Secret Anniversaries

by Scott Spencer

  I’m with you, is what she thought, but all she said was “No.”

  “Kind of a waste, isn’t it?”

  “How long have you been in New York?” she asked, steeling herself to look neutral no matter what he said, even if he confessed to having been in town for days, weeks, without coming to see her and the child.

  “I took the Twentieth Century. Today. I mean I got here today.”

  “Joe.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just … Joe.”

  Caitlin took his hand and fervently he brought her hand to his lips and kissed it, once, again, and again.

  She laughed.

  “I’m being ridiculous, aren’t I?” he said.

  “No. I just never had my hand kissed before. It’s strange. Feel.” She lifted his hand and bowed over it as if looking for her reflection in a pond. She placed a kiss on the back of his hand. His skin smelled of tobacco and the night. And when she looked up at him he had leaned far back in his chair and had raised his other hand and covered his eyes.

  “It feels good to be with you again,” he said. His voice was soft, unstable.

  Caitlin held on to his hand and leaned forward, to be closer to him. She felt the way you do in a house when a loose shutter finally stops banging.

  “Do you want to see Ardo?” she asked. It made her lightheaded with happiness to be finally asking this question of Joe.

  “Ardo?”

  “That’s his nickname. This week anyhow.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s what he calls olives.”

  “As in ‘What are doze?’ ”

  Caitlin laughed. She hadn’t thought of that one. It was the difference between one mind and two. “No,” she said. “I don’t think so. It’s just what he calls them.”

  They were silent for a few moments and then Joe said, “Does he look like me?”

  Caitlin stood up and held her hand out to Joe, the hand he had pressed with his lips. She led him into the bedroom, where the crib was, as well as Caitlin’s bed.

  The boy was awake. He had thrown all those carefully arranged toys out of the crib and was sitting up, wearing a pair of pale blue pajamas, watching the reflections of the headlights of the passing cars skitter across the ceiling. When he saw Caitlin and this stranger come in, he scrambled up and held his arms out to her.

  She lifted him up. He felt the warmth of her hands through his pajamas. “What are you doing awake?” she asked, but her voice was pleased.

  “I don’t know,” the child said, looking at the man and then at her.

  “Do you want to say hello to your father?” she asked, and what a question, but she hadn’t spent what time she had to read going over books about child psychology.

  “No,” the boy said, his voice a nasal croak.

  “Oh God,” Joe said, almost sobbing it, and reaching out to take him.

  The boy looked at his mother as this dark, melancholy man scooped him into his arms.

  “I didn’t know myself how I’ve waited to see you hold him,” Caitlin said to Joe.

  “Let me stay,” said Joe. “We understand each other. We need each other. We can be a family.”

  “I want you to stay.”

  “I’ll never leave. I must have been crazy, all this time.”

  Caitlin was silent for a moment. She stood next to Joe, pressed her forehead against his shoulder, reached around him to touch their son.

  “Maybe you will leave,” she said. “But for now—”

  “I’ll never leave,” said Joe.

  “We’re very different,” she said.

  “And very alike.”

  “That’s so. Maybe things work out better for people who are only a little bit different and a little bit alike.”

  “I can’t believe I’ve been missing all this. Look at him!” He touched the child’s chin and then withdrew his hand as the boy smiled.

  “Joe, it doesn’t matter now. Whatever happens after this. I think you can know, actually know, when your life is coming together, when you are in the very best part of it—and for us, at least for me, for me, it’s now. I don’t know if I can say I completely care what happens after. I’ll always have this.”

  “Will you look at him? He’s looking at me, as if he knows who I am.”

  “Talk to him, Joe.”

  “Hello there, Ardo,” Joe Rose said, trying to be hearty. “I’m home.”

  He held the child above him, the way men like to, high, up toward the ceiling with its moving shafts of light cast up like calls of hello and farewell by the cars on Barrow Street below, and, as he said, he was home, home from his long moment in history, home for just as long as he could manage to stay, but, in a sense, forever, because now he had claimed this woman and this child as his family.

  Caitlin touched Joe’s shoulder, to caution him, and to caress him, and the child opened his arms because he had never been held like this. He was flying, the room turned on its side this way and that, the blue of his bed receded and then rushed toward him, and though for a moment it seemed possible that he might howl, he looked at his mother and she cooed reassuringly and she had never looked so beautiful, so mysterious, as she did right then.

  And so as it happened he did not cry but reached down toward the magic presence who had come to transform this room, to turn the steady frustration of parallel lines into the contagious chaos of a triangle, the child reached down with his small reddish fingers to touch the dark, smiling, yet ineffably sad male face below, and that child, who would live his life in the afterglow of this moment, that child looking down at his father was me.

  DECEMBER 5, 1989

  Caitlin had me promise that I would not publish the story of her life while she was still alive and I have, of course, remained faithful to my word, as I have tried to remain faithful to the stories and the legacy she left for me. I often attempted to get her to speak into a tape recorder, but she would have no part of it. It wasn’t until she had died (in her sleep, peacefully, with the bedside lamp blazing and her thumb holding her place in the middle of Travels with My Aunt) that I realized that, except for me, she had left no trace of her story behind. There were no diaries, no notes, and, as far as I have been able to tell, no letters of any consequence, except the following, which she sent to me in 1970, written in her proper, somewhat overdisciplined script, on the parched, pale-blue skin of an aerogram.

  My dear son,

  “Gordon’s heart attack threw a scare into me, too, but his health problems—which really are not as desperate as you and your father fear—have nothing to do with our decision to marry in January. I think what Joe says is right. Gordon with a heart problem is like a giraffe with a sore throat.

  I have so wanted someone who would know exactly what I was thinking about when I thought about the war and about all those terrible people like Coughlin, who wanted us to sit on our hands while the Nazis tore the world apart like pulling petals off a flower. I wanted somebody who could know what I know, and know me, too, and the strange path I’ve taken, and after things didn’t work out between your father and me I suppose I let that hope die, or just decided that I had had my moment in the sun.

  I would prefer you not to discuss this with your father, though I realize that it is your decision—and with you all the way in Denmark, I wouldn’t have any idea what you were saying to each other, anyhow.

  Don’t misunderstand me. I am glad you have found your father. I was worried when you first told me you intended to look him up. I didn’t know if you’d be able to find him and I was even more worried about what you would find him to be. Having lived without him all your life, you must have had quite a few dreams, or unrealistic expectations, and like any common garden-variety mother I was concerned that you would have your hopes dashed—or worse. I frankly did not know if your father would be particularly anxious to have you track him down.

  I do think, however, that for you to bring your father with you when you come to the wedding is r
idiculous. I know there’s been a lot of water over the dam (or is it under the bridge?) but nevertheless I am not prepared to suddenly have Joe back in my life. For the first years of his expatriation I continually expected him to come back—if not to me then at least to America. After all, it was Joe who taught me—well, not taught me, that’s not true, but helped me to learn, yes, helped me to learn that we must erase or ignore all the borders—between countries, between people, between parts of ourselves, between the public parts and the secret parts, between the parts we have learned to love and the parts we are trying the best we can to accept. It was the feeling I had on this very day twenty-two years ago when he came to see us smelling of the night, his mustache wet with frost, and though there have been times I felt a little gray and cheated that that moment did not last for very long, I still know that it was the best time of my life. My heart was never so huge and never so happy and everything I felt and everything I was made sense, and in so many ways that clarity has lasted.

  I love you and I can hardly wait to see you next month. I feel right now that my life has been on the whole a good one. I have loved and I have known love. I have had a wonderful son, whose presence in the world gives me great joy. And most important of all, I have been a part of my time. Darling, I say this to you knowing you will understand.

  A BIOGRAPHY OF SCOTT SPENCER

  Scott Spencer is the New York Times—bestselling and award-winning author of ten novels, including the National Book Award finalists Endless Love (1979) and A Ship Made of Paper (2003).

  Born in 1945 in Washington, D.C., Spencer moved with his family to the South Side of Chicago at age two. His father, Charles, had been in the army before beginning work in a hot and noisy Chicago steel mill. Charles later wrote and self-published a book titled Blue Collar (1978) about the experience. Spencer remembers his childhood as peaceful despite his family’s tight finances and his parents’ concern over the political climate during the McCarthy Era, both of which were kept secret from Spencer at the time. Charles was a dissident in his union and, Spencer remembers, “sometimes feared for his safety and even his life. There were mornings when he checked under the hood of his car for a bomb before igniting the engine.” The far South Side of Chicago was at the time the set of atrocious racial violence, which Spencer’s parents steadfastly resisted, adding to the home’s sense of peril and purpose.

  Spencer was an avid reader from an early age, a passion that his parents encouraged. At age sixteen, he discovered the beatnik subculture and was very much influenced by that literary movement. Though he studied at the University of Illinois and Chicago’s Roosevelt University before earning his B.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin, Spencer considers himself above all to be “an alumnus of the Chicago public library system.”

  All of Spencer’s novels are intimately related to his life. He wrote his first novel, Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball (1975), during and directly following his college years. The novel centers on a control-hungry experimental psychologist and his dangerous experiments, which reflected Spencer’s own experimentation with mind-altering drugs and his studies in behavioral psychology at the time. His second novel, Preservation Hall (1976), is about an ambitious man’s fateful encounter with his ex-convict step-brother while the two are snowed in together in an isolated rural house, not unlike the one Spencer would move to later in life in Rhinebeck, New York. His next novel, Endless Love, explores the obsessive and all-consuming relationship between a young couple and was his first major success, selling more than two million copies worldwide. Endless Love was universally hailed by critics, establishing Spencer as a leading American author, and inspiring the film directed by Franco Zeffirelli.

  In 1986, Spencer published Waking the Dead, the story of the tragic love between a career politician and a progressive activist living in Chicago. The book was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times and later became a film produced by Jodi Foster and starring Billy Crudup and Jennifer Connelly. Spencer followed the success of Waking the Dead with Secret Anniversaries (1990), a coming-of-age story of a young woman in mid-twentieth-century Washington, D.C., and Men in Black (1995), a comedic novel about a struggling author’s unexpected success after penning a book about UFOs. Secret Anniversaries and Men in Black is set partly in the fictional town of Leyden, New York, a town that Spencer revisits in many of his novels. Leyden and many of its residents are modeled after Rhinebeck, and Spencer says that, though he doesn’t directly base his characters on real people, he does draw from them and join different people’s traits together, “giving a red head a limp, a lawyer a dog.”

  After Men in Black, Spencer published The Rich Man’s Table (1998), about the strained relationship between a Bob Dylan—like American music icon and his unacknowledged son. Most recently, Spencer has published the novels A Ship Made of Paper (2003), Willing (2008), and Man in the Woods (2010). Spencer’s nonfiction journalism has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and GQ. He has also taught fiction writing at Columbia University and at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

  This photo, taken around 1945, features four of the people who most influenced Spencer’s life. His father, Charles, is seen in his military uniform (second from the right), with Spencer’s aunt Elfride and uncle Harold to Charles’s right and his mother, Jean, to Charles’s left. Elfride and Harold both moved to Cuba after the 1960 Cuban Revolution.

  Spencer’s fourth grade class at Burnham Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side. Spencer is in the second row, fifth from the left.

  Scott and Charles on vacation in Arizona around 1958.

  Spencer with Victoria Wilson, his editor at Knopf. Wilson edited many of his books, including Endless Love, Waking the Dead, and Preservation Hall. The two have remained friends.

  An exhausted Spencer holding his newborn daughter, Celeste, at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City in 1979. Celeste is now a painter living in Brooklyn.

  Celeste in 1984, standing in front of the Spencer house on the South Side of Chicago. Spencer remembers Celeste as being determinedly artistic throughout her childhood.

  Spencer and his son, Asher, in New Orleans, Asher’s mother’s hometown, in 1987. Asher now lives in Brooklyn and is working toward his PhD in economics from CUNY.

  Asher on vacation he took with his father to St. Petersburg, Russia, in front of a restored war ship that the Bolsheviks used to fire upon the Winter Palace during the Russian Revolution.

  Celeste with her dog, Oliver, in Rhinebeck, New York, taken while she was studying at Bard College.

  Charles Spencer, Scott’s father, reading a selection from his second book, Left, Two Three (1986), in a Chicago bookstore, with Scott’s children Celeste and Asher listening on.

  Nominees at the PEN/Faulkner Award ceremony in 1995. Among those present are Spencer (front row, second from left), George Plimpton (back row, center), Francine Prose (back row, second from left), and Mary Lee Settle (front row, fourth from right).

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  The Estate of Spencer Williams: Excerpts from “Ticket Agent, Ease Your Window Down” by Spencer Williams. Used b
y permission.

  The Songwriters Guild of America: Excerpts from “Empty Bed Blues” by J. C. Johnson. Copyright 1928, renewed 1956 by Record Music Publishing Company. All rights administered by The Songwriters Guild of America. Used by permission.

  copyright © 1990 by Scott Spencer

  cover design by Joanna Rieke

  ISBN: 978-1-4532-0544-0

  This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media

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  New York, NY 10014

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  SCOTT SPENCER

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