Emma and Flora made one of our family favorite dinners that night, a tuna casserole that my mother once said owed a large debt to the Campbell Soup Company. I did not care. It slipped down, warm and cheesy with just a hint of sherry, heating the cold core of me to languid comfort. The crumbled potato chips on top were browned and crisp. There were some sautéed green beans, too, and hot rolls and cold milk. I doubted I could eat anything; I ended up eating everything. Flora and Emma beamed. My father, who did not finish his meal, did too.
After dinner he said, “Sit with me for a while,” and I followed him into the sitting room, where a large fire crackled, even in the warm spring dusk. He took his accustomed deep leather easy chair on one side of the fireplace, and motioned me to the faded brocade wing chair that sat opposite it. I hesitated. It had always been my mother’s chair.
“She’d like to know you were sitting in her chair,” he said. “And this way I can see you better. It strikes me that I haven’t really looked at you for a while. You’ve turned into an amazing swimmer, haven’t you? And all without your mother and me watching it happen, or encouraging you. Somehow I guess we never took it very seriously. I’m not going to let that happen again. I intend to really know my daughter from now on.”
Something inside me tightened. Would he be able to see the diver’s suit and helmet if he observed me closely? What on earth would I say about it? Surely no father in his right mind would want a daughter who walked around in a diver’s suit and helmet day after day. Perhaps I could begin to leave it behind me some of the time. But the fear that hit me after the thought pinned me motionless in my mother’s chair, and I knew that I could not walk unprotected in the world. Not yet. I would keep the diving paraphernalia, and if he should discern it, we would talk about it then.
I looked across at him, in his chair under the circle of light cast by the old bronze floor lamp that had always stood there. Firelight flickered on his face.
When had he grown so old?
I thought in alarm.
I never noticed. Had it all happened since my mother?
But the lines in his face, and the slight sag to his jowls, and the little mound that was now his belly could not have happened overnight. The bleak, sunken eyes, yes, and the gray pallor, but not the rest. His slim athlete’s body was still slim, but it had softened, and his erect spine seemed to have bent a little. I knew that he seldom worked out in the basement gym now that I was so far gone in swimming, but I had noticed little else about him. We both needed to really look at one another. I did not want to lose the sense of my father. I had already lost my mother; my sense of her would always be what it had been before her death. I would not see it grow, or change. I did not know if that thought grieved or comforted me. I could not seem to feel much at all about my mother and wondered bleakly what that said about me as a person and a daughter.
“Perhaps we should talk about your mother,” my father said slowly. “Tatty says we should, as soon as possible, that we can’t start to work through our loss until we do. Would you want to do that?”
“No sir,” I said, dropping my eyes. “All I know about her right now is that I miss her awfully. I don’t know what else there is to say about her.”
“Me either,” he said, smiling faintly. “I guess when the time is right we’ll know. I did think the service and reception went well, didn’t you?”
“Yes sir,” I said, relieved that I did not have to begin to parse my mother. “It was beautiful. Everybody said so.”
And it had been. Even I could see that. Through the intervention of Tatty Glover, who said that she and my mother had talked about it many times, my mother had indeed been cremated, and her memorial service was held in the little Episcopal church on Connecticut Avenue where she and my father were married. Her bronze urn had been placed in the church’s new columbarium, in a wall niche, and the service itself was small and dignified and yet with an upward tilt of joy. One of her painting subjects, a lyrical black soprano, sang “Deep River” and “Morning Has Broken.” Some of my mother’s closest friends stood and recalled their fondest memories of her; many of these were downright funny, and there was real laughter among the real tears. My father had decided not to speak, Jeebs couldn’t because he could not stop crying, and I had threatened to run away from home if anybody tried to make me. I insisted on leading Wilma in on his jingling chain, and for once he behaved with (for him) doggy propriety. For some reason, Wilma made more people cry than any of the eulogies, and I was proud of him, even though I heard Tatty Glover, at the end of our pew, give a great, rattling sniff of disapproval.
Afterward, at home, Tatty and Emma and Flora had made magic happen, had managed to make the old high-ceilinged rooms a glowing, polished, and light-filled arena for my mother’s last party. There were flowers everywhere, though we had asked, in the funeral notice, that gifts be made to the Elizabeth Constable Foundation, to benefit women in the arts who were working for social change. There had been a small deluge of checks, too. My father looked at them helplessly, laid neatly on his desk, and Tatty took them away, saying we would go to the bank and the lawyer’s office and set up the fund after a few days had passed.
One of the bouquets, a glorious fountain of pink, blue, and lavender anemones, came from Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, though, of course, not from the White House. The accompanying note said. “We can scarcely afford to lose the glowing gifts and souls of women like Mrs. Constable.” Tatty was literally high on the note, and placed it, with the flowers, on the round table in the foyer so that no one could miss it.
“And,” she burbled to my father after the reception was over, “you
did
speak to Mrs. Graham and Mr. Bradlee, didn’t you? So thoughtful of them to come.”
We stood at the door, my father and I and Tatty, speaking to everyone who came and departed. I thought there must have been hundreds, most of whom I did not know. It occurred to me only then that my mother had a rich, separate life from mine, lived with people who were fond of her and of whom she was fond, without my knowing anything at all about it. It gave me a strange feeling to nod and mumble to all these people, who seemed to know me but who might, as far as I was concerned, have arrived this day on a spacecraft from Uranus. It felt as if my mother had been leading a secret life, one hidden from me, as if I were not deemed fit to become a part of it. I looked anxiously up at my father, who stood stiff and formal beside me, shaking hands and kissing cheeks and murmuring thanks to the population of this other world. If he did not know who they were, he gave no sign. I felt like a changeling in the drawing room I had grown up in.
Once, looking out onto the front walkway, I saw Canon and Mrs. Davenport waiting in the queue to come into the house. My heart fell into my stomach. I started like a pony bitten by a deerfly, and made as if to flee, but my father clapped his hand on my arm and I stood still, heart thundering.
“Peaches sends her love and condolences,” Mrs. Davenport said to me when she reached me, leaning over to kiss me on the cheek. She smelled powerfully and dustily of violet bath powder. “She’s at Madeira and simply couldn’t get away—finals, you know. She was very sorry. She admired your mother very much.”
I nodded, looking at my shoes.
“Please thank her for us,” my father said, and the Davenports moved on.
We did not sit very long before the fire that first night, but while we did I was oddly comforted—or at least anesthetized—by the warmth and light and presence of family, even diminished family. In truth I could feel little, and I finally looked at my father and said, “I can’t feel anything, Daddy. It scares me. I should be like Jeebs, I should cry or something. I can’t cry. Do you think there’s something wrong with me?” I had never spoken to my father of anything that went on deep inside me, of my secret joys and sorrows and fears. In the world of my childhood, kids simply did not. It did not seem remarkable to me now that I did. Much had changed.
“No,” he said, smiling slowly at me. Some of the young father I had always followed into adventure was back, just for a moment.
“Dylan Thomas wrote something once I’ve always remembered,” he said. “He said that ‘after the first death, there is no other.’ You’ve had your first death, Lilly, a long time ago, at Edgewater. It doesn’t mean that you don’t mourn your mother, and always will. It just means that the awful surprise of the first one isn’t there. Once we’ve been through the first one, I think we build walls so that the next one, and the next, won’t simply kill us. You’ve done that. You started doing it the night we . . . lost Jon. Your mother and I saw that. It’s all right. We do what we have to do not to simply . . . sink.”
A brief explosion of grief and shock, a sense of drifting fog and feet pounding up a gangplank, swamped new acid tears. I simply pushed it away.
“Will it ever be different?”
“Of course. When you’re ready for it to be.”
He smiled at me again, a bit more broadly.
“You’re a brave girl, Lilly,” he said. “Your mother always said that.”
“She did?”
“She did.”
We did not speak much after that, and suddenly I was so drugged with food and firelight and this strange new communion with my father that I fell asleep in my chair, and woke only when he shook my shoulder gently.
“Time for bed,” he said.
I stumbled up the stairs and into my room without thinking of where I would sleep—in my own room, of course. Where else? Wilma followed me up and settled himself into the crook of my leg. In my parents’ room I heard my father moving about softly, and saw that the light from the bedside lamp in their room went out. I did not wonder for a long time after that what that first night without her in the bed they had always shared must have cost him. Where else but there would he sleep? This was right too.
In the morning there was light and warmth and Flora and Emma in the kitchen, and the smells of french toast and sausage, and then my father and I walked to the car and he drove me to school.
“See you after school,” he said.
“See you,” I said.
I did not realize it then, but that first night and the day after it laid down a pattern we would follow for many years. Perhaps we always would have; many people do cling to what they have as long as they can, and don’t seek anything more. Literature is full of them. I see now that I might well have done just that. It was just a safe and comforting life, for both of us. The time came when we clung to each other and our routines out of more than love and comfort, but that was in the future.
My father took me to school and picked me up afterward, or after swim practice. He came to all my meets. We had dinner at home, or sometimes he would take me out; to the little Chinese restaurant in Chevy Case Circle that we had always gone to on Sunday nights, or to the Marriott Hot Shoppe at the Key Bridge, or to the Chevy Chase Club. But mostly we ate at home, the dinners that Emma and Flora had cooked us, and sat in the sitting room afterward and talked over our days, or I did homework and he read and listened to music on the phonograph, and Wilma twitched and snored and groaned happily and grew old before the fires.
Outside the house on Kalorama Circle, the world caught fire and flamed; crowds shouted and ran and threw bricks and bottles and sometimes a bomb; good men who stood for sanity were shot and died; an unimaginable war half a world away wallowed on in the virulent heat and mire and wet of bloodied jungles; flags were burned and furious people marched and were beset by dogs and police and fire hoses; scandal and treachery leaked from our own federal heart; hemlines soared and music shouted and jangled and railed; smoke from cigarettes changed and sweetened; academicians exhorted the young to tune in, turn on, and drop out and the young did just that; city streets that once had been busy and lamp-lit and alive were now dark and dead places where faceless danger slid through shadows, waiting; the pill that was supposed to liberate young women enslaved a generation with rote sex that many of them did not even want yet; hippies and head shops and smoke-fumed rock festivals and deadly summers of love bloomed on televisions that fed it all to us; Wisconsin Avenue became a street few mothers would let their daughters travel alone. For the young, it was all largely intoxicating and enabling; for the no-longer-young it was often downright terrifying.
My father became one of the latter. Given different circumstances, I might have been one of the former. As it was, cloistered away behind paneled walls and automobile doors and Cathedral’s seemly stone and mortar, and most of all swathed in cool disinfected green water and the suit and helmet, I was only remotely curious about the world outside. It had about the same immediacy as an engrossing history book, or a gripping serialized novel. But still, there was a pull; only later I realized that it was a small, buried urge simply to be young that was as immutable as the thrust of a green shoot toward the sun.
At the time, I buried it. Because not long into it I realized that my father had become not just solicitous for me, but desperately afraid. Afraid that something would happen to me, some harm come to me when he was not with me, afraid of losing me, too. It was painful to see and somehow shaming, and so I stayed close to him, dutifully and then willingly and then gladly. For I had become afraid, too. Afraid of the world outside my small arena, afraid that it would take me away from him, afraid that it would take him away from me. Those few years of my growing up, I see now, were for both of us a seemingly endless pas de deux of love, and fear. We were artists at it.
I was pretty and knew it; he never tired of telling me so, and on the occasions when my Aunt Tatty dragged me shopping for clothes, I could see it in the mirrors of many chic small shops. I was still slim and small, like my father, but I had my mother’s blooming fullness, too, as well as her ocean gray eyes and her hair. I wore it long because my father loved it so; Aunt Tatty would urge me periodically to have it cut into a smart Carnaby Street bob, but when I mentioned it to my father he was so genuinely stricken that I abandoned the idea. Secretly I loved the mass and swirl of my bronze and gold hair. Sometimes I took my mother’s hair out of the bag I kept it in and held it up against my own; they were the same.