The Orphan Sister (23 page)

“My parents told me it was over—they’d take care of it. But it wasn’t technically over; it wasn’t a Catholic wedding, so even though they had the Church’s okay, we weren’t actually divorced. I was too upset to investigate, Clementine, I know I should have made it official, but—Clementine—”

I was fidgeting with the bridal portrait, and he yanked it from my hands. There was a quick tear, and I held a scalloped corner, while he had the rest.

“Don’t take my things.” He recovered himself, as if remembering he was the father. “Please.”

“Does she know about us?”

“Look, Clementine; I want to tell you the whole story, but you have to be willing to listen.” Dad stood and put his hand over mine on the dish towel. There was a rustle from Cheese’s cage—he was probably watching again.

“Fine,” I said, looking up. He looked old. He needed a haircut, and his belt was too tight on his belly.

“She’s dead,” he said, face screwed into someone’s idea of sorrow. He just looked odd to me, as though he’d cracked his tooth on a walnut shell. Bitter and pain, great together. “She asked me to
come when she was dying. And to the service just two days ago. I went without my usual . . . planning . . . because she died.”

Eli’s shower was running; I could smell the steam and the hotel shampoo my mother stocked in there—a soft, milky, almost sweet, clean smell.

“It was something that happened right after college—really, it started in college. We were babies,” my father said, twisting the dish towel. For once, he didn’t sound like an authority on the subject, as if he were testing out a new lecture for the first time.

“You were never a baby. You were born an old man.” I was digging in, trying to make a red mark somewhere, because as much as I needed to hear this story, I didn’t want to.

“Anyway, Clementine”—he held up his hands, I give up—“whatever you want to call it, we were young. She was in my theater class at Harvard. We had scenes together.”

“You took
theater?
Really?”

“Clem, I loved all kinds of things—I still do. Music, theater. My parents may’ve been uptight WASPs, but they appreciated a variety of things. I was allowed to dabble in the arts, as long as I became a doctor, as planned.”

“Was your father a doctor?”

He looked at me, puzzled, his head tilted like that of a dog listening to food rattling a bowl. “My father was a businessman,” he said, still quizzical. “You don’t know all this?”

“How would I know if you never told me? Did you sleep with her and Mom in the same day?”

Outside, there was lightning and a rumble of thunder, but no
rain. I was wearing only a sleep T, bright purple, too festive for this occasion. I hugged myself, wanting something. I heard the shower stop. Eli would smell amazing, and his face would be clean-shaved, and I didn’t know what we had done, though it had been incredible, like scratching an itch when the cast came off, like cracking open a coconut for the sweet, thin milk and oily, delicious meat.

“He sold auto parts,” said my father, ignoring my questions. “It was his father’s business, and it was lucrative, and he hated it. Three generations back, a Lord started selling carriage parts on the streets of Philadelphia, and after fifty years they had a city-block-size auto-parts store downtown. It’s gone now—everyone sold out. I thought you knew this?”

“Again.”

“Will you be mad at me forever?” he queried, a little aggressive, a little contrite.

“Yes. Grandpa.”

“He’s magnificent,” said Dad, getting almost misty-eyed. “And, Clementine, I love your mother.”

“He’s going to be okay—they both are, right?” Suddenly I didn’t want to go back, I wanted to go on, I wanted to divorce his first wife from our family, but I still needed to know everything.

But Dad wasn’t listening; he was still involved in his personal narrative. “I was supposed to be a doctor because it was the right thing to be. After my brother died, there was so much pressure.”

“Your brother?”

“He had leukemia,” said my father, a stranger, this man.

“Jesus—is there a reason you pretended you didn’t have any family, that you didn’t tell us we had an uncle who
died?
” How did
I get to be almost thirty without knowing all this? I mean, most families don’t keep so much to themselves.

“I was angry at my parents. I wanted to make my own choices, but after Adam died—”

“
Adam?
Your brother was an Adam? Does Odette know this?”

“I told her about my brother. Honestly, I thought I’d told you, too.”

“Odette and Olivia are the ones you’re supposed to mix up. I’m the different one.”

“Which is why it’s more important for you to understand,” he said.

I thought of Me and Da, their clean faces. How Me always had makeup on and wore a corset. How when we stayed with them, she let us help put on the cold cream to “take off her face.” Unlike my mother’s parents, I never knew these Lords at all, never had a chance to make up my own mind about them.

“I wanted to do something different after he died, Clementine—maybe research, maybe something else. But they wanted me to be a doctor; they’d planned my life for me, and when I said I wanted to change course—when I fell in love with Amelia—”

“Amelia? Her name is Amelia?”

“Her name
was
Amelia Cohen,” he said, sighing. “She’s gone, Clementine, that’s why this is all coming out now. She’s gone. Amelia Cohen Lord, only of course she dropped the Lord when we had it annulled—when . . .” He was actually misty-eyed. He wanted my sympathy for his dead extra wife. I couldn’t help it—I was a little sorry for him.

“
You
married a Jew?” I said. “So it isn’t possible to annul a
mixed marriage?
” This all seemed like theater of the absurd. I
heard Eli coughing in the bedroom. He made a loud show of emerging.

“That’s why I thought we weren’t married—a technicality. I didn’t know about my daughter for several years—”

“Dr. Lord!” Eli proclaimed as if he hadn’t been listening all along. “I have to get to work,” he said, leaning in toward me. “The mushroom study is really heating up. You may be using boletus in your operating room someday, Dr, Lord.”

“
Need me to interrupt?
” Eli whispered, leaning in, having appeased the bear in his need for small talk. I shook my head,
No, thanks. “I need to handle it on my own,”
I whispered back.

“Call?” Eli held his hand to his cheek like a phone. He kissed me, but I turned my head, so he made contact with my cheek, not my lips. Still, I felt it everywhere, his kiss, in my belly, in my arms and breasts, between my legs, absurdly electric and good. I shouldn’t feel this now.

“Okay,” I said to the door, but he was already gone.

My father was quiet for a minute, then went to the cabinet and selected a mug—my favorite mug, because unlike all the perfect second-home mugs with their blue flowers and smooth rims, it was stolen from the cobalt casual set in the kitchen of the big house. I had dropped it on the brick patio and chipped the lip, so it would’ve been rejected anyway, culled from the perfect crop inside. I was surprised to see him choose that one, so clearly not a part of his flawless life. He didn’t have Alzheimer’s—he had a horrific case of narcissism. And fallibility.

“How serious is this with—” He paused as if he’d forgotten my best friend’s name. He used to do that with Sophie and Mary, act as if he mixed them up, as if they weren’t as important as they
really were. I used to think it was a social ploy, but after seeing my father from a distance, I thought it was a mild social impairment. He just forgot, for a moment, couldn’t access his inner perfect memory, didn’t read the face as anything other than Clem’s friend what’s her name.

“Don’t change the subject.” I replaced the coffee beans and slammed the freezer door. “Don’t do that. This is about you—like just about everything in my life—about you. Just tell me everything and get it over with.”

I winced, feeling the way I felt before a blood draw, embarrassed to be nervous, embarrassed to be bothered by something so clearly necessary, a fear so ordinary. We were not supposed to be ordinary. But then, we were not supposed to be applying to vet school, we were not supposed to have dead boyfriends and uncles named Adam, we were not supposed to learn our father had been married before Mom—to dead Amelias.

“Okay,” he said slowly, drawing it out. If it was going to be on my terms, he was still going to have some control. “I married Amelia Cohen just before college graduation. I loved her. My parents didn’t approve—because she was Jewish, and because I wanted to crap out on med school and not
become a doctor
—and Amelia and I were married for three months and my parents wrote me out of their will. I found a job in a construction company—your father built houses for a few months, Clementine.” He paused and looked at his hands as if this were impossible. He was smug, narcissistic, and I wanted to call him on it, but that would prolong the Band-Aid removal that was his slow reveal. I wanted to see what was beneath the bandage. I wanted it over.

“And then I realized I actually
wanted
to be a doctor, that I
had done all this to rebel, to prove I wasn’t going to just be the son they wanted. My father hit me, you know, Clementine. I never laid a hand on any of you.”

I wanted to gasp and say I was sorry, maybe I was supposed to, but I knew if I interrupted, I’d never get the whole story, so I just looked down at the counter, counting the silvery flecks in the stone. Fifteen, sixteen . . .

“Anyway . . .” He heaved a huge sigh. I looked up and saw his eyebrows needed trimming. They were more gray than reddish brown. His nose hairs were too long, too, and his pores looked enormous, up close. I was about two feet from my father, standing in the kitchen of my carriage house, his carriage house.

“Amelia and I split up before I knew she was pregnant. My parents had it annulled, or at least they said they did. I loved her, but my love was entwined with my rebellion, and when I decided to attend medical school after all, she disapproved. She said I was sacrificing my own life to make my parents happy. I was, but it wasn’t only that.” He spilled a little coffee on the counter, taking a noisy sip. His fingernails needed trimming. The man was a veritable wreck, considering his usual impeccable grooming.

“It was also for me.” He poured another cup. I could feel the acid in my own belly. No milk, my father never drank his coffee with milk. He had ulcers; he had a hernia and diverticulitis and acid reflux and, generally, “weak guts.” His words, not mine. It was a joke that he could take everything in, it just ate him from inside. And right now, that seemed truer than ever. He was just a man, after all, and no longer young. I wouldn’t relinquish my fury, though.

“We fought a lot,” he continued. “It wasn’t playful after a little while—we were both just growing up at the same time, but neither of us was willing to make space—oh, it’s complicated.”

I snorted. Obviously complicated. She had a kid—
she
must have made plenty of space.

“Anyway, she never told me she was pregnant. I found out when I had a two-year-old daughter, but I only saw her every few months or so. I never told my parents—Amelia wanted nothing of them. Now I have a grandson. He’s ten and lives with his mother in San Francisco.”

San Francisco. I could’ve met my own half sister there. I could’ve met my half nephew and never known it. I thought of all the people I’d known there, scanning faces in my memory—the women who worked at the co-op, the Mexican-cooking class I’d taken in the Haight, the used bookstore on Twenty-Fourth Street.

“And she died, Amelia. She just died of breast cancer.” His eyes were watery, rheumy. Either he was old or sorrowful; either way, it was more than I could bear. I was wishing bitterly, ridiculously, that I could meet her. I
was
sorry for him, and I was surely sorry for this dead wife, but I couldn’t say so. Sorry, so sorry that he didn’t think I was important enough to know these things about his life. So sorry I wasn’t entirely convinced I was that important, either. Were there just so many women around him, constellations of women, that he didn’t focus on the individual stars? Or was I too dull, too far from his gravitational pull to matter? I wanted to matter.

“And that’s it,” he said.

“No. The money. You were giving her money.” This was a stretch on my part, but it only made sense, piecing together what Olivia had told me, and thinking about Mom, shredding the Accounts. All those years of counting and measuring. Years of being more careful than she had to be, because of his mistakes. But we had plenty; we always had enough, and sometimes more than enough. The principle of it was what infuriated me—why keep it a secret? We didn’t live in the 1950s. But then, he had.

“Yes,” he sighed. “I sent her money. But I didn’t know at first about the child. It was just part of what my parents arranged. I didn’t want it to get complicated, that’s why I kept track of everything so carefully—”

“
You?
You kept track of everything? No, Dad, Mom kept track of everything. Mom is the one who had an allowance, like a child, Dad, you treated her like a child. I don’t know why she put up with it, and I don’t know why you think that’s a good example for anyone. You have three daughters—” I stopped. “No, you have
four
daughters. And you’ve taught them to cover up their secrets and treat the people they love with suspicion and—”

“Now, Clementine,” said my father, trying to put his hand on my shoulder.

“No. You told me enough. Now get out of my house.” I pointed at the door. I was evil; I was uncaring. This woman he had loved had just died. I didn’t have anything against youthful mistakes, just colossal lies of omission.
Mom never knew he still saw her. Or did she?

My father raised his eyebrows at me.
Your house is really mine
,
his face said.
It’s all mine, you’re just borrowing it
. He clenched the ripped portrait and picked up the Chaucer.

I wanted to push him out the door, but couldn’t bring myself to touch him. Instead, I went into my bedroom, where I started packing. I wasn’t sure where I planned to go, but I knew I had to get out, do something. I imagined taking Mom with me, accidentally backing over Dad in the driveway as we made our getaway. He’d have crushed legs, but would live to suffer with them, and his guilt. I could see the sinews exposed, the blood filtering through the gravel like water draining out of a potted plant. Or else he’d be uninjured, but would run after us, calling toward the car like a lost lamb.