She heard me talking to myself, so I must be a schizophrenic. Once, she even tried to stop me by making me wear tape over my mouth when I played in my room, especially when she had guests visiting and feared they would overhear me. She mistook my mixture of Portuguese words with English words as a sort of insane gibberish.
When Daddy learned about what she had done with the tape, he put an end to it, too, but that didn't stop her effort to establish that I had mental problems. Because I cried at the drop of a pin, or dropped my eyes when she looked at me. I was a paranoid. How could I help but be afraid of her? Even when she spoke nicely to me or stroked my hair and
complimented Amou on how well she kept me. I was waiting for some ugly or terrible comment to be tagged on at the end, even if it was just a wagging of her head and a sigh to indicate that I was somehow beyond hope and all that was done for me would be wasted. She was that convinced I carried the seed of some mental aberration inside me.
One morning, she even scooped up my drawings and my coloring books to show Daddy how I was revealing some deep-seated mental disturbance through my distorted faces and figures. I think she suspected some of them were depictions of her, and she couldn't imagine how anyone, especially me, could see her as anything but beautiful.
"You're supposed to be such a great expert." she told my father, rushing into his office and waving the childish artwork in his face. "I don't know how you can't see this, see what you have brought home. She's an embarrassment. I see the way my friends look at her. I was a fool to agree to it, even with Isabella here to do most of the dirty work,
"You should put her someplace where she can get the proper treatment and not leave her here to be a burden on me."
She doesn't have to go anyplace. Alberta. There is nothing abnormal about those pictures or her behavior." Daddy insisted in his typically even tone of voice. "You simply don't have experience wit
h children. Alberta, or you would know."
"Go on, throw that in my face. Throw it in my face that I have been unable to have children!" she screamed at him, and marched out of his office, slamming the door behind her hard enough to shake even our big house.
Amou and I would have had to be deaf not to have heard it all. She would embrace me and whisper. "Don't cry, pequeninho,little one Amou always be here. No one is going to give you away."
Knowing that my mother, even my adoptive mother, didn't really want me was like living in a house made of cards, a cardboard home that would fall apart in a heavy rain or blow apart in a strong wind and leave me naked and alone or falling forever down a deep, dark tunnel. My nightmares were an ongoing series of such horrid events.
I wasn't the only thing that my A.M.
complained about. however. In fact, she seemed never to be without some grievance, whether it be about me. Amou, the other servants, or the people who worked on our grounds-- anyone and everything. She often paraded her complaints through our home. stringing them behind her like rattling cans tied to the rear bumper of a just-married couple's car. Maybe that was why Daddy spent so much of his time away from home and, consequently, away from me.
How many times had I glanced in at him in his sacrosanct home office in the evening without his realizing I was there and seen him just staring out the bay window that looked west on our South Carolina property just outside the small community of Spring City? From the corner of the doorway. I would catch that wistful expression playing on his lips and in his eyes as he gazed up at the moon. It shone through clouds so thin they looked like smoke and captured shadow after shadow in its golden net of light.
When I was older and I caught him sitting alone in that office. I could almost see the will-o'-the-wisp regrets of all the things he should have done differently. Of course. I worried that I was included, that maybe he thought my adoptive mother was right, that he shouldn't have brought me home. Later. if I even so much as suggested it, he would reassure me that he had never had the slightest doubt Or hesitation,
There were other regrets playing on his face: lost opportunities, moments not seized, too many ships he just let pass him in the night. I had no idea how deep and troubling those regrets were for him. and I would have none until I went home this time, this dark and horrible time that justified my dreads.
1
Saying Goodbye
.
I recognized the dean of students' secretary,
Mrs. Schwartz, standing in my classroom doorway. She was shifting her weight nervously from one foot to the other and rubbing one palm against the other as if she were sanding down a block of wood. She gave each of my classmates a flashbulb smile as they entered, then quickly turned back to the hallway. I didn't know for certain yet. but I had a hunch she was waiting there for me. As usual, she was dressed in her navy-blue suit with her lace-trimmed white blouse and stiletto shoes-- practically her work uniform.
"Oh, dear," she said, reaching out for me as I approached. She seized my hand and drew me closer. "We have received a rather frantic call from your aunt Agnes Delray, Apparently, she was unable to reach you at your apartment last night or this morning and has been burning up the telephone lines between here and Charleston." she ran on, obviously infected by my aunt's histrionics. Aunt Agnes often had that effect on people.
I could not tell her why I hadn't been able to receive Aunt Agnes's call. I had spent the night at Allan's apartment, and that wasn't anyone's business but mine. I was positive, however. that Aunt Agnes had been suspicious, especially if she had tried late in the evening, and had overdone her exasperation over failing to reach me, My father's fifty-one-year-old sister was the sort of person who expected that anyone she called or beckoned was just waiting to serve and fulfill her requests. She and I never got along, anyway. She never came out and said it in so many words, but she considered an adopted child somehow inferior, despite my achievements, especially a child whose mother was a patient in a mental clinic.
But even if my adoptive mother had given birth to me. Aunt Agnes would have been critical. I always knew she believed my father had married beneath the family. My adoptive mother came from one of those old Southern families that had lost most of its wealth but desperately clung to its heritage. That was not good enough for Aunt Agnes. Money, heritage, position in society, and certainly power were the pillars upon which she built her church, and if one was weak, the church would collapse.
My father tolerated Aunt Agnes rather than loved her as a sister and once told me that her husband. Uncle Darwood, probably had welcomed the Grim Reaper with open arms, seeing death as an avenue of escape, even though it wasn't any sort of pleasant death. He was a very serious closet alcoholic and had drowned his liver with all his unhappiness.
Talking about Aunt Agnes and Uncle Darwood was one of the few things Daddy and I could have a warm, loving time doing together, basking in each other's laughter, soaking in the warm intimacy of a private hour when we were just father and daughter, alone, almost discovering each other for the very first time. This was some months after my adoptive mother's death, which ironically was the catalyst that finally drew us closer. It was almost as if she had cast a long, deep shadow over Daddy and me, keeping us both hidden from each other most of the time
"What's wrong. Mrs. Schwartz?" I asked, sucking back my breath and swallowing it down into my lungs, already burning with anxiety.
A few of my classmates lingered just behind her in the room, waiting to hear.
"Your aunt says your father's been rushed to the Spring City General Hospital and you should come as quickly as you can." She pressed her right palm against her chest. It was as if those words had been burning inside her and now she was relieved.
"Why? Has my father been in an accident?" I asked.