by Selena Kitt
She picked up the envelope, turning it over. It was still sealed. She put it back on the desk where she’d found it, realizing even though she’d basically known the man she was about to marry for almost her entire life, there was a great deal she didn’t know about him. Donald Highbrow had mentioned their age difference, and while Leah didn’t really feel it most of the time, the reality that Rob had lived a lifetime of experience before she had even learned to walk hit home when she thought about him going off to join the army. What if there was another war? Oh God, she couldn’t think about losing him, not again.
When they got Grace back—and they would get her back, Leah held on doggedly to that hope—Rob would be the father of a newborn again. It wasn’t something they’d discussed. It had just happened. They were going to be an instant family. And it hit her, after Erica’s news—Grace was Rob’s first and only biological child. And when Grace graduated high school in 1975, Leah would be thirty-seven, and Rob—he would be sixty.
Did the age difference really matter? Her heart told her it didn’t, but the math was a little frightening. Leah had always felt like an old soul, far more serious and grown-up inside than her peers. She’d never been susceptible to peer pressure, unless you counted the way Leah always tagged along after Erica with her mischievous streak. It was Erica who had led her astray, showing her the wicked collection of photographs under her father’s bed.
Leah stared at the tapestry covering the door, remembering the first time they’d snuck into the secret room, Leah following Erica like Alice down the rabbit hole. There was no turning back then and there was no turning back now. She didn’t want to. She loved Rob, she knew she would love him until the day she died, which she hoped and prayed would be on the same day, because she couldn’t bear the thought of being without him.
She remembered how shocked she had been at their discovery, how intrigued, how titillating the photographs, how exciting the reels of film. Leah opened the top drawer of Rob’s desk, finding the key, the one on the leather fob, and she went to the tapestry, pulling it aside. There was a padlock and a bolt, and she slipped the key into the lock, turning—but it didn’t budge. Frowning, Leah tried it again, but no. It wouldn’t unlock. Was it the wrong key?
She checked the drawer again, finding lots of other keys inside, but none attached to a leather fob. Had Rob changed the lock? He must have. But why? Leah put the key back, continuing her journey to the kitchen, her rumbling stomach insisting. She found a plate of stuffed celery wrapped in plastic with a note written in Solie’s fat, child-like handwriting, “Miss Lee.” Smiling, Leah took the plate, poured herself a glass of milk from the pitcher, and settled back on the sofa in front of the soap operas to eat it.
By the time Rob came in and kissed her awake, Twenty-One was blaring on the television and Leah had slept away the whole afternoon.
“I missed you,” he murmured, his breath redolent with alcohol, and she smiled and stretched, yawning and sliding her arms around his neck, pulling him down onto the couch with her. He laughed, stretching out beside her on the sofa, still wearing his shoes, wet from the snow.
“What’s for dinner?” he inquired. “I’ve been shooting city council photographs all day, and the only thing they had was bourbon and Good n Plentys out of the vending machine.”
“Leftovers?” she suggested. “Solie didn’t come today. She called with a cough and I told her to stay home.”
Rob nuzzled her neck, his hand lightly cupping her breast through her blouse. “How about I take my beautiful future bride out for a nice, big juicy steak dinner?”
“You sound more interested in the steak than me.”
“Only momentarily.” He grinned. “One need satisfied at a time.”
“I’ll have to get ready.”
He groaned. “I’ll starve.”
“Five minutes. Just let me change and freshen up.” She pushed at him and he rolled off the couch, standing and holding out his hand.
“Oh all right.” Rob tossed his suit jacket over a chair and wandered off toward the kitchen. “I’ll raid the fridge while I wait.”
Leah went over to the closet under the loft. Many of her clothes were still at her mother’s, but Rob had cleared room for some of her things in his walk-in closet and she flipped through her dresses, finding a nice casual, cream-colored one with a pencil-thin skirt.
“Don’t spoil your appetite!” she called, stripping down to her underwear and slipping on a garter belt. Then she pulled the dress over her head.
“Not possible.” His mouth was full, his words intelligible, but barely. “Oh, you meant for food?”
She smiled, zipping her dress and choosing a light blue cardigan to cover her shoulders. Sitting on the edge of the desk, she slid one stocking on, slipping it up to her thigh and fastening it to the garter, front and back.
“Rob, can I ask you something?” she called.
“Mmmmph?”
Leah did the other stocking, fastening it to the front, the back giving her more trouble. “Did you change the lock on the darkroom door? The one under the loft?”
Rob went quiet. Leah frowned, still trying to get her stocking hooked to the garter, when he came around the corner, seeing her with her dress hiked up, stockings showing.
“Why?” he asked.
Leah finally got her stocking fastened, smoothing down her dress. “Because I tried the key and it didn’t work.”
He frowned. “Why were you trying to get in there?”
“I don’t know.” She slid up onto the desk, so she was sitting, holding a hand out to him. “I guess I was thinking about what the lawyer said. About having anything incriminating in our past?”
“I suppose you’re right.” He sighed, taking her offered hand, situating himself between her thighs, leaning into the desk to put his arms around her. “If anyone found out, it would be very incriminating.”
She wrapped her arms around his neck. “So can we get rid of it?”
“No.” He grimaced.
“Why?”
Rob nuzzled her neck. “I promise you, no one is going to find out about it.”
“But what if they did?” Leah asked, pulling back to look at him. “You know, your daughter has been sneaking out in the middle of the night to see that Webber boy.”
“What?”
“Rob, think for just a minute, what Erica’s been through,” Leah said. “She finds out she’s adopted—you aren’t her father, and Susan wasn’t her mother—and not only that, she learns one of the conditions of her adoption was that she be sterilized.”
“I didn’t know about that!” he insisted, his eyes flashing.
“I’m not blaming you,” she soothed, touching his cheek. “I’m not accusing anyone. I just want you to think about it from her point of view. She’s confused, she’s hurt. Not only that, but she let herself get involved with that damned baby-selling sex ring Father Patrick is running and she ended up being ritually gang-raped by, oh I don’t know, how many priests?”
Rob winced, turning his head away. “Jesus, Leah.”
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
He shook his head. “I really don’t want to think about it.”
“Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt,” Leah replied, repeating Erica’s words to her.
“Look, Father Patrick and I have an understanding—”
“You had an understanding before, but Erica ended up being initiated into the Mary Magdalenes anyway.”
“I know! I know!” Rob threw up his hands, stepping away. “I just didn’t anticipate her pursuing it on her own.”
“But that’s what I’m saying,” Leah pleaded, sliding off the desk and facing him, looking up to meet his eyes. “We have to anticipate what could happen. Donald said this could be a long and drawn out fight, right? Well Erica is out running around with boys, and she’s absolutely fearless because she knows she can’t get pregnant. It’s only a matter of time before tongues start wagging.”
Rob went to t
he closet, yanking off his tie and tossing it onto the closet floor. “I’ll talk to her.”
“It won’t help.” Leah went to him, touching his arm. “She’s rebelling, and who could blame her? She’s angry and she has a right to be, although I think her anger is being misplaced onto you...”
“Then you talk to her.”
“I tried.” Leah shrugged, turning up her hands. “She’s mad at me for loving you. But listen to me. What if she decides to defy you? Get back at you? She’s already pulling the ‘you’re not my real father, you can’t tell me what to do’ bit out of her bag of tricks. What’s next? She calls the police and tells them about your hidden darkroom?”
Rob paled, unbuttoning the top button of his shirt. “What do you want me to do?”
“We have to get rid of it,” she insisted. “All of it. And you have to stop. Are you still… involved?”
“Yes,” he admitted.
“You can’t do it anymore,” she cried. “It’s going to jeopardize everything!”
“If I stop, it’ll jeopardize everything.” Rob dug into his pocket, pulling out his key ring. He walked over to the tapestry, pulling it aside and unlocking the bolt. He motioned for her to follow, the door closing behind her from the weight of the tapestry alone. He flicked the switch, the fluorescents buzzing to life overhead.
Leah’s sense memory came to life at the smell of the darkroom chemicals. There were photographs of nude women hanging on the clothesline over the developing table. Full breasted women with roomy hips who spread their legs and let Robert Nolan photograph their most private parts, the looks on their faces orgasmic or teasing or seductive, but every one of them arousing.
“Come on.” He went around the developing table, finding the hidden latch in the wall and opening the door to the other room. Leah remembered the night she had first discovered it, how she had snuck in so quietly and had found Rob on the twin bed, a reel of film running on the projector, his erection in his hand as he watched the couple on the screen have sex.
Leah had watched too, touching herself—she couldn’t help it. Later, she would lose her virginity on the same bed, lost in the bewildering, wondrous pleasure of her first time. Did we make Grace on that bed? she wondered. Or was it the time in the movie theater bathroom? Or one of the many times we’d made love in the backseat of his Cadillac.
“I met Susan in the summer of 1937.” Rob turned on the small lamp beside the bed and went over to the cabinet where Leah and Erica had found all those reels of film. “I was a young photographer, just out of college, and she was the most stunning beauty I’d ever seen.”
Leah cringed at that, but she took it in stride. She’d known Susan Nolan, had come to think of her as a kind of surrogate mother over the years, because she spent so much time with the Nolans, and she had been a very beautiful woman.
“I asked if I could photograph her, and she agreed.” Rob squatted down, looking through the boxes at the bottom. “Here we go.”
He came over to the bed where Leah was standing, sitting down and patting the bed beside him. “Sit. I’ve got a lot to tell you.”
She sank down, watching him open the box and pull out an envelope. It was sealed and unmarked. Just the sight of it made her feel weak. She remembered asking her mother for honesty and then regretting it. Careful what you wish for.
“When you said that, about Erica being fearless, it made me think of these. I took them on our third date. I thought of them as dates, but I don’t think Susan did. Not at first. But she was like that. Absolutely fearless. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know why.” Rob slid his finger along the envelope, breaking the seal and sliding the photographs out between them on the bed.
Leah squinted, picking up the first one in the set, holding it up to the light. She recognized the two of them instantly, although they were much younger than Leah ever remembered them. Patty Wendt was stretched out on a bed, head thrown over the side, her long dark hair hanging down almost to the floor. Rob’s camera had caught her moment of orgasm perfectly, her legs open, and Susan Nolan’s face between them, only her eyes showing, a sly, mischievous gleam in them.
“I saw some of these before,” Leah told him, picking up the photographs, not sure she wanted to see, but unable to stop herself. “I knew you’d all been together once. That’s why my mother thought you were my father. I ran home that day, I don’t know if I was packing to leave, or packing to come live with you, I just knew I had to do something. I snuck in the house, and I heard you both, Rob. I heard my mother telling you that day in the kitchen, I was your daughter, and after seeing these… why wouldn’t I believe it?”
“I didn’t know about the Mary Magdalenes when I took those.” Rob watched Leah’s face as she flipped through them, all explicit scenes of Patty and Susan, touching, kissing, embracing, spreading their thighs and rubbing their mounds together. Leah couldn’t look away, remembering what she and Erica had done, things so similar to this. Of course, Rob didn’t know about that, and he never would. It had been an experimentation Leah doubted they would repeat, spurred only by the titillating images and arousing films they’d discovered in this hidden darkroom.
“I didn’t know anything, I just knew Susan was fearless and beautiful and her best friend, Patty, loved and wanted her almost as much as I did.” Rob sighed, rubbing his eyes with the palms of his hands. “Many of the girls they call ‘The Marys’ end up entering the convent. They’re sterilized, so they can never be mothers, and back then, there were even less options in the world for them than there are now. Without marriage and a man, who could they become?”
“Nuns?” Leah asked, incredulous.
“Yes.” He nodded. “Some of them, like Susan, defied convention. She was twenty-three when she married me, and an old maid by most standards. But until then, she’d never met a man who’d tolerate her relationship with Patty.”
“Her… relationship?” Leah blinked at him, setting the pictures down between them.
“They were lovers.” Rob took a deep breath before continuing. “They remained lovers until the day Susan died.”
“But you were married?”
“Yes.” He smiled. “We were.”
“But my mother loved you, Rob. She said so. She told me, if it was the only way she could be with you, then she was willing to make that bargain...”
“No. She loved Susan, not me. She only tolerated me. Still does.” He gave a little, bitter laugh. “I was the one who made the bargain. I looked the other way. I loved Susan and she loved me. She just also happened to love Patty too. And Susan made it very clear, if I wanted her, I’d have to accept her relationship with Patty.”
Leah tried to wrap her head around this new information, her brain spinning with it. She actually had to put her head in her hands to make it stop. Her mother had been in love with Susan Nolan?
Was it possible? Could it be true?
She lifted her head, looking at her future husband, trying to make sense of it.
“It happens, Leah. Some women… they just have a stronger affinity for their own gender than they do for the opposite sex. The world we live in calls this sexual deviancy. They label all of this—” Rob waved his arm around the room, at the photographs, the movie reels, all depicting some sort of sex act that society, the church or the government would consider deviant. “Offensive. Sinful. Criminal. But do you know what I see?”
She shook her head, not trusting her voice.
“Beauty.” He smiled, looking down at the pictures fanned out on the bed between them. “Truth and beauty. That’s all I see when I look at these.”
“Susan told you about this.” Leah nodded toward the photographs. “Her relationship with my mother...” She still was trying to process the fact. Saying it out loud made it more real somehow. It was slowly starting to make some kind of strange, surreal sense. “But they didn’t tell you about the Mary Magdalenes?”
“No.” Rob looked away, shaking his head, and she saw his jaw working again like i
t did whenever he got mad. “Not until the end. Not until she had to.”
“My mother said you made some kind of deal with Father Patrick, about keeping Erica out of it?”
Rob had a faraway look in his eyes. “Susan made me promise I’d raise her to be a Mary. But once she was gone, well… at least Patty and I saw eye to eye on one thing. It was the only thing Patty and Susan ever fought about. Me and Patty didn’t want either of you involved in the Mary Magdalenes. Of course, Father Patrick had other ideas.”