Our Father

by Marilyn French

  When will you learn you can’t think your way out of a paper bag? You think you’re so tough. You don’t begin to know tough. Now Elizabeth …!

  Only Ronnie looked normal when they gathered for drinks that evening. She built a fire without being asked, and she was the one who made the drinks.

  “Jesus, I feel like I’m tending three zombies. We don’t have to do this, you know. We haven’t even told the doctor yet.”

  There was a long silence before anyone spoke. Then Elizabeth said in a dead voice, “No, I want to do it.”

  Mary’s face, usually clear and white as porcelain, was crisscrossed with shadows. “Yes,” she said faintly.

  “We have to do it,” Alex said fiercely. She looked the worst, her usual blonde pert sweet prettiness drained and lined.

  “What, am I the only one who doesn’t know what’s going on?” Ronnie asked suspiciously.

  “What’s going on?” Alex asked angrily.

  Elizabeth stirred. “Don’t be paranoid.”

  “Well for chrissake, what is it?”

  The sisters looked at each other.

  “I can’t speak for anyone else,” Elizabeth said. “I have my own problems.”

  “So what are they?”

  “Just memories. The past.”

  “Or lack of memories,” Alex exploded. “I called my mother this afternoon. I told her what he said. In the hospital. I asked her what he meant by an agreement. And you know what she said? She said she had no idea what he was talking about, that the stroke must have addled his brain! Do you believe that? My mother! I CAN’T TRUST my own mother!”

  “Join the club,” Elizabeth grunted.

  “I barely knew mine,” Mary said sadly.

  Momma.

  “She’s lying to me! I know it! I know it!” Alex cried.

  “Maybe you’re lucky,” Elizabeth said with a mean smile. “The worst things I ever heard were the truths my mother told me.”

  “My mother never talked to me at all.”

  My mother loved the devil.

  “And you were no help either,” Mary whined to Elizabeth.

  “I’m not your mother,” Elizabeth said between her teeth.

  Ronnie held her head. “Jesus, are we back there again? I thought we’d moved beyond that.”

  “She doesn’t care how I’m suffering!” Alex cried. “She doesn’t care that I feel as if I’m going crazy. I told her, I told her, I said, I have to know! But she goes on lying!”

  “Mothers fuck,” Ronnie said with a grim little smile.

  “Obviously,” Elizabeth murmured, and they all laughed.

  A laugh. Good, thought Ronnie.

  “Listen,” Ronnie said, “it’s intolerable, it’s going to be unbearable if you all keep on being this way. We can’t do this if you’re going to be like this. You have to get past whatever it is that makes you all fight all the time or else we can’t do this. You know I’d really like to stay here with you for a month or two, but I can’t stand this.”

  “I’ve told you what’s upsetting me,” Alex complained.

  “We are all upset, aren’t we. It’s understandable: we’ve made a life-changing decision. How come you exempt yourself from this conflict?” Elizabeth asked Ronnie.

  “Argh!” Ronnie cried. “I’m not fighting with anybody am I? And I’m not as upset as you-all. It isn’t that I don’t have my own difficulties with it. It’s—I mean, he’s coming back here in such a different position, I’m in a different position, I’m not here as his servant’s daughter, I’m here … with you … as another … daughter. But I am upset by … the whole thing seems so ugly, his … incapacity and his rage—and our … terror, or whatever it is … and …” She stared hard at the fire, trying to find words. “It’s so strange to see the past being turned upside down. We have the power now. Parents treat kids any way they want … but now we’re the parents. In a way. I feel as if we’re sliding down a tunnel into hell. …”

  “Power corrupts,” Alex said, sententiously.

  “A tunnel into hell. Yes,” Elizabeth said in a low voice. “I feel that too. But I also feel—you know—being here this way—with Father gone, without a houseful of servants and guests—but with you”—she glanced at Mary—“and you”—she glanced at Alex—“it throws me back into past summers when I was a child. That wasn’t the happiest time of my life. It hurls me backwards as if in my body and emotions and whole sense of myself I’m still ten and eleven and twelve … I feel like that child. But I’m not one, I expect more of myself. These feelings are terrifying and terrible. Here I am, fifty-two—well, almost fifty-three years old …”

  “Oh! That’s right!” Mary exclaimed, “your birthday is soon. The thirtieth, isn’t it? When is that?”

  “Umm, Friday, I think,” Elizabeth said indifferently. “Do you remember how you felt as a child? It’s horrible! Childhood is the most terrible time of life!” She stopped pulling at her hair and looked up at them. “Wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Mary murmured.

  “I was happy as a child,” Alex said vaguely. “I think. I have a lot of happy memories, mostly about Grandpa and Charlie after he came into our lives. … Funny, I don’t have really happy memories of my mother—or unhappy ones either. Charlie and Grandpa are the ones I had fun with, they played with me.”

  Ronnie smiled. “It’s ironic—here I am—a chicana bastard whose mother was a servant, who didn’t have a dime. Of course, we had a place to live and enough food, without which—nothing. But I had a wonderful childhood. I was really happy—outdoors, anyway. Not at school. But I loved coming back here after school and running outdoors. You know, for a while there were horses. …”

  “From my mother’s time,” Mary said softly. “I don’t remember when he got rid of the last of them. Do you?” she asked Ronnie.

  “I remember horses!” Alex cried in excitement. “I gave them sugar! There was a man …”

  “Mcsomething,” Mary said. “He took care of them. McDonough?”

  Elizabeth frowned. “McCormick?”

  “Yes,” Alex said dreamily, and drifted off.

  “No,” Mary argued. “MacTavish?”

  “That’s way off! He was Irish. MacTavish is Scottish!”

  Mary shrugged. “Whatever. He really knew horses. When did Father sell them, Ronnie?”

  “I was little. Don’t remember. Just one day, they weren’t here anymore. I cried and cried. Momma bought me a little horse made of clay afterward, to try to make me feel better, and I threw it on the floor and smashed it in a fit of temper. I’ll never forget her face. Like I’d slapped her. I’ll never forget that. Cruel, I was.”

  “Kids are cruel,” said Alex.

  “So are parents,” Mary said coldly.

  “Anyway, I liked parts of my childhood. There were dogs and cats and normal wildlife—birds and butterflies and chipmunks and squirrels and raccoons, but there used to be deer, wild turkeys, foxes, pheasants, quail here too. And the plants! Flowers and the vegetable garden, and trees to climb or swing on. When no one was here, I’d play in the swimming pool … And Momma—she always had a lap for me to sit on, cookies and milk, a hand to stroke me. I was happy until I realized he …”

  “It was beautiful. I wasn’t able to see all that,” Elizabeth mourned. “Take pleasure in it.”

  “No,” Mary murmured.

  “What are you, an echo?”

  “I’m just agreeing with you, Lizzie,” Mary said in a hurt voice.

  “Tell your own story then.”

  Mary’s fingers were twisting her rings. “It’s the helplessness I remember most. Feeling little, feeling like a nothing. Knowing I was sad but knowing too that I couldn’t do anything to make myself feel better. Because I was a child. I wanted to be grown up, so I could get away from here. …”

  “Me too. I wanted to take command of things, of my life. And I knew that to do that I had to get away. From him, from my mother. My mother was bad, she didn’t mean to be, she was just total
ly obsessed with the injustice done her. But I tried to be sort of frozen around her, to keep her from getting to me. But when I was here, the things that happened—oh, Father, or the servants, or the aunts and uncles, your mother”—she glanced at Mary—“somebody would say or do something. Maybe not even to me or about me—to or about you, maybe, you were such a golden girl … And the difference in the way we were treated was so striking, I couldn’t not feel it. I tried. I wouldn’t cry or say anything, I was ashamed of my weakness, humiliated that they could hurt me. I’d go out in the woods. I could never cry. Sometimes I even tried, but I couldn’t. I’d imagine being grown up and getting away and doing things that would make people love me, acclaim me, think I was wonderful. And now, I’ll be out walking in the woods and suddenly feel overwhelmed, just the way I felt back then. …”

  Mary leaned forward, staring at the floor, her hands clasped loosely in front of her, almost as if in half-prayer. “It was different for me. Everybody paid attention to me, I was always being picked up and kissed and fondled. But then I was always trundled off out of the way with some nanny or other. Some of them were nice. But … And then after Mother died … Father wasn’t around much, you know. … And even when he was, he didn’t really pay attention to me except … He paid attention to me when other people were around. The only other time … the only way I could get him to pay attention to me was if I acted a certain way, if I was coy and teased him, flirted with him, really. … So …”

  “Yes,” Elizabeth said sadly. “I tried to be brilliant at the dinner table. He mostly laughed at me.”

  “No he didn’t Lizzie! When you were young, he talked to you! He’d laugh at you but in a nice way. He thought you were really smart. He’d mock me when I tried to join in, say, ‘What are you doing, trying to be smart like your sister!’ And laugh at me for a fool.”

  “I don’t remember him talking to me.”

  “He did, though. Before you went to London, before you took the job in Washington. Not later. I wondered why. It seemed as if he was frightened of you, the way he sneered, he wouldn’t let you get a sentence out. But when we were little, I used to try to talk like a smart person, talk like you. I’d sit out in my playhouse and pretend I was a grown-up lady, but I could never figure out what to say. I’d say things you’d said, but I knew I didn’t have them right. And it wasn’t much fun because I didn’t know what grown-up ladies did besides have tea and chat with other ladies about clothes and the ladies who weren’t there. And I was all alone. …”

  “I stole your dishes,” Elizabeth said.

  “What?”

  “Your little tea set. In the playhouse. After you went back to school one year, I stole it.”

  Mary sat back. “My dishes!”

  “Don’t you remember, that little tea set you had, pink roses on white, with a gold band?”

  “I remember a tea set …” She broke off, stared at Elizabeth. “But why?” she asked in a soft bewildered voice.

  Elizabeth burst into tears. “I guess I was trying to steal the love I felt you had.”

  The three sat appalled. Elizabeth crying? She sobbed in hard dry wrenches, briefly, pulled a hankie from her pocket and blew her nose. She raised her head.

  “Sorry,” she said stiffly.

  “Oh Lizzie, I would have given it to you if I’d known you wanted it. I would have given you anything. …”

  Elizabeth’s eyes shone wet. “I know.” She burst into tears again, burying her face in her hands. No one moved.

  It was a long time before anyone spoke, and then it was Alex, musing, “God, how important mothers are! I don’t think I ever realized. Don’t you think it’s hard? I mean, I’m a mother, and I know how hard I tried, how hard I worked, but I bet my kids have complaints like this. Can any mother live up to what we need of them? Is motherhood possible?”

  “Oh, my mother didn’t mean to be rotten,” Elizabeth said. “She was so wretched herself. She never got over what Father did to her. What Father did just sank in there with what her father did and her mother did or didn’t do and stewed itself up into a poison broth. She wanted things to be better for me. But she had no idea of what it was to be a child. From the time she was five years old she’d had to take care of one baby or another. She had no childhood.”

  “You’re so forgiving,” Mary said ruefully. “I can’t forgive my mother, and all she did was die. You can’t help dying.”

  Elizabeth looked at her pointedly.

  “Well, maybe she could,” Mary said defensively, “but only because she was so unhappy that nothing else mattered. But I guess that’s why I can’t forgive her. Because she never cared about me at all anyway!”

  “Excuse me, but are you saying that Elizabeth is a forgiving person?” Ronnie asked incredulously.

  They all laughed, even Elizabeth.

  “Well, maybe in that one instance,” Mary smiled.

  “I’m not. I hate her,” Elizabeth said. “Oh I guess I love her too. That’s the bitching fact about parents and children. But I had to try to understand why she acted the way she did. Otherwise, I’d have to think it was me, my … awfulness. I mean, nobody loved me. Nobody. Not my mother, not my father, not my grandparents, my aunts or uncles … no one.”

  “Poor, poor baby!” Alex breathed.

  Elizabeth glared at her but her eyes were glittery.

  Ronnie changed the subject. “So we’re all feeling thrust back into childhood, babyhood I guess. When you can’t control anything, including your emotions.”

  Elizabeth wiped her eyes. “It is really strange, this visit. Don’t know why—all of you, Father, what’s happened in my own life. Decisions I made in my life which at the time I was sure were right but now look crazy to me. I feel as if the whole basis of my life, the floor of it, has cracked, and I’m falling through it, falling into a dark basement. …”

  Mary leaned forward, face suddenly animated. “Oh, Lizzie, that’s how I feel too, only I feel as if I’m in a vertical tunnel, falling falling, it’s dark and nothing is familiar, not a signpost, not a single thing I can reach out and touch, recognize. Except Father, and Father looms so huge, it’s his face at the top, I know I agreed to help take care of him, but I don’t know if I can do it, I’m so afraid. …”

  “Afraid of what?” Ronnie asked.

  Mary’s fingers twisted each other cruelly. She shook her head back and forth, over and over.

  “Last night,” she whispered, “I dreamt he was in bed, in a bed like the one he’s in in the hospital, but in his room here, upstairs. And I went in with tea on a tray, and I said, ‘Look, Father, I made this by myself,’ and he sat up and he said, ‘You can’t do that,’ and he got out of bed and he walked over to me and knocked the tray to the floor and pulled out a knife and he killed me. Killed me!” She laid her head in her hand. “They say you never really die in your dreams, but I did. I felt myself fall, I knew I was dying, I hit the floor. That’s when I woke up.”

  “You’re not imagining your dream is prophetic,” Elizabeth asked, not unkindly.

  “I suppose I am,” she sniveled.

  “Mary!” Elizabeth spoke sharply. “The damage he’s suffered is largely irreversible! He can’t get up, he can’t walk or use his right hand! He never will again!”

  Mary burst into loud sobbing. With one hand holding a handkerchief to her face, she reached out her other one toward Ronnie. “Ronnie! Ronnie!” she cried.

  Ronnie went to her, crouched beside her. She touched Mary’s hand. “I’m here, Mary.”

  Mary threw her arm around Ronnie’s neck. “You’ll protect me, say you will!”

  “Mary,” Ronnie protested.

  “You can do it! You can do it! You’re like a boy! And he never acted like a father to you, he wasn’t your father except by a shudder in the loin. You can do it. You’re free of the taint. You’re like the virgin in legend, the one who can tame the unicorn, who can bring harmony to society, you know, like in Shakespeare!”

  Ronnie stroked
Mary’s hand. “Free of what taint,” she asked coolly.

  “Womanhood! You’re not really a woman, you’re a lesbian, you’re like a man. You can do what we can’t.”

  Ronnie shook her head and stood up.

  “That’s crazy, Mary,” Elizabeth said.

  “Maybe it is! Maybe it is! But it’s what I feel!” She looked up at Ronnie, her face like a child’s, wet and swollen and pink, pleading. “Promise me you’ll protect me from him.”

  Ronnie stroked Mary’s forehead. “I promise. For whatever it’s worth.”

  Mary calmed. She blew her nose. She leaned her head back against the chair.

  Elizabeth was in deep frown, staring at the floor.

  “No one is talking to me,” Alex said in a near-whine. “No one is asking me, helping me!”

  “What do you want us to do?” Elizabeth asked in irritation. “Call up your mother and scold her? What can we do for you?”

  “We all carry around our own pain, Alex,” Mary said self-righteously.

  “None of you seem to understand,” Alex said wildly. “I don’t understand myself!” She stood up. “I feel as if I’m going crazy! Really! I have blackouts! Sometimes I faint! I fainted yesterday, fell down on the floor!” She plopped back into the chair. “I don’t remember anything from my young life! It’s all a blank! A void! I need help!” She put her head in her hands.

  “What a crew,” muttered Ronnie. “And we’re going to take care of a sick man?”

  13

  WITH THE NURSES’ HELP, the sisters had made a list of what they would need, went home and drew up a rota. For two days, each did a share of the telephoning to arrange to rent a hospital bed and supplies, hire a registered nurse, a practical nurse, and a live-in maid to help Mrs. Browning and Teresa with the extra work. They called a local shop and ordered a television set, a swivel-top table, and a VCR. They called Boston to order a small computer that would allow Stephen to type messages onto the television screen—but that would take a week to arrive. They discussed his diet with Mrs. Browning, held a meeting with the staff to discuss new schedules and duties. Apart from their frequent conferences about these matters, they had almost no conversation with each other. When their chores were done, each retreated to her private space—Elizabeth to the library, Ronnie to her room, Mary to exercise in the playroom (which she had made her own, no longer reading in the sitting or drawing room), and Alex for a walk outdoors.