Her Father's House

by Belva Plain

  When Laura replaced the receiver, she looked at Gil. He was fidgeting with a pencil that had been lying on a table, pushing the lead in and out.

  “This game of secrecy is not fair to me,” Laura said angrily. “First you, and now Jennie.”

  “Jennie?”

  “You've met her. The nursery school down the road. Oh, do put that pencil away and talk to me, will you?”

  When he came close to draw her to him, she retreated. “You had better talk to me,” she said fiercely.

  Gil did not answer. He was looking at his fingernails.

  After a moment, he said slowly, “I really think you should go home. If you had people at your door, your dad may have had them, too.”

  All through her blood and bones there surged an awful nameless fright.

  “Yes. Yes, of course I have to go.”

  “I'll go with you.”

  When she laid her head back with her cheek on a pillow, she heard the throb of her heartbeat in her ears. The sky flew past the window. She was in a hurry to reach home, and at the same time afraid to reach it because of what must be waiting for her there. Perhaps there would only be some oddity, nothing to fear? Gil held her hand, and with his other hand, held a book that he had not read since he had taken it out of the carry-on. Neither had he spoken.

  Late in the afternoon, they landed and rented a car. “You'll have to guide me over these roads,” he said.

  “Gil, I'm terribly afraid of what I'll find.”

  “It won't be the end of the world, whatever it is. Try to remember that.”

  Houses, villages, highways, and scattered farms were unchanged. At a crossroads they came to a small sign with an arrow pointing the way to Foothills Farm. Someone had spilled a load of gravel; the car crunched over it and stopped in front of the house, which looked unchanged. So perhaps there was nothing wrong after all.

  One of the old workmen, Bob, came to the door. He had tended the cows for Richard's grandfather and although he wasn't quite “all there,” still did small jobs around the place.

  “Hey, how're you, Laura? Didn't know you were coming. Nobody told me. Nobody told me nothin'. All topsy-turvy here. Bad day. Bad days. Never thought I'd live to see anything like it. I said to myself, I—”

  “Like what?”

  But Laura's intended interruption was itself interrupted. “Took poor Mister Jim away this morning. Never thought I'd live to see such a thing, him dressed up in his good suit—”

  “Took him where, Bob? Where?”

  “Why, jail, Laura. Captain Ferris come from the police in town, and I know it hurt him plenty to haul off Mister Jim, but—”

  Before she could make a sound, Gil led her to the sofa. “Sit down, sit down. Your dad'll be okay. It's just some kind of what you might call a formality. He'll be back here and he'll tell you about it himself. Please. Believe me. He's okay.”

  “Here,” Bob said, “look here. It's all in the paper, county news, come this morning. Read what happened.”

  Jim Fuller is Donald Wolfe, long sought as kidnapper.

  Reached by telephone at her home in France, Lillian Storm, a tearful mother, described her agonized yearning for her baby, Bettina Wolfe, stolen from her more than twenty years ago by the baby's father, a prominent New York lawyer turned farmer.

  The words blurred, the room revolved, and Laura read on.

  Mr. Wolfe, known to this community as Jim Fuller, proprietor of Foothills Farm, has been active in local affairs in this community as a generous benefactor, an advisor to the Board of Education, St. Clare's Hospital administration, and . . .

  She screamed. The paper fell to the floor. The room was filled with her eerie screams. Even as she heard them, she was able to understand that this was hysteria. It could push you over the edge and down, down, with your own appalling voice in your ears.

  “Give her a drink,” Bob said. “Mister Jim keeps brandy in the cupboard over there. I seen where he keeps it, time I run a saw over my finger.”

  Laura was clinging to the arm of the sofa. Oh God, oh God, she was going to be sick. She was sick. She wanted to die. It wasn't true. Dad wouldn't do that. It couldn't be true.

  “Is it true, Gil? No, it's not true. You knew, Gil. You knew, and you didn't tell me.”

  “Ah, Laura, don't blame me. What can I do for you? It wasn't my story to tell. I didn't know it all, anyway. Oh, don't cry. No, do cry. Cry it out, it's better—”

  “She needs a drink. Make her take it. Here, let me—”

  “No, no, Bob, it's too strong for her. She's not used to it. She won't keep it down. Ah, darling, you always wondered so much about your mother. Now you can have her. You'll be all right. You'll be fine again, you'll see.”

  “All my life, the lies, the lies! Even my name isn't my own! Read the rest of it to me. Is it true? Yes, it has to be. They wouldn't print a long story like that if it wasn't.”

  Lillian Storm, recently divorced from Arthur Storm, the financier, divides her time between New York and her home abroad. Well known in social circles, she is renowned for her charities, as well as for her art collection. Bettina, who is her only child, grew up on Foothills Farm and is now a medical student in New York. Her many friends in this area have long known her as Laura Fuller, a top student, swimmer, and basketball star—

  “How could he have done this to me and my mother? I want to see her! My mother! Oh my God, how can a man do such a thing?”

  “They're home,” Gil said, “and Rick just drove in. Somebody's with him.”

  “Oh, poor Kate! He lied to her, too. Poor Mom!” Laura cried, and stretched out her arms as Rick and Kate came into the room.

  “No, darling, not ‘poor Kate.' It's ‘poor Jim.' Oh, how brave. My heart's breaking for my Jim. So you heard so soon? And you flew here to be with him? God bless you.”

  A few seconds passed before these words arranged themselves into some comprehensible shape: “came to be with him” . . . “how brave” . . . “poor Jim” . . . And Laura sprang up, almost throwing Kate off balance. A volcano erupted and scorched her chest.

  “What are you saying? I came to be with him? A fraud. A liar. Destroyer of—of a whole world, my world and yours, and you tell me how brave he is? I am going insane. Yes, I'm losing my mind, I'm dreaming this, why don't I wake up? And if it's only a nightmare, why am I having it? Yes, I'm sick. I'm sick. Who am I? What's my name? Bettina Wolfe, it said. Yes, I'm losing my mind.”

  There they stood, all of them looking at her, shocked and helpless with their foolish, staring faces, the old man scared, Kate's cheeks wet with tears, Gil numb, and Richard, standing with Dr. Scofield in the rear, like two statues.

  Dr. Scofield moved his hand across his forehead. “You are not going to lose your mind,” he said steadily. “You are understandably in shock.”

  “Yes, shock.” She turned to Kate. “Is it for him you feel sorry? What's wrong with you? He lied to you, turned your whole life into a lie, and you—”

  “No,” Kate said very low, as if it was a tremendous effort to speak. “No, no, your father told me the truth.”

  “Are you saying that you've known this about my mother and me?”

  Kate's despairing eyes looked straight into Laura's. “Yes.”

  “You! Whom can one ever believe? And you, Rick? Have you known, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gil?”

  “Not really. Just something vague—unreliable. A couple of days ago I didn't know what to believe.”

  “Dr. Scofield?”

  “No.”

  Scanning the silent room, Laura felt only hatred. A prisoner must feel such hatred for his captors; all the triumph and strength belonged to them. Could Richard and Kate ever be made to take back the wrong they had done her? Could they undo this humiliation, these blank years?

  And suddenly before anybody could stop her, Laura ran into the hall where old Bob had sought refuge, and raced, stumbling, up the stairs into the room where the pretty woman smiled from her p
retty frame. She seized it, ran back downstairs, and thrust it before Kate.

  “This! Is this my mother? Or is this another lie? Tell me the truth, if you can.”

  “It is as close as I could find to your father's description of her. He had no photo, and you needed one.”

  Frantic in her rage, Laura raised the picture overhead and flung it into the fireplace.

  “Then everything you people ever told me or did for me was a fake and false. How can I ever trust anybody in the world again, if you could do this to a child?” She sobbed. “How can a man, a father, do this to his child? And to the child's mother, too—how she must have suffered! Things come back to me, that man at my graduation, I never suspected he could be right. Why should I suspect? Why would anyone? But now . . . No wonder we never went anywhere, just stayed here, hiding—oh, now I see, I see it all. I know.”

  “All this didn't just happen of itself,” Richard said quietly. “You need to listen to the other side, talk to your father, it's only right, and then—”

  “Fine. I will. Take me to him now. Gil, you drive me. Let's go. Yes, I want to hear what he can possibly have to say.”

  Richard put his hand out as if to stop her. “Not now, Laura. It's not allowed.”

  Ah, yes. In jail. Her father. And she said aloud, not asking a question, but making a statement: “In jail.”

  “He will be arraigned on Monday before a magistrate,” Richard explained. “It was too late today. Tomorrow's Sunday, so we can't do anything before Monday. But we do already have a lawyer. In fact, one offered himself, Harold McLaughlin. He knows Jim and wants to represent him.”

  Dr. Scofield asked, “What will happen on Monday?”

  “He'll plead guilty and be released on bail. Mom and I will provide it with the farm. Naturally, the trial will be held in New York.”

  “Does it have to be?” Kate pleaded.

  “Mom, it all happened in New York.”

  Dr. Scofield sighed. “They're saying he was a big-shot lawyer there.”

  “Jim never called himself big-shot anything,” Kate said. “He was always simple in his ways.” And she sat down with her hands over her face.

  “Yes, simple,” Richard said, “and wise. Anytime I had a problem, or there were decisions—”

  Laura's cry interrupted him. “You're forgetting the real victim. The mother. My mother! Gil, take me to her. If there's no plane, we can drive. I feel so sick. . . . I can't stand up. I'll lie down on the backseat. Start now. You'll do this for me. Please, Gil?”

  “Listen here.” Dr. Scofield spoke up with severity. “I'm going to prescribe something that will give you a night's sleep, Laura. One of you young men take it to the pharmacy now, before it closes.”

  “No,” Laura said. “I'm not staying in this house. And I don't take drugs. I'll face reality, not escape it.”

  “This is medicine, Laura. I'm not a drug dealer.”

  “I won't stay here in this house!”

  “There's noplace else for you to stay. You'll stay here. And anyway, you're not fit to travel. Kate and I will take you upstairs and get you into your bed.”

  When she awoke, the room was gray, and rain was spattering the window glass with the force of anger. Even before she left the bed, she knew that a gale had come down from the north.

  Something, Dr. Scofield's pill or perhaps some curious quirk of her nerves, hormones, genes—no matter which—had turned yesterday's helplessness into determination. Whatever it was, it pulled her upright and set her feet onto the floor.

  Tomorrow she would be united with her mother. Mother. The woman who had borne her. And she looked at the desk where the fake had stood, the smiling fake that she had loved enough to have it duplicated for her other desk in New York.

  Someone tapped on the door. “May I come in? I heard you moving around. They asked me to be here so you wouldn't wake up in a vacant house,” Jennie said.

  She seemed shy. She seemed small, this teacher who had once been tall in her authority. No doubt she knew the whole story, while I knew nothing, thought Laura. She knows everything about my life!

  “Your friend Gilbert left early to catch a plane home. He wants to find out what's happening, to see how he can help your father. He'll phone you later today, he said. I should be sure to give you that message. I should be sure to tell you he loves you. He wants you to be calm.”

  “Thank you. I am calm.”

  “Your father called, too. Said not to wake you. He'll be home and try to explain everything. It's an unbelievable shock, he knows that, but in the end he's sure you will understand and forgive.”

  “So he's sure, is he? How nice for him!”

  “Will you come down and have a late breakfast or an early brunch? It's half-past ten. Kate took corn muffins out of the freezer. Corn with raisins. She said you love raisins.”

  Muffins! Are they supposed to make up for twenty years of deception? Nevertheless, Laura went downstairs and sat with Jennie at the familiar kitchen table, across from the dog's water bowl and Rick's raincoat on a wall hook in the corner.

  There was nothing to say. Or rather, there was too much to be said. Jennie got up and brought to the table Kate's treasured copper-trimmed coffee pot. The clock in the hall chimed eleven. Clancy came in, lapped water noisily, and rested his wet whiskers on Laura's knee.

  Strange that it should be a dog who brought forth the tears she had just vowed not to shed! Be calm, Gil said. Be strong. Cope with disaster as a person must, and people do every day, everywhere.

  Jennie spoke softly. “Is there anything you want to ask me, Laura?”

  “There's so much that I don't even know how to begin.”

  “When you telephoned yesterday, I wasn't able to talk to you. I think I said something about a pot boiling on the stove. They had just come for Jim—for your dad. They were expected, so Kate had asked me to be here. Old, old friends, you know. Not that she seemed to need me or any support. She held her head up. Jim—your dad—had put on a business suit. He answered the officer with his correct name, Donald Wolfe. The officer was a nervous wreck, I could see. Of course, he must have known Jim for years. Everybody knew Jim, and loved him,” Jennie faltered.

  A fascinating topic, this would be, from the courthouse to the beauty parlors and the coffee shops, all through the town. The crowds that collect around a four-car accident on the highway are full of pity at sight of the blood and guts, but there is more than a touch, a thrill, of drama along with the pity.

  “A fellow was here this morning,” Jennie hesitated. “A reporter. I forget what paper he was from. I told him you weren't here. You were in New York.”

  “That was kind. Thank you.”

  There was a silence. Jennie got up, rinsed the few plates, and tidied the kitchen counters while Laura stared out at the windy sky.

  “You won't mind if I go home, Laura? It's Sunday, and it's our turn for the family's get-together at our house.”

  All of a sudden, the most innocent words, “the family,” were sharp as a knife. Whose family? Where? Who?

  “No, I don't mind. And thanks again for everything.”

  “Sure you're all right? What are you going to do while I'm gone?”

  “I guess I'll just read the paper or something.”

  “I took it in from the front step. Maybe I shouldn't have. I didn't think. Don't bother with it, Laura. It's just a scandal sheet.”

  Dear, forgetful Jennie. Yes, probably she shouldn't have brought it into the house.

  Friends are rallying on behalf of Lillian Storm. Early rumors yesterday from authorities in Georgia suggesting that Donald Wolfe, her former husband, will defend his kidnapping of their child by charging her with being an “unfit mother,” have shocked people here and abroad. Not one person out of the several who have already been interviewed during the last two days has failed to be outraged by the charge. The consensus of opinion is that she has spent the last twenty years in a brokenhearted, fruitless search for the girl, Bettina, whom
Donald Wolfe took away from her nurse in Central Park and has hidden in Georgia, where they now live on a tree farm owned by Wolfe and his second wife.

  The girl, now known as Laura Fuller, is a medical student in this city.

  So the mother, Rebecca, is Lillian. The daughter, Laura, is Bettina. And they would not even recognize each other if they were to pass on the street.

  “I cannot bear this,” said Laura.

  Beyond the window swept the gale, ripping early blossoms from the trees, twisting and crippling their branches. Any living creature would be grateful for any kind of shelter on such a terrible day, yet if she could have walked through it to reach Lillian Storm, she would have done so. For a long time, she stood there staring out into the rain.

  She was still looking out when a bedraggled little group—Mom, Richard, Dr. Scofield, and another man—came into the room.

  “Laura,” Richard began, but she stopped him.

  “You're forgetting. The name is ‘Bettina.' ”

  “Ah, don't,” Kate pleaded. “This is Mr. McLaughlin. He's kindly come here to talk to us.”

  Mr. McLaughlin might indeed have come kindly, but he had clearly not missed the little exchange about names; his quick glance encompassed everything from Kate's reddened eyes to Laura's retort.

  “I have had my understanding with Jim,” he said. “It was effortless on my part. He had all the answers almost before I asked the questions. But I haven't yet laid things out on the table for the rest of you. It's a tragedy.” He shook his gray head and continued. “Shakespeare could have written it. Yes, it's a blow to you, young lady. I understand that. But believe me, it's even worse for your father.”

  “Young lady.” The old-fashioned term would have amused her if she had been in a mood for amusement.

  “It seems you are only thinking of him,” she replied coldly. “Of course. You're his lawyer. But I am thinking of my mother. Have you by any chance read this?” And she handed the newspaper to him. “‘Punishment to the fullest extent of the law,' she wants. Well, I have to tell you, that's what he will probably get, and he should. I have a different point of view from yours, you see.”