A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (3 page)

“Come on!” I said, pulling hard at his sleeve. “Let’s play. See? There’s another truck for you.” I ran to the box and dug inside it.

“COME HERE! Look at this one, it carries rocks and dumps them all over the floor, all by itself.”

I wound the truck and put my patent-leather shoes in the flatbed so that he could watch them being dumped on the floor. He took a few uncertain steps in my direction, but would not talk or play and continued to grip the suitcase.

My mother pulled together cookies and milk and ice cream in the kitchen while Candida followed her around pointing to the right cabinets and drawers. The little brother ate up everything quickly, as though he thought my mother might change her mind and take it all away from him.

“Won’t you put your suitcase down on the floor? Look, you can put it between your legs,” she said in French.

He conceded, finally, and moved it from his lap to the floor. This was after my mother agreed to let him have a second bowl of ice cream. Half of the first bowl had ended up on the suitcase and I was disgusted because if
I
had behaved that way I wouldn’t have been allowed to finish the
first
bowl.

We went from the kitchen to our rooms and the little brother almost fainted from shock at seeing my toys. I had twenty stuffed bears who lived on my bed whose names I changed every few days and five Barbie dolls with yellow hair who had their own beauty parlor and closet. They were spread out in different twisted positions, some undressed, some half-dressed, their tiny shoes scattered about like pieces of chewed gum. I also had a Lego set and was building a castle out of red, white, and blue bricks. There were half-constructed puzzles and coloring books everywhere.

The little brother stared but would not touch. He had his suitcase and his two trucks in his arms and these he would not part with. I naturally was bored with my own toys and wanted to play with his trucks and a tremendous fight erupted.

Candida dragged me off screaming to the kitchen, and my mother took the little brother out shopping for clothes in the neighborhood. In a moment of crisis (when I fell ill, for example) my mother’s reaction was always to buy, buy, buy. I was not the victim of this crisis but the cause; suddenly my whole little world was standing on its head.

Candida was peeling potatoes and onions at the kitchen table, her large, chafed hands moving swiftly over a glass bowl. She had come from Portugal at twenty-five, without her family, and had been with us since I was two months old. I spent more time with her than anyone else, watched her cook, sew, clean, shine our shoes, and these daily routines had a calming effect on me. “I am your second mommy,” she would tell me in all seriousness. She was my ally, my best friend, but she was not my protectrice although she often tried to be—she was as terrified of my father’s wrath as I was.

The kitchen was disturbingly quiet that afternoon. The radio was off and the bright light above our heads buzzed like a mosquito.

“I hate him,” I told her. Candida sighed deeply but for once would not agree with me.

“He’s ugly,” I said. “He’s dumb.”

“Ay, ay, ay, Channa,” she said. Candida added
a
s,
o
s, and
i
s to the ends of words. “Don’t talk like that.”

“You don’t love me anymore too,” I said.

“Ay, ay, ay,” she said, sighing.

The little brother spread his new clothes out on his bed, organizing by color. He put the new blue shorts with the blue pajamas, the red shirt with the red socks, and so on.

“That’s not how you’re supposed to do it,” I said.

“Leave him alone,” my mother said.

“Pour moi, pour moi, et pour moi,”
he said, touching each thing admiringly with a flat hand.

He brought his suitcase out from beneath the bed and opened it. He put all the clothes in and zipped it shut and put it back under the bed.

“You have a closet of your own here.” My mother pointed to the unvarnished wooden closet that had arrived yesterday.

“When I go, can I take the clothes and the trucks with me?” he asked her.

“You are going to stay with us forever,” she said.

He looked at her with the same expression he’d worn when the strange woman had left him at the front door.

Every day was like a holiday that first week. I was out of school for the summer, but instead of sending me to the park or shopping for groceries with Candida, my father quit work at lunchtime and took the family out. We went rowing on the Marne, picnicking in the country, out to fancy restaurants, and walking for hours around the Latin Quarter. He took us to the Lido Club on the Champs Élysées to eat hamburgers. The little brother ate four hamburgers with fried onions (since he was allowed to so was I, but I couldn’t finish my third) and then we went to the movies. We saw lots of cowboy movies in English and my father told the little brother about America.

“Ben-wa,” my father called the little brother. We only spoke to him in American now, except when we were with Candida.

“Ben-wa sounds terrible in English,” my father said one day. We were having lunch in the Brasserie Lipp and the little brother and I were eating escargots, pulling them out of the shells with a tiny fork and sopping the baguette in the rich butter sauce.

“Maybe we should change it?” he suggested.

“But to what?” my mother said.

“I don’t know. Let him decide.”

“He’s too little to decide his own name,” I said.

“No he’s not,” my mother said. She had this childish singsong tone in her voice sometimes, “Goody-goody gumdrops,” she called it; I hated it, and was convinced she was using it right then to inflame my already inflamed being.

“Then I want to change my name too,” I said with a mouth full of bread and sauce.

“No,” my father said flatly.

“I won’t answer unless you call me Jenny from now on,” I said.

“I’ll call you Agatha, how’s that?” my mother said in that same voice.

My mother’s father had died when she was sixteen and I think on some level she never grew up, was never given the opportunity to rebel against her strong father. She acted like a child with me, but the only time I ever saw her cry was when she’d describe her father, a strong-willed, handsome, blue-eyed Italian man. Sometimes she would wail like a baby and put her head down between her arms. Sometimes, in that childish voice, she would say, “My daddy was just as nice as your daddy.”

“Agatha,” my mother said as I sopped up the last of the escargot sauce, “would you like some dessert?”

“You’re Agatha,” I said.

“Cut it out, you two,” my father said. “Ben-wa, would you like a new name?” He said this in American, slowly, several times, and then in French.

The little brother shrugged indifferently. You could never tell what he was thinking or if he even understood what was going on around him, and that drove me crazy too.

“Think about it,” my father said. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

After about five days he moved his clothes from the suitcase to the closet, but kept the suitcase under the bed.

It was that night, I think, that I was awakened by terrible whimpering sounds coming through the open archway that connected our two rooms. I got up and went to his bed in my bare feet. His tile floor was cold and I sat down on his bed and tucked my feet up under my nightgown.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“
Le loup-garou
,” he said.

“What
loup-garou
?”
Loup-garou
was the French werewolf.

“He’s here.”

“No he’s not.”

“I did pipi. They’re going to beat me.” He slid a hand out from under the covers and reached under the bed, his hand groping blindly in the dark space.

“Don’t worry, it’s still there,” I said as though he were the stupidest person in the world. “And they’re not going to beat you. I promise you nobody’s going to beat you.”

“You can draw already and you can write your own name,” he said in a dismal voice.

“Didn’t they teach you to draw and write There?”

He thought about this in silence for a minute. “Yes,” he said finally, “but I couldn’t.”

“Tomorrow we’ll ask Papa to show you how to write your own name. What was it like, There?” I asked.

“It was all right,” he said in that indifferent tone.

“Did you have lots of friends?”

“Everyone was all right except Sister Elene. She used to beat us for doing pipi in bed.”

“Where did you get that suitcase?”

“I don’t remember. Leave me alone.” He dug his head into the pillow.

“Take off your pajama if it’s wet. Here, I’ll get you another one.” I went to the wall and switched on the light. I opened his closet drawer and took out another brand-new pair of pajama pants which he had folded neatly, and placed according to color, next to some socks.

“Here.” I handed them to him. He changed quickly, under the sheets. His feet and knees kicked the sheets up in all directions. I put the wet pants on the floor in the corner and switched off the light.

“NON!
Don’t turn off the light. The
loup-garou
comes in the dark. Sister Elene says he only eats bad children.”

“You’re
not bad. You’re as good as can be. I’m much badder than you, and no
loup-garou
is going to get me.”