A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (25 page)

“I don’t know—if they think we’re rich, they might treat her better.”

As we stood in the elevator, the doors opened and a man was wheeled in on a bed. There were tubes sticking out of his arms and snaking up under the sheet. Suddenly I thought of my father and my knees began to shake. When we stepped out on the fifth floor, my mother went straight to a row of plastic chairs and collapsed.

“I need a minute,” she said, wheezing, and opened her purse. She twisted the cap off a brand new airplane bottle and took a sip. “Christ,” she muttered. “I just realized, almost everyone I know is dead. Do I look as old as these people? I keep thinking, these could be my high-school classmates. I’d have gray hair too and no teeth if I let nature take its course…

“That poor man in the elevator—he looked like my first love, Rusty Schlondorff. I wanted to marry him.”

“Rusty Schlondorff?” I said, incredulous. “Rusty Schlondorff?”

“He ran numbers for Daddy and that meant he wasn’t good enough for me. If Daddy had known I lost my virginity to Rusty Schlondorff, well…he probably would’ve killed him.”

She upended the little bottle, then threw it into a garbage can. A young doctor in a white coat came marching down the hall. My mother stood up and introduced herself to him with a superior air. The doctor took her hand in both of his and smiled reassuringly. “She’s had a minor stroke,” he told us, “but she’s doing fine. She should be able to go home in a few days. She’d be better off, however, in a nursing home or an assisted-living situation. That big mansion is too much for her to handle now.”

A gray-haired, slight woman in a plain blue housedress and a pink cardigan, and brown lace-up shoes with white rubber soles, was sitting beside my grandmother’s bed. Grandma Bertie was asleep, her dentures in a plastic cup on the night table. Her upper and lower lips had collapsed into her mouth cavity, just below her nose. She was unrecognizable.

“Mary Margaret? Hello, Mary Margaret,” my mother said, approaching the woman.

“Why, Marcella.” The woman blinked up at us with pale, vague eyes, very much like my mother’s.

“This is my daughter, Channe.”

“Why, yes,” she said, and stood up.

“Mary Margaret is my first cousin. Grandma Bertie’s niece. Uncle Bud’s daughter.”

Uncle Bud, the garden ghoul. I’d never known he had a daughter.

“I saw you once when you were just a little girl,” said Mary Margaret. I nodded, forcing a smile.

“Where’s Janie?” my mother asked her cousin.

“Why, she’s at her school. You know. Janie usually comes home for the weekend, but I called and told her to stay there till Bertie feels better.”

My grandmother stirred, turned her head toward us, and blinked several times.

“Hello, Mother.”

Grandma Bertie’s hand reached up and searched blindly for my mother’s. My mother grasped Bertie’s hand, and Bertie brought their intertwined fingers to her chest. Under the white and blue hospital sheet, the outline of her body rolled downward like a rock slide, chin to breasts, breasts to stomach, stomach to hips, hips to thighs, where everything began to taper back in again. She smelled vaguely of urine and medicinal hospital soap. Her upper lip poked tentatively out of the hole of her mouth like a sea anemone, and quivered as though she were struggling to say something, but then her face twisted up and tears began to stream from her eyes.

“I…I’m sorry,” Bertie said in a high, warbling voice.

“She’s embarrassed,” my mother said. “It’s all right, Mother, don’t be embarrassed. It’s all right. I’m here now. Do you want your teeth, Mother?”

Bertie nodded, and my mother took the teeth out of the glass. Feeling queasy, I turned away, and when I looked back, Grandma Bertie looked like herself again.

“Is that Channe?” asked my grandmother.

“It is,” my mom said.

I took a step toward the bed. My grandmother smiled daintily, reached out to me with her other hand, and I took it. Some tubes were taped to her forearm, and I was afraid of hurting her.

“They want to put me away,” she said, lips quivering. “I don’t want to go to a nursing home.”

“It’s all right, Mother, you aren’t going to any nursing home. I promise.”

A few minutes later we fled, and drove around until we found a bar. We stepped into the darkness from the bright sunlight on Main Street, and the gathering of hard-faced men went quiet, just like in an old Western. My mother glided up to the zinc-topped bar, sat down on a barstool, crossed her pretty legs, and ordered a scotch on the rocks. I was thinking, a bartop like this in the city would be worth a fortune. I ordered a White Russian. What a sight, a lady in high-heeled pumps with a Chanel purse and her daughter, drinking with the plumbers, the truck drivers, and the traveling salesmen in Fibber Magee’s.

“Maybe we could find her an apartment, a part-time nurse or a nurse’s aid?” I suggested.

My mother drank her scotch and smoked in silence. She ordered us a second round. Finally, she said, “If I needed a kidney and you were the only match, would you give it to me?” She was and always had been the Queen of Non Sequiturs.

“No, I wouldn’t give you a kidney,” I said, without thinking. I added quickly, “Not if you didn’t quit drinking. What would be the point?”

“I wouldn’t want your kidney anyway,” she said. “The way you drink yourself, it’s probably already full of holes. You’re boring, you know that?” And she added matter-of-factly, “You’re the most boring person I know.”

Anger pricked at me from the inside, rising in a wave of heat to my neck and face. I felt so uncomfortable I wanted to scream. I held my tongue, literally squeezing my jaw tight to keep from spewing poison at her.

“I’m going to take Bertie home with me. It’ll be all right now. She’s old, she can’t hurt me,” said my mother.

Fine, I thought. Take her home with you. What do I care?

She’d been running from Bertie for more than two-thirds of her life. Paris, France wasn’t far enough away. But, really, I was thinking about myself. About the fact that at that moment I hated my mother almost as much as I thought she hated Bertie.

But I couldn’t get away, either. Two, sometimes three months would pass, and I’d find myself driving home again. Someone had to fix things. Someone had to make sure everything was all right. And each time I walked out of her house and got into my car, I’d breathe a sigh of relief, swearing to myself I’d never come back.

I was in a rage, and needed to calm myself. I downed my drink, shook the ice around, drained the last few drops, and ordered a third White Russian from the bartender.

He came over and slid the drink to me on a napkin. Wiping his hands on a long swatch of white cloth, he said to my mother, tentative and solemn, “Marcella?”

My mother gazed at him. “Hi, Gerry,” she said, “how you doing?” as if they’d seen each other yesterday and there was nothing out of the ordinary going on here.

“Saw your picture in the paper couple years ago. So sorry for your loss…” His voice trailed off.

She introduced us and I smiled, relieved that her focus had shifted away from me. While they chatted about what had happened in their lives since their graduation from Most Holy Rosary School in 1944, I brooded and sulked, and drank.

I’d gone back to Paris once, during spring break of my junior year, with a college boy who had a lot of money and wanted to impress me. We stayed at the Meurice, and I felt like an impostor.

One day, I decided to walk through the Tuilleries by myself. Strolling along the wide alley lined with chestnut trees in bloom, I heard the Guignol Puppet Theater bell ringing, and all at once, children came running from every direction, shouting with glee. Suddenly I was blinded with tears, and was forced to sit down on a park bench to compose myself. A long-forgotten memory came to me, cracking through the years and years of lacquer I’d applied over it.

It’s a Saturday, and I’m seven or eight. Still small enough to pass under my mother’s arm when she opens the door to the beauty salon and holds it for me. She calls this “Girls’ Day Out.” I’ve been looking forward to it for days, my heart palpitating like it does when I’m in love. I’m always in love, with one boy or another.

In her terrible French, she says to Monsieur Guillaume, “Can you lighten her hair a little? She looks so much better when she’s blonder.”

“Bien sur, Madame, un petit rinsage
,” says Monsieur Guillaume.

I’m dressed to the nines in an outfit from Bélina, a burgundy wool dress and coat, just like her Ungaro, she says. I
hate
this outfit, it itches. I hate wool tights. But this is a small price to pay to be spending a whole day with her!

“I like my hair like this,” I protest, but my mother says, “Oh, shut up.”

“You shut up.”

“You want to go home?”

I fall silent, kicking my feet in and out, in and out from under the swivel chair.

“Stop that,” she hisses.

She orders lunch from a fancy menu, from the restaurant downstairs, and the
salade de crabes
arrives on individual trays, with doilies and fancy silverware. I get to have
un Coca-Cola
.

Afterwards, we walk to Place de la Concorde, and W.H. Smith’s bookstore on rue de Rivoli, where my mother can buy the latest American novels. In the children’s section, a new Tintin! I ask, she says no. For some reason, which I can’t begin to imagine, today she says no. I beg, then, outraged, I begin to blubber, “But—but—but, please, Mommy! It’s a new Tintin!” On any other day, she’d buy it, wouldn’t think about it twice. The inconsistencies in her behavior are the hardest for me to cope with. Now I’m really having a fit. I can’t stop myself. It’s unjust! Maybe she’s still mad because I didn’t want to lighten my hair. People are staring at us and murmuring and she’s embarrassed.

Finally she gives in. After paying for my Tintin and forgetting to get books for herself, she pulls me by the wrist, back out onto the street. “I’ve never been so ashamed in my whole life.” Her words are like little daggers thrown at my heart.

“Are we still going to Guignol?” I ask apprehensively. The Tuilleries’ gold-tipped gates loom tall, just across the street.

She drags me across the cobblestones to the opposite sidewalk. “A promise is a promise,” she says, in a tone that indicates this is the last thing in the world she wants to do. “You want to know something?” she adds in a rapid, clipped voice. “I don’t like you. I don’t like taking you to the park. It bores me to tears. I don’t like taking you to the hairdresser. I don’t like being with you at all. You bore me to death. I am so bored when I’m with you I can’t stand it. I can’t wait for you to grow up.”

By now we’re walking fast along the pebbled, dusty alleyway between long rows of denuded chestnut trees, and I’m stumbling along to keep up with her. In the distance, the Guignol Theater bell is ringing merrily, urging the children to hurry.

She buys one ticket from the dour-faced lady in the narrow ticket booth. “I’m not coming. I’ll wait for you outside,” she says. “Don’t talk to strangers.”

I sit in the front, with the other children whose parents are waiting outside. Our eyes are glued to the huge white clock, waiting for the big hand to reach twelve, when the show will start. Children are screaming, “Guignol! Guignol!” so loudly my ears ache. I’m clutching my Tintin book to my chest, in a W.H. Smith’s crinkly paper bag. The day is ruined.

The Tintin book doesn’t make me feel guilty. I’m glad I have it. But as I sit alone among the children on the hard, narrow bench, the red-velvet curtains and dark stage before me, I see for the first time how this place might appear to her. The Guignol story is always the same. All the children scream, “Watch out, Guignol!” And Guingol, the wily servant in a funny black cap, gets bashed on the head with a stick by the bad guy. Then Guignol bashes the bad guy on the head with a stick and the children cheer. In the end the noble princess gives Guignol a kiss. I realize suddenly that I am older than most of the other children. Yes, this is stupid and boring. And I am stupid and boring. And she will never be happy with me.