Our Father Read Free Page A

her a look but Alex was staring upward, remembering something, exclaiming, “Didn’t you marry somebody famous? I remember my mother reading about you out loud from the papers one day. Much later.”
    “Probably Alberto. Alberto di Cenci. That made all the papers. He was famous for being gorgeous, rich, and a playboy, nothing else. He never did anything!”
    “He really got famous,” Elizabeth drawled, “when he left you for Nina Newton.”
    “The movie star?” Alex exclaimed excitedly. “I remember her! I’ve seen her old movies on TV.” She glanced at Mary’s face. “She must be very old by now,” she added quickly.
    “She must be very dead by now the way she hit the booze and drugs,” Mary snapped. “She lived on a cocaine circuit even then. Cocaine was the drug of choice for high society for decades.”
    “For the Eurotrash set, anyway,” Elizabeth added primly.
    “You were well out of that, then,” Alex said warmly.
    Elizabeth smirked at Mary. The room was silent.
    Alex tried again. “Oh, I envied you both—so beautiful and grown up and you had each other and this wonderful house. You”—she turned to Mary—“used to come to Father’s house in Georgetown, but you”—she turned to Elizabeth—“never did. Why was that?”
    “My mother was dead,” Mary said shortly. “I had no place else to go on school holidays. I had to stay with Father—at Georgetown at Christmas and Thanksgiving and Easter, and here summers.”
    Alex frowned, pushing her memory. “Did you have a white room? All white?”
    Mary nodded.
    “But you never came there?” she asked Elizabeth.
    “My mother was divorced from Father, she was alive, she still is. I lived with her. He had custody of me summers, so every summer I had to come to Lincoln. The rest of the time I lived with my mother in Boston,” she said emotionlessly.
    “Oh!” Alex breathed out deeply, as if these bits of knowledge appeased some hunger. Her voice reached out to them, heated, urgent. “My mother—Amelia—you knew her, didn’t you? Yes. Well, she remarried, a sweet guy but they never had children of their own. I think Charlie was … well, I know she would have liked to so I guess he couldn’t. I mean, it couldn’t have been her. Could it. I mean, she’d had me.”
    “Oh, right,” Elizabeth said in a mocking voice. “I mean, right on, I mean.”
    It went right past Alex. “And I used to wish, oh, I wanted sisters so badly, I thought about you two all the time. I’d think about where you were and what you were doing, I’d beg my mother to invite you to visit us. But she’d always have some excuse: you were grown up and far away, you had children of your own to take care of”—she addressed Mary—“or you were living in France or Switzerland.” She turned to Elizabeth. “You had some important government job and couldn’t leave.” She paused. “I used to wonder how she knew about you but somehow I never got to ask questions about you beyond that. She’d always hug me or try to distract me. I came to recognize this tactic,” Alex laughed.
    The others gazed at her.
    “Fuck sisters,” Elizabeth said. “Consider yourself lucky. You had a mother who hugged you.”
    “Consider yourself lucky you had a mother,” Mary said coldly.
    Alex lay in bed, the drapes and curtains pulled open, looking out at stars. I finally find them, am finally in the same house with them and I might just as well be in Newark, Delaware. Her eyes filled. Would it have been different if I’d found them years ago, if they’d visited me, if I were allowed to visit them? Why weren’t we? Of course, they’re so much older, and with different mothers. … Oh, why do I care so much about them when they don’t care about me at all?
    Oh they didn’t want to talk or maybe they didn’t want to talk to me it’s just like Mom, why won’t anyone tell me when there’s so much I want to know, need to know, why do I need to? but I do, I do, I want to know