Free Our Father by Marilyn French Page B

feeling the way I so often felt in those years. Same hate and jealousy even without Father around to put us in our place, terrify us. Your mother does not educate you socially, Elizabeth, but of course how could she, shanty-Irish that she is. Uptons do not use salad forks for their fish or fish forks for their meat; they do not chew with mouths open, drink until they have finished chewing, pick up a dropped napkin, blow their noses at the dinner table, speak about personal matters in front of servants, make requests of servants who expect to receive orders, hold a piece of bread in the palm of their hand while they butter it, eat with their forearm upon the table, slurp soup. They do not show themselves outside their rooms in their dressing gowns or attend to personal hygiene in public; no Upton woman would ever think of combing her hair or refreshing her lipstick in a public place, much less try to fix a flaw like a hanging slip in the front hall of the house as I saw you doing last week! Uptons avoid slang and Upton women never never never use words like “damn” or “shit” and I don’t want to hear them cross your lips again young woman.
    Another age. Gone but not lamented.
    Upton women are gracious, they defer to men at all times, they remember their lineage. Your ancestors were ministers, one the greatest preacher of his day, held the Colony in the palm of his hand. Your great-great-grandfather was governor of this state, your great-grandfather was majority leader of the Senate, your father, miss, is more powerful than the secretary of state. …
    Men in limousines came and went, all superimportant. Whispers and Secret Service men. Library door closed for hours, the butler—we had a butler then, I’d forgotten—knocking with his white-gloved hands, carrying in trays of booze, a Secret Service man sitting on a hard chair in the hall. Another outside the French door to the garden, sitting in the hot sun on a folding chair. But I eavesdropped from the toilet off the playroom. Mary never found that out—not interested, probably. Long arguments for or against bombing railroad lines leading to some camps or other, must have been the Holocaust. Father against it, he carried the day. Was it after the end of World War II that I heard Father argue that we should drop an atomic bomb on the Soviet Union? Me maybe fourteen, fifteen. He was yelling that Bertrand Russell and John von Neumann were both urging preventive nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union. Goddamn Reds have nuclear weapons, Father growled. Better to get rid of the commies before they corrupted the whole goddamned world. Commies powerful in Germany before Hitler, could arise again. Strong movement in China. Did they want to see that here?
    Made sense I suppose. Look what’s happened. Soviets, Eastern bloc, China, Africa, spreading to Central America, South America if we hadn’t got rid of Allende. …
    Still, that seemed a drastic step. …
    I wonder if he supported Hitler. In 1939, say, or earlier.
    Later Russell turned into a Red himself. Father hated him. And I heard that when von Neumann was dying, he spent his nights screaming in uncontrollable terror.
    What goes around comes around.
    That’s all over now, everything over now. Father’s dying, and the CIA reports I’ve seen show the Soviet Union collapsing from the inside. We’ve won. I suppose I should include myself on the winning side. Capitalism has won. Still there are things I don’t agree with, things I can’t seem to work into the theory, things Clare never dealt with, did he think about them? I need him now, I need him to talk to.
    I don’t know why I’m so … Father isn’t here and his demands aren’t important anymore are they. Only Mary’s here and Alex. The way it was most summers, Father down in Washington, Mary here, then Alex, little towhead. Sends my mind back, not my mind, my mood, feel childlike somehow, as if all the years I’ve lived since are part of a movie and