A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries Read Online Free PDF Page B

parents to punish you as they see fit.”
    Tears fell from my eyes, but I refused to grimace. I stood frozen before Madame Beauvier, who was slowly shaking her head.
    “I’m sorry,” she said simply. “Go back to your class and finish the day.”

    The rain stopped as I was crossing the bridge to the Île Saint-Louis. I was not nearly cold or wet enough. My father would not feel sorry for me. I stood in a puddle at the end of the bridge and stared down at my reflection. The white blouse wriggled into the blue blazer and gray skirt. Would he beat me? He had never beaten me, although he sometimes threatened, making a fist and shaking it in the air, “I’m going to beat you to a pulp!”
    Maybe I could tell him I’d been hit by a car. He would not believe me. Where could I go? With a sense of utter doom, I crossed the quai and headed down Rue des Deux Ponts toward my house.
    I tiptoed up the back stairwell, past the first floor, because my nanny would be waiting for me there and she’d have made me change my clothes before going to him. I climbed the three creaking, splintered flights of stairs in the dark. The cartable thumped quietly on every step as I dragged it up by the strap.
    My father spent every day up in his study away from the rest of the house, writing long, important books. There had been two already, before I was born. Now he was writing Number Four. It had to be terribly important, because no one was allowed up in his office except for emergencies. Once when Billy and I had been cleaning the fishbowl, one of the fish went down the sink. Billy flew up the three flights to the office screaming, “DADDY! DADDY! THE FISH! CHANNE! THE FISH!” And our father had come charging down the stairs like a lightning bolt. He’d thought I’d swallowed a fish bone. With tweezers he pulled the fish out of the drain and saved its life. Now it had a tear in its tail and was our favorite. I wished that this emergency were more like the one with the fish.
    I tapped softly on the office door with my knuckles. I waited a few minutes and he did not come. I turned away and felt for the stairs, sliding my foot in the dark. Maybe, I thought, I could have an accident by falling down the stairs? But the deep black stairwell frightened me. I was going to get it one way or the other, no matter what, and my father, I decided, would certainly not kill me although falling down the stairs might. Turning back, I kicked the door with the toe of my shoe. I heard his footsteps and then I heard my heart pounding in my head. He opened the door. The smell of his office wafted out from behind him; all his odors seemed to conglomerate here into one strong, alien, and not very fatherly smell. I recognized pipe smoke, old black coffee, fresh shaving soap and aftershave, the light metallic grease of his exercise and office machines, and his strange, acrid sweat.
    “Hello, you,” he said in a gruff voice. I looked up and saw deep wrinkles in his forehead. His eyebrows came together over his nose so that they looked like one curly salt-and-pepper moustache. He had a chin that stuck out like Popeye’s, which usually made me smile, but today his lips were pressed into a thin angry line.
    “Come on in here and sit down. We have to have a serious talk.”
    I couldn’t move. “Come on,” he said, “take off your jacket and sit.” He walked away from the door. My face was burning up and I could not look up from the floor.
    “You’re all wet. Take off your shoes.” He turned back and put his hand on my shoulder, leading me toward the radiator below the window. He crouched before me, tugged at my shoes, and placed them on the windowsill. I lifted my skirt and spread it out in a circle around me as I sat down. The chair came from the Village Suisse and was an antique with a peach-colored velvet seat. He cleared his throat.
    “Madame Beauvier called me today.”
    “I know,” I mumbled. “She told me when I was in her office.”
    “You did a