Secrecy

by Belva Plain

“I never missed it.”

  “I’m terribly sorry.”

  “You may keep it, Charlotte.”

  “No, I’ll ask Dad to take it to you.”

  “Will you perhaps come with Dad?”

  “I can’t—you see, it’s really your house, not you, that—”

  The house. Yes, of course. It probably happened in the living room on the sofa. She will see that room forever, imprinted like the room in the hospital. We all have them, only for most of us they are not as horrible as hers, these images printed in black on white or carved in stone.

  “What if I came to see you sometime at your house? I can bring Rob and Roy, if you want me to. You must have missed them.”

  Charlotte was looking away down the road, obviously wanting to be released. “I don’t know,” she answered.

  At that Claudia put the car into gear. “Well, anytime,” she said, and drove off thinking, I can only try.

  The doorbell rang while she was sorting the groceries. She opened it to admit Casper from the police department.

  He said at once, “Don’t be alarmed, there’s no bad news, or good news, either, depending on how you want to look at it.”

  They sat down and he began, “Here it is in a nutshell. The report just came in. The young man is not Ted.”

  A sigh, heavy as a groan, rose and fell in Claudia’s chest; whether it came out of a vast relief or from dashed hopes, she could not have told.

  “No, definitely not. The French police traced him from the restaurant where he was known as Timothy Matz, the name he gave those people, the Prescotts. They traced him to the university at Grenoble, and found that he really is Timothy Matz. He and his brother worked all summer in France and then went on to study. The authorities at Grenoble met the parents on a visit. They come from Kansas. The mother is a teacher, and the father does some sort of work for the blind. They were very thorough, the French police.”

  “The pictures,” Claudia murmured. “I was so sure.”

  “It happens. Don’t they say everybody has his double somewhere in the world? Makes sense. Let me tell you some more that’s really amusing. Timothy Matz was suspicious of the Prescotts. He saw them photographing him, and he wondered why. It scared him. He thought they were criminal types.”

  “I guess it would scare you to have strangers staring at you like that. They said he looked suspicious. It all fits, doesn’t it?” She sighed again. “So, where do we go from here?”

  “To the FBI. Our department has already been in touch with them. We’re all, the parents of the girls, too, naturally, and all of us in the department, in a hurry to get this solved.”

  “This” being Ted, Claudia thought. And the parents of the girls are in a hurry. Wouldn’t I be, though, if I were in their shoes? Or in Bill’s, or in Charlotte’s?

  And mustering all her resolve, she said quietly, “I’ll do what I can to cooperate. You can tell everyone that no matter what my personal grief may be, I understand that the law comes first. Ted belongs back here to face it. I will not cover up for him. If I should hear from him in any way, you will know it.”

  Casper nodded. “These are hard times for you, and I’m sorry. Sorry that you people, that a man like Mr. Dawes, has to go through all this. He is one of our most respected citizens, he and his father before him. It’s tough.”

  Yes, tough indeed. You can’t imagine how tough.

  “Well, I’ll be going along, Mrs. Dawes. You’ll be having your next visit from the FBI.”

  “And many more afterward, I suppose,” she said wryly.

  Casper agreed. “Unless they break the case fast. With Interpol in the act they may very well do it.”

  “So that’s where it is,” Bill concluded when they were taking their evening walk, “in the hands of the FBI.”

  It was the first time in many months that there had been any mention of Ted’s name between Charlotte and her father.

  “I know it’s a horror for you to be reminded of him, and I certainly don’t intend to harp on the subject, but it will be mentioned in the newspapers and by people you meet, so you might as well be realistic about it. Those two other girls must feel the same horror you do.”

  Not exactly, Charlotte thought. He didn’t get them pregnant and sick. At the same time she was aware of an element almost childish in her comparison. It was like saying: You may have a broken leg, too, but my break is a compound fracture.

  “I met Claudia yesterday afternoon,” she said. “She stopped the car when she saw me.”

  “And what then?”

  “She asked me to go home with her, but I wouldn’t. I can’t go to that house, Dad.”

  “I’m sure she would come to ours if you asked her.”

  “She said she would.”

  “So, did you ask her?”

  “I didn’t say yes or no.”

  “Charlotte, I think you should have said yes.”

  Sometimes she was sure that she could read his mind. Now he was thinking that she was in need of a mother. Everyone knew that a fifteen-year-old girl needed a mother, she thought ironically.

  “I just think you need a woman to talk to.”

  Because Elena went away, he meant but had not said, because hers was another name that they, in their mutual hurt, rarely spoke these days. And he was right. For the whole year past while away at school, she had known only kids and kids’ talk. It left her often with a sense of floating unanchored. Sometimes, although you were too proud to admit it, you felt the lack of a person who would tell you what to do, even though you might not want to do it. A father, no matter how wonderful, was different.

  “I’m thinking besides that it’s rather awkward for you not to be on speaking terms with my brother’s wife. Try to forget whose mother she is, Charlotte. She can’t help that, and she is suffering because of it. You even said once that you were sorry for her.”

  Yes, it was in the car coming home from Boston, and Elena’s mocking laugh had scoffed.

  She was silent. Her father was asking a favor of her now. For the whole year past he had asked nothing of her; he had cared for her as if she were a basket of eggs that with the slightest jar would smash. He must be very, very weary of all this. The whole year had been a year to remember—or rather, if it were possible, a year to forget.

  “All right. Tomorrow I will ask Claudia to come,” she told him.

  They had walked as far as the river. On the other side between the road and the marsh the Dawes mill loomed like a soiled gray ship run aground. Bill stood there gazing at it. The wind was strong. Charlotte, shivering, crossed her arms over her chest and waited for him to speak; she still felt the worry and weariness within him.

  Presently he said, “I’m afraid we’re going to have trouble with our tenants before we’re through. I don’t feel comfortable with them. It’s not the kind of operation we expected. Do you notice anything different? Look out over the marsh.”

  “Well, there are no ducks. Is that what you mean?”

  “Precisely.” He stood there frowning. “I don’t know. Perhaps I’m imagining things. I don’t know.”

  “Well, there are butterflies, anyway. Look, Dad.”

  Crossing the river, heading south, there appeared a flying army, a broad band of monarch butterflies.

  “Starting toward Mexico for the winter. Look at them speed. Hundreds of them, with more to follow. They know summer’s almost over.”

  He meant: The butterflies know where they are going, and you had better make up your mind too.

  She was uncertain whether to stay or go. She had been sure that she hated Kingsley, but she was not so sure now. For why did she often weep at night in Margate Hall? Yet when she was there, she was rid of certain haunting ghosts. The mournful emptiness of Elena’s room at home; the terror of rounding a corner to find that Ted had reappeared.

  Her father was looking at her, hoping for an answer to his unspoken question, but she had none to give, and now, grown suddenly silent, they started home.
>
  It seemed to Bill that he had long known he would eventually confide in Claudia. The more he knew her, the more he liked her. She was a lovely woman, calm and courageous. Slowly and tentatively during these last weeks of summer, Charlotte and she, the one fifteen, the other more than twice that age, each needy, each separated from the other and at the same time connected by a common disaster, had begun to come together.

  A subtle change was visible in Charlotte. She had gone back to swimming every morning and was losing weight. Instead of spending solitary days at home reading, she was cautiously venturing out with her old neighborhood friends. Bill had no doubt that Claudia was responsible for these changes. One afternoon he went to tell her so.

  “And I’ve come with a question. What do you think I should do about school? Charlotte doesn’t seem to know what she wants. You see,” he explained, “her fears conflict with each other. She hasn’t told me so, but I feel it.”

  “For one thing, she must be afraid that Ted will be brought back.”

  Respecting Claudia’s honesty, he returned it in kind. “That’s true.”

  “You don’t conquer your terrors overnight, Bill. It’s taken me almost a year to conquer my particular terrors, even to walk into the supermarket with my head up. I couldn’t bear knowing that I was being pointed out or whispered about, even sympathetically. It was awful.” As she spoke, the color on her pink face grew deeper. “Awful,” she repeated.

  “But if you have done nothing wrong,” Bill said, “if you can live with yourself, that’s really all that matters in the end, isn’t it? And God knows, Charlotte has done nothing wrong.”

  Who would believe, he thought, that we two would be able to talk like this? And yet, how civilized it is that we should do so.

  “Tell me, then, what we should do about her, Claudia.”

  “Keep her home. Strangers in boarding school can’t restore her strength the way you can.”

  “Or you,” Bill said steadily.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I hear myself talking like a ridiculous know-it-all, I, who don’t even understand why my own child went wrong.”

  “You were and are a mother, not a miracle worker.”

  Claudia’s hands made a gesture of helplessness. “I did the best I could.”

  “That’s all any woman can do. Some, of course—well, that’s past and gone,” he said roughly, looking away for fear that his eyes would fill. “I’m afraid Charlotte will have to get used to that particular loss.”

  “She will weather it. She’s going to be an exceptional human being. She’s intelligent and sensitive, probably too sensitive. She’s been wounded badly, and she needs to be healed. And she will be.”

  “So I will tell her that I want her to stay home.” He looked directly at Claudia. “And will you help with the healing?”

  “You know I will.”

  Still he persisted, “Will you be her mother?”

  “Yes,” said Claudia. “Yes, I will.”

  PART TWO

  1994–1997

  ONE

  Neither of us has any real comprehension of the other; to her, life always looks so easy, Charlotte thought. And yet, there must be plenty of other people in New York’s tower hotel suites, with a view of both rivers and the city below, with hush-foot carpets and potted azaleas in January, who do not find everything so easy. Elena’s particular kind of ease was her own. Not only her words revealed it, but also her shrug and the way she wore her diamonds with her plain black dresses.

  “Ten times in ten years,” Elena wailed, “and I’ve always been the one to go to you. Every single summer, to say nothing of all the Christmases and other times in between, I’ve begged you to come to Italy.”

  Now that the first tearful embraces were past and they had come to the end of their vacation, she was repeating her customary complaint.

  Although Charlotte had expected it, the need to respond to it yet again was tiresome. She was tired anyway, simply from five days of following Elena through the shops—“Things are so much cheaper here than in Italy”—to theaters, and fashionable restaurants. A little of that sort of thing went a long way for her.

  Nevertheless, she answered patiently, “I keep telling you, and you know, that I’ve worked every summer through college and graduate school—oh, what’s the use! You don’t understand that there just isn’t enough money for travel.”

  “That’s nonsense, Charlotte. Time and again I’ve offered to send you the fare.”

  “I can’t afford to take the time off from work. I’m very lucky to have even a bottom-level job in an architect’s office where I can see what’s going on.”

  “How can things be all that bad? I don’t understand it.”

  “There’s no mystery. Nothing’s changed. Dad lives on the rent money from the mill, the small salary he gets from the state commission, and on Uncle Cliff’s repayments. It’s a finite amount. He can’t stretch it.”

  “Cliff should have sold that house. Two people rattling around in that huge barn! He should have gotten a good job for himself, anyway, instead of writing books that nobody reads.”

  “People do read them, Elena. His book on textiles got a lot of praise, even though it didn’t make a fortune. And he has a contract for two more, on Third World industry.”

  Elena was not so easily defeated. “Well, each to his own. I still say that Bill, with his brains, should go back into business, too, instead of working for the government for peanuts.”

  “Dad is doing something important, something he loves to do. And he wants Cliff to stay in the house. It’s the kind of place that should be preserved, it’s a treasure in itself, it’s a bird sanctuary and the trees are a century old,” Charlotte said, rather hotly.

  When Elena laughed, her curls shook and her bracelets tinkled.

  “Aren’t you a Dawes, though! You’re just like them, with your head in the clouds. But you’re very, very sweet, all the same. And so pretty. I never dreamed you’d turn out to be so pretty. You were such a large kid, weren’t you? Here, let me show you something.”

  She got up and crossed the room to the table where she had placed the photographs that always traveled with her. One was of the husband whom Charlotte had never seen; a dark man with elegant features, he looked both intelligent and sardonic.

  “Mario hates traveling,” Elena had always explained, “so that’s why I have to come here alone. Besides, he is such a busy doctor. He has a tremendous practice. We never go very far from Rome.”

  She said now, “Look at our new apartment. It’s in the seventeenth-century palazzo near the Piazza Navona. Those are our windows on the second floor.”

  Here, indeed, was something worth seeing. The wonderfully balanced, serene facade was ornamented with simplicity and grace, as if to temper the truth that the structure was strong as a fortress, built for protection in a bloody time.

  “Beautiful,” Charlotte murmured, adding, “It’s only a few hundred years, not long as history goes, when people lived behind those walls in fear of being attacked.”

  “It’s not too different from New York today, my dear. Each year when I come here, I think it’s the same, only more so. Do you get here often?”

  “No, very seldom.”

  “You should. There’s so much going on here in spite of everything. And it’s practically next door to Philadelphia.”

  Charlotte smiled. “There’s plenty going on in Philadelphia too.”

  “I do hope you’re not burying your nose in work, Charlotte. Of course, it’s marvelous and I’m proud you’re doing what you always wanted to do. I only mean that architecture, a career, isn’t everything for a woman. There’s more to life than work.”

  She sees me as a grind, hopelessly dull and hopelessly unlike herself, thought Charlotte. But maybe I like being what she calls a “grind.” I probably could have squeezed out a few days and a few dollars to visit her and her Mario; the fact is that I haven’t wanted to. She makes me uncomfortable.

  He
r gaze wandered out to the somber, wintry sky. And suddenly, without forethought, she asked, “Are you happy, Mama?” using the name she had not used in years, ever since her mother had asked to be addressed as Elena.

  “What a question! Life’s a great bag, Charlotte. You stick your hand in and see what you pull out. You unwrap it, and if you don’t like it, you try again, that’s all. You go from happiness to unhappiness and back, if you’re smart. Anyway, let’s not be so deep. Tell me the news. What’s going on at home? How’s my friend Claudia, who doesn’t approve of me?”

  “She never says a word about you, Elena.”

  “Okay, don’t be indignant. I meant nothing. I know you love her.”

  Love. How many kinds are there, anyway? Charlotte wondered. The kind I feel for you, Mama, is mingled with an old, old ache. I try not to let it be judgmental, but I don’t always succeed. My love for Dad is total trust, companionship, and gratitude; he has always been there for me and always will be. As for Claudia, she is my friend, my teacher, and my therapist. At fifteen I had turned away from the world, and she led me back into it.

  You can do anything with your life that you want to do, Charlotte. You can be beautiful. You can be unafraid.

  All this she did for me when she herself was beset.…

  “Life must be very hard for her.”

  “They’ve had their troubles. Nuisance troubles, magazine writers wanting interviews, and even TV interviews, which they won’t give. And there was even a letter from Ted, but of course it was a hoax. The police told Claudia right away that it was, but she didn’t want to believe them. It was typewritten, sent from England. Somebody reported the kids who had sent it. It was cruel. They thought it was funny.”

  “She ought to give up and accept the inevitable.”

  “Nothing is inevitable. After fifteen years they found a man who had murdered his whole family. He’d been living in the United States all the time. And it’s even easier to hide abroad. The Interpol people aren’t going to make it any priority to find Ted. They’re looking for big-time crooks. Oh, he’s out there someplace, that’s sure.”