Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  I sat down on the closet floor. Livvy had wanted all along not just to visit, but to come to live with me. Or she’d thought she might want to. All right. It made a kind of sense. I’d been so eager. She might have been concerned about how disappointed I’d be if she said she might stay, then decided against it. It crossed my mind that maybe she’d wanted to see whether I was still the ogre she remembered, someone worse than her father’s wife, but I told myself not to get carried away. When things went well, I got scared because it couldn’t last; when they went badly, I was afraid she’d take off. Our first week alone had been wonderful, the succeeding ones good to all right, more like real life (or what I still thought might be real life). At some point jealousy over Marsha had mixed with theoretical relief; it was clear that she was having a better time than a fourteen-year-old could have with just her mother. Now I wouldn’t need to be at all jealous. On the other hand, if she really wanted to stay, there was a great deal to be done. It had occurred to me that Angelo might not stand in our way, but I’d need financial help from him. I couldn’t imagine plunking her into one of the ordinary, rotten Manhattan public high schools, and it was too late to test for one of the special schools, even if she could have gotten in. Once upon a time, I might have asked my parents to help me pay private-school tuition. But they were already complaining about the money required to keep up the house, even as they talked about adding rooms because Beatrice and Larry’s family was growing. If Livvy stayed, they would be more interested than ever in adding bedrooms; two of the four they had were small and now that Beatrice and Larry were there for August, I was sharing a room with Max. It was out of the question for Livvy to do so.

  I zipped the suitcase, pushed it back to where it had been, shut the closet door, and left the room. I was in turmoil. Not at all the way I’d have expected to be upon discovering Livvy might stay. Maybe it would have been different if she’d said something to me. Or maybe . . . If I had someone who helped me with Livvy the way Larry helped Beatrice with Max. Shortly before Livvy’s arrival, a pleasant man at a Westport cocktail party had invited me to dinner and I’d told him I had to get back to New York. I’d been afraid to get involved with someone when Livvy was coming. By the next time I’d seen him, he had a girlfriend. Now I felt I’d been foolish. A nice, mature man who knew what teenagers were like was just what I needed. To advise me, to keep me sexual and other company, to give me the affection that, whatever my brain told me about adolescents or anything else, had been part of the fantasy of Livvy’s return. I needed to be very close to someone who didn’t address me as Mother. Beatrice and I hadn’t regained our closeness. If I complained about Livvy to my parents, I was interrupted with assurances of how purely happy and grateful for her presence I should be. I needed to be very close to someone who liked Livvy but understood. Someone who was like a husband but like a father as well.

  I returned to a hot afternoon in Westport. Everyone had been to the beach and come home. I changed into shorts and a T-shirt, let my father grill halibut for dinner (hamburgers for Marsha, Livvy, and Max, who’d begun to want hamburgers when “the big kids” were having them, which drove Beatrice wild), and we enjoyed the first local corn of the season. Beatrice couldn’t stand anything about Marsha, and when it appeared that the girls were settling on the porch with us, she told Larry she wanted to go to a movie after Max went to bed. She’d entered her seventh month and she was huge. Much larger, she said, than she’d ever been with Max. My parents considered going to the movies, too, but Livvy said there was something she and Marsha needed to talk to them about, that was, to me and to them, and my mother said it was just as well, she wasn’t really in the mood for a movie. When Larry and Beatrice had left, I brought out ice cream for the girls, cold drinks for the rest of us. I felt a drowsiness it was hard to understand since I’d barely done anything all day.

  Marsha began to giggle.

  “Go on, butthead,” she said to Livvy. “The world is waiting.”

  Livvy was disconcerted by her use of the name. She told Marsha to wait for her in the front, then, as soon as the other girl had left, she said, looking at my parents, never at me, “I don’t want to go home!” And burst into tears.

  “Sweetheart!” my father said, holding out his arms. “That’s wonderful!”

  Livvy rose from the table, came across the terrace to settle within the warm, grandfatherly crook of his arm.

  My father saw my expression and asked quickly, “What has your mother said about it?”

  Livvy sat up, wiped her eyes and nose, waited for me.

  I smiled sweetly. “I haven’t said anything because this is the first I’ve heard of it.”

  It wasn’t fair. I should have been able to be happy now.

  “Oh, dear,” my mother said, then put her hand over her mouth lest she say anything else that would convey even the mildest disapproval of her granddaughter’s behavior.

  I sipped at my iced coffee, although I was already telling myself it should have been decaf, I was going to have enough trouble sleeping.

  Livvy looked at me, nervous-expectant, as though she really believed there was some way in the world I was going to not want her to stay.

  I said, holding my voice as steady as I could, “You must know that I want you to stay. I just don’t understand . . .” I trailed off, not knowing how to finish the sentence.

  “I think your mother’s a little hurt,” Livvy’s grandfather said, “that you didn’t talk to her about it first.”

  “I was afraid,” Livvy said.

  There we were again.

  “Oh?” I said. “What were you afraid of this time? That I’d scream at you again? Beat you?”

  “Caroline,” my father said, gently reproving.

  “I was afraid you’d say no.”

  “Why would you be afraid of that?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t think you mind if you don’t see me.”

  The first in a series of bitter laughs issued from my mouth.

  “Oh? Would you like me to keep you from seeing Marsha to prove that I want you around?”

  My father, certain I’d hoisted a line that would yield useless matter, said, “Let me ask you something, Livvy. How will your father feel about your staying here?”

  She shrugged. “He’ll be just as happy.”

  “Come on,” I said. “Your father never wanted you out of his sight for a day and a half.”

  She looked at me levelly, said, “He never wants me around now.”

  Of course, she thought I didn’t want her around, either.

  “Oh, Livvy,” I said, “just because he has a new wife . . . and she’s having a baby . . . doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you just as much.”

  “He beats me.”

  We all gaped at her. This was before accusations of abuse had become standard fodder for the six o’clock news, and anyone’s doing such a thing was shocking, never mind that we were talking about a man who had adored his daughter more than any living creature. Later, I would find it more believable. Later, there would be times when the possibility of slamming her crossed my mind, when I was convinced she’d go as far as required to provoke such a reaction. But at this time I was barely aware of the possibilities.

  My mother murmured, “No.”

  My father held her more tightly.

  “I can’t believe it, Livvy,” I said. “Your father got mad if I even yelled at you!”

  “That was before Annunciata,” she said pathetically.

  “Do you understand,” I asked after thinking for a while, “that I want you to stay here? That I love the idea? That your father doesn’t have to do anything terrible for me to want you to stay? For all of us to want you to?”

  She nodded. “But he still beats me. If the house isn’t quiet enough. If I don’t do what she tells me to do.”

  “So,” I asked after a long time, “you think that if we, if I, ask him, he’ll say it’s okay for you to stay with us.” Dammit. “With me.”

 
“He’ll be glad to be rid of me.” She began to cry again. My father held her, stroked her, told her he was sure it wasn’t true, but in any event, we all wanted her with us. And I sat there, feeling just as I had in the old days. Out of the loop. The Angelo-Livvy loop. The grandfather-Livvy loop. It barely mattered.

  Marsha shouted to ask Livvy what was going on.

  “Can she come back?” Livvy asked me.

  I smiled. “I didn’t ask her to leave.” I sounded defensive, even to myself. Was I going to be defensive for the rest of our lives?

  Livvy called to Marsha to join us.

  “School,” my mother said. “That’s the first thing we have to figure out.”

  “I want to go to Marsha’s school,” Livvy proclaimed as Marsha came around to the porch.

  My parents and I smiled uneasily. Marsha went to Hunter, which, for those who don’t know it, is a school in Manhattan for academically gifted students. We knew, just from the way Livvy’s English, good when she arrived, was getting better in spectacular fashion, that she was academically gifted, but we didn’t know whether she was nearly as good in math or science as she was in language. And even if she was, the exam for fall entry was held in the spring.

  My father began to explain all this to her, but Marsha interrupted.

  “My mother knows the assemblyman.”

  We stared at her blankly, three adult, voting Americans who had never understood that knowing one’s elected representatives might yield as many benefits as a thorough reading of Gadney’s Guide to Contests, Festivals & Grants, and we repeated, as one, “Assemblyman?”

  Marsha nodded. “She wouldn’t talk to him unless we asked you first, but she’ll call him, and—”

  “Hold on for a second, Marsha,” I said. Never mind that Marsha’s mother knew before I did that Livvy wanted to stay in New York. Stick to the operational realities. “It’s a very nice thought, but the test for next year was given in the spring.”

  She shrugged. “My mother said he can get her the test, if he wants.”

  He wanted. Marsha’s parents had thrown two fund-raisers before his election, and Marsha’s mother volunteered in his office. Livvy was given a date to take the test. Angelo readily consented, in an English far better than I remembered his as being, to her remaining. When I asked whether he’d want her to visit, he said it was too early to worry about that. He would ship over her clothes. His surprise, when I said that she already had most of them, was transatlantically transparent. I began to wonder if she’d ever had a return ticket. She spent most of the remaining August days going over old exams with Marsha and on her own with an intensity that made me nervous when I wasn’t admiring. I quietly investigated the other school possibilities, then wrote to ask Angelo whether he’d pay for a good private school if she didn’t pass the Hunter test. It seemed to me that whatever was going on between father and daughter, I’d best have his response in writing. I received a letter from a man named Joseph Giulini who explained that he was the accountant for the Pirelli family, and now, of course, the Angelo Ferrantes as well. He wondered if I would be so kind as to outline for him the tuition for each school, as well as any other costs I anticipated for Signorina Ferrante in the coming four years. With my father’s help, I detailed tuition costs at Fieldston and the U.N. school but said I did not, as yet, have a good idea of what it would cost to have Livvy with me. Perhaps they would think about some sort of modest allowance until I did. Also, I needed various papers she hadn’t required for her passport, most particularly her school transcripts. Signor Giulini obtained those with remarkable dispatch and sent them with a letter saying Signor and Signora Ferrante could promise to pay her tuition and four thousand lira a month, then the equivalent of about two hundred dollars, to cover her allowance and other expenses. I told Livvy that her father was being generous. She made a comment to the effect that he would do anything to get rid of her. I said I didn’t think that was fair, that she was a real student and he knew as well as we did that if she didn’t get into Hunter, we’d have to take a shot at one of the good private schools.

  Her response, uttered in as plaintive a voice as the little match-stick girl ever possessed, was, “I don’t want to go to a private school. Marsha says all those kids are buttheads!”

  I laughed. “What’s a butthead? Someone who doesn’t like Marsha?”

  She looked at me suspiciously. “Maybe you just don’t want me to go to Hunter.”

  “All I want,” I told her, “is for you to realize they only take a tiny fraction of the kids who apply, and it won’t be the end of the world if you have to go someplace else.”

  She wasn’t interested. I was with ‘er or I was agin ‘er. And, in fact, when she received word a short time later that she had not been admitted (she’d made excellent scores in math and science but hadn’t been able to handle the extremely difficult section on English usage), she turned on me, or perhaps I should say, away from me, with a coldness suggesting that if I hadn’t talked about other possibilities, she might have gotten into the school of her choice.

  It was our first really bad period together. I need not detail our initial attempts to get her into Dalton or the U.N. school. She refused even to interview for either. A couple of kids she knew from the beach who lived in the Village were going to the High School for the Humanities, a new public school on West Eighteenth Street, and that was where she wanted to go. When my parents urged her to reconsider, she told them that she couldn’t bear to have her father take money from Annunciata to send her to school. (She never objected to any other reason for taking Annunciata’s money.) When I urged her to reconsider, she said that maybe I thought the High School for the Humanities was no good because the kids weren’t all Jewish. (This was the first sign that the anti-Semitism she’d come by through her father hadn’t dissolved along with their attachment.) Or maybe I didn’t like the idea that she’d be so close to home? Why was I making such a fuss, anyway? It wasn’t as though she was such a great student that she had to go to the best school in the world. If she were that good, she’d have gotten into Hunter.

  Indeed, the only person she appeared to dislike more than me these days was herself.

  My parents checked out the High School for the Humanities for me. It was the reincarnation of an old school called Charles Evans Hughes, which had once had a good academic reputation. Now, with its new name and a small student body, the Board of Education had restored it to academic health. I was relieved not to have to fight her on the issue, and pleased that she’d have to walk just a few blocks to get to school. I remembered a ridiculous amount of my high-school time as having been spent on trains.

  Even before we returned to the city to enroll her, she refused to see Marsha or take the other girl’s calls. When I told her that Marsha’s mother had called to say that Marsha was very upset, she shrugged, said that once school began, they wouldn’t be able to see each other, anyway.

  Before the test results had come in, Marsha had taken Livvy on a first, exploratory shopping trip in Westport, explained what was cool, if not essential, in the way of clothing for a New York City high-school girl: Levi’s or army pants (a pair for every day of the week; this generation washed its clothes almost as fanatically as it washed its bodies. Early on, Livvy had giggled about this with me, but she was already spending so much time in the shower that I’d asked her to warn me when she was going to take one, just in case I had to use the bathroom during the next hour); Lacoste T-shirts, Brooks Brothers men’s shirts; sneakers—their brand names less rigidly ordained than they would be a couple of years later, when anything worth putting on their feet cost more than dinner at Lutèce.

  I couldn’t tell what was reasonable in the way of allowance. The first monthly check from Angelo for two hundred dollars had come in. After checking with a couple of parents who gave me wildly different figures, I told Livvy I would give her twenty dollars a week for basic expenses (she’d have no carfare) and I’d pay for her clothes, within reason. It seemed bes
t not to raise the possibility of my getting more from her father until I had a better feeling for what she really needed. But when I told her that I could afford Levi’s, if not a pair for every day of the week, and that we could find nice substitutes for Lacoste and Brooks Brothers shirts, she stared at me as though I were trying to thwart her entry to the new world, then immediately tried to call Angelo. By the time she reached him, she was frantic about beginning school “looking wrong.” I’d said she could ask whether he would reimburse me if I allowed her to put a few things she absolutely had to have on my American Express charge. I sat in the living room, trying not to look as though I was listening as she spoke from the wall phone in the kitchen, the only one I had. Then Angelo apparently insisted that she put me on. She called me to the phone and stormed into her room in the manner that would become her standard exit after a conversation she found unsatisfactory.

  I picked up the dangling phone, cautiously said, “Ciao,” and waited.

  “Ciao, Cara,” Angelo said jovially. “How are you?”

  “I’m okay, thank you,” I replied. “I feel as though we can’t always talk to the lawyer when she . . . You know.”

  “Already she gives you a bad time?” he purred, the old, seductive Angelo.

  “Well,” I said cautiously, “she needs clothes and stuff for school, and I was trying to figure out what I could afford, and what I should ask you for.”

  “Ah, yes,” Angelo said. “I told her, I will send you money. I will not send it to her. Ask her what she did with the money from the return ticket. From the time she sees my wife’s family has money . . . If I send it to her, she will spend it and want more. This way, you give her what she should have.”

  “Well,” I said as my brain tried to absorb all that was going on, “it’s nice that you’re going to send it.” I didn’t know how to negotiate with this kinder and richer Angelo, whose only suspicions were of his daughter. “Did you have any sum in mind?”