Our Father

by Marilyn French

  Elizabeth nodded. “Is that what your mother would have said?”

  “I don’t know. I suspect it’s what she felt, but I’m not sure. I think she would have cried, sort of helplessly, hugged me, but that’s all. She wouldn’t have tried to stop it. That’s what I think.”

  “So why were our mothers that way and we’re not?” Alex asked. “How come they didn’t help us?”

  “Feminism,” all three chorused, then burst into laughter.

  Alex smiled, dropped her eyes, raised them again looking like a naughty child. “I made another phone call today. I called the Dominican sisters at St. Cecilia’s. A convent school near Newark,” she added.

  “You’re Catholic?” Mary, aghast.

  “No. I’m Jewish. Remember I converted when I married David.”

  “The nuns,” Elizabeth reminded her.

  “Yes. Well, I first met them at the hospital where I volunteer, and they’re so great, so full of life and cheerful and happy, I’m drawn to them. So I go over and give them a hand once in a while. They’re great with kids, but they’re also very political. They help refugees from El Salvador, they take them in and transport them and hide them if the immigration people try to capture them. And they send nuns and lay medical workers down there to help the people. They hate the pope, they pay no attention to him. They love their lives, they are always so … so gay, really. I thought maybe if I lived like them, I could be that way too.”

  “Dangerous, doing religious work in El Salvador,” Elizabeth said.

  “Yes. One of the nuns killed there—you remember?—was from their house. But even just medical work is dangerous. Just helping the peasants is dangerous. The government is so terrible, a really cruel regime.”

  Ronnie leaned forward. “So Alex—Alexandra—why did you call them? Are you thinking of joining them?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that! I’m Jewish!”

  Ronnie kept staring at her, but Alex refused to meet Ronnie’s eyes. “No. I just wanted to see how they are. I’ve missed them. See what they’re doing now.”

  “And what are they doing now?” Elizabeth asked, slightly amused, lighting a cigarette.

  “They’re preparing to send another team down there. After Christmas probably, maybe early spring. As soon as they raise enough money. Some nuns—a doctor, a nurse, and some assistants. And an administrator, probably.” Unable to look at any of them, she got up and poured another glass of wine for herself without even asking if they wanted anything.

  “Alex! Alexandra! What’s going on?” Elizabeth demanded.

  Her face flushed painfully, there was a red line on her neck dividing her flaming face from the rest of her body. She bit her lip. She stared at the wall. “Well. Of course, I don’t even know if I’m in it, if he remembered me, I mean he never did before. But I thought … if Father did leave me any money … you see, they always need money for these things of course.” She turned to them apologetically, her face eager, begging forgiveness. “So I wanted to know if, if he did, if there was anything, if I can do anything if there was anything to do. You see?”

  They smiled, embraced her with their eyes.

  “Do you think I’m being greedy?” They shook their heads.

  She sighed. She returned to her chair and took a great gulp of wine. “Well, that’s what I was doing!”

  Dinner was quiet that evening, but a great peace hovered around them, even Mrs. Browning noticed it, although she read it as sorrow. Even though the old man was dead now, they still left the head of the table empty and sat in their usual places, two on one side, two on the other facing each other at one end of the long table.

  Elizabeth sighed. “Jesus, there’ll be so much to do once they release the body. A million phone calls. We’ll have to pick out a casket. All that. That’s how you get through these things when you really are in grief, I suppose.”

  “Are we not?” Mary wanted to know.

  “Are we?” Elizabeth challenged her.

  “People always have mixed feelings, don’t they?” Mary said.

  “I suppose,” Alex mused.

  “Well, certainly we don’t miss him,” Elizabeth said in a very low voice.

  No one responded.

  “Do we?” she asked in surprise.

  Three heads shook no.

  “But when a person dies—a lot of things die with him. Or her. What he used to be. What you hoped for from him. What you wanted him to be,” Alex said. “And you know those things were dreams, are illusions, will never happen, and you have to put them away. Forever. And you grieve. For them. For yourself.”

  They sat in silence.

  Mrs. Browning heard it as she cleared the soup bowls and served the chops, the vegetables. Poor girls, she thought. They cared so much about him.

  “I was telling Ronnie,” Mary began as they started to eat, “that whoever inherits this house will sell it. I mean, if it’s us, or a foundation, I can’t imagine anyone will keep it. And the estate will have to have a caretaker until it’s sold. A paid caretaker. And I thought maybe Ronnie would want to stay on here and do that for a while. Until she finishes her dissertation.”

  Elizabeth, mouth full of food, nodded. “Good idea.”

  “I thought I might stay here with her. Go back and put my apartment on the market, then come up and keep her company.”

  Elizabeth put down her fork.

  “I thought you were coming to live with me.”

  “I am. I will. After the house is sold and my apartment, and I have some money and Marie-Laure is … after I get to know her a little better. Then I thought we could buy a house together in Virginia. There are some gorgeous little places in Falls Church, or even Arlington. What do you think?”

  “Great!” Elizabeth cried, picking up her fork again. “I’d love a house after all these years in an apartment. Maybe we could find one with a little garden. Or even a pool. I used to love to swim.” She turned suddenly to Ronnie. “Maybe you’ll get a job with the government and come and live with us! Alex is only over near Wilmington! We could have dinner together every week!”

  Ronnie stared at her. Her throat full of tears, she could only growl, “I wouldn’t work for the fucking federal government in a million years, and you know that perfectly well, Elizabeth!” But once she had swallowed her emotion, she added, “However, I am sure that working in my field, I’ll have lots of reasons to travel to Washington and scream at somebody in the government.”

  “No, Ronnie, that isn’t the way it’s done. If you want to get things done in Washington, you don’t scream at anybody, you make friends!” Elizabeth said tutorially.

  “How did you get ahead then,” Ronnie snapped. “You’re about as friendly as a guard dog.”

  Mary and Alex burst into laughter; Alex hid hers behind her napkin. Even Elizabeth grimaced a smile.

  “If you can get ahead in government, so can I, Elizabeth,” Ronnie argued.

  “I got ahead partly on Father’s name,” Elizabeth said.

  “Aha!” Ronnie grinned. “Well, I’ll be coming down there for one reason or another, and I insist you have a guest room with my name over the door in that house of yours.”

  “Okay. How do you want it decorated?” Mary asked.

  “Decorated?”

  “Yes. What style of furniture do you like? What colors?”

  Ronnie seemed to shrivel in her chair, and Mary suddenly realized she had never in her life had the luxury of deciding on the look of her own environment.

  “Well,” Ronnie said finally. “You know that old pine table I use as a desk? In my room? I’d like that to be in it.”

  “Oh that!” Mary exclaimed. “It’s old and probably valuable, but it isn’t—well, I wouldn’t have it in my house! Take it with you when you leave if you want it. But that’s a good clue—you like Early American. I can see that. Maybe with Indian throw rugs on the floor—Navaho rugs—do you like them, Elizabeth? I think they’re gorgeous. A room in earth colors, that would suit Ronnie.
”

  Ronnie’s emotions swooped from resentment at patronization to resentment of charity to resentment of Mary’s taking over her life, until she began to laugh inside, and after a moment the laughter burst out.

  Alex smiled at them benignly, as if from a great distance. “How good! How good to have found my sisters!” she exclaimed softly. Then stretched out her hands to Ronnie beside her, and Elizabeth across the table from her, and they did the same to Mary, and the four of them sat in smiling silence for a long minute.

  21

  BY FRIDAY MORNING, THE autopsy had been completed. The cause of death having been found to be natural, Stephen’s body would be released to them for burial. The few reporters who had lingered around the hospital left, and Dr. Stamp called and asked if he could stop in and see the Upton sisters around eleven on his way from the hospital to his office.

  All four of them were waiting for him in the front sitting room, where the tea table was already set with coffee and little cakes. Entering, he stared in awe at the huge foyer, its tapestries and sculptures, and walked solemnly into the sitting room like a man entering a museum or a shrine to a revered scientist. Mary wore a dark wool dress with pearls, only the little pleats of the lower skirt lightening its mood, but the others wore sweaters and pants—jeans in Ronnie’s case—and low-heeled shoes. They served him coffee. The doctor sought out Mary, but this time she did not seem to be waiting for his gaze. She acted as if, today, he were there for her consideration. He felt the difference, but could not have expressed it in words. Disconcerted, he wondered if she blamed him for her father’s death.

  He wiped his mouth, set down his cup.

  “I want you all to know that everything that could have been done was done …,” he said.

  They assured him of their belief in this.

  “I know you’ve heard by now that your father died of a pulmonary embolism. This is something that happens very often to bedridden people, and I don’t want you girls to feel in any way responsible. You did everything you could for him. His time on earth was limited—after all, he was eighty-two. Nothing could have saved him. You have nothing to reproach yourselves with.”

  “Yes, we believe that,” Elizabeth said. But there was such a strange look on her face that he felt he was taking part in some drama without knowing his role. He glanced at the others: they had it too. He searched for a way to erase his discomfort. “You girls were really wonderful!” he declared.

  “We’re hardly girls, Dr. Stamp,” Ronnie said.

  His mouth opened.

  “I’m the youngest, and I’m twenty-five. Elizabeth’s fifty. Would you call a fifty-year-old man a boy?”

  He squirmed in his chair. “Sorry, of course, I wasn’t thinking. What I meant was you are truly wonderful ladies.”

  Ronnie opened her mouth again, then shut it.

  He launched into an explanation of pulmonary embolism, explained that their father had died swiftly, in minimal pain, and that in the end it was a mercy, given the state in which he was living and his unhappiness with it. The doctor wanted to leave, but did not know how to do so quickly, so rambled on and on. The sisters attended politely, nodding their heads occasionally, but asking no questions.

  Finally, he felt he could lay down his napkin and make his departure. “I just want to say it was a privilege to attend your father. I’m sorry the outcome wasn’t happier.”

  Elizabeth smiled politely, but Dr. Stamp’s glance yearned toward Mary, seeking that sweet turned-up look she usually gave him. But she barely glanced at him. Grief, probably.

  He left hastily, in deep disappointment and discomfort. Strange women, he thought.

  No, Mary decided when he’d gone, he’s completely unsuitable: insufficient chin and no idea at all of how to dress. And he’d require constant bolstering. Not worth it unless he were a trillionaire. Not even then.

  She turned to Elizabeth. “Do you think we should call Hollis and tell him that Father has been found to have died of natural causes?” she asked with a conspiratorial smile.

  “I imagine he already knows. Channels,” Elizabeth said dryly.

  And indeed, Hollis soon called to say he would drive out late that afternoon to read them the will.

  Others called as well: the president and the secretary of state and the governor of Massachusetts, as well as hundreds of other men of high rank in government, bankers, diplomats, corporate presidents, university presidents, foundation heads. Elizabeth and Mary handled the phones. The governor wanted the funeral to be held in Boston, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, where generations of Uptons had worshiped. He argued that the bishop would want to eulogize this great man and that the church, although shabby and old, was a revered monument. And it would be easier for the president to get to Boston than to Lincoln.

  Elizabeth and Mary were grateful to relinquish control of the ceremony. Besides, Stephen never went to church in Lincoln, never went to church at all except for weddings and funerals. A formal ceremony in the 1830s Boston church, which despite its crumbling state still glowed with the bishop’s prestige, the president and governor in attendance, with a small reception afterward for a hundred and fifty chosen figures to be held in Worth Jr.’s house in Louisburg Square, absolved them of the need to devise a more personal farewell. Still, there were a million details to be seen to. Their time was completely given over to the practicalities of death. Mary thought, if you were really shot through with grief, if it was pouring like boiling blood screaming through your veins, arms, legs, fingers, the way it had when Don died, then all this busyness helped. How had Emily Dickinson put it?

  The bustle in a house

  The Morning after Death

  Is solemnest of industries

  Enacted upon Earth—

  The Sweeping up the Heart

  And putting Love away

  We shall not want to use again

  Until Eternity.

  And maybe she was. Maybe that sick feeling running through her veins, as if her blood had turned watery, depleting her strength, so that even walking was an effort, and her voice came out in a croak, maybe that was grief? How could she be grieving for him, for such a man? Yet Elizabeth too looked pale and stiff and spoke in a surly terse manner, the way she had when they’d first arrived here, tense and mean. Even Ronnie seemed subdued and withdrawn, she hid out in her room almost all day. She helped with nothing, involved herself in no arrangements; she refused to pick up the telephone even when she was standing beside it when it rang. Only Alex seemed serene, liberated, well of course she had her memories back. But what memories! How could such a replacement ease a mind?

  Although Hollis arrived during their usual cocktail hour, Ronnie did not join them in the sitting room where they waited to greet him. He scanned them quickly, his genial self, expansive, a man bringing good news, Elizabeth thought with some relief. He made a great fuss opening his briefcase and pulling out papers, setting his half-glasses on his nose. He asked if it might be better to do this in Stephen’s study, but Elizabeth objected. She did not want him sitting at Father’s desk. It was a mess, she lied, papers all over everything, and he did not insist, he was pleased with himself, with them, and with the timing of the event, which had saved him a painful decision. Sorry as he was about Cab, he’d had a long life, a good life, had accomplished much, was one of the prominent men of his generation. …

  He happily accepted the Manhattan Mary mixed for him. The sisters held decorous glasses of wine.

  The will was long and involved, with bequests to many institutions—schools and churches and conservative foundations. There was a trust for Catherine Callahan Upton, and, Alex was surprised to hear, one for Amelia Upton Massey; there were substantial trusts for Albert and Marie-Laure di Cenci and a small one for Martin Burnside, whose own father had left him a great deal. The remainder—and it was substantial—went to his daughters Elizabeth, Mary, and Alexandra.

  “You should each have between ten and fifteen in investments at todays prices, I’d
estimate. He was a very canny investor. And maybe four or five more apiece from the real estate. His properties have increased in value tremendously. Of course, the real estate market is at an all-time high.”

  “Ten to fifteen … thousand dollars?” Alex asked innocently.

  He looked at her over his glasses.

  “Ten and fifteen million, my dear,” he said haughtily, sounding insulted.

  And he had made Elizabeth executor.

  Something in her heart gave a great pang, then rested.

  “I’m real glad we didn’t change anything. He clearly wasn’t himself at the end,” he concluded. “This thing must have been coming on even then. Tom Kaplan had decided to award you conservatorship,” he told Elizabeth. “I have to tell you, he wasn’t himself even with us. I’ve never seen Cab act that way—well, it’s water over the dam now, but his condition just seemed to make him hate everybody. …”

  Having brought good news, he was happy to lean back and talk genially to these lovely ladies, beloved daughters of a multi-millionaire, a great man who entrusted them with the bulk of his estate. Too bad he had no son, but they were worthy heirs. Great ladies. A shadow crossed his face. He set his drink down, leaned forward and lowered his voice.

  “I know … you girls are … you’re really special, I am certainly aware of that. The way you gave up your own lives to care for Cab, the way you took his … confusion … everything you’ve done. And accepting his bas—… illegitimate daughter, that was the act of true Christians, of kind generous ladies. You behaved like saints, if you ask me.

  “And she too may be a perfectly fine person for all I know, a good woman. But”—he glanced warily toward the hall—“she could also present you with a problem. He didn’t acknowledge her, didn’t mention her but”—he leaned back and held his hand loosely in front of his mouth—“if she can produce any proof … of her parentage … she could … well, she could make trouble for you. Even without any proof, she can make trouble. Probably not shake the will, but hold it up in the courts for a while, years even. …”

  Elizabeth stood up. “I can’t permit you to discuss Ronnie unless she is present. I’ll get her.”