Love,
P.S. Joanna is a cold fish, and I really don’t want any relationship with her, thanks!
P.P.S. Anyone for seconds? No, thanks, I’m full!
P.P.P.S. My trust can be regained, even if the road is a hard one — but only with honesty and love. Do you even know what love means? Love, Dad!
He read her letter again, and then another time. He sat very still in his chair for a very long while. Then he lumbered to his feet, and went upstairs to the guest room she had shared only Saturday night with Sparky, and went to the closet there, and took from it the several cartons in which he had stacked her photographs. He carried the cartons downstairs to the living room, one at a time, and spread the pictures on the floor around the fireplace in a widening circle, as though he were dropping pebbles into a still lake the exact center of which was the hearth, watching their ripples move out, overlapping, to touch a distant shore.
Here was the picture he’d taken of her in Central Park when she was six years old and stooping to pluck a dandelion from the ragged lawn. Here was the one he’d taken at Martha’s Vineyard in 1965, Lissie almost fourteen and sitting in a flaking, rusting rowboat. He moved back from the hearth, dropping pictures on the floor at his feet, the ripples widening.
Lissie at the age of twelve, tangled in her skis at Stratton. Lissie by the river in Rutledge when she was sixteen, the secret shot taken from the deck above. Lissie at the Jacobsons’ Fourth of July party that same year, grinning around a hot dog dripping mustard. Pictures of her, widening circles, pictures of his daughter.
Lissie in her graduation gown, the mortarboard rakishly tilted, the zoom shot across the lawn. And here... ah... his favorite, Lissie at Jones Beach in the second year of her life, looking down in consternation at a sand-covered lollipop, her blue eyes squinted, her blond hair catching the sun for a dazzling halo effect. She had known who she was on her second birthday. When she’d seen the poster-sized shot of herself squinting at the lollipop, she’d squealed with glee, remembering, and then ran to him and hugged his knees. He’d lifted her into his arms and kissed her plump little cheek and whispered into her hair, “Daddy loves you.”
He picked his way among the photographs, gingerly treading through them as though he were walking a minefield sown with memories. He stood back from them then, surveying the panorama of pictures, the floor covered with them, the room bursting with Lissie. He stood looking at the pictures for a long, long time. Then he went to the dropleaf desk in the corner opposite the fireplace, and lowered the front of it, and took a sheet of stationery from one of the cubbyholes, and picked up a pen. Sighing deeply, he began writing:
October 12, 1971
Dear Lissie:
You’ve reviled my wife, you’ve called me an adulterer, an egomaniac, a loveless and dishonest person, a worthless father. I think, Lissie...
He crumpled the sheet of paper, and dropped it in the wastebasket under the desk. He took another sheet from the cubbyhole, looked at it blankly for several seconds, and then began writing again:
Dear Lissie:
I’m sorry I’m not the father you want or need. That is my apology. I am sorry for that. But Lissie...
Tears were beginning to form in his eyes.
He took a deep breath. His hand began trembling:
... no father in the world can be expected to take such abuse from a daughter and still offer friendship to her, no less love. You have made it impossible, finally, to offer you anything at all. If this is the freedom you’ve wanted all along, then, Lissie, you may have it, you may have your freedom from me.
He looked up sharply, as though she were standing immediately behind his shoulder silently reading every word as he set it down on the page, the pen moving slowly, the tears coursing down his cheeks:
You do not know how it pains me to say this, my daughter, but please understand that you are no longer welcome in my home or in my life. Lissie, my darling, good luck — and goodbye.
He read the letter over again, and sat at the desk, crying openly, while across the room the clock ticked away the fleeting minutes. Then he put the letter into an envelope, and addressed it, and sealed it, and went out to mail it.
It was bitterly cold in the street outside.
1979
19
“The thing of it,” Lissie says, “is that I was there, I was actually there! So when I see the television pictures of all these Iranians shaking their fists outside the American Embassy, all I can think of is that man at the border, the one who wanted to do an internal search.”
The two women are sitting at a table in an Italian restaurant called II Menestrello on East Fifty-second Street. Barbara Duggan is the one who suggested the place; until this past September, she was working as an editor at Harper & Row across the street, and sometimes dined here with writers she hoped to impress. Today is the Friday before Christmas, and Barbara has been invited by her former boss to the company’s annual Christmas party. She has asked Lissie to join her for lunch first.
Both women are dressed for their pregnancies and for the unusually mild weather that has wafted into New York for the holiday season. Barbara, in her eighth month and rather larger than Lissie who is in her sixth, is wearing dressy black slacks with medium-heeled black pumps, a white silk blouse with a Peter Pan collar open at the throat and long sleeves cuffed at the wrist. A massive turquoise-and-silver pendant is hanging between her breasts. Her thick black hair is swept up severely onto the crown of her head and fastened there in a small neat knot. Her slanting brown eyes (she still looks marvelously and inscrutably Oriental to Lissie) are touched with fawn-brown shadow and a darker liner. Her lips are tinted with a berry-colored gloss.
Lissie is wearing a navy blue wool jersey dress with an Empire waist, its drawstring tied in a bow just below her breasts, the pleated front cascading over her belly. A flamboyantly patterned Gucci scarf is knotted at her throat, and her straight blond hair is styled in a blunt shoulder-length cut, somewhat longer in the front, and parted in the middle. She wears a frosted peach-colored lipstick and smoke-gray shadow with no liner.
“I know it’s chic to hate Iran these days,” she says, “but I hated it even then. I couldn’t wait to get out of that country, Barb. They had these ditches, you know? These little drainage canals, whatever you call them? Running through the gutters? And the people would wash their food in those ditches, and throw garbage in them, and spit in them, and—” her voice lowers — “pee in them, you know? And then they’d wash their hands and faces in the same water, you had to see it to...”
“Please, not while I’m eating,” Barbara says, and grins.
“What is that, anyway?” Lissie asks.