Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“I didn’t know you knew anybody,” I said stupidly.

“A nice woman,” he said, looking away. “Her name is Andrea. I call her Andy. She’s a widow. She lives in Pascagoula and she has a great big sailboat. She and her husband used to go all over the world in it. You and Laura will have a good time on that boat.”

I was silent, staring at him. I could think of nothing to say. A boat? All of us, him and Laura and me, on a huge boat with a woman from Pascagoula called Andy? I had never known my father to call me by any sort of nickname, nor Laura, either. Not even Mother. I had never known him to evince the slightest interest in boats or the sea. When we vacationed, we usually went to Highlands, North Carolina, where he played golf and bridge with other lawyers. I could find no picture of us as a merry, seagoing family in my mind.

“But who will run it?” I said. “Can you? Have you learned to run a boat?”

He smiled. “She has a captain who looks after it and does the actual sailing and a crew to help him. We won’t have to do anything but lie back and get suntans and eat great food and sleep with the waves rocking us. Forget the world for weeks at a time. You could get used to that, couldn’t you?”

I felt my face redden at the thought of my father and this Andy woman, in a bed rocked by the waves. In my mind she was massive and blond, and very tanned, and walked in a rolling swagger.

“When did you…I mean, I never knew you even were…you know, seeing someone,” I said, feeling the sofa rock under me as if I were already riding waves.

“Well, for some time now,” he said. “She has a little place here and one in New Orleans, too. Say, you all will really like that. It’s in the Quarter. I guess I thought you knew. Laura does.”

“Laura does?”

Nothing seemed to connect, to fit together, to make any sense.

“I told her a while back,” he said a shade too casually. “I was sure she would have told you by now.”

“I wish you’d felt you could tell me, too,” I said thickly around the tears that were pooling in my throat. “I thought you told me everything—”

“I told her because I had to talk to her about something else, and I want to tell you about that now; see what you think,” he said. “You were in the middle of your thesis when it came up. I didn’t want to bother you then. This all depends on you, Merritt. If you’re uncomfortable with it in any way, at all, we’ll make other arrangements.”

“Uncomfortable with what? You mean you wouldn’t get married if I didn’t want you to? I’d never interfere in that, Papa, if it’s what you really want—”

“No, no. We’re definitely getting married. Too late to back out now.” He laughed, and then coughed and went on. “Here’s the thing. Andy has never had children of her own, and while she’s really looking forward to getting to know you two, she feels…we feel…that she needs a little time to get used to me and my strange ways before she takes on Laura. Laura isn’t the easiest…well, you know. We thought we might take a long honeymoon cruise, maybe down around South America, maybe even as far as the Galapagos. Take our time, just bum around…and I thought it might be fun for both of you if Laura came with you to Atlanta for a year or two. I’m prepared to pay her way, of course, and she’s already accepted at Westminster. It’s the best private school up there. I had a couple of friends in the Georgia Bar Association look into it; their kids go there, too. They pulled some strings. She’s already accepted, and I’ve made all the arrangements. She starts this summer because she needs to get up to speed with the rest of her class. I know it sounds like a big responsibility, but they’ve got a bus that picks students up and drops them off, and there’s a program for students who need to stay until six or so. I’ll give her a clothes and living allowance as well as her tuition, of course. All you need to do is keep an eye on her in the evening and on weekends. You know you can handle her; you always could. And of course she’ll make friends and be out of your hair a lot of the time, and she’s surely old enough to stay by herself occasionally when you want to go out. And you will, because you’re going to knock ’em dead in Atlanta. She isn’t going to be any trouble. I’ve already talked to her about it.”

“No trouble,” I whispered. “Papa, that’s all she knows how to be. In a new city, a big one, with all those new kids and…I don’t know, the drugs and the rock concerts, and the hippies and the war protests and civil rights…she’ll be like a bomb with the fuse lit. I can’t work and run around bailing Laura out all the time; it’s going to be different up there. I’ll be trying to get a career going—”

“And fighting off the guys. I know,” he said jocularly. But he would not look at me.

“She promised,” he said. “I told her all that, and she swore on her mother’s Bible that she would do everything her teachers and you told her to do, and not make any trouble at all. I believe her. She knows I’ll have her out of there and in Saint Ida’s before she can blink if she makes one misstep. And I will. That’s a promise. But of course, if you really think it’s too much—”

Saint Ida’s. A New Orleans convent school so thoroughly and murderously cloistered that not even fathers and brothers were allowed to go further in than the beautiful old courtyard. Academically first rate, socially beyond reproach, culturally luminous in matters pertaining to the late Renaissance and backward from that. The nuns of Saint Ida’s had no truck with Rousseau and his kindred romantic sauvages , nor with much that followed them. The sixth and seventh decades of the twentieth century simply did not exist. Little outside the thick, high walls did. I had known three girls at LSU who had gone there; two were said to be lovers and the other dropped out pregnant during her first year. Stories of suicides and breakdowns among its alumni made the rounds regularly. Laura would not last a month there.

“It’s not too much,” I said in a low voice, looking down at my new rope-soled wedgies. “I wouldn’t want her at Saint Ida’s.”

“Neither would I, really, but she’s as good as there the instant she causes you any trouble,” my father said.

“Private school must be awfully expensive in Atlanta,” I said, only then feeling the heat and anger. “Are you sure you can afford it?”

He flushed.

“I can handle it,” he said. “Don’t you worry about that.”

“I won’t, then,” I said, and thought with a small curl of malice that I knew just how he could afford it. Cap’n Andy, or whatever he called her, obviously had truly big bucks, and counted them well spent if they kept a troublesome adolescent out of her venue. I would, I thought, be harboring a remittance sister.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked Laura later, when I had gone upstairs and found her crouching at the top of the stairs, listening.

“I didn’t want you to worry,” she said, looking up at me through her thick gold lashes.

“Bullshit,” I said, forgetting my resolution not to use sorority language in front of her. “That’s just what you want me to do. C’mon. Why didn’t you tell me?”

She was silent. The skin at the base of her nostrils whitened. Finally she said, “I was afraid if you had time to think about it you wouldn’t let me come to Atlanta with you, and I’d have to go live with him and her . I know she doesn’t want me, but I was afraid he’d have to take me if you didn’t, or put me in some boarding school. If I had to go to Saint Ida’s I’d jump out the highest window there. If I had to go on that stupid boat with her I’d drown myself. I really would, you know.”