A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (20 page)

Our family ran according to our father’s own form of democracy; Billy and I and our mother could vote against him on any proclamation he made, but he held the right to veto the vote if all three of us voted against him. On that day no one said a word in protest but our faces all wore crestfallen expressions. We understood instinctively from the sad and slightly guilty look on his face that he was not only talking about the phone system or the plumbing, he was talking about his heart, which he would not entrust to French doctors, even if they were hired by the American Hospital.

Our father went on to explain what was wrong with him. His heart had suffered scarring from the malaria he’d caught in the Pacific during the War. He told us that his friend had found us a house in a little resort town by the sea, that it would be a quiet place in winter, which was what he needed to continue to write the enormous book about the War that he had been working on for five years already.

By our first Christmas in America, our father’s health had deteriorated so much that he could no longer leave the house because of the cold. Billy and I continued to behave as though he could still manhandle us, which, emotionally, he could. His strength of character had not deteriorated with the weakening of his body, which was now like a seventy-year-old man’s. He spent most afternoons in a rocking chair between the fireplace and a large window in the living room, reading a book.

On that Christmas afternoon, as Billy and I rolled our snowman together, we witnessed an extraordinary sight: The young rosebuds on the split-rail fence at the bottom of the hill which had turned from pink to vermillion overnight in the first November frost, had not withered and fallen off the bushes. In the vast expanse of snow, they stood out like specks of fresh blood on a sheet. Billy and I abandoned our snowman and approached the fence. The roses seemed to be growing still in the complete desolation of white, stubbornly defying nature’s onslaught. We ran up the hill toward the house, yelling.

We barged into the living room dragging in stacks of snow. Our father was sitting by the window looking out. He was dressed in one of the cotton nightshirts he had ordered from Brooks Brothers, and a warm blue robe and slippers. I was suddenly struck by the thinness and paleness of his ankles, by the fact that the veins were thick and the same color as the robe. Not wanting to shatter the mood my brother and I had rushed in with, I yelled out excitedly, “Daddy! You wouldn’t believe it! The roses are still growing on the fence. Come and see!”

I was out of breath and enveloped in a cloak of icy air which had followed me into the room.

My father shuddered almost imperceptibly. Billy ran off to shut the door.

“I’d love to, baby, but you know I can’t. I can’t even make it up the goddamn stairs,” he said evenly.

“Where’s your camera, I’ll take a picture,” I offered, my voice almost disappearing completely. I became paralyzed when the severity of his illness struck me; like a house hit by lightning, my entire system seemed to shut down.

“Good idea,” he said, and smiled wanly.

When the pictures came back from Fotomat a few days later, I spread them out on the same oak table that had once inhabited our Paris dining room. Now it was in the long, amber-colored kitchen. The pictures turned out well and I was ecstatic. “Look at this one!” I said. “And look at
this!”
There was the dark brown fence, the dark brown rose stems, the dark brown house in the background, and the vermillion roses against the white, white snow and the white, white sky. My father gazed at them for a long time and then a solitary tear fell from his eye. He wiped it away absently with the back of his hand.

“Daddy,” I mumbled, “what’s the matter?”

“They’re beautiful,” he said. “They make me feel sad.”

Billy’s and my first semester at the local high school had been a miserable one. The local kids had not befriended us. It seemed the locals were becoming slightly schizophrenic due to the radical change the summers brought to the town. They disliked and mistrusted but also adulated “New Yorkers,” which included anyone who had not been born and raised locally, like the corn and potatoes the area was famous for.

Our schoolmates were the sons and daughters of the firemen, the store owners, the fishermen, the farmers, anyone who kept the town running for people like us who were only supposed to invade in summer. Since September Billy had gained fifteen pounds and had pimples on his face and back and had taken to hibernating in front of the television set. He would not talk to anyone, including our father, for days.

In September my father had persuaded me to join a local theater group and I became friendly with the actors and stagehands who were older and more sophisticated than the high school kids. I fell madly in love but I would not tell anyone with whom.

One day my father made my mother and me sit down in the kitchen and he said in a neutral voice, “It’s time to discuss sex.”

“It’s a little late for that,” I said apprehensively.

“But don’t you need birth control?” my mother said in a shaky voice. “My God, what have you been using up till now?”

“Rubbers,” I said, and not another word.

“All right,” my father said. “We’ll call the doctor tomorrow. You don’t have to tell us anything you don’t want to tell us, but if you want to tell us, you can.”

The reason I would not tell them was that the object of my passions was the twenty-nine-year-old carpenter who built the sets for the Playhouse. Dave had thin green eyes and a red beard. He had been in Vietnam but would not talk about it. I had already tried everything with him—all the things my father had warned me about continuously back in Paris—starting with alcohol and sex and working up to marijuana and cocaine, twice.

Dave had been married once, and had other women, including an older actress from the Playhouse. This woman, at least ten years my senior, despised me. I was no competition for her and stood frozen while she attacked my acting and called me an overprotected, spoiled brat during rehearsals. I could not help myself concerning the carpenter; I was obsessed with him and would not give him up. He often tried to warn me not to become attached to him. “I can’t get involved with you. I’m still trying to figure out who I am,” he would say.

At twenty-five I would never have looked at him. He would have seemed petty and cowardly and vain. But at that time, Dave filled some kind of void in my life which I was incapable of understanding. It seemed that he loved me when he took me for long drives in his station wagon and when he cooked hot dogs for me in his trailer. Then he would disappear. Dave would never call my house, and at first this seemed perfectly normal. But then I would call him for days, allowing the phone to ring up to twenty times, but he would not answer and would not show up at the Playhouse. I thought I might collapse from a short-circuit of emotions, because I loved and hated him so much at the same time. Promising myself never to speak to him again, I would go to rehearsal determined and end up in his trailer once again.

My father told me he was worried about me. I was becoming too thin and too quiet. After my lonely school days, he began to teach me to drive his Volkswagen on the winding back roads.

He never asked me about my lover. He would teach me about driving, about hitting the gas when I turned into a curve and about never panicking. Always expect the unexpected, he would say. And once in a while he would offer to listen if I wanted to talk to him or ask him questions. I would not talk.

He went four times to see the play I was in,
The Cat and the Canary
, in which I played a thirty-five-year-old neurotic old maid. My father sat in the first row and watched only me. He gave me sound advice.

“Don’t ever look out at the audience,” he told me. “The audience doesn’t exist.” I told him I wanted to be an actress when I grew up. He told me acting was the toughest job in the world and that actresses are treated “like shit.” This made me want desperately to tell him about the carpenter, but I knew that if I did, my father would have pulled me out of the Playhouse and threatened Dave with one of his shotguns.

Driving with my father was the one thing besides seeing the carpenter that I looked forward to that fall. Then suddenly, during the last week of October, my father got sick again and the carpenter disappeared forever.

Billy and I came home from school on an afternoon that was like any other afternoon in the late fall. The school bus dropped us off across the street and we ran up the driveway, over a red and gold crackling carpet of leaves, to find an ambulance parked by the back door. Our father was coming down the brick path on a stretcher. A brown wool blanket covered his body and was tucked in at his sides. Leaves swirled all around him like an escort of frantic, rust-colored birds. Our mother was walking beside the stretcher, holding his hand. Her face was pale and drawn. Billy and I stood watching, clutching our books by the ambulance’s doors.

Our father gave us an apologetic look and raised the hand our mother was not holding. “No driving class today, honey,” he said to me. “Billy, will you rake up these leaves when you get a chance? Don’t worry, you two. You hear? I’ll be home soon.”

After trying to call Dave for four days, I found out from someone in the theater group that he had up and moved to Florida in his trailer, taking along the older actress who had gotten pregnant. I figured the woman had done it on purpose and I wished every misery in the world upon them. I was ashamed when the woman returned less than a year later without him and with a baby named Biscayne Bay.

I thought that all boys would understand sex the way Dave had. Something terrible and frantic was happening inside me and I had no idea what it meant. I was hungry all the time, but not for food—I stopped eating almost completely after my father went into the hospital—I wanted things, wanted to be loved, accepted, understood.

I did not correlate the high-school boys’ sudden interest in me with the disappearance of Dave. Finally Janet, the girl who sat next to me in homeroom, told me: They all knew. Everyone in school knew that I had had an affair with an older man.

My father was in the hospital for three weeks, during which time I had sex with a basketball player, a surfer, a farmer’s son, and a boy who worked in his father’s auto body shop after school. After each urgent, hurried embrace in the scratchy backseat of some parent’s car, parked in the dark corners of the woods, and each cold, indifferent stare I was subjected to the next day, I felt more lonely and more hungry and more frantic to find whatever it was I was looking for. I understood that they did not care a damn about me or how I felt or that my father was in the hospital, but I could not help myself when they turned all sweet with me and coaxed my clothes off in their dirty, chilly cars.

I could not discuss this with anybody and I worried constantly that someone would say something to my brother in school. But Billy never mentioned a word; he was dealing with his own worries. Every day after school he took the rake out from the barn and attacked the lawn. He raked with a passion he showed for nothing except the television. After the third day of this I watched our mother walk out of the kitchen into the yard, pulling a cardigan together over her chest. The wind made the screen door flutter on its hinges. “Billy, you don’t have to do it every day! Wait till all the leaves fall!” she cried out in a desperate voice. Billy said nothing. The leaves kept falling, there was a new carpet of them each afternoon. They twirled about in that frantic way, falling all around as Billy kept raking until all the trees were bare and the lawn was bare and brown.