Our Father (32 page)

He looked, for the first time, directly at Ronnie. Nodded his head toward her.

“‘She knows,’ he’s trying to say,” Elizabeth translated.

They all looked at Ronnie. She shrugged. “I wasn’t paying attention,” she told them. She looked at him. “I don’t know. I’m not my mother,” she said coldly.

“You know what you’ve been eating for the last months, Ronnie,” Mary said with irritation.

“I can’t remember. Anglo food all tastes the same to me.”

Alex pulled a side chair up beside the armchair, patted it. “Now Ronnie, you sit here, and I’ll sit here, and we’ll ask Father what he likes to eat.”

Ronnie stood where she was. “He likes Anglo food. Roast beef, baked potatoes, steak, pot roast, leg of lamb well done, lobster salad, omelets. Mrs. Browning knows, not me. Doesn’t he have a diet? Didn’t the doctor give you a menu?”

“Yes. I think so.” Elizabeth darted across the room to where her bag was, searched it violently.

Alex leaned toward Stephen. “Okay. Now, Father, suppose I start naming things and you write on the tablet—here, let me lay it on the tray for you—you write—let’s see—you write a number when I say the thing, you know, one to five, according to how much you like it. You know? If you like a thing very much, you make a one, and if you don’t like it at all, you make a five. We won’t give you any fives. Okay? That shouldn’t be too hard.”

Stephen glared at her. He picked up the stick with his left hand and scrawled on the tablet: LAWYER. He pulled up the plastic and scrawled again: WILL.

“I knew it, I knew it,” Elizabeth muttered to Mary.

“If you knew it, why did you let it happen!” Mary’s hair, usually flawlessly composed, was in tangles; curls popped up all over her head. Her face was damp with perspiration and she was breathing heavily as if she had been running.

“It’s my fault,” Alex said, near tears. “I was treating him like a child. But I didn’t know what else to do, how else to do it!”

“It’s not your fault. It’s no one’s fault,” Elizabeth said anxiously. “Not even mine!” she said, whirling on Mary. “There’s no way to be right with him, no way to be kind. …”

“What do we do now?” Mary wailed.

“Call the goddamned lawyer, why not?” Ronnie shrugged. “Jesus, you’re being a bunch of fucking saints, why do you feel so guilty?”

“Suppose he disinherits us!” Mary cried. “Suppose he’s so angry at us for taking care of him that he cuts us all out!”

“Don’t you think this lawyer—is his name Hollis?—don’t you think he’d see that as insanity? Because it is.”

Mary reached out behind her for the arms of the easy chair and let herself down into it slowly. “It is?” she asked shakily.

“Well, of course it is, Mary!” Alex said heartily, reassuringly. “I mean, we’re doing a good thing, a kind thing!”

“We are?”

Elizabeth smiled her grim smile and sat down beside Mary. She patted Mary’s hand. “Mary always goes by the emotions. And she knows we have subversive intentions. That we’re not being kind.”

Ronnie was sitting at the glass sun room table gazing out at the dry-gray sunlit field behind the house. “What a champion game player he is,” she said. “He knew just how to reverse the power arrangement. How to bring you all to your knees.” She hooted a laugh.

Elizabeth stared at her. She lighted a cigarette. “Of course, Ronnie’s absolutely right, that’s what he’s doing. Trying to intimidate us. And succeeding. I’m going to call Hollis. And then we’re all going up there and tell him we’ve done it.” She stood up and left the room.

Mary still sat trembling, sweating and pale. Ronnie gazed at her, went and sat beside her. She put her hand on Mary’s arm.

“Listen, Mare—can you hear this? You can live without a lot of money. You can learn how. Sell what you can, and invest what you get and live on the interest. You can do it, I can show you how.”

“You don’t understand!” Mary cried. “If I don’t live the way I’ve always lived, I’d lose all my friends!
Who would I be?
”

Ronnie’s body jerked against the chair back.

Elizabeth returned. “Okay,” she said briskly, “let’s go.”

Alex stood up, at attention. Ronnie looked up, unwound her legs, stood up. She looked at Mary. “Come on, Mare.”

Mary appealed to Elizabeth with eyes like a child about to be fed cod-liver oil. “Do I have to go?”

“Yes. All of us have to go. Up!” Elizabeth ordered.

Ronnie reached out her hand, Mary took it and stood. “I won’t be any use. I’m too … destroyed.”

Elizabeth grabbed her arm, put her hand around it hard.

“Ouch!” Mary whimpered.

“Now listen,” Elizabeth whispered. “You are going to behave like a person! He’s trying to intimidate us, and we’re going to tell him he can’t.
Show
him he can’t. Understand?”

“But he can!” Mary cried. “He can hurt me! He always could and he still can! Don’t you see?”

Elizabeth stood stock-still. She turned to face Mary, who was inches shorter, and moved back a little so she didn’t have to look down. “Mary, the only power he has now is money. And I promise you: if he cuts us out of his will, I will buy a house in Virginia. In a good neighborhood. I can afford it. You’ll come and live with me. There are society people in those towns, I have a high-level, visible government job, a high-status job. You have old friends there. You will be accepted.”

Mary’s eyelashes dampened. She bit her lip. She looked up at Elizabeth like a naughty child. “Suppose you lose your job. Suppose the Democrats win in ’eighty-eight. What will you do then?”

Elizabeth smiled. She really isn’t a dope. “I’ll be fine. I’ve been saving money all these years, I’ve never spent all of my salary. I’ll get a university appointment, or go to work for a think tank or an investment firm, and make a fortune. I’ll be fine and so will you. If you add what you have to what I have, we’ll live like queens. We don’t need him, Mary. Try to believe me!”

Mary threw her arms around Elizabeth and buried her head in Elizabeth’s bosom. Elizabeth stiffened, looked uncomfortable. She put her hand on Mary’s back, patted it automatically. “Okay? Ready?”

Mary stood up, wiped her eyes. “Ready.”

And upstairs they marched.

The television set in Stephen’s room was tuned to a news program on CNN. Stephen’s eyes were at half-mast. The practical nurse, Florence, an almond-colored woman with oriental eyes and a northern British accent, looked up from her knitting and smiled as they entered. “He’s been just fine,” she said reassuringly, putting down her needles. “Watching the telly.”

“Thank you, Florence. Perhaps you’d like some tea? Mrs. Browning is in the kitchen, I’m sure she’d be glad to fix it for you. Will you excuse us? We need to talk to our father.”

“Of course!” the woman said heartily, put her work down and stood. “I’ll be glad of a stretch,” she said, arching her back and stretching her arms out behind her substantial body. She smiled apologetically, darting around them to leave the room.

Elizabeth switched off the television set. Only then did Stephen acknowledge them, looking up sharply, angrily.

“Hello Father, how do you feel?” Elizabeth began, walking to the bedside. The others followed her, stood there like sentinels.

He glared at them.

“I called Hollis. He couldn’t come this afternoon and he’s going sailing this weekend, but he’ll drive out to see you Monday around eleven. He knows you want to discuss your will. He wondered if you want him to bring a secretary with him?”

Stephen shook his head heavily. No.

“I’ll inform him. Now, about your meals. Mrs. Browning says she knows what you like, and she has the diet the hospital suggested. She’ll draw up your menus and we’ll stay out of it. If you want any changes, just let us know.

“We’ll leave you alone now, but we’ll come up and visit with you after dinner. Is there anything you want? Anything we can do?”

He shook his head, and hit the power button on his remote control, turning the television set back on.

When they reached the downstairs foyer, Mary whispered, “Why did we all have to be there for
that
?”

Elizabeth shook her head, put her finger on her lips. She led them through the sitting room to the library and closed the door. Even there, she spoke softly, just above a whisper.

“I want him to know we’re united on everything. That he can’t divide and conquer. That we’re strong. Okay?”

They all nodded.

“I also want the nurse to see a picture of four concerned daughters tending their father with loving care. If he chooses to respond with anger or malignity—well, that’s his business. I don’t want them to see us in any way divided among ourselves and above all I don’t want them to see us as
plotting
against him.”

“Are we?” Alex asked.

Ronnie grinned, shook her head, patted Alex’s head, and wandered off to the French doors. She stood there looking out through the glass panes at the empty terrace and the graybrown garden and bare trees beyond.

“But why?”

“Alex! You want something from him, don’t you?” Mary cried. “With Father, you have to plot to get something. Anything!”

“All I want is some answers,” she protested. “I don’t care about the money. What’s wrong with that?”

“We all want some answers. That’s the last thing he’ll give us. He’d rather give us money.”

“I don’t understand,” she said plaintively. “I don’t like feeling like a conspirator.” She threw herself into a chair petulantly.

Ronnie turned and looked at her. “You want to feel innocent, like a good girl. But you want him to give you what you want. You’re quite insistent about that. But you can’t have both. Don’t you see that?”

“No!” Alex wailed. “I don’t! What’s bad about what I want?”

“It ain’t what Daddy wants, you dope!” Ronnie whirled away from her. “Sometimes I wonder how you can be so stupid.”

Elizabeth sat down behind the desk. Mary sat on the leather couch, bent over like an old woman.

“It’s not as if I’m asking for something terrible!” Alex said.

“You’re asking for something he doesn’t want to give. That means we have to force him to give it, somehow. Through pressure, through superior power,” Elizabeth explained, lighting a cigarette.

Alex considered. “Maybe … maybe …”—she stared at the floor—“it would be better if we all went away. So he could miss us. Then we could come back one at a time,” she said craftily

“Hah!” Elizabeth cried.

“You think he likes you,” Ronnie surmised. “You think he’d tell you if you were alone.”

“Well, maybe he would,” she whined.

“He’ll never trust us again,” Mary said from her corner of the couch. “None of us.”

“Why?” Indignant.

“Because we’re together. Don’t you see? He’d have been entirely different if we’d come in—well, first of all, without Ronnie. Her being there was major, I didn’t fully realize how major, although I sensed … And then, if we’d gone alone, or if we were squabbling with each other, if we weren’t so …
united
.”

“We weren’t, at first.”

“That’s true, we weren’t.”

“We were by the time he woke up,” Elizabeth said.

“Are you sorry, Mary?” Alex asked.

Mary thought. “No. No. With Father … I’ve always been terrified. Nervous. He always makes me feel like a beggar. I always was with him … And I am now too. … I need money desperately, I guess you all realize that by now. I’m in real trouble, financially. But”—she looked up at them, turning her head to face each in turn—“I feel I have something with you. Something that will last, something that makes me stronger, not weaker. Something that makes him … almost irrelevant.” She smiled weakly. “Not that I’m not still horribly scared. I don’t know what it is exactly, why he scares me so. It makes me feel … humiliated. None of you is frightened that way.” She turned to Ronnie.

“Ronnie, I’ve been thinking for quite a while—in all the business of arranging to bring Father home, I kept forgetting to bring it up. But I think you should move upstairs with us. Take one of the guest rooms—one of the big front rooms reserved for special guests, presidents and board chairmen. They each have a big desk, a settee, an easy chair. They have big closets, big bathrooms. You spend so much time in your room. You’d be more comfortable upstairs.”

Ronnie stared at her. Her voice, when she spoke, was hoarse. “Thanks, Mare, but I’ll stay where I am. I appreciate the offer—really—but there’s no way I can ever feel comfortable in any part of this house except my room or Momma’s—or the kitchen. I can sit in here or in the sitting room or the playroom—with you—but not by myself.” She shrugged. “Strict childhood training,” she smiled.

Mary smiled back. “Well. If you change your mind—just do it. Okay?”

Ronnie nodded.

“All right,” Elizabeth said, standing up as if she were ending a meeting. “Father has dinner early, at five, so Florence can leave by six. After she goes, during our cocktail hour, we’ll go up and start in on him.”

Alex sat forward, eyes bright. “Oh, thank you, Elizabeth. Thank you all!”

“Just don’t count on anything,” Elizabeth warned.

Ronnie lay on her bed, a book open beside her, supposedly working. She turned to stare out at the dimming light of the afternoon sky, laid her head back on the pillow she had propped against the old wooden headboard. Mary’s words, Mary’s face hung in her mood like a color, a taste, like something sweet, sweet and thick and healing like blood, knitting up a crack in her heart. Easing her stomach, releasing her fingers, her shoulders, from some locked position. She bit her lip: how much she had needed that acceptance, how much it meant when it came. Humiliating. To need that way. From them. From anyone.

I’m as bad as Mary: “
Who would I be?
” Like her, I need the people around me to tell me who I am. As if I can’t be anything without them. Maybe you can’t. Maybe everything I ever learned was lies. We’re told we make ourselves, identity is individual, forged in the mind, what other people think doesn’t matter, they can’t affect the rational Man, the free Man. Maybe that’s only true of men.

Because women know they’re women without somebody else telling them. But they don’t know
who
they are, we don’t know, do we. All of us bound together by that, the jostling and jangling against and with each other that create our identity. Me the vaunted self-made woman, tough girl, streetsmart schoolsmart, had it locked. Nobody could get to me. Just cut Tania off when she talked about stuff like that, cut her off for good when she wouldn’t stop, just packed my things. Look on her face like I’d stabbed her. Made me hate her. I’ve hated her for years. But she was a sweet kid. Just too needy. Clingy. She was. Sarah too, before she took off. Clinging one minute, gone the next. Shows you. And Susan, so jealous, so watchful. Lilah was like me: didn’t believe in that stuff. Don’t get too close. So we didn’t, and that didn’t work out too well either. Funny how devastated I was when we split up. With Sarah too. Still an ache.