“I’m sick and tired,” Congressman Stowe was saying, “of people just assuming the worst about Germany. What gives you the idea that Hitler wants to meddle in Hungarian affairs? People just have to realize that Herr Hitler is a transitional figure, a figurehead, nothing more, a leader to help reorganize Germany and bring about a decent balance of power in Europe. Strikes me as a hell of a lot better idea than letting Mr. Stalin organize things over there.” Stowe leaned forward, reached for his drink on the little inlaid Oriental table next to his chair. It was just an inch out of reach and his fingers waved like underwater plants as he strained to touch it.
Then he gave up and sank back into his chair. To Caitlin, he looked like an invalid, defeated, gray. He had a reputation as a ladies’ man and she wondered how that could be.
She had an image of him striking a woman with a cane.
“Perhaps Hitler will go after Hungary to get his hands on this miracle pen,” Fulton suggested. Mary laughed at his joke and he reached over the chair and touched her on the collarbone.
“I don’t give a hang for politics,” said Roscoe. He made an apologetic little bow in Stowe’s direction.
Stowe nodded back, as if to say, That’s perfectly all right, I’ll look after those things.
“But I just don’t want Biro going underground like a weasel, that’s all,” said Roscoe. He sounded genuinely worried.
“Is your Gypsy a Communist as well?” Mary asked. “Oh, Roscoe, you’re just much too trusting. All that California sunshine has made you … oh, I don’t know.”
“He’s not a Communist.”
“A Jew then?” suggested Fulton Fleming.
Jamey put his hand over Caitlin’s. When she looked at him, he winked.
“No, no, no, and no,” said Roscoe. When he smiled he looked serene. “He’s no Red and he’s no Jew. But I think the Nazis will be keeping an eye out for Mr. Biro because, if what I hear is correct, he happens to be as queer as Dick’s hatband.”
Caitlin felt her own heart thumping. She was a spirit, a spy. One of those chambermaids before whom the masters went naked.
She turned to whisper something to Jamey and saw he was no longer beside her. Had she been in a trance?
Without him, she had no legitimacy in that room. A sudden hollowness within, like a dream of falling.
She turned and saw him stalking out of the library into what had once been the conservatory but was now merely a room, with sofas, a globe, a hutch filled with flowery china. Jamey gestured for her to follow.
“Roscoe, you’re spilling,” Mary was saying, as Caitlin got up and slipped out of the room.
“Are you crazy, leaving me there?” Caitlin said, grabbing Jamey’s wrist.
It was dark in that shabby, infrequently used room. The others, sitting in the library, were bathed in the gold the lamps breathed out through their umber-fringed shades.
Jamey was wearing a ring, from college. It was gold with a dark sapphire in the center.
His mother had already spoken to her mother. Casually, drifting through while Annie plumped the cushions on that sofa right over there, the one with the green-and-silver stripes. “Jamey’s so restless,” she had said. “I only hope he doesn’t get anyone else in trouble because of it.” Annie was no fool: she knew it was a warning; she knew who was meant by anyone else.
“Let’s go upstairs,” Jamey said. “I want to show you my room.”
“I’ve already seen your room.”
“But not with me in it.”
He led her through the room that used to be the conservatory, through the dining room, then the pantry, and up the pantry staircase. Caitlin was no stranger to this part of the house. She had often helped Annie clean, and two summers ago when Mary’s sister came to the house, Caitlin was hired to look after the sister’s baby, an ill-tempered child who scowled at Caitlin like an old woman who thinks you are trying to cheat her. Little Joan was fat, her stomach gurgled with milk and graham crackers and red grapes, which she ate seeds and all. When Caitlin lifted the child’s legs to change a diaper, the pressure against the hard pink belly caused the baby to break wind.
He led her down the hall, past the bedrooms. Each door was closed, as if the place were a hotel. Their way was lit by small wall sconces, with bulbs the size of pigeons’ eggs and little heat-stained lamp shades tilted like hats on drunken playboys.
“Your parents know we’re up here,” Caitlin said.
He clutched his chest as if he were having a heart attack and then smiled, held out his hand for her.
She took it. She felt she deserved a little fun.
The walls owed her that much, and the floor, the closed doors, the whole house.
Jamey’s room was small, rather cold. There was a Princeton pennant on the wall, a shelf of trophies he’d won years ago at horse shows—before his horse threw and almost crushed him. There were scuff marks along the woodwork, left by tantrums, a long time ago. How long has it been since this room’s been painted? Caitlin wondered.
His bed was stern, cast iron, with a black blanket so coarse it made Caitlin shudder to look at it.
Jamey closed the door. He leaned against it and looked at her.
She looked right back at him. He didn’t frighten her. If he wanted to make her nervous he should have kept her down in the library, but in this room she was his equal.
He strolled past her and sat on the bed. He reached behind and took out a bottle of Old Grand-dad bourbon.
“Do you know the story of this room?” Jamey asked. He put the bottle on his lap and tapped his fingernails on it. “Charles Dickens stayed in this room,” Jamey said. He unscrewed the cap of the Old Grand-dad, took a swallow, and held the bottle out to Caitlin.
Caitlin felt something turn in her stomach. That Dickens had slept in this room seemed both wondrous and profoundly unjust—how could a man whose work exposed heartlessness and hypocrisy have spent the night beneath any Fleming’s roof? She tilted the bourbon bottle back and let the warm liquor touch her lips, searing them, and then she let a trickle of it into her mouth.
“My father read Great Expectations to me when I was nine years old,” she said. She was about to hand the bottle to Jamey but she stopped herself and took another swallow, this time letting it go into her with more abandon.
Jamey smiled. He had a look on him: a hunter watching a doe nose up to the salt lick.
He’s got another guess coming, thought Caitlin.
“Next to Tolstoy, Charles Dickens is my favorite writer in the world,” she said to Jamey.
“He was on some kind of lecture tour,” Jamey said, “and making piles of money. And when he came to this area he was my great-grandfather’s guest and he was put right in this room. He stole a soup spoon, sterling silver, made by Paul Revere. God, I hate the English. I hope Hitler eats them alive. ”
“How long did he stay here?”
“The people around here practically think they are British, Oxford, Eton, all that crap.” Jamey took a long drink and passed the bottle to Caitlin, who was still standing in the middle of the room. Jamey’s eyes sparked feverishly.
He was on his way to an adventure and Caitlin felt he was leaving her behind. She took the bottle from him.
“I think I’ve read everything Dickens ever wrote,” Caitlin said.
“I never read anything,” said Jamey. “Part of that one about the beggar boy, I think.”
“Oliver Twist?”
“I guess.” He patted the bed for her to sit down.
Caitlin felt a rush of emotion go through her as sudden as a spill. He seemed so spoiled, so distant from any sense of effort, or responsibility.
It was not like being with a real person. He was someone in a story, someone you made up.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” she said, sitting next to him. “You go to college, with every advantage. You should at least read. I just finished War and Peace. It explains everything.”
“What I’d really like to do is spend
all our money.”
“Are you trying to sound crazy just to be interesting?”
“We’re running out of it anyhow. My grandfather knew about business but my father doesn’t and I don’t even care about it. One day we’ll be poor anyhow, so I figure spending the money fast would be like shooting a wounded horse. To take it out of its misery.”
“I would have given anything to go to college.”
“You wouldn’t have liked it, Catey.”
“How do you know?”
“You’ve been living here all your life. I guess I know you pretty well.”
“I don’t think you know me one slight little bit, Jamey.”
“Oh yeah? Then how come I feel the way about you that I do?”
“And how is that?”
He put his arm quickly around her and pressed a hard, ardent kiss onto her lips. His weight tipped her over and she stopped herself from falling by putting her hand down behind her, which thrust her breasts into his embrace.
He moved back to look at her face. Are you going to do anything about this? his eyes asked.
“I think your parents must be getting curious,” Caitlin said.
“My parents are getting drunk.”
“So are we,” said Caitlin. Jamey reached for the bottle. It had rolled off the bed but she hadn’t heard it when it hit the floor.
“You must hate my parents,” said Jamey. “I mean really despise them.” He put his arm around her shoulders and let it drape, touching her breast.
“Not as much as you do, Jamey,” she said, removing his hand. She did it the way girls did, holding him around the thumb and lifting his hand as if it were a drowned rat.
He flushed red and she felt a jolt of compassion. He was so nervous, so undefended. He put the bottle to his lips and drank enough to half fill a highball glass. She was impressed.
Then the bottle was in her hand again, and when she drank from it she could feel drunkenness coming on like the sound of a parade getting closer.
“Caitlin,” he said, his voice a ball of knots. He moved closer to her, lowered his head onto her shoulder.
And she did feel a terrible urge to cradle him. There was a pulse of desire in her that had been beating for a long while, but the desire was without a subject, or an object, or even a target. It simply was, like signals from a radio tower in a world without radios.
“I watched you all our lives,” he murmured.
“Don’t make more of it than it is, Jamey,” said Caitlin. “You don’t have to. You’re a college man home for the holidays and this is what you guys do.”
“That’s not true, Catey. All your life, watching you. In the quarry. You swam in your underwear. I saw your breasts beneath your undershirt. I … I saw everything. I’ll never forget.”
He gestured up for her, waving his fingers like Congressman Stowe reaching for his drink.
She couldn’t decide if she was drunk or if she was about to use drunkenness as an excuse for whatever happened next.
She did not feel that Jamey was a good man. He was handsome, however. His cheeks were shaved and smooth; he was wearing cologne that smelled of lemon and spice. The hand that reached longingly for her was softer than her own.
She placed the nearly empty bottle on the floor and said, “Tonight’s your lucky night.”
She lay next to him and their bodies trembled in a petit mal of desire. Something like a sob broke in his throat and Caitlin felt as if the bed were swallowing her. She opened her eyes; the ceiling looked one hundred feet high.
Jamey rolled over and draped a leg over Caitlin, rising on his elbow to look down at her. He placed his lips upon hers. The kiss was dry, formal. He seemed to be going back to the very beginning, like a piano student who flubs a note and then goes back to the first measure.
Eventually, his kiss softened into something tender and expressive that sent roots of sensation deep into Caitlin. But then his hand fondled her breast and the root of feeling died and began to recede.
“We’re not alone, Jamey,” she said, but as soon as the words were out they seemed to make no difference.
He rolled onto his back and she missed him immediately—or at least the warmth of his body. Her own skin was burning and without him near the air felt too cold.
She slid next to him and kissed his forehead, the tip of his . nose, and then his mouth. Her kiss was moist and enormous and she felt it scaring him—but leading him forward, too.
“Caitlin,” he said. “Maybe we should—” He pointed to the door.
“Shhh,” she said. She returned to him as if to a meal after a disturbance—still hungry but aware that the plate had cooled.
She pinned his shoulders and kissed him again and again and again. She pressed herself against him.
He wrapped his arms around her and turned her over. It was meant to be masterful but it embarrassed Caitlin in some obscure way. She did not want him to be on top, but she knew it must be like that. He kissed her with a passion that trailed off into something near violence. And then, because he must, he ground his genitals into her.
She felt he had done this many times in this very bed, alone.
She opened herself to him out of a combination of wanting to find a more comfortable position and wanting to help him. He was thrashing around but then his motion became deliberate, solemn, and he began making a low, stunned animal noise that seemed so tender and universal. She was half trying to listen for footsteps, but all she could hear was his breath and the sounds of their clothes, and the rustle of horsehair in the mattress, the creak of the wooden floor as the old bed shuddered upon it.
A memory began to surface in her, rising from some great liquid darkness within, but then it disappeared and all that was left was Jamey, his weight, his smell, his hardness, and the movements of his body.
He came. For all the thrashing that preceded it, the completion of his desperate dance was rather secretive. The bottle had been knocked over, and it rolled across the uneven floor toward the bookshelf and then rolled back. She felt his spasms. She imagined an icicle breaking off an eave and dropping into the snow.
She hadn’t bothered to lift her skirt but she felt naked for a moment. He was looking down at her with exhausted, guilty eyes.
“Caitlin.” He held her in his gaze. It seemed as if someone had once told him he was supposed to. Then he flopped onto his back with an enormous sigh.
She looked at him. He was breathing rapidly; he seemed infinitely happier and more satisfied than she. And so she leaned over and kissed him on the mouth, as if brocaded within him was the secret of his happiness. He made a low hum of sleepy assent, touched the side of her face. He may have thought she was congratulating him on a job well done.
But then she climbed on top of him and grabbed the hem of her skirt, hiking it up as if to ford a stream. She positioned herself, as if it were her God-given right, as if this need and the power it magically bestowed were as familiar as the feel of her own skin. She opened herself, not to Jamey, altogether, but to the heat she sought, to that gnarl of sensation that buzzed within.
Instinct told her to rise higher and change the angle of contact, and the ticking of her suddenly powerful sexual metronome measured the duration of every downward thrust. This pleasure, this sexual justice was finally a thing she could ask for, a thing she could claim. And now her eyes were open and Jamey was staring up at her. He gripped her hips and pressed down to increase the power and specificity of her movements and part of him seemed to be trying to stop her.
Something within her felt as if it were growing immense and falling into pieces at the same time. The drunkenness burned off her, flambeaued by lust. She made a high keening cry of surprise and abandon and all at once her back and her legs were cold and her face was scalding. Her arms went weak and she began to collapse on Jamey’s chest, but she held herself up above him, because she wanted to move some more.
“OK, OK,”Jamey said.
“Sorry,” she said, lowering herself
onto him. She took comfort in the rise and fall of his breaths.
“God,” he said.
“What?”
“I mean. You know. It’s like a whore.”
“I’m like?”
And it was then, before he could answer, though probably he would have ended up denying that was what he had meant, it was then that the door to his room flew open and the space it had once filled was occupied by the looming figure of Fulton Fleming. He stood with his arms folded over his chest.
“I heard the creaking of the bed springs,” Fulton said.
“Get out of here!” Jamey’s scream was wild, infantile. “This is my room.”
Caitlin was smoothing her dress over her legs. She had gotten off the bed so quickly she didn’t remember doing it. She just found herself standing there.
“I think you better run along now, Caitlin,” Fulton was saying. His tone was reasonable, he looked amused, faintly aroused. He wet his lips, smiled.
Caitlin felt as if she were speaking not only for her own dignity but for the dignity of every Van Fleet who had ever worked on the estate when she said, “Thank you for a lovely evening, Mr. Fleming.” She pushed right past him and walked down the front staircase, directly to the foyer and out the door.
She walked home without her coat, only intermittently aware of the cold, and she had not even reached her parents’ house before the Flemings had begun to arrange with Congressman Stowe to hire her to work in his office in Washington, D.C. It was just as simple as that. She crept into the house, built the fire up in the kitchen stove, let it burn for a few minutes, banked it, and then went upstairs. She lay in her bed, remembering every word that had been said, every silence, every caress, and before she was asleep her life had changed forever.
TWO
FEBRUARY 3, 1941
It was winter, dead winter, the very core of the coldest time, and Caitlin was on a slippery, snow-packed path, guiding a man named Joe Rose and Joe’s friend Gordon Jaffrey. The three of them moved swiftly because the cold came up through the soles of their shoes and entered their bones. The winter sun was a circular smudge in the white sky, a fingerprint on a pane of glass.
Secret Anniversaries Page 2
