What James Fern wanted, in the weeks movers packed up the Spanish Colonial where he had raised her, was to corner the precise moment Fay had ceased to identify as his daughter. The closer to the minute he could pinpoint it, the further from blame he would feel. He spent this obsession physically, walking often, behaving as though it were a visible imperfection he was going to locate somewhere on the estate, a fissure in the peach stone courtyard. With Christine—he had refused to call her Charlie—the reasons had been much easier to see, a girl from school in her room too late too many times, the two of them caught naked in the orchard by a farmhand sent to check on a busted valve in the water line.
As a Christian I won’t tolerate it, he had said to Christine, fingers steepled, speaking to her in a part of the house that was never used, a sitting room where velvet teal shell chairs surrounded a low glass table. She had been sixteen, brawny but not heavy yet, the pride of the local equestrian chapter, always a little sunburned, a delight to his friends who called her the Wabash Cannonball. A reg’lar combination.
As a Christian I will not tolerate it.
As a goddamn person, she had said, splayed far out on the edge of the chair, her baby fat gone though he couldn’t say when, I cannot help it.
For her last competition the month before, he had given her a six-piece luggage set, monogrammed Peruvian calfskin with brushed nickel padlocks. It was no small irony. He heard her say goodbye to the cat.
It began when Fay was fifteen and Charlie was already six years gone: what came first with her were questions, posed at lunch at the country club, where her food went mostly untouched, watercress fallen, pink ice cream melted. She wanted to know how much her nanny was paid. The maid, the groundskeeper, the gardener, the men who picked their oranges. James caught Fay in town wearing clothing from a box in the attic, his own old Army-issued thermal chopped at the sleeves. Their daughter refused, her last two Christmases at home, to compose a wish list.
In her senior year—she was sixteen then seventeen, had skipped the third grade—the packages from all the Seven Sisters colleges had come like holiday visitors, bringing news from different places, their arrivals staggered until the table was full of them. She asked to borrow his letter opener and brought each to a place outside, a reclining patio chair she liked to drag from among the potted ferns and into the sun on the lawn. He had spied on her with some pride, watching how carefully she held the blade, the glossy brochures she touched lightly so as not to smudge them.
She waited until the last had arrived to cry. They found the congratulatory letters and embossed pamphlets in the waste bin, images of books spread under centuried oaks, lecture halls lit only by sun, stairwells where bobbed girls in pearls linked arms. At first they could not understand the word she was repeating into her pillow in her bedroom, still painted the eggshell lilac she’d chosen as a girl. Scholarship, they mouthed to each other, scholarship? And then when they had heard it clearly there was a kind of dumb relief, a leap to a conclusion about her plans that excluded who she had become. Honey, you didn’t have to apply for a scholarship. They were laughing, clutching at each other’s elbows as she turned over onto her back, why would you apply for, only a thousand a term, her face setting around the hard line of her mouth that was its organizing principle. Everything else about their daughter, the rest of her body on the bed, was flushed, boneless.
The next weeks had been like a deathbed vigil, each of them taking their turns growing simpering and then apoplectic by her locked door. The few times she chose to respond she did so calmly, with the same perfectly turned phrases about the injustice of wealth, and for as many times as he yelled, furious, about how many people dreamed about being in a position like hers, there were twice as many occasions when he stood begging, knocking with one curled finger, bargaining, calling her names he hadn’t since she’d been a giggling figure in tulle on the piano bench at their cocktail parties, peaches, gripping a stick of celery all night like a wand for reasons unknown, daisy, entreating guests to visit her room and collection of abalone shells, my sweet bird. He started to believe that there was a smell coming from his daughter’s room, from her, and this unnerved him beyond all else, that the change in Fay had entered other parts of the physical world. As many times as he asked her to, Claudette could not agree. It was like yeast and also like sap, he told her. Sniff again. One of these evenings he pinned Claudette under him and was rougher than he meant to be. He wanted to make things move, to make her breasts fight their way up to hit her chin. She was in the bath after for a long time.
After a week their daughter emerged for dinner, looking somewhat recognizable, her hair combed, half of it pushed back with a blue headband the width of a pencil. She dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a napkin and thanked Libett for the posole and looked, again, like a young woman who knew the art of being with people, could recite the relevant Milton or fox-trot across the room.
Claudette’s chignon flashed high as he began to speak, chin sewn to her neck, a hint about her unhappiness he ignored. Had she considered what they talked about, had she decided on a school.
Fay cleared her throat, a womanly noise he couldn’t remember her adopting, and put an elbow on the table and a palm to her jaw, a transgression in etiquette he once would have corrected immediately. Daughter daughter strong and able, take your elbows off the table.
Libett, she called, a name she had known before all others, one she had screamed the summer she’d fallen from the roof, where she’d been going in secret. Her first kiss, eight years old in the pantry, had been Libett’s son Joaquin who did beautiful impressions of birds and trains. He had taught her how to put two fingers in her mouth and whistle.
Libett was at her side in a minute. Libett, how is Joaquin, she said. I haven’t seen him in a year I think.
They all knew the answer and Libett tried to leapfrog her confusion at this being spoken, head it off at the pass by saying only, He is well, taking a table brush and sweeping it in a practiced arc to remove any crumbs.
Where is he now, for instance.
There was Brahms on the phonograph, the last light of the day filling the wineglasses. Through the open balcony doors they could smell the ocean, warm and amenable and ignorant of what happened in houses like these. Flanking the dining room, hallways led to rooms that were confections, tasseled bed skirts and oil paintings of mountains, perfect and empty and useless.
She looked like she had the autumn she mastered backgammon, a game he had taught her in the study he forbade anyone else to enter. He remembered her lunula on the felt, white as milk, her fingertips tapping to imagine her next move, her posture, every part of her curved toward the chips and dice and darted fabric. When she finally beat him she did not look surprised.
Where is he now, for instance.
Libett had stopped looking for a task to hide inside of and answered the girl’s question. Resting, I think. He worked today.
Worked? Worked where? She was feigning ignorance like a true criminal, he remembered thinking at the time. She was admitting nothing of what she knew into her eyes.
That’s enough, he said. He was holding his fork with every muscle in his hand, he noticed, maybe every muscle in his body.
For your father. Picking fruit.
I see. And where’s he going to university?
You can clear the plates now, Claudette said. Please. No dessert tonight.
Where’s he going to university?
Not.
He’s not? She looked back and forth to each of her parents. But he’s so bright.
The plates.
I’ll tell you what, Daddy. You can send me to college if you send him, too.
Their border collie, red and white, got up and padded away, taking with it all the shine and warmth of the room. Libett was finally gone. Claudette was a shape on the balcony. He made a fist around his daughter’s right hand, obscuring it completely, tightening it until he could feel it seizing.
What is this? What exactly do you think this is? Are you very proud of yourself for taking this little political soapbox? It doesn’t suit you. You look like a fool. You look like someone who needs to be let out into the world and ruined some.
He was speaking low enough that only Fay could hear him. They looked almost like lovers, his hand keeping hers, his neck locked in the angle that put his mouth near her ear. She stayed there until he released his grip, her last obedient act as a daughter.
He found Libett still in the kitchen late that night and let her go, waiting until her head was hidden in the cupboard where she was putting things away to actually say the words. She had worked for the family nineteen years.
FAY HAD SPENT THE WINTER writing letters they didn’t understand, eating only almonds from the dry pantry, behaving in general like a kind of rodent, her light always on, her face never at rest, her old happy industriousness changed into something leaner and unbecoming. She was at the library every day, doing what they didn’t know, walking the three miles there, insisting on it. Though she was careful about always giving her outgoing mail to the postman, Lou, whom she called by first name and with whose ailments and hobbies she was familiar—an embarrassment to James that presaged the rest—there was a day she left a letter to be sent wedged into the flag of the mailbox that sat at the head of the long, curving driveway. He removed it without fully stopping the car.
She was posing as—what? A scholar, a journalist, somebody documenting the education of women. The note was at least the third in a series of letters, and he skimmed it looking for the thing she wanted, his wicked and resourceful daughter, which he knew was hidden in the language of her perfect cursive. Any syllabi you could enclose would be most appreciated, it said, as I assemble the compendium that will capture this unique pedagogical moment in our country, a time when the minds of girls are being nurtured as never before.
If she could not go to college on her terms, she would make it come to her. He read the letter in the parking lot of the bank and punched his horn.
The books listed on the papers returned by professors she sent away for in droves, and they arrived tied in cruciform and wrapped in brown paper, so many that in the rare glimpse of her room they could see the texts becoming pillars before her closet. At Easter, Claudette bought Fay a dress and hung it on her bedroom door, which was where it stayed.
Deep in the summer, the fallen purple of the jacaranda trees already thick underfoot, the vendors on the side of the road selling sculpted mango dipped in chili powder, there was a visit from her sister. The artifice in these returns of Christine’s confused him. Arriving with souvenirs and descriptions of exotic birds, a telegram the day before if they were lucky, she never acknowledged that her departure had been something less than a choice. They did not notify anyone of Christine’s presence and were careful to keep it from the papers. Claudette accepted the brash, woodsy perfumes Christine brought in boxes of taffeta and wore them, for the few days her older daughter was back, to the table.
He had seen what would happen before it did, woke up the third morning she was there and heard it in how they laughed, a sound that had too many parts and was everywhere in the house whose design he had so carefully overseen, spilling down the tile of the arcaded covered porches, from the top of the rounded stairwell, where they sat with Fay’s bare feet threaded between her sister’s. By the fountain in the rear courtyard at midnight, he caught them before an audience of lilac bushes, tossing a log of ham like it was a football. She’s going to leave with her sister, he told Claudette, removing his cuff links from a velvet drawer in their bureau. His wife, a mannequin in the half hour before she had her coffee, sitting up against four tasseled pillows in the canopied bed, did not or would not hear him.
THE WEEK BEFORE HE AND Claudette left, a house where they had lived thirty-odd years, a part of the state where their lives were written up in the society pages, he pinched the bridge of his nose and whispered at the woman they’d finally hired to pack up Fay’s room. Was there a thought in your mind, he said.
She had put the church dresses with the ski jackets and summer camp pinafores, and there was no way, when his daughter needed something, she would be able to find it.