Whispers

by Belva Plain

  Now, having made herself say the name, Lynn made herself continue to the end of the horrifying story.

  There was a long silence when she’d finished. Emily wiped her eyes, got up, walked to the window, and stood there looking out into the oncoming night. Lynn’s heart ached at sight of the girl’s bowed head; revelations like these are not what you want your nineteen-year-old daughter to hear.

  “Poor Aunt Jean,” Emily said. “She must have struggled all these years with herself: to tell or not to tell?”

  “She couldn’t possibly have told. There are some things too awful to let loose. It would be like opening a cage and letting a lion out.”

  “The lion got out anyway last night.”

  And again there was a silence; it was as if there were no words for the enormity of events.

  Lamplight made a pale circle on the dark rug, laying soft, contrasting shadows in the far corners of the flowery room, with its well-waxed chests, its photographs and books.

  And almost absently, Emily remarked, “You love this house.”

  “I don’t know. I love the garden.” The roof had caved in. Everything was shattered. “It will be sold.”

  “What’s going to happen to Dad, do you think?”

  “It’s a big world. He’ll find a place, I’m sure,” Lynn said bitterly.

  “I meant—will he go to jail for this?”

  “No. He could, but I don’t want that.”

  “I’m glad. It’s true that he deserves it. Still, I should hate to see it.”

  “I know. I guess we’re just that kind of people.”

  There was a tiredness in the room. They were both infected with it. They were people who had come, breathless after a steep climb, to the top of a hill, only to find another hill ahead.

  “I had to come and see you.” Emily spoke abruptly. “I thought I would lose my mind when I heard last night.”

  “But you have exams this week.”

  “I’ll take a makeup on the one I missed today. Once I’ve seen the doctor, if he says you’re all right, I’ll go back. Harris came with me,” she added.

  Lynn was surprised. “Harris?”

  “He insisted. He wouldn’t let me go alone.”

  Lynn considered that. “I always liked him, you know.”

  “I do know, and he knows it too.”

  “So then, how are things with you both?”

  “The same. But we’re not rushing.”

  “That’s good. Where is he?”

  “Downstairs. He didn’t think he ought to come into the house, but I made him.”

  “What, freezing as it is? Of course he should have come in. I’ll put on some decent clothes and go down.”

  “Downstairs?” Emily repeated.

  “It’s just my face that’s awful, not my legs.”

  “I meant—I thought, knowing how you are about yourself, that you wouldn’t want anyone to see you like this.”

  Go down, put out your hand, and don’t cringe. Don’t hide. That time’s over, and all the burden of pride is over too.

  “No,” Lynn said. “I don’t mind. It’s out in the open now.”

  She had spent so many hours in this chair across from this man Kane, whose ruddy cheeks, gray-dappled hair, and powerful shoulders were framed by a wall of texts and law reviews, that she was able to feel almost, if not entirely, comfortable.

  “It’s funny,” she said, “although I know perfectly well that it’s not true, I still, after all these months, have the feeling that something like this only happens among the miserable, helpless poor. How can it have happened to me? I ask myself. Ridiculous of me, isn’t it?”

  Kane shrugged. “I guess it is, although most people like you would be surprised to learn that twenty percent of the American people, when polled, believe it’s quite all right to strike one’s spouse on occasion. Do you know that every fifteen seconds another woman is being battered by her husband or her boyfriend in this country? There’s nothing new about it either. Have you ever heard of the ‘rule of thumb’? It’s from the English common law, and it says that a man may beat his wife as long as the stick is no thicker than his thumb.”

  “What a fool I was! A weakling and a fool,” she said softly, as if to herself.

  “I keep telling you, stop the blame. It’s easy enough for the world to see you as having been weak, for staying on so long. You saw yourself, though, as strong, keeping the home intact for your children. You wanted a house with two parents in it. In that sense you really were strong, Lynn.”

  Her mind was racing backward into a blur of years, as in an express train, seated in reverse direction, one sees in one swift glimpse after the other where one has just been. At the same time her passive gaze out of the window at her side fell upon a street where a cold, late April rain was sliding across a stationer’s window, still filled with paper eggs and chicks, although Easter was long past. Holiday decorations were inexpressibly depressing when the holiday was over.… Robert had used to dye the eggs and hide them in the garden.

  “And besides, in your case,” Kane was saying, “one could say you had plausible reason for hope. One could, that is, if one hadn’t the benefit of knowledge and experience with these cases.”

  His fingers formed a steeple; the pose was pontifical. Men in authority liked to make it, she thought, observing him.

  “He is an extraordinarily intelligent man, according to Tom Lawrence and to his own counsel. And of course, there was his status. I don’t mean that status was anything you sought, but he was admirable in the public’s eyes, and that had to have had its effect on you.”

  “I guess so. But how unhappy he must have been in his youth!”

  “Yes, but that’s no excuse for making other people—a wife—pay for it. If that’s the explanation at all.”

  “When he lost that promotion, he lost everything. I had an idea that he might even kill himself.”

  “More likely to kill you, it seems.”

  Kane shrugged again. It was an annoying habit, and yet she liked the man. He was sensible and plain spoken.

  “I understand he has the offer of a job with some firm that’s opening an office in Mexico. He’s probably glad enough to go, even with a great deal less money. But he’s lucky, and his counsel knows it. You’ve let him off easily. No criminal charges and no publicity.”

  “I did it for my children. They have a terrible memory of this as it is. Annie’s still having bad dreams, even with therapy.”

  “Well, he’s out of their lives, even without Mexico. His attorney says he’s satisfied about custody—he damn well better be! Your children are all yours. He said he thinks it will be better for them and for himself not to see them.”

  “My daughters don’t want to see him. But it’s a terrible thing for a man to lose his children, so if they should ever want to see him, I would not stand in the way. Right now, though, they refuse.”

  “He knows that. I believe he meant the little boy.”

  The little boy, now surefooted, could run all over the house. The first week or so after Robert’s disappearance he had called “Daddy,” but now whenever Tom came, he seemed to be just as comfortable playing on the floor with him as he had been with Robert.

  “Bobby will not remember,” she said, thinking, This is the second time that Robert has lost a son.

  “So there being no contest, this will move along easily. You’ll be free before you know it, Lynn.” He regarded her with a kindly, almost fatherly smile. “How’s the baking going? That cake you sent for my twins’ birthday was fabulous. They’re still talking about it.”

  “I’ve been doing some. One friend tells another and I get orders. But my mind’s been too disturbed to do much of anything.”

  “And no wonder. Is there anything else you want to ask today?”

  “Yes, I have something.” And from the floor beside her chair she picked up a cardboard box and, handing it over to Kane, said only, “Will you please give this to Robert’s lawyer for m
e? It belongs to Robert.”

  “What is it? I need to know.”

  “Just jewelry, some things I no longer want.”

  “All your jewelry?”

  “All.”

  “Come, Lynn. That’s foolish. Let me look at it.”

  “Open it if you want.”

  Each in its original velvet container lay the diamond wedding band, the solitaire, pearls, bracelets, and earrings, twenty years’ worth of shimmering accumulation.

  “Heavy. The best,” he said as he spread the array on the desk.

  “Robert never bought anything cheap,” she said dryly.

  Kane shook his head. “I don’t understand you. What are you doing? These things are yours.”

  “They were mine, but I don’t want them anymore.”

  “Don’t be foolish. You’ll have a pittance when this is over, you know that. There must be over one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of stuff here.”

  “I couldn’t wear any of it. Every time I’d touch them, I’d think”—and she put her finger on the bracelet, on the smooth, deep-toned cabochons in a row, emerald, ruby, sapphire, emerald, ruby—“I’d remember too much.”

  She would remember the diamond band on the white wedding day: flowers, taffeta, and racing clouds. She would remember the earrings bought that week when Bobby was conceived, when the night wind rustled the palms. She would remember the bench by the lake in Chicago, the cold windy night, the despair, and the crazy woman laughing. And she withdrew her finger as if the jewels were poisonous.

  “Then sell the lot and keep the cash. You won’t have anything to remind you of anything.” Kane laughed. “Cash is neutral.”

  “No. I want to make a clear, clean break. Just get all you can for my children from the man who fathered them. For myself, I will take nothing except the house, or what’s left of the sale after the mortgage is paid off.”

  Kane shook his head again. “Do you know you’re incredible? I can’t decide what to think about you.”

  He looked at Lynn so long and hard that she wondered whether he was seeing her with admiration or writing her off as some sort of pitiable eccentric.

  “I’ve never had a client like you. But then, Tom Lawrence told me you were unique.”

  She smiled. “Tom exaggerates.”

  “He’s always concerned about you.”

  “He has been a true friend in all this trouble. To me and to my children. Annie adores him.”

  Annie asks: “Will you ever marry Tom, Mom? I hope you do.”

  And Emily, even Eudora, too, put on such curious expressions whenever his name is mentioned, just as Kane is doing now.

  Well, it’s wonderful to be wanted, she thought, and I daresay I can have him when I’m free, but right at the moment I am not ready.

  “By the way, his lawyer mentioned something about Robert’s books. He’ll want to come for them. I’ll let you know when. Perhaps you can have them packed so he can remove them quickly. And you should certainly have someone in the house when he comes.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “The house should sell fast. Even in this market the best places are snapped up. It’s a pity that the mortgage company is going to get most of it.”

  “A pity and a surprise to me.”

  She stood up and gave him her hand. When he took it, he held it a moment, saying kindly, “You’ve had more surprises in your young life than you bargained for, I’m afraid.”

  “Yes. And the mystery is the most surprising.”

  “The mystery?”

  “That when all is said and done, all the explanations asked for and given, I still don’t really know why.”

  “Why what, Lynn?”

  “Why I loved him so with all my heart.”

  “You need to get married again,” said Eudora some months later. “You’re the marrying kind.”

  “Do you think so?”

  Eudora had gradually become a mother hen, free with advice and worries. She had taken to sleeping several nights a week at the house, ostensibly because she “missed Bobby,” but more probably because she feared that somehow, regardless of new locks and burglar alarms, Robert might find his way in.

  It was natural, then, that a pair of women in a house without a man should develop the kind of intimacy that enabled Eudora to say what she had just said.

  “I was thinking maybe you shouldn’t sign any papers to sell the house just yet.” She spoke with her back turned, while polishing Lynn’s best copper-bottomed pots. “You might want to stay here, you never know,” she said, and discreetly said no more.

  Of course they all knew what she meant. Tom Lawrence was in all their minds, as in Lynn’s own. The two girls, Annie and Emily, home for Thanksgiving, were having lunch at the kitchen table and giving each other a sparkling, mischievous look.

  “I shall never stay in this house,” Lynn said firmly. She was breaking eggs for a sponge cake. “Eight, nine—no, eight. You’ve made me lose count. I have only stayed here this long because I’ve been instructed to until everything becomes final.”

  Divorce was a cold, ugly word, and she avoided it. Everything said it all just as well.

  “And when will that be?” asked Emily.

  “Soon.”

  “Soon,” shouted Bobby, who was pushing a wooden automobile under people’s feet.

  “He repeats everything. And he knows dozens of words. Do you suppose he always understands what he says?” asked Annie.

  Eudora’s reply came promptly. “He certainly does. That’s one smart little boy. One smart little boy, aren’t you, sweetheart?”

  “He’s crazy about Tom,” Annie informed Emily. “You haven’t seen them together as much as I have. Tom spends half an hour on the floor with him every time he comes to take Mom out.”

  They were pressing her for information, and Lynn knew it. What they wanted was some certainty: along with the relief of knowing that the shock, the plural shocks, they had undergone were never to be repeated, they were feeling a certain looseness. There was neither anchor nor destination; the family was merely floating. So they were really asking her what was to come next, and she was not prepared to answer the question.

  “I’m trying out a new recipe with the leftover turkey,” she told them instead. “It’s a sauce with black Mission figs. Sounds good, doesn’t it?”

  “Why, what’s the celebration?” Emily wanted to know. “Who’s coming?”

  “Nobody but us. It’s celebration enough to have you home. Do you want to invite Harris for leftover turkey?”

  “Oh, thanks, Mom, I’ll call him.”

  “Is Tom coming?”

  “No, but he’s coming tomorrow afternoon. It’s the day your father will be here for his books.”

  In spite of herself Lynn felt a tremor of fear. She had not seen Robert since that horrendous night. And dread mounted now even as she stood stirring the yellow dough. Still, Tom would be there.…

  “Eudora’s going to put Bobby in his room while he’s here, and I’d like you two to be out of the house. Go visit friends, or maybe there’s a decent movie someplace.”

  Emily said cheerfully, “Okay.” She got up and laid her cheek against Lynn’s. “I know you worry about us. But we’re both, Annie and I, pretty solid by now. As solid as we’ll ever be, I guess, and that seems to be good enough.”

  “Thank you, darling, thank you.”

  As solid as they’d ever be. No, one never “got over” what they had seen. It would be with them for the rest of their lives, and they would just have to work around it. That was what they were doing; now in her second year, Emily had a 3.6 average, and Annie—well, Annie was trudging along in her fashion.

  Alone in the kitchen a short while later, Lynn’s thoughts found a center: Tom. No man could be more attentive. All through this troubled time he had been there, solid as a rock, for her to lean on. And as the trouble began, ever so gradually, to recede into the past, during these last few months especially, she had begun to fee
l again the stirrings of pure fun. They had danced and laughed and drunk champagne to commemorate the day when her last scar faded away. He had brought her again the brightness that had surrounded him on the fateful night of the dinner in his house.

  He never made love to her, and that puzzled her, for how many times since they met had he not told her that she was lovely? It was not that she wanted him to attempt it; indeed, she would have stopped him, for something had died in her. Perhaps it was that that he sensed, and he was simply being patient. But it troubled her to think that she might never again be the passionate woman she once had been.

  And Robert had always said, “Funny, but to look at you, no man would guess.”

  Yet she felt sure that ultimately Tom would ask her what the girls were hoping he would ask. Sometimes it seemed that when that moment came, she would have to say no to him, for what was lacking, she supposed, was the painful, wonderful yearning that says: You and no other for the rest of our lives. Yet, why not he, with his intelligence, his humor, charm, and kindness? A woman ought to have a man, a good man. It was a terrible thing to be alone, to face long years going downhill alone.

  She would have to make up her mind, and soon. For only this morning on the telephone, he had answered her invitation to stay for lunch after Robert’s coming: “Yes, I’ll stay. I’ve been wanting to have a talk with you.”

  The day was bright. She had carefully considered what she was to wear, dark red if it should be raining, or else, in the sun, the softest blue that she owned. When she was finished dressing, she examined herself from the pale tips of her matching blue flats to the pale cap of her shining hair, and was more pleased with herself than she had been in a long time. Simplicity could be alluring without any jewels at all.

  Eudora appraised her when she came downstairs.

  “You look beautiful, Mrs. Ferguson.” And she nodded as if there was complicity between the two women.

  Eudora thought the dress was for Tom’s benefit, which it was, but in a queer way, it was also to be for Robert’s; let him see, especially with Tom in the house, that Lynn was still desired and desirable.