The Story Hour (4 page)

She wrote for several long minutes and then flipped back a couple of pages to reread the psychiatrist's notes. Unlike many of the psych patients here, Lakshmi had not seemed fuzzy-headed. Maggie was relieved to find that Tom had not gone heavy on medicating her.

She was aware that she was still shaking as she took the elevator down to her office and was thankful that she was alone. It was a silly problem, this, but there it was. She had mentioned it to her therapist, Sophie Anderson, when it first started five years ago, but Sophie had shrugged it off. You can't be in this line of work, and be engulfed by human misery, and not develop a tic or two, Sophie had said.

Maggie had escaped it longer than most of her colleagues. For years, she'd been capable of detaching herself from her patients' problems, was able to enjoy her life with Sudhir—the home they'd built, the garden they'd planted together, the vacations they took, the friends from grad school whom they still visited, the visits by Sudhir's siblings and cousins from India. She'd had no trouble reminding herself that this was her true life. She'd come home from the hospital, take a shower, and let the running water wash away the tales of incest, domestic abuse, parental neglect, or child abuse; would compartmentalize the suicide attempts, the PTSD, the schizophrenia, the autistic younger brother, the borderline mother, the cigarette burns, the beatings with rubber hoses, the date rapes, the hoarse whisperings in the dark, the muttered threats to never tell or else, the guilt at having killed civilians at point-blank range. She prided herself on her ability to maintain the wall of separation between home and hospital.

Her confidence in her ability to keep her boundaries intact was so great that five years ago she'd convinced Sudhir to add a back porch to their house, where she could see clients in her private practice. It would be cheaper than the office space she'd rented all these years, she'd argued, and ultimately, the goal was to quit the hospital job and focus on her practice. The Cedarville winters were cold and brutal; it would be nice not to have to travel to the office after a day at the hospital.

And so, for her birthday, Sudhir had hired the brother of one of his colleagues to build the extension. They'd gone to Rome for two of the four weeks it took for the structure to be built.

Two days before she was to see her first client at the new office, her phone had rung. It was her day off, and she had just stepped out of the shower. She ran to pick up the phone, sure it was Sudhir calling to say he'd forgotten something at home and could she drop it off. “Hey,” she said.

But it wasn't Sudhir. It was her father. She knew from the way he wheezed into the phone a fraction of a second before he said, “Baby girl? It's me, Wallace.”

When had he taken to calling himself that instead of Dad? She knew she'd sometimes called him that during her angry college years, had said it deliberately, as a way of hurting him, punishing him for all the things she held him responsible for—for the four years when her mother lay dying of cancer, for the fact that she died despite the torturous, barbaric treatments and surgeries, for the fact that he had married Sybil Miller, a wealthy widow from Florida, and had moved to Naples with her soon after Maggie left for college, as if his years with her mother and her had been a mirage, as if all he'd done was bide his time, counting the minutes until she left home for the first and last time. And then there was the other business, but she never permitted herself to think of that anymore, the memory of it too dark and confusing.

Maggie felt a spurt of anger. Years and years of no contact and then a phone call out of the blue. The easy familiarity of calling her “baby girl,” as if the intervening years of silence had never happened, as if he had not ceased to be a father the minute she'd entered college, leaving her to fend for herself at Wellesley. Her first summer from college, Sybil had invited her down to Naples, but after two weeks of staying with them in Sybil's sprawling home, of watching her father and a woman she didn't know frolic like lovesick teenagers in the pool, of catching him pinch his new wife's bottom when he thought she wasn't looking, of seeing her father—a man who had worked two jobs for as long as she could remember, one as a maintenance man at Columbia University and the other as a clerk at the neighborhood convenience store—dress up each evening in a Hawaiian shirt and freshly pressed chinos to go to the country club to play cards all night, after two weeks of being around a man who treated her as if she were a distant niece he was rather fond of rather than his only daughter, whose eyes were mysteriously unburdened by the weight of those dark years when his wife had lain in her bed growing pasty and skinny as the cancer ate her alive, who dabbed a little aftershave on his shirt just before he left for the club, as if to keep his nostrils from remembering the smells of rubbing alcohol and morphine and bleach, after two weeks of suffocating in Sybil's air-conditioned, museum-like home, Maggie bolted. Used the last of her work-study money to buy a plane ticket to New York. Their old neighbor, Mrs. Tabot, her mother's best friend, had taken her in, just as Maggie had known she would. She would spend all four summers during her years at Wellesley in Mrs. Tabot's brownstone in Brooklyn.

“Hello? Baby girl? You there?” Wallace was saying.

“Don't call me that.” She hated how peevish her voice sounded and hated herself a bit more when she heard his chuckle.

“You sore this early in the mornin'?” he said. “Wake up on the wrong side of the bed, huh?”

She sighed. “What do you want, Dad?” she said. “Is everything okay?”

“'Course it is,” he exclaimed in the cheerful voice he now spoke in, which made him sound like an Amway salesman. “Sybil an' me are gonna be passin' your way tomorrow and thought we'd like to stop and see you, is all. We're drivin' to Oregon to attend her godchild's daughter's wedding. Thought it'd be fun to stop and visit with you and that husband of yours. You gon' be around?”

She'd ended up inviting them to dinner the next night. Wallace and Sybil had not been in their home even though she and Sudhir had lived there for over ten years. In fact, her father and Sudhir had met only twice. She had visited Sudhir's parents, who lived halfway across the world in Calcutta, more often than that.

The shock of seeing how old Wallace looked since she'd seen him last helped her to be polite to him for the entire evening. That and taking her cues from Sudhir, who, as always, was an impeccable host, attentive and gracious. She noticed the effort her husband made to play the role of the dutiful son-in-law, how he drew Wallace into every conversation, how he frequently refilled the older man's glass with the single malt he was drinking, how he was polite even to Sybil, who had only gotten louder and sillier with age. At the end of the evening, he insisted on driving the elderly couple's car to the hotel to drop them off, even though Wallace swore he hadn't had too much to drink. Maggie followed in her car.

Sudhir got into the passenger seat after they'd said their goodbyes and was quiet for the first few minutes of their ride home. Then he asked, as if picking up a conversation, “Do you really hate him so much? He seems harmless enough.”

“I don't hate him.” She took her eyes off the road for a minute. “What makes you say that?”

“The fact that you flinch every time he touches you. Like when he tried to hug you goodbye. I mean, God, Maggie. He's old. He's probably worried he might never seen you again.”

She was quiet, knowing he was waiting for a response but unsure of what to say. The blankness, the still whiteness, that always fell on her when she thought about those years with her father, covered her now.

“Mags?” Sudhir's voice was gentle, tentative. “Where did you go?”

In response, she turned left into the nearly empty parking lot of a shopping plaza and pulled into a space where there was no one around. “I'm going to tell you something, okay? Something I should've told you long ago. But I couldn't.”

Sudhir shifted in the leather seat. “Oh God. Don't tell me he—” he started.

She nodded. “Yes. I mean, not exactly. That is, nothing happened. Not really. He just . . . It began after my mom got sick. He rented a hospital bed for her and put her in this little room we had off the kitchen. And then at night he'd come and get me. To lie in bed with him.”

Sudhir made a choking sound, and she put her hand on his arm and stroked it absently. “It's okay. I told you. He didn't, like, do anything. He just, like, rubbed himself on me. He called it cuddling. He said we were comforting each other since Mommy was sick.” The old, familiar coldness began in her stomach and moved into her limbs as she spoke.

“Bloody bastard. I'll go to that hotel and kill him,” Sudhir swore, and she shook her head impatiently.

“Hey. Stop it. Like you said, he's an old man now. And God knows what he was going through, too, with Mom being ill and all.”

“How long did it go on?”

“I don't know. I honestly don't remember. Those years when she was sick—it's all a blur, y'know?”

“So it stopped when your mom died?”

“Uh-huh. Before that. Odell was in college then, and he came home for a week. I must've said something that made him suspicious. I just remember him asking me all kinds of questions. Made me feel queasy, the look on his face. God. I still remember the look on Odell's face.” Maggie gave a nervous laugh, the icy feeling now in her throat.

Sudhir undid his seat belt, leaned over, and pulled Maggie toward him. “Oh, honey. How could you have carried this with you all these years? Without telling me?”

She spoke with her head buried in his shoulder. “I wanted to. But I don't know—for years I told myself it was essentially meaningless. I mean, when I think of what horrors some of my clients have suffered, this is nothing. Know what I mean?”

She heard an uncharacteristic harshness in Sudhir's voice. “Nothing? Is that why you're shaking like a leaf?”

She half-heard him, remembering what had followed: Odell had confronted their father, threatened to expose him. “Listen,” Odell had hissed. “You so much as look at Mags wrong ever again, I'll move her out. And I'll tell the whole goddamn ‘hood you're a dirty old man. I'll expose you in church. I'll tell your boss and his boss. And then I'll kill you with my bare hands.”

Wallace had been defiant, then defensive, and finally, defeated. “A man gets lonely, Odell,” he'd said. “You too young to understand. Your ma bin sick for a long time. Besides, I ain't done nothing evil to your sister. We just cuddle, is all. I dunno what lies this girl is spreading about me.”

Odell's hand curled into a fist. There was metal in his eyes. “You need a woman, you go to a whorehouse. But you leave my baby sister alone. You understand?”

“I do,” Wallace muttered, but the look he flashed Maggie was pure hatred. Wallace had always worshipped Odell, his boy who was studying at Berkeley on a full scholarship. The weight of his son's contempt was more than he could bear.

“Odell helped me,” she now said to Sudhir. “He made him stop.”

“Then I'm forever in his debt.”

“But Dad never forgave me,” Maggie continued. “When Odell moved to Paris directly after college, I think Dad blamed me for it. Not that he'd ever say it. He found other ways to punish me.”

“He beat you?” Sudhir's voice sounded as if it had been brushed with glass.

She shook her head. “No. He just—ignored me. He was formal with me. Exaggeratedly polite. And distant. Treated me like I was made of porcelain. And—he never touched me again. Never hugged me or consoled me or told me he was proud of me. Even when I got in to Wellesley. And first chance he got, he moved to Florida. Suddenly, I had no home.”

The back of her throat hurt, as if a jagged piece of ice were lodged in there. “Even when Mom died. He . . . he just let me grieve. Alone.” How raw, how close, the pain felt. It surprised her. She had processed this with her therapist many times, until the memory had lost its sting. Or so she'd believed.

“I wish you'd told me this earlier, Maggie. My God, you're my best friend. I've told you every bloody thing that's happened to me. To think that you would carry this all these years . . .”

“I couldn't. I tried. I wanted to. Sophie always urged me to. But I couldn't.”

“Why not?”

Why not? Because it was too confusing, too shameful. Objectively, she had known that she was the wronged party. But always there was the nagging thought that she had made a mountain out of a molehill, that she and Odell—she, in the dumb ignorance of childhood, he, with the angry self-righteousness of youth—had not been sufficiently sympathetic to what Wallace was suffering because his wife had been dying a slow, harrowing death. But then she would imagine if one of her clients confided that her husband was using a ten-year-old child in this way, carrying her to his bed, rubbing against her, and she knew how outraged her response would be. And so, round and round in circles her thoughts would go.

There was also this: Before Wallace had withdrawn behind the wall of silence, of stiff formality, before he'd turned a cold, stony face to her, he had been the most affectionate of fathers. When she was a kid, he had laughed uproariously at her endless repertoire of knock-knock jokes, taught her to ride a bike, enthralled her with stories about his native Jamaica and how he'd come to America as a stowaway on a boatful of bananas, taught her card tricks, held her hand as the four of them walked to the Church of the Open Heart every Saturday evening. While the other men in the neighborhood spent their money on booze and drugs and alligator-skin shoes and stood on street corners tittering at the women who walked by, Wallace Seacole worked two jobs, paid for piano lessons for his daughter, shook his head at the “lazies” who hung around the entrance to their brownstone, eschewed alcohol or cigarettes (“them rich folks' habits,” he'd say), cooked lavish Sunday dinners for his family, his soups and stews steaming up the windows of their small kitchen. Until her mother got sick, theirs had been a family envied by all who knew them—and Wallace had been the beating heart of that family.