The Gun Runner's Daughter (45 page)

She seemed to see him more than hear him as he spoke. Even the crime she had committed did not seem to breach the limits of his paternalism. She wished she could offer him the same lack of
condition. But her affection no longer seemed adequate to her response to this man. Nor, however, like a curse on her, would it abandon him, and as she watched him talking, pouring tea, lighting a
cigarette, talking, she ached with desire for him to kiss her as that man, this afternoon, had kissed his daughter.

His monologue slowed at last, and a silence fell between them. Finishing his tea and lighting a cigarette, he rose and stood by the big windows that gave out onto the Place Vendôme.
Turning in her armchair, she watched him in profile: a strong, rather squat man with the embonpoint of a life of wealth and power, a weathered face, a piercing green eye. At last, not looking at
her, he spoke in a quiet voice she had not, she realized, heard for years.

“Now, Essie, I’m not going to ask about what happened. I know neither Stein nor the papers got the truth. I don’t believe I need to have it either. Is there anything else you
want to tell me?”

“Yes.”

“Go ahead.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she answered.

“I want you to give Ocean View to the Trustees of Reservations. I want a guaranteed stewardship for me and my heirs. If I have no children, then it reverts to reservation land. The rental
houses I want demolished. At your expense.”

Her father nodded, as if he had been expecting this. “Agreed.”

“There’s more. I want you to stop sending me checks. I’m not going back to law school, and I no longer want to be supported.”

That, at last, made him blanch, as if she had dealt him a physical injury. She softened her tone, but she went on, as if administering a just and implacable punishment. “And I want you to
know that whatever I might one day inherit from you, I will not accept. The half that should have been Pauly’s, I want you to give to Yale. The half that should have been mine, I want given
to nonpolitical charities.”

This time, he countered, as if he had already prepared his response. “Agreed. On two conditions.”

Suspiciously, she waited.

“Firstly, when I sold Abba’s store to Metrotech I put the money in trust for you and Pauly. I want you to take that.”

Through her head passed a quote from Balzac:
Tout se transige.
“Everything is negotiable.” It was a lawyer who’d said it, too.

“I’ll take my half. Pauly’s goes to charity.”

Her father nodded. “Secondly, I think you should have someone to talk to.”

She rose now and walked to the room’s left-hand window, her arms crossed tight around her breasts. For a brief second, she felt regret. And then it was over, her moment of control gone,
and she listened, a girl being spoken to by her father. “By talk to, you are meaning . . .”

“Psychiatric help. Psychoanalytic, I think, but it’s up to you.” He was talking fluently now, fully in charge.

“Essie, it used to be, I worried about you, I’d make you go to law school, or something.” He looked now, across the bay between the two windows, at her, and smiled a smile that
strangely resembled, she thought, her own. “But you seem to have grown up now.”

“So your solution to this rite of passage is to send me to a psychoanalyst.” She noticed she was childishly accentuating the educated in her diction, in counterpoint to
Rosenthal’s emphasis of the Brooklyn in his.

“Yeah, I think that’s appropriate.” He was watching out the window now, and she listened carefully. “Essie, you know the score. It scares me not to be able to take care
of you. But then I think, well, maybe it’s time for Essie to take care of herself, anyway. She sure seems to want to.”

Now it was her turn to look out the window. It occurred to her suddenly that she had thought only of herself as having lost everything when Pauly died. Suddenly she felt his . . . his
asphyxiation by life, his panic at being forced to interrupt the idyll not of his, but of
her
privileged life with the reality of its buried roots. It was like a curse. She looked back, a
twenty-seven-year-old woman, in a cashmere sweater and jeans, the only surviving member of what once had been a family sprawled throughout the Lithuanian shtetl, all gone now, all gone but her.

“Okay.”

He looked at her, pensive, then shook his head, once. “I need a lot better answer than that.”

“I mean yes. I want to. I want to take care of myself.” And, when she saw how worried he looked, she said in a different tone: “It’s no big deal. I have a job. I’ll
be living in Paris from now on.”

“And you’ll find yourself a shrink?”

A shrink. A shrink. Suddenly she wanted to scream. What right had he to try to help her? Even to have had her? What right had he to put an ideal, intellectualized and ridden with corruption,
above his children? She wanted to pull from the darkest point in her the things no child should ever say to their father and coldly, harshly destroy the man she had sacrificed everything to save,
as she knew she could.

When she spoke, she said: “Yes, Daddy. I’ll find myself a shrink.”

And then his breath of tobacco and his warm skin were against hers and then she was outside, standing on the rue de Rivoli again, not knowing how she had gotten there.

Night. She lay on the bed in Mr. Chevejon’s apartment, the room dark but for the light of the street lamps coming in from the high, dry, wintry European night that had
moved in over the rue de Fleurus.

After she had left her father, she’d walked across the river and stopped, on her way home, for an omelette at La Palette: since she’d been sick, she found, she was nearly always
ravenously hungry. She knew the owner there, and had sat at the bar in his warm presence for maybe an hour, as if putting off the inevitable. It had been toward seven when she’d gone up to
her rooms then undressed and gone to bed without turning on the lights.

She slept, immediately, mercifully.

Then, just after midnight, the telephone had rung: short, scary bursts from the living room, and she had woken, eyes wide, fear expanding like a spill of water across ice.

But only the innocent, she knew, wake unafraid, and she had risen to sit next to the phone until it stopped.

Now, back in her bed, before her eyes were the father, his daughter, and her brother, that afternoon.

And now it was night.

She hadn’t even liked Pauly when they were children. An annoying, active little child, always into everything, always taking her mother’s attention. Now, in her
memory, it seemed that it was only when her mother had left, when they’d been at St. Ann’s that she’d started noticing him. By then he was a thin, graceful boy, blond as she,
pretty as she with their father’s green eyes, but brash where she was retiring, rebellious where she was obedient, angry at everything. When their mother had gone he was fourteen, she
sixteen. He took it very hard, her leaving, and from the moment he heard, he blamed his father. Nights in their suddenly empty brownstone on Grace Court, nights when her father was out, or away,
and the maid was long asleep, he’d arrive at her bedroom door in tears of rage.

That’s when she got to know her brother, really: that’s when he stopped being an annoying sibling and became, suddenly, a person. That year in Grace Court had been, perhaps, a lonely
one for her, too: Dee was gone after the summer; by bad luck Martha’s father was teaching at Oxford, and had taken his family with him. And so she had the occasion to come to know the
complex, smart person her little brother, in his loss, in his misery, had so precociously become. And so she had had the occasion for her little brother to become, in the solitude that year, her
friend.

Or so she thought.

It shocked her, she remembered, when she had understood one day how utterly different he was from a friend. Martha was a friend. Pauly, for all he could smoke pot with her, joke with her, walk
down the street with her in his jeans jacket and swinging blond hair, was fundamentally different. He was family.

It was an early evening. Her father was out, they had gotten stoned together on the back porch, and under the sway of a towering ailanthus and the—suddenly so astounding—shiver of
its leaves she had watched him standing, shirtless, watching the sky.

What makes friends, she suddenly saw, is their
difference.
But Pauly was not different from her. For the first time she saw, in the fall of his thick blond hair, in the sway of his back,
in the tone of his skin, how
same
they were, this boy and her, how equally one genetic dose of matter had been shared between them. No one would ever be the same to her as he, she thought,
the lock and key of their creations had been taken apart, by divorce, by menopause, and now the meioses that defined the molds of their beings were unrepeatable historic events. And now they were,
each, the key to the other. And as she thought that, Allison Rosenthal, at sixteen, standing under a bowing ailanthus at night on the porch of her Brooklyn house, had her first experience of adult
love.

Now, years later, that night stood in her mind as myth, so powerful, so seminal, that sometimes it seemed to her that this central event of her life could not have been simply a revelation, a
vision, but must have been something more. And when she wrote about it, years later in a poem, she had found coming to her pen images of brute symbolism: a swan with beating wings, red blood on the
white of a sheet. He himself she could feel, in that poem, in all his familiarity, his smell, his touch. And as time passed, it was as if the poem had replaced the memory, or rather as if memory
had become confused with its own mythicality, and really, she no longer knew what had happened.

Except that time passed. And she’d left for New Haven. Leaving Pauly alone to return to a new house, her father’s new apartment on Park Avenue.

She’d left him, alone, to her father.

Only her mother had understood. Her father, with his endless stories about growing up in the streets of Borough Park. Of the gang fights, the Jews against the Micks; the
refugee life on the streets of New York; the jobs and petty crime. Of how at seventeen, the day of his graduation from yeshiva, her father had run away to Israel and enlisted in the army. How
he’d returned to Brooklyn College, then against all odds gotten into Yale Law School, and how he’d worked his way through both. Only her mother had understood the indoctrination in
righteousness, entitlement, and reparation to which Allison had abandoned her brother.

The year she went to college Pauly had entered Dalton. Now, in his senior year, her father started in earnest. He wanted Pauly to go, as he had gone, straight out of school to Israel. The army
was a great experience, for a boy, for a Jew, and as he had done his service, so should his son. He owed it to Israel, he owed it to his grandparents.

Pauly hadn’t wanted to join the army. He wanted to join his sister at Yale. Pauly didn’t want to have anything to do with Israel, and as that year went on their arguments subsumed
any other part of their relationship. Pauly had always been too young to understand the pathos of Zionism, to him his father was all kitsch, all rationalization, all bogus stories of a heroism that
no longer meant anything in a world where Israelis were an occupying force and the Holocaust a subject for Hollywood films. And as the year went on he dug deeper and deeper into his father’s
affairs to hold him in accusation, so deep that his father had grown, in the end, scared that Pauly was going actually to do something crazy. So scared that finally her father had agreed to let him
go to college before the army.

Pauly at Yale. Lying in a bed in a foreign city, a stranger’s apartment, she saw his beautiful, brilliant, boyish face, filled with strength and grace, eager to make everyone his friend.
Every night he’d be at her dorm room, to study with her, to sit with her, to sleep curled on the floor.

And then he’d met Johnny. When she first saw them together, toward Christmas of his freshman year, at a Lambda party, Pauly had looked momentarily afraid of her. Which was funny, because
she hadn’t given it a second thought, so natural had he looked in that crowd of hip, handsome young men. Then, after seeing his expression, understanding had come in a flash and she’d
stepped over to him without hesitation, to hug him, kiss him, to meet Johnny and talk to his friends. His expression—grateful to her, proud of her—had never long left her mind.

Perhaps there had been something else in his expression. Perhaps he had seen her relief, and it had broken his heart.

God, he’d blossomed that year. Nothing stopped him: the Writing Program, squash team, those endless coked-up parties, he had time for everything, and in everything he’d done well. He
was a junior when she, having finally made her deal with her father, had gone, reprieved from law school, to Paris. And a senior when, on the phone from New Haven to Paris, he’d broken to her
the unbelievable news that her father had started again on him to make plans for Israel after graduation.

At first, the summer after he graduated, she’d thought that after all, it was going to be okay. Pauly was holding his own, determined to resist his father. He thought, in fact, that the
old man was weakening: Pauly had come out to him, and was confident the shame of having a gay son would make his father want to keep him home, under wraps.

At first. She stayed in Paris, the summer following his graduation, dawdling in the European summer, delaying returning for the late summer in Ocean View, having too much fun to want to end her
precious time away. Anyway, she had agreed to give her father some time to be alone with Pauly. She thought Pauly would hold firm, she thought it would be all right.

Then it had all started to go wrong, and when Pauly had called, in early June, she had understood quickly that it was not all right. Her father was entirely unconvinced by Pauly, more than ever
determined to have his son follow in his footsteps, and was planning on leaning heavily. Allison knew what it was like when her father leaned. Pauly tried to sound cheerful on the phone, but the
strain had come through. And when she heard his voice she’d known that she had to come straight home, right away, Charles de Gaulle to Kennedy to Logan to the little island airport in two
days, abandoning her life and her possessions in Paris.