“That’s what my mother says: he’s above the law,” Elizabeth murmured. “But that’s unacceptable.”
“Yes,” Alex said softly. “We have to get Father to acknowledge his acts.”
They fell silent.
“He never will and we can’t make him,” Elizabeth said finally.
“No. No district attorney is going to indict a sick old man like him, even if we were to accuse him. And can you imagine how they’d look at us if we did, especially now? They’d say we were crazy or vindictive or worse! They’d let him change his will!” Mary argued.
“Anyway, he’s not able to stand trial. He can’t speak.”
“Even without being able to speak, he has more control of his life now than I had over mine when I was two or three,” Alex said.
They pondered this.
“That’s true,” Mary agreed.
“We could try him ourselves,” Alex said.
They stared at her.
“Hold a trial here. At night, after the servants have gone to bed. He never turns out his light until eleven or eleven-thirty. After the news. We could go up after dinner.”
“How do we hold a trial?” Ronnie wondered.
“I don’t know. Just present our evidence … our memories … and see what he says. Does. Writes. How he acts.”
“If we’re going to do it at all, we should do it right,” Elizabeth said. “Someone should accuse, someone defend, someone judge.”
“But we’re all his victims.”
“I like that idea. Elizabeth should be the prosecutor—she’s the most articulate in law and things like that,” Alex said.
“Mary has the most sympathy for him. She could defend him.”
“And Alex could be the judge. She’s the kindest of us, and probably the fairest.”
“So what about me!” Ronnie protested.
“You suffered the gravest injury. You are the primary complainant,” Elizabeth said.
“I suffered the gravest injury? Why? Because I became a lesbian? Is that what you think? That has nothing to do with what he did …”
“No, Ronnie!” Mary interrupted. “You suffered the gravest injury because not only did he use you sexually even though you were a child, but he refused to acknowledge you as his child, he did nothing for you, he cast you out into the world with nothing—not just no money, but no love, no help, no—no embrace. And it was clear from the way Hollis acted that he didn’t know about you. Which means he didn’t acknowledge you even in his will.”
Ronnie was placated.
“Okay.”
“So. Shall we do it?”
They all agreed.
“What about Wednesday night, when Mrs. Browning is away and only Doris is here. She’s new, she doesn’t understand the household yet. We’d run less risk of being interrupted,” Mary suggested.
“Wednesday night, then. Prepare your cases, women.”
18
RONNIE DIDN’T, DID NOT, want to meet the lunch ladies as she called them, did not want to eat with them, make conversation with them, even show herself. But Elizabeth and Mary insisted.
“You are part of us, we’ve been all through this, you are intrinsic to our—our—sisterhood!” Elizabeth argued.
“You’re part of our lives now. What are you going to do, disappear every time someone else from our life appears? You have to have courage, Ronnie. I thought you were so brave!”
The challenge to her machismo worked, and she agreed to appear, but her stomach was twisted, and she had to take a pill to calm it before the women arrived.
Mary’s friends arrived a little after eleven in a stretch limo that belonged to Francine. Teresa opened the door to them, but Mary was behind her, waiting in the foyer to welcome them. After Teresa took their coats and they had embraced each other in the tight distant way such women had, she led them upstairs.
“My sisters are up there with him now,” she explained. Up there trying to jolly him into being decent to his guests. But in fact, their efforts were unnecessary. Stephen was well schooled in courtesy, and the moment they entered, his strange warped face curled itself into a smile, the first the sisters had seen on him.
“Oh, Mr. Upton, do you remember me, I’m Chrissie, Christine Bidwell I was, my mother used to bring me out to Lincoln sometimes to play with Mary, my mother was a good friend of Laura’s, they’d been at school together. You visited my parents a few times, Anne and Walter Bidwell, do you remember, we used to live in Back Bay and on the water in Manchester. …” She bent to kiss his cheek and he patted her arm with his good hand, stretched it out then to the next one, “Frankie, Mr. Upton. We played croquet with you once, you taught me the finer points of the game, do you remember?” He opened his mouth in a kind of laugh, stretched out his arm, the old Stephen, full of good humor. Francine kissed his cheek too, then Eloise reintroduced herself, “Lulu, Mr. Upton,” all of them talking at once now, reminiscing, “Remember the time up in Manchester when Mary got stuck in a tree and was terrified to come down?” “Remember the party where Willie Lowell got so drunk and fell in the pool?” “I remember riding through your woods on a wonderful bay named Baby!” Remember … remember … remember. Their reminiscences were highly selective, shot through with tact: they failed utterly to recall Laura falling down drunk, or Francine’s father, also very drunk at a party, suddenly smashing her mother in the face, or Elizabeth always hiding out in a corner somewhere away from the action. They recalled no divorces, his, their own parents, or their own. To hear them, Ronnie thought, you’d think life had been one long garden party.
“So glad you’re home and better, Mary says you’re improving. You’ll be talking and up and about in no time, I’ll bet.” No apparent awareness that Stephen would, whatever else, never be up and about again. They pressed their happy memories upon him, fictional as their happy wishes for the future, convinced that this was the road to well-being. They chatted for fifteen minutes, then noticed he looked tired, they were tiring him out, they should leave but they had so wanted to see him again, to see him home and almost well. …
Stephen was indeed tired. So much smiling, twisting his mouth to appear to laugh, so much energy it took, being gracious. He was out of the habit. These days he acted the way he felt. Being honest becomes a habit hard to break.
The women all trooped downstairs. Ronnie came last, still not introduced, but she understood that Stephen’s room had not been the place to do that. Mary waited until they were settled with drinks in the sitting room, where a fire burned today. “I don’t think you’ve met my half sister Ronalda,” she began and the women looked at her for the first time. At their looks, Ronnie was ready to dart from the room. Only a fierce desire not to shame her sisters made her stand her ground.
“Your half sister! How do you do.” Gloved hand extended. “I didn’t know you had another sister, Mary.”
“Well, I do. We do. Ronnie’s an environmentalist, finishing up her Ph.D. at BU. She specializes in mosses and lichen.”
“How fascinating. So nice to meet you.”
“A pleasure,” murmured Francine.
Bursting with questions they did not dare to ask, they made idle conversation about Francine’s latest acquisition, a David Salle painting, about Christine’s daughter’s engagement to a blessedly appropriate boy from Princeton, about Lulu’s last trip to Morocco. Francine tried, once.
“Would we know any of your people, Ronnie? We sometimes stay at the ranch of some friends of ours in the country near Acapulco—the D’Honorios, do you know them?”
“They’re of Spanish blood, I imagine. I’m Indian—Mayan, actually.” Knew instantly I was Mexican. How come? I could be lots of other things, Ecuadorian, Puerto Rican. …
“A much older aristocracy,” Mary put in.
Ronnie rolled her eyes at Mary. “Who says they were aristocrats?”
Alex grinned. “Ronnie keeps us honest,” she said. “She punctures any pretension.”
The guests seemed, at t
his, to shrivel into a paralyzed silence. But Alex blithely continued. “Doesn’t matter what we talk about, she always sees through false superiority—in life, in politics, in religion. You know”—she turned to Ronnie—“you’re really amazing.”
Ronnie, embarrassed, looked away from Alex, but Elizabeth, amused, picked up the subject. “Yes, she keeps us all on our toes. She’s a feminist, card-carrying. She certainly challenges me.”
“You, Elizabeth!” cried Christine. “I always think of you as the intellectual.”
“Oh, she is,” Mary said fervently. “But Ronnie gives her a run for her money.”
“Really.”
“So that’s what the four of you do all day? Argue about … intellectual matters?”
“No, we work,” Elizabeth answered. “Ronnie on her dissertation, me on my book, Mary on her poetry, Alex … on her soul, I guess,” she finished, smiling.
“Oh, that’s nice, I like that, Elizabeth.” Alex’s face was radiant.
“You work.”
“I didn’t know you wrote poetry, Mary.”
“I’m not very good. Not good enough. But I’m working on it.”
“You put us to shame,” Eloise said, without a shred of shame showing. “I myself do nothing. I just enjoy life. Except of course we all work to help various charities, give luncheons and balls and that sort of thing, which is some sort of contribution I suppose. But mostly,” she shrugged at her own irresponsibility like a delightful child, “we have fun.”
“So tell me,” Francine said to Ronnie, “are you converting them to feminism?”
Ronnie shrugged, unsmiling. “I’m not trying.”
“Well, she’s set me thinking about things in a different way. Her view of history. …” Mary let it hang.
“I don’t know if it’s feminism …,” Alex began tentatively. “A lot of the things Ronnie believes in, I believe in, but I never knew they were feminist ideas.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, I don’t know. What’s really important in life, what matters more than other things. You know, like love and community and well-being. As opposed to, well, power I guess. Worldly power. Which is such an illusion, but people take it for reality, you see. As if it were something you could hold on to forever, that would protect you.”
Three pairs of eyes glazed over as Alex continued in this vein until, to the guests’ relief, lunch was announced. Mary gracefully steered the conversation back to gossip and acquisitions, trips and parties, and Ronnie crept back into silence, grateful to be ignored for the rest of the lunch.
Still, when it was over and the guests had left, she wandered back to her room feeling a sense of harmony in herself, with her sisters. They had wanted to include her, wanted her to be accepted, had put her forward. She had not, herself, much helped in this effort, and did not regret that. Those women were not her kind, would never be her kind. They would not recognize her, she thought, if she ran into them on a Boston street, or if they did, would not want to linger. But neither would she. Was it necessary, for sisterhood, that all women love and fully accept all other women? If so, sisterhood was impossible. But somewhere, under the surface conversation, they had thought about the serious matters that had been mentioned, and while they were all dependent on rich men—at least to some degree—and accepted the values of that world, they also had sympathy and a kind of guilt for not being, not supporting, something else. And that was something, wasn’t it? They weren’t enemies. They just weren’t quite friends.
She sat down at her computer feeling full of energy and worked well for the rest of the afternoon.
The sisters gathered in the playroom Tuesday night after dinner to discuss strategy. Elizabeth and Mary scrawled lists or outlines on lined yellow pads; Alex stood at the glass doors communing with the stars. Ronnie listened to their ideas, agreed, disagreed. Eventually, after a discussion in which voices were raised, they discarded their original strategy and decided that each sister would be both prosecutor and defender, that Alex would be the final judge but they would each have a voice in the judgment.
Wednesday they were tense and silent, each of them—you could almost see it, Ronnie thought—arguing with herself in her head, preparing her argument with him, the silent man. They picked at the cold dinner Mrs. Browning had left for them, but forced themselves to remain at the table for the usual amount of time. While Doris cleared the table, they went into the playroom and turned on the television set, whose blare and glare passed by them: they barely saw or heard it.
“We have to disconnect the intercom,” Elizabeth said.
“Why? That makes it seem as if we’re planning a crime!” Alex shuddered. “Like breaking and entering.”
“You want him summoning Doris, buzzing constantly while we talk? He will. It will buzz all over the house. She’ll come running, she’ll see that something’s wrong.”
“I’ll do it,” Ronnie said.
It was nine-thirty when they went up. Stephen’s television set was on but his eyes were closed. Ronnie bent and pulled out the plug connecting his intercom. Mary unplugged his telephone. Elizabeth slid the remote control from under his limp left hand, blipped the television set off, and put the remote on a dresser across the room. Alex pushed back the swivel table holding the television set and placed three straight-backed chairs at the foot of the bed and another near the window, facing the bed but at some distance from it.
Stephen’s eyes popped open the moment the sound stopped. His left eye widened in alarm and he reached for his remote control. When he saw it was missing, he reached for the intercom. He pressed it wildly, but no one came running up the stairs. Unmoved by the contortions on Stephen’s face, his wild hitting of the intercom button, his raised fist, his bared teeth, his rage, the sisters stood and gazed at him. He looks like the villain in a silent movie, Mary thought.
All four of them stood together on one side of the bed. The alarm on Stephen’s face was patent, it looked like …
I’ve never seen him afraid, Ronnie thought.
I never imagined Father afraid, Mary thought.
God, Elizabeth thought, he’s terrified.
Oh poor man, so frightened, Alex thought. He must think we’re going to kill him or something.
Elizabeth began. “Father, you have unfinished business with all of us. You know that, don’t you?”
He glared.
“We thought of turning you in,” Mary said sadly. “You know, bringing charges, telling the district attorney, or whomever it is one tells in these cases. We understand that there is no statute of limitations in these cases—or that it begins only after the victim remembers what happened.”
“Not that we ever forgot,” Elizabeth said. “But Alex did. She’s just remembered.”
The left side of his face twisted, the left side of his body writhed in rage, his arm rose, his fist threatened them, his mouth worked, his eye stormed. They stood close together, their shoulders almost touching.
“But it seemed—well, they would hardly indict you now, would they? You can’t even speak in your own defense. And years ago, when it was happening, they wouldn’t have indicted you then either, would they? They wouldn’t have believed us. Such an important man you were. …” Elizabeth moved back and walked to one of the straight-backed chairs and sat down. She lighted a cigarette. “My mother—you do remember my mother?—she always said you were above the law. You framed her and got away with it. God knows what else you got away with. We can’t have been your only victims.” She blew smoke toward the door, crossed her legs, waggled her foot, the only sign of her nervousness.
Was he smiling? Could it be he was smiling?
“I’ve been reading your papers, you know,” she continued. “Sitting down there in your office reading thirty-year-old memos packed away in cardboard cartons. You were a vicious bastard weren’t you. Someday someone’s going to write quite a nasty biography of you, Father. Of course, someone else will probably write an idolatrous one. The one thing you ca
n count on is”—she turned back to face him—“it won’t be one of us.”
Insofar as one could read his expression, he seemed to be sneering.
Elizabeth sighed. “I know, I know what you believe: women don’t understand Realpolitik. Don’t know how the game has to be played to win.”
“Let’s not get into this, Lizzie,” Mary urged. She turned to the old man. “The point is, Father, what you did to us. We have never had any recourse for your terrible crimes against us. We were children. Even if you hadn’t been who you are … it would have been close to impossible. And we still don’t really have legal recourse. But we do have power. Over you. And this gives us moral recourse. We’re going to put you on trial ourselves.”
One side of his mouth cracked wide, a noise emerged from his throat.
The old bastard is laughing, Ronnie thought. But his left hand was searching for the telephone. It scrabbled around the side table, searched the bedclothes.
“We’re going to try you for incest, pass judgment, and enforce that judgment, Father,” Mary said.
Alex’s light sweet voice intervened. “At first, we thought one of us would act as prosecutor, one as defender, one as accuser, and one as judge. But we couldn’t decide who could defend you or who should accuse … since we’re all your accusers. And since none of us is really impartial enough to be the judge.”
She spoke quietly, reasonably, turning her sweet face as if she were arguing a matter of principle with someone who was bound to understand.
His mouth was still cracked in that queer smile.
“So each of us is going to speak against you and for you. Doesn’t that seem fair? It’s the best solution we could come up with, Father. And we are all going to vote together on the judgment.”
“But Alex alone will determine the penalty,” Elizabeth put in coldly. “Because she is the kindest of us and because she seems to have some sense of higher things,” she explained adding dryly, “At least she believes she does. And since none of the rest of us feels we have such a sense, we’re willing to leave that to her.”
The crack broadened. He was finding this hilarious.
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