Her Father's House

by Belva Plain

  Richard, who had been standing beside his mother with shoulders bowed, seemed suddenly to come to life.

  “Laura doesn't know the other side,” he said. “I know Jim wouldn't want me to tell it straight out to her; in fact, he forbade me to do so, but I'm going to do it anyway. That kind of life was—it was indecent. And so, to remove his child from it, he sacrificed everything he had achieved for himself.”

  McLaughlin had settled into a chair as if he were exhausted. His voice was low and agitated.

  “Kidnapping is a federal crime. The best we can hope for is a reduction in prison time. Let me put this to you bluntly right from the start, though it hurts me like hell to do it.”

  Richard put his arm around his mother, who, having released one cry, was still.

  “I've already heard from Mrs. Storm's lawyers. They lost no time, not an hour's worth. But I cannot defend Jim in New York, that you know. I'll have him out on bail tomorrow morning, but that's as far as I can go. You'll be needing counsel in New York, and I suggest you hire the best you can find.”

  “I thought,” Laura said, “there would be an enormous fine. I didn't realize that they put a man in prison for taking his own child.”

  “For kidnapping? You didn't know?” McLaughlin's thin smile was astonished. “You'd better stick to medicine then, not law. Your father was telling me—he's very proud of you. Yes. They put you in prison for kidnapping.”

  In a low, strained voice, Richard managed a question. “For how long?”

  “It depends. It can be as long as twenty or thirty years, and usually is.”

  Kate began to weep, making fearful, choking sounds while she rested her head on Rick's shoulder.

  A woman whose child had been run over on the street where Laura lived had made just such awful sounds. . . . “Thirty years,” Laura whispered, watching Kate, who never cried. Then she turned to McLaughlin.

  “Thirty years,” she repeated. “Is that the fullest extent of the law?”

  “I would expect so. It could be more if Jim had mistreated or neglected you, but since that's not the case—at any rate, that's what they'll aim for.”

  “And they will get it?”

  “It's safe to say he'll serve some years. I wish I didn't have to say it.”

  “But all the people who know him, people in town, surely they'll vouch for him, a citizen like him. Won't that count for anything?” asked Richard.

  “Frankly, I doubt it will help much. Shouldn't you get a doctor for your mother?” McLaughlin asked with pity, and glanced toward Kate, whose body seemed about to collapse.

  “I have those pills I took last night,” Laura offered.

  “Yes, give her one. I'm sorry that I've had to talk as I've done, but you wanted the truth. I'm always sorry when I have to give people news that they don't want to hear. But you need the truth in order to do your best for Jim. A tragedy,” McLaughlin repeated. “A splendid man. An eminent lawyer, well on his way to the very top, they tell me. I myself have known him for a long time, but of course I never knew who he really was. I never guessed. How could I have? Well, I'll see you in the courtroom tomorrow. You know you have to bring the deed to the farm,” he added as he went to the door.

  “We know,” Rick said.

  The house was still. Only the creak of the top step as Richard mounted the stairs disturbed the stillness. Then came the small thud of his door as he went to his room. From Kate's room there came no sounds; she must have taken one of Dr. Scofield's pills.

  Now finally, long after midnight, the rain had ceased and with it the last gurgle in the spout near Laura's window, through which there poured the poignant scent of wet grass. On the rim of the hills there rested a gibbous moon, faintly green. Living as long as she had in the city, she had long forgotten to look outside except to question whether to carry an umbrella.

  Dad and Richard always searched the sky. Should they irrigate today? Was that a rain cloud, or was the sun about to break through the mist? After breakfast, Dad always put on a jacket and drove to town, or else wore jeans and worked in the office, or else wore jeans and surveyed the farm. So it had always been.

  Yesterday morning, thirty-six hours ago, everything had made sense. Laura Fuller had made her tidy plans for Saturday; she had had plans for Sunday and would be back in class on Monday. Now, like the victim of earthquake or war, she had no plans. She was not even Laura Fuller anymore.

  Needing to steady herself, she grasped the back of a chair and stared about the room, at the bed, the chest, and the desk, where until yesterday had stood that fake photograph, and where, next to it, still stood the smiling family, herself in the midst of them, wearing cap and gown. There they were, for all time together, and now split apart.

  Is that really you, Donald Wolfe? What have you done with your life? Oh, I am so angry, I am enraged, I am crushed. I have come home and found my house bombed and everyone in it dead.

  An unfit mother, he says. And she has spent the last twenty years with a broken heart! How they must have despised each other. Oh my mother, I need to talk to you!

  The morning dawned, this morning that should be taking her back to New York, where she would wait for that Rebecca, now to be known as Lillian. Yet she could not leave here without knowing what the day would bring. Dressed and ready within ten minutes, she went downstairs to find that Kate was already in the car, and Richard was about to join her.

  “I can't talk, we have to hurry,” he said.

  “I'll be quick. I accused you last night. I was pretty frantic.”

  “Understandably. It's okay. We'll talk about it later.”

  “Is Mom all right?”

  “No, but she'll manage. She has to.”

  “Shall I go with you now?”

  “No. He doesn't want you to see him where he is.”

  Laura nodded at Richard, and the door closed.

  The county newspaper had been delivered and put on the table. On the front page in a column next to the state election ran the black heading:

  FULLER BAIL, VERY HEAVY,

  EXPECTED TO BE SET TODAY

  It seemed as if every nerve in her body was quivering. She needed air. And going outside, she walked up the slope and farther up the hill to the cottage where once she had lived. A sense of panic overcame her, a claustrophobic feeling such as one can have in a locked space where nobody hears one's call for help, or conversely, a panic that one can feel at the junction of roads where the signs are in a language one cannot read.

  What happened? What happened? Why did he take me away from my mother? Why did he ruin our lives? I look down at the window of my room; I think of all the books he bought for me, the blue ceiling with the stars on it, and the dog bed he got for Clancy because he likes to sleep in my room. I look at all these things and I am so angry at my father, at everything, at life.

  Kate left them alone. She had set before Jim a cup of coffee and a sandwich, neither of which he had touched. All of a sudden he looks older than Dr. Scofield, Laura thought.

  She had been prepared to rage at him when they brought him home, to fling at him all the pain and despair that were choking her throat, but instead there seemed to be only this icy scorn that one feels toward some white-collar embezzler who has robbed the poor and now stands alone without defense, beneath contempt.

  “I wanted to talk to you first,” he said, “but they came for me unexpectedly. You were in New York, and this was nothing I could tell you over the telephone. Even now the right words don't seem to be coming to me. It's a long, sad, complicated story, Laura. I've told you what I could. I don't seem to have the energy for any more right now.”

  “You keep forgetting that the name is Bettina. And yes, it's a sad story, but it doesn't have to be such a long one. Actually it seems rather simple to me. You robbed me of my mother. You're not the first man who's done that, nor will you be the last.”

  Jim shook his head. “It's never that simple.”

  “How did they find out?” she deman
ded.

  “It isn't a pretty story.”

  “I didn't think it would be. But I want to hear it.”

  “Well . . . well, it was Gil. He recalled that man at your commencement, as I thought he would. I said so to Rick. Of course, it seems like an awful thing that he would report his girl's father, and I can't feel very loving toward him. And yet I can't blame him too much, either. A lawyer has to obey the law or lose the right to practice it. And I am guilty of the charge. It's as simple as that.”

  “A minute ago I heard you say things are never that simple.”

  “I wasn't talking about the same thing, was I?”

  “Lillian's on her way back, Gil told me. I'm going to New York to see her, you know.”

  “Of course. You should.”

  Now Kate came into the room looking as though she had not slept; her eyes were weary, and her hair was untidy. Gently, she scolded Jim.

  “Can't you even manage a small sandwich? You have to eat something! Tell me what else I can get you. And you have to go upstairs to take a nap right afterward. Please. Please, Jim. And Gil phoned for the third time, Laura. I told him you were talking to your father and I wasn't going to disturb you. You'd better call him back. He says he has something important to tell you.” And taking the tray with the plate and cup, Kate added sharply, “I can't for the life of me imagine what else he could possibly add to the damage he's already done.”

  Upstairs in her room, Laura gripped the telephone. “So you really knew more about all this than you admitted to me,” she said.

  “That's true. I haven't told you everything.” His voice wavered. “I've put off telling, because I hadn't the courage.”

  “My father said you remembered that awful man at the commencement. So obviously it's you who notified the proper people?”

  “Laura, I was just about knocked for a loop. I wasn't able to keep it all to myself, so I told my parents, and my father hit the ceiling. ‘When the friend of yours who works for that woman's lawyers reveals that you knew—and you can be sure he will reveal it, since it's too good a story to keep to oneself,' he said, ‘you'll be in a pickle. Don't you know you'll be questioned? My God, you've been going around with Laura for how many years now?' I couldn't answer, didn't have the wits or the strength. And then he pointed out the publicity that I'd have unless I were one of the first people to go to the authorities with the facts. And I told him that it would break my heart to do that. And he said, ‘Okay, do as you please. What do you think the senior partners in your firm will say about it?' So I knew I had to do it, and I did it. I went to the district attorney.”

  They knew it by then, anyway, Laura thought, so I suppose it really doesn't matter. And yet it breaks my heart, too.

  “Please don't hate me, Laura. I'm trying so hard not to hate myself.”

  From the tabloid newspapers spread out on the kitchen table, a picture of Lillian, standing before a grand Fifth Avenue hotel, smiled up at Jim.

  “I'm surprised she's given up the impressive name of ‘Storm,' ” he said. “Well, she's had a lot of names: born Morris, married and divorced Wolfe, then Buzley, then Storm, and now back to Morris.”

  Kate spoke bitterly. “It must be quite a nuisance to keep replacing monograms on all your things. Didn't you say that everything had to be monogrammed? Oh, Jim, we really should stop reading this stuff.”

  “It will die out soon. And it won't be born again until the case comes to court.”

  But he was not sure about the dying out. He had never known—how could he have known?—the extent of human meanness. A woman had actually written a letter to the editor of the local paper saying Jim Fuller was not only a kidnapper, but a sponger who had married to get hold of a tremendous business and an easy life. In another letter someone predicted that a little more investigation would reveal that he had a criminal record in New York. Worst of all now, most devastating of all, were the words of Lillian herself: People as cruel as he is don't deserve to live.

  Right here in this house, we are all detached from one another, he thought. We hardly speak anymore. Each one of us is sunk in his own wretchedness: Richard keeping busy at unnecessary labor outdoors, Kate keeping up her spells of false optimism, and Laura sunk into depression. Like delicate shrubbery, we are wrapped in burlap against the winter storms, waiting for spring. The difference is that for us, there is no spring in sight.

  As well as Jim could without revealing things that would be best for Laura not to hear, he had tried to explain to her what had gone wrong between her parents. But always he had been stopped on the threshold of the unspeakable; as vividly as if it had been yesterday, he found himself back on that rainy Sunday morning at the hotel in Italy. Long ago that had been, and long the trail afterward from there to here, with—had McLaughlin not told him?—as many as twenty years ahead.

  What have I done? he asked himself, and chided: You could have done nothing else.

  “I thought you should read this,” Richard told Laura. “I found it on the kitchen table. It's one of those tabloids they have in the supermarket. Hot off the press overnight.”

  There she stood, this time above the heading:

  JUST ARRIVED, LILLIAN MORRIS,

  OVERJOYED AND FURIOUS,

  IS IMPATIENT TO MEET WITH

  HER LONG-LOST DAUGHTER

  The long-suffering mother, accompanied by friends from France and Italy, has arrived in America with some words about that daughter's father, Donald Wolfe.

  “I have turned heaven and earth to find my child. They talk about twenty or thirty years in prison for him, but they could put him to death as far as I'm concerned. There is no punishment severe enough to compensate me for my lost years with my child. The man hasn't a decent bone in his body. He is a criminal and should suffer for the rest of his life.”

  Before Laura's dizzy vision there appeared a striking face, curiously not unlike the fake photograph with which she had grown up. She had a strange awareness of herself looking at this face, and a feeling that this was perhaps the most dramatic moment of her life so far. And then suddenly, unbidden, there appeared another picture: iron bars, bars on doors, on windows, and on gates, while between them peered great pleading eyes in pleading faces.

  He is a criminal and should suffer for the rest of his life.

  Anger, yes. Oh, yes, she thought. But so much hatred?

  People as cruel as he is don't deserve to live.

  “I don't understand you,” Gil said over the telephone for what was possibly the fifth time in the last two days. “Ever since I've known you, whenever you mentioned her, I could feel your longing. And now when you could actually meet her, you're not doing it.”

  He was waiting for an explanation that she was unable to give him. There were no words to describe, possibly no words existed, that could describe the tumult within her.

  “Gil, my mind is barely functioning.”

  “They say she wrote you a letter. Is that true?”

  “Yes. I returned it unopened.”

  “I can hardly believe what you're saying. Are you afraid of something?”

  “I don't know how to describe how I'm feeling. But something has changed.”

  “Well, one thing hasn't,” he said gently. “You've already missed a week of classes. It's time you came back here. You need to go on with your life, Laura.”

  “I'm not going back.”

  “What? You're quitting? Giving up medical school?”

  “I don't know. I don't know anything anymore. Can't you feel what's happening to me? I'm tired of trying to think. And now, I'm sorry, but I have to hang up. Let's talk again tomorrow.”

  Still her thoughts whirled. If only she didn't want to put Dad in prison! I keep having that vision of iron gratings, and the faces. Neglect, they say. Neglect of a child. I wish I knew the whole story because that can't be all of it. But nobody wants to talk about it. Rick says I should not bother Dad with so many questions. Now I see why he always seemed to take Dad's part when he r
efused to go with us on a trip. I remember, too, the time we were all trail riding and I was asking Dad a lot of questions about my mother; Rick told me to “shut up and leave your father alone.” I was furious with him, which was in itself very strange, because in a certain way I loved him.

  Perhaps if he had not known the secret, he would have loved me, too, and would have been less reserved and solemn. But since he never said anything, I could hardly say anything, either. And then came Gil, with all that fun and laughter.

  There is such confusion in my head. Everything is haphazard. Yesterday when I approached our front door, I had a horrible, weird sensation of fright. I seemed to see myself running through the rain, needing to get inside. I don't know why. There is a cat sitting on the step, and it wants to get in, too.

  There is so much that we do not know about ourselves or, I suppose, about anybody else, either.

  On sudden impulse, Laura got up and went outdoors. The day was fair and warm; it seemed impossible that everything, sky, grass, and a pair of doves at the feeder, could be as they had always been. It seemed impossible that terror could exist in such a world.

  Yet how terrified Dad must be today, and every day! All these years, he has walked around with an awful fear inside.

  Twenty or thirty years. He doesn't even deserve to live.

  Uncertain, quite alone, her glance fell on a pair of magnolias just coming into blossom. Rick and she had planted them years ago. If you take care of them, water and feed them, they'll be three times your height ten years from now, Dad had told them that day. And so they were. Two chipmunks emerged from their homes in a stone wall and chased each other up to the top of these trees. Once a car had run over a chipmunk and killed it on their driveway. Dad had shown her its tiny feet with their five toes like her own. He had hoped that it hadn't suffered before it died. She remembered that she had wanted to bury it in a flowered candy box, and that he had helped her give it a funeral.