by Edmund White
I ran out of the room; Bobbie Jean could see I was sobbing. Maybe she thought I was afraid he would die. She said, “Why, whatever is wrong with you, Yvette?” But I just kept sobbing; I was afraid I might throw up. I kept running. Once I got in my car I sat there for five minutes, stunned.
I don’t know why I dredge all this up now, maybe just to keep myself honest and not to wallow in posthumous idealization. I have to admit he was and will be the only man to touch me in this life; Duke tried, Mercy as a woman succeeded, but Daddy was the only man to enter me and make me pregnant. Lot’s daughters may have made their father drunk and raped him to get pregnant and to continue their family line; Noah’s son may have seen his drunken father naked and done something to him (whatever it was) that shamed Noah when he took note of it the next day. Fathers and children … The Old Testament is rife with incest and family violence. Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac puzzles all of us today, but they say the moment God substituted a ram for Isaac symbolizes the end of human sacrifice in the Middle East. But think of the horror of the father taking his little boy’s hand and carrying the firewood and his knife and leading him up the mountain to his certain death. Isaac, puzzled, asks his father where the ram to be burned and sacrificed to God is. The father says, guiltily, “God will provide.” But the boy is stripped and bound and only when Abraham raises his knife does he spot a ram, his horns caught in the thorns. And the animal is sacrificed instead of the child.
Of course, God himself was willing to go all the way and to sacrifice his only begotten son, to let him be crowned with thorns and crucified. We say the lamb of God but he was really the ram. Why would God demand a man sacrifice his son to Him? Why did God let me be sacrificed to my father?
The Book of Common Prayer may be Protestant but it says it best.
“Father, I am sore affeared
To see you bear that drawn sword.”
The father says;
“Make thee ready, my dear darling,
For we must do a little thing.
Come hither, thou art so sweet.
Thou must be bound both hands and feet.”
When a father sacrifices his child, plunges his sword into him or her, we should say, “For we must do a little thing.” Death should be called the Little Thing. My bishop wants me to go as a missionary among the indigenous people, where I might contract dengue fever. It’s not usually fatal, but I am so frail (some days my only nourishment is the host) that I fear—and he must fear—that I’ll die from it. If the bishop demands my sacrifice I am eager to make it for him and God: the Little Thing.
Bobbie Jean suddenly arrived here in Jericó! Of course, true to character, her first half hour of conversation was all about the difficulties of getting here. (“But my travel agent, that nice Dorothy Spiers, was willing to turn herself inside out for me, she’d like to join the life-drawing Rembrandt Club, I’m the president, don’t you know, but we’re not sure she’s qualified, anyway, she gets an A for agreeable, but I must say I was surprised that the folks down here don’t speak much English. What’s wrong with them? Are they just backward? Maladjusted? Retards?”)
The second half hour was all about the details of Daddy’s funeral—the black ebony coffin with the rose velvet lining, the telephone he wanted installed in case he was buried alive; he wanted it hooked up to the police station. Bobbie Jean pointed out that all his blood would be drained and he’d be filled with embalming fluid. She also pointed out that he’d just be a vegetable after all that time in the ground. “And I said that that sheriff was always drunk and wouldn’t hear the phone ringing and if he did he wouldn’t answer it. Daddy looked real nice in his best navy blue suit with that awful hand-painted Countess Mara tie he liked so much. They put too much rouge on his face. His part was on the wrong side. But he looked peaceful and I can’t wait to join him. There was only some old uncle who came and Pinky drove up but stayed in the back away from the white folks. She always knows her place, you gotta hand it to her. I’m gonna have a nice marble stone carved for him but I might wait cuz if I die it’s cheaper to put two names on the same memorial at the same time.”
Then she wept and I tried to take her in my arms but she shook me off with a little ironic laugh.
Then she got down to business. I knew, didn’t I, that she had to have dialysis every two weeks, her high blood pressure had destroyed her kidneys, and she had to move out of that gloomy, understaffed White House into an assisted-living suite next to Neiman’s where several of her Rembrandt pals and other ladies from the four-hand piano club were already living, for all that she would need plenty of moolah to pay for her new apartment and her charities and clubs and Daddy left her only nine million dollars (“With that I’d be pauperized,” she said seriously). I told her that she could have forty-eight of my fifty million; I needed the rest for my convent since I’d promised it. She grabbed my hands in ecstatic thanks, but then she began to wonder if I wasn’t spoiling these simple South American Spanish-speaking nuns, who didn’t seem to have such extravagant needs, and they could easily be corrupted with that sort of reckless, thoughtless Yankee wealth thrown in their faces like an insult.
I told her that I would consider her objections and asked her how I could contact the lawyers in order to renounce my inheritance in her favor.
Now that I had laid to rest her fears of dying a pauper I could see she couldn’t wait to return to Dallas. In fact, she’d kept her car and driver waiting outside the convent walls.
“Poor man,” I said. “Did he get anything to eat?”
“I told him I’d be gone only an hour.” What efficiency! I thought.
“Are these people what you’d call wetbacks?” she asked with real anthropological curiosity.
“I wouldn’t.”
“How do they think they’ll ever get ahead if they don’t speak English?”
“And you? Are you hungry?”
“Dorothy Spiers told me not to eat a bit down here if I didn’t want to have the most awful diarrhea and not to drink anything except a bottled Coke. Guess you’ve built up a resistance. She said when I got back to the Hilton Bogatá I could order room service. It’s safe there, but she told me to brush my teeth only with bottled water. Imagine that!”
I walked her to her car and she gave me a peck and said, “So long, Sister.” By her tone she sounded like a gangster in a ’30s film saying, “Kiss off, sister.”
I watched her drive away with her overweight mustachioed driver behind the wheel. I went to kneel before the statue of the Virgin. Now I was less devoted to God and more intimate with his mother. She was the great invention of the Catholic Church, our Kali when angry, our Kwan-yin when peaceful, the soft-spoken (or silent) guardian of Baby Jesus, and the desperate, mourning mother of the Crucified Christ. She pitied us all; like a truly gentle mother she knew how to console us. I needed her love. The final curtain had fallen on the great drama of my life.
Last week Bishop Oscar was assassinated! He was coming out of the cathedral after his Sunday morning Mass, surrounded by the faithful and altar boys, when suddenly someone in a passing car opened fire on him. The murderer must have been a good shot, because only one youngster was wounded in the shoulder otherwise, but Oscar was killed instantly. When his body was brought into the convent he was gray, he’d lost his miter, and his robes were soaked in blood. He was dead; he’d predicted his own death.
Just before he was shot he’d delivered a homily about the sufferings of the poor in the village and in the surrounding countryside. His Sunday talks were broadcast and were blamed for the unrest among the tenant farmers and campesinos. His text that day was from Vatican II: “God’s reign is already present on our earth in mystery. When the Lord comes, it will be brought to perfection.” In Oscar’s interpretation: “That is the hope that inspires Christians. We know that every effort to better society, especially when injustice and sin are so ingrained, is an effort that God blesses, that God wants, that God demands of us.”
&nbs
p; Poor Oscar, though he knew his life was in danger and that the landlords or the government had shot a fellow priest a week before, was willing to be a martyr in his fight for better land distribution and a sharing of wealth. Since Adam sinned, he left Eden as a landless man. But Christ redeemed us from Adam’s sin—and with that redemption restored land to the least man or woman. Jesus said that whatever is done to the poor is done also to Him—for that reason the poor are both human and divine. Oscar said God is the one who wants land reform.
We all feel vulnerable now. Thugs could attack the convent at any moment and mow us down. The walls of the convent, which seemed so monumental, now feel paper thin. Of course, we nuns are silent, passive, and the convent is just a warehouse for off-loading unwanted daughters. No reason to slaughter us.
I’m determined to fulfill my promise to Bishop Oscar to go as a missionary among the Embera-Chami. Just because he was assassinated is no reason to disobey him. I doubt he told anyone about my mission and I could do as I please with impunity, especially now that I’m giving two million dollars to the convent (Oscar told me to limit my gift to two million). I could probably be made Mother Superior for such a sum. But I prefer my nearly anonymous life.
We feel so adrift without Bishop Oscar to guide us. He was the good shepherd. That he loved me with a love not entirely befitting a priest made me feel special. I’m only sorry that my passion for Mercy troubled the last weeks of his life. Or maybe not so much. His energy was almost entirely devoted to the people and their struggle to survive.
Anyway, I’ve cooled off on Mercy since Daddy’s death, as if I no longer have to impersonate him, the unwelcome maniac bullying a pure, unwilling victim; now that he’s gone I no longer feel the urge to enact his indecencies.
I may not be able to write you for a while, since I’ll be traveling through rough country.
CHAPTER 18
Adhéaume prided himself on having reformed French taste and having transmitted it to America. He felt that Americans had been overly impressed by Spain or by Venice previously and that he’d been the necessary champion of French architecture and decoration—and of French culture in general. I asked him what had given rise to this fantasy of his. I told him that Americans paid lip service to their national origins (“Then I discovered I was half Danish and half Montenegrin”) and thought of Europe as a mildly diverting but too-distant and too-expensive Disneyland. As for architecture and decoration, there were two styles: “cute” and “expensive.” For an expensive look they might like velvet and silk and human-size blue-and-white Chinese vases, but the chairs had to recline and the TV screens had to be huge. The kitchen should be open to the dining room so the cook-wife wouldn’t feel isolated from her guests. Unlike the French, Americans liked the smell of cooking food and they felt uncomfortable having servants lurking around. Above all, everything must look new and match and be replaced every two years. Less fortunate people could make do with the cute look: creamers shaped like tiny cows, beanbag chairs, slippers like dachshunds, dishes printed with prewar Coca-Cola advertising, rubber mats twisted and colored to look like daisies. Designers might flip through books of old furniture or decors in search of new motifs, but the customers wanted everything new, unscratched, and comfortable. A Louis XVI La-Z-Boy was preferable to some actual Louis XVI “broken duchess.”
Addy had met the shah of Iran and decided to give a bal masqué for him preceded by an elegant dinner of le tout Paris. The only problem was that the shah was used to dining with the most beautiful, half-nude adolescent girls and he couldn’t understand why he was surrounded by old bags and bleary-eyed gents, none of whom seemed capable of belly-dancing for his pleasure or serving him peacock tongues and pistachio sherbet, their eyes lowered respectfully. Instead, they were glowering at him and cackling at their own jokes; in his country he would simply have beheaded them and silenced that awful noise, but here he had to treat these dukes and marquises as equals and pretend to be interested in their squalid lives. The food was in twelve courses instead of the normal sixty-six, in reference to the 6,666 verses of the Koran, and some of the dishes smelled of pork. Fortunately, the shah was warned off it by his official taster, who spent the rest of the evening in his room vomiting and reciting spells to undo the dreaded ithm.
When Mme de Clermont-Tonnerre asked the shah what he was reading at the moment, he replied, “A monarch has no need to read. His ministers can do that for him. You don’t lead the masses with books but with eloquence, prestige, and physical prowess.” Her smile vanished.
The Persian Ball went better. No one over forty had been invited. The Princess de Lucinge had a great success in her beaded midriff and harem pants covered with paillettes doing her very athletic sabre dance. I made my entrée with three women dressed as birds in cages carried by blue Negroes. The Princess de Polignac was a white owl. Six bare-chested boys in floppy trousers by Mme Grès pretended to rape us bird-women. It was a big success. Addy came as a sultan and sat beside the shah on a dais fanned by ostrich plumes wielded by young aristocrats. The shah looked absolutely bewildered, especially when Mme de Montargis came in on a bejeweled elephant, which promptly defecated in the ballroom filled with spotlit orchid pyramids ($100,000). About the dinner and ball, Addy said with satisfaction, “This cost me three million and amused me for three minutes.” The shah, despite his preference for youth, said, “This smells like armpits. Let’s go to the Ritz for champagne.”
When I found out Daddy had died I felt there was nothing standing in the way between me and the vault of the night sky. Unlike my sister, I’d never believed in Heaven and God and his saints and the Holy Virgin. I could feel the absolute bleak emptiness of nonexistence all around me and above me. There was no Daddy to protect me now, to stand in my way, to rebel against, no Daddy to disapprove of or to glory in my accomplishments. No Daddy to ride herd on my expenses. I was all alone in the universe. No relative who was next in line to go to the slaughterhouse and into the grand Nihil. I was the next, or would be. Even my struggles with him now had to be waged with a proxy. He had withdrawn into an impenetrable basalt sarcophagus, his orifices stuffed with oil-softened cotton, his limbs straightened, his skeletal hands folded over the empty balloon of his belly. He was unreachable. His life had vanished.
Daddy’s will made me the executor of his estate. I guess he thought Bobbie Jean was too much of an airhead and Yvette too spiritual (or too much under the spell of the Church). But what about my cruel, fortune-destroying husband? The man who threatened to harm my children if I divorced him?
I went to an American lawyer on the Avenue Montaigne whose job, I gathered, was to help his fellow Americans to buy property in France, to sue the French (though the courts here did not reward such huge damages and there were fewer pretexts for clogging the courts), and to arrange their taxes for both countries. With me he wanted to open Daddy’s will.
Jim West was an affable, round little man in a Brooks Brothers suit with a rep tie and no hair. He wore a gold wedding ring that was engulfed by his pudgy finger; it would have to be sawed off (the ring, not the finger). He was the sort of Yankee I’d met in white-shoe lawyers’ offices in Dallas, reassuring to Texans. He had a big Kiwanis Club banner on his wall under his University of Michigan law degree and an Ohio accent to match (“probably” was two syllables, “coupon” was “koopawn,” “route” was “rout,” he offered to pour “melk” in my coffee). He’d met a Frenchwoman in Chicago, married her, and moved to Paris. He was a little too chatty for my taste (or for the occasion), but I played along and did my American “act.” He reassured me they went once a year to stay with his “ant” in Kal-ma-zoo.
He was affiliated with Daddy’s Dallas lawyer. He offered me his condolences and observed five seconds of silence. Daddy wrote of his beloved wife, Bobbie Jean, and his beloved daughters (“Says here your sister is a Catholic nun,” Mr. West observed as neutrally as humanly poss-ble).
“Each of you is to receive a third of his estate, minus about five million,
which you and your husband charged to your father.”
“That was my husband’s doing.”
“I see. Well, there’s still about forty-five million dollars left to you and about fifty million for your sister.”
“My sister was talked into giving all but two million dollars to my stepmother, but that will be handled by the Dallas lawyers.”
“How odd,” Mr. West said.
“She is a nun,” I pointed out.
“Of course.”
Mr. West poured us some more coffee minus the “melk.” Then he said, “Another thing that’s odd is that though your father trusted you to be the executrix, he’s doled out your inheritance in ten-million-dollar payments every ten years over four payments.”
“That’s to protect me from my husband’s profligacy. My husband will undoubtedly try to break the trust and get all the money immediately.”
Mr. West shook his head no, as if he were awakening from a bad dream. “He won’t be able to do that. Mr. Crawford’s will is airtight.”
“Can you send me a letter with all the terms?” I handed him my address and stood up. “You will be so kind as to send me a bill?”
“No, all expenses are handled by the estate. I already have your address—that’s how I contacted you.”
I hurried away.
On the one hand I was relieved by Daddy’s will and on the other a bit frightened by what would surely be Addy’s rage and violence. I knew he’d been running up enormous bills on the expectation of “his” inheritance. He’d waste another million on court procedures trying to unpick the lock.
I waited until Mr. West’s letter arrived and then put it beside Addy’s breakfast setting. No comment.
As expected, by noon he was fuming at my father’s “treachery” and he’d already engaged an international lawyer, someone he’d met at the Jockey. “Oh no, no, he’s gone too far this time, tricking me out of my money.”