Secret Language

by Monica Wood

  Connie takes up the photograph eagerly, then places it on the table for everyone to see. A young woman about Isadora’s age, dressed in a sequined dancer’s costume, stares out from an eight-by-ten-inch glossy. She is tiny like Isadora, but dark-haired, dark-eyed. Her form is perfect, if a bit staged. She reminds Faith of Delle, except for the expression on her face, which is decidedly unprofessional. She is like a woman madly in love trying to look serene: ready to burst into laughter, or song, or tears. Faith can’t fathom this woman keeping track of her and Connie’s whereabouts, and yet she has a single-minded look, much the same as her daughter.

  “She’s very pretty,” Connie says. She smiles easily at Isadora. Faith can see she’s convinced, not that it would have taken much.

  Isadora holds up another photograph. “Here’s one from Silver Moon.”

  Another publicity shot. Billy and Delle—Billy in overalls and Delle in low-cut gingham—are posed cheek to cheek, surrounded by six chorus dancers in similar garb. Isadora’s mother is easy to pick out, smiling directly into the camera.

  Isadora lays the photograph reverently on the table next to the first one. Faith stares at it, shaking her head.

  “Is that—” Ben begins.

  “Yes,” Faith says. “It’s them.”

  Ben picks up the photograph, then hands it without a word to his brother.

  “I have something else,” Isadora says.

  She takes out a creased letter and hands it to Armand. He reads aloud: “ ‘My dearest Marie.’ ”

  “That’s my mother,” Isadora says. “Marie Lazarro. She married my father—the man I thought of as my father—when I was a baby.”

  Armand looks at Connie. “I can have the handwriting verified,” he says.

  Faith takes the letter, then hands it back. “It’s his.” Connie is looking straight at her. Please, she seems to be saying, pleeease.

  Armand scans the letter, then gives it to Faith. It reads:

  My dearest Marie—

  How you float when you dance. You take my breath away. Here is a small token of appreciation for your graceful presence in “Silver Moon.”

  —All my love, Billy

  Isadora folds her hands. “Listen, I’ve got a couple of aunts who adore me, and a few cousins. Bucketloads of friends. I’m not alone, not at all. But the thought of having sisters …”

  Armand breaks in. “Miss James,” he says. Faith can hear the strain as he speaks a functionary’s words. He feels sorry for Isadora, perhaps for them all. “These things—this so-called evidence, your mother’s testimony—I’m afraid if you tried to go forward with some kind of claim—”

  “Claim?” Isadora says. “I’m not talking about claims or evidence or testimony.” She gestures with one of her fluttering hands. “I’m not claiming anything. I have everything I need. My mother married a beautiful man who took good care of us.” Her eyes rove briefly over the photographs. “I don’t know what I thought would happen here. I thought maybe when you saw me … I thought … this might sound stupid, but I thought somehow we’d all know.” She pauses. “I believe in signs. Do you know how my mother met the man I called my father?”

  Connie shakes her head no, answering for them all. Ben and Chris are still.

  “The day she took me home from the hospital, this man moved into the apartment across the hall. An older man, a widower, no kids. There he was, alone in the world, and his name turns out to be Rudy, the name my mother had picked out for me if I was a boy, after Rudolph Nureyev.” She looks at them as if she expects applause. “That was her sign, see? That everything would be all right. And it was. They got married on my first birthday.”

  She tucks her fists under her chin. “I don’t want your father,” she says. “I had a wonderful father. I just want to know you, is that so much to ask?”

  For some reason Faith is thinking about the second step of the Long Point trailer. Thin and rotting, it never broke through only because she and Connie always skipped it. They stepped from the first to the third step every time, at first deliberately, then without thinking about it at all. Eight, nine, ten times a day they skipped that rotting board until it became part of the way they moved. All that time Isadora James was a clean and thriving child, the apple of somebody’s eye in Brooklyn, New York.

  “What was the token?” she hears Chris say. He is hunched forward, his forearms resting on his long thighs, his hands loosely clasped.

  “Token?” Isadora says.

  “The token of my grandfather’s appreciation.”

  “Oh.” Isadora points to the photograph from Silver Moon. “A gold heart on a chain.” They all peer down, and there it is, sparkling on Marie Lazarro’s chest.

  “He gave it to her just before he left the show,” Isadora says quietly. “She was already pregnant.”

  “Did he know?” Connie asks, staring at the picture.

  “Yes.” She adjusts the photograph, squaring it with the edge of the table. “He gave her some money, then left her on her own.”

  “But he was well known then,” Faith says. “At least in the theater crowd. Why didn’t she—”

  Isadora gives her a long look. “She wasn’t that type.”

  Faith catches herself breathing with her mouth open; there is simply not enough air in this heavy, heavy room. It is filled with Billy and Delle, their mean and petty life.

  “I know I’m your sister,” Isadora says.

  For a few moments no one speaks. Finally Armand clears his throat. “You’ve done your part here, Miss James.” His voice is careful; Faith realizes that again he is being kind. “If Faith and Connie wish to pursue a relationship with you, then it’s up to them.”

  Isadora stands up and gathers her things. She glances around. “To be honest, this isn’t what I expected,” she says. “I thought we’d just—well, fall into each other’s arms.”

  “I’m sorry,” Connie says. Her cheeks are red. “We’re not very—we’re not like that.”

  Isadora writes her phone number on a card, shaking her head, her hair shimmying in the slanted light. “I thought it would be so clear.” She offers the card to Connie. “Will you take this?”

  “Of course,” Connie says, casting an eye in Faith’s direction. A flutter of panic flits through Faith’s chest, as if her future were somehow dangling from a cliff; this is the way she felt when she said yes to Joe, that she was about to be engulfed by ordinary life and its terrifying requirements.

  “If nothing else, it was nice meeting you,” Isadora says. She offers her hand all around and comes last to Faith. “I mean it.”

  Faith can’t think of anything to say. Goodbye doesn’t seem quite right. She shakes the cool, small hand and watches Isadora James walk out the door, her satchel bumping against her hip like a sack of holiday mail.

  She wants to be home. She wants to see Joe, tell him it was nothing, it was just as she had thought, some silly girl with a notion. But now she has witnesses. She can refuse to believe her own eyes, she has done it before, but hers are not the only eyes.

  “Do you believe her, Armand?” Connie says. She sounds like a little girl.

  “Yes.”

  “Faith?”

  “I don’t like this,” Faith says, finding her voice.

  “But she’s here,” Connie murmurs. “She exists.”

  “Mom,” Chris says, “she looks exactly like you two.”

  Faith closes her eyes. There’s nothing she can do to stop this now; the snowball is already rolling down the hill.

  “I don’t think she looks like you, Mom,” Ben says then. He looks around guiltily, at his brother, his aunt, Armand. He is lying. Faith puts an arm around him and for the first time recognizes that he is going to be tall.

  “I thought she was kind of sweet, Mom,” Chris says. She knows he’s trying to be gentle, trying to make her see, as he has at other times, that there is nothing in the world to be afraid of.

  “She has no reason to lie,” Connie says.

  �
��I’m not calling her a liar,” Faith says. She is suddenly exhausted.

  “Then you believe her?”

  “I can’t think of any reason not to.”

  Armand takes her hand. “It’s a strange turn.”

  He sees them to the elevator. His lips are cool on Faith’s cheek, and she holds him an extra moment. When the doors close in front of him, Connie says, “Why did you let her walk out?”

  “Why did I—”

  “If you believe her, why did you let her go?”

  The boys are watching. “Maybe I just didn’t like her,” Faith says. “Do we have to waltz into her arms just because she says so? Just because she’s related to us?”

  “We could give her a chance,” Connie says. “She’s not asking for much.”

  “How do we know how much she’s asking? We’ve only known her for five minutes.”

  “Faith—”

  “I have all the relatives I want,” Faith says. She looks at her sons, their solemn faces. “There’s no room for her.” If she sounds harsh she can’t help it. The truth is, Isadora James reminds her of the Fullers, all the vociferous sisters-in-law bubbling in one slight body.

  “There’s room,” Connie murmurs. “You make room.”

  The doors open on the lobby, where Isadora James stands waiting. She darts over to them, her satchel swinging in her wake.

  “Please, can’t we go somewhere for coffee?” Her face still has a rosy cast. “Just for a few minutes? Please—all of that upstairs was so formal.”

  She is looking mercilessly at Faith. They are all looking at her. Connie mouths a word: Please.

  And again, Isadora: “Please say yes.”

  Please, the word Faith refused to speak as a child. Why are they even asking her? She can already see how it’s going to go: this pixie woman has come thundering into their lives and means to stay.

  Faith grimaces. “All right.”

  She lags a step or two behind as the others follow Isadora across Columbus Circle to a cafe on Eighth Avenue, where Isadora is greeted by a waitress who apparently knows her. They hug and kiss, falling instantly into a frenzied conversation that Faith can’t begin to comprehend: a flurry of names and places and arbitrary exclamations. Faith glances at Connie and the boys; they don’t seem to mind waiting. Faith does mind—she’s getting tenser by the second. Still, it interests her to see these young women, their animated faces, the way they want to catch up on each other’s lives. “I worked here for a couple of months last winter,” Isadora explains after she finally extricates herself. “We got really close.”

  The tables—placed among a formidable snarl of potted plants—are round and spindly, with copper tops. They drag two together and still there is not quite enough room. They have to huddle in close, shoulders touching. A redheaded waiter, who also seems to know Isadora, comes over to take their order.

  “Don’t get the guacamole, it’s canned,” Isadora cautions the boys, as if in their wildest nightmares they’d order such a thing. Ben exchanges a wry look with his brother, who then passes it to Faith. This small intimacy cheers her.

  “I’ll have a Coke,” Chris says. They all order Cokes (something quick, to Faith’s relief), then there seems to be no place to begin. Isadora laughs nervously.

  “I practiced a hundred speeches,” she says. “My roommates were ready to kill me.”

  It is Connie who finally gives shape to the conversation. “Where do you live?” she asks, and Faith notices how the boys, both of them, square themselves to listen.

  Faith listens too. Isadora lives in a big apartment in Brooklyn with several roommates and a bobtailed housecat. She calls herself a blues singer.

  “Not that it’s a living yet,” she quickly adds.

  “Blues?” Chris says.

  Faith feels an unexpected flash of tenderness for Isadora James, who looks about as much like a blues singer as Ben. She must spend half her time in the wrong skin. Faith knows exactly how that feels.

  “I’ve got a guitar,” Ben announces, then glances at Faith as if checking the rules.

  “Well, good for you,” Isadora says. “Maybe we can jam sometime.”

  Ben flushes scarlet to the tips of his ears. “I only know a couple of chords.” He checks again with Faith. “G and C.”

  “First position?” Isadora asks.

  “I guess so.” He looks mortified.

  “Three fingers or four?”

  Ben thinks a minute, still blushing. “Three.”

  “Four’s better, I’ll show you sometime,” Isadora says. “But listen, you have to start somewhere.”

  Chris asks Isadora what she does with her time.

  “Right now I work at a copy place,” she says. “It’s a bitch of a job but I like my friends there. Every once in a while I get a decent gig. I did a show at the Back Door last week.” She pauses, as if expecting everyone to know the place. “I used to send demo tapes through the mail, but I get better results taking them around myself. It’s kind of embarrassing—I mean, there you are, your whole life on the line, and you just stand there trying not to swear out loud while some tone-deaf bar manager sticks the tape in a machine and listens to it, not even looking at you.”

  Faith can’t imagine such a thing; she can’t imagine being related to someone who could.

  Isadora asks Connie about being a flight attendant and listens, chin in hand, as Connie tells stories that Faith has never heard, peopled with names to which she connects no faces.

  “What do you do, Faith?” Isadora says suddenly.

  “I—well, I run a doctor’s office.”

  Isadora raises her pale eyebrows. “How do you run a doctor’s office?”

  “Well,” Faith says. She pauses. “You’d probably find it boring.”

  “They’re switching the office over to computers,” Ben says. “Mom’s running the whole show. Tell her, Mom.”

  Faith tells a little, for Ben. She understands that he wants to be proud of her. Isadora looks interested in a way that seems like an effort, but the boys are paying attention, their generosity an unexpected gift.

  “Mom’s a computer nerd,” Chris says, grinning. He taps her arm, as if to say You’re doing fine.

  Eventually the boys and Isadora take over the conversation: music they like, movies they’ve seen, teams they follow. Isadora reveals herself to be an avid baseball fan; she and the boys pass names back and forth, waiting for each other’s reactions. They’re playing catch, Faith thinks. She feels her life giving way beneath her like loose rock. She sits there, helpless, watching the future change.

  Isadora has a friend—she seems to have friends everywhere—who works the Yankee Stadium box office, and after a minute’s discussion Connie agrees to let Isadora take her to a game that night with the boys.

  “Is that all right, Faith?” Connie asks. Her face is flushed; happiness looks peculiar on her, like a costume.

  “I suppose so,” Faith says. She’s outnumbered, choiceless.

  “Come with us, Mom,” Ben says. “You’ll have fun.”

  “I only have fun when you play.” She forces a smile, but her head is pounding. When she gets up from the table her bones shiver ominously, ready to fly apart and take up residence in a more accommodating body.

  Faith has Joe on her mind—a vague and troubling sense of him, of their worst times, the times at the end of their marriage when he would rail at her, frustrated beyond his considerable limits, telling her to face things. “Why are you letting this happen?” he would shout, his face transformed by anger. “I can’t do it all myself!” Then, as now, she would find herself immobile, unable to act, not even in her own interest.

  There was so much she hadn’t told him for so long, back when telling might have made a difference. How her baby boys had terrified her! She was stricken by love, and feared its unbuckled force, as if it might kill her; she feared it in the most literal way, her heart making dangerous fluttery pats just under her skin.

  “Tell me somethin
g,” Joe used to ask her. They’d be sitting somewhere, at the beach, say, watching the boys clamor in the surf. He’d look at her, desperate: “Tell me something.”

  She told him nothing, for everything she knew embarrassed her. Everything she didn’t know embarrassed her more. She had taken him once to a snowy field—for an owl she wanted to see—and found herself walking behind him, setting her feet one after another in his deep prints. She was grateful for them, and at the same time troubled by the sense that this was the way her life worked.

  She lies in the dark on top of her tightly made bed in the hotel, her sister and her sons wedged somewhere into the thin-air section of Yankee Stadium with Isadora James, all yelling their heads off at a couple of baseball teams. She closes her eyes and tells herself, in Joe’s voice, to face things: Connie wants a different sister.

  She gets up and goes to the window. From the eerie gradations of dark below comes the suggestion of movement. She saw the hope in Connie’s face. The need. What ever happened to Rule Number One? Dump them before they dump you. Faith sighs. Connie was never good at following even her own rules. A sudden, tender flash stalls her thoughts: Connie, cross-legged on the floor of Chris’s bedroom before Chris was born, when the room belonged to Connie. She had six or seven airline brochures laid out like a hand of solitaire in front of her. They were exactly the same size and almost all of them had a red border. “These are my plans,” she said, picking up the brochures one by one until they came together as a small deck in her hands: neat and finite, with a precise weight and order, with red edges. Faith wonders now if Connie sees Isadora James as a plan she can pick up and hold in her hands.

  She hears them in the hallway outside her door, scuffling and whispering. Chris and Ben are in high spirits, and Connie sounds surprised by her own laughter. They rap softly on the door. Faith remains at the window, hugging herself, until they go away.

  THREE

  The phone is ringing when Connie comes through the door.

  “Don’t say a word,” Stewart says. “I’m on my way up and I want every last detail.”

  “Stewart—”

  “I called every hotel in New York.”