Blood Secrets

by Jones, Craig

  “She’d never be willing to leave Virgil. That’s another problem I haven’t begun to deal with. I’m sure she’s been sleeping with him from the beginning. If she ends up pregnant, I don’t know what that would do to Frank. But I want you to see him, I want you to watch him when Regina doesn’t show up for dinner.”

  She winced slightly. “Like watching a fish on a hook.”

  “And what have I been?”

  “Take it easy, honey. I wasn’t criticizing.”

  When Frank came home, he took one look at Gloria and stopped cold. Gloria played her part perfectly. She was cheerful and breezy and right on cue with a story of how her mother was considering a property investment and wanted her here to look at it. Frank smiled and went through the amenities by asking about Pat and the kids. But as soon as she turned her back, he gave me a wounded look mixed with fear and accusation.

  Gloria took care of the dinner conversation by rattling on about the trip to Europe she and Pat were going to take and a dozen other things I barely heard. I sensed the close attention she was paying to Frank, and I wondered if he sensed it too. Finally, when Gloria paused, he looked at his watch and asked where Regina was.

  “She’ll be late,” I said as casually as I could.

  “Where is she?”

  “Some club meeting.”

  “What club?”

  “French, I think.”

  “Her French club meets every other Thursday. This is Tuesday.”

  “I think this was a special meeting about fund-raising. Anyway, she’s having supper with some of her friends.”

  “You mean at one of their houses?”

  “Yes, that’s what I mean.” My tone of voice told him he had gone far enough. He asked nothing more, but he stopped eating and took to his wine.

  After dinner, he sat in the living room with us. He faced the window and kept staring through it. After less than an hour, he excused himself by saying he had work to do in his study.

  As soon as he was out of the room, Gloria turned to me and said, “There is something wrong with him. I can feel it. He’s absolutely panic-stricken.”

  For weeks, I had longed for an outside confirmation. Now that I had it, I began to shake and my whole body seemed to race downhill into my stomach. I couldn’t talk, I didn’t want Gloria to talk, so I turned on the television. And waited.

  At nine, he came downstairs and announced he was going out for ice cream.

  “And take a little ride past Virgil’s?” I said. “You needn’t bother. She’s not there.”

  He paused. I knew he wanted to maintain the charade about the ice cream because of Gloria, but he also wanted to know what I knew.

  “Did she call you? I didn’t hear the phone ring.”

  “No, she didn’t call and no, the phone didn’t ring. I know where she is.”

  He managed a small chuckle. “Where, then?”

  “She’s on a little vacation. She’ll be gone for the week.”

  I watched Gloria. She kept her face turned to the television, but I saw her swallow hard.

  “Irene, I don’t think this is anything to joke about.”

  “I don’t, either. Especially since the joke is on me.”

  “Gloria, would you excuse us for a minute?”

  “Sure.” She started up from her chair.

  “Stay where you are,” I said. Then to Frank: “Does it bother you that I have someone here on my side?”

  “Is she with Virgil?”

  “You see?” I said to Gloria. “Everything comes back to Regina. His darling daughter. His desirable daughter.”

  “Stop it. Now where is she? What do you mean—‘for the week’?”

  “She’s where you’ll never find her. I want her away from here while I decide what to do about you. I’m going to see a lawyer. If it takes the truth to keep you away from her legally, then I’ll tell the truth.”

  “Tell him whatever you want. Only tell me where she is right now. Is she with Virgil? Is she? Because if she is, she’s in danger!”

  “In danger,” I mimicked. “No, she’s not with Virgil. She was in danger, but she’s not going to be anymore.”

  “Irene, don’t toy with me. For her own good, tell me where she is. You can’t play this game; you don’t know what’s involved. Tell me where.”

  I said nothing. Gloria watched. The next thing I knew, I was pulled to my feet, my shoulders gripped in Frank’s hands, his face red and furious in front of mine.

  “Tell me, goddammit, tell me! You don’t know what might be going on!” He began shaking me. “Tell me, tell me!”

  “Take your hands off her.” Gloria was standing and her voice was hard. “I said take your hands off her.” He turned and looked at her. She didn’t make a move and neither did he. He just stared. “Take your hands off her now.” His hands fell away from me. He looked as if he were going to be sick. The three of us stood there and then Gloria backed up and turned off the television. Frank collapsed into the chair I had been sitting in and put his hands over his face.

  “How perfect!” he gasped. “How perfect you should be here now!” He dropped his hands and looked at her. “You were right, Gloria. You tried to save her from me at the very beginning. You were right and I should have let you do it. But now it’s too late.” His face drew back in a smile. His shoulders and chest began to shake, but it took a few seconds for me to realize he was not laughing. He was crying. “And so it’s time to tell, and you might as well hear it too. I admired you, Gloria, and it’s hard to fight someone you admire. Sit down, both of you. I don’t want you standing over me this way. Please sit. Over there, together.” We sat down on the couch. “You’re right, Irene, everything comes back to Regina. I knew when she was born it would have to. I tried to think it wouldn’t; I just willfully underestimated them. But they’re strong. They’re so goddam strong, it’s frightening.”

  “Who’s strong?” asked Gloria.

  “Vivian. My so-called family. The kind of family neither of you would know anything about. And there’s no reason why you should, except that through me Regina’s part of that family. She may not recognize it, but they do. They’ll try to claim her the way they tried to claim me and my sister.”

  His big hands hung limp over the arms of the chair, but he was breathing like a runner.

  “Regina died because of them—and me. I wouldn’t take her away. I promised her I would and then I didn’t. I told her to wait but she couldn’t wait and I just closed my eyes to it because I wanted to get out my own way, I wanted to wait until it was convenient for me. By then it was too late for her. And then she was dead.” He took a deep breath and shuddered. “Irene, I must tell you something I should have told . . .” He turned his face away. “Vivian is my mother.”

  Gloria and I looked at each other. Her eyes said the same thing I was wondering: Was he going to become so irrational that we would have to call the police?

  “Frank, Vivian is your sister.”

  He nodded, not looking at me. “Yes, that too.” He drew breath again. “Regina and I were hers and my father’s—”

  “Frank, maybe you should—” But Gloria squeezed my arm and shook her head, indicating I should let him continue.

  “From the beginning,” he said, “I knew there was something different about Regina and me, the way my mother—or who I thought was my mother—looked at us, the way the older ones looked at us. I understood it with Regina—she had that clouded look, she was ‘slow’—but I couldn’t understand why they looked at me the same way. We seemed to amuse some of them and embarrass the others. Except Doris, the oldest, and my . . . mother. Doris hated us and the other one hated us and pitied us at the same time. Sometimes when we were sleeping, they would come in together and Doris would hold the pillow over our faces so no o
ne would hear us scream and my—the other one would beat us with a piece of garden hose. Doris said if we ever told anyone she’d kill us. One night, Vivian came in and caught them. She knocked her mother to the floor and dragged Doris into the house—”

  “Into the house?”

  “Regina and I didn’t sleep in the house. There was a shack in the backyard, an old toolshed. They put a wood stove in it and that’s where we slept. Vivian used to clean it and get wood for us until I was old enough to do it. Then, this one night, Vivian caught Doris, and from what we heard from the others, she beat her to a pulp. The next morning Doris was gone for good and from then on my—Vivian’s mother never stepped foot into the shack. She ignored us most of the time, but once in a while I’d catch her looking at me and I’d think she was going to cry. I remember once this hot, hot day she called me into the house and gave me a glass of lemonade and said, ‘Listen, boy’—she never called me or Regina by our names—she said, ‘Listen, boy, today ain’t half as hot as the fires of hell. You got to watch out. God’s already paid your sister by making her feeble-minded and I’m sure he’s got something waiting for you too. You just remember you belong to him because even the devil belongs to him, even Vivian.”

  He stopped and seemed to mull this over in his head. But I could mull nothing over. To me, it was a story about someone I didn’t know.

  “When I was ten or eleven I began to realize why the others were crowded into three bedrooms while Vivian had her own room. Sometimes my father slept in there with her, sometimes my brothers Tom and Jack. They were the nicest to us besides Marian. Marian worked in the dime store and she used to bring us candy and little toys until Vivian made her stop. They hated each other. Later, Marian met a man, only she never brought him to the house. They moved away to get married and we never heard from her again. The night before she left, she came out to say good-bye to us and she told me to watch over Regina and keep her away from Vivian. I asked her why; she said in a few years I’d know why. And of course she was right. One night, Vivian and Jack came out and took Regina into the house. When they brought her back she was crying, this dull moaning. I asked her what happened. She slid her hand down her stomach and said they had hurt her. The next day she helped me nail metal prongs on the doorjamb and I got a board to stick in them. About a week later they came for her again and they broke the door down. Jack and Tom held me down and Vivian took Regina inside. Then Vivian came back and they left. That’s when—when she told me Regina and I belonged to her. She stroked my hair and told me I didn’t have to mind anyone but her and my father and they would take care of us. She kept saying how someday we’d all get even with Ridgeway; she’d see to that personally. We’d have money and they’d come crawling to us and then we could laugh at them. She said we didn’t need any outsiders, not if we all stuck together. Then she started”—he shuddered—“she started kissing my neck. She said we all had to love each other, her and my father and Tom and Jack, Regina and me. The rest of the family didn’t count, not if they ran out the way Doris and Marian did. I got away from her and ran for the house. In my father’s room, they—Regina was in the bed making that dull moaning and my father was saying, ‘It’s all right, Daddy’s here, Daddy’s going slow,’ and he was moving on top of her and when he saw me he smiled. . . .”

  Through his words I could hear that dull moaning. It was coming from inside my head. I glanced at Gloria. Her mouth was slack, and her California tan looked tawny.

  “. . . Regina called to me, she called my name, but I couldn’t move, and then—then he got off and Jack got on and I began to scream, and I ran to my moth—Vivian’s mother’s room. She was sitting there in her straight-back chair with the Bible in her lap. I begged her to stop them, but all she did was smile and say, ‘They’re none of mine, God has sent me a sign, they were conceived in lust but I’ve put lust aside, they’re lust’s children, they’re none of mine.’ She closed her eyes and started praying for me. I yelled for her to come and help me, but she didn’t move, she only smiled and said, ‘You can’t shout down lust, boy, you have to put it aside.’ ”

  He stopped and closed his eyes. His hands were still hanging over the arms of the chair and his veins stood out like a network of tubing. When he spoke again, his voice was distant and strangely metallic, like a noise traveling down a long, narrow pipe.

  “After a while, Regina didn’t cry when they took her in at night. Vivian was working at Leo’s lumber company and bringing home more money than her job was worth and she was buying Regina presents and dresses. For a long time, I didn’t do anything. If someone looked at me sideways at school or on the street, I was afraid they’d found out about us. I had to keep reminding Regina not to tell anyone. Then one little thing happened and it changed me and it changed Regina.” He glanced at us briefly, then stared out the window. “This girl asked me to a dance. She was afraid to ask me because her father was a drunk and her brothers were hoods and her sisters were whores and the whole town knew it.”

  “Wanda Hoople,” I murmured.

  “Yes. The whole town knew about her family but no one knew about us. When she asked me, she stood there, ashamed of what she was, and waited for me to answer. But I couldn’t answer and she backed away from me like I was some kind of a prince she had no right to approach and I wanted to say, ‘It’s not like that, you don’t know who I am,’ but I didn’t say anything, I didn’t say a word. After that, in school, she’d slink past me with her head down and I wanted to say . . . I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t say it to anyone. So I turned it on Regina. One night I told her not to go with them when they came for her, I told her it was a sin, it was filthy, and she’d rot in hell for it. She started crying and moved toward me, but I pushed her away and when they came to get her, she started howling. She ended up telling Vivian what I’d said, so the next day Vivian took me for a ride in the car Leo had given her. We parked on this country road way out of town. She told me there was no place in the world for Regina and me except with her. She told me to keep my dirty mouth shut around Regina and to stop putting ideas in her head. But it was too late to undo what I had done. Regina kept after me to take her away and I kept promising her, but . . . I kept seeing her as one of them and sometimes when she touched me I wanted to jump out of my skin and leave her with them. But she kept begging me to take her away and I kept saying later, later. Then I got the scholarship to college. All I could think about was privacy and no noises in the night and no one to look after but myself. I told her she would have to wait, wait until I got to college, and then maybe in a year I could come get her. She said she couldn’t stay there without me. She said she’d follow me, she’d go wherever I went. She knew what was really in my mind. You’ll never come back, she said, you’ll never come back and I’ll rot in hell. And then I—” His voice broke and the words came out in spasms. “I told her she could never follow me because where I was going they wouldn’t let her in. The next day she took the can of lye into the woods where no one would hear her scream. And she must have died screaming. When I found her, her mouth and her eyes were wide open.” He was crying again, without sobbing, and his hands were fisted. “Vivian knew why she’d done it. And she told me I was going to pay for it. I could run off to college or the North Pole, it didn’t matter where, but she’d know where I was, and someday I was going to pay for it. But those few years in college, it all slipped behind me like a story I’d been written out of. They left me alone. Until our wedding. Then I knew that nothing had slipped behind me; I knew that the worst was ahead of me.”

  Slowly, he turned and faced me, and he waited. But my tongue was only a blur in my mouth, and there were no words to focus it.

  “That day Vivian came to the hospital, I knew. I knew she was just beginning. Then I started hoping. Hoping she would get some fatal disease or smash up her car. But she’s invincible. She’s proven that much.”

  “Why . . . why didn’t you tell me at t
he beginning?”

  “I never planned on a beginning. When I left Ridgeway, I had accepted the fact I could never marry anyone. I thought just to be away from them, to breathe my own air, would be enough and I could live alone. But it didn’t turn out that way. In a way, it was blessing not being attractive, because I never had to fight girls off. But there was a kind of girl who was attracted to me. Girls like Regina and Wanda Hoople, girls who hid in corners and thought the world was made for everyone else but them. And I found that somehow I made them happy. For a while that was enough. Until you came along.”

  He squinted and turned away as if the very memory were some harsh glare he couldn’t endure.

  “You came along like some cruel joke. At first, I thought . . . I even thought Vivian had hired you to lead me on and mock me. That’s why I avoided you until I ran a check on you through the registrar’s office and convinced myself there couldn’t be any connection. But for months after that it was worse. I used to stand in front of the mirror and ask myself: ‘What does she see in me? What can she love?’ I decided a hundred times to tell you, but I always backed off. Then that day your parents came to my apartment, I saw who you came from and what you came from, and you held me up to them like a prize, and they took your word for it. I decided then I’d do anything to keep you and I have tried . . . to keep you.” He turned and looked at Gloria. “But you knew something. Every time I was around you, I felt naked, and I asked myself: ‘Why doesn’t Irene see what Gloria sees?’ You were a bigger threat than Vivian was. If Vivian ever tried to approach Irene, I had a story all set to counter hers. But you were a stranger and yet you sensed something; there was no way of fighting you. I had to leave that to chance.”

  “Frank, it wasn’t that . . .” She didn’t finish. I watched a tear drop from her jaw.