Our Father (9 page)

Elizabeth kicked through dead leaves. The sun, pale, still low in the sky, spilled faint light on the forest floor through a stand of leafless maples and oaks, where she stopped for a moment to warm herself in the pale light. So quiet. No one up yet, no coffee made even. I don’t mind making it myself.

Mother trying to keep up appearances, pretending we had help, scurrying around the apartment, was it Edith Wharton’s mother said, “Drawing rooms are
always
tidy.” Whenever it was her turn to entertain her lady friends she’d pretend she was a lady of leisure. Lucky she got to keep the wedding presents, the silver tea set, the Rosenthal crystal.

Actually, I think she got decent alimony. Just not enough to keep her on Beacon Street. So important to her to be part of that wealthy crowd. Why she fell in love with him. No, be fair to the bitch. It was also the old name, the status, the class. She grew up in a three-decker in Somerville, eight children in a three-bedroom flat, laundry hanging on the lines out the back porch. Yelling Friday nights when the men got paid and boozed up, her father always waving his belt at one of them. Her mother old at forty, hardly any teeth left in her mouth and a front one black. Mother had ambitions or anyway dreams. Paltry as they were: “If you are bright and accomplished, Elizabeth, someday you may marry a Big Man.” Well it was the 1930s after all.

Lost her family really when she married Father. His turned its back on her, but not on him. Father’s mother—did I meet her when I was a baby?—refused to go to the wedding of her son to a Catholic. And Mother’s lout of a father, Jack Callahan, hated mother for marrying a man who thought himself too good to set foot in his house. “She married out of the faith,” he’d yell when Grandma tried to defend her—as if he cared about religion. He hated me for being Father’s child; Father hated me for being hers. Father hated Mother for forcing him to marry her; Mother hated Father for forcing divorce on her. My legacy: hate. What a family. Callahan kids with bruises and bad memories grew up to beat their own kids. Mother couldn’t stand it after a while, stopped going to Somerville. Both dead now, li’l ole Gramps and Granny. Sweet dreams.

Her dreams: I became their instrument. All I ever was to her? Even now? Still, that’s more than I was to Father. And to Clare?

Clare loved me. I know that. I’m sure of it.

Mary loved me too. Why couldn’t I love her?

She walked on, hands in her pockets, kicking leaves, raising leaf-dust, making noise, swsh swsh. How it sounded when I was little, when I was here at Thanksgiving, Christmas. Long walks by myself, get out of that house.

Had to get out, my innards aflame with envy. Envy hurts, it screams, burns. Mary and Laura and all the attention they got, the cousins too. My aunts and uncles—
his
brothers and sisters and in-laws. All of them looked at me coldly, seeing my lower-class Catholic mother, one step removed from a prostitute, me one step removed from a whore’s bastard. What would they have thought if they ever met Ronnie! Hah! Mary such a spoiled brat, used to being waited on hand and foot. Expected everything, expected everyone to love her. She had all that love and still she clung to me, always seeking me out, Lizabit, play with me, Lizabit, I color with you. Sometimes I’d give in, go swimming with her or play hide-and-seek in the woods. Not much fun with only two of us and she so little, five to my ten, seven to my twelve … I stopped then. Not a child anymore. No other children ever here until Alex. Alex born when I was sixteen, already planning my getaway, to get out for good. Took me another few years. No children visited regularly. Aside from family parties, the only visitors men in limousines, no children with them, imagine a limo with a sign in its window “Caution: Baby on Board.” Hah!

But what did I care, I didn’t get along very well with kids anyway. Nothing mattered but using my mind, thinking. Finding my intellectual equals. Certainly didn’t find them here—Mary, what a joke! Father understood politics and money but what he had wasn’t really intelligence, oh he’s smart enough I guess, but not like Clare. What he was was known, part of the inner circle, accepted by the right people, into inside conversation for years, privy to the secret springs that drive a state: street smarts a la Constitution Avenue.

But Clare! God I was so excited, stimulated, oh god the desire that surged in my gut! Something I’d never felt before. Me twenty-one to his forty. Sitting in his study while he talked, so easily, all of it in his head, never needed a note. His blond forelock falling in his face, tying a capitalist cash economy to the philosophers, to Hobbes and Hume and Adam Smith of course and then Darwin and Herbert Spencer, to painters, writers, capitalism creating art forms, the novel, family forms changed by removing production from the home. To Marx, who really understood capitalism, its potential.

Clare so golden, so beautiful and brilliant and passionate, Ellen so sour, I couldn’t understand it, how could she not love being married to him? How I envied her. She wasn’t jealous of me, looked at me with contempt another stupid little protégée as if she knew something I didn’t. Well, she did didn’t she. But I could never stop adoring him. Even now. She’s still alive I hear, living in a cottage in the Cotswolds, doing her vapid watercolors. While he in a cold cold grave lies. …

Will Father die unscathed, with nothing said between us, not the one thing or the other? If I asked him straight out how he felt about me, he’d probably laugh. But if he didn’t love me why did he say he did, well of course I suppose in that situation he would. But that didn’t have to happen. Was it love? Could anything I did hurt him, make him suffer? Is that the definition of love, putting yourself in a position where someone can hurt you? Once in a while a glint in his eye I thought might be pleasure in me, in my brains. I thought he liked me that day I went to him in Washington and told him I wanted him to get Clare a job in the government commensurate with his stature and not the puny little job he’d been offered,
or else
. I’d prepared myself, I was tough. He was amused. That day he saw his own flesh and blood. I probably couldn’t have damaged him no matter what I did. He must have known that but he did it anyway. But said “I don’t want to see you here again.”

Still, even after that I kept getting summonses from his secretary, family get-together at the Lincoln house, July 4. Be there. His brothers and sisters and their families, all the cousins, famous friends, all the bedrooms opened, a huge staff in those days. A hundred people milling around, he courtly, showing off: my daughters Elizabeth, Mary, and Alexandra, their mothers named them after queens and I’m sure you can see why. Oh he was good, so gracious. Mary with the husband of the moment, children. I took Clare a couple of times: what did they think? Father respected Clare, they spoke the same language somehow. But Father never again spoke to me privately, personally. Only that cordial public persona, what a master he was, fooled everyone. I never mastered it. Only men can really get away with it: the world is my oyster. Women are the pearls.

Fewer parties after Amelia left. But some. And he still called me, Mary too. But never Alex. What did Amelia do to him that he cut off her child so completely? God knows he hated my mother but he still called me. Had me called.

His eightieth birthday the president came for an hour. Helicopter on the front lawn. Photo op, the
Globe
,
People
. Grand old man, distinguished elder statesman. He still looked fine, as if he might live forever. Arms around his grandsons. Children not mine. I end with me: she goes on. My work my immortality. I’d like to see her write a book on capitalism as the triumph of Man the Creator, everything from nothing. Clare’s ideas extended, deepened. If I ever finish it. No heart since he died.

Loved reading sections to him sprawled on the couch in my apartment Sunday mornings, a Bloody Mary in one hand, cigarette in the other, those eyebrows raised, always ready to make some witty supercilious remark. He’d wake me up after his morning jog, make brunch with me sitting there drinking coffee in my robe, an Upton no-no. He’d make omelets or eggs benedict, hollandaise sauce from scratch. Always impressed me. Or bring bagels and cream cheese. A ritual. Lying around the sunlit living room reading the
Washington Post
and the
New York Times
. Happy. Always scoffed at me doing the
Times
crossword puzzle—“such a middlebrow hobby, Liz”—but he loved knowing an answer when I asked. Careful to ask about the clues he would know: Greek letters, quotations from poetry, geography. River in east Borneo. How did he know things like that? Then I’d read a new section out loud, him listening with his whole self, his body intent, face gleaming. Cared about my work, wanted it to be great. Didn’t care to do it himself. His fame established among the cognoscenti. His immortality guaranteed. The man who showed Keynes was wrong.

But now, 1984, Orwell’s year of the apocalypse, something new happening, recession 1981–82, well they’re to be expected, necessary purgations of waste, of course they hit the poor first, that’s par for the course, that’s not what’s frightening me, it’s the new systems, new approaches, make me old-fashioned, global markets, global accounting, transnationals moving to countries without labor laws, junk bonds, hostile takeovers, last year Siegel saved Martin Marietta from Bendix, something new is being unleashed exploding the way Clare felt something new had exploded in the fifteenth century, thirst for something, powerful drive trampling down everything in its way, things that deserved to die anyway of course, can’t hold Man back. One of the great purges necessary for the survival of the fittest, catharsis that cleanses the economy, purges wasteful lazy workers, methods. Can’t concentrate on the misery, have to look at the big picture, future of the human race.

A church bell clanged eight times in the distance, each note trembling on the air: Sunday morning. Stomach pursed up, she headed back toward the house, then slowed in a patch of sunlight: I could take a leave of absence! I could work on it here! Fly home, pack up disks, books, files. Have to have them sent, too much to carry. That would take days. Maybe drive, take the Alfa, no one here uses it.

Her mind stopped. An image seeped into it like ink on soft paper, an October day in New England, Elizabeth driving Clare’s Porsche, he sitting beside her sulking because she refused to hear a Brandenburg Concerto one more time, she’d put on a tape of Bill Evans playing “I Was Up with the Lark Today,” the music lilting with an easy joy, driving down a road tree-lined like a
chemin cru
in Normandy, a tunnel of scarlet, orange, crimson, shades of gold, the red maples coloring in a corkscrew pattern, around and around, shading from orange to vermilion to maroon, he beside her smiling after all, she steeped in contentment, thinking that whatever the cost, it was worth it.

Was it?

There was no change in the old man’s condition, said Dr. Stamp. The sisters understood that he came to the intensive care ward especially to see them at eleven Sunday morning, that he made his rounds early, before eight, and often did not come in at all on Sundays. Elizabeth also understood that he did not want them to move the great man from this little local hospital to Boston: if there were television cameras or journalists, he wanted them to focus on him. The sisters were content, Mary especially let him know she appreciated the personal care Father was receiving here.

Elizabeth had called Dr. Biddle to ask him to recommend a neurologist, and he had named the same Professor Roper at Harvard. But she told Dr. Stamp they had taken
his
recommendation and that Dr. Roper would be arriving tomorrow afternoon around four. Would that be convenient? He was pleased (such a grande dame), he left the room almost bowing, walking backward.

Such are the rewards of fame and wealth. Ronnie smirked.

The sisters stood around the old man’s bed and studied him for ten minutes, then left.

In the car afterward, Alex said tentatively, “Do you think it’s true that people in comas can hear what is said around them? I mean, I read that someplace. Do you think it’s true? Do you think we should talk to him, say who we are and tell him we are hoping he recovers soon, and that we are thinking and praying”—she saw their looks—“well, anyway, say something to let him know we are there and we care?”

The other three gazed at her.

“Do we?” Ronnie grinned.

Alex charged on. “Or we could play tapes. You know, calming music. They have these tapes of the ocean, waves breaking, gulls, the roar of the crashing surf. They might calm him if he’s upset. And he’s probably upset, you know, being unable to speak and everything. You know?” She studied their faces, desperately seeking response.

No one looked at her.

“What would you say to him?” Mary asked after a time. “You hardly know him.”

“I know,” Alex worried. “That’s why …”

“He was no father to you. He left you when you were—how old?”

“No, we left. Mom and I, we left suddenly. In the middle of the afternoon. It was right before my tenth birthday, I remember because I was sick on my tenth birthday so I missed my birthday
and
Christmas, all at once! I don’t know with what, something funny, a fit of some kind. It wasn’t epilepsy,” she added quickly. “I don’t think. At least, I haven’t had a fit in years. Since I’ve been grown.”

“Okay,” Mary said in irritation, “so he threw you out. In any case, you don’t know him.”

“He did love your mother,” Elizabeth mused.

Alex’s entire body yearned toward Elizabeth, her glance a plea. “Did he?”

“Didn’t he summon you to family parties?” Elizabeth asked.

“I don’t know. … I don’t know. Mom never said.”

“Well, it is strange,” Elizabeth said. “He may not have been an attentive father but he was proprietary: he wanted his daughters to appear at ceremonial occasions; he wanted to show them off.”

Alex’s eyes misted. “I can’t tell you how I longed for him—longed for my father. Of course,” she added swiftly, “I don’t mean Charlie wasn’t wonderful. But of course, Mom didn’t marry him until a few years later. And I didn’t understand why I didn’t have my old father and why Charlie was my father now. I do envy you having a father,” she said timidly to Elizabeth.