“They’re two peas in a pod,” I heard Mummy tell my sister. “Both stubborn and butting heads.”
Now he stood there in our entryway, the threats dripping from his eyes, his lips quivering with rage. I was trembling, too, but I wouldn’t let him see that.
“I’ll call you, Mummy, when I arrive in New York,” I shouted past him. She looked up and at me, tears streaming down her face.
“No, you won’t. You won’t call this house if you step out of it with that suitcase,” my father said. “I forbid your mother to speak with you, and your sister as well, if you leave. Send no letters, either. They’ll be burned at the door.”
Despite how hard I was shaking inside, I stood as firmly as he ever had stood whenever he had forbidden us from doing something. Maybe he saw himself in me, in the determination fixed in my eyes, and that told him he wouldn’t win the argument today, no matter what.
“Burn what you want,” I said. “I’m going to do what I’m meant to do, Daddy, with your blessing or without.”
“It’s without!” he screamed behind me when I opened the door.
I gazed back at him. He looked made of stone. I would never deny that I was afraid. I had never defied him as much as this, and I was about to set out alone for a world in which I didn’t know a soul. Julia was right about that. For a girl from a small city in England who had never even been to London except only on a school trip to see a West End show, this was the same as being rocketed into outer space.
In my purse I had pictures of my mother, my sister, and my father. I had the gold locket they had given me on my sixteenth birthday. I had my birth certificate, my passport that my father never knew I had, and a little more than three and a half thousand pounds that I would exchange for United States dollars at the airport currency kiosk. I had packed a fraction of my wardrobe in my one suitcase, thinking most of my clothes were not really suited for an entertainer in New York City.
I had called for a taxi to the airport, and the car was there at the curb waiting for me. Even at this moment, I couldn’t believe I was really doing it. But I was.
I looked back into the house.
“I love you, Daddy,” I said, and closed the door behind me before he could reply.
It was the last thing I would ever say to him.
And he had said his last words to me, words that would reverberate over thousands of miles and haunt me all the days of my life.
ONE
When I was a little girl, in the late afternoon or early evening right after the sun set—or what my father referred to as “the gold coin slipping down a slippery sky to float in darkness until morning”—I would edge open the window in the bedroom that I shared with Julia. No matter what the temperature outside, I would crouch to put my ear close to the opening so that I could hear the tinkle of the piano in the Three Bears, a pub down our street in Guildford. During the colder months, when Julia came in, she would scream at me for putting a chill in the room, but she would never tell our father because she knew he likely would take a strap to me for wasting heat and costing us money. Like his father and his father before him, he believed “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”
In our house money was the real monarch. Everything in one way or another was measured and judged in terms of it. We could easily substitute “Long live our savings account” in our royal anthem for “Long live our noble queen.” I suppose that was only natural and expected: my father was a banker in charge of personal and business loans. He often told us he had to look at people in a cold, hard way and usually tell them that they didn’t qualify because they didn’t have the collateral. He didn’t sugarcoat it, either. He made sure they left feeling like they had cost the bank money just by coming there to seek a loan, for he also believed that “Time is money.” He called those whom he rejected—who had convinced themselves they could be granted credit despite the realities of their situation—“dreamers.” And he wasn’t fond of dreamers.
“They don’t have their feet squarely on the ground,” he would say. “They bounce and float like loose balloons tossed here and there at the mercy of a mischievous wind.”
Sometimes, when I looked at people passing by our house, I imagined them being bounced about like that, and in my mind I would tell them not to go to see my father for financial assistance, to go to another bank. My father was so stern-looking at times that I was afraid to confess I had experienced a dream when sleeping. He might point his thick right forefinger at me and say, “You’re doomed to be a balloon.”
He wasn’t a particularly big man, but he gave off a towering appearance. When he walked, he always kept his five-foot-ten-inch body firm, his posture nearly as perfect as that of the guard at Buckingham Palace with his meticulous stride, even though my father never had military training. He was truly our personal Richard Cory, “a gentleman from sole to crown,” just like the man in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem. And that wasn’t simply because of the similarity of his surname. Even on Saturdays and Sundays, he would put on a white shirt and a solid blue, gray, or black tie, no matter how warm the weather. When I asked my mother about it once, she said he simply felt underdressed without his tie. Then she leaned in to add in a whisper, “It’s like his shield. He’s a knight in shining ties.”
He didn’t care that so many men his age dressed quite casually most of the time, even at work. But I’d have to admit that when he stood among them, he looked like someone in charge, someone very successful and very self-confident. He did everything with what my mother called “a banker’s precision.” He shaved every morning with a straight razor, making the exact same strokes the exact same way, and never missed a spot. Sometimes I would watch him make his smooth, careful motions as if he was another Michelangelo, carving his face out of marble. He had his black hair cut or trimmed more often than other men, and he wouldn’t step out of the house wearing shoes unless they were shined almost to the point where you could see your face in them. He always carried an umbrella, the same one he had since our mother and he married.
“He brought it on our honeymoon,” she said.
But I gathered that he didn’t keep it and care for it for romantic reasons. It would have been a waste to do otherwise. He felt justified carrying it no matter what the weather.
“The biggest unintended liar in the U.K. is the weatherman or woman,” he would say. He used the umbrella like a walking stick on sunny and partly sunny days, but he was always poised, like an American western cowboy gunman, ready to snap it open on the first drop that touched his face and defeat the rain that dared soil his clothes.
Other people saw him this way, too, as Mr. Correct or Mr. Perfect. Those who couldn’t get any bank money from him called him Mr. Scrooge, but everyone would agree that he lived strictly according to his rules.
“Your husband moves like a Swiss timepiece,” Mrs. Taylor, our closest neighbor, told my mother once. She was fifteen years older than my mother and had thinning gray hair. In the sunlight she looked bald. Her face had become a dried prune, but her eyes still had a youthful glint, especially when she was being a little playful. “I’d bet my last penny that he takes the same number of steps to work every morning, maybe even the same number of breaths.”