“It’s not her fault, Brandon,” Lara said when he admitted it to her. “She’s not her mother.”
“I know she’s not,” he said, “but I can’t separate her from the memories.” Antonia sensed it too, and it made her sense that she should be invisible, in order not to upset him. He and Lara were so happy together that she still felt like an intruder at times. She knew that her father was waiting for her to leave, so he could be alone with his wife.
The time came soon enough. She was spared camp the next year, and Lara convinced Brandon to rent a house in Water Mill on Long Island for a month, and they rented it the following summer too. Lara improved the quality of Antonia’s life immeasurably. She had never wanted children of her own, but she loved Antonia as she would have her own child. She was a wonderful stepmother, and Antonia was only sorry that she had come into her life so late.
With strong grades, she applied to several Ivy League colleges. She applied to USC, for their film school. She still wanted to write screenplays after she graduated. But she had several backup schools, since her father didn’t want her on the West Coast. No matter how much she begged and Lara cajoled, he was adamant. So, she applied to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, for their classes on film. It was her first choice.
She was accepted in March, for the fall semester, and Brandon stubbornly said he wouldn’t let her go. He wanted her to go to Columbia, as he had, to Barnard, the women’s school, or any other school. But not film school at NYU. They had a division for actors too, and he was sure she would be seduced into the acting division, and wind up an actress like her mother, and he flatly refused to let that happen.
“I have no interest in being an actress,” she insisted to him, and he wouldn’t listen, to her or Lara. She was about to accept a school she didn’t want to attend, two days before NYU’s deadline, when he and Lara had a showdown. It sounded suspiciously like one of his battles with Fabienne, but Lara was fighting for Antonia’s right to attend the college she wanted. Antonia felt guilty to be the cause of dissent between them, and was filling out the acceptance form to her backup school, when Brandon walked into her room, stone-faced.
“I give up. You can go to NYU,” he said in a voice so low she almost couldn’t hear him. She turned in her desk chair to look at him as he stood in the doorway. He didn’t want to fight with Lara over this, and somehow she had gotten through to him, and was almost willing to risk their marriage for it. She had never fought so hard for anything in her life.
“Do you mean it?” Antonia stood up and stared at him, and rushed to hug him as he nodded. Lara had finally won the war when she pointed out to him how he had punished Antonia all her life for reminding him of her mother, and how unfair it was. He knew it was true, and finally conceded.
“Yes, I mean it,” he said in a gruff voice, as she hugged him. “But don’t ever tell me you’re becoming an actress. I’ll never speak to you again if you do.”
“I won’t, Dad. I promise.” There was no chance of it, and he knew it too. She wanted to write, not be an actress. And she was nothing like her mother.
* * *
—
Lara helped her pack to move into the dorm on Washington Square. Brandon came too, to set up the room. He hung pictures, while Lara made her bed. Brandon set up the stereo and the computer and carried her bicycle up the stairs, while Antonia hung up her clothes in the tiny closet. She had a roommate from Virginia, Betty McCabe, who was going to be in the Tisch School of the Arts too, and wanted to be a playwright. She had already written two plays, which had been produced in summer stock that summer. Her parents and younger sister had come to settle her in and looked like nice people.
Lara reminded Antonia to call if she needed anything. They were a short ride uptown. Brandon stood looking stiff and awkward when it came time to leave. He hadn’t expected to care, but he was filled with emotion, to be leaving the daughter whom he hardly knew and had kept his distance from all her life. She was taking to the skies now. It was too late to undo the past, but there was hope for a better future, with Lara to assist them.
Antonia felt awkward with him too, and thanked him again for letting her go to school there, and Lara for convincing him. He had hoped for this day for so long, after the responsibility Fabienne had left him to shoulder alone, but now that it had come, he had tears in his eyes and a lump in his throat, and wished he could undo the last eighteen years, or at least the last eleven. Lara could see what he was feeling and felt sorry for him. He had shut Antonia out for years, keeping himself from her, and she had lived without warmth or protection for most of her life, but their bond to each other had been slowly getting stronger since his marriage to Lara. She was the best thing that had happened to both of them. She had humanized Brandon, after the holocaust he had been through with Fabienne. Antonia had paid a high price for it too. Both her parents had cheated her of a loving childhood.