A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (19 page)

Within a year, she was asthmatic. Her shoulders had begun to droop, and her face lost its rosy color. Her skin was pasty white and the wrinkles at her eyes and mouth had turned her face hard, unyielding.

Candida had always been relatively open with me about her body—she changed her sanitary napkins in front of me. As soon as I began to menstruate, her attitude changed. An embarrassing silence replaced her joking, lighthearted, shallow talk about “whores” and “maricons” and the love lives of stars. Sex had been fine, in her opinion, as long as it had stayed away from her, and by osmosis, me.

She could no longer bear to have boys visit my bedroom, if only to sit at the table and have a piece of cake. She hovered behind us every moment, disgruntled, watching. The air was heavy with her presence.

In the summer of my twelfth year, my family went to Normandie for two months. Candida went to Portugal to visit her mother. On our first day in Deauville, my father bought me a little red bikini on the boardwalk, and then took me for a stroll down the beach. The Channel was at low tide. We had to walk far on the hard, wet sand to get to the water.

My father took me by the hand, which seemed rather strange now that I was so grown-up. It occurred to me that a whole year had passed since the last time he’d taken my hand and walked with me on a beach, and that he had forgotten how much I’d grown.

“Candida’s not coming back,” he said carefully, and waited for my reaction. My thoughts were immediately scrambled; I did not know whether to act furious at this subterfuge, or whether to listen. One thing was certain: He was the most trustworthy person I knew, honest to a fault. In his honesty, he was always hardest on himself.

“Why?” I asked.

“Believe me it hurts me terribly, honey,” he said. He looked out over the Channel, but turned and focused on me from time to time. “I could barely stand to do it. I sent her home for a year. I felt so goddamn guilty I gave her enough money to buy her mother a house on the beach and retire if she wanted. This is such a crucial time for you. You need space, to be independent.

“You know what’s wrong with me? I’m a coward, that’s what’s wrong with me. I should’ve done it years ago. But a better, more trustworthy nanny we never would’ve found. She loves you too much and it’s ruining you.”

We walked for a long time. The wind was blowing, stinging my face and throwing my hair from side to side.

My father talked about normal love and obsessive love, about Candida’s repressed sexuality: it had never come to the surface and had turned inward, into allergies and asthma and insomnia. He said she’d funneled all the feeling she should have had for a man into me, and never realized it.

“You can’t be someone’s passion, someone’s whole life, unless you’re that person’s lover, you see. Someone’s husband or wife. And even then, it’s dangerous.

“Goddamn it, I wish she’d married Mamadou. What scares me most is that I might have waited too long. That you’ll never recover. You’re so spoiled, so used to getting your way. I don’t want you to be a mess—about sex and otherwise, you know?”

Know? I had only a dim, childish notion of what he was talking about. I certainly did not think I was a mess compared to all the emotionally wounded, lonely, unhappy kids I knew at school. Well—so oftentimes I couldn’t sleep. But I’d finally talked to our family doctor about it and he’d said, So what? Some people can sleep and some people can’t. It’s your metabolical clock.

We were used to not having Candida with us during summer vacations. She often went home to Portugal while we traveled
en famille
. But vacations stood apart from real life. I did not begin to miss Candida abnormally until we got home, and every night was like a Sunday. Like an addicted person, I began my withdrawal. I wrote her a letter every night, and she wrote me back. Three times a week we talked on the phone. My father permitted this for the first few weeks; he felt responsible, I suppose.

One week into school, I stubbornly announced to my parents that I was going to Portugal by myself for my Easter vacation. I added that Didi was paying for the ticket.

My parents, gazing at me skeptically, said fine, if that was what I wanted to do.

I never went to Portugal. Within six months, being cool and hip at school had become more important to me than my loyalty to Candida. I was reluctant to surrender my newfound freedom to visit her, even for ten days. I made up an excuse—I blamed it on my parents. In a self-indulgent, snivelly letter, I wrote that they thought it was too soon—that it would throw me back into my terrible depression, from which I’d just recently emerged.

When Candida came back to us a year later as planned, we had terrible fights. “But you can’t wear that out! It’s like a bathing suit!” she’d say nervously.

“Daddy said I could wear it,” I’d counter. “LEAVE ME ALONE!”

She looked at me in silence as I, coquette that I was, admired myself in the mirror, ignoring her.

She’d give me warnings like, “It’s minus five degrees today, don’t forget your coat.” And I’d turn on her, furious: “Do you still think I’m three years old?”

My father had bought and fixed up the concierge’s apartment for her, but she only went downstairs to sleep. She must have been terribly lonely; Maria was now married, had two daughters who were Candida’s godchildren, and she did not have much time for her old friend.

Candida would walk into my room without knocking so often that I finally asked my father to put a lock on the door, which he did. Then they must have made some kind of agreement. She stopped bothering me about my clothes and dates, and never said another word about missing the way it used to be between us.

Two years later, when I was fifteen, my father decided he’d had enough of France and sold our apartment. It was decided—by my father or Candida, or both—that she would not come along to America. With fabulous recommendations from my parents, she found a comfortable job as a housekeeper for an elegant, elderly French couple.

“Why don’t you take care of babies, Didi?” I asked her.

“Ah
non
,” she said, throwing up her hands. “
Jamais de la vie
!” Not on your life, said she.

Bewildered, frightened, looking forward to the future, I packed up my room. With Candida’s help, it took me two full days. I kept only the most precious mementos.

My poor old Barbie dolls and teddy bears were brought out from the top storage space in the closet, dusty and gnarled and looking miserable. They all had crocheted sweaters and slippers, flowery gowns and hats, made with care by Candida and her mother over the years.

“I’ll clean them and give them to the poor,” Candida said. “Don’t you preoccupy yourself with them now, there’s too much to do. Don’t you preoccupy yourself.”

In a drawer, we found the tiny wooden clogs Candida had brought me back from Portugal as a souvenir when I was six.

Cupping them in her hand, Candida said, “You know, I still have your first pair of shoes.”

Our old Enrico Macias records were deep in the back of the closet, piled in a cardboard box. I had completely forgotten that I had been crazy about Enrico Macias. He was totally uncool now, the brunt of many jokes at school. Kids said contemptuously that only old ladies and fags went to the Olympia to see Enrico Macias.

He had been our entertainment on Saturday nights, long ago—we’d dance in my room to Enrico’s crazy gypsy love songs; I’d stand on Candida’s feet and she’d twirl me around from corner to corner, laughing and singing in a loud voice.

“I adore him,” she’d say, red in the face, a hand over her heart.

Smiling up at us from the dusty jacket at the top of the pile was Enrico, fat-cheeked, curly-headed, happy as ever, impervious to the fickle nature of his fans’ hearts.

“What do you say, Didi, shall we listen to a song?”

“Oh, no,” she chuckled. “Not now. There’s too much to do.”

A sudden flood of emotion rose in my throat and I had to stare at Enrico’s smiling face for a long while before I could talk.

“Here, you keep them, Didi.” I handed her the box.

She took it from my hands and lovingly wiped the dust off Enrico’s face with the flat of her hand.

“And here, keep the clogs too.”

“You’ll always be my little girl,” she said, looking down at the little lacquered, hand-painted shoes.

A taxi came to take us to the airport. Candida stood in the street, in a black dress with a flowered scarf around her neck. She waved a white handkerchief, smiling bravely as we drove away. I watched her and waved frantically from the backseat. The taxi hadn’t gone ten meters when her face collapsed, and marblelike tears began to tumble from her eyes.

NEW YEAR’S EVE

It snowed heavily on Christmas Day and my brother and I went out to build our first snowman in America. The previous spring, our family had moved into an old farmhouse on the eastern end of the South Fork of Long Island. We had left Paris shortly after our father suffered his second attack of congestive heart failure. He had come home from the American Hospital of Paris fifteen pounds thinner and there was a look of resignation in his eyes which frightened us all.

“I always intended to go home when you kids got to be teenagers. You’re already fifteen and I’ve waited longer than I intended to at first.” No one spoke as he paused for a breath. He had gathered us around the antique oak table in the dining room, which was where most plans were proposed and discussed. My brother and I watched our mother’s placid eyes for a clue but received none. Our father went on, “I want you kids to be real Americans. Anyway, I’m tired of Europe, the phones don’t work. The plumbing’s for shit. Nothing works properly. I want to go home.”