I looked over at my audience. She’d fallen beautifully asleep, with her hands laced on top of her rounded belly. Our chocolate would have to wait a bit. I let her nap and went to speak with Mrs. Circumstance. Star sprang up when I stood, and we walked past windows filled with gold dust motes—ever present in spite of Mrs. Circumstance’s best efforts. Every day of this first fall here has been miraculous.
There was only one story left to tell. The hardest one. Daddy has only been dead for five months. I am in the middle of a shift from being pinioned by his illness and its rage, and the beginnings of remembering him as I mainly knew him. He is gone, but coming back to me. Neither a memory yet, nor a presence. Oh, my father. Lachlan Lee, of the sanguine personality, the brightly applied intelligence. A person born into privilege at a time in history when the world changed dramatically. He saw the advent of the automobile, the airplane, the turn of the century. He didn’t go to any of the wars as a soldier, but worked hard to offer support to the wounded and the displaced. He never questioned the ideal of pacifism. He practiced mild manners, and deflected conflict when it came his way. His general attitude was one of amusement and curiosity. Over time I understood that those weren’t wholly natural traits, but the result of choice and discipline. The stories of him as a boy featured other traits, such as temper and competitiveness. He let those go, to be a light in the world.
He encouraged us to use our minds freely. I knew no other father of any girl at school who took her ideas as seriously as Lachlan took ours. He gave us no sense, at least not when we were children, that he saw limits for us—or that he considered himself smarter than us. We were brilliant as far as he was concerned, and he spent a lot of time with us asking what we thought about this or that. Often he presented us with a business problem he was working on at Lee & Sons, and asked us to tell him what we thought would be the right thing to do. He asked Edmund, too, of course, but that was to be expected, and perhaps because it was expected, Edmund wasn’t interested in these sessions, and was apt to drift away to do something else. You and I were enthralled by his attention. He encouraged us to seek commonsense answers. But what was common sense? How did a person develop it? Slowly we refined our understanding of what was possible for the human mind, how elastic it really was, how far we could stretch and how much we needed to know to be sure that what we thought of as common sense wasn’t subjective. He was leading us to believe that the best way to reason was to become as well educated as possible. The more we studied and learned, the greater pleasure he took in spending time with us.
I know people wonder if Daddy’s attention, the way he treated us as interesting, had something to do with why neither you nor I married. It’s a funny speculation, isn’t it? That our minds may have been too well respected by a man? The intelligent bluestockings we had as teachers were marvelous, but not meant to set examples for our futures. Grace fully expected us to marry powerful men and be good partners to them. We might well have interests, even work of our own, but the strong message sent to us was that we didn’t want to end up as spinsters. Yet both of us did. We each had chances to marry, but one cannot marry simply for the sake of marriage. Or we couldn’t. It is true, though, that I liked being Daddy’s companion, and chose it over other possibilities. A father-daughter relationship is unique in the kind of delight it brings to both persons, a proprietary pride that also contains an understanding of the boundaries that hold the two apart. I was proud going out with him in the city, having lunch at a restaurant, or in the private dining room at Lee & Sons. Most especially, for drives. Daddy and I both enjoyed nothing better than to get in the car and head out for the day to see what lay beyond. We prided ourselves on our sense of direction and only rarely consulted a map. We had disdain for people who said they were lost. We were only and evermore bushwhacking. We could go a hundred miles and back on a Sunday while Grace went to church and had midday roast beef and Yorkshire pudding in the company of relatives or friends. Daddy never felt the social pressure to be anywhere. Dozens were the evenings when our parents were meant to go out and Lachlan, at the last minute, felt uninterested for one reason or another, and our mother either had to make the call to excuse them or she went alone.
His mind deteriorated after he broke his hip and was stuck with the grinding rehabilitation, the walker, the wheelchair, the bed, death. I was present for every moment of it, and witnessed the gradual winnowing away from his personality those aspects that had served all his life to disguise or mitigate anger and insecurity, until they were all that was left. He needed me to sit with him in the dark, lonely hour before dawn. He spoke of the death of his brother at thirteen when Lachlan was fourteen. He spoke of the feeling he had after that of never really caring what became of him, for who was there for him to share it with? He hadn’t cared what he did for a living, or whom he married—the more his wife would leave him alone the better. He wanted to be near his brother’s grave here, but I never saw him visit it, did you, El? I’d had no idea of any of this. He often sobbed. Every mistake he’d ever made, every embarrassment, every act of thoughtlessness or perfidy that had been perpetrated against him, or that he’d performed, he relived in detail while I stroked his large smooth forehead and kept my eye on the thin gap at the edges of the curtains where the first gray light showed, and then on good days a rosiness, and finally a yellow that was my release, time to turn him over to the care of the day nurse who’d get him up and bathe him in the shower, or his wheelchair, or his bed.
His brother, his mother, his father, Edmund, Elspeth, and finally his Grace—these were the ghosts who haunted him. “Where is Agnes?” he’d shout at me. “She’s deserted me.” “I’m Agnes, Daddy,” I assured him, but he looked at me with such dark doubt that I didn’t try very hard to make him believe it.
He cursed me; he raged at me; sometimes he threw books or pictures or forks or glasses at me. I stood between him and that graveyard outside. I was an abomination, a dried-up old prune of a female, a witch, and a bitch. My father, who’d never once sworn in front of me, now spoke to me so horribly that my stomach turned sour; I could barely eat and had to take medicine to calm it. I knew that it infuriated him to have no control over his legs and body, to need to be diapered like an infant—yet what I knew wasn’t a protection, as knowledge often isn’t. I did my best to remain calm and detached, to cling to my role and not my affection, but every day, I failed. For him to hate me was unbearable. Yet I had no choice.
We moved up to Maine in the middle of May—he wanted to die here. Up we came, quite a production, like Lord Marchmain returning to Brideshead to die. We settled him in his bedroom, and he had a couple of days of peace influenced by the sea air, but toward the end he became furtive, and looked at me suspiciously whenever I entered his room. When I heard him whimper at four and went in to him, he pulled one of his pillows to his chest and wouldn’t speak to me.
A few nights later I suddenly knew—he was leaving. His skin was pulled tight over the bones of his face. His beard had come in, and I briefly wondered why he hadn’t been properly shaved. What difference, I uttered out loud, I think. What does it matter? I watched him, intentionally slowing my breath and making it loud enough to hear. I wanted to calm him.