A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (30 page)

In my life, up until the following spring, I’d had only one encounter with death. I was in eighth grade at the École Internationale Bilingue, when in the middle of October, my best friend Janet Morgan’s father died of stomach cancer. He’d been sick a long time. When I’d go over to Janet’s to play, she’d knock on her father’s bedroom door and I’d go in and shake hands with him in the semi-darkness. The room smelled like a hospital, the close air was heavy with medicine and body smells. Her father did not look like a human being to me, he was so thin and pale and old.

The day after he died, Janet came to school and played soccer as usual during recreation, ate lunch with us as usual in the cafeteria, laughed as she always did at silly jokes, and sang her favorite Elton John songs aloud in the hallways. Sally, my other best friend, and I (grown-up creatures that we were!) were horrified by Janet’s lack of feeling and decorum, and whispered disapprovingly behind her back.

As Fate will have it, the day before my father died, another girl called Janet drove me to the hospital after school, to visit him. Keith kept trying to help but I avoided him. He reminded me too much of what I was about to lose. It was spring and the air was light with those happy sounds. The sun beat hard and yellow through the windshield. The radio was blasting some hip tune. For a moment I felt unperturbed by things. Janet said, “I wish my father was in the hospital instead of yours.”

“God, how could you say a thing like that?” I said.

“I’m serious. Bastard beats us where it doesn’t show. I hope he dies a long slow miserable fucking death.”

She lifted her shirt and showed me an enormous black bruise on her ribs, turned her head, and stared at me blankly through her glasses, her small face pale, her mouth a purplish knot.

This was on my mind when I went into the glass room to see my father. “You know my friend Janet?” I said. “I just found out her father beats her!” There was a hysterical edge to my voice. We talked only about Janet and what I could do to help her. My father said short of calling the police, there was nothing we could do. He said if I called the police, Janet’s father would probably beat her worse and nothing would come of it. He had that fatalistic tone in his voice, and I felt completely helpless. I thought, when he gets home, I’ll bring Janet over and he’ll talk to her. He’ll fix everything.

All night I could not get Janet and her father off my mind and kept envisioning the sordid scene. It would play itself out like a film—Janet’s father raising his heavy fists—and my intestines would cramp up and rise to my throat as though I were riding downhill in a speeding car without brakes.

The next day, Billy and I sat huddled together in the hospital waiting room while our father fought through his last hours.

“Can you believe this shit? Janet’s father beats her!” I said this over and over, as though it were the only thing that mattered in the world.

“What should I do? Billy, what should I do?”

He watched me with heavy, worried eyes, eyes brimming with tears that refused to fall.

When the end came I went into a fit of hysterical laughter that wouldn’t stop. It wouldn’t stop after one ten-milligram Valium so the doctor gave me another. He offered Billy one too, but he refused to take it.

During the summer, none of us could face each other. Keith and I broke up; I had no emotions left for anyone. Family friends came and went, taking turns standing vigil over our mother. She had sunk into an alcoholic stupor that withdrew her completely from us and from the world. I despised her. I thought she was the most self-indulgent person I’d ever known. “You don’t have a right to behave this way,” I’d tell her, standing over her prostrate form on the living room couch.

“You’re a monster,” she’d say in a high-pitched, childish voice. “You have no feelings for anyone except yourself!”

I stopped eating and went out to bars every night and stayed in them until they closed. It was incredible that all of my friends were underage, and all of us drank in bars, and no one seemed to care.

And during all of this, alone in his room and alone in our garden pruning the bushes and trees, in three months Billy grew into a tall, slender, strong, and handsome young man.

Very late one night at the end of August, I was very drunk and I drove my father’s car home with the windows down. The chill of fall was already in the air and suddenly I became aware that my fear had taken up all the space in the car.

I started thinking about the two Janets. Soon after her father died, the first Janet began making up stories that were so horrifying we couldn’t imagine where they’d come from—she told everyone I’d slept with my brother, and that Sally’s father had affairs and that Sally’s mother had tried to slit her wrists. On and on.

And now, at parties, the second Janet was suddenly getting gang-banged by three or four football players at a time. Anyone who’d give her a beer or smile at her could get her out to a parked car. Pain never shows the way you expect it to. First you run.

When I was very drunk, as I was at that moment, my mind suddenly fed me a single, agonizingly clear picture: my father’s green eyes fogging over, staring up at the ceiling while his knuckles turned white in my mother’s hand, and me laughing, laughing and not being able to stop.

I started to scream “Why?” as loud as I could. I knew that the next morning, sober, I’d try to bring the image back but it would never come.

So much time was going to pass, so much time before it was going to be all right. And then it hit me that maybe it was never really going to be all right.

Panic-stricken, I stumbled up the stairs of our house to Billy’s room and banged on his door. “What? What?” he called out in a confused, sleepy voice.

“It’s me!” I cried.

“Come in,” he mumbled.

I sat at the edge of his bed in the darkness as I had so many nights as a child. I tried to start out calmly but no words would come, just tears, hot ones smelling of vodka.

“Help me, Billy,” I managed.

After a long silence, he said gently, “I can’t. I wish to God I could, but I can’t.”

He stared at me with a tight, sad expression while I wept. After a while it subsided, and Billy said, “I can’t stand it either. Stay here with me if you want.” He moved over in his double bed.

In a few minutes he was snoring in the loud, nasal way that used to drive me crazy when we’d had to share rooms traveling. But that night the sound was as comforting as a lullaby. I slept without dreams and when I awakened the next morning, he was gone.

On his prompting, we began to go out together to the local hangouts. My girlfriends thought he was beautiful and asked me where I’d been hiding him. They told me there was something about the way he carried his head, about the look in his eye, that they would have known he was my brother immediately, even if he’d walked in alone.

One night Billy asked me out of nowhere, “What was the last thing Daddy said to you?”

We were sitting way in the back of a disco, away from the music and the crowd. The light was dark and reddish on my brother’s face and his large eyes seemed particularly bright. The question caught me off guard, and I might have seemed overly ready to respond; I was always grateful when he allowed us to share confidences.

“He told me I was much smarter than I thought and that I shouldn’t let any guy talk me into getting married before I was ready.”

Billy turned his beer upside down in his mouth and then gazed at me with a blank expression. His mouth began to twitch just slightly; he looked away.

“He told me to take care of the house,” Billy said. “‘The house,’ he said. ‘Don’t let the house fall apart. If you start with that, keeping the garden and the house in good shape, everything will be all right.’”

“You’re doing that,” I said, putting my hand over his. “The house is beautiful and so’s the garden.”

He removed his hand and waved to the waitress for a new round of drinks.

Within days of taking down the photographs of our father, the beau built a six-foot-tall chicken-wire fence around the most glorious section of Billy’s garden. The beau wanted to keep his emus from running away. Emus run forty miles an hour and destroy everything in their path. Australian farmers shoot them on sight. They decimated Billy’s lilac bushes, roses, and hydrangeas. Our mother acted as though this were amusing, but I wasn’t convinced she thought so at all. When something upsets her badly, she finds a way to joke about it. Letting the beau move in and take over was probably her way of defying our father’s ghost.

“That bastard,” she used to say to me as we drove together through sunsets or moonlit nights, “I can’t look at such beautiful sights anymore.” And she’d shed silent tears.

I believed she would have let the beau throw out the window everything that reminded her of our father, including us. But I also believed her hope in this new romance was an enemy in disguise, much closer to despair than the void of emotion that had preceded it.

During the week before Billy’s naturalization, I thought about our childhood the way one might be inspired to spring-clean one’s dusty memories before a wedding or graduation. If there had been a party for him and I’d had to make a toast, I would have told these stories about him as a little boy. But it was to be a solitary event, just the two of us and four hundred immigrants pledging allegiance to the flag.

It was a particularly hot October morning in New York, even at that early hour. Billy was in his banker’s suit and I wore a blue linen dress and high-heeled shoes. All the soon-to-be citizens were in their Sunday clothes, sporting cameras and surrounded by their families—grandparents, husbands, wives, children, and grandchildren. We stood in a long line outside the courthouse and everyone smiled at each other with proud, congratulatory expressions. An hour later we approached a desk where Billy was to sign in and receive his papers.

“Willhelm Willich?” said the Puerto Rican clerk. “No, William Willis,” Billy said.

She smiled as though she understood his zeal perfectly well.

“Sign here, Mister Willich.”

Billy turned red to the tips of his ears. I began to feel the need to cry but checked myself as Billy would certainly have disapproved.