Family Merger

by Leigh Greenwood

  He felt himself tense when he heard the door handle turn. He looked up as his daughter entered. She looked as if she were facing a grim task, one she’d love to avoid but knew she had to endure before she could be free again. Ron felt his hopes sink.

  Ron barely kept himself from breathing a sigh of relief when Kathryn followed Cynthia into the room. He hadn’t asked her to come—the whole point of the weekend was to throw the families together without outside influences—but he was glad she had. They didn’t agree on lots of things, but she wanted him to be successful with Cynthia. And she liked him. He wondered if Cynthia did.

  Ron wasn’t sure he wanted Cynthia to see him as her confidante, but he did want her to feel she could come to him when she was in trouble. At the very least, he didn’t want to be closed out of her life just when she needed him most. He was relieved when Cynthia chose to sit directly across from him. Kathryn chose a seat across the room, much as she had the first night back in Charlotte. Could it truly have been only two weeks ago? It seemed like years.

  “Did you and Leigh had a good time?” Ron asked. How did you start a conversation when anything you said could be taken the wrong way? “Thanks for all your help with the parents.”

  “We didn’t do anything but talk,” Cynthia said.

  “That’s exactly what I wanted you to do. Everybody was nervous when they got here. They won’t be able to make any progress if they feel tense and defensive.”

  “Do you feel tense and defensive?”

  He hadn’t expected such a question from his daughter. He glanced at Kathryn, but she shook her head. No help from that quarter. “Yes,” he replied. “Now that you mention it, I do.”

  “Why?”

  He’d planned to do the interrogating, but Cynthia had struck first. “Because you and I don’t seem to be making any progress. It seems like every time we talk, things are worse. Tonight you didn’t even want to talk to me. Why?”

  Cynthia squirmed in her chair, but she didn’t back down. “You haven’t told me why you’re defensive.”

  “I guess it’s because everybody thinks I did something wrong, something I knew was wrong, and didn’t do anything about it because I didn’t care, but it’s not true.”

  Cynthia turned to Kathryn. “Do you believe that?”

  “What I think doesn’t matter. This is between you and your father.”

  “But it does matter,” Cynthia said.

  “Why?” Ron asked. “Are you saying you can’t believe anything I say unless Kathryn agrees with me?”

  Cynthia met his gaze for a moment, then dropped hers to her lap. “I’m not a good judge of people. Sometimes I believe what I want to believe whether it’s true or not. Other times I’m scared to believe things. Then there are the times I don’t know enough to be able to tell what’s the truth. I feel a lot better when Miss Roper agrees with me.”

  Ron swung his gaze to Kathryn. “It looks like the ball is in your court.”

  Kathryn looked at Cynthia. “I don’t know what your father might have done to prevent this situation from arising, but I’m sure he didn’t realize what was happening. I’m equally certain if he had known what was happening, he’d have done everything in his power to stop it.” Kathryn directed her gaze to Ron. “I’ve always thought he devoted too much of his time to his career and too little to his daughter, but I feel certain he loves you very much and will do anything he can to restore a relationship he realizes is very important to him.”

  Ron hadn’t expected such generous support from Kathryn. While he thought she had come to like him personally, she continued to make it clear she disagreed with the importance of his career in his life.

  “Do you believe me now?” Ron asked his daughter.

  She squirmed under his scrutiny. “I don’t know.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t feel it’s true.”

  Ron fought against letting his irritation show. A logical person didn’t make decisions based on feelings. Any consultant worth his salt knew that you could have six very intelligent people in the same room participating in the same conversation, and all six would come away with a different interpretation of what people meant by what they said. You dealt with facts, observable actions, concrete outcomes. Depending on feelings could send you into a miasma of supposition at variance with the facts. But he restrained himself.

  “What do you feel?” he asked.

  She clearly didn’t want to answer him. She clasped her hands tightly in her lap, bit her lip. That reminded him so much of what she did when she was a little girl that most of his irritation melted. He wanted to reach out, take her in his arms and assure her everything would be all right, but he knew they had a long way to go before she would let him do that.

  “It’s hard to say how I feel,” Cynthia said. She was backing away, looking for a way out of telling him something she thought he wouldn’t like.

  “You said you would be candid with your father,” Kathryn said. “You said you wouldn’t let him argue you out of your position.”

  “I know,” Cynthia said.

  “What’s holding you back?” Ron asked.

  “I don’t like saying mean things about you,” Cynthia flung at him. “After all, you are my father.”

  “If my being your father is to mean anything beyond a biological fact, you’ve got to tell me what you’re feeling. I really don’t know what it is. If I’d known, I’d never have let things get this bad.”

  “What do you see as bad?” Cynthia asked.

  “Your being pregnant at sixteen. Your not wanting to talk to me about that or anything else.”

  “Is that all?”

  “It’s enough.”

  “It’s not even the beginning,” Cynthia said, her anger apparently enabling her to push past her reluctance to hurt her father’s feelings. “I don’t feel like you care about me, about what I want, what I feel, what makes me happy, what makes me sad, my friends, anything. I’m just some teenager who lives in your house, someone you check on once in a while to make sure somebody is taking care of her.”

  “That’s not true. I love you.”

  “You love your daughter, whoever that might be, but you can’t love me because you don’t know who I am. You haven’t asked my opinion on the war on terrorism, whether the Tar Heels will make the Final Four, or whether I think North Carolina ought to allow nude beaches. You don’t know whether I want to stay at Country Day or transfer to Latin. You don’t know who my friends are, who I’ve been dating, if I’d like to go out for cheerleading.”

  “If you wanted to discuss any of those things, all you had to do was bring them up.”

  “You made me feel that next to your work they were frivolous, that you had more important things to do.”

  He couldn’t dispute that. He couldn’t think of anything that interested him less than whether she wanted to go out for cheerleading. She’d never indicated a desire to change schools, he knew better than to interfere with her friendships, and he’d damned well have met every date at the door with a shotgun if he’d had any idea his daughter would end up pregnant.

  “I have a lot of deadlines,” Ron said. “Some things can’t wait.”

  “Everybody told me not to bother you, that you had important work to do. They didn’t say what I did was unimportant, but that’s what they implied.”

  “Margaret wouldn’t say that.”

  “Why not? Mama did. When I wanted to sit on your lap or ask you to read me a story, she’d tell me not to bother you, that you had important work to do. Everybody acts like what I do isn’t important compared to you.”

  Ron hadn’t suspected the problem extended beyond him and his daughter. He was at a loss to know what had been said and what he could do about it.

  “You don’t have to ask me,” Cynthia said, resentment filling her voice. “You can ask Miss Roper.”

  “I can’t help you there,” Kathryn said. “All I know is the article in the newspaper was very flat
tering. Then when the second article came out in Time, he became a minor celebrity.”

  “That’s all I heard about for months,” Cynthia said. “Everybody wanted to know what you were doing and how much money you were making. Why did you let them interview you? Didn’t you know it would make my life miserable?”

  “I thought you’d be proud of me.” The Charlotte Observer wanting to do an in-depth article on him pleased him more than the Time article because it meant he was finally getting some recognition in his hometown. He was no longer the upstart from the trailer court who’d managed to wheedle a few scholarships out of some nice schools. He was that brilliant young businessman who’d distinguished himself at some of the finest schools in America and was making a name for himself on the international business scene. “It never occurred to me that it would be a problem for you. You should have told me.”

  “And have half the world saying I was an ungrateful brat or that I was just jealous of your success?”

  “Nobody would say that. There’s no comparison between the two.”

  “That’s just it,” Cynthia cried, pouncing on his words before he could understand the way she’d taken them. “Everything you do is important. Nothing I do is.”

  So it wasn’t just that he’d failed to be aware of the changes in his daughter as she grew up. Everything around her had conspired to make her feel unimportant, that other people—strangers—had more of a right to her father’s time than she did. And her own mother had begun the process.

  “The world doesn’t value feelings when they’re set against large sums of money,” Kathryn said. “It’s not fair, but that’s the way it is.”

  “The world might not value your feelings, but I do,” Ron said. “I know I’ve let myself get overly preoccupied with my job. There have been times when I’ve almost forgotten I had a family. It may not seem like it, but everything I did was as much for you as it was for me.”

  “Yeah, right!”

  Complete disbelief. How did he explain that a father could love his family so much he would work himself to exhaustion for them? Just because this wasn’t a case of a poor man with a backbreaking job working to support a large family living below the poverty level didn’t mean it couldn’t be the case. Kathryn had said Cynthia might not want the same things he wanted. If that was so, she wouldn’t see his work the same way he did.

  “Both your mother and I came from poor backgrounds. We only got ahead by constant hard work.”

  “Mama told me that all the time. I suppose she did it to make me understand why hard work and success were so important to both of you, but if you’re doing it for me, how come I got left out, forgotten, ignored?”

  “Because I forgot you weren’t your mother or me,” Ron said. “I forgot you’d grown up under circumstances that made it impossible for you to understand how your mother and I felt.”

  “That’s like what happened to Kathryn,” Cynthia said. “Nothing changed her father. I don’t see why I should expect you to change.”

  “I’m not going to change completely,” Ron said. “I’ll always be driven to succeed. It’s bred in me. What I can change is the way I relate to you and the other people I care about.”

  “How do you propose to do that?”

  She didn’t believe a word he said.

  “I’m depending on you to tell me,” Ron said. “We wouldn’t be in this mess if I’d known what to do. You can’t imagine how guilty I feel that something I didn’t do caused you to want to go out and get pregnant.”

  Immediately Cynthia went from looking angry to defensive. “I never said I got pregnant because of you.”

  “Then what was it? You’re intelligent. You knew what could happen if you had unprotected sex. No teenager wants her life turned upside down, her education put on hold, her friends drifting away because they have nothing in common, her time consumed in caring for a baby who requires her attention twenty-four hours a day. You had to have a reason. And that reason had something to do with my failure to provide what you needed.”

  “Is that how you see a baby? Is that how you saw me?”

  “Your mother was twenty-two, not sixteen. I had been working for two years. We were ready for children. We had the time to devote to them.”

  “I want this baby,” Cynthia said. “I don’t consider becoming a mother ruining my life.”

  Ron had no doubt Cynthia did want the baby. But whatever her reasons might be for wanting it, he was convinced they were the wrong ones.

  “Tell me why you want this baby, why you don’t want to share it with its father.”

  Cynthia’s reaction told Ron he’d made a wrong move. She appeared to stiffen, flinch and draw back.

  “You’ve wandered away from the point,” Kathryn said. “You said you hadn’t provided Cynthia with something she needed and you wanted to know what it was. That doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the baby.”

  “Okay,” he said, trying to sound unflustered, “what did I do wrong? What do I need to change?”

  Cynthia seemed to relax a little.

  “I never said you did anything wrong,” she said.

  She’d implied he’d done everything wrong, but he wasn’t about to contradict her. He just wanted her to talk. And keep talking until she said something he could understand.

  He wondered if his parents had ever had this much trouble communicating with him. He didn’t think they’d tried very hard, wasn’t even sure they’d wanted to, but he was certain once he’d made up his mind what he wanted for his future, he’d stopped listening. They simply didn’t have the same goals. What worked for them didn’t work for him. Once he’d figured that out, he didn’t see any need listen to them.

  Had that happened with Cynthia? He couldn’t understand how that could have been the case. They wanted too many of the same things—education, a career with marriage and family to follow, as well as being a fully accepted part of society. The big things were all in place. Why didn’t the little things follow?

  “I must have done something wrong. You’ve got to tell me.”

  Now that he was giving her permission to say anything she wanted, Cynthia’s anger seemed to have disappeared.

  “I’m trying, baby, but I need some help. You know I wouldn’t have knowingly hurt you.”

  “You didn’t do anything terrible,” Cynthia said. “I just felt left out. Like what I wanted didn’t matter.”

  “But what you want has always mattered. Why do you think I work so hard?”

  “For yourself.”

  There was no hesitation this time. No gaze sliding left or right. Her words reflected a deeply held conviction.

  “Of course it was for me. I love my work. I love being successful and making a lot of money. But it was for you, too. I wanted you to have all the things I never had, the things I had to sacrifice for. I didn’t want you to have to go through what your mom and I endured.”

  “I know all that,” Cynthia said, “but I always felt like I was part of the career, part of the success, that I came in a package with everything else.”

  Ron couldn’t understand how she could feel like that. He had done everything he could to make sure she didn’t want for anything. That’s why he had a staff of four just to take care of her. That’s why he’d bought a house in the Eastover neighborhood, why he’d put her on the list to attend Charlotte Country Day School the day she was born. That’s why he paid for any private lessons she wanted, why he sent her on vacations with friends to places he didn’t have time to take her.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “When have you ever wanted something that I didn’t get you?”

  “I don’t think you understand what she’s saying,” Kathryn said.

  “No, I don’t.” Ron hadn’t meant for his voice to be quite so sharp. He paused, leaned back in his chair, took a deep breath. “I’m trying, but I don’t understand.”

  Kathryn looked to Cynthia, but the girl shook her head, unable or unwilling to explain
further.

  “Let me tell you what I think Cynthia is trying to say,” Kathryn said. “Cynthia, stop me if I’m wrong.”

  Cynthia nodded.

  “I think she’s trying to say she feels you did all of this for her because you thought you were supposed to, that it was your idea of what she wanted. But you never asked what she wanted, never did anything just for her.”

  “Of course I did. Who else could I have been doing it for?” He was trying to contain his frustration, but this didn’t make any sense. He couldn’t understand. What in the hell was she talking about?

  “For you,” Cynthia said, some of the anger she’d bottled up coming out. “And for Mama. Margaret tells me all the time what Mama planned for me and all the other children she hoped to have. I know it all by heart. But you never once asked me if I wanted something different.”

  “Did you?”

  Her anger and the energy it produced disappeared. She looked almost apologetic. “No, but you never asked me.”

  He could feel control slipping away, the pressure of his frustration on the verge of breaking out of his restraint.

  “Are you sure I never asked you?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Not even once?”

  She shook her head.

  “I asked you about going to Exeter,” Ron said. “You said you’d rather stay with your friends.”

  “And you never forgave me for it, either.”

  “Of course I did.”

  “You haven’t been home once since that you haven’t mentioned some connection you made through somebody you went to boarding school with. You’ve told me at least a dozen times you’d never have known what a brilliant tactician Ben Archer could be if you hadn’t been on the debate team with him.”

  “Ben’s a tiger. I couldn’t be here right now if he wasn’t in Geneva.”

  “That’s something else. I feel like I’m forcing you to sacrifice all the work you and everybody else has done because I got pregnant.”

  “I’m not sacrificing all the work we’ve done just to be with you. But if that’s what I had to do, I’d do it. There’s nothing in Geneva that’s as important to me as you.”