My Dearest Friend (20 page)

When they went into their house, Daphne said, “Sit down and talk to me a minute, Cyn,” and turned on the living-room lights. Dickens waddled over and laid his head in Cynthia’s lap, and automatically she opened her hands so he could lick them. Fred, the cat, had died of old age not long after David’s death. “Cynthia, what is all this really about?” she asked.

Cynthia looked at her mother and burst into tears. “I don’t know,” she said. “Oh, Mom, I’m sorry. I love you so much. I really do love you so much. I don’t know why I get so mad at you. I don’t know why. Sometimes just the sight of you irritates me so much I could scream! But I really love you! Do you think I’m crazy? Do you think I should see a shrink?”

Daphne went over to sit next to her daughter. She put her arm around her. “I think you’re a teenager,” she said, smiling. “I think you’re just a normal teenager. Now,” she said, “can we have some cocoa and talk about the play? God, Cynthia, you were divine! How do you think it went?”

Then they were okay again. They went into the kitchen and sat up late talking—Cynthia talking, reliving every moment, while Daphne listened, entranced.

The day after opening night, Daphne had found in the mail a letter from California, addressed to Cynthia, from Joe. Daphne held the letter in her hand as if it were a ticking bomb, which in a way it was. Joe had not written to his daughter in all these years, not so much as one birthday note. So what was this? She wanted to tear the letter open and read it herself, but it was addressed to Cynthia, and Cynthia was out. She waited, heart thudding as if she were in a race. As if a war had been declared.

For those few moments in her life, Daphne had no dignity. In the late afternoon she hung around the front hall, pretending to pick dead leaves out of the Christmas-cactus pot, waiting for Cynthia to come in the front door and find the letter waiting, where all mail waited, on the front-hall table. Like a jealous lover, she smiled and spied, watching
Cynthia’s face when Cyn came breezing in the front door that afternoon.

“Hi, Mom!” Cyn said, and immediately her eyes went to the table—so she had been expecting this!—and she tossed her books on the hall chair and grabbed up the letter. Daphne, kneeling over her Christmas cactus, heart knocking away inside her, watched eagerness … amazement …
ecstasy
spread across her daughter’s face.

“What is it?” she asked before Cynthia had even finished reading the letter. She was insane with curiosity.

“Daddy’s coming to see me in the play!” Cynthia said. “Oh,
wow,
he’s flying all this way just to see me in the play!” She twirled around the room as if waltz music were filling the air.

Daphne rose gingerly, as if in the last few seconds she had aged fifty years and all her bones were so brittle that one slight touch would break them. “How did he know about the play?” she asked.

Cynthia stopped her twirling. She looked at her mother defiantly. “I wrote to him,” she said. “I found his address in your address book and I wrote to him and told him about the play and sent a picture of myself and told him that now that I was an interesting person, he might want to get to know me. I invited him to come see the play.” Her joy overwhelmed her defiance. “And he’s really coming!” she whooped.

“But, Cynthia. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what?” Cynthia asked, eyes wide, moronic.

“Why didn’t you tell me you had written to your father?”

Cynthia shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I didn’t think you’d mind. I didn’t think he’d write me back, I guess.”

Mother and daughter looked at each other.

“I never have tried to keep you from your father,” Daphne said evenly. “I’ve always made attempts—”

“Mom.”
Cynthia bugged her eyes out at Daphne. Then, obviously trying to control herself, she said with ultimate patience, “I know you’ve tried with Dad. But now I thought I should try. This isn’t about you and Dad, Mom. This is about me and Dad.” She looked down at the letter, and in spite of herself, her joy came rippling out of her, brightening her face with radiance. “I’ve got to go call Donna!”

She raced from the room and into the kitchen. Daphne sat in the still eye of the storm and listened to her daughter dial the phone. “Donna!” she screamed. “Guess what!
My
father’s
coming to see me in the play! He’s going to fly all the way from California!”

There were holes in several of Daphne’s underpants, and suddenly she felt a strong desire to mend them right away. She went to her room, took out her sewing kit, and set to work, stabbing and yanking the thread through like a madwoman. She had tried. God, this was a slap in the face, it was Joe saying, “Cynthia, I’ll have something to do with you as long as your mother isn’t involved,” but why should Joe act as if Daphne were the poisonous one? Daphne had always been the one who tried. There had been hate in her heart, but she had kept it hidden, or released it in tearful outbursts only when alone or with Pauline and Douglas. When Joe remarried and moved to California, Daphne had tried to keep him interested and informed about their daughter. Cynthia had been only two when he left, just a baby. Every four months or so for the first few years, Daphne had sent Joe current photos of Cynthia as she progressed from a toddler to a kindergartener with braids and a bike. She sent neutral, polite letters about Cynthia’s ballet or piano lessons, friends, school activities, along with copies of Cynthia’s report cards.

Not once had there been any response. She might as well have sent it all into a black hole. Once a month she did receive the court-decreed child-support payment in a plain white envelope, but never any personal word, never any questions or suggestions or congratulations. It was as if Joe were paying a utility bill, or income tax, a legal necessity, nothing else.

Bizarre. Joe had been the one who had had the affair, but he had been furious when Daphne wanted a divorce. He would never forgive her for not forgiving him. And perhaps that was just. But that he would take his anger out on his daughter, that he would have such a total lack of interest in Cynthia—that was bizarre.

When Cynthia had been very little, Daphne sent her bright funny Christmas cards and birthday cards and presents and signed them “Love, Daddy.” But when she was eight, Cynthia seemed too intelligent for such a charade, and who was this “daddy,” anyway, who communicated only twice a year? Very carefully Daphne explained that Daddy had gone away to live in California so he could teach there and that he was very busy and forgot about holidays. Later, when Cynthia was older, Daphne made Joe out to be a sort of absentminded-professor type. “It has nothing to do with you, sweetie,” she said. “It’s not that your father doesn’t love you. He doesn’t know you. He’s just too wrapped up in his work. Some men are just that way.”

What else was Daphne to say? That Joe was cold, egocentric, reprehensibly
unloving? Psychologists warned: Don’t criticize the other parent; the child knows that parent is in her somehow and she will come to hate herself. Daphne had tried to protect Cynthia. She had tried to remain neutral always. She had never ranted, raved, hurled insults about Joe—within Cynthia’s range of hearing.

Now Daphne pricked her finger with the needle and blood spotted the white cotton underpants right at the elastic waist. What she wanted to do right now was to grab that cloth and tear it. She wanted to hear the material shredding, she wanted to feel destruction, the power of ravage. But after all, Cynthia had said a true thing: this was not about Daphne and Joe, this was about Cynthia and Joe. If Daphne could only hang on to her sense and stand back, if she could only control her jealousy and fears, then perhaps Cynthia would have a father in her life.

And wasn’t that what Daphne wanted for Cynthia?

Joe called Cynthia that evening to tell her his plans. Cyn answered the phone—it was infinitely odd to Daphne to hear her daughter say casually, “Oh, hi, Dad.”

Daphne waited for Cynthia to call her to the phone—wouldn’t Joe want to check plans with Daphne, ask her for information? After a few minutes she could stand it no longer.

“Tell your father I can pick him up at the airport if he’d like,” she said.

“He says thanks, but he’ll rent a car in Boston,” Cynthia relayed. “Okay, see you then,” she said to her father. Hanging up the phone, she turned to Daphne with the face of a woman in love. “Mom, he’s got such a nice voice!”

“Mmm,” Daphne said, trying to sound noncommittal. “What are his plans?”

“He’s going to fly to Boston, rent a car, stay at the Westhampton Inn, and see the play on Saturday night. He wants to take me out to brunch on Sunday morning, then he’s got to fly back to California.”

“Quick trip,” Daphne said, smiling, heart thudding. Thank God he’s not staying, she thought. This will be over before I know it.

That Saturday night she did not see Joe; she did not attend the play, but went to the Whites’ to drink and be obsessed. Sunday morning, though, it was she who opened the door to Joe’s knock.

There he stood, on her doorstep, her ex-husband, the man who had changed her life, the man who had married her, impregnated her, wrapped himself around her, and
betrayed her. He was bald, and that sign of age made her happy, but he was slim and tanned and he must have been wearing contacts; she knew he needed glasses. With that tan, without the familiar blond hair and glasses, she would not have recognized him if she had passed him on the street.

Joe stood on her doorstep, and Daphne found herself smiling an absurdly friendly smile: if she met him now, she would not find him attractive! He seemed like a pleasant man, but so nondescript. She felt no yank of desire. Her heart floated out of her like a balloon.

“Hi, Joe. Cynthia’s just coming. Would you like to come in?”

“Here I am!” Cynthia called, rushing down the stairs, swinging her purse. “Hi, Dad. See ya, Mom.”

Joe nodded at Daphne and smiled with his mouth, but his eyes stayed cold. He put his arm around his daughter’s shoulder and led her to his rented car. Daphne stood in the doorway watching them walk away. The only thing Joe had said to her was, “Hello.” After all these years. Not even a “How are you, Daphne?” If she read his expression correctly, then Joe still hated her. But why? She was the one who should hate him. Certainly at the moment she had feared him.

And she had been right to do so.

When Cynthia came home from brunch with Joe, she told Daphne that her father had invited her to live with him and his wife in California, and Cynthia had accepted his invitation. Daphne stood in her sunny living room on that clear spring morning and felt her blood turn to venom.

“…  and I think it will really be good for me,” Cynthia was saying earnestly. “It will broaden my horizons. I’ll be able to see what a completely different part of the United States is like and get to understand a different culture.”

Daphne looked at her child and thought: I hate you. You are a stranger. You are a monster. You are an ungrateful, spoiled little bitch.

“Don’t look at me that way, Mom.
Mom,
I
knew
you’d be this way. Mom, come on. Dad lives in California, he lives near
Hollywood.
He’s going to give me a car. He says he’s really proud of me, Mom, and he wants to help me be an actress, he thinks he really could help me and I really could be an actress. You’re always complaining about how we never have enough money and you never have any help, and now here I’m going to be getting some help, which will help you—I mean, you’ll be able to spend some
money on yourself for a while.…”

“I can’t believe you chose to live with your father instead of with me,” Daphne said. The words were choking her. Her grief was choking her.

“Mom, it’s just for a year. Like I’ve lived with you for sixteen years, right? I mean, Dad has paid child support all along, and he deserves a turn, right?”

“But how could you accept his invitation without discussing it with me? Don’t you care what I think? How I feel?”

Cynthia looked down at her feet. “I guess I was so surprised and excited I just accepted right away at once.” She looked up at Daphne. “Mom, I’ve never even seen California. I’ve never even seen anywhere.”

“Don’t you know how much I’ll miss you, Cynthia?” Daphne said, keeping her voice gentle but not letting it break.

“Well, I’ll miss you too.”

Daphne looked at her beloved only child and thought: I hate you as I have never hated anyone else in my life. I hate you enough to hurt you. I want to hurt you as much as you are hurting me.

“Oh,” Daphne said. “Cynthia.” With great and agonizing control, she walked past her daughter. She grabbed up her purse where she had left it on the hall table and went out the front door. She got in her car and drove off down the street. She drove around for almost an hour before she went to Pauline’s house. When she stood on Pauline’s doorstep, knocking on the door, her eyes were so swollen from crying that she could scarcely see through the puffed and painful lids.

“Oh, God … oh, sweet Jesus God,” Pauline said when Daphne told her the news, and hugged Daphne and then made her sit down and drink quantities of Scotch.

“You can’t blame her, you can’t blame her,” Pauline had said. “Every girl wants her father to love her—to adore her. Daphne, you have to let her go.”

It had not even occurred to Daphne not to let Cynthia go. She would never stop Cynthia from going. But that Cynthia had not even hesitated when asked!

“My whole life has been devoted to raising that child.”

“Maybe Cynthia is aware of that.” Pauline used this cruel observation as a form of surgery, as a means of healing, like cauterizing a wound. “Maybe she thinks it’s time you devoted some of your life to yourself.”

“Oh, come on!” Daphne exploded. “It wasn’t like that, and you know it! I didn’t
sacrifice
my life to hers! I had a good time, I had fun—I had David.”

“Well,” Pauline said calmly, “in any case, Cynthia was destined to leave home soon. In two years she has to go off to college. If you had the money, you would have sent her to some kind of camp. Or prep school. It’s time for Cynthia to go. It’s time for you to move on too.”