Keeping Secrets

by Andrew Rosenheim

  ‘Coming.’ He walked down the corridor to her door, which he had left slightly ajar. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Renoir,’ she said urgently.

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered back, trying to keep her calm and close to sleep.

  ‘Why didn’t you call the farmer by his name?’

  ‘I didn’t think we knew his name.’

  ‘Yes we did. It was Will.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, surprised. Did I tell her that?

  ‘Was that short for William?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Though he was always “Will” to me. Sleep tight.’

  ‘Was Will married?’

  He sighed. ‘Honey, you really have to go to sleep. You’ve got school tomorrow.’

  ‘I know, but was he?’

  ‘No. He wasn’t married.’

  ‘But did he have a partner then? You know, like you and Mummy.’

  Renoir hesitated. ‘Yes, he had a partner. Back then she was called a girlfriend.’

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Maris. Now come on—’

  ‘Was she pretty?’

  ‘Kind of. Now that’s enough.’

  ‘Please, Renoir, just one more. Was she nice?’

  ‘Most of the time. Though she got irritated if you asked her too many questions.’

  ‘Oh.’ This seemed to sink in.

  ‘Goodnight now,’ he commanded.

  ‘Renoir?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said with ill-concealed annoyance.

  There was a slight pause. ‘I love you.’

  She had never said that before, and he felt dismayed to find emotion suddenly overtaking him. ‘That’s nice,’ he managed to say.

  As he started to go he heard Emily sit up in bed. ‘Renoir,’ she said, and there was no question in her voice, only a child’s demand.

  He held the door still for a moment, then finally said, ‘I love you too, Emily. Now go to sleep before I change my mind.’

  Will and Maris

  ON THE THIRD morning that he had to get his own breakfast, he started to worry. There were not enough Cheerios for a full helping, but he poured what was left from the box into a bowl, then managed to pour the milk from the bottle without spilling very much of it. He drank a little orange juice straight from the carton, though it tasted very acid. On the refrigerator was a pad of paper held to the door by a large magnet shaped like a frog. Lately his mother hadn’t been writing anything down at all, so in large letters he now wrote CEREAL, then MILK, and finally, on a third line, OJ.

  He looked in at his mother from her bedroom door, which was ajar. She lay sprawled on her back, half covered by a sheet, her mouth open as she lay in a deep sleep on the big brass bed she had bought at a junk sale in Daly City. It had cost more to have the man deliver it than to buy it in the first place.

  At least she was alone. The week before there had been a man in bed next to her. He had worn boxer shorts but nothing else, though there was a tattoo of a dragon on his left arm. When the dragon suddenly started moving the boy realised the man was waking up, and he had beat a swift retreat down the hall to collect his book bag and shoot out the door to school. On an earlier occasion there had been another man, who’d jumped out of bed when he’d seen the boy, and moved buck naked for his clothes, exclaiming, ‘You never said you had a kid!’

  When he got to school he tried to forget his hunger during the morning, and fortunately he had a week’s worth of tickets for the cafeteria lunch. Mrs Dielecki, his homeroom teacher, walked by him in the afternoon as they all trooped to the auditorium for some geography film, and she seemed to make a special point of asking if he was all right. He nodded but kept his eyes down, though usually he liked to look at her – she had a big freckly smile, and a head of blond curls he was always tempted to reach out and touch.

  When he walked home that afternoon he wondered if his mother would have been shopping. But there were no new groceries – and no mother. He was not worried at first, since she would stay after her shift and socialise with the other waitresses, but when suppertime came and went he began to wonder where she was. He had watched his mother cook often enough, and there were dried beans and rice and pasta in jars stored in the cabinet next to the fridge. But he was scared to turn on the stove, which was gas, and usually needed a match for a burner to catch – which it would do with a great whoosh that made him nervous, even though it was his mother doing it, standing right there beside him. So now he went out to the corner store and used the thirty-five cents he’d found to buy two candy bars, leaving a note for his mother in case she came back. But when he returned she hadn’t come back, and he ate the candy and finished the rest of the milk, which he drank fast as it was beginning to sour. He was both worried and still hungry, so even watching television way past his bed time did not entirely distract him. He wasn’t sure if there was something he should do.

  Eventually, for all his waiting vigil, he must have got drowsy, for he woke up to find the sun streaming like a billowing golden sheet into the living room and the Today show playing on the TV. Outside he could hear the early morning traffic on Oak Street down the block, but when he went to check his mother’s bed had not been slept in.

  On the way to school he used his remaining change to buy one last candy bar, which he ate as slowly as he could. This time Mrs Dielecki spoke to him in the morning, catching onto him at recess before he could get away to the playground. She made him sit down on a chair and started to ask him questions which he did his best not to answer. But this evasion made tears well up in his eyes, enough for them to be visible and make him wipe them away with his clenched fist. Fortunately, some other teacher came back to the classroom to ask Mrs Dielecki a question, and the boy took the opportunity to sneak away to the playground. By the time recess was over and they had trooped back in for math class, Mrs Dielecki seemed to have forgotten all about it.

  So when the school day ended and he gathered his notebooks together he was surprised to find his grandmother standing at the classroom door. She must have come directly from work, for she was dressed for her job at City Hall, where she was a clerical administrator, whatever that was, and wore what she wore now – a white blouse and a mid-length skirt, and a cloth overcoat against the chill of the early fall morning as she took the bus to work.

  Now she spoke a few words with Mrs Dielecki, who smiled over each time they turned to look at him. Then his grandmother beckoned him and when he walked over she took his hand, holding her purse in the other. As they left the school together he asked, ‘Where are we going, Gram?’

  ‘To get your things,’ she said. Otherwise they walked in silence, and she seemed oblivious to the colour and characters of pavement life as they moved into Haight Ashbury. She ignored the sax player who held out his hat for her change, and nodded politely but uninterestedly at Louis the Juggler, who today had stripes painted all over his face and made a special show of three balls in the air as they walked by.

  Four black men were standing on the far corner and one whom the boy recognised shouted out across the street, ‘Hey, my man, my little man! Who’s that fox you’re walking with?’ The boy couldn’t tell if his grandmother heard this or not, for she looked straight ahead, keeping a firm grip on his hand.

  They turned off Haight when they came to his street, a quiet one of Victorian wooden frame houses, painted in light pastels and all with high and sharply angled gables, but differentiated from each other by idiosyncratic additions of château-like turrets or screened side porches or even a boxed-in widow’s walk at the top. Once single-family residences, most had been broken up into units – like the boy’s house, which was the third one down and separated into three apartments, one on each floor, with an external uncovered staircase at one side of the building. The boy and his grandmother climbed these stairs to the second-floor landing, where he took off the house key which he wore on a string around his neck, and handed it to his grandmother. She opened the door and they both stepped into the kitchen. When h
e looked through to the living room he saw his mother.

  She was sober, he knew at once, because she was vacuuming the living room. When she was drinking she never cleaned up at all. As she looked up at them he couldn’t read her expression. She didn’t seem surprised to see his grandmother there, didn’t look embarrassed, or guilty, or give any indication that she had left her nine-year-old son unchaperoned, unsupervised and utterly alone overnight.

  His grandmother touched him lightly on the shoulder. ‘Why don’t you go play,’ she said. It was not a question. He went past his mother and down the hall to his little room, next to the bathroom. He left the door ajar, so he could hear their voices as he tried to read The Fireside Book of Baseball, an anthology he had picked up for twenty-five cents at a school book sale one weekend. Though he didn’t want to know what they were talking about, he was still about to go out and interrupt them to say he was hungry when he heard his mother’s voice rise. ‘Don’t lecture me, Mother,’ she said. ‘Just don’t lecture me.’

  ‘The boy is nine years old, Maggie.’

  The boy – he hated being called that. It reminded him of how his mother would talk in company when she’d been drinking, mentioning him sometimes as if he weren’t even in the same apartment. So he closed his door and turned on his radio. Now he could hear the noise of the voices without hearing the words themselves. After a few minutes the door to the apartment slammed shut, which meant his grandmother had left, though it would have been his mother who slammed the door.

  He emerged only later, cautiously, wary of his mother’s mood. Lately she had seemed a different person from the mother she had been when he was very little. Lately she seemed as interested in hitting him as in kissing or hugging him, maybe more in fact since the scale was turning almost two to one in favour of the hitting by his most recent reckoning. And the number of times was well past counting on his fingers, even if he used both hands.

  But she was whistling now – interestingly, for a singer, she never sang to herself – and said nothing to him until, after he’d watched a late-afternoon cartoon in the living room, she called out from the kitchen that supper was ready. While he ate – it was fried hamburger, with a baked potato and tomato salad and a large glass of milk – she moved around the kitchen wiping surfaces and adjusting the position of things. He wanted to talk to her – wanted to ask where she’d been, wanted to explain that he hadn’t turned her in, he hadn’t asked his grandmother to intervene – but he didn’t know how to begin, and she didn’t give him much of an opportunity, moving around the room as she was, whistling still and sometimes humming to herself, with the wash cloth from the sink in her hand. When he finished he put his plate and knife and fork and the glass in the sink and mumbled thanks and went back to his room.

  And the next two days were normal – his mother went shopping and gave him his cereal in the morning and she was home when he returned from school. On Saturday she left early to work breakfast, and she wasn’t back after lunch. She didn’t call, either, to say she was working a double shift. There was food to eat this time, and he managed not to fall asleep that night in front of the television, but early Sunday morning when he went down the hall he found her bedroom empty.

  He waited all morning, then went at lunch to the restaurant where she waitressed. It was a long walk, and he stood by the kitchen door in back of the brick single-storey building off Market Street, and waited while one of the kitchen boys fetched the manager, an unsmiling Eurasian who wore a tight grey suit. No, his mother wasn’t working that day, the man said, then hesitated and the boy got worried that the man would ask him questions, so he said thank you very quickly and left, walking west along Haight, feeling a mixture of puzzlement and fear.

  He thought of going to his grandmother’s house, out in the Sunset, but he had only ever been there with his mother, and he was uncertain which bus to take, or where precisely he should get off. He knew it wasn’t that far away, probably only three or four miles, but the way his mother spoke of it – so foggy and wet – made it sound like a different country. He knew how to use the telephone, and his mother’s address book was in the hall, where he was pretty sure he could find his grandmother’s number – though her last name was not the same; it was Shaughnessy, and he knew how to spell it – but something held him back, some hope that he had perhaps misheard his mother or misunderstood her, or that she had been detained unavoidably, or that she had in fact telephoned while he was just now out, or rung the night before only he had been asleep or the television had been on too loud for him to hear the phone.

  And he continued with this rationalisation through the rest of the day, through the evening when he ate cereal for what now seemed the thousandth time, and into the night and the late movie until he fell asleep, again, on the sofa. In the morning he was about to go to school when the front door suddenly opened and his mother came in. Her hair was a mess and one of her stockings was torn and when he started to ask where she’d been she snapped at him – ‘Don’t ask’ – and when he tried again, she suddenly took two steps and hit him very hard across the face, with a closed fist, so hard it half closed one of his eyes. When she had hit him before, as recently she had done a lot, she had only slapped him, which stung but didn’t do much damage. And didn’t show.

  And he ran from the apartment, fast down the steps, crying and feeling frightened and alone, and when he got to school it took Mrs Dielecki no time at all to see that something was wrong, for she stared hard at his eye and asked if he was all right, and when he nodded his chin wobbled and again tears welled up, though curiously only in the eye that hadn’t been hit, and he did not trust himself to speak.

  This time his grandmother came to the school within an hour, and this time there was a policeman with her.

  It was raining when he crossed the bridge, sitting in the front row of the bus. His grandmother had spoken to the driver as the boy took his seat, but he was nervous anyway, worried that the driver would forget about him and not him when they’d reached his destination. I’ll probably end up in Oregon, he thought, for though he wasn’t very sure about where he was heading, he knew it was in that direction. He could not really see the Pacific out the left side of the bus, but turning right he made out Alcatraz, where his mother had often promised to take him but he’d never been.

  He had been across the Bridge before: a school trip to Muir Woods, walking through the towering redwoods there; a jaunt with his mother to friends on the coast near Stinson Beach back in the days when they still had an automobile. The friends had owned a dog he’d played with almost all day long, a little boot-brush of a terrier mutt, and the boy had cried when he wasn’t allowed to take him home.

  And there had been a trip for a family reunion in Sausalito, lunch at a harbour-side restaurant, outdoors on a big deck, with cousins who had subsequently moved to – where? What had his grandmother said? Buffalo? That was it. A funny kind of name for a town. And his uncle had been there, he knew that, because his grandmother had explained just two nights before today that the man he was going to be staying with – while your mother gets better – was someone the boy had met before. He wasn’t an entire stranger after all; he was not just a blood relative (his mother’s brother) but also someone he had seen with his own eyes.

  The problem was, the boy couldn’t locate any clear visual memory for the man, only the vague impression of someone big and dark. Had he been dark-skinned with a shadowy hint of beard? Or did he have an actual beard? The boy wasn’t sure, though he thought he could remember someone designated as his uncle coming up and hugging his grandmother as they had entered the restaurant. Hugging her hard enough, actually, for her to squeak when she laughingly protested, the air escaping from her like toothpaste squeezed from a tube. Then his uncle had kissed the boy’s mother, his sister, but without the hug. The boy remembered that. And knew, too, from mentions by his mother (not that there were many) that his uncle had been a soldier. Served in Vietnam.

  The Bay was now behi
nd him and out of sight, and the hills on either side of the road looked impossibly lush and green. They came down slowly through the rain into a flatland stretch of highway where water lay in long slick puddles on the road. Now there was a town again – he saw the sign San Rafael, and wondered how you pronounced that. On either side there were sloping hills of green woodland, with the occasional new office carved out in low buildings of brick. Soon they were back in country again, and here he saw several herds of cows, black and white, poking along in grasslands dotted by the odd scrub oak.

  You’ll like it there. It’s the country, his grandmother had said, after explaining to him where he was going. He had been too surprised to form objections in his mind, much less express them. His grandmother was always so determined – he remembered that day in Sausalito when she had driven them there, in her ancient automobile, both hands gripping the steering wheel, face taut and concentrated as they had driven slowly across the bridge.

  So was this ‘the country’? he wondered. His spirits sank at the prospect of his unknown destination, this strange uncle of his he couldn’t for the life of him really remember at all. It can’t be for too long, he told himself, but why hadn’t his grandmother said how many days he’d be away? Why, for that matter, couldn’t he have stayed with her, just until his mother got back on her feet and he could go home to Cole Street and their apartment again? Though in fact part of him didn’t want to go back to Cole Street, didn’t ever want to see the apartment again, didn’t actually want to see his mother for a good long while.

  ‘Where is Mom?’ he’d asked, just before his grandmother told him he’d be going to stay with his uncle.

  She looked at him with a mild detachment, as if to think before speaking. ‘She’s in the hospital.’

  ‘Will she be okay?’

  ‘Yes,’ his grandmother said firmly. ‘But she has to stay there for a while. Your mother’s not well.’

  Your mother’s not well – not your mom, or even Maggie, since that after all was his mother’s name and what Gram called her as a daughter, rather than as his mom. That was on the second evening of his stay with her, in the small pink stone house in the Sunset, just blocks up from the Pacific Highway and the ocean itself. He stayed in the spare bedroom, which he helped Gram clear of boxes and wrapping paper and spare blankets she stored on the floor and on the bed.