A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (5 page)

“
Bonjour, Mademoiselle Charlotte-Anne
!” she said energetically in a voice that sounded like a violin off key, as though she were thrilled to see me, who stood paralyzed two feet from the desk.

Oh boy, I thought, this is it. No one called me by my full name anymore: Charlotte-Anne, I’d learned on my first day of kindergarten, sounded in French almost exactly like “charlatan.” It was a word I’d never heard before that day, but it suddenly appeared everywhere—in poems, songs; and even teachers could not resist making a little joke about it.

I asked them to write Channe, my nickname at home, on everything, even my report cards. At first they’d refused, claiming that it was improper and against the rules, but my father backed me up. He called Madame Beauvier and told her that if they would not write my name the way I wanted it written, he supposed he’d just have to find me another school that would. Then he threatened to send me to their rival, the American Middle School, which he never would have done because the Middle School, in his opinion, was much too narrow-mindedly American.

Madame Beauvier leaned forward and crossed her long, delicate fingers on the desktop.

“Tell me, Mademoiselle Charlotte-Anne,” she said in French in a confidential tone, “how do you spell gymnastics?”

I stared at Madame Beauvier’s hands and did not respond. The hands slid below the desktop and opened a drawer, withdrawing a little folded paper from it. They carefully unfolded the paper and spread it out flat on the desk.

“This is your excuse from gymnastics class…” She waited a bit. “Your father is a successful American writer, is he not? Your father, it seems to me, would know how to spell gym? Yet—” she slid the paper toward me with the tips of the nails, turning it around. “Here gym is spelled J-I-M. This is your father’s signature, is it not?”

“No,” I mumbled. “I did it, Madame. I didn’t feel well.”

“We have an infirmary.” Her voice went terribly high then, but remained calm. “I have telephoned your father. Normally, you would be expelled for this.” She picked up one of her fresh yellow pencils and tapped its eraser against the desktop. I thought, I’m going to have to run away from home.

“Considering you have never been in trouble with us before, and that you are not a terrible student and have been with us since the
jardin d’enfants
—four years, isn’t it? We have decided to give you a chance. We have left it up to your parents to punish you as they see fit.”

Tears fell from my eyes, but I refused to grimace. I stood frozen before Madame Beauvier, who was slowly shaking her head.

“I’m sorry,” she said simply. “Go back to your class and finish the day.”

The rain stopped as I was crossing the bridge to the Île Saint-Louis. I was not nearly cold or wet enough. My father would not feel sorry for me. I stood in a puddle at the end of the bridge and stared down at my reflection. The white blouse wriggled into the blue blazer and gray skirt. Would he beat me? He had never beaten me, although he sometimes threatened, making a fist and shaking it in the air, “I’m going to beat you to a pulp!”

Maybe I could tell him I’d been hit by a car. He would not believe me. Where could I go? With a sense of utter doom, I crossed the quai and headed down Rue des Deux Ponts toward my house.

I tiptoed up the back stairwell, past the first floor, because my nanny would be waiting for me there and she’d have made me change my clothes before going to him. I climbed the three creaking, splintered flights of stairs in the dark. The
cartable
thumped quietly on every step as I dragged it up by the strap.

My father spent every day up in his study away from the rest of the house, writing long, important books. There had been two already, before I was born. Now he was writing Number Four. It had to be terribly important, because no one was allowed up in his office except for emergencies. Once when Billy and I had been cleaning the fishbowl, one of the fish went down the sink. Billy flew up the three flights to the office screaming, “DADDY! DADDY! THE FISH! CHANNE! THE FISH!” And our father had come charging down the stairs like a lightning bolt. He’d thought I’d swallowed a fish bone. With tweezers he pulled the fish out of the drain and saved its life. Now it had a tear in its tail and was our favorite. I wished that this emergency were more like the one with the fish.

I tapped softly on the office door with my knuckles. I waited a few minutes and he did not come. I turned away and felt for the stairs, sliding my foot in the dark. Maybe, I thought, I could have an accident by falling down the stairs? But the deep black stairwell frightened me. I was going to get it one way or the other, no matter what, and my father, I decided, would certainly not kill me although falling down the stairs might. Turning back, I kicked the door with the toe of my shoe. I heard his footsteps and then I heard my heart pounding in my head. He opened the door. The smell of his office wafted out from behind him; all his odors seemed to conglomerate here into one strong, alien, and not very fatherly smell. I recognized pipe smoke, old black coffee, fresh shaving soap and aftershave, the light metallic grease of his exercise and office machines, and his strange, acrid sweat.

“Hello, you,” he said in a gruff voice. I looked up and saw deep wrinkles in his forehead. His eyebrows came together over his nose so that they looked like one curly salt-and-pepper moustache. He had a chin that stuck out like Popeye’s, which usually made me smile, but today his lips were pressed into a thin angry line.

“Come on in here and sit down. We have to have a serious talk.”

I couldn’t move. “Come on,” he said, “take off your jacket and sit.” He walked away from the door. My face was burning up and I could not look up from the floor.

“You’re all wet. Take off your shoes.” He turned back and put his hand on my shoulder, leading me toward the radiator below the window. He crouched before me, tugged at my shoes, and placed them on the windowsill. I lifted my skirt and spread it out in a circle around me as I sat down. The chair came from the Village Suisse and was an antique with a peach-colored velvet seat. He cleared his throat.

“Madame Beauvier called me today.”

“I know,” I mumbled. “She told me when I was in her office.”

“You did a very bad thing, you know.” I looked at my feet. I was trying to squeeze them between the radiator tubes. The heat stung fiercely.

“Were you by yourself? Was it your idea to forge my signature?”

“It was me and Melissa,” I mumbled. “We both did it. We didn’t feel like going to gym today ‘cause it was raining.”

“That’s no reason to forge my signature. You know, if you were older you could go to jail for that. It’s a very serious crime to sign someone else’s name. It’s against the law.” My father did not raise his voice; he maintained a stern, even tone. His eyes, when I glanced at them quickly, seemed worried rather than angry.

I wished he would yell or give me that licking he was always talking about. Then I could be furious at him. If he’d slap me I’d cry, then we’d make up and love each other again and forget it. But he wasn’t mad, he was disappointed, and that was horrible.

“You’re just too damn used to getting what you want. I guess I’ve been too easy on you.” He sighed, then, as he did whenever he was trying to think hard, pressed his hand against his wrinkled forehead, and rubbed his eyebrows. When he did this his eyes focused on nothing and he became cross-eyed.

I began to cry. I clenched my teeth and pressed my lips together. I thought about when I fell and hurt myself. He bandaged my sprains and cuts and whispered our secret to me—a soldier’s daughter never cries.

He stood by the tall window and looked out at the dismal day. The building across the street was old and gray, darker than the sky. I watched him arch his back and bring his shoulder blades and elbows together behind him.

“I’m sore,” he said. “I’ve been sitting up here all day. That goddamn Beauvier’s voice sends chills down my back that make my hairs stand up. It’s stopped raining. You dry enough?” He turned to me. I nodded.

“Want to go for a walk?”

I nodded again. He bent over me and helped me with the jacket and shoes. “Shoes are still damp,” he said, sliding them onto my feet.

“It’s not cold out,” I said.

Just then the phone buzzed. It was the recently installed line that connected my father’s office to the rest of the house.

“Hello,” he said. There was a pause. “She’s here, honey. Everything’s okay. We’re going for a walk…I’m explaining,” he said in a preoccupied tone. “She’s very sorry.” He told my mother we’d be back in an hour or so and hung up.

“Here.” He took an olive cashmere sweater off the back of his office chair and wrapped it around my shoulders like a shawl. It was the same color as his eyes.

“I don’t want to stop downstairs and involve the whole damn house in this.”

I was immensely relieved that he wasn’t planning to force me to atone in front of the entire family.

We went down to the riverbank. The lower quai ran almost completely around our side of the island, the southern side. It was where people walked their dogs, and lovers sat on the green park benches and “necked.” I had learned this word from him and did not quite know what it meant although I knew it involved boys and girls and sounded dirty.

Once we rounded the first bend, Notre-Dame was in full view, looming tall and gray across the river.

“You know, I like the pissy smell this place has,” my father said.

“Oo, gross, Daddy.”

He took slow, even steps so that I could keep up with him. After a while he held my hand. My mother and Candida seemed to forget when my brother and I were holding on and made us run to keep up. My father never seemed to be in any hurry. I watched the cobblestones and tried to avoid the cracks because it was good luck.

He said, after a long silence, “I don’t know what to tell you. You know I have to punish you. What do you think would be a fair punishment?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe nobody can sleep over for a month?” I looked up at him and my eyes felt heavy. He nodded slowly but did not respond. He rubbed his forehead with his fingertips and squinted.

“Do you think that’s reasonable, under the circumstances?”

“No desserts for a month, too?”

“Let me think about it,” he said solemnly. I squeezed his large, dry hand. I could not tell if he felt it or not. There was a free bench a little further on and we sat down. I began to swing my legs back and forth beneath it.

“When I was younger,” my father said, “before I met your mama, something like this happened to me. There was a guy in New York City called Bill Willis, like me. And he went around signing my name on bills in all sorts of places. Bars and restaurants and a few stores. He even took a lot of money out of my bank account. Over ten thousand dollars, that was an awful lot of money back then.”

“Did you know him?”

“No.”

“Did the police catch him?” I stopped swinging my legs and looked sideways at my father.

“Yeah, finally. But he’d spent all the money already.” He was looking off toward Notre-Dame.

I watched a bottle bob up and down in the greenish water, until the current carried it away under the bridge.

“Did you meet him, Daddy?”

“No. I never did. I didn’t want to, really.”

“But they made him pay you the money, didn’t they?”

“How could they? He didn’t have any to give.”

“So he went to prison?”

“No, I let him go. I didn’t press charges.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know, baby. I felt sorry for him, I guess.”

“He should’ve gone to prison,” I said with finality.

“But what if he had a wife and kids? What if he was hungry? Who knows…”

I frowned. “Oh,” he sighed, “I don’t know.” He rubbed the top of my head lightly with the tips of his fingers. I had thick, curly, dirty-blond hair like his. We both hated for people to touch our hair. I envied him because he was a grown-up and nobody chased him, brandishing a brush. Everyone said I looked like I had a rat’s nest on my head. Sometimes I minded when my father absently passed his fingers through my hair, but today I did not.