Our Father

by Marilyn French

  Elizabeth and Mary sat impassively, but Alex, pale, glared at them. “How could you talk about her that way! In front of her! That was cruel, mean, it was horrible! You’re … terrible! She’s our sister!”

  “Half sister,” Elizabeth corrected.

  “Illegitimate. A bastard,” Mary corrected.

  “We’re all half sisters. She’s a human being,” Alex said wonderingly. “With feelings.”

  “I haven’t noticed any except jealousy and resentment,” spat Elizabeth.

  “Oh, knock it off, Alex,” Mary said contemptuously, adding, “She wasn’t exactly affectionate toward you.”

  Alex examined their faces. “You really don’t feel anything? For her, about her? Do you ever think what her life must have been like here? A servant’s child, and you know how he was about … minorities. And living in Lincoln, little brown girl in a white school, lily-white neighborhood? What’s wrong with you?”

  “Oh, I feel something!” Mary exclaimed. “Every time I look into her baby blues. Father’s eyes. How did she get them? Blue is recessive—she couldn’t have blue eyes unless she had a blue gene from somewhere else too. Her mother wasn’t the only whore in the family. Probably a whole long line of them.”

  “You’re hardly in a position to call any other woman a whore,” Elizabeth said coldly.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just because you marry them …”

  “WHAT?”

  “One after the other—how many, four? You’re an expert at fucking for pay, just like a prostitute. As Ronnie so accurately said. Sexual service in exchange for cash. Had to be sexual services you provided, you never had anything else to offer.”

  Mary’s pale face blotched blood-red. “I didn’t marry Don for money! Or … any of them! I loved them! But you don’t know anything about love, you frigid cow, you’re probably still a virgin! I don’t believe that Clare ever got it up in his life! He had about as much sexuality as a dead mackerel!” Her eyes were wet.

  “You bitch!” Elizabeth whispered.

  Alex gaped at them. Mary swung on her. “Don’t sit there with your mouth open catching flies, Alex, you simpering little creep.”

  Alex closed her mouth, but her face was frozen in shock. “Why?” she cried tremulously. “Why such hate?”

  “Why not?” Mary exploded. “You hear how she talks to me! And was she ever a sister to me? When I needed her, growing up in this house? I loved her so much, I have a loving nature! But she treated me like dirt, beneath her, she was much too good for me! The big brain,” she brayed, whirling to face Elizabeth. “And you had a mother to go home to, I had to stay here. …”

  “My mother was a world-class bitch,” Elizabeth spat, “so don’t try to pretend that I had it easy. She bounced me back here to him like a tennis ball. If I’m a responsible member of society and not a parasite like you, it isn’t because I had such a wonderful life. I formed myself. I made myself into what I am. By willpower and brains.”

  “And Father’s help,” Mary said venomously. “He got you your first job. He never did anything for me.”

  “What could anyone do for you? You didn’t even finish college. All you could think about was getting in bed with some man with deep pockets. Anyway, you were his favorite, he doted on you.”

  “DOTED!” Mary shrieked. “He was never home! He worked all the time. We were lucky if he was home on Thanksgiving or Christmas. The most he ever took off was a month in the summer, and he didn’t even do that during the war. He never spent any time with me, not even after my mother died. Right after she died, I was shipped off to school, like he was punishing me! I was seven. Seven! I grew up with a nanny and a housekeeper. I needed you!” she sobbed.

  “You were not my responsibility. I had my own problems, something you never noticed.”

  But Mary’s head rested on the table, she was sobbing. Alex’s face twisted, her hand hovered over Mary’s head, but she did not touch her, did not speak. She gazed mutely at Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth lighted a cigarette and turned to the window.

  It played itself back in Elizabeth’s mind, her younger self, brokenhearted, weeping, “I don’t want to go!”

  “You have to go,” Mother said, exhaling smoke, “whether you like it or not. I want you under his nose like a bad smell, constantly. You have to be if you’re going to get anything from that bastard. He’d love to forget you exist.”

  She reached for her Manhattan, bangles jingling on her arm. “And you have to get something from him. I have nothing to give you. My alimony supports us but that’s all it does and it ends when I die or if I should remarry, so just watch your p’s and q’s, young lady. You don’t do what I say, I might just marry Mike O’Brien, the car mechanic my parents wanted me to marry when I was eighteen. He’s a widower now with eight kids so you’d have lots of brothers and sisters, you’d just love that, wouldn’t you, spoiled little princess that you are, that he’s made you! Expecting the house to be cleaned around you, meals served. And if I do, you can just forget college—you can go out to work as a secretary, the way I did.”

  She lighted one cigarette from the tip of another. “I want you there every summer, any holiday he invites you to, and you’ll be obedient and polite, you hear me? You be a good little daughter and don’t you let him forget that you exist. I won’t have him treating you the way he treated me!”

  “Please don’t make me go, Mother,” Elizabeth wept. “I hate it there. I’ll clean my room! I’ll wash the dinner dishes! I’ll go to college on a scholarship.”

  But Mother couldn’t hear her anymore, she was off in that place she went, repeating to herself that same old monologue, only seeming to talk to Elizabeth.

  “He threw me out the way men throw out whores, when he knew I was a virgin, a good Catholic girl, when I met him. How he wooed me then! He’d come up behind me in the office and kiss the back of my neck and stick a rose in front of my face. He wanted to see me every night, a moment apart was too much, he said, he liked to sit in his office so he could see me all day long. He’d follow me when I went to the ladies’ room. The ladies’ room! The girls all teased me about him, standing outside the ladies’ waiting for me. Said he was jealous, couldn’t bear for me to be out of his sight. Well, I had some looks I guess, I had great hair, red like yours but thick and curly not thin and limp like yours. But I thought I was ugly because I had freckles. At least you didn’t get them. He was so handsome then, tall and slender and dark with those gorgeous blue eyes and a hawk nose, such a strong face! So manly! How could I resist? I tried, I told him it was a sin! But when he pulled me toward him, oh he was so forceful, and I resisted but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. …

  “I felt like some little servant girl in the hands of her master. He said that. He said, You are my servant, my slave, and you will do what I want. I laughed, I thought he was playing. But I did it, god I practically swooned in his arms, he had me, he knew it. After that he’d look at me across the office like Clark Gable, that kind of all-knowing look, you know, the one that says you belong to me. Until I found out I was pregnant. Five weeks of bliss I had in my life. Then he didn’t want to know me. Said he wasn’t the first. He saw the blood, it was so difficult the first time trying to get it in! I was so stupid, I thought he was just still jealous, I couldn’t believe he’d stopped loving me after all that passion. …

  “So I insisted on marriage. And I won. The battle. And lost the war. You were three years old, he stuck it out for three years, he was never home, we never went anywhere together not even on Christmas. He went to his family alone, he said he couldn’t take home an Irish slavey. I took you to my parents, I cried the whole day. Then he threw me out, you were there, you know what happened. Settlement conditional on a promise to shut up. He framed me and no law stopped him, all the laws in the world are on the side of the Stephen Uptons of this world.”

  As if awakening, she blinked, looked around the room, looked over and saw her daughter.
“He will not treat you the same way. You may not like it, but it’s your good I’m thinking of. You’ll thank me someday. You’ll need to make your own way in the world, the way you are.”

  How could anyone define the way I was when I was twelve? Pale, scrawny, too smart, Grandpa Callahan said. I never understood how a person could be too smart. Stuck here in this house with him every summer, him always calling for his baby, where’s my Mary? Mary had him, she had a nanny, she had a mother, but still she was always whining, always being coddled, spoiled. Until the accident and then she was always just crying, wanted me to be her mother.

  By sixteen, I was brilliant but they kept watching me, waiting for the falloff. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of falling into a stupor like other girls at that age. At eighteen, still too thin and smart. Too smart. Father surveying me with those cold eyes, head to toe, dull thin red hair, glasses, my body skinny, shapeless, a stick, you could see him thinking it: “With charm like yours, you’ll have to be educated.” Surveying my grades at the end of my first semester at Smith, nodding: “If you keep it up, I’ll send you to graduate school. If you can get in!” he exploded, laughing. A female economics major at the London School of Economics in 1953. Such dreams I had of the school founded by Beatrice Webb. Brutal. But it made me grow up. And at least it was London, far away from here, from her, from him. And my tutor: Clare! O brave new world! For a while, I thought I might be happy after all.

  Poor marymiggypiggy, I suppose it isn’t her fault she’s stupid. If she just didn’t vaunt it so, only love matters, everything else is a substitute, preening herself that summer we went rowing on the lake, Clare I had just realized, thirty-one years old and such a fucking fool, I wanted to die, I researched dying, tranquilizers, booze, slit wrists. I even thought of driving into a tree like Mary’s mother. I always scorned her for that, but it took more courage than I had anyway. In the end I was chickenhearted. A coward in the end. So I’m still here living out my life day after day. I deserve my life.

  And Mary had just married the gorgeous Alberto, playboy prince of the world, had brought him here to the Fourth of July party to parade him before the family and Father. And me. Of course, Father snorted at him, parasite pansy wop, he called him, the gorgeous guinea. Might as well be a woman, he said. Both of them gorgeous, she in a floaty white dress, he in a trim white suit, she voluptuous, pale skin and dark hair, she had on a floppy straw hat. I worked the oars, while she leaned back against the green-striped cushion, preening, “I know everything about love!” Everything about love! I wanted to hit her, smash her with that oar. I could have told her a few things about love she never imagined.

  Well whatever she knows about love is probably not much use to her anymore, what is she, forty-five, forty-six? No, I’m fifty-three, she’s five years younger, she’s forty-eight. Getting along. She’s still a beauty though, the doctor was knocked out by her, maybe a little help from her local plastic surgeon. Acts terrified. Seems to be desperate for money. And she’s always lived like a queen; apartments on Fifth or Park, houses in Paris or Capri, lodges in Maine, country estates in Virginia, villas in Vail or Gstaad, what money those men had! Staffs of servants, limousines to take her shopping, she still doesn’t know how to drive. Immobilized by money. One even had his own airplane I think. Which one was that? Paul. Lived it up, all those rich husbands.

  While I was making do with a little apartment in Washington. Still, I was working. Always a joy, even when it gets mucked up by the politicians.

  Harry Burnside left Mary a bundle when he died. But then they sued—his children from his first two marriages. Still, she got millions, I read. Got a huge settlement from Alberto too when he took off with that movie star, I had to laugh, I wanted to mail her an anonymous card: how did the woman who knows everything about love manage to lose the world’s greatest lover? The next guy was richer than the two of them rolled together, Paul, the one with the airplane. Of course, she left him for that crazy Don, who probably didn’t have much. Left a man with an airplane for one with a motorcycle: hah! Still, how could she be broke? She’d have to have gone through all Harry’s money and Alberto’s. Couldn’t have: she may be dumb but not that dumb.

  She turned back and tamped out her cigarette. She glanced down at the table, where Mary still lay, her head on her arms, quieter now, sniffling. Alex fetched some tissues and slipped them into Mary’s hand. She sat up and blew her nose. Nothing ladylike about that snort.

  Elizabeth gazed at her calmly. Mary looked back over the tissue. “I know you hate me,” she said in a quiet hoarse voice. “You’ve always been jealous of me. You think Father likes me better than he likes you.”

  “He does. Pretty vacuity, he likes in women. Like your mother.” She turned to Alex. “And yours. I’ve long since accepted that. Pretty vacuity entertains him. But you can’t love without respect and he respects me.”

  “My mother is not a pretty, vacuous person,” Alex said. “She may not have your education, Elizabeth, or your kind of brains. But she has kindness.”

  Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. “Learning to fight back, are we? Might as well, you’ll get no pity here.”

  “And your mother?” Mary shot back.

  Elizabeth was ready. “That was my mother’s great flaw: she seemed a pretty bubblehead because she was so young. But soon enough her true intelligence appeared. That’s why he got rid of her so viciously.”

  “He got rid of her because she trapped him into marriage,” Mary argued.

  “What do you know about it? What do you know about anything?”

  “Aaaaaagh!” Alex cried, putting her hands on her temples. “Is all we’re going to do fight? Don’t we have anything in common? We’re sisters! We share a bloodline, genes, some history, whatever you want to call it! Can’t we talk peacefully?”

  Elizabeth and Mary looked at her.

  “You’re right,” Elizabeth conceded, but continued before Alex, sighing in gratitude and relief, could speak again. “There are decisions to take, and we need to be able to speak civilly.” She tapped her pencil end on the glass tabletop. “We have to decide what to do. He could stay in a coma for weeks, maybe months. I have an important job, I can’t be away for weeks and months. On the other hand, he could come out of it at any time. What I propose is that we take turns—each of us stay a week, so someone’s here to visit him every day, and to signal the others if any major change occurs.”

  “So one person would be here alone, in this house alone,” Mary said, frowning. “Including Ronnie?”

  Elizabeth shrugged.

  The door burst open and Mrs. Browning rushed in. “Ma’am”—she swung her head from one to the others—“Miss Upton”—she settled on Elizabeth—“there’s people here from the papers and the TV Reporters. Out front. A whole bunch of them with cameras and all. They’re asking about Mr. Upton. What do you want me to tell them?”

  “We’ll see them, Mrs. Browning. Tell them we’ll have a statement in fifteen minutes. Maybe you could prepare some coffee for them.”

  “Oh. Yes. I can do that.” The woman bustled out bursting with the importance of the event.

  “Close the door after you, Mrs. Browning.”

  As soon as the door shut, Mary wailed, “I can’t see anyone in my condition! My eyes must be red, I’m a mess!”

  “You’re fine. You’ll look like the loving daughter. We have to appear together, worried, the Upton girls, remember? His queens, weeping for him. I’ll draw up a statement that says nothing, says we can’t predict what will happen, we are hoping for the best, grieving. …”

  “And praying,” Alex murmured.

  Two heads turned to her. Again the wrong thing.

  They look pretty good for a bunch of over-the-hill broads, the reporter thought, standing there together in front of the gray stone house that looked like it belonged in a BBC film, only one of them still young, thirties probably, blonde and slim, pretty. The dark one gorgeous, really stacked, if a bit short in the leg. Even t
he old one with silvery hair didn’t look bad—slim, elegant, grand, a power in Treasury. Famous when they were young, magazine pieces on family parties featuring “the three Massachusetts graces,” one just a kid then, all different mothers, the old man a real swordsman. Don’t look anything like each other except the blonde and the old one have his eyes, unmistakable eyes, proof of fatherhood if I ever saw it, ice-blue. Real patrician, upholder of tradition, his class. The dark one has dark eyes, warm, she looks like she belongs on satin sheets with an ostrich boa around her. Big big big knockers. They all look sad, as if they really cared. Blonde one pale as a ghost, dark one even looks like she’d been crying. Old man in his eighties and they still cared.

  The reporter was impressed.

  The eldest sister took the microphone.

  “Our father”—she paused and looked at the other two—“would want us to thank you for coming, for being concerned. He has had a stroke and is receiving the best of care in Emerson Hospital.”

  “Any plans to move him to Boston?” a voice called out.

  “Not at present.” Coooold. This lady did not like being interrupted. “We are anticipating his swift recovery. Since he is presently in a coma, my sisters and I would appreciate your not disturbing hospital personnel. If you will leave your cards, we will inform you of any change in his condition.”

  She seemed to be finished but the photographers did not put their cameras down. They were waiting for something.

  “Has the president called?”

  “Yes, the president was kind enough to call this morning to convey his hopes for our father’s full and swift recovery.” She waited too. Immovable, not a twitch. Erect as a soldier, completely in control. A real bitch. The dark one was fooling with her hankie, pulling in her tummy. The blonde one looked dead. Dead white. Tragic. Amazing. Eighty-year-old man.

  “Anyone else call?” someone yelled.

  She held up an envelope. Prepared. She read them off in order of protocol, heads of state of foreign countries, American cabinet ministers, senators, agency heads, an Episcopalian bishop, a slew of Republican mayors, movie stars. Rewards of greatness: a bunch of telephone calls. Still, it must make them proud. Stephen Cabot Upton, Big Daddy. No sons. Must have killed him. Not even a by-blow according to the grapevine although seemed there was talk of a nigger daughter years ago. Not here today. Probably buried away in Podunk, Mississippi, bought off with a nice little annuity. Keeping her mouth shut for dear life.