A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (23 page)

Keith and I left them sitting in the kitchen in front of the TV. They were watching the crowds in Times Square. A cloud of steam hung over the crowd’s collective breath.

“God, am I glad I’m not there,” my mother said.

The roads were so dark the trees seemed white in the headlights. The road through the woods wound dangerously and there were no other cars in sight.

Keith was in an ebullient mood.

“I can’t believe he let us have the car!” he shouted, laughing. “Damn, your old man is great. Maybe next year he’ll be all right and we can all go out together. Dancing or something. Wouldn’t that be great?”

Next year. Would we have anything to celebrate on New Year’s Eve? I wondered. I saw my family sitting quietly, resignedly, in front of the TV set and my heart constricted in my throat.

“He’s never going to be all right,” I said, choked by tears.

“What are you talking about?”

“With what he’s got you don’t get better. You stay the same or you get worse. Turn back, Keith.”

“What?”

“Turn back, please. I want to be with them.”

“Come on, Channe. The guys are waiting for us. The band’s going to be great. It’s New Year’s Eve already. We’ll get to dance together like you always say you want to do.”

We headed on through the icy night. Keith squeezed my knee and talked about happy things, about how lucky I was to have a father like that, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we should have turned back.

Tides was packed with people. I waited for the phone by the bar for a long time. My turn came as people were getting ready to shout the countdown. The phone rang three times before my father picked up.

“Daddy,” I said, barely able to control the shaking in my voice. BINGO! Midnight, everybody was screaming and kissing behind me.

“Happy New Year, Daddy,” I said.

“Happy New Year, baby,” he said.

“I wish I was home with you.”

“It’s quiet here,” he said. “Your brother and I are having a tiny drop of champagne and your mother’s finishing the bottle.” He laughed quietly into the phone.

“Daddy. I wish I’d stayed home.”

“It’s all right, baby,” he said in a soothing voice. “Have a great time for all of us.”

The shouting around me was so intense I could barely hear him. I blocked one ear with my hand and listened to my father tell me that everything in my life was going to turn out just fine.

“Just as long as you don’t marry Keith,” he said. “It’s fine to have an affair and all but I’m scared to death he’s going to ask you to marry him and that you’ll give up your whole future.”

“Don’t you worry, Daddy. I’m going to go to college.”

“I love you,” he said. “See you tomorrow.”

I stepped outside without my coat, into the parking lot that was filled with cars. The air was bitterly cold. I looked up at the stars which swam in and out of focus like a million fireflies above my head. Without my father, the world meant nothing, and I had abandoned him on New Year’s Eve.

“Please, God,” I thought. “Please, if you exist. Please make it be all right.”

There was a fence at the end of the parking lot but the rosebushes on it were dead. They looked like weeds, barren and black against the snow.

“Please, one more winter,” I said, tears falling from my eyes. “Even if it means a wheelchair.”

Keith was suddenly behind me; he placed my coat over my shoulders and wrapped his arms tightly around me from the back.

“Let’s go,” he said. “If we hurry we can make it back in fifteen minutes. We can still have a glass of champagne with him.”

MOTHER’S DAY

“Why is it,” I said to my mother on the phone, “that every time you have an emergency I have to come, and not Billy?” It was one o’clock in the morning and I was in the kitchen of my university apartment, hunched over two translations of The Iliad, with various notebooks, dictionaries, histories, and loose-leaf sheets lying in haphazard piles on the Formica table in front of me.

“You have to come with me, Channe,” said my mom. “Mother’s had a stroke. Besides, school has always been easier for you than for Billy. I can’t ask him to drive all the way to Pennsylvania when he has an Economics exam.”

“But I have a paper on
The Iliad
due on Monday,” I replied.

“That should be easy,” she said, “your father read that to you when you were eight.”

I heard her light a cigarette, inhale deeply, then break into a horrible fit of wet, bronchial coughing. When people who weren’t used to it heard that cough, they volunteered the names of lung specialists.

“Jesus, Mom,” I said.

“It’s a sinus infection,” she said defensively, her usual reply. “My lungs are fine.”

At eight o’clock the next morning, a Friday, I called the professor of my Senior Seminar, “War as Told,” and asked him for an extension. I told him it was a family emergency. Then I threw some clothes and my Lattimore and Fitzgerald translations into a bag, and headed out the door.

This time of year, mid May, I didn’t need a reservation to ride the car ferry across Long Island Sound from New London to Orient Point. The day was perfect, the sky a deep blue, no clouds. I sat in the wind on the top deck with my two
Iliads
open before me, feeling like quite the diligent student. Except I couldn’t read a word.

Sunday would be five years since my father died. May fifteenth. Spring had been unseasonably warm that year, and our lilacs bloomed early. By mid May, they were so plentiful you could barely see the green through the cascading wall of pale violet flowers.

May fifteenth was also my aunt Nora’s birthday. Nora had died of polio at six, when my mother was four. She mourned Nora every year, except five years ago, when my father died on the same day.

I turned into our long driveway, feeling apprehensive. I didn’t like coming home this time of year. The rosebushes on the split-rail fence were just beginning to green. The cone-shaped lilac buds were still tight as fists, and I was unreasonably grateful to them for exhibiting such self-restraint.

The kitchen screen door had been torn to shreds by my mother’s new Siamese, an abandoned cat with wild eyes who hated everyone except her. I turned the handle on the inside door, and as it swung open, the polished stone knob fell off in my hand. A vague feeling of panic settled in my chest, and for a moment I found it hard to breathe.

I walked through the musty-smelling house. Frames hung askew and dust floated in the thick bands of sunlight pouring in through the windows. In the living room, the murky, sicklysweet smell of old cat pee wafted up from a threadbare Persian rug. I thought, As soon as Billy gets home from college, everything will be fine, he’ll fix all this. But last summer he hadn’t come home, he’d taken an internship in Washington, and I was still angry at him for that.

My mother was sitting on a swing on the front porch, rocking and smoking.

“Hi, Mom.”

She tamped out the cigarette in a pewter ashtray in her lap. Smoke enveloped her entirely, a cocoon. “It was a day exactly like this—April, I guess—when your college acceptances arrived in the mail. Your father and I sat out here together. He was so pleased. He knew you were set. He didn’t have to worry anymore.”

I felt tears stinging my eyes and turned away. “I’m going to lie down for a half hour, then we’ll go.”

The fauve smell of cat pee slammed into me the moment I opened my bedroom door. I forced open the storm windows and let the warm spring air blow through. I marched back out to the porch, in a rage.

“Mom, this whole house smells like cat piss. It’s really bad.”

“What are you talking about? It doesn’t smell.”

“You’re getting to be like those two old aunts of Jackie Onassis,” I said, trying to control my voice. “The doorknobs are falling off! It’s out of control, Mom.”

“No one else says it smells.”

My rage was too big, and I was ashamed of it. “Your friends are scared of you,” I said, trying to get ahold of my voice, which sounded wooden in my own ear.

“You’re such a tight-ass,” she muttered, and lit another cigarette.

“Forget the nap,” I said woodenly. “Let’s go.”

Crossing the George Washington Bridge, we ran into a rainstorm like a wall of water. My mother was on her fifth or sixth cigarette and I could barely see, between the smoke and the rain.

“You know, they’ve done a new study that says secondhand smoke can kill you just as fast, so you’re not just killing yourself, you’re killing me, too.”

“Oh, bullshit,” said my mother. “Be careful!” She grabbed my forearm and I jumped out of my seat. “That truck’s about to swerve into our lane!”

“I see him, Mom, for God’s sake. Don’t do that while I’m driving.”

The green road signs swooped in and out of sight before I was able to read them.

“Just keep going straight,” my mother said. “Don’t worry, I could drive this road blindfolded.”

So why did you need me to come with you? I wanted to say, but held my tongue. Sometimes, just holding my tongue seemed the hardest thing in the world. She went into a coughing fit that bent her practically double in the passenger seat and I felt that unnerving tightness in my own chest.

We drove on in silence for a while. I turned on NPR, a station we could agree on. A public service announcement sponsored by Parsons Flowers reminded us that Sunday, May fifteenth, was Mother’s Day and that they could deliver anywhere in the tri-state area for an extra three dollars and ninety-nine cents.

“Shit,” my mother said gloomily. “Mother’s Day. What can we get her?”

“Gootz’s Chocolates,” I said, and we both laughed dryly. Every Christmas, even back in Paris, a square white box would arrive, with
Gootz
embossed in gold script on the top, and a note, “
Merry Christmas from Grandma Bertie in Gibbsville, PA.
” The box contained an assortment of the strangest-looking chocolates we’d ever seen—pink and green marzipan fillings and a gooey white paste so sweet it made your teeth ache. Within hours every chocolate in the box would be broken open, bitten into, or crushed, then left there to languish until New Year’s Day, when my mother would throw out the box.

After a moment, my mother said, “I was thinking…” and stopped.

This could not be good news. “What, Mom?” I prodded.

“I was thinking…If Bertie’s really in bad shape, maybe she should come live with me.”

“What!?” I turned toward her and almost swerved off the road. “This is the woman who attacks and insults you every time you speak! This is the woman who drowned your kittens when you were eight years old! The woman who wouldn’t give you two cents to rub together to go to college!”

“It’s just a thought,” my mother said.

“It’s not a thought, it’s suicide.”

She snapped open her écru Chanel handbag and took out an airplane bottle of scotch. The label crackled as she twisted off the cap and took a demure sip. I was surprised she’d held out this long.

“My stomach is bothering me,” she said, as if in answer to a rebuke. I didn’t say a word. She needed a shot to get on an elevator. Three shots to get on an airplane. A visit with Grandma Bertie would surely require a great deal more than one airplane bottle.

After a moment, she said in a voice filled with fatalism, “She’s a mean old bugger, my mother, but I feel sorry for her. Ending up all alone like this.”