Life Sentences Read online

  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 I was encouraged to tell my parents whatever passed through my quicksilver little brain, I told my father what I was thinking.

  “I hope there are kids who live in those apartments and they’re in my class and they become my friends and I get to go to their houses after school and play there.” It was lonely on Hillhouse Road, where I was the only child in the five houses. There were teenagers, but they had no use for me. We had so little in common that they might as well have been bears or Martians or salamanders.

 
“Your mother won’t like that,” my father said.

  “Why?”

  “Because your mother’s a snob.”

  I pondered that. A snob considered herself better than other people. This did not fit my sense of my mother, who seemed forever…sorry about things. She was always apologizing, mainly to my father. For dinner—its arrival time, its contents. For letting me sneak television shows like Peyton Place and, a few years hence, Love, American Style, which my father found so appalling that he couldn’t stop watching it. Television, which my father despised, would become a regular feature of my weekend visits with him, a reliable way of “entertaining” me. On Friday nights, I would sit rapt in front of the television, tuned unerringly to ABC, where I progressed from fantasy to fantasy—the blended world of The Brady Bunch, the domestic magic of Nanny and the Professor, the harmonious life of The Partridge Family. That Girl (my personal idol), Love, American Style. It was fun, or would have been if not for my father’s running commentary. (“So this is what farce has become…forget Sheridan, forget Wilde…bug-eyed virgins, bugger them all.”) By the time I was eleven, I knew about Sheridan and Mrs. Malaprop, and Oscar Wilde, who said anyone could be good in the country, and even virgins, who were people who had yet to try to make babies. My father managed to avoid giving me bugger, however, and I was left to assume it was what happened to the bug-eyed. To be bug-eyed was to become a bug, and, therefore, buggered. I was twenty-one before I knew what it actually meant.

  On the first day of third grade, bugger was not part of my vocabulary yet, although I had other odd words. Souse, for example, my father’s preferred term for drunks. Delaine, a fine fabric for which my mother pined as she decorated our house on the mingiest of budgets. Antidisestablishmentarianism, then reputed to be the longest word in the dictionary. I knew not only how to spell it, but—at my father’s insistence—what it meant, vaguely. And, yes, I did know brent, if only from context—smooth, handsome. Entering third grade, it was my plan to use these words, super-casually, and establish myself as an intellect with which to be reckoned.

  My classroom assignment unearthed, I said good-bye to my father, trying not to display any panic, and walked upstairs to Mrs. Klein’s room. Mrs. Klein was young and pretty, the two best things a teacher could be. The class filled up quickly and I looked around, trying to decide who would be my best friend. I recognized a shy blond girl, someone I had seen around the neighborhood, but dismissed her. She had a strange look about the eyes, which were underscored with dark circles. I drifted toward the group that seemed the most confident, three girls in all. The desks had been arranged in configurations of four and they had seized a desirable quartet, alongside the windows, in the middle.

  “May I sit here?” I asked the smallest of the three girls.

  She cast a quick glance at the other two. One was tall and a little pudgy, but I could see in an instant that no one would ever dare tease her about her weight. The other was pretty but too shy to make eye contact. All three were Negroes, the word I would have used then, and felt quite proud of using. The class was equally split between white and black children, a change from Thomas Jefferson, where there had been only two African-American girls. I did not choose the group for this fact, nor was I especially conscious of it at the time. Later, my parents would make me conscious, even self-conscious. My father would praise my friends far too much, and my mother would practically congratulate herself on how nice she found their mothers, how polite. Except Fatima’s.

  My father was particularly fond of Donna, whom he called doe-eyed Donna—always in those words, doe-eyed Donna—but he liked Tisha and Fatima, too. They would not be my only friends at Dickey Hill. I would, over time, find girls who lived in the Wakefield Apartments, go to their homes, and find it almost as interesting as I had hoped, the rooms so small and cunning, like something a mouse might build. But during the school day, this was my group. We were the smart girls, the leaders, each with a clearly defined role. I got good grades. (As did the others, but I got the best grades.) Donna was the artist. Fatima was the adventurer, destined to do everything first. And Tisha was the boss, looking out for all of us. We thought we were the future.

  GLASS HOUSES

  March 1–2

  CHAPTER

  8

  “GOOD MORNING, DARLING.”

  Cassandra slept heavily and those who truly knew her well—her parents, two ex-husbands—understood that she was capable of answering the phone while still asleep and even managing several seemingly coherent sentences. She was particularly disoriented this morning, confused about her whereabouts—Baltimore, right, the leased apartment—confused about who might be calling her. She had been dreaming, and it had been pleasant, but that was all she could remember.

  “Bernard,” she murmured after exchanging a few sleep-fogged sentences. Then: “What day is it?”

  He laughed, as if she were being droll, but it was a legitimate question. More than a decade into her life as a full-time writer, Cassandra had yet to become accustomed to how self-employment dulled the days, blurring all distinctions. Monday, Monday? She not only trusted that day, she rather liked it. As the workweek progressed, she could observe but not really share the rising tide of high spirits she saw in the people around her, at cafés and coffee shops. She especially missed the giddy high of Friday afternoons, the luxurious emptiness of Saturdays, but not so much that she would want to experience the lows of the working week. It was a bit like being on medication, she supposed, each day more or less the same as the one before.

  Not that she had ever been on medication. Her father’s daughter, indeed. Ric Fallows bragged about how he never took so much as an aspirin or an antihistamine, and while Cassandra knew her father’s stance was a kind of bigotry, born of serendipitous good health, she couldn’t help absorbing his views. It amused her, a little, when he had to start taking Lipitor.

  There was a period, just before her first marriage broke up, when she was given a prescription, but she never filled it, although she lied and told the doctor she did. He had gotten in touch with her after she revealed that detail in her second memoir, outraged. Outraged! By telling the world—well, about 800,000 readers, give or take—that she had ignored her psychiatrist’s advice, he argued, she had branded him incompetent, unworthy. And never mind that she hadn’t named him, his e-mail continued, anticipating her defense.

  “As I will remind you,” his e-mail huffed, “libel law requires only that a person be identifiable to some, not all. Your ex-husband, for example, would know that this passage refers to me, so it’s inferences may, in fact, be libelous.”

  She had written back, “It’s hard for my ex-husband to have a lower opinion of you than the one he has long harbored, given some of the ‘advice’ you provided at the time. In the end, I am happy with how things worked out, so I don’t really care that you were unethical and boneheaded and not a particularly good listener. But if you’re worried about your professional rep, be advised that the possessive ‘its’ takes no apostrophe and that only the listener may infer, so the word you want is ‘implications,’ not inferences. Cheers, your former patient, now quite sane, no thanks to you.”

  She wouldn’t write such an e-mail today, fearful that it would be posted on the Internet. But it felt good at the time. She had been wise, rejecting whatever drug the doctor had been pushing on her. Not feeling wasn’t the secret to happiness.

  Neither was Bernard.

  “It’s Saturday,” Bernard said, “and Tilda decided to go up to Connecticut to visit her sister for the weekend. Can I come over?”

  “You could, if I were in Brooklyn,” she said. “But I’m in Baltimore, working on the new project. I told you.” She was awake now, hearing everything, even the things that weren’t actually said.

  “I thought you might come back, on weekends.”

  “Some weekends. Although it never occurred to me that you would be free on a Saturday.”

  “Me either,” he said. “But you were the fi
rst person I thought of.”

  “You’re sweet,” she said, stifling a yawn. Bernard was sweet. And considerate—not only of her but of his wife. Granted, he was cheating on his wife, but he was conducting the affair in the kindest, most thoughtful way possible. Cassandra had been able to rationalize the relationship because it was truly about sex—sex and a little companionship. She had no interest in marrying again and the men she dated eventually found this intolerable. Bernard, who really did love his wife, had seemed the perfect solution, because he could be scheduled, usually weeks in advance.