I stood on a mountain like that, the goats were running around my legs. I stood for hours with my arms folded staring out across the red-brown hills, there were more trees then, I remember olive trees and a few domed stucco houses. Only a few then. The sky was the same, the huge blue spread of it, I could see for miles, the dry red hills, the merciless land that everybody fought for, why I wonder? Did I know then? Watching for something, an army maybe, a horde of men, I was planning something, leading something, I had a heart of steel, I was a fighter, a leader of fighters. Hard land, scraping food from the earth with your fingernails, hard life, but I didn’t question it, didn’t question anything then, just tried to survive, one knew in those days what constituted survival. We all knew.
Tall I was for a woman and very thin, with a hawk face and long thick straggly black hair. The wind blew it around my face. I stood with folded arms, watching. Five thousand years ago maybe. And when I spoke, people listened; I uttered words and people attended to them, acted on them. Maybe I was a prophet.
Dawn rose over city walls ancient as tortoises, gilded and pocked and softened by time, but I remember when they were new. I knew this place better than my own name, yet standing there I didn’t know my own name, didn’t know my history, my past.
But I knew what I was, what I had been, what I had to do, something I never knew before. But I forgot it when I came home. How could I do that? Blanked out memory. Until now. What does ten million dollars have to do with that? All it will do is cause a breach between David and me, I can’t stand that, I hate that. I wish he’d left me out of his will. I wish he’d forgotten me completely. I wish Ronnie would take it. It isn’t what I wanted from him, it’s not what I can use, what I need.
She pulled down the covers and got into the cold bed, still shivering.
And the worst part is there really isn’t anyone I can talk to about this. Elizabeth and Mary won’t understand, I know they won’t. David won’t understand. The nuns won’t understand why I don’t just give it to them. But how could I be sure it wouldn’t go to pay for some anti-abortion action or something like that. And if I gave it to Israel, how could I be sure they wouldn’t use it to buy weapons? And that isn’t what I want, not at all. To talk to Ronnie would be insulting: she was left out. God: I wonder how that must feel. Even worse than I feel now.
Ronnie lay naked on her bed staring at the ceiling, her arms thrown out to the sides. A bitter taste wouldn’t leave her mouth, must have been the strawberries they’d had at dinner, strawberries in December, probably been picked unripe, flown up from California or Costa Rica. Sour, lingering taste. Everything had happened as she had expected. She hadn’t expected anything different. What, after all these years he was going to remember something in her that touched him once, some little gleam of eye or run or jump that had caught at his heart? Insert some sweet little clause about my unacknowledged daughter …? He never even looked at me until he raped me, of course he must have, under his eyes, when I wasn’t aware, otherwise why would he … how would he even have known? No, if he’d been going to do it at all, he’d have done it to my face, in life; he’d never put evidence of his peccadillo on paper, in his will for all the world to know, remember, to be read and stamped and sealed in some court, to go down in the history books, the great statesman Stephen Upton. …
I didn’t expect acknowledgment for one minute.
Not ever, never, not for one instant.
So why does it seem so bitter?
Money is shit, Freud said didn’t he? Most people think money is love. Maybe I do too? Not love exactly, but giving it or not giving it does seem some kind of measure of feeling. Food too, Momma, her face flushed from cooking, laying out our dinner on the kitchen table so pleased, so pleased at there being enough food for us, for me, good food too, so happy that my eyes lit up at the smells, the heat rising, Momma’s good food, I was so happy to eat it, made her happy too. Holding a hand, embracing, is sort of like that too. Only money is different, I don’t know how, maybe because it’s such a weapon. But so is food, look at the Ethiopians, the Somalians, withholders of food during war … the Nazis in their death camps making people work while starving them.
Nothing is pure.
Love he didn’t know about but he knew about giving and withholding. Surely he must have been loved once, held by his nanny, probably even his mother and father, rich kid in a house filled with luxury and ease, why not? Not like poor Rosa, grabbing up one kid under the waist while she stirred a pot with the other hand, a screaming toddler grabbing her around the legs. …
But he loved Momma. I know he did. She knew it too. Only he didn’t know it.
Maybe Mary’s right, maybe I should look through her things, maybe there is something, a note, a letter, a valentine. It would have meant so much to her even though she couldn’t read it, she’d have known what it was … maybe he slipped once and put something on paper, gave it to her.
What crap. Why would he write a note to a woman who couldn’t read?
Everything is exactly as I expected. Even them, the way they were different after Hollis left, you could see it, rich women suddenly, withdrawn, already planning how to spend it. Their whole world changed, Mary saved. Didn’t I predict that this sisterhood wouldn’t last? Is sisterhood possible only in hardship? Does it inevitably fall apart when things get easier, softer? Lilah and I were closer when we were having a hard time, trying to get by on our teaching assistant’s pay, living in that awful room in Roxbury, crack addicts on every corner. Living on rice and beans and lettuce, we had such laughs, we made a wonderful joke out of our poverty. But once that damned Professor Witlow we called him Witless discouraged her so cruelly, she fell apart, left school, went and got a job as a secretary and moved out, didn’t want me with her, probably resented the idea of supporting me. …
Not that the brothers are any better. Brotherhood too seems hard to sustain once one person is coopted, that’s the secret, make it better for one and unity dissolves, stratification it’s called. Destroys union, community.
They’ll each go their own way now, back to the way they were in the beginning. Still, it was nice while it lasted. I liked it.
Her eyes moistened.
So if everything is exactly as I expected, why do I feel so alone suddenly? Alone in this house, in the world, in the universe, like a fragment broken off from a star that long ago whirled eons away, a tiny fragment whirling in orbit, alone in the dark cold silence forever and ever and ever. Or did I feel this way before and just not recognize it?
You are alone. You have neither mother nor father and your half siblings live in different worlds. You have no blood kin that accepts you.
She gazed out her window at the night sky, barely perceptible above the trees, then got up and stood there looking up. Dark tonight dark dark no stars. Sometimes the heavens are peopled with stars, dotted so heavily you imagine stars living on top of each other like street folks looking out the windows, sitting on stoops, standing in the shops, working at their sinks. …
Go back where you came from. Better there than here. Why should you stay here as their caretaker? Noradia’s daughter, occupation passed down in the family, while they go off to their penthouses and forget they ever knew you.
What about the dissertation?
Fuck it.
Find a job somewhere, any kind of job, something to get you by, live decently, why aim for anything in their kind of world. There is nothing you can do, ever, that will make them recognize you as a full person, will force them to acknowledge you. The most you can ever be is part of a power bloc of the marginal, detested, feared, mocked, one more illegitimate trying to blast open the doors. Concentrate on what will make you happy: find a lovely warm woman, someone kind who will hold you, will understand you, someone you can let yourself cry with. …
Cry with?
Jesus, Ronnie. Someone to laugh with is more like it girl!
You’re just depressed tonight. Left out. You let yourself come to love t
hem. And believe they loved you.
What a fucking fool you are.
22
“YOU HAVE TO COME,” Elizabeth said quietly but with an almost threatening edge in her voice. “You must.”
Ronnie shook her head.
“We need you,” Alex wailed. “I’ll feel so alone without you!” Then swiveling toward Elizabeth and Mary, reaching her hand out toward Mary’s arm, she added swiftly, “Not alone alone. You know. But you all know these famous people and you know how to act with them and I don’t and”—she turned back to Ronnie—“I need Ronnie to hold my hand.”
“On the assumption that I don’t know how to act with them either,” Ronnie said dryly.
Distant and stiff again, Elizabeth thought. She’s changed. She’s been different since the will was read, Father’s split us again. She garnered all her energy.
“We have to be together,” Elizabeth insisted, “all four of us! We’re sisters! We need each other! We need you! And you need us! Tell the truth, how will you feel sitting here alone while we go off to Father’s funeral? Sitting in your room in front of your computer, you’ll be miserable and lonely, you’ll feel left out. And so will we!” She stood and put her hands on the sides of her head. “Don’t let Father win again!” she cried.
Jesus H. Christ. Is she really that upset? Ronnie’s face softened and she spoke quietly. “Look, Lizzie, Mary’s right. If I’m with you, the press might make a scandal of it, might ask questions, investigate, write articles, print pictures of my mother, of me. … I don’t want to be known as his bastard for the rest of my life!”
Elizabeth took her hands away from her head and shook it hard. She turned to Mary in despair. “Say something,” she begged.
“We don’t know they will,” Mary mused. “It’s possible they won’t pay any attention to you. At all. Or to us, for that matter. Especially with the president coming to the funeral.”
“Don’t act mealymouthed with me!” Ronnie cried. “You know you’ll be photographed in the limo, getting out of the limo, sitting in the pew together, shaking the president’s hand, all that. You in your fancy black dresses and hats, and I’m supposed to follow you in my grubby jeans.”
“Well, we could fix you up a bit, you know,” Mary said haughtily. “You could be very attractive if you tried. Unless you consider it a badge of honor to wear nothing but jeans.”
“Thanks a lot. I don’t own anything else,” Ronnie said between her teeth. Three pairs of jeans, some tops, two pairs of high-tops, a raincoat, a jean jacket and a down jacket: that’s my wardrobe. I travel light.
“Well, maybe we could cut something down for you. Teresa has a gift with a needle. I have a black silk I don’t wear anymore,” Mary said, and almost thinking aloud, allowed her glance to travel to Ronnie’s feet and legs, imagining them encased in black satin slippers and hose. …
Then saw Ronnie’s face.
Mary sat back. “Maybe,” she said, “you could come separately. You could drive yourself in the Alfa, sit in the back of the church. We’d make special arrangements for you …”
“What would that accomplish!” Elizabeth shouted. “That defeats the entire purpose! It’s us—the four of us—in the face of him, don’t you see?”
Alex stared at her. Ronnie gazed at the ceiling. Mary rearranged her face sympathetically and turned to Ronnie. “I understand how you feel. And I want you there too, I truly do, I feel it will be wrong if you’re not.” Her voice changed, as if suddenly she was feeling what she was saying. “Without you we feel incomplete, missing a link … part of our heart.”
Ronnie met her eyes for the first time. She stood up and walked to the bar, set down her Coke glass and poured a scotch. “Anybody else?”
They all stood up, walked to the bar, poured drinks for themselves. Elizabeth put her hand on Ronnie’s arm as she stood there; Mary put a hand on her head. Alex embraced her, refusing to let her go for a long minute. Then they all sat down again.
“Ohhh, what a day!” Mary sighed, tossing off her shoes.
“I don’t see why you always wear high heels,” Elizabeth said in an irritated voice. “Naturally you’re exhausted. And they’re terrible on your feet.”
“I normally have no trouble with my feet, thank you very much, Elizabeth!”
“There must be some way to get around all this,” Alex said biting her lip. “Some way to include Ronnie without calling undue attention to her. …”
“I could come as the daughter of the longtime family servant. Don’t family retainers sometimes get invited to the funerals of their lords and masters? Isn’t Aldo invited? And Mrs. Browning? Aren’t they slotted into row two hundred or something?”
No one responded.
“Or you could wear a dress with a train, Mary, and I could walk behind you and hold it up off the ground.”
She sipped her drink, glanced at their lowered faces, and shamefaced, leaned forward to them. “I’m sorry. I know you didn’t create this situation, and I believe you don’t like it either.”
Three sets of eyes rose, warmed gratefully.
“Look. He never acknowledged me. I’m not going to acknowledge him. To attend his funeral, however I did it, would be to acknowledge him.”
“But not acknowledging him is not acknowledging us,” Alex argued. “We’re tied to each other through him.”
Ronnie sat back, pondered. “Yeah,” she finally decided, “Stephen Upton gave us our biological bond, but he did everything he could to keep us from forming any other kind. Besides, how many sisters get along, care about each other? How many brothers do you know who are competitive and jealous of each other? We’re tied to each other through ourselves, through our own efforts, our own … love.” Her face flamed.
I can’t believe I used that word.
“And if our tie unravels,” she added slowly, deliberately, “it’s because that love is insufficient.”
They all looked at her.
“He came to your mother’s funeral,” Alex said with a wily look.
“And told me to get her shit out of his house right after it,” Ronnie muttered.
They all stared at the rug.
When Ronnie finally looked up, her voice was firm, calm. “If I don’t go, you’ll feel incomplete—you say—and I’ll feel left out. I admit it: I probably will. But if I go, the press may pick me up, pick up my relation to you, may make my life—and maybe yours—miserable. So for me the choice is between two potential miseries. But they’re not equal. Say the press doesn’t notice me, what are you going to do with me afterwards? Take me to the reception at Louisburg Square and introduce me to the governor? To your father’s nephew, the possible next governor of Massachusetts? Or will you ask me to sit in the car with Aldo waiting for you? Or take the train home to Lincoln and walk back from the station? Or go to my friend Rosa’s house over in Somerville and wait for you to pick me up? A limo in Somerville? She’d never live it down. Or go to Linda’s on the T?
“Don’t you see: whatever I do, I’m going to feel left out. There is no alternative to that for me.”
They all gazed sadly at her. Then Mary got up and walked over and bent over Ronnie and kissed her lightly on the forehead.
Hollis had named himself head usher and was there early, meeting the great men as they stepped out of their limousines, making the appropriate conversation—a great loss, but a life well lived, a long life, needless to grieve unduly, and how are you, Chip, hear you pulled off a real coup with Bonn last week. …
But he couldn’t breathe easy until he saw the Upton car pull up and three sisters get out, god that Mary, exquisite in black chiffon, even though he was getting on these days and couldn’t always get it up, even though she was one of his best friends’ daughters, he really wouldn’t mind …
Anyway, the important thing is the wog bastard isn’t with them, which is what his stomach had been worrying about all morning, forcing him to down several antacid tablets and finally Evelyn had made him swallow a couple of tab
lespoons of that disgusting white stuff. …
What would I have said to the president? the governor? Bill Benton of the BCLI Bank? How could it have been explained to the press? Claim no knowledge of course, mutter something about an old family retainer, but still …
It would have been impossible under any circumstances, the girl stood out so with her color, that short square Mexican body and those Upton eyes blazing in her head, Jesus, and even Cab’s chin, so noticeable, so remarkable, remarkable looking girl she was or would be if she ever wore anything but dirty jeans and T-shirts. … If her mother looked anything like her, you could understand why Cab …
Well, but it was all right, he sighed, his smile properly subdued as he bowed, kissed their hands, three of them erect and dignified in black, all wearing hats, Mary’s with a veil, so lovely, up the steps into the church, scandal that it was in such bad shape but it had a great history, it was central to New England history. And with the bishop presiding, it had seedy class, the mark of Boston in a way, not glitzy like New York or L.A.
Everyone else had already arrived except the governor and he’d accompany the president, they’d arrive last, there was their limousine now, Hollis stepped forward, prepared himself, the door opened, he stood erect, put out his hand, Mr. President, Mrs. Reagan, Governor, led them into the already full church, led them to the front row alongside former president Nixon and Helmut Schmidt and Richard von Weizsäcker, the president of West Germany, and the British ambassador. Jim Baker in the second row with the vice president and the widows … the daughters that is … and most of the Council on Foreign Relations. In the row behind them, in the Upton pew (marked with a discreet plaque), Mary’s children sat with the nieces and nephews, most prominently Worth Upton IV, who was probably going to be the next governor of Massachusetts, and might even someday make president.
With grave approval, Hollis noted Peter Highland, the Texas oil billionaire, Arnold M. Richards, chairman of Calloosa, and dozens more chairmen of the richest corporations and foundations in the country. He counted three former secretaries of state, Elizabeth’s boss at Treasury, lawyers from the most important firms in New York, Boston, and Washington. Looking around, he spotted the CEOs of every major insurance company in America. In the first row on the left-hand side, Henry Kissinger sat beside a Rockefeller and the heads of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the present national security adviser. Every high-ranking Republican in the country was there.