If I had had a close friend, and she had been there with me, she would surely have asked how I could put my love for and loyalty to my father so high above my own wishes and dreams, even my own needs. After all, didn’t everyone need to have someone love him or her, someone other than a father or a mother, a sister or a brother? Or was it just romantic drivel to believe that someone out there was meant to be your life partner, your soul mate?
From reading, from history class, and even from stories Daddy had told me, I knew that there had been a time when young women lived in such a confined and restricted world that it was impossible for them to find soul mates, real lovers. Their parents arranged their whole lives. Those young women became wives and mothers and never experienced the thrill of romance, the excitement of self-discovery. Did they die because of it? Did they suffer and go crazy? Here and there, there were probably some who did, but on the whole, they lived full lives, had and loved their children, and although they didn’t fall in love, at minimum, they developed cordial, respectful, and maybe even deeply devoted relationships with the men they were forced to marry. They lay beside each other in cemeteries just like passionate lovers who married, spent their lives together, and passed away.
So, too, my sisters and I could not have boyfriends, go to proms, press flowers and pictures into albums, write love letters, carry on endless soft and loving phone conversations, get engaged to someone we loved and who loved us, or have a wedding that fulfilled our hearts. Our destinies had been prearranged as well. Would we, like those young women ages ago, put all of those romantic ideas in some closet and forget them, or would they haunt us forever? Was that part of the destiny that awaited me?
I stared at myself hatefully in the mirror. Suddenly, everything that was attractive and beautiful about me annoyed me. If I had been born plain, if I had no more sexual power in me than someone like Ruta Lee or Meg Logan, wouldn’t I be better off? If I hadn’t cried out when Daddy and Mrs. Fennel were walking past my bassinet, would some ordinary childless couple have adopted me and soaked me in their love? I’d have probably fallen in love with some likewise ordinary young man and had a wedding and children. I’d have no other destiny than the destiny most young women had. I would grow old without any illusions about myself. I’d probably not battle against age, either. I’d accept it and be satisfied with an epitaph that read, “She was a good wife, a good mother, a good woman, who made friends easily and never knew the meaning of real unhappiness.”
But would I have really been happier never to have known Daddy, never to have traveled in that first-class world that we lived in, a world of glamour and wealth, music and elegance? Would I have really been happier never to have lived in a world in which I never had a sick day, in which youth, energy, and beauty were forever? Would I really be happier sitting in my comfy little living room watching romantic movies or reading books about love and settling for the vicarious experience?
“When you stand on the cliffs of Capri or feel the wind in your hair as the yacht surges forward toward Mykonos, when you have dinner on the Eiffel Tower looking out over Paris or have lunch in Eze on the Riviera and look out over the bluest sea, when you have your cocktail on the rooftop of the Hassler in Rome and look out over the lights of the Eternal City, when you share hors d’oeuvres with the richest, most powerful people in the world, people who can clap their hands or snap their fingers and change the lives of thousands, you will feel the full glory of who you are and what you are,” Daddy had promised. “It’s out there, waiting for you to claim it, my darling daughter, like some ripe fruit for you to pluck and enjoy. You will have many affairs that are as passionate as any possible. You will miss nothing and have everything.”
His kiss had sealed the promise.
I stared at myself in the mirror. Yes, now I understand what you meant, Ava, I thought. Now I know why Mrs. Fennel called love our poison. I must try to fight back all these thoughts and feelings for Buddy Gilroy. I must try to become more like you. Loyalty, obedience, and sacrifice must replace this craving for love and self-fulfillment. I am, I declared to myself with new resolve, my father’s daughter, too. I can be no one else. Perhaps that was what Daddy and Mrs. Fennel meant by fulfilling our destiny. In the end, we really had no choice, nowhere else to go. Could I convince myself of that? If Daddy or Mrs. Fennel even suspected I had these doubts…
I wrapped my secret thoughts into a neat package and put them away as deeply as I could in the closet of my memory just as my door opened and Ava stepped into my bedroom. She looked about my room and then at me, as if she could literally search the air for traces of my innermost secret thoughts. Then she nodded at the textbooks I had open on my desk.
“Don’t waste too much time on all that,” she said, moving suspiciously about my room, her eyes going everywhere.
“What do you mean? Why not?”
She shrugged. “Your days at that school are numbered. Why bother to worry about your grades?”
“We’re close to the end of the school year. Surely, Daddy wouldn’t move us before I finish.”
“Do you think that matters at all to Daddy?” she asked, and smiled. “Don’t be ridiculous, Lorelei. Others, them,” she said disdainfully, waving at the window to indicate any and all who lived outside our world, “need good grades to be the keys that open doors for them. We don’t. Daddy arranges everything for us forever.”
“I don’t do it to get doors open for me, Ava. I do it because I enjoy it.”
“Oh, please,” she said, and sat at my vanity table. She primped her hair and studied herself in the mirror.
“Where did you take Marla?” I asked. She was so lost in herself that I didn’t think she hea
rd me. Then she stopped looking at herself and turned to me.
“To practice,” she said.
“Practice? Practice what?”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed lately, probably not, because your head is in the wrong places these days, but our little Marla is surging into maturity. Daddy says there is something quite remarkable about her, even more remarkable than you or me. For the first time in, what should I say, centuries, he thinks he might have two daughters mature and skilled enough at the same time.” She laughed. “Imagine being able to take turns every month. What a relief.”
“I don’t understand. How can that be? She’s not quite fourteen. She doesn’t have the mature figure, the—”
“Daddy says he can sense that she will soon look more like eighteen, nineteen. In less than six months, matter of fact, she’ll probably be breathing down your neck.” She widened her smile.
“My neck?”
“Of course, Lorelei. Just think of the competition, the real sibling rivalry then. Each of you trying to outdo the other when it comes to bringing Daddy what he needs as quickly as he needs it. Who will catch the better prize? Which one of you will do it better, easier?”
She turned back to the vanity mirror, took my brush, and swept her bangs back.
“That way, should one of you have to be replaced, there’ll be no problem for Daddy, either,” she said. She stopped brushing. “It’s exciting, isn’t it? I almost wish I could trade places with you, that you’d be the one leaving and not me.”
“How can that be exciting? It sounds horrible to think of two sisters trying to outdo each other.”
She nodded at herself. “I was right about you. Daddy’s beginning to see it, too.”
“Right about what?”