“This is going to sound terrible,” my dad’s voice begins. “But I was even more surprised to hear that Madison got past the gates.” A chuckle. “Frankly, I was dumbfounded.”
My own father thinks I ought to be in Hell.
Stranger yet, I suspect that Babette can see me. I’m certain she can.
Quickly, dryly, my dad adds, “I could imagine Madison getting into Harvard… but Heaven?”
“But she’s there now,” says Babette, even as she sees me here, trapped on Earth, hovering within an arm’s length of their adulterous postcoital dialogue. “Madison spoke to you from Heaven, didn’t she?”
“Don’t misunderstand me,” my dad says. “I loved Maddy as much as any parent ever loved a child.” His silent pause here is long and infuriating. “The truth is that my baby girl had her shortcomings.”
As if making a token effort to resolve the topic, Babette says, “This must be painful for you to admit.”
“The truth is,” says my dad, “my Maddy was a little coward.”
Babette gasps in theatrical shock. “Don’t say that!”
“But Madison was,” insists my dad, his voice exhausted, resigned. “Everyone saw it. She was a spineless, gutless, weak little coward.”
Babette smirks up at me, saying, “Not Maddy! Not spineless!”
“Those were the empirical findings of our entire team of behavioral experts,” my dad’s voice affirms dismally. Downhearted. “She hid behind a defensive mask of false superiority.”
The statement roils in the cramping bowels of my brain. My ears gag on the words team and findings.
“Those eyes of hers watched everything and they judged everything,” my father declares, “especially her mother and me. Madison decried every dream, but she never had the courage or strength of convictions to pursue any vision of her own.” As if laying down his sad trump card he adds, “Nothing led us to believe poor Maddy ever had a single friend….”
That, Gentle Tweeter, is an untruth. Babette was my friend. Not that she’s such a great endorsement of friendship.
Too quickly, too gently, Babette says, “We don’t have to discuss this, Tony.”
And too fervently, my dad responds, “But I do.” His voice simultaneously righteous and defeated, he says, “Leonard warned us. Decades ago. Long before she was born, Leonard said Maddy would be very difficult to love.”
Narrowing her eyes, grinning up at me, Babette prompts, “Leonard? The telemarketer?”
With an almost audible shaking of his head, my father says, “Okay, he was a telemarketer, but he made us rich. He warned us that Madison would pretend to have friends.” My dad laughs quietly. He sighs. “Over one winter break Madison spent the school holiday entirely alone….”
Oh, for the love of Susan Sarandon, I can’t be hearing this! My ghost brains bloat and ache, stretching, painfully, the swollen belly of my memory.
“She told her mother and me that she was spending the holidays with friends in Crete,” he continues. “And for the next three weeks, she did nothing but eat ice cream and read trashy novels.”
Gentle Tweeter, fie! Ye gods! Forever Amber is not a trashy novel. Neither am I weak and a coward.