The Secret Women

by Sheila Williams

  Howard frowned again. Obviously, the jury was still out as it concerned the toddy.

  He coughed a little and then took another sip.

  Carmen decided it was time to go. She’d talk with him about her mom another time, when it was just the two of them.

  “How’s that little . . . project coming along?” her father asked.

  Carmen slipped on her coat and paused. She would hardly call the search for her identity “little.”

  “Fine. Just fine. We’re meeting up on Saturday. We’re almost finished at Mrs. Wade’s home. I don’t remember if I told you, Dad: it sold quickly, and the closing is in less than three weeks.”

  Howard nodded. “Good, good. I’m glad. I didn’t think it was such a good idea before, but now I do. You girls are helping each other.”

  Carmen nodded. “Yes. Yes, we are. It’s been good for all of us.”

  “So . . . have you finished going through those boxes? Joanie’s boxes?”

  Carmen stopped buttoning her coat and stared at her father. In all her life, she’d rarely heard him refer to her mother as “Joanie.” That was a name she heard only from Joan’s brothers and their wives. “Joanie” was an Adams family thing. “Joan” was what her father had always called her mother. And then, of course, there was “Jo,” the name Richard had used.

  “Yes, Dad. I’ve looked through them.” There was no hiding now.

  Howard moistened his lips. “All . . . of them?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded, swallowing slowly. He cleared his throat again and took another sip of Mrs. Reverend Doctor Elaine’s solution.

  “Then . . . you know.” His voice was so low that Carmen barely heard it.

  She took a deep breath, glancing again toward the kitchen. “Yes.”

  The sound of footsteps distracted them. Elaine marched into the room, a gigantic Louis Vuitton satchel draped over her arm.

  “Carmie, excuse me, dear.” She turned toward Howard. “The dishes are washed, and I put the rest of the soup in the fridge. There’s enough for you to have for lunch tomorrow. Don’t forget to eat an orange with your breakfast.” She reached for her mink-trimmed cape and slid it around her shoulders. “And I’ve left the pill dispenser on the counter so you have no excuse. One orange pill and one blue one before bedtime. All right?”

  She kissed Howard on the forehead, which caused him to blush, and then patted Carmen on the shoulder as she turned toward the door. “Good night, sweetie,” she said, her dark eyes flashing with energy, intelligence, and something else that Carmen couldn’t quite put her finger on. Elaine leaned close to Carmen and planted a gentle kiss on her cheek. “I knew your mother,” she whispered. “We were in Sunday School together.” She leaned back and smiled. “She would be so proud of you.”

  Carmen was surprised into silence. She hadn’t known that. The front door closed quietly, and Carmen heard the tweet of car locks. Something else she hadn’t known about her mother.

  “Dad . . . why don’t we talk about this in a few days when you’re feeling better? I can imagine that it isn’t . . . one of your favorite subjects.” She added, lowering her voice, “You know that I’d never want to hurt you.”

  Howard shook his head slowly. “I’m not that sick. And this isn’t painful. It’s just that . . . well . . . I can counsel the bereaved, I can referee feuding spouses, but this situation? Well, this is different. Your mother was the light of my life. We grew up together—did you know that? I loved her from the first day I saw her. She was probably . . . five years old, had dirty skinned knees, braids in her hair going every which way, and a smile that could light up heaven.” Her father’s eyes were shining with joy. “And I love her still.”

  At home, Carmen had a file one-inch thick of letters, photos, printouts from and about a man named Richard. But her father knew all this, so why go over it again?

  “Even though . . .”

  Howard smiled. “That didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. What mattered was that she needed me. I knew what she’d been through. I knew . . .” Howard’s voice hardened and his tone elevated, as it did when he gave a sermon. “I knew what those people had done to her. They’d cut her out of their lives as if she didn’t exist. They were ashamed of her. Of you!” Her father’s voice cracked. He shook his head slowly. “I wasn’t having that. And then . . .” He started smiling, but a cough took over. “Excuse me. And then, finally, Joanie came home. Back to your grandparents’ house. And I met you.”

  Carmen smiled. “That’s not saying much—meeting a baby.”

  “Oh, I don’t know . . .” her father commented.

  “You . . . didn’t mind?” Carmen asked. “Taking . . . another man’s child as your own?” The question sounded archaic, like a sentence from a Victoria Holt novel (one of Carmen’s guilty pleasures).

  Her father laughed heartily until his laughter transitioned into coughing. Carmen suppressed a smile as he took another sip of Elaine’s potion, then set it down on a small table beside the chair. “Are you kidding? Yes, I minded! But not for the reason you’d think. Look, I was an only child. No sisters or brothers. I had cousins, but they were older than I was, some by over fifteen years, and most of them had moved away from Cincinnati by that time. So I didn’t have any small children around except for the ones I saw at church. I didn’t know what to do with a baby, didn’t even know how to hold one! But your mother . . .” Her father’s face beamed at the mention of his wife. “Your mother pushed you into my arms.” Howard’s eyes were shining. “I was done for then!”

  “Dad . . . did she tell you . . . what happened? In New York? Did she talk about . . . Richard?”

  Howard blew his nose and nodded slowly. “She did. On our honeymoon. She told me. Everything.” He paused and smiled sheepishly. “Well. Maybe not everything. Your mother had a thing about secrets.”

  Now it was Carmen’s turn to pause. “Mom? Secrets?” She shook her head. The image of Mrs. Joan Bradshaw sitting in the front pew of Saint Paul AME Church wearing a powder-blue suit, her hands folded primly in her lap, popped into Carmen’s head. “I just don’t see that.”

  Her father’s eyebrows rose. “No. You wouldn’t. But Joanie Ann Adams Bradshaw . . .” Howard stopped and glanced down at his hands, resting in his lap. His gold wedding band was still on his finger. “Joan Adams Topolosky Bradshaw. She had a thing about secrets. She said that every woman needed at least one thing that she kept close to her heart, something that was hers alone.” His smile had faded. “And Joanie always meant what she said.”

  “You didn’t ask her?” Carmen inquired.

  Howard stared at his daughter for a moment, then grinned. “You didn’t know your momma very well, did you?” he asked, though his question was phrased more like a statement. He smiled, a pensive expression on his face, as if he was remembering something. “You just didn’t ask Joanie Adams something that she thought was none of your damned business.”

  “Dad!” Carmen was startled. Her father was not known for cursing.

  Howard shrugged. “Hey. Those were her words, not mine. You can’t imagine how many times your grandmother Nona got after her for that.” Now it was Howard’s turn to chuckle.

  Carmen laid her coat across the back of the couch and sat down again. “Can you tell me . . . what she said?”

  “Yes,” he answered with a tone of finality in his voice, corrugated and rough from coughing. “But I want you to know one thing. Joan was always straight with me, about Richard, about her life with him. She never lied, and she didn’t hold back. We’d known each other too long for that. I knew . . . I’ll always know . . . that she loved me in her own way. But your father, Richard, was the love of her life.” He stopped and sniffed, whether from the cold or emotion, Carmen didn’t know. “But I want you to know that your mother was the love of my life. And always will be.”

  Chapter 28

  Joan and Carmen

  “Joanie? Joanie! Cricket’s here!” Nona’s voice echoed through the house.


  Winona must have been a magician. That early spring evening transformed Joan, transformed them all, and made a time traveler of Joan Topolosky. At the sound of those words, in less time than it took to blink an eye, years disappeared and Mrs. Joan Topolosky was no longer a married . . . widowed woman with an eight-month-old baby. That person was gone. Joan was, once again, a ten-year-old girl named Joanie with scraped, knobby knees and a grubby, grass-stained dress.

  Even when Joan saw him, standing in the front parlor wearing a suit, shirt, and tie, his wing-tip shoes polished to a glass-like finish, he looked awkward and self-conscious, as if afraid to occupy the space of carpet he stood on. His smile was still crooked, and the tortoiseshell glasses he wore, which should have made him look professorial, made him look goofy. Cricket stared at her for a second, then smiled, and she wondered how she looked to him.

  “Hi, Joanie.”

  “Hi, Cricket.”

  “I-I am sorry for your loss.”

  “Thanks,” she said with a sigh, something she hadn’t done a lot of before Rich died.

  “It’s good to see you. You look . . .” He’d stopped, realizing that a compliment of her appearance was not the usual offering of condolence. “I’m sorry. What I meant was . . . I’m glad to see you. Your parents are glad you’re here too. They’ve been worried about you.”

  Joan smiled. “I know. And it’s good to see you too, String Bean.”

  Cricket grinned. “No one calls me that anymore,” he said.

  “Except me,” she said, the old defiance present in her voice.

  “Except you.”

  She smoothed the front of her skirt with her palm.

  “Well, it won’t hurt you to get pulled back down to earth once in a while, Reverend Bradshaw. That’s what I’m here for.”

  He’d opened his mouth to speak but was distracted by the sound of crying.

  “Oops! The empress is awake! Excuse me.” Joan scurried out of the room.

  When she returned several minutes later, she was carrying the baby, in an untidily arranged assortment of pink blankets, and a bottle of milk.

  “Here she is!” Joan said proudly, kissing the baby on the tip of her nose. “My little dumpling. That’s what Rich called her, his ‘little dumpling.’” She smiled, then looked up at Cricket. “What’s the matter?”

  She knew from his expression.

  Cricket stared at the child with a mask of distress coupled with disbelief. He had deluded himself. As long as it had been just Joanie in the room, just Joanie and him, nothing had changed. The world was the same as it was twenty years ago, when they played games in the Adams’s vast yard: Joanie Ann Adams and Cricket, a.k.a. Howie, Bradshaw from down the street. But the baby’s existence burst that bubble. Leah was the living, breathing evidence that Joanie was not the same anymore. That life, as Cricket remembered it, was different.

  “Do you want to hold her?”

  Cricket was aghast. “Me? No! I don’t know how!” he blurted out, holding up his hands as if he was about to be robbed at gunpoint.

  “Really! Cricket! She won’t bite you. She doesn’t even have teeth yet! She’s just a baby. Here!”

  When had he ever disobeyed an order from Joanie Adams?

  Cricket’s arms were trembling, and he looked as if he might drop Leah. He could tell that Joanie was thinking she’d made a mistake. But she didn’t take the child away. Instead, she adjusted his arms. “Here. No. Here. Like this.”

  He settled the baby in the crook of his arm and looked down. Reaching up from the profusion of pink blankets was a chubby arm and tiny wiggling fingers. Cricket leaned closer to get a better look only to find his nose captured by a small but tenacious paw.

  He giggled. Maybe because of the baritone rumbling from his chest, his laughter deep-seated and athletic, the baby released his nose, and then he blew a raspberry on her forehead. Leah giggled. Cricket lifted the baby up to his shoulder, where she promptly spit up, then grinned at him with toothless gums. His navy pin-striped suit jacket would have to go to the dry cleaners. But Cricket wasn’t dismayed. He giggled again.

  Two months later, Joan Adams Topolosky married Reverend Howard Bradshaw at the Saint Paul AME Church.

  * * *

  “You know we honeymooned at French Lick, over there in Indiana.” Howard continued, “It was a gift from my parents.”

  He hadn’t coughed in over half an hour. Carmen suppressed a smile: Elaine’s potion was working.

  “Grandma and Grandpa?” Carmen commented, realizing too late that she’d sounded incredulous. “That was nice of them.” She remembered her father’s parents as pleasant but quiet people, old-fashioned and staid. The concept of a “honeymoon” in connection with Eleanor and Gordon Bradshaw just didn’t add up to Carmen.

  Her father smiled. “I know what you’re thinking. You wouldn’t have known it to look at her, but my mother was a closet romantic. She loved all of that mushy stuff. Kept a stash of romance novels in an old handbag that she hid in the back of her closet.” He grinned. “It was only a weekend getaway, but it was nice. Winona and Hubert had the baby . . .” Howard looked up. “You. And so for the first time since we were kids, almost, we were alone.”

  Carmen cleared her throat. “But it wasn’t quite the same thing.”

  Howard smiled slightly. His gaze, once fastened on Carmen’s face as if trying to read her thoughts, softened and seemed blurry, as if he were far away. And it occurred to Carmen, like a thunderbolt, that he was remembering . . .

  Oh Lordy. Carmen hoped she wasn’t blushing. Thinking about her parents having . . . an intimate moment . . . Carmen knew her unfiltered thoughts labeled her as a prude. But still. Mom was married before. She’d had a child. But knowing Daddy, it was probably his first time. She stole another glance of her father. Howard’s face was immobile, but his expression was wistful. This was private stuff and would stay that way. Carmen didn’t need a psychic to figure it out: her brother, Howie, had been born that next summer.

  Now she had only one question.

  “Dad. Did she . . .” Her stomach was jumpy. It almost seemed an intrusion to ask. But she had to. She had to know. “Did she tell you? What happened to Richard?”

  Howard looked down for a moment at the soup-bowl-size mug that he again took up in his palms. “Humph. This concoction tastes better than I thought it would.” He inhaled and cleared his throat, then looked back at his daughter.

  “Yes. Yes, she did.”

  Chapter 29

  Joan

  Richard died on an ordinary day. Most days that end in one of the fraternal twins of misery and delight begin with a routine. Rich would always get up first because it took him a while to shave and get ready for work. Joanie had teased him for hogging the closet-size bathroom. Unless the baby was crying, she would stay in bed, savoring a few extra moments of cocooned warmth and quiet. Her day would officially begin with the changing of what was usually a Godzilla-size diaper. She hadn’t returned to work yet; her substitute teaching assignment didn’t begin until fall. So she had a few weeks left to luxuriate in delicious inactivity, time that was hers to listen to the sounds of morning: the Jeffries’s children upstairs thumping around, the door to the stairwell slamming (the super had been promising to repair it since they moved in), the faint sounds of the radio coming from the kitchen, and the smell of coffee. That morning she patted her belly and tried to tighten her stomach muscles, still slack from childbirth. There were few things Joanie disliked more than sit-ups, but if she was ever going to get her favorite slacks zipped again without holding her breath she’d have to start soon. She closed her eyes and sighed with pleasure, wiggling her toes. The sound of water splashing in the bathroom made an odd but soothing lullaby, and since Joanie felt too comfortable to move, and the baby was quiet, she yawned and drifted off again, a dream taking her back to Paris.

  Joanie woke with a start. She sat up in the bed, then froze. Had she heard something? No, the apartment was quiet. But something
had woken her up, and it wasn’t the baby. What was it?

  She felt as if she’d slept for hours, but it was only 7:38. Rich wouldn’t have left yet; he usually left at a quarter after 8. The sounds of cooing and gurgling reached her ears: the baby was awake. Joanie shook the sleep cobwebs from her brain and scrambled out of bed. She was late. She had so much to do today and . . . She reached for her robe, then paused. Now she realized what was different. The apartment was totally quiet. No radio. Rich always turned on the radio; he enjoyed the jazz station. And she didn’t smell coffee. Had he forgotten?

  “Rich? Honey? Are you still here? Why didn’t you wake me up? Rich!”

  Joan shrugged on her robe, then grabbed up the baby, wet diaper and all, and ambled toward the passage that led to the kitchen, then stopped. Richard lay across the doorway to the kitchen, the contents of a Chock full o’Nuts coffee can spread like fine grains of dark chocolate-colored sand across the tile floor.

  * * *

  “An aneurysm of the brain. He was dead before he hit the floor,” the doctor told her, as if that was any comfort. “There was nothing you could have done,” he added, his omniscient tone now modified, perhaps by the expression of total devastation he must have seen on Joanie’s face. That remark wasn’t comforting either. Nothing she could have done would have saved Rich’s life. All that statement did was make her feel that her entire existence was for nothing because she wouldn’t have been able to save her husband’s life, a man named Richard, who now lay on a gurney covered by white sheets. It was over, her life, his life. Gone. Just like that. Baby Top squirmed in her arms, and Joanie’s attention returned to the soggy diaper she’d forgotten to change. Again.

  “Mrs. Topolosky?”

  The doctor’s voice pierced her from a second-long daydream of Rich climbing out of bed this morning . . . a moment only two and a half hours ago. She was back in the small waiting room outside the emergency room. The ear-splitting whine of an ambulance was competing with the swoosh of a gurney speeding down the hall guided by a circle of medics, its squeaking wheels in need of oil. Joan stared at the doctor with incomprehension. His voice had pulled her abruptly from then to now. Now was not where she wanted to be.