Secrecy

by Belva Plain

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered.

  He was telling her here in the hushed elegance of this place, this place that she would never forget, that they were losing each other. She knew that surely.

  Once more she met his eyes, which were pleading and tense. Don’t you know I would die for you? she thought.

  But there are blood ties, and no one can possibly feel how strong they are until they are tested. Her father’s life … Even Elena—even Elena!—all these years had guarded it. For with that recent letter to Bill she had meant to protect her daughter. Blood ties …

  “If I allowed myself to think it,” he said, “I’d think there must be another man.”

  “Am I really hearing you say that, Roger?”

  “I haven’t actually said it, have I? But if you cared about—us—you would let nothing keep you from being open with me. You insult my intelligence, you and your father, with an excuse that even a child might see through. No one believes it. The lawyers, Uncle Heywood, the Lauriers, too, no doubt. No one. But here you are, watching the ship head toward the rocks, and still you will not speak. What am I to make of you?”

  “Make of me? I love you.” Her lips quivered and she stopped.

  “There’s more to love than just making love,” he said quietly. “No, I cannot continue like this, Charlotte. That shouldn’t be hard to understand.”

  “Take me home,” she said, “I need to get home.”

  “Then wait in the doorway while I find a cab.”

  Neither of them spoke in the taxi. The only sound was the rushing of traffic and rain.

  That evening he telephoned. By his voice alone she knew that he was desolate, though his words were only a repetition of what he had so many times already said.

  He wrote: We have loved each other. Need I tell you what you have meant to me? Yet now I feel that I don’t know you. And he explained again how impossible it was for a relationship to exist alongside of such enormous, damaging secrecy, to which she gave the lame reply that was the only one she had to give.

  After a week or two she heard no more. So she returned his little ring that she had not once removed from her finger. Now it was back in its velvet box, wrapped and addressed to the man who had given it. Then all contact came to an end in silence.

  Often Charlotte wondered about herself. Remembering that first-love episode with Peter, her wounds and spasms of weeping, it seemed strange that she could be dry eyed and quiet now. Perhaps she was simply too shocked to accept the fact and finality. Perhaps she was like those stone-faced parents at the funeral of a child who has met some kind of violent death.

  Indeed, Pauline thought it was like that. “A heart can be too broken to show itself,” she said. She was being very kind and asked no questions, which was the greatest kindness of all.

  She also said, “People heal, and work is the best healer.”

  Well, Charlotte knew that. She passed her days at the drawing board, thankful for having work. She often stayed there late, and was thankful again for being tired when she went home. She had no desire for company, and had no contacts, anyway, since Roger and she had been too busy and too engrossed with each other during the past year to keep any.

  As for her father, she could but wonder. There was a sore and heavy ache in her chest when she thought of him, alone now in the neglected house in these dark, short days of fall.

  Most painful of all for him, she knew, was his sense of responsibility for her break with Roger. Again and again she had to assure him that his own conviction for murder would be far worse for her.

  She was filled with a vast loneliness. The city, too, seemed to hold a loneliness that she had never observed before. In its parks she looked at the statues of its great, of John Adams with the troubled face, and Garrison, solemn in his stone chair, with wet yellow leaves on his long coat. She stood there thinking, Well, he had his troubles too. And turning, she beheld an old man, not stone, but alive, sitting on a bench with his arm around his dog. Lonely. Lonely.

  “Do come for Christmas dinner with us,” Pauline urged. Since Charlotte was no longer “attached,” she had again assumed her motherly role.

  The prospect of a lively dinner with interesting people had been cheering, but there was no doubt that Charlotte must go home instead.

  * * *

  There were just the two of them in Kingsley. Cliff was dining with friends. Bill had made reservations for dinner at a country inn, one of those Revolutionary saltbox houses with a spinning wheel in the corner and pewter tankards on the mantel over the original fireplace. The moment they walked in, Charlotte recognized it as the place where they had stopped for lunch on their journey back from the hospital in Boston so long ago. No doubt her father had forgotten.

  The tables were filled with elderly people who were probably there because they had no other place to go. Here, also, there was too much loneliness.…

  They tried to talk of neutral subjects: Charlotte’s work, the election, and Bill’s neighbor, who was being transferred to Texas. But the talk was false and finally died away. Back home again, they watched carol singers on television and then, both admitting to being tired, went to bed.

  In her old room Charlotte sat on the window seat looking out at the empty night. It came to life when she turned off the lamp; lights glittered from scattered houses on the nearest hill, and above the farthest darkness shone the stars. And she wondered where Roger was tonight. Last year at this time—yes, just around ten o’clock—they had taken a walk together, crunching through the snow.

  She turned the lamp back on and readied the bed. Elena, knowing that Charlotte would be spending Christmas here, had sent her usual bounty in a glossy box. It lay now on the bed, spilling its contents in crackling tissue paper: a powder-blue cashmere sweater, an alligator handbag, and a silver picture frame with a note attached.

  Darling, save this for the photo of your next lover. He’s out there. He always is. Brighten up, and go find him.

  All the agony that she had so determinedly controlled until now exploded and tore her apart. She burst into tears, lay facedown, and sobbed into the pillow, beating it with desperate fists. Nothing mattered anymore. If she could only lie there and die there! If only her heart would stop before morning!

  After a while, a very long while, there were no more tears left. Her exhausted chest heaved in its final spasm, and she became aware of the cold. She got up, undressed, and crawled under the quilt.

  In the morning she was calm again, but this calm was different from the contrived calm that she had had before. The outburst, the total collapse, had in some strange way cleared her head.

  Some days later she went to Rudy and Pauline with a proposal. The firm had been commissioned to draw plans for a semisuburban housing project, where low-income families might purchase their own homes. She asked them now to let her work on it.

  “I’ve been thinking and drawing pictures in my head. It seems to me that there should be a variety of facades, maybe four or five, all in harmony, but differing enough to be interesting. Maybe a few Victorian touches here and there?” She paused as if to wait for a reaction, but none came, and she continued. “Each front yard should have shrubs and flowers. I’ve seen pictures of English towns where even the most modest houses have a front garden. It makes a greenbelt up and down the street, makes it all seem larger. What do you think?”

  Pauline and Rudy looked at each other. They were smiling, and Rudy said gently, “We have, as a matter of fact, been wondering when you’d be ready to tackle another big job like that.”

  And Charlotte smiled back. “I’m ready now,” she said.

  THIRTEEN

  Late in January, Charlotte had to return to Kingsley. Each of the brothers had been served with notice of foreclosure. The news, although long expected, came to her abruptly one morning when Bill telephoned, and for all the rest of that day she was filled with a melancholy nostalgia. With sad irony she thought how true, after all, were the trite icons of childhoo
d and family life, the Halloween pumpkin at the door and the backyard barbecue on the Fourth of July.

  Of the two homes Cliff’s was the one with the more valid treasures, things not all of them worth as much in money as in remembrances of three generations. He was asking Charlotte to come and take whatever she wanted before the rest was sold.

  “I really don’t want to take anything,” she told Pauline. “It’s all too sad.”

  “Nevertheless, you should take whatever you can, those early American antiques you described, and the paintings—”

  “There’s no place for them in my life,” Charlotte objected.

  “There will be. You won’t always live in a tight little flat. When you’re married—”

  “No,” she objected again.

  Pauline smiled. “All right. When you’re a prominent architect living in a house of your own design—”

  Charlotte threw up her hands. “Okay, you win. I’ll go next week.”

  Snow was melting on the roadsides. Thick and grainy, it slid into puddles on Kingsley streets, where people walked with open collars, as if this were April instead of a January thaw. Over the landscape there lay an air of weariness, which was certainly not dissipated, when she arrived home, by the sight of cartons in the back hall, filled with discards.

  “Amazing how much junk you can collect in twenty-five years,” Bill said. “Thought I might as well get to work on it gradually. Emmabrown’s taking all your toys for her grandchildren, unless of course there’s anything you want.”

  “Only a few books, Charlotte’s Web, Little Women, stuff like that. I’ll sort them.”

  “Don’t bother. I’ll sort them for you. I’ll know what you want to keep.” Bill smiled. “I ought to know.”

  Yes, he ought. He was the one who had bought the books, had read them to her before she had learned to read, and even long afterward; summer afternoons and winter evenings had been good times for reading aloud.

  Heavyhearted, she inquired about Cliff. “Do you still not speak to each other?”

  “As little as possible. What is there to say?”

  Indeed, there was not much to say anymore between these brothers, or between Bill and herself, so their little supper was eaten in the kitchen, while Tosca, playing on the stereo, removed the need for a conversation that could only be depressing.

  After a while Charlotte got up and went outside to look again at her old familiar hills. The sky was filled with whorls and shreds of dark clouds, deep gray-blue over glints of a cold silver sun about to disappear in the west. The evening felt ominous to her, although that was, of course, only her mood, the mood of the place and the circumstances. And she went back inside.

  That night the rain began. It might have come on slowly, but by the time it woke her, it had the force of an open faucet splashing into a half-filled tub. Peering out, she could see water streaming down the roof of the porch and could hear it gurgling in the leaders. An eerie wind, roaring and shrieking, wrenched the apple tree near her window. It seemed to Charlotte that something extraordinary was happening.

  She went back to bed, but the noise outside kept her awake and, in a sense, watchful, as though at any moment that noise would attack the house, which was surely absurd. Yet, dark and early as it was, she got up again and dressed.

  It was just past five o’clock by the kitchen clock. She was putting a pot of coffee on the stove when Bill, also fully dressed, came downstairs.

  “A real northeaster,” he said. “Wind must be thirty miles an hour. This’ll take down a lot of trees, I’m afraid.”

  He sounded almost cheerful, and she thought she understood why. Just as during a war people forget their personal problems, so a great storm unites people against the common menace. And they waited for daylight while Charlotte made pancakes and Bill fiddled with the radio.

  When full morning came, they looked out. The ground, now almost bare of snow, was covered with the debris of broken branches. Few cars passed, and only one neighbor had emerged as yet to struggle on the walk with his chow, who cringed against the rain that drenched his orange hair. Down the sloping street a stream fled toward the river.

  Later, Emmabrown telephoned. “It looks bad out, Charlotte. Your dad won’t mind if I don’t come today? There’s plenty of food in the freezer. Take out the chicken pie. Put a spoon of vanilla ice cream on the apple pudding, your dad likes that. I’ll get to see you before you go back, maybe even tonight, when it lets up. It can’t keep on like this all day. Never does.”

  Charlotte thought, I’ll miss Emmabrown. I’ll miss many things. There’s altogether too much parting and giving up in life. However, there’s no use being philosophical, is there? Better to go to work.

  She had brought a briefcase full of notes and sketches for the low-cost housing project. And now, laying these out on the dining-room table, she began to resume where she had left off the day before. But concentration did not come easily today. There was, to start with, a pervasive sense of uneasy change in the house. Added to that was the drone of the radio, to which Bill seemed to be fastened in the kitchen.

  Above all, there was the rain; eventually, by the fourth or fifth hour, she was used to the monotonous background splatter, although intermittently a violent gust of wind would send it drumming against the window, demanding attention. She could not remember when or whether she had ever seen such rain.

  Once Bill came wandering in and, looking over her shoulder at her work, asked a few suitable questions, telling her yet again how proud of her he was. Yet she knew that his heart was not in his words, and his thoughts were elsewhere.

  “I wonder how Cliff is doing,” she said.

  “The same as we are,” he replied, and wandered back into the kitchen.

  He had infected her with his restlessness. She got up and, going to the window, looked out upon the water-soaked afternoon. The wind that had so furiously been whipping the trees was now visibly dying down, while the rain, impossible as it might have seemed that morning, was actually increasing. Like a screen or curtain it was almost opaque, so that, before Charlotte’s eyes, the landscape was dimmed like a faded photograph.

  As if mesmerized, she was still standing there when Bill came back with a cup of coffee for her and a grim report.

  “All hell’s broken loose upriver. The Smithtown Bridge is submerged, and the highways are closed. The Bradley Road collapsed, and two cars went into the river. Five dead. Eleven inches so far.” They stood silently at the window until he resumed, worrying, “The river will be rising over flood level here, too, if it doesn’t let up soon. Last time it flooded was about fifty years ago, wasn’t it? I don’t remember.”

  Emmabrown phoned again from Kingsley, talking fast. “It’s a mess here. You wouldn’t believe it. They’ve got firefighters running extra buses to take people to shelters in the schools and churches. But no shelter for me! I’m loading the car, overloading it, with grandkids, three dogs, and a hamster, going to my relatives uphill toward Walker. If we don’t leave this minute, we won’t be able to get out. Other side of Main Street, cars are already sunk up to the windows. Take care. I’ll keep in touch.”

  “I’m calling Cliff,” Charlotte said.

  “What for? He’s all right. He’s as high up as we are.”

  “I’m calling him all the same.”

  She had barely spoken when a terrific crash blasted in the backyard; the windows rattled, and in the front hall Elena’s fancy crystal chandelier jangled frantically.

  “A tree’s down,” Bill cried. “Look! The ash tree’s gone.”

  There it lay. Over a century old, taller than the house that it shaded, it was stricken and fallen. Its roots, ripped out of the soil, were a soldier’s torn, bleeding wound, and the topmost branches, reaching as far as the fence line, were his pitiful, broken arms.

  “Thank God,” Bill said in awe, “it fell away from the house. Imagine, the ground’s too sodden to hold it up.” Then, squinting through the rain, he reported, “The telep
hone line went with it too. Look.”

  A moment later the lights went out and the room turned dark blue. The furnace, which had been humming, went silent. All up and down the street the lights were out.

  “Power lines must be down all over,” Bill said with some lessening of his first exhilarating sense of adventure. “Let’s get the candles and flashlights out right now before night.”

  They ate cold chicken pie by candlelight. The house grew gradually colder. Charlotte, trying to read by candlelight in sweater and outer jacket, gave up and, having anyway been awake since before five that morning, decided to go to bed.

  “Well, at least they promised that it would stop by tomorrow morning,” Bill said cheerfully.

  It did not. At seven o’clock the rain was still coming in cascades and cataracts. The sky was drowned. The ground was a waste of barren brown grass spotted with islands of mushy snow.

  News came from the little transistor radio in the kitchen. People were being rescued from rooftops, this was the worst calamity in they weren’t able to hear how many years, and the governor had declared a state of emergency.

  “Thirty-six hours now, and no letup,” Bill said. “No letup in sight either.”

  Again, Charlotte spread out her work on the dining-room table. For a few minutes Bill watched her, considerately refraining from interruption, then walked away and went down again to the radio in the car. After a while she heard him come up, rummaging for some cold food in the kitchen. He did not know what to do with himself. And she went to him, saying gently, “Why don’t you just give up worrying? There’s nothing you can do about this, so you might as well accept it.”

  “I wish I had work to do as you do.”

  “Get a book. Sit down and pass the time with a book.”

  “No,” he said suddenly, “I can’t sit still. I’m going out.”

  “Out! For heaven’s sake, where to?”

  “Just out. I need to move around.”

  “In this torrent, this—this tempest? This all-time record? Are you crazy?”