A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (4 page)

He thought about this for a while, frowning in that stubborn way. He did not seem convinced.

“Anyway, Papa would shoot any
loup-garou
that tried to get in our house. You want to come sleep with me? You can sleep with me if your bed is wet.”

“All right,” he said, throwing back the covers. He crouched down and brought his suitcase out from beneath the bed.

“You’re not going to bring that stupid old thing, too, are you? Nobody’s going to take it.”

“I’ll just put it down beside your bed. All right?”

It was strange to have him in my bed. I had a girlfriend who lived next door who slept over sometimes. We would talk and talk until we fell asleep. I didn’t know what to talk about with Benoit. It wasn’t as though he’d be gone tomorrow and everything had to be said right now.

“Well, then. Good night,” he said.

“Good night.”

I lay awake for a while, listening to his deep and even breathing and watching his round face, his heavy eyelids, his puffy mouth, finally at peace and comfortable in sleep. I hoped his dreams were good ones. I hoped that tomorrow I would be able to be nice. When we fought and my parents were not around, Candida took my side and smacked him or sent him to play in his room. Afterward I would watch him, feeling vindicated and righteous, through the crack in his door. He would sit on the floor hunched over his trucks and hum melancholy tunes he’d make up as he went along. I adored Candida for favoring me, but I knew it was not right. The strangest thing about it was that Benoit never told on us. My parents had no idea.

Why was it so hard all the time to be nice? Wasn’t it easier to be nice? Why, on the rare occasion that I
was
nice, did I suddenly feel so rotten about all the times I wasn’t nice to him? Why did he always make me want to pull his hair or bite him as hard as I could? Either that or he gave me a feeling of utter self-disgust, emptiness, and gloom. I wished there was a place they could send me to teach me to be nice. Like the place where he had been. I only wished this for a second, because I knew it was a place where there was no Candida, no parents, and no one to protect me.

For lunch on Saturday we went to the brasserie at the end of the island on which we lived, to celebrate that Benoit had been with us a week. It had been the longest week of my life and I did not think there was anything to celebrate at all, especially if the coming weeks were going to be as long as this one.

Benoit had two slices of
tarte aux framboise
for dessert and my father brought up the subject of changing his name again.
“J’ sais pas,”
the little brother said. He had pieces of raspberry all over his face, even high on his cheeks, and I was disgusted.

“Bill,” my mother said, “why don’t we give him a name. How about Anthony, like my father?”

“I
told
you he’s too little to pick his own name. Look, he’s got sticky stuff all over the place.”

“Be quiet, Agatha,” my mother said.

“Let’s give it a little while,” my father said. “Let him think about it.”

After the brasserie, I liked to hold my father’s hand and run along the top of the four-foot-high cement rampart that ran all along the upper quai. It gave me the feeling I could fly. Below, on the lower quai, were dogs and fishermen and the murky river splashed loudly against the embankment.

“Daddy! On the wall! On the wall!” I reached up to him. My father lifted me onto the rampart and gripped my wrist. I skipped and yelled as I ran along the two-foot-wide wall, arms spread out and flailing the air.

“MORE! MORE!” I shouted, but my father lifted me off and put me down on the sidewalk.

“Ben-wa, do you want to walk on the wall?”

“Non.”

“He’s such a scaredy-cat he’ll never do it,” I said.

“Look, I’ll lift you up and you can see how you feel about it.” My father only spoke to the little brother in American now, and he seemed to understand the gist of things well enough, although he would only respond in French.

He lifted Benoit onto the rampart and Benoit started to scream. Tears poured from his wide-open eyes.

“NON! NON!”
he cried. He threw his arms around my father’s neck and crawled onto him, his feet scrambling to hook onto something at my father’s waist.

“It’s all right. It’s all right,” my father kept saying.

“Papa, non, j’veux pas! J’veux pas!”

“I told you he’s scared,” I said. This didn’t make me feel better at all, though I had hoped it would. I felt sick inside from his fear and grabbed my mother’s hand. She squeezed it tightly.

“I’m sorry, Mommy.”

“It’s not your fault.”

My father’s hand held the back of the little brother’s neck while he rocked him from side to side. Benoit pressed his face into my father’s chest.

“O, Papa,” he said. “O, Papa Papa Papa. I’ll walk on the wall. You’ll see, I can do it.”

“We’ll try it some other day,” my father said, walking toward our house with the little brother in his arms. “O, Papa Papa,” Benoit kept saying, as though it were the only word he could remember.

My father went upstairs to his office and wrote every day but Sunday. It was the only day of the week he slept late. It was also Candida’s day off and my mother had to go to the kitchen to pour the water into the coffeepot that Candida had left out on a tray with the cups and sugar the night before. Then we had a ritual. My mother called to me and I ran to the kitchen and went downstairs with her to their room which was below the living room. I crawled onto the enormous bed and had a glass of milk in a coffee cup while they had their coffee and discussed our plans for the day.

This was Benoit’s second Sunday. When my mother called from the kitchen I stopped by Benoit’s room on my way.

“It’s Sunday. Are you coming?”

“Not right away,” he said. He was organizing his suitcase again. It was lying open on his bed and he was taking things out and putting things in. I didn’t wait to see what and ran down the hall, happy to have my parents to myself for a few minutes.

My mother’s voice always sounded gravelly on Sunday mornings. She was slow to wake up and her eyes seemed puffier than on the other days.

“Where’s your brother?”

“Doing something in his room.”

“There’s a John Wayne cowboy movie on TV at two,” my father said. “We’ll go have Vietnamese and then watch the movie. Maybe I’ll put on my cowboy hat and boots. Maybe I’ll get my pistols out too.” My father had a real cowboy outfit he’d bought in the West when he was young; he liked to put it on when “humdinger” cowboy movies were on TV. He had gotten Benoit a toy cowboy hat and a gun belt, a special belt for bullets, two big black pistols, and a little cowboy vest with fringes. They’ll probably both get dressed up together from now on, I thought, wanting a cowboy suit.

We heard Benoit’s footsteps coming down the stairs. Something thumped on the stairs behind him.

He came in carrying the suitcase. He hopped up onto my father’s side of the bed and crawled toward him with the suitcase dragging beside him. He put it down on my father’s lap, over the sheet, and said,
“C’est pour vous.”

“For me?” my father said.

“
Pour vous
.”

“Are you sure? My God, Ben-wa, that’s the nicest present I’ve ever gotten in my life.” My father unzipped the little suitcase and peered inside. In it was everything the little brother had arrived with, including the plaid suit he had been wearing.

In French, the little brother said, “I want to call myself little Bill.”

“Little Bill? Billy. All right.” My father’s voice went quiet.

“Billy Anthony Willis,” my mother said. “How’s that, everybody? All right?”

“Billy,” the little brother said.

“Isn’t that something? I’ve hated that name all my life and he wants my name.”

“Billy! Billy!” I said, jumping up and down on the bed. The cups jiggled on their saucers, my mother grabbed the tray and steadied it. She did not reprimand me

“I just have this feeling,” she said in her gravelly voice, “I really had no idea but now I think everything’s going to be all right.”

I see the rich velvety colors of the curtains and bedspread and the antique bedside lamps bathing us in amber light. I see the little brother’s flushed and smiling face, his sweet blue eyes all watery, and the dark space glinting between his front teeth.

We had our first four-way kiss. The little brother put one arm around my father’s neck and one around my mother’s. I was on the other side. Our four mouths came together in a loud smack.

The happiness I felt did not last through the day, nor did it return the next day, but at the moment of the four-way kiss I was happy that he was mine and that I was his. For a short moment, I was almost in love with him, for he was certainly brave, much more so that I would ever be, and had somehow found it possible to forgive me.

A SOLDIER’S DAUGHTER NEVER CRIES

I sat down at the top of the metro steps in the pouring rain, cringing as sudden blasts of wind slapped the rain against my face. The ground rumbled beneath me. It was the next train pulling in. I heard its doors slide open, and thirty seconds later a crowd of cranky French people came rushing up the stairs. It was just past five o’clock and everyone wanted to get home as fast as possible except me. The French people pushed and shoved and grumbled aloud,
“Quel temps de chien.”

I watched a man in a suit push a woman out of the way as he climbed the stairs. The woman yelled, “
Ah, ça, alors! Merde
!” and swung her handbag, hitting the man across the face. He turned back and called her a
putain
. He ran on up toward me and stepped on my gray uniform skirt, smearing mud all over the pleats.

“And what the hell are you doing sitting there!” he shouted. “You want to catch the
grippe
?”

I refused to look up. Instead, I tried to wipe the mud off my skirt. One after another, four more trains rumbled in. One fat woman’s high heel speared my shoe at the instep, grazing the skin. The scratch stung pretty badly, but would not bleed in a dramatic way at all.

I felt terribly sorry for myself and wanted to fall ill or have an accident before I reached home. I’d had pneumonia once, three years ago, and I remembered that in the red haze of my fever the entire household had come to a standstill. My father had held my hand while I lay facedown on my parents’ bed and the doctor gave me a shot in the behind. My father said in a gentle voice that if I relaxed my muscles the shot wouldn’t hurt and he’d been right. I had been so sick that he’d even given up work for one whole day to watch over me personally.

What I needed now was to come down with a serious high fever like that one, before I had to face my father.

I picked up my
cartable
, heavy with exercise books, and stood. I wiped the itchy gravelly dirt off the backs of my legs and opened my navy-blue blazer. At the curb I stood in the gutter while I waited for the light. The water had a current in it and was ice-cold and I wiggled my toes inside the blue loafers. I sneezed three times, a good sign.

Madame Beauvier, the
directrice
, had called me down to her office in the middle of class. In the middle of class! The teacher and all of my classmates had turned in silence and stared at me as I left the room. I felt all their eyes on my back as I went through the door; it sent a shiver up my spine.

I knew exactly why I was being sent down to Madame Beauvier and fear forced me to grip the banister as I descended the wide, vinyl-covered stairs. They would probably expel me for what I’d done. There was no feeling left in my knees. I had never been in trouble before and had always gotten on perfectly politely with Madame Beauvier. But Madame Beauvier’s anger terrified everybody because it was so calm and expressed itself in such odd ways. Once, I’d seen her take an enormous pair of scissors out of her pocket and snip off a loudmouth’s bangs, right in the middle of the crowded hallway. “I told you last week, Antoine, to get a haircut,” Madame Beauvier said. She had not raised her high voice or even frowned.

Madame Beauvier was waiting for me behind her tall desk. She was a short woman with small, hunched shoulders and a tight, pale face. She had the longest and most beautiful bright red nails I had ever seen. They were so long she used the eraser end of a pencil to dial the phone.