A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (16 page)

“But this hair fall out,” Candida said reassuringly. “With blue eyes maybe later she be blond like you, Madame. I raised from infants my brother and sister.” She laughed lightly. “I was not much more than an infant myself.”

She put me back in the crib and then her face tragically collapsed.

“Ay, what nice peoples you are. And I am so unhappy with those French. I still owe them much money for the trip from Portugal.”

“How much do you still owe them?” my mother asked.

Candida shrugged. “Maybe a hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred francs.”

My father took out his wallet and started counting out bills.

“Here’s three hundred francs.”

“No, no, I couldn’t.”

“You take it,” my mother said. “Tell them you are coming here tomorrow. If there is a problem, my husband will talk to them.”

The next afternoon Candida arrived with a suitcase, a wicker basket, and a face flushed pink with pleasure. She gave my father back a hundred and seventy-five francs, explaining that they’d only asked for a hundred and twenty-five.

“Cheap French bastards,” my father said, shocked that they would actually hold a penniless person accountable for such a measly sum. He was so thrilled by her honesty that he told her to keep the money. He pushed the bills toward her with a flat, downward motion of his hand.

“I’ll send it to my mother in Porto,” she said, clasping the bills to her chest.

Candida’s room was right next to the nursery. It was an all-purpose room with a blue linoleum floor, a sink, and a small plastic rectangle of a shower. There was a single bed against one wall and a colorful rug below it. She asked if she could take a few francs out of the house budget for plants, and my parents immediately agreed. They told her to take as much money as she needed to fix the room up the way she wanted it. This confused her slightly, as it was a big room and Candida had simple tastes.

On the wall above her bed she hung a few religious watercolors in ornate, gold frames. One, in soft, earthy colors, depicted Christ giving the Sermon on the Mount, another was of the Crucifixion and in it Christ’s eyes moved, following you around the room with the changing light, and the last was of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes kneeling before the apparition of the Immaculate Conception. This one was all rosy and the sun streaked through a cloudy sky in brilliant white lines. These had hung in her bedroom all her life; she had brought them with her from Portugal.

With her first paycheck she bought a little porcelain statue of the Virgin Mary with robes painted blue, her arms outstretched in an embrace to the world, and placed her on the windowsill at the head of the bed. These objects made her feel protected and safe. And I, her new charge, was suddenly so entirely in her care that Candida felt God had reversed his orders regarding her life, and had chosen to bestow on her a providential gift.

When I was two, we went to Haiti for the winter; my father was gathering research for a book. Our house was on the beach; the sea practically came up to our front porch. Candida could not swim, but pushed me around in a rubber life preserver in front of the house, in water that came up to her chest. My father could watch us from the window of the study where he wrote. One morning he heard a horrendous scream and looking up, saw splashing and arms flailing the water. He knocked his chair over running for the door. He saw that Candida was fighting something in the water, and trying to hoist me onto her shoulder at the same time. I was emitting a gurgling sound so filled with terror and pain that it made my father’s blood freeze. Then he saw the bluish bladderlike sac of the floating Portuguese man o’ war, and its oozing tentacles wrapped around Candida’s body and the lower part of my legs. Even in her panic, her eyes white with fear and shock, Candida refused to let go of me. My father threw himself into the water and pulled us out.

Candida was much more badly stung than I, so badly that she contracted a high fever and was bedridden for days.

“What kind of a thing was that thing? A thing from the Devil it was,” she said to my father.

“A Portuguese man o’ war,” he said. “A jellyfish.”

“How could a Portuguese thing do that to another Portuguese?” Candida said, her dark eyes spilling tears.

This nearly disastrous event shook my father so completely that he told the story for years. “She would have drowned, I swear to you, before she’d have let you go. I never saw a person show more devotion to a child that wasn’t her own.”

Candida and I spoke our own form of childish French, with English and Portuguese mixed in. So many Portuguese words had invaded my vocabulary that even my parents had started to use them.
Passarinho
—a birdie—“When you sit, don’t spread your legs like that, Channe,” my parents would say. “People can see your
pass.”

By three, I’d developed insomnia. But my neurosis was limited to Saturday and Sunday nights. Saturday’s insomnia was in preparation for Sunday’s—the only night of the week I was separated from Candida.

I waited until my parents had gone out before I cried in my bed on Saturdays. Candida tried to avoid running to me because my father had told her not to. But from her room next door, she could hear my whimpering and sobbing as it grew progressively louder. When she could no longer bear it, she came running to me. She’d appear in the doorway in a white nightgown, translucent with the light behind her.

Candida’s arrival would throw me into an even more violent fit of emotion. I’d stop breathing, or begin to choke on my tears—and Candida would sit on the bed and take me in her arms.

When I’d calmed down a little, I’d ask, “Where do you go tomorrow? Who do you love more than me?” in a hard voice heavy with resentment and jealousy.

Candida would shrug unhappily and explain that it was not her choice: My parents
made
her leave on Sundays. It occurred to me several years later that this was not entirely so—Candida liked her day off as much as anyone.

“Take me with you to Maria’s,” I’d say.

“Your papa and mama wants to be with you on Sundays.”

“Then why do they always have a party on Sunday night?”

She’d shrug, making a tight-lipped pious face, as though to say she disagreed with their parenting but did not have a say in my upbringing.

My parents had a poker game on Sunday nights. It had started one Sunday because they’d had to babysit me, and bled into the next, and the next. It had become a tradition in our house. Any American in Paris who wanted a good plate of spaghetti bolognese (it was the only dish my mother could make but she made it well) and a good poker game came to our house on Sunday night. Sometimes we’d find them still there on Monday morning, stooped around the green felt table, pungent glasses and ashtrays at their elbows and clouds of smoke around their heads.

“I don’t know why,” Candida would tell me. “They don’t care about you like I do, I suppose. I been feeding you and changing you and staying with you late at night since the night the President Kennedy was elected and you mama drank too much champagne.”

“One day you’re going to get married and leave me.”

“Never.”

“If you ever get married, will you live with us with your husband and children?”

She’d laugh, throwing back her head, her face crimson.

“Stay here with me to sleep,” I’d beg, wrapping my arms like a vise around her neck.

“I can’t.” She’d try to pull me off. “You papa say no. You know how he get mad.” I’d beg and whine until she finally conceded, and promised to spend the night with me.

With the good intention of waiting for me to fall asleep, Candida would stretch out beside me and pretend to go to sleep. I also waited, knowing that if I fell asleep first, Candida would leave. It was a battle of wills that I sometimes won and sometimes lost.

If Candida managed to leave the room and I awoke, the crying and wailing started again. And then when she’d come running to me, I’d attack her for betraying me:

“You lied to me! You lied! You left!”

But once in a while, Candida nodded off first. In my victory, I instantly found sleep, imagining I was floating above the city, enveloped in a cloud.

Sundays were wonderful days. My parents took me to the park or to the movies. Sometimes we went to the Zoo de Vincennes with Lyddie Lowenstein, a collagist who was divorced and had no children. She was always stopping on the walkways and picking up bits of discarded paper—a candy wrapper, a cigarette butt that struck her the right way, or a peanut shell with a peculiar shape.

“You always find the most interesting things at the zoo,” Lyddie would say.

There was an American Buffalo at the Zoo de Vincennes, and Lyddie liked to lean over the cement ledge and yell at it, “Yankee go home!” which made my parents roar with laughter. The French people threw nasty glances in our direction.

“We’ll make an American out of you yet,” Lyddie would tell me.