by Jeffrey Lent
Katey was prepared for the wife, or possibly the man himself. She said, “Well, I hope so.” Sliding into her best confused, slightly girlish but also mildly supplicating tone. Which she used with certain teachers, other adults. She said, “I’m looking for Brian Potter. Isn’t this his place?”
The woman scanned her up and down and said, “This the Trask place.” At the same time turning and calling back through the open door, “Miss Judith? Some gal here looking for somethin. You best come.” She glanced again at Katey and went back in the door, a simple screen open to the day, shut it behind her and left Katey, who heard her footsteps going down the hall.
Katey considered all of this and wanted to get in the truck and flee. Instead she went up the rest of the steps so she stood on the porch and waited. Her hands clasped in front of her.
The woman came fully out the door and stood on the porch before Katey. She had sandy blonde hair cut in a neat bob, blue eyes and a graze of freckles over her nose. Wearing a white sleeveless blouse, light blue capris and tan mary-janes with low heels. “I’m Judith Potter,” she said as she reached out a hand. “Faye said you’re looking for Brian?” Just the hint of upward lilt put that question into his name.
Jesus, Katey thought, I can’t do this. Judith was perhaps thirty, a good couple of inches shorter, a small woman with presence and command. And as she thought this she sensed movement and glanced at the screen door where two little girls had materialized behind the dull cast of the screening. But she was taking the cool hand in her own warm damp one and said, “I don’t mean to bother anyone. My name’s Katey Snow and my dad was in the war with Mr. Potter and—”
Judith had released her hand and at once looked over Katey’s shoulder at the truck and then was turning to the door as she spoke. “From Vermont. Yes.” And then said, “Phyllis, Diane I want you to go to the kitchen and sit with Faye while I speak with Miss Snow.”
“Mama!”
“No sass. Now scat! I mean it.”
They went down the hall and for the moment there was a pause and together the two on the porch watched the little girls, perhaps five and six, one with long blonde hair and the other with auburn hair much like Katey’s. In mismatched dresses and both barefoot as if the day hadn’t truly started for them.
Katey said, “They’re cute.”
Judith studied her a moment and then said, “They are. They’re also sisters. Do you have siblings?”
“I don’t.”
“Well, I don’t know how that is, but I can tell you: Girls. And there’s a third. Veronica, who’s out with her daddy. If I had to have all girls I’m grateful for Veronica. I love em all, don’t get me wrong. But Veronica, she’s Daddy’s girl. Loves the dogs, loves being outside along with him. Oh, I guess you’ll get to meet her. Maybe.” Then she paused and said, “Why don’t you come in and sit.” This time, not a question.
“Oh. I don’t want to be a bother.”
Judith regarded her with an open face. The trace of suggestion that perhaps Katey already was a bother. Then said, “We’ll sit in the parlor. Faye will keep the girls in the kitchen. Come along and give me a minute with Faye. Would you care for coffee?”
Katey felt caught out, as if there was something out of balance, as if this woman had someway expected her. And thought of Maine and Thornton Potter and wondered what message he might’ve conveyed. She wanted to leave but couldn’t. And beyond that, she felt no anger or hostility from Judith Trask. But guessed there might be some hidden. She was finally here, and that meant riding this through and learning what she would.
She said, “I’d drink a cup, if there wasn’t any trouble to fixing it.”
Judith said, “It’s in the percolator still hot. How do you take it?”
“Just black, thank you.”
“Come along, then.”
They went into the house. A long central hall ran all the way to the door that opened onto the back of the house, with rooms opening off the hall, and a staircase built midway that went up and down in both directions. Judith led her to a room off the right-hand side and Katey could hear the murmur of little girls further ahead down off the hall.
They went into a parlor that was sparely furnished with an old daybed covered in crushed faded green velvet, a set of chairs of a deep cherry wood, with padded seats and armrests, a pair of wingback chairs placed across from a table holding a chessboard with a game in progress laid out. The walls were old beadboard painted a deep warm mustard color and a pair of oil portraits hung on opposing walls, a man and woman, in clothing from another century.
“Sit where you like,” Judith said. “I’ll only be a moment.” And left the room. She closed the door behind her, which had been open when they entered.
Katey looked about and considered. She chose one of the wingback chairs because they looked the most comfortable and the chess table gave her a bit of distance from wherever the woman chose to sit when she reentered. She sat forward on the edge of the chair and clasped her hands between her knees. She felt out on a great precipice and wildly uncertain and wanted to be at her best and wished she’d considered more carefully what she’d worn and then simply gave herself over, knowing she’d actually done that once she’d made the decision to come here. Also, she was trying to recall what Brian’s father had said about Judith Trask, and while she couldn’t recall his words, or perhaps his comparison, she had the distinct impression that Thornton Potter felt Judith to be a formidable woman.
Judith came back in with a tray in one hand with coffee in cups and saucers. She bent and set down the tray and handed Katey coffee, took up the other cup and settled herself, much like Katey, on the edge of the other wingback.
She studied Katey a moment and said, “Good Lord. Ronnie, that’s Veronica, will look just like you in a few years. Give or take an inch.”
“Ma’am?” Katey managed. She drank some of the coffee but her separate hands couldn’t quite manage the cup and saucer, both shuddering. She brought them back together and set them down.
“As you said. You’re Katey Snow from Vermont and your father was in the war with Brian. Oliver, is that right? And your mother is Ruth?”
“How’d you know all this?”
Judith smiled. She said, “Well now, you told me much of it, yourself.”
“I guess I did?”
“I’m sorry,” Judith said. “I suspect it took a bit of gall but a great deal of grit to set out doing this. And I expect you’re terribly nervous. You don’t need to be. As long as we reach some … understandings.” And let that last fall slow into the room.
“All right.” Katey said this slowly, a deliberate lilt of uncertainty, of possible confusion.
Judith said, “For the moment at least, we don’t want the girls to know who you are.”
Katey took up the coffee cup, leaving the saucer on the chessboard and using both hands to steady the cup as she sipped and dipped her eyes away from Judith. Then lifted her eyes and said, “But you know who I am.”
“It appears that you’re Brian’s daughter.”
The last thing she expected, this bald statement. Then she gathered herself and said, “I guess Brian’s dad told you I visited him.”
“It was Louise, actually, who made the phone call. She spoke with me, had no choice. And Lord bless her but it was hard. She hemmed and hawed but the end was simple—you take one good look at you, your eyes, that hair, even your frame. Struck from a mold, so similar once you see it, there’s no argument. And it was a terribly hard thing for Louise to do and I was kind as I could be. And, yes, surprised but not, oh, you know, not bowled over.”
“I’m not understanding this.”
Judith nodded. “I’m sorry. It’s such an old story for me that it just feels a part of who I am, of who we are. Brian and myself. But you see, between when he came to visit your parents, when those things happened, there was another thing in his life before he met me. A terrible tragedy. There was a girl he loved—”
“The gir
l that died in the car wreck. Deedee? His dad told me.”
Judith smoothed her hands down her lap. “Debra. Debra Springer. So you know that story. Well. Here’s the part you don’t know. When he met me. Well, now. I need to get my mind around this. He met me in the summer, I was up in Maine, there’s a little place on an island, from long ago, my great-grandmother came from there. And we don’t go every summer, there’s cousins and all sorts of descendants and it’s not that grand sort of place that can fill up with five or six extended families. Anyway, we met there and I saw plain as the nose on my face that this was the man I’d been waiting for but it took him a bit longer. He was still in school, college, I’m talking about. But that fall he almost surprised me by coming down to see me and meet my family and when I got that letter I thought I knew what it all meant. But I recall the moment, the evening after dinner, we walked out past the sheds and down the farm lanes and there was a full moon and a warm night for December and he’d spent that day out bird hunting with my granddaddy. Those two, a small joke, they were birds of a feather. Some good things are hard and hard things are never easy, even if they make your life better. So, we got to this certain spot, an old rail fence by some rundown tobacco sheds and a big old oak strung with dead wisteria, just a pretty spot in the moonlight and we paused there, as a young couple will. He asked me to marry him. I already knew my answer. But he stopped me and told me before I answered, he had things about himself to tell me. And that once he did, he’d understand if I said no. That he’d leave and never bother me again. Well, that was a wallop to my heart. I didn’t have the first idea what to expect. He started off telling about Debra, who I already vaguely knew about. Then he told me about the war, things he saw, things he did. A whole pile of it pretty bad stuff and I got a sense of what sort of burden he was carrying. And I did stop him then and reminded him of where he was, and that the old man he’d come so fond of those last few days, how that man’s own father had his own war and one piled up with right and wrong so much it can’t hardly be sorted but how those things stay with a man and float on down the years, even into the children to come. In ways we can never know, or endings we can never see. Excuse me.”
Judith stood and walked to one of the side tables and opened a silver box, took up a cigarette from the box and an oval lighter shaped like an egg, removed the top of the lighter and smoked. She returned to her seat and set a glass ashtray on the chessboard. Katey wanted to ask for one but didn’t. She was perched still on the edge of her chair, cramped and hot like a bird on a wire.
Judith said, “It was after I ran off at the mouth, trying to reassure him, that he told me about your father. When he visited after the war. Now, I don’t know how much you know of that time, except enough to have come looking for him.”
Looking at the floor, Katey said, “My mother tried to explain it to me. The best she could.”
“People,” Judith said, “are complicated. More so than some of us more fortunate ones can ever know.” Then she paused, crushed out her cigarette and gazed toward the window out the side of the house, raised her hands and made a church steeple of her fingertips and rested her chin there a moment. Then made a barely perceptible nod and looked back at Katey. “And how did she come to tell you? No, wait: Oliver Snow? What sort of man is he? I mean, I’ve heard the stories from Brian. I’m asking, is he a good father to you?”
“Oh. Oh, yes. He was, I mean, he is … I love him dearly and he loves me, I know. I never doubted him—he’s seen by some as a little odd but never anything but kind and attentive to me. I miss him and I’m terribly worried I’ve hurt him by running off like I did, but once I knew the truth I just had to …”
“What, dear? You had to what?”
Katey picked at nothing on the knee of her jeans. She took a breath and said, “Once I knew, I got the notion into my head, and it wouldn’t let go. That I needed to stand before Brian Potter and have him see me and learn what that felt like. I’m prepared to dislike him, to feel nothing at all. I know he might deny me or just ask me to stay fully out of his life, I’m prepared for that. But I felt like, at least for me, I needed that. I needed for him to know I exist.”
“Yes,” Judith said, although with a certain hesitation. Then, “I can see how that would be. How old are you? Katey? Or is it Katherine?”
“It’s both. I’m seventeen.”
Judith nodded. “That’s a hard age.”
“People keep saying that! Why’s it so damned hard? Because I think and feel and want to know things? Because I’m figuring out all the little boxes we’re supposed to fit things into are almost all false? Because the world is so wrong and everyday we just go along pretending it’s not? Is that what you mean?”
Judith dipped her chin and then, eyes full on Katey, said, “I was thinking more about how, in the process of learning those things, the old ground you once walked so sure and certain upon is swept from under you. That’s the hard part. Now, then, answer me a question I came upon a bit ago. Why did your mother, Ruth, why did Ruth tell you about Brian? What happened?”
Katey was quiet a moment, drank the last of what was now cold coffee. Her hands were steady as she set cup into saucer. She looked up and said, “She didn’t.”
“You just told me she did.”
“I told you she tried to explain what happened. With Brian and herself.”
“All right. But, what happened to cause her to attempt that explanation?”
Katey stood and walked to the side table and took up a cigarette from the box and the lighter and smoked. She went back to her chair and leaned to pull the glass ashtray close and tipped the miniscule ash from her cigarette and said, “I found six years of Christmas cards hidden away. Addressed to both of them and with his Maine return address. Which is how I knew where to go looking.”
Judith crossed one leg over the other knee and looked off again. Then she said, “I guess it’s how they say. We keep the very things that will hurt us most, for the worst possible reasons. But I don’t quite understand. How did those cards tell you who he was? He told me he never heard from your mother after that weekend. So how would he have known about you? What could he have said in a card that alerted you to who he was?”
“Nothing.” Katey was suddenly small.
Judith leaned toward Katey and said, “The truth can be a slippery thing. And you learned one of those slippery truths. But how? It’s just not clear to me.”
“My father told me.”
“What? What do you mean, he told you? Why would he do that?”
Katey was now the one looking beyond, out the window. There was a bit of lawn, then a swale of dried tall grasses and a stand of tall pines with long trunks before spare branches. She said, “I don’t really know.”
Judith paused and again steepled her fingers and frowned. Then she said, “Your mother, when she tried to explain what had happened, what did she tell you? I’m not meaning to pry, and I’m not asking for details. Just a sense of her tone, her words. Because I can’t imagine the man you’ve described, and the man Brian has told me of, doing something so cruel. Which is how it sounds to me.”
Katey thought about this and then said, “All right. Mom, when she explained, mostly what she told me was that it was a long hard weekend for all three of them. She ended up learning things Dad had never told her about. And she said she was just struck down with it all and there was a part of the whole story I could never understand unless I was there. But that there was a real bad time when she was listening to all of this from Brian and she sort of broke down and he, Brian that is, did also. And Dad wasn’t there. I don’t know where he was. But they were alone and she said to me that there are times when life is terrible and raw and precious and people do things that they wouldn’t otherwise do. That’s almost her exact words. And I knew from the way she told me, she was talking not just about all the things she’d learned but also what happened right then, that afternoon or night or whatever it was. When I was made.”
A si
lence then. Made more so by the whir of a housefly about the room, then up against the windowglass. Also the sound of a vehicle coming past the house, the engine pulsing onward but barely receding before it cut off. Which brought Judith upright in her chair, alert. But she only said, a low voice, “I be damn.”
Katey shook her head. “Look, this has all been a big mistake. I think I should just get in my truck and go. Save everybody from any more misery that I never intended in the first place.”
“You could do that, I suppose.”
“You want me to?”
“Of course I do. But you can’t.”
Katey stood up. “You watch me.”
“Sit down. You can’t leave, first of all, for you. Second, for the man who’s going to be walking in the door in the next half-hour or so. And finally, finally I think for your mother and your father. The man who raised you. Comes back to that, doesn’t it? Now you sit down.”
Katey walked over and took another cigarette from the box and lighted it and then, as if it were her own choice, came back and sank into the wingback chair. Her head hurt. She smoked a bit, studying the black and white tiles of the chessboard and then raised her eyes to Judith and said, “Comes back to what?”
“Why he told you that you were not his birth-daughter. Why, after all those years of being, as you said, a wonderful father, would he do that? It doesn’t make sense to me. Can you explain it?”
At the time, that evening at the dinner table when her father rose and spoke and left the house, she’d known somehow why he spoke. And when her mother finally addressed the statement two long days later, she also had been candid: “He’s tired, Katherine. Of how we bicker, you and me, it seems all the time these days. And it’s my fault as much as yours. I don’t think he meant to say what he did. But look at us, always at odds with each other. It must wear on him. I think he meant to shock us, both of us, out of our constant harangue with each other. I know he feels dreadful about it. But then, he also has a certain freedom, he’s a bit aloof isn’t he? From how you disregard me, the all-too-reasonable demands I place upon you. And your utter refusal to comprehend the reasonableness. Goodness, girl, you’d think I was intending you for a life of servitude, the way you react to me.” But within days Katey had tossed this aside, seeing only a way for her mother to lay blame upon her. To the point that she’d forgotten this exchange. Best she could.