American Anthem

by BJ Hoff

  Susanna nodded. “Deirdre was very frank in her letters. More than once she told me their marriage was a failure.”

  His lips thinned. “The marriage was a disaster. A battlefield. And for a very long time.”

  “But why? Deirdre was so happy in the beginning—”

  Paul looked at her. “Please, Susanna, you must let me tell you this in my own way, as best I can. And first, you must try to forget anything Deirdre may have written to you. There will be much you do not understand. Even after I have finished, you will no doubt have questions, but please realize that I can only tell you what I know. What I witnessed for myself. You are already aware that Michael will say nothing. Even now, he is not willing to speak against Deirdre. For Caterina’s sake—and for his own reasons—he will keep his silence.”

  Reluctantly, Susanna nodded, indicating that he should go on.

  “There was much trouble between Michael and Deirdre,” he said heavily. “Much trouble. Always they fought. Deirdre, you see, was always angry with Michael, and she would try to make him angry, too. She provoked him. Deliberately.”

  Susanna found it nearly impossible to remain silent in the face of such gross overstatement about Deirdre, an exaggeration that Michael surely must have fostered. But sensing that too many interruptions on her part would only distract Paul from the accounting he had begun, she resisted the temptation to object.

  As if he could read her thoughts, Paul made a rueful smile. “You think I exaggerate about Deirdre, that I defend Michael and tell you only his side of things.” He shook his head. “I am telling you the truth, Susanna. I know this is most difficult for you, but you must try to understand. Deirdre hated Michael.”

  At that, Susanna couldn’t stop herself. “That’s not true! She never wrote me anything of the sort. To the contrary, she said—”

  Again he smiled, but it was bitter and utterly without humor. “That she was afraid of him, no? And what else? That Michael mistreated her? That he was a madman, with a vicious temper, and she lived in terror of what he might do to her?”

  A terrible coldness began to seep through Susanna as she sat staring at him. The truth was, Deirdre had written those very things…and worse. Much worse.

  “How—”

  “How do I know what she told you?” His mouth twisted as though he had bitten down on something foul. “Because that’s what she told everybody! Anyone who would listen.” He glanced away. “Especially when she was drinking. As she almost always was.”

  Shock and outrage streaked through Susanna. “I won’t listen to this! This is all Michael’s doing, isn’t it? He put you up to this—”

  “Why would he do that?” Paul’s retort was sharp, almost angry. “Why would Michael tell me what to say, when in truth he will be furious with me for saying anything?”

  Then his expression gentled. He reached to touch her hand, but she pulled away.

  “Susanna…I am so sorry. I know this must be very difficult for you. But you wanted to know…”

  “I wanted the truth,” she bit out.

  “And that is what I am trying to tell you,” he said evenly. “But if you prefer that I not go on, I understand.”

  Susanna hesitated. Here, finally, was her first glimpse behind the door that up until this moment had been firmly shut to her. If she stopped him now, she might never have an opportunity like this again. And yet his words had already stirred up such a maelstrom of disbelief and doubt, such a tempest of anger and resentment in her, she couldn’t imagine how she would deal with it all, much less whatever else she was about to hear.

  But wasn’t not knowing worse? And even if Paul’s perspective had been colored by his affection for Michael, he was at least making a sincere effort to be honest with her. So absolute was the integrity that emanated from Paul Santi that there could be no question of his deliberately twisting or tainting the truth. Not even for Michael.

  So she swallowed hard and turned back to him, waiting. “Go on,” she said. “Please.”

  He nodded. “Before I say more, I think I should tell you that Michael has always believed Deirdre had a…a sickness. That she was ill.” He put a hand to his head. “In her mind.”

  “Are you saying he thought she was mentally ill?”

  He delayed his reply, obviously considering his words. “Sì, but not because he meant to make…ah…the excuse for her, you see. He truly did believe this. And perhaps he was right. Perhaps to do the things Deirdre did, she would have had to be ill. Michael said that Deirdre was…that she could not control the drinking. And when she drank, she did things—she became very difficult. She hurt many people—especially Michael.”

  He paused, his voice dropping. “You say that Deirdre wrote to you of how Michael had hurt her. But the truth, Susanna, is that Deirdre hurt Michael. And Caterina. She hurt Caterina as well.”

  Despite the mildness of the day, a chill shuddered through Susanna. Questions and doubts came rushing in on her. And yet watching him, seeing her own hurt reflected in his eyes, sensing how difficult, even painful, this was for him, she found it impossible not to believe him.

  “The fights were terrible,” he went on in the same strained voice. “And Michael is a man who, I can tell you, resists an argument. Always, he has sought peace in his life. But Deirdre would give him no peace.”

  “You’re painting a very cruel picture of my sister, Paul,” Susanna said, her voice thin.

  “Sì, it must seem so to you, I know. But the truth is sometimes a bitter thing, Susanna. And I will not lie to you: Deirdre could be a very cruel person.”

  All the uneasy memories and reluctant recollections that had begun to crowd her thoughts of late now collided with Paul’s bitter narrative, battering her with the force of a tidal wall. For a split second Susanna thought she might suffocate under the weight of her own emotions. But she managed to nod an indication that he should continue.

  “Michael tried—for a long time he tried—to save their marriage. To help Deirdre stop the drinking. But Deirdre, she did not want to be helped; she did not want to save the marriage. She wanted a divorce.”

  Susanna looked up. “A divorce? Deirdre never mentioned a divorce in her letters.”

  He shrugged. “Nevertheless, it is what she wanted. She asked him for a divorce often. All the time.”

  “But surely after his accident—”

  He laughed, a short, strangled sound. “After Michael’s accident, she demanded a divorce.”

  Susanna forced herself to take deep, steadying breaths, fighting off one wave of nausea after another. “But by then they had Caterina.”

  “Sì, they did.” Paul’s tone was almost plaintive. “But Deirdre never wanted Caterina, you see. She meant to leave both Michael and Cati.”

  “No!” The fierceness of her response surprised Susanna. “Deirdre wouldn’t have abandoned her own child—”

  “But of course she would have abandoned her! Caterina was little more than a nuisance to Deirdre!”

  Paul’s words cracked like the lash of a whip, startling Susanna. Her arms felt numb, and she began to rub them with a hard, bruising roughness.

  “Susanna? I’m sorry, I think I must say no more. This is too difficult for you. I am hurting you—”

  “I’m all right,” Susanna said shortly. She wasn’t, of course. She wanted to pummel him with her fists for inflicting these hideous images onto her, even as the entire sum of her own fears began to materialize in her mind.

  The stone of pain in her midsection might crush her in half at any moment. But she couldn’t let him stop. Not now. “I have to know,” she whispered.

  He sighed and started in again. “I will tell you what Michael believed. This he told me himself, that Deirdre had never loved him, not even from the beginning.”

  “No, I—that’s simply not true, Paul! She absolutely raved about him in her early letters. She adored him—”

  “Perhaps she adored what he represented to her,” Paul interrupted, an edge to his
voice, “but Michael is convinced that for Deirdre, it was nothing more than a brief infatuation, that in truth she used him. As she might have used a rung on a ladder to get where she wanted to go.”

  Susanna stared at him, struggling not to believe. “That’s unfair! Deirdre wouldn’t have married him simply to advance her career—”

  She stopped. Her heart gave a hollow thud, and her own words echoed in her ears as she remembered a day in the past. A sweet, warm summer’s day at the farm, when Deirdre had been about to leave home for a tour with a small theater company…

  They had ventured down to the stream behind the old Mannion place and were sitting on the bank, splashing their bare feet in the water. Deirdre had just announced, somewhat pointedly, that on this particular trip she would be traveling in the same company with Donal Malone, an older man from the village, fairly well known in the county as a gifted baritone and an above-average actor.

  He had also been sweet on Deirdre for some time.

  “You don’t want to be telling Papa that old Donal Malone is going along,” Susanna warned her, only half teasing.

  “It’s not as if we’ll be traveling alone together,” said Deirdre. “We’ll be with all the other members of the troupe. Not that I’d mind being alone with Donal.”

  Susanna had responded like a typical adolescent, giving an exaggerated shudder and a curl of her lip. “Donal Malone is an old man!”

  “He’s just past forty, you little eejit. That’s hardly old. Not that it’s any of your affair.”

  “He has a belly, and his hair is always greasy. I’ll wager he uses fish oil on it.” When Deirdre didn’t react, she pressed, “You wouldn’t let him touch you, would you?”

  Deirdre had simply given her a look of disdain—a look that made it clear Susanna was still a child and, at the moment, a tiresome one. “Donal is thick with Thom Drummond, the director,” Deirdre said archly. “It never hurts to have a man of influence take a fancy to you. I’ll let the poor fool chew on my ear all he wants if he can boost my standing in the company.”

  Susanna fervently wished she could dismiss the memory as nothing more than mere girlish foolishness. Instead, she found herself cringing with sympathy for Michael. Even then, her sister had displayed a blatant tendency to manipulate. Was it really so difficult to believe that Deirdre had refined her skills even more in that particular area as she matured? If that was the case, what an incredibly painful—and humiliating—discovery it must have been for Michael, to realize he’d been nothing more than a means to an end.

  Paul was watching her. “I am only telling you what Michael believed, Susanna,” he said. “And he believed that he had been—used. Especially when—”

  He stopped abruptly, frowning as if uncertain how to proceed.

  “When what?”

  “When the affairs began.”

  “Affairs?” Susanna flinched as if she’d been struck. “She was unfaithful to him?”

  Paul was staring at something in the distance now, his jaw tight. He had begun to pull at the frame of his eyeglasses so viciously Susanna expected them to snap in his hands.

  Abruptly, he replaced the glasses and turned toward her. In that moment, Susanna encountered an expression of such bitterness, such misery, that she knew she had not yet heard the worst of it.

  “There is no kind way to tell you something like this, Susanna, so I will simply say it: Deirdre was openly promiscuous. She cuckolded Michael almost from the time they came to New York.”

  Susanna felt the blood drain from her head. The cold that had earlier enveloped her now seemed to turn inward with a fierce, numbing blast. She felt Paul’s eyes on her, watching her as if he feared she would faint.

  “Do you have any idea how difficult this is for me to accept?” she choked out.

  No matter what else Deirdre might have done, Susanna simply couldn’t believe that her sister had actually been capable of such baseness, such…depravity.

  And yet every instinct within her seemed to shout that Paul would never lie about such a thing. As unbelievable and vile as it was, he was telling the truth.

  And so she sat, mute, her mind reeling, her heart aching, and listened to the rest of it.

  31

  A STORY TOLD

  I will my heavy story tell…

  W. B. YEATS

  Susanna couldn’t have said when she turned the final corner of her lingering suspicions and doubts. She knew only that she could now see the truth evolving, like a distorted collage being formed even as she watched, as pieces of her own unsettling memories converged with Paul’s devastating narrative. One after another her fragmented recollections came together, finding their place among the heartbreaking images Paul was painting for her. Having accepted the irrefutable reality of her sister’s shame, she now unlocked the closed places in her mind and prepared herself to hear whatever was left to be told, no matter how grievously it might wound.

  Stunned and trembling, she listened to the evidence against a sister whose debauchery had eventually robbed her of all reason, morality, and self-respect, only to leave her a dissipated virago who ultimately brought the worst sort of scandal down upon her husband and herself.

  She listened in silence, her heart breaking even as a part of her raged inwardly for the awful destruction wreaked by her sister upon the very ones who loved her most. She learned of the ways Deirdre had shamelessly used Michael and his influence in the operatic world to foster her own career, while all the time Michael knew her voice suffered the lack of brilliance and power that might have eventually brought her true greatness.

  And when he left the world that Deirdre had been so desperate to conquer, she had viewed his abdication as a kind of personal betrayal, foisting upon him even more bitterness, more resentment, more vicious attacks.

  She heard with shuddering revulsion of the ongoing trysts with other men that had continued right up to the disgraceful affair in which Deirdre had been involved at the time of Michael’s accident…and her death.

  She bled inside to hear that her sister had turned away from her own child. Having never wanted Caterina, she punished Michael by punishing his child with her sharp tongue and scolding derision, indeed punishing the girl so cruelly Michael had begun to fear she might actually resort to physical abuse.

  When Paul was loath to continue, offering to spare her any further demoralizing details, Susanna insisted he go on. And so she sat listening with mounting horror as he told her of the sick and demented “pranks” Deirdre had perpetrated on Michael after he lost his sight—often just before an orchestra performance or a social event: despicable tactics which caused him such humiliation and embarrassment that eventually he could scarcely bring himself to leave the house.

  She listened, she anguished, and she quietly wept. By the time Paul reached the night of Deirdre’s death, Susanna felt stricken with such misery she thought she could not bear to hear the rest of it. But she knew she must. There was no way in the world she could live without knowing what had happened that terrible night.

  “The night she died,” she choked out, “had she been drinking?”

  Paul nodded, his face engraved with the stark, grim lines of remembered pain. “Most of the day. Earlier in the evening, I heard her and Michael arguing. She was determined to go out, was demanding that Dempsey take her to the ferry so she could go to the city. But Michael had already alerted Dempsey and me that we were not to drive her anywhere, not under any circumstances.

  “It was a terrible night,” he went on. “A dangerous night. The roads were treacherous at best. But apparently Michael’s attempts to keep her from leaving only made her that much more determined. I was in the back, in my office, but I could hear them. Some time later, Deirdre went upstairs, and I thought she had retired for the night.”

  He leaned forward on the seat of the buggy, his expression doleful as the mild breeze blowing over the mountain ruffled his hair. “I was wrong,” he said. “Much later—I think it was nearly midnight�
�I was reading in my room when I heard them again. Downstairs, in the music room. Deirdre was screaming, and Michael was shouting—an uncommon thing for him. I heard a crash, the sound of something breaking. I got up and went to Caterina’s room. Cati was terrified of those drunken rages,” he explained. “I didn’t want that she should wake up alone.”

  His face ravaged, he faltered in his account. Susanna very nearly told him to stop. Her heart ached, not only for Caterina, for the fear and bewilderment the child must have endured, but for Paul as well. She could see what this was doing to him, that it was as painful for him to relive as it was for her to hear for the first time. But he quickly regained his composure and went on.

  “Caterina was awake and very frightened. I wanted to go downstairs, for by then Deirdre had gone wild, screaming like a madwoman, and we could hear glass shattering. I was afraid of what might happen—”

  He stopped to take a breath. “Michael had instructed me I should never interfere. Deirdre never liked me anyway—she resented anyone Michael cared about—and I was afraid I would only make things worse if I tried to intervene. So I stayed upstairs with Caterina.

  “A few minutes later, I heard Deirdre in the vestibule, raving, screaming at Michael, that he was trying to keep her a prisoner. Then I heard the front door slam.

  “Soon, Michael called for me and Dempsey. I left Caterina and went downstairs. Michael was beside himself. Dempsey and I left as quickly as we could get the carriage horses harnessed. Michael was insisting he would go with us, but we convinced him to stay at the house, with Caterina.”

  He looked at her. “Later, we were much relieved that he had stayed behind.” He stopped, his expression bleak. He seemed to shudder, and his voice faded until Susanna had to strain to hear. “We were too late. She had gone off the road.”

  He motioned to the bluff. “She was dead by the time we reached her.”