Other people

Two Widmer

Who knows a daughter better than a father? Her suitors are afflicted with the nearsightedness of passion and the clangor of the chase. They meet a matured young woman. They lack biographical perspective, which is as much a failure in perceiving people as the lack of an historical perspective is a failure in perceiving events. A father knows his daughter as a child growing up, and can see the woman she is today through the gauze of all those years.

Even as a baby, Francine seemed more quickly exploratory of the world around her than her sisters had been. When she was six or seven, there seemed an aura of sexuality about her I hadn't detected in her sisters, though I must admit that when Joan and Margaret were that age, I was preoccupied with my career, and Priscilla carried most of the burden of their upbringing.

From school the reports were that Francine was aggressive. I went down to see the principal — he knew who I was of course — and it turned out that what Francine's teacher had characterized as aggression was pure precocious energy battling its way into the world. She was accelerated through school fast enough once they understood.

Francine was six when Priscilla told me the story of coming upon her and the little Crocker boy, who was younger than six, stark naked except for their socks and shoes.

"What were they doing?" I asked, stifling any visual image of the scene, knowing that I would think something far worse than had actually happened.

"They said they were playing doctor."

"What were they doing?" I was annoyed that Priscilla was taking it all so lightly.

"They were examining each other's orifices."

"Simultaneously?"

"Prurient interest, Mr. Widmer?"

"For God's sake, Priscilla," I said for the third time. "What were those children doing?"

"Well, at the very moment that I saw them, he seemed to be looking very closely at her private parts."

"Which parts?"

"Her vagina, if you must. Didn't you ever play doctor as a child?"

Of course I had. I felt absurd for having pressed Priscilla for the details. "I trust it won't happen again," I said.

Priscilla just looked at me. Finally she said, "They were just children playing. You're acting as if someone has trespassed on your lawn."

"That's a ridiculous comparison," I said, closing the matter, though when next I saw the Crocker boy my instinct was to throttle him. That very night I dreamt I was getting older year by year, though the years whipped by like minutes, yet Francine remained the same age as she was then, nine, and the growing gap between our ages seemed like a fault opening in the earth into which my child or I would fall if we attempted to reach across to each other. When I awoke I felt that I had been witnessing something obscene, and remember thinking that dreaming was an invention of Viennese Jews, a disease they had passed on to upset and weaken us.

In waking life, Francine also grew — too fast! What I noticed most was her quality of mind, quite different from her mother's. Priscilla's mind flits about like a hummingbird, poised before a flower for seconds, then off again for nourishment somewhere else. Francine in her very early teens seemed able to pursue a thought to its conclusion, in fact she had a relentless quality that to me still seems strange in a woman and something I more readily associate with a scientist or a trial lawyer building a case toward the making of a new law. Of course I realize that a scientist can be a woman as well these days, and a lawyer too. I speak from the perspective of what was customary in my own generation.

When Francine's breasts were no longer buds but of a size as to be apparent whatever she wore, it was more difficult for me to hug her to me when she accomplished something particularly pleasing. It was as if she wore a notice board warning me.

Of course she saw boys, and soon enough — too soon, alas — I'd meet the young men when she brought them by. She was very good about introducing them. The boys themselves usually struck me as handsome enough, though immature looking, you can understand that, and compared to Francine they seemed — what shall I say? — ordinary? I suppose the boys' parents might think Francine ordinary until they got to know her. It was about this time that I caught myself noticing the bulge in the young men's pants. In my day, of course, we wore quite ordinary trousers, and one supposed males had their apparatus at the appropriate location, but since this jeans thing, you not only know it's there, it's as if some special effort has been made to draw attention to the private parts. Oh I suppose a codpiece did the same long ago. All the boys Francine brought home seemed, in that regard, to be on display. I got used to it in time.

Because of her early acceleration, Francine was able to get into Radcliffe at sixteen and had her degree behind her at twenty. I frequently debated with myself about sending her off to Europe for a year — I could have easily afforded it then — but I weighed the experience of Paris, Venice, Florence against, well, it's not a myth that European men take advantage of young American women. Why should Francine have to experience a year of sordid attention from men who treated women as objects, Don Juans who expected to receive their meals and travel expenses in exchange for their sexual services? She pooh-poohed my alarms. I dealt with my doubts by way of a foolish compromise. Instead of a year, I sent her for six months. Her postcards told me nothing. When she got home, she could speak French better, and her Italian was quite passable. I noticed she would accept the offer of a cocktail before dinner more readily than she would before she left. Her appearance was strikingly changed. Perhaps it was the clothes she had bought in Europe, what they advertised about the figure of the person who wore them.

"Tell me about the people you met," I had asked her.

"You mean the men," she had replied, and went on to give us her observations of the museums she had visited, wickedly watching me from time to time.

I resigned myself to the fact that Francine had a private life knowledge of which was barred to me from now on.

I didn't want all the other ties cut as well, and interested myself in her plans for a career. But they weren't plans at all. She frivolously accepted positions, and as frivolously departed from them. In all, she spent nearly a year Job-hopping through Manhattan, saying she was having a marvelous time, knowing how numb I made myself about it. In my day, you did not quit a job in a week or a month. You settled down.

The worst part of it, I thought, was taking a room in that brownstone floor-through in the East Fifties. Five young women in one apartment, blind-dating, the New York singles scene. Thank heaven she began to miss the countryside. The cacophony of traffic bothered her as much as it does me. I envy Thomassy that he can practice in Westchester instead of being involved like the rest of us in that highly unsatisfactory arrangement called commuting to work. The mindless hurrying of anonymous crowds is not the kind of thing our people were brought up for.

I was so pleased when she visited us one evening for dinner and announced that she had gotten a more permanent-seeming job at the U.N., and admitted that she yearned for Westchester, where houses are not always in sight of each other, and one can hear and watch and feed birds. In the summertime, we hear the occasional roar of a chainsaw or distant lawnmowers leveling grass, but on the whole, life here is so much better. I offered her a chance to move back in, which would help her put some money aside from her U.N. job, but she said that after sharing an apartment with four others, she'd prefer absolute privacy. I wasn't sure in my own mind whether that was true or whether she simply did not want us enmeshed in her life again.

I suggested it would be years before she could afford a house (the thought of a husband who could afford a house seemed even more remote). Nevertheless, she began to follow the real estate ads that led, each Sunday morning in a rented car, to disappointments, until she reluctantly accepted my advice — I told her it's all right to use one's father — and she got in touch with a certain real estate agent named Phillips, called Well by his friends because of his habit of beginning every assertion with that word.

She reported that Well Phillips sat her down in his office — it's furnished and decorated solely in wood, like a New England cottage — and told her, "Well, you don't really need to run around to find a place if you use your head and my experience. You can't afford a house, young lady, and you don't want an apartment in a neighborhood where only bowling is spoken. That leaves here, here, and here," he pointed to the map, "if you want an easy commute by car. In the place last pointed to, there're a couple or three apartments, on the loose right now, three-story buildings that got their backs against the steep slope up from the Hudson, unbuildable, so there's woods and streams in back and the river in front. The Croton Aqueduct is great for walking on in that area, and it'll be years before the crazies tar it over for motorbikes, and by then you'll have gone somewhere else. Let's see now, if you want a living room, a separate bedroom with a view, and a kitchen that's a kitchen, there's a building I can get you a second-floor front apartment in for…"

He named a price less than she was paying for a fifth of the city flat. Of course, gas and parking would bridge the difference. She didn't want to pledge fealty to Conrail. Besides, I know she loved tooling around in the gearshift Mustang I had given her for graduation, not as a reward, but as an expression of my continuing affection.

Well Phillips had driven her to the place and it turned out to be better even than his description of it. The previous tenants had left the apartment in immaculate condition. The walls were off white, clean, even the windows seemed newly washed. She asked what the other tenants were like.

"Don't really know," Well Phillips had said, and checked with the man who had given them the key. I remember her description. Below the empty flat lived a couple, there since the building went up, and opposite a woman who keeps cats. Across the hall from the empty apartment two men lived together — can't avoid that any more — and upstairs, there was an Italian family with a baby and a grandmother. Just above the empty apartment lives a fellow who owned the nearest gas station, handy to know, I thought, if your car doesn't start some morning. He had a wife, a quiet sort according to Phillips, and two young kids. Young kids could clatter around on your ceiling, but then Francine wouldn't be home weekdays and by her return from work, they'd probably be on their way to bed.

She asked if there were problems with burglaries in the neighborhood. The hippie janitor had told her, "It's not like that here. You're from New York. This is Westchester."

And so she paid the month's deposit and moved in under the gas station owner who raped her.