Prologue
“You see the door?” my father asked, pointing his thick right forefinger at the entrance of our East Side town house in New York City. “Pack your things and get out. Go on, get out,” he added, poking his finger in the air repeatedly, as if he were trying to hit the invisible button that would make me disappear.
Mama stood next to him looking even more terrified than I did, her beautiful cameo face shattering beneath the storm of his rage. She was always easier to read than I was. I never showed my father fear, cowered, or retreated, which only made him angrier. In fact, my defiance usually grew stronger as the volume and intensity of his anger boiled over like hot milk. There was simply no middle ground for either of us to occupy, no well of compromise from which either of us could draw a cup of calmness. Ironically, I was too much like him.
“You think I won’t?” I fired back.
“No. I think you had better,” he replied with a level of determination I had never seen him reach. There was no hesitation in his eyes and nothing that suggested an empty threat. This time, there was no doubt that he meant what he had said and how he had said it.
I glanced at Mama again. She looked far more surprised at his firmness than I had ever seen her look. She confirmed his determination for me. She could see that Papa wasn’t simply having one of his spontaneous temper tantrums. Her eyes were wide open now, her lips trembling. In fact, her whole face looked as if it was vibrating as she paled. She even stepped away from him. I had no doubt that throughout their twenty years of marriage, she had never confronted or witnessed such fury in him and had no idea what else he might do. We had been circling each other like two martial-arts warriors for months lately. This confrontation was inevitable.
“Yes, sir,” I said, then clicked my black leather shoe boot heels together and saluted him. The proper way to salute was one of the first things he had taught me when I was a little girl. After he taught that to me, emphasizing how smart and snappy it had to be, with my palm to the left, my wrist straight, and my thumb and fingers extended and joined, I saluted him every time I saw him. In the beginning, even he was satisfied, and Mama thought it was cute, but after a while, he saw that I was really mocking the salute, doing it so often, practically every time he looked at me, and he began to be annoyed by it and eventually forbade me to do it.
Now whenever I did it, especially with my heels clicking, it was as though I had set off a firecracker in his brain. At the moment, the veins in his neck pressed boldly against his skin. Pea-size patches of white at the corners of his lips began to spread like a rash. He looked as if he had swollen into some horrid ogre who could heave me and all of the furniture out the window.
My father wasn’t a terribly big man. He was a little more than six feet tall and had broad shoulders, but he didn’t look like a weight lifter or a lumberjack. Having been brought up in a military family, he had a cadet’s perfect posture, so he always seemed solid and battle-ready, even though he had rejected the military life and had gone into investment management and financing.
His father was General Thornton Wilcox, who was once considered a top candidate to command NATO. The gilt-framed two-by-four picture of my grandfather in full dress uniform with all of his medals glittering hung in our entryway hall and loomed over us the way the picture of a saint might hover in the home of a religious family. The light positioned above it seemed to highlight the dissatisfaction I had no trouble imagining in his face. My father’s older brother, Orman, had followed in his father’s footsteps, but not mon père.
Even though no one came right out and said it, I knew that in my grandfather’s mind, my father was a great disappointment. I knew that both my grandfather and my uncle ridiculed my father’s decision, treating him as if he were somehow weaker than they were, and in a family where affection and emotion were considered weakness to start with, his father and brother had little trouble thinking of him as an outsider.
I never saw him or my mother shed any tears at how his father and his brother treated him, but there was no question about where he stood in their eyes. Even though no one clearly had said, “You’re not one of us; you’re no Wilcox,” the words hung in the air between them like some foul odor whenever they had occasion to meet, which was happening less and less, anyway.
So I guess that pointing at the front door and telling me I was no longer part of our family wasn’t all that big an emotional leap for my father. His family had all but done the same to him. That old expression, It takes one to know one, probably fit him, but I’m not laying all the blame at his feet. I’m not looking for some psychological rationalization or a comfortable excuse for what I had done and what was now happening.
No, I’m not going to deny being the top choice to model for a problem-child poster. Mon père had threatened to disown me many times and had suggested more than once that I be sent to one of those isolated behavior camps to experience tough love, but I really didn’t want to believe that he would actually reach the point where he would firmly and permanently want me out of his life the way he obviously did at this moment.
I looked at Mama again to see if she would interfere and rescue me. She appeared to be wilting quickly in the wake of my father’s overwhelming rage. As if she were trying to keep her body from breaking apart, she wrapped her arms tightly around herself. She looked like someone in a straitjacket. No, there was no sign of my getting any help there. This time, she wasn’t going to step between us as she had many times previously. I knew that especially lately, she was coming to believe that I was irretrievable, too.
No matter what the reason, opposing my father was one of the most difficult things for her to do. She was about as devoted to him as any woman could be devoted to her husband. From overhearing conversations between her and some of her friends, I knew that she was constantly accused of having no mind of her own and permitting my father to run her life. But I also knew that my father had convinced her that I could be a devastatingly bad influence on my little sister, Emmie, his and Mama’s golden child, their enfant parfaite, and that possibility also caused her to stand back.
They weren’t even supposed to have Emmie. After my difficult birth, Mama’s doctor had advised her not to get pregnant again. I didn’t know all of the medical reasons, but I did know that her getting pregnant, even nine years after my birth, was a dangerous thing for her to do. When I heard she was pregnant, my first thought was that my father wanted another child because he was so disappointed in me. He wanted this child so much that he was willing to risk my mother’s life. If I had any doubts about how low I stood in his list of priorities, Mama’s pregnancy confirmed it. Every time he closed his eyes in my presence, I suspected that he was wishing I had never been born.
“Norton, s’il vous plaît,” Mama said softly. That was the extent of her resistance that day. She came from a family in France where men were treated like kings. That’s where the Napoleonic Code established the supremacy of the husband when it came to his wife and children.
“No!” he screamed at her. “No more. I want her out of my sight.”
His shout bounced off the walls and rattled my spine, but I didn’t show it.
“No problem,” I said. “Relax. The feeling’s mutual,” I added as coolly and calmly as I could, and went to pack my things, sucking in my fear and shock. As I walked by him, I thought I could actually feel the heat in the air.
When I was honest with my
self, I admitted that I had always expected this day would come. Secretly, I had planned for it, hoarding money, considering what I would take and what I wouldn’t and where I would go first. My parents didn’t know, but I had recently been seeing a college boy who had his own apartment in the Bronx. He was always trying to get me to stay overnight, and I had done so once, lying about sleeping over at a girlfriend’s home. Now maybe I would stay for quite a few nights.
As I packed, I heard them arguing downstairs. Comments such as “You remember we were told that tough love was our only hope” and “Let her see what it’s like trying to survive out there” floated up the stairs to my room. I could imagine my mother wringing her hands as she chanted, “Mon Dieu, mon Dieu.” That wouldn’t impress my father. Calling for God’s help was something a soldier did in battle, and surely my father was thinking that this battle was over. Not that his family was very religious, anyway. To me, it seemed that they thought of churches the same way they thought of the officers’ club, just another place you visited from time to time to remind yourself that you were special.