Constance (12 page)

I was alone in the apartment one evening. I was again thinking about my father. Until I knew where he died he remained
somehow adrift in space and time, and not at peace. Nobody cared about him. No one cherished his memory, no flowers were left, no words spoken. I heard someone knocking. Who shows up unannounced at ten at night? A wild idea flickered to life in my mind. I went to the door but I didn’t open it.

—Who is it?

Silence. But someone or something was outside the door. There’d been a knocking. I’d heard it distinctly. With racing heart I asked again, louder this time. I am not a superstitious woman, but there are more things in heaven and earth—

—Who’s there?

I
am
a superstitious woman—

—Your sister.

Relief. Disappointment. She knocked again. I feared what would happen if I let her in. I wasn’t strong. I’d be overwhelmed. She knocked a third time.

—Iris, go away. Just fuck off, please.

—Let me in for a minute.

I was once her mother. I didn’t have it in me. I waited for a few seconds more, then I opened the door an inch or two. I saw her as though for the first time. She was showing the ill effects of sustained drinking. Her eyes were watery, her cheeks were puffy. I was still angry with her but before I could stop her she’d pushed her way in and taken hold of my face, her fingers spread across my cheeks and her thumbs pressed into my jaw. We stood there in the doorway and I smelled the liquor on her breath. We were both tall women, tall, angry women. She slapped me on the cheek and walked into the sitting room and threw herself down on the chesterfield.

—So why didn’t you call me?

—Iris, you have to make this right between us. I’m not going to.

She didn’t hear me. She sprang up and crossed the room to the drinks table. Her hair was in copious disarray. She was wearing a man’s tweed jacket and blue jeans, also those stupid cowboy boots. She asked me where the master was.

—Atlantic City.

—Wanna get stinko?

I knew what was happening. She was making it right between us. This was how she went about it. A normal explanation or even an apology was out of the question. Fortunately for her I didn’t want to discuss it either. An hour later the talk was starting to get loose. Iris was sitting on the floor with her back against an armchair, rolling a cigarette. She wanted to know if I thought she should move to Vermont. It was a dumb idea. I told her she had to go to medical school. I asked her if she’d talked to Daddy about it.

—No.

—But that’s why you went up there.

—I think he knows anyway. But listen, something’s happened.

She lit her ragged cigarette then busied herself picking tobacco off her tongue. What was the matter with this family, I thought. Why were they incapable of telling me the truth?

—I think he’s had a stroke.

She’d noticed it the morning after I left. He’d slept later than usual and when he came downstairs his speech was slurred. After a few hours it cleared up.

—What else?

—Tremor in the fingers of his left hand. That cleared up too. You know he hardly drinks at all now.

—So what does it mean?

—It might be dementia, first signs. It might be nothing.

Mildred Knapp was going to let her know if anything else occurred. I was skeptical. I thought it was a play for sympathy on Iris’s part. Get me worried about the old man, I might forget I hated him. She’d always had his interest at heart, not mine. Then I thought: Did I cause that stroke? I didn’t ask her. I wasn’t going to confide in her. But she’d read my mind. She told me I was killing him.

—Don’t be absurd, I said.

—Just come up with me for a night.

—Why?

—Clear the air.

—It’s too soon.

—Then when?

—I don’t know. Never.

—I’m going up for the weekend.

—I’m glad, Iris.

—So if you change your mind—

She was at the table, freshening her drink. I was afraid she was going to start talking about Eddie Castrol. I dreaded another maudlin session with her telling me how her love was like a tree. She sat down on the floor again, spilling whiskey on the rug. That night in the fall when I’d gone to the hotel by myself Eddie had told me about his daughter, and I’d seen a different man, I’d seen a father. I’d told him I was surprised Iris hadn’t mentioned that he had a daughter. He said he’d never told her,
but he thought I’d understand. I did understand. None of this could I say to Iris, of course. Fortunately she wasn’t finished with Daddy yet and I was spared a dirge. A little later she decided she loved me after all. She lifted high her glass and I poured her more scotch. I wanted her drunk. I wanted no more tricky questions and no soggy rambling.

—To life.

—Yeah.

She left soon after that and I gave her the cab fare to get downtown. I went back into the sitting room. I was still preoccupied with the glimpse I’d had, when she’d first knocked on the door, of the visitor I’d imagined waiting out there in the hallway.

She called me from upstate two days later. I asked her what was wrong. There was nothing wrong, she said, she just wanted to hear my voice. I stood at the window in my office as the rain came streaming down. The skyscrapers all around me were lost in mist. Their lights were mere bleary smudges in a kind of damp gauze and I felt that I was high in the mountains of that dreamy German painting, Sidney would know the artist. I let her tell me what she was doing. Not much, it was clear. She was bored. There was snow on the ground. Daddy’s tremor had returned but not the slur. Mildred said he’d forgotten her name a few days earlier. I thought of how he’d made us stay in a cold house at Christmas. That was part of it, an early sign. And him telling me he wasn’t my father, that was another.

—He talks about you all the time, she said.

—Oh sure.

She knew not to labor the point. If Daddy was in pain I felt no obligation to give him comfort. She did, but she loved him.
Anyway she was a better woman than I. She was a more
messy
woman than I, with her drinking and her men and her feckless abandonment of a career in medicine, but she had a big heart and I didn’t. It matters. Iris didn’t have to make an effort at sympathy or warmth or generosity, it came naturally. It takes courage to stay receptive like that. It’s much easier to
sour.
All the world’s a
sour.
But now at least I knew who my father was.

I’d become obsessed with this one question. I wanted to know where he’d died. It was so I could let him rest in peace. I’d had the idea he was knocking on my door the night Iris came. He wasn’t there, of course, I wasn’t mad yet, but what the idea represented, what it
meant
, was that I had to let him in. I owed him more than I’d yet admitted, out of fear of being overwhelmed. I talked to Sidney again. I asked him why he fell under a train. We were in the kitchen. It was again late at night, it seemed the proper time to talk about these things. I remember being aware of the ticking clock above the stove, the apartment otherwise silent. I heard the hum of the refrigerator, and outside, a city bus starting up. I felt as though we were the only two people awake in all of Manhattan.

—Shame.

But what was he ashamed of? Sidney was evasive. He was like a lawyer now. He said that Daddy could no longer give reliable testimony about the past.

—I think he accused him of something, he said at last.

He reached across the table for my hand. I didn’t want to be touched. I just wanted to know what happened.

—He said he attacked your mother.

I pushed my chair back and went to the window. I spoke without turning around.

—Sexually?

—Yes.

I didn’t believe it. This was Daddy’s doing. I asked Sidney if he thought Daddy was telling the truth.

—Do you? he said.

I turned to face him. I was furious suddenly. I remember I stood glaring at him, leaning forward a little, with my arms folded tight across my chest. There couldn’t be any doubt about it. It was an ugly, contemptible lie. I saw no reason to think Harriet was coerced, nor would I accept that I was a child of rape, if that’s what he was telling me. After a while I came back to the table.

—How did he find out? I said.

—Mildred.

—If Harriet was raped she’d have told him herself.

—Perhaps.

He stayed quiet. He let me think it through. It seemed normal to be sitting in the kitchen at dead of night talking like this. A moment later it was all very bizarre and disquieting.

—So did he actually
say
my father killed himself out of shame?

—I couldn’t get a straight answer out of him. I said he had to tell me for your sake but he was vague. I think he may have told him he’d be prosecuted and that’s what—

—That he’d go to prison.

—He’d go to prison. It wouldn’t look good for him, not if it was his word against the doctor’s. Not unless your mother—

He didn’t want to finish his sentences. He wanted me to put it together for myself. But it was too much for me then. I was
suddenly exhausted. I could barely stay awake. He followed me into the bedroom and within seconds I was asleep.

Later he said he believed Daddy was trying to tell him what happened, but that frailty of memory and, too, some residual moral revulsion had confused the thing in the old man’s mind.

—It’s tragic, he said. Your whole life all you’ve wanted is your father’s love. Then you discover he isn’t your father at all, and your real father died before you were even born.

All my life I’d been building on quicksand, was that what he was telling me? Unspoken was the question whether I had the resilience to sustain this fresh damage. Daddy threatened my father. He told him he’d go to jail for what he’d done. So my father threw himself under a train. Why couldn’t Sidney grasp the obvious here?
Daddy was responsible.

He took me to Penn Station. He didn’t want me to go to Ravenswood without him but he wasn’t free. There were no cabs so we had to take the subway. We were crushed together among damp irritable New Yorkers hanging on to leather straps being jolted to and fro with every jerk and judder of the train. It was slow and noisy. There was much screaming and grinding of metal on metal. Electricity sparked and flared in black tunnels. It was filthy, too, trash on the floor and graffiti smeared all over the doors and windows. Penn Station was worse. The work of demolition continued unabated, hammers clanging on girders, the roar of heavy machinery, men shouting. It was too much for me. Coils and wires spilling out of walls. The concourse had already been gutted and there was a crane in there now, and almost as bad as the noise was the dust. It got in your eyes, your lungs, your stomach. Sidney said we were being forced to eat Penn Station as a punishment for letting it die. I thought, the hell with Penn Station, who let my father die?

A week had passed. Iris had visited Daddy and returned to the city. Now it was my turn. I’d told Sidney I had to go see the
old man because apparently I was killing him. I said I wanted to be around for his last words. I hoped they’d be:
Forgive me.

—And you’d say?

He told me he hated how bitter I’d become. He said he wanted his sweet innocent girl back. I said that Daddy had destroyed my innocence by telling me the truth.

—I’d say, forget it!

I told him I just wanted the chance to say good-bye to it all: I wanted a last look at what I was about to lose forever. I said I intended never to return after this visit, it was just to lay a ghost. That wasn’t so far from the truth. I had to find out where he died. I owed it to him. It was the least I could do.

North of Cold Spring there was a fierce chill and the river was icy silver beneath a cloudless sky. I had a manuscript with me and I worked for most of the journey. I left the train at Rhinecliff and found a cab in the station yard. I had the driver take the river road. By the time we turned in to the driveway I was making a conscious effort to keep my breathing steady. I hadn’t called in advance.

I knocked on the front door then stood on the porch for more than a minute. Snow still blanketed the roof and clung to the slates of the tower. Icicles hung frozen from the eaves and there was frost in the upstairs windows. It was like a kind of ice museum, or a mausoleum, or a
sarcophagus
, and I thought, More than Harriet’s spirit left this house when she died. There’s no heart here anymore. There hasn’t been for years. I wanted very badly to turn around and go straight back to New York.

But there were signs of life. Firewood was stacked on the verandah and the stack was much depleted since Christmas. Wood smoke drifted from a chimney. Tools were propped in
the porch, an ax, a saw, and a hatchet. They should have gone back to the barn. Daddy got furious when tools were left out. And the truck was out front although it looked as if it hadn’t been driven in a while. Then the front door opened and Mildred Knapp stood there wiping her hands on her apron. This woman was married to my father. I stared at her with new eyes. I don’t know what I expected to see. She saw nothing.

—He didn’t say you were coming.

Blunt and chilly as ever.

—I didn’t tell him.

The house wasn’t warm. I followed her across the hall and down the corridor. I felt oddly exhilarated, knowing that she didn’t know that I knew who I was. If she did know she gave no sign of it. I tried to find something in her I’d missed before, some kind of connective tissue. Some
link
. I left my bag at the foot of the back stairs and went into the kitchen. She stood at the counter and poured me a cup of coffee.

—Iris is worried about Daddy, I said.

—Most days he’s like he always was.

She put the cup of coffee in front of me. She was a woman of sinew, lean and weathered in her frame and in her hands, and with a harsh, bony face. The untidy black hair was threaded with silver. She’d moved into the tower soon after Harriet died and she lived up there still, alone with her memories and her secrets. She was my father’s wife but not a word of it had ever passed between us. She was another one who’d kept the truth from me. To her too I was the living embodiment of betrayal. They both hated me. It made no sense. None of us controls the circumstances of our birth. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure that out.