The English American (16 page)

A
FTER DINNER
,
Walt sits in his gray velvet armchair and I perch on the couch. He begins speaking with his face half in shadows.

“I wanted your mother as much as it is possible to want anyone,” he says. “Hell, I was twenty-five and stuck in the wrong marriage, I was a sitting duck. ‘Billie will destroy you,’ Mother said, when she met her. And she did. But not in the way Mother meant.”

Walt looks angry for a moment.

“They kept us apart. Oh yes, they did that.” He takes another sip of whiskey and squints his eyes.

“You see, kid, Billie didn’t destroy
me
—she destroyed the rest of the world for me. No one was ever as vibrant. Laughter was never again as helpless as it had been with her. And sex with any other woman never came close. I had to stay away from her in the end. Because you couldn’t get too close to Billie without being burned.”

As Walt is talking, the brown and blue pattern on the curtains seems to swirl a little. The whiskey is making my head fuzzy.

“You’re the best of both of us, Pippa,” Walt says, back in the room with me now. “You’re as smart and alive as Billie was. As I was. I knew you’d be talented. With our ancestors you had to be. Hell, you’ve got generals, concert pianists, artists going back two hundred years. Even the governor of a state!”

We sit in silence for a minute. Then, “The old man used to say, ‘Everything comes full circle.’ That’s for sure.”

“I keep thinking of the night, long after it all blew up, after you were gone and Margaret had given birth to our second child. I’d pulled the chip and done the right thing, killing a part of myself in the process.

“I hadn’t seen Billie in five years. I’d been driving myself as hard as a man can. Trying to forget. And, I might add, helping change the world in the process. A lot of Wall Street guys were running the world, and I went out to fight ’em by helping the conservative movement. Really we were Enlightenment guys who believed in God. We were not Jeffersonian. Some people called us extremists, but we weren’t. You took what soldiers you could get.

“I’d been working like a dog and was home for the first time in days. At one a.m., the doorbell rang.

“I’ll get it,” I said to Margaret. I put on my slippers and went down the stairs to the door. It was raining outside, and someone was standing on our doorstep. My God. It was Billie. I let her in.

“I told my wife there was an emergency at work. I told her to go back to sleep. Your mother was wearing a yellow slicker and her hair was wet and her deep green eyes alight with mischief.

“‘Hi Walt,’ she said, smiling. ‘I was passing through.’

“‘You were passing through?’

“‘I was passing through.’

“I pushed her into the library and shut the door. And while my wife and children slept upstairs I made love to Billie, on the couch, on the table…

“‘I had to see you,’ she said. ‘You were forgetting. I don’t want you to forget. I want you to long for me. So I came by. I don’t want you to be happy without me.’

“‘I’ll call,’ I said.

“‘Every year,’ she said. ‘On her birthday.’ She looked at me and I knew I would call. And then she was gone.

“We promised each other it would be the last time. I went back to Washington, started working, but then I’d smell her scent on a woman in an elevator—and my hand was reaching for the phone.”

I am rooted to my chair, watching my father take this journey back to the most painful time in his life. He is not looking at me. Then he begins speaking again, as if to himself.

“I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stay away from her. I didn’t.

“She came to me at home again. This time I introduce her to Margaret as a colleague.” Walt’s face is clenched in pain, his eyes squinting as he remembers.

“There’s an intense beauty in her. And its opposite.

“It’s the opposite that stops me saying to hell with it all, my career, my life, I’m going with the woman I love. There’s something about Billie that’s dangerous. I know this.”

He’s back with me now. The whiskey in his glass rocks to the left and right. We sit in silence. Than he looks at me and says, “Part of me feels we did the right thing. The other part of me yearns for the life I might have had with the woman I loved. And you. My precious child. My self, in female form.”

His voice breaks a little.

“It was a terrible time, kid. Hell on earth. But never forget this. You were the product of a great love. The kind of love that only comes once in a lifetime. Every day I thought of you. Wondering where you were. Our child. Our baby. Our little baby girl.”

His glass catches the light again. His face is relaxed now. His eyes are almost closed. He’s speaking very quietly.

“The cherry blossoms had just come out when I left you both at the hospital. I had the top down on my convertible and remember every excruciating moment of my drive home. Agonizing about the harm Billie and I had done to each other. Wondering what harm we might have done to you. Joy and unspeakable sorrow and outrage. And those pastel trees.”

Within a few moments he is asleep on the couch. I get up, cover Walt with a blanket, go into my room, and close the door. That night I am haunted by dreams of Walt and Billie. Billie is young, beautiful, desperately in love with my handsome, charismatic father. They’re dancing together, unable to stay more than half an inch apart.

Then something else enters the dream. Something malevolent. It cuts the air between the two of them. Suddenly I am a babe again, cut off from my people, thrown, alone and whirling, into the dark blue night.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
,
Billie calls. She’s coming to Washington so we can spend some time together, “just the three of us.” I do my best to savor the time I have left just with Walt.

We visit the Washington Monument and the National Gallery of Art. I help Walt a bit with his work.

Walt dictates letters much more slowly than I can type. The paper he gives me is headed “The Conservative Coalition” and has a post-office box address at the top and Walt’s cell phone number.

Walt is impressed by the speed of my typing. I am impressed by my father. Instead of taking a break after recent losses in Afghanistan, he’s already preparing to help the Ukraine.

Billie is running late. She’s had her hair permed. Then she decided she didn’t like it, so she had it straightened. Then she changed her mind again and had it re-permed. Then she had it “sun-glitzed.”

“She’s the love of your life,” I say to Walt. “This is a historic meeting. You must dress for the occasion.”

Walt puts on the red bow tie I bought him and a tux. We’re sitting upstairs in Walt’s apartment. Below us, Washington is drowning in rain.

The intercom buzzes. “I’ll go and get her,” I say.

I go down in the elevator. There, in the lobby, is Billie. She is wearing a cherry red coat. She’s damp from the rain. She’s not looking at me.

“I told Daddy I probably wouldn’t marry again, but if I did, it would be Walt.”

She takes off her red plastic rain hat, and shakes out her newly styled hair. The curls are even tighter than usual. She hands me the long, light tan camel-hair coat she is carrying.

“This is for you,” she says. “You can borrow it until you go back to England.”

When she says this, what I hear is that she wants me to go back to England. She doesn’t really want me around.

I feel pain, instantly, in my chest, as if my heart’s been hit with a hammer. Sometimes the hammer hits softly. Sometimes it hits hard. This time it hits hard, and I react, as I always do when I think someone’s going to reject me, by resolving to leave them first.

Walt opens the door to his apartment and we walk in. We stand awkwardly in the middle of the room. Billie and Walt look at each other and say nothing. Then Billie walks toward Walt. Her voice is soft. “You look as handsome as ever, Walt,” she says.

“Hello, Billie,” he says. His voice has a crack in it.

She holds his hands in hers.

So, finally, here we are. All three of us, in the same room, at the same time. My mother, my father, and me. I stare at Billie and Walt. They are no longer ghosts. But I still can’t quite believe they’re real.

I’ve started to shake. I pull my sleeves over my hands so they can’t see. I turn my back, pretending to look out over Washington. Actually I am looking at their reflection in the huge window. Despite her hair, Billie looks beautiful. Ephemeral, almost. And Walt is mesmerized.

What would it do to a family, I wonder, if the father fell hopelessly in love with someone else, but stayed with you and your mother anyway? I’m sure you’d feel it. It would be there, under the surface. You’d see sadness in your father—and hurt in your mother—you’d catch it, from time to time, and you wouldn’t know why it was there. Even if they lied and said everything was fine, you’d know it wasn’t.

Billie says it again. “You look as handsome as ever, Walt.”

I can’t tell what Walt is thinking. “Hello, Billie,” he says again.

“Just going to the loo,” I manage to mumble and walk quickly into the bathroom.

The hammer hits my heart like a metronome, in time with the raindrops on the window, over and over again.
Bang,
I am not wanted.
Bang,
I am not wanted.
Bang,
I am not wanted.

I turn on the tap so they won’t hear my sobs. Twenty minutes later I somehow manage to walk back into the sitting room, tear-free and smiling, ready to spend time with the parents who gave me birth.

Billie and Walt get up late the next morning. Billie is wearing a shiny light blue nightie made of satin, and Walt is still in his blue toweling robe. He makes us eggs and bacon for breakfast. Billie has her hair in aluminum foil. “Marie told me to re-treat my hair two days after the perm,” Billie says. She does not care that her head looks like a Christmas tree.

We spend the day hanging out in Walt’s apartment. In the evening we watch
The Producers
with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. I have never seen it before. During the roof-garden scene, Walt and I are laughing so hard we literally roll on our backs on the floor. Billie is curled up in Walt’s gray velvet chair, reading
Women Who Give Too Much.
“I prefer a more subtle kind of humor,” she says.

When the movie is over, Billie kisses the top of Walt’s head. Her perfume is sweet and strong and displaces all other smells from the room.

“Shall we keep her?” Billie says to Walt, smiling.

“I think the real question,” Walt says, quietly, “is, will she keep us?”

When Walt shows me photographs of people on his side of the family who look like me, and explains who’s who, Billie keeps coming into the sitting room and then leaving again. Finally she comes in, stands behind the couch, and starts running her fingers through Walt’s hair. “Let’s go to bed, honey,” she says. “Pippa’s tired. I’m tired. It’s late.”

Billie and Walt go into the bedroom and close the door.

I walk into the kitchen. My heart hurts terribly, and then the numbness comes back, stopping my tears. Which is a good thing, because the sign on the wall next to the fridge says “Crybabies will be shot.”

The next day, Walt says he has to go out for some kind of meeting, on which he does not elaborate, and Billie and I find ourselves alone together. I am feeling everything, and therefore nothing.

“What is it, honey?”

The words are almost impossible to say, because I am so afraid of the answer.

“Are you sure you really want me here?” I ask her, finally. “Wouldn’t you prefer me to go back to England? So you and Walt can be together? Without me?”

Billie looks genuinely astonished.

“Is that what you really think, honey?”

“Well, yes. And it’s hard because—well, you’ve had years to get together with Walt, but I’ve only just shown up.”

“Oh, honey,” Billie says. Her face is full of love. She pushes my hair out of my face and tucks it behind my ears.

“It’s not Walt I want to be with,” she says. “It’s you.”

The place where the hammer hit almost stops hurting. But not quite. I want to believe her. I look at her face. Her eyes are certainly full of love for me.

For a second, she is the mother who used to float above me when I was sent to stand under the clock at boarding school. Caring about me first. Loving me first. I drink in her next words, because I so want to believe them.

“I can’t get enough of you,” she says. “Don’t you ever think, for one second—now, look at me honey—don’t you ever think for one second that just because Walt and I…well, don’t think for a second it means I don’t want you. Because I want you more than anything in the world! You coming to live with me, and work with me, so we can really spend some time together—well, it means the world to me!”

I’m staring at my long-lost mother. I see nothing but love in her eyes.

“You are very much wanted.” As she says the words, the tightness in my chest loosens.

“Really?” I say, laughing through my tears.

“Oh yes, honey. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!”

She takes me in her arms. And I stay there, wishing, not for the first time, that Billie wouldn’t wear quite so much perfume.

Billie has to get back to New York for a meeting. I am to follow the next day. The moment she drives off, Walt and I run upstairs, turn on the video of
The Producers
, and watch it again, laughing even harder the second time. We don’t talk about Billie’s visit.

Walt gives me the glass ball with snow in it that he keeps on top of his television.

“Here,” he says, “take this. My father gave this to me when I was a child. It is something that is truly mine.”

When you turn the ball upside down, snow falls over skaters with scarves and hats on, and there’s a wizard in it too. When I turn it upside down I’m taken back to the night Billie and Walt met. They are skating around the ice rink at Rockefeller Center, holding hands and laughing. When I hold the glass ball, I am skating with them, invisible, waiting for their love to grow too strong to resist. So I can be born.

At five o’clock the next morning—I’m leaving early to beat the traffic back to New York—I accidentally drop my bag and the glass ball smashes to the ground. I can’t stop myself from crying. The noise wakes Walt, who comes running out of his room.

“I broke it! I’m so sorry!”

Walt crouches down on the floor, picking up the pieces of glass.

“Don’t cry, Pippa,” he says. “Don’t cry.”

His voice has a rough kindness about it that makes me cry more. I’m inconsolable. We are both crouching, picking up the pieces, my tears splashing against the broken glass. Then Walt points to the wizard and smiles.

“See, kid? You’ve released Merlin. The magic is out in the world now, Pippa. You’ve set him free.”

“Have I?” I say.

“You have,” he says firmly.

A warmth creeps back into my soul. I stop crying and leave with a sense that, in spite of my usual clumsiness, I have just done something magical and good.