Family Secrets

by Nancy Thayer

  She began to work furiously, designing a line of jewelry that she seemed to have been dreaming of all her life. But the basement wasn’t large enough, bright enough, safe enough—or private enough. She couldn’t concentrate even when the housekeeper was watching the children. A thump, a cry, and her mind flashed away from her work to worry whether a child had been hurt, whether she should rush upstairs to hug and console.

  So she’d rented a small space on the second floor of a building near Porter Square in Cambridge. The front room was for the office manager she hired and their files of invoices and orders. Behind was Diane’s studio, a large open space with a wooden floor and a lovely big sink, a wall of windows, a skylight. Now she could have her workbench, acid bath, acetylene and propane torches, drill press, polishers, and the hand tools that could have hurt a child badly in the blink of an eye. Here, she designed and experimented, coming up with elaborate, exotic jewelry, pieces like mazes, knots, labyrinths studded with dark, unusual gems and stones: agates, cat’s eye, topaz, peridot, jade.

  At Christmas she gave her mother one of the most expensive, most ornate necklaces.

  “How amazing,” Jean said when she called on Christmas morning after opening her present. “Do you know what your jewelry is like? It’s as if you had lifted up the designs from our Bokhara and made them three-dimensional.”

  Diane was stunned. Her mother was right—that design had been waiting for her in her memory since she was a child.

  When Jean and Al White were married, they’d received, among a score of silver trays and electric toasters, a gorgeous Turkish rug, obviously old, but still vivid with color, deep red, dark blues, black. The card, addressed to them both, said merely, “Congratulations on your marriage.” It hadn’t been signed. They asked their friends and finally assumed that some friend of Jean’s father, who was in the navy and had at one time traveled a great deal, had sent it. In fact, both Jean’s and Al’s parents had many friends in all corners of the world. They would find out sooner or later who had given it to them, they thought. Then they were married, and although they never forgot the mystery, they never had time to solve it, either.

  Now Diane said to her mother, “I guess that’s been hiding away in my brain all these years.”

  “I’ve been studying Bokharas, by the way,” Jean continued. “I even had an expert out to the house to look at ours. He said we shouldn’t be using it on the floor; we should hang it on a wall, or even give it to a museum. It’s that valuable.”

  Diane laughed. “I’d hate to think of all the baby goo I put there.”

  “Mr. Yarinen says our rug is probably one of the famous ‘red rugs’ made by the Turkoman nomads in Russia. It’s about a hundred and fifty years old. Amazing how the color has lasted, isn’t it? And, Diane, the central medallion of your necklace, the octagon-shaped piece?—that’s repeated over and over again in our carpet. It’s called a ‘gul’; it means flower or rose in Persian.”

  “Aren’t you a veritable font of information,” Diane teased. Privately she was thrilled to be having this conversation with her mother about something other than children or holidays or family birthdays. Her mother cared about her work, had noticed.

  “Well, you know I’ve always been so curious. And with you children grown, I’ve got a little more time on my hands.”

  “I wish I had some free time,” Diane said with a sigh.

  “Oh, darling, I admire you so. You do so much.”

  Warmed by her mother’s words, Diane confided, “I only wish I could get Jim to help me just a little bit more.”

  “Your father was never much help with you children, either,” Jean said.

  Diane tossed her head. The comparison rubbed her the wrong way. She and Jim were of a different generation. “Oh, it’s not so bad, really. We’re muddling through.”

  Then Julia came down with a hideous cold, the sort of gobby, globbing cold that plugged up her small respiratory tract like glue.

  Her breath came with difficulty, each intake accompanied by a ragged, wet pop. Diane had given their babysitter the day off, because she wanted to stay home to nurse Julia. So she was alone in the house when the phone call came from Chase’s preschool: during a game of tag, Chase had fallen against the side of the brick building, slicing his forehead open. He would need stitches. And he had passed out. Perhaps he had a concussion.

  Jim was in Washington at a DNA conference that day.

  Frantically, Diane dialed the houses of various babysitters, but no one was home, and so she had bundled Julia up and stuffed her in her car seat and driven to the hospital where Mrs. Eames, Chase’s teacher, had taken Chase. There, during the course of the long afternoon, she waited at Chase’s side, rocking a miserably uncomfortable Julia in her arms. Chase had quickly regained consciousness, but the doctor wanted to keep him in the hospital overnight for observation: the cut required eight stitches, and the swollen area was enormous. The doctor was reassuring, though—this was really just a typical child’s accident. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  Young and exhausted, the doctor suddenly noticed Julia. He nearly snatched the little girl from Diane’s arms and, after a rapid scrutiny, said sharply, “You shouldn’t bring a child this ill out into this kind of weather!”

  Diane held her tongue; she didn’t want to anger this doctor who held her son’s life in his weary, trembling hands. And she was glad she was, for once in her life, femininely submissive; for the doctor insisted on taking Julia’s temperature, listening to her chest, and then, in an even greater fury, prescribing antibiotics. Coldly, he insisted that Diane take her little girl home and keep her in a room with a consistently warm temperature and a vaporizer. A kind nurse—a saintly nurse—held Julia, who was screaming and twisting with fury at the intrusiveness of these strangers—while Diane made the necessary phone calls. Sheila, a good friend of hers, agreed to come in to spend the night with Chase in the hospital. Her own husband was home and could take care of their children.

  So Diane carried her daughter, who with her teary anger seemed to have grown heavier and more awkward in her arms, down through the antiseptic halls of the hospital, down the elevator, down to the hospital pharmacy. While waiting for the antibiotic prescription to be filled by a stern older woman, sitting on a bit of hard, scooped-out plastic masquerading as a chair, Diane’s eyes fell on the gift section of the pharmacy: hopeless stuffed animals, dusty games, and heart-and-flower-decorated plaques printed with mawkish, cloying sentiments.

  One Pepto-Bismol-pink heart read:

  God couldn’t be everywhere

  So he invented mothers.

  Until that moment, Diane had been in control. Now something snapped.

  “How dare they!” Diane said. It was as if she had been slapped in the face. “How dare you sell such stuff! No one has the right to charge mothers with such responsibility!”

  “Excuse me?” the bun-haired pharmacist asked.

  “What about competent physicians? I don’t know how to make my son well; I can only hope that prepubescent doctor can! For that matter, what about you? I don’t know the first thing about pills. I have to trust that you know what you’re doing, that you’ve got the sense to put the right medicine in that bottle for my baby, that you’ve measured it correctly and not accidentally added strychnine or digitalis!” In her extremity, Diane had risen, clutching the startled Julia to her breast as she shouted at the pharmacist.

  “My diploma is hanging right there on the wall for you to see!” the pharmacist shot back, but she made the mistake of glancing down at the bottle of syrupy medicine in her hand as if in doubt.

  “They should print a sign saying that God couldn’t be everywhere so He invented antibiotics! And physicians! And reliable pharmacists! Right? Right!”

  “Madam,” the pharmacist said, drawing herself up stiffly, “if you’re going to raise your voice, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

  But Diane was explosive.

  “What if I were a single mother!”
she cried. “What if I were poor! What if I had five children! I couldn’t do it alone. I can’t do it alone now. And I will not accept total, sole responsibility. What are you being paid for? Simply to pour fluid from one bottle to another? No! You are being paid for doing it with intelligence and discrimination and caution!”

  The pharmacist glared, then relented. After a long moment of silence, she said, “Assuming that your doctor and the company didn’t make a mistake, I’m sure this medicine will help your child.”

  Diane went limp with exhaustion. She’d made a scene and, in doing so, had not helped her children at all. She had only helped herself, and yet the pharmacist’s admission brought her no comfort, and not the slightest sense of safety. When she spoke, her voice was meek.

  “Do you have a plastic spoon? If I could give her the first dose right now—so that it starts working as soon as possible—we have a long drive home—it would be a relief—”

  By the time she got home, Julia had fallen into an invalid’s deep sleep, her cheeks flushed with fever. Diane set up the vaporizer and tucked the covers around her little girl. Then she sat on the bed awhile, watching her daughter sleep. She loved this child so much she thought her heart would break with it.

  “The sign should say, ‘Mothers couldn’t be everywhere, so they invented God,’ ” she whispered.

  Finally she left her daughter’s side. After a quick, immensely comforting hot shower, she pulled on her warmest flannel nightgown and her favorite quilted robe—clean, but permanently stained with cherry cough syrup and baby food. She was beginning to feel like that robe, marked by motherhood. Collapsing into a chair, she dialed the hotel where Jim was staying in Washington. When he answered, she burst into tears.

  “What’s wrong?” Jim asked.

  “Oh, it’s been such a terrible day …”

  “Are the children all right?” His voice sounded aggressive, even hostile. Only later, when she replayed the conversation in her mind, would she realize it was laced with fear.

  “Well, yes and no. Chase fell against a brick building when he was playing at preschool. He’s got a cut on his forehead, and possibly a concussion, and Julia has an awful cold.”

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “Chase is in the hospital.” She sniffled. “They’re keeping him there for observation. They say it’s just a typical childhood accident. He didn’t vomit or show any signs of concussion, but they want to be sure … Sheila offered to stay with him tonight. Oh, God, Jim, it took eight stitches to sew up his forehead.”

  “Well, if he’s at the hospital, he’s in good hands. What about Julia?”

  “I have antibiotics for her. And I put a vaporizer in her room. Oh, Jim, I’m exhausted. Won’t you please come home?”

  “Why?” Jim seemed honestly baffled. “It sounds as though you’ve got everything under control.”

  “Chase is in the hospital.”

  “That’s obviously the best place for him.”

  “He’s a little boy in a hospital. He needs a parent with him.”

  “You just said Sheila was with him.”

  “Sheila’s not his parent!”

  “Diane, calm down. I can’t stop work every time one of the children is sick. That’s unrealistic.”

  “I stopped work.”

  “It’s not the same. You’ve got your office manager to cover for you.”

  “You have employees to cover for you.”

  “I need to be here. This is an important conference.”

  “So was the one last month. And the month before that.”

  “Diane, listen. You’re just tired. The babysitter will be back tomorrow and—”

  “Jim, I’m frightened. And I’m so tired.”

  “Then go to bed. I’ll be home in two days.”

  “You were the one who wanted to get married; you were the one who wanted children, but I’m the one who’s doing all the work.”

  “Diane, this is ridiculous. It’s late.”

  “Jim. If you don’t come home and share all this with me, help me through it, I’ll never forgive you.”

  “Diane, I’m tired. You’re tired. Let’s go to sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

  Diane hung up the phone without saying good-bye. As she wept, she listened for a ring, for Jim to call her back, to apologize, to soothe her, to calm her. But the phone was silent.

  She carried the weight of that crisis in her heart like a stone, a heavy dense mass of stone that she polished with her anger each time Jim refused to help. Sometimes she considered divorcing him but decided against that: she loved him, after all, and she knew that in his own reserved way he loved her and his children. Then one day, years later, she understood something about the man she had loved for so long.

  All during his childhood, spirited, energetic Chase managed to keep himself covered with scrapes and bruises. When he was nine, he and Sam built a tree house in the Randalls’ backyard. One bright summer evening, fooling around, Chase fell out of the tree house. He landed on his arm, which snapped. Diane rushed him to the hospital. After the X-rays, the doctors informed Diane that Chase would have to be kept in the hospital overnight. It was a compound fracture, which required anesthesia that they couldn’t administer because Chase had just eaten dinner. In the morning, they would set the arm and put it in a cast. After the painkillers took effect, Chase relished the experience, loving the attention, thrilled that he’d get to have a cast. Since Diane had grown up with two brothers, this all seemed just another part of childhood, and she brought seven-year-old Julia to the hospital with her and pointed out the nurses’ uniforms, their mysterious instruments and charts. Sam and his parents arrived with a package of comic books and word puzzles. The whole episode turned into an adventure, for all of them.

  Jim arrived separately. He’d gone back to his lab to work after dinner, but when Diane called him from the hospital, he drove over immediately.

  “Hi, there, sport.” Jim’s words as he entered Chase’s hospital room seemed normal enough, but he spoke stiffly. He carried himself oddly, leaning backward and looking around apprehensively.

  This was the first time she’d been in a hospital with Jim since the birth of her babies; and now, freed of the immediacies of those events, she realized that her husband was almost paralyzed with fear.

  “Hi, Dad. Guess what! I get to have a cast. And they’re going to knock me out. Sodium pentothal. The truth serum!”

  Jim went pale. He turned on Diane. “Is that absolutely necessary?”

  “The doctors x-rayed his arm—”

  “Who’s the doctor? Does he know what he’s doing?”

  Jim was sweating. Diane wanted to get him out of there before he frightened his son.

  “Jim. Let’s go down to the nurses’ station and they can explain it to you.”

  To her relief, Jim instantly agreed. It was eight o’clock and the doctor had gone home, but a nurse carefully outlined for him what was really a routine procedure. When she was finished, she said gently, “There’s no need to be alarmed. He’ll be fine.”

  “I’m not alarmed!” Jim barked, digging his chin into his chest.

  “Well, that’s good,” the nurse replied, smiling. As she walked away, she raised an eyebrow at Diane.

  Through the night Diane was aware of Jim’s restlessness. He tossed and turned; twice he got up and pattered downstairs, roaming their house in the dark. He wouldn’t talk to her about it, but she realized that he was afraid—afraid of hospitals, doctors, injuries, illnesses. He had been just Chase’s age when his mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and only a year older when his mother died. How had she not realized this before?

  Diane understood at last that Jim saw all chaos as threatening. If he couldn’t bring order to any kind of confusion, he would retreat. She sympathized with him and felt a wave of affection for him that surprised her. But she was determined to pull him into the lively complexities of their family life in spite of himself. She tugg
ed; he retreated. She cried and lectured; he responded with silence. The more heated she got, the colder he became.

  In 1980, Jim was asked to head a well-funded lab connected with Harvard that was engaged in genetic research on breast cancer. This was the work he’d been aiming for all his life. He settled into it with obsessive devotion. He was home less and less, working at the lab into the night.

  The children were ten and eight. They could tie their own shoelaces, fix their own sandwiches, be reasoned with. Even better, they were wonderful fun. Diane loved going to movies with them, playing board games together at the dining room table on rainy Sundays, sharing jokes and gossip. Her energy and ambition for her work returned.

  One May afternoon she sat in her studio sketching a design for her fall collection, a necklace of stamped brass pieces: pumpkins, leaves, and squirrels.

  “Lisa,” she called through her open office door, “come look at this. What do you think?”

  Her office manager entered the studio. Holding the pad in her hand, she scrutinized Diane’s painstakingly detailed work: “It’s cute,” Lisa said.

  “ ‘Cute.’ Yes. Great. Pumpkins and squirrels. Too young for my clientele.” Diane ripped the page from the pad, crumpled it fiercely in her hand, then tossed it across the room.

  “Well, the leaves are pretty.”

  “Mmm. I don’t want ‘pretty.’ ” With her pencil, Diane sharpened the points and angles of the leaves she’d drawn. “I want unusual. Eye-catching.”