13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [70]
My father’s face is ghastly pale, his eyes lost and drowning. A choked sound escapes him, and I realize suddenly that it’s a sob. In all my life, I have never seen my father weep. He is aware of this also; he is still trying to hold it in. I go to him. I take his hand, still clenched so tightly around my sewing scissors. Gently, I cup it. I give a kiss to his white knuckles. I whisper, “Let go.”
Slowly he opens his hand for me, as one making a willful effort to unfurl his rigid musculature. When he presents the scissors to me on his open palm, I take them and put them on the table. I can see the reddened imprint of the tiny handle there in his sweaty skin, speaking the furious pressure of his emotion.
“Oh Father…”
“Yes?”
“You weren’t going to… you weren’t really going to stab him, were you?”
“I was.”
For an instant, there is something in me that wants to laugh. Perhaps we might have ended this moment collapsed in sad yet healing mirth, if a rictus hadn’t seized his face, forcing hot tears to gush forth from his eyes. Oh—my father is crying in earnest now, and the heat of his grief and shame permeates the very air I breathe. He covers his face with his hands because he cannot bear me seeing him wrecked like this. His knees give out under him and he collapses back onto the chair; his smothered weeping is the worst sound in the world—worse even than the last breath of his only son. His broken feelings are such a shock to my system that it doesn’t even occur to my body to weep also; my concern is entirely with him. I drop to my knees before him and take the handkerchief out of his breast pocket. I gently touch his hands with the tips of my cool fingers. His are hot and wet from his tears.
“Don’t stifle yourself so,” I say softly. “Just let it flow freely.”
He obeys me and rests his hands on his lap. He lets me dab at his tears with his handkerchief, attempting to comfort him as if he were a child and I his mother. He tries to catch his breath, but I can hear his voice flood when he says to me, “Louise, Louise, you are the only thing I have left.”
“And you are too, Father. You are the only thing I have left.”
“Ah, I am not.” He gently shakes his head and appears to be gathering himself. “You will have a husband, and children, and a whole life ahead of you.”
“Then these things will be yours also.”
His stricken face looks to be softening; to encourage this softening, I say, “I love you.”
He answers, “I love you,” but there is a strange inflection in his voice when he says this. With his thousand-yard eyes lost to me, he adds almost inaudibly, “You look so much like her.”
I am about to ask whom he means when the realization crushes my throat like the pressure of a choking hand—he means my mother, the mother who lived only to give me light, the mother of whom he has not spoken since we were children, my brother and I. I am left there, lips parted on a smothered utterance, when my father encircles my shoulders with his arms and kisses me hard on the mouth.
deliver us—
I am in a swoon when he does this, a near faint. I raise both hands when he does this and I cannot know if this is me attempting to fight him off or this is a gesture of surrender, as if he has pointed a gun at me—
lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil—
suddenly I feel as if I am watching this from a great height—
hallowed be Thy name Thy kingdom come Thy will be done—
from a great height—oh, Louise—if your mouth opens for his tongue, time will tear open and I will float out forever, a dried dead husk in the great black nothing—
hallowed be Thy name Thy kingdom come Thy will be done—
Louise, I cannot stay in your body while you do this. You cannot blame this on possession…
forgive us our trespasses as we