Mother East, Daughter West

By John Livingston

Twenty-year-old Monique has grown up in Boston, the daughter of a Lebanese mother and an American father who never wanted her. Now after being absent for nearly her entire life, Dennis is traveling from the Middle East to visit his wife, Marcelle, and Monica. But returning to his family will not be as easy as he thinks. Monique, a virgin who has witnessed her mother clinging to a dead marriage for years, resents him.

As Monique learns secrets from her fathers past and attempts to move past her bitterness, Dennis makes an effort to heal their relationship by taking her to New York, Washington, and then on a luxurious Italian ship to several international destinations that include Barcelona, Marseilles, and Venice. But when an unexpected bombshell occurs between father and daughter just before they arrive in war-torn Lebanon, everything changes as a chain of events leads the family in a new direction where it becomes exceedingly difficult to distinguish between obsession and love and nothing is certain, especially life.

Mother East, Daughter West shares the tale of a tumultuous relationship between an American father and his half-Lebanese daughter as their lives intersect after twenty years apart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 24, 2016
• ISBN: 9781532005404

John Livingston

John Livingston earned his BS at MIT and his PhD at Princeton University. He is currently a professor of Islamic History and Civilization and Modern Middle East History at William Paterson University. Dr. Livingston currently resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Love on the Wings of War is his fourth book.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Marcelle was at first overjoyed. She hadn’t seen her husband in nearly twenty long years. What she had hoped and prayed for all that time was about to be fulfilled. God had answered her prayers.

When the joy and excitement had settled and the dreamy fog of blissful romance had dissipated and she realized that the past was coming back, the sober reality, she sat down and reread the postcard. It was a colored picture of central Beirut before the civil war had broken out. The picture brought back memories. Marcelle’s eyes watered. Martyrs Square was now destroyed. The so-called Green Line ran through it. They had had wild, wonderful adventures there. The Kit Kat Casino, the Normandy Hotel, Lucullus, l’Elefant Noir, les Caves du Rois.

She sighed and read it again, turned it over, and stared at the colorful picture. So many heartaches—dreams of love and youth had been crushed, as much in ruins as her city was now. Be careful what you pray for, she thought to herself.

She wasn’t sure anymore.

She climbed the stairs to her bedroom, where, sitting on the edge of the bed, she held the postcard in her hand. A quiver of a smile played at the corners of her mouth as she picked up the faded, gold-framed, black-and-white wedding photograph from her dressing table. She and Dennis were standing on the steps of her village church in the mountains. She was in a long white gown, he in a black suit and bow tie. He had been twenty-two but looked even younger than her eighteen. What would he look like now? She looked at herself in the dresser mirror: a woman approaching forty, hair beginning to gray, the curves of youth filling in. They said men aged slower than women.

She examined the wedding photo more closely. He had a slight smile on his young face, one that could have been of nervousness, fright. It wasn’t the smile of someone just happily married. She could now understand how it had all happened. He had been alone in Lebanon, no family, no friends, in a strange country, a young engineer—still a boy, really—on a short vacation from the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, full of romantic dreams after a year in the desert without seeing a woman. He landed in Beirut, city of sin and beautiful girls. Neither of them knew anything about life. They lived in the clouds.

She smiled wistfully and shook her head at the bittersweet memory. The passion, the pain and suffering. The wild adventures. It had not been all bad. It had been exciting, adventurous. It had made her a woman and a mother. It had given her Monique—the baby her father hadn’t wanted.

Marcelle returned the marriage photo to its place and gazed at Monique’s high school graduation picture that was next to it. The baby was now a beautiful young woman with a year left before graduating from university. Marcelle had devoted her life to raising her to become the woman Dennis had wanted his wife to be: poised, intelligent, independent, musically inclined, and in the same degree modest, traditional, loving—everything all in one. The impossibly perfect woman. He was so young. He hadn’t grown out of his boyish idealism. A romantic lost in a foreign land. She had been even younger and equally naive. She worshipped him. She had never doubted he was living perfection. A simple, innocent village girl with a high school education, she had done her best to achieve the impossible but could never satisfy him.

Monique was far from perfect, but Marcelle was pleased with the result. She had created something Dennis would be proud of. She was sure he would be. Through Monique she had made up for the past. Some of it. There was so much to make up for, so terribly much. Marcelle tenderly stroked the glass surface over her daughter’s photograph and replaced it next to the marriage photo, and as she did so, a chill ran through her. The past was coming back to stand her in judgment. Her good work was to be tested. She knew in her heart that there was no making up for the past. The past had to be suffered. Whatever Dennis thought of Monique, the baby he hadn’t seen in twenty years, however much he might come to love his daughter, Marcelle could never forgive herself. The past was locked in an iron cage in her breast, and the cage was filled with heart-eating vampires that never slept.

If it was a divorce he wanted, she would give it to him this time.

*     *      *

Monique was more than disturbed that her father was coming. She was infuriated. Her father? Who was her father? A shadow. Someone she had never seen. The man wasn’t worthy of the name. She had no father. Why, after so many years, would he bother? Why had he sent her mother and her away from Lebanon for America when she was a baby? Why hadn’t he returned to his own country? Why hadn’t he ever visited them? Why hadn’t her mother divorced and started a new life instead of wasting herself by hanging on to old memories all those years, waiting for his miraculous return, like he was a Greek Orthodox Christ or Saint George, spending his life killing dragons? Why had he abandoned them?

Monique had many questions that her mother couldn’t answer rationally. Hard, cold reason didn’t come easily to her Lebanese mother. Monique loved her mother, but when it came to rational, logically constructed discourse, her mother was a superstitious Arab woman from the Bronze Age or before. Whenever Monique questioned her about the missing father, her eyes went dreamy, her head went soft, and her words got lost in a fog of love and a woman’s duty to her husband. She would open her mouth, and out would float billowy pink-and-gold clouds of fairy-tale romance that carried her up and away into a fantasy of love, courtship, marriage, and honeymoon that never faded in its sunshine-and-roses beauty, as if a moment of mythic paradise had crystallized and come down to earth to live eternally in her heart. The fairy tales had been okay when Monique was a kid, but now they made her almost puke. She couldn’t understand how her mother could still slavishly love and remain faithful to that bastard who’d abandoned them so many years ago.

And faithful her mother had indeed remained. Of that Monique was certain. Arab women! she would exclaim with a confusion of contempt and admiration for her loving mother, whose medieval ideas irritated and amused her in turns. Arab women and their archaic fidelity. Silly ideas about love and marriage. No wonder Middle Eastern society is so backward. Why don’t they just go out and get fucked and join the human race?

Nikki!

Monique was sure there was more to the story than her mother cared to reveal, but she despaired of ever squeezing a rational explanation from the woman, so her father remained a mystery. The man sent money every month from Lebanon; paid for her music lessons; gave her a piano, a flute, university, and $1,000 on her birthday; and bought them a nice house, but he never appeared, never wrote her—just an empty card with a cashier’s check drawn on the British Bank of the Middle East in Beirut.

Who was this man? Every time her mother went on about him, Monique felt something of a mystery to herself. You are so much like your father, Nikki. He will be so proud of you.

Because I’m like him? You haven’t seen the narcissistic bastard for twenty years! How do you know what he’s like?

News of her father’s imminent arrival frightened her. The mystery was about to materialize, and she was frightened to think of what, after all these years, she might discover. A missing piece of herself? The other strand of DNA that made the biological bundle of contradictory feelings she felt herself to be, that drove her to excel, that separated her from close friendships, though all she wanted was a close friend her age, a girl friend to share secrets, urges, inexplicable feelings? She had told herself that so often that she was no longer sure if that was what she really wanted. And the physical presence of the man, her so-called father, the thought of seeing him, terrified her. What if he were a fat, bald, bug-eyed runt of a man with bad breath and teeth, a squat parody melted down from the Apollo of her mother’s fantasy? Her stomach turned at the thought.

Monique’s feelings for this unknown man about to appear were confused to the extreme. On the one hand, she hated him to the point she couldn’t call him her father, nor had she for the last several years. That man or what’s his name was how she referred to him. Once, when she was fourteen, she called him that bastard, and for the first time in her life her mother had drawn back her hand as if to strike her. Show respect for your father, who is so generous to you!

He was indeed generous. His generosity, expressed by monthly checks had given them a comfortable life. Brown University was not cheap, nor were the music teachers. But the handsome remittances failed to thaw the hard crust of her regard for her father, the ghost who had abandoned her and had caused years of sorrow for the little child, then the young girl, pining for her lost father, until the young girl matured and the lost father became an unfeeling, selfish, narcissistic bastard. It was for guilt he sent the money. Who did he think he was that he could buy her!

If you knew your father, you’d know what a wonderful man he is.

How can you say that? He abandoned us.

He had things to do, Nikki. He has done a lot.

Twenty years, and you still defend him. Wake up, Mother. Just because he was the first man to take your virginity is no reason to be a slave to his memory.

The first? He was the only! How many men can take a woman’s virginity? Let me tell you something if you haven’t learned it already. A woman’s duty is to be a virgin for her husband and be faithful afterward.

Even if he leaves you for twenty years?

Even if forever!

My mother, the Arab Penelope.

What’s wrong with being Arab as long as you’re Lebanese and Christian? Show respect for your origins.

How? I don’t know anything about my origins and I don’t think I want to. Virgin, duty, faithful. The land of darkness. You know what I think, Mother? Your so-called husband should be castrated!

"Bila adab. Go practice your flute, girl without culture. It’s time for your lesson. And remember who bought it for you."

She remembered. Every time she held the silver instrument, she remembered. It had come in the mail on her sixteenth birthday. Made in Vienna. It was a work of art. She loved it. She loved holding it, playing it. It often brought tears to her eyes. How could there be a relationship between a father and a daughter without love? Not even a letter?

*     *      *

Ever since Monique could remember, ever since she was a little girl, her mother had been telling her what a wonderful man her father was: sensitive, loving, handsome, strong, adventurous, and a man of astonishing accomplishments—engineer, historian, orientalist, traveler, writer. On and on she would go, making him a god in human form who had come down to visit Earth and sire a daughter who would share his wisdom and physical perfection. By the time Monique was nine, the stories of her godlike father had become ageless myths in her child’s mind, filling her with an awesome kind of love, the fearing love of a child for an unseen but present power of good that she was told she must love because the god-father loved her and expected the best of her. She did her best to love and please the unseen father, as her mother told and instructed her to; piano, flute, French, Arabic, books, anything her mother put her to, she did her best and did well. Her grades at school were excellent.

By her thirteenth birthday, she had wised up. Her father was a louse, and she hated him. As she had outgrown the fear and love for the unseen father whom she’d previously been sure was watching her from somewhere, her feelings hardened. The father she had once worshipped had played false. He had abandoned her. The god of clay feet had fallen. She continued to excel because by then she loved all those things that her mother had put her to. She loved them for themselves.

Fallen but not completely smashed. She could still, when looking at the wedding photograph in her mother’s room, feel a trace of her child self’s awe. Her dark-eyed Lebanese mother, young and beautiful in her white gown and long black hair, stood next to that tall, broad-shouldered Westerner staring expectantly out at the camera, a half smile on his boyishly innocent face. He was blond, blue-eyed, and strikingly handsome, an angel in an alien land, a child of the gods, and they were Adonis and Aphrodite. Her mother never tired of telling her about their springtime honeymoon splashing in the icy waters of the Adonis River in northern Lebanon, when the valley was carpeted in the bloom of bloodred poppies. It was then she had two fathers: one the beloved, mythic father-hero of childhood memory, the other the selfish, unloving bastard who’d rejected his family, rejected her. When she thought about her father now, it was with the anguish of conflicting emotions that set hate born of rejection against the simple love of a daughter nurtured by her mother to love a faraway father.

*     *      *

A nervous excitement crept upon mother and daughter as the day of Dennis’s arrival approached. Marcelle spoke more and more about him, while Monique patiently sat through her mother’s fairy-tale stories of courtship and honeymoon, just as she had as a child, but now with a cynicism appropriate to her age. Stripped of her mother’s dreamy embellishments, it was a simple story of two young people meeting on a bus, falling in love at first sight, conveying their feelings in sign language or through an interpreter—since they didn’t have a common language to communicate in—and then stupidly getting married without knowing each other and having a honeymoon that was probably pleasant enough but soon over. The reality that followed must have been too much for them, and they separated. Everyday story.

But to hear her mother tell it!

On a pink cloud. Yes, it was like that, Nikki, really, floating on a pink cloud. I remember it was the third day of our honeymoon. We were staying in a wonderful hotel in the mountain in Bhamdoun, and coming up from Beirut, it was at the curve near Aleyh where the sea came into view all of a sudden right in front of us, and the sun was shining. It was spring and very misty, and an afternoon fog was rising from the mountain valley after a light rain, and the sun hitting the misty cloud turned it all pink—you wouldn’t believe it, Nikki. It was like we were bathed in this radiant light, a heavenly pink cloud, so bright and pure, and the taxi kept going up the mountain, and it was—yes, it was a magic pink cloud, all brilliant in light, carrying us up to the top of the mountain, up to heaven. Marcelle’s eyes rose upward in smiling memory and gazed dreamily across the room as if seeing the cloud lifting from over the television set to the ceiling. She paused and lowered her eyes back to her daughter. Yes, it must sound like fantasy to you, so educated and intelligent. But it was real. I saw it. I felt it. I lived it.

Monique couldn’t hold back a cynical smile. And the Adonis River was covered in bloodred poppies, and you were Aphrodite.

There are beautiful moments in this life that are not fantasy, Nikki. But for those who know things without love, everything beautiful is fantasy. How could you understand until you’ve loved?

What I can’t understand is why you never divorced. Almost twenty years. Was it to keep the myth of your love alive? Marcelle didn’t answer. Mama, face it. He couldn’t have loved us. I came along, and he sent us packing. He didn’t want a baby any more than he wanted a wife.

He loves you, Nikki. Why do you think he sent you to that expensive private school, and now to that university? That’s the way he knows to show his love. Don’t blame him for not being like others. He is what he is.

I have no idea what he is. Your myths don’t help.

The day after you were born, he put a pencil in your little hand so you would grow up to be a great writer. You gripped onto it so hard he could hardly pull it away. It was a sign you would grow up to be everything he wanted.

Monique had heard it too often. In cynical reply, she arched her brow and rolled her eyes with an impatient sigh. Her mother was a great believer in signs. Every little thing was a sign for what was going to happen; the more unrelated the sign from the event, the surer the sign and the surer the event. The embarrassment and contempt Monique had at one time felt for her mother’s superstitions had, as Monique matured, softened into a sentimental forbearance, a fond acceptance that her mother was a precious remnant of the Bronze Age.

That’s what you’re worried about. That maybe I won’t please him. Monique fixed her eyes on her mother.

You’ll please him. He will be proud of you.

I don’t give a damn if I please him or not, she replied curtly. But in truth she did. She cared very much. It was important to her mother that she live up to expectations, and there was that little-girl awe inside her, still echoing the childhood canticles to do her best and please God the Father. I’m not a plant to grow a certain way just because you watered and fed me. I’ll be myself. If he likes me, fine. I’m not going to pretend.

He will like you. Just don’t be sharp with your tongue. The bad feelings you have, put them away. It’s not for long.

It shouldn’t be at all. We don’t want him to come. Admit it. That’s what we’ve been secretly thinking, isn’t it? Monique’s nervousness broke through. What right does he have to come after all these years, upsetting us? Who does he think he is?

"He’s your father who loves you and has taken care of you, that’s who he is. He’s the man who brought you into the world, and don’t forget it. Soon he will be gone. While he’s here, we must do our best to