. “Anybody else?”

They all stood up, walked to the bar, poured drinks for themselves. Elizabeth put her hand on Ronnie’s arm as she stood there; Mary put a hand on her head. Alex embraced her, refusing to let her go for a long minute. Then they all sat down again.

“Ohhh, what a day!” Mary sighed, tossing off her shoes.

“I don’t see why you always wear high heels,” Elizabeth said in an irritated voice. “Naturally you’re exhausted. And they’re terrible on your feet.”

“I normally have no trouble with my feet, thank you very much, Elizabeth!”

“There must be some way to get around all this,” Alex said biting her lip. “Some way to include Ronnie without calling undue attention to her. …”

“I could come as the daughter of the longtime family servant. Don’t family retainers sometimes get invited to the funerals of their lords and masters? Isn’t Aldo invited? And Mrs. Browning? Aren’t they slotted into row two hundred or something?”

No one responded.

“Or you could wear a dress with a train, Mary, and I could walk behind you and hold it up off the ground.”

She sipped her drink, glanced at their lowered faces, and shamefaced, leaned forward to them. “I’m sorry. I know you didn’t create this situation, and I believe you don’t like it either.”

Three sets of eyes rose, warmed gratefully.

“Look. He never acknowledged me. I’m not going to acknowledge him. To attend his funeral, however I did it, would be to acknowledge him.”

“But not acknowledging him is not acknowledging
us
,” Alex argued. “We’re tied to each other through him.”

Ronnie sat back, pondered. “Yeah,” she finally decided, “Stephen Upton gave us our biological bond, but he did everything he could to keep us from forming any other kind. Besides, how many sisters get along, care about each other? How many brothers do you know who are competitive and jealous of each other? We’re tied to each other through ourselves, through our own efforts, our own … love.” Her face flamed.

I can’t believe I used that word.

“And if our tie unravels,” she added slowly, deliberately, “it’s because that love is insufficient.”

They all looked at her.

“He came to
your
mother’s funeral,” Alex said with a wily look.

“And told me to get her shit out of his house right after it,” Ronnie muttered.

They all stared at the rug.

When Ronnie finally looked up, her voice was firm, calm. “If I don’t go, you’ll feel incomplete—you say—and I’ll feel left out. I admit it: I probably will. But if I go, the press may pick me up, pick up my relation to you, may make my life—and maybe yours—miserable. So for me the choice is between two potential miseries. But they’re not equal. Say the press doesn’t notice me, what are you going to do with me afterwards? Take me to the reception at Louisburg Square and introduce me to the governor? To your father’s nephew, the possible next governor of Massachusetts? Or will you ask me to sit in the car with Aldo waiting for you? Or take the train home to Lincoln and walk back from the station? Or go to my friend Rosa’s house over in Somerville and wait for you to pick me up? A
limo
in Somerville? She’d never live it down. Or go to Linda’s on the T?

“Don’t you see: whatever I do, I’m going to feel left out. There is no alternative to that for me.”

They all gazed sadly at her. Then Mary got up and walked over and bent over Ronnie and kissed her lightly on the forehead.

Hollis had named himself head usher and was there early, meeting the great men as they stepped out of their limousines, making the appropriate conversation—a great loss, but a life well lived, a long life, needless to grieve unduly, and how are you, Chip, hear you pulled off a real coup with Bonn last week. …

But he couldn’t breathe easy until he saw the Upton car pull up and
three
sisters get out, god that Mary, exquisite in black chiffon, even though he was getting on these days and couldn’t always get it up, even though she was one of his best friends’ daughters, he really wouldn’t mind …

Anyway, the important thing is the wog bastard isn’t with them, which is what his stomach had been worrying about all morning, forcing him to down several antacid tablets and finally Evelyn had made him swallow a couple of tablespoons of that disgusting white stuff. …

What would I have said to the president? the governor? Bill Benton of the BCLI Bank? How could it have been explained to the press? Claim no knowledge of course, mutter something about an old family retainer, but still …

It would have been impossible under any circumstances, the girl stood out so with her color, that short square Mexican body and those Upton eyes blazing in her head, Jesus, and even Cab’s chin, so noticeable, so remarkable, remarkable looking girl she was or would be if she ever wore anything but dirty jeans and T-shirts. … If her mother looked anything like her, you could understand why Cab …

Well, but it was all right, he sighed, his smile properly subdued as he bowed, kissed their hands, three of them erect and dignified in black, all wearing hats, Mary’s with a veil, so lovely, up the steps into the church, scandal that it was in such bad shape but it had a great history, it was central to New England history. And with the bishop presiding, it had seedy class, the mark of Boston in a way, not glitzy like New York or L.A.

Everyone else had already arrived except the governor and he’d accompany the president, they’d arrive last, there was their limousine now, Hollis stepped forward, prepared himself, the door opened, he stood erect, put out his hand, Mr. President, Mrs. Reagan, Governor, led them into the already full church, led them to the front row alongside former president Nixon and Helmut Schmidt and Richard von Weizsäcker, the president of West Germany, and the British ambassador. Jim Baker in the second row with the vice president and the widows … the daughters that is … and most of the Council on Foreign Relations. In the row behind them, in the Upton pew (marked with a discreet plaque), Mary’s children sat with the nieces and nephews, most prominently Worth Upton IV, who was probably going to be the next governor of Massachusetts, and might even someday make president.

With grave approval, Hollis noted Peter Highland, the Texas oil billionaire, Arnold M. Richards, chairman of Calloosa, and dozens more chairmen of the richest corporations and foundations in the country. He counted three former secretaries of state, Elizabeth’s boss at Treasury, lawyers from the most important firms in New York, Boston, and Washington. Looking around, he spotted the CEOs of every major insurance company in America. In the first row on the left-hand side, Henry Kissinger sat beside a Rockefeller and the heads of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the present national security adviser. Every high-ranking Republican in the country was there.

It was the funeral of the decade, and he, Hollis Whitehead, had arranged the whole thing—with the assistance of the secretaries in the office of the governor and some presidential aides, of course. He, Hollis Whitehead, could count himself attorney for and trusted confidant of the greatest men in the United States. With a solemn self-consciousness of the weighty place in history borne by these great men, he took his place as one—if only a minor one—among them, at the end of the row where Evelyn waited for him beside the Upton nephews. And when he took his wife’s hand with bowed head and a humble heart, there were tears in his eyes. Dear old Cab.

Ronnie sat at the computer for two hours, but barely saw the screen. She was merely moving words about. She decided to clear her head by taking a walk, and set out toward town, a longer walk than the one through the back woods. Everything seemed gray—earth, trees, sky. Her face was shadowed by the hood of her down jacket, but she was grateful for her Indian face, which she knew seemed impassive, concealed any tumult inside her. My face has built-in privacy, she thought.

They hadn’t acted the way she thought they would last night, she had been being her old negative self. They hadn’t totally abandoned her, they cared about her, cared to some degree anyway, no, they cared a lot, they had the same feeling of connection she had, they too seemed to feel that their connection mattered profoundly, that it kept each of them from feeling like a fragment, the terrible feeling of being like a discarded hand or eye floating in space, eternally in search of the arm or head it belonged to. Blood ties were not like friendship, friendship could be changed, blood couldn’t, not ever—a family was something you were irrevocably tied to. It survived disagreements, conflict, even hatred. Even if the connection were severed, it went on living, it had a life of its own. People who hated their parents or siblings might avoid them for decades yet if they were reconnected with them, symbolically or really, they could rise into a tornado of ferocity, explode, even kill. Blood ties were stronger than marriage by far—husbands and wives could divorce and completely forget about the existence of the other. Look how little impression any of Mary’s marriages made on her—all except the last one, Don. …

But blood ties …! Look at Mary yearning for Elizabeth’s love, approval, all these years; and Alex all these years gnawing her heart out for her sisters. And Elizabeth denying it, pretending she didn’t need anybody, but she was the loneliest of all of them, longed most for … something. No one ever longed for me of course. Oh, Momma did, what am I thinking? But here I was, completely unaware of wanting them, yet all the while wanting to be recognized as their sister, as his child, wanting it almost more than I wanted to breathe or eat or walk and I didn’t even know it.

To live, you must love, Ronnie.

Is that what she meant?

Okay, so they feel it, but strongly enough to counter the effect of all those millions of dollars they’re inheriting? Strongly enough that when they leave here I’ll be anything to them but an embarrassment, a sister remembered but left behind, like some half-wit half sister who married years ago and is now an alcoholic slob living in a trailer camp out west somewhere.

Too many differences among us. Even the surface ones are amazing really. Lizzie and Mary were at least raised Episcopalian and I guess they consider me Catholic and Alex seems to consider herself Jewish.

But even if we were all the same everything, we’d have trouble understanding each other. Our take on things isn’t the same. We don’t inhabit the same mindspace, and we certainly don’t share the same … heartspace. Share enough feeling that we can reach across all the extremes of what we don’t share.

It’s like the problem all the women’s movements have faced—women come from different classes, religions, colors. … No movement has ever been able to unify for very long, or in large numbers, can’t get past all the differences. Rich women need maids, need other women to be poor. Hatred among white, black, brown, yellow, red, all the variations, all the religions and splinter religions, how clever they are, the ones who made up, set up this system. Keeps us at each other’s throats while they sit safely in luxury raking in all the moolah. Start wars, send us off to kill each other while they stay home, make laws and weapons.

We all join in wholeheartedly, men hate women, whites blacks, straights hate gays, religions hate religions. …

And you’re so pure? Jesus, I do the same thing, participate in this. All my life I’ve been part of it. Who don’t I hate? Rich white bitches looking down on a little
chicana
, straights who act homophobic, whites who treat people of color like a servant class, women who spend more on a dress than a working woman earns in a month, men who buy two three-thousand-dollar suits, exorbitantly expensive cars, stereos, airplanes, all the male toys, men who treat women like a servant class, men who look at women as if they were things to buy, who whistle at them on the streets, men who rape, murder, beat women, men who pay women like me too little to live on, men who pass laws that harm women, men who think they own women’s bodies, men who vote themselves more and more power, men who build armaments then make us pay for them out of our taxes, men who poison the entire earth, men who rule, men like him. …

Him.

But how can I not hate him? How can I not hate his kind? How can I not hate the system that gives them this power?

And if I give up my hate, how do I hold myself together?

She stood still on the grass under an old oak, thinking. Then she walked on, hands in her pockets, head bowed, tiredly, like a weary old woman.

Alex, Mary, and Ronnie were drinking wine in the playroom. “Not that I need any more,” Alex sighed. “Good heavens, there was so much food and drink at that man’s house—what was his name?”