By the Light of My Father's Smile Read Online Free PDF Page B

did.
    After the beating she was warm to me and cool to him for several weeks. Then, it simply evened out again. The temperature in our house—the roomy, boxy one with the lawn, in Sag Harbor—became normal. He moved, finally, into the big bedroom where she slept alone at night. Sounds came from that room, voices, late into the night. Within a month, or less, my father loved my mother back to himself.
    But something had happened to precious little Susannah at the keyhole. It was as if she’d peered into our simple, girlish bedroom through the keyhole and witnessed her gentle, compassionate father turn into Godzilla. She would never be loved back to her daddy again. With time, as I understood how severely the twig was bent in that moment of her horror and disbelief, my revenge against my father, a revenge so subtle Susannah would not realize its damage to her for another thirty years, was born. As for my father, he would never again be permitted to really know or enjoy his favorite little tree.

Twins
    Susannah is writing a novel that explores the relationship she had with a man after her marriage to the Greek. But she is having difficulties. She cannot write in any sex.
Write it in
, I screech from the celestial sidelines.
Put the sex right on up in there!
Even if it’s nothing but the copulating dogs you saw from your window as a five-year-old when we lived in Mexico: you thought they were twins, that being hooked together in that way was what being twins meant. Your mother and I laughed, and I remember thinking that even your little mind was cute. Or think of the giraffes you saw doing it years later in Africa, their long necks like chimneys. You stared, and started to fan yourself. Your lover smiled to himself. That night he shocked and stirred you, when he entered you from behind. It is not so big a deal! I want her to know. As I see her, crippled in a place that should be free, and still, after all these years, perplexed by the memory of her sister’s stubborn face and the sound of the whistling silver belt. And my own face, what did she read there, what message about the consequences of a searing passion, ecstatic sex?

Ritual
    If a man has not committed too grave a crime it is not impossible to love himself back into his wife’s arms. It is even easy to do this, if she is sick, weary, or weak in some way. Langley, when we left the mountains, was all of these things. My behavior with our daughters exasperated her. My assumption that Susannah was pure and Magdalena a tramp. She had left the home and social circle that she knew in Long Island to follow our shared anthropological star to Mexico. There she had dutifully masqueraded as a pastor’s wife. And even gaily lived in sin, after I elevated myself to priest. She had, being Langley, gone beyond this role to become a sunny and welcomed force among the village women, making friends she cherished and busily writing down every aspect of their ways.
    Her sacrifice was in the isolation she endured, far from her family and friends; the absence of a daily newspaper, the
Times
; the remoteness of our splendid wilderness in the thin air that we loved.
    My own remorse for having struck the child was great. In the solitude of my ostracism, an estrangement from all my girls,Langley as well as June and Susannah, I contemplated my error. I could find no justification for it. Yes, the child was willful, disobedient. She was born that way. The idea that a child comes into the world a clean slate is a ridiculous one. When she was two and we tried out the notion of shoes on her feet, she rebelled. At five she said a final no, thank you, to oatmeal. At six she wanted a zipper at the front of her pants just like I had. And then the red zippered pants Langley had found for her caused offense. In her child’s mind—but after how many previous lifetimes as a discriminating being! my friends the Mundo shamans might say—they did not seem serious enough.