The Sisters Antipodes Read online

  Because I did go, just not for the magical year with my “husband” near my father. I went on a desperate mission to win Anthony back from the attractive artist, from a safe base in my father’s Residence, and to take care of Albert when he visited and my father and Helen had to travel, as I’d promised.

  I’d miss Jenny again, but Anthony didn’t. Just before he told me that maybe I didn’t want to come, my father and Helen had him up to the Residence for dinner, while Jenny was still there. She had a whole evening to watch him and listen to his jokes and stories and see him look satisfied and run a hand through his hair, and afterward she said only one thing: “It’s amazing. He’s exactly like Father.”

  Helen told me this after I’d landed, as I sat bleary at the dining-room table, bright paintings and mirrors all around. I’d come with gaudy earrings, lipsticks, a frolicky dress for my mission, and when Helen told me what Jenny had said, it was like a pane of clouded glass rubbed clear in my head: Anthony was like Paul. Of course he was. He was Paul. Which made what I was doing there even more sickly, more entrenched in the fathers, and I split open before her right there on the table, spilled out how Anthony and Paul slurred together inside me, men and fathers and crawling hands and blackness, that split running right through my core.

  Helen and my father left the next day. So the Residence was empty, just Albert, me, the chef, the Nigerian staff. Albert gamely marched with me down Parioli to the Ara Pacis and ancient squares. He whistled and recited lines of Romantic poetry about ruins as he peered from beneath a hand withered by the antipodean sun at this antique new world. When he’d been tucked into bed at nine and lay like a pontifical statue, I had nothing to do in that Residence but roam.

  From outside you had to buzz at the gate to be let in, then cross cobblestones through rosebushes toward the brick and fossil-white, stripped-classical palace. Wide, bright terraces jutted out, and a cold pool lay deep in the garden. There was a porch for harangues and a living room so cavernous it had three archipelagos of sofas and took a long time to walk through. Above this formal floor rose three or four more, reached by a wide, carpeted staircase, an elevator, and invisible stairs for the staff. The place was crowned by a tower, where you could stand on a marble floor so brilliant in the sun it hurt your head and look down at the Stadio Olimpico, the snaking brown river, umbrella pines on the hills in the haze. You couldn’t get out, though; because before Samuel and Ahmed disappeared for the night, they rolled the security gates over the windows.

  A formal house, a Residence, turned out for function — the public rooms downstairs, of course, but even those on the family floors, because this family must always represent. I roamed up the wide staircase past the bright paintings that had traveled from New York to Canberra to here; I wandered soundless down the wide, pale hall, no bamboo here, just padding, hunting feet. I wandered into my father and Helen’s room. Plumped pillows, silken tassels, mirrors, composed as a painting. I looked at the big framed pictures of the girls. I looked in the closets, at the sheathed clothes and rows of polished shoes. I looked at the jewelry box, the neat leather clothes brush and mirror and combs, the room and its objects bespeaking marriage as art, accoutered, in well-crafted collusion.

  Sixty silent paces back up the hall to the room where Jenny had stayed. It was on the family floor, not the formal gold-and-green guest suite in which I’d been installed, with instructions on tipping the staff. But there was no trace of her here, none of the treasures that were also mine, none of the names that were also mine, carved into the desk or lipsticked on the mirror. No pet skull or trash or bloodstains on the carpet, not even any ruinous shoes.

  I’ve seen pictures of Jenny there, taken just before I arrived, in that big Parioli villa, photos taken in spots where photos were later taken of me, as if we could never occupy a space without displacing each other. She stands in the garden before a wall of ivy, laughing at a marble grottescho that leers from the green. Her hands are clenched, her eyes squeezed shut, the smile the only thing that shows pleasure. She wears culottes, as she’d worn in New York almost twenty years earlier. Her knees are bare and look scuffed and awkward: a little girl’s knees, but old. She’d been there a few months, worked at some job. She’d been trying to sort herself out and managed, mostly, but one night evidently she got out — how, I don’t know, but here’s what I picture: I see her roaming through those pale carpeted halls like a maddened thirty-year-old Goldilocks until finally she just smashes out of those gates, goes running down Parioli.

  She ended up in a man’s car, and what happened then I don’t know, but I think she was dumped somewhere alone. I keep seeing this: Jenny waking up in a field outside the city, a field of scarlet poppies like in The Wizard of Oz but unframed, unfriendly. I see her looking down at her scuffed dirty knees, feeling the scratches on her back, touching a finger between her legs for the usual information, and wondering which way was home.

  From Jenny’s nonroom I drifted down the soundless staircase, oversized to make you small. Into my father’s study: spears and boomerangs on the walls; his desk, scrolled and polished; his emu-and-kangaroo stationery; his gold Cross pens, where all those blue words had been born.

  In the vast living room, on coffee tables and shelves, was his collection of small silver boxes. He’d bought them in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, beautiful silver boxes in animal or geometric forms or rustic and lumpen, with tiny silver clasps. They gleamed, so small, so appealing, anything might be inside, there must be something; for millennia, girls have been hoping.

  I started at the top left corner of one shelf and picked up the first little silver box and opened it. Not even dust, the inside wiped clean. I shut the latch and replaced the box on the shelf, picked up the next one. Empty. I closed it and put it back on the shelf. The small silver turtle, the elephant, the cube. I picked up each and looked in each and closed each and returned it to its spot, and each time I held a cool little heart — this time there’d be something.

  They were all empty, I’d already known that. But if there had been another room with a hundred more silver boxes, if the entire Residence had been a mausoleum of silver boxes, I would have opened each, poked my finger inside, shaken it, to find what must someday be there.

  Before my father collected silver boxes, he’d collected antique blue soda bottles. At another time, he’d collected pewter. Also Audubon prints. People collect to fill the space around them? All that empty time? To fill themselves, like ballast, give themselves weight against a terrible pull that tells them the center is elsewhere? Is the center always elsewhere?

  I would say that I collect nothing, I like throwing things out, except I’ve saved almost every letter my father and Paul and any other man have written me, love letters starting from when I was seven, notes left on my door, postcards sent by men I don’t even remember.

  Dolce Vita. I went out in my lipstick, sundress, and high heels, down Parioli, past couples clasping in the grass, to the Pincio for trysts with Anthony. But this won me only a dinner and walk and an aborted fuck behind some shrubs in a park. He looked at me but didn’t see me, had invested all his gold elsewhere.

  The night my father and Helen returned, at dinner with Albert in the dining room overlooking Jenny’s ivied garden, my father turned to me and whispered, “How about meeting in an hour or so, after Dad’s in bed, up in the tower to have a bottle of bomb?”

  I glided through the salon and up the carpeted staircase, into the dream of the airplane, the tarmac, the glorious union. In the gold-tasseled suite, I washed my face and put on that same lipstick and sundress. Then paced, looking out the window across the gleaming river, toward the Villa Farnesina and the lowering sun. Then up in clattering heels to the tower.

  But again I’d somehow forgotten about Helen. Because of course she was there, what had I thought, a date alone with my father? I sat on a plump floral sofa, heels hard and shaky on the marble floor, with the city melting all around, while my father fussed with the prosecco cork. He
poured, said, Cheers, chaps! and we three clinked and sipped.

  Then Helen leaned back into her flowers and said, Jane. Don’t you think it’s time we talked about all this? About the problem you’ve always had with me — as the other woman?

  Vespas wailed down the Via Flaminia, the sun sank glaring into the haze, and my father and Helen watched me, waiting. I made some sort of answer like, What do you mean? But they shook their heads; we had a history to get to the bottom of, now.

  Of course I’d always been jealous, she said, which was perfectly natural, given that she’d taken the man I first loved. But didn’t I understand how I’d won out in this situation? How lucky I’d been, and how her girls had suffered? Could I possibly imagine how hard it had been for her girls to lose their father? How deeply my relationship with him had damaged them?

  In the dark I saw my father stroke his beard and nod.

  It went from there, as the light faded and the city began glittering. It slid into a dark, mirrored labyrinth, during which two more bottles of prosecco were popped, a labyrinth in which a monster was needed, a monster that might well lurk behind any troubles with fathers and men I’d spilled at the table but — far more importantly — surely lurked behind Jenny’s. Helen said that of course she had needed to get her girls away from him. And once we’d stepped to the edge of the split, we slid in deep, into my mother, and I was told such intimate details that it was like being pressed into her body, and again what she’d done on the bloody ship, until at some point something slipped in the dark and the blurring lights of the city and all the mirrors along the way and I became her, my father with his sixth glass of bomb lost track.

  All you do is fuck and fuck and fuck, he said. You are nothing but —.

  Helen rose quickly and said, I’m sorry, Jane. That’s it. He’s gone. You’d better go to bed.

  I ran down the marble stairs and locked the door and stood staring at the dark mirror, clutching elbows, teeth jammed, as if I’d explode from the compaction, Anthony and Paul and Daddy, my mother and me, Helen the other woman, Jenny and me, all pressed together for twenty-five years, and I couldn’t stand another second in that skin, that house, that metamorphic family. But I couldn’t leave the Residence because Ahmed had locked the security gates, and I couldn’t even call Maggy, because to dial long distance you needed a key.

  The next morning, no trace. The ivied garden peaceful, the city humming in the distance, coffee poured from a silver pot into cups with the gold Australian seal.

  When I think of that scene in the tower again, I feel the floral couch, the prosecco bubbling in my throat, and I try to hear what was said as clearly as possible. I can look through the darkness of that night and see a mother struggling with the dissolution of her daughter, a mother perhaps craving absolution, and a man still confirming the cause for his actions, a man who’d hoped that this enterprise would turn out all right — a pair of people so desperate in the water that they must push down any head to stay up.

  I can do this, and believe it, and feel empathy, if it’s true. But I don’t know if it is. And I don’t know if it’s right to excavate living people, try to dig out their secrets so that I can create an intelligible line. And I also don’t know if it’s honest to imagine that I can distance myself from this story: not still wonder why, for their story to hold, others must be pushed under.

  _______

  In the Residence, partway down the hall to the master bedroom, was a gate. You wouldn’t see it without knowing to look, it was embedded in the ceiling, but Helen had pointed it out once, glancing back over her shoulder and smiling as I followed her down the hall. The gate would drop if the place was attacked, she said; it would drop and protect the ambassador and his wife. Separate from anyone else in the house: the chef, laundrywoman, maids, butler, guests, maybe even any children on the wrong side. Like that secret place in the Fifth Avenue hallway where the garden trellis turned to bamboo.

  That gate I also see like this: as the film that seemed to drop in my father’s eyes when they shifted into protocol, the established story. The film that took all those family portraits, the film that said, No harm done! The film that seemed the crucial belief that the enterprise had not gone wrong.

  A similar gate fell in Paul’s eyes; maybe the device comes with being a diplomat. But Paul didn’t seem so much to stand behind his gate as fiddle with it as he liked. He knew perfectly well that the gate was a story, and that back there on the other side was what was really going on. And he seemed to like being able to give a glimpse of the truth if he wanted, otherwise setting his face hard and not giving an inch.

  I told my father that I did not want to call him Daddy any-more; the word felt childish. I wanted to call him something else, maybe Father. But he wouldn’t have this; Father was already taken, he said. So I tried Edward, but he wouldn’t have that, either, because only his wife and friends called him by name. (Why do you want to use my first name? he wrote. After all, I’m not Paul!) I decided I couldn’t call him anything, which meant I could have no relation with him at all. Which, of course, wasn’t true. There was no escaping, no getting out of that house.

  I didn’t see Jenny when I was there, but she sent a letter her mother wanted me to read, saying Jenny sent me her love.

  “Don’t you know how important you are to her?” Helen said, following me through that enormous living room with the letter in her hand. “I know you’ve never cared for her, but you’re terribly important to Jenny. She loves you very much.”

  Helen said this to me often, and each time I felt compacted, wanted to break free and out. From that word love mostly, that ruined word love, and this impossible family.

  I still don’t like the word love; it makes me hostile. It demands an equal answer and so rarely seems true. Yet when it does seem earnest, what does it mean? An Anthony I knew when I was fourteen, the first one whose tongue touched mine, and then this other Anthony ten years later, both said too often, I love you. I told them the phrase seemed cheap and asked them to say it less. But what I learned with the second Anthony was that he loved me the way you might love dulce de leche ice cream, love having that sweet cold stuff in your mouth. A happy, consuming, acquisitive love. Which isn’t worth much, because appetites shift.

  My sister and her daughters say I love you! at the end of each phone call, and they mean it, just not necessarily when they say it. When they say it on the phone it’s an amulet, hopeful, warding off hijacking or crash. I love you! The last thing we said was we loved her, so she knows.

  Then there’s the word love at the ends of those letters, my father’s, Helen’s, the girls’ (I love you and miss you!). Here it seems a prescription, as if it might come to mean what it says or at any rate proves in writing that the intent was there. In Maisie’s letters, the ones she’d sign all my love — lovingly, adding new words for love in the last sliver of space — the word is alive, reaching warm hands through water and wind. The next time the word meant as much was in the negative. I’m not in love … so don’t forget it … Refusing to have anything to do with it, to admit that need at the core.

  Albert parsed the word in one of his last letters, turning to dictionaries, showing his old schoolmaster heart.

  With my love and affection (not really the same) to you.

  G.P.P. Albert XX

  “love” = fondness, paternal benevolence

  or “affection” = emotion, a more mental state or a more physical affair (so says “Concise Oxford Dictionary”)

  Albert wrote with an old fountain pen and sprinkled his letters with poetry. His marriage did last a lifetime, fifty-six years, even as pretty, preening Maisie lost an eye, got a glass one, and then lost sight in the other eye, too; even as she became frail and broke her wrist; even as paranoia seized her and made her snappish. Still he wrote, until she died, Nothing will separate us. An old fairy-tale couple, twining together as trees.

  Theirs is a good story about love. At the end of his life, Albert wrote an account of the
ir courtship in his old, watery hand. It’s sentimental but suffused with a love he held his whole married life, love not choked at each breath with jealousy, indistinguishable from void.

  But my father has stressed that he had not truly loved my mother. In a letter, and at lunch one day with many old friends, and in that tower, he said how miserable they had been. To rationalize, maybe, to show consistency. As if love weren’t something that could come into being and then fall away, change its intensity or hues. Either there is love or there is not: no lingering fond memory; cut her out of the photo.

  And I have told him I never loved him, either. Not only do I not love you but I don’t like you, I don’t care about you at all. Although, of course, just saying these words undid their meaning, just sitting locked with him at a table, clenching cold hands under the red-and-white checked cloth as my eyes and tongue blackened, unable to get up and leave him, yet unable not to say those words, and, above all, unable to get what I wanted, which was not to need to say those words because I knew he loved me and always had.

  Oh, the word love makes me hostile. It’s like a ripping burr I can’t get out of my skin.

  Jenny had said her clean words about Anthony, but he’d said something about her, too. He knew the family story. After dinner at the Residence that night, he had called me and said, “She just seems like a fucked-up little girl.”

  I’d written in the blue Reagan notebook in Canberra that our parents had finished with the story but that for us it was only beginning. This wasn’t true: or it was for me, but not Jenny. I was still caught in the family nets like a baffled moth, but she’d slipped out of them and flown on, into tighter ones. When she’d gone back to Sydney, apparently she was met by that boyfriend who didn’t like chairs, and he had the usual bad treats in his pocket, and she went under again.