Our Father (31 page)

“You’re so forgiving,” Mary said ruefully. “I can’t forgive my mother, and all she did was die. You can’t help dying.”

Elizabeth looked at her pointedly.

“Well, maybe she could,” Mary said defensively, “but only because she was so unhappy that nothing else mattered. But I guess that’s why I can’t forgive her. Because she never cared about me at all anyway!”

“Excuse me, but are you saying that Elizabeth is a forgiving person?” Ronnie asked incredulously.

They all laughed, even Elizabeth.

“Well, maybe in that one instance,” Mary smiled.

“I’m not. I hate her,” Elizabeth said. “Oh I guess I love her too. That’s the bitching fact about parents and children. But I
had
to try to understand why she acted the way she did. Otherwise, I’d have to think it was me, my … awfulness. I mean,
nobody
loved me. Nobody. Not my mother, not my father, not my grandparents, my aunts or uncles … no one.”

“Poor, poor baby!” Alex breathed.

Elizabeth glared at her but her eyes were glittery.

Ronnie changed the subject. “So we’re all feeling thrust back into childhood, babyhood I guess. When you can’t control anything, including your emotions.”

Elizabeth wiped her eyes. “It is really strange, this visit. Don’t know why—all of you, Father, what’s happened in my own life. Decisions I made in my life which at the time I was sure were right but now look crazy to me. I feel as if the whole basis of my life, the floor of it, has cracked, and I’m falling through it, falling into a dark basement. …”

Mary leaned forward, face suddenly animated. “Oh, Lizzie, that’s how I feel too, only I feel as if I’m in a vertical tunnel, falling falling, it’s dark and nothing is familiar, not a signpost, not a single thing I can reach out and touch, recognize. Except Father, and Father looms so huge, it’s his face at the top, I know I agreed to help take care of him, but I don’t know if I can do it, I’m so afraid. …”

“Afraid of what?” Ronnie asked.

Mary’s fingers twisted each other cruelly. She shook her head back and forth, over and over.

“Last night,” she whispered, “I dreamt he was in bed, in a bed like the one he’s in in the hospital, but in his room here, upstairs. And I went in with tea on a tray, and I said, ‘Look, Father, I made this by myself,’ and he sat up and he said, ‘You can’t do that,’ and he got out of bed and he walked over to me and knocked the tray to the floor and pulled out a knife and he killed me. Killed me!” She laid her head in her hand. “They say you never really die in your dreams, but I did. I felt myself fall, I knew I was dying, I hit the floor. That’s when I woke up.”

“You’re not imagining your dream is prophetic,” Elizabeth asked, not unkindly.

“I suppose I am,” she sniveled.

“Mary!” Elizabeth spoke sharply. “The damage he’s suffered is largely irreversible! He
can’t
get up, he
can’t
walk or use his right hand! He never will again!”

Mary burst into loud sobbing. With one hand holding a handkerchief to her face, she reached out her other one toward Ronnie. “Ronnie! Ronnie!” she cried.

Ronnie went to her, crouched beside her. She touched Mary’s hand. “I’m here, Mary.”

Mary threw her arm around Ronnie’s neck. “You’ll protect me, say you will!”

“Mary,” Ronnie protested.

“You can do it! You can do it! You’re like a boy! And he never acted like a father to you, he wasn’t your father except by a shudder in the loin. You can do it. You’re free of the taint. You’re like the virgin in legend, the one who can tame the unicorn, who can bring harmony to society, you know, like in Shakespeare!”

Ronnie stroked Mary’s hand. “Free of what taint,” she asked coolly.

“Womanhood! You’re not really a woman, you’re a lesbian, you’re like a man. You can do what we can’t.”

Ronnie shook her head and stood up.

“That’s crazy, Mary,” Elizabeth said.

“Maybe it is! Maybe it is! But it’s what I feel!” She looked up at Ronnie, her face like a child’s, wet and swollen and pink, pleading. “Promise me you’ll protect me from him.”

Ronnie stroked Mary’s forehead. “I promise. For whatever it’s worth.”

Mary calmed. She blew her nose. She leaned her head back against the chair.

Elizabeth was in deep frown, staring at the floor.

“No one is talking to me,” Alex said in a near-whine. “No one is asking me, helping me!”

“What do you want us to do?” Elizabeth asked in irritation. “Call up your mother and scold her? What can we do for you?”

“We all carry around our own pain, Alex,” Mary said self-righteously.

“None of you seem to understand,” Alex said wildly. “I don’t understand myself!” She stood up. “I feel as if I’m going crazy! Really! I have blackouts! Sometimes I faint! I fainted yesterday, fell down on the floor!” She plopped back into the chair. “I don’t remember anything from my young life! It’s all a blank! A void! I need help!” She put her head in her hands.

“What a crew,” muttered Ronnie. “And
we’re
going to take care of a sick man?”

13

W
ITH THE NURSES’ HELP,
the sisters had made a list of what they would need, went home and drew up a rota. For two days, each did a share of the telephoning to arrange to rent a hospital bed and supplies, hire a registered nurse, a practical nurse, and a live-in maid to help Mrs. Browning and Teresa with the extra work. They called a local shop and ordered a television set, a swivel-top table, and a VCR. They called Boston to order a small computer that would allow Stephen to type messages onto the television screen—but that would take a week to arrive. They discussed his diet with Mrs. Browning, held a meeting with the staff to discuss new schedules and duties. Apart from their frequent conferences about these matters, they had almost no conversation with each other. When their chores were done, each retreated to her private space—Elizabeth to the library, Ronnie to her room, Mary to exercise in the playroom (which she had made her own, no longer reading in the sitting or drawing room), and Alex for a walk outdoors.

At night, they gathered for drinks as usual, but on Wednesday for the first time, they used the playroom, a large room in the rear of the house, with sliding glass doors opening onto a terrace and the back garden. It was isolated so that sound would not carry to the formal front rooms, the dining, sitting, and drawing rooms. Unlike the upstairs nursery, it had been created for children past infancy, and had a big stone fireplace, comfortable plump chintz-covered sofas and chairs, a big television set, stereo equipment, and a Ping Pong table pushed against the wall. Its overcrowdedness added to its easy, comfortable air. The sisters sat in front of the television set watching the evening news, sipping Perrier, cola, wine, and vermouth cassis, watching reports on another spurious effort to end the war in El Salvador, another sharp drop in the stock market, Chilean police rounding up citizens in cities across the country.

Funny how long silences always feel angry, whatever their cause, Ronnie thought. How we are now, each one of us burrowing inwards. Except Alex, who’s usually the nice one. Now she’s jangly, exploding with frustration. She screamed “Shit!” when she dropped her handbag as we waited for the car. Tears in her eyes as she bent to pick up her scattered possessions. I helped her, but she barely thanked me.

Dinner was almost as silent. Mary’s suggestion that Father’s bed be moved against the north wall so he could face the windows was discussed at length but without passion, as was Elizabeth’s worry that the new intercom system was not working properly. They moved from dinner back to the playroom and immediately turned on the television again, sat there through something, watched the eleven o’clock news, and each went off to bed murmuring unfelt good-nights.

The morning of his move, Stephen maintained a stubborn grim silence, looking like a man about to be led to the death chamber. Nurse Thompson, taking his pulse and blood pressure, reproached him gently: “I don’t think you realize how fortunate you are, Mr. Upton. I know it’s upsetting to be in your condition, but believe me, few people are as lucky as you. I tell you, I see it every day: people ship their parents off to these rest homes without a second thought. And here your wonderful daughters want to take care of you themselves. You’re a very lucky man!”

He was the color of parchment as they moved him. Mary watched the stretcher-bearers slide him into the ambulance, returning him to life, real life, not like the hospital, which was just a transit station, but to his house, his home, his own bedroom, in this shape. Forever in this shape. Forever helpless. Unbearable, it must be, she thought.

Alex saw the tears in her eyes. She laid her hand on Mary’s arm.

It took a host of helpers and observers to transfer Stephen to his house, to the tender care of his loving daughters. Poor girls, Dr. Stamp thought, they don’t know what they’re in for. He must be a remarkable man, to have daughters who love him so much. Of course, there may be a lot of money involved. That may be it. He’s probably kept them on tenterhooks about their inheritances. That’s it, has to be it. Dr. Stamp shook their hands and went back to work. He knew he would hear from them again. This could not last long.

Each segment of the team had its own ideas of proper procedure, so stretcher-bearers argued with nurses, and again with the nurse waiting at the house, who argued with Mrs. Browning and the practical nurse, all on hand to oversee the important event. The daughters stood guard in the hospital corridor, in the courtyard, and again in front of the mansion, saying nothing, although Mary started forward at one moment when she thought the stretcher was tilted too far to one side. But he was delivered safely back to his house, to his old bedroom in the front of the house on the second floor, a room called his for nearly sixty of his eighty-two years, which opened onto a small sitting room shared with a bedroom that had been home to three different wives. Now and forever more empty.

He didn’t care.

He doesn’t care, Mary thought. Sex is nothing to him now. “A shudder in the loins engenders there / The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead.” Is that all I am to him, a shudder in the loins? Is that all fatherhood is? All it was to my kids’ fathers. Harry didn’t want more kids, another family. Alberto didn’t want any at all: he never even laid eyes on Marie-Laure. She saw him at a party last year for the first time: so dissipated-looking she was shocked.
That
was her father? Dancing with some B-movie queen. Wanted to go up and introduce herself and didn’t have the nerve. Poor kid, what must that feel like, your own father doesn’t even have the interest to lay eyes on you. Like Alex. Maybe we should just write off fathers. Still, I can’t blame Alberto for the way she is. I did that myself, harping, carping: posture, grammar, manners, makeup, you
must
be right, you’re a girl! Hates me for it. Always critical, she says. Tries to avoid me.

Mary stood watching, silent, beside the door, trying to keep out of the way of the many functionaries restoring Stephen Upton to his family home. Father, she thought, trying to connect the word with the helpless gray broken man in the bed.

Looks like an alien unsure if he can breathe in this air. Old, he is old and frightened, his life no longer in his control, try to remember that, Elizabeth, try to speak to him gently.

Did he ever speak to me gently?

So what are you going to do, beat him up? He never beat you up.

He did worse.

Elizabeth. Try to be a decent human being. Try to be like Alex.

But she could not control her drive for efficiency, and kept interfering with the professionals arranging the man, the oxygen tank that would be kept near him in case of need, the nurse making the bed, arranging the furniture. The nurse’s patient long-suffering looks drove Elizabeth back and she went to stand beside Mary. Both of them stood with their hands clasped behind them. Elizabeth jumped suddenly, as something alien, something soft and clammy wormed into her hand. It was Mary’s finger. She clasped it. They clasped hands behind their backs like children.

Alex felt a ferocious thrust of rage. She could hardly bear to look at him. A hate she did not name, failed to recognize, never having felt such an emotion before, inflamed her stomach, her esophagus, her throat. Hideous horrible old man, a father who never was one, who abandoned me, who never even sent me a birthday card. What did I ever do to him, how could I have done anything terrible to him, I was only nine years old.

I have a right to feel this way. My father abandoned me, and the truth is, Mother is abandoning me too, always abandoned me, you can abandon someone without leaving. What else is she doing when she refuses to tell me why she left, why she took me away, why she deprived me of my sisters and my daddy? And now he can’t speak. This is unbearable. HE CAN’T SPEAK!

Ronnie tried to help. Because she blended in with the variegated skin hues of the working staff, they took her for one of them, and appreciated her efforts. Her Indian face remained impassive. She did not speak.

Sick old man, helpless now. Left to our tender mercies. We’ll probably tear him limb from limb.

Do I really want to do that? Do I care about him at all?

A crab clawed her intestines in answer, doubling her over for a moment.

Throughout the process, Stephen glared. He glared at the workers, and once the workers had left, glared throughout Alex’s recital of the various comforts they had arranged for him (for the sisters had agreed that Alex communicated with him best). See, a remote control button on the table near his hand, to press if he needed someone; a television set directly opposite him, with a remote control; a bed tray and bedside table with everything he could possibly want set upon it. And if not, just press the button. A little computer was coming later in the week, he’d have to learn to use it, but he would and he could type instructions on it. He showed his teeth at that. Well, okay, if you don’t like that idea, here is the plastic tablet with its stick, to write on. “Now,” she said, sitting on the armchair pulled permanently up beside his bed, “tell us what you like to eat.”