That’s what I loved about my father. He knew a lot about how the world worked, even without me having to tell him. Most parents were so clueless.
“It was pretty cool,” I said. “Where to now?”
“Austria,” he said. Nothing else. He walked ahead of me, leaving me to ponder what was next.
********
A couple hours later we were gliding above the Atlantic Ocean in a Gulfstream jet, my father punching the keys on his laptop as I sat next to the window in a soft leather seat, a Diet Coke in my hand. I couldn’t remember the last time I was ever this happy.
“Sorry, I have a little bit of work to do before we get to Vienna,” he said. “I promise, no work once we’re there. We’re going to see everything.”
And we did. We landed a few hours later and were picked up in a sleek, black SUV which took us to The Ritz Carlton. We napped and then had dinner at Steirereck.
It was the most amazing meal of my short life; so many different dishes. There was hearty goulash, plates of tafelspitz (beef), all kinds of strudels, and then desserts I’d never even dreamed could exist. The menu was completely in German, but my father seemed to understand and speak it as fluently as if he were Austrian himself. He confidently ordered for us and I sat in complete admiration of my cosmopolitan father who didn’t seem to be a stranger to any place he walked into.
After my third strudel, and a glass of wine (“Being that it’s legal here for you to drink, you may have one glass,” my father had said.), I felt loosened up enough to talk more openly with my father, to ask him things I’d rarely had the chance to before.
My father was the ultimate unexplored frontier for me. I knew very little about him, other than the essentials. He was an only child, born on Long Island. He’d been the son of wealthy parents, grandparents I’d never met, and he’d gone to boarding school too, but at Groton. He’d gone to NYU for undergrad and Columbia for law school, where he’d met my mother. They’d had me a year after meeting, to the day. They never married, but they were always together, until one day my father left and didn’t come back for four years. My mother was devastated; she only knew he was alive because he sent money every month from places all over the world. She assumed it was an affair, another woman. But that was all she knew; one day he loved her, the next day he didn’t.
Something happened when I was seven that changed her, something to do with my father, but I never knew what it was. She stopped being angry with him and instead just became scared for him, for me, and terrified of the world in general. She kept me home for school, had tutors come to teach me my lessons. Part of me always assumed it was when the cancer must have started. It had made her ill, made her not think about things rationally. But that was all speculation on my part. I knew very little about her, something I realized once she was gone. It made me sad how little I knew the people who made me. Not knowing who they were meant I didn’t completely know who I was either.
But on my sixteenth birthday, at a beautiful restaurant in Vienna, I finally had my chance (and the courage) to ask my father more about himself.
“How do you know German?” I asked, as he bit into his pastry. He smiled as he chewed.
“Picked it up in college,” he said. “I’m good with languages. Have a knack for them, I suppose. And German is not so terribly different from English in many ways. Well, the basic words anyway. Here in Vienna there’s a Bavarian dialect…”
He started going on and on about language and the differences between all the different German dialects and I quickly grew bored, realizing he’d done what he always did when it came to me getting personal-he’d changed the subject.
After dinner we took a car down to the famous Vienna State Opera House to watch the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, which I knew I should be stoked about, but it meant I wouldn’t get to talk to my father, which was the only thing I was interested in doing. I knew after this trip I probably wouldn’t see him for a while, so I wanted to take advantage of all the time we had.
That night when we finally got home, we were both too exhausted to socialize. We retired to our rooms, but not before my Dad came over to give me a peck on the cheek and a long hug goodnight.
“Camilla, I’m so happy,” he said, as he squeezed me tight. “This was one of the best days of my life.”
My heart swelled and my prior agitations were forgotten immediately.
“Me too, Dad,” I said. “I love you. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, my darling girl,” he said. “I love you always.”
********
The next morning, after a delicious breakfast in the grand living room of our suite, my father informed me we were heading to Salzburg.