A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (15 page)

At first she avoided calling Maria but loneliness finally led her to a pay phone one Sunday afternoon. Maria sounded thrilled to hear from her and immediately offered to come fetch her. She told Candida to wait right outside the café.

“Now, for God’s sake, don’t smile at any men or they’ll think you’re a prostitute!” Maria said, laughing shrilly into the phone. Candida’s heart almost stopped; she’d never heard a girl talk that way. By the time I was six, however, she called a
maricon
a maricon and a
puta
a puta.

Although Candida did not listen to gossip, she felt safer not mentioning Maria in her letters home—in Portugal, to avoid trouble, Candida would have passed Maria in the street with only a slight nod of recognition. The news of the budding friendship would have thrown Castelha into one of her attacks of high blood pressure, in which her face became blotchy and her breaths short and she collapsed prostrate on the closest couch or bed.

Candida felt guilty, but her Sunday afternoon in Maria’s
patron
’s kitchen was the only fun she had all week. Maria was a ray of sunshine; she dressed nicely, brightly, wore makeup (maybe too much), laughed all the time, smoked cigarettes, and served Porto wine in tiny stemmed crystal glasses, and
chouriço
with bread on a pretty blue plate.

Maria tried to coax Candida into going out with her and two Portuguese boys she knew but Candida only wanted to sit in the kitchen and talk about home. Maria was working for an American businessman whose apartment was on Place des Vosges. Maria told Candida, who cried quietly but often about her French
patrons
, that she should go to work for an American. They weren’t as cheap, Maria said, they weren’t as unpleasant, they never noticed if things were clean or not, and they treated their maids like human beings and not slaves or dogs.

“But I couldn’t work for an unmarried man. My mother would be horrified,” Candida pointed out.

“You’re so funny,” Maria said. “And how’s your mother going to know who you’re working for?”

“Someone would write to her and tell her,” Candida said, as though to report were simply every person’s moral obligation.

“You’re so funny. Can’t you see that you’re in Paris now?” Maria chided her.

Maria took it upon herself to get Candida out of her bad situation. She approached her American businessman on Candida’s behalf. “This girl from my hometown,” Maria said in all earnestness, “is like a saint. A saint, I tell you! I would leave her alone in a room with a million francs.”

A few days after this conversation, the businessman gave Maria the phone number of a young American couple who were in immediate need of a nanny—my parents.

The following Sunday, Maria pressed the number into Candida’s palm. She repeated what the businessman had told her: The Willises were a young American couple—the husband was a writer, they had just had a baby—and they were looking for a full-time nanny.

“Call them,” Maria insisted. “You drive me crazy, Candida,” she said exasperatedly. “What good is life if you don’t take advantage of it?”

My parents asked Candida to come by right away, explaining that they had had a good deal of trouble with their domestics and were now quite desperate. This was not an exaggeration. They’d been in Paris less than a year, a newlywed couple with no clear notion of how to run a household, and their first attempt at domestics had landed them a Sikh and his Liverpudlian wife, jewel thieves hiding from Interpol. The Sikh carried a switchblade and the wife wore gold, high-heeled mules and her hair in a bright red bouffant. My parents found them a bit garish for European domestics, but hadn’t had any domestics before with whom to compare them.

The relationship had ended in a switchblade confrontation between my father and the Sikh.

Calling the domestics out of the kitchen after dinner one evening, my father explained very calmly, apologetically, that although he found the Sikh a terrific cook, his rough manner and condescending glares were inappropriate while serving dinner, especially to guests.

“And your wife,” my father went on, “likes to burn holes with the iron in my wife’s dresses.”

There was no reaction whatsoever.

“You seem very unhappy,” my father concluded. “This work doesn’t seem cut out for you. We believe you’d be much better off doing something else.”

In an action so quick that my pregnant mother saw only a flicker in her peripheral vision, the Sikh lunged at my father and stuck his switchblade under his chin. Holding the knife in a shaky hand, he said in a blood-chilling, hate-filled voice, “You think you’re some hot stuff, don’t you?”

My father, who’d been somewhat expecting a confrontation, leapt out of his chair, grabbed the man’s wrist with his left hand, pinned him down on the dining room table, sending the dishes flying, and stuck his own switchblade under the Sikh’s chin.

My father had carried a switchblade himself ever since he’d been in combat in the Pacific, and slept with a pistol under the bed. This was antithetical to his adamantly pacifist views, but had become a habit he could not break, and never did break for the rest of his life.

The Sikh’s eyes went round and white while my father glared down at him with an evil grin.

“I’ve killed a man in hand-to-hand combat before so don’t think for a second I won’t do it,” he said slowly. “I’ll give you ten minutes to pack up and get out of my house; after that I’m calling the police.”

The Sikh’s wife, as a last statement, came up from behind and knocked my mother’s plate off the table and the leftover lamb Vindaloo landed on her lap.

“You nouveau-riche Americans make me sick,” said the Sikh’s wife, and spat on the floor.

“And you’re just a dumb, low-class slut with no taste,” my mother said calmly, picking up the chunks of lamb and putting them back on her plate.

The Sikh’s wife screamed and ran from the dining room.

In ten minutes they were gone and not a trace of them was left in the little room they had occupied at the bottom of the back stairway.

A week later a detective came by with a warrant for the Sikh and his wife’s arrest and the whole truth came out.

My parents remained without live-in domestics until I was born, at which time they hired a large-chested, pie-faced Bavarian widow. Although terribly good-natured, Frau Hausler liked her Kronenbourg and after three or four bottles, spoke nostalgically of life under the Third Reich. She would sing “Deutchland, Deutchland Über Alles” to me in a booming voice and then cry, telling my parents that she had nothing against Americans because, after all, real Americans were mostly Aryan like the Germans, but how much better off the world would have been had the Nazis won the War. Finally my father got into an argument with Frau Hausler on this subject and fired her on the spot.

As soon as Candida walked into our apartment with her frightened, wide-open, angular face and her halo of black kinky hair, my parents fell in love with her. She sat down in a corner of the sofa holding her cheap little bag on her knees. Her hands were strong and pink and her legs, beneath the stockings, were black with hair.

In timid, halting French, Candida explained her situation. She told them about the farm’s misfortune, that sudden poverty had scattered her family across the world. She told about the French couple who had brought her from Portugal and treated their dog with more respect than they did her.

My father thought that her story sounded quite a bit like the Sikh’s, and like Frau Hausler’s as well, and gathered that all domestics had a touch of the Cinderella syndrome and that it was a completely forgivable trait.

“The dog they think will not steal,” Candida said, “but I know that dog and that dog will steal off the table while for me to take an orange is a terrible thing.”

My parents enthusiastically explained, also in halting French, that they’d just had their first baby, a girl who was now two months old. Candida asked to see the child. They took her downstairs to the nursery and all three stood around my crib in silence, peering down at me as though I were some rare and fragile object that needed to be kept under glass.

My parents were nervous around me. It had been a very difficult pregnancy for my mother. Her water had broken at six months and she’d had to lie still, on heavy medication, until the delivery. My father had moved his typewriter into the room next door, brought her meals to the bed, cleaned her, brought her bed pot to her, and never left her side although he was a person who loved to sit in bars and restaurants until they closed, talking to strangers and friends alike about the state of the world. Instead, my father brought the party to their bedroom, and friends would gather around and drink and tell jokes and keep my mother in a good mood.

After the high-forceps delivery, the doctors told my mother that the chances of her ever having another child were not good.

Driving us home from the American hospital in Neuilly in his little white convertible Mercedes-Benz, my father refused to exceed twenty miles an hour. My mother sat with me in the tiny backseat, yelling over my father’s shoulder that they were going to have an accident if he didn’t speed up. Cars honked, drivers shouted at them and swung their fists, but my father, wiping large drops of sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, would not accelerate.

They were still absolutely petrified around me and in the week since Frau Hausler’s departure had taken to hiring a registered nurse to come give me a bath because they were terrified of drowning me.

“May I?” Candida gestured toward my crib. My parents nodded nervously, and Candida slowly, gently lifted me out, one hand beneath the neck and head and one around the tiny body. She cooed and mumbled in Portuguese, and rocked me against her chest. I was born with black black hair, like a Mexican, and one thin lock stuck straight up above my forehead. Candida decided she would put a little bow there, a little pink one, if God were kind enough to offer her this charge.

She said, “She look like a little Mexican baby.”

“There’s American Indian blood on Monsieur’s side,” my mother said, smiling with profound relief at Candida.

“When she was born,” my father put in, “I said, ‘I know who the father is but who’s the mother?’” He chuckled loudly and Candida stared at him, missing the joke.