Secret Language

by Monica Wood

  “But it doesn’t seem fair to make up a bunch of—”

  “Faith.” Connie looks away, toward the sofa, where Isadora is still chattering as she tunes Ben’s guitar. “Not wanting her won’t turn her into somebody else’s sister.”

  Faith falls silent, for this is the first thing Connie has said since arriving that has the ring of truth. Isadora clears her throat and beams at everyone, then begins to coax some languid blues out of Ben’s cheap guitar. Her voice is dark and husky, yet plaintive, astonishingly clear. Faith listens.

  Isadora’s singing brings the surprise of memory, for there is something in her voice that is reminiscent of Billy’s, and Faith remembers how she felt as a very young child, watching Billy and Delle on stage, listening to their entwined voices, filling herself with the sweetness of the characters they played. For the longest time she thought these charming people who sang and danced and said funny and romantic things to each other were her real mother and father, however fleetingly they appeared. Billy and Delle were some sort of stand-ins, altered somehow by the darkness of life offstage.

  When Isadora finishes her song the room erupts. “Yeah!” Ben calls out. Stewart and Chris whistle through their fingers.

  “Wow,” Joe says.

  Without a word Isadora begins again, another song about love. Faith moves her eyes slowly around the room, at the ring of faces transfixed by Isadora’s music. She has to admit to being transfixed herself, not so much by the music as by this brief glimpse of what they all might have been, given a different life.

  V

  SECRET LANGUAGE

  ONE

  Garrett has not done well. His waiting room is small and stale, its one window looking down on the wintry rubble of Times Square. Behind a flimsy desk sits a secretary, a girl barely out of high school, with heavily made-up eyes. She has the aspiring look of an out-of-work actor and is reading an unbound script. Her head moves oddly, as if she is walking the stage in her head.

  Photographs jam each wall. Many of them are old, including one—the largest, almost poster-sized—of the cast of Silver Moon. Isadora gets up to inspect it. She is quiet, obviously disappointed by Garrett’s poor quarters. Connie wanders to a different wall, sorry to have brought Isadora here, to have presumed she had anything to give her.

  She scans the photographs, dozens of obscure faces—musicians, actors, comedians, dance troupes, rock bands: a parade of hope and frustration in which she recognizes no one but her parents. In one photograph Billy and Delle stand side by side, dressed as a count and countess. Connie recalls the costumes but not the show, though she thinks she might remember a choking heat, a vapid audience, a bitter, ongoing argument. In another photograph they are posed in evening clothes, flanked by Garrett and some cast members in front of the Barrymore. The marquee reads Smythe and Smythe. Their smiles are huge and gluttonous, for this is their first Broadway show.

  She blinks at this photograph and, as if they have just appeared, finds two tiny girls hovering like dust motes at the fringes of the small crowd. They stand close to each other, but nothing touches except the frilly hems of their white dresses.

  A shadow appears behind the milky glass window of Garrett’s office door. As it swings open, the letters on the window, GARRETT REESE, MANAGEMENT/PROMOTION/PUBLIC RELATIONS, appear backwards behind him. The secretary doesn’t flinch from her reading; in the twenty minutes Connie has waited, the phone hasn’t rung once.

  “I’ll be goddamned,” he says, putting his hand out. “Connie Spaulding.”

  His smile strikes Connie as unnervingly forgiving, as if she has come here for restitution. His face, mostly unchanged, triggers a clutter of eavesdropped memories: screaming phone calls, accusations back and forth, threats and counterthreats and ultimatums. She’d had some foolish notion of cashing in on his nostalgia, but realizes too late that there is nothing to collect.

  “This is Isadora,” she says.

  Isadora offers her hand, a little stiffly, Connie thinks. She looks like a person aware of wasting time.

  Garrett looks from one to the other. “Amazing.” He shakes his head, chuckling softly. “Amazing. Come on in.” To the girl at the desk he says, “Hold my calls.”

  He ushers them into his office, a roomier, more cheerful space with two windows and a smaller explosion of photographs on each wall. He sits down and teeters back on his chair. His hair is almost gone, but otherwise he is not much changed. His clothes are casual, but expensive and pressed, and he moves like a man who knows what he’s doing. He is still slim, slight, and his eyes contain the narrow gleam that Connie had once taken for whimsy and recognizes now as hunger.

  “So this is the love child,” he says, looking at Isadora. If he is being indelicate, Isadora doesn’t seem to mind. She opens her hands as if to say That’s me.

  “You do blues?” he says.

  “I do blues.” She regards him evenly. “A lot of people think I’m good.”

  “A lot of people don’t mean shit.”

  Isadora shrugs. “Depends on who they are.”

  “Maybe.” Garrett seems to be playing a game to which Isadora already knows the rules. He looks pleased.

  Isadora points to the wall behind Garrett, at a photograph of the curtain call of Silver Moon. “My mother’s the one on the end,” she says. “The pretty one.”

  Garrett doesn’t look. “Don’t remember her.” He glances at Connie as if they share a secret. “I had my hands full with the leads.” He leans back a little farther, lacing his fingers behind his head, his eyes glittering out at them—a man with a plan. “It was different then,” he says. “You got involved. Nowadays you book your gig and take your ten. It’s a lonely business.” He unlaces his hands, taps the picture frame behind him without looking. “I produced the whole shebang, raised the money, hired the director, babysat the whole tour. I did half the rewrites on this thing, did you know that?”

  “No,” Connie says. She doesn’t understand what it is she is witnessing, but the room feels sepia-toned all of a sudden, quiet in the way of house lights going down.

  “We had a ball on that tour.” He looks beyond her. “Tours lasted forever back then. It was one big party when you knew you had a real show. Even Billy and Delle behaved themselves; they could smell a hit.” His teeth are showing but he does not quite smile. “Everybody wanted in on that tour, even the backers. One of them might pop in for the Houston run, then another one in San Francisco. That’s how it was, a family deal.”

  Connie tries to remember the tour, but it fades into other tours, other shows, dim hotels and pink backdrops and curtain calls and fold-out couches and Faith tossing all night next to her.

  “We worked with it,” Garrett continues. “Rewrites every couple of weeks, fine tuning, you understand? It wasn’t like that other crap we patched together. No sir, this one was the one; it fit them like white on rice.” He stops for a moment. Connie has clearly underestimated Garrett’s capacity for nostalgia. “That was the thing about that show,” he says. “The fit. They’d been parading around the country for years playing ball-busting aristocrats, and it worked fine, we’d get to Broadway, last a respectable six or seven months, then off we’d go with another drawing-room comedy or musical about dukes and duchesses.” He rubs his chin, looking off again. “See, no one ever thought to plant them in a cornfield to sing about the moon. Billy and Delle? Please. But it worked. Star-crossed, dewy-eyed lovers, Jesus. They looked sixteen.”

  He finds Connie again. “You remember this stuff? Seems to me you and your twin were always underfoot. How is she, by the way?”

  Connie hesitates. “You mean Faith?”

  “Faith, right.” He grins. “Faith and Constance. How is she?”

  “She’s not my twin.”

  “No? I thought you were twins.”

  “No.”

  “So how is she?”

  “She’s fine. Two kids. Boys.”

  His eyes for a moment lose that angling look, and he seems to take h
er in for the first time. “Glad to hear self-destruction doesn’t run in the family.”

  A needle of bitterness sticks in Connie’s throat at Garrett’s presumptions, his cynical recollections. She remembers him now: always in a rush, predicting disasters, starting fires. She is helpless here, at the mercy of her parents’ ghosts.

  “That show was a little gold mine,” he says. “By the time we got back to New York we really had something.”

  “A hit,” Isadora says.

  He sits forward on his chair with a clunk. “You know it, dear. A hit like you wouldn’t believe.”

  Isadora looks around Garrett’s office. “So how come you’re not rich?”

  Garrett tips back in his chair again and raps on the glass over the photograph, on Billy’s face. “Two years, ladies,” he says. “Two years on the Great White Way. We could’ve gone four, five, even more. A movie, maybe, who knows.” Without turning around, he lifts the photograph off its nail and sweeps it down gently onto his desk. Billy and Delle, Marie Lazarro, and a host of strangers smile desperately out at them. “This, ladies, is the big fish. The one that got away.”

  He gives Connie a sudden, searing look that seems to blame her for something. “I own this show now,” he says. “Every once in a while some community theater or high school acting club produces it.” He purses his lips, his mood darkening. “I sold a couple of the songs. Patti Page did ‘Making Up,’ ever hear it?”

  Connie shakes her head.

  “Course you didn’t, it was a B side,” he says. “The thing is, Silver Moon was a mediocre show, just like all the others. Forgettable music, stupid script.” He presses his hand into his desk and his voice drops. “It was the fit,” he says. “When they started missing performances, the jig was up. People wanted to see Billy and Delle playing virgins, not a couple of understudies covering for a hangover.” He stops, as if he expects Connie to say something.

  “They were difficult,” she says. What else can she say? What else does she know?

  He looks away, out the window at the magnificent, tacky billboards of Times Square. “They were set to be the Lunts of the sixties, the new first couple of Broadway.” She hears a stream of air escape his lips. “And they took us all down with them.” The photograph seems to be moving, as if the cast is ready to burst into song. Christmas music drifts into the office from somewhere else in the building.

  Isadora taps one red nail on the desk. “So what can you do for me, Garrett?”

  “Wrong question,” he says. Connie feels the weight of all the photographs and their sense of failure. She understands Garrett to be a bitter man. He crosses his hands on the desk like a schoolteacher, looking at Isadora. “What’ve you done lately? Let me guess. A more or less steady gig in Jersey? Some East Village coffeehouse crap?”

  “Close enough,” Isadora says. “I played the Speakeasy twice last summer. And the Bottom Line once.”

  Garrett raises his eyebrows. “You get those gigs yourself?” Isadora nods, and settles further into the chair. She is either getting comfortable or getting ready.

  “She really is good,” Connie says, but her words sound irrelevant. Garrett and Isadora apparently expect something of each other; Connie is the go-between, with no real business here.

  Out of nowhere Isadora produces a tape and places it in front of Garrett. As he picks it up, she rips a piece of paper from a pad on his desk and writes down an address. “I start at nine-thirty, tonight and tomorrow.” She makes a face. “East Village coffeehouse crap, but who’s complaining?”

  He looks at the address but doesn’t touch it. “Ever do show music?” Isadora laughs dismissively. He opens a lower drawer and produces an old hi-fi record. “I brought you a present.” He hands her the record, on its jacket a hand-colored moon over a cornfield. In the foreground Billy and Delle sit smooching on a porch glider. Connie remembers the record, an entire box of them in fact, left for the Salvation Army when she and Faith packed up the trailer.

  Isadora turns it over in her hands. “Listen to it,” Garrett says as he escorts them to the door. The phone is ringing and the girl at the desk picks it up. “We’ll talk,” he says, then takes the phone.

  Out on the street the noise and motion appear random and faintly menacing. Connie follows Isadora to the end of the block.

  “He’s a classic,” Isadora says. She holds the record across her chest like a shield, its colors cartoonish, lurid somehow, against her dark clothes.

  Connie looks out at the traffic, the thin, dirty patches of snow. “I’m sorry. He was the only person I could think of.”

  “Don’t be sorry yet.” Isadora’s eyes slide over.

  Connie is struck by her self-possession. What on earth ever made her think Isadora needed her? When they first met Isadora had seemed almost frail—she might have been constructed from the hollow bones of a bird. It seems to Connie now that those bones must be stuffed with gunpowder.

  When the light changes, Isadora charges ahead, her garish shield at her chest, her walk purposeful and titanic. Connie hurries after her, barely keeping pace, the grimy street soughing under her shoes.

  TWO

  In his hotel room at Le Perreault, Stewart opens another bottle and offers Connie the first glass.

  “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire,” he says. “New snow, Mom’s plum pudding …”

  “What about precious David and his precious wife and his precious son?” Connie reminds him.

  “Cinnamon buns, eggnog, Bing Crosby …”

  “I take it you weren’t invited.”

  Stewart lifts his eyelids, a sly gleam in his eyes. “Connie. Sweetheart. Haven’t you ever crashed a party?” He drains his glass. “My mother, bless her soul, said I could come for New Year’s. The homophobes will be cleared out by then.”

  “So wait till New Year’s.”

  “Nope. Christmas morning. Can I borrow a dress?”

  She laughs, pours more wine. “I saved the best news.”

  Something shines fleetingly through the dull cast over Stewart’s eyes. “Tell me.”

  “Remember Silver Moon?”

  “The toast of Broadway.”

  “Garrett’s resurrecting it.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not.”

  “How’s he pulling that off?”

  Connie pauses, milking the suspense. “By casting Isadora James as the female lead.”

  It takes him a minute. “Who’s going to want to see this masterpiece?” he says. “Besides you, of course.”

  “A lot of people remember Billy and Delle, Stewart. Isadora is Billy’s daughter; her mother was in the chorus. People will be curious at the very least.” She folds her legs underneath her, the carpet’s soft pile a familiar cushion against her skin. “Think of it, Stewart. Here she comes, an unknown with a huge talent, reviving the show that broke her father. People love this stuff. Plus she’s rewriting the music.”

  “A blues musical?” Stewart says. “I thought it was about a farm couple in Nebraska.”

  “Don’t laugh, Stewart. They’ve raised half the money already. They even have the posters designed.” She sets down her glass and squares her hands to show him. “Here’s a faded replica of the original poster with Billy and Delle and a handful of the chorus, including Isadora’s mother. Juxtaposed over that is a picture of Isadora with a guitar slung over her back and a small caption: ‘The Moon Is Blue.’ What do you think?”

  “I think it’s got a snowball’s chance in hell.”

  “You’re wrong,” Connie says. “They’re angling for a big, fat nostalgia trip.” His cynicism can’t touch her. She’s already thinking ahead to hearing about the casting, the rehearsals, the tour. She’s already beginning to see how close it will bring them.

  “Doesn’t this bother you even a little?” Stewart asks.

  “Why should it?”

  “It smacks of opportunism to me.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Connie says. “How else do y
ou make it in this world?”

  “Can we talk about something besides Isadora for a change?”

  She raises her eyebrows.

  “Isadora this, Isadora that. You sound like a first-grader with a new friend.”

  Stung, she shrinks from him. “Go to hell.”

  He hangs his head like a bad dog. “I’m sorry. I’m just jealous.” He thumps on his chest. “Hit me, go on. I deserve it.”

  “Stewart.”

  “No, really. Hit me, go ahead.”

  “Forget it, Stewart. I forgive you, okay?”

  He lifts his glass to her, empties it into the carpet, and with the magnificence of a cymbal player smashes it between his hands.

  “Jesus!” Connie leaps up, tears his hands apart, blood spattering. “Jesus Christ! Stewart, goddammit!”

  He is bent in two, whimpering. Her pulse thundering against her temples, the liquor lurching through her body, she helps him into the bathroom and runs cold water over his palms to see better what he’s done. She picks slivers of glass from his skin as the water runs. “Jesus,” she says, shaking all the way out to her fingertips. “Oh, Stewart.” His blood runs in a pink swirl down the drain.

  “I’m sorry,” he keeps saying. “I’m drunk.” The water begins to reveal his white palms. One hand is miraculously unscathed. The cuts on the other are lightning-shaped, shallow but cruel.

  “You’re a lucky goddamned bastard, Stewart.” Even her teeth are quivering. “What is this, anyway? Your family? Make up a new one, for Christ’s sake. Come home with me.” She places his cut hand on the counter, palm up, and presses a washcloth into his skin.

  “Connie?” His head hangs down and blood seeps up through the cloth. “Do you love me?”

  “Hold still so we can see what we’ve got. I might have to take you to the hospital.” She peers under the cloth. “You’re going to have to explain all this in French.”

  “Say ‘I love you, Stewart.’ ”

  “Shut up.”

  “Say it.”