CHAPTER TWELVE

Los Angeles, 1950

There was no immediate disaster, no sudden cataclysmic event that changed our lives after that broadcast. My father was not fired or denounced, but our maid vanished. “We don’t need her that much,” Mother said when I asked one day why she, not Mandy, was ironing my school blouses. Both parents seemed finally drained of talk. They drew into themselves, each separate from the other. We continued, all three, to sit in front of the new television set and watch anything that was on. In silence.

I wanted them to ask me how things were at school, so I could practice my debate skills and slip in the fact that I just might be graduating with honors. I wanted to talk about Stanford and Bennington and Marymount and should I also apply to UCLA? I wanted to see my mother beam with pride and my father slap his knee and laugh and say, “Hey, wow, am I proud of you!”

I knew some of my father’s worries, but Mother was a puzzle. She was more remote than ever. She slept later in the mornings, and fixed dinner silently; once in a while, I caught her gazing at my father with some unspoken question in her eyes.

She continued to come in to say good night, but then sat on my bed without speaking. I didn’t know how to respond to that. Was something expected of me?

“Do you need to talk about anything?” she asked one evening.

I thumped my pillow and pulled up the covers, trying to sound confident. “That’s okay, I’m fine,” I said.

“Good night, then.” She squeezed my hand and slipped out of the room.

I stared out the window by my bed, thinking of Mother, of God and school and Philip (why hadn’t he called?), everything bunched together. I felt like we were all waiting for something.

“Jessica, when the class bell rings, come into my office for a moment.” Sister Teresa Mary’s black serge habit smelled faintly musty as she leaned over my desk in study hall. I felt caught in its shadow.

“Yes, Sister,” I said, startled. What now? I remember sending a beseeching glance in Kathleen’s direction, but she just raised an eyebrow and shrugged her shoulders—her way of saying, You’ll figure it out soon enough.

“Come in, Jessica.”

I walked into Sister Teresa Mary’s office, a very spartan place with a bookcase, two steel filing cabinets, and an old mahogany desk. A crucifix hung on the wall. I had only been in here a few times, once for some infraction back in seventh grade, and nothing seemed different. The desk, though, was buried in a clutter of forms and papers.

“College applications,” she said, seeing my glance travel. “And our recommendations. Sit down, Jessica.”

I knew it. She wasn’t going to approve my applications.

“I’m glad you chose to apply to Marymount,” she said, nodding at the nearest stack of paper. “A good school, though far away.” She stopped and gazed at me. “Jessica, have you been happy here?”

Had I been? I had never framed the question. And I realized, astonished, for all my restlessness, I knew the answer. “Yes,” I said.

“You’ve been a fine student in your high-school years; don’t think I haven’t noticed. Even though you’ve been through some turmoil lately—”

Please, I prayed silently, don’t denounce Ingrid; please.

“—it’s not of your doing. I know things have been awkward the past few weeks, for us all.” A flash of sadness in her eyes. “But I’ve decided”—she drew a deep breath—“you should not be penalized. Jessica, the faculty has discussed this. We want you to serve as valedictorian of your class.”

“Me?” I gasped.

And then the stern, unbending visage of the principal of Saint Ann’s Academy softened into what I had never seen before: a smile.

“Good luck in the Redlands Tournament,” she said. “And don’t worry about your applications; they’re all going out.”

I brought that piece of news home and announced it proudly at the dinner table.

“Fantastic,” my father said, dropping his napkin. He stood so he could swoop me up from my chair, and gave me a hug so exuberant it took my breath away.

“Jessica, I am proud of you,” Mother said, reaching out to me. Her eyes welled with tears.

It felt wonderful. Everything I had been holding back about all the good things, the exciting things that went with soon turning eighteen, rose like the best of surfing waves—exuberant, catching the wind and the light—and I rode it high.

We had a celebratory night. They even gave me one of their golden cocktails, and I thought, I am here, I am being noticed, I am happy, there could be no prouder moment. We were healing, I was sure of it.

The first thing I saw when I walked in from school a week later was my mother sitting at the dining-room table—pounding it with her fist, pulling at her hair, tearing pieces of paper in two, throwing them on the table, as her voice spiraled into a wail. “I knew it would happen,” she said in a strangled, despairing voice.

I rushed to her, frightened. “Mother—”

“Look at these,” she said, sobbing. “Read these dirty little notes, just read them.” She shoved one into my hand.

I was shaking now, having a hard time focusing, but I smoothed the paper out. It looked like a letter, a letter written in bright-lavender ink with lavish curlicues and flourishes. I stared at it, held fast by three words. My darling Gabriel…

“You see? You see? What did I tell you?”

Tell me? What was she saying? She was pulling at her hair again, so hard it frightened me. I picked up another piece of paper, then another. They were all to my father—how could that be?—imploring letters. I saw the word “divorce,” and my brain at first scrambled in confusion. Then I put them down; tears were blurring the lines. I didn’t need to read any more. I knew what “My darling Gabriel” meant: my father was having an affair.

I tried to release Mother’s grip on a chunk of her hair, tried to soothe. “Please don’t cry,” I begged. I was sobbing now, too.

“It’s been waiting to happen—”

Father suddenly burst through the front door and strode over to Mother. She pushed him away.

He gave me a quick glance. “Jesse, will you leave us, please?” he said. It wasn’t a request.

I grabbed my books and headed for my bedroom, where I threw myself on the bed, unsure if I wanted to cover my head and hear nothing or stand by the door and listen. How many times had I strained to hear their private conversations, always dreading something?

“God is punishing me,” I heard Mother wail.

“Vannie, I won’t leave you.” My father’s voice.

She kept crying; I heard her chair scrape back, then a crash; maybe it fell over.

“Vannie, calm down,” my father kept repeating. “I would never leave you.” I heard him open the hall closet door. “Here, put on your coat, we’ll go talk,” he said.

The front door opened and closed; the house was silent. They had left. They had forgotten me.

I lay there for a long time, dozing intermittently, afraid to come out of my room. I didn’t want to see those letters again.

It must have been hours later when my door opened and Father came in.

“Jesse, you need to know what’s going on.”

What was going on? I was no child. “I already do,” I said.

“Let’s take a walk.”

We left the house and started walking up our winding road, in silence at first. There were no people out, no cars rushing by, no honking horns. My clothes felt clammy and rumpled from lying on the bed for so long. All I really wanted to do was take everything off, go back to bed, pull up the covers, and think of nothing. The memory of Mother’s wailing made me tremble.

Father cleared his throat. “The first and most important thing I need to tell you is, your mother and I will be all right. The affair is over. She found those damn letters in an old briefcase. I thought I had destroyed them, but—”

“Maybe you didn’t because you didn’t want to.” I spat it out; anger was replacing bewilderment.

“I told you, it was over months ago. Finished. I was a fool. She called me when she found the letters. I rushed home to tell her that.”

“Why would she believe you? I saw what some of them said.” I could hardly believe I was saying these things to my father.

He inhaled noticeably, a kind of scratchy sound, then yanked a cigarette from the pack in his breast pocket. He groped for a match, took his time lighting the cigarette. “It got out of hand for a while,” he said.

I started to cry. “How could you do that to Mother? Why did she say it was her punishment?”

His face sagged; it looked goopy, like butter melting in the sun. We rounded the curve and walked slowly downhill. “It gets complicated; when you’re older…But—Jesse—I’d give anything not to have hurt her.”

I kicked at a broken tree branch, hard. I was infuriated now. He was trying to excuse himself. The entire night felt smothering, like a pillow descending onto my head. I wanted to hurt something, before it hurt me.

“All right, if you need to have a reason, isn’t it kind of out there? I’ve been feeling for a while that your mother and I don’t care about the same things. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.”

My fury was rising. Of course I had noticed. I felt like I had been noticing all of my life. “You’re an adulterer, that’s what you are.”

“Look, those thunderous biblical words don’t always work in real life.”

“Well, they work for me.” I started to cry.

His voice was tired; he was beyond seeking understanding. “These things happen to people, even people who love each other. And, crazy as it may sound to you, I love your mother, and I believe she loves me.”

This was my father? I had always adored him. He was my escape into common sense, the one who saw the tyranny of clerical orations, the one I could count on to stay straight, earthy, and true. Didn’t he see what he was excusing?

“If Ingrid is an awful person because she had an affair, and you had an affair, what…” I stopped, waiting until my voice might be steady.

“What does that make me, right? You want a better label than ‘adulterer’?”

I nodded.

“I don’t know, Jesse. I guess that’s up to you.” He unlocked the front door and stood aside, looking sadder than I could ever have imagined he could look. I wanted to turn around and march away, just stomp out and never come back. But where would I go?

I walked into the dining room. The table was pristine, empty of those letters written in purple ink. I looked around for Mother.

“She’s gone to bed,” Father told me. “She said she would talk with you tomorrow.”

I don’t know how I managed to sleep, but “tomorrow” did come. When I walked into the kitchen, there was Mother, apron on, briskly whipping up batter for corn muffins. I wanted to console her, to tell her I loved her, to try to find the right words that would help. “Mother—”

She turned to me, her chin firm and square. “Jesse, I wasn’t thinking straight yesterday. Your father and I have worked it out.”

Worked it out? “What do you mean?”

Her chin quivered slightly. “Nothing is going to change.”

“What do you mean? What about what I heard you say—”

“There will be no divorce,” she said firmly. “That is settled.”

Her expression never changed. She didn’t seem like Mother; she seemed different—oddly stronger, I thought, but not more accessible. If anything, she had retreated back into herself and was looking out, as if through a car window, at people passing by. People like my father.

That’s when he walked into the kitchen.

I felt sick to my stomach sitting there, watching them stare at each other. They were exchanging some kind of message, something that would affect everything, I was sure. I wanted not to know what it was. I wanted to be a kid again, to believe in my parents. How did I fit in all of this?

Mother stood and, with a fluttery motion, patted my arm. “I think we’ve talked enough,” she said. “I’ll fix dinner. Corned beef hash tonight. Gabriel, one dropped egg or two?”

I looked at my father’s confused expression and, for just an instant, I felt sorry for him. That night, I listened as hard as I could to the murmured rise and fall of their voices, understanding nothing. Would I ever have the whole picture? Deeper down, what I couldn’t touch yet, was confusion. All my reliance on absolute values wouldn’t help me now. I couldn’t label the villain.

And why did Mother think she was being punished? What had she done?

Trying not to think about the sadness that now enveloped my family, I threw myself into preparing for the state tournament at Redlands. I gave it every waking moment, except when Kathleen and I huddled together on the tennis-court benches while I told her everything. She listened intently; she did more than listen, she heard. With Kathleen, I could cry and bang my fists and declare my parents hypocrites who were depriving me of my security and childhood and—

“You’re really not being deprived of any of that,” she broke in. “Your mother and father aren’t any different than anyone else who makes mistakes.”

“Mistakes? How about sins?”

“When did you expect them to be perfect? Didn’t you know they weren’t?”

“I knew they fought.”

“So, okay, now you know the details.” She stretched out her legs and sighed. When she spoke again, her tone was subtly different. “You’re going to be surprised all your life by ‘the details’ unless you think about what it costs to never forgive anybody,” she said.

I gazed at her. She was hunched over, the sleeves of her white tennis jacket pulled tight across her shoulders. She gave the illusion, even to me sometimes, of being wholly strong. I knew she was good at hiding her own pain—but there were times when she showed more.

“Kathleen,” I said quietly, “are you saying you’ve forgiven your father?”

She didn’t look up. “No,” she said.

“Do you think you will ever be able to?”

She glanced sideways at me, a small smile on her lips. “Probably not. But I remember how lost he looked when you were talking with him at the fence. My mother isn’t lost, and neither am I. So, not needing him—maybe that’s a first step toward forgiveness.”

I thought of Kathleen’s brisk, ramrod-straight mother with her sunny smile, working the hosiery counter at the May Company. “You’ve got a brave mother,” I said.

“We do all right,” she said. “Even saving for college.” She gave me a playful poke in the arm. “Don’t look so down in the mouth,” she teased. “We’re both going to do okay.”

And I halfway believed her. Kathleen, my gritty, no-nonsense friend, tossing that brilliant red hair of hers, walking into every situation with the easy, loose gait of a born athlete. With her casual way of poking fun at authority, her acceptance of what was without raging and screaming, she was indeed brave. I hoped she would be my friend for life.

I’ve discovered, you only need one.