The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

I close the door behind me and walk up to him, pulling the shawl around myself. I stare my father in the face.

I don’t spend much time with Papa. Mother shoos us away from him so that we don’t irritate his nerves. That’s how she puts it, anyway—Papa has a bilious constitution, and we’re not to upset him. When we were small, we weren’t permitted under any circumstances to make noise while Papa was home. I don’t know that he’s really cut out for politics. His opinions are changeable, and he tires easily. But it’s been Mother’s plan for him for as long as I can remember.

“Papa,” I say.

“You’re not dressed,” he remarks.

“I don’t care about that!” I exclaim, stamping my bare foot.

There’s a falseness to my parents’ propriety that exhausts me. A refusal to acknowledge the encroachment of reality. To look at him you’d think my father never dove into the river off the docks as a boy, never bought hot corn and favors from those high-yellow girls in the alleys. You’d think my mother never wrung chicken necks on a farm in Connecticut. Who do they think they’re fooling?

A shadow crosses my father’s face.

“You’d best care about it,” he says, tossing down his newspaper. “Today’s an important day. We’re due on the dais after the corporation dinner at the governor’s house. And then the barge tonight.”

“I know that. Are you going over your speech, just now?” I ask, and the words taste bitter in my mouth.

Papa gives me a funny look. “Yes,” he says slowly.

I step nearer. “Going to tell all the people of New-York how wonderful the canal will be?” I prod him.

“Why, yes,” he says. He looks nervous. His eyes shift left and right, as if grasping for a means of escape from his wild-eyed daughter.

“Will it be wonderful, Papa? Will it bring us all into the modern age?” I ask, my lip curling.

“You know it will,” he says.

“We’ll be able to go into the wilderness in days instead of weeks. Take that rich land that should belong to us, instead of a few naked savages. Furs! Land! Grain! The whole of the west unfurling at our feet like a rich carpet, just waiting to be plundered!”

“Yes!” my father cries, slamming his fist onto the table. “Just so! Yes! It’d be madness to want it otherwise!”

“Tell me, Papa,” I whisper, stepping nearer.

My father looks actually afraid. I’ve never made either of my parents afraid before, and the sensation is both sickening and exhilarating. My mouth draws into a wolfish smile. I lean close to his ear, and whisper, “Tell me why someone put the word SLAVEMONGER on our door.”

My father flings aside his newspaper and stalks to the tall window that looks out on the hubbub of Hudson Square. There’s no space between street and housefront to speak of, no pretense at sidewalk, and carriages and carts rattle by close enough for my father to touch, if he weren’t imprisoned by the panes of glass. In the window I see his sallow face reflected, a wasted shell of the man he used to be. Or the man I used to imagine he was.

“I . . .” He falters, not meeting my gaze in the reflection. “I don’t know.”

“You’re lying,” I marvel.

It’s not even the gentle lie of elision that adults are in the habit of inflicting on their children. Those lies I’m used to. I even echo them myself, sometimes, especially when talking to Ed, who is still after all very small. This is a lie of the bald-faced type. A lie with no honor.

My father’s shoulders sag. “Annatje,” he starts to say.

“Annie,” I correct him. I want none of his Dutch pretense anymore.

He turns and faces me, looking wan and desperate. “I don’t suppose I can expect you to understand,” he says.

“What won’t I understand?” I ask.