Father's Arcane Daughter Read online

  “That’s true,” Mr. Eppes replied. “That also happens to be the Opinion of some historians as well as some scientists. But historians have the courtesy to add that we, as well as Mr. Franklin, were lucky. It would have been unfortunate for America if Ben Franklin’s life had been cut short by a bolt of lightning.” He began to turn toward the blackboard, his signal that the discussion was over. I quickly raised my hand, my signal that it was not. “Yes, Carmichael?”

  “What is the difference between a natural son and a son?” I asked. Mr. Eppes didn’t answer immediately. “The reason I’m asking,” I went on, “is that Mr. Franklin’s son William was a natural son. Does that mean that Mr. Franklin had not married William’s mother?” (Of course, I knew the answer; I had looked it up before I asked.)

  Mr. Eppes answered very hurriedly, “Yes, it does,” and then he turned again toward the blackboard. Before he was a hundred eighty degrees around, I raised my hand again. “Yes, Carmichael?”

  “I was wondering, sir, if you could tell me the difference between a common law marriage and a marriage?” Again Mr. Eppes,did not answer immediately. I filled in. “The reason I’m asking, sir, is that Mr. Franklin’s marriage to Deborah is described as a common law marriage. Do you suppose that is because she lived with old Ben at the same time she was legally married to some sailor?”

  At that point Mr. Eppes said, “Carmichael, I will discuss this matter with you after class.”

  So he kept me after class, and we didn’t discuss Benjamin Franklin at all. We talked about Winston Elliot Carmichael. Mr. Eppes told me that being picky is not being smart. He told me that I ought to begin using my talents to learn and to evaluate information. He told me that he had to admire my strategy—my perseverance was phenomenal.

  “Are you going to tell my father about this?” I asked. Father was on the Board of Trustees of Wardhill.

  “I am not even going to tell Headmaster Reeves,” said Mr. Eppes gallantly.

  I asked for permission to leave, and Mr. Eppes granted that. I walked slowly to my next class, thinking that the awful Mr. Eppes had applied the word talents to me. Also, he admired something I had done and had referred to something else as phenomenal.

  The situation in the fifth grade improved after that day.

  MOTHER’S LAST TESTING of Caroline resembled my testing of Mr. Eppes—a frontal attack with cuticle scissors. It occurred on the Monday before Thanksgiving.

  MOTHER BEGAN: It has always struck me as the most remarkable coincidence that you should find yourself working at the same nursing home that your Grandmother Adkins was at.

  CAROLINE: It was no coincidence at all. I had gone to Grandmother’s house as soon as I reached Pittsburgh. I was desperate to see her. I felt that she would tell me what kind of a welcome I would receive from Father.

  MOTHER: How did you get in to see her? She had become so impossible—senile and throwing magazines —those last months that no one was allowed …

  FATHER: Now, Grace. She only threw magazines at that one nurse, the one she called The Enema.

  I laughed.

  MOTHER: Are you sure she said “Enema”? Wasn’t it more likely “The Enemy”? (Father shook his head no.) Even so. She was mean and senile, (then looking at Caroline) I don’t know how you expected to get information, information about Charles’s feelings, or anything else for that matter, from her.

  CAROLINE: I found that out. Once I learned that Grandmother had to be put in a nursing home, it was not difficult to find out which one. I took the night shift, the only opening they had. By that time, I wanted to help her instead of having her help me. And I wanted some time to sort out my feelings about coming home.

  MOTHER: You had had sixteen years to sort those out.

  CAROLINE: I was sorting them out in place. A person must be far more certain of her actions when she ? knows they will produce a reaction. I realized that my actions would affect many lives. I had to ask myself what would be the kindest thing to do.

  FATHER: Well, I’m certain that you did the kind thing. I’m grateful for your decision to return.

  MOTHER: Was your Grandmother Adkins glad you came back?

  FATHER (impatiently): Oh, Grace! What a question. Her Grandmother Adkins was in no condition to even know if she was grateful. She didn’t even recognize me. On two of my visits she called me Seth.

  Caroline kept as silent as a smile, her smile.

  THANKSGIVING DINNER at our house was always an evening affair. The turkey dressing varied as did the cook. Cora’s was chestnut, and the cranberries were served as a relish. Father always made the first blessing, offering thanks for all the customary things, including the food. Since lack of food was something that I knew about only from movies and books, I thought that Father’s offering thanks for it was insincere—like offering thanks for not having acne at his advanced age. Father then asked each of us at the table to say a prayer. Mother was next; she mentioned good health and the safety of her children.

  Caroline thanked God for allowing her to enjoy her new life without forgetting her old.

  Heidi made the following blessing, holding her folded hands on the table in front of her: “Thank You Lord, for Mummy and Daddy and for Winston, for my teachers, Miss Foyt and Mrs. Schenk, for Sister Clothilde, for Simmons, Luellen and Maurice and for our cleaning lady, Mrs. Wylie, and for Solomon. Thank you also for Cora and all the good food she has cooked for us today.” Then Heidi, with her head still bowed, raised her eyes to look at Caroline, sitting by me across the table.

  I looked at, Caroline, too. It was the first time in my life, that I had ever heard a prayer that was an insult. I had rehearsed a prayer to myself. I bowed my head, grateful for the privacy that a bowed head allowed, and said, “Thank You, dear Lord, for delivering me out of the depths of ignorance and loneliness and into the company of my beloved sister, Caroline.” I kept my head bowed and thought a minute and decided to skip the rest. At last I looked up and through two eye sockets that felt rimmed with orange neon, I read the faces at the table: Mother, annoyed; Heidi, unaware; Father, pleased; Caroline, flattered / embarrassed / quietly, indeed, thankful.

  I hoped that my prayer of thanks would stop the testing of Caroline, and it did. But later, when events sorted out, I realized that the time of testing had just passed. The papers, making Caroline the legal heir to the Adkins estate were signed the first Monday in December. ‘

  six

  “How different the news coverage would he today” I said. “Father never even called the television stations then. ‘The evening news allowed all of fifteen minutes to cover Pittsburgh, football, the world”

  “Did the news make you a celebrity at Wardhill?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes. For a whole day. But for a school where fathers often made front page news, and at least one mother a week was on the society page, that was an accomplishment. Celebrity, like everything else, was more modest in 1952, and I guess that, too, was because of less television” I laughed as I remembered something else. “Barney Krupp mentioned to me that he would like someday to meet my new sister, and I answered, You really would, Barney. You really would. She’s nothing at all like my other one.’”

  She seemed preoccupied. She opened a file folder that was on her desk, she flipped through it, then quickly closed it and placed it in the middle of her desk. She folded her hands over it. She seemed to have to pull herself hack to the present. “It was only a short time from then until Christmas,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Go on,” she said. “On to Christmas”

  I WAS NOT INVITED to the signing of the papers, and neither was Heidi. Mother said that our being there would be an open invitation.

  “Open invitation to what?” I asked.

  “Why, to another kidnapping,” she said.

  The newsmen were there, the network radio stations and the local papers and the news services, AP and UP, as well. The newspaper clippings, show Mother and Father standing behind a desk at which Carolin
e is seated; Caroline is holding a pen. Everyone in the picture is smiling. I learned later that Mother had won a major battle; she had convinced Father that if at any future date, they found conclusive evidence that this woman was not Caroline Adkins Carmichael, the Adkins’s fortune would be returned to the Carmichaels. Father had agreed, but he had insisted that it would not be necessary for the woman claiming to be Caroline to return any of the worldly goods she may have received in the meantime. In the picture Caroline is smiling, too. Each of them had a victory to celebrate.

  The day following the signing, three hundred engraved invitations were mailed to friends and relatives to attend a reception at our house in Caroline’s honor on Christmas Day.

  “I WOULD LIKE to take Winston with me to shop for my dress” Caroline announced at the dinner table.

  Father looked pleased. Mother did not.

  “I thought we could go shopping together,” Mother said. “I’d like to take you to the Club for lunch and then we could do the shops.” Shopping was Mother’s strongest suit. The happiest year in her life had been the year that I grew two sizes in one semester and had to have everything—underwear on out—replaced twice.

  “You have enough to do,” Caroline said. “Ordering flowers, making arrangements with the caterer. I’ll have Maurice drive me to Wardhill, and we’ll go to town from there.” She looked at Mother and asked innocently, “The stores are still open on Thursday nights before Christmas, aren’t they?” I had seen her check the paper to make sure they were.

  “Yes, they’re open,” Mother said. “But can you tell me what the child is to do for dinner?”

  “We’ll have some supper at Horne’s.”

  Father smiled, “Lunch at Horne’s was always a special treat when Caroline was a little girl.”

  Mother asked Father, “When do you suppose the child will get his homework done?”

  “Oh, yes,” Father said. “There is that. Well, now, let me see …” He looked over at Caroline. She returned his look, almost a look of defiance, and he said to Mother, “Oh! let him go, Grace. The stores close at nine. Even if they stay out until then, I’m sure he can get his homework done when he comes home, if he gets to it immediately.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t like him wandering about town late at night. And what about Heidi. What will Heidi do?”

  And then Caroline said something that almost ruined it altogether. She said, “Come now, Grace, don’t you think he deserves a Thursday off. You escape every Thursday.”

  Mother’s face grew as gray as a raw oyster. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I think you do,” Caroline said.

  Mother looked at. Father and then nodded, a cold, stiff jerk of her head, and said, “See that he’s home by nine.” She left the room with a cold, stiff walk.

  CAROLINE CHOSE QUICKLY—almost without vanity. She modelled the gown for me, a deep purple dress that the saleslady insisted upon calling aubergine. While the seamstress was marking the dress for hemming and for a few other alterations, I told her that I needed some money to buy something. She opened her purse and asked, “How much?”

  I had no idea.

  I knew that I wanted to buy her something, something special, something beautiful and just from me. “Oh,” I said, “fifty will do.”

  “How about ten for starters?” she asked.

  Ten did very nicely. I found a beautiful book, a slipcased edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. I glanced through some of the poems and decided it would be the perfect thing to give her the day of the party at some moment when we were alone. I paid for it, took it to be gift wrapped and paid for that, too. So unaccustomed was I to having money—to having to use money—that it never occurred to me that I had taken hers to buy her a present.

  OUR PACKAGES rode up front with Maurice. After having had the dress fitted, she had purchased other necessaries, and I had gone with her from one department to the next. We never left Horne’s.

  “I like the dress,” I said. “Aubergine.”

  “Eggplant,” she said, laughing. “But at least I got shoes and bag to match. I am coordinated,” she said triumphantly.

  “Do you suppose a trip to Horne’s would do it for Heidi?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Get her coordinated,” I said.

  That was the first time I had ever indicated to Caroline that I realized that Heidi was damaged, not special.

  Caroline asked, “Will you feel less responsible for htr if she gets coordinated?”

  “I think,” I said, “that I’d feel relieved.” And then I felt guilty saying something like that. But why? Why was Heidi so guarded that I couldn’t talk to a friend about her. And Caroline was supposed to be more than a friend. Why should I feel guilty talking to one (half) sister about another?

  Caroline stared out the window. She turned toward me and patted my knee. “If we stretch the bars of the cage very wide—very, very wide indeed—even a cripple can walk through.” Then she stared out of the window and said nothing the rest of the way home.

  I hadn’t wanted our evening to end like that. Crippled.

  EVEN THOUGH Caroline wore her aubergine and even though she was coordinated, I knew that Mother looked much prettier standing in the receiving line. Caroline stood between Father and me. Mother and Heidi made a trochee at the end. The guests passed down the line, shaking hands.

  There was little kissing; most of the kissing I had seen had been at Italian movies.

  There was some testing: You probably don’t remember me … But it was more a test of the person’s importance than of Caroline’s talent for identification. She remembered more people than she did not. I had to admit that if Caroline wasn’t Caroline, she was pretty good at being what Caroline should be.

  I saw a large old lady, hair like an ancient dandelion, and using an aluminum walker, bump her way through the doors of the living room. The woman paused on the threshold. Caroline dropped the hand that she had been shaking and ran across the room. “Miss Trollope!” she called. “Miss Trollope, I had given up hopes that you would be able to make it.”

  I had never seen this Miss Trollope before. I remembered from the scrapbook that she was the headmistress of Finchley, Caroline’s prep school. Caroline seemed overjoyed to see her. I had never seen Caroline overjoyed before. Friendly was Caroline’s style. Warm friendly was her style. Overjoy wasn’t.

  Miss Trollope looked hard at Caroline, her breathing visible and audible. “Come, come, Miss Trollope,” Caroline urged, “have a seat on the sofa.”

  Miss Trollope sat down, her hands resting on the walker, the skirt between her knees draped into a gray satin smile. She stared hard at Caroline and then seemed to make a decision. “I want to ask you something, child.” There occurred at that moment a conversational synapse, one of those natural pauses in the rhythm of the room. It was a loud silence, full of nerve endings waiting for a stimulus. It came: Miss Trollope’s question, a noisy question, an overwhelming question, that only an old lady, accustomed to command and weary of pain would ask.

  “Why,” she boomed, “why, child, have we not heard from you for all these years?”

  Caroline smiled. “I was in love. And there was the war.

  “Did love breed amnesia?”

  “No. It bred selfishness.”

  “Are you married?”

  “No.”

  “Were you?”

  “No.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Dead”

  And the babel in the room began again.

  The party became very gay after Agatha Trollope’s entrance. Mother moved from cluster to cluster, answering the same questions with the same answers and being her best, being a hostess. She looked smooth and immaculate. Caroline’s aubergine had wrinkled and her hair began to frizz; she looked more picturesque than pretty. Heidi, in her petticoats and her curled and ribboned hair was forgotten and ignored.

  I watched Caroline become
surrounded first by one group and then another. I watched Father lift Caroline’s glass from her hand and replace it with another drink, freshly wrapped in a napkin, and I saw Caroline look over her shoulder at him and smile her thanks. Father never moved farther than one cluster away from his new-found daughter.

  Heidi sat on one of the sofas against the wall. Without Mother or Maurice or Luellen running interference for her, she was lost in the crowd, like a beribboned, beruffled mushroom, lost in all the talk that entered her head as verbal fuzz.

  I walked toward her, and as soon as I was close enough, she welcomed me with that sad flaying of her arms, her elbows close at her waist. I sat down next to her, and she looked up at me, head tilted, eyes squinting, and mouth open: her creature look, I thought. Then she smiled, a wet bubble, making a convex lens, magnifying her gums. It was a hesitant smile, as alone on her face as her person was in the room.

  Some part of her knows, I thought, and suddenly I couldn’t bear it. I took hold of one of her hands and said, “Stay here, Heidi. Don’t move. I have something for you. Something special.”

  I ran to my room and brought her the Rubaiyat of Omm Khayyam. She took it from me and managed to get it out of its slip cover and opened. Then her thumb found her mouth and her hand rubbed her ear as she made important contact with the book. I watched her until I saw her leave the room—in every sense but physical.

  seven

  I walked over to the window. The view from the executive floor. A view so good it could he classified as an experience. I could see the roof of Home’s, and the Allegheny River. She stayed behind her desk, behind a barrier of buzzers and special phone sets. “I’ve thought about jealousy a lot,” I said. “I’ve concluded that it is sometimes necessary.”

  “Jealousy is a form of pain,” she said. “I guess some pain is necessary.”