I am a woman

Tell your father to go to hell. Try it. It’s a rotten hard thing to do, even if he deserves it. Merrill Landon did. He was an out-and-out bastard, but like most of the breed, he didn’t know it. He said he was a good father: sensible, firm, and just. He said everything he did was for Laura’s own good. He took her opposition for a sign that he was right, and the more she opposed him, the righter he swore he was.

But he was a bastard. Laura could have told you that. But she couldn’t tell him, because he was her father. That was why she ran out on him. Left him high, dry, and sputtering in his plush Chicago apartment with only his job to console him. And never told him where she went. Never told him why.

Never told him of the angry agony of her nights, spent torching for a love gone wrong. Never mentioned his straight-laced bitter version of fatherly affection that hurt her more than his fits of temper. He never kissed her. He never touched her. He only told her, “No, Laura,” and “You’re wrong, as usual,” and “Can’t you do it right for once?”

She had taken it all her life, but it was the worst the year after she left school. It was a year of confinement in luxury, of tightly controlled resentment, of soul-searching. And one rainy night when he was out at a press dinner, she packed a small bag and went to Union Station. She bought a ticket to New York City. She could never be free from herself, but she could be free from her father, and at the moment that mattered the most.

So she rode out of the big city, wet and cold with its January gloss, and left behind Merrill Landon, her father. The man in her life. The only man in her life. The only man she ever seriously tried to love.

All she wanted from New York was a job, a place to live, a friend or two. As long as she won them herself, without her father’s help, she would be happy. Much happier than when she had been surrounded with comfortable leather chairs, sheathed in sleek fine clothes, smelling like an expensive rose.

In school Laura had studied journalism. She did it to avoid a showdown with Merrill Landon. He had always taken it for granted that she would follow his profession, just as if she were a doting son anxious to imitate a successful father. She accepted his tyranny quietly, but with a corrosive resentment that he was unaware of. There were times when she hated him so actively for making a slave of her that he saw it and said, “Laura, for Chrissake, don’t pout at me! Snap out of it. Act your age.”

Laura was more afraid of loving Landon than leaving him. She was afraid the yearning in her would flare someday when he gave her one of his rare smiles. When he said, “Klein says you’re learning fast. Good girl.” And her knees went weak. But he saved her by quickly adding with embarrassed sarcasm, “But you messed up the water tower assignment. Jesus, I can never count on you, can I?”

When things became intolerable she left him at last with no showdown at all. She had considered going in to tell him about it. Walking into the library where he was working, where she was expressly forbidden to go in the evenings, and saying, “Father, I’m leaving you. I’m going to New York. I can’t stand it here anymore.”

He would have been brilliantly sarcastic. He would have described her to herself in terms so exaggerated that she would see herself as a grotesque mistake of nature, a freak in a fun-house mirror. He was not above such abuse. He had done it to her a few times before. Once, when she was very young and hadn’t learned to tiptoe around his temper yet, and once when she quit school.