A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (29 page)

Our parents were stupefied.

Our dad was furious because, having been raised poor, he could not stand the waste of food. Our mom was beside herself because some of those “tight-assed embassy people” were going to be under the impression we were destitute. And according to our dad, we were always almost destitute until he finished another book. It seemed he’d celebrate finishing a book for a day, and the next day he was right back to worrying about starting the new one and keeping us from destitution. We worried when my father worried; but looking back, I believe none of us ever felt safer or happier or more worry-free than we did during those years when my father was so concerned about money.

Our dad stormed through the door to Billy’s room looking like King Kong. “Billy, what do you do with your sandwiches?”

Billy was not that stubborn and knew when it was time to talk.

“I give them to this
clochard
who sleeps at the metro stop near my school.”

“Why?”

He thought for a while. “Candida makes lousy samwiches,” he said.

“I can believe that,” our dad said. Every time we watched him eat his hamburger at lunch, he complained that Candida flattened it with the spatula while it was cooking and made all the juice run out. He said he’d demonstrated for her a number of times, but she just refused to do it properly. “Maybe she does it on purpose,” he’d reflect, making a disgusted face. One day he’d shouted, “THIS IS A FUCKING HOCKEY PUCK!” and side-armed the hamburger into the wall. It bounced off and landed on the floor without breaking apart or leaving a stain.

Sensing that our dad wasn’t going to start yelling about the sandwiches, Billy went on more enthusiastically.

“Plus everybody’s else comes in this little box, see, with drawings on it?” He made a box of the approximate size with his hands. “And everybody’s else has that flat bread like we had in America and peanut butter and jelly and chips and stuff. Sometimes tunafish with mayonnaise and stuff.”

“What does Candida give you?”

“Scramble eggs with butter and sometimes ham with butter on a baguette. The scramble eggs leaks on the bread and it’s all mushy. Plus I look like a Frog with samwiches like that.”

“Well, goddamn it, why didn’t you say something before?”

Now Billy shrugged, staring at the floor. “I didn’t want Candida to get mad.”

“Well, Marcella”—our dad turned to our mom—“we’re just going to have to go to the commissary and get peanut butter and all the rest of that American crap.” From that moment on, Billy’s Americanization proceeded with very few hitches.

I have never understood why things happen when they do; I don’t truly know why we stayed in France for fifteen years and then left everyone behind, including Candida. We “came home” and bought the house on Long Island with the money we’d gotten for selling the one in Paris. It was exactly as our father had predicted: close enough to New York for our mother and far enough away for him. We learned to set the table, wash dishes, pick up after ourselves, but not without a good deal of complaining. It was quite simple: Either we did the dishes and cleaned up after ourselves or we didn’t get to do anything else. After meals, our father seriously but good-humoredly gave us the Army KP white-glove treatment. He went over the counters with his index finger and if he found a spot or a crumb, we had to start all over again.

The move to America combined with his failing health caused my father to open up about his family in a way he never had before. Up until then, we’d only known that he had left and joined the Army at eighteen, and had never gone home. Now he was longing for his brother and sister, who had both died of bad hearts.

One day I was walking around the property with him. The sky seemed tired and colorless and the land was frozen so that the grass crackled when you stepped on it. All the leaves had fallen while he’d been in the hospital. He was telling me all the things he wanted to do to the house, where he’d put in a pool and a grape arbor the following spring. Then he started telling me about his sister, Charlotte-Anne, who had died at twenty-five. “You know,” he said, “Charlotte-Anne and I used to fight. We had terrible, terrible fights. I was jealous because my mother babied her—she hated me, my mother, because I wouldn’t feel sorry for her and thought she was full of shit. My mother died while I was in the Army in Hawaii and I didn’t even ask for leave. When Charlotte-Anne died I was thirty years old and we’d never really made up. Never talked about things. All my life it’s the one thing I’ve regretted. She’ll never know that I really did love her. That’s why I hate it so much when you and Billy fight.”

I was blinded by tears; he put his arm around my shoulder and told me not to cry. He said the good thing was there was so much time left in my life for me to be nice to Billy.

I also don’t know why he and my mother chose one particular icy, windy February night, as we sat across from each other at the long oak table that had come all the way from Paris with the rest of our furniture, to tell me the story of Billy’s birth.

That night at dinner, my parents had drunk a good deal of wine. My father had just finished a particularly difficult chapter of his book and we were celebrating, although he really was not supposed to drink alcohol, even wine.

Billy had gone off to bed hours before; he was going through the worst of what our father called his “growing-up stage.” We must have been talking about this “stage” of Billy’s in one way or another, when my father suddenly leaned across the table toward me and said, “I want to tell you something, but you have to swear to God never to tell anyone.”

My heart froze. I thought he was going to bring up his will.

“I swear,” I said, my anxiety rising with my voice.

“See,” my father started gently, “I’ve been offering to tell Billy about his parents for years now. But he doesn’t want to know. I keep telling him that if he wants to know, all he has to do is ask.

“So I don’t want you ever telling anyone until Billy knows and says it’s okay. One day I’ll be gone, and maybe he’ll ask you.”

My mother’s face went expressionless then, took on the serene flatness of a mask.

“We were so scared,” she whispered. “Every month for the first year a government official came to look in on us. And we thought Billy’s mother was going to change her mind and take him away. It was all so damn
illegal
. You see, in France you’re not allowed to adopt if you already have a child, and to top it off, we were Americans.”

“His parents aren’t dead?” I asked, completely bewildered.

“Now, Marcella, will you let me tell this story?” my father said calmly. She had a habit of throwing the end in before the middle, which infuriated us all.

“No, they’re not dead,” my father said.

I wasn’t angry at them; I felt privileged in an odd way. I had a fleeting sense that this was a once-in-a-lifetime shot, that by tomorrow they would discuss having told me and probably regret it.

“We never met his father but we met his mother,” my father said. “I begged his mother after a year to allow us to try to adopt him. See, she wasn’t sure she wanted to give him up. She was fifteen when he was born.
Fifteen years old
.” He paused, as though it were still hard for him to comprehend this. “Your age,” he said soberly.

I squirmed in my seat but he went right on.

“She came from a very upper-class family and they carted her off somewhere to have the baby. But she refused to give him up for adoption, God knows why. Stubbornness or something.

“The French couple who fostered him the first two years were from the same kind of background. Upper class and so on, but he was a writer and that’s how I knew him. They couldn’t have kids. When his wife killed herself he couldn’t face raising Billy alone and put him in a children’s home. It was up to Billy’s real mother to decide what to do.”

“I don’t understand people like that,” my mother said angrily. “How can you give up a child just like that, just because your wife kills herself?”

“We offered to take him immediately, as soon as we found out, but it took another six months for the government to agree. It was touch-and-go for those six months. Billy’s mother didn’t want him in a children’s home, but she also didn’t want to take him back, and it would have taken any family several months to get through the bureaucracy. So we had to convince her to wait.

“Billy had been with us a year when we met her. She was a law student at the Sorbonne. She was a tall, thin girl with light blond hair and a really classically beautiful face. Completely poised, she was. A little cold. You know who she looked like? Catherine Deneuve very young. She said she’d researched me. Read a couple of my novels, in French of course. She said my writing seemed brutal to her. But honest.”

My father laughed; his eyes crinkled up and went out of focus.

My mother put in, “We had her over for tea and made Candida take you kids to the Jardin d’Acclimatation. We told her she couldn’t bring you back till dinnertime…If you ever got pregnant you’d tell us right away, wouldn’t you?” she added quickly, a moment later, as though the thought had just occurred to her. I didn’t say anything and made a face at her, a “don’t be ridiculous, Mom” face.

“I begged her to give Billy up for his own good. I swore I’d give him the best life I possibly could,” my father said.

“She said, ‘A much better life, certainly, than
I
could.’

“A week later she met me in a café and gave me a diary she’d kept while she’d been pregnant. She said maybe it would explain things a little to her son. Maybe it would help him understand where he came from. I’ve never read it. It’s for Billy, if he ever asks. If he ever asks you, Channe, the diary is in the vault and has Billy’s name on it. But you’re not to touch it. Not until Billy asks.”

From that day on, I looked at Billy in a different way. It was a bit like learning the root of a word you think you’ve known forever. You think you know something so well and then suddenly you find out it was something completely different all along. Like the word “cowboy.” For years I’d thought it was “calboy.” Cow-boy, someone finally told me. Cow-boy. But what did those guys riding horses and carrying pistols and chasing Indians have to do with cows?

I kept my promise to my parents, and never brought the subject up with Billy.