Our Father (12 page)

“He had to make his way with only a few measly millions?” Ronnie jeered.

“Less than that,” Elizabeth said coldly. “You may scoff, but it takes effort and talent to build a fortune, even when you start with a million dollars.”

“Of course! Even when most people were earning twenty dollars a week or less.”

Elizabeth threw her a look of disgust.

“My mother decorated this house when she married Father,” Mary said dreamily. “It hasn’t been redone since her time.” Over forty years: looks it.

“Well, she did a beautiful job!” Alex cried. “So tell me: what has everyone decided to do! Is everyone going to stay?”

Elizabeth lighted a cigarette. “Well, if I’m going to be conservator, I guess I’ll have to. I made some phone calls yesterday. I can probably get leave, although it’s a bad time: we are involved in major negotiations with Chile, there’s a chance of new constraints on trade with South Africa,” she said self-importantly. “But I’ve already drawn up the guidelines and I’ve overseen most of the background work. My staff can draft the reports and express mail them to me for approval. I can work with them over the phone.”

They were silent, comparing Elizabeth’s life with their own.

Tuesday night Women’s Club, Wednesday the shelter, Thursday the hospital. David plays golf every weekend, the kids gone most afternoons and weekends: I am a useless person, thought Alex.

Nothing but boredom and unpaid bills waiting for me, thought Mary. How long will it be before the girls realize how long it’s been since I picked up the lunch check? How long will my old clothes see me through? I’ll end like some nineteenth-century spinster, replacing the collar and cuffs of the old black dress worn shiny.

I have important work to do too, Ronnie thought fiercely. I just have to get going on it. But if I leave here, I’ll have to get a job to live. Then how will I finish the dissertation? If I stay, I live free. Is that corruption?

“So,” Elizabeth continued, “I’ve decided to work on my book while I’m confined here. I thought I’d take the Alfa and drive down to Washington tomorrow and vote while I’m there. You know Tuesday’s Election Day—maybe you all want to fly home and,” she grinned, “make sure the right man wins. I’ll get my computer and files and bring them back.”

“Oh! Election Day!” Alex murmured.

I can vote in Massachusetts, you snotty cow, Ronnie thought. And will, to cancel out yours.

“Election Day,” Mary repeated vaguely. “But surely there’s no question but that Reagan will win, is there?”

“None,” Elizabeth announced.

Mary said lazily, “I think Alex is right about—it’s probably good for Father for us to visit every day. So I’ll stay for a while. Even though it’s a real bore here.”

Alex clapped her hands like a child. “Oh, I’m so glad! So happy! I really want to get to know you,” she said. “My mom’s retired, she’s taking care of the kids and David while I’m here. And I just called them, and they’re all fine and she says she’s happy to stay on, it gives her something to do. And David … well, David believes family always comes first, he wants me to do everything I can to help Father. And the kids … well, I think they barely notice I’m gone. Such an indispensable mother I am!” she mocked herself. “So I can stay!” she crowed. “And you too, I hope,” she said to Ronnie, who was staring at the fire.

Mary’s face stiffened. “I’m sorry but I have to say that as far as I’m concerned, Ronnie definitely has no right to be here. Neither Elizabeth nor I has invited her and I don’t think you have the right to invite her.”

Alex frowned questioningly. “Why?”

“You left Father when you were ten and never saw him again!”

“He’s still my father,” Alex argued quietly, “
and
Ronnie’s. What do you say, Elizabeth?”

Mary screamed, “Don’t ask
her
!
I’m
saying she can’t stay!
I’m
saying it,
me
! I’m saying I don’t want her here! She’s the bastard child of a colored servant! As far as we’re concerned she has no relation to him—or us! And you he repudiated! He never invited you to the family parties! Only Elizabeth and me! He threw your mother out! A little nobody, a secretary, a nothing!”

“So was my mother,” Elizabeth inserted coldly.

Mary whirled on her. “And look how he treated you!”

“Are you saying you are the only legitimate daughter?” Elizabeth laughed.

Mary sealed her lips and sat back.

Ronnie watched them, fascinated. And herself: how come I’m not storming out of the room? she wondered.

“Well, all right, Alex can stay but Ronnie can’t!” Mary burst out finally.

Without rancor, Elizabeth said, “Because her mother lacked a marriage license? He lived with Noradia longer than any of our mothers.”

Ronnie gaped at her.

“She was a servant! Not even white!”

“My children are Jewish—I converted when I married David. And two of yours had an Italian father,” Alex said firmly. “And Noradia probably gave him more comfort than any of our mothers.”

“Alberto was an aristocrat!”

“Oh, please,” Elizabeth cut in, “save us your snobbery. You were always such a snob. The only thing you learned at Peabrain Academy.”

“Miss Peabody’s was the finest girls’ school in Virginia!” Mary protested. “You talk about snobbery, there’s no bigger snob than you! Always boasting about Concord Academy, Smith College, that fancy London Economics College!”

“London School of Economics!” Elizabeth blasted.

Mary charged on. “Who’s the snob around here! Of course with a background like yours, you insist social distinctions are snobbish! Your mother’s family was nothing but shanty Irish from Chelsea.”

“Somerville,” Elizabeth said.

“She was a little tramp who trapped him into marriage.”

Elizabeth turned white. “My mother was no tramp, but your mother was a lush who committed suicide in a drunken car crash hushed up by family money!”

“She was not! It was the other driver’s fault! Father told me!”

“What other driver, you idiot! She drove into a tree! Spoiled brat princess pissed off at Father because he was working day and night in the War Effort. He had it hushed up, but it was suicide! How would you know anything about it, you were only seven! But I was twelve, I heard the servants, the aunts and uncles talking. Everyone knew but you!”

“You bitch! You bitch!” Mary sobbed.

“She was a drunk! Don’t tell me you don’t remember her drinking. If I saw it, just spending summers with her, even a stupid cow like you must have seen it living with her! She was falling-down drunk half the day and she stank of booze all the time!”

Mary wiped away tears, glaring at Elizabeth. “My mother was a lady, she was sweet, gentle, everyone loved her. Yours—even you call her a world-class bitch! A cheap tramp! You call me names! Father even
caught
her with another man, there were photographs! Aunt Pru told me!”

Elizabeth spoke slowly, coldly. “You stupid fucking cunt, you silly cow bitch, you asshole. That was a setup. Don’t you know Father yet?” She stood up and walked to the bar set up on the sideboard. Leaning against the wall, she poured Perrier into her glass. She stood there looking down at it.

Mary was sniffling. The others watched white-faced.

“My mother never looked at another man,” Elizabeth said after a time. “Even after the divorce. Said once was enough. I think she hated men after Father. When Father lived with us we were living in a brown-stone on Beacon Street. I don’t think he was there very much. I don’t remember him but I was very little. I don’t know where he spent his time. Mother said he was either fucking some secretary or sucking up to some man who could advance his career. ‘Fuck or suck, everything he does rhymes with luck,’ she said. The setup—I was only two and a half when it happened. But I remember it. One night, I was asleep in my crib but I heard terrible noises, pounding, shouting, Mother screaming. I was big enough to climb out of the crib and I ran out of my room, there was a man in the upstairs hall holding a camera with a flashbulb that kept going off. It was blinding, I was terrified, I didn’t understand what was happening. Mother was screaming, her nightgown half off, her breast flopping out, she was pounding another man on the chest, yelling at him, screaming.

“The flashbulb kept flaring, while the other man posed with his arms around Mother. He was naked. Mother got away, she ran for the phone and the naked man grabbed her, knocked her down, she screamed. The man with the camera held her down while the other one threw clothes on, then they left, ran down the stairs and out the front door. Mother was crying, muttering, she kept saying ‘That bastard, that bastard.’

“Her arms and back were black-and-blue for weeks afterwards. The house hadn’t been broken into, they had a key. Father didn’t come home that night. He never came home again. I didn’t understand what had happened until years later. He had set her up, he hired the guys. Mother said, ‘He always wins.’”

The room was silent.

Mary chewed her lower lip. “Well, she shouldn’t have forced him to marry her,” she said finally.

Elizabeth whirled. “For Christ’s sake, Mary, even a world-class bitch was an innocent girl once. She was only twenty, she was a good Catholic girl, she didn’t believe in abortion, she loved him, she thought he loved her. She would not be bought off by the family. By her standards, she was behaving honorably. They offered her fifty thousand dollars! They offered to send her to Switzerland! But she thought the family hated her because she was Catholic, but that Father loved her and that’s what mattered. That’s the story he gave her—said he couldn’t buck his family or they’d cut him off.”

“She threatened him! Pru told me!”

“I didn’t say she was a saint. She threatened to sue him for breach of promise. And he did get her to bed by promising to marry her. That was true. She thought she was pressuring the family, not Father. She convinced herself he wanted what she wanted.”

Mary argued, “But the threat means she recognized that he didn’t love her. And she still insisted on marriage. She was some nervy bitch, going up against a family as powerful as Father’s. That doesn’t sound like an innocent girl to me.”

Elizabeth walked slowly back to her chair, sat, threw her head back. “She was very religious,” she said wearily. “The conviction of righteousness can give an innocent girl courage. He should have known better than to dally with someone so religious but I think her piety was a challenge to him, goaded him. That’s the way he is after all,” she said bitterly. “He always wants what’s forbidden.”

Mary was silent.

“Is she still religious?” Alex asked.

“No. She says if God could let what happened to her happen, he isn’t worth worshiping.”

“So what happened?”

Elizabeth shrugged. “The family arranged an annulment. He didn’t want a divorce, he wanted a career in public service and in those days—1934—divorce wrecked people. The family paid people off, the church, the courts, to get it on some spurious grounds, they didn’t have real grounds for annulment. They had a baby for godsake. It broke her heart, she didn’t believe in divorce and for her it was divorce, no matter what it was called. But she had no choice, felt she didn’t, anyway. She crumpled because of the pictures—he had these pictures proving she had committed adultery. He threatened divorce cutting her off with nothing. She didn’t realize until afterwards that he didn’t want a divorce any more than she did.

“If she’d accept an annulment, he promised her a decent allowance for the rest of her life and a bequest in his will if he died first.” Which he may. “So she gave him the annulment to get the allowance, so she could support me the only way she could. Decently. She couldn’t have earned enough to keep us both in any comfort.” So childbirth does make cowards of us all—women anyway. Hostages to fortune. “She knew when she was beaten.”

Ronnie got up and put more logs on the fire. They watched, listened to the crackle.

“You spent every summer in this house,” Alex said wonderingly. “What did that feel like, living with him knowing that? Was it awful for you?”

“I didn’t know the details until later … until I was grown.”

“At least he wanted you here,” Alex said longingly.

“He didn’t. Mother insisted he have custody of me summers. She wanted me to have …” Her voice clouded.

“She wanted you to get his money!” Mary brayed.

Elizabeth looked at her wearily. “Yes. Get something from him, contacts, entrée to his world, education at least. And she was a bitch, is a bitch, she’s impossible, a hateful woman. … But part of it, I can hear it between the lines when she talks … she wanted me to have a father, a male parent, some kind of … Her own family disinherited her—metaphorically—they had no money—when she turned up pregnant without a wedding ring. Her father called her a whore, me a bastard, because she didn’t marry a Catholic. He hated me for being Stephen’s child, he saw him in me.”

“The eyes,” Alex murmured.

Elizabeth shrugged. “Whatever.”

“Oh, it’s more than the eyes. Look at the chin. And the carriage. Elizabeth is the most like Father,” Mary said.

The women appraised each other. “Except Ronnie,” Alex said.

They studied Ronnie.

“She’s so short,” said Elizabeth.

“She’s
brown
!” Mary cried, outraged.

“She has his eyes, his chin, his mouth,” Alex argued.

“So do you. Have his eyes,” Mary said to Alex.

“Do you know I never knew that until I visited here eighteen years ago,” Alex exclaimed. “I didn’t remember what he looked like and Mom didn’t have any pictures of him, not even a wedding picture.” She paused. “I could never understand that.”

“There were plenty of pictures in the papers when he married her,” said Elizabeth. “You could have checked a newspaper morgue.”

“I guess.” Alex leaned forward, her voice fervent. “What do you think happened with my mother? Do you remember what she was like then?”

“I only read about their wedding in the papers. Heaven forfend that Father would tell me what he was doing,” Elizabeth said sarcastically. “I was at school, the new term had just started at Concord so it must have been fall, I must have been …”—she calculated—“fifteen. Nineteen forty-six, I guess, soon after the war ended.”