Whispers

by Belva Plain

  “He was dead wrong. When the Hungarian project was first conceived, Bruce was right up among the top prospects.”

  “How do you know all this? Even if you’re connected with Monacco, you still don’t work for GAA. So how do you know?”

  “I never did know or care about GAA. But this one time I made it my business to. I wanted Robert to get a promotion. I did it for you.”

  At that Lynn slipped her hand out of his so quickly that he, too, spoke quickly.

  “I knew, it didn’t take much to see, in spite of your protests, Lynn, that the marriage wouldn’t last. And then you’d be needing a decent settlement. Courts aren’t giving much to wives these days.”

  The room was absolutely quiet. A phone rang somewhere in the house and stopped when Tom did not answer it. A man passing on the walk outside gave a rumbling laugh, and a woman laughed in return. Then the sound faded. So people were still finding humor in the world! The thought came to her that she might never again have anything to laugh about. And another thought came, a questioning: If I were free now, unencumbered by events, would I accept this humorous, quirky, kindly man who’s sitting here carefully looking at his shoes again and not at me? Surely his last words meant something: I did it for you.

  “How good you are!” she exclaimed, and would have said more, but was fearful of tears.

  “Well,” he said. “Well, I like to set things straight. Lawyers, you know. They’re orderly. So tell me, where do we go from here? Or I should say first, where do you go?”

  “Where can I go, Tom? The man is ill. He begs forgiveness—oh, not only for the bad things, but for his failure. There’s been very little money put aside. I was surprised how little. He needs a position, he’ll need one soon, but first he’ll have to get back some pride and courage. He wants to move away from here, to start fresh. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I’m sick at heart myself, Tom. It’s a whole strange, sad new page. He’s so humble, so changed.”

  “No, Lynn. He’s not changed.”

  “You can’t say that. You haven’t seen him. On the telephone, talking to Emily, he sobbed.”

  “I don’t need to see him. You’re too good,” Tom said. “That’s the trouble.”

  “Does one step on a person when he’s already fallen down?”

  Tom did not answer, and she hid her face in her hands, thinking that Tom, after all, couldn’t know what was churning inside her. Twenty years together, with so much good! Oh, yes, bad too, bad too. And yet grown together, one flesh even when he hurt her, so that now she could feel his suffering as no outsider, no matter how sensitive or how subtle, could ever feel.

  She raised her face, appealing for understanding. “I can’t leave a sinking ship, Tom. I can’t leave.”

  He nodded. “But you will eventually,” he said.

  It was a time of waiting, an uneasy suspension of customary life. The days went slowly, and although it was autumn, they were long. From this house, surrounded by heavy foliage, Lynn looked out into a haze of faded colors, of greens gentled into gray and reds turned rusty, mournful yet lovely in their melancholy. It seemed to her that the earth was reflecting the mood of the house, for the fall should be bright and blazing. But it is all in the mind, she told herself; one sees what one needs to see.

  On the far lawn under a maple Annie was doing her English assignment, reading Huckleberry Finn. Robert, kneeling on the grass, extended his arms toward Bobby, who, now going on ten months old, had already taken a few independent steps. Robert was proud; the boy would be athletic; the boy would be a strong tennis player, a swimmer, a track star.

  If that gives him comfort, Lynn thought, let him have comfort. It was strange to see him here at home in the middle of the afternoon. Eudora, as she passed now between the garage and the grape arbor, must think so too.

  Poor woman, only a week ago she had come, hesitant and shy, to make a confession.

  “There’s something I have to tell you, Mrs. Ferguson. All Mr. Ferguson’s trouble, I heard about it from my friend, she shouldn’t have talked, but I shouldn’t have talked, either, I know I shouldn’t. It was just that we were all having lunch at church, and you know when people work in other people’s houses, they hear things, and they talk. I didn’t mean to hurt you all, honestly I didn’t. Even Mr. Ferguson, he’s a gentleman, and I really liked him until he—”

  Lynn had stopped her. “Dear Eudora, I understand. And it wasn’t just you or your friend at the Stevenses’. Even the policeman at the country club knew, it seems that a great many people did. Oh, don’t cry, please. Don’t make it harder for me.”

  There had been no stopping the contrition. “I wouldn’t hurt you for the world, you’ve been so good to me, all those clothes, and not just your old ones, but the new things for my birthday and last Christmas. You’ve been my friend. I couldn’t stand it that morning when I came in and saw what he was doing to you, such a little thing you are, can’t be more than a hundred pounds. Such a little thing.”

  The mild, anxious eyes had been asking a question that Eudora dared not ask aloud: “Are you staying, Mrs. Ferguson? Are you really?”

  Lynn, raising her chin ever so slightly to show determination, had replied to the unspoken question. “We always need to look ahead in life, not back. What’s past is past, isn’t it?”

  And in the saying she was conscious of maturity and strength.

  “It’s between Robert and me, our affair alone,” she had told Tom Lawrence.

  But of course, it was not. It was the proverbial stone thrown into a pond, with the widening ripples. It was Emily and Annie.…

  Annie had been the surprise. The resilience of this so-often-troubled child was always a surprise. Unless she was holding it all in …

  “Uncle Bruce told me not to believe what the kids said. He told me not even to answer them. They want you to cry and get angry,’ he told me. ‘But if you don’t do either, you’ll spoil their fun, and they’ll stop.’ We talk on the phone a lot.” And she had finished with assurance, “Uncle Bruce gives me good advice.” Then abruptly switching, she had demanded, “Why doesn’t he come here anymore?”

  “He’s been busy getting ready to go away,” Lynn had explained.

  It was a question whether Bruce was more concerned to avoid Robert or to avoid her.

  She wished Bruce would talk to Emily, but then was almost positive that his remarks to her would be quite different from his advice to Annie. Anyway, Emily was determined not to be moved.

  Speaking to her sometime after the day of Robert’s first frantic telephoned appeal, Lynn had come up against a wall of resistance.

  “Mom, you’re making a dreadful mistake,” she had said in a sorry tone of disapproval. “Dreadful. I’ve done a lot of reading about marriages like yours.”

  “I know. I saw a book in your room. Those statistics don’t fit every case, Emily. People aren’t statistics.”

  “But there’s a pattern, no matter how different each case may seem. We’re still discussing wife abuse in my sociology course and I tell you, I’ve felt cold chills. You’ve got to take care of yourself, Mom. You can’t depend on Dad anymore. You need to leave, and soon, Mom.”

  “No. If you could see your father, you’d know what I’m seeing. He’s a different man. This has done something drastic to him, something terrible.”

  “You may be looking at him, but you’re not seeing him.”

  “Have you no mercy or forgiveness, Emily? No pity?”

  “Yes. Pity for you.” And at the end Emily had said, “Well, Mom, you have to do what you think best.”

  Offended and defeated, Lynn had replied rather coolly, “Of course I must. Don’t we all?” Then, softening, she had tried again. “In spite of his worries Dad’s looking forward to Christmas, to the family being together. Would you like to bring Harris to dinner too? I’ll make a feast, a bûche de Noël and everything.”

  “Harris has his own family dinner,” Emily had replied, in the dry tone she seemed lately to h
ave acquired.

  “Well, one other day during vacation, then.”

  “Well see,” said Emily.

  Stubborn! When Robert was really trying so hard to make amends!

  “Don’t tell Emily I’m worried about what I’m going to do,” he kept saying. “I don’t want her work to be affected. She needs a clear mind.”

  “But what are you really going to do?” Lynn had asked again only last night.

  “I don’t know yet. I need more time to think. In the meantime we can manage with my severance pay.” The tone was dispirited, and the words were certainly vague. “Something, I’ll find something.”

  On her birthday he had laid a long-stemmed rose at her plate.

  “It’s the best I can afford right now. I won’t buy jewelry unless it’s flawless, you know that. So, a flawless rose instead.” Straightening his shoulders, and with a smile intended to be brave, he had said, “But next year at this time there’ll be a shiny box tied with ribbon.”

  Something within Lynn had been displeased with this image; she had picked up the rose, so alive in its perfect simplicity, and held it against her cheek, saying only, “This is perfect, Robert. Thank you.”

  She could have said, “I don’t measure things by shine and ribbon, don’t you know that?”

  But it would have come out prissy and righteous-sounding, which was not her intent at all, so she had just let him go to the piano, where, while she ate her breakfast, he played a birthday song.

  Yesterday when it rained, she thought now, watching the baby stagger across the grass and fall into Robert’s arms, he had spent the whole afternoon at the piano playing dreamy nocturnes. How long could the man go on this way? He went nowhere, not even on simple errands to the shopping center, where he feared to meet anybody he knew.

  “You have to go out and hold your head up,” she kept saying. “After all, you’re not a murderer out on bail, are you? This is a seven-day wonder, anyhow. There’s something new every week for people to chew over. Already, I’ll take a bet on it, your departure from GAA is old stuff, forgotten.”

  But that was not true. At the supermarket there were no more curious glances and conversations broken off at her approach, but the telephone at home, an instrument that had once rung steadily, was now silent. And she recalled the conversation at Monacco’s dinner table, the caretaker’s light in the vacant house across the lake where had lived that couple about whom “you’d never guess it was possible.”

  Now Robert, seeing her at the window, waved, and she opened the casement.

  “Bruce phoned while you were out,” he called. “He’s cleaning the house out and has some stuff he wants to give us, though I can’t imagine what. Will you go over in the station wagon? He’d bring it himself, but his car’s too small. Can you go now?”

  “Can’t you do it?”

  “I’d rather not get into conversation with him in the circumstances,” Robert pleaded.

  Dismay was her instant reaction. Clothed though she was, she knew that she would feel naked in that room with Bruce, with no third person there to draw attention away from her. And yet, as she closed the casement, another thought came: I have neglected him, and he was, he is, or he and Josie were, our dearest friends. Shameful to have been so engrossed in her own trouble when his loss was so much greater! Yes, on one hand, came the argument: You have to remember that afternoon; how can you face each other, Lynn, tell me how? But on the other hand … So she stood, fearing to go, not wanting to, then in a queer, shamefaced fashion, wanting to.

  Some time ago, before Josie’s death, she had meant to give her a collection of pictures that they had taken together over the years. In the hall chest lay this folder, this record of the radiant hours that people want to save, the picnic on the Fourth of July, the birthdays, the company outing, and the silly hats on New Year’s Eve. Surely Bruce would want this treasure. He would want every scrap and crumb of memory. Yes.

  He was standing in a house half stripped when Lynn arrived. The first thing she noticed was that the living-room sofa was gone. A pair of early American matching chests were all that remained in the room.

  “The new owners bought the best stuff,” Bruce said. “The tall clock under the stairs, the stretcher table—stuff. The rest I gave away to the homeless project. Come, I’ll show you what I thought might look nice in your garden. The new people don’t want it.”

  Through the garden door, which stood open, he pointed to the birdbath that had been bought during his and Josie’s only trip abroad. It was a large marble basin, on the rim of which there stood a pair of marble doves, drinking. Bruce laughed about it.

  “Damn thing cost more to ship home from Italy than I paid for it! But Josie fell in love with the doves. And it is rather nice, I have to admit.”

  Now he added, “Would you like to have it? If you do, I can ask my neighbor’s boy to help me load it into your car.”

  “It’s beautiful, Bruce. But are you sure—?” she began.

  “That I won’t ever use it? Yes, Lynn. Quite sure. I’ve had my time for a home, and my time’s passed.”

  What a pity, she thought, to feel so old at his age. He was beginning to look himself, though; the haggard desperation that had marked his face during these hard months had lessened; the body tries to heal even when the spirit cannot. Rest healed, and so did the sun that was now glinting on his curly, summer-bleached hair. Funny, she thought, I never noticed his lashes are golden.

  They were standing in the doorway. A white butterfly fluttered and poised itself on a clump of dead, still-yellow marigolds.

  “Butterflies,” murmured Lynn, “and it’s almost Thanksgiving.”

  He, apparently not inclined to speak anymore, stood there with his hands in the pockets of his jeans, his glasses thrust up into his curly hair, and eyes that seemed to be seeing, not the quiet surrounding afternoon, but something different, something far away.

  And she, feeling superfluous, made a move to leave, asking hesitantly, “Did you say your neighbor will help carry?”

  “Yes, his son. They’re across the street. I’ll go out the front door and get him.”

  The kitchen cabinets had been almost all cleaned out, Lynn saw as she followed him. The floor was littered, a broom stood in a corner with a new trunk next to it, and a pile of books stood waiting to be packed into stout crates.

  “I’m taking my books and Josie’s, the only things I want to save.”

  “Oh,” Lynn said, “I almost forgot, I’ve got a collection of pictures that you’ll want. I left them in my car. They go all the way back to when you first came to St. Louis. Oh, my head’s a sieve.”

  “You’ve had a few other things to fill your head with,” Bruce said. “How is Robert these days?”

  “Subdued. You wouldn’t know him. Subdued and worried, but nothing like what he was in the first days, thank God. I’ll never forget how he cried on the telephone to Emily. I’d never seen a man show grief that way, although there’s no reason why men shouldn’t. But still, my father, even after my mother’s funeral—” Abruptly, shocked at her own tactlessness in mentioning funerals, she stopped.

  “I take it that you’re staying, Lynn.” And when she nodded, he said quite gently, “I thought you probably would.”

  “He’s changed,” she told him, aware as she spoke it that she had used the same word, changed, both to Emily and to Tom.

  Unlike either of those two he made no protest but looked at her with an expression of utmost sweetness. Leaning against a kitchen counter, he faced her as she leaned against the counter opposite, the two of them standing among the disarray of an abandoned home. Neither one would venture to speak of what surely must have been in each of their minds; she was thinking, as she regarded him, that it had always been a total impossibility for her to have sex with any man but Robert, and yet it had happened with this man.

  “It is your loyalty,” Bruce said suddenly, as if he were thinking aloud. “You feel his pain as if it were your own.”


  “Yes,” she said, surprised that he had expressed her feelings so exactly. “I suppose it makes no sense to you. You can’t understand it. And Josie would be furious with me if she could know.”

  “You’re mistaken. Josie would try to talk you out of it, but she would understand. There are very few things that Josie failed to understand or forgive.”

  He meant what had happened between the two of them, on that day when she lay in such pain that even morphine could not assuage it. That’s what he meant.

  “Oh, she was no saint,” Bruce said. “I don’t want to draw false pictures. She deserves to be remembered as she really was.”

  Indeed, not saintly, with that sharp scrutiny of hers and that peppery tongue! Only good, purely good, to the very last day.

  Bruce made a little gesture with both hands, a movement implying emptiness.

  “They say an amputated limb still aches. So I suppose it doesn’t really do any good to go away, since the ache will only go along with me. Still, I’m relieved to be given this chance, although not at Robert’s expense, it’s true.”

  “When are you going?”

  “Next week. Tuesday.”

  “And how long will you be gone?”

  “Years, I hope. They tell me I’m climbing up the ladder. I don’t know. If I do well in Budapest, there’ll be more places, they say. Moscow, maybe. I don’t care, Lynn. But the communists have left a lot of ecological cleaning up to be done, and I care about that.” He smiled. “For the Emilies and the Annies and the Bobbies of the world, I care.”

  The cat roused itself from where it had been sleeping in an empty box, crossed the room, and rubbed against Lynn’s ankle. Extremely moved by the words and the memories that had just passed, she stooped to stroke its back, and the cat, to acknowledge the soft stroke, raised its small face, its pink mouth, and its astounding periwinkle eyes.

  “You did ask us to take him, didn’t you, Bruce?”

  “If you still want to.”

  “He can come with me now,” she said, wanting a reason not to have to see Bruce again, only to leave quietly now, to say the last good-bye and have it over with. “I’ll take good care of him. Don’t worry.”