Secrecy

by Belva Plain

  “Right. No traffic jams. Not yet, anyway.”

  “To me it felt dangerous,” Claudia said, “and that was part of the thrill, I guess. Probably silly of me, though.”

  Webster shook his head. “I wouldn’t call it silly. I go there all the time on business, and I can tell you there’s a lot happening that isn’t very pretty, quite aside from what we all know about the government.”

  “What’s your business?” inquired Cliff.

  “Farm implements. Tractors.”

  Claudia, growing restless, wished that the car would hurry up. They were wasting time, standing here making useless conversation.

  But Cliff, sociable Cliff, was very good at making conversation. He said now, “I had an idea how nice it would be to surprise my wife with a fine Burmese ruby while we were there. The only problem was, I couldn’t afford one.”

  “There aren’t that many around, anyway. The big business nowadays is drugs. The place is loaded with drugs, producers, smugglers, and foreign kids. It’s a pity to see so many American kids hiding out in these countries.”

  Claudia asked quickly, “Hiding out? How is that possible? You need visas, passports—”

  “Anything’s possible,” Webster said, “especially things you would think are impossible.”

  “So a boy, a young man, could really spend his life there.…”

  “That depends. But probably he could, yes, unless somebody’s looking very, very hard for him.”

  “We loved the landscape,” Cliff said quickly. “So colorful. Dramatic. A great James Bond setting.”

  “James Bond? Oh, you’re right. Yes, of course—”

  “But if you wanted to find someone,” Claudia persisted, “how would one go about it? I mean, are there special places where these young people gather, certain towns, you know, where maybe they can find a job or—”

  Without touching him she felt Cliff stiffen. A darting reprimand came from his eyes. She did not understand it, but it silenced her.

  The car stopped at the veranda, and Cliff said, “We’ve got to make time. Thanks for the tip about the sculptures. North side, I’ll remember.”

  When they got into the car, Claudia inquired, “Why are you annoyed? Why were you looking at me like that?”

  “Didn’t you know you were asking stupid questions? ‘How long could a young man safely’—for God’s sake, Claudia!”

  “Well, I stopped, didn’t I? Although I do believe it’s paranoid to suspect everybody.”

  At this Cliff laid a not-so-gentle hand on her knee. Angry at being so absurdly chastised, as though she were a child or an idiot, she subsided, and they rode for the rest of the way not speaking.

  Out of the car on the temple grounds he began to scold again.

  “You really are naive, Claudia. You behaved like a sap, if you want to know. Didn’t you see how that man pricked up his ears? Didn’t you realize how interested he was? Didn’t you sense anything?”

  “You freak me out, Cliff. You really do. You are thousands of miles from home, you meet a friendly American man, a tractor salesman, and—”

  “To begin with, he’s not a tractor salesman. Huh! Water buffalo salesman is more like it. He’s either in drugs himself or, ten times more likely, he works for the United States government intercepting drugs.”

  “I wish we were that lucky, that he did work for the government. If Ted’s anywhere around here, he might find him for us. I’d like to ask him right straight out to help us.”

  “Oh, sure. You dropped your needle in a haystack, and you’re going to ask, ‘Please, friendly man, find my needle for me? Please?’ ”

  They were standing in a blaze of heat without having taken one look at the facade of the famous temple.

  Claudia’s jaws were hard set. “Cliff Dawes, you don’t want to find my son. No, you don’t want him to come back.”

  “That’s a rotten thing to say to me.”

  “Life’s more comfortable without him. That’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Ask yourself whether you’re eager to have him come back and go to prison.”

  Pain, the forerunner of tears, began to press against the back of her eyes.

  “When one of those girls he raped is now married to a political lawyer who’d love nothing better than a fat juicy case on behalf of his own wife—can you imagine the trial, the media, the melodrama?”

  “I can’t say I’m a hundred percent eager, but still …” And closing her eyes, clenching her fists, Claudia fought tears yet again. “But I do want, how I do want, to see him once more. I need to ask … I need to understand, if it’s possible, why—Oh, never mind, you never had a child, so you don’t know. Your brother would. He knows, even in spite of all that happened, still he knows I remember when Ted was a baby, how he laughed, a laughing baby boy.…”

  She stopped to take a long breath. That was how you brought yourself under control. You took deep, long breaths and exhaled.

  Cliff put out his hand and took hers, not speaking. They began to walk. A boy came up to them holding a caged bird, a little brown bird, common as a sparrow, in a cage too small to let it even spread its wings.

  “Ten cents?”

  The appeal, accompanied by ten raised fingers, was probably the only English the boy knew. Countless times before, they had seen this appeal. The dime was handed over and the bird, released, sped off into the trees.

  “I can’t stand seeing anything in cages,” Cliff muttered.

  “I know.”

  He pressed her hand. “We’re in all these troubles together. Let’s forgive each other for the dumb things we just said.”

  “Of course, my darling.”

  There was a fragrance in the air, and a sense of peace. Could it be emanating from the Buddha? That, after all, was the general purpose of his life and teaching. Peace, in a latticed framework of scarlet and gold. They walked toward it. Perhaps it will touch us, she thought. Peace.

  FOUR

  The week at home had not given Charlotte any relief from her tired, restless mood. To the contrary she was in a hurry to go back to work. At the table on the last night, while eating the good food that Emmabrown had prepared, she was impatient with herself. What on earth had she expected, some sort of comfortable, warm return to the womb, or at least to childhood? As if, she thought ironically, my childhood had ever been all that warm.

  Bill broke a silence that had lasted for at least five minutes. “Do you hear anything special from your—from Elena?”

  “Just the usual. She plans to be in New York next fall and expects to see me there. I wish she’d fly to Boston sometimes. It’s not easy for me to take as much time off as she wants me to take.”

  “Still, it’s nice for you to be together.”

  This ordinary, even trite, remark lingered in the air, heavy with sad connotations, like a final note in a minor key.

  “I had a birthday card from her with a nice message. She was always punctilious about birthdays and Christmas.”

  Bill’s vocabulary had never been imaginative. Nice was usually his most descriptive adjective. Charlotte wondered about the “nice message” and wondered what it could possibly mean to him, if anything. She wondered about things she would never know.

  So much had changed in this place that had been her home!

  “It hurts me to see what’s happened to the Dawses,” Emmabrown had told her. “Years ago if anybody had predicted things like this, I couldn’t have believed it. Your father’s so depressed, so run down, I don’t know what to make of him. Even this house going to rack and ruin.”

  The house was hardly “going to rack and ruin,” but it was unmistakably shabby. The dining-room curtains were brittle and yellow. Paint on the ceiling was peeling. Elena would be appalled if she could see it now.

  And Emmabrown had continued, “No, no. He’s not himself. I only come once a week to clean the house and cook enough for a few meals. I guess he does for himself the rest of the time, eats out and goes to his brothe
r’s. I could come more often, but he says he can’t afford it, not that I mind. I can always get jobs if I want them. But it hurts me, Charlotte. He’s not himself, your father isn’t.”

  If to “be himself meant to be without burdens, or at the very least to carry them totally concealed, then it had been a long time since Bill had “been himself.” Still, there had been nothing she could do about it, and there was nothing now.

  Her impulse was to touch his hand, to show him that she was aware and cared so much. But she knew that neither male pride nor parental pride would accept that from her. He would hate it.

  Briskly, as if with a sharp instrument, Bill’s voice cut through the thick atmosphere.

  “Tell me about your job, about your life. I never hear enough.”

  “It’s wonderful,” she said, responding in kind. “I love the work and I’m lucky to be working. Jobs are scarce, what with the end of the eighties real-estate boom.”

  “So I read. There’ve been articles about big firms laying off half their staffs, and articles about architects leaving for jobs in the Far East. That’s where things really are booming, as I should know.”

  There could be no denial of that, so she said only, “I’m glad I’m in a small firm. We do things that don’t involve big millions, so somehow we keep busy. We do a lot of historical preservation on country houses. Of course, Rudy likes to play around with modern design whenever he can find a client who can afford some brand-new dazzle.”

  Charlotte smiled. There was an artificial quality about this conversation, an avoidance of reality.

  “What do you like?”

  “Either, or a combination when one can properly be made. I’m eclectic.”

  “I’m proud of you. I still can see you lugging those big coffee-table books on architecture. You were—how old? Fourteen, maybe?”

  As if abruptly aware that “fourteen” was an unfortunate choice of year, he stopped and, quickly recovering, went on, “How about your private life? Still no serious love, or shouldn’t I ask?”

  “You may ask. The answer is no.”

  “Just as well. You’re young yet. Don’t make any sorry mistakes.”

  Now his voice, which, unlike his vocabulary, was always expressive, told her that his own mistake still pained him. And in Charlotte’s mind the contrast between him and Elena, who seldom expressed regret about anything, was a keen one.

  Bill poured a second cup of coffee. She saw that he wanted to prolong this last evening. “I miss you,” he said abruptly. “We all do. Cliff and Claudia too. They’ve been having a hard time this past year on account of that fellow. That’s why Cliff took her away. Has she told you?”

  “No. Our phone conversations are short.” And we never mention “that fellow,” Charlotte thought, discomfited that he was being mentioned now.

  “Well, it’s all come back to life after lying dormant for the last few years. All of a sudden two different families, perfectly well-meaning people, one family in Tennessee and another in Connecticut, sent letters claiming that they’re sure they’ve seen him. Then come the newspapers, naturally, one of them with a TV crew, at the front door. It was all a false alarm, as you might expect.”

  “Why ‘as you might expect’? Somebody’s going to find him somewhere. I’ve thought … God knows, I’ve thought … of coming face to face with him on a street, and how it would be.…”

  “The chances of that happening are one in a billion. I wouldn’t give it another thought if I were you. Don’t make yourself sick over this thing, dear. Poor Claudia was almost turning inside out. Some people in town are saying that the Dawses really know where Ted’s hiding and are protecting him. Can you imagine anything so cruel?”

  A dreadful thought shot through Charlotte’s mind: could it be possible that Claudia did know? Ted was her child, after all. Then, instantly, she was ashamed of the ugly, disloyal suspicion.

  “Well,” Bill said, rising from the table, “enough of that. How about an evening walk? We haven’t had one since last fall.”

  They stepped out onto the road, which now, at April’s end, was covered by an arch of maples so barely greening that the sun, which still had an hour’s worth of light to give, was able to flicker brightly through the arch. To the right lay the way to the lake, a familiar route still quaintly, peacefully countrified, while to the left lay the downhill way from the plateau to the river, the town, and unavoidably, to the mill. Or to what remains of it, thought Charlotte.

  She hoped Bill would choose the direction of the lake, but he chose the opposite. So they walked, making inconsequential conversation about the houses they passed, so-and-so’s eighty-fifth birthday, or so-and-so’s lavish display of crocuses. Bill’s mind, as Charlotte did not need to be told, was elsewhere, drawn toward the river’s edge, where, finally, they stopped.

  There it lay, the proud old mill that she had used to compare with a huge, menacing prison. But now, in this state of decay, it looked more like a beetle whose innards bulged from its outer shell.

  “Crammed,” Bill said. “There’s hardly room to set foot inside. It’s crammed with rubbish. They’ve even put up more sheds for more stuff! You know, don’t you, that the commission, over my signature, has given Premier two warnings this past year, and then got a court order for them to clean up. They’ve ignored the order, just submitted a worthless cleanup plan that fools nobody. Now the state is suing them, but it’ll probably take half a century to get through the courts. And in the meantime Cliff and I have to take the heat. Look there!” he cried impatiently when Charlotte failed to respond. “And the windows are all gone. The pressure’s done it.”

  Charlotte asked gently, “Why do you come here to torture yourself?”

  “How can you ask? Here, see these.” From his jacket pocket Bill pulled a packet of folded newspaper clippings. “Letters to the editor, even a couple of editorials by my friend Howard Haynes. My friend! Listen. ‘In spite of his eloquence at the recent city council meeting, Bill Dawes failed to convince anyone that he and his brother are doing enough to curb their tenant. They are the owners, and it is their responsibility to correct conditions at their property. For too many years now the community has been subjected to an unbearable, windblown stench.’ Et cetera, et cetera. Now hear this letter by a science teacher at the high school. ‘What was supposed to be a recycling operation has become a dumping ground for hazardous trash. The acres behind the building have become a viscous, noisome swamp. Ducks and wildfowl that used to live there are long gone. Soon there will be no more fish in the river because the waste that’s been mixed in with the so-called construction-site waste is bound to leach into the river. Eventually it will enter the neighboring groundwater and the food chain. We are faced with disaster, and nobody is doing anything about it. Mr. Dawes should be ashamed to keep his job on the state environmental commission. He should know enough to resign.’ Well, there’s more,” Bill concluded, tucking the papers back into his pocket, “but I guess that’s enough. You get the idea.”

  The sun was fading away into a pool of foggy pink clouds, against which the ruination below became all the more depressing. And involuntarily, Charlotte turned toward the greening landscape at her back.

  “Our good name is mud in Kingsley,” Bill said bitterly. “Between this mess and that other business of Claudia’s—and Cliff’s—we’ve been marked as liars, or fools, or both.”

  When she stared down again at the mill, it seemed to her that it had always been the pivot around which her life revolved. She remembered standing here and hearing her father’s prediction, remembered it as clearly as if he were giving it right now: We’re going to have trouble here yet.

  “If we had moved the whole thing away to Central America or someplace, we’d be rich and respected now. But we made a fine product in a thriving town, and we wanted to save them both, wanted to save the good jobs. No one gives us credit for that. We tried our damnedest to make a go of it here, but the cheap competition hurt us, and the town died with u
s. That’s the whole story.”

  The town died with us. The dying was slow; one by one the good shops that had thrived on the grid of old streets that led to the river’s edge closed down. In the gray, dilapidated town there was no park, no recreation, no inviting place to sit with friends over a cup of coffee, no entertainment since the theater had been shut, except for the multiplex movie in a row of gimcrack chain stores and strip malls out on the highway. Life had moved out to the cheerless highway.

  Of course it was not only the death of the mill that had caused this; it was happening all over America.

  And suddenly Charlotte was seized by an idea. Afterward, she could not have told how it came to flash into her head any more, she supposed, than a musician might explain how a melody had been born to him. But as it flashed, she saw what ought to lie below in the broad curve of the river, under the lovely rise of the pine-covered bluff where she was standing now. What should be there was a beautiful public space.

  “Yes,” she said aloud, “a public space.”

  “A what?”

  “Oh, you know. Something like a square, a place to attract people, with things for them to do. The sort of thing,” she said with a vague wave of her arm, “that they’ve done on the Baltimore waterfront, or at Faneuil Hall in Boston.”

  “This isn’t Baltimore or Boston. There’s no comparison.”

  “But why can’t there be, on a smaller scale? A town square like the ones in Europe, a lively marketplace with new businesses and new jobs—”

  “I’m afraid that’s a pipe dream, daughter.” When Bill was jovial or, as now, was trying to humor her, he called her “daughter.”

  “But you mean well.” He patted her shoulder. “Thanks for trying. Even if it were possible to carry out your idea, there’s that small matter of the tenants. They’re a tough crew, Charlotte. We can’t possibly outwit them. And if we could—if we even could manage to find lawyers who’d take a chance on suing them—the case would cost God knows what. Then, if we were to win in court and get rid of them, which I don’t think we have one chance in ten of doing, how would we manage without their lease money? Who else would want to lease this ruin? And who would buy a property in this town?”