Into the Darkness (38 page)

“As red as a polished apple! I had no doubt that she would die before she would give in or get what she wanted.”

I was always told that fathers and daughters could have a special relationship because daughters often see their fathers as perfect, and fathers see their daughters as little princesses. My mother assured me that nothing was further from the truth when it came to Roxy and my father.

“
Mon Dieu
. I swear sometimes your father would look at Roxy with such fire in his eyes that I thought he’d burn down the house,” my mother said.

Although she was French, my mother was fluent in English as a child and, after years and years of living in America, usually reverted to French with my father and me only when she became emotional or wanted to stress something. Of course, I learned to speak French because of her. She knew that teaching it to me when I was young was the best way to get me fluent in the language.

“Your sister would look right back at him defiantly and never flinch. He was always the first to give up, to look away. And if he ever spanked her or slapped her, she would never cry.

“Once, when she was fourteen and came home after two o’clock in the morning when she wasn’t even supposed to go out, he took his belt to her,” my mother continued. “I had to pull him off her, practically claw his arm to get him to stop. You know how big your father’s hands are and how powerful he can be, especially when he’s very angry. Roxy didn’t cry and never said a word. She simply went to her room as if she had walked right through him.

“She defied him continually, breaking every rule he set down until he gave up and threw her out of the house. You were just six and really the ideal child in his eyes,
un enfant parfait
. Why waste his time on a hopeless cause, he would say, when he could spend his time and energy on you instead? He was always afraid she’d be a bad influence on you, contaminate you with her nasty and stubborn ways.

“Your sister didn’t cry or beg to stay. She packed her bags, took the little savings she had, and went out in the world as if she had never expected to do anything different. She didn’t even look to me to intercede on her behalf. I don’t think she ever respected me as a woman or as her mother because I wouldn’t stand up to your father the way she would. Sometimes she wouldn’t even let me touch her. The moment I put my hand out to stroke her hair or caress her face, she recoiled like a frightened bird.

“Maybe your father hoped she would finally learn a good lesson and return, begging him to let her back into our home and family and promising to behave, but if he did have that expectation, he was very good at keeping it secret. After she had left, he avoided mentioning her
name to me and if I talked about her, he would get up and leave the room. If I did so at dinner, he would get up and go out to eat, and if I mentioned her when we were in bed, he would go out to the living room to sleep.

“So I gave up trying to change his mind. Sometimes I went out looking for her, taking you with me, but this is a very big city. Paris is a bigger city, but more people live here in New York. It was probably as difficult as looking for a needle in a haystack.”

“Didn’t you call the police, try to get her face on milk cartons or something?”

“Your father wouldn’t hear of it for the first few months. Later, there were newspaper stories and a magazine article about lost girls, and your sister was featured. Nothing came of it. He said if she could stay away, she didn’t belong with us anyway. I used to go to other neighborhoods and walk and walk, hoping to come upon her, especially on her birthday, but it wasn’t until five years later that your father revealed he had seen her. He told me only because he thought it proved he had been right to throw her out.

“He was at a dinner meeting with some of his associates at the investment bank. After it had ended, one of them told him he had a special after-dinner date. They walked out together, and a stretch limousine pulled up. He winked at your father and went to the limousine. The chauffeur opened the door, and your father saw this very attractive and expensively dressed young woman inside the limousine. At first, he didn’t recognize her, but after a few more moments he realized it was Roxy. He said she looked years older than she was and glared out at him
with the same defiance he had seen in her face when she was only five.

“Later, he found out she was a high-priced call girl. She even had a fancy name, Fleur du Coeur, which you know means “Flower of the Heart.” That’s how rich men would ask for her when they called the escort service.

“
Mon Dieu, mon Dieu!
It broke my heart to hear all of that, but I didn’t cry in front of him.”

Even now, talking about it brought tears to her eyes, however.

My mother told me more about Roxy after my father had passed away. I was devastated by my father’s death, but now that he was no longer there to stop it, I wanted to hear as much as I could about my forbidden sister, the sister I could never acknowledge existed.

I had no trouble pretending I was an only child. Since the day Roxy had left, I was living that way anyway. My father had taken all of her pictures off walls and shelves and dressers. He had thrown most of them into the incinerator. Mama was able to hide a few, but anything else Roxy had left behind was dumped down the garbage chute. It was truly as if he thought he could erase all traces of her existence. He never even acknowledged her birthday. Looking at the calendar, he would do little more than blink.

He didn’t know it, but I still had a charm bracelet Roxy had given me. It had a wonderful variety of charms that included the Eiffel Tower, a fan, a pair of dancing shoes, and a dream catcher. My mother’s brother had given it to Roxy when my parents and she were in France visiting, and she gave it to me. I never wore it in front of
my father for fear he would seize it and throw it away, too.

Of course, I could never mention her name in front of my father when he was alive, and I didn’t dare ask him any questions about her. My mother was the one who told me almost all I knew about Roxy after she had left. She said that once my father had seen her in the limousine, he tried to learn more about her despite himself. He’d found out that she lived in a fancy hotel on the East side, the Hotel Beaux-Arts. I had overheard them talking about it. Beaux-Arts was small, but very expensive. Most of the rooms were suites and some were full apartments. My mother said that my father was impressed with how expensive it was.

“The way he spoke about her back then gave me the impression he was impressed with how much money she was making, too. Of course, before I could even think he had softened his attitude about her, he added that she was nothing more than a high-priced prostitute,” she said.

She didn’t want to tell me all this, but it was as if it had been boiling inside her and she finally had the chance to get it out. I knew that afterward she went off to cry in private. I was conflicted about asking her questions and learning all this from her because I saw how painful it was for her to tell it to me. Of course, I had rarely heard my parents speak about her, and I knew I couldn’t ask my mother any questions about Roxy in front of Papa. If I did when he wasn’t home, my mother would avoid answering or answer quickly as if she expected the very walls would betray her and whisper to my father like whistle-blowers.

However, the questions were there like weeds, undaunted, invulnerable, and as defiant as Roxy.

What did she look like now?

What was her life really like?

Was she happy? Did she have everything she wanted?

Was she sad about losing her family?

Mostly, I wanted to know if she ever thought about me. It suddenly occurred to me one day that Roxy might have believed my father risked my mother’s life to have me just so he could ignore her. He was that disgusted with her. Surely if Roxy thought that, she could have come to hate me.

Did she still hate me?

The answers were out there just waiting for me. They taunted me and haunted me.

I had no doubt, however, that eventually I would get to know them.

What I wondered was, when I did get to know them, would I be sorry?

Would they change my life?

And maybe most important of all, would I hate my sister as much as my father had?

My father was always the first to rise in the morning, even on weekends. He was never quiet about it either. All three bedrooms in our town house on East 81st Street just off Madison Avenue in New York were upstairs. It was a relatively new building in the neighborhood and Papa often complained about the workmanship and how the builders had cut corners to make more money. He said the older structures on the street were far more solid, even though ours cost more. Our walls were thinner, as were the framing and the floors.

Consequently, I could hear him close drawers, start his shower, close cabinets, and even talk to Mama, especially if their bedroom door was open. The cacophony of sounds he made was his rendition of army revelry. Of course, being the son of an army general he actually had heard it most of his young life. His family had lived that close to the barracks often, depending on where his father was stationed, but especially when they were overseas.

When I commented about it once, Mama said the volume of the noise he made after he awakened in the morning was a holdover from the days when Roxy lived
with us. Her bedroom was on the other side of theirs. She would never wake up for school on her own, so Papa would be sure to make all this noise to get her up much earlier than was necessary. No matter what Mama said, he was stubborn about it. Maybe Roxy had inherited that obstinacy from him. Who could be more inflexible when he made up his mind than my father?

Even though he basically had defied his father’s wishes and had chosen a business career rather than a military one as his older brother, Orman, had, Papa still believed in military discipline. Disobeying an order in our house could lead to the equivalent of being court-martialed. At least, that was the way it felt to me, and I’m sure it had felt that way to Roxy, especially when he had told her to leave the house. To her, it must have been like a dishonorable discharge. Perhaps, despite what Papa said, she had felt some shame. I imagined she would have, even though I couldn’t remember her that well anymore. After all, it was now a little more than nine years since I had last seen her or heard her voice.

I often wondered if she had seen me and secretly watched me growing up. During these years, did she hide somewhere nearby and wait for a glimpse of either my mother or me? One of the first things I used to do when I stepped out of the house and often still do was look across the street, searching for someone Roxy’s age perhaps standing behind a car or off to the side of a building watching for any sight of us. Even if I didn’t see her, I couldn’t help but wonder if she followed me to school.

Sometimes I would pretend that she was following me and then I would stop suddenly and turn around
to catch her. People behind me always either had an annoyed or frightened look on their faces. Whenever I walked in the city, whether it be to school or to the store or just to meet friends, I would scan the faces of any young woman who looked to be about Roxy’s age. Often I studied some young woman’s face so hard, she flashed anger back at me, and I quickly looked away and sped up.

One of the first things my parents had taught me about walking in the streets of New York was never to make too much eye contact with strangers. I suppose Roxy would be like a complete stranger to me now. I even had trouble recalling the sound of her voice, but I did sneak looks at the pictures of her that Mama had hidden away every chance I had.

Of course, I believed Roxy would be as curious about me as I was about her. Why shouldn’t she be? Although I feared it, it was hard for me to accept that she hated Mama and me because of what Papa had done to her. Despite his stern ways, it was also hard for me to believe she hated him. Maybe it was difficult only because I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t even want to think that someone with whom I shared so much DNA could be that bad, that immoral. Or did it mean that somewhere deep inside me there was a strain of evil that would someday rise to the surface, too? How would it show itself? What emotions, lusts, and desires, exactly, did we share?

Having an older sister who had become so infamous to my parents naturally made me worry about myself. When I suggested such a thing to Mama once, she looked at me with pain in her eyes. I know the pain was
there because, like me, she didn’t want to believe Roxy was so wicked and sinful, or as evil as Papa made her out to be. Then she softened her look and told me to think of Cain and Abel in the Bible. Abel wasn’t evil because Cain was. Abel was good.

“Besides, we must not believe that evil is stronger than good, Emmie. You’re my perfect daughter, my
fille parfaite, n’est ce pas?
”

“
Oui,
Mama,” I would say whenever she asked me that, but I didn’t believe I was as perfect as Mama or Papa thought I was. Who could be?

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