Our Father (62 page)

“We haven’t even had time for a heart-to-heart!”

Marie-Laure gimlet-eyed her. “A what?”

“A talk. A long quiet talk together.”

Marie-Laure grimaced.

“What time are they coming?”

“Umm. Around eleven?”

“Umm. That means maybe not until twelve. Anyway, they can wait. Put on your coat and boots. We’re going for a walk.” Mary rose and left the room.

“There’s snow on the ground!” Marie-Laure whined after her. But Mary was halfway up the stairs and did not respond.

The girl sighed, dragged herself out of her chair and followed her mother.

Fifteen minutes later, warmly dressed and in fur-lined boots, Mary stood tapping her foot by the front door. “Hurry up, Marie-Laure,” she yelled up the stairs, a thing she had never done before, in this house or any other. The girl eventually appeared and sauntered down the stairs.

“We’ll walk towards town,” Mary said, taking her arm.

Marie-Laure allowed herself to be led, but she was silent as they walked down the long driveway toward the road, silent as they turned onto it and headed toward town. Mary was silent too until finally her daughter burst out, “I don’t understand what you’re doing. Why this sudden interest? You’ve never been interested in talking to me before.”

“Have I not?” Mary’s face was surprised. “I haven’t spent time with you shopping for clothes for prep school and college, helping you pack? I’ve never taken you to dinner, lunch, movies? I’ve never asked you about your grades, about your classes?”

“Rarely!” Marie-Laure exploded. “I mean, really, I could count the times. You’re always off with some
man
.” She gave the last word a bitter charge.

Mary did not respond, and they walked awhile in silence again, until Marie-Laure burst out again. “I mean, my whole childhood, you were off somewhere with some man. In Capri or Vail or Virginia or Paris or London or god knows where, while we stayed home alone with a nanny, Bertie and I. Martin was away at school, you were off with some man, my father never even bothered to lay eyes on me, so you’ll understand, Mother”—she gave that word a bitter charge too—“that I am not accustomed to parental attention.”

“I took you with me! To Capri, to Vail! To Virginia!”

“You took us a few times. Paul didn’t like children, remember? And Don … well when he was around, we could have dropped dead and you wouldn’t have noticed.”

Mary mulled that over for a while, then said thoughtfully, “That’s the way I was raised too. I was sent away to private school when I was seven. My mother was dead and I rarely saw my father, only on holidays sometimes, and then …” She stopped. She waited a bit, then started again. “That’s not to excuse it, just to say I didn’t know any better. I thought that was the way you raised kids. Most of my friends did the same thing. But I’m sorry now, and I want to change things.”

“It’s too late.”

“It’s never too late.” Mary hugged Marie-Laure’s arm closer as they trudged through the snowy grass verge of the road, faces pink from exertion, breathing deeply. “I’m forty-five, and …”

“You’re forty-eight, Mother.”

Mary stopped dead. She looked at her daughter with alarm. “I can’t be!” She counted silently. She slumped a bit. “God, I’m almost fifty!”

They set off again, Mary walking a bit slower now, as if age had caught up with her in a sudden sweep.

“Well, anyway,” she recovered herself, “I’m not young and yet being here with my sisters while Father was sick has totally changed me, changed my relation with them, created one, really—I had no relation with Alex and Ronnie before. It’s been wonderful, it makes me happy. If that can happen at forty- … eight, it can happen at twenty.”

Marie-Laure was silent now.

“I want us to be close.”

No response.

“Wouldn’t you like to have a real mother? Someone you could call when you’re unhappy or upset, or when you’ve just aced an exam or when you’re having boyfriend problems? Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t you like that?”

The girl’s face did not change expression, and she did not reply. Mary stopped again, turned to face Marie-Laure directly.

“Wouldn’t you?”

The girl would not meet her eyes. “I don’t know.”

Mary reached out and took Marie-Laure’s face between her hands. She turned it toward her.

“Wouldn’t you?”

“I guess,” she muttered, turning away again. But Mary had seen a glint of tears in her eyes, and was satisfied.

She took Marie-Laure’s arm again, held it close, set off walking. “Of course it would. And I would too. It would make me happy.”

The girl was silent, but her bodily tone had changed, was less tense.

“So tell me what’s going on in your life.”

Marie-Laure shrugged. “Nothing much.”

“Your grades weren’t great this semester, were they?”

“No.”

“Don’t you like school?”

She shrugged again. “It’s okay.”

“You don’t eat, Marie-Laure. You’re too thin.”

It was Marie-Laure’s turn to stop. She pulled away from Mary. “Is this what you mean by closeness? Picking at me, finding fault?”

“I’m worried about you. I think you’re anorectic.”

“I eat what I want.”

“You eat nothing.”

“I eat enough.”

Mary gazed at her, then took her arm and began to walk again.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

She half shrugged. “Sort of. I mean, there’s this guy I see. But he lives in Washington and he goes to Yale, so we only get together on weekends, some weekends, not every one.”

“What’s his name?”

“Ho. We call him Ho. His real name is Howard Hodding McKenzie III. His father is secretary of the interior. He knew Grandpa. His father, I mean, not Ho.” Her voice was flat.

“And what’s the problem with Ho?”

“How do you know there is one?” Fierce, suddenly.

“Just a mother’s intuition,” Mary smiled.

Marie-Laure’s glance was almost admiring. Surprised. “Oh. He just … I never know when he’s going to call. He calls when he wants. Weekends go by and I don’t hear from him. He doesn’t care that I’m sitting there, waiting, doesn’t ever think to call just to say hello. I stay in the dorm, I don’t go out with my friends, just waiting, but he only calls when he doesn’t have anything else to do. That’s how it feels. It makes me feel miserable, like some kind of worm.”

“Of course, poor baby,” Mary said warmly. “Where is he spending Christmas, Washington?”

“No!” she cried. “Aspen, skiing with his parents! And he asked two of his male friends to go along but he didn’t ask me!”

“Oh,” Mary said sadly. Then, “Why don’t you go out with someone else?”

“Because I love him!” Marie-Laure wailed.

“Oh, oh,” Mary moaned with her, and removed her arm and put it around her daughter. Tears were streaming down Marie-Laure’s face, and she wiped them away with her mittened hands.

They walked in silence. Then Mary said, “I tell you what. Come back to New York with me, or come down tomorrow. We’ll go see some plays, visit some museums, I’ll take you to some parties. How about it?”

“Maybe,” she said unenthusiastically. “Boston’s a real bore.”

“Everyplace is a bore when you want to be with someone who isn’t there. Don’t you find that?”

Marie-Laure glanced at her mother again. “I guess.”

“So when that happens, we girls just have to cheer ourselves up.”

Marie-Laure almost smiled. “Has that happened to you?”

“Oh god yes. I was still married to Paul when I met Don, and couldn’t see him very often. And every day I didn’t see him, every minute away from him was an agony. That was really the only time I was in love, even though I was married four times. I was infatuated with your father at first, but that didn’t last long. I thought it was love, but after I met Don I knew it hadn’t been. That’s the trouble, you know. Until you really fall in love, you can get confused. Other things seem like love. You know, a man seems appropriate, he’s the same class as you, he’s rich, he adores you … you convince yourself you’re in love. But it isn’t love. …” Her voice wandered off wonderingly.

Marie-Laure pressed her mother’s arm against her.

They walked on in an agreeable silence now, hearts pumping, breathing deeply, the steam from their breath warming their faces. They had walked far; they were nearly at the town.

“Marie-Laure? Can I ask you something?” Mary’s voice was almost timid.

“Yeah.”

“How did you feel about Grandpa?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that. Did you feel any affection for him, did you like him, did you dislike him, did he frighten you?”

“I didn’t feel anything,” she answered in a flat voice.

“Nothing at all?” Mary asked incredulously.

“Nothing at all!” Marie-Laure shouted. “Why are you asking me this! He was just a disgusting old man, why should I feel anything for him!”

“What was disgusting about him, why do you say that?” Mary cried.

“Will you stop picking and just leave me alone! Just leave me alone!” She pulled away from her mother and walked swiftly ahead, almost running. Mary’s short legs could not keep up, she began to run, calling Marie-Laure’s name. But the girl kept up her swift pace, she pulled yards ahead of Mary, farther and farther away. Mary, breathless, stopped running, slowed her pace, but continued. Marie-Laure’s figure grew smaller and smaller. But when Mary reached the main road, the girl was standing there, bent like a hoop, waiting.

Mary gazed at her. Marie-Laure’s eyes were dropped as if she were staring at the pavement. “Let’s have a cup of coffee,” Mary said, pulling her across the street and south, toward Lincoln’s only coffee shop.

They sat there in silence, sipping coffee. Mary kept glancing at Marie-Laure, who would not return her gaze.

Oh god oh god oh god.

Finally, Mary said, “I’m exhausted. I’m going to call Aldo to come and pick us up, okay?”

Marie-Laure looked up at her. She nodded. Mary gazed into her daughter’s face. “Please come to New York,” she begged.

“Okay,” the girl said faintly.

After breakfast, Alex went upstairs to pack, then nestled in the couch in the playroom reading the biography of Edith Stein. Ronnie, passing her, felt her heart fill with pleasure. Elizabeth, who had said almost nothing during breakfast, locked herself in her father’s study.

Ronnie went to her room and sat in front of her computer, intending to work. But she did not even turn on the machine, just sat there, gazing out the window, trying to figure out what she was feeling. No one acted angry with Elizabeth. Mary and Alex seemed if anything newly solicitous of her, Alex as if Elizabeth had suddenly shown signs of illness and needed comfort, Mary as if she had a new distance from her elder sister, a new perspective from which, for the first time, she pitied her. But Ronnie was angry. Elizabeth’s attack had left her feeling cold, alone, torn away from a center. By striking out at them, she thought, Elizabeth had ripped the delicate fabric of intimacy they had woven from inside themselves, hurled them out of it into cold space, threads clinging to them like torn tissue. For everything she said was a repudiation of the kind of world they had created over the last two months, a denial of its value, even its reality. Why would she want to do that, Ronnie wondered, when their closeness and affection had so clearly made her happy, warmed and eased her stiff heart? Why had she felt it necessary to renounce what she clearly wanted?

Pondering, Ronnie could not work but hung her head over the keyboard as if she were studying it, lost in some limbo. After a long time, she sat up, her face impassive and still, her eyes dull. She leaned back in her chair, and gazed out at the snowy woods behind the house.

I can live without them, she thought.

But she felt haunted by a question she did not want to bring up to consciousness, but that finally forced itself up: was it irrevocable? Was their sisterhood going now to end, to fragment into bitterness, as if it had never been forged? Was there any way to get it back, to re-bind the connection? Which, she now saw, was precious to her. Where was Elizabeth, her mind and heart, what was going on inside her?

Elizabeth herself hardly knew. She had felt numb since the night before, had gone to bed like a zombie, been unable to sleep, had smoked and drunk until nearly four, sitting up in her bed. Her mind was empty and reeling at the same time; it was full of things racing too fast for her to discern their nature. Nor was she sure why she was going through her father’s correspondence files, what she expected to find in them. She had packed only some of his official papers before she left here earlier in the month. There was a closet, really a room, off the study, packed nearly to the door with his files, boxes of files from Washington, New York, Boston. It would take months to go through them all, and for a while she had considered taking a leave of absence to do that, then asked herself why, why, why? But a metal file cabinet in the study itself held correspondence from the last twelve years, since his retirement, and that was accessible. It was that she was going through now, sitting on the floor, pulling out one file after another, reading the letters he received and copies of his replies.

One after another after another, she tore through them, searching, searching. Searching for what? What did she need so desperately? She realized after a time that she was hungry for some personal note, some clue, something that would hook her into what the man had felt, wanted, needed. There were personal notes in many of the letters—banter about a racquetball or tennis game he’d played with the recipient, compliments on a party or dinner given or attended, gossip about Washington personalities—all of it slightly sarcastic, put-downs, challenges, but with an edge of humor, wit. A great sense of humor, one of the funeral speakers had said. This must be what he meant. This must have been the tone of his conversation with these men too, in fact, she remembered it. Yes.

The personal notes were designed to base the power relation in personal connection, but they ignored the real person, focusing on the image—killer squash player, charmer of the ladies, intimate of the highest and most powerful. She found a few letters to women within the power structure, which had a more flattering tone, but no letters to women friends or lovers. Did he not write them, or did he destroy theirs and not keep copies of his own? Even the letters to his brother or sister were full of business, property matters, or discussion of the proper family stance on a public event. She piled up the files she had already examined, the pile was too high, it fell over. She wanted to weep.