he ever had stood whenever he had forbidden us from doing something. Maybe he saw himself in me, in the determination fixed in my eyes, and that told him he wouldn’t win the argument today, no matter what.
“Burn what you want,” I said. “I’m going to do what I’m meant to do, Daddy, with your blessing or without.”
“It’s without!” he screamed behind me when I opened the door.
I gazed back at him. He looked made of stone. I would never deny that I was afraid. I had never defied him as much as this, and I was about to set out alone for a world in which I didn’t know a soul. Julia was right about that. For a girl from a small city in England who had never even been to London except only on a school trip to see a West End show, this was the same as being rocketed into outer space.
In my purse I had pictures of my mother, my sister, and my father. I had the gold locket they had given me on my sixteenth birthday. I had my birth certificate, my passport that my father never knew I had, and a little more than three and a half thousand pounds that I would exchange for United States dollars at the airport currency kiosk. I had packed a fraction of my wardrobe in my one suitcase, thinking most of my clothes were not really suited for an entertainer in New York City.
I had called for a taxi to the airport, and the car was there at the curb waiting for me. Even at this moment, I couldn’t believe I was really doing it. But I was.
I looked back into the house.
“I love you, Daddy,” I said, and closed the door behind me before he could reply.
It was the last thing I would ever say to him.
And he had said his last words to me, words that would reverberate over thousands of miles and haunt me all the days of my life.
ONE
When I was a little girl, in the late afternoon or early evening right after the sun set—or what my father referred to as “the gold coin slipping down a slippery sky to float in darkness until morning”—I would edge open the window in the bedroom that I shared with Julia. No matter what the temperature outside, I would crouch to put my ear close to the opening so that I could hear the tinkle of the piano in the Three Bears, a pub down our street in Guildford. During the colder months, when Julia came in, she would scream at me for putting a chill in the room, but she would never tell our father because she knew he likely would take a strap to me for wasting heat and costing us money. Like his father and his father before him, he believed “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”
In our house money was the real monarch. Everything in one way or another was measured and judged in terms of it. We could easily substitute “Long live our savings account” in our royal anthem for “Long live our noble queen.” I suppose that was only natural and expected: my father was a banker in charge of personal and business loans. He often told us he had to look at people in a cold, hard way and usually tell them that they didn’t qualify because they didn’t have the collateral. He didn’t sugarcoat it, either. He made sure they left feeling like they had cost the bank money just by coming there to seek a loan, for he also believed that “Time is money.” He called those whom he rejected—who had convinced themselves they could be granted credit despite the realities of their situation—“dreamers.” And he wasn’t fond of dreamers.
“They don’t have their feet squarely on the ground,” he would say. “They bounce and float like loose balloons tossed here and there at the mercy of a mischievous wind.”
Sometimes, when I looked at people passing by our house, I imagined them being bounced about like that, and in my mind I would tell them not to go to see my father for financial assistance, to go to another bank. My father was so stern-looking at times that I was afraid to confess I had experienced a dream when sleeping. He might point his thick right forefinger at me and say, “You’re doomed to be a balloon.”