Secret Anniversaries

by Scott Spencer

  Her father was lax about making her do Saturday chores; in fact, he discouraged it. But he did like her company and he was content to stack the bales of hay along the north end of the barn while Caitlin sat on the floor, her legs stretched out before her, her back against the slightly warped wagon wheel. She was reading the Saturday Evening Post.

  She read every word in the magazine. Because it was sent to her it seemed to have been written for her—the stories, even the advertisements.

  Now she was looking at a picture of the Empire State Building. The picture was taken from the base of the building and it looked like a fountain that had erupted from the sidewalk and then turned to stone.

  “The Empire State Building is one hundred and two stories high,” Caitlin said to her father.

  He turned to face her. Little sticks of hay clung to his shirt like porcupine quills. He wore a red handkerchief over his mouth and nose because the dust from the hay made him choke. He was tall, bony, with large, hard hands and deep, wounded eyes. In the house, he wore cardigans and wire-rimmed reading glasses, but when he worked he wore overalls, greenish gum boots, and no glasses—it made him seem like two separate people to Caitlin.

  “Lot of little rooms to rob people blind,” he said.

  Caitlin watched his mouth moving beneath the handkerchief, moisture appeared, disappeared as he spoke.

  “Wish we could go to New York,” Caitlin said, detecting the note of petulance in her own voice. She hated to sound whiny and childish but sometimes desire kicked so hard within her she couldn’t really help it. It was like being thrown from the saddle by a wild horse—there you were on the ground before you knew it.

  “What are you looking at there anyhow?” Peter asked. He walked across the worn gray plank floor. He was about to crouch down in front of Caitlin but then he remembered his stiffened, scarred leg and stood up, very, very straight, as if pain were his commanding officer calling him to attention. He yanked the kerchief off his mouth and it draped around his long neck.

  “Does it hurt?” Caitlin asked. She felt oddly accused by her father’s injured leg. It made her feel guilt, despair, and it seemed to create within her a path she dared not follow, a path of shame.

  “Just a little stiff.”

  Caitlin closed the magazine and stood up. The blood seemed to leave her head like water down the drain—she stumbled a little, feeling dramatic, rapturous, about to faint.

  “I don’t see why you can’t be estate manager anymore,” she said.

  “Shorty’s doing a good job. He’s a good worker.”

  “But it was always your job, and your father’s before you had it.”

  “And his father’s, too.” Peter smiled. He had large white teeth, which he took good care of, scrubbing them with salt and baking soda. He said there was nothing so low class as a mouth full of bad teeth.

  “So it isn’t fair.”

  “The fair is at the end of the summer.”

  “No, I really mean it.”

  “It’s fair. Until my leg’s better I can’t get around as easy as I used to.”

  “Do you think it will get better?”

  “It’s slow. But it gets a little better every day.” He took the magazine out of Caitlin’s hands and thumbed through it. She wondered what he was looking for.

  “Well, are you mad at the mister for taking your job away?”

  “Don’t call him the mister,” said Peter.

  “Mama does.”

  “She’s from Ireland. I would call him Mr. Fleming.”

  “That’s what I do, to his face.”

  “Well, you see, that’s the whole thing right there. There should be no difference between what you say to his face and what you say behind his back.”

  “So then you do like him,” said Caitlin. She smiled but there was something in it that disturbed her. She would have liked her father’s relation to the Flemings to be somehow clever, concealed, like one of those humble, treacherous clerks in stories who manage to take over the business secretly before anyone gets wind of what they are doing.

  “The Flemings have been good to us, Caitlin,” Peter was saying. “You read about what’s going on. There are men everywhere nowadays who can’t feed their families. With business so bad and the banks holding on to every penny. It’s happening right here, in our own hometown. Boys and girls in your own school without shoes on their feet. I think we’re pretty lucky, don’t you? We all eat and have a good house, with a good roof, and plenty of firewood, and we get to live in the most beautiful spot on earth. We live like real gentlemen, without all the worries.”

  “We do all the work,” said Caitlin.

  A thin bar of sunlight, with a swarm of dust captured within it, poured down from a pinhole in the barn’s metal roof.

  “It’s good work, Caitlin—”

  But that’s all he said because just then they heard a sound that opened the day and emptied it over everything it once held, like a knife slitting a sack of feathers. They heard Mr. Fleming calling Peter in a loud, commanding voice—with that undertone of mirth that always seemed to be there, as if Peter, or Mr. Fleming’s relationship to Peter, was somehow humorous, like the relationship between a man and a chimpanzee.

  Fulton Fleming drove straight into the barn, crushing a scythe that had been left on the floor. He was in his shining maroon Hudson, without a top, and he wore a blue suit, a white shirt, a yellow tie. His hair was wet, shining, slicked back.

  “There you are, Peter,” he said, exasperated. “Get in.”

  Peter looked himself up and down and gestured apologetically at his dirty clothes.

  “Never mind that,” said Fleming. “Just get in back.”

  Without waiting to be asked, Caitlin followed her father into Mr. Fleming’s Hudson. There were vases attached to the doors in back, with fresh daffodils in them.

  Mr. Fleming threw the car into reverse and ran the scythe over a second time. His eyes looked boiled and he didn’t move them when he wanted to see more but only opened them wider. Once he had backed out of the barn and turned the car toward the main house, they sped along, exploding the clouds of dust that seemed to be curled into every rut like genies in bottles.

  “What seems to be the trouble, Mr. Fleming?” Peter asked.

  “Annie,” said Fleming.

  “Mama?” said Caitlin.

  Peter patted her hand, counseling her to keep silent.

  “Did she hurt herself?” Peter asked.

  “No, no, nothing like that,” said Fleming. “Mary’s cousin asked her to do something and the next thing we knew—” He was about to make a helpless gesture when the car hit a heave in the road and he gripped the wheel hard with both hands. “She simply went berserk.”

  “What happened?” asked Caitlin. She leaned forward and shrugged her father’s hand off her shoulder.

  “You must handle her, Peter,” said Fleming. “Calm her down and do whatever needs to be done.” And then, softly, to himself: “I knew something like this would have to happen. We have people in our house who have never come to see us before.”

  The house was at the top of the drive, on a breezy knoll, with a view of the valley and the iridescent ribbon of river winding through.

  They followed Fleming into the house. The marble floors shone like water in the sunlight. Their footsteps echoed.

  Fleming opened the french doors to the music room. Sitting at the piano was a good-looking young man in a blazer. He had placed a newspaper on the music stand and played the piano as he read, as if the letters in the headline—“German National Socialists Call for Moratorium on All Other Political Parties”—could be played as musical notes. The tune he played was like circus music.

  Sitting on the floor was a woman with long red hair. She had one arm wrapped around his legs; she supported herself with her other arm and she cocked her head and smiled at Mr. Fleming.

  The lilac branches were scratching at the window.

  “Where’s Mary?” asked Flemin
g.

  The red-haired woman pointed straight up at the ceiling. Fleming took a deep breath, and then nodded formally. He closed the doors.

  “They’re upstairs,” he said to Peter. He made his way toward the staircase, with Caitlin and Peter following. The local muralist had painted a scene of New York Harbor on the curved wall going up the stairs, where Morris Fleming, upon whose labors the family fortune was based, had made millions in the maritime trades—importing, exporting, insuring ships, storing cargo, and gaining a reputation for rapaciousness and easy morals that Mary and Fulton Fleming were still trying to escape.

  “That was William Porter in there,” Fleming said to Peter as they climbed the stairs. “His family was one of the first to build in Windsor County—over two hundred years ago. They have really seen people come and go.” He breathed a sigh and shook his head.

  As they made their way upstairs, Caitlin saw a man and a woman dressed for tennis leaving through one of the side doors, the one that let out onto the bluestone terrace, which sprouted ironweed no matter how many times Peter cut it back. Following them was Jamey, holding two snowy-white tennis balls. He was saying, “I get to play, too, you know.”

  “Oh, there you are,” said Mary Fleming, as they reached the second floor. She was wearing pleated trousers and a billowing shirt. Someone had done her hair so it curled at each temple. Even at thirty-two, she seemed like a woman straining to act young.

  “Bill and Daisy seem like they’re doing just fine downstairs. Bill’s playing the piano,” Fulton said. His inflection seemed to be asking Mary to back this observation up.

  “I’m glad you think so,” she said. “It took us a year to get them over here.”

  Fulton turned to Peter, finding solace in easy commands, stable lines of authority. “I think you had better look in on your Annie.”

  “Is she in there?” Peter asked, pointing to a gray door in a corridor of blue doors. It was the room in which the linens and cleaning supplies were stored, as well as wooden valets, chamber pots, footstools, wicker baskets, dry sinks.

  Fulton nodded. “She won’t open the door.”

  “I’m sure she will for Peter,” said Mary, and Caitlin marveled at this woman’s hideous facility to combine in a few words so many conflicting emotional clues: mockery, nonchalance, panic, and threat.

  Peter rubbed his hands together and made a loud sniffing noise. There were moments of coarseness that Caitlin always felt her father produced for the Flemings, as if he sensed they were expected of him. At home, he was reserved, diffident, almost elegant, but in the main house he was jittery, a Rube Goldberg contraption of jiggles and shrugs.

  He walked to the gray door of the west-wing supply room and tried the handle. It was locked.

  He tapped the door with his large, raw knuckles. But softly.

  Softly.

  The way he tapped on Caitlin’s bedroom door to wake her for school in the morning, now that he no longer just came in and lay with her as he once had. In days gone by.

  Caitlin felt shame tumbling through her like a barrel down a flight of stairs.

  “Annie,” her father said, “open the door. It’s Piet.” He glanced over his shoulder to see if the Flemings had noted his reversion to Dutch—and Caitlin could not tell if he wanted them to, or not.

  “Should I leave?” Caitlin whispered to her father. She felt suddenly light-headed, trapped in the force field created by the ominous impatience of the Flemings and the increasing nervousness of her father.

  And behind that door was Annie, whom Caitlin now imagined to be in a state of nightmarish duress: a she-devil, with her hair huge and erect, her eyes empty of everything but madness.

  “Open this door now,” Peter whispered frantically. He shifted his feet and Caitlin sensed that what he would like to do was kick at the door, break it down. But he didn’t dare. He had to respect that door as he respected the Flemings.

  And then from behind the locked door came the raw heaving sound of Annie weeping.

  “Do you think I should leave?” Caitlin asked again, making herself stand so straight that her knees ached.

  “Annie?” Peter said. He must have thought it was going to be easier than it turned out to be. He must have thought that hearing his voice would heal her.

  But now he didn’t think it was easy. He had always known his wife as a woman of extravagant moods: a glass of beer could launch her on a fit of laughter; an early snow could make her want to die. But these emotional outbursts were contained and they had always been private. He had served as her confessor throughout their marriage. She would whisper to him of her grievances against the Flemings, her hatred of her work, her loneliness for Ireland and that fading photograph of near-strangers she called her real family. He had listened and absolved her by simply not judging her harshly. She was always ready to do what was expected and that was what counted. She was, finally, a good worker.

  “Daddy?” Caitlin said. She touched him on the arm, not certain he could hear her.

  He waved her away from him.

  All of his suppressed impatience and scorn were in that gesture. It did not say, Move back; it said, Go away.

  “Annie,” he said, “come out.”

  And then she spoke. “I’m resting, now, Peter.” Her voice shook as if she were speaking into the blades of a whirring fan.”

  “You can rest at home,” said Peter. He glanced back at the Flemings and they nodded yes, giving their permission to let Annie go home.

  “I don’t want anyone to see me,” said Annie.

  She sounds like a normal person, thought Caitlin. And now she imagined her mother behind that door not as a haunched hag but as a woman in repose, someone enjoying herself, someone who had been given one task too many and who had decided on her own to change the lives of the Van Fleets forever, to get them thrown off the estate and into some amazing, transforming, resurrecting adventure.

  Caitlin thought of the Empire State Building exploding out of the sidewalk, rushing up toward the little tufts of cloud and then right through them like a beanstalk in the fairy tale.

  “I’m all dirty,” said Annie. Now her voice had a gruesome singsong quality, ancient and deranged. “Oh-oh-oh,” she wailed, and the way her voice came forward and receded made Caitlin think that her mother was being swung back and forth on a rope, like someone about to drop into the ice water of a quarry. “I think I’ll die now. Yes?”

  “Annie,” Peter said, like thwacking a hatchet into the chopping block.

  Annie heard the anger in his voice and it frightened her, made her let go of the last strand of good behavior—there seemed no more point in holding anything back.

  She rushed to the door and flung herself against it. “Let me alone!” she said, her voice a shriek. “Don’t you understand anything, you horse’s ass, you horse’s ass opening, you hole. God, I hate you. I am too dirty to come out of this room.”

  Caitlin felt as if her bones had been removed and replaced with breath.

  I should not be hearing this, she thought to herself, at first censoriously, as if she were witnessing a species of bad behavior, and then with a sense of peril, as if the words were really a form of infection, and could kill her. When was one of the adults going to realize she was there? When was someone going to grab her by the arm, turn her around, point her down the steps and send her off?

  She could almost see her mother pounding at the door from the other side, as if it were not made of wood at all, but canvas, or gum.

  Caitlin glanced over her shoulder at the dark curve of the staircase leading down to the entrance hall, the front door, and, at last, to the silence and privacy of the warm afternoon. She stepped back away from Peter and was about to turn when he took her by the hand.

  His eyes were bright with desperate hope. His smile, usually so subtle, almost withheld, was large and awful and the falseness of it made her afraid of him for the first time in her life.

  “You talk to her, Caitlin,” he said. Terror m
ade his breath sour; he held her much too tightly.

  She shook her head No. That was all she could do; she couldn’t speak.

  “Yes, yes, she likes you, it’ll be goot.” He held onto her with his right hand and patted her shoulder frantically with his left.

  The sound of Annie’s crying grew fainter, but Caitlin couldn’t tell if she was getting herself under control or had just moved further away from the door.

  “Annie?” Peter said. “Caitlin is here. She wants to see her mother. Open the door for her, Annie. Caitlin needs you.”

  There was silence.

  The birds were terribly busy outside.

  “She doesn’t seem to be answering, Peter,” Fulton Fleming said. He folded his arms across his chest and pursed his lips.

  “Peter?” Annie called, softly.

  “Annie,” Peter answered, his voice having that At Last quality of someone coming to the end of an ordeal.

  “Peter, I want to rest, Peter.” Annie’s voice was young, pleading. “They tell me to do this and then the next thing and then another. And so nothing ever gets done, nothing is finished. Everything is half done all over the house.”

  Peter looked back at the Flemings. He seemed to be apologizing for his wife’s complaining.

  Caitlin couldn’t believe how low they were sinking, her family, and taking her with them.

  “Your daughter is here,” Peter fairly crooned to the door.

  “I have no daughter!” Annie screamed this and her voice assumed an actual shape in Caitlin’s mind: a cat with its back curved, its fur up, all claws extended. “I have no daughter, no daughter!” Annie continued to howl. “She came out of my ass. I shit her. Oh. I said it. I said a bad thing. But it’s true.”

  Caitlin was knocked backward by the force of the words and the hatred of that laugh. She covered her ears but her mother’s voice tore them away and she heard every word, even the dank vibrations at the back of her mother’s throat, the sound of her swallows.