To Hear a Nightingale

by Charlotte Bingham

  Cassie stared at the letters on the carpet. There was something odd about the whole collection, yet she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Then she realised that there was no letter in all the carefully preserved correspondence which dated from before the year Grandmother had moved to Westboro, which had been in 1943, two years after Cassie had been born. And then there were the photographs, or rather the lack of them. Cassie had half expected to find some family albums: not of her and Grandmother, naturally, because Grandmother had never taken one single photograph of her, but of her grandmother’s own and early life, before Cassie had been foisted on her, to ruin her remaining years on earth.

  But there were none. Cassie found two fast-fading sepia portraits of a man and a woman she suspected must be her great-grandparents, but there were none whatsoever of her grandmother as a child, and none of anyone else at all. No unknown young men or women who could possibly be Cassie’s own father or mother. Why had her grandmother taken and kept none of her own daughter? Did she hate her that much as well? The only other photographs which Cassie had found in a small locked tin were country views and pictures of a small town which looked as if it was in the far West.

  And that was all. There were no diaries, or personal accounts of any nature. The only other items which her grandmother had kept locked away from her were a few board games, which Cassie remembered being allowed very occasionally to play on wet afternoons, usually after Sunday lunch, when Grandmother was sometimes, but not often, in a more benign frame of mind.

  But nothing else.

  A life had just gone, taking away with it a 65-year-old history. Cassie sat back, leaning on her hands, her arms stretched out behind her. Had her grandmother held out to the last, and carried the secrets of her hatred for Cassie to the grave?

  Then she remembered the small key which hung by the large key which had opened the bureau. She took the ring out of the bureau’s lock, and tried it in the tin which had contained the photographs, and which Cassie had easily forced open with a can opener. It didn’t fit the box, so Cassie looked around for something else it might open. But as far as she could see, every drawer in the desk was open.

  She saw the tiny keyhole quite by chance. She had been about to give up and go to bed, as it was now well past two o’clock, and if she hadn’t been such a tidy-minded person she would never have discovered it. But rather than leave all the letters lying about on the floor until morning, Cassie had put them back in the order in which she had found them, preparatory to replacing them in the rosewood pigeon holes. It was as she was placing the last set of letters in the last cubicle that she saw it, a keyhole in miniature set up in the side of the woodwork inside the compartment itself. Once the letters were replaced there, it was invisible. But once removed, you could just see it if you bent down. Cassie was kneeling on the floor while she was putting the letters away, which is how she was able to discover it.

  But she hesitated before trying the key in the lock. If there was indeed a secret drawer, then what it contained was meant to be secret, and therefore should remain undisturbed. But what if whatever may lie in there helped reveal to Cassie the truth? Was it not vital for her to try and understand the very nature of her existence? Could she really live the rest of her life without opening the secret drawer and seeing what was within it? She knew at once she couldn’t, because until she found out whether or not there was anything in there which might help her to understand what her life had meant so far, she would never rest easy.

  She turned the little key, and immediately underneath the row of pigeon holes, a drawer held in place by a spring shot open. Cassie stared at it, transfixed. There was a letter, and there it lay, in a long white envelope, quite clearly and boldly addressed to Cassie.

  Cassie took it out slowly, wondering why her grandmother had gone to this elaborate charade. If she had anything important to tell her after she was gone, then why not lodge the letter as most normal people did with their lawyers? But then of course, Cassie realised, as she turned the letter over in her hand, Grandmother was not most people, nor was she normal. She must have plotted it, and worked it all out: how Cassie, once Grandmother was dead, would inevitably go through her desk in order to try and find the meaning of her existence, and how at first she would find nothing. But knowing well Cassie’s determination, she had obviously decided to prolong the game, and hide what must be the vital clue, in the hope of a bit more sadistic pleasure, albeit posthumous. But then Cassie had found it after all by chance, and not because of her determination, since Cassie had in fact given up, and was about to close up the desk for ever.

  But now in her hand was a letter which could contain if not the answer, maybe at the least a partial explanation of her grandmother’s attitude. Cassie sat down, and tore it open. Now she had it, there were no further reasons to delay. She would read it at once. And then as she read it, she wished she had never been born.

  Cassie, (it started). Knowing you, you will eventually find this letter. And even if you do not, someone else will. Perhaps a stranger who will buy this bureau. And if he or she may find it, then they will pass it on to you, once they too have read the contents.

  You were forever curious about the conditions of your birth and the nature of your mother. I am going to tell you about these things now. You were born in a town outside Kerby in Oregon, where your mother had been touring in burlesque. Your father was the manager of a travelling group of players, who used to play the western towns, and sometimes some of the northern Californian ones. He was a drunk, and was having an affair with your mother. Then she became pregnant by him and once he discovered, which took him several months, he fired her from the troupe. This was a pity, because your mother was a wonderful singer and a consummate actress, and earlier in her career it had looked as if she might indeed have become a big star. But the business she had chosen for herself was a fickle one, and for many reasons which I won’t go into, her career faltered and she was reduced to touring with third-rate outfits. Of course she and your father, although they had been cohabiting for several years, never married, so naturally you are what people like to call a bastard.

  Your father left your mother out West to fend for herself while he travelled back to Chicago. She had no money, and was so ill while carrying you that there was no possibility of her being able to work. So it was in much reduced circumstances that you entered the world. However, your mother did not die giving birth to you, thanks to the ministrations of a young man who was at that time studying to be a doctor. Your mother survived, and soon was well enough to earn enough money to follow your father to Chicago, where he had become in those two years a surprisingly successful showman – no small thanks to a very rich woman he had seduced and consequently married.

  Your mother did, however, manage to persuade your father to part with a sizeable amount of money, since your mother knew he was already married and therefore a bigamist. He also agreed to settle on you, his child, a lump sum to cover your education and welfare. Your mother then moved on up east.

  That is really all there is to the story of how you came to be. The only other fact which may interest you is that the young man who saved your mother’s life finally qualified as a doctor and by coincidence settled to practise in the town where your mother was living. When he found where she was, and who she was, he tried to get her to marry him. But your mother didn’t love him. She only ever loved your father. And as a consequence, the doctor became an alcoholic. However, he knew enough about your mother to cause a scandal in the respectable town in which she lived, so arrangements were made to pay him a certain amount of money regularly so that he should remain silent about these matters. But now that your mother is dead, such arrangements need no longer concern you.

  Yes, Cassie. In case you have not yet arrived at the truth in your mind, I am not your grandmother, but in fact your mother. There was no problem in keeping up the deception, since I gave birth to you when I was forty-five, and when I finally settled in Westboro, I had m
ade quite sure that all my past was well and truly buried. Until that is, Doctor Fossett, the young man who attended your birth, arrived in town.

  I hope this satisfies your curiosity. Which is all I hope for you. For to my mind, it would have been a much better day had you never been born.

  Mother.

  Cassie stared at the letter and stared particularly at the word at the bottom. The word she had been looking for, the word she had been longing for. Mother. Someone to love her. Or someone whom she could have loved. And all the time it had been the person who had hated her and beaten her. Grandmother.

  She began to tremble, and soon she was shaking. She didn’t even hear the scream she gave as she consigned the letter to the flames of the dying fire, nor afterwards could she remember how she got up to her bedroom. But it was there she found herself, lying on the floor, with her fingers bruised from where she had been tearing at the carpet. Then she climbed into bed and, pulling all the covers over herself, lay beneath them in womblike darkness until long into the following day.

  In the evening she vaguely heard the doorbell ring, and even though it was probably Joe she didn’t bother to answer it. She just lay under the covers. Dead to everything but the truth. After some time, the bell stopped ringing and she heard a car drive away. Shortly after the telephone started ringing but she ignored that too.

  By dawn she was sitting in front of the mirror trying to repair the ravages to her face. Then wearily she started to pack her case, and as the sun came up she left Westboro Falls on the first Greyhound bus which passed through the town. A small, lonely figure facing a future of uncertainty, a past of pain. The other passengers never looked at her, nor she at them. They were all just journeying on, but for Cassie anyway the road behind was shorter than the road in front.

  Chapter Nine

  New York

  1960

  When Cassie had arrived in New York, in the early hours of a late October morning, she made straight for the one and only address she had, which was Gina’s apartment, two rooms shared with another aspiring model above a delicatessen in Greenwich Village. Gina, wearing a New York Giants sweat shirt and nothing else except for some night cream on her face, had opened the door to her almost as if she was expecting her, and immediately sensing that something was wrong, took Cassie into her apartment and under her wing.

  Luckily for Cassie, Gina was on the way up. After a difficult eighteen months, she had finally been spotted on the catwalk by a scout for Richard Kanin, who was the latest most-important-up-and-coming fashion photographer. He had suggested Gina as the new Miss Angel Face, but although Gina didn’t finally land the contract, Kanin was sufficiently taken with her to use her for a big spread in Harpers. Gina was on her way.

  Cassie wouldn’t have guessed it from the state of the tiny apartment, with its one barely double bedroom, and its cluttered living room, in the corner of which was also the kitchen area. There was no bath, just a shower, and the john was always a jungle of dripping hosiery and underwear.

  But it was a haven for someone on the emotional run, and Cassie gratefully accepted Gina’s generous offer for Cassie to share her bed until she found her feet and a job. For three months, in fact, rather than disturb Gina who because of the nature of her work needed her beauty sleep, Cassie slept on the floor, while working as a waitress in the diner on the corner of the block. Gina, having known Cassie most of her life, knew better than to enquire as the exact reason for Cassie’s precipitous flight from Westboro Falls. Cassie volunteered a certain amount of information; that she had quarrelled with Joe, and that since her grandmother was dead, there seemed no reason for her to stay behind in such a one-horse town, where the most any girl could hope for was to get married to somebody ‘suitable’. But the story didn’t ring true, and Gina’s doubts about its veracity were soon confirmed when Maria wrote to her and told Gina that Joe had gone completely to pieces when he discovered Cassie had fled Westboro without apparent reason.

  But Joe didn’t follow Cassie to New York, although he had found out easily enough where she was. And night after night as Cassie lay wrapped up against the cold, huddled on the draughty floor, she wondered why he hadn’t. In her imagination, once she was over the first tremendous shock wave, she still thought of Joe as a kind of shining knight on a white charger, who would arrive back in her life and carry her off to the fields of Elysium, regardless of the fact that Cassie was a bastard and socially quite unacceptable. But he never showed up.

  One day in December, though, he finally wrote. Cassie waited until Gina and her friend Barbara had left for work, before climbing into Gina’s still warm bed to read his letter.

  Dearest Cassie,

  I guess I should have written to you before, but I didn’t because I was always just about to get into my car and drive to New York to see you and explain. But somehow I never got round to it, and when I tell you what happened after you disappeared from here, maybe you’ll understand why. I don’t go along with it myself, but because you’re so honest and understanding and sympathetic, I think you’ll see the sense.

  After you left, I guess I went a little wild. I’d never gotten drunk before, but I did then. No one knew where or why you’d gone. All we found in your house were all those letters in the open bureau, but there seemed nothing to cause you any great upset, unless, as Pa said, you’d found something distressing and taken it with you when you left. We did find the remains of a burnt-up letter in the fireplace, but all we could make out were the words ‘much better day had you never been born.’

  Pa then reckoned your grandmother had left what he calls a ‘springer’ for you to find, and you found it. So God bless him, he ordered me to go at once and try and find you and bring you home. But before I could leave, Doctor Fossett called on us. He was pretty sore because after the result of your grandmother’s post mortem had been made public there was a big move made to have him replaced. He certainly lost an awful lot of his patients overnight.

  Cassie put the letter down and got out of bed. She stopped reading deliberately to make herself a strong cup of coffee, while she tried to stop herself shaking. She knew what the rest of the letter was going to tell her. Doctor Fossett had taken his revenge on Cassie by going and blowing the whistle on her to Joe’s parents. He’d probably made the story even more unpalatable, if that was possible, by exaggerating his own relationship with her mother. Or maybe no exaggeration was needed. However, whatever version of the story he chose to tell Mr and Mrs Harris, it would be enough to put an end to any hopes Cassie might have had of Joe climbing on his white charger and carrying Cassie back in triumph to Westboro and happy-ever-after land.

  She sat and drank her coffee at the table, with the letter still lying on the bed. Then when she had stopped shaking sufficiently, Cassie collected it and finished reading it. She’d guessed dead right. Doctor Fossett had ridden in, shot up the Harris ranch, and ridden out of Westboro in a blaze of disgrace.

  Please try and understand, Cassie dearest [Joe’s letter finished], that there is nothing we can do about it. We all sat up all night – Pa, Mother and I – and talked about what to do. But we have no alternative. Due to the nature of my Father’s position here, there is no chance of us ever getting married, let alone even seeing each other again. Were I a fully qualified lawyer in my own right, I’d come and get you right now, and we could go and live where no one would know about us.

  Just like my mother, Cassie thought. No thanks, Joe. So she skipped through the excuses about money, and position, and responsibility, curious only to see how he had finished the letter.

  So there it is. I know it’s painful. It’s painful for both of us. But if I came to see you, I’d only want to stay and we’d both be ruined. If it’s any consolation at all, Cassie, I can tell you with complete conviction I will never again in my whole life love anyone the way I loved you. Joe.

  Cassie read the last paragraph again and then lay back on her pillow. The way I loved you, he had written. Love in the past tense
. He no longer loved her now, he had already finished loving her. She dropped the letter on the floor, folded her arms behind her head and stared up at the ceiling. She knew she wasn’t going to cry, because her tears had long since ceased. Instead, she just determined to become even more determined. If people didn’t consider her good enough, or acceptable, because she was a bastard and through no fault of her own, then she would build the rest of her life in such a way that society would have no option whatsoever but to open its doors to her, come hell or high water.

  That was nearly two years ago now, Cassie remembered, as she lay in the bath in Gina’s new apartment in the East Fifties, recalling the morning she had lain in her friend’s narrow bed, taking her new vow for life. And so far she had lived up to the promise she had made for herself. She had put Westboro right behind her, and Joe out of her mind. So much so that three months after her arrival in New York, when Gina and she moved in to share their new apartment, Cassie felt as if she had been reborn. Gina was now a successful model and Cassie, with a little help from her friend, had at last landed a regular job as a salesgirl in Bergdorf Goodman. It was in the lingerie department, and when Cassie summed up the rest of the girls working with her, she knew it wouldn’t be very long before she had left them well behind.

  The rent on the apartment was pretty high, a little too steep for Cassie’s budget. But Gina, the languorous, cool-minded, even-tempered Gina, argued that since she was earning at least twenty times what Cassie was earning at present, then it was no hardship for her to pay more rent than Cassie. Cassie made up for it by waitressing three evenings a week, and doing all the cleaning and cooking, which wasn’t Gina’s strongest suit. And the two girls got along just fine. In return for Cassie slaving, Gina taught her how to make herself up properly and how to dress herself to the best effect. She taught her how to walk correctly, how to deport herself and, as Gina described with a lazy smile, how to use her gifts. It wasn’t long before Cassie had been transformed from an obvious out-of-towner into what Gina described as one of New York’s professional orphans.