Other Men's Daughters

by Richard Stern

  “I don’t think French waters are that much deeper than ours, Lisa.” He was going to keep his temper. Though he could not get used to this plain (no make-up, no flirtatiousness), long-legged beauty of his telling him what she called the score.

  “The Pill’s changed everything, Daddy. You have to get used to it.”

  Here was someone whose every atom he’d either created or subsidized, who only existed because he’d stirred out of a dream twenty-four years ago, and here she was mapping out the world for him. It was not easy to take. Not in this apoplectic heat with the old ladies and their ancient pugs staggering along the Drive with their tongues out. “I don’t like to have my face rubbed in mud, Lisa, that’s all. Not by my own children.”

  He’d called Lisa in New York after he’d read the Newsweek article. Did she want to go to France with him for a few days, he trusted her judgment, maybe she could help detach her sister from whatever mess she was in.

  Lisa didn’t want to go, she was the last person to budge Cynthia, the sibling war was over because they didn’t see each other, but it would be years before they could talk easily. She still tried to help. “Maybe she is working with the professor. It said she was his assistant.”

  “She has a thousand dollars for eight weeks, she doesn’t need to work. She’s supposed to be seeing the Louvre and the Uffizi.”

  “All right, so she met someone she liked. Is that unnatural?”

  “Nothing that happens is unnatural. I’m just going over to take a look and see how far she’s gone.”

  Lisa stared toward but not into her father’s eyes. It was very hard facing up to him, he just overwhelmed you; he was a bully with right on his side, and a bully without it. Every encounter with him was a struggle for survival. It was unfair. He weakened her, then bullied her. And the worst was she loved him.

  “You’ll scare her to death.”

  “I telegraphed I was coming.”

  “God warned Adam and Eve about the apple.”

  Such a burst of female mis-analogizing; so dear these intelligences but so fouled up. “Lisa, honey, your sister may be in deep water. Isn’t that the point?”

  “She seems to be doing all right. I just think you don’t know the score.”

  They were the only ones in sight now, the only ones dumb enough to be on the street. Now and then a bus lumbered by, or a few cars, but this part of New York could have been a ghost city except for the two Ryders facing each other. “It’s too hot to fight. I’ll buy you dinner at the airport and send you back in a taxi.”

  Lisa said she’d better not go, she had a welding class. “Have a good time, Daddy. And don’t,” the bare shoulders lifted and fell.

  “Don’t worry about that.” He took the check he’d made out for her from his wallet; she accepted it like defeat, and, head low, walked slowly to Broadway and waited till he flagged down a taxi.

  Mademoiselle was watering when the Citroen drove up the path. When the regal gentleman descended, she almost curtsied. “Cynthia Ryder?” he asked.

  Mademoiselle wiped her hands and chattered alien gibberish, while he repeated, “Cynthia Ryder” till Cynthia ran out and leaned against the white suit.

  The first hour she kept off his questions with her own: how was the trip, how was Lisa, how was Momma, what were Jenny and San doing, they never wrote, wasn’t it beautiful here, look at the apricots, the plums, the medlars, come see the tomato field, the church, isn’t Mademoiselle grotesque, and those hounds, aren’t they devils. Mr. Ryder had a diplomat’s patience; and he enjoyed the charm and beauty of his daughter. The sun had bleached her hair, her legs—in denim shorts—were a woman’s, there was no baby fat in the thighs. She spoke easily, listened well, without Lisa’s shoulder-chip, without her mother’s hickish clowning. Still, the evaded point was swelling. It was time to find out things. She wasn’t renting this villa on the thousand he gave her. Finally she came to it and said her friend would be coming back from the lab before long.

  “This is his house, I take it.”

  “He rents it from our red-toed friend here. Two hundred a month. I pay twenty.”

  “You’re getting a good deal. I suppose he is too.” Which went further than he’d meant. Cynthia blushed.

  “He’s a friend, a close friend.”

  Mr. Ryder said he’d seen that announced in Newsweek. Cynthia, small face aburst from its yellow wood, began talking, talking. It was at Harvard, such a summer, they met by chance, he was a distinguished doctor, professor, researcher, he was lonely, he’d been separated-in-spirit for years, she was lonely, she never got on with boys, she needed an older man, Merriwether was full of scruples, she overcame them, he had children—yes—some nearly as old as she, but there were millions of such couples, take Onassis, take Justice Douglas, Senator Thurmond, Dr. Barnard, it was difficult, but they loved each other so, please don’t do anything, Daddy, please don’t take it away, she did not know what would happen, they were making no plans, just trying to get through day by day hurting others as little as possible, that was why she hadn’t said anything, who knows, by the time she’d written, it might have been all over.

  So there it was. The word storm blew and Mr. Ryder stood in the sun looking at this blonde child he’d raised. In minutes he would be meeting a sag-bellied, lecherous graybeard, a father, a careless, oblivious professional man who’d taken leave of his senses and debauched this girl. Here they were, abandoned to their confused felicity in a French villa, thousands of miles away from their obligations.

  “What a business, Cynthia.”

  He knew he should touch her, but did not want to. These old vines and fruit trees, the glistening urns, the stucco with red splints gashed across it, what a setting for this absurd amour.

  “He doesn’t know what to do,” said Cynthia.

  “Doesn’t know. He doesn’t know.” Strong feelings turn people into machines; they go mechanical, repetitious, they sputter as the newer system of mentality tries to control the lava spurting out of the infantile fears. Mr. Ryder’s face grew bloody, liverish, then pale, he walked the terrace, away from this suddenly detestable presence, this oddly unfamiliar daughter. He came back spouting his own marital story, how he had courted her mother for years until he’d finished law school and passed the bar exam, they had restrained their passions, they had not gone against the grain of their teaching. All right, the world was on a moral bender, things had changed somewhat, but mores were stored training as heredity was stored environment, and she had been trained, what did she mean by so going against the grain of her life?

  Yellow shirt, maroon shorts, one-band sandals, Cynthia looked more waif than lecher’s morsel. Mr. Ryder could have scooped her up and paddled her. But no, there was a woman’s rear, and under the yellow shirt, there were woman’s breasts. His daughter was not only capable of having a grand affair, she would be a lucky man’s treat. What madness to waste her sexual noontime with an antique.

  “I haven’t gone against anything,” she said. “You wait till you meet Robert, he’ll be here any minute. He’s the dearest, finest man. Not unlike you. In many ways. It’s probably how I found him.”

  “Don’t spread that jam on this stale bread, Cynthia.”

  “It’s not stale. It’s the good old bread of compatible human beings. It’s common sense, it’s truth.” This was laced with hysteria, she felt the unsteadiness, the unloosening of something she knew she didn’t want to release. She managed to hold on. “Yours and Momma’s story’s lovely. I don’t even care that people today would think it unnatural. For me, it’s something out of Jane Austen. Out of Camelot. It’s lovely. Only it’s not mine, Daddy. My life is different.”

  Mr. Ryder had lots of legal acreage on all sides of his feelings. With words, discussion, debate, argument, he settled in. “I know times change, Cynthia, and I know you can’t live anyone else’s life. The cliché is I can’t live your life nor you mine. I don’t accept that. If something happens to you, that becomes my life. I hope the same
is true for you. If only to the extent that I still support you.”

  The nausea of authority, the old claw, the male threat in the male throat, affection quantified to death. “Your daughters don’t need those reminders, Daddy.”

  “Knowing’s one thing, doing’s another.”

  She shook her head. “I have to sit down.” She sat where she stood, on the cement. “I’m not here to hurt you,” he said, looking down. He touched her head. That was better. His daughter’s head. Her father’s hand. The shuttles between rage and bafflement slowed up. He knelt and stroked her head. “Do you have a cup of tea?”

  They went inside, she boiled water, Mr. Ryder sat at the table. He kept his coat on, a uniform of paternity. When the Peugeot bounced up the path, he took a long swig of tea and followed Cynthia outside.

  Merriwether was clearly no chicken, but to Mr. Ryder’s large relief, no Grandpa Lecher. Middle-sized, nice-looking, sporty without flamboyance (he wore sneakers, slacks, a sport shirt); his hair was a bit shaggy—“professorial,” thought Mr. Ryder—but conventional. He had a pleasant smile, and his speech—“So glad to see you”—a blend of Kennedy and England. A decent-looking fellow. And, it turned out, direct. “This secrecy has been burdensome to both of us. We have difficulties enough without that,” and right there on the terrace he launched into them—his family situation, his love for his children, his “deep feeling” for Cynthia. “Nothing in my life prepared me for this.”

  It overwhelmed Mr. Ryder. Too much, too quick. The garden noise, the flowers, the silken heat, the tiny lady in long dress and sandals hoisting water arcs over a tomato field, the fluent doctor, his daughter, even his own displacement (a condition as real as these other things), all of it worked against meaning. Mr. Ryder was used to thinking clearly, feeling strongly, deciding quickly. Now cloth seemed as much a part of flower as of the shirt it composed, the shirt had as much to do with the heat as with the body it clothed, and Merriwether—name, voice, sport shirt, trouble—was but part of the scene, a speaking vine, not something that menaced the happiness of a daughter. What was a daughter anyway? Something visible, glinting fibers, dark spheres, a triangle. This disorientation passed in a second, but it was a deep, unique, strange second in Mr. Ryder’s life. Meaning, decisiveness, movement: useless, that was what that visual disintegrity spelled for him, and as it passed, and as a giddy ease it brought passed too, Mr. Ryder fought back for what he knew: settlements, breakage, families, homes, plans, the order of the world whose threats he’d faced down so many years in the courts of Shallot and New Bern, Durham and Raleigh. “How could you let it happen?” he said to Dr. Merriwether. “How could you let it continue?”

  Something between sigh and groan came out of Cynthia. There was her father, dark, small-chinned face drawn in like an inquisitor’s, standing over Bobbie in his white suit, his face like a thuggish prince’s, glowering with regal menace. “What are you saying, Daddy?”

  “I understand, Mr. Ryder,” said Merriwether. He was holding onto himself. You owe him, was his control. You owe it. “Life surprised me. That’s about it. Now I go back with the not-easy job of telling my wife and children.”

  “I suppose too much milk is spilled,” was Mr. Ryder’s odd response.

  “The marriage part of my life was spilled long ago.”

  “And you and Cynthia, that isn’t spillage?”

  “I’m going inside, Daddy.”

  “Cynthia,” said Merriwether. “Maybe we can drink a little wine in the grape arbor.”

  “You drink,” said Cynthia. “I have to lie down.”

  Merriwether went inside—what relief—and opened a bottle of white wine. He and Mr. Ryder sat and drank in the arbor. Their clothing made them seem like adult and child, but now they talked as contemporaries.

  “Have you thought about breaking up? With Cynthia?”

  “Yes. But every day we’re together makes it more difficult. Not that it’s all wine and roses.”

  “I can imagine,” said Mr. Ryder. This wine was augmenting his vertigo. And suddenly he knew and simultaneously felt the strain of it all. What did it all have to do with his life? “I’ve come close to divorce myself—may I call you Robert?”

  “Of course.”

  “My wife is a good person, but we couldn’t be more unlike. The years haven’t made us more alike. But we both saw where our center was, so we stayed together. There are so many things in life.”

  Merriwether said he came from a family where there was no divorce, the idea of doing anything to hurt his children was an agony to him, but he believed his married life might be poisoning them; as for leaving Cynthia, though he believed he would almost enjoy the pain as a kind of martyrdom of reparation, he feared for her. “She’s not the steadiest young woman in the world.”

  “You think she might do something to herself?”

  “Such threats are common, but I believe they’re genuine. There’s an enormous amount of sheer lack of will to live in people. It’s very hard for people like me—or you, I should think—to understand. I don’t believe psychiatrists generally accept Freud’s notion of the death wish, but he surely felt it himself and saw it in other people. I think Cynthia could yield to it, yes.”

  Mr. Ryder had no close friends at home. His life was activity. He’d had intimate talk from clients, they were fond of him and he of them, but the intimacy was one way: their troubles, his advice. He did not open himself to anyone. What was the point of stirring up emotional subtleties? He was no artist, no psychologist and, as far as he could tell, not particularly neurotic. But talking with this intelligent man was unusually pleasant. He enjoyed the talk, he enjoyed his stake in the man, and he enjoyed something that he wouldn’t have acknowledged, the marks of privilege he himself lacked. This man had twenty years’ advantage over him, he’d grown up with people who’d talked quietly about all sorts of things, he felt assured about his family, he had a place that existed before he was born. Mr. Ryder had made everything he had. His father had been a drunkard, his mother had worked hard, a decent woman who ran the hardware store and went to church, he loved her, but as soon as he could, he’d gone off on his own. As early as he remembered, he’d made up his mind to drive the hick out of himself, bit by bit. He’d done it. He still lived where he was comfortable, in Shallot, but he took no value, southern or northern, on face value. When he was concerned, he looked into things. He’d taught himself a thousand things, he designed a house, built a car, learned to play the flute, to fly a plane, and enough about market procedures, animal husbandry and oil geology to make far shrewder investments than he would have made through most brokers. He was proud of his skills and proud of his methods, but there was also a grain of innocent dazzlement at what could not be achieved, for those skills and that knowledge which one “breathed in,” which one was born to. The way Merriwether held himself, the stretched legs linked above the white sneakers, the lift of the head, the dramaless quiet of the voice, the courtesy and attentiveness, the naïveté of the look. Maybe none of it expressed a truth about the man, but it did express what was beyond him, and Mr. Ryder found it valuable, as he had when he was nine years old listening to northern voices on his radio, watching Tyrone Power, Gary Cooper (in civilian, not cowboy clothes) and William Powell in the Shallot Paramount.

  “Robert,” he said. “Maybe we should save the rest of this. I better go take a nap back at the hotel, or I’m not going to be up to much. I only have five days here in Europe, and I’m planning to see a few things. Maybe you and Cynthia will come down to the hotel”—the accent was on “ho,” one of the few remnants of his family speech—“and have dinner with me.”

  They said goodby using, a bit self-consciously, first names—“William,” “Robert”—Merriwether pulled the Peugeot out of the Citroen’s way and pointed it down the road to Nice.

  They met Mr. Ryder on the dining terrace of the Negresco. Cynthia wore a scarlet dress with brocade collar, Mr. Ryder a navy blazer and white tie; Merriwether was slightly a
skew in olive turtleneck and tan polo coat. Thirty yards away, cars whirred Cannes-or-Menton-ward, six or seven yachts lit up in the bay, a band of red moon glowed on the palms, there was glitter, mildness, poly-lingual babble, and then lobster stuffed with crab meat, a salade Niçoise, crêpes flambés, showtunes of the American Thirties and floods of anecdote, Harvard, Carolina, legal and medical cases, travel stories, family jokes. Mr. Ryder was now completely at ease with Dr. Merriwether. He even had the added pleasure of being a proprietor: this was almost a son-in-law.

  Cynthia felt excluded. “They have me here like those flowers,” but, after all, this was the solution to her worst fear, that her father would hurt Bobbie or take her away.

  Mr. Ryder was going off to Rome, Paris and London, and he felt much better than he had hours ago. “I want to help,” he said, at the end. “I’m afraid you’re going to have bad times. I’ll do my best to stick with you.” He wasn’t at all drunk, but the remark came out of a general, blurred delight to which a few glasses of wine had contributed. Mostly, though, it was the beauty of the place, the beauty of his daughter, and the distinction of the man who was a kind of brotherly son-in-law, a man who, almost as inexperienced as himself, had somehow fallen into a new life.

  Driving up the St. Vetry road at eleven o’clock, Cynthia could barely believe that what she’d so dreaded had come and passed, that her father and lover had met and somehow gotten on and that she was going back not with her father but—with his implied consent—to her lover’s house.

  It was a lovely night; once they’d left Nice, the air was fresh.

  “Did you like him?” asked Cynthia.

  “I liked his control. I liked the way he treated me, I liked his courtesy, his manner. I don’t know that we’d ever be friends.”