“Come on now, you’re too big a girl to cry.”
“Don’t. Don’t go,” she said.
But she knew he would and that her search must begin again. She would see his face in crowds of strangers; she would catch a glimpse of him passing in a speeding car or walking into an elevator just before the door closed.
She tried to hold on to his arm. He said quickly, “Good-bye, Daisy,” and started across the room.
“Daddy...”
“Don’t call me Daddy anymore. That’s over. That’s gone.”
“Wait a minute, Fielding,” Pinata said. “Off the record, what did Camilla say or do to you that made you furious enough to knife him?”
Fielding didn’t reply. He just turned and looked at his former wife with a terrible hatred. Then he walked out of the house. The slam of the door behind him was as final as the closing of a crypt.
“Why?” Daisy said. “Why?” The melancholy little whisper seemed to echo around the room in search of an answer. “Why did it have to happen, Mother?”
Mrs. Fielding sat, mute and rigid, a snow statue awaiting the first ominous rays of the sun.
“You’ve got to answer me, Mother.”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“Now.”
“All right.”
With a sigh of reluctance Mrs. Fielding stood up. She was holding in her hand something she’d taken unobtrusively from her pocket. It was an envelope, yellowed by age and wrinkled as if it had been dragged in and out of dozens of pockets and drawers and corners and handbags. “This came for you a long time ago, Daisy. I never thought I’d have to give it to you. It’s a letter from — from your father.”
“Why did you keep it from me?”
“Your father makes that quite clear.”
“Then you’ve read it?”
“Read it?” Mrs. Fielding repeated wearily. “A hundred times, two hundred — I lost count.”
Daisy took the envelope. Her name and the old address on Laurel Street were printed in a shaky and unfamiliar hand. The postmark said, “San Félice, December 1, 1955.”
As Pinata watched her unfold the letter, the malevolent chant from his childhood kept running through his head: Cholo, cholo, grease your bolo. He hoped that his own children would never have to hear it and remember. His children and Daisy’s.
21
My beloved Daisy:
It has been so many years since I have seen you. Perhaps, at this hour that is very late for me, I should not step back into your life. But I cannot help it. My blood runs in your veins. When I die, part of me will still be alive, in you, in your children, in your children’s children. It is a thought that takes some of the ugliness out of these cruel years, some of the sting out of the tricks of time.
This letter may never reach you, Daisy. If it doesn’t, I will know why. Your mother has vowed to keep us apart at any cost because she is ashamed of me. Right from the beginning she has been ashamed, not only of me but of herself too. Even when she talked of love, her voice had a bitterness in it, as if the relationship between us was the result of a physical defect she couldn’t help, a weakness of the body which her mind despised. But there was love, Daisy. You are proof there was love.
Memories are crowding in on me so hard and fast that I can barely breathe. I wish they were good memories, that like other men I could sit back in the security of my family and review the past kindly. But I cannot. I am alone, surrounded by strangers in a strange place. The hotel guests are looking at me queerly while I write this, as if they are wondering what a tramp like me is doing in their lobby where I don’t belong, writing to a daughter who has never really belonged to me. Your mother kept her vow, Daisy. We are still apart, you and I. She has hidden her shame because she cannot bear it the way we weaker and humbler ones can and must and do.
Shame — it is my daily bread. No wonder the flesh is falling off my bones. I have nothing to live for. Yet, as I move through the days, shackled to this dying body, I yearn to step free of it long enough to see you again, you and Ada, my beloved ones still. I came here to see you, but I lack the courage. That is why I am writing, to feel in touch with you for a little, to remind myself that my death will be only partial; you will be left, you will be the proof that I ever lived at all. I leave nothing else.
Memories — how she cried before you were born, day in, day out, until I wished there were a way of using all those tears to irrigate the dry, dusty rangeland. Dust and tears, these are what I remember most about the day of your birth, your mother’s weeping, and the dust sifting in through locked windows and bolted doors and the closed draft of the chimney. And at the very last moment before you were born, she said to me when we were alone, “What if the baby is like you. Oh God, help us, my baby and me.” Her baby, not mine.
Right from the first she kept you away from me. To protect you. I had germs, she said; I was dirty from working with cattle. I washed and washed, my shoulders ached pumping water from the drying wells, but I was always dirty. She had to safeguard her baby, she said. Her baby, never mine.
I couldn’t protest, I couldn’t even speak of it out loud to anyone, but I must tell you now before I die. I must claim you, though I swore to her I never would, as my daughter. I die in the hope and trust that your mother will bring you to visit my grave. May God bless you, Daisy, and your children, and your children’s children.