Secrecy

by Belva Plain

“Their names are withheld. That’s not to say their names won’t leak out when they have to testify.”

  “What will happen to Ted?”

  “I imagine he’ll serve time.”

  “They should take him out and shoot him,” Elena said.

  Dad sighed. “Everything’s a mess. Cliff had to make enormous bail. And Claudia—well, you can imagine how she must be.”

  A memory of lemon tarts flashed. I still have some of the books that she lent me, Charlotte thought.

  “I’m sorry for her,” she said.

  “Sorry!” cried Elena. “The woman’s a fool. If they put that monster away for the rest of his life, which they won’t do, she’ll be well rid of him.”

  Bill reproved her. “He’s a heartbreaking blow to a mother. Don’t you see that? And Claudia is far from being a fool.”

  “Oh, you two! You and Charlotte. Two softies if there ever were any.”

  No one answered. The car meandered through a long green aisle, around curves, up little hills and down. All you could hear was the soft throb of the engine.

  Imagine having to go to court and tell, thought Charlotte. I would die.

  “We’ll be in Roseville soon,” Elena said. “Let’s stop for lunch.”

  “Are you hungry, Charlotte?” Dad inquired.

  “It doesn’t matter whether she is or not,” Elena interrupted. “She needs building up. She needs to eat.”

  “Meaning that, as usual, you are starved,” Dad said, not unkindly. “Okay, we’ll find a diner when we go through town.”

  “No diner, Bill, please. You know I hate the smell of frying grease. Let’s go to a decent place. Roseville must have one. There!” Elena said a few minutes later. “The old Colonial Inn. That looks nice.”

  “Tearoom,” Bill grumbled. “Little doilies, sweet salads, and a spinning wheel in the corner. Oh, and a warming pan used by Washington—no, he didn’t get up this far north. Used by somebody, anyway, by Daniel Webster, maybe.”

  Elena laughed. But it wasn’t funny. Couldn’t they ever agree about anything? Even about where to eat lunch?

  “Put your sweater on,” Elena commanded. “It’s chilly, Charlotte.”

  “Mama, it’s warm. It’s hot.”

  “Don’t take any chances. Listen to me. You haven’t got your strength back yet.”

  That was true. She did not have all her strength, and since it was easier not to argue, she put on the sweater. Besides, Mama meant well.

  “It’s not so bad. Even rather nice,” Bill observed of the clean, bright room with the ubiquitous blackened fireplace and iron pots, ferns in hanging baskets, and middle-aged ladies wearing floral prints. He was being, as usual, conciliatory.

  Elena’s comment followed. “It’s dreary, like all these towns.”

  Beyond the window where they were sitting, traffic was slow on the wide main street. People ambled under a typical arch of elms.

  “It’s remarkable,” Bill said, making conversation. “The elm blight seems to have escaped this town. What a difference trees make! We don’t prize them enough.”

  Elena played with her chicken salad. For someone known to have a huge appetite, she was not doing very well. She sighed, so audibly that a woman at the near table, which was very near, turned to look. Perhaps, too, Charlotte thought, she is looking at Mama’s fashionable scarlet linen dress, a type not usually worn in Roseville.

  “It’s been a nightmare,” Elena said. “This whole year, finishing up with the hospital, the horror of it. A nightmare.”

  “Nightmares end when you wake up,” Bill said.

  “Oh, I’m awake. That’s how I know I have to get away for a while.”

  Calmly, Bill asked where she wanted to go this time. And Charlotte, suspending a fork midway to her mouth, waited for the answer. Please, not Florida again!

  “I want to go back to Italy. I haven’t been there in years. I’ve been thinking—during all those miserable hours in the hospital there was plenty of time to think—that it would be wonderful for Charlotte to have a year at school abroad. We could have the rest of the summer to travel first. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

  “You know very well that I can’t take any time away now,” Bill said firmly. “There’s too much going on.”

  “About Ted, you mean? I should think you’d be glad to get away from that mess. What they do with him is no concern of yours.”

  “Yes, about Ted, but also our business. I’m worried about the new tenants. They’re our livelihood.”

  “Well, Charlotte and I can go.”

  This was simply a replay of the Florida affair. “No,” Charlotte said flatly.

  Elena raised her eyebrows. “So emphatic? Why not?”

  You ask, Charlotte said to herself, but you know why not: Italy, and parties, and another Judd.

  “Because I won’t go without Dad,” she replied, which was also true.

  “You do hurt me, Charlotte. I am, after all, your mother. Sometimes you seem to forget that.”

  “I don’t mean to hurt you, Mama. But I don’t want to go. What I want is boarding school, someplace out in the country.” The idea was taking firmer shape as she spoke. “I want to start right away. Some schools have summer sessions.”

  “What do you think?” Elena asked Bill.

  “Whatever Charlotte feels will be good for her. She’s been through enough, and she knows best how she feels.”

  “You see,” Elena said, “your father won’t mind if you go to Italy with me.”

  “But I don’t want to go there,” Charlotte said.

  Elena shrugged. “Well, I tried, that’s all I can say. I, however, am definitely going to go.”

  There was a soreness in Charlotte’s chest, a grieving that comes when, in a book or at the movies, men go off to war, a child dies, or even—even when a beloved old dog is abandoned. It’s parting, she thought, a breaking apart. That’s what it is.

  “You won’t come back,” she said very low.

  “I never said I wouldn’t,” Elena cried sharply. “I didn’t say that.”

  “But I know,” replied Charlotte.

  A heavy atmosphere engulfed them all. When they rose from the table, it followed them into the car. The engulfing sweetness of the last two weeks’ truce, when the parents on either side of Charlotte’s bed were united in their love for her and all their words were soft, had vanished.

  No one made any effort now to bring it back; even Dad stopped making conversation. In a semidoze Charlotte lay on the backseat watching the treetops fly by. When at last he broke the silence and she sat up, they were on the river road, nearing home.

  “They’ve already got trucks dumping,” he said, as if to himself. “I had no idea they’d get started so soon.”

  The desolate huddle of the barren building reminded her of the state penitentiary, and gloom overcame her. She hated Kingsley. She was going to leave it and never, never come back.

  When Cliff and I were kids, Bill asked himself, who could have imagined where we would be today? We had the world in a jug, as the old folks used to say. We’d ride downtown with our father and visit the mill; it was the heart of Kingsley; our father was the respected king of the town, and we were the young princes.

  In the days since their return from Boston he had fallen into the habit of taking an after-dinner walk, alone with his turbulent thoughts. Elena watched television, and Charlotte, postoperative but recovering, went early to bed. Sometimes he met Cliff walking. Each of them, needing now some brief escape from stress, seemed to find it in the dark and quiet summer evening. They understood each other perfectly, Cliff knowing that Elena did not want him in their house and Bill aware that an encounter with Ted at the other house would be a disaster.

  “He hides in his room,” Cliff had told him, “and won’t come out. Claudia brings his meals up to him. He’s terrified, and well he should be. I love her, and that’s the problem. If I didn’t, I’d have booted him out, let him rot in jail until the trial date, let
him take his punishment. Now I’ve loaded myself with debt because of him.”

  Sorrowfully, Bill thought, My brother married a pack of trouble, and he said, “Some people are no good. That’s it, plain and simple. No matter what you do for them, they’re just no good. Bad seed. Not from Claudia,” he added quickly.

  Cliff always wanted to hear about Charlotte, but there was nothing new to tell him. She was remote, depressed, and determined to go away. At night, going home from his walk, he would look up at her window where the light was still on. She read late, and she read serious books, much poetry. Also, she had read some newspaper articles and editorials about Ted.… Bill would miss her terribly when she was gone. She was still here under his roof, and yet he already felt the bone-ache and soreness of loss.

  The summer was sliding away into August before applications were made and accepted and arrangements became final; Charlotte was to leave at the end of the month. The school was two hundred miles distant. It might just as well, Bill thought, be in the antipodes. No more walks together, no more chatter at the dinner table. She was going away among strangers with the weight of her heavy secret upon her.

  He wondered that Elena could be so accepting. Brisk and cheerful, she had everything prepared for Charlotte. The proper clothes in abundance, the required booklist fulfilled, even writing paper and stamps, all were neatly packed in new luggage. A picnic lunch for the journey was ready in a basket, Emmabrown having made Charlotte’s favorites, fried chicken and apple pie.

  Emmabrown is teary, Elena is efficient as she has always been, while I am just clumsy, Bill thought. I am bumbling my way through this departure.

  On the ride he kept watching Charlotte. Without a doubt she was scared; everyone going away to school was scared. He tried in his usual way to lighten the atmosphere simply by breaking the silences, to remark that the days were noticeably shortening or to observe that the cicadas were unusually shrill this year and he had heard somewhere that it meant an early fall.

  “Though that’s probably just another superstition,” he added.

  Elena chose a picnic stop on the top of a hill looking northward into ever-rising mountains. She, too, made conversation; hers was all forward looking.

  “You must polish your conversational French. So many people can read Molière and still not be able to go into a shop and ask for something. You’ll find what fun it is to travel and be at ease in another language.”

  When Elena was really nervous, she had a slight stammer. He remembered how charming that had seemed the first time he heard it. Now it filled him with pity. Like him—and yet how unlike him—she was suffering. And for an instant he became an outsider, passing the little group at their country picnic, surrounded by wild lilies and Queen Anne’s lace, a pair of nice-looking parents with their wholesome daughter, enjoying a family hour together. This outsider would not see how sadly disconnected they were.

  And yet, through Charlotte, they were connected, for all time.

  “How much farther do we have to go?” asked Charlotte.

  “We should be there by two,” Bill said.

  She seemed relieved. Probably, she was feeling the way you do when waiting your turn at the dentist’s; you are in a hurry to get it over with. He knew that although she had wanted, had even insisted on, this great change, the last minutes would be very hard and should be made as short as they could make them.

  Indeed, all went so quickly that afterward he had no clear recollection of very much except for a swirl of cars, luggage, parents, and noisy girls, a great bustle against a background of red brick, white columns, and old trees. There were a few well-controlled tears, some hugs and admonitions, these on Elena’s part.

  “School food is starchy, so eat plenty of vegetables and don’t get fat. And call collect twice a week.”

  They hugged again, walked toward the car, looked back, and waved. Then they got into the car and drove away. Bill’s head swam. Those girls, those other girls, had seemed, in spite of their height and their makeup, so childlike! And to his mind’s eye came again the picture of Charlotte being wheeled to the operating room. He wanted to punch the dashboard. He wanted to weep.

  When, late in the day, they reached home, it was raining hard. The house was enveloped in the sound of it as they ate the supper that Emmabrown had left for them.

  “Cold autumn here already,” Elena said mournfully. “Listen to it.”

  Here are two people in the room, Bill thought, one hearing the dismal rain, while the other hears its peaceful rhythm.

  “We don’t understand each other,” he said, feeling a vast tiredness. “I guess we never did.”

  He wished they could talk openly. But, given that they had not understood each other, how could they talk openly? He wanted to ask about that man in Florida. She would only deny the whole business, though, and he would be made to seem a fool. Then suddenly the words slipped out of his mouth.

  “I’ve been wondering about that man in Florida. Do you want to say anything about him?”

  “Oh, he! A lightweight, a fun person, that’s all. I’ve already told you that, and there’s nothing else to say now.”

  “So there really is no ‘other man’?”

  “No, none at all.”

  “You simply want a divorce.”

  “Did I say so? Why, do you?”

  Halfhearted, not sure that he was in the right, he replied uncertainly, “I believe that marriage is worth saving.”

  “Any marriage?”

  “Where there are children,” he began, “Charlotte—”

  “Charlotte’s gone to boarding school.”

  He felt his temper rising. It was almost as though, with this parrying, this game of words, she was flirting with their tragedy.

  “All the same,” he said, “she needs to know there’s a mother at home.”

  “A father will do just as well while I’m away, or better. She always loved you more than me.”

  “She loves you, Elena.”

  “Well, perhaps she does. But she doesn’t like me. There’s a difference.”

  “Then maybe you should make changes in yourself.”

  “I can’t. People don’t change. I am what I am.”

  Her complacent acceptance of her own faults infuriated him. Because of this fool—oh, me too—but mostly because of her, this awful thing befell our child. God alone knew what Charlotte’s needs had been. Bitch, he thought, you foolish bitch.

  “I saw your lips move. You said bitch.”

  “And so I did,” he replied.

  “Don’t hate me, Bill. Don’t fight with me.”

  Elena got up and walked through the hall into the living room, her heels pounding the bare floor as usual, and pounding in his ears as well.

  He smothered his anger and followed her, saying quietly, “I’m not going to fight. The last thing you and I need is a battle. It’s the last thing Charlotte needs too.”

  Her face was pale and shadowed. For a second she put her fingers to her lips, and he saw light glinting on the ring, the diamond, modest enough, that in the delight of a passionate first love, he had given to her. When she put her hand down and opened her lips as if to speak, she said nothing. Then suddenly, and again, he felt the warmth of forgivingness. She was what she was, and she had not asked to be what she was. There was no use in blaming her.

  He often had these abrupt reversions from outrage to compassion. Maybe I need a shrink, he thought bitterly.

  “So you are going?” he asked.

  “Yes. Don’t look like that, Bill. I’m not abandoning you, for heaven’s sake. I never said anything about divorce. I’ll be back.”

  He supposed that she really believed what she was saying, but he knew different. They had at long last come to the end. And very likely or maybe surely it was better so, after the way they had been living. Yet it hadn’t been entirely bad. He didn’t really know. From generation to generation, he thought, we move in a sort of twilight. We think we see, but there is so much
hidden, so much.

  “When do you want to go?” he asked.

  She gave him a tentative smile, replying with a question. “Next Tuesday? Will that be all right?”

  “Yes, Tuesday,” he said gently. “I’ll drive you to Boston to the airport.”

  TEN

  They were at breakfast when Mr. Miller telephoned with the news. “I heard yesterday, very late, but I thought Claudia might gain a night of slightly better sleep if I waited till morning. Here it is: The grand jury voted to indict.”

  Miller’s voice was loud enough for Claudia, on the other side of the table, to hear him. Laying down her spoon, she grasped the table’s edge and stared at Cliff.

  “Will you be taking it to trial?” Cliff asked.

  “Not I. Criminal defense is not in my line, as you know. The firm has a very bright young litigator who’ll be your best bet, the best in town. His name is Kevin Raleigh, and he’ll see Ted at three-thirty this afternoon.”

  Criminal defense. All the tense and terrible courtroom scenes that Claudia had ever seen on television were melded into one picture. In a hellish circle with Ted at bay in the center were scornful faces and accusing fingers, pointing at him. For a few seconds the picture blazed; then she pushed the table away and started toward the stairs.

  Cliff cried, “Where’re you going?”

  “To tell him.”

  “No, wait. We’ll do it together. This is killing Claudia,” he said into the telephone. “He’s killing his mother. Let me phone you later.”

  From the foot of the stairs he called, “Ted? Come down here, please.”

  “He’s still sleeping.”

  “I’ll get him,” Cliff said somberly. “He can’t sleep this business away. He’d better pull himself together.”

  Ted had been escaping reality through sleep. At night he went out and prowled, but Claudia had no idea where. No friends called. Obviously, the horrendous publicity had warned them away. She had tried to talk to him, but he had refused to listen, even though he must see that she only wanted to give him hope, to explain that people can take harsh punishments and still change, can begin a new life, that it was hard but not impossible. All this went through her head.