Life Sentences

by Laura Lippman

  “I know,” Cassandra said. “About Daddy and Annie.”

  Lenore didn’t even look up from her work. “Did he tell you, then? He has been worrying about it.”

  “How—” The phone calls. That’s why her parents had been talking to each other. Cedric hadn’t been needling Lenore about Cassandra’s visits with him. He had been confiding in his ex-wife, the only living person who knew his true story. “Did you know always? From the beginning?”

  “Not from the very beginning,” Lenore said, starting on the table’s legs, sighing a little. “I always forget how hard legs are, relative to the top. I say I’m going to do the legs first, save the easy part for last, then I forget. It’s so much more rewarding, stripping a flat surface.”

  Cassandra was not going to let the matter drop. “When, then?”

  “Not long after he left for good. I had my suspicions before, of course. His insistence on getting out of the house the day of your birthday party, then seeing Annie at the hospital. But she was such a different type for him, after all those bony faculty wives. I tried to tell myself he couldn’t possibly love her. I’d think, She doesn’t even read the New York Review of Books!”

  Cassandra couldn’t help laughing and Lenore joined in, once she realized that Cassandra’s amusement was not at her expense. Her mother’s objections mirrored her own long-standing confusion over her father’s choices.

  “Did you ever see the police report?” Part of her hoped that her mother would say, Police report? There was no police report. What did it matter? Her mother had all but confirmed the report was accurate.

  “I had a copy at some point, thinking it might give me leverage, financially. But you can’t get blood from a stone, as your father liked to say, and there simply wasn’t that much money.”

  “But why did you let me believe his…version of things? Why would you let him get away with lying to me, when—when—”

  Lenore didn’t need Cassandra to finish the question. It had probably been uppermost in her mind for years.

  “When I could have swayed you to my side? Well, even when I hated your father—and I hated him for a long time, Cassandra—I didn’t want you to hate him. Your father had bestowed quite a legacy of issues on you. But also—also—”

  Lenore’s eyes began to tear and she had no hands with which to wipe them, given the heavy rubber gloves, the fingertips coated with paint thinner. She tried to press her eye to her shoulder, a futile gesture that almost made Cassandra cry. “You were always a daddy’s girl, Cassandra. I could have made him look bad in your eyes, but that was never what I wanted. I only wanted you to think that I was interesting, too.”

  “I do,” she said. “I think you’re extraordinary.”

  And just because she had never said it aloud didn’t mean it wasn’t true. Her mother was extraordinary. Cassandra thought back to the opening of her first book, the story of how she had found speech. How quickly Cassandra had skimmed over her mother’s role in that beloved anecdote, the unnerving choice she had made when she pointed the family car down the icy slope of Northern Parkway. What was it like to be home alone with a small child—a silent one at that—while one’s husband moved in a world of ideas and clever talk? Was her mother really that different from Callie, depressed and overwhelmed, yearning for a man she could never have? Cedric had courted her and wooed her, recited Poe’s “Lenore” to her—then moved on. Long before he met Annie, he had, in essence, abandoned Cassandra’s mother. Yet she had refused to use her knowledge to turn Cassandra against him.

  Lenore shook her head, refusing the compliment. “No, I was silly and embarrassing, the one you tolerated. That wouldn’t have changed if I let you find out your father was lying to you. I didn’t want your relative admiration. I wanted the real thing.”

  “I never thought you silly.” She had, though. “And I was only embarrassed when I was a teenager. Every teenager is embarrassed by her mother.”

  “Perhaps silly isn’t the right word. Boring, I guess. My Father’s Daughter. The title alone makes it clear. It was as if you hatched from an egg, as if that elephant, you know, had brought you to life.”

  Her father would have invoked Zeus and Leda, Cassandra knew, but she liked the fact that her mother chose Dr. Seuss. “Horton?”

  “Yes, Horton, that was the one. As if the elephant hatched the egg while I was off gallivanting.”

  Lenore recovered herself, more or less, and returned to her work. Her shoulders twitched a little, as if she was still holding back some strong emotions, but she was otherwise composed.

  “I came here first, the moment I learned,” Cassandra said. “You should know, there’s…someone threatening to make this public, but I can keep that from happening. It’s your decision.”

  “More your father’s, I would think. Go talk to him.”

  “I will. But his counsel will be steeped in self-interest. He made his choices. You didn’t. What should I do, Mom?”

  She realized it might well be the first time in years that she had sought her mother’s advice out of something more than politeness.

  “Are you asking if I’ll be humiliated if that old story comes out? A little, I suppose, but nothing compared to what your father will experience. At the same time, I think he’ll feel relieved. He’s been dreading this thing at the Gordon School.”

  “Shit.” Cassandra had quite forgotten the fund-raiser. Whatever she decided to do, she couldn’t go forward with that farce. But if she canceled, she would have to offer a plausible explanation, perhaps even cover whatever money the school had already spent in preparation. Secrets are like floodwaters, she had warned Donna. But that was before she knew she had her own secret to protect.

  “Why didn’t Daddy say anything before the book came out?”

  “It was too late. It’s not like you came to us first and said what you were going to do. It was already done and sold. Of course, we didn’t imagine that so many people would read it—”

  “Of course.” Funny how galling that still was, being reminded that her own parents had not expected her to be successful.

  “Even if we had, he never would have made you pull it back. You believed every word, after all. You took your father’s story and made it something lovely. And it was true, in the important ways.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “He and Annie did love each other. He risked his life for her. Her boyfriend went after her first, and your father defended her. To him, it didn’t matter if he met her in the middle of a riot or buying that stupid Washington’s Birthday cake at Silber’s bakery. It was love at first sight, a transforming event. He liked seeing that in print. Besides—he was proud of you, honey.”

  “Proud when the book began selling, you mean.”

  “No, proud that you finished a book. He couldn’t get over that. In fact, that was the first time we spoke in years. He read that early copy you gave us—”

  “The galleys.” She remembered that plain little book, bound in a matte blue cover, with great affection. The day she had taken her advance copy out of the Federal Express envelope, life had been all sheer possibility. In many ways, life had exceeded the dreams and hopes she had that day. So why wasn’t she happier?

  “Right, and he called me, probably for the first time since you left high school, and said, ‘Can you believe this daughter of ours?’ Oh, he was downright obnoxious, going all over town about what a good writer you were.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I was the one who said—what about the, um, fact that it’s not exactly true? And he said, ‘She wrote it so beautifully that she made it true.’”

  Too little, too late. “That’s the advantage of being duped,” Cassandra said. “One is nothing if not sincere.”

  Indifferent to the dust and dirt, Cassandra slumped on an old kitchen stool, a relic from her mother’s Swedish phase, possibly the very stool on which Callie had sat forty years ago. It was quiet on Hillhouse Road on a Sunday afternoon, quiet enou
gh to hear her mother’s steel wool moving up and down the table leg, the wind in the trees, the thrum of traffic on Forest Park Avenue below. She looked at the table. The grain was mottled, cheap pine most likely. Her mother would end up painting it. Her trash-picked find would cost her dozens of hours, and in the end, she would have a table that she could have purchased for fifty or sixty dollars at any midprice furniture store. But she worked with what she had. Everyone did.

  “What are you going to do, Cassandra?”

  “I’m not sure, Mom. There are financial implications, legal implications. At the very least, I owe a book, and if I don’t deliver it, or something in its place, I have to return a rather large amount of money.”

  “Do you have it?”

  “Maybe. My financial situation is complicated by the fact that I have memoirs out there posing as nonfiction, when the very spine of the story is false. If they recall it, pulp it—well, I’ll lose a big chunk of income that I thought I could count on for years.”

  Her mother looked stricken at this. Scandal she could weather, but financial problems still unnerved her.

  “It will be okay,” Cassandra assured her. “Somehow. I could sidestep the whole problem by writing a book about you. My Mother’s Daughter. I’ll set the record straight and make you the hero.”

  She was joking. At least, she was pretty sure she was joking.

  “No thank you,” Lenore said. “Besides, you’ll be fifty next week, Cassandra. Whatever you are, whatever you write, you’re your own person by now. Or should be.”

  HAPPY WANDERERS

  September 5–6

  CHAPTER

  35

  NO ONE HAD EVER SEEN a party like the “graduation” celebration that the Howards threw for our passage from elementary school to junior high. It was a melancholy night for me, filled with reminders that I would be going to a different school from the others. The color theme, for example, was maroon and gold, the colors for William Lemmel Junior High, and the elaborate cake held the legend HERE WE COME, SCHOOL #79. I didn’t even know the colors for Rock Glen, although I had already attended an orientation where we were taught the school song, to the tune of “The Happy Wanderer.”

  We stand to sing our song today

  Its words will be our rule

  To grow and learn

  To work and play

  Our name is Rock Glen School

  “Dag, Cassandra,” Fatima said when I sang it for her. “You sure do sing loud.”

  I also had been given a copy of the school’s dress code, a mysterious document that seemed more concerned with potential weapons than propriety. The banned items included clogs (then bulbous, wooden affairs from Sweden), picks with metal teeth, and belts worn unbuckled. The latter was presumably forbidden because an unbuckled belt could be whipped out and used to administer a beating. I wish I could say that the list was an alarmist, reactionary document, but it proved eminently sensible. Rock Glen was a tough school, although those of us in the “enriched” track usually moved in a rarefied bubble, at a safe remove from the rougher element. The year after I left, there was an actual riot. Lemmel was tougher still, yet this was not mentioned, not at the graduation party.

  The Howards’ house was a marvel, modern for the time, built in such a way that the front revealed little about its true scale and tasteful luxury. No, the Howards’ material wealth was evident only from the back, where the house had been positioned to take full advantage of the lot, on a wooded hill high above the Gwynns Falls. The rear of the house was almost entirely glass, the better to take in that view. Earlier that year, a girl had run down that hill, building up so much momentum that she had plunged into the stream, swollen by recent rains, and ended up drowning. Donna said her family wasn’t home at the time, or her father surely would have run down the hill and saved the girl. There was a pool with a flagstone terrace. There was a pool at my house, too, but we couldn’t afford to fill it even before my father left, much less repair the cracks and return it to functionality. We danced around the Howards’ pool, but no one went swimming, not that night.

  The party was winding down when Tisha’s little brother burst in, probably sent to summon Tisha for her ride home. Reginald Barr was known as Candy, the kind of nickname that Tisha never would have allowed anyone to bestow on her. Another child, one with a lesser personality, might have been ruined by such a nickname, but Candy embraced it, developing a signature dance that he performed whenever possible, singing an Astors song by the same name. “Gee whiz,” he sang, spinning in circles as Tisha rolled her eyes, disturbed that her baby brother had crashed the party. But he was singing to Donna, our hostess. I don’t remember the lyrics exactly; it was a typical love song, full of sweet lips and blue eyes. But when he got to the part where he declared that the girl would one day marry him, Candy Barr dropped to one knee on that flagstone terrace and held out his hands to Donna, who had covered her face to smother her laughter, soft as it was. Candy didn’t mind that Donna was laughing at him, as long as she was laughing. Donna’s laugh was a rare thing; we all competed for it.

  “THE THING IS, HE WASN’T THERE,” said Tisha, who had marked the spot with a Post-it in a copy of the hardcover edition of My Father’s Daughter, now a collector’s item twice over—a first edition of a bestseller that had been extensively revised. “Not at the graduation party. That happened at my birthday party, a month earlier.”

  “Well, thanks for setting the record straight on that crucial matter,” Cassandra said. “Unfortunately, I’ve already sent in the new epilogue and the book is in copyediting.”

  They were in the same suburban restaurant where they had lunched six months earlier, but it was Tisha who had suggested this meeting. She also had chosen a later time, happy hour—“But on the late side, after the teachers clear out”—and was indulging in a glass of wine. Still, Cassandra couldn’t help being wary. Tisha was Reg’s sister, Donna’s oldest friend. She had to have an agenda.

  “I’m not showing it to you to prove what you got wrong,” Tisha said. “It’s about what you got right. Can’t you see? Even then, Reg was crazy for Donna. He wasn’t just fooling when he did that dance. He’d do anything for her.”

  “I’m well aware of that.”

  “He loves her, Cassandra. He loves her more than she’ll ever love him, and that’s tragic. You may not have understood what you saw, yet you captured the way he put her on a pedestal.”

  “Hmmmm.” Tisha’s overture, while well intentioned, was cold comfort. What was the point of glimpsing the little things in hindsight? It didn’t change the fact that she had been wrong about so many big things.

  The more disturbing development was how little anyone cared about setting the record straight. With her father’s blessing—as Lenore predicted, he was relieved to let go of his secret—Cassandra had gone to her original editor, Belle, and explained that the heart of My Father’s Daughter was essentially false. Cassandra had expected the existing copies to be recalled and pulped, but Belle had proposed a new edition with a lengthy epilogue, which would allow Cassandra to clarify the record but also reflect on how she had changed since the book was written.

  “It’s still a beautiful little book, and so heartfelt,” Belle had said. “I think it would be more valuable to let it stand on its own, then give readers the context to understand all this new information. After all, that’s how you experienced the story, so it’s not ersatz or false. This was true when you wrote it. Now it’s a different kind of true.”

  And as Cassandra worked—interviewing her mother and father, but also steeping herself in the historical record of the time in order to provide a more accurate overview of the riots—she realized that the bulk of her story was unchanged. What were those hurtful words that others had thrown at her? Martin Luther King was assassinated and ruined my birthday party, boo-hoo-hoo. Stripped of its fake portent, its never-was link to a seminal event, My Father’s Daughter turned out to be a genuinely sad story, one about a girl who needed the my
thology of a huge historic moment to rationalize a parent’s pedestrian betrayal.

  The epilogue did not reveal how she had learned the truth; she wrote only that someone had furnished her a copy of the police report. And while her old publicist—another happy reunion—had stoked the media with a few tantalizing details, she had shrewdly kept back the biggest revelation. The orders for the new book promised to be robust and Belle had even floated the idea of an updated version of The Eternal Wife. Cassandra was far from the financial ruin she had envisioned when she sold her place in Brooklyn and used part of the equity to make a sizable donation to the Gordon School. She had thought her profits on New York real estate would mean she could buy a waterfront penthouse in Baltimore, especially in this soft market, but between the donation and her decision to return the advance on what was to have been the Callie book, she had just enough to buy a condominium with a view of another condominium.

  But she hadn’t moved back to Baltimore because it was cheaper. She wanted to be close to her parents, especially her mother, who would eventually have to give up the house on Hillhouse Road, probably sooner than she thought. A few weeks ago, Cassandra had stopped by unannounced and discovered her mother weeping in the middle of the afternoon. Lenore confessed that she had trouble mustering the necessary strength to open the elbow joint on her powder room sink. Cassandra had taken the wrench in hand and, with much coaching, done it for her.