Our Father

by Marilyn French

  “No,” Elizabeth said shortly.

  They gazed at her in silence, without judgment.

  “I still can’t get over the fact that you stopped him!” Mary said.

  “Yes. Ironic—after all those years, it was so easy: I just said ‘Stop.’ I was seventeen, I’d finished high school that June, I was going to college in September, I just couldn’t stand it anymore. He was married to Amelia, you”—she looked at Alex—“were a baby. He’d come up for the Fourth and hadn’t—touched me—and he left a few days later. Every time he left, my whole body would relax, I would feel my stomach unwind. But I always knew he’d be back. It—consumed me, I walked around feeling … evil, as if my body was tainted, contaminated, as if it smelled—because if there weren’t something foul about it—it wouldn’t make him do those things to me. He always said it was my fault, that it was my body that was making him do it. I remember sitting for hours out in the woods trying to figure out what it was about my body that did that …”

  “Me too!” cried Mary. “That’s what he told me! My body did something that made him do that! I used to stand in front of the mirror naked at night looking at myself, wondering what it was about me … because I was little, you know, like Alex, I was just past babyhood when he started—I wasn’t developed at all. But he always said I was a little tease, that I wanted it.” She pondered for a time, then shook her head brusquely and looked up at Elizabeth. “So what did you do?”

  “He came back in August. It was a couple of days after he arrived. He was staying the whole month. My heart sank when I heard that, just plunged right into my stomach. I didn’t plan to stop him, I didn’t think about it. It never occurred to me that I could, that I had the power to do anything. At all. One afternoon, you were all in the pool—Amelia and you two, Alex and Mary. I was my usual sullen self, hiding in my room reading. He came in and shut the door. I knew what that meant. I was lying on my stomach on my bed, I remember I had just started reading The Brothers Karamazov, about this vile father who gets murdered. Maybe that filtered in, I don’t know. I pulled myself up into a sitting position still on the bed and I glared at him. I held the book out in front of me like a shield, like a crucifix against the devil in a vampire movie. And I yelled ‘NO! NO! NO! No more! I want you to stop!’

  “He said, ‘Think again, Elizabeth. You and your mother need my support. Just ask her if that’s not true. And as long as I support you, you will do as I say.’ I stood up, leapt up, I was tall—thin, but strong, I played hockey at school. And I took this posture—I don’t know where I got it—I sort of bent my upper body just a little, and my knees just a little—like a karate posture, you know? But I didn’t know karate, I’d never even heard of it. I said, ‘You support my mother by law, by contract.’ God knows I knew enough about it by then, knew he’d hired detectives to frame her, knew he’d trapped her into divorce. I knew what a louse he was. Still—he was my father. So … anyway, I put on a brave face, much braver than I felt. I was icy cold, I talked like a grown woman. I said, ‘As for me, I don’t need your support, I don’t care about it, I can make my way without you. You are never going to touch me again!’ When I think about it, I have to laugh at myself but I think I may have looked a little fierce.

  “He was furious and cold—you know he couldn’t bear to be brooked in anything, especially by us, his kids. But I think he was a little amused at the same time.” She lighted a cigarette, cleared her throat. “I started to move toward him, my fists raised, getting ready to sock him. God knows what would have happened if I had. I shouted, ‘GET OUT! OUT OF MY ROOM!’ And he did.

  “He did! He snarled, ‘You’ll regret this, Elizabeth,’ but he turned on his heel and left, slamming the door. I’d made him leave! That was the greatest moment of my life. For the first time in my life, I felt I had some power. I wasn’t just a Ping Pong ball, a counter in other people’s game, something everybody, anybody could toss around. Father, Mother, grandparents, relatives … teachers. I had something to say about my life! It was a wonderful feeling. I felt so great I put on a swimsuit and ran down to join you guys. But you’d already left the pool. I dove in anyway and just swam by myself. I must have swum for half an hour. I had so much energy. …”

  She gazed at the dark window for a long time, then wiped her cheek, damp with perspiration. She laid her hands in her lap quietly. “I knew he’d never trouble me again. And he never did. But he never forgave me, and I did something—almost as bad as what he’d done. I didn’t care, you see. I have no … had no … scruples. Not where he is concerned. I went to him when I needed a job and informed him, simply informed him, that I expected him to help me. He did that time, half smiling at my chutzpah. But then I did it again, when Clare came back to the States. He had a harassed job at a small college, but he needed and deserved something much more, something prestigious. There was no way he could get it without political pull. So I went to see Father again; I told him it would redound to his credit, that Clare was a brilliant economist, a Republican in sympathy, oh I built it up. I shouldn’t have had to do more, that’s the way the system works, it’s—well, they call it networking now, but it’s a buddy system. He should have helped me without question. Helped Clare. But he wouldn’t. He sneered at me, asked why he should do one fucking thing on this earth to help me. Just as if I weren’t his daughter. I guess he thought Clare was my boyfriend. I saw red—literally—the insides of my eyes filled up with red. Actually, a blood vessel did break in my eye that day, I had to go to the doctor. I spat at him: ‘Because you owe me.’

  “Oh, the look! Well, you can imagine! He picked up his pen, asked me what kind of job I wanted for Clare, wrote down his name and phone number. He said we’d hear from his secretary. Then he put down his pen and stared at me with that malevolent glare, you know, you’ve all seen it. And he said, ‘I never want to see you in this office again. You are never to contact me again.’ I stood there for a minute. Do you know,”—she turned to them with an anguished expression,—“I felt like crying? Isn’t that crazy? Here I’d just blackmailed him, but what I felt was that I’d been thrown out by my father—as if none of the rest had ever happened, as if he were just an ordinary father and I just an ordinary little girl and he’d thrown me out of his life. I thought I’d never see him again. She turned back to the window, her cheeks damp. “I wanted to throw myself at his feet, grab him around the knees, plead, beg, please Daddy, don’t throw me away!

  “I didn’t. I pulled myself up and marched out of there—somehow. And I was still invited to the family parties. By his secretary. But he never spoke to me personally again. Only in front of other people.” She sighed with a deep shudder, like someone laying down a huge burden she has carried for many miles. She leaned back her head, gazing at the dark window. “And that enraged me. Deeply. I still can’t forgive him. That’s why it’s so hard for me to talk to him now. I don’t think he ever said a kind word to me his whole life, except when he was in my bed. And when he was in my bed he was doing something to me that I didn’t want done, that made me feel I had no will, no self—that I was just a thing he owned. So for me, to this day, kindness, love, sex—mean annihilation.” One by one, tears gathered and spilled over the ledges of her eyes. “He ruined my life,” she said in a faint voice.

  They were silent together.

  “Please don’t say that,” Alex pleaded. “Please. I can’t bear it.” She sat very straight in her chair, staring at the wall.

  No one spoke.

  “He ruined all our lives,” Elizabeth insisted. “Look at us—a bunch of miseries.”

  “I’ve been having these blackouts,” Alex said. “Something triggers them, I guess, some memory or association, and I just go into a—cloud. I don’t know what happens while I’m there, I don’t faint … except once I did. I just come to suddenly and know I’ve been away.” She paused. “I began to think—I was possessed. You know? That I was having visions—religious visions—although I never remembered one afterwards. Then I thought
—maybe I was sick. That I had a brain tumor or petit mal or something like that. That terrified me.

  “After I came up here, it started to happen almost every day. Blackouts. I’d be walking along, or bicycling … it’s a wonder I didn’t fall off. See, it wasn’t just in Georgetown. He started doing it here, in this house, when I was still sleeping in the nursery … I don’t know how young I was when he started, but I know it started there … up there, in that room …” She broke off. “How old,” she sniffled, “how old are you when they move you out of the nursery?”

  Mary frowned. “I moved my children into their own rooms when they were nine, but I left the nursery at seven. But that was because I was sent away to school and didn’t have a nanny anymore.”

  “No, no,” Alex moaned. “I was just a baby! Two or three. I was lying in a crib. I’m sure of that!”

  The women were silent, picturing this.

  “My mother used to say—all the time,” Elizabeth recalled, “especially after she’d had a Manhattan or two—she’d yell that no law stopped him from framing her and that all the laws in the world were on the side of the Stephen Uptons of this world. At the time, that really shook me because I thought maybe she knew what he was doing to me and was saying she couldn’t stop him, that he had the law on his side. I suppose I wanted to believe that. I wanted to believe she knew because I wanted to think she sympathized with me, felt for me, felt with me—but just couldn’t do anything about it. I didn’t want to feel that I couldn’t tell her because she wouldn’t believe me—or because she’d blame me. …”

  She stopped, lighted a cigarette. “Well, of course she never suspected—as far as I know. But she was right: all the laws are on his side.”

  “That’s not true,” Ronnie objected. “Incest is against the law.”

  “Really,” Elizabeth sneered. “Do you think he would have been prosecuted if we’d accused him when we were little? Do you suppose anyone, anyone at all would even have believed us? The great Stephen Upton, a molester of little girls, his own daughters?”

  They pondered.

  “Even now. If we accused him now, would anybody do anything?”

  “Maybe,” Alex said.

  “A sick old man. We have no proof. We waited all these years. We’re afraid he’ll disinherit us. Oh forget it!” Mary cried. “They’d see us as monsters, monster daughters, ungrateful malevolent Gonerils and Regans bent on destroying a poor old man in his dotage.”

  “Who’s Goneril and Regan?”

  “Oh, characters in a play. Monster daughters called unnatural. As if love of parents were built into nature.”

  “It is, though, isn’t it,” Alex said faintly.

  They all looked at her.

  “We do love him, don’t we. All of us.”

  “Not me,” Ronnie said fiercely.

  “I see the kids at the hospital. The abused ones,” Alex went on. “There they are black-and-blue, with welts or burns or broken bones, cracked heads. But if the parent comes to see them, the one who did it—they reach out their arms to them, they’re so happy to see them! The little ones. Even if they’re scared of them. It’s heartrending.”

  “What about the older ones?”

  “They shrink a bit, they’re more fearful. But they cry when their parents leave. It’s so … There’s no solution.”

  “And men do most of the abusing,” Ronnie muttered.

  “Not true,” Elizabeth said in a bored voice. “Women do half of it.”

  “Women are with them ninety percent of the time,” Ronnie shouted.

  “Listen, Ronnie, dominate or submit is a law of nature. …”

  “That isn’t a law of nature, it’s a law of patriarchy!”

  Mary moaned, put her head in her hands.

  “Oh! So lions are patriarchists when they kill anything smaller than themselves?”

  “They kill to eat, not to dominate. Only man kills to dominate.”

  “Man and woman.”

  “Rarely woman.”

  “But you’ll admit it happens?”

  “Women too have been seduced by power on occasion,” Ronnie pronounced.

  “Oh, they’re not a pure saintly sex, immaculate by virtue of their hormones?”

  “They’re better than men,” Ronnie said stubbornly. “They take the responsibility for children, they sacrifice everything for their children, they put the children first.”

  “Like your mother?” Elizabeth shot in.

  “My mother did sacrifice everything for me! She wore the same winter coat for fifteen years, she hardly ever bought herself a new dress, and then it was some cheap rag, and she never bought herself anything more than that! She used every paltry penny your bastard of a father paid her to take care of me! God knows he never did. He never paid for a diaper, not even a safety pin! Never paid a doctor bill, never bought me a notebook for school! She had to stay here—it was the best way she could protect me!” Ronnie shook her head, tears springing to her eyes. “What a bitch you are,” she muttered. “Just because your mother was cruel …”

  “Why! Why, why why, if you want to argue about politics or whatever it is you’re arguing about, do you have to attack each other personally!” Alex screamed.

  “She started it,” Ronnie protested.

  “Can’t you just agree to disagree,” Mary said sourly.

  “Jesus!” Ronnie jumped up. She danced around in fury, as if her toes were on fire. “You two act as if we’re arguing about some academic matter, angels on pinheads or whose turn it is to do the dishes! But what we’re arguing about is fundamental! It goes to the very heart of everything we believe about life, about people, about how to live! She believes”—she stood still, darting a malevolent look at Elizabeth—“that the urge to dominate is inherent and I’ll bet she thinks men have more of it than women. Testosterone poisoning, no doubt,” she added viciously.

  “I’ll thank you not to try to describe my beliefs, Ronnie,” Elizabeth said stiffly.

  Ronnie ignored her. “So that life is inevitably a constant scramble for power, with men having more to start with than women—probably because women have the babies—right, Elizabeth?” she sneered. “And if that’s true, then women can’t ever be more than victims, are doomed to scramble for safety from generation to generation, finding protection under the wing of the least rotten man they can find …!” She stopped, out of breath.

  “Whereas,” Elizabeth took it up, “you and your ilk pretend that domination is not central to the human psyche, pretend that if we all just gave it up for Lent, we could create a sweet little cuddly world where everyone shared, cooperated, nourished everyone else—as if you could wipe out, extirpate violence, rage, greed. …”

  “It’s a better vision than yours! Yours is a counsel from hell!”

  “And yours comes straight from heaven?”

  Ronnie sighed, calmed, sat down again. “Look. We both know that the nature of human nature isn’t decipherable, isn’t really knowable. That all definitions of the human are manufactured, that we can’t know the truth about ourselves if there even is a truth. So why not choose to define ourselves in a way that makes felicity possible, that doesn’t set us on an endless course of desperate power seeking? Desperate because it never ends, you never have enough power, you never can. Why not adopt a philosophy that allows alternative ways of living? At least mine makes positive action possible.”

  “And mine puts women on their guard, prompts them to protect themselves—wisely. In this world, they need to.”

  In the silence, Mary stirred. “I hate politics,” she said airily. “Politics is mundane, transient, doomed to obsolescence. I mean, when you read Shakespeare, do you care who was queen? Art deals with universals—which is all that really matters.”

  Ronnie glared at her. “If you think art isn’t political, you’re a fool too!”

  Alex looked bewildered. “The way you all talk … you sound as if you had no sense of the divine, as if—deity, spirit, whatever you wa
nt to call it—didn’t hover over you … as if you invent yourselves! How can you believe that?!”

  All three groaned.

  16

  EVERYONE KNOWS ART IS above politics, Mary thought, stiffly avoiding meeting Ronnie’s hard set gaze opposite her in the car. How can she say it’s political? Certainly the great classics she had read during her brief formal schooling—The Iliad, The Aeneid, Shakespeare’s plays, Paradise Lost, The Faerie Queene—certainly they weren’t political. But what Ronnie meant by political didn’t seem to involve Republicans and Democrats or even communism. …

  Aldo was driving Mary and Alex to Back Bay to lunch with Eloise, dropping Ronnie at the BU library on the way. Elizabeth had elected to remain at home.

  They spoke little during the drive.

  Alex’s mind was a wounded blur wandering in confusion at how other people saw the world. She could not comprehend how they could laugh at, how they could be ignorant of such a huge dimension of experience. Did they never feel it? That powerful sense of connection with something beyond, eternal, hovering, always present, a dimension essential to her, in which she spent much of her time. What would it be like to live without that sense? How could they not feel it around them, embracing them, uniting them, connecting and embracing all humanity, all creatures, the entire created world? She pressed her mind to try to imagine herself without that sense, but managed to blank out only her surroundings, the Massachusetts landscape as they moved from country to city, the road, the cars, the others in the car vanished and she entered the opaque space familiar to her, in which she felt the air brush against her, sensed objects as motes dancing in space, heard their three hearts beating in unison, felt the rhythm of the dance. …