The English American

by Alison Larkin

  “What were you thinking we’d do tonight?” he says. “I could take you toMy Fair Lady .”

  I remember going to seeMy Fair Lady with Dad when I was about eight. I loved it so much, I learned all the parts on holiday in Scotland one year and performed a two-person version of it with Sally Gibbs, to our parents. Actually we performed it in the bathroom of the farmhouse we were staying in, because it was the warmest room in the house. The grown-ups all sat around the heated towel rack, and Sally and I performed the entire musical for them on the ledge in front of the bath. It’s my favorite musical, and it’s Dad’s favorite musical. Thinking of Dad, for a second I feel guilty and disloyal.

  “Aren’t you tired?” I ask, bringing my attention quickly back to Walt. “It was a long flight, and with the time change and everything…”

  “Good God, no! The night is young!”

  “How long are you staying for?”

  “I’m here on a twenty-hour stopover,” Walt says. We fall silent.

  “Can I put in a request to just go out to dinner and talk?”

  In the taxi, on our way into the West End, Walt tells me that my grandmother ran a marathon at seventy-two. And that my great-grandmother, who’s ninety-two, drives a red sports car with the top down and was recently photographed in a leather pantsuit on the back of a Harley-Davidson. He tells me that her mother was half Cherokee Indian.

  Thank God, I think. Longevity—and sanity. Eccentric old ladies on Harleys I can deal with.

  “You have Billie’s laugh,” he says.

  “I know,” I say. It still feels odd, suddenly sharing parts of myself—that I used to think of as unique—with somebody else.

  We walk past Trafalgar Square, along the Strand, past the Savoy Theatre, where my friend Rachel is playing the oboe inThe Three-penny Opera , and end up in Bertorelli, an Italian restaurant in Covent Garden. We talk for an hour and a half before ordering anything but cocktails, which I explain to the waiter aren’t “cocktails” but a predinner drink.

  And then I have to ask Walt about Billie. He takes a sip of his drink. Then, in a soft voice, he says, “Billie was magnificent. No one could come close.

  “I first met her in New York. In the lobby of the Waldorf. I was twenty-two years old. I’d just delivered a speech for the Young Conservatives and was in the lobby, talking to her father—your grandfather—who shared my views on communism. I had heard wonderful things about him and was glad to meet him.”

  I picture my grandfather and my father meeting as much younger men. Tough, smart and valiant—the best of their respective generations—they would have impressed anyone.

  “Suddenly this extraordinary woman walked up to me,” Walt says. “She was alight with life and beautiful and all I could see. Her eyes were full of wit and intelligence and laughter. And her fragrance—oh…” He takes a deep breath and leans back in his chair, remembering.

  “That night the great Pearl Bailey was in the Cedar Room. Just after her last number Frank Sinatra surprised everyone by walking up on the stage, and the two of them brought the house down with ‘A Little Learnin’ Is a Dangerous Thing.’ It was an unforgettable night. In every way.”

  He stops. He looks at me.

  “From that night on, we saw each other as often as we could, usually when I was in New York, staying at the Waldorf.

  “When we found out she was with child, I went to Margaret and asked for a divorce. In half a minute, the gentle woman I married turned into someone I didn’t recognize.”

  Walt takes another sip of whiskey. There is silence between us.

  “Mother flew in,” Walt says, finally. “She played every card she had. ‘There has never been a divorce in this family,’ Mother said. ‘You will bring disgrace upon the family, upon Margaret, upon yourself—and you will ruin your political career.’”

  He tells me that when he and Billie “hit town” people would whisper, “Who are they?” And before they knew it, they’d be at the center of a crowd.

  I watch my father across the dinner table. I can see he is still under Billie’s spell.

  “Do you enjoy living in a big city, Pippa? Do you enjoy going out at night?”

  “Yes,” I say, “But I hate nightclubs. They make my ears hurt.”

  “It’s no fun unless you’re with somebody exciting,” he says.

  I’ve never met anyone anywhere near as exciting as Billie and Walt. Except Nick.

  Walt watches me while I’m eating. He looks at my arm. “The way your arm bends is exactly the same as Billie’s,” he says. He looks at my hands. “Billie’s hands,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  He tells me a little about his wife, Margaret. “She’s very good,” he says. “Billie isn’t ‘good.’ But at bottom there’s pure diamond. Real strength.”

  He tells me that Margaret was very beautiful when she was young, and that when Jackie Onassis walked into a room, followed by Margaret, all eyes would be turned on Margaret. He also tells me that Jackie was always photographed from the waist up, because she thought she had thick ankles and big feet.

  “Did you love your wife?” I say.

  “Hold out your hands, Pippa.” I hold my hands out across my linguini. “Now look at them.”

  I look at my hands.

  “Now, if you had to, which hand would you cut off?”

  I understand. I can’t eat anymore.

  I ask him whether or not the stability and lack of passion in his marriage enabled him to go out and fight the dragons he has fought in his life. That if he had been wanting to be at home with his loved one all the time, maybe he wouldn’t have achieved so much. He looks at me closely and does not deny it.

  “Do you really think that if you and Billie had got married that your marriage would have lasted?”

  “Of course,” he says.

  I am not so sure. Neither is Billie. I remember that Billie told me one of the reasons she doesn’t think their marriage would have lasted was because they were too alike. They both had so much energy, if they’d tried to make a life together, there would have been an explosion.

  I think of Nick again.

  Walt asks me what I think about the Iraq war. I tell him how profoundly wrong I felt it was, right from the very start. I tell him that I think America as self-appointed international policeman is terrifying. I tell him how sickened I am that millions of people, including myself, sit riveted to news about the war while eating cheese on toast in front of the television.

  “And as for George Bush? I can’t bear thinking about him. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, ‘The fellow seems to possess one idea, and that idea is wrong.’”

  Walt doesn’t say a word. But when I am finished, he leans back in his chair, smiles broadly, and says, “So this is what happens when you’re raised in a country teeming with socialists.”

  I have no idea whether or not he means what he has just said, and he has no intention of enlightening me. He seems to be enjoying himself thoroughly.

  And then, in a serious, ponderous “this is how I talk about war” sort of voice, he says, “The mistake we made—and it was a colossal one—was to react before taking the time to understand why 9/11 happened. Those Saudi Arabians did not fly those planes into the World Trade Center to protest the Bill of Rights. They flew those planes into the World Trade Center because they wanted us to get the hell off Muslim soil. It was a huge mistake, and we’ll pay for it for the next hundred years.”

  “But I thought you were a conservative?” I say, surprised by how relieved I feel by his answer.

  Walt laughs. “Daughter of mine, I am a conservative. And so are you.”

  “Oh no I’m bloody not,” I say, pointing at him, my brows knit together, in what Charlotte has always called my “contradict me and die” look, which I now realize I inherited from the man sitting opposite me.

  “You are.” Walt’s pointing at me, leaning toward me in exactly the same way I’m leaning toward him. When we realize we’re mirroring each other exactly,
we get the mad laughs, after which Walt orders two glasses of port.

  “Conservatism is in your genes.” Walt’s teasing me now. I won’t rise to this. “From what you’ve told me about it, your play’s about socialism killing the individual spirit.”

  “No, it’s not! It’s about fascism, about what will happen if the conservatives have their way in Europe! I’m not a bloody conservative, Walt.”

  “It’s George Bush who isn’t—as you put it—a bloody conservative.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The whole concept of preemptive war takes America as far from the wishes of our founding fathers as it is possible for us to go.”

  “Exactly!”

  “Exactly!”

  Walt looks at me, squinting.

  “You remind me so much of myself at your age. I want the Iraq war to end as much as you do, kiddo. You’re right to call it a terrible war.”

  I think of the number of times Dad has shushed me when I’ve tried to engage people in the subject of politics over Sunday lunch at Little Tew. Then I try to picture Walt sitting at the lunch table at Little Tew. I can’t.

  At about one o’clock in the morning, we leave and take a taxi to my car, which is parked outside his hotel. He holds my hand in the taxi. I feel his strength running through his hand into mine. Running through my hand into me.

  I hand him the letter I first wrote to the adoption agency, explaining how important it was to me to meet my birth parents, and drive home, feeling terribly sad that he’s going away again the next day.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  IWAKE UP AT THE CRACK OF DAWN,give Walt a little time to sleep, and arrive at his hotel at 8:40 ready to drive him to the airport. He is already in the lobby. Before saying good morning, he hands me his plane ticket and says, “Go upstairs to my room and do whatever you have to do to have the airline defer my return trip to Washington until tomorrow.”

  The weight of sadness lifts, I fly up the stairs, happier than I have ever been, and call Virgin Atlantic. The woman says they’ll have to charge him to change the ticket.

  “But you can’t!” I say. “He’s only staying the extra day because he’s my father and we need some more time together. We haven’t seen each other since I was born, when he held me in the hospital, before I was given up for adoption, which I was, a few days later, only I didn’t go straight to my parents, I went to a foster home first, though he didn’t know that…” I explain the situation to the lady at Virgin Atlantic, who waives the fee and bumps Walt up to first class.

  We walk off arm in arm to Tootsies for breakfast. I show him a few pictures of Billie from my visit. He looks at each one once, filled with emotion. He doesn’t say much. He hands them back to me and says, “Thank you.”

  When I tell Walt about Miles he says, “good.”

  “You weren’t really in love with him, were you, Pippa?”

  “He started growing on me,” I say.

  Walt is peering at me from behind his glasses.

  “Gro-wing on you?” he says, slowly.

  “You don’t understand,” I say.

  “I do,” he says.

  “No, you don’t,” I say. “You don’t understand what it’s like to be too frightened to let yourself really fall in love, because then—”

  “Because then you might be left,” he says. “And it would hurt way too much. To be abandoned by someone who really mattered.”

  “Yes, goddammit!”

  Walt’s very still. I’m not sure, but I think he might be trying not to cry.

  “There are heroes in the world,” he says, “believe me. Don’t settle for anything less.”

  “Are there?” I say.

  “Courage, kid. You have courage. You will know.”

  “Yes,” I say. “I will. One day. Hopefully you’re right.” I want to believe him.

  “I am right,” he says. And then, “There can be no courage without fear.”

  After breakfast we go to Sloane Square. I ask him what his favorite songs are.

  “The Lady is a Tramp” is one of them, he says.

  I start: “I’ve wined and dined on Mulligan stew and never wished for turkey…” He starts singing too. We carry on as we start walking down the King’s Road. There’s a strong wind blowing. We sing into it.

  “Oh boy,” he says, “the energy level is on its way up.”

  I thought it was just me who got surges of irrepressible energy. But no! Battling against the wind, we sing, while walking, for a quarter of a mile. Then I start singing “My Favorite Things” just as we’re getting to Man in the Moon pub.

  “Stop,” he says. He looks at me, stunned.

  “What is it?” I say. He speaks slowly, emphasizing his words. “That is the song Billie sang the night we met. We were walking around New York City in the snow. I kept leading her into doorways and kissing the snowflakes off her face…” He’s obviously feeling something painful, so I stop.

  “Come on!” I say. “You’re in London! Let’s go to the top of a double-decker bus!”

  We climb up the stairs to the bus and sit, like children, leaning against the rails at the front.

  Unlike Billie, Walt wants to know everything about me. And he really listens.

  “It’s so difficult,” I say. “Because Dad is my father. Mum and Dad are my parents. That is what it has been. And yet. And yet. And yet they tell me to be sensible, beg me to get a ‘proper’ job, which I can’t do, not without dying inside. And I love them, but I feel in here that you are my father. My God. You are my father.”

  I feel something lift.

  “You’re a good listener,” I say.

  “No, I’m not,” he says. “I’m a talker. But if I don’t listen to you—well I want to know all about you. It’s the only way I can find out.” Later, he says, “I didn’t expect this. I expected to feel a quiet affection.”

  “It’s not a quiet affection, is it?” I say.

  “No,” he says. “It’s not.”

  We drive to Kew so I can show him my flat.

  “Have you ever thought of spending time in the States?” Walt says.

  “Not really,” I say. “I mean, apart from fridges with ice-makers, what have you got that we haven’t?” It’s a weak joke, but he’s going, and I’m feeling sad again.

  “You’re living in a country where success and enthusiasm are frowned on,” Walt begins. “That will, eventually, destroy someone like you.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is,” Walt says. “And you know it. Come to America, kid. In America, you can be who you are.”

  I grin at him. “Whoever the hell that is, now Billie and you have been thrown into my mix.”

  “We’ve always been in your mix.”

  We climb up the steps to the flat. The postman has arrived. I pick up the airmail envelope.

  “This must be from Billie,” I say. My address is written in Billie’s trademark bold red ink.

  I read the letter quickly and hand it to Walt so he won’t feel left out. It’s a short letter telling me she misses me and can’t wait to hear all about my meeting with my father, about whom, she says, she has been dreaming again. At the bottom she has drawn a large red heart with the initialsB andP in the center, surrounded byx ’s.

  Walt’s hand shakes as he reads it. I say nothing. Then I ask him if he’d like to see what Billie wrote just before I was born, about the two of them, the letter I received five months before.

  “No. I can’t,” he says.

  I show him a photograph of Mum and Dad. “I feel so grateful to those dear people,” he says, looking at it. His eyes are moist. “So very, very grateful.”

  Walt says he’d love to read my plays and sits on the sofa, drinking a mug of lumpy Horlicks. I kneel on the floor, watching him closely as he reads the part of the nineteen-year-old secretary in my first play. He speaks in a high-pitched voice, with an appalling British accent.

  The play is calledOdd Behaviour . It’s about two so
cial misfits and a middle-class couple who set up a company designed to remove odd behavior from the streets of London.

  He laughs and laughs and laughs. At the end of it he looks at me and says, “My God, you’ve only picked the most important theme of our time. You’re the real stuff, kid.”

  He says again that, now he’s read it, the play definitely proves I’m a conservative. It doesn’t at all. It’s a play about individuality under threat. We banter back and forth about it, but I know he thinks it’s really good. I know he’s not just being kind, I know he’s excited by it. And the specific tightness in my chest that comes from a fear that Mum and Dad are right, that I am deluding myself about wanting to be a playwright, loosens a bit more. I love him for reading it with me. And for laughing.

  “Are you writing anything at the moment?”

  “Well, yes—I’m trying to finish a play I started a few years ago.”

  “What’s it about?” he asks.

  “Well, there are these two characters. Talking to each other. In a womb. They’re twins, obviously.”

  “Twins?”

  “Yes, twins.”

  He’s looking at me intensely.

  “It’s calledWomb Mate. ” I wait for him to laugh; I thought that was a clever title. I’m fossicking around in the box, trying to find page five when, in a quiet, insistent tone of voice Walt says, “Did they tell you?”

  “Who?”

  “The adoption people…anyone…”

  “What?” The pages collated into some kind of order, I look up. Walt looks old suddenly.

  “Did they tell you about your twin?”

  The air in the room has changed. I can’t hear anything. Then I can. I sit down. My body is tense.

  “I have a twin?”

  “No,” he says slowly. “You had a twin.”

  “I had a twin.” I repeat his words because I want to be sure I heard him correctly. Walt’s voice, when he finds it, is gentle.

  “He died, Pippa. In childbirth.”

  I had a twin. And he died. In childbirth. The sorrow is instant. It flows into my heart like thick black ink. Walt’s voice seems far away.