Double Happiness (9 page)

The blonde woman in the fur coat from Bergdorf's leaned against the jewel case. Thick diamonds hovered behind her head like a crown, but she looked hurt, puffy-eyed. Olivia's father passed his large hand over the woman's cheek and held it there, completely obscuring her face from Olivia.

Olivia slipped back between the palms to their table. The waiter came over and poured her cocoa. He dropped three marshmallows into the top of her steamy cup. The orchestra played a polka. Then the violinist took a break, standing behind a partial screen sipping water with slices of lemon floating in the ice. He winked at Olivia. Her father's highball was removed by the waiter once all the cubes had melted.

All this time Olivia avoided looking toward the main lobby. Now she examined the horse pinned to her coat. The red ruby-chip eyes looked distended, pop-eyed, too large for the tiny sinews of the long gold horsey face. Olivia unhooked the pin and trotted it across the table. She stood up and trotted it over to the palms and slipped the horse's red eyes through the foliage, pointed in the direction she believed to be her father's. When the horse returned, Olivia asked it what it had seen. But the
horse was recalcitrant, and Olivia was forced to see for herself. She pried through the palms. Her father was gone.

The violinist played the opening bars of “Yellow Submarine.” Olivia returned to her seat and sat for a moment as if magnetized by the satin stripes of her chair.

She reached into her pocket to check for the twenty dollars her mother had given her for emergencies. There were also several dimes for phone calls and her father's private office number written on a blue index card. In her other pocket she had the messy tangle of bills from her father. She pulled them out and dropped them on top of the table. Although her mother had told her countless times how rude it was to display money, Olivia now arranged the money, not in denominations, but into a little stable for her horse. She leaned the stable walls up against the cream and sugar. She trotted the little horse inside for a nap and dropped the remains of a marshmallow inside, in case he woke up hungry. She stood the boxed panda pin on its side as guard. Still her father didn't return.

Olivia decided to call the office. As she crossed the small auxiliary lobby, the violinist played louder and more insistently as if begging her not to leave. Olivia dropped a dime into the phone and dialed the number written on the card.

Yes, breathed Ann Marie. When Olivia didn't answer, she said, Peter, is that you?

Olivia hung up. It was obvious her father wasn't there. She dropped all the remaining dimes into the phone and dialed her
home number. Her mother would know what to do. The phone was silent for a moment, then screeched like a siren in her ear. She must have done something wrong. She put the receiver back so she could try again, and all the dimes disappeared with a jangle. For the first time she began to feel afraid.

Olivia arced back toward the Palm Court. Tea had given way to full-blown cocktails. The band was bouncing, and a woman in silver sang lyric fragments. Olivia checked inside the little money stable; the horse was sleeping. She looked one last time for her father. The violinist edged into “Send in the Clowns,” one of Olivia's mother's favorites, and Olivia decided to go home.

Outside the sky was a deep purple over the black trees of Central Park. Several horses fronting carriages stamped and pawed their cold feet. Olivia wondered if it would cost more than twenty dollars to take a carriage to Penn Station and began to approach the first. The artist was stacking up his paintings. He threw one on top of the other and Olivia saw the one she liked tossed face down into the pile.

Someone touched her elbow. She turned to see Nat's solemn face. His goodwill was coming to her as thick and complicated as a honeycomb.

Olivia! Where are you going?

He had the car waiting in front of the fountain.

Home, she said.

Then it occurred to her that Nat was here for a reason. Her father was planning a surprise, and this hiding was part of the game. He was teaching her something. She searched Nat's dark brown eyes. They would tell her the right thing to say.

Are you going to go get my father now? she tried. Nat's face seemed suspended.

Your father said you should wait here until he comes for you, said Nat, but he said it so slowly Olivia knew he was lying.

Did he really say that?

I know he'd be unhappy if you left.

The street had become very quiet. Olivia pushed her hand through her hair and waited for something, maybe for the light to change, for the traffic to start moving. Nat was talking, but she couldn't hear him. She looked up into the sky, the white snow twisted like smoke that went up forever. She put her hands together and laced the fingers. The artist pushed his rusty cart right past her. His face looked frozen solid.

Wait! she said, but the artist kept going, pushing his cart toward Fifth Avenue. Wait! called Olivia and she ran to catch up with him.

I want to buy
Dawning Day
, she reached into her pocket for the twenty dollars her mother had given her. The artist took the bill, rather quickly Olivia thought, then stood there looking at her.

Dawning Day
, she said and nodded toward the stack of paintings in the cart.

The artist began to lift the paintings one by one. When he got to hers she cried, There it is! He pulled it from the pile, gave it to Olivia, and then seemed in a hurry to get away.

Nat squinted at the painting, Oh, that's a doozie, all right. He withdrew a white handkerchief from an inside pocket and wiped the surface of the canvas. The odd specks that had attracted Olivia in the first place began to look brighter, as if lit from behind. Just in that moment, her father came spinning out of the Plaza, breathless. When he spotted Olivia beside the fountain he slapped his chest as if she'd thrown something heavy and hit him dead-on. He ran to her and dropped his hands to her cheeks. She could smell him, the clean saddle smell mixed with something sharper.

Don't ever, ever, ever do that again, he said.

Her mother was waiting for her at the train station in Red Bank. Olivia could see the Lincoln parked in almost the same spot; she could see her mother's face glow red as the cigarette lighter made an arc through the dark space behind the windshield. When Olivia reached that end of the station her mother opened the car door. She hopped out and dropped the freshly lit cigarette to the ground.

Olivia felt the sudden burden of all she had failed to bring back with her: the dress, the pins, her father. Her mother found her and wrapped Olivia in her thin arms and kissed the top of
Olivia's head. It was hard letting her mother go. She smelled like a snapped twig, and the wool of her coat was prickly. Olivia pushed her cheek against her mother's lapel.

What's this? said her mother, tapping the painting under Olivia's arm.

It looks like Rome, said Olivia. I bought it myself.

Her mother pulled out a lighter and held the flame toward the canvas to see.

God, if that's Rome, we're in trouble.

Look at the specks, said Olivia. The white parts.

What are those?

I don't know.

Hmm, said her mother. Lights, maybe.

Olivia held her mother's hand until the train left the station, then she let it go and carried her painting to the dark blue car. Inside, she held it carefully on her lap as if the paint were still wet.

H
E BROUGHT VANILLA CANDLES
. S
OME GIFT
. M
Y MOTHER
squeezed them into old silver on the mantle and lit each one. They scorched the wall. Even our best sofas couldn't make up for the cheesy, rundown way the wall looked now. Still, this was London, not New York, and my mother didn't even seem to notice. She was on a date. Derek Duncalf, the anesthesiologist, wrapped his legs down around the last curve of the love seat. My mother bent over, pushed a log back inside the grate. I was saying hello.

Hello, Dr. Duncalf.

My mother said that Derek Duncalf put his patients under by talking to them. But his tedious droning didn't cure him from occasionally leaping across all obstacles to pin my mother to the wall. My mother liked this. She enjoyed the telling of it. She giggled and described his whining and pleading. Their dance of love was set. She would never give in; he
would sleep, then spring, then be rebuffed. He sent her flowers: huge sprays, branches hacked from trees in first budding, wired into fanciful shapes. They would lean against the empire mirror in the foyer and my mother would sniff at them, then snore, then laugh.

We were waiting for my father. My father had a small bachelor flat not a block away from us on Upper Brook Street. Every day he would pass by on his way to the office, on his way home. Sometimes he would stop in for a drink. All his things were still with us, half-packed in bags, a favorite painting taken down from the wall, rehung, taken down. Six months of this, eight months, nine months. My mother began to date. My mother began to wear falls—hair attached from the crown of her head that ran down the length of her spine. She loved to wear hot pants and silk shirts and lace-up boots and false eyelashes and brown lipstick and no bra. And though I could see only her faults, the thickness of her upper arms, the glazed look in her encumbered eyes, men came regularly to her living room.

One day Derek brought a friend, Dr. Dan Ovita. Dr. Ovita was from Israel. My mother made a huge fire in the marble fireplace. The flames tossed wild shadows on the silver of her caftan. My mother tossed her fall from right to left, and Dr. Dan Ovita studied her and me. He studied us both, and his gaze made us forget to look out the window at half past six to determine whether my father would be coming for cocktails that day. As it happened, he didn't; not that day, not the next.

Dr. Dan Ovita talked about the war in Israel. The war was fresh. The soldiers were young men and women not much older than me. They were fighting to keep their homeland. Dr. Dan Ovita was the most famous hand surgeon in Israel. He told us that hands were more fragile than butterflies, and when he was able to fix a mortified palm, it seemed a miracle, even to him.

I couldn't forget what he said about hands. My own hands were being leeched of their delicacy by the stones I was gaining. Stones. In London we weighed ourselves in stones—pounds were for money. No amount of dieting, or diet aids, or worse things—abrading my own throat—could help me. It didn't matter. I was getting bigger by the day. My breasts bloomed. But I saw them as two folds among many. By the time my father had been in his bachelor flat a full nine months, I was heavier by seven and a half stones, fifty-four pounds, a pound and a half for every week he had deserted us.

My mother explained: my father needed to forget. We reminded him of all the things he could no longer stand to think of. Without us to remind him, those bad memories shrank and disappeared. He forgot my baby brother's death; he forgot the false indictment and jail; he forgot betrayals and infidelities. He forgot the woman who wrote to my mother saying she'd kill herself, then did, falling from a second-story window. Not so far to fall, but still, she died. Without us, my father was beginning life all over again. He was brand-new, my mother said. He still missed us as people, though, and that's why he
visited without calling first, as if he still lived with us. He used his own key, he showered and changed, he smoked and made phone calls. Each time, after he left, my mother found reason to hit me. Once she punched my right breast, and the sensation in that nipple flew away for good.

Dr. Dan Ovita told me that sometimes the men's and women's hands he operated on blossomed like flowers. They became saturated with feeling. Patients took up painting who'd never noticed the color of anything before. People played piano and guitar and mandolins and their families felt haunted and grateful at the same time. One patient who could neither paint nor fathom a tune made hand shadows on walls move like living things. Dr. Ovita was talking about physical therapy, not magic. There was nothing magical about Dr. Ovita, which is why I liked him. He never disappeared; he never changed shape.

One evening Derek Duncalf and Dr. Ovita drank grappa with my mother. They were celebrating because Dr. Ovita had convinced many surgeon volunteers to go to Israel for three-month rotations. By the end of the week he'd be home setting up field hospitals on the borders. They all nibbled on tiny sandwiches I made of pressed-down brown bread and watercress. Their stomachs were barely lined by such things, and the grappa felled them each like a tree. Derek Duncalf's boneless legs rippled down to the floor and I thought his shoe might catch fire, it was so close to the flames. But Dr. Dan Ovita repositioned
Derek's body like a kindly choreographer might before melting himself into a graceful puddle on the carpet. My mother's head flipped to the left, one of her breasts scrubbed against her blouse. Under brown silk the nipple looked gnarly and rough, something to scour a pot. That scared me. I couldn't help but run my tongue over my inner cheeks, though she'd never nursed me. Then I went to bed.

Even I was asleep when my father came the next morning to find his blue tie. But I heard him weeping, as I had so often in my dreams. My father's crying sounded like the most deserted baby's, a howling, choking wail. I found him on the side of the bathtub holding his blue tie. He said he didn't understand. He just didn't understand. I felt afraid to touch him. His mouth looked swollen.

Daddy?

Don't, he said.

The only things I could think to say were old things, good things. More things he couldn't stand us for. Especially me. I remembered everything.

I went to find my mother. The curtains were only half-pulled in the master bedroom. Light slipped in from the courtyard. My mother was still semidressed. Hot pants crinkled, wedged at the tops of her thighs, stockings all snagged. Her fall lay at the foot of the bed like a dead dog. Derek Duncalf was stripped completely and his body had little contour, just flesh and hair and a short stub of a penis I could barely stand to look at. He
smelled like smoked salmon. I had to stop breathing when I leaned across him to shake my mother. She sat up and her breasts fell into order, the nipples perfect. My father's sobs from the bathroom pulled her toward him, just as she was, like a sleepwalker.