Y
our father is an important man.” Rosemary placed her small delicate hands firmly on the ebony surface of her desk, the desk that had followed her through the governor’s mansion to the Washington house the Senator had rented at what Rosemary said was an exorbitant price. She had called Melissa and Billy into her office at the back. “You have to learn to behave accordingly. If this gets into the papers, it could damage your father.”

Billy was trying to look remorseful, but Melissa worried he was not succeeding. The windows were open onto the narrow yard, where something exotic was in bloom. It was spring vacation and much warmer in D.C. than at Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut where Melissa was in her last year. In her father’s family, the Dickinsons, the women always attended Miss Porter’s—even her, no matter how far down the family hierarchy she was rated. The garden was her favorite part of this new house in Georgetown on a street called P in the block off Wisconsin where her parents had moved after the election. She and Billy sat out there last night smoking dope under a magnolia whose big flowers were just browning and falling on them. A tree with pink flowers was opening, a tree as feminine as if it wore a prom dress. In the twilight after Billy went in, she had lain under that tree imagining a lover—not real sex, with its brutal disappointment, but with a soft dissolve, romantic, like perfect kissing. Her grandmother Susie, whom she never saw anymore, would know the name of that tree. When she was little, she had wanted to be like Grandma Susie—growing tomatoes and peonies, beans and zinnias in the yard in Youngstown. She had started a garden on the grounds of the governor’s mansion in Harrisburg, but when Rosemary discovered it, the
gardener pulled her plants up and restored it the way it had been. Melissa was supposed to want to be a lawyer or something better, whatever that might be. Her father wanted to be President, and her mother was determined to get him there. Billy had bought the pot on M Street. M and Wisconsin were a different world from the staid block of old houses mostly flush to the sidewalk and always swarming with workers painting, gardening, tuck-pointing the bricks, primping the houses—on Wisconsin and on M it was a world of the young, alive and noisy, racially mixed and of all classes. This house was Second Empire, which sounded sinister, and only a hundred twenty-five years old; Rosemary had wanted a federal house of red brick two hundred years old, but those were even more expensive.

“It was just pot, Mother,” Billy said. His forelock had fallen over his eyes. She fought the impulse to push it back. His hair in the sun beaming through the window was that light red gold called strawberry blond, different from anybody in the family—not blond like Father and Merilee. Not ordinary light brown hair like Rich Junior and herself. Mother’s hair had been blond for years now; it went with her porcelain skin.

“You’re just fifteen. Are you trying to get expelled again?” Rosemary shook her head in annoyance.

He gave Melissa one of those Here-we-go-again looks. Actually Billy did not much care if he got expelled, as he’d said to her when he was waiting to be called on the carpet—the two of them sprawled on her bed as always talking in mutters and whispers. He had friends at prep school, but he made friends easily and one school was like another to him. This was his third. They always let him get away with a lot before they tossed him because he was the Senator’s son, and because he was good at every sport he bothered to try.

“I was just going along with the other guys.”

Melissa said, “In high school, most guys smoke pot sometimes, Mother. Be glad he’s not on Ecstasy or heroin. Let’s have some perspective.” She always tried to make peace between her mother and her younger brother—if only Billy could manage to seem truly sorry, but he couldn’t fake it successfully. He had never taken their mother’s reprimands as intensely as she had. She had been a puppyish fool, wagging her
tail, fetching slippers, trying, always trying to be someone Rosemary wanted for a daughter. Now her aim with her mother was to be cool. She was an undercover agent playing the dutiful daughter, but they would see. They had no idea who she really was, her deadly skills and her hidden brilliance as she played the part of a too tall, too busty, hardworking high school senior. But under that drab exterior, she was something else, something that would astonish them. Oh, sure.

Rosemary ignored her. “Everything you do is visible, Billy. Everything any of us does can come back to haunt your father.”

Melissa sighed and slumped into a chair. It was a weird curvy chair, which she supposed went with the house, upholstered in nubby blue silk. Her father’s importance. She could not remember when it did not exist. In retrospect, it gilded even the snapshot of him from his Dartmouth days, holding an oar aloft like a captured trophy—a shot always accompanied by the caption saying that he had gone to the 1968 Olympics with his sculling team. She had learned only two years ago that he had not actually competed—her aunt Karen told her. Karen cultivated the unusual habit in the Dickinson family of telling the truth, not a trait valued by the rest of the family—except Billy and her, the two young misfits. Actually Billy was too handsome to be a real misfit. It was one of the many things she wished for, to be gorgeous like her older, golden sister Merilee or like Billy. Billy was two and a half years younger than Melissa. He had been a cute kid, but he had gone through an awkward period around puberty—an awkwardness she had never grown out of. But he had. Lately they weren’t as close. Karen was her favorite relative, but she had only been let out of the sanitarium to attend Grandpa Dickinson’s seventy-fifth birthday celebration. For the last five years, she had been shut up there. One of Rosemary’s favorite admonitions to her: “Do you want to be like your aunt Karen?” when Melissa had done something her parents viewed as out of line, inappropriate, not supportive of family ambitions and goals.

Daddy’s importance was like a family member, bigger and even more visible than her two older siblings, Richard IV, called Rich—to differentiate him from his father, Dick. Rich was already talked about as a candidate
for state rep in Pennsylvania—and her perfect sister, Merilee, in her first year of law school at George Washington. When Melissa was little, she had imagined her father a king, a radiant figure out of fairy tales. As a highly visible prosecutor in Philadelphia, he had appeared a hero who put dangerous bad guys in jail. She would sometimes enter a room behind him, behind her mother, and the air would crackle and people would stand and applaud and cheer. It had been years since she had thought of him that way. She did not like to remember that she had been such a sucker for his phony smiles and big hellos and ready laugh. How she had believed in him! She had drawn his portrait in crayons, then in acrylic for art class. She had kept a photo of just the two of them—usually photos were of just him and Rosemary, him and some other politician, one of him and the President, or of the whole family—on her dresser until this year.

The first big event Melissa remembered after her father became governor was an execution. It was actually the second execution, but Melissa had been in bed with one of her frequent sinus infections during the first. Number two was a criminal Daddy had prosecuted himself. One great thing about being eighteen was that she had gradually come to understand things that had been encoded and hidden when she was young and naïve. Her past with her parents rewrote itself as she gathered knowledge, as the landscape of her childhood mutated out of golds and bright sky blues to a landscape with shadows and dark pits and hidden fires burning underground like those anthracite mines under Wilkes-Barre that had been ablaze for decades. Her parents were powerful and she was powerless, but she could try to place them in perspective, she could learn and criticize, silently, stealthily. With them, stealth was everything.

Both parents had been out that night. Daddy was at the execution, and Rosemary was talking with her favorite reporter from Channel Four. Merilee and Rich were away at school. Melissa and Billy were in the upstairs rumpus room of the governor’s mansion, supposed to be watching
The Little Mermaid
on the VCR, but both of them wanted to watch TV, where all the people with candles were in the streets singing. It was the same outside. Every so often they would look out the window and see the people gathered on Second beyond the fence that surrounded the gover
nor’s mansion. Security cameras would be trained on the crowd, and she could see state troopers standing by, as well as the regular security men she knew by name. Mommy called the demonstrators softheads.

The prisoner’s name was Toussaint Parker, and he had killed a policeman. Mommy said it was an excuse for the radicals and the commies and the softheads to make a fuss, but no judge was going to let off a Black troublemaker who killed a cop. Melissa noticed all the African-American staff were gathered downstairs in the kitchen watching too. She was aware that her nanny Noreen did not rejoice in the execution the way Rosemary did. Melissa loved Noreen, who had come to take care of her and Billy when Daddy was first running for governor. She never felt that Noreen was disappointed in her the way her parents were. Sometimes she thought that they forgot about her entirely. “I’m not the oldest, I’m not the youngest, I’m not the smartest, I’m not the best looking, I’m not the best athlete,” she wailed to Noreen.

“Then you be the sweetest. You be the sugar in the family tea,” Noreen said, ruffling Melissa’s too fine brown hair. She loved to be held against Noreen’s warm chest, which she could sink into, her nice big lap where she was welcome.

Billy and she thought they would actually see the killer die, but they didn’t show it on television. Just the people outside the prison with their candles, the people in Philadelphia in front of the courthouse, and the people outside their own house they could see if they peeked out. It looked more impressive on TV. The guy from the Channel Seven news interviewed Daddy and then a police chief who said that cold-blooded cop killer was going to get what he deserved, to deter other lawless thugs from shooting policemen and leaving their families widows and orphans. She had been so silly, she had imagined that when her father was still prosecutor he went after killers like a lawman in a Western and brought them back.

Both her parents liked to ride. When they all went up to Vermont to Grandpa Dickinson’s farm, everybody got on horses and climbed the trails on the mountain. Melissa really loved horses. When she was little, she used to pretend to ride a horse to school, before her father got too
important for her to walk. Horses were the best thing about going to Vermont to visit crabby Grandpa Dickinson—especially the big grey horse Legerdemain—so it was easy to imagine her father on horseback bringing the outlaw to jail with hands tied behind his back. Seeing her father on TV that night, she wanted to be worthy of him, the hero who had captured the outlaw and now, as governor, was about to hang him. Except, as her teacher had explained in class, execution was by lethal injection. That made her think of the school nurse sticking a needle in her arm to give her a vaccine so she wouldn’t get measles. She and Billy fell asleep on the floor by the TV. When Rosemary got in, she was upset to see them sprawled there and scolded Noreen.

When Noreen went out of the governor’s mansion that week, she put on a black armband for Toussaint Parker who had been executed, as did a lot of people on the streets of the predominantly African-American neighborhood surrounding the governor’s mansion and its huddled bunch of office buildings; but when she came inside, she took it off. Still, Rosemary must have heard about it, because suddenly Noreen was gone. Her place was taken by a white lady with a weird accent, Mrs. Corniliu, who bossed them around and told them how spoiled they were and how lucky. Melissa tried to feel lucky, to make herself worthy of her famous daddy and her beautiful mother.

Melissa felt as if she abandoned past selves like snakeskins of shame along her bumpy route toward adulthood. Girls in her class said that senior year was the best time of their lives, but she never believed that. No, she viewed herself as a project under construction, the road all torn up, piles of dirt heaped to the right and left, dump trucks coming and going, cranes digging away. She would remake herself, she would, into somebody strong and important.

Melissa jerked to attention, suddenly aware her mother was addressing her. “I hope I never have to worry about you, Melissa. I have to know you’ll behave in an exemplary way when you begin college in the fall.” Rosemary fortunately had no idea how many stupid stunts Emily and she had pulled over the years, because they were more careful than Billy about covering their tracks, about not getting caught. Together they had
gotten drunk endless times, tried Ecstasy, shoplifted sweaters, bought and worn clothes Rosemary had forbidden as too revealing, too slutty, gone to raves, though Melissa was too shy, even on Ecstasy, to pick up guys there.

Rosemary said “college” and not “Wesleyan.” Melissa suspected her mother had momentarily forgotten which school had accepted her. Rich had gone to Penn State and Merilee had gone to Penn, but now that Father was a senator, she was allowed to go out of state, even though her mother had been disappointed in her choice. Wesleyan would do her no good, Rosemary said, in terms of important contacts. She could easily fall in with a radical crowd there. But Melissa liked Connecticut, near her best friend Emily’s family.

She knew her mother didn’t want her to go to Wesleyan because she had hidden outside her mother’s office and heard Alison, her mother’s factotum, discussing whether Rosemary should insist she go elsewhere. Then later she had listened on the steps while Merilee was arguing with Rosemary. They hardly ever fought, so it was worth spying, especially since it turned out they were arguing about her. Merilee said, “You made me go to George Washington law school instead of UCLA to keep me close by. Don’t lean on Melissa that way. She’s already kind of damaged.”

Her gratitude to Merilee for defending her choice of college vanished when she heard what Merilee really thought of her. Damaged? What did that mean? At that point, she hadn’t even done it with Jonah yet.

BOOK: The Third Child

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