Becoming the Butlers (2 page)

Then one morning, my father surprised me. At breakfast he reached across the table and took my hand. I was spooning cereal into my mouth, and was unhappy with the interruption.

“What is it?” I asked, mouth inches from my oats.

“Rachel, I have something very important to tell you.”

“Hurry up or we’ll both be late for school.”

“You know how we usually go skiing in New Hampshire during Christmas vacation? Well, this year we’re going somewhere a little different.”

“Oh? Where?”

My father’s eyes were bright and his cheeks flushed with excitement. Releasing my hand, he quickly downed a glass of orange juice as if for support, and wiped his mouth vigorously with a napkin.

“Spain. We’re going to Spain.”

I dropped a spoonful of oats to the floor. “Not Madrid…”

“Yes. Tell me, have you ever been in love?”

“I’m only fourteen.”

“Come on, Rachel. I know you talked about this stuff with Mom. Don’t you have a boyfriend?”

The only boy I ever had a crush on was Edwin Butler, who was adored by every other ninth grade girl. I saw Edwin Butler’s almond eyes, his yellow hair, which I thought would taste like lemon ice, and his mouth, that always made my tongue feel swollen.

“I love your mother,” my father said. “I always will, and I can’t give up on her yet. If she’s not coming home then we’ll have to go to Spain and bring her back.”

“Maybe she doesn’t want to come back.”

“Then at least we will have tried, Rachel. Do you know the two most terrible words in the English language?”

I shook my head.

“
If only.
I’ve been saying them to myself all my life. If only I’d stood up to my father and become an actor. If only we had moved to New Hampshire and bought the farm. If only I wasn’t a math teacher. If only I wouldn’t drink so much. If only I had been more loving to Elizabeth. If only I caught George sneaking up the back staircase. But I’m not going to say it anymore. I don’t want to be a coward. This is war; if we don’t put on a good offensive for Elizabeth, who will?”

This kind of impulsive scheme was typical of my father. As a teenager he had run away with the circus and for an entire summer was decked out as Jiggles the Tap-Dancing Clown until Grandfather, the Presbyterian minister, found him in North Dakota. Instead of attending Columbia University my father joined an East Village theater group and dressed in fatigues until my grandfather threatened to cut off all his money. Then he eloped with my mother after taking her out only twice to the movies.

None of my friends’ parents were so flighty. Their families were as solid as rock; no one, nothing, could dissolve them. Sometimes I wished my parents would just settle down; and that my father wouldn’t stagger drunk in and out of rooms, losing his balance, slipping and hitting his head. All I wanted was everything for once to be still.

“How would we find her?” I asked, still skeptical about my father’s latest stunt. “I can’t even find Spain on a map.”

“Geography was never your strong point, Rachel. Mrs. Vasquez gave me George’s uncle’s address in Madrid.”

“This still sounds crazy to me.”

“I know it does, honey,” he said hoarsely. His face looked paler, and he clasped his hands and cracked his knuckles. “But the whole situation is crazy. Extreme circumstances call for extreme measures. I love her. George can’t love her as much as I do. And even if he did, she’s still my wife. I don’t know about Elizabeth, but I took those ‘til death do us part’ vows damn seriously. Madrid’s not that far away. What’s a mere six hours on a plane? It’s the least I can do to save my marriage.”

I felt a sudden surge of pride. Here was my father risking everything for the woman he adored.
Notorious
was one of my mother’s and my favorite old movies and I imagined my father would be like Cary Grant saving Ingrid Bergman from the Nazis. He would carry my mother down the same winding marble staircase, she pale and lovely, swooning “Oh! You love me!” My mother always said my father sounded like Cary Grant, with an accent neither American nor English but belonging to some other country, where everyone drank gin and tonics in glasses filled with tinkling ice cubes. My father’s students had crushes on him, dribbled Jean Naté cologne over their homework, left crushed flowers in their exam books. Life,
I always thought, would be so much easier if my father was plain and clumsy and I was the beauty.

“All right,” I told him. “Just promise we’ll be okay if she doesn’t want to come back with us.”

“Of course she’ll come back. Keep the faith, Melody,” my father said, patting my hand. “Everything will be all right.”

Melody was my original name. At ten I announced I would from now on be called Rachel. Rachel was the dullest name I could think of; no one would ever accuse a Rachel of having a hippie mom who still ate Granola bars and wore Earth shoes. But it was my father, the preppy from New Hampshire, who had the real social conscience. He always kept a pocketful of change for beggars and worked at a soup kitchen in the Bowery. My father rescued lost animals he found in Riverside Park; mangled kittens left in shoe boxes, dogs so starved they’d try to swallow a sneaker. The animals lived in our spare bedroom, the floor padded with discarded towels and pillows. But tenants complained about the noise and someone phoned the Health Department; my father gave most of our menagerie to the ASPCA, though he was convinced our animals would be murdered there and sold in Chinatown for chow mein. I often tried to remind him that not everyone wanted to be saved. That the wino enjoying his Thunderbird in the early morning sun liked lying there in Central Park, and wasn’t interested in going out to brunch on the Upper West Side. That maybe my mother was very happy with George in Madrid. No one had forced her to leave us the way she did.

Mrs. Vasquez was the only person who knew about our trip. My mother’s parents were dead, and my father’s mother lived in a senior citizen’s home near Dartmouth College. My Aunt Ruth, my mother’s sister, had married
into an Orthodox Jewish family and decided my mother was as good as dead for marrying a minister’s son. My father’s brother, an English teacher in Japan, fell in love with a Geisha and lived with her in Osaka. Because I was too embarrassed to tell my friends what happened to my mother, I quickly dropped all of them and wouldn’t return their phone calls. As for my father, his drinking and frequent nastiness alienated both colleagues at school and his ever-shrinking circle of friends. We were embarrassed: my mother and our building super wasn’t
Masterpiece Theater,
but something crude and outlandish, like an outdated episode of
Love American Style.

At the airline check-in counter I told my father I refused to sit next to him on the plane.

“But this is a six-hour overnight flight,” he argued. “Who knows what you’ll be sitting next to, or what could happen at four
A.M.…
”

“But James,” I moaned. (I called him James when I was annoyed, or trying to wheedle something out of him, or felt like he wasn’t being much of a father.) “This is Iberia Airlines, not Times Square. And anyway, my health would be more endangered if I sat next to you in the smoking section.”

My father couldn’t disagree with that. He was a chain smoker with yellowing blistered fingers and sloppy habits. He left a trail of ashes wherever he went, and I would find crushed cigarette stubs on the top of my cereal box, in the soap dish, nestling between the sugar packets in the sugar bowl. My mother hated his cigarettes too, and for a long period when I was in seventh grade walked about the apartment wearing a surgical mask. But our efforts were in vain, and after my mother left, my father’s smoking became nonstop.

“All right,” my father finally relented. “But if anyone lays a finger on you, kick him where it’s most painful and
add that your dad gave permission to gouge his eyes out too.”

My father and I argued in the souvenir shop. I wanted to buy several sweatshirts and he said no, that once we were in Madrid we should look like natives, not tourists. The sweatshirts I wanted had stencils of the Manhattan skyline with a round, red setting sun or the Statue of Liberty surrounded by sailboats. The cashier kept punching the price in, my father would shake his head, and she’d have to get her manager to void the receipt. My father bought himself an anthropology magazine which seemed to be covered in the same white dust as featured in the lead story about the Sahara. It didn’t seem fair to leave without any memento of my hometown, so I shoplifted a fifty-cent Empire State Building chrome lighter, which I would lose thirty minutes later.

As we waited to board the plane, my father suddenly told me to hold his place in line. “I’ll be right back,” he said urgently. “Don’t move an inch.” His face was pale and his eyes, usually blue, looked washed out like faded denim. I didn’t know if he was scared of flying, or suddenly terrified at the thought that this could all be a failed mission. At the airport bar he ordered shots. My father thought vodka didn’t smell. His choice used to be whiskey, but one of his students complained, and my father, rather than cut back, decided to change drinks.

I watched him make his way through the crowd, his shoulders hunched forward as if any moment he expected a crushing tackle. My father still walked with a slight limp from his accident. A bike messenger on Sixth Avenue had run over his left foot. My father claimed the messenger was high; the teenager said my father was drunk and crossed against the light. Both were probably right, and all I could think was what if the bicycle had been a truck?

My father wore his usual outfit: faded chinos, scruffy loafers with worn down heels, an old, Irish fisherman’s wool sweater with a wrinkled Brooks Brothers striped shirt and a creased navy blue jacket. I once heard a family friend describe my father’s style as “definitely decadent Andover.” According to my mother, he just picked up whatever was on the floor and hoped nothing clashed too much. That morning my father had visited the barber, and his pale blond hair was cropped so close that in some places you could see the pink scalp. The newly exposed back of his neck looked as fragile and white as an eggshell.

Over the loudspeaker a breathless female voice announced exotic destinations as if they were pop songs: Tobago, Port-Au-Prince, and Jakarta, which sounded to me like an exotic tea with rose-colored leaves. The lounge’s seats were filled with passengers or piles of luggage; one man in a trench coat embraced his leather suitcase as if it were a person he couldn’t bear to leave.

“Rachel,” I heard my father call, “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

He clutched a half-crushed plastic cup. A young woman in a purple coat stood next to him. At first I thought she was a stewardess, and then I saw that she too held a plastic cup with melting ice cubes and an Iberia airplane ticket.

My father crouched down till his face was next to mine. I recognized the faint scent of vodka, which always reminded me of watered-down formaldehyde.

“Who’s she?” I asked.

“Who?”

My father seemed surprised the woman had followed him and began rubbing his hands nervously together. “I think her name is Cynthia. Cynthia Lime.”

My father stood up and awkwardly nodded to Cynthia Lime. Strange women were always trying to pick him up. He was blond, blue-eyed, and tall, and had perfect teeth. Though he sounded like Cary Grant, most people thought he looked like Robert Redford gone to seed.

“Cindy, this is my daughter, Rachel. Rachel, Cindy.”

“Cynthia,” she corrected him. She was a tall and emaciated girl with a physique like a hat stand. Her dark hair was pulled severely back with a tortoiseshell barrette, and she smiled in a tight way that made her eyeballs recede slightly into her head. A large backpack hung from her shoulders, the bulging outer pocket crammed full. Cynthia unzipped the pocket, took out a plastic bag filled with what looked like cereal and weighed it in her hand.

“These are my grains,” she explained. “If I eat a tablespoon from each bag once every hour, I won’t get any jet lag.”

“Well?” I moaned to my father. “Are we leaving or not?”

“Of course, Rachel. I don’t hang out in airport lounges for fun.” My father grinned, and Cynthia laughed in a tinkling way that surprised me. I didn’t expect something so light to come from such a grave person. She laughed the same bubbly way as my mother, a laugh, I thought, which if you could taste it would be like the sweet cherry soda the waiters made with grenadine syrup in village cafés. Maybe my father looked at her in The Pilot’s Cove because he heard that laugh and thought, Elizabeth, are you here too?

“Well, they just made the final boarding call,” I announced, picking up my suitcase, “so I guess we’ll head home.”

“What! Jesus Christ!” My father grabbed his bags and ran to the counter, shouting “wait” to the attendants.

Cynthia followed, leaving a trail of cornflakes from a torn plastic bag. An angry buzzing greeted us as we made our way into the plane. I felt very powerful, as if we were important persons who couldn’t help but keep everyone waiting. My seat was in the third row. If I leaned to the left, I could see the door of the cockpit partially ajar, and the silver tips of the pilot’s pins. Next to me an old lady leafed through one of the airline’s digest magazines. I expected my father to heave a sigh of relief, or at least to ask her to keep an eye on me. But he was still engrossed in his conversation with Cynthia Lime, who told me when we were boarding that she was a freshman studying dance literature at Barnard College.