Liar

by Jan Burke

  “Since Gwendolyn was murdered? Actually, you don’t know much about what my life has been like since I was about a month old, right?”

  “Right.”

  He was silent.

  “You can punish me like this for another twenty-some-odd years, if that will make you happy,” I said. I stood up, started to clear dishes.

  He reached over with his bandaged hand, lightly touched my wrist. “No. It won’t make me happy. I’m sorry.” When he spoke again, there were sharp breaths between the words. “I’m not usually—I guess— everything—that happened yesterday—it’s just been a lot to take in, all at once.”

  I sat down again. “I know.”

  He wiped at his face, embarrassed, not looking at me. We sat in silence for a few minutes, listening to the kitchen clock tick. He grew calmer.

  “I want to go with you and Rachel when you talk to Richmond,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  He seemed surprised.

  “You were expecting an argument?” I asked.

  “I guess so.” He was silent again.

  “I’ll take you shopping if you like, but before we go I need to take the dogs for a walk,” I said. “Want to go down to the beach with me?” Sure.

  The air was cool and misty, the sky was low and gray. A typical June morning; by noon the clouds would burn off, the day would be warm. The crowds would show up then. At this hour, the lack of morning sunshine cut down on the number of beachgoers; other than a surfer here and there, we didn’t pass many people as we walked along.

  Maybe being out in the salt air made a difference, or maybe the Pacific stretching gray and endless soothed him as it did me.

  “I was just thinking that you were only about ten or eleven when you stopped having contact with my father,” he said.

  “Yes, I guess I didn’t know him very well at all. After what you told me last night—I realize I’ve had these childhood impressions that were wrong.”

  “You couldn’t have known that he couldn’t read,” he said. “Last night, I told you I’d tell you more about that.”

  We walked a little farther, then he said, “My father didn’t begin to learn to read until he was over forty. He never learned to read very well; his type of dyslexia made it very difficult. When he was in grade school, in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, no one correctly identified the cause of his problems with reading. He was very bright, but he was always put in the ’slow‘ groups. Success in school was almost entirely dependent on being able to read and write. He couldn’t do either. It was analogous to trying to force deaf students to learn from tape recordings. He had to learn in other ways—you couldn’t get through to him with the written word.”

  “You taught him to read, didn’t you?”

  “To the extent I could,” he said. “It took me a long time to convince him that it was worth trying. He never would have gone back to school. He was too ashamed to let other people know he couldn’t read.”

  “He had dropped out of school?” I asked, remembering the questions I had when I saw Arthur’s death certificate.

  “Yes,” he said. “He wouldn’t go to adult school, no matter how hard I tried to convince him it would be different now.”

  I noticed that he seemed embarrassed about this.

  “Who could blame him?” I asked. “I admire him for even trying to learn privately, from you. From what you’ve told me, school must have been a miserable place for him, a frustrating place, a place where he was made to feel ashamed of something he couldn’t help. Becoming an adult wouldn’t allow him to suddenly forget that misery, or decide that school might be a wonderful place after all. You shouldn’t blame him, either. You know that, don’t you?”

  He hesitated, then said, “Yes. And the truth is, I do admire him. He had to do so much to compensate for his illiteracy; he came up with all of these tricks and ways to keep other people from guessing the truth. Most people never knew he couldn’t read.”

  “Tell me about him,” I said.

  After a long silence, he said, “It isn’t easy to describe him. When I think of his good qualities, well, he was smart and funny and very generous. He was hardworking. He was good with numbers—they didn’t seem to cause him problems in the way letters did. He couldn’t write checks or read ledger entries, or he might have been a bookkeeper. My mom paid the family bills, but if I said a group of numbers aloud, he could add them in his head as fast as she could with a calculator.

  “If he had been able to go to school to study it, I suppose he might have been an artist—he was very creative. I have some of his drawings and paintings.

  “But he liked being outdoors, and loved making things grow. So that was the business he went into. As you know, he was very good at it. He also had—I guess you’d call them ‘people skills’—he made other people feel at ease. He was a great storyteller. One reason I never questioned his ability to read was that he could tell these wonderful stories. Who needed something out of a book when Dad could make up a better story?

  “Sometimes the stories were on a grand scale—made-up fairy tales of knights and dragons, but mostly they were family stories, or just little tales about someone he had met that day, or something he had seen or done. I loved listening to him.”

  I remembered that about Arthur, thought that perhaps I had liked that in him before I took up my father’s self-righteous anger against him. I said nothing, though, and after a moment, Travis went on.

  “On the other hand, there was always a false front. Even simple things involved deception. When I was very young, if my mother wasn’t with us, we ate at places like Denny’s and Howard Johnson’s—because they had photographs of the food on the menu, and he could get something besides a burger, which is what he usually ordered if there was no Ho Jo’s nearby. That was a safe order.

  “I started reading at an early age, so by the time I was seven, I helped him without realizing it. He used to make me feel very important when we ate out together, because he’d say to the waitress, ”This young man is going to pick out something for me. What do you think I’d like best, Travis?“ I felt flattered—my father was trusting my judgment.

  “There were other tricks he’d use. For example, if a note came home from the teacher, he’d watch me, assess my attitude. He could tell if it was good news or bad news based on my nonverbal cues. He had incredible abilities as far as that went—he might not have learned to read books, but he could read people.”

  “I can’t believe you got in trouble at school very often,” I said.

  “I did. Ironically, for the same reason he did. I was bored, but for the opposite cause. I was reading ahead of my grade level. I used my spare time to be a class clown.”

  “And when he got these notes?” I asked.

  “If I was giving him reason—nonverbally—to believe it was bad news, he’d smile conspiratorially and say, ”Has your mother seen this yet?“ If the answer was no, he’d sigh and say, ”Well, she’ll understand. And you better let her be the one to talk to the teacher. As for you and me, we both already know that you’re smart enough to figure out how to do better.“ And he’d hug me and tell me not to let it get me down.”

  “But he pretended he could read?”

  “For many years. He wasn’t home every day, of course, but there was a routine when he was there. Every morning, he would open the newspaper and browse through it at a steady pace. He would come across an ad which featured a woman in a dress and he’d recognize the logo of the store. He’d say, ”Bree‘—that was his nickname for her—’here’s something you might want to take a look at. There’s a sale at Buffum’s.“

  “Anything like that was her cue. She’d take the paper from him. ”Oh, maybe I’ll go by there,“ she’d say, but then she’d go back to the front page and say, T see they’re going to build a marina near downtown,” or comment on whatever local news was there. Sometimes she’d mention national news, but usually he’d pick that up from the car radio or from television.
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  “While he had been ‘browsing,” she had been looking at other sections for any small items of unusual interest, so that he could, throughout the day, regale customers or vendors with these. “Did you see that story about the bank robber who wrote his hold-up note on the back of an envelope with his name and address on it?” Stories like that.“

  “Did your mother always know he was illiterate?”

  “Yes—I mean, she knew not long after they met. She was working for a commercial nursery. He was a friendly person, and she was shy, and he was someone who always wanted shy people to feel more comfortable. At parties, he would find the person who was excluded or hanging back, and bring them into the conversation. He had a way of doing this so that the other person didn’t feel put on the spot.”

  “Those people skills you spoke of,” I said.

  “Yes. I don’t mean to say he was universally popular. There were people like your father, who never liked him from the moment they met him.”

  I started to say, “That’s not true,” but it was. Instead I said, “I don’t know why my father reacted the way he did.”

  Travis shrugged. “I think some people could sense he was hiding something from them. Some men didn’t like him because women liked him so much. Most women, I should say.”

  “The vast majority, as I recall,” I said, thinking back. “And somehow he did it without really flirting. I don’t just think it was his smile or his good looks. If there were two handsome men in a room, your father was still the one with all the women around him.”

  Again he shrugged. “He always told me that most men would do better with women if they just listened to them. For him it was natural; without being able to read, he had to listen to people to learn what was going on.

  “In any case, my mother took a liking to him. One day, her boss came in while my dad was talking to her. He greeted my dad, who was one of his best customers, and slapped a trade magazine down on the counter. It was opened to an article. ”Take a look at that!“ he said to my dad. My dad did everything in his power not to panic. There were no photographs with the article.

  “He did what he usually did in that kind of situation. He tried to base his response on the other man’s attitude. He wanted to say something noncommittal, but still have an appropriate reaction. But I guess my mother’s presence made him feel flustered. ”Wow!“ was all he managed to say.

  “ ‘What do you think that’s going to mean to you and me?” the man persisted. My mother must have seen that something was wrong. She said, “Let me see that,” and she took the magazine from my dad and read the first paragraph aloud. It was something about the sale of one pesticide company to another.

  “From there, my father could manage to participate in the conversation. He was grateful to her. He took her out to lunch. He admitted to her that he couldn’t read.”

  “Who else knew that?” I asked.

  “Unless someone guessed and didn’t let him know they’d guessed, not many people. W, Gerald, Gwendolyn and Mr. Brennan. I think he said his housekeeper at the other house knew. I didn’t realize that he couldn’t read until I was about ten.”

  “Were you disappointed?”

  He shook his head. “No. I’m not sure why not, really. It wasn’t a revelation, all at once. I gradually began to realize it, and knew it was a secret. At first, I didn’t want him to know I knew that secret; maybe I sensed it would hurt him, I don’t know. And even then, I thought he just couldn’t read very well.

  “But one day, the two of us had been out somewhere together and the road he would usually take to go home was closed. There was a sign saying ‘Detour, use such-and-so street,” but of course, he couldn’t read the sign. When he was working, one of his workers would do all the driving. But with us, he found his way around by memorizing landmarks. Only this time, there were no landmarks. He tried making turns, tried to get back to something familiar. He got lost. I could see he was terrified. Finally, I told him not to worry and pulled out a map and figured out how to get us home. I read the street signs and told him where to turn.

  “We managed to get home before my mother came back from wherever she was. He was still shaken by the whole ordeal. So I gathered my courage and told him I already knew he couldn’t read, and I’d teach him if he wanted me to. He started crying. I had never seen him shed a tear before then. It scared the hell out of me.”

  I called to the dogs, and we turned, heading back toward the house.

  “He told me about a nightmare he used to have all the time,” Travis said. “In the dream he would be driving alone in the car to a place he had been to many times, but then the car breaks down along the way, before he gets to his next landmark. Tough-looking men are watching him— he’s in a rough neighborhood. Suddenly he’s near a phone—it appears out of nowhere, as things do in dreams—and so he calls the operator and asks for help. She puts him through to the police. The police say, ”We’ll send help right way. Where are you?“ He has to say, ”I don’t know.“ They say, ”Read the address on the phone,“ and he panics. He lies and says it isn’t on the phone, that it must have been torn off. The police say, ”Read the street sign,“ and he can’t. ”Read the signs on the stores,“ and he can’t. He finally has to tell everyone, ”I can’t read,“ and the police start laughing at him and hang up. The tough men are laughing at him, too. Everyone is pointing at him, jeering, and then walking away from him, leaving him, as if he isn’t worth bothering with.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  Again we walked in silence.

  “This morning, you asked about the time just after the murder,” he said. “It was this strange time when we—my father and my mother and I—were actually closer than we had been just before Gwendolyn died. We pulled together to protect my dad. Richmond was the enemy, this monster outside our gates.”

  “Your mom already knew about the marriage between Gwendolyn and your dad?”

  He nodded. “She found out—I never knew how, but she did. She was devastated. I can remember her staying in her room for days on end, not eating, not sleeping, just staring at the ceiling, crying. Wouldn’t answer the door or the phone. I took care of things the best I could, did the shopping, things like that. I got her to call my school and tell them I had the flu. Maybe it was just a kid’s way of looking at it, but I was afraid to go to school, afraid she’d kill herself if I was away from her too long.”

  “But you were only—”

  “Eleven. I finally told her I was going to get the priest—she begged me not to. She was so ashamed, thought of herself as everything from the world’s most gullible fool to a home-wrecker. I guess the threat of my telling anyone about it snapped her out of the worst of the depression. I started going back to school, life settled into a routine. But I don’t think she was ever the same after that.”

  “Your dad—”

  “I was angry at him, of course. She wasn’t the only one who felt betrayed. When she made him move out, I was glad. At the time, I didn’t want him to come anywhere near us. That’s what I told myself, anyway.

  “They had hoped to settle everything quietly—for my sake, they said. Mom was going to sell the house, move to where no one knew us, tell everyone she was a widow.”

  “Did Gwendolyn know?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not sure, but I don’t think she knew. Mom made him swear he would never tell Gwendolyn. She believed they had both wronged Gwendolyn, but that no good would come of revealing the truth to her. It could only hurt her.”

  “Did your father ever try to explain why he didn’t just divorce Gwendolyn? Why he tried to lead a double life?”

  He was quiet for so long, I began to regret the question. He looked out over the water.

  “He gave different explanations for it over the years. I suppose there is no one answer to that question. He was very young when he married Gwendolyn, and I think his brother pressured him into it—or pressured her into marrying my father, by threatening to expose her as a seducer.” />
  “What?”

  “Gerald Spanning. My uncle. When I was becoming—oh, let’s call it reacquainted—with my dad, he talked a lot about his younger days, the days before he was married. I’ve never met Gerald, though.”

  “Not even when you were little?”

  “No. Gerald was part of my father’s other life. Introducing us would have meant revealing his secret family.”

  “But after the secret was out in the open—”

  “I don’t think Gerald had much to do with my father after the murder. The Kellys weren’t the only ones who disowned us.”

  I let that go by. “Gerald was his older brother?”

  “Yes. Gerald is a lot older than my dad—about ten years older. There had been at least a couple of other children born in the years between, but those children had died. They were poor. My grandparents were migratory farm workers.”