But wouldn’t it be nice if she could? Just now, wouldn’t it be lovely to be able to take all her troubles, as if they were a load of dirty laundry she’d brought home from school, and dump them? As if they’d be washed and folded, squeaky clean, in the morning?
But that wasn’t going to happen, not in a million years. Not here. So she’d better get on with changing the subject. She did. She switched into what had always been a routine for her visits home—trying to get Jake to tell her more about Helen.
“Daddy,” she said lightly, swigging from her beer, “did you ever tell me what it was my momma, Helen, did for a living when she was living in New York?”
There. He knew it. She was easing up on it, but nonetheless closing in.
“She worked in an office. I told you that.”
“As a clerk?”
“I’m not sure. I think so.”
“I can’t believe you never talked about it.”
“It was a long time ago, Emma.”
“I know, but when you first met, didn’t you talk about what you did? You had to talk about something when you went out on dates.”
Closer.
“We didn’t go out on many dates.”
“How long did you date before you got married?”
Closer still. He could feel where she was heading, as inexorably as a bullet that had been fired from a gun. Who had told her? Ruth? No, Ruth wouldn’t. George? It didn’t matter. Maybe she’d just figured it out. Or maybe it had been something he’d said. He felt so lightheaded. Hadn’t the doctor warned about his medication and alcohol? He’d laughed then. Yet here he was, the irony of it all, a Jew, who, like most, hardly ever touched the stuff, tripped by demon rum.
“Two weeks,” he said.
“I know you’ve told me that before, but I just can’t imagine it.”
Why not, Emma? she thought then. How long did it take you to decide to move in with Jesse? One night. It happens.
“Why not? I married your stepmother after three days.”
“Yes.” Emma frowned. “But that was because of me. You didn’t marry Helen because of me.”
And then there was a silence—a big deep silence that you could have driven twelve eighteen-wheelers through. You could have run both the Coupitaw and the Mississippi through that hole. You could fit Baltimore, West Cypress, Atlanta, New York, California, all of Emma’s past and present in that space, and it wouldn’t have filled up. And in that silence Emma listened to a bird sing on a branch overhead, and in that moment that was hanging, frozen, still, she thought of herself and J.D., poor dead J.D., together on a blanket beneath a tree, beside the water. And then she saw herself and white-blond Will, making love in the forest beside a stream, that weekend they’d gone to Gatlinburg. She and Minor, rocking on the ocean. Then Jesse, above her, the two of them outside, many times, many places. Then that hanging, frozen moment of time became a tunnel that went back, far back, and Emma saw, as clearly as her hand holding the yet unopened beer bottle in her lap, Helen’s face that she’d come to know from the photographs Jake had given her once the secret was out, Helen’s blue eyes smiling, her soft brown hair spread out beneath her on a blanket like an aureole, her head twisting and turning as a man pleasured her in the fresh air beside a pond, a lake. And that man wasn’t Jake.
“You did.” The words flowed from her lips like water, so gently that she wasn’t sure she’d said them. “You did marry her because of me, didn’t you?”
“No,” Jake answered, looking up, looking her dead in the eye, now that like a thunderbolt on this bright cloudless day it came to him that the secret was no longer worth keeping, the secret that had cost him so much. “No, I married her because I loved her.”
“But she was pregnant.”
“Yes.”
Emma turned away, her eyes filled with sudden tears. They were so hot, those tears, they scalded. She put a finger to her cheek, sure it was boiling.
“I’ve counted up the months before…” she went on breathlessly, for if she said it quickly, maybe it wouldn’t hurt. Or it wouldn’t be true. Maybe it would just be a story she was telling, an anecdote about someone else’s life. I knew this woman once, and… But it was her life, wasn’t it? “…the months between the story you told me—about getting married at City Hall with her in a dress of pale blue and you in a suit that looked like vanilla ice cream—and my birthday. And I thought, Premature. But I was an awfully big baby for that.” Over seven pounds, that certificate had said, the one she’d found in the hall closet in the little suitcase, the same one that had told her about Helen.
Jake just nodded.
“Yet if you got married only two weeks after you met, then…” And then, and then, she faltered.
Jake reached over and, in a completely uncharacteristic gesture, took her face in his hand. Then he said it. The words tumbled out.
“Emma, I’m not your father.”
Inside her head everything went dead still and bright white. She stood, jumped up, and the beer bottle fell from her lap and rolled down, down, bouncing into the Coupitaw, where it floated, heading south now on a journey of its own.
Emma ran down the levee’s other side, across River Road without looking, between two magnolias onto the sidewalk that promenaded before the mansions where in upstairs ballrooms debutantes in long white dresses had come out into the world. She ran in the same direction as her beer bottle floated, and had she been in the position of the bird she’d listened to earlier on the branch above her, she’d have seen that she and the beer bottle ran a head-to-head race, even when it hit a snag for a moment, and at that same instant she hesitated, hearing Jake calling from atop the levee, standing now, “Emma, Emma, stop!”
But she didn’t. She ran even faster then, as if he’d yelled, “Keep going, girl, you can do it,” as if he were urging her on in the race. She passed the cornerstone of the line of mansions, the glass-enclosed aviary of the local Coca-Cola bottling heir’s home. She leaped, again without looking, across the two lanes of the boulevard that marked the beginning of River Road Park. Tires screeched. A horn honked. On into the park she ran, past spreading live oaks bearded with Spanish moss. And in her head there were no thoughts, just a whirligig of shock. She heard her breathing. She heard her footfall. She heard her name, Emma, Emma, though not in Jake’s voice.
She had cruised this park at fifteen, part of a carload of giggling girls. At sixteen, she’d been half of one of the couples she’d been spying on a year earlier, a parker snuggled in beside Bernie in his two-tone green Ford.
Emma, Emma, the voice called, and just before she tripped and fell across the end of a seesaw—a teeter-totter she’d played on as a child, Jake balanced midway down the end of his side so that she could lift him, but all the while wishing that she weren’t an only child, wishing that her momma and daddy had had some more children so she wouldn’t feel so alone—just before she tripped and fell flat on her face, sprawled, she realized that the voice she heard calling her name was her own.
The bottle flowed on down the Coupitaw. It had won. Eventually the bottle would float into the Red, hang a left at the intersection of the Atchafalaya into the Mississippi, past Baton Rouge, past New Orleans, where Emma and Bernie had spent that weekend in the Monteleone, past the brewery just on the other side of the French Quarter levee where it was given birth, on into the Gulf.
The bottle had gone only about a half mile more of that slow, low-water journey when Jake finally reached Emma and leaned over her, brushing gold-and-red leaves out of her hair. She didn’t move. She murmured into the earth, “Why, Daddy?”
“Why what, Missy?” He hadn’t called her that since she was about four.
Why did you marry her? Why didn’t you tell me? Why am I both a motherless and fatherless child?
“Who?” she asked instead.
“I don’t know. Helen never told me her lover’s name. And I didn’t care. All I knew was that I loved her. I didn’t even care that she didn’t love me back
at first, though I think she came to. I didn’t care that she tricked me, that she married me because she needed a father for you, because what else was a girl in trouble to do? I didn’t know anything. And I didn’t care.”
“But who am I?” she screamed then into the fallen leaves and the dirt.
“Why, Emma. You’re still Emma Fine, of course.”
On the drive back to the house in West Cypress, Jake said it all over again, as if once he had started talking he couldn’t stop. “I love you, Emma, and I loved Helen.”
She reached over from the steering wheel and patted his hand, pulling out of herself and into him for a moment because he sounded so pitiful. But she couldn’t answer. She couldn’t say a word. She just nodded and kept driving slowly. As they approached their house in which she’d never lived, she saw Rosalie’s little car in the carport.
And then she found words. “I can’t go in,” she whispered.
Jake nodded.
Another question occurred to her, and it wasn’t why, or who, or what.
“Does she know?”
He shook his head. “No.”
Suddenly Emma laughed. She laughed so loud, so strong, from so far deep down inside herself, that she had to pull the car off to the side of the road.
Jake looked at her with frightened eyes. He was afraid she had lost her mind. But he was also afraid that she was going to tell on him, that she was going to tell his secret, now their secret.
She gripped his arm. “Well, I’m sure as hell not going to spill the beans!”
Jake managed a little embarrassed smile, the same one as when he paid a compliment or when someone complimented him, though in Jake’s life those latter occasions had been few and far between.
“Listen,” Emma said then, dropped once more to a whisper as if Rosalie could hear them, though she couldn’t even see them unless she stepped out into the front yard, and she might just do that, any second, she just might. “Listen, Daddy, I’m not going to stop. You get out of the car right here.”
“No!”
“I’m all right,” she said and smiled to prove that it was so.
“Where are you going?”
Where was she going? Emma Rochelle Fine Tree, no mother, no husband, and now no father, where the hell do you think you’re going?
“I’m not sure,” she said. “But I’ll call you when I get there. I’ve got to be alone and think about this. You understand, don’t you?”
Well, he did, but he wished he didn’t.
“Quick now,” she said. And then she sounded like herself again. “Go. Git.” She reached across him and opened the car door.
Jake got.
19
Driving East Again
Emma got, too, right back on the interstate, I-20 headed east, veered over into the left lane, the fast lane, and stayed there. She found herself an eighteen-wheeler convoy and tucked in behind a Peterbilt, sped on past exits to Rayville, Delhi, past the turnoff to Pearl Bank. Hello, goodbye again, thanks for the memories, J.D. She was headed for the Mississippi, and an hour and a quarter after she had left West Cypress the tall steel of the Vicksburg Bridge loomed before her. She held her breath.
She’d always done that since the first time she drove across it with Bernie, it sneaking up on them while she was still behind the wheel, and she’d screamed, “No, it’s too high, too long, I can’t do it.”
“Yes, you can, Emma. Just hold your breath.”
What seemed like ten minutes later, for the Mississippi is a wide river, she’d grinned and gasped, “Goddamn!” And then a flagman had pulled them over. “Double goddamn!” But it wasn’t a ticket. The piece of white paper he’d handed her was a postcard, preaddressed to President John F. Kennedy. That must have been about 1962.
“Dear Mr. President,” it said. “I want to ask you to cease and desist from your integrationist persecution of the State of Mississippi and to turn your attention to the Communist threat both at our borders and from within.”
She still had that postcard somewhere in the bottom of her bureau drawer along with the little notebook with names inscribed in purple ink, photographs of Helen, love letters from Bernie, somewhere back in the mountain home she shared with Jesse Tree.
Jesse! Jesus, he seemed now like part of someone else’s life. Emma Rochelle What? Why she hadn’t thought about him in…she couldn’t remember when.
Oh, yes, she could, she’d thought about him just a few hours ago when she was sitting on top of the levee with Jake. Didn’t you, Emma? she said to herself. Didn’t you think about telling Jake all about Jesse and asking him what you ought to do about the mess you’ve gotten yourself in, making promises you couldn’t keep, saying yes when you should have said no, didn’t you? But that seemed like days, weeks, years ago. A lifetime ago, before Jake had said…and now that she thought about it, it didn’t seem like the telling would have had much to do with Jesse. Somehow, spilling her secret would have been more about Jake, more about closing old wounds, but Jake had beat her to the punch, hadn’t he, and opened a gap so wide, wider than the Big Muddy she’d just crossed over—why, the gap between them now had no sides. There was no way to bridge them. How could there be connectors when there was nothing to hang them to? Why, the whole idea of her ever trying to make her family whole was a colossal joke. She had no family. Not Rosalie. And now not Jake. Her mother was long buried with the secret of her father’s name. What in the hell was her own real name?
Emma looked down at her hands clenched on the steering wheel and realized she had the shakes.
Get hold of yourself, girl. Don’t think about it.
I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.
A pickup truck passed her then, and through the window, just before the gun rack, the man driving turned and looked at her and grinned. You’re talking to yourself, Emma. You’re talking out loud.
The unfamiliar names of Vicksburg streets flashed by her on the interstate.
You’re in Mississippi, Emma. Now what?
She pulled off at an exit sign announcing services.
“Fill her up.”
“Where you headed?” asked the old man in a blue uniform as he wiped dead bugs off her windshield. He looked down at her license tag and back up at her. “You a long way from home. Where you headed?” he repeated.
“Georgia,” she said when she opened her mouth. She listened to the word. It sounded about right.
“You got family there?”
She shrugged, “Used to. My momma was from north of Atlanta. Up near Helen, Tallulah Falls. Tiny place called Meadville. Ever heard of it?”
“Nawh. Cain’t say as I have. I’ll check your oil since you got a far piece to go.”
That done, he stood by the side of her window, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. “So you going to visit kin?”
Emma handed him some money. “I don’t know. I hope so.”
And that was how she decided, since she didn’t know who she was, what she wanted, or what the hell she was doing, to go in search of her mother, to go to Meadville. It was easier than flipping a coin, and she had to do something, she couldn’t just drive in circles, and she was no good at sitting still. Meadville it is, she said, Meadville.
She was tempted when she got within spitting distance early the next morning, having sped across Mississippi, Alabama and part of the state of Georgia, when she pulled into the little town of Helen, to just stop. For she’d turned off the main road to revisit the site where she’d sat shivah for Herman with a bag of tuna fish and crackers and a brace of Jack Daniel’s. The motel where she’d spent that week was still there, but Helen had really flossed itself up, had tacked pseudo-Swiss carpentry onto the front of plain Southern houses, full-blown touristique. Well, she sure as hell wouldn’t have come here to mourn her pseudo-daddy Herman now. Pseudo? Hell, he was as real as any daddy she had.
God Almighty, wasn’t life weird? You thought you had the simple stuff down, like the name of your mother, your father, your own name for that
matter, then even that slipped sideways.
* * *
Meadville is a hamlet perched on a flat space in the north-Georgia hills, anchored, like many small Southern towns, by a square. In the center of that square stands a statue to the memory of the Confederate dead lost in that war that is still referred to by many locals as the Recent Unpleasantness.
Emma drove around the square a couple of times, reading the names written on storefronts and attracting the attention of a trio of old men passing the day on a bench in front of the Piggly Wiggly grocery store.
“California,” one of them said, reading her tags.
“Yep,” answered another.
“That girl’s a long way from home.”
“Might be lost.”
“Might be one of them hoopers selling marijuana. Ain’t that what they call ’em?”
“Trouble’s what I’d call it, young girl being off by herself like that.”
“What you think she wants?”
“Guess you can ask her that yourself, Vern. Here she comes.”
* * *
“Ain’t never heard of no one by that name. And I reckon I’ve lived here most of my life. Helen Kaplan. Nope. No Kaplans.” The men exchanged a look. And then the man who’d answered her shoved back his old straw hat. Beneath it his forehead was white. He stared straight at Emma.
“You think maybe that was her married name?” asked the man on his left.
“No, sir. Her married name was Fine, the same as mine. I mean my maiden name.”
“You married?” asked the third man.
She had to think about that a second. “Yes, yes, I am.”
The man glanced at her left hand. “Don’t wear no rings.”
“No.” Emma shifted her weight from left to right. How did she get herself into these things? She couldn’t lie worth spit. Hadn’t she gotten caught every time it mattered? What she was best at was omission. Yes, leaving things out was the name of her game.
“They don’t wear no wedding rings in California?”
“Well, not everyone does.” She flashed him a big smile, hoping that would get her off the hook. But these were mountain folk, not flatlanders, and they were crusty as old billy goats.
Keeping Secrets Page 32