A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (6 page)

“You’re so nice, Daddy,” I said. I pressed myself against his shoulder. He chuckled and I felt his chest shake.

“I’m too nice, that’s my problem.” He put an arm around me and I began to cry again.

“I’m sorry, Daddy.” The world sank behind a curtain of tears. “Daddy, I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again, I promise.”

“Ssh, now. What’d I used to tell you? Remember?”

“A soldier’s daughter never cries,” I said.

“That’s right…Are you hungry?”

I shook my head.

“Well, I am, and since I’m the boss, I say let’s go down to the brasserie and have us something to eat.”

He sat me on a barstool in front of the pinball machine and slipped two francs into the slot. “You’re getting pretty good at this,” he said, standing behind me with a hand on my shoulder. “Pretty soon you’ll be beating your old man.”

“Oh, no.” I was concentrating on the ball.

The bar area was filled with workers who were stopping in for a drink on their way home. Most of them lived on the island and knew my father. They discussed their different jobs and the weather and the government with him. They liked him, I thought, because they considered him their own, personal American. And because his kids spoke French without accents and played in the street with their kids.

He showed me a new trick: how to capture the ball with the flipper and hold it so that I could aim my shot. Finally he lifted me off the stool.

“Time to go,” he said.

As we walked along the upper quai, under the streetlights which were surrounded by yellow halos in the mist, he said, “I think you were being a little hard on yourself about your punishment. We’ll just say no desserts for a month, how’s that?”

I nodded slowly.

“And you’ll give me your word you won’t sneak into any bakeries on your way home from school?”

“I promise. I won’t even look in the window. I won’t see Melissa either.”

He sighed and made a large circle with his arm, shoving the whole thing away from him. “You don’t have to do that.”

When we reached the corner on which we lived, I tugged on his arm.

“Are you still mad at me, Daddy? Are you still sad?”

“No,” he said. He looked straight into my face for a moment and then burst into a loud laugh.

“What’s so funny?” I didn’t think any of it was funny and was perplexed and slightly annoyed.

“You’re in third grade and you still can’t spell gym! How do you spell gym?”

“J…no, G-Y-M.” I had difficulties with
J
and
G
because in French
J
was pronounced
gee
and
G
was pronounced
jay
. My father roared with laughter.

“I bet you’ll remember now,” he said.

Still laughing, he picked me up, sat me on his hip, and carried me into the house.

THE HOUSE IN THE TREE

One summer, my parents rented a house outside Deauville with their friends the Smiths. The Smiths had three impossible daughters. Cassandra, the oldest, was fourteen. She considered herself too grown-up to care about our silly games and spent most afternoons, after the beach, trying on grown-up clothes: stockings of all colors and little pink and powder-blue garters and bras, which her mother bought her in the town’s fancy boutiques. She might have been fun if she had been willing to let us gaze at her spoils, but no. Only the other two Smiths, Mary-Ellen and Gillis, were allowed in Cassandra’s room. (Billy and I peeked anyway.) At first Billy and I had hoped to make an ally of Gillis, as she was only ten, a year older than we. But Gillis was treated like a Princess Child by her older sisters and soon tired of our form of democracy, which was basically that she could not always have her way.

Their nanny Bethany did not speak French and our nanny Candida did not speak English, but those two got along just fine until a fight between the camps erupted. The fights usually started when the Smith girls accused Billy and me of not being really American. We were being raised in France, and could not, for example, tell the difference between quarters, dimes, and nickels. We had never eaten at a McDonald’s or been to a drive-in movie. The Smith girls wore embroidered peace signs on their blue jeans and knew all the words to the most recent, most popular antiwar rock ‘n’ roll songs. “Peace, brother,” they would say, making the sign, or “The Black Panthers live,” making the fist. The Vietnam War had not started to affect our Parisian lives yet; they considered us highly uninformed but would not teach us anything and took every opportunity to tell us what idiots we were. Billy and I spoke American with a strange close-mouthed lilt, putting emphasis on the wrong ends of phrases and mispronouncing words.

“It’s not he
say
-z,” one of them would invariably correct. “It’s he
sez.
Can’t you hear the
dif
ference? God, are you two Frogs.”

This drove my brother to madness.

It had been five years since Billy had come to our house from the children’s home. When he’d arrived he could not speak a word of English but had picked it up in a matter of months. The children we played with on our street in Paris called him Amerloque, a serious insult that Billy took as the highest of compliments. Telling him that he was not really American was about the worst insult anyone could lay on him. There were certain things I was forbidden to say to him (you are not really American being one) but the Smith girls did not have these rules; they probably did not even know Billy was adopted.

Until that summer, things between Billy and me had not improved much. I have to admit that I was far from being a good child. I was bossy, loudmouthed, insecure, neurotic, and furiously jealous of my brother. Billy brought out the worst in me. But since the Smith girls picked on him as much as I, that particular summer we found solace in sticking together, sticking up for each other. For the first time since his arrival, I was happy for long stretches that Billy was my brother.

The parents were not around much. The reason we were there with the Smiths was that our father and Mr. Smith were writing a screenplay together “which could mean a lot of money,” our father explained. Our mother and Mrs. Smith went to the racetrack at Clairefontaine practically every day and all four of them went to the casino in Deauville at night. After our nannies brought us home from the beach we were given hours of free time to roam the property and invent games. The only iron rule was that we weren’t to disturb the writers at work. Their presence in an upstairs room of the house hung over our activities like the eyes of God.

The house looked more like a château than a villa; it was a long, two-story stone edifice with a high slate roof and arching windows with little balconies. On the ground floor, you could walk out through the tall windows of any room, onto the gravel terrace and down some steps to the rose gardens. Around the entire house went the white pebbled driveway, and around the driveway were enormous pink and pale-blue hydrangea bushes and white rhododendrons. There was a long, sloping green lawn where several ancient, magnificent oaks grew, and beyond the lawn was the untamed, deep green forest.

The Smith girls’ favorite game was croquet. They would dress up and pretend they were duchesses parading on the lawn. Haw haw haw, they would laugh in a throaty way, as though whatever was funny was really not funny at all. It seemed to Billy and me that the two oldest girls were just as unpleasant to each other as they were to us, but with them it seemed to be some kind of inside joke and they never really became offended by one another.

Billy and I took to the woods, not so much because we loved the woods, but because it was the one place we were certain not to encounter the Smiths. “The woods are barbaric,” Cassandra often said.

In the middle of the forest was a green chicken-wire fence that you couldn’t see until you were right up against it. Behind the fence the trees and brambles went on out of sight. We decided that this must be where our property ended and the neighbors’ began.

Billy and I invented all sorts of games, our favorites being Thierry la Fronde Saves The Fair Maiden From Certain Death At The Hands Of The Forest Elves, and The Heroic Cowboy Finds An Indian Squaw Tied To A Tree In The Woods Dying Of Hunger And Thirst. It always ended up with And They Get Married And Build A House In The Forest. That part wasn’t much of a denouement because, after all, Billy was my brother and we never even kissed. Sometimes we looked for the doors to Elves’ houses in the thick roots of the large trees and at the bases of the big, flat brown mushrooms. This grew disappointing after a while, because the doors were too well hidden and although we called to the Elves and promised them no harm, they would not come out to play.

One afternoon, I stood with my back to a big tree, arms encircling the trunk behind me (I would not let Billy really tie me up, I didn’t trust him that much). The woods were so dense and green that the sun-filled sky hardly made it through to the ground. There was the rustle of the leaves disturbing the fine ribbons of light around me, and then a face, pale, greenish, with a disheveled shock of dirty-blond hair, was suddenly staring at me, its dirty hands gripping the diamonds in the chicken wire.

“AAHHHH!” I screamed, and started to run in the direction Billy had gone.

“N’ai pas peur!”
a boy’s voice called out. “Don’t be afraid! I live here.”

Billy came charging out of the brambles just ahead of me, and I stopped running.

“Salut!”
the boy said. Billy gazed at him with his suspicious and impenetrable blue eyes.

“Salut,”
Billy said through a closed mouth. He had a long stick in his hand and was whacking at the underbrush.

“I live here.” The head turned to the side and gestured over the shoulder.

“Where are you from?”

“From Paris,” Billy said. “But we’re Americans.”

“Americans! I don’t believe you. How come you speak French then?”

“I told you we live in Paris.”

“Want to see my tree house?” the boy said. “My father helped me build it.”

“There’s a fence,” Billy said, still suspicious. He did not take to people easily.

“There’s a hole a little ways down,” the boy said, beginning to walk to the left, slowly, along the fence. Billy and I followed on our side. The boy’s dirty fingers skidded along the diamonds as he went.

“My name’s Stephane,” he offered.

“I’m Channe. This is my brother Billy.”

“You have strange names.”

“That’s ‘cause we’re American,” Billy said with pride.

“What’s it like there?”

“Big,” Billy said. “All the cars are big, the streets are big, the buildings are huge, and the people are bigger than French people.”

“You make me laugh,” the boy said derisively.

“It’s true,” I said. “The cars are as long as three French cars.”

“Here’s the hole in the fence,” the boy said. He ran his fingers down the fence and pulled up on the bottom part of it.

“Maybe the Elves made a hole,” I said.

“They don’t exist,” the boy said.

Once we were on his side he seemed big, much bigger than we, in any case. He was at least a head taller than Billy and had spots of dirt on his face and on his arms, up to the elbows. He was wearing a brownish shirt that faded into the background.

“I know these woods better than anyone except my father,” he said. “My father is the caretaker of the big house over there.”

“Show us your tree house,” Billy said. The boy set off, turning his back and waving for us to follow.

But first Billy did something I found extraordinary; he very nonchalantly took a red handkerchief out of his pocket and tied it to the fence above the hole. What a Boy Scout! I thought. All our cousins back in Pennsylvania were Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts, and I bet they wouldn’t have thought of doing that. I’ll have to tell Daddy about how Billy remembers everything he tells us about playing in the woods, I thought. I was so overwhelmed with pride and affection that my heart began to pound in my head, making me dizzy.

“I think you’re the best,” I said to Billy, squeezing his arm as we followed the bigger boy through the brambles and thickets. Billy shrugged me off, blushing. He did not like compliments, never had, not since I’d known him.

The tree house was a beauty. It had a thick wooden floor propped up at the fork of the largest branches, three walls, the back one with a large window, and an A-shaped roof. There was a ladder leading up to it which the boy climbed like a monkey. He sat in the house and gestured for us to follow.

“You go first,” Billy said quietly. “In case you fall I’ll be able to maybe catch you.”

Normally I would have been angry at him for suggesting such a thing, but under the circumstances I considered him gentlemanly, and went first. I was wearing long cut-off shorts (a rarity, I always wore skirts, even in the woods) and thought that this was a good thing because he could not look up my skirt at my underwear.

The boy had a flashlight, some dirty pillows, a dirty blanket, a pack of Gauloises, a box of matches, a slingshot, a pile of stones, and a pocketknife in his tree house.

“I can kill squirrels from here with my slingshot,” he said. “Just like Thierry la Fronde.”