Legacy of Silence

by Belva Plain

  Now Jane was scrutinizing first one, then the other, as she had done at the table last night. You wouldn’t think that a child’s eyes could reveal such canny appraisal. She is figuring out, Eve thought, what is going on between Tom and me.

  And Jane said, “Tom doesn’t like me.”

  “Of course he likes you.”

  “He doesn’t, Eve.”

  “Well, let’s not argue about it this minute. You’re still in your pajamas. Go on and dress yourself. I’ll come in if you need help.”

  “May I wear my party dress again?”

  “Yes, if you want to.”

  Tom was slashing red paint all over his twilit ocean. She followed him outdoors to the trash can, where he tossed the picture away. The lid clanged shut.

  “I’m sorry,” she said desperately, “I really am, Tom.”

  “She’s some little treasure. A joy to have around.”

  “She really is, Tom. She’s fundamentally very good. You should hear Mrs. Dodge talk about her. She just has her moments and this was a bad one.”

  “Eve, what are you going to do with her? You’ve got to get rid of her.”

  “Get rid of her? You can’t mean that.”

  “I most certainly can, and for your own good.”

  “My good? What about hers? She never knew her mother and has lost her father. She can’t understand death, she feels that Daddy has simply abandoned her, and now you want me to abandon her, too?”

  “I said you have to think of your own good sometimes.”

  “I don’t know you when you talk like this, Tom.”

  How was it possible after last night that they could be standing here face-to-face like adversaries? Or like two dogs, she thought roughly, preparing to fight.

  “You’d think,” Tom said, “that I was telling you to leave her on somebody’s doorstep. What I meant is, find a top-notch boarding school for her. I know they’re expensive, but I can pay. I’ll be glad to. And you and I will go off to our dig as we planned.”

  “Tom, let’s get this straight. I’m not going to go out of the country and leave a six-year-old among strangers, even if there is such a thing as a boarding school for children her age, which I doubt.”

  “So that’s it. You weren’t intending to go with me at all. After two years’ worth of plans, you were simply going to walk away.”

  “I intended to be with you here, to get a job. I never intended to ‘walk away’!”

  “That’s not how I understood it.”

  “The trouble is that neither of us thought to question the other. We’re both at fault. We just assumed.” She was protesting, pleading and trembling. Then she threw pride away. “You never said a word about marrying me, and being a family.”

  “I thought you took it for granted.” He picked up a handful of pebbles from a potted cactus and threw them, one by one, over the fence. “The truth is, Eve, this baby business has thrown us all off course. She’s taken up all your time, or almost all of it.”

  That was true. Or almost true. Yet she had to defend herself. “What would you have had me do? Thousands of mothers have to fit their jobs into child care or the other way around.”

  Tom answered quietly, “But you are not her mother.”

  “I am aware of that,” Eve said, tasting her own bitterness on her tongue.

  When he stooped for another handful of pebbles, her patience broke. “Will you please stop doing that?” she cried. “You’re driving me crazy.”

  “I’m not the one who’s driving you crazy, Eve. It’s this responsibility, for which you are entirely unprepared.”

  That, too, was true. And she thought for the first time how different it would be now if she had inherited her fair share of the estate: Jane would stay on in their home with a first-class nurse, and Lore there after work every day to oversee things. Then she herself would go with Tom, and they would make long, frequent visits to Ivy. How different it would be.…

  “Where are we?” Tom asked, shattering all the “if’s.”

  “Eve,” Jane called, “the button came off my party shoe.”

  “Where are we?” Tom repeated.

  “I know where I am. I’m in a state of exhaustion. Maybe you should drive us home. Then you can have the rest of Sunday in peace.”

  LIFE had been turned inside out, and she knew no way to right it. She felt completely alone. Women of her age, here on this campus, did not have enough experience to advise her; each one’s opinion would be based only upon her particular temperament. Several times she went to the telephone, thinking that Lore might be able to give counsel, but each time she withdrew her hand. For Lore knew nothing about loving a man. She was virginal. Confide in Mrs. Dodge, maybe? You could tell that she was a sensible woman. But no, in the last analysis, you had to make your own decisions.

  Haven’t you already made it? she asked herself then. The rest is now up to Tom. She stood above the bed where, in the night-light’s pale glow, Jane slept with Peter at her feet. The whole of Jane, body, cheeks, and small, plump hands, was round, soft, and so very, very small. Inside the curly-haired head dug deeply into the pillow, a person was forming, a person sensitive, vigorous, and smart. This was Caroline’s child.…

  A week passed without word from Tom. She had one more examination to take. In two weeks after that, the Dodges would reclaim their room. Then what?

  Late one afternoon when she returned to the house, Mrs. Dodge had a message for her. “Your friend Tom phoned.”

  Curious, as she had been from the start, she was waiting for a reaction. When it did not come, she gave the message. “He wants to meet you at five on the campus today. Under the tree. He said you’ll know where.”

  Five minutes before the hour, Eve sat down under the tree. The walls and lawns, in the hiatus between the end of the summer session and the start of the next, were almost deserted. This stillness created a sense of departure. Her diploma was in the mail. The college years were finished, their finality emphasized by the realization that she had no address for the delivery of the diploma. It was to be mailed to Lore’s apartment.

  A breeze came up, clattering through the palms. The afternoon was cool and blue. Blue. Memories take such funny turns and have such funny quirks! At the beach one day they had argued over the blues in sky and water, he naming one and she another: cerulean, or turquoise, or lapis lazuli, down the long list. How could those days, that laughter, ever come to an end?

  She closed her eyes. When I open them, I will see him striding down the path around the back of the library. “We’ll postpone Guatemala,” he will say. “We will work here together, and when Jane is of a proper age, we will find a plan that is good for us all. Don’t cry, Eve,” he will say, because there is no doubt that I will cry. They will be my thankful tears.

  “Eve,” he said. No familiar humor touched his lips or his eyes. “What are we going to do?”

  “I was waiting for you to tell me.”

  “Well, I do have an idea, although I suppose you won’t like it. We can take her to Guatemala.”

  He knew very well that she “wouldn’t like it.” He hadn’t even spoken Jane’s name.

  He was standing there looking down. Their positions rendered them unequal, making Eve a supplicant. She got up to stand straight and almost as tall as he.

  “A little child on a dig in the jungle, Tom? Is that the best you can do?”

  “I took a chance with the idea. I couldn’t think of anything else.”

  “Not of postponement?”

  “I’ve already waited around here for an extra year until your graduation.”

  There was a physical pain in her chest. Broken heart, she thought, is an accurate description. And she did not reply, but looked at him.

  He was bracing himself by a hand on the tree trunk. “I told you that first day, it’s been a dream of my life. People unearthing ancient civilizations, building from clues, a shard, a scrap of carving, a piece of a calendar, a reading of the stars—I told you.”


  “I wanted to do it with you, Tom.”

  “Your family!” he cried out. “You’ve been strangled by them. The monstrous father who haunts you, and compassion for your mother, and now this obligation you feel for her child—an obligation that isn’t yours—”

  Now, suddenly, her anguish turned to wrath. “If it isn’t mine,” she said passionately, “then tell me whose it is.”

  “Oh, Eve, I don’t know. We’ve come to an impasse.”

  “An irresistible force meeting an immovable object. I always thought love was the irresistible force.”

  “I love you, Eve, you know I do, but—”

  “But not enough,” she said.

  “Don’t say that, Eve.”

  “I suppose I should understand your need and admire it. And I do admire it. You have a scholar’s mind, and you have to go where it leads you.”

  The chapel clock chimed the half hour. Time, as usual, flowed while two human beings wrestled with future time and how to spend it. Eve felt that she could not endure another minute here, looking at the so-beloved face. And yet, the wrath was still inside her, that and the pity.

  “Pity,” she said. “I pity us both.”

  He put out his arms, but she moved away. Get it over with. Do what has to be done. And she ran. And he did not follow.

  FIFTEEN

  The plane swerved over the Pacific, followed the coast for a while, and turned eastward. A California idyll was over. There was no place else to go but home to Ivy.

  “Come back,” Lore had said. “We’ll work out a solution. There’s always a solution.”

  So here they were, Jane in the window seat craning her head to see everything, to exclaim, and as always, to ask questions.

  “Who lives down there? Where is that boat going? Have they got candy on this plane?” She worried about Peter. “Are you sure they won’t lose him?”

  “No, no, he’s safe in his crate, probably asleep. We’ll get him back when we land.”

  She worried about Vicky. “Are we going to see Vicky again? I don’t want to.”

  No, they were not going to see Vicky again. I was a fool, Eve thought. I should have fought for what was mine. I depended instead upon Tom, not on his money, but on him, which is very different. And she thought of her mother, who had also depended on someone, a man who failed her by a desertion far more terrible than Tom’s. But when you catch your fingers in a closing door, it doesn’t help to be reminded of another person’s cancer.

  For the long flight, she had equipped both Jane and herself with a coloring book and crayons, a doll to be dressed and undressed, the Babar books, a newspaper, and a paperback novel. Between these, lunch, and perhaps a few naps, the time would pass. She craved a nap. Occasionally as her spirits ebbed, she wished she might sleep forever.

  “If I close my eyes, will you let me sleep, Jane? Not talk and wake me up?”

  “Yes, because I think you’re sad,” Jane said.

  “I’m not sad,” Eve protested. “What makes you say I am?”

  “I saw you cry yesterday.”

  “I told you I had a cold.”

  Jane shook her head. “No,” she said solemnly, “I saw you cry.”

  The plane rose through clouds that darkened as it flew toward the declining day. Dirty gray, like watered milk, they measured off the miles from California. She wondered what Tom was doing, whether he was already packing for his departure to the jungle, whether he felt the bewildered anger toward her that she felt toward him. Or was as maimed as she.

  She slept a little, and watched Jane sleep with the new doll clasped to her breast. They landed, checked Peter’s whereabouts, and waited for the connecting flight. They landed again and found a taxicab to take them to Ivy. The ride seemed to last as long as the flight from California. Over the highways, the underpasses and overpasses, the old cab rattled. Past shopping centers and bowling alleys it sped; past red neon signs and billboards with depressing exhortations to eat, or smoke, or wear, all for your welfare, it sped on.

  At last came Ivy. Here was the high school where she had sat, here was the war memorial, noble and stately, and here was Lore’s apartment.

  “Come, darling, Lore is waiting for us. Hold Peter’s leash while I pay for the ride.”

  Beaten, she thought. I’m not going to let myself feel beaten if I can help it, but the fact is, I am.

  LORE had always done things with style. The cloth that covered the card table had a border of her typical hand embroidery. The pottery dishes were a copy of a famous French bone china. A little pot of supermarket daisies stood at the center of the table.

  “Why not?” was Lore’s cheerful response to Eve’s compliment. “Why not dine as nicely as any millionaire?”

  She had prepared a chicken and baked a cake, thus filling her little rooms with the savors of roasting, mingled with a trace of chocolate.

  “I’m thinking of making a move,” she said. “This place is so cramped that I had to put a lot of my things in storage, my bedroom furniture that your mother gave me and all my books, a lot of stuff.”

  Eve understood that to avoid the painful fact of this unexpected return, Lore was making conversation.

  “You remember the Wilmott estate? They’re breaking it up for garden apartments, good-sized rooms and not too expensive, I hear. So I’m looking into it.”

  Mechanically, Eve responded, “That will be lovely.”

  “Oh, there’ve been changes in this town since you went away to school. It seems as if they couldn’t have happened in only four years, but everything’s moving so fast these days. Ivy’s almost become a bedroom town. Commuters and plenty of money. Take a walk, and you’ll see what I mean. Boutiques, fancy foods, fancy clothes. Yes, a big change.”

  “Why are we eating in your house, Lore?” asked Jane. “Why don’t we go home to our house?”

  The two women looked at each other as if doubtful about how to answer.

  “We can’t. It isn’t our house now,” Eve replied gently.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, because—because we went to California.”

  For a moment Jane considered that, and then made a demand. “I want to see the lake, Eve. I do. Remember, we took Peter, and sometimes Lore, but not Vicky.” Emphatically she shook her head and frowned. “Never Vicky. And afterward we had a treat.”

  Eve remembered, but did not say that as a little girl, she, too, had walked along the lake. She was terribly tired, with the tiredness of a bruised heart and a bewildered brain. She was walking through a wilderness without a map.

  She had thought: If he ever leaves me, I’ll want to die. But dying is not so easy.

  Jane, with a mouth full of icing, announced, “I know my ABC’s, I’ll say them for you if you want to hear, Lore.”

  You’ve got to get rid of her, he had said.

  Lore had a loving smile. “I certainly do want to hear. But first, will you feed Peter? I forgot to buy dog biscuits, so you can give him the chicken scraps. Careful, no bones. He’ll choke on bones. And after that, you can turn on the television by my bed.”

  “So how are you?” she asked when Jane had left them.

  “As you see. I kept nothing out when I telephoned you. The call cost thirty dollars. I was a wreck.”

  “Men,” Lore said contemptuously. “Men.”

  “Not all of them. Think of Dad.”

  “Yes, Joel was a good man. He was different. But even he—”

  Having talked all around the core subject, they had now reached it. “Things have happened here overnight. As I told you, Vicky sold the house before a week was out. Would you believe I heard she made a fortune on it? Almost double what Joel and Caroline paid. The new people are painting it mustard yellow, and the Schulmans are having a fit because they have to look at it.”

  “Mom’s pretty house. She was so happy there. I remember when Jane was born and they had the party on the lawn. And my party on my sixteenth birthday.”

  “Well, wha
t can you do? It’s life, Eve. You win and you lose.”

  “We made a mistake, both of us. We gave in too easily.”

  “You could have lost just as easily. But that’s neither here nor there, now. The big news is that the McMulligan chain has bought the Orangeries, all six of them. And Vicky has moved to Arizona with Gertrude. It’s amazing how those two get along. But of course, since Vicky has all the money, she has the upper hand, and Gertrude is as meek as a lamb. People are not always what they seem to be, are they?”

  The question required no answer. Tonight she and Jane were to sleep in a motel, where Lore had made a reservation. The Schulmans, kind as always, had offered their guest room, but Eve had told Lore to refuse. As a homeless guest, she would have felt poignant defeat; in the motel she would still feel independent.

  “Just please keep the dog for a while, Lore,” she said now. “Jane can go along while I start my job hunt. I’ll take anything that pays enough to feed us in a couple of rooms someplace.”

  “Where do you plan to start?”

  “I thought I’d go first to an agency and find out what my possibilities are. I have no skills, after all. A college degree with a string of good marks doesn’t prepare you to do anything.”

  “What about teaching languages? You’re as fluent in French and German as any French or German native.”

  “I have no teacher training, no license, and no time now to get one.”

  “You don’t need one in a private school. Now, I’ll tell you something.” Lore’s face crinkled into a sly smile. “I think I may have something for you. I had a patient last week, emergency appendix, a teacher at the Dale Forest School, out in Dale. We got talking for a couple of minutes, and I suddenly got the idea of finding how the land lies in private schools. They don’t have any language program there yet. The place is so new that they’re still organizing and expanding. A school like that is bound to do well. A lot of these new people in town have ideas about education.”

  “Snobbish?”

  “Not necessarily. Would you be interested?”

  “Lore, you mean well, but I don’t stand a chance.”

  “Don’t say that. I asked this teacher what she thought, and she advised you to apply. They’ve got a new head, a master this time. Headmaster. Go try. What have you got to lose?”