A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (31 page)

The courtroom was packed with people from every corner of the world. Most of them were slowly mouthing the words on the pamphlet they’d been handed, entitled “How to Be a Good Citizen,” or some such thing. Billy and I read the pamphlet together, leaning toward each other, shoulders touching. “These people are going to raise monsters!” he said between his teeth, pointing to a line about how important it was to raise your children in the drug-free, alcohol-free, rock ‘n’ roll—free American Way.

The judge was a second-generation Italian, Francesco Giuseppe Antonio Bonnano. In a heavy Brooklyn accent, he talked about his parents’ trip over on the boat and their arrival at Ellis Island and how much more room there used to be a century ago for capitalist-minded entrepreneurs. “But it’s still America!” he shouted. “Your kids can still make it big, look at me.” Everyone laughed. He closed with, “I congratulate you all from the bottom of my heart on this momentous occasion.”

Then we all stood up and faced the flag. “I pledge allegiance,” we all began. It seemed that everyone was reading from the pamphlet except Billy and me and the judge. I glanced at my brother quickly out of the corner of my eye and saw his chin raised high, his glassy eyes staring straight ahead, and all at once the tears welled up in my throat and came pouring out of my eyes in a most conspicuous way. He elbowed me gently in the ribs. “Don’t,” he said.

We came out into the bright sunlight a little after noon.

“You want to have lunch somewhere?” Billy suggested in an offhanded way. I readily agreed, having taken the whole day off.

“You cried,” he said dead-seriously. “You promised you wouldn’t.”

Flustered, I apologized, and his face broke into an open, childish smile. “Willhelm Willich, can you believe it?”

It turned out that Billy had made reservations in a very expensive French restaurant near Wall Street. The atmosphere was festive, people were drinking and it was loud and crowded and bright. We had escargots de Bourgogne followed by sole meunière, our favorite dishes as children, which we would invariably order when our parents took us to Lipp for Sunday lunch. We each had two glasses of wine.

We talked easily about our jobs and avoided the subject of our mother.

“Have a
tarte aux framboises
for dessert, like you used to,” I coaxed him.

“On my birth certificate,” he said in a matter-of-fact way, “it says
unemployed
next to my mother’s name. I figure she was either very rich or very poor.”

I drank my wine down to the bottom and nearly choked on it.

“Are you just speculating, or are you asking me?” “No, no. Tell me.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything.” He shrugged complacently. “Whatever you know.”

I repeated almost verbatim the conversation I’d had with my parents late that February night, long ago. Billy gazed at me earnestly, sometimes nervous, sometimes uncomfortable, but he listened without flinching until I got to the end, to the diary that was still lying in the vault, in an envelope with his name on it.

“Do you want to read it?”

He thought about this for a while. His
tarte aux framboises
arrived and he picked at it with the tip of his fork.

“No,” he said finally. “You read it. Maybe one day I’ll ask you what it says. I don’t think so, though. I only have two parents. And I only have one sister.”

“Remember how you used to get the raspberries all over your face and I used to get so mad?” I laughed lightly, feeling a warmth spreading upwards from my chest.

“You were such a bitch,” he said.

“If you ever want to find her, you know, well, I’d go with you. We could just go knock on her door.”

“No,” he said flatly. “Thanks.”

We were so different. If it had been my mother, I would have wanted to go. But he was exactly the same as he’d always been. He’d made up his mind about it, probably when he first saw his birth certificate. That must have been almost four years earlier, when he’d put his papers in for naturalization. He’d never mentioned it to anyone. Now he apparently knew as much as he wanted to know. I didn’t understand it, but I respected his decision.

There were so many things I wanted to tell him, but I had a knot in my throat and tears in my eyes, and he despised displays.

I looked closely at his face and saw the tiny scars my nails had left on his cheeks during my childish fits of rage.

“Remember when you used to sit on my face and fart?” I asked him. He turned automatically to see if anyone was listening and then broke into a high-pitched giggle.

With a new burst of courage, I said, “Remember that night I came into your room hysterical after Daddy died?”

“Yeah,” he said, and stared at his
tarte
.

“I think you saved me. I’m sorry I was such a bitch when we were little, Billy.”

He shrugged this off. “Kids are kids, after all, aren’t they? It wasn’t easy for you either.”

THE DIARY

Translated from the French by Charlotte-Anne Willis; October, 1988

Thursday 24 June, 1960. Paris.

Aunt Susanne gave me this little diary and said I should write down my thoughts. That I may not want to now but in years to come I’ll thank her for it, the way I will for the piano lessons.

I’m already happy I didn’t give up the piano but what difference does it make now? What difference does anything make and who am I dear God and what did I ever do to deserve this? That is my thought for today.

Friday 25 June.

Well, the cruise left this morning. Mother canceled for both of us two days ago. She says she couldn’t possibly leave me at a time like this. Everything with her and Aunt Susanne has become “at a time like this,” like they’re talking about a national disaster and not something that is my fault personally.

Mother wanted to go to Greece so badly. I could see it in her eyes. She probably thought she’d meet a potential husband on the cruise. I can just imagine how she pictured him: a man wearing a linen suit with a little ascot and a pair of binoculars around his neck. He’s the one leaning on the railing of the de Brieux’s one-hundred-and-fifty-meter yacht reciting Greek poetry in Greek into the wind.

Saturday 26 June.

She’s starting to get on my nerves with this cruise. It’s all she talks about. How upset she is that she had to cancel on such short notice. How the de Brieux are never going to forgive her and how they are not people you want to offend. She walks around in circles wringing her hands and rubbing her eyelids. Aunt Susanne keeps telling her to calm herself, to be quiet. I have nowhere to go. That’s Rule Number One around here now: I have to hide inside till they can figure out where to send me. So I have to be with them all day long in a way I’ve never had to be in my life.

I said, “Mother, why don’t you just have a car drive you down to Marseille and join them?”

“No, no, no don’t be a silly girl. I’m your mother aren’t I? What kind of mother would I be if I left you at a time like this?”

The same kind you’ve always been, I wanted to say. I didn’t say anything as usual because there’s really no point in making things worse.

That habit she has of rubbing her eyelids with her fingertips has gotten out of control. And now she’s biting all her nails off again after she’d gotten it down to biting only two. That took her ten years and now because of me all that hard work is lost.

Her eyelids are red, her eyes are big and round and when she sits there hunched over biting her nails she looks like this exotic monkey from Africa I saw at the Jardin des Plantes

Aunt Susanne says Mother’s fragile. Too fragile and that this might really send her over the edge. Don’t think I don’t feel totally responsible because I do.

But my thought for today is this: Nothing’s going to change between Mother and me even now because she’s the kind of person who bends with the wind and I think she doesn’t have a personal thought in her head. It’s Grandmother’s fault, that’s the truth, because Grandmother controls the money. But look where that got us!

Sunday 27 June.

Mother told Grandmother, my three uncles, my oldest aunt, my brother, all my cousins, and the de Brieux that I have a thyroid problem. I’m going to spend the summer in a sanatorium by the sea. I got sick so suddenly that it was a shock to everyone. That’s why we had to turn down the cruise on such short notice. Aunt Susanne must have made up the story because Mother doesn’t have that kind of an imagination.

I respect Aunt Susanne because she’s not really like the rest of the family. She’s made money on her own with Saint Laurent and she doesn’t have to put up with Grandmother’s nonsense like the rest of them. Aunt Susanne says she’s the only one of Grandmother’s offspring who has testicles. The brothers are all eunuchs, she says. I looked that word up in the dictionary and it made me laugh.

But the inheritance is nothing to laugh at and even Aunt Susanne will honestly tell you this herself. She still wants to be included, and when she stands against Grandmother and the rest of them it’s always “to make a point” and it’s always temporary.

This time it’s not about one of their silly secret love affairs that the entire family hears about within two days anyway. This time no one must ever find out. No one must find out. No one must find out. How many times have I heard that in the last five days? About a million. Mother had to tell Aunt Susanne the truth because she couldn’t cope with it herself.

They say we have to lie to protect my future. They say it has absolutely nothing to do with the inheritance. I think they’re hypocrites.

Monday 28 June.

“Think productively, that’s what I do.” Aunt Susanne says this all the time. She’s of course the one who found the apartment in Trouville. It’s not too far from Paris so Mother and Aunt Susanne can drive up whenever they want. They say the sea air will do me good. That’s a good one considering I’m not allowed to go outside. I’ll have a phone so I can call them anytime. And it goes with the story because if I was in a sanatorium they couldn’t stay with me anyway. We’re going to Trouville tomorrow morning.

I’m scared. I had the best grades in my class. I was the best in French and music and history and some of the other girls did much worse things. For example my friend Sophie slept with the priest who was our biology instructor.

Why me? That’s what I don’t understand.

Tuesday 29 June. Trouville.

Night.

They left at nine to miss the traffic. Now I’m alone. I don’t mind. The
autoroute
was completely blocked outside Paris and the gas fumes made me sick. I threw up out the back window of Aunt Susanne’s Fiat. I thought the roof was caving in. I’m not claustrophobic or at least I’ve never been until now. I told them I had to throw up so Aunt Susanne pulled off the road. They both stared at me as though they thought it might already be time or something.

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” Mother pulled my hair away from my forehead and made a disgusted face. Poor Mother, she never changed one of our diapers and never saw us vomit so it must really have come as a shock.

“Oh God, Susanne, do you think—”

“Don’t be completely ridiculous, Sylvie.”

Mother started rubbing her eyelids, going round and round with the tips of her chewed-up fingers.

“If you start being completely neurotic then she’ll get frightened and goddamn it, Sylvie, I’m not going to put up with your nerves today.”

Aunt Susanne can really say what she means at times.

Maybe to them I’m a dog. People talk to a dog. “Cute doggie,” they say. “Aren’t you just the cutest doggie in the world!” and then the dog wags its tail so they figure it understands everything. But then five minutes later they’ll turn around and say something nasty about the dog to a guest or something,
right in front of the dog!
like, “When I bought this dog I had no idea the breed was so stupid.” It doesn’t make sense.

Wednesday 30 June.

Of course, Mother immediately began to complain about the room to the concierge. Mother was embarrassed by me so she acted haughty to the concierge. She always does that. I think the room is very nice. Mother said she thought the room would be much bigger. The concierge explained in a gentle voice that it’s the only one available with its own bathroom and kitchen.