Dry Your Smile (32 page)

The intercom on Minna's desk made a burping sound—like a cyanide pellet dropped into acid under the seat of a condemned prisoner, Julian thought, shocked by her own mental association. Then Minna was already hanging up the phone and rising, again smiling that ingratiating
mou
of sycophancy.

He knows. He read the form and found the answers peculiar and suddenly put it together with E. Atreus and he knows and she's about to politely throw me out. Oh dear god, what if he knows? And what if he doesn't?

“The Doctor will see you now,” bowing her head toward Julian.

She opened the door beside the Dürnstein print and took a step backward. Julian walked through and heard Minna muffle the door shut behind her.

This office was only slightly smaller than the reception room, but just as impersonal. This desk, however, was not metal, but burnished mahogany, facing into the room in front of glass double doors that looked out—as he now did, his back toward her—over what appeared to be a modest flower and vegetable garden. Another door led to what must be the examining room. The details around her would blur forever in Julian's remembrance, except for three specific imprints: the dappersuited back of the man of medium height who stood behind the desk, and the two large silver-framed photographs that sat on a side table. One was obviously the young Minna, that obedient smile well in place decades ago. The other was an instantly recognizable baby photograph of Julian herself.

She stood just a step inside the closed door, waiting. Everything seemed to have stopped: time itself, her own heart. He turned, his gaze fixed on the clipboard in his hand, and glanced up at her. What she saw, more than registering any of his features, was a man's face suddenly paling to chalk before her eyes.

“Hello, David. I'm Julian. Your daughter.”

His eyes jerked involuntarily down to the clipboard, then up again to her, then down again, then up. So he had not deciphered the clues. She could hear his mind skidding, braking, careening in the silence of the room.

He regained control, and looked at her evenly. By the time he spoke, the voice was already contained, almost suave.

“I know.”

“Oh? May I ask how? You seemed surprised.”

“You look—very like your mother did when we—when I knew her.”

So that, too, had worked. Set the stage, design the makeup, let no detail escape you. She was wearing her hair as Hope had worn hers in old pictures—parted in the middle, with the sides loosely brushed back, shoulder length—even though she herself usually wore it knotted in a bun, to look and feel older than eighteen. So it had worked.

He came toward her. Each gesture now was weighted with years of fantasy scenarios, and as the movement rose and entered reality so rose the possibilities. In that instant, as it hovered, his motive hung in a balance equal with exquisite likelihood. Then, as it chose one action only, the other possibilities fell away for all time, as the striking of a first chord ends all music.

He did not embrace her. Instead, he continued past her, opened his office door, put out his head, and curtly told Minna that he wished not to be disturbed. Then he shut and locked the door. So died forever part of the hoping, while part of the panic was resurrected in its place, wildly, irrationally. They were locked in together. What did that mean? Why had he done that?

He retreated to the safety behind his desk.

“You will please to sit down?” He all but clicked his heels. The Viennese accent was pronounced, unmistakable, as if intentionally retained.

Julian moved to the seat in front of his desk and sat down.

She saw before her a man in his late fifties or early sixties, well preserved and well dressed—spotless white shirt, a discreetly expensive tie, cufflinks. The silver hair was worn in a fashionable haircut, but slightly longer than common, more in the European style. The features of his face offered her nothing of herself.

The eyes were dark gray, the complexion a smooth-shaven olive. The high forehead rose from a long straight delicately flared nose. There was a slackening line around the jaw, from age, which didn't belie the full, sensuous mouth or the thrust of a square chin below it. Hope was right, there was a real dimple in the chin. And when he had been younger, and blond, and the face and body lines sharp and lean, Julian could see that he must have been handsome.

“Well,” he said, leaning back in his chair, now in possession of himself, “I can say I
am
a bit surprised.”

“I … wasn't sure you'd know who I was.”

“I knew who you were the moment I saw you. You really do look very much as she did.”

“Any other features you recognize?”

“I see nothing of myself, if that is what you mean.”

“Well, the genes must be there. I wasn't born by immaculate conception.” She'd meant to sound witty, but the words came out edged with sarcasm. Bad beginning. She flinched. His eyes narrowed, the physician making a diagnosis.

“Please, why have you come? What do you want?”

So this was to hate him, then.

That the same man who had against all explanation kept her baby picture on his desk for almost nineteen years could, on finally meeting her, think of nothing to ask but “What do you want?”

“I want nothing of you. As to why I'm here, I should think that was obvious.”

“Perhaps. But frankly, I do not know.”

“For all of my life I've wanted to meet my father. Is that so very strange?”

He shrugged elegantly. “A great many people have never met their parents. It doesn't seem such an uncommon thing.”

“It's uncommon enough to have become something of an obsession in my case.”

“That's unfortunate. I understand that girls often are melodramatic … ah, intense, perhaps. But surely the world does not revolve around anything so trivial as—”

“Forgive me. But you can't possibly realize my position. It isn't a trivial concern to me.” Perhaps if she shifted from the emotional realm, demonstrated the intellectual … “Look. If I had been a son in search of my father, I would have been reenacting a major archetype. Oedipus. Theseus. Christ. Does my being a daughter in search of the same thing make it a trivial quest?”

He shrugged again. “And so you want …?”

“Only to have met you, seen you face to face, talked a while with you. Heard your side of the story.”

“My side?” he smiled. “There is, I am afraid, very little story.”

“Nevertheless, I would like, more than you can imagine, to hear it from your lips. And that's
all
I want.” She added, trying for a note which would betray neither humiliation nor bitterness, “I haven't come to blackmail you, you know. Or to harm you or your new wife in any way.”

“My new wife? You mean Minna? What is so new about Minna?”

“Well, I mean … your second wife.”

He swiveled slightly in his chair.

“I see,” was all he responded. Then he leaned forward and began playing with the silver letter-opener on his desk.

“And may I ask,” he murmured in a lower tone, “why the elaborate pretense? This strange false name in which you made the appointment? And why after so long, suddenly? Is your mother no longer alive?”

Something was going wrong. It was she who should be asking the questions, not he. But the impetus of interrogation already lay firmly in his grasp, and so eager was she to show herself to him—to have him understand the burden of ignorance she had borne for years, to have him comprehend the frail indomitable stubbornness of her pursuit—that she knew she would reply to any question he put her.
And
, chanted the chorus,
it must mean he too is curious. He cares. He cares. He always cared
. Some vestige of pride helped her to ask, with her most disarming smile,

“You mean the false name I gave means nothing to you?”

He studied the clipboard.

“No. I am afraid not. And please to not play games with me.”

Another chord, the death of more music. So this is what it was to fear him. She struggled back to her own ragged courage.

“It's not a game, and I'm not playing. My mother is still alive. She doesn't know I'm here. I gave a false name because, quite honestly, I had no idea whether you would receive me as myself or refuse to let me come. I traveled a long way to this meeting, and not only in mileage. I didn't intend to be turned away. But I gave that particular pseudonym as a possible clue to you. Please understand that I have been told very little about you. But I
was
told that you were once apparently fond of classic Greek drama. Aeschylus. Sophocles. Euripides.”

“That was many years ago. I fail to see—”

“Miss Atreus. From the House of Atreus. That house had only one daughter with the initial ‘E.' Her name was Elektra. In case, as it seems, you have forgotten.”

He looked mildly amused.

“And I was supposed to decipher this as some sort of clue? How very ornate, my dear.”

Her tragedy, interpreted by him as farce. So this is what it was to recognize each other.

“Perhaps not ornate to someone who remembered his Mycenaean history,” she ventured, as politely and insultingly as he had.
You are his daughter
, the chorus murmured,
you can hold your own with him
.

“Perhaps not. But a great deal of modern history has intervened and—preoccupied me somewhat.” He forced a short laugh.

So this is what it was to feel a lifetime of defenses shatter in tenderness.
This is your father, Julian, and he only has escaped alone to tell thee
.

“I—I would like to ask
you
a few questions … You don't have to answer anything if you don't want to, of course,” she added hastily.

“I may not know the answers, and I have no idea—or perhaps I do—what you've been told, but …”

Like an ancient biblical blessing: the permission. Of all the firmament of questions, where would she begin?

“Why did you never … Did you ever try to see me?”

“I saw you once. You were an infant, a few days old only.”

“That was all?”

“It was … unpleasant.”

“Seeing me?”

“The circumstances. Your mother, her sisters …”

“And you never tried to see me after that one time.”

“No.”

“How could you—I mean, did you never want—”

“It was not that possible—or that necessary—to follow up. Those women—your mother and her sisters—made it difficult. Distasteful. They were, I regret to say, quite … vicious at times. And—”

“Vulgar.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Yes.”

How would it ever be possible for her to discern in her memory of that gaze the shadow of approval cast by his surprise? Or ever to differentiate what she saw from what her desire cast, a shadow itself, over his face? And if it were, ever could be, approval, at what cost? That she deny the flesh which had cared for her sufficiently to live the lie that permitted the living? Somewhere in all this famishment for acceptance, she had to find an appetite—that much if no more—for honor.

“How did you imagine they'd regard you? As a prince with
droit de seigneur?
I realize, of course,” she threw in casually, speaking of her life in the third person and the passive construction, “that the child was unwanted. But you were the doctor, after all. You were the one who might have thought about a contraceptive.”

“I had other things to think about. Food. Shelter. Survival. And survival as much as possible on my terms. Or what the world had left to me of my terms.”

“It … could appear to some as a convenient excuse.”

He shrugged. “You are your mother's daughter.”

One honor gained, another lost. Pain rusted through her as if a scalpel carelessly left in the intestines from some long-ago operation had suddenly been twisted.

“I am also your daughter.”

An indifferent smile. “On one meeting?”

“No. Not on one meeting. Merely on fact. Or do you deny it?”

“I don't deny it, my dear. But I think it has little relevance to either of our lives.”

There was no key and no way to batter against a door sealed with such Old World politesse. Julian sensed treacherous tears rising. She forced them down.
That he will not have. He will not see you cry. Never
. But the voice that asked the next question embarrassed her by its thin, childish quality.

“Did you—ever love her? At all?”

“What a traditional question for a modern young woman.” Was he trying to tease her, his way of being kind? “But I fear I must tell you: the answer is no.”

“Never? Even—”

“Even when you were conceived? No. Oh, yes”—that smile—“you are shocked that I knew what you were really asking? You forget, you see, I am a pediatrician—which means I know women. I know their sentimentality about conception. Nature herself is not sentimental about it, you know.”

“She loved you. You knew that.”

“I knew that, yes. And certainly I was—fond of her. Your mother was an attractive woman. And she was good to me, I will say that. But she was totally unrealistic in terms of what she expected from me. A possessive woman, Hope. She wanted my whole life, my soul.”

“She wanted you to love her, perhaps. That might be a simpler reason for what later became her possessiveness.” How odd to defend the rights of one's enemy, as if to keep the adversary worthy of what had been one's own best, in a lifelong contest of wills. “She shared her life with you. Was it so bizarre for her to want you to share the building of your new life with her? It wasn't as if you already had an established way of existence. You'd lost your entire family, you'd crawled through the nightmare of the camps, you were a fugitive from the hell that Europe had become—”

He shifted abruptly in his chair. The posture stiffened, as if an old fencing master had entered the room.