Saturday's Child (27 page)

Viga's intercom made a burping sound—like that of a cyanide pellet dropped into acid under the seat of a condemned prisoner, I thought, shocked at my mental associations. She was already hanging up the phone and rising, again smiling that ingratiating
moue
of sycophancy.

I slid straight into panic.

He knows. He read the form and found the answers peculiar and put them together with E. Atreus and he's told her to oh-so-politely throw me out. Oh god, what if he knows? But what if he doesn't?

“The Doctor will see you now.” She bowed her head at me.

Then she opened the door and took a step backward. I walked through and heard her muffle the door shut behind me.

This office was only slightly smaller than the reception room, but just as impersonal. This desk, however, was burnished mahogany, facing into the room in front of glass French doors that looked out—as he now did, his back toward me—over what in spring and summer must have become a modest flower garden. Another door led, presumably, to the examining room. The details around me would blur forever in my remembrance, except for three specific imprints: the dapper-suited back of the man of medium height who stood behind the desk, and the two large silver-framed photographs on a side table. One was obviously the young Viga, that obedient smile already in place decades ago. The other was an instantly recognizable baby photograph of myself.

I stood just a step inside the closed door, waiting. Everything seemed to
have stopped: my heart, my breath, time itself. He turned, his gaze fixed on the clipboard in his hand, and glanced up at me. What I saw then, more than registering any of his features, was a man's face suddenly paling to chalk before my eyes.

“Hello, Mates. I'm Robin. Your daughter.”

His eyes jerked down to the clipboard, then up again to me, then down again, then up. So he hadn't deciphered the clues. I could hear his mind skidding, braking, careening around the silence of the room.

He regained control, and looked at me evenly. By the time he spoke, the voice was already contained, almost suave.

“Yes. I know.”

“Oh? You seemed surprised.”

“You look—very like your mother did when—when I knew her.”

So that, too, had worked. Set the stage, design the makeup, let no detail escape you. I was wearing my hair as Faith had worn hers in old pictures—parted in the middle, with the sides loosely brushed back, shoulder length, even though I usually wore it knotted in a bun, to look and feel older than my eighteen years. So it had worked.

He came toward me. Each movement now was weighted with years of fantasy scenarios, and as the gesture rose and entered reality so rose the possibilities. In that instant, as it hovered, his motive hung in a balance. Then, as it chose one action only, all other possibilities fell away forever, just as the striking of a first chord ends silence but limits music.

He did not embrace me.

He continued past me, opened his office door, put out his head, and curtly told Viga he was not to be disturbed. Then he shut the door and locked it. Then he went to the examining-room door, and locked that. So part of the hoping died forever, while part of the fright was resurrected in its place, wildly, irrationally. We were locked in together. What did that mean? Why had he done that?

He retreated to the safety behind his desk.

“You will please to sit down?” He all but clicked his heels. The Viennese accent was unmistakable, as if intentionally retained.

I moved to the chair in front of his desk and sat down.

Before me was a man in his late fifties, well preserved and well dressed—spotless white shirt, discreetly expensive tie, cufflinks. The silver
hair was worn in a fashionable haircut, but slightly longer than common, more in the European style. His features offered me nothing of myself.

His eyes were dark grey, his complexion a smooth-shaven olive. The high forehead rose from a long, straight, delicately flared nose. There was a slackening line around the jaw from age, which didn't belie the sensuous mouth or the thrust of a square chin below it. Faith was right: there was a real dimple in the chin. I could see that when he had been younger, and blond, and the face and body lines sharp and slender, he must have been very good-looking.

“Well,” he said, leaning back in his chair, now in possession of himself, “I can say I
am
a bit surprised.”

“I … wasn't sure you'd know who I was.”

“I knew who you were the moment I saw you. You really do look very much as she did.”

“Any other features you recognize?” I smiled.

“I see nothing of myself, if that is what you mean.”

“Well, the genes must be there. I wasn't an immaculate conception.” I'd meant to sound witty, but it came out edged with sarcasm. I flinched. He peered at me, the physician making a diagnosis. Then he said coldly,

“What do you want?”

So this was to hate him, then.

That the same man who had against all explanation kept my baby picture in his office for almost nineteen years could, on finally meeting me, think of nothing to say but
What do you want
.

“I want nothing from you. I'm here because I … isn't it obvious?”

“Perhaps. But not to me.”

“For all my life I've wanted to meet my father. Is that so strange?”

He shrugged elegantly. “A great many people have never met their parents. It doesn't seem so uncommon.”

“It's uncommon enough to have become something of an obsession in my case.”

“That's unfortunate. I understand young girls often are romantics. But surely the world does not revolve around anything so trivial as—”

“Excuse me. You can't possibly realize my position. This isn't trivial to me.” Perhaps if I shifted from the emotional realm, demonstrated my
intellectual … “Look. If I'd been a son in search of my father, I'd have been reenacting a major archetype. Oedipus. Theseus. Horus. Does my being a daughter in search of the same thing make it a trivial quest?”

He shrugged again. “And so you want …?”

“Only to have met you, seen you face to face, talked a while with you. Heard your side of the story.”

“My side?” he smiled. “There is, I am afraid, very little story.”

“Nevertheless, I want more than you can imagine to hear it from your lips. And that's
all
I want.” I added, trying for a note of dignity that would betray neither humiliation nor bitterness, “I haven't come to blackmail you, you know. Or harm you or your new wife in any way.”

“My new wife? You mean Viga? What is so new about Viga?”

“Well, I mean … your second wife.”

He swiveled slightly in his chair.

“I see,” was all he responded. Then he leaned forward and began playing with the silver letter opener on his desk.

“And may I ask,” he murmured, “why the elaborate pretense? This strange name in which you made the appointment? And after so long, why now, suddenly? Is your mother no longer alive?”

Something was going wrong. I should be asking the questions. But so eager was I to show myself to him—to be known by him, to have him comprehend how indomitable I'd been in my pursuit—that I knew I'd reply to any question he put.
And
, chanted the chorus,
it must mean he is curious. He cares. He cares
. Hoping to impress him with my erudition, I put on my most disarming smile, and asked,

“You mean the false name I gave means nothing to you?”

He studied the clipboard.

“No. And please to not play games with me.”

Another chord, the death of more music. So this is what it was to fear him. I crawled back toward what remained of my raggedy courage.

“It's not a game. My mother is still alive. She doesn't know I'm here. I made the appointment in a false name because I had no idea whether you would receive me as myself or not. I traveled a long way to this meeting, and not only in mileage. I didn't intend to be turned away. But I gave that particular pseudonym as a possible clue. Please understand that I have
been told very little about you. But I
was
told you were once very fond of classic Greek drama. Aeschylus. Sophocles. Euripides.”

“That was many years ago. I fail to see—”

“Miss Atreus. From the House of Atreus. That family had only one daughter with the initial
E
. Her name was Electra, as it seems you've forgotten.”

He looked mildly amused.

“And I was to decipher this—this clue? How ornate, my dear.”

So this is what it was to recognize each other. My tragedy interpreted by him as farce.

“Perhaps not ornate to one who remembered his Sophocles or his Mycenaean history,” I ventured, as politely if insultingly as he had.
You are his daughter
, the chorus murmured,
you can hold your own with him
.

“Perhaps not. But a great deal of modern history has intervened and—preoccupied me somewhat.” He forced a brief laugh.

So this is what it was to feel a lifetime of defenses shatter in pity.
This is your father, Robin, and he only has escaped alone to tell thee
.

“I would like to ask you a few questions … You don't have to answer anything if you don't want to, of course,” I added hastily.

“I may not know the answers, and I have no idea—or perhaps I do—what you've been told, but …”

Like a biblical blessing: the permission. But of all the firmament of questions, where to begin?

“Why did you never …
Did
you ever try to see me?”

“I saw you once. You were an infant, a few days old only.”

“That was all?”

“It was … unpleasant.”

“Seeing me?”

“The circumstances. Your mother, her sisters …”

“And you never tried after that one time.”

“No.”

“How could you just—I mean, did you never want—”

“It was not that possible—or that necessary—to follow up. Those women, your mother and her sisters, made it difficult. Distasteful. They were, I regret to say, quite, ah …”

“Vulgar.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Exactly.”

How will it ever be possible for me to erase from my memory the shadow of approval cast by his surprise? And if it had been real approval—at what cost? Denial of the women who had cared for me sufficiently to live the lie that permitted my existence? Somewhere in all my famishment for acceptance, I had to find at least an appetite for honor.

“How did you
imagine
they'd regard you? As a prince with
droit du seigneur?
I realize, of course,” I threw in casually, speaking of my life in the third person and the passive construction, “that the child was unwanted. But you were the doctor, after all. You were the one who might have thought about a contraceptive.”

“I had other things to think about. Food. Shelter. Survival—as much as possible on my terms. Or what the world had left to me of my terms.”

“Some might think that a convenient excuse.”

He shrugged. “You are your mother's daughter.”

One honor gained, another lost.

“I'm also your daughter.”

An indifferent smile. “On one meeting?”

“No. On fact. Or do you deny it?”

“I don't deny it, my dear. But I think it has little relevance to either of our lives.”

There was no way to batter down a door barred with such politesse. I felt tears rising and forced them down.
That he will not have. He will not see you cry
. But the voice that asked the next question embarrassed me by its childish treble.

“Did you ever love her? At all?”

“What a traditional question for a modern young woman.” Was he teasing me? Was this his way of being kind? “But,” he went on, “I fear I must tell you, the answer is no.”

“Never? Even—”

“Even when you were conceived? No. Oh”—that tight smile—“you are shocked I know what you were really asking? You forget that I am a gynecologist—which means I know women better than they know themselves.
I know their sentimentality about conception. Nature is not sentimental about it in the slightest.”

“Faith loved you. You knew that.”

“I knew that, yes. And certainly I was fond of her. Your mother was an attractive woman. And she was good to me, I will say that. But she was totally unrealistic in terms of what she expected from me. A possessive woman, Faith. She wanted my life, my soul.”

“She wanted you to love her, perhaps. That might be the simplest reason for what later became her possessiveness.” How odd to defend the rights of one's enemy, as if to keep that adversary worthy of one's own best in a lifelong contest of wills. “She shared her life with you. Was it so bizarre for her to want you to share building your new life with her? It wasn't as if you had an established existence anymore. You'd lost your entire family, crawled through the nightmare of the camps, were a fugitive from the hell Europe had become—”

He shifted abruptly in his chair. His posture stiffened, as if an old fencing master had entered the room.

“My dear young woman. I cannot tolerate all these maudlin assumptions. I am not responsible for your misinformation about my life. But you ask. So I tell you a few hard truths. I was never in a concentration camp. Nor were any of my family. I already was a full surgery and medical graduate, having just commenced my practice in Vienna. My father had died some years earlier, peacefully, in his sleep, of a heart attack. My mother wished to emigrate to Israel, so my sister and her family also settled there to be near her. They are still there, quite healthy and happy—except of course for the stress caused by these demented Arabs. But it was felt there were more career opportunities for me in the United States. And so it was arranged, through friends who had influence and with considerable bribery, that I be put on the priority list of émigrés with the Jewish refugee committees—although the company I had to keep in that category was often quite unpalatable.”