I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (21 page)

My first night, he took me down to dinner in the lavish restaurant on the ground floor. After dinner, a man rolled a cart of desserts over to our table and I politely said I was full. But my grandfather must have seen my eyes go wide at the
île flottante,
a meringue floating on vanilla cream, and he insisted I order it. When I'd scraped the last of the cream from the plate, I looked up to see him watching me with horror.

“You fat little pig,” he said. “How could you have eaten all that?”

That night, I sat on the bed in my room as I listened to him on the phone in the living room.

“It's not just a bubble in her stomach that's going to pop and go away. We need to do something about her,” he said.

He didn't come to say good night. I fell asleep staring warily at the ominous blue-eyed kittens. Hours later, I heard the door to my room open and my grandfather come in. I was lying on my
stomach on top of the blankets, my face turned toward the wall. He sat down at the foot of my bed. He gently lifted my nightshirt. He began to stroke my butt. I kept my eyes shut so that he wouldn't realize I was awake. I don't know how much time passed. Eventually, he left.

The next morning, he told me to eat plain nonfat yogurt with artificial sweetener for breakfast. He had filled the fridge with it just for me. When I bathed, he remained in the bathroom. At eight, this was something my mother or grandmother might have done with me as well, but his presence made me uncomfortable without my knowing why. I noted it in my diary, in a childish scrawl. “I know he's my
grandfather
,” I wrote, “so it's okay. But I just wish he'd leave me alone.”

I didn't tell my mother. What would I have told her?

—

I
T WAS YEARS
before anything happened again. I kissed my grandfather on the cheek when he bought me too-expensive Christmas presents, just as I was supposed to. His skin was strangely, worrisomely soft, but I remember very few of the actual moments I spent with him. Mostly my brother and I sat quietly on his brown leather couch, or didn't sit quietly and were scolded. Then we sat down to elaborate catered meals—plates of oysters, lavish cakes—and I was inevitably reprimanded for eating incorrectly, or too much. His girlfriend was a marquise who wouldn't marry him in order not to lose her title. Once, I was invited to her castle, where the stairways were tight, winding stone affairs and I slept in a princess bed with a red velvet canopy. At high noon, all the children were locked into a cabin filled with bunk beds and made to nap. Through the windows we could see the adults
drinking cocktails by the pool in the sunshine. The other children did not see this as a grand injustice, but I tried to argue my way out and was spanked by the woman who was minding us. This I did tell my mother, my voice trembling with outrage. I liked the marquise, but she told me gently that I could not call her
grand-mere
because she already had too many grandchildren of her own. I had no memories of my grandfather from that visit beyond one breakfast, when he lectured me on butter knives.

Then I was fourteen, and the way his gaze and hands lingered on me made me uncomfortable. But I was often uncomfortable in my body then, and there were many men who made me feel that way. My grandfather had invited the family out for dinner. I hated the mannered extravagance of those meals. My grandfather flirted with the waitress outrageously. He slipped an enormous bill into her hand as a tip. I felt her discomfort acutely. The conversation was strained, with both my aunts trying to convey their polite dislike for the marquise, whom they suspected of being after their father's money. I went to the bathroom to have a moment alone.

The bathroom was very small. There was a vestibule with a sink and a mirror, perhaps two feet wide, then two doors that led to toilets. As I was washing my hands, my grandfather came in. I backed up against the wall to let him pass. He stood facing me, pushed up against me. He touched my stomach.

“You stick out here,” he said. I put my head down. I could smell the stale cigars on his breath.

“But not as much as you stick out here,” he said, putting both his hands on my breasts. I laughed politely and pushed past him, out of the bathroom.

At the end of the meal, my mother said, “Thank your grandfather.” I kissed him on the cheek and thanked him.

Back in New York, I told my mother. I told her about the bathroom and that night when I was eight years old, and the vague discomfort I had no name for. I was leaning in her doorway, watching her get ready to go out. She was wrapped in a towel with her hair dripping wet, applying lipstick.

“But he's a plastic surgeon!” she said. “You don't understand. He's just used to touching women.” She turned back to the mirror, clipping earrings on her ears.

“It's a professional deformation,” she said. “It's just the way he is.”

“Okay,” I mumbled and went to my room.

—

T
HE LAST TI
ME
it happened, I was nineteen. My mother wanted to go have lunch at his apartment once more before we left. She wanted me—me specifically, though my father and my brother were also in Paris—to come along. Your grandfather is dying, she said. This might be the very last time you see him. This possibility seemed sad to me only in the most maudlin, abstract way. But when my mother decided that I was going to do something, it was very difficult to alter that path.

My grandfather had been on the verge of death for three years and would go on to live another two. He had bladder cancer and he wore diapers. He refused to hire a nurse, preferring to have Sylvie and Andrée change him. It was made clear to my mother that she was the delinquent daughter, the one who was not doing enough.

His maid had procured lunch for the three of us. I used the oyster fork incorrectly. After we'd finished eating, my mother went into the back room, the office still decorated as my bedroom, to talk to the maid in private. My grandfather got up and stood
behind my chair. He put his hands on my shoulders, his grip surprisingly firm, and pulled me upward.

“Well, let's have a look at you,” he said.

My mother came back into the room.

“We've got to run, thank you so much for the marvelous lunch, Papa,” she said, giving him a hug.

“Yes, thank you,” I said as I leapt for my coat. “Good-bye!” I waved and walked quickly down the hallway to the elevator. My mother and grandfather stood in the doorway to his apartment.

“Not even a kiss good-bye?” he asked, calling out to me.

I hesitated, shifting my weight, trying to think of something to say that meant no but sounded like a friendly joke. My mother said, “Come give your grandfather a kiss,” so I walked back.

As I leaned in to kiss his cheek, my grandfather grabbed my breasts. Then he grabbed my shoulders and held me at arm's length and stared at my chest.

“You're much too round,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “Bye.” My mother and I walked to the elevator.

As the doors closed, my mother laughed.

“What was
that
?” she said, grinning as if we'd both just been through a wacky caper.

“
That
'
s
why I never particularly want to see my grandfather,” I said. I wasn't smiling. I was annoyed.

Her smile faded. “
Ohhhh,
” she said. “Oh.” We were both silent as we left the building.

On the street she asked, “But why did you never tell me?”

“I did,” I said.

“Of course you didn't,” she said. “I would remember.”

“I did,” I insisted. “You said he was a plastic surgeon and that's just how he treats women.”

“But he's your
grandfather,”
she said. “He's not allowed to do that to
you.
”

“Yeah,” I said, “I guess I know that.” But I hadn't known it, really, before then.

—

M
Y MOTHER WAS
UPSET
, but when she told my father, he was furious. It was a surprise to me that this should make anyone so angry. I felt very cozy beneath the black blanket of his outrage. I have always felt at my safest around anger directed at someone not present.

“You don't ever have to see that asshole again,” my father told me.

“Really?” I said. I looked at my mother. She nodded confirmation. I felt as if I had received an undeserved gift.

In conversations that happened behind their closed bedroom door, my mother asked my father to talk this out with Paul. My father refused, saying that if he saw the man it would only be to break his jaw. My mother begged him to call Paul on the phone in that case, and find a resolution man to man. Instead, my father wrote my grandfather a letter. I never read it, but I know my father's anger when it turns into words. He faxed it from New York. A few weeks later, one of my aunts called. My grandfather was very wounded. He couldn't understand why I'd invented such outrageous accusations. I must be crazy, he'd concluded. Which was no surprise, considering.

We sat on my mother's bed as she told me about my grandfather's reply. That my grandfather had accused me of inventing the story disturbed me deeply. Ever since the disappearing food in high school—those weeks when I'd allowed myself to become convinced that I was doing something I had no memory of having done—my hold on my own past had felt tenuous. When we
watched the film
Gaslight
in a college course, my whole body trembled. Later, in seminar, I had blurted out, “My mother used to accuse me of willfully throwing away all her spoons,” which was true. “I did
not
throw the spoons away,” I continued forcefully, though we were talking about Barthes and no one had appeared to doubt my innocence. I did not know then that the film had been powerful enough to become a verb.

“I'm so glad it happened in front of you,” I said now to my mother with a huge exhale of relief, because I still felt a nagging worry as to whether anything had happened at all.

“Yes,” my mother said. “Well.” She pulled her earrings from her ears and gazed at them in her hand. The circles under her eyes were deep and she looked infinitely sad.

“It's not easy for me, all this, you know,” she said.

“I know,” I said, though I hadn't until then.

“He's still my father,” she said. “The only one I have. And he's dying.”

“I'm really sorry that I've made it so complicated for you,” I said with genuine remorse, though I knew in a textbook way that it was considered incorrect for victims to blame themselves.

“It's not you,” she said. “It's your father. If only he had called him instead of sending that letter.”

—

W
E DIDN
'
T TALK
about it much after that. I suppose we no longer had Christmas lunch with my grandfather, though getting out of it must have raised considerable tensions within the family. I do know that I never saw him again. When we were in Paris, my mother saw him on her own. I stayed behind with my father and
brother. I felt as I had on the rare days when a thermometer had miraculously displayed a temperature high enough to keep me home from school.

Two years later, my mother called me sobbing to tell me that Paul had died. I was working as a counselor in a summer camp for people with developmental disabilities, as a way of trying to push my extreme and somewhat debilitating desire to be of service to others to its breaking point. I was nearing it.

My father was not going to Paul's funeral, of course, my mother told me on the phone. I sensed that she didn't want to face it alone. I offered to leave the camp a week early and go with her.

The funeral was held in Paris. Though my grandfather had never been a religious man, he had hedged his bets at the end and called a priest. The service was Catholic, with Latin chants and a censer that spewed aromatic smoke. The church was filled with women I had never seen before, women of all ages in pearls and flamboyant black designer dresses.

“I loved your grandfather
so much,
” they came one by one to tell me afterward, “
so much.
” Their voices wavered, but their faces were so taut they could barely shed a tear.

Later, a much smaller party went to the internment in Ussel. My memories of that trip are all tinged gray, though it was July. I'd been curious to visit the town where my mother had spent her summers and boarding school years, imagining folkloric country cottages, but it was all grim, short buildings of a claustrophobic sameness. My mother told me several times how grateful she was to have me by her side. At the cemetery, the coffin was pushed into a mausoleum. My mother squeezed my hand tightly. I cried along with her, though less for the grandfather I had known and more for the grandfather I wished I'd had.

—

I
T SEEMED TO
ME
now suddenly possible that they were the same person. I was learning that adults look very different through the eyes of the young. My mother had mentioned, over the years, her great grief that she had never had a moment of reconciliation with her father. My aunts had. They loved him now, with a simplicity they could not manage before. “He was a different person at the end of his life,” Sylvie said. “We talked honestly, about a great many things.” They did not hide this from my mother. It was their prize, for having changed his diapers, and her punishment, for living in New York with her crazy lying daughter. I knew that my mother didn't blame me for this, and yet guilt weighed on me all the same. It was one of the many reasons I'd come to Paris. It was why I'd called her so breathlessly to tell her about Josée's photo of the pillow.

I went to a shelf of the studio apartment that was lined with my grandfather's collection of old medical books. They were mostly from the 1700s, their spines golden and red, and they crumbled to the touch. I opened one. A photograph slipped out and fluttered to the floor. My breath caught. I bent to pick it up. But it was only a glossy color snapshot of my grandfather and some other old men in a banquet hall, wearing name tags. A surgeon's conference, sometime in the 1990s. This wasn't a fairy tale, I reprimanded myself. The books didn't contain answers.