Keeping Secrets

by Sarah Shankman

  She hadn’t come back for Christmas, when Jake would sleep late and leave his presents untouched under the tree for days.

  “He hates it,” she’d told Rosalie for years. “Jews don’t do Christmas.”

  Rosalie sniffed, “He just does it to be mean.”

  It certainly wasn’t for the Christmas meal, a fatty hen masquerading as a turkey, devoured in silence, as all their family meals were, in ten minutes.

  It wasn’t because she missed Rosalie, her stepmother, to whom she’d never said that word.

  No, she’d never confronted her daddy and Rosalie with their secret. It was as if the knowing of it was enough. And once she knew, she’d rolled it up and swallowed it and kept it deep inside in a little room, shut off. It was as if their secret had become her secret. She knew, but she wasn’t going to tell them.

  And through those two years that she’d nurtured the secret inside her, her affection for Jake and disaffection for Rosalie had grown. He lied, too, she told herself when she thought about it. And he was the same distant, difficult, silent, mercurial Jake. But he’s your daddy. He’s your blood. And he married Rosalie, she’d begun to figure out, for your sake.

  Back in the kitchen, Rosalie blew on her tea and said, “She’s just wasting her time at school. Wasting her time and our money.”

  Jake shook his head. He didn’t agree with that.

  “I knew that’s what would happen the minute she got away. She’s gone over there to play. And Lord only knows what else.”

  “Ro…” he began to answer that playing wasn’t such an awful thing, but Emma walked back in and he stopped.

  Emma’s voice was light again, though tight. If she were here to talk to Bernie again, and to Herman, and to say hello to Jake, she’d grit her teeth and make the best of it with Rosalie. You can do it, Emma, she cheered herself on, you’ve had lots of practice.

  “I’ve been tutoring too, in Atlanta.” She picked up her tea. “Helping kids who are behind in school.”

  “Where do you find the time to do all this?” Rosalie shot Jake a look: See, it was just as I thought.

  “It’s only a couple of hours a week. Some of us take a bus to their neighborhood from the campus.”

  “Children don’t try very hard these days. Most of them need a paddle, not a tutor.” Rosalie stood from the table then and rinsed their cups in the plastic basin of saved tepid water that stood in the sink.

  “These kids need special help.”

  Emma knew she was heading down a path toward trouble. But hadn’t she known, since she started this conversation, that the punch line was something that Rosalie wasn’t going to like? Big surprise. There was no completely neutral territory. Every conversation they’d ever had was laced with mines.

  “Why do they need help?” Rosalie turned from the dishes.

  “They’re colored. You know how it is. They haven’t had a lot.”

  “Niggers! You’re teaching niggers?”

  “You know I hate that word!”

  Rosalie felt a sick headache coming on. She wouldn’t sleep all night.

  “Here I am giving up my teaching job that I’ve worked so hard at all these years, and you’re over there in Atlanta going out of your way to help the niggers. Emma, I swear, I don’t know what’s come over you!”

  “Things are not the same everywhere as they are in West Cypress.”

  “They have schools, don’t they?”

  “Separate schools. And everybody knows they aren’t as good.”

  “I don’t know why not. It’s their own who are teaching them. If they want them to be smarter, they ought to do a better job.”

  “You just don’t understand.”

  “I understand plenty. I understand that you’ve been gone four months and already you’ve turned into an integrationist—and I don’t know what else!” Rosalie could feel the tears rising. She knew that any minute she was going to start to cry.

  “This isn’t new. It’s not as if you haven’t heard me say these same things since I was old enough to figure them out.”

  “It’s all those books you read. And that Herman Graubart. You think I don’t know, all those ideas he put into your head?”

  “He’s never told me anything but the truth.” And you? What have you told me? The words hung unspoken.

  Rosalie knew that this wasn’t the time, but she couldn’t stop herself. “I guess he told you that it was all right to…to…sleep with his son, too?”

  There. There it was. All the cards lay face up on the table. Now let’s see how you play this hand, Miss Emma.

  Emma looked as if she’d been slapped—which was what she ought to be, Rosalie thought, slapped until she had good sense.

  “No,” Emma answered slowly then, staring Rosalie straight in the eye. You want it? You’re going to get it.

  She has no shame. The thought took Rosalie’s breath away.

  “He never told me sex was right. He never told me it was wrong either. We talked about it, though; we didn’t hide it in some closet like a dirty secret.”

  Rosalie held a hand over her heart. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “I don’t want to hear it, either. I walk into this house five minutes, and you’re at me—picking at my underwear, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Emma!” Rosalie was white around the mouth.

  “Emma what? There’s lots worse things than taking the Lord’s name in vain, Mother.”

  “Yes, and I guess you’re proud you’ve done some of them.”

  Emma placed both hands flat down on the kitchen table. “What exactly is it that’s gnawing at you? What is it that you want? You want to talk to me about my underwear, about my ideas on race, religion, sex, education? Do you want to sit down and have the very first intelligent conversation we’ve ever had, or do you want to just stand there and pick at old scabs?”

  Rosalie’s hands fluttered. “You’ve gone crazy! Off to school for four months and you’ve thrown Bernie over and you’re too good for us! But you always thought that…that you were too good for your father and mother.”

  Three beats passed. Then Emma opened her mouth and said it: “You’re not my mother.”

  Rosalie reeled back against the counter.

  Then everything moved in slow motion, and it was like she was watching Rosalie from a far distance, as if she were standing on a faraway hill. This must be what it feels like to be in shock, Emma thought. I didn’t really mean to say that. I’ve walked around with it all these years, not knowing, then knowing, but not knowing how to say it, to ask it, once I knew it.

  Yet there, as if the thought had birthed itself, it just plopped out.

  “Emma.” Jake was standing now, moving toward her, his arms outstretched.

  “No! Don’t touch me!”

  Tears banked on Jake’s cheeks, then fell. He looked from Rosalie to Emma, then back again. “I told you it would never work, Ro. I told you that from the start.”

  “My fault! That’s right, make it all my fault,” Rosalie screamed. “As if I haven’t suffered enough.”

  Emma wheeled on her, furious. “Exactly what is it that you’ve suffered, Mother? Why is that you always think that you have such a monopoly on pain? Why do you think that your life is so much more terrible than anyone else’s? What about my mother’s life?” And then her voice climbed and broke. “Who the hell is Helen Kaplan anyway? Or was she?” Then, strangling through tears, she sounded like a little girl. She turned to Jake. “Where is my mother, Daddy?”

  Rosalie wheeled and fumbled through the double hallway curtains that she’d nailed in place to keep in the precious heat. She ran blindly from the room.

  Later, lying on her bed, Rosalie could hear Jake and Emma murmuring in the kitchen. Their voices rose and fell, but she couldn’t make out the words.

  * * *

  There wasn’t that much to tell, though Jake tried to answer Emma’s questions: No, he and Helen hadn’t known each other very long. They met in New York. He did
n’t know exactly why she was there. No, he knew nothing of her past. A little town in Georgia or Alabama—he wasn’t quite sure where she was from. He didn’t know her relatives, didn’t know whether there were any. What she was like? Why, she was very nice. She was a very nice woman.

  He didn’t have the language to describe how he’d felt about Helen. He couldn’t tell Emma that he thought about her every day, that her softness and her warmth still filled his daydreams and nights. To explain, he’d have to talk about himself, and he didn’t know how to do that.

  He didn’t stutter when he talked about Helen, Emma thought. Though he fumbled when he tried to explain why they’d kept the secret so long.

  “Rosalie loves you, Emma. She thought if she raised you as her own, it would be better.”

  Emma shook her head. She still didn’t understand. She doubted that she ever would.

  Yet she did feel easier toward her daddy, though not toward Rosalie. Rosalie—that’s what she’d decided to call her from now on.

  Herman had warned her not to do this in anger. But that was what Rosalie always made her feel, anger, as if she were personally responsible for all of Rosalie’s hurt. Hell, she didn’t even know what the woman was hurting about. But whatever it was, she wasn’t going to feel ever again that it was her fault. Nope, not now that her daddy had told her all the secrets.

  And he had—well, almost.

  * * *

  Rosalie didn’t sleep a wink that night, except sometime in the early morning, she must have dozed off for just a second. And in that second Emma had dressed and was gone.

  A few days later a long letter with an Atlanta postmark arrived. It read: “Dear Daddy and Rosalie, Why didn’t you tell me? Explain to me what the secrecy was about.” Then she went on to talk about the coloreds and school and how she’d said goodbye to Bernie and how she felt like she had to be free to grow.

  Rosalie didn’t know what she was talking about. Jake guessed.

  In her reply Rosalie didn’t address Emma’s first question. Instead, she wrote how Emma was way over her head, how she was going to have to pay for her sins, how she’d ruined herself with Bernie, and now what did she think she was going to do? Rosalie didn’t think she was pretty enough to make up for it; Bernie had probably been her only chance. And now that she’d turned away from him, she’d better be prepared to get by on her brains. She had plenty of those, if she’d only use them. If she’d only wake up and smell the coffee and see the error of her ways. Maybe Bernie would even forgive her, take her back. She could return to West Cypress, settle down with him, and teach school.

  Emma ripped the letter to pieces. Then she’d leaned over the wastebasket and shouted into it, “Don’t you tell me what to do. You don’t know me. You don’t know me at all!” She stared at the black metal basket for a few minutes, then picked the shreds of the letter out of it, tore them even smaller, and burned them in an ashtray, cremated them a few at a time. She poured the ashes into a plastic bag from the Kroger’s, walked over to the lake by the university president’s house, and tossed the ashes of the letter across the water until they were all gone.

  That had been January. Now it was June. In that time, Rosalie and Jake had heard from Emma exactly five times. She wrote a one-page letter the first of each month as if she were paying a bill. The words filled the page, but they didn’t say very much.

  She was fine. School was fine. The weather was fine. She wouldn’t be home for vacation; she was working a part-time job for a caterer, had discovered she had a knack for cooking, was going to summer school.

  She never mentioned Bernie. Rosalie wondered whether she knew that, just as his mother had predicted, the Army had called his name. He’d been in Vietnam since March, since right after his birthday.

  * * *

  Now Rosalie stood in her garden and stretched. Her back hurt from the leaning over. Her squash was looking good. So were her tomatoes. Maybe she’d make a sack of vegetables to give to Mary Ann Graubart when she came to call.

  Why was that woman coming here again today, a little over six months after her first visit? Was she coming to tell her that Bernie was dead, that, just as she’d predicted, Emma had laid waste to more than his heart?

  “Rosalie!” That was Jake now calling from the back door. He was standing with the sliding screen door pushed aside, still wiping sleep out of his eyes in the bright morning sun.

  “I’ve put the coffee up. Come and get some.”

  He was pouring hot water into the plastic cups, the instant coffee foaming as she came inside. She was blinded for a moment. After the sun’s glare, it seemed so dark. She’d pulled the screen door to with a bang, hoping he’d notice and remember that he should close it, too.

  There was another sound then, the slamming of a car door. Rosalie peeked out. There was Bernie’s old two-tone green Ford in the driveway. She was here, Mary Ann Graubart.

  Now she was rapping on the screen door.

  Rosalie, still wiping the sweat off, welcomed her in.

  “No,” Mary Ann refused coffee. She wouldn’t even take a chair. She stood there, once again in their kitchen, her feet planted firmly, her jaw set like a bulldog’s. It was like a rerun, like watching the same television program over again.

  “Herman’s ill,” she said, “probably dying. So they’re sending Bernie home. With Herman gone, I’ll get to keep Bernie, because he’s an only son. It’s a trade-off. I don’t get to keep both.”

  Having said her lines, she was back out the door now, standing in the carport which was only a tad cooler than being out in the blazing sun. The heat made her look wavy, her image disappearing in the carport’s dark. Rosalie blinked. Looking at Mary Ann made her eyes hurt, which in turn gave her a stomachache.

  I’m going to be sick, she thought, as a yellow taste filled her mouth.

  “You be sure and tell Emma that.”

  Rosalie couldn’t see Mary Ann anymore. It was like listening to a ghost.

  “Tell her she’s helped kill Herman, and Bernie doesn’t want her anymore.”

  “You get out of here!” Suddenly Jake was yelling. “Emma never killed anyone in her life.”

  His head was out the screen door now. “She never killed anyone. Do you hear me? It’s not her fault.”

  He yelled those words, It’s not her fault, fault, fault, over and over. They echoed out into the hot June morning, as if the words could save Herman, as if they could bring back the long-dead Helen, the image of whose body lying in a long-ago bedroom, quiet except for the wails of the infant Emma, never disappeared. His words rumbled through the air long after Mary Ann Graubart, that hit-and-run artist, was gone.

  9

  Los Gatos, California

  1970

  Jesse and Clifton sat at the long bar of the Claremont House in the little town of Los Gatos, seventy miles south of San Francisco, having a late-afternoon drink.

  “Another?” Jesse caught Clifton’s eye in the mirror.

  Clifton stared back at the younger man’s reflected face. Jesse was looking better and better every day.

  “Sure. I told Maria I’d be a while.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Fine. Fine.” Clifton leaned back on his bar stool. “I’ll tell you, coming up here and marrying your landlady is the best thing I’ve ever done.”

  Jesse slapped him on the back and laughed. “Things going pretty good for you, old man?”

  “Hell, Jesse, I hear you’re not doing too badly yourself. Not from what you just showed me over at Montalvo. How’s it feel, son, to be having a retrospective of your work at thirty-two? What did that reviewer in Art News call you, ‘The Redwood Tree of Craftsmen’? Not bad at all for a little colored boy from Watts.”

  And Clifton was right, for both Jesse’s skill and his fame had grown. Two of his pieces were in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He had spun his furniture back to his sculptural roots, crafting trompe l’oeil pieces, wardrobes hung with clothes so realistic that it took a
close look to discover that they too were carved of wood. Both the Metropolitan and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts were asking for works from this newly opened Montalvo show.

  “Yep, I sent Lucretia a clipping. She called and said, ‘Boy, you’re stepping in high cotton.’”

  “What’s next?”

  “Think I’m going to take a break for a while.”

  “A break! You made it to the big time and you’re laying off? No time to stop.”

  “I’ve been working like a madman since I was a boy, Clifton. Think I want to take some time to do something for myself.”

  “Humph. Don’t sound like the Jesse Tree I know. You got something in mind?”

  “I just closed the deal on an old inn up Highway 17 from my house. Think I’m going fix it up.”

  Clifton shook his head. “Houses eat you alive, boy, you know that even with your little place. An inn, you say? How big is that?”

  “Oh, about fifty thousand square feet.”

  “Sheeeit! You mean you’re going to hire some men to do the work.”

  “Nope. Think I want to do it all myself.”

  “Have you lost your mind?”

  “Maybe. I just feel like I want to get out of the rat race for a while. Still make art, but coast. Maybe it’s the scale of this that appeals to me.” Jesse spread his arms. “Miles and miles of woodwork.”

  “Yeah, well, by the time you finish it, Art News is going to have forgotten your name. I think you’re making a mistake.”

  They drank in silence for a while, each man pondering his and the other’s words.

  “You know what’s wrong with you, Jesse?”

  “I didn’t know anything was, but what?”

  “You need to settle down.”

  Jesse threw up both his hands. “Jumping Jesus H. Christ! You are infuckingcredible. You sound just like my grandma.”

  “Lucretia always was a smart old broad.”

  “You call her that to her face.”

  “Nah. I may be bad, but I ain’t stupid. Anyway, what I said is true.”

  “I’ve settled down before. It didn’t take.”

  “Marrying a woman for three months because she tricks you into thinking she’s knocked up ain’t my definition of settling down.”