Father's Arcane Daughter

by E. L. Konigsburg

  One evening after she had been working at the home for two weeks, she answered a call light from room 12A. She checked her charts to see who it was: a new patient, Flora. Adkins, admitted, just that afternoon. Martha opened the door and saw an old lady leaning on one elbow, who commenced to stare at her. The old lady stared at her a long time before she held up a forefinger—warped like a bonsai—and said, “Come here, Caroline.”

  Even in the short time she had worked there, Martha had grown accustomed to answering to strange names. The week before she had been Sylvia (a daughter) to Mrs. Lancaster, the broken hip in 14A, and just two dap ago she had been Harris (a former butler!), to Mrs. Stillitoe, arteriosclerosis in 15C. And now she would be Caroline to Flora Adkins, arthritis in 12A. She didn’t mind. She would answer to whatever name they chose.

  She walked over to the old lady and asked her gently where she hurt. Flora Adkins answered, “In my proud soul. I need a bed pan.” Martha laughed. Here was one with a sense of humor. She brought the bed pan and then Flora Adkins said, “I always knew that you would return to help me in my hour of need.”

  “Yes,” Martha replied. “I will be just a few steps away when you need me.”

  “I knew you would be, Caroline,” Flora Adkins answered.

  Martha smiled to herself, shrugged and returned to her station.

  Flora Adkins called Martha once again that night. She couldn’t sleep; she wanted to talk. Martha felt a jot of annoyance. After all, she had taken the night shift because it was almost free of interruptions. “We won’t tell Charles that you’re back,” Flora Adkins said. “Not yet anyway.”

  “Charles?”

  “Your father,” Flora Adkins replied.

  Martha patted the old lady’s hand, ready to go out the door again and said, “Yes, Flora.”

  “Grandmother!” Flora Adkins insisted. “It is not that I object to the modern practice of having children call their elders by their first names, but I must insist that you call me Grandmother. After all, I’ve waited a long, long time to hear it.”

  So Martha leaned down and kissed the old lady’s forehead and said, “Good night, Grandmother.”

  “Now, don’t tell Charles.”

  “Don’t worry,” Martha whispered. “I’ll never see him. No one ever visits when I’m on duty.”

  ’Martha returned to her desk again, and this time she pulled Flora Adkins’s chart from the file. The patient in 12A had been cared for in her own residence until being admitted to the home. Her mind had become increasingly confused; moreover, she had become hostile to the point of open aggression toward one of her nurses. It had become impossible to find people willing to attend to her. She had been deemed mentally incompetent, and Mr. Charles Carmichael became her legal guardian; it was he who had committed her to the home.

  Now, don’t tell Charles the old lady had said. Charles Carmichael, Caroline’s father, must be the Charles she meant…

  Martha soon found out more about Charles and even more about Caroline. Flora rang for Martha every night. “Caroline,” she would begin, “do you remember the time…”

  And it was from those many small beginnings that Martha Sedgewick began to learn about Caroline Carmichael. The old lady had an appetite for detail. Distant detail. The sharpness with which she recalled the past made it hard to remember that Flora Adkins had been declared out of her wits. Of course, the present easily slipped from old people. (Flora sometimes did not remember what she had eaten for dinner.) The past where everything was known and finished and required no action was much more comfortable. Especially at night when the present was dark and threatening. Martha began to look forward to her visits with her patient in 12A. Flora Adkins’s Tales of Caroline proved to be better company than her own lonely thoughts.

  One night—as if some hand other than her own did it—Martha removed her identification badge as soon as the call light from 12A flashed on. She removed it the next night and the next. On the fourth night that she appeared without the tag that declared that she was M. SEDGEWICK, Flora Adkins asked for her pocketbook.

  The old lady tried to open it herself, then looked down at her fingers and said, “My hands look like they have been assembled out of miscellaneous parts by a mad plumber.”

  Martha opened the purse for her and handed her the wallet. She knew that was what Flora wanted. The old lady handed it back to her and said, “Look at the pictures, Caroline. Start with the first one.”

  Martha began looking through them, and Flora Adkins watched her with a look as intense as her look had been that first evening when Martha had answered the call from 12A. She watched as Martha turned over one picture and then another. Martha took her time; to flip through them quickly would be insulting. She saw a photograph of a bride and a groom, of a distinguished older gentleman, and then she stopped short. She gasped. There smiling at her was someone who might have been herself, a teen-age self, wearing a dress she had never owned, could never have afforded to own. Flora Adkins threw her head back and laughed; her gnarled hands bounced up and down on the bedcovers. She fastened Martha with a stare and said, “You are as lovely as you ever were, Caroline.”

  Martha continued to hold the picture, saying nothing. Flora Adkins waited and then said, “This is the picture that was in all the papers, Caroline. Your kidnap picture.”

  Martha Sedgewick’s taking off her badge was her first unconscious step into the life of Caroline Carmichael. Her study of that photograph was her second. Her third step was deliberate and was longer in coming, long enough for her to learn from Flora Adkins everything there was to know about the life of Caroline Carmichael. She learned names and relationships, the ground plan of the Carmichael family estate, and as Flora Adkins reminisced evening after evening, she came to recognize faces from the photographs that Flora brought out of drawers and closets, patches of a past she refused to give up.

  As the pattern of family and fortune emerged, Martha learned that when Flora’s daughter, Anne, had married Charles Carmichael, their marriage had been of as much interest to the financial pages of the paper as it had been to the social. The Adkins family holdings were smaller and quieter than the famous Carmichael millions, but they were considerable. At the time of her marriage, Anne’s father had settled half of his estate upon her. Through wise investment and interest, her inheritance had grown into a fortune that could easily have been halved again to make two more independent fortunes. Anne Adkins had left her estate to her daughter, Caroline. Unless Caroline returned to make a claim before her thirty-fifth birthday, the Adkins money would meld with the Carmichaels’.

  Flora Adkins did not want that to happen. She did not resent Charles Carmichael, but she hated his new wife, Grace. She detested her with eighty-two years worth of experience in family relations. There were two children from this second marriage, but Flora Adkins knew almost nothing about them. She had refused to set foot on the Carmichael estate since Grace had come into residence. She obviously did not care if Charles came into the Adkins money, her daughters money, but she knew that when Charles was gone—he was considerably older than Grace—the’ Adkins money would pass through him to Grace.

  Late that summer, the summer of 1952, the old lady began to sink noticeably. The Caroline lessons covered less, new material; they became instead longitudinal, reviews of time and latitudinal reviews of ancestry. One night while reminiscing about Caroline’s eighth birthday, Flora abruptly stopped speaking. She studied Martha a while before she finally said, “When it appears in the papers, Caroline, I don’t want my death attributed to heart failure or cerebral something-or-other. I want them to say, ‘cause of death: old age’ Now, that has a ring of dignity to it.”

  Martha recognized that the old lady was letting her know that she would not live much longer. She requested a replacement for her regular night duties and kept vigil at the bedside of her friend/patient, Flora Adkins, mother of Anne Adkins Carmichael, grandmother of Caroline. Only two nights later she was holding the old lady’s ha
nd, not at the wrist to take a pulse, not as a nurse, but holding her hand like a grand daughter when Flora Adkins opened her eyes, fixed them on her and with the last tiny bit of amperage she had left to her, said, “Go to it, Martha girl!”

  Then Flora Adkins died.

  Martha folded the lady’s hands across her chest and knew that with her dying words, Flora Adkins had commissioned her, Martha Sedgewick, to be an impostor.

  But it was Charles Carmichael who was the final factor in her decision.

  Martha went to Flora Adkins’s funeral. She sat in the back of the small chapel that was in the nursing home. She had arrived late. Charles was the only outsider, the only person besides the residents and the staff of the nursing home to attend. Martha watched him leave; he looked lonely. Perhaps it was only his dark suit amidst all the nursing home gray—green gray walls, gray-haired residents, tattletale gray nurses’ uniforms, a sea of gray cable-stitched sweaters—but walking up the aisle from the front of the chapel, the rich Mr. Charles Carmichael looked hurt and lonely and vulnerable. Martha decided at that moment that she would return his daughter Caroline to him.

  Her first step toward doing so was to slide into the corner of the pew away from the center aisle. She would hide in the shadows until the time seemed right.

  It was Flora’s lack of knowledge of the two children that made Martha realize that the deception would be easier than she had thought. She, as Caroline, would not be expected to know anything about the Car-michaels’ last sixteen years. Besides, she realized, she would not have to be something other than Martha for all those years in between. She had only to say that Caroline Carmichael had assumed the identity of Martha Sedgewick and had gone off to Ethiopia. There was not even a need to destroy Martha Sedgewick’s records. The only small piece of invention that was necessary was the part of the story covering the time when Caroline Carmichael supposedly escaped and assumed the identity of Martha Sedgewick.

  That, too, proved surprisingly easy. She, Martha, had been ill during the time that the real Caroline had been kidnapped. So she made up the following tale to tell the lawyers: Martha Sedgewick had died, and Caroline, in cahoots with one of her kidnappers, assumed all of Marthas credentials and went to Ethiopia. It was not even necessary to forge a death certificate for Martha Sedgewick; she maintained that Caroline Carmichael had destroyed it.

  Martha’s true experiences in Ethiopia could stand for Caroline’s, except that she had to be careful never to mention her parents.

  Once she had successfully pulled off the deception, she began. to enjoy being Caroline. She came to believe that a second identity was a positive step toward good mental health. Except for one thing: The more effective she was as Caroline, the less likely it was that Charles Carmichael could love her as something other than a daughter. But life always provided some compensation. And she had found Winston. Since there was no chance to be his stepmother, she would be his sister, and be very good at that. And that would be easy. She had come to love him.

  So it was her love for Winston and her increased recognition of and, eventually, love for’Heidi that kept her bound to the role of Caroline Carmichael. And it was that love, love in the service of two young lives that threatened to uncover her deception. That was when she came to me. And that was when I decided to help.

  I would like to add the following note to the above report: it is the record of a conversation that I had with Martha Sedgewick one afternoon after Heidi had demanded to be kidnapped and after the plans for her rehabilitation had been made.

  Martha began by telling me that the money had never been an important factor in her decision to assume the identity of Caroline Carmichael.

  “I find that hard to believe,” I said,

  “Oh,” she answered, “the money is nice because it represents margins.”

  “Margins?”

  “Yes, margins. Margins of time: no rushing, being able to have someone pick up the details. Margins of time and margins of space: large rooms, ample wardrobe, not having to match your wardrobe with the laundry schedule. That’s what money buys. The money was important because it bought a certain ease. But I could see that for Winston and Heidi, the money bought too wide a margin. It bought a moat. Grace was able to hide her daughter in Carmichael castle and pull up the drawbridge. The casde was self-contained. And Grace, using the fear of another kidnapping as an excuse, and using the name of protectiveness was able to widen the margins between Heidi and the world. Unfortunately, Winston was locked in with his sister. Grace called it a margin of safety; it was too ugly to be called by its real name.”

  “What name would you give it?” I asked.

  She shook her head slowly and whispered, “Shame. I ’d call it shame. Grace was so ashamed of her daughter.”

  thirteen

  I PUT the file down. While I had been reading, Heidi had been working at her desk, she had even dictated something to her secretary, but I don’t know what. “How long have you had this?” I asked.

  “A long time. I knew that Miss Agatha Trollope held the answers. I always suspected that the famous yellow envelope contained test scores. I had certainly been tested enough to know that psychological tests are as sure an identification as fingerprints. After Father died, and I took over running the corporation, I approached Miss Trollope with a business proposition. I would endow Finchley with a Fine Arts Building, named in her honor, if she would give me information on Caroline. I assured her that I would do nothing to endanger Caroline’s position with the family. I told’her that, after all, I had other ways to get at the truth. (I didn’t really.) And I played on her fondness for Finchley.”

  “Had you ever confronted Caroline?”

  “No. Never. I owed her too much.”

  “Ever tell Mother?”

  “No.”

  “Why have you never told Mother?”

  “Part of the war zone. There is a part of me, Winston, that can never forgive her for being ashamed of me. For allowing me to develop bad manners and bad habits so that they could provide her subconscious with visible evidence that I needed to be hidden, just as the Caroline kidnapping provided her ? with conscious excuses. Part of me can never forgive her for that. She would have kept me a golliwog.”

  I thought about what she said. The pain that she felt as she said it was visible. I thought about the pain she must have felt when she had first realized the truth. “Tell her now,” I said, half-teasingly, half-sincerely. “Think of the sweetness of revenge. Think how incensed Mother will be when she realizes that the Heidi/Hilary miracle was worked by an impostor.”

  ’Til not tell her. Now or ever.”

  “Command decision?” I asked.

  “Decision making is what I am best suited for.”

  “How lucky for us and for the business that you are. Just think,” I said, laughing, “were it not for you, it would have been me taking over when Father died.”

  “Yes, Winston, dear Winston, with all your talents for literature and learning, you are not suited to business. I am a good provider. In that sense, Mother owes Caroline her way of life, too. Her life in the Club and on committees.”

  “Give me back the envelope,” I said. She handed it to me. I put it inside the manilla folder.

  “What are you going to do with them?”

  “I am going to the funeral home to make the arrangements, and I am going to very gently and very lovingly place them under my other sister’s head. She deserves to be buried with some funny papers, the final frames of our comic strip.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Heidi said. “We are her heirs, you know. Just think, at the cost of a small piece of a very large inheritance, I bought a productive life.”

  “You are a mystery, Heidi,” I said. “To have had this file all these years.”

  “The difference between us, Winston, the difference that makes me an executive and you a writer, is that I have to work from knowing and you have to work from not knowing. That is why I had the open file and that is
why you had the sealed envelope.”

  I studied her, my admiration boundless. “You are mysterious, Hilary Carmichael. Arcane.”

  “Arcane?”

  “Yes, arcane. I’m the writer. I can call you that.” I tucked her hand in the crook of my arm and held the manilla folder in the other. “Now let us bury Caroline, and Martha. Sedge wick with her.” We started out of the room. “Because of her,” I said, “you lead the life you do, and because you lead the life you do, I can lead the life I do.” I stopped just short of the door I was to open. “I guess I owe her two lives.”

  This is what E. L Konigsburg has to say about writing My Father’s Daughter:

  “Hallmark Hall of Fame made a movie of this book. They called their version Caroline? (That question mark is part of the title.) The title wasn’t the only thing they changed. As a matter of fact, when I went to Los Angeles to see a preview of the movie and watched the opening scene, I wondered if they were using my book at all. But soon, I got caught up in the story and recognized that it was indeed My Father’s Daughter. Overall, I liked it. And—here’s the acid test—I cried at the end. The movie won an Emmy as the best made-for-television movie of the year.

  “A book is a quiet thing—a writer tries to catch a reader’s mind—but a TV show has to catch a viewer’s eyes and ears. The producers told me that they have about a minute and a half to catch an audience’s interest, and they couldn’t open with a quiet conversation. So that is why their opening scene is so different from my book’s.

  “Actually, I realized that the movie people were in effect translating my book into another medium. When one of my books is translated into a foreign language—say French or Italian—I never know what kind of spin the translators are putting on my words. (I am unfortunately decidedly monolingual. English is my only language.) ( Maybe something that is funny in English just can’t be translated as funny in another language.