The Peacock Emporium(57)

“I know.”

“What?” Vivi’s head shot up.

Douglas took a long drink of his whiskey. “I meant to tell you. I went to see her last week.”

Vivi had been about to place the cake tin in the oven. She stopped. “She never said.”

“Yes, Tuesday, I think it was . . . I thought this silly row had gone on too long.” Douglas was holding his glass in both hands. They were wind-chapped and red-knuckled, even though high summer was fast approaching.

Vivi turned back to the oven, placed the tin inside, and closed the door carefully. “And did you sort things out?” She struggled to keep the dismay from her voice, to smother the ferocity of her feelings of exclusion. She knew she was being childish, but she didn’t know what was hurting her most: that after all her attempts at bridge building, neither father nor daughter had thought to mention it to her; or, if she dared admit it to herself, the fact that it hadn’t been just Douglas who had been in that shop before her. “Douglas?”

He paused, and she wondered, with a brief madness, how long he had gazed upon that image. “No,” he said, eventually. “Not really.”

He sighed, an unusually mournful sound, and glanced up at her, his expression fatigued and vulnerable. She knew he was half expecting her to put her arms around him, to say something soothing, assure him that he had done the right thing and his daughter would come around. But, just this once, Vivi didn’t feel like it.





13




The Day I Realized I Did Not Have to Be My Father


My whole life I do not think I ever saw my father without oiled hair. I never knew what its real color was: it was a kind of perpetual slick dark shell, separated into tiny furrows by the tortoiseshell comb that protruded from his back pocket. He was from Florence, my grandmother would say, as if that explained his vanity. Then again, my mother did not look like an Italian mama, not the way you English think of one. She was very slim, very beautiful, even into her later years. You can see them in this photograph. They look like something from a movie, too glamorous for a little village like ours. I do not think my mother ever cooked a meal in her life.

I was six when they first left me with my grandmother. They used to work in the City, which I was told repeatedly was a place not fit for a child. They took a variety of jobs, often linked to the lower end of the entertainment business, but never seemed to make much money—or, at least, any more than they needed to maintain their own beauty. They sent back envelopes of lire for my upkeep—not enough to keep the hens in corn, my grandfather said dismissively. He grew or raised almost all our food—the only way, he would say, slapping my back, that he was going to grow himself a fine young man.

They would come back every six months or so to see me. At first I would hide behind my grandmother’s skirts, hardly knowing them, and my father would tut and then pull faces at me behind her back. My mother would croon to me, smoothing my hair and scolding my grandmother for dressing me like a peasant, while I lay against her chest, breathing in her perfume, and wondering how two such exotic creatures could have created a lumpen animal like myself. That was how my father used to describe me, pinching at my stomach, exclaiming at my chins, and my mother would scold him, smiling, but not at me. Some years I didn’t know whether I loved or hated them. I knew only that I could never live up to what they had wanted of a son, that even I was possibly the reason they kept going away.

“You mustn’t mind them,” my grandmother would say. “The City has made them sharp as knives.”

Then, the year I turned fourteen, they returned with nothing for my grandmother, nothing for my upkeep. It was apparently the fifth time in a row. I was not meant to know this, and was sent to my room, where I peered through the door, straining to hear the rapidly raised voices. My grandfather, losing his temper, accused my father of being a wastrel, my mother a prostitute. “You still have enough money to put this shit on your faces, the shine on your new shoes. Yet you are good for nothing,” he said.

“I don’t have to listen to this,” said my father, lighting a cigarette.

“Yes, you do. Call yourself a father? You could not even kill a chicken to feed your own son.”

“You think I could not kill a chicken?” said my father, and I could imagine him pulling himself up to his full height in his pin-striped suit.

The parlor door slammed. As I ran to the window, I could see my father striding out into the yard. After several attempts, and much squawking, he managed to grab Carmela, one of the older hens, who had long since stopped laying. Facing my grandfather, he snapped her neck, and casually threw her body across the yard toward him.

A silence descended, and suddenly I felt my father’s gesture had been almost a threat. I saw in him something I hadn’t seen before, something mean and impulsive. My grandmother had seen it too: she wrung her hands, imploring everyone to come inside, to drink some grappa.

My mother glanced nervously from her father to her husband, unsure who to try to placate first.

The air seemed to grow still.

Then with a strangulated squawking sound, Carmela appeared at my father’s foot, her head a little tilted, her expression malevolent. She hesitated, wobbled, and then made her way unsteadily past him, across the yard and into the chicken house. No one said anything.

Then my grandmother pointed. “She crapped on your suit,” she said.