Secret Language

by Monica Wood

“I need an answer. Connie won’t fly, so I thought you could drive down together. All of you.”

  “I don’t know. Ben has baseball camp that week.”

  “So?”

  “Chris is working.”

  “You and Joe can come, then.”

  “We have to be around, Isadora. If we have to go get Ben, if something happens …”

  “Then come alone. With Connie, I mean.”

  “Isadora, this really isn’t a good—”

  “Faith, you have to come.” Faith sighs.

  “So you’ll come? Faith, I don’t have anybody else. Believe me, you find out who your friends are when you make it to the top.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Think hard, okay?”

  After they hang up Faith goes upstairs. From Chris’s room comes the chop of Joe’s voice and Chris’s stark retorts. She opens the door. They are facing each other, two men: their bodies rigid, planted, as if they’d each been struck. Joe turns to her.

  “It’s goddamned raining condoms in here and Tracy’s pregnant.”

  “I know.”

  “He’s goddamned eighteen years old.”

  “Shh. I know.”

  He turns back to his son. “Do you have any idea how much responsibility you’re taking on here, pal?” His pupils are big and black. “Do you have any idea how much work, how much time, how much of your goddamned soul you’re about to give over?”

  “Joe—”

  “A goddamned avalanche, that’s how much. And sometimes no matter how hard you try, no matter how hard you work and pray, sometimes no matter what the goddamned hell you do, it doesn’t work. Do you have any idea—”

  “Shut up!” Chris says. His face is red and tight and shaking. “I haven’t got a clue, are you happy now? I’m not like you, Dad, I don’t have a fucking road map for everything!” He makes a sound, a deep, manly groan, and slams out of the room.

  Joe sinks to the bed and slumps forward, elbows on knees, hands dangling like mittens on a string. Faith sits next to him and lays her arm across his shoulders. “You’re missing a part,” she tells him.

  He closes his eyes, shaking his head gently. “What’s that?”

  “Sometimes no matter what the hell you do, it works out anyway.”

  He gropes for her hand. “Aw, Christ.” He lies back on the bed, taking her with him. “I had such hopes for him.”

  “You still do,” she says. “You know it.”

  They lie there, holding hands, staring up at the ceiling. It is marred by old tape marks from the days when Chris used to hang big, black posters of rock bands named after reptiles. Faith’s first thought is to paint it over, a fresh white start. For whom? This room will soon be empty. Her hand is warm and moist where Joe holds it. She decides to leave the ceiling as it is, scars and all.

  FOUR

  Isadora’s cat has ripped the white chair, the one near the window, to smithereens. “No!” Connie yells, and swats the cat on the nose, but Bob doesn’t flinch. He simply stares at her, a silent, smarmy, yellow-eyed pronouncement on her life.

  Ben gives her pointers. “Pick him up like this, Aunt Connie,” he says, showing her. He puts Bob down again, petting his brown head. “Now you.”

  She imitates him, scooping her hand under the cat’s big feet, lifting him under the chest with the other. He stays in her arms.

  “There,” Ben says. “See?”

  Ben has a way of surprising her with all kinds of knowledge. He has taken to stopping by for short visits, usually on his way home from somewhere: school, his friend Rick’s house, or Phoebe and Joe Senior’s, where he and Rick practice with their band in the garage. She’s always glad to see him, and it seems he arrives each time with information of some kind: how many men on a hockey team, the difference between a country scale and a blues scale, Reggie Lewis’s field goal percentage, how to pick up a cat. She listens to him, considering his company a gift she has done nothing to deserve but doesn’t mind taking. After her long convalescence, Ben is her best sign of life.

  “I wouldn’t mind getting a cat,” he says. “I think Mom and Dad are weakening.” He says “Mom and Dad” with a certain intonation, a mixture of surprise and satisfaction that implies a mom and dad who sleep in the same bed.

  “How’s the band?” she asks.

  He sits heavily on the ruined chair. “We sort of broke up.” He sighs like an old man. “Nobody likes the blues.”

  Connie smiles. The broken-up band notwithstanding, Ben’s body seems to pitch forward with the anticipation of a school year winding down, a summer ahead, the whirl of high school waiting beyond that. She envies him his forward motion, even though she likes her new job, its daily-ness, its distance from danger. At noon every day she leaves the office and walks to Monument Square, where she sits under Lady Victory with a sandwich and a couple of colleagues, watching the homey, noontime bustle. One of the women in the office also used to fly, and Connie thinks they might become friends. She feels young, but not in the way of the youngsters who come to her to be interviewed, their hair done in certain identical ways, a certain collective knowing in their carefully made-up eyes. She feels young in the way of a having a second chance, young in the way of learning a new neighborhood, young in the way of acquainting herself with the landmarks of life on the ground.

  “How about I give you a ride home,” she says to Ben. “I haven’t seen your mother in a while.”

  They leave Bob to wreak havoc in private, closing the door on his willful face.

  “Wanna hear a joke, Aunt Connie?” Ben asks as Connie pulls her car onto Brighton Avenue.

  “I love your jokes.”

  “It’s about the Patriots.”

  “Baseball, right?”

  He looks to the car roof for mercy. “Scratch this one, Aunt Connie. Guaranteed you won’t get it.”

  Connie reaches over and cuffs his hair. “You should’ve known better.”

  When they get to Faith’s, the house is quiet except for the murmur of the television in the den. Faith appears in the hall when Ben calls out.

  “Isadora’s on TV,” she says dryly.

  “You’re kidding!” Ben shouts, and races into the den. Faith follows him, and Connie follows Faith without a word. Chris and Tracy are sprawled on the rug, close to the screen. They look tragically young, Connie thinks, stripped of their adolescent hardiness. Ben stretches out next to them on his stomach, one fist tucked under his chin, the other arm slung over the dog.

  Connie recognizes the show: “Heart to Heart,” an entertainment program that comes on before the news: gossipy stories about TV and movie stars, and once a week a live interview with a New York stage actor to spruce up its image.

  A statuesque brunette sits in one of those slate-blue interview swivel chairs, chatting with Isadora, who is perched in a matching chair that’s too large for her. She’s wearing a small black dress, the familiar glossies of Silver Moon spread out on her lap. Connie misses her. She hasn’t seen her in months.

  “What’s—”

  “Shh!” Ben says, without turning.

  “… the same show where my mother met Billy Spaulding,” Isadora is saying. “I can’t tell you what a thrill it is to bring this show back, just the way it was.” She looks directly at the brunette in a way the woman seems to find endearing. On television Isadora’s eyes look unnaturally green.

  “They’ve restored all the original songs,” Faith whispers. “The moon is silver again.”

  “Isadora said that?” Connie whispers back.

  Faith nods. “When all was said and done they couldn’t bear to alter a classic.” The corner of her mouth flickers in the blue light of the TV screen, and it takes Connie a minute to realize they’re sharing a family joke. She remembers Billy and Delle, suddenly fired, lamenting their “classic” being ruined by Garrett and a new director and a brace of understudies who had the temerity to show up sober for every curtain.

  The brunette swivels her chair toward the
camera. “Theater buffs will remember him as one half of Billy and Delle Spaulding, the acting duo whose career was cut short by personal turmoil, alcohol, and premature death.” She begins to quote from reviews of the original Silver Moon, asking Isadora how she thinks the revival will compare. Each snippet rustles in Connie some half-formed memory, and she can feel Faith tensing next to her. They could be standing under a marquee somewhere, side by side and not touching, nine and eleven years old.

  The camera flits back and forth from the interviewer to the interviewee. Something is happening in Isadora’s face. Her eyes take on a ferocious wanting, her whole body seems to swell. Connie finds this physical attitude unsettling, for it is reminiscent of Billy and Delle at their worst, so stuffed with themselves she feared they might literally burst. Connie turns, begins to say something to Faith’s implacable profile.

  “Shhh!” comes a voice from the floor. Chris this time. “They’re talking about you guys.”

  “… as if the fates brought you face to face with your heritage and your destiny at the same time,” the woman says, tapping Isadora’s wrist for emphasis.

  “Wow,” Chris murmurs. He moves even closer to Tracy.

  Isadora lifts her eyes slowly. For the first time it crosses Connie’s mind that Isadora can probably act.

  Joe has slipped into the room. He smells of machinery, though he has shed his coveralls and his hands are more or less clean. He touches Connie’s shoulder, whispers hello, then stands behind Faith, twining his arms around her waist. She tilts her head back and says something to him.

  “Sh-shhhhh!”

  “And then when I met my sisters, we literally fell into each other’s arms and cried,” Isadora is saying. Her fingers are moving like butterflies. “They’d been looking for me for years.”

  Ben and Chris turn as one face, their mouths half open, but before Connie or Faith can say anything they are all riveted back to the set by Isadora’s voice.

  “Billy told them about me the night he died.” Isadora casts her eyes down. “It was just like he … knew … he wouldn’t be coming back.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Faith says.

  The camera moves in tight on Isadora’s face. “For some reason, though, he never told me about them.”

  “You knew him?” the interviewer asks, her eyes flickering over her notes.

  “Oh, yes. It was a secret, of course. He used to call me a couple of times a week, at night.” She smiles. “Sort of like tucking me in.”

  Tracy’s head swivels back. “Is that true?”

  “No,” Connie says, bewildered. “She never even knew he existed.”

  “You can’t imagine how I felt, finally meeting my sisters! To finally see them in person! It was like we’d known each other forever.” Isadora touches the woman’s hand. “We’re very close.”

  “Well of course,” the woman says, her hair swaying. “It’s the most natural bond in the world.”

  “Exactly,” Isadora says. “When I was laid up for a while over the winter with a broken leg, they took me in and nursed me back to health.” A palpable silence descends upon the room. For a moment the sound blinks off, leaving Isadora’s lips moving desperately. When it returns she’s still going. “… while I was healing it gave me a chance to teach my nephew how to play blues guitar.” The woman murmurs something, then Isadora plunges on. “Yes, oh my God, he’s unbelievable. An absolute natural.”

  Chris howls with laughter.

  “Shut up,” Ben says, his face flaming.

  “Save it, guys,” Joe warns them.

  “It’s in the blood,” Isadora says. She twists her hands together like a child. The camera holds her a moment, then closes in on the brunette.

  “Thank you, Isadora James.” She turns to the camera. “Isadora will appear later this summer in the Broadway revival of Silver Moon, a show that originated almost thirty years ago with her father, actor Billy Spaulding,”—she falters slightly—“the father she knew only as a voice on the line.”

  The show is over. As the credits roll, the camera lingers on a long shot of Isadora and her interviewer, just shadows now in a darkened studio.

  Connie is afraid to look anywhere. On the floor Ben is sitting up, stunned as a bird that has just hit a window. Chris is whispering explanations to Tracy. Finally, Connie steals a look at Faith. She’s leaning against Joe, who still holds her around the waist. Her fingers are gathered loosely over her mouth and her eyes are riveted to the screen as if she were watching one of her sons perform dismally in a big game.

  Chris snaps off the television but the room does not come to life. Ben looks miserable, having been falsely exposed as an eighth-grade blues prodigy.

  “She wasn’t so far off about you, Ben,” Connie says, but she sees that her lie is worse than Isadora’s.

  “None of your friends watch this, anyway,” Chris says.

  “How do you know?” Ben snarls.

  Chris shrugs. He did his best.

  “Let’s get out of this room,” Faith says. “Connie, are you staying for supper?”

  “Thanks,” Connie says quickly. She doesn’t want to be anyplace else tonight, least of all alone in her apartment.

  Faith turns politely to Tracy. “Tracy?”

  “Gee … no, thanks,” Tracy mumbles, as if aware of being caught inside some family business she’s not quite ready for. “I have to get home,” she says.

  “Are you sure?”

  Tracy nods. “I’ll be back later.”

  She gets up quickly and Chris trails her to the door, where they kiss furtively for a few minutes before she leaves. A resigned look passes silently between Faith and Joe. He winks at Connie. “We’re getting there,” he says.

  They all file into the kitchen, and the mechanism of dinnertime clacks into motion. Water hisses on the stove, the refrigerator groans open and closed. Ben is muttering to himself.

  “Isadora only said that because she likes you, Ben,” Faith says.

  “Think if she didn’t,” he grunts. “Boy, can’t she tell some whoppers.”

  “Remember when we first met her?” Chris says. “All that stuff she supposedly knew about baseball?”

  “What about it?” Joe says.

  Ben shakes his head. “She didn’t know beans, Dad. She had the names all mixed up.”

  “I don’t know what to say to her after this,” Connie says.

  Faith turns from the stove. “I don’t think it makes much difference. She’s not what I’d call a good listener.”

  Connie pauses. “I suppose not.”

  “Why’d she make up all those stories?” Ben asks.

  “I don’t know,” Faith says. “At least she didn’t mention us by name.”

  The phone rings.

  “Hello,” Faith says. She looks at Connie. “Yes, we saw it … No, Isadora, it’s all right—No, I understa—Isadora, it’s all—” She hands the receiver to Connie. “I’m sorry, she just exhausts me.”

  Connie takes the phone. Isadora is still talking. “Isadora, it’s Connie.”

  “Connie! You’re there, too? Did you see me on TV?”

  “Yes. Where are you?”

  “I’m standing right here in the studio. You should see this place! Listen, are you mad about what I said? The part about me and Billy, that’s just publicity. Garrett thought of it, it wasn’t my idea. Are you mad?”

  “No. No harm done, I guess.”

  “I don’t blame you if you’re mad. I didn’t even know what I was saying, it just came out on automatic.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Are you sure? Are you still coming to the opening?”

  “I don’t know about opening night. I’d rather wait until Faith can drive down with me.”

  “No! You have to come to the opening, Connie, both of you!” She pauses for breath. “You’re mad, aren’t you? It was the broken leg, wasn’t it. Was that it?”

  Connie closes her eyes. “Isadora, I’ll call you back tonight.”
/>   “You’re not mad?”

  “No.”

  “Is Bob all right?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “Does he miss me?”

  “I’m sure he does.” How is she supposed to tell?

  “Promise you’re not mad?”

  “Promise.”

  She hangs up to find everyone looking at her. She sits down. “Isadora thought we might be mad,” she tells them.

  They stay quiet, all of them, all through dinner. Down the street someone is calling a dog. The distant drone of a lawn mower drifts in and out of hearing. It seems to Connie they sit closer to the table than usual, and closer to each other. It seems to her they stay longer, and eat more heartily, as if to fortify themselves against Isadora’s version of the truth.

  FIVE

  Bob has been missing for a day and a half. First Connie looked around the tidy grounds of her condominium complex, under the boxy hedges and behind the dumpster, then along the white paths of gravel that connect the squares of rear patios. She enlisted Stewart and Adam, who made a grim pilgrimage to the frog pond at the center of the complex in case Bob had drowned. Ben checked both sides of Brighton Avenue in case Bob had gotten hit. Faith and Joe walked the length of their street and the curving roads leading back to Connie’s in case Bob had gotten lost. Tracy drew a picture of Bob that Chris hung up at the Shop ’n’ Save in case Bob had gotten far lost. Phoebe and Joe Senior stopped over to walk the complex again, check the hedges again, peer around patio fences again, in case Bob was just hiding.

  But the cat is gone.

  Connie wakes late on Sunday and in her bathrobe goes out to check around the door, the walk, the little bush at the foot of the lamppost. She slams back into the house and calls Stewart.

  “He’s still missing.”

  “Don’t worry,” Stewart says. “Cats always find their way back home.”

  A horrifying thought seizes her. “Oh my God, he’s probably walking to Brooklyn.”

  “Take a bath, Connie. Drink some tea.”

  The knot keeps its grip on her stomach. “She’ll never forgive me, Stewart.” She fiddles with the broken screen on the window through which Bob escaped, cringing at the ragged edges. Had he wanted out that badly?