Our Father

by Marilyn French

  “The flashbulb kept flaring, while the other man posed with his arms around Mother. He was naked. Mother got away, she ran for the phone and the naked man grabbed her, knocked her down, she screamed. The man with the camera held her down while the other one threw clothes on, then they left, ran down the stairs and out the front door. Mother was crying, muttering, she kept saying ‘That bastard, that bastard.’

  “Her arms and back were black-and-blue for weeks afterwards. The house hadn’t been broken into, they had a key. Father didn’t come home that night. He never came home again. I didn’t understand what had happened until years later. He had set her up, he hired the guys. Mother said, ‘He always wins.’”

  The room was silent.

  Mary chewed her lower lip. “Well, she shouldn’t have forced him to marry her,” she said finally.

  Elizabeth whirled. “For Christ’s sake, Mary, even a world-class bitch was an innocent girl once. She was only twenty, she was a good Catholic girl, she didn’t believe in abortion, she loved him, she thought he loved her. She would not be bought off by the family. By her standards, she was behaving honorably. They offered her fifty thousand dollars! They offered to send her to Switzerland! But she thought the family hated her because she was Catholic, but that Father loved her and that’s what mattered. That’s the story he gave her—said he couldn’t buck his family or they’d cut him off.”

  “She threatened him! Pru told me!”

  “I didn’t say she was a saint. She threatened to sue him for breach of promise. And he did get her to bed by promising to marry her. That was true. She thought she was pressuring the family, not Father. She convinced herself he wanted what she wanted.”

  Mary argued, “But the threat means she recognized that he didn’t love her. And she still insisted on marriage. She was some nervy bitch, going up against a family as powerful as Father’s. That doesn’t sound like an innocent girl to me.”

  Elizabeth walked slowly back to her chair, sat, threw her head back. “She was very religious,” she said wearily. “The conviction of righteousness can give an innocent girl courage. He should have known better than to dally with someone so religious but I think her piety was a challenge to him, goaded him. That’s the way he is after all,” she said bitterly. “He always wants what’s forbidden.”

  Mary was silent.

  “Is she still religious?” Alex asked.

  “No. She says if God could let what happened to her happen, he isn’t worth worshiping.”

  “So what happened?”

  Elizabeth shrugged. “The family arranged an annulment. He didn’t want a divorce, he wanted a career in public service and in those days—1934—divorce wrecked people. The family paid people off, the church, the courts, to get it on some spurious grounds, they didn’t have real grounds for annulment. They had a baby for godsake. It broke her heart, she didn’t believe in divorce and for her it was divorce, no matter what it was called. But she had no choice, felt she didn’t, anyway. She crumpled because of the pictures—he had these pictures proving she had committed adultery. He threatened divorce cutting her off with nothing. She didn’t realize until afterwards that he didn’t want a divorce any more than she did.

  “If she’d accept an annulment, he promised her a decent allowance for the rest of her life and a bequest in his will if he died first.” Which he may. “So she gave him the annulment to get the allowance, so she could support me the only way she could. Decently. She couldn’t have earned enough to keep us both in any comfort.” So childbirth does make cowards of us all—women anyway. Hostages to fortune. “She knew when she was beaten.”

  Ronnie got up and put more logs on the fire. They watched, listened to the crackle.

  “You spent every summer in this house,” Alex said wonderingly. “What did that feel like, living with him knowing that? Was it awful for you?”

  “I didn’t know the details until later … until I was grown.”

  “At least he wanted you here,” Alex said longingly.

  “He didn’t. Mother insisted he have custody of me summers. She wanted me to have …” Her voice clouded.

  “She wanted you to get his money!” Mary brayed.

  Elizabeth looked at her wearily. “Yes. Get something from him, contacts, entrée to his world, education at least. And she was a bitch, is a bitch, she’s impossible, a hateful woman. … But part of it, I can hear it between the lines when she talks … she wanted me to have a father, a male parent, some kind of … Her own family disinherited her—metaphorically—they had no money—when she turned up pregnant without a wedding ring. Her father called her a whore, me a bastard, because she didn’t marry a Catholic. He hated me for being Stephen’s child, he saw him in me.”

  “The eyes,” Alex murmured.

  Elizabeth shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “Oh, it’s more than the eyes. Look at the chin. And the carriage. Elizabeth is the most like Father,” Mary said.

  The women appraised each other. “Except Ronnie,” Alex said.

  They studied Ronnie.

  “She’s so short,” said Elizabeth.

  “She’s brown!” Mary cried, outraged.

  “She has his eyes, his chin, his mouth,” Alex argued.

  “So do you. Have his eyes,” Mary said to Alex.

  “Do you know I never knew that until I visited here eighteen years ago,” Alex exclaimed. “I didn’t remember what he looked like and Mom didn’t have any pictures of him, not even a wedding picture.” She paused. “I could never understand that.”

  “There were plenty of pictures in the papers when he married her,” said Elizabeth. “You could have checked a newspaper morgue.”

  “I guess.” Alex leaned forward, her voice fervent. “What do you think happened with my mother? Do you remember what she was like then?”

  “I only read about their wedding in the papers. Heaven forfend that Father would tell me what he was doing,” Elizabeth said sarcastically. “I was at school, the new term had just started at Concord so it must have been fall, I must have been …”—she calculated—“fifteen. Nineteen forty-six, I guess, soon after the war ended.”

  “Yes. I was born on Christmas Day, 1947,” Alex said urgently.

  She’s doing a jigsaw puzzle on which her life depends and has just fitted in a piece, Ronnie thought.

  “I was at Concord. I picked up the paper one night and there was Father—right on the front page. Walking down the steps of some church with this young woman with a headline, ‘CABINET MEMBER WEDS SECRETARY.’ I had to read well into the first paragraph to find out that her name was Amelia.”

  Alex leaned farther forward. “But you knew her later on, didn’t you?”

  “I told you he loved her! What do you want from me?”

  Alex stared at her. “Please.”

  Elizabeth gave her a long sober gaze. She stood up and walked to the bar, poured scotch into a glass halfway up.

  “Please,” Alex begged. She was almost whimpering.

  “I remember the first summer they spent up here. He was still working in Washington, they lived in Georgetown, in the same house he’d lived in with Laura. Mary’s mother. She—your mother—was very pretty—she looked like you, same golden hair but her face was softer, not so … fierce,” she concluded in surprise. “And she transmitted … a great sweetness. It enveloped him. His face changed when he looked at her, he softened. He was always touching her, putting his hand on her arm or her back or stroking her face. And she’d look up at him so adoringly. It made me sick.” She sipped her scotch. “I hated her.”

  Alex stared at her. “Why?”

  Elizabeth considered. “She’d been a loved child. Like Mary. You could see it. Loved children expect everyone to love them and they do. They radiate that expectation, it’s self-fulfilling. They get love everywhere. I wasn’t loved. By anyone.”

  Ronnie studied Elizabeth.

  “I wasn’t a loved child,” Mary muttered. “I just appeared to be a loved child.
”

  “I’m sorry, Elizabeth,” Alex said sadly.

  Elizabeth flared, “Don’t feel sorry for me! I’m okay, I’ve done just fine, I’m doing fine.”

  Alex ignored this. Relentless as a hunting dog on the scent, she turned to Mary. “Do you remember her? The way she was then, the way he was? Do you remember me?”

  “I was ten in 1946, at Peabody School. Father was living in the Georgetown house, my mother’s house, she’d furnished it, decorated it. … I went there holidays. I was probably there the Christmas after they got married, Father and Amelia, maybe Thanksgiving too, I don’t remember. … I don’t really remember her then. Maybe they went away on a honeymoon?”

  “I don’t know.” Alex kept staring, concentrating on Mary, who shifted uncomfortably.

  “It was so many years ago!” Mary protested. “I remember your mother was pretty, very pretty. Pretty hair. I was just a girl, taken up by my own affairs, you know. There were always so many parties at the holidays. I had my own room, my books, my radio, my phonograph, I had a huge record collection, and my own maid.”

  “I remember your room,” Alex breathed, her eyes shut. “It was all white.”

  “She’s spent her adult life trying to recover her virginity,” Elizabeth snorted.

  “She was only ten,” Alex demurred, gently. “She was a virgin.”

  They were all silent.

  “Your room was white,” Alex recalled, leaning forward as if her posture alone could exert pressure, could extract whatever it was she wanted.

  Mary sank back. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I was upset and Father was trying to calm me down. He let me redecorate my room. He let me make it all white. The housekeeper helped me, called in decorators, took me shopping. …”

  “Why were you upset?”

  Mary’s body stilled utterly. “Your mother …”

  Alex’s posture was a pressure.

  Mary threw out a hand. “I don’t know! I don’t know! Maybe I was jealous. Maybe I felt he was betraying my mother.”

  Alex sagged.

  Mary sat up angrily. “What do you want from me! They were in their own world! I can’t remember! Yes, I guess he loved her, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Alex prodded. “And what about me?”

  “You like mainly white food too,” Elizabeth murmured, chuckling with pleasure. “Fish, potatoes, cauliflower, cake, cake, cake …”

  “SHUT UP, ELIZABETH!” Alex cried, silencing all of them. She stood suddenly, went to the bar and poured wine into her glass without offering anything to anyone else.

  “What about here,” she began again, “do you remember her here?”

  “Jesus Christ, you’re impossible!” Mary cried. “Your mother is alive, why don’t you ask her whatever it is you want to know!”

  “I want to know what you remember.” Patient but tense.

  Mary sighed. “Look, she was nice to me but she was only a kid herself, nineteen or twenty, she couldn’t help. But she was kind—to both of us.” She turned to Elizabeth. “Remember? She went swimming with us and played checkers with me and every afternoon she’d gather us for lemonade and cookies on the porch.” Her face soft, she turned to Elizabeth. “Remember, Lizzie?”

  Elizabeth shrugged.

  “But after you were born,” Mary continued, “she was busy, I didn’t see so much of her or if I did she had you in her arms or was nursing you or something.”

  Alex cried out in pain, “Do you remember me?”

  The sisters stared at her.

  “She was always fussing over you, talking to you, holding you, carrying you around. You had hardly any hair, just fuzz, golden fuzz. Like a halo. You were a good kid, though, you weren’t a brat,” Mary conceded.

  “All kids are cute, aren’t they?” Elizabeth snarled.

  Alex glared at Elizabeth.

  “Look, I went to England to graduate school when I was twenty-one. You were still only five or six. I didn’t come back for four years and then I got a job in Washington and lived there. I never lived here again, I just came for the family parties and after a while you weren’t at them. I saw very little of you after you were five or six. And I never paid that much attention to you. Little children bore me.”

  Mary studied her rings, recalling. “You went to England after the Fourth of July party in 1953. Father had been made under secretary that spring. How old were you then?” she asked Alex.

  She counted back. “Summer of ’fifty-three I would have been five. Six that Christmas.”

  “I went away to college in ’fifty-four and got married the next June. I never lived here again either.”

  Alex subsided.

  “What are you trying to figure out?” Mary challenged her.

  “I don’t know exactly. What happened. Why we left. How he felt.”

  “How he felt about you,” Elizabeth corrected her.

  “Yes.” Faint voice. “I guess so.”

  “What does your mother say?”

  “She doesn’t want to … she won’t talk about it. She just says they weren’t getting along and she decided to leave. That’s all she’ll say. But …”

  “But?” Mary picked it up.

  Alex shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “She remarried, didn’t she?”

  Alex smiled, shifted into another gear. “Yes. Charlie really was my father. He and my grandfather, they played with me, took me places—the playground, the zoo, ice skating, the circus. They were great. Charlie’s dead now. Gramp too of course. Mom really misses them. Between Charlie and me and her parents, she was filled up, she didn’t need any other life so she didn’t make a lot of friends or anything. She has no one now.”

  She has you, she waited for them to say. She has your children, your nice family, she waited to hear.

  “Your childhood was probably a hell of a lot more pleasant than ours,” is what Elizabeth did say finally, “so don’t envy us Father. There was nothing enviable about our childhoods, however it may seem.”

  “It’s just … you wonder why your father doesn’t care about you,” Alex said, her voice thickening. “You wonder if you did something—or were something—that made him abandon you.”

  They sat in silence watching the fire wane and die. No one got up to poke it back to life.

  After dinner, exhausted, they watched TV in the playroom. As they separated to go to bed, Alex stopped them. “Ronnie’s staying,” she said. “I want her to.” No one argued, not even Ronnie.

  Stupid cow, feeling sorry for herself because Father abandoned her. Doesn’t know how lucky she is. All that love her family lavished on her for no reason, just given. All the luck of who you’re born to. Jesus loves me that I know cause the Bible tells me so. Hah! Enough to make you want to go to church. Not the way Mother’s religion tells it. That bitch, even though she’d left the church she sent me to a fucking church school because she couldn’t get Father to spring for private school. Hell and damnation, sin all over the place. The damned nuns: the Catholic way to brush your teeth, the Catholic way to fucking sit and walk. No patent leather shoes because they reflected up your skirt. Until I complained to Father about my education. Heard the word Catholic and in a fury had me transferred to Concord. Mother gloated, she’d gotten him to pay for it without begging. Didn’t matter what it cost me. Made me complicit in her games.

  Father never did anything until he was forced. When Mary suddenly refused to eat red meat, poking around at the food on her plate, pushing the meat aside, trying to dam up the juices, keep them from running into her potatoes, crying if the juices stained her potatoes. Ate nothing stained by blood. Father shouted at her to eat it, sent her from the table when she got hysterical. She never became a vegetarian, she became a blancomaniac! Hah! Took Father years to give in.

  We’re all peculiar in this family. Look at Alex. I thought she was so normal. But she’s indefatigable, a driving pushy little thing, she wouldn’t let Mary off the hook, me either. Is our family abnorma
l well of course it is how could it not be, so are the Callahans, what a heritage I have, Grandpa Callahan always drunk or getting there, always brawling his arm always raised ready to hit, Grandma always cowering, the sons skinny and pale and scared-looking but full of bravado the daughters always trying to make nice act cheerful how ludicrous what a bunch except Mother, she had spirit, you have to hand it to her, she didn’t let them dominate her.

  Maybe that’s what being a society lady meant to her, a way out. Every day puts on a suit or a silk dress, red red lipstick, eye makeup, blonded hair, high heels, sits there in that apartment working her wrinkled upper lip, waiting for the phone to ring. “My dear! So glad you called, yes, me too, so busy, mad isn’t it? Oh how nice, I’d love to come, I do have another party that afternoon, they pressed me so I promised, but perhaps I could stop in afterwards. …” Then sit around all afternoon and show up late. SEE: I AM WANTED.

  Still she’s better off than her sisters, worn out by forty with six, eight kids and husbands who know what it is to raise a hand to a woman. Just like dear old dad. Without a pot to piss in except Geraldine, who married a man with enterprise, five-truck fleet, lords it over all of them. Hah! The things that make people proud.

  Better not to marry. Helena, the nun, at least has peace and quiet in her life. And the brothers are losers, replications of the old man. Wouldn’t mind seeing them all, actually. See how they are now, how life has carved their faces. But they would probably look at me with pity, a dried-up spinster, ugly duckling. …