The sisters walked in silence.
“I think,” Alex said finally, slowly, in a low voice, “that Father has to be made to acknowledge Ronnie. Much as he hurt us, he hurt her worst of all.”
“Yes,” Mary said, “you’re right. But he should be made to acknowledge everything—what he did to us as well. I never would have gotten married at nineteen except for … Maybe I wouldn’t have thought that marriage … sex … was all I was good for.”
“Oh, you might’ve,” Elizabeth said gloomily. “It’s what they taught us in those days.”
“Maybe,” Mary agreed. “But maybe I would have become a poet.”
“A poet!”
Mary stuck out a challenging chin. “I write poetry.”
“I didn’t know,” Elizabeth said in a small voice.
“I’ve written a poem a day since we’ve been here,” she said proudly. “Of course, they’re probably not any good. They’re probably awful.”
Elizabeth put an arm around Mary. Alex embraced her from the other side. At the crossing where their road met a main road, Ronnie stood waiting, kicking dirt. They all walked back together but without speaking.
Mary came a little late to the dinner table. She’d had a telephone call. “That was Chris, Christina, one of my friends, the ones who came to tea? They want to come to visit Father. I’ve told them he’s home, and they want to pay a call. Tomorrow. Is that all right?” She looked around.
They just looked at her.
“I suppose,” Elizabeth said.
“They’re planning to come at eleven. I feel we should give them luncheon,” she said tentatively.
“Not if it’s the big deal the tea was,” Elizabeth said. “I can’t go through that again.”
“I’ll be glad to help you, Mary,” Alex offered.
“Something like what we had for the men today would be adequate,” Mary said. “With, perhaps, a more elegant dessert. They know we weren’t expecting them. All right then? I’ll speak to Mrs. Browning.”
Teresa entered to clear their plates.
“Did you see that they arrested another Sikh for murdering Mrs. Gandhi?” Elizabeth said to the table at large.
They gathered in the playroom and Alex turned on the television set. Elizabeth picked up a book lying on a table—poems by Barbara Greenberg. Must be Mary’s, she thought. She began to read. Ronnie was gazing dully out the glass doors to the terrace.
Mary rustled in. “Well, that’s settled! A watercress soup and a chicken salad—there’s enough left over from the birds we had tonight—and she’ll make a wonderful dressing and serve it with dill, black beans, and tomatoes. And she’s going to make French pastries in the morning! Isn’t that wonderful?”
“That sounds delicious, Mary,” Alex said warmly.
“These poems are really wonderful,” Elizabeth murmured.
“Yes, aren’t they? She’s a local poet, I found her book in the Concord bookstore.”
“Any poems on incest?” Elizabeth asked.
“No. Not by her. But in Anne Sexton. And I often wonder about Sylvia Plath. …”
Ronnie sat tensely and looked portentously at Mary, then Elizabeth, then Alex. They all looked back at her. Elizabeth slowly put down the book. Alex switched off the set.
“I’m sorry,” Ronnie said.
“No need,” Elizabeth muttered.
“It’s nothing,” Mary said.
“Oh my dear.” Alex reached a hand toward her.
“You’re right, of course,” she said in a dead voice. “I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to say. To think. To admit.”
She turned her body to face them. “When I was little, I used to lie in bed and imagine that I had a poppa and that he would come one day in an old black car and lift me up crowing with joy at me. Wanting me. And take Momma and me away from here to our own house, where I could run around just as I chose. Momma had wonderful parents, her poppa used to carry her on his shoulders when they all walked out to the fields in the morning. The grass was still covered with dew, it was damp and she had no shoes. She remembered the light coming up, she remembered him with so much love. I wanted a poppa like that, a man who wanted me, wanted me to exist, I mean, not what he … your father … what he wanted. And with my Poppa would come all these people, grandmothers and grandfathers and cousins and aunts and uncles, and they’d all be happy that I existed. That I was alive. I yearned to feel that, feel them, be surrounded by them. I wanted to be … welcomed into the world.” She stopped, rose, left the room. They heard the bathroom door slam, then silence.
Only Alex was unaware of her, was elsewhere. “Yes,” she sighed, almost to herself. “Lifted! Warmed by body heat, smelling their body smells, seeing the pores on their skin, the gray in their hair, feeling part of them, like them, not perfect but wanted. Then you know what home is!”
Elizabeth studied the Ping Pong table. She carefully avoided rolling her eyes.
Ronnie came back with swollen eyes and a washed face. Even her hair was damp. She sat on the edge of a hassock, staring at the floor.
“Talk to us, Ronnie,” Alex pleaded. “It’ll make you feel better and us feel wanted.”
“Wanted?”
“As if you need us. We want you to need us. We need it.”
Ronnie grimaced. She asked Elizabeth for a cigarette. She stared at the floor, smoking.
“Your father,” she said in a dead voice, “did seem like a god to me when I was little. He was so tall and handsome and rich and powerful and my mother adored him, and he was so easy with all those important people. …”
She stopped. No one spoke.
She looked up at them. “But he treated me like a nigger slave, and I don’t want to talk about it,” she said firmly.
“We won’t mention it again,” Elizabeth said after a time.
“Thank you.” Dead face, dead voice.
The four of them sat in silence, their faces thoughtful.
“He should be tried for his crimes,” Elizabeth said at last.
“Tried?” Alex frowned. “You mean put on trial?” she asked incredulously.
“Yes. Indicted and tried—incest
is
a crime, and we all know he’s guilty of it.”
“That will never happen,” Mary said.
Ronnie said, “Even if we’d been able to tell, even if anyone would have listened to us, even if anyone would have believed us, can you imagine them prosecuting a man who entertained presidents?”
“That’s what my mother says: he’s above the law,” Elizabeth murmured. “But that’s unacceptable.”
“Yes,” Alex said softly. “We have to get Father to acknowledge his acts.”
They fell silent.
“He never will and we can’t make him,” Elizabeth said finally.
“No. No district attorney is going to indict a sick old man like him, even if we were to accuse him. And can you imagine how they’d look at us if we did, especially now? They’d say we were crazy or vindictive or worse! They’d let him change his will!” Mary argued.
“Anyway, he’s not able to stand trial. He can’t speak.”
“Even without being able to speak, he has more control of his life now than I had over mine when I was two or three,” Alex said.
They pondered this.
“That’s true,” Mary agreed.
“We could try him ourselves,” Alex said.
They stared at her.
“Hold a trial here. At night, after the servants have gone to bed. He never turns out his light until eleven or eleven-thirty. After the news. We could go up after dinner.”
“How do we hold a trial?” Ronnie wondered.
“I don’t know. Just present our evidence … our memories … and see what he says. Does. Writes. How he acts.”
“If we’re going to do it at all, we should do it right,” Elizabeth said. “Someone should accuse, someone defend, someone judge.”
“But we’re all his victims.”
“I like that idea. Elizabeth should be the prosecutor—she’s the most articulate in law and things like that,” Alex said.
“Mary has the most sympathy for him. She could defend him.”
“And Alex could be the judge. She’s the kindest of us, and probably the fairest.”
“So what about me!” Ronnie protested.
“You suffered the gravest injury. You are the primary complainant,” Elizabeth said.
“I suffered the gravest injury? Why? Because I became a lesbian? Is that what you think? That has nothing to do with what he did …”
“No, Ronnie!” Mary interrupted. “You suffered the gravest injury because not only did he use you sexually even though you were a child, but he refused to acknowledge you as his child, he did nothing for you, he cast you out into the world with nothing—not just no money, but no love, no help, no—no embrace. And it was clear from the way Hollis acted that he didn’t know about you. Which means he didn’t acknowledge you even in his will.”
Ronnie was placated.
“Okay.”
“So. Shall we do it?”
They all agreed.
“What about Wednesday night, when Mrs. Browning is away and only Doris is here. She’s new, she doesn’t understand the household yet. We’d run less risk of being interrupted,” Mary suggested.
“Wednesday night, then. Prepare your cases, women.”
18
R
ONNIE DIDN’T, DID NOT
, want to meet the lunch ladies as she called them, did not want to eat with them, make conversation with them, even show herself. But Elizabeth and Mary insisted.
“You are part of us, we’ve been all through this, you are intrinsic to our—our—sisterhood!” Elizabeth argued.
“You’re part of our lives now. What are you going to do, disappear every time someone else from our life appears? You have to have courage, Ronnie. I thought you were so brave!”
The challenge to her machismo worked, and she agreed to appear, but her stomach was twisted, and she had to take a pill to calm it before the women arrived.
Mary’s friends arrived a little after eleven in a stretch limo that belonged to Francine. Teresa opened the door to them, but Mary was behind her, waiting in the foyer to welcome them. After Teresa took their coats and they had embraced each other in the tight distant way such women had, she led them upstairs.
“My sisters are up there with him now,” she explained. Up there trying to jolly him into being decent to his guests. But in fact, their efforts were unnecessary. Stephen was well schooled in courtesy, and the moment they entered, his strange warped face curled itself into a smile, the first the sisters had seen on him.
“Oh, Mr. Upton, do you remember me, I’m Chrissie, Christine Bidwell I was, my mother used to bring me out to Lincoln sometimes to play with Mary, my mother was a good friend of Laura’s, they’d been at school together. You visited my parents a few times, Anne and Walter Bidwell, do you remember, we used to live in Back Bay and on the water in Manchester. …” She bent to kiss his cheek and he patted her arm with his good hand, stretched it out then to the next one, “Frankie, Mr. Upton. We played croquet with you once, you taught me the finer points of the game, do you remember?” He opened his mouth in a kind of laugh, stretched out his arm, the old Stephen, full of good humor. Francine kissed his cheek too, then Eloise reintroduced herself, “Lulu, Mr. Upton,” all of them talking at once now, reminiscing, “Remember the time up in Manchester when Mary got stuck in a tree and was terrified to come down?” “Remember the party where Willie Lowell got so drunk and fell in the pool?” “I remember riding through your woods on a wonderful bay named Baby!” Remember … remember … remember. Their reminiscences were highly selective, shot through with tact: they failed utterly to recall Laura falling down drunk, or Francine’s father, also very drunk at a party, suddenly smashing her mother in the face, or Elizabeth always hiding out in a corner somewhere away from the action. They recalled no divorces, his, their own parents, or their own. To hear them, Ronnie thought, you’d think life had been one long garden party.
“So glad you’re home and better, Mary says you’re improving. You’ll be talking and up and about in no time, I’ll bet.” No apparent awareness that Stephen would, whatever else, never be up and about again. They pressed their happy memories upon him, fictional as their happy wishes for the future, convinced that this was the road to well-being. They chatted for fifteen minutes, then noticed he looked tired, they were tiring him out, they should leave but they had so wanted to see him again, to see him home and almost well. …
Stephen was indeed tired. So much smiling, twisting his mouth to appear to laugh, so much energy it took, being gracious. He was out of the habit. These days he acted the way he felt. Being honest becomes a habit hard to break.
The women all trooped downstairs. Ronnie came last, still not introduced, but she understood that Stephen’s room had not been the place to do that. Mary waited until they were settled with drinks in the sitting room, where a fire burned today. “I don’t think you’ve met my half sister Ronalda,” she began and the women looked at her for the first time. At their looks, Ronnie was ready to dart from the room. Only a fierce desire not to shame her sisters made her stand her ground.
“Your half sister! How do you do.” Gloved hand extended. “I didn’t know you had another sister, Mary.”
“Well, I do. We do. Ronnie’s an environmentalist, finishing up her Ph.D. at BU. She specializes in mosses and lichen.”
“How fascinating. So nice to meet you.”
“A pleasure,” murmured Francine.
Bursting with questions they did not dare to ask, they made idle conversation about Francine’s latest acquisition, a David Salle painting, about Christine’s daughter’s engagement to a blessedly appropriate boy from Princeton, about Lulu’s last trip to Morocco. Francine tried, once.
“Would we know any of your people, Ronnie? We sometimes stay at the ranch of some friends of ours in the country near Acapulco—the D’Honorios, do you know them?”
“They’re of Spanish blood, I imagine. I’m Indian—Mayan, actually.” Knew instantly I was Mexican. How come? I could be lots of other things, Ecuadorian, Puerto Rican. …
“A much older aristocracy,” Mary put in.
Ronnie rolled her eyes at Mary. “Who says they were aristocrats?”
Alex grinned. “Ronnie keeps us honest,” she said. “She punctures any pretension.”
The guests seemed, at this, to shrivel into a paralyzed silence. But Alex blithely continued. “Doesn’t matter what we talk about, she always sees through false superiority—in life, in politics, in religion. You know”—she turned to Ronnie—“you’re really amazing.”