The English American (27 page)

D
AD AND
I had been to see the Saturday matinee at the Mariton,” Mum says. “It was a very interesting play about Isadora Duncan. The one people always used to say you reminded them of.”

“The one who got strangled by her scarf?”

“Yes, that Isadora Duncan. Well, anyway, I drove your father home afterward. And then, because we were on Weight Watchers and I didn’t feel like cooking, I popped down to Sainsbury’s to get us a Lean Cuisine for supper. They’re so good, especially the ones with salmon and rice in the white sauce.”

“Mum.”

“Sorry. When I got back home there was a red rent-a-car in the driveway.”

“It’s Billie’s favorite color,” I say, trying to keep things light, despite the fact that I am terribly afraid of what I am about to hear.

Mum tells me she walked into the kitchen and saw Dad talking to a woman in white furry boots and a multicolored jumpsuit.

“Although she looked awfully familiar,” Mum says, “I couldn’t think where I knew her from. She said ‘hallo’ in a pretty southern American accent, with such a friendly smile. I said ‘hallo’ back, of course.

“And then I noticed your father jabbing the air behind her back with his finger. Honestly, Pip, for a second I thought he’d gone quite barmy. And while your father was jabbing the air like a lunatic, the woman was hugging me and telling me she would have called, only she didn’t have our number.

“It’s funny. It wasn’t the accent that made me realize who it was. It was the expression on her face when she told me she got our address from the back of one of your letters.”

Mum doesn’t look traumatized. She looks intrigued. “When you were about four years old, and trying to charm me after doing something you knew was naughty, you used to look at me in exactly the same way. And that’s when I knew who it was.

“She has your dimples, you know,” Mum says.

“She’d say I have hers.”

“I suppose she would.” Mum takes a sip of her tea and carries on.

“When she got out her cigarettes, I thought your father was going to have a fit. So I told him to go and read the paper, led her out to the porch, and opened a window. Her cigarettes are very thin, aren’t they?”

“They’re called Eve,” I said. “They’re menthol.”

“Not like Dunhill then? I do miss my ciggies you know. If your father dies before I do, I’m going to start smoking again.”

“You never told me you missed smoking!”

“Can’t tell you everything now, can I?” Mum smiles, pleased that she has shocked me a little.

“Anyway, then Billie said, ‘I’m here to talk about my daughter.’ It was odd, hearing another woman talk about you as her daughter.”

“Just odd?”

“Well, yes. I mean you are her daughter, darling. And—well—no. It didn’t bother me. In fact I was fascinated, if you really want to know. I’ve never seen anyone who looks even slightly like you before. It gave me an idea of what you might look like twenty-five years from now.”

“So it was interesting?”

“Very. We
have
wondered about the people you came from, Pippadee. It’s only natural.”

“Well, why didn’t you ever say so?”

“Probably for the same reason you didn’t tell us you wanted to know who they were. We wanted to protect you, I suppose. We didn’t want to bring up things that might upset you.”

Ping-Pong again. There I’d been for years, longing to talk to my parents about it all, but not, for fear of upsetting them. There they were, for years, feeling the same. Neither of us doing anything about it for fear of upsetting the other. How absurdly, entirely, utterly English.

Mum and I sit still for a moment. The moment between us feels honest and clean.

“She kept calling me Jemima,” Mum says suddenly.

“Jemima?”

“Yes. And she kept taking tiny puffs of her cigarette while she paced around the room. Just like you did when you used to smoke. It is ‘used to,’ isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I say. “I stopped when I realized that even though she claims to only have one or two, Billie smokes a pack a day. I didn’t want to be like her.”

“I suppose every difficult situation has its perks.”

“Yes.”

Mum is leaning back in her chair, as relaxed as I am tense.

“Then Billie turned toward me and told me you were dead.”

“What?”

“That’s what I said. But she told me she didn’t mean it literally. She meant it metaphorically. She said she felt that you were cut off from an important part of yourself, and that it was crucial—for your development—that you spend more time with her than you have been recently. In order to fulfill your potential as a creative artist, I think she said. I must confess I was so relieved you weren’t actually dead, I didn’t take much of that part in.”

“Oh, Mum!”

“It’s all right, darling. Really. It was fine. Then Billie told me how much you love each other. And then she became quite fixated on the puffin.”

Granny Dunn found a puffin dead on a beach somewhere in 1936, brought it home, and had it stuffed. It’s been sitting on the dark brown armoire in the dining room ever since.

“‘Oh how sad!’ Billie said. ‘To stuff a bird and leave it in a glass case like that!’ Do you know, I’d never thought of it as sad before. But she was so convincing, suddenly I felt quite sorry for the puffin. Almost guilty—as if I’d killed the puffin myself. Even though I knew perfectly well the puffin was dead as a doornail before Granny Dunn found him.”

Mum puts her teacup back into the saucer with a satisfying click and continues with her tale.

“Billie’s mind was darting around from topic to topic, just like yours does, darling. She said she thought our garden had a ‘wonderful contained beauty’—I think those were the words she used. Perfect for people of our nature. She compared it with her garden in Georgia, and told me how much you both loved the wildness of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

“I was particularly intrigued by her curly hair, which is a lovely color and bounced rather charmingly as she spoke. She’s very animated, isn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, and guess what she did with the bourbon biscuit I offered her?”

Mum is actually giggling.

“She scraped off the choccy cream in the center with her teeth—just like you do! Amazing!”

I hadn’t thought about this part of it. That Mum and Dad might have wondered, too. I look for signs of upset in Mum’s eyes. There’s nothing there but curiosity and—yes—glee, glee, glee.

“Then Billie thanked us for being wonderful parents to you. And then she said it was time for us to let you go. She said we were adult women. She said there was no point in sugarcoating things, and she was going to get straight to the point. And then, after meandering quite charmingly around several subjects for a minute or so, she told me I didn’t understand you like she understood you, because I’m not your real mother.”

My heart is beating fast. She did hurt Mum. Oh God.

“And then she asked where you were. That’s when I realized she wasn’t being truthful about how inseparable you were. I imagined that you probably needed some time and were therefore avoiding her. But it was quite clear she didn’t want to give you any time and was trying to find out where you were. With everything you’ve had to absorb during the past year, I thought she was being unspeakably selfish.”

“Oh, Mum.”

“But I thanked her for coming to see us and told her how grateful we are to her. And we are! Oh darling, if it weren’t for Billie…”

“Yes.”

“Anyway, I assured her that we only wanted what was best for you and that if you wanted to spend time with her, of course that would be fine with us.

“And then she said, ‘So you won’t be pressuring her to come back to England?’

“I told her that, in my experience, putting any sort of pressure on you to do something you don’t want to do only causes you to do the opposite. And that you probably just needed a little time to sort yourself out. She looked relieved for a moment. And then, as suddenly as she appeared, she left.”

The story is over. I look across the porch at the mother I’ve known and loved since I was a child.

“Mum,” I say, with a lump in my throat, “you are my real mother. And nothing could ever change that. If…if I could have designed you myself, I couldn’t have done a better job.”

Mum’s smiling at me, with a twinkle in her eye. “Well, that’s lovely, darling, and thank you for saying it. But the last part’s not strictly true, is it, Pip?”

“Well—well, if I could have designed you myself you might have been playwrights—but, but—no, Mum! No! If I could change a thing I wouldn’t. I love you so much, Mum.”

“I know that, darling. But I also know that love doesn’t come in amounts. I know that you loving Billie doesn’t mean you’d love us any less.”

“But I don’t love her,” I say, appalled at myself for saying it aloud. “I know I
should.
And I feel dreadfully guilty about it, but I just don’t. I’ve tried to. And I thought I did for a while. I’ve told her I do. And maybe I do in a way. But—well, the truth is being near her is confusing and—well, immobilizing. And I can’t live a happy life if I can’t move, Mum.”

A furious fly is buzzing around the chrysanthemum pot.

“It’s awful, Mum. I’m awful. But when I’m near her I—well, I just can’t feel for Billie the way she wants me to feel.”

The fly has found its way out of the porch window now and is headed off toward the swimming pool.

“And I know how terrible it must have been for Billie to have to give up her baby,” I say. Saying this, thinking this, has become a sort of mantra.

“Yes,” Mum says. Her tone is firm now. “And being given away by your mother must have been terrible for you, darling. You were tiny. A babe. You’d only just been born.”

Now Mum has tears in her eyes too. “We were so happy to have you darling. And we believed that adopting a baby would be exactly the same as having one of our own. But that wasn’t true, was it? Especially for you.”

“No.”

“Darling Pip, you’ve spent all this time thinking about Billie’s feelings and no time at all thinking about your own. Billie was a grown-up. She made a choice. You were a tiny little baby. You had no choice. It must have been far, far worse for you.”

Perhaps.

We sit for a moment saying nothing. The garden stretches out behind us in the afternoon sun.

I sit hopelessly, looking at Mum.

“I wish…”

“You wish what, darling?”

“I wish I could find a way to give her some of what she wants from me.”

Dad has been standing by the door. In a tone that’s as gentle as it is gruff, he says, “It’s not your burden to carry, Pip. It never has been.”

I catch my breath and stay very still. I’ve never heard Dad speak in this way before. Ever. Mum is equally still and, I am certain, as surprised to hear Dad’s words as I am.

“You’re not Superwoman, you know,” Dad says.

I smile inwardly at the expression, knowing he’d never have used it if he hadn’t been forced to watch
Superman II
when Marjory’s grandson came to tea.

“You’ve had a huge amount to deal with, Pippadee,” Dad continues. “You wafted off to another country, into a very complicated situation, with no support whatsoever, an ocean away from everyone you knew. Good God, it was like throwing yourself off the high trapeze without a net! Meeting Billie and Whatshisname as a grown-up meant you’ve had to completely reassess who you are. While dealing with what must have been overwhelming emotions. That would be difficult enough for anybody.”

I dare not move. Dad’s voice sounds reassuringly Scottish as it comes to me through the afternoon air. His hand rests steady on my shoulder.

“Add to it this, this—how can I put it? This hole Billie has inside her, that she’s been asking you to fill. Well, it’s not fair of her to expect you to do that, Pippadee. It’s not your responsibility. It’s hers.”

The knot inside me loosens a little.

“The years we’re granted to live on this earth are few and precious,” Dad says. “You have a right to live them happily. You don’t have to carry Billie’s burden, darling. It’s not your burden to carry. Put it down, Pippadee. Just put it down.”

With that, the father I thought didn’t understand me at all pats me awkwardly on the shoulder and goes back into the house. Mum doesn’t move. But I detect a little extra light in her clear blue eyes.

And then something happens. Inside me. There’s another shift. The thoughtful words—spoken by the father who fed me, loved me, and nurtured me when my other father could not—open the doors to the sense of peace I’ve been aching for all my life, which floods into the heart of my being. With my father’s words, the thick, ugly knot of guilt inside me finally comes untied.

And everything I’ve been holding in for so long, in order to protect people who did not need to be protected, finally has permission to come out. And I start to cry. Mum sits next to me and hands me Kleenex after Kleenex from the yellow tissue box, which Dad has brought into the porch from the top of the downstairs loo. Dad appears at the porch door every so often, checks to see if I am still crying, and then disappears back into the house.

And then, as the afternoon turns into the evening, I tell Mum everything I’ve told you, about Billie and Walt and my life in New York. When I tell her about Jack, her expression changes slightly.

The early September sun is setting over the wheatfield behind the house now, and it’s getting a little chilly. It’ll soon be time to go in.

“Do you remember, when I was little, when I used to be frightened of monsters under the bed?”

“Yes,” Mum says, laughing. “Until we turned the light on and your monster turned out to be the pile of clothes you’d inevitably left on the floor.”

“Well, finding out the truth about Billie and Walt has been a bit like that, I think.”

Mum smiles. “Then it’s been a good thing, darling.”

“Oh yes, Mum. Yes! If I hadn’t found them, I’d never have known what to do with the parts of me that are so different from you, Dad, and Charlotte. Now I know the people I’ve come from—well, now I can be wholly me, instead of just half me, if you see what I mean.”