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.
Not all his threats and tantrums could send her back to school, however. There was a ghost lurking there that Laura could never face, that Landon knew nothing about. He was forced to let her stay at home, but he committed her to journalism at once, and made her work on his paper with one of his assistants.
Even Laura was surprised when she was able to resist him about returning to school. She wouldn’t have thought she could stick it out. Especially when he roared at her, “Why? Why! Why! Why! Answer me, you stubborn little bitch!” And smashed an ashtray at her feet.
She did not, could not, tell him why. It took all her courage to admit it even to herself. She simply said, “I won’t go back, Father.”
“Why!”
“I won’t.”
“Why?” It was menacing this time.
“I won’t go back.”
In the end he swore at her and hurt her with the same ugly irrelevant argument he always used when she resisted him. “You know why you’re alive today, don’t you? Because I saved you! I dragged you out of the water and let your mother drown. And your brother. I could only save one, and it was you I saved! God, what a mistake. My son. My wife!” And he would turn away, groaning.
“You weren’t trying to save me, Father,” she said once.
“You just grabbed the nearest one and swam for shore. You screamed at Mother to save Rod and then you dragged me to shore. It’s a miracle you saved even me. You see, I remember it too. I remember it very well.”
He turned a pale furious face to her. “You dare to tell me what you remember! You silly little white-faced girl? You don’t remember anything? Don’t tell me what you remember!”
So she chose a night when he was out and left him without a word, at the start of an unfriendly January, and came to New York. Her first thought was to try to get work on one of the giant dailies. With her experience, surely they could find something for her. But then she realized her father was too well
