Our Father

by Marilyn French

  “Okay,” Ronnie said abruptly, “let’s get on with it. Elizabeth, you’re the oldest. You go first.”

  Elizabeth sat up erectly. Ronnie and Mary sat down on either side of her. Alex took the chair by the window. She held a pad and pen loosely in her hand.

  “If at any time you wish to speak, just …”—Elizabeth peered at his hand—“just hold your hand up and I’ll stop. Then you can write on your cellophane pad. We’ll listen to anything you care to say. Or write.”

  Elizabeth too had a yellow pad lying on her lap, but she did not glance at it. Nor did she look at Stephen. She looked at her hands, folded loosely over the pad in her lap. She said: “In August 1942, when I was ten years old, you entered my bedroom in this house during the night and raped me. You told me that this was how fathers showed their love for their daughters and that you loved me. I will not detail the acts you performed, made me perform.” She turned her head sideways, catching her breath, clearing her throat.

  Ronnie stared at him incredulously. Was he smiling?

  “Afterwards, you threatened that if I told anyone what you had done, you would cut my mother and me off and leave us penniless. You also said no one would believe me. You raped me again after that, many times, every summer until I was seventeen and stopped you forcibly.”

  She finally looked at Stephen. “Do you have anything to say? Do you deny any of what I’ve said?”

  Ronnie gasped silently. He was staring at her, smiling.

  Elizabeth stared back. Ronnie had never seen that expression on her face: numb, helpless, appealing, like a young girl. He did not drop his eye. She dropped hers. This time, she glanced at her pad.

  “It wasn’t difficult to frame your defense. Because I feel certain—and seeing your expression now, more certain than ever—that you and generations of men before you felt that incest was their prerogative, their right—that fathers own the bodies of their daughters as they do those of their wives and slaves. And that they believe they have the right to own other human beings, to control them, that indeed, they define manhood as the ability to control others. Knowing your heart as I believe I do, I believe this is what you too think. And so I spent all day yesterday and today reading in history and myth and philosophy, trying to frame these charges in a way you would understand and accept.”

  The lips narrowed; the eye narrowed.

  “And I think that to do that, I must discuss the nature of fatherhood itself. But I believe to define fatherhood, we must first define motherhood. Now, traditionally motherhood means carrying a child within one’s body to term and giving birth to it. Some mothers feed the baby from their bodies, some take responsibility for its daily care until it is adult. But that responsibility is made impossible by societies in which economic forms are such that mothers cannot carry their children with them while they find or grow the food to feed them, as they do in gathering-hunting and horticultural societies. So motherhood is not a given natural role, but a role partly given by nature, and partly defined by the economics of society.”

  Elizabeth whispered to Ronnie, who poured a glass of water for her from the pitcher Alex had placed on a side table. Alex glanced at Stephen, offering him one: he merely glared at her. The room was charged with silence as Elizabeth sipped her water. Alex watched solemnly. Ronnie and Mary stared straight ahead. Stephen tried to stare at the wall to his right. Elizabeth cleared her throat and continued.

  “And men determine the economics of society. Fathers traditionally have avoided the hands-on responsibility for babies. Mothers have traditionally taken it, but especially after the child is weaned, they bear no special obligation to do so: since both parents are genetically represented equally in the child, both have an equal investment in fostering the child’s survival.

  “Moreover, it is clear that different acts are required to foster the child in different economies. While in gathering-hunting societies one parent alone can maintain a child—especially if she or he lives in a village society—this is more difficult in horticultural societies unless the maintaining parent, which is usually the mother, owns the right to use of land. In an industrial economy such as ours, two or more parents are necessary to maintain a child. Does that seem clear?” she asked Stephen sharply.

  He ignored her. She stood up. She walked around to his right side. She peered at him, moving her face close to his.

  “DOES THAT SEEM CLEAR?” she shouted at him. “DOES IT?”

  He, startled, nodded.

  The sisters too, startled by this interchange, moved slightly in their chairs. Elizabeth returned to her chair.

  “What remains to be discussed,” she said, turning over a page of her pad, slipping her half-glasses on, examining the page, then removing the glasses and looking up at Stephen again, “is the question of ownership. You”—she pointed a finger at Stephen, who was looking toward the wall—“you, Stephen Upton”—he turned slightly to face her—“have always called yourself a libertarian, a believer in constitutional liberty, in individualism, in the rights of man. Is that correct?” His face, looking at her, was expressionless.

  She bent over and picked up a thick notebook. She opened it; it was filled with plastic pages containing newspaper clippings. “I have here one of your scrapbooks, lovingly maintained by your various secretaries over the years, containing clippings of speeches you have given, quotations offered to the press, and reports about your influence on national policy. Do you wish me to read aloud from these, or can we take it as given that your philosophy has always been one of libertarian individualism?”

  He glared.

  “Do you want me to read them aloud?”

  Oh that cold nasty voice.

  His left hand waved her away.

  “Very well, then.” She put the book back on the floor. “In such a philosophy, the notion that any human can own another human is repugnant. The way such philosophers phrase this belief is that each man has the right to own himself. In many places in legal literature, we are informed that Man is generic and includes also Woman. These writings, however, have neglected children, and it is unclear whether children are believed to own themselves. It appears that, contrary to libertarian thinking, you believe that children do not in fact own themselves, that their fathers own them. Such ownership amounts to the Roman concept of patria potestas, which granted the father of the family the right of ownership over wives and children, including the right to punish, sell, or make other use of their bodies, even killing them.”

  She sipped her water. Stephen looked around at them now, his one alive eye a fiery assault.

  Amazing how much expression he can show, Ronnie thought. Contempt, outrage, ridicule, scorn, hatred, belittlement, incredulity—all of that with a single eye and a twisted half-mouth.

  “In Roman law, male children were at some age freed from paternal control, but daughters never were until they married, at which point—with certain exceptions—they passed into the control of their husbands. I therefore argue that Stephen Upton had a perfect right to rape his daughter Elizabeth by Roman law which makes her his property and without legal existence of her own. However, the right of patria potestas conflicts with libertarian philosophy, and Roman law does not hold in the United States, the country where Stephen Upton resides, and where he built his career as a great defender of libertarianism. Therefore, I charge that according to American law, he must be found guilty of either incest or a hypocrisy so extreme as to negate his entire career. And the penalty I ask for is a signed confession to one or the other of these crimes. I have indeed prepared two confessions”—she pulled some typed pages out from under the yellow pad—“for your signature. If you can make only an X, that will do.”

  Stephen’s head started, his left eye seemed to jump out of his head.

  She laid the pages before him and held out a pen. “Will you sign them?”

  Stephen swept the pages off his tray with his good hand, looked up at Elizabeth with the defiant frown of a ten-year-old child.

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nbsp; She bent and picked up the pages. She glanced at Alex, who nodded. “I’m finished,” Elizabeth said to no one in particular.

  “Shall I go?” Mary asked them. Ronnie nodded. Elizabeth returned to her chair and sat utterly immobile, staring down at her lap.

  Mary too had a pad, but as she sat up preparing to speak, it slipped from her lap to the floor. She didn’t seem to notice. She was wearing something heavy and white, almost like a monk’s robe, with a long gold pendant lying beneath the folds of its cowl. She did not look at Stephen at all, but at a crucifix that had long hung on the side wall of the room, a simple gold cross that had belonged to his great-grandmother.

  “Yes,” she murmured. “All right.” She looked at Stephen. “In 1944, when I was eight years old, shortly after my mother died, you came into my bedroom in Georgetown and got in my bed and put your arms around me and told me you loved me and that fathers and daughters who loved each other showed that love this way, and you raped me. You did not at that time use your penis. You told me that if I told anyone it would kill you and I would have no parents at all, I’d be an orphan. You continued to rape me in Georgetown and here in Lincoln, until you married Amelia two years later. I had to look that date up because the horror of what you did to me in bed filled me with terror every time I was in the same house with you, forever afterward. It still does. After Amelia became pregnant, you began again. When I was twelve, you had full intercourse with me, saying you were making a woman of me. Afterwards, you showed me a gun with which you said you would kill yourself if I ever told anyone. You did not stop raping me until I was eighteen and engaged to be married. In 1954.”

  She turned her head to look at him and her eyes misted. “The problem was I really loved you. Father.”

  He regarded her warily.

  “My accusation, therefore, is that not only did you rape me, which I think is a crime by human law, but you destroyed utterly my ability to discriminate love from power, sex from submission. You ruined my emotional life. Forever.” She turned to the crucifix again.

  “Elizabeth accused and defended you on more or less legalistic grounds. At least, that’s what I assume they are, not knowing anything about law—as you well know. Not knowing much about anything, I presume you would say.”

  She pulled an immaculate hankie from the pocket of her dress and wiped her cheeks under her eyes, careful not to smudge her makeup.

  “But I was carefully raised within the bosom of the Episcopal church by my nannies, who felt that religious indoctrination was part of their job. And although I later left the church—religion itself, really—the message was not lost on me as the various priests discussed God the Father, that the Father was god. And indeed, if all fathers are gods to their families, my father was preeminently a deity—Stephen Upton, confidant of presidents, a valued presence among the powers that rule this country, one of the small handful included in books written about ‘the Establishment.’ Stephen Upton is a god not just to his family but a god among men, who, I believe, sees himself as having divine powers. And we all know that those who make the law consider themselves above the law. He is almost interchangeable with God the Father, to whose will the priests tell us we must submit. I heard this message and always obeyed it. I always deferred to men, especially my father—that is, my God.”

  She turned away from the crucifix and looked down in her lap, fingering the huge gold pendant she wore. “As I grew older and more thoughtful—I know you think that’s ridiculous, Father, but in fact I am a relatively intelligent person, I have even read a few books of philosophy in my time—I discarded the idea of a benevolent god ruling the earth. But not the idea of god the father. And what made father-god so powerful was not goodness but money. Money that can buy things like guns and tanks and planes and soldiers and property and houses and land and oil wells and companies that force other people into obedience one way or another. I never lost my faith in that deity—but for me faith is a belief in his power, a belief that he must be placated or he would punish you—until … well, you wouldn’t be interested, but once in my life I deserted that god and adopted another, one you’d mock I’m sure, the god of love who gave me an experience more ecstatic than I’m sure any Saint Teresa or whoever Episcopalians venerate ever had … well. …”

  She wiped beneath her eyes again. She looked up, directly at him this time.

  “And I was punished. Still I wouldn’t give it up for anything … not even for eternity in heaven if I or you or any of us believed in such a thing. Anyway, you’re not interested in that. My defense of you is that you really are a god and that godly power is real even if it is based only in money. Now how the fathers got all the money, that’s another question and I can’t answer that, I have to leave that to Ronnie, I’m sure she knows. All that matters to me is that they have it and they are not about to give it up.

  “So!” She faced him bravely. “My defense of you is based on religious grounds—that this hearing is invalid because no mere human can bring God to judgment. And since the Father is a surrogate for God, his deputy on earth, no child can bring the Father to judgment—especially female children, who are illegitimate and subhuman. Women have no rights at all in the Father’s eyes, daughters no more than wives, free women no more than slaves.”

  Her voice softened, became less formal. “But the way we’ve arranged this trial, we are each prosecuting, defending, and judging you, Father. So while I accuse you of incest, I defend you on grounds of your godliness. But when I was writing up my notes for this, I noticed I had defined godliness as power. And that, you see, affects my judgment. This father before me, who retains the power of money, and has recently threatened to use it against us, in fact retains few other powers. Indeed, his money right now cannot help him; although he still has his money, he is close to impotent. That means Father no longer equals power; Father is no longer god. At this moment, we, the women without rights, have the physical power to subdue and even kill you if we so choose. At this moment, we, having the power, are the gods and can act with impunity, just as you did when you were a god. At this moment, we are above the law. The penalty I recommend is that we should rape you as you raped us—with an instrument, of course, not our bodies—in keeping with the ancient law of an eye for an eye.”

  Stephen’s good eye popped, his mouth grizzled, saliva poured from the right side of it, his left hand clawed up. He stretched it out as if he would could destroy her face with it. But she merely watched him, Mary for once in her life not terrified, Elizabeth thought, watching her almost serene glance around the room, saw her notice the yellow pad on the floor, bend and retrieve it, sit up again, glance at Stephen, then turn calmly to Alex.

  “Are you going to speak, Alex?”

  Alex licked her lips. “Can I go last?”

  The sisters turned to Ronnie. “Okay with you, Ron?”

  She shrugged, nodded. She examined the bedclothes at the foot of Stephen’s bed. She turned to Elizabeth. “I don’t have much to say. I’m not sure I can defend him.”

  Elizabeth nodded.

  Stephen only once or twice turned his eye on her with an extreme wariness, then immediately turned away as if he were unwilling to acknowledge even her presence in the room.

  Ronnie looked at him calmly, sadly, as a school director might look at a poor student she was considering expelling from her school.

  “I guess what she said—Mary—is right, reflects the way you feel. Felt. Probably would still feel if you were younger, had the power. You had all the rights. So I guess you felt you had the right to screw my mother—she was your servant, I guess to you that meant your property. Anyway, she loved you, I know that. I think you loved her too but I’d be willing to bet you never told her so. But that she knew it. My mother is another matter. Forgiving her is hard.

  “Forgiving you is impossible. You took me like a piece of meat, like a slave, an animal. Do you remember it? The day I was swimming in your pool?” She leaned toward him, her face fierce.

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sp; He drew back, drew in breath—was that a gasp? He glared at her.

  “You raped me. You treated me like a thing over which you had complete power, a thing with no feelings of her own, no pride, no dignity, no rights. This left me with a sense of helplessness and inferiority—a sense that I have no existence, don’t matter—that I will have to battle as long as I live.

  “You are my biological father”—she stopped, her voice thick, then started again—“but you have denied that fatherhood and denied my daughterhood. This will leave me seeking an identity for as long as I live.

  “Even though I never harmed you—after all, I have no responsibility for my own existence, my own birth—and never wished you ill, you have condemned me to eternal shadowhood and pain.” She raised her eyes. Stephen’s left eye was looking at her. “I want retribution,” she said.

  She turned to Elizabeth. “I can’t defend him. You’ll have to do it.”

  Elizabeth nodded, gazed at Stephen.

  “It is clear that of all the daughters, Ronalda Velez is the most powerless. She is not just female, but a bastard, not just a bastard but of color, not of the dominant race, without funds or friends in high places, that is, with no social standing in this court. Her temerity in bringing these charges is incredible, and her arrogance requires punishment as an example to any others of the inferior classes who might dare to challenge the superior classes. Challenging the superior class is treason in every state. The judge should—as many judges in such situations have done—not only dismiss all her charges but should charge Ronalda Velez with high treason.” She turned to Ronnie, her eyebrows a question.

  Ronnie grinned at her with delight.

  Stephen gazed at the two of them with a puzzled exhaustion.

  Mary intervened. “But there’s more to say. Although Ronalda Velez is your child, you not only never acknowledged her, but you never helped her financially or emotionally, did not even pay for her education.” She looked meaningfully at Stephen. “The fact that she has completed all the course requirements for a Ph.D. in environmental science and is presently working on her dissertation is due entirely to her own efforts. She has not yet completed that dissertation only because she returned to Lincoln to nurse her mother through her illness at the demand of Stephen Upton.”