This Is My Daughter Read online

  “Aman-da,” Caroline said, and looked up at Warren and gave him a conspiratorial wink. The little girl tilted her own head, ducking into her neck as though something unpleasant had brushed against her. She did not speak or put out her hand. For a moment nothing happened, and the circle of grown-ups was held, mute and motionless, by the mute and motionless child.

  Now, Emma could not remember what had happened afterward, but she didn’t think Amanda had given in. Later Amanda, arms still crossed, had been led away by the tight-lipped nanny, who spoke to her in a low severe voice. Caroline stayed, talking with her friends, animated, the gold bracelet glinting with her gestures, the smooth pleats in her skirt swaying as she moved.

  Afterward, Warren told Emma, “Amanda is famously difficult. The headmistress at Nightingale told Caroline that if Amanda is going to stay there she has to see the school shrink. She’s completely intractable. And Caroline is the most perfectly ordered woman in New York. It drives her crazy, as you can imagine.”

  Sitting now in the car, waiting for Amanda, Emma remembered that watchful, sullen face, those tightly crossed arms. She wondered if Amanda ever actually had bitten anyone. She wished Peter had not used that phrase. She wondered unhappily why he had chosen it.

  Emma looked away. A wire mesh trash container stood at the corner, and trash littered the street around it. What was the impulse, Emma wondered, that drew people to throw trash near, but not in, a trash basket?

  On the sidewalk, two women walked past in mink coats, their orange hair curled, their mouths disagreeable in bright lipstick. Emma wondered if there had ever been a city without these sharp contrasts, the rich, cocooned in entitlement, stepping blindly past the squalor on the streets. Maybe New York in the fifties? That seemed now, in retrospect, to have been quiet and romantic. The urban landscape was made up then of modest brownstones, the skyline low and manageable, a small clean grocery store on every other block, optimism and politeness the common language. Now, in the mid-eighties, squalor seemed to be winning, and resentment was the reigning emotion.

  A bulky balding man passed Emma, wearing an expensive camel overcoat and walking a fat self-absorbed cocker spaniel. The dog wandered in a complicated pattern, sniffing exhaustively. He found the right place on the sidewalk and stopped abruptly, squatting. He hunched his back into a high arch, flattened his ears and concentrated, staring into space, avoiding gazes. The man looked around with furtive urgency. Emma could see his criminal plan: he was not going to clean up after the dog. When the cocker was finished with his task he straightened, lifting his nose in a dignified way. He stepped briskly away, kicking powerfully backward, dissociating himself from his act. The man did the same, his manner turning supercilious. The two of them moved off together, self-satisfied, aloof, ponderous. White-collar street crime, right in front of me, thought Emma. People justified doing whatever they felt like. She wondered what the man would say, if accused. That he hadn’t known the law included cocker spaniels? But his dog was so small? Were people now really more arrogant and contemptuous than in the past, or was it just more evident now?

  Emma watched them walk away. She wondered what was taking Peter so long. She wondered what she would do if Peter did not come back. Perhaps Caroline was causing a scene. She wondered what sort of scene Caroline would make. Caroline, with her smooth hair, her pearl earrings, her neat shoes: Emma could imagine her angry, but not distraught. What would she wear for passion, anguish, intemperance? Emma thought of how Caroline must feel, waiting, in the apartment they had shared, for Peter to arrive. Seeing him appear in the door, knowing he no longer wanted her.

  But what if Peter changed his mind, what if he simply fell back into his old life? What if he decided just to stay? Suppose the doorman came out to her with a message: “Mr. Chatfield says for you to go on without him.” What if he decided to abandon her, Emma, instead of Caroline, leaving her illegally parked at the curb? If he did not come back, Emma would simply get out of the car and walk away.

  Emma had been with Peter for the weekend. Her three-year-old daughter, Tess, was with her father until Sunday night. Emma thought of going off alone, of solitary browsing in secondhand bookstores. She would buy something old-fashioned and comfortable to read, a novel by Elizabeth Taylor. She would sit with it over a bowl of soup in a small restaurant. Imagining this, the rest of her weekend, by herself, Emma gazed out the side window again, her eyes unfocused, leaning against the cold glass.

  A face was looking at her through the window: the brutal chopped-off line of light brown bangs, the heavy eyelids, the closed and recalcitrant mouth. Amanda stared in at Emma through the glass, nose to nose, bullyingly close. Beyond her, Emma knew Peter must be standing, but Amanda blocked him; Amanda’s blank staring face blocked everything else from Emma’s view; instinctively Emma drew back. Then Peter squatted, and his face, smiling, appeared next to Amanda’s. Emma rolled down the window, now smiling too.

  “Hello, Amanda,” she said. “How are you?” Amanda did not answer. She looked sideways, and moved her jaw back and forth without opening her mouth.

  “Amanda, this is Emma,” said Peter in a loud managerial voice. Standing behind her, he could not see Amanda’s face. His own face looked concerned.

  “Hello, Amanda,” said Emma again, leaning forward, smiling energetically. She opened the door, wondering if she should kiss her. She wanted this to start off well. She thought of her own ingenuous Tess, meeting Warren’s future girlfriends. Oh, please, she thought fervently to the unknown women, be nice to my darling. Emma held out her hand to Amanda to shake, but Amanda kept her hands in her pockets and looked at the ground. Without pausing, Emma altered her gesture, reaching to the car door and resting her hand on it. She hoped Peter hadn’t seen. He was squatting behind Amanda, his face tense. Emma smiled at both of them. “Come and get in the car,” she said to Amanda, and turned, awkwardly opening the door behind her. Peter took Amanda by the hand, but she balked.

  “What is it?” he said, bending over. Emma couldn’t hear what she was saying. “What’s the matter?” Peter asked. “Amanda, get in.”

  A pause, then Emma heard him say, “What? What is it? Oh, no sweetie, not now. Another time. There isn’t room now. You sit in the back.”

  “What is it? Would she like to sit in front? Here, Amanda, come and sit in my lap,” said Emma, smoothing her skirt.

  “There, Amanda,” Peter said, pleased. “Would you like to sit with Emma?”

  Amanda gave Emma a long stare and slowly shook her head.

  Peter’s mouth grew stern, but Emma smiled at them both.

  “Another time, then,” she said easily.

  Sternly Peter handed Amanda into the backseat, and Emma twisted to smile at her again. Peter shut the door, and while he was walking back around to the driver’s seat the two were alone in the silent car.

  Amanda, in a dark red wool coat, slumped at once against the seat back, her head turned toward the building she had just left. Her hands beat a noisy irregular rhythm on the seat. She did not look at Emma.

  She’s been forced to do this, Emma thought, watching her. Why wouldn’t she hate it? Emma turned again toward the front. Peter got in beside her and pulled the door shut hard, his face closed and angry.

  As he started the car, he spoke, low, under cover of the engine. “There was a firestorm upstairs.”

  “I thought you took a while to come down.”

  “There was a scene. Caroline’s going to call her lawyer. She says she didn’t realize this, she didn’t realize that.”

  “She didn’t realize about me,” said Emma.

  “Well,” said Peter, “yes.”

  “I can go home,” Emma said at once.

  “No, no. It had to happen sometime. She asked me if I was going to be alone today. I said no and she blew up. She says she’s going to go back and see what the agreement says about visitation rights.”

  “She can’t have thought you’d be alone forever.”

  “She hasn’t thou
ght, period.”

  It was that Caroline didn’t believe her marriage was really over, thought Emma. She didn’t believe Peter had really left. He had moved out in September; Caroline still thought it was temporary. She thought Peter would come to his senses, and they could return to their real life.

  Emma imagined herself in Caroline’s place: it would be so bewildering, as well as painful. As far as Caroline was concerned, the marriage had carried on normally, well enough, until one day Peter had announced it was over. Caroline had been just as she always was. It was Peter who had changed, who had decided that what he wanted in a wife was someone else. He had never given warning, never said they needed to change things, or work them out, he had simply told her he was leaving. If Peter hadn’t given Caroline a second chance, why would he give Emma one? How could you trust a man when the very things he was telling you were the same things he was telling his wife that he had never meant?

  In downtown Manhattan the streets were almost empty. People and cars moved slowly, at a weekend tempo. Peter parked in an open lot, and the three of them walked to the South Street Seaport. On the sidewalk, Amanda hung back, waiting, until Emma took one side of Peter. Then Amanda took his hand on the other side, keeping her father between them.

  Peter had planned the excursion; they went first to a small marine museum. “Ship models,” he explained, pleased, looking around the room. Lighted cases, each containing a tiny vessel, stood against the walls. “Aren’t these neat?” he asked Amanda, full of enthusiasm.

  Emma looked dubiously at a miniature ship, the intricate rigging, the tiny coiled ropes. It was ingenious, but boring. The colors were dead grays and browns, and there were no figures, no sense of life. The only energy was implied: wind and water, abstract forces. The models were like math equations, symbols of a theoretical struggle. Intellect against nature. Suddenly Emma started to yawn. Guiltily she closed her mouth, feeling the telltale flare of her nostrils.

  “They are neat,” she said. “Like dollhouses,” she offered.

  Peter looked offended. “They’re not remotely like dollhouses,” he said. “Dollhouses are boring.”

  “What do you think, Amanda?” Emma asked.

  “I like them,” said Amanda staunchly, allying herself with her father. But she barely glanced at the models, and kept looking restlessly around the room. She was never still. Sliding from case to case, she was constantly in movement, lifting a shoulder, tilting her head, jogging her knee up and down, jittery, unquiet.

  Beside them appeared a man and a little girl, younger than Amanda. The girl lunged suddenly toward the glass case.

  “Don’t touch that, Hilary,” the man said sharply, tugging her back by the hand. Sulkily, the girl subsided, without answering. The man was dark haired and heavyset, with horn-rimmed glasses. His face was locked, his mouth stiff and determined. He looked indignantly at his daughter, antagonistic. He’s divorced, thought Emma. She looked around the room at the little knots of people, wondering if all the single parents here were divorced. Moving sullenly past these handsome cases, each parent, each child waiting for the other to make a wrong move, to do something that would justify the anger they felt at the separation, the resentment they would never lose, the resentment at the great failure.

  They went afterward to lunch, at a nautical restaurant that seemed a cross between a sailors’ tavern and the interior of a ship. Thick ropes hung in ponderous loops against the walls. Within each loop, slightly off center, hung a lifesaver. The windows had thick round panes, like bottle bottoms. The oak tables and chairs were machine carved and heavily varnished.

  Peter picked up the big menu and leaned back in his chair.

  “Now, Amanda,” he said expansively, “what are you going to have? Your favorite onion soup?” He looked at Emma and explained, “Amanda likes the onion soup here.”

  Emma smiled at Amanda. “I love onion soup,” she said. “If you say it’s good I think I’ll have some myself.”

  Amanda shifted back and forth in her chair, frowning at the menu. She would not commit herself to an alliance with Emma. There was a pause.

  “Amanda?” Peter said. “What about it? Your F.O.S.? Favorite onion soup?” There was another pause, lengthy. Amanda frowned at the menu and her mouth twisted slowly, as though she were thinking hard.

  “Amanda?” Peter said again, and this third time his voice held impatience.

  Still she waited. When her father opened his mouth for the fourth time, she spoke.

  “No,” she said, her upper lip curled meditatively. She stared at the menu, not lifting her eyes.

  “No, what?” Peter said. “And stop twisting your mouth around.”

  “No onion soup, I bet,” said Emma. “Not today. Right?” She waited. Amanda raised her eyes to Peter and nodded.

  “All right,” said Peter. “What would you like, then? How about a grilled cheese sandwich? That’s another favorite of yours, if I recall correctly.”

  Again Amanda waited. This time Emma said nothing.

  “Yes,” said the child, looking up at her father. She had not looked at Emma once since she had first peered in at her through the car window. She closed her eyes now and shook her head self-consciously, as though a fly had landed on it. She opened her eyes and gazed fixedly at her father. There was a silence. Peter’s face looked ominous, he seemed ready to speak: Amanda slowly gave him a wide, ingratiating smile, utterly false.

  She doesn’t like me, thought Emma, but why would she? How could she like the woman in her mother’s place? Why would Amanda ever like another woman smiling at her father? She would have the wrong face, the wrong smile, the wrong smell. There would be nothing right about this woman at all. It was bad enough for her, having her father leave, without a stranger intruding into her private life.

  Emma waited until the food had come, until they had eaten, to speak again to Amanda. Then she smiled at the child. “So,” she said. “Do you and your daddy come here often?” As she said the word, “daddy,” it sounded wrong. She wondered if that was what Amanda called her father. Any error would produce disdain.

  “‘Daddy?’” said Amanda, wrinkling her upper lip, as though this were a word in a strange and distasteful language. She looked near Emma’s midriff, then away. She shook her head.

  “Yes, you do,” said Peter. “What do you mean, no, Amanda? We come here all the time.” Now, having eaten, he was relaxed. “Who do you come here with often, if it’s not me? I’m getting a little suspicious, here. Who is taking you around town if it’s not your loving old dad?”

  Amanda leaned back against the curved chairback, putting her arms along its arms and threading her fingers in and out of its rails. She buttoned her mouth firmly closed, but a smile leaked out along the edges. Against her will, her face began to soften.

  “I’m going to have to look into this,” said Peter, buttering a piece of his roll. He sounded firm and efficient. “I’m going to have to get my secretary onto this right away. ‘Oh, Miss Jacobs,’” he said authoritatively in a gruff bass, his eyebrows knitted, “‘would you find out who is taking my daughter to the restaurant at the South Street Seaport, please?’” His voice changed to a ridiculous falsetto, and he folded his hands tightly in front of him on the table. “‘Certainly, Mr. Chatfield. Right away at once. On the double. Chop chop.’”

  Amanda’s face smoothed out entirely. Her smile was wide and delighted. She began to laugh out loud.

  “Miss Jacobs is not what you call her,” she said to her father firmly, “and she doesn’t sound like that.”

  “She doesn’t?” said Peter, lifting his eyebrows, astonished.

  “Chop chop,” said Amanda, and giggled uncontrollably. “She doesn’t say that.”

  “Miss Jacobs says ‘chop chop’ almost without pause,” said Peter solemnly. “There’s hardly a sentence she completes that does not contain ‘chop chop.’”

  “Daddy,” said Amanda, giggling. She flapped her hand at him once, admonitory, flirtatious.
r />   “What?” asked Peter. “Didn’t you know that about poor Miss Jacobs? It’s a kind of speech impediment. ‘Good morning, Mr. Chop Chop Chatfield.’ That’s what she says when I come in every morning. It’s sad but it’s true. I don’t want you to mention it to her because it would be rude.”

  Amanda was sitting on her hands, and she rocked back and forth happily. She laughed, her body loose.

  “Daddy,” she repeated, shaking her head. “Mr. Chop Chop Chatfield,” she said, and lapsed into giggles again, rocking deliciously in her chair, her body full of delight. Peter leaned back, smiling, easy, the tension between them suddenly gone.

  Emma could see how things would be for them, driven by blame, guilt, rage. Amanda would blame her father, for leaving her, for abandoning her mother, the darling of her world, for placing this wound at the center of her life. Peter would feel guilty, he would resent Amanda’s accusations. The love between them would be fierce and strangled.

  There would be moments, like this one, when calm suddenly moved across them, like the eye of a hurricane. The gales and roaring would stop, and they would be blessed with silence and peace, and allowed to act out of love alone. But the storm would recommence; this would never be easy, they were embattled. Emma’s heart went out to them.

  2

  Late on Sunday afternoon, Emma left Peter and Amanda to go home. She now lived on West Tenth Street. She had moved downtown when she left Warren; she had wanted somewhere unexplored, a place unrelated to her old life. Greenwich Village appealed to her, with its modest scale and bohemian associations. When she first considered it, she told Warren.

  “It’s not you, Emma,” he said at once, shaking his head and smiling. “Trust me. Divorce me if you have to, but don’t move downtown. You’ll hate it.”

  That had decided her.

  Emma liked the new neighborhood. It seemed like a different city: tidy brick and brownstone facades with their bright painted doors and polished brass door knockers. It had been late summer when she moved, and there were scarlet geraniums in the window boxes and great twisting pythons of wisteria clambering up the walls. The size of the buildings felt comforting, the scale human. In the mornings, the clear sunlight slanted easily over the low roofs. Walking along Tenth Street she could hear her footsteps echo against the row of houses. At that hour the sound was neat and domestic, as though she lived in a small town.