Our Father

by Marilyn French

  “There is some difference in the goals,” Elizabeth remarked dryly.

  “I don’t know,” Alex insisted stubbornly. “Don’t you think that if you were secretary of state you could make people’s lives better? Doesn’t Ronnie feel that way …?”

  “I can’t quite claim that,” Elizabeth said with a little smile, “whatever Ronnie can claim.”

  “It’s an eternal question whether poetry ever made anyone’s life better,” Mary said smiling. “But mine certainly won’t, since it isn’t even published.”

  “Oh, Mary! Won’t you read us one? Just one of your poems?”

  “Oh, everything’s packed.”

  “Surely you remember one?”

  Mary shook her head. “Not tonight.”

  “PLEASE! For me! Before my ordeal!”

  Mary set down her glass. “All right. I wrote one today, it’s still in my head. It’s kind of rough. Don’t tell me what’s wrong with it, all right? It’s called ‘Father.’”

  Father’s large warm body pressed against mine

  When I was in tears at four.

  His encompassing arms

  made me know what safe meant.

  What is a father?

  Safety, warmth, body wholly there, mine and his, always.

  Father’s large laugh aimed at the others

  His talk, his eyes, all for them.

  Fathers gone.

  What is a father?

  An absence.

  A girl became invisible.

  Father’s large warm body pressed against mine

  When I was near sleep at eight.

  His encompassing arms made me know what fear meant.

  What is a father?

  Thief in my own bosom, taking from an invisible child all she had left: her will.

  In the silence, Elizabeth lighted a cigarette. Ronnie gazed at her thumb. Alex looked awed. “Oh, that’s wonderful, Mary! Just wonderful! So powerful!”

  Mary shrugged. “It’s rough.”

  Elizabeth stood up suddenly. “Oh! I have something for you. Something to return,” she added, and walked over to the shelves where there lay a large battered cardboard box in a plastic bag. “It isn’t wrapped, but then it isn’t a present,” Elizabeth said, handing it to Mary.

  Mary took her time opening it. She pulled off the cover, and found inside a child’s tea set, tiny porcelain cups and saucers and plates, a sugar bowl with a broken top, a chipped pitcher.

  She looked up at Elizabeth in total surprise.

  “Your tea set. The one I stole. I’m returning it. It’s sat all these years on a shelf in my mother’s apartment.”

  “You didn’t need to, Lizzie,” Mary protested.

  “Yes I did.”

  Before they parted for the evening, they went over their arrangements. For the time being at least, Ronnie would remain at Lincoln to oversee the house with Mrs. Browning and Teresa and Aldo as a skeleton staff. In the spring, she would supervise the gardeners in restoring the grounds preparatory to selling the house. For this work she would be paid two hundred dollars a week—she would not take more. Elizabeth and Mary promised to remain in constant touch—Alex too, as soon as she had sorted out her life. Their talk had calmed her down—no one had hooted with derision, no one had exploded about her duty to her children, her husband, her husband’s family, her mother. … And she had clarified her ideas in her own mind, put them in some semisolid form that gave her the strength to go forward. But the other sisters had made no decisions, or if they had, they did not discuss them. Ronnie watched them hedge around their futures, making bets with herself about the chances of Mary’s returning to her old life, Elizabeth being able to end her cruel isolation. They hedged around each other too, unwilling to bring up any subject that might stir contention, emphasizing that side of them that Elizabeth always called—with contempt—women’s “niceness.” They embraced deeply that night before going their separate ways to bed, and rested their heads against each other, standing in a circle.

  The car drove off at nine Monday morning. Ronnie waved them out the drive from the portico. She went back to the sun room for another cup of coffee and what she swore was her last cigarette. The house fell into a gloomy silence. Nothing to look forward to, no lunchtime laughter or argument, no cocktails at six, no laughable conversation that tiptoed around the servants at dinner. Gone. Forever.

  She felt too empty to work, and took a long walk in the woods behind the house, planning to make plans. It took her some hours, but she eventually got down to work, driven by the haunting silence of the place, its emptiness of sisters. Can’t stay here long, too lonely. Have to make progress. She began to work in earnest: she drew up a schedule, she listed references to be obtained, and she scheduled trips to Boston to go to the library and see friends—to keep from going mad. After that, she got down to the collating of her data.

  The day passed in a silence more brooding for the memories that hung in the house. She worked on doggedly, but could not muster real concentration. And when she saw that Mrs. Browning had set her place for dinner at the huge dining room table, she blanched.

  “Can I just have a small table set up in the playroom?” she almost whined, and Mrs. Browning nodded knowingly. She’s thinking breeding tells, Ronnie thought, but didn’t care. She turned on the television set while she ate, barely tasting the food.

  She woke in the same stuporous state the next day, but it was rainy, cold, and very windy, too miserable for walking outdoors.

  I’ll clean Momma’s room.

  The sturdy Teresa was pleased to help. “About time,” she muttered, “a regular rat’s nest in there.” Ronnie dumped the contents of her mother’s chest and closet on the bed, then Teresa shoved the two chests into the hall, pushed the bed around and vacuumed under and around it, up the walls, in the closet. She pulled down the shabby curtains, which came to pieces in her hands, and sneezed at the dust, commenting volubly on the filthiness of the room. She washed the windows, the moldings around them, and the doors. With Aldo’s help, they carried one chest up to the attic. As Teresa vacuumed and dusted and wiped up soot (see how easy it gets to let other people do the hard work, Ronnie, she told herself), Ronnie folded and sorted her mother’s possessions. She counted:

  6 pairs cotton underpants, one ragged

  6 pairs pantyhose, two ragged

  2 bras, 34D, both soiled and torn, pink

  1 bra, 34D, black satin, little used

  1 pair black satin underpants, slightly torn

  6 cotton housedresses in varying states of disrepair

  2 black uniforms with white cap and apron

  1 pair white nurse’s shoes

  2 pairs smelly clogs

  1 pair shabby black heels

  1 black dress, dubious silk, of even more dubious vintage

  assorted nightgowns, shabby handbags, a hat with a feather, an old black coat, a rough jacket

  The clothes were too worn for recycling; any self-respecting homeless person would turn up her nose at them. They would just have to be discarded. She packed the clothes in cartons to be disposed of, but then stood still, puzzled. Noradia had been a respected servant in a proper house. How come she had nothing? It made no sense. She should have at least a few decent outfits, of course there was the purple dress we buried her in, but all of this was dreck. How come? He paid her decently, didn’t he?

  She pulled at her hair and studied what was left on the bed, the surface of the other chest. More dreck. Some photographs of Ronnie, a sepia portrait of Noradia’s family around the 1930s in an old gilt frame, a rosary, some trinkets—jewelry he must have given her, nothing worth much, a little opal ring, a pair of jet earrings. To go with the black bra and pants presumably. A shabby case containing a little makeup—how do you like that?—lipstick and mascara from Woolworth’s. And there was an envelope, sealed, addressed “To My Daughter Ronalda.” Momma wrote this? It was painstaking, as if she had practiced it over and over.

 
; With trembling fingers she broke it open. Inside a letter:

  I, Algonzada Olguin, friend to Noradia Velez, write this letter for her in Boston, March 15, 1984, to her daughter Ronalda, to be opened after her death:

  My Ronalda,

  I know I die soon. When you little, I decide to take care of you myself forever. Not him, not anybody else, just me. You mine. So I get Murray, you know her, upstairs maid, to go to bank with me and I open account and all I earn go into it. And when you eighteen, I go to bank and tell them to make account yours and mine together. Joint account, they say. Yes. So here is bank book. You don’t need them now. Nobody. You momma take care of you always Ronacita. Don’t say nothing, don’t make no trouble. In their world, it’s not no good, no use. Take, go, make happiness for yourself. Love.

  I love you always,

  Your mother,

  Noradia Velez

  Also in the envelope were dozens of bankbooks, each full of steady small deposits—$20 and $25—entered weekly over years. Their size and shape changed over time, and eventually there was simply a computerized sheet. The bankbooks showed the mounting up of interest. The latest computer printout showed that Noradia had saved over $200,000. My god.

  Suddenly, Ronnie had energy, drive, concentration. A future, she had a future, she could imagine a future. She realized suddenly that her image of the future had been one of walking down a long dim hall in which all the doors were closed. Now, just as suddenly, one had opened. Does money heal? Is money love? Because it was the discovery of the bankbooks, of her inheritance, that cleared the fog in her head, that opened a path. She worked hard all week, made good progress, and on Sunday drove into Boston to have dinner at her friend Linda’s apartment—pasta and salad, cheap wine, many friends, much laughter. She stayed up late and drank more than she was used to, and happily agreed to the suggestion that she spend the night on Linda’s couch—although she worried about the car through her dreams, and told herself that next time she’d come by train. But the Alfa was—miraculously—still on the street next morning, and she drove back to Lincoln singing, wishing it were warm enough to put the top down, eager to get back to work.

  But something else was working in her stomach, something uneasy, querulous almost. She pushed it away for several days, but by Wednesday morning, body fatigued from steady sitting, the stomach beginning to grind painfully, she decided to go out to the woods to gather kindling—just to do it—she didn’t need kindling, she never built a fire just for herself. Taking along a thermos of coffee and a sandwich, she gathered twigs for a couple of hours, wheeling them back to the woodshed, returning for more. She enjoyed the exercise. Around noon, she took a break, wandered to Alex’s spot in the woods and sat on the flat-topped stump to eat.

  Was it the money? Her mind utterly rejected the thought that money could in fact heal, that it mattered to her, that it could strengthen her sense of her mother’s devotion to her, that money, money, could make her happy.

  Well, it isn’t money itself but what it purchases, she told herself, the freedom from worry, the end of anxiety, for she was, had been terrified about how she was going to live for the next year or two, until she got a decent job—and when would that be? She hadn’t even finished the dissertation much less had it accepted—of course she could probably get a TA appointment at BU but teaching assistants earned only a couple of thousand a year, not really enough to live on, and after this time in Lincoln, living here the way they did, it would be terrible to go back to poor meals, to being cold most of the time, to the many discomforts of student living. One apartment she’d shared had had plaster falling in the bedroom with the bathtub in the kitchen; another had no sink in the bathroom, only the one in the kitchen; none had a really comfortable chair, a television set, or a decent bed. Well, she didn’t have a decent bed here either, if truth be told.

  So it was that, the sense that she would be able to live in some decency, yet without anxiety about money, that was easing her mind. She could draw a few thousand from the bank to live on. She’d leave most of it there, she wouldn’t blow her—matrimony, she wanted to call it—her mother’s hardworking life measured out, symbolized, transformed into paper and coin. And since she was saving most of what she earned living here as caretaker, she could even add to it. She’d be fine—she could live, and have enough left to establish herself decently once she found a job. Maybe even buy a car. A car!

  And Momma had done that for her, had made this possible by sacrificing everything for her child’s future. But Ronnie knew she hadn’t felt it as a sacrifice but as a triumph, as power: she was able to guard the future of the person she loved most. She didn’t care about clothes, about owning things, or if she did, such desires were buried under layers of knowledge of poverty, of a driving determination that Ronnie should not suffer as she had. She had a clear morality, created in utter hardship and the anguish of losing most of her family, one way or another. Beyond survival, her own and her child’s, she cared only about loving, being loved. She was proud of herself, maybe she even took a malicious pleasure in looking poor and shabby for him while putting his money away for the child he refused to acknowledge.

  Ronnie’s hands were cold and she wrapped them around the thermos cup. A surge of pride in her mother sprouted in her heart. She wasn’t just his victim, she had her own agenda. She wasn’t a slave to love, a submissive adoring servant of the great man, or at least, not just that. She had a private goal and she had succeeded in it, and she knew it. That serenity on her face as she lay dying proved it: she had had and done what she wanted in life. And if Ronnie had repudiated her for a time, had left her hanging in a tortured vacuum for a year, in the end she had been there, hadn’t she, at her mother’s side, tending her with the same loving care her mother had given her when she was a baby. And he had been there too, showing his love in his own peculiar way. Who knows what he said or did when they were alone together. Maybe he held her hand, maybe he smoothed her brow. Maybe he even spoke to her, maybe he told her he loved her.

  She tried but couldn’t picture it somehow. But who knows?

  It was too cold to go on sitting. She stood up, walked back to where she’d left the wheelbarrow, and wheeled it toward the woodshed. Leaving the thermos behind after she unloaded the kindling, she went back for one more load. She had collected enough for fires for two weeks. If they ever had a fire again.

  On the other hand, why shouldn’t she build a fire tonight just for herself? She loved a fire; she had loved sitting there with her sisters drinking her Coke or wine or scotch, watching the fire. She was entitled to have this pleasure alone, why not? She would.

  24

  ABOUT A WEEK AND a half after the sisters had left, as Ronnie sat before her fire in the playroom nursing a glass of wine, the telephone rang. It was Elizabeth. Her voice sounded strained, her tone was distant; everything was fine, she said, hard to get back to work somehow, she’d never had so long a period of leisure before, never knew how much she’d enjoy it. Hard to get back to the grind, the bureaucracy, the politics.

  “I miss all of you,” she said finally.

  I’ll bet you do. “Me too,” Ronnie said.

  “I was wondering …”

  “What?”

  “What are your plans for Christmas?”

  “Christmas?”

  “Yes, Christmas. It’s next week.”

  “Don’t have any.” Could go see Rosa. Should, probably.

  “Well, how would you feel about having some company? For a couple of days? Would it intrude on your work? We could have a tree. I’ve never had my own Christmas tree. Tell me the truth, though, Ronnie, I won’t come if you don’t want me.”

  “I’d love it,” Ronnie said in a soft low voice.

  Elizabeth’s voice cleared. “All right then. I’ll come this weekend if that’s okay. Sometime Saturday. I’ll call you later this week to tell you what flight I’ll be on so Aldo can meet me. That will give us time to get the tree up and plan our dinner. Is that
all right with you?”

  “It’s fine,” Ronnie said quietly, trying to dismiss the jubilation in her heart.

  She set the phone down in a daze. Elizabeth missed her. Elizabeth cared about her. It hadn’t been just the contingency of the old man’s sickness, the kind of closeness that happens at conferences or crises or vacations, where people meet and come to believe they are best friends, swear eternal friendship, or at least promise to write, but never think about each other again except maybe at Christmas, when they send a card. This wasn’t like that: Elizabeth wanted to spend Christmas with her.

  Her heart lightened, she sat and gazed out at the garden, although it was dark now by five o’clock and she could see nothing but the reflection of the room in the glass doors. She mulled, she couldn’t call it thinking, her mind wandering to the night the old man died, the afternoon her mother died, to her childhood, to what she knew of her mother’s. To her mother and Stephen. And her mother’s legacy. Love, she had written.

  But if she had her own agenda, if she was using him for her own ends, did she love him?

  Ronnie knew Noradia had loved Stephen. She could see it.

  And I? All my love affairs failed.

  She thought about them, the women she had loved. There hadn’t been many of them—Tania, Susan, Julieta (but that had been brief), Lilah, Sarah. She recalled her posture with them—a posture she had adopted when she realized—how old was she? fourteen maybe? fifteen?—that it was girls she was drawn to, not boys, the way everything suggested—the movies, the ads, television—it was supposed to be. But it was the sight of a girl’s hair lifting in a curl, shining in the sun, a girl’s quick walk in the school corridor, a girl’s delicate hands clutched around her schoolbooks, that lifted Ronnie’s heart, that twisted her head and made her want to reach out, to touch gently—and sometimes, to grab, not so gently.

  She was weird.