Our Father (8 page)

After some minutes, her sobbing abated, and she turned off the shower and stepped out, wrapping the bath sheet around her. She dried herself vigorously, walking back to the bedroom. She felt her bed sheets: still damp. She drew back the blankets to let the sheets air, then went and sat on the chaise near the window. Her purse was lying on the floor nearby and she dragged it over and took out a cloisonné box and some cigarette papers. She opened the box, pulled out a lump of hash and crumbled some inside a paper. She took a cigarette from an open package, broke it and sprinkled the tobacco over the hash. She rolled it up, licked the ends, and twisted them tightly. She lighted it. Ah.

When she had smoked it down to a tiny nub, she put the roach back into the box. Have to find a connection here. Probably have to go to Boston. Aldo might know. Ronnie probably knows lots of sources. Can’t ask her.

Why am I so upset? Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s fault. So full of hate, so hateful. And I loved her so much, needed her, no mother to speak of, Laura always off at some do, luncheon, tea, cocktails, whatever. Led in to say good night before she went out for the evening, in my nightgown, my hair brushed, oh my pretty girl, my adorable girl. She smelled of powder, perfume, stroking her dresses to feel silk, taffeta, velvet, wool soft as velvet. Good night Mama, have a good time.

Sometimes she had a funny smell, sometimes Daddy did too, strong and sour, funny talking, words drawn out heeeer’s my liille giiirl, Mommy’s baaaby. …

Only thirty when she died, papers full of pictures of her, Laura Upton, society matron dead in automobile crash. Nanny hid the newspaper but I saw it, I could read, I was seven, “DEATH IN ACCIDENT” it said. Nanny Gudge’s mouth tight when she told me, holding me on her lap, Mommy won’t be coming back anymore she’s gone to heaven to live with the angels, she’s an angel now looking down at you protecting you, Maudie across the room making the bed, the way she looked at Maudie her eyes a warning when Maudie said “I’m not surprised.” How come I remember that when I didn’t understand. Aunt Pru sweeping in from Boston in a felt hat with a feather and a carved jade ring, Uncle Samuel behind her like a thinner shadow, she grabbing me, poor child, and Daddy so angry crying his face red and white, his eyes red. He had the funny smell. Aunt Pru scolded him, she wasn’t afraid of him, her baby brother.

She’ll have to go away to school, he told Uncle Samuel, I can’t be here to look after her there’s a war on I’m needed State Department works day and night, had my bags packed shipped off to Miss Peabody’s.

Everyone I’ve ever loved has abandoned me.

But at least at Peabrain’s there were other girls, friends—Amy, Caroline, Elena, Catherine, all unwanted children. Happier there, children to play with be with. But lonely in the summers, long lonely summers at Lincoln, all those years. Only Elizabeth here and she hated me, always hated me. Well, most of the time. When she didn’t—the day we got cook to fix us a picnic lunch and sneaked off, all the way down to the brook. We played let’s pretend, Elizabeth was Rosalind and I was Celia, that was Shakespeare she said.

Amy married a French count, Catherine turned bohemian and opened an art gallery in New York, Elena dead of a drug overdose at thirty, Caroline lives in Boston now, married again, like me divorced four times well I was only divorced twice, widowed twice. Widow. Relict.

She got up and pulled the quilt from her bed, returned to the chaise and wrapped herself in it. She lay back staring out at the sky, really black here in the country never saw it that way in New York, like the sky over Vail or Gstaad but no stars tonight just the blackness, clouds like smoke, like pale light.

Oh Lizzie probably couldn’t help it, given the way things were. Her mother thrown out to make way for mine, she thrown out to make way for me. She was always alone here, always, hanging about in corners, pale, holding a book, looking at us with those pale cold eyes, me and my momma and my nanny and my maids, I a cute little baby, where’s my little girl, Daddy’s home and he wants his Mary! Barely spoke to her, she tall and gangly and charmless. Alone always. What else could she feel, she was only a kid.

But I loved her. Couldn’t she feel that? She hated me for loving her, what’s the matter with her?

You’d think she would have told her mother she didn’t want to come here! Why would anyone want to be where they clearly weren’t wanted? And she’s not a kid now. She’s a hateful adult. I should just shrug her off, what does she matter? I will. I’ll simply ignore her, she doesn’t matter, she isn’t important to me. She doesn’t matter, she’s insignificant. Forget her. Jealous bitter dried-up old maid. I’ll bet she’s never had an orgasm in her life.

4

A
RABBIT DARTED SOUNDLESSLY
across the path into the underbrush. Terrified, little heart racing, afraid of me the way I was afraid in England. Held myself stiff and superior when Clare took me up to Oxford to meet his friends. Why was I so terrified? They all seemed so brilliant, that Oxbridge accent and scathing British wit, I didn’t don’t have it, couldn’t keep up my end. My jokes come out heavy, sarcastic, nasty. Jokes of a child nourished on hate. Elizabeth trod heavily on the forest mast.

Oh, why do I keep thinking about those days, being a child, all that? Ever since I got here. Spent my life burying it. Transcending it. It’s being here with Mary, feeling the way I so often felt in those years. Same hate and jealousy even without Father around to put us in our place, terrify us. Your mother does not educate you socially, Elizabeth, but of course how could she, shanty-Irish that she is. Uptons do not use salad forks for their fish or fish forks for their meat; they do not chew with mouths open, drink until they have finished chewing, pick up a dropped napkin, blow their noses at the dinner table, speak about personal matters in front of servants, make requests of servants who expect to receive orders, hold a piece of bread in the palm of their hand while they butter it, eat with their forearm upon the table, slurp soup. They do not show themselves outside their rooms in their dressing gowns or attend to personal hygiene in public; no Upton woman would ever think of combing her hair or refreshing her lipstick in a public place, much less try to fix a flaw like a hanging slip in the front hall of the house as I saw you doing last week! Uptons avoid slang and Upton women never never never use words like “damn” or “shit” and I don’t want to hear them cross your lips again young woman.

Another age. Gone but not lamented.

Upton women are gracious, they defer to men at all times, they remember their lineage. Your ancestors were ministers, one the greatest preacher of his day, held the Colony in the palm of his hand. Your great-great-grandfather was governor of this state, your great-grandfather was majority leader of the Senate, your father, miss, is more powerful than the secretary of state. …

Men in limousines came and went, all superimportant. Whispers and Secret Service men. Library door closed for hours, the butler—we had a butler then, I’d forgotten—knocking with his white-gloved hands, carrying in trays of booze, a Secret Service man sitting on a hard chair in the hall. Another outside the French door to the garden, sitting in the hot sun on a folding chair. But I eavesdropped from the toilet off the playroom. Mary never found that out—not interested, probably. Long arguments for or against bombing railroad lines leading to some camps or other, must have been the Holocaust. Father against it, he carried the day. Was it after the end of World War II that I heard Father argue that we should drop an atomic bomb on the Soviet Union? Me maybe fourteen, fifteen. He was yelling that Bertrand Russell and John von Neumann were both urging preventive nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union. Goddamn Reds have nuclear weapons, Father growled. Better to get rid of the commies before they corrupted the whole goddamned world. Commies powerful in Germany before Hitler, could arise again. Strong movement in China. Did they want to see that here?

Made sense I suppose. Look what’s happened. Soviets, Eastern bloc, China, Africa, spreading to Central America, South America if we hadn’t got rid of Allende. …

Still, that seemed a drastic step. …

I wonder if he supported Hitler. In 1939, say, or earlier.

Later Russell turned into a Red himself. Father hated him. And I heard that when von Neumann was dying, he spent his nights screaming in uncontrollable terror.

What goes around comes around.

That’s all over now, everything over now. Father’s dying, and the CIA reports I’ve seen show the Soviet Union collapsing from the inside. We’ve won. I suppose I should include myself on the winning side. Capitalism has won. Still there are things I don’t agree with, things I can’t seem to work into the theory, things Clare never dealt with, did he think about them? I need him now, I need him to talk to.

I don’t know why I’m so … Father isn’t here and his demands aren’t important anymore are they. Only Mary’s here and Alex. The way it was most summers, Father down in Washington, Mary here, then Alex, little towhead. Sends my mind back, not my mind, my mood, feel childlike somehow, as if all the years I’ve lived since are part of a movie and this is real, I’m home again. My adult life only a movie. I walked in these woods day after day when I lived here. Walked in them before I went to England that first time, so frightened so determined my teeth clenched with it like Mother, I would would would. Would what? Show him. Escape. From Mother. From him. From my sense of not having any place. Would make a place for myself. Would end my helplessness.

But how could I do it there? Those Brits, that British wit superior and light, life an amusing absurdity. Intimidating. I acted even more superior than they, hoping they couldn’t see. Terrified I’d be discovered stupid after all. Maybe underneath the manner, they’re frightened and shy too. What do such people say when they’re in pain? The manner proclaims they never are. A clever quip tossed off as they slit their wrist, a jest as they tip themselves off the edge of the balcony.

LSE another kettle of fish, full of wogs and pinkos, everyone buzzing about the famous American who decamped with his tail between his legs in ’fifty-three to escape McCarthy. Who knew it would be a goddamned pinko refuge! Except for Clare, thank god. So much prestige it had. Econometrics department completely ignored women. Male professors preferred men, even wogs. A lot of those Muslims, Africans, Indians, presidents or prime ministers of their countries now. Last year I sat on silk cushions drinking tea in porcelain cups, chatting about old times with my friend Sayyid the president of Iman. He’s forgotten that I didn’t speak to him then. Remembers LSE fondly, yet it was an unhappy time: strange how that is. Laughed about the smell of the place, the eternally boiling cabbage. All day every day. Disgusting food. Toilet paper read “London Country Council” on one side, “Now wash your hands please” on the other. Sayyid had never seen toilet paper before, thought it was reading matter. We each had a desk in a graduate reading room and whenever the Queen Mother visited we had to open our lockers for her. They gave us a brush to remove the dust from books brought from the stacks, dust of ages.

My flat in Hampstead, not so fashionable then. Top floor, little gable windows, gas ring to cook on, heater took shillings. Always cold and damp.

A gaggle of girls, but not in economics: three of us in the class, two dropped out the first year, one pregnant, one a nervous breakdown. I determined I
would
get through, wouldn’t let them destroy me. Clare got me through. Different kind of intelligence, kind I understood, tying things together. Sitting in his study, a fire always going the room so damp, piled with books and papers, served me tea or sherry, talked, just talked for hours. We loved each other’s minds. Both American.

We both saw money as a concept, a convention: a human agreement to value something inherently valueless. One of the Trobriand Islands, what was its name, Kiriwana, Kiriwina, they value banana leaves. Women tie them into whisk broom shapes, the men raise pigs, things with real value, of course the women do the work. But the women get even: only they can bind the banana leaves and the men will give anything for them, use them to unbind the living from the dead in burial rites. Treasured bundles, sign of wealth: utterly worthless really. I laughed, snorted my contempt for such stupid people! Primitives! How his eyes lighted up, he loved cutting me down: “It
is
amusing, but consider, Elizabeth, if you will for a moment, how creatures from outer space might view our reverence for gold or diamonds or paper money for that matter—which can’t feed or warm us or in any way keep us alive. Yet for which we fight, even kill. You may find Kwakiutls or New Guineans absurd for sacrificing to throw big-man feasts to gain prestige but the good ole boys at Virginia, where I got my undergraduate degree, drank themselves sick for the same purpose. And it is not unknown for adults considered perfectly rational to bankrupt themselves buying houses, cars, paintings, for the same purpose. Consider that one of the most valuable—and expensive—substances in the western world is plutonium—which is utterly lethal. A tiny ball of it can kill an entire city.”

Sent me off silent with thought.

Diamonds just bits of rock, gold just bits of metal. Even the real things people want—fancy clothes and cars, fancy houses—are just icing. Entire world system artificial, a game of let’s pretend, great states mounted on paper. But when currency collapses, so do real human lives. Real life built on nothing. Nothing comes from nothing: Shakespeare was that?
King Lear
? Not true. Everything comes from nothing, from a word, from declaring that this is good, that is valuable. He found it brilliant, a magnificent artifice: man recreating the world through words and money. He crowed about it, the triumph of man’s will over matter.

Never discussed what has real value. What does? Food water sleep. Love? Is there such a thing? Or is “love” just another word for power? Mary: I know everything about love. But what she calls love gets her money. What she calls love is power.