For all of Cassandra’s hard-earned literary sophistication, she could not read the passage about her father and Annie in front of them. Or, for God’s sake, her mother and her friend, starchy Lillian. She read from the prologue instead, but she wasn’t prepared, and she tripped over words as if she had never seen them before. Later, her father and Annie took her to Tio Pepe’s—had they won or lost the coin toss? Cassandra wondered wryly—and her father tried to suggest that Lillian was a repressed lesbian who had been in love with Lennie for years, but even Annie found that ridiculous. ‘Oh, Ric,’ she said with a fluttering sigh, and he looked at her as if he could not believe she was his.
How sweet it had been, three years later, to return to Baltimore and speak in an auditorium at the Pratt library, the room brimming with people who had discovered the book in paperback. Women from reading clubs, in the main, but also some much younger girls, those who had their own problematic fathers, and even a few older men, the type who had studied her author photo a little too closely and thought they might help her with her daddy issues, whether they admitted that to themselves or not.
She wondered now if her father, despite all his years in classrooms, had a touch of stage fright.
‘You’re not nervous, are you?’
‘When have I ever been nervous to face an audience?’ he shot back. ‘Besides, you do all the work, right? You’re going to ask the questions, and I’m going to answer.’
‘Well, they bill it as a conversation. It wouldn’t be wrong if you had a few questions for me.’ Her voice caught; she had stumbled into an old psychic tar pit, her father’s incuriosity about her life. Cassandra knew the various ways her father might describe a woman’s ass, but he wasn’t sure what either of her husbands had done for a living. Ah, but if she had pressed him on it, he would have said, ‘Well, neither one stuck around.’
‘Sure, sure,’ he said now. ‘I’ll lob you a few softballs.’
‘And you’ll talk about Annie?’ Probing, careful.
‘What do you mean?’
‘About meeting her, the circumstances.’
‘If need be. But, you know, it doesn’t matter—’
‘Of course it matters.’
‘I didn’t need a riot. I would have met her some way, somehow. Annie was my destiny.’
That had always been the rationalization, but there was no doubt that her father had come to believe it. He hadn’t cheated on her mother; he had encountered his destiny and he knew enough not to defy the Oracle of Delphi. Yet her father didn’t acknowledge destiny in any other aspect of his life.
It was hard, trying to come to terms with the fact that her father had such a huge and ruling passion, much larger than any Cassandra had ever known. Sure, she knew what it was like to be swept away in the early part of a love affair, but she was amazed by those people who never seemed to abandon that wildness, that craziness. Would it have been easier if her father’s passion had been for her mother, or more difficult? In some ways, she was glad that her father’s big love was for someone other than her mother, because she at least had her mother to keep her company. Around her father and Annie, she had been lonely, the odd girl out. Especially as a teenager, she couldn’t help feeling that they spent their time with her wishing she would go away so they could have more sex. Of course, teenagers think the whole world is sex, all the time. But even now, as an adult with two marriages behind her, Cassandra still believed that her father’s sexual passion with Annie had an unusually long life span. If Annie left a room for even a moment, her father looked lost. When she returned, the relief that swept over his face was almost painful to see. He was crazy about her. That’s the kind of line her father would have red-lined in an essay as vague, imprecise, and overwrought. Yet it was true in his case. And Cassandra didn’t have a clue why.
Annie was beautiful, yes, the mild flaws of her face—the space between the front teeth, the apple roundness, the heavy brows that she never tended—balancing out the cartoonish perfection of her body. Sweet, too. Not unintelligent. But not sharp. This, more than anything, had bothered Cassandra, then and now. If her father, for all his snobbery, could choose a woman of ordinary intelligence, then what were the implications for his daughter? After an exceedingly awkward adolescence, Cassandra had grown into a reasonably attractive woman. Not necessarily pretty but sexy and appealing. Yet whenever she visited her father, she was reminded that the qualities that her father had taught her to value—intelligence, quickness—had nothing to do with the woman he declared the love of his life. The test of a first-rate mind, her father often said, quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald, was to hold two opposing thoughts simultaneously without going insane. Cassandra looked at herself, she looked at Annie, and she concluded that her father had a first-rate mind.
‘Time for dinner,’ her father said. Although his apartment had a kitchen, he took his meals in the community dining room, but he always insisted on a cocktail before dinner. He seemed a little shaky getting out of his chair, and Cassandra reached a hand out to him.
‘I’m fine,’ he snapped. ‘Just a little light-headed from that expensive gin you insist on giving me. It has a much higher alcohol content.’
He had used his own gin and made his drink to his exacting specifications, but never mind.
‘Come on, Dad,’ Cassandra said. ‘We’ll climb the hill together.’
He smiled, pleased by the allusion to one of his favorite poems. ‘But I’ll beat you down.’
Tottering down
Dickey Hill Elementary, school number 201, new in the fall of 1966, opened in utter chaos. I stood in the hallway near the principal’s office, willing myself not to reach for my father’s hand. Just five minutes ago, I had shaken his hand off as he walked me to school, a rare treat. We had been climbing the hill past the Wakefield Apartments, prompting, inevitably, a recitation of ‘John Anderson, My Jo’. In a Scottish accent, no less.
John Anderson, my jo, John, We clamb the hill thegither; And monie a canty day, John, We’ve had wi’ ane anither: Now we maun totter down, John, But hand in hand we’ll go, And sleep thegither at the foot, John Anderson, my jo.
It was the first time I felt a twinge of embarrassment at my father’s behavior. Fleeting, to be sure—I was still years away from the moment when everything about one’s parents becomes unbearable, when the simple act of my mother speaking, in the car, with no one else there to hear, could make me cringe—but I remember speeding up a little so the students arriving by car and bus might not associate me with this odd man.
‘Do you know what brent means, Cassandra?’ my father quizzed me, referring to another line in the poem: His bonny brow was brent.
I pretended great interest in the Wakefield Apartments, and the pretense quickly became authentic. Apartments were glamorous to me, in general, and although these did not conform to my penthouse fantasies, the terraced units had that kind of compactness that often appeals to small children. I wanted to make friends with people who lived in those apartments, see what was behind their doors and windows. It was a frequent impulse, one that would later lead to my dismal attempt to support myself as a freelance journalist for shelter magazines. Wherever I went—the sidewalks of the Wakefield Apartments, the long avenues of rowhouses that led to various downtown destinations—I wanted to know the interiors of people’s homes, their lives, their minds.
Because