Family Secrets

by Nancy Thayer

  Family Secrets is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2014 Ballantine Books eBook Edition

  Copyright © 1993 by Nancy Thayer

  Introduction copyright © 2014 by Nancy Thayer

  Excerpt from Nantucket Sisters copyright © 2014 by Nancy Thayer

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Originally published in hardcover by Viking Press, an imprint of Penguin Books in, 1993.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Nantucket Sisters by Nancy Thayer. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-553-39103-9

  Author photograph copyright © Jessica Hills Photography

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Cover design: Eileen Carey

  Cover image: ©Isabelle Lafrance Photography/Flickr Open/Getty Images

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  An Introduction from the Author

  Chapter 1: Diane

  Chapter 2: Jean

  Chapter 3: Julia

  Chapter 4: Diane

  Chapter 5: Jean

  Chapter 6: Julia

  Chapter 7: Diane

  Chapter 8: Jean

  Chapter 9: Julia

  Chapter 10: Diane

  Chapter 11: Jean

  Chapter 12: Jean, Diane, and Julia

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Nantucket Sisters

  An Introduction from the Author

  I’ve always loved reading mysteries, perhaps because nothing is as mysterious to me as my own family. I wrote Family Secrets when my daughter was a teenager and my widowed mother had just remarried and was traveling in Europe. Suddenly the two people I thought I knew the best had secrets from me. Suddenly, I was the responsible, sensible, stay-at-home mother—but the heroine of my novel didn’t have to be. I discovered the diary my mother had written during World War II and was prompted to write this novel about three women–grandmother, mother, and daughter–each at a dramatic turning point in her life.

  I’m delighted that my early novels are being made available to my readers as ebooks. My style has changed slightly, as the world has grown faster, but my subject, family life, remains as mysterious and fascinating to me now as it was in these early books: falling in love, raising children, friendships and betrayals and forgiveness.

  I hope you enjoy these early novels and discover some new friends there.

  Nancy Thayer

  Chapter 1

  Diane

  In the clear light of her Cambridge studio, Diane Randall sat at her workbench drawing the model for an elaborate brooch that had been commissioned by a banker as a wedding present for his bride. The windows were open to the street so that shouts and laughter and traffic sounds drifted in on the cool October air, but Diane didn’t notice. As she bent with intense concentration over her sketch pad, she was thinking of love, young love and new love, married love and family love. Sexual love. Her thoughts swirled and twined like her design, until she raised her head and shook it, because her eyes had filled with tears.

  Howard Roerson was marrying Patricia Wayne. She must concentrate on that. She had suggested casting the scrolled first letters of their last names in gold, framing and enclosing in the center an emerald-cut one-carat diamond. R and W. Biting her tongue, Diane returned to her work, painstakingly interweaving the tails of the lovely, curly letters, striving to make them baroque yet distinct. Marriage was like this, she mused, an arabesque coupling, pulling two people into the heart of intimacy and back out again to face the world alone.

  She’d send the wax model to Providence to be cast; they’d return it and she would set the diamond herself.

  R and W. If she’d kept her maiden name years ago when she’d married Jim Randall, this brooch could be hers. But she’d wanted to be rid of the boring White, her family name, and she’d wanted—oh, so passionately—to be with Jim completely. She’d loved him so entirely then, with all the heat and hope of first love, and he had loved her equally, fervently. Then.

  Finally, she was ready to carve the wax model. But it was late—she could tell by the slant of the sun across her studio floor. She could hear Lisa, her efficient office manager, bustling around in the front office, slamming file cabinets as she tidied up for the day. Lisa was fastidious to the point of fussbudgetry about the organization of her desk and files; whenever she looked into Diane’s studio she was barely able to suppress a shudder of horror at the chaotic glitter in which Diane thrived.

  Now Lisa opened the door. “I’m off!”

  “ ’Bye, Lisa. Have fun tonight. See you in the morning.”

  “Don’t stay too late. You know you don’t work well when you’re tired.”

  “Yes, Mother.” Diane took off her glasses and smiled. She’d been short-tempered with Lisa recently; she’d felt generally low-spirited. Certainly it wasn’t Lisa’s fault; it was no one’s fault. A fog had floated over her normal cheerfulness, and an invisible virus was sapping her energy. The opposite of spring fever: fall chill.

  Lisa shut the studio door. A moment later Diane heard the office door close. She folded her glasses and laid them on the workbench, closed her eyes, and rubbed the bridge of her nose. Eyestrain. Both she and Jim spent so much time focusing on details it was no wonder they had trouble seeing each other clearly.

  Standing, she stretched luxuriously, looking around her. Primitive beauty and state-of-the-art technology met here where beads and charms glittered among small chrome-and-steel machines. She’d been sitting at one of her three workbenches, a jeweler’s bench made of solid oak. A cable snaked from a motor suspended from a hook on the workbench to the flexible shaft that operated a variety of hand pieces for precision work. Another cable led down to the foot pedal of her micromatic wax pen; its digital temperature-readout box sat on her workbench, along with the spatulas, round nose, probing, needle, beaver tail, and bent tips, all looking like so many medieval dental tools. Along the back of this workbench as well as the other two grew a metal garden of fluorescent and magnifier lamps, curling and angling their wiry stalks and heads down over her work surface. A counter ran along the back wall holding a double sink, an acid bath in a crock pot, propane and acetylene torches, an exhaust system, polishing wheels, electronic scales, and a steam cleaner. Safety goggles and face shields had been tossed down among her sketch pads and colored pens and pencils.

  She was successful in her fine-art and custom-jewelry line, but it was her fashion jewelry she loved most. Playing with her baubles not only inspired new designs for her business, it also served as a form of meditation and consolation in her life. Piled on a table and stacked on the floor were open plastic trays glittering with her playthings: Czech crystals, tiny brass bells, metallic amulets and zodiac symbols, millefiori beads, copper and silver crosses, African brass beads. Her beloved semiprecious stones—amber, turquoise, agate, garnet, moonstone, amethyst—as well as sheets of silver and a few precious jewels, were locked in the safety vault hunkering in the corner. Every time she unlocked the door to her workroom and saw her loot waiting to be transformed by her skills, she felt like a witch
returning to her charms.

  If only these sparkling gems and glowing metals really could work magic! If only she could shape the fates of those she loved with the same sure results that she could count on in her work.

  Her life was in a real jumble. In the past year her father had died, her mother had sold the family house and taken off for Europe, her youngest child had fallen desperately—even frighteningly—in love, and her own body seemed to be failing, fading into bland middle age. Her business was as successful as ever, but suddenly that seemed the least important aspect of her complicated life.

  It was not the complication that bothered her. She’d always liked complexities and had never let difficulties hold her back. A talented, artistic, determined woman, she’d intended that her life be as opulent and intricate as her jewelry, full of love and sexual pleasure, of children and profound married joy, of challenges and triumphs at work, of food and friends and books and music and wine.

  And she had had years and years of that, all that, success at work, and a happy family life. Perhaps she expected too much. Or perhaps she was only experiencing what the magazines called the “empty nest” syndrome. Chase was twenty, in his second year at college, and Julia was eighteen, ready for college next year. Jim joked that they were going through the “empty wallet syndrome,” with all the tuition they were paying, but Diane knew it wasn’t financial worry causing his abstracted coldness. Between them, Jim and Diane had easily been able to afford the boarding schools the children had attended since ninth grade.

  No, it wasn’t money at the heart of her brooding. Until now she’d been able to have at least the illusion that if she worked hard enough, if she did all the right things, she could keep her children safe and happy.

  Now that sense of security had evaporated. Her children were changing. Not quite adults, they no longer seemed to think of themselves as children but as superior beings sprung from pure air. Chase and Julia were the heart of her life, while she was to them only a minor planet blipping annoyingly from the fringes of their universe. As it should be, she supposed. Still, she found it hard to realize that what mattered to her was of little importance to her children, and although she’d devoted her life to their health and happiness, she could no longer shape their destinies, and she might not even know what was deepest in their hearts.

  Chase especially treated Jim and Diane with a mixture of fond indifference and wariness, as if his parents had grown irrational over the years and were now not quite to be trusted. He’d become arrogant, even disdainful. Two months ago, to celebrate what she considered a crucial breakthrough in the world, Diane ordered a watch from Bloomingdale’s. A Russian watch. When it arrived in the mail she stared at it with reverence, cradling it in her hand, stroking the silky black leather wristband, studying the round distinctive analog face encased in shining chrome. The Arabic numerals three, six, and nine were in black, and in place of the twelve was a red star. She strapped it to her wrist, this physical, concrete symbol of the tiny but real steps man had made toward peace in the world. Born in the forties, growing up in the fifties, she had been taught as a child to fear the Russians; now she exulted in the progress the world seemed to have made. She wanted to share this with her children.

  She found her son and his friend Sam in the den. The two healthy, lucky, handsome young men sat with their muscular legs wrapped around their chairs as they bent forward over the computer. They were laughing, showing their milk-white, brace-straight teeth. The sight of them filled her with joy.

  “Look!” she said exuberantly, holding out her wrist. “My new watch came!”

  Chase looked, then grinned. “Cool. High tech. Good, Mom. You bought a watch that winds.”

  Diane was thrown off by his reaction. “I prefer a watch that winds,” she protested.

  “Yeah, Mom, I can understand that,” Chase agreed, grinning. “Those digital watches are really tricky.”

  Actually, to Diane, they were. She found the new rectangular watch faces ugly, and the flashing digital numbers looked like algebra equations or alarms. She liked to see the hours divided up like pies; she liked looking at a round face to see how big a piece of time was left.

  “Good-looking watch, Mrs. Randall,” Sam had observed dutifully. “What do those letters mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Diane confessed.

  She held out her wrist and the two young men studied the watch face.

  B P E M and a backward R were printed underneath the red star.

  “I can read a little Russian,” Chase informed them. “Ah, yes. It says, ‘Made in Chernobyl.’ ”

  Sam snickered.

  Diane grabbed her hand back. “That’s not funny. You don’t understand, Chase—I used to have nightmares about Russia, and now—” But she could see how their eyes glazed over and their faces settled into an attitude of impatient tolerance. “Oh, never mind,” she’d said, and left the room, reminding herself that these young men had grown up in a world quite different from hers.

  She was afraid Chase’s casual arrogance would cause him trouble someday; she could not protect him from that, nor at this point in his life could she hope to change him. In general Chase was a good-natured, healthy young man, happy, kind, and reasonably sensible, and she was grateful to him for his comfortable, contented state. When her children were in pain or sad, she was in agony; that was simply the way motherhood worked.

  She worried terribly about her daughter.

  Julia, like Diane, was tall, big boned, and slender, with brown hair and blue eyes. Unlike her mother, Julia never wore jewelry of any kind. She’d never even had her ears pierced. She spent her clothing allowance on fabulous undergarments—ribbon-trimmed camisoles, velvet and satin bras—and covered these delicacies with jeans and ragged shirts from secondhand shops. Julia was in her senior year at Gressex, a boarding school in Lincoln, not far from home. Diane had sent both children away at fourteen, partly because she traveled so often—to the Orient to buy gems, all over the States and Europe to jewelry conventions—but mostly for her children’s sakes. She wanted them to be independent—and she’d wanted Julia to know that a woman could have children and a flourishing career.

  Julia had been happy at Gressex for three years. She was popular, academically successful—a golden girl, really. But suddenly this year, only two months into her first term, her personality seemed to have changed drastically. On the weekends when Diane drove out to take her for a day of shopping and lunch—usually a treat for both of them—Julia had been moody, cantankerous.

  Then, just last week, Julia’s adviser had called Jim and Diane to tell them that Julia’s grades were slipping, and worse, she was cutting classes. Diane had driven out to the school that evening, walked through the dark campus, entered the dorm, climbed the stairs, turned the corner, and knocked on Julia’s door.

  “Who is it?” Julia’s voice was heavy.

  “Your mother.” Diane peeked inside. Julia was sprawled on her bed. “May I come in?”

  “Oh, man,” Julia responded, and rolled over to face the wall.

  Diane entered, shutting the door tightly behind her. She crossed the small room and sat on Julia’s bed, putting her hand lightly on her daughter’s shoulder. “Julia. Sweetie. We have to talk.”

  Julia didn’t reply.

  “Your counselor called. She said you’ve been cutting classes.”

  Again Julia didn’t respond but simply lay there, her rigid back eloquent with anger and misery; and in her anxiety, Diane snapped, “Stop it, Julia! Stop acting this way! Turn over. Look at me. Tell me what’s going on!”

  Julia turned onto her back and looked up at her mother. “I hate my classes.”

  “Anything else?”

  Julia shook her head.

  Diane sat a moment, then asked, “Are you taking drugs?”

  “Oh, please,” Julia replied, exasperation provoking her to roll over and sit up on the side of the bed.

  “Well, then, what is it? Are you sick? Are you un
happy here?” Diane’s voice rose with her frustration. Julia stared down at her hands. “Julia,” she pleaded. Reaching out, she took her daughter’s soft hands in her own. “I’m so worried,” she said softly.

  When a tear fell on Diane’s skin, she looked in surprise at Julia’s face and saw that her daughter was crying.

  “What!” she whispered, tortured. “Please tell me! What?”

  “Oh, Mom,” Julia wailed, and her entire body sagged into Diane’s arms. “Oh, Mom. I’m in love.”

  Oh, yes, she should have known. Over the years, she’d tried to teach her daughter to be independent, self-sufficient, able to change a tire or a fuse, ready to take on any career a man could have—she’d tried to let her daughter see that the world was hers for the taking. But she couldn’t protect her from the ravages of love.

  “Darling, who is it?”

  “Sam.”

  “Sam!” Diane couldn’t have been more surprised. Sam was one of Chase’s best friends, and his oldest friend from the neighborhood. The adopted son of two lawyers, Sam was bright, intelligent, kind, and exotically handsome. Girls fell all over him. In August Diane and Jim had rented a house on Martha’s Vineyard for a month, and friends of their children had crowded the place. Sam had been there, but she hadn’t noticed him with Julia in particular.

  “How does Sam feel?”

  “He says he loves me.”

  “He does?”

  Julia pulled away, insulted. “Why do you sound so amazed? Is it so impossible that someone might be in love with me?”

  “Don’t be so prickly. Of course not. It’s just so sudden. I mean, love, Julia. I didn’t even know you were dating.”

  “We started going out in August. He drives up from Wesleyan on weekends, when he doesn’t have too much homework. When he doesn’t—then I’m always afraid he’s seeing someone else.” Tears rolled down her cheeks.

  “Oh, honey.”

  “Mom, I love him so much! I don’t want to live without him!”

  “Oh, sweetie.” Diane hugged her daughter, smoothed her hair.