“He was at a dinner meeting with some of his associates at the investment bank. After it had ended, one of them told him he had a special after-dinner date. They walked out together, and a stretch limousine pulled up. The man winked at your father and went to the limousine. The chauffeur opened the door, and your father saw a very attractive and expensively dressed young woman inside the limousine. At first, he didn’t recognize her, but after a few moments, he realized it was Roxy. He said she looked years older than she was and that she glared out at him with the same defiance he had seen in her face when she was only five.
“Later, he found out she was a high-priced call girl. She even had a fancy name, Fleur du Coeur, which you know means ‘Flower of the Heart.’ That’s how rich men would ask for her when they called the escort service.
“Mon dieu, mon dieu! It broke my heart to hear all of that, but I didn’t cry in front of him.”
Even now, talking about it brought tears to her eyes, however.
My mother told me more about Roxy after my father had passed away. I was devastated by my father’s death, but now that he was no longer there to stop it, I wanted to hear as much as I could about my forbidden sister, the sister whose existence I could never acknowledge.
I had no trouble pretending I was an only child. Since the day Roxy had left, I was living that way anyway. My father had taken all of her pictures off the walls and shelves and dressers. He had burned most of them. Mama was able to hide a few, but anything else Roxy had left behind was dumped down the garbage chute. It was truly as if he thought he could erase all traces of her existence. He never even acknowledged her birthday. Looking at the calendar, he would do little more than blink.
He didn’t know it, but I still had a charm bracelet Roxy had given me. It had a wonderful variety of charms that included the Eiffel Tower, a fan, a pair of dancing shoes, and a dream catcher. My mother’s brother had given it to her when my parents and she were in France visiting, and she gave it to me. I never wore it in front of my father for fear that he would seize it and throw it away, too.
Of course, I could never mention her name in front of my father when he was alive, and I didn’t dare ask him any questions about her. My mother was the one who told me almost all I knew about Roxy after she had left. She said that once my father had seen Roxy in the limousine, he had tried to learn more about her, despite himself. He found out that she lived in a fancy hotel on the East Side, the Hotel Beaux-Arts. I had overheard them talking about it. The Beaux-Arts was small but very expensive. Most of the rooms were suites and some were full apartments. My mother said that my father was impressed with how expensive it was.
“The way he spoke about her back then made me think that he was impressed with how much money she was making. Before I could even think he had softened his attitude about her, he added that she was nothing more than a high-priced prostitute,” she said.
She didn’t want to tell me all of this, but it was as if it had all been boiling inside her and she finally had the chance to get it out. I knew that she went off afterward to cry in private. I was conflicted about asking her questions because I saw how painful it was for her to tell these things to me. I rarely heard my parents speak about Roxy, and I knew I couldn’t ask my mother any questions about her in front of Papa. If I did ask when he wasn’t home, my mother would avoid answering or answer quickly, as if she expected the very walls would betray her and whisper to my father.
However, the questions were there like weeds, undaunted, invulnerable, and as defiant as Roxy.
What did she look like now?
What was her life really like?
Was she happy? Did she have everything she wanted?
Was she sad about losing her family?
Mostly, I wanted to know if she ever thought about me. It suddenly occurred to me one day that Roxy might have believed that my father risked my mother’s life to have me just so he could ignore her. He was that disgusted with her. Surely, if Roxy thought that, she could have come to hate me.
Did she still hate me?
The answers were out there, just waiting for me. They taunted me and haunted me.
I had no doubt, however, that I would eventually get to know them.
What I wondered was, would I be sorry when I did get to know them?
Would they change my life?
And maybe most important of all, would I hate my sister as much as my father had?
1
My father was always the first to rise in the morning, even on weekends. He was never quiet about it, either. All three bedrooms in our town house just off Madison Avenue on East 81st Street in New York were upstairs. It was a relatively new building in the neighborhood, and Papa often complained about the workmanship and how the builders had cut corners to make more money. He said the older structures on the street were far more solid, even though ours cost more. Our walls were thinner, as were the framing and the floors.
Consequently, I could hear him close drawers, start his shower, close cabinets, and even talk to Mama, especially if their bedroom door was open. The cacophony of sounds he made was his rendition of Army reveille. Of course, being the son of an Army general, he actually had heard it most of his young life. His family had often lived that close to the barracks, depending on where his father had been stationed, especially when they were overseas. When I commented about it once, Mama said the volume of the noise he made after he got up in the morning was a holdover from the days when Roxy lived with us. Her bedroom was on the other side of theirs. She would never wake up for school on her own, so Papa would be sure to make all this noise to get her up much earlier than was necessary. No matter what Mama said, he was stubborn about it. Maybe Roxy had inherited that obstinacy from him. Who could be more inflexible when he had made up his mind than my father?
Even though he basically had defied his own father’s wishes and chosen a business career rather than a military one as his older brother, Orman, had, Papa still believed in military discipline. Disobeying an order in our house could lead to the equivalent of being court-martialed. At least, that was how it felt to me, and I’m sure it had felt that way to Roxy, especially when he told her to leave the house. To her it must have been like a dishonorable discharge. Perhaps, despite what Papa said, she had felt some shame. I imagined she would have, even though I couldn’t remember her that well anymore. After all, it was now a little more than nine years since I had last seen her or heard her voice.
I often wondered if she had seen me and secretly watched me growing up. During these years, did she hide somewhere nearby and wait
for a glimpse of either my mother or me? One of the first things I used to do when I stepped out, and often still do, was to look across the street, searching for someone Roxy’s age standing behind a car or off to the side of a building, watching for any sight of us. Even if I didn’t see her, I couldn’t help but wonder if she followed me to school.
Sometimes I would pretend she was, and I would stop suddenly and turn to catch her. People behind me would look annoyed or frightened. Whenever I walked in the city, whether to school or to the store or just to meet friends, I would scan the faces of any young woman who would be about Roxy’s age. I often studied some young woman’s face so hard she flashed anger back at me, and I quickly looked away and sped up.
One of the first things my parents had taught me about walking the streets of New York was never to make too much eye contact with strangers. I supposed Roxy would be like a complete stranger to me now. I even had trouble recalling the sound of her voice, but I did sneak looks at the pictures of her that Mama had hidden every chance I had.