Our Father

by Marilyn French

  Stephen stared at Ronnie.

  Ronnie dropped her eyes to her lap. Thanks, Mary. She carefully avoided looking up at Stephen but the other three sisters stared fixedly at him. He dropped his eyes.

  “Therefore, I have prepared a legal document for you to sign. In quintuplicate, so each of us has a copy.” Elizabeth held out several typed pages. “It acknowledges your parentage of Ronalda Velez, and entitles her to a full share in your estate.” She stood and placed the pages on his tray table.

  He glared at her with hate. He spit on the pages.

  Elizabeth left them where they were. She sat down. She turned to Alex. “Ready?”

  “Oh, I guess so,” Alex said faintly. She pulled a small, thin gold Star of David from under her blouse and fingered it. She seemed to be in intense communication with something invisible, something interior. They waited in silence. Finally she looked up at Stephen.

  “I forgot everything, you see. It was a gap in my mind. I lost the past. I felt the loss, it was like being without some internal organ that you can live without but not fully—you know something’s missing. But coming back here triggered things—I went up to the old nursery….”

  Stephen’s eye widened.

  Tears filled Alex’s eyes. “I was only a baby, Father. What was I, two, three years old? Still sleeping in a crib! How could you?”

  His mouth widened. He was smiling! He pulled his pad to him and scrawled U LIKD IT.

  “I suppose she asked for it,” Ronnie said grimly.

  Alex studied him. “Father,” she began tentatively, “did you—do you—really believe that what you did to us was all right?”

  He flung his face away from her.

  Alex turned inward again, fingering her star. “The thing is,” she murmured, “all of us loved you. Even Ronnie, even though she tries to deny it. Loved you. Love you.” Her voice trailed away faintly

  He turned to her grimacing, nearly smiling. He picked up the pad again. CHANGNG WILL. U CANT CHANGE THAT.

  Alex snatched the pad away from him, pulled up the plastic, screamed, “FUCK THAT! WHO CARES! Do you acknowledge Ronalda Velez as your daughter? WRITE!” she shrieked, thrusting the spat-upon pages into his left hand.

  He hurled them away from him, scrawled on the cellophane. Ronnie stood up, picked it up: BASTD, he’d written.

  “Stephen Upton,” Alex’s voice said wavering, “do you admit you raped your daughters, causing them immeasurable harm and pain for the rest of their natural lives?”

  It looked as if he were laughing at her.

  “WRITE!” she screamed again.

  “FUCK U ALL,” he wrote, quite distinctly.

  “Oh, Father,” Mary sighed palely.

  Finally, Alex asked, “Does that mean you’re pleading guilty? Admitting you did fuck us all?”

  He glared at her, turned his face away from them, stared straight ahead with an expression of great dignity, even nobility. He would not participate. He refused to legitimate these proceedings in any way. He would not plead at all. They had no rights over him. No right. At all.

  They watched his face, his body, his left hand. They understood.

  Alex stood gazing down on him, her face as still and tragic as a religious painting of a martyr. Thinking: all he has to do is spread out an arm and reach it toward us and all of us—well, Mary and I certainly, maybe Elizabeth too—would enter it, hold him, forgive, sob, pat his face. Well, maybe they wouldn’t, but I would. … He’s my daddy. Yet when a single gesture could win our forgiveness, harmonize us with him whatever his crimes whatever his horrors whatever his scorched and calloused soul spirit psyche might be, Father, our Father, however he was we are doomed to love him forever law of nature, when that’s all he has to do, he tells us to fuck off.

  Elizabeth stared at the picture that hung over his bed, a nude woman in the style of “September Morn.” It had hung there as long as Stephen had occupied the room.

  Alex turned away, walked to the window, pulled open the drape and the curtain, gazed out at the moon, brilliant now, low in the sky above the treetops. She leaned her forehead against the windowpane, cold and damp. She was still fingering her star. Did he realize he’d made some terrible mistake? Did he know what he’d given up? Did he care? The sisters watched her; even Stephen glanced at her briefly, uneasily, then swiveled to stare stoically ahead at the dead television set.

  Finally, she spoke. “I’m going to give my judgment.” She raised her head but did not turn around. “I once saw a movie about a trial and I think that in such cases, the judge is supposed to put a hood over his head. I don’t have a hood, so I’ll just keep turned away from you.

  “I have observed and believe it to be a law of nature that the oppressor hates those he oppresses far more than they hate him. We hate those who harm us, but it is with a lesser fire, because one who is harmed is hurt from the outside but not from his own insides. He does not harm himself. She does not harm herself. Whereas, a person who harms another harms also himself, desperately, wounds his deepest being. So the great haters are those who do the harm, and the people they hate most are the very people they harm.

  “So you, Father, hate us with a passion far exceeding any hate we have for you. As you have just shown. But you imagine we hate you equally. That is your worst sin.”

  She paused.

  “Your crimes are of the most serious sort—crimes against your own blood, those you must have loved in some way in some place in your tortured spirit, those you were entrusted to protect and nurture. Such a crime deserves the ultimate penalty—death.”

  Even Ronnie gasped. The three sisters stared at Alex with absolute intensity. Stephen’s left eye glared, flared, seemed to float around in his head. His left hand twitched. He turned his head wildly, looking at them suddenly in terror. Of course they could. They could!

  “And death is the verdict of this court,” Alex went on.

  Stephen pulled himself up, he opened his mouth, a faint sound emerged…. Oooooo.

  Mary’s hand darted to her mouth. “Father …!” she cried faintly.

  Alex turned to him briefly. “Are you thinking we’re going to put a pillow over your face, smother you, kill you before you can change your will?” She laughed grimly and turned away again. “Whatever you think and I know you won’t believe this, none of us really came back here for your money. We came for something you scorn, something you will not in any case give—your love, which would enable us to forgive you.

  “This court condemns you to die of lack of love. Your inability to give it or feel it. We are going to leave you. And you will die of your own hatred, day by day, alone in this house, your house, your property, the property you begrudge your blood. Keep it, and live with your aloneness, for you have denied us and we now deny you. Tomorrow, we will pack our things and leave this house—and you—forever. We will not return. We will take no responsibility for your caretaking, for the honesty, decency, or kindness of those who tend you. We do not care if they abuse you, rob you, or treat you cruelly. We will not do to you as you did to us: we will not rape your body or your mind or—what is most important to you—your purse. But we will refuse to acknowledge your humanity as you have refused to acknowledge ours. We will deny your feelings as you have denied ours.”

  Alex was still talking but Stephen’s head was thrown back, his mouth was wide open, he was gasping, his hand clutched at his chest. His eye was rolling in his head, he was falling back, his face had turned blue, his mouth was open, his arm fell. Large, twisted, and bluish, his hand lay still on the sheet. His eyes stared at them.

  Alex stopped speaking and turned around. The sisters stared at her in silence, and she walked toward him, put her hand on his wrist, took his pulse, looked up at them, her mouth agape. They looked at her, then all four of them stood around the bed gazing down at his wrenched blue face, his pop eyes staring at them.

  He’ll have to have a closed casket, Mary thought.

  Part III

  The Legac
y

  19

  LIKE CRIMINALS, THEY SCURRIED to replace the telephone, remove the chairs, move back the television set, set the remote control on his tray table, reconnect the buzzer. “It’s as if we were cleaning up after a crime,” Alex said worriedly. “Well, we are, aren’t we,” Ronnie said, while Elizabeth called Dr. Stamp’s answering service from Stephen’s telephone.

  She put down the phone and surveyed the room. “Everything in place? Fine. Okay, it’s”—she consulted her watch—“eleven-fifteen. Father usually went to sleep around eleven-thirty after the evening news, so a little before that we came upstairs and looked in on him to say good night and found him like this. Or should it just be one of us? Is one better?” She glanced at their faces. Alex and Mary nodded yes. She considered. “Yes, one is better,” she agreed. “She’d try to wake him, she’d call out his name, pat him, touch him, get upset. It would be a few minutes before she called the others, before any action was taken. Okay, which one?”

  She examined each of their faces. “Is anybody here going to crack? You can if you have to, but we have to have a story to cover it.” Alex looked extremely pale, Mary’s face was blotched with tears, Ronnie looked stiff and gray. “How do I look?” she wondered, and ran to Stephen’s low chest of drawers and examined herself. Aged and gray, she thought. That’s okay. “Which one came up?” She looked from one to the other.

  “Not me,” Ronnie muttered.

  “No.”

  “Me,” Mary said. “I’m considered such a flibbertigibbet anyway. I wouldn’t know what to do. I’d flutter around him, call his name, pat his hand, try to bring him to. Only after a while would I think to call the rest of you. Then I’d get hysterical. Which I am.” She burst into tears.

  “Yes, okay. The rest of us were watching the eleven o’clock news. Did we leave the set on?”

  “I’ll check,” Alex said, running downstairs.

  “He would have tried to hit the intercom,” Ronnie said.

  “Yes. He’d flail out at it, maybe knock it to the floor.” Elizabeth walked to the bed, used the sheet to shield her fingers as she picked up the intercom by the wires and dangled it gently down. It fell facedown on the rug beside the bed.

  When the phone rang, they all jumped. Elizabeth grabbed it.

  “Yes, Dr. Stamp!” She sounded panicked. “I’m not sure. We’re not … we think he’s dead. Alex couldn’t get his pulse. We just found him. …”

  Alex returned breathless. “The set was on. I didn’t realize we’d left it on,” she whispered to Mary as Elizabeth spoke to the doctor.

  She hung up. “He’s sending an ambulance.” She gazed at Stephen again. “Is there any possibility he’s not dead?” she asked Alex.

  Alex picked up his wrist again and felt for a pulse; she laid her head against his chest and listened. She shrugged. “I don’t think so.” She slumped into the armchair and put her head in her hands. “I killed him. I really did kill him. I condemned him to death and he died.”

  The others sat down too in chairs spread around the room, and gazed at the inert figure of their father.

  “If you killed him, we all killed him.”

  “Oh, what the fuck difference does it make?” Ronnie asked wearily. “He’s still alive inside us. Still gnawing away at us from inside.”

  “Don’t you feel you got retribution?” Mary asked, surprised. “I’d think you’d feel … I don’t know … avenged.”

  “Ronnie didn’t want retribution, Mary,” Alex said.

  “Well, she said she did.”

  Wanted to be embraced, Alex thought. All of us. All he had to do.

  “We should call Aldo. We’ll want to go to the hospital with him. And somebody should be downstairs to open the door to the ambulance people,” Elizabeth said, rising.

  They all rose. As they walked downstairs, they saw the lights of an ambulance flickering in the sky out beyond the trees.

  By one-thirty Dr. Stamp had shaken their hands and left the hospital, mumbling that it was really a blessing, no way to live, a great man like that. Stephen’s dead body had been sent for the requisite autopsy. The sisters were completely silent in the limousine driving back to the house. It was nearly two by the time they got home again, and they muttered good-nights and went off to bed immediately, without speaking. It dawned on Elizabeth that Doris would be horribly shocked when she went into Stephen’s room to tend him the next morning, so she scribbled a note, took the back stairs up to the third floor and slipped it under Doris’s door. Then she threw off her clothes and fell into bed without even washing her face.

  Wet anyway, it was, why, why should I cry for him, am I crying for me? I killed tonight. We hounded him to death, we killed him as surely as if we had used that pillow. I killed my father. A person should have some feelings about that. Why don’t I? Do I? Grim horse-faced man glaring at me. Gone now. Forever gone. Never again see. Died justly. It was justice. Not mercy, I don’t deal in mercy, neither did he. No point in bombing the railroad lines to the camps he said. Waste of ammo, energy, danger to our gallant airmen. Who cares about a few Jews? Who cares about a few daughters? Not him.

  We gave him a just trial, not according to the law of course but it was just. We each defended him. By his own lights, his standards. If he defended himself, wasn’t that what he would have said? His rights, his prerogatives, his power. And we granted him all of those; we convicted him simply to die of his own values. And he did. Isn’t that justice?

  Used to hate him, then afterwards when I knew I was safe from him forever, I admired him, so famous, so much power he had, so much respect—the people who deferred to him, high-ranking government people when he wasn’t even in it anymore! Influence. Esteem. Wanted it for myself. Joke.

  The most a woman can ever be in government, Elizabeth, is Eleanor Roosevelt! He burst out laughing, he found her a joke, made fun of the way she talked, her teeth. “My Day,” he would say in this simpering voice. Laughed and laughed, my eyes were burning, I asked to be excused from the dinner table, he wouldn’t let me go, sat there braying at me. I didn’t want to be Eleanor Roosevelt, I didn’t want to be a joke. …

  I wanted to be him.

  Maybe I was lucky to be born a woman. If I’d been male, maybe I would have become him.

  She shuddered, turned to her side, turned to the other side, sat up, lighted a cigarette.

  You hate those you harm, Alex said, more than they hate you, but I don’t hate him tonight, for the first time in years I don’t hate him.

  No hate. Just …

  A great emptiness had settled inside her, a yawning space like a black sigh, a uterus opened wide to contain life that would never contain life, that would never be filled, never hold anything but space, that would always be open wide, waiting. …

  She hadn’t drawn her drapes and she gazed out at the night sky, dark, the moon already sunk below the trees, no stars.

  He will never …

  Never what? What had I hoped for?

  A child’s dream, no, a baby’s, even by the time I was four or five I knew better, knew he never would. A baby’s dream, a baby’s demand, pick me up, hold me, keep me warm, keep me safe. …

  Not just that. He will never acknowledge that I loved him, never allow my love for him to have any meaning.

  Her face was soaking now, and she wiped it dry with her sheet, which fell back damp on her naked chest.

  Amazing. I managed to find the perfect lover for me: he never touched me beyond a chaste kiss on the forehead, cold it always was, wonder what kind of lover he was with men, so cold his body always, his hands, his lips, did they warm up when he was with them, what did he look like when he felt passion, such cold eyes, only heated up when we argued, ideas made him passionate, conversations, years of conversations, our only form of intercourse. …

  He was probably the most I could have. That’s why I gave in to his blackmail, his coercion. Wonder if somehow he knew how I was, knew what I didn’t. …

  What kind
of marriage could I have had, how long before the man I married turned into Father, hot damp hands on my body, me weeping, or later on, just numb, silent, Father’s body always so hot, so wet, rubbing against mine, the tortured cry when he came, how I hated it, the hot pulsing liquid I could feel it even though he at least used a condom, impregnating his daughter would violate his code.

  The opposite of Clare, hot hands, hot eyes, although they could be cold too, as cold as Clare’s. Mine too, some people say I have cold eyes. Wide mouth, big teeth Father had: Clare’s face was delicate, fine-featured, fine blond hair. …

  But suppose I’d married … whomever. Can’t picture myself a mother, couldn’t be a mother, don’t know how, don’t want to be one, I would hate any child of mine. … Lucky I never did it, lucky for them, the blessed unborn. … Can’t picture myself a wife either, why should I be one, what is a wife but an unpaid servant and whore, a breeder of sons to inherit men’s property? I was wise, I made the right choices. I made the best choices available to me.

  Available.

  It isn’t that I haven’t had a life. News photos of those Ethiopian Jews escaping into Israel, women under twenty wizened and sick, carrying babies that are just a collection of bones, holding them, clutching them, people in Bhopal in the news today, what about their lives, millions and millions of people across the world starving to death, poisoned, tortured, imprisoned, and even they would say: I had a life.

  Life’s a bitch and then you die. Someone put that on a T-shirt.

  If you consider the lives millions of people have, I’ve been lucky I guess, despite Father. Suppose I’d had a father like my mother’s, Grampa Callahan? Would things have been any better for me? Would have been nice to have a mother who knew how to love me, though, that would have made a difference. Have to call her this afternoon, she’ll crow, the old bitch, revenge at last, I outlived the bastard, get that bequest.