Secret Language

by Monica Wood

  It is mid-afternoon by the time they get into the car. Faith steers them out of town, into the country. The midsummer flowers that Faith would know all the names of fly by outside the open windows in a violent streak of color.

  “Faith, what are you doing?”

  Her profile is serene. “I’m helping you.”

  Connie decides not to ask anything else. She settles back in her seat, content to trust that Faith is telling the truth. A few more miles churn behind them. The shell inlay of the marble box on the seat between them shoots sunlight back through the windshield as the city disappears from view.

  “Did you ever find the cat?” Faith asks.

  Connie grimaces. “No. She’ll never forgive me, Faith.”

  “She’ll forgive you,” Faith says. “What choice does she have?”

  The rural scent of distant barns begins to waft through the windows. They pass Fuller Machine Company, a forlorn-looking outpost with its Sunday-empty lot. The trees come thicker on the side of the road. Faith slows the car and turns into a wide dirt path, deeply rutted, steaming with dust. She rolls up her window. “We’re almost there.”

  The path winds around a dense ridge of trees, and they bump over it for another few minutes before it opens into a summer field dotted with orange flowers.

  Faith stops the car and looks out the window for a few minutes. Connie follows her gaze beyond the field into a grim stand of evergreens.

  “I’ve always liked this place,” Faith says. She opens the lid of the marble box and plucks the two locks of hair from the satin cushion. She works the hair into one thick piece, red and gold, then divides it. Connie takes her half gravely, as if she’s being given a medal. The hair feels raw, unseemly, in her hands. She can’t remember touching this hair when it was alive.

  They get out of the car. The grass is upright and waving, families of flowers poking up in random clumps. The burdensome odor of new growth comes to Connie in a sultry gust of wind, with the loftier scent of new leaves and the roiling ocean somewhere beyond the farthest trees.

  “Joe and I saw a snowy owl here once,” Faith says. “Right over there.” Connie looks toward a snag in the middle of the field. “Listen,” Faith says. Connie listens: a faint teeming of birds, high calls and warbles from deep within the trees. The hair pinched between her fingers begins to feel alive.

  Faith lifts her tuft of hair. “It’ll end up in a bird’s nest,” she says. “It’s not exactly like throwing it away.” She scans the trees as if she can see each bird, each nest. The field unrolls from all sides, the far trees dissolved into a downy wash of green.

  “Say goodbye,” Faith says gently. She backs into the breeze, tearing a few strands from the lock and letting go. Connie follows, walking next to her, shoulder to shoulder, strewing hair like petals in a wedding.

  “Goodbye,” Connie whispers. The strands flare briefly, then disappear, into air, grass, trees, seasons, time.

  They do not speak at all on the ride home, but their hands lie next to each other on the seat. The sun is low but the sky is still light, and will be for some time.

  When Faith eases the car into Connie’s driveway, Connie doesn’t move, not wanting to abandon her sister’s company.

  “Are you okay?” Faith says.

  “I think so.”

  She moves her hand and Faith takes it up. “Good.” Their fingers twine around each other, the same fingers.

  Suddenly Faith laughs. “You’ve got company.” Connie looks toward her front door, painted gray like all the other units in the complex. Plumped beneath it, with the self-possession of a visiting prince, sits a big brown cat.

  “I don’t believe it,” Connie says. She slips out of the car and tiptoes down the walk, clucking softly, afraid of startling Bob into disappearing again. But the cat clearly has no such plan. He settles deeper into his own fur, plump as a tea cozy, staring. Connie reaches for him, picking him up exactly the way her nephew taught her.

  “See?” she says, holding up the cat to Faith like a sign: this remarkable animal who, having never once seen this place from the outside, somehow found the way home.

  VIII

  OPENING NIGHT

  It is a night like so many she remembers, the marquee lit up like a merry-go-round, a whirl of showy dresses sweeping through the theater doors. Armand is waiting just inside, fussily dressed—for them, Faith is pleased to recognize—in a silk suit with a handkerchief fluffed out of the breast pocket. Connie reaches him first, wending through the crowd easily from years of maneuvering through airports. Faith arrives in time to catch the powdery scent of Connie’s perfume on Armand’s wrinkled cheek.

  “How was the drive?” he asks.

  “It didn’t seem long,” Faith says. She glances at Connie, who raises her eyebrows good-naturedly. Seven hours in a car, miles of highway landscape, conversation patterned after the monks’ in Ben’s favorite joke. And yet she can see Connie agrees with her: It didn’t seem long.

  “Have you seen Isadora?” Connie asks.

  “No,” Armand says. “She had some notion it would be bad luck.” He squints up at the ceiling. “It’s crossed my mind that it might not be an altogether marvelous evening.” He pauses. “Things in the air, you know. A few ghosts.”

  He looks different to Faith now—his Santa Claus face seems burdened by kindness, lined with a trail of wrongs he could not right. She pats his arm. “It’s all right,” she says. “Let’s go in.”

  Armand shepherds them to the front row. Faith looks around self-consciously, suddenly aware of being gawked at.

  “People are looking at us,” she whispers to Connie. “Why on earth would anybody care?”

  Connie turns her head, scanning the crowd. “Garrett must have put out the word.”

  Faith sighs. “God only knows what he said.”

  “Brace yourself, here he comes.”

  Faith is surprised to find Garrett so little changed. He’s wearing a handsome tuxedo that doesn’t quite fit. He kisses her hand, his thin lips dry on her skin. She remembers suddenly that Billy used to kiss ladies’ hands, an affectation he took on after playing an archduke.

  “We’ve got a hit on our hands, friends,” Garrett says to them. “A hit like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Is that so,” Armand says genially.

  “We got the last of the bugs worked out in Pittsburgh. It’s a gold mine, mark my words.”

  “So marked.”

  “You ladies will want to pose for some shots backstage,” Garrett says. “The three sisters and all that jazz.” He moves his shoulders inside his tux and pulls down the sleeves. “The press is hot for it.”

  Faith blinks. “I don’t think so.”

  “You’ll change your mind,” he says, rapping on her chair arm. “Enjoy!” The house lights begin to dim and he disappears into the hush of the crowd.

  After a sluggish, meandering overture and the requisite applause, the curtain rises. The set is thrillingly huge, a seemingly endless expanse of sky and field. At the fading edge of the applause enters Isadora, stranded stage left in pink gingham, no bigger than a locust against these tricks of the eye, miles and miles of waving, sun-glinted corn stalks. Already Faith can see that the show is a failure. Next to her Connie’s breathing stutters, as if this recognition has passed like a current from one sister to the other.

  Oblivious, Isadora propels herself through each scene, hurling her lines over the footlights as if she were begging for mercy. When the leading man appears out of the burnished corn rows—a dark-haired, six-foot bear of a boy—Isadora seems to shrink even further into the scenery, nothing but a husky voice to prove her presence. They look strange together, stranger still when they sing: the boy’s notes float from his thick throat in a delicate, incongruous tenor, while Isadora’s warm, whiskey-soaked tones give her farm girl a disquieting air of the street.

  Faith can’t bear to watch. She turns away, focusing instead on Connie, whose profile shimmers in the creamy light coming off t
he stage, her eyelashes casting a spidery shadow on her cheek.

  “Faith,” Connie whispers, staring straight ahead.

  Faith turns back to the stage. “I know.” She closes her eyes, letting the show wash over her—the familiar score, the remembered melodies, the flurry of dialogue. Listening, but not seeing, she allows herself to spiral back into time. Even then, Silver Moon was just another silly musical, yet Billy and Delle had possessed enough talent, heart—something—to transform it. She remembers their faces, ruddy with joy, singing their plain intentions, two kids trying to save the farm. How did they do it? From what pocket of their exhausted souls did they retrieve this sweetness, this simple yearning? She remembers watching in wonder, remembers her fleeting belief that these wholesome lovers were the real Billy and Delle.

  It is possible to live an imagined life. This Faith knows. She begins to believe Billy and Delle could have had a cache of sweetness stored somewhere, held in reserve for their life on stage. And what might she herself have hidden, in her own reserves? Willingness is the word that comes to her; a virtue far short of courage, but, in the business of ordinary living, more practical. She holds to this thought, suddenly missing Joe.

  The show is over. The audience, irritable from suffering ninety minutes with no intermission, offers a halfhearted rumble of applause. Isadora takes the final bow, a bouquet of roses bunched in her arms, her eyes flickering over the front row, full of questions. By the time the house lights begin to come up, most of the audience is already moving, gathering wraps and purses, a steady, querulous murmur circling through the rows. “Ill-bred bunch,” Armand says. The curtain is not quite down, the house lights not quite up.

  An instinct for escape seizes Faith as she looks frantically for the exits, but the doors are clogged with theatergoers making their way out. At the back of the crowd she spots two tiny women, each with identical rolls of silver-blue curls arranged like hats on their heads. They are ancient, stooped, obviously sisters, decrepit in exactly the same way, walking deliberately, cautiously, arms hooked together for purchase. Faith watches their slow progress, resisting the inclination to help them. All evening she’s thought of nothing but thirty years past, yet here before her is a glimpse of thirty years hence. Two sisters left after a spate of sorrows, the inevitable string of losses: Phoebe and Joe Senior; Armand; one of the brothers, perhaps, or two; one of the wives, a child, a grandchild—all of this unthinkable, yet she thinks it—perhaps even Joe himself, or one of her own sons.

  In this view of the future, she and Connie remain. She can imagine a front door, not the front door of the house she lives in now, but another house, one like the Connecticut house before her grandmother left it. She can imagine the doorstep of that house on an ordinary day, a visit from her sons and their children. They will be standing at the door in a cluster—Isadora is there, too, she’s surprised to see—all of them holding something: a baby, a round of bread or some flowers, a birthday present. The sky will be streaming down on them, lighting the tops of their heads as they wait for Faith and Constance to open the door.

  “Do you think we can do this?” Connie says. Faith turns, startled, and sees that Connie intends to go backstage. “She’ll be looking for us, Faith. We have to go.”

  Armand hangs back, leaving it all to her. Faith lets out her breath. “We’ll just tell her she was wonderful.” All at once it seems easy. “We can say she lit up the stage.”

  Connie nods solemnly. “That’s just what I was thinking.”

  Faith glances back at Armand. “You coming?”

  He shakes his head. “I’m not a brave man.”

  “Wait for us, then,” Faith says, and begins to move up the aisle, Connie at her elbow.

  Backstage the air is sparked with a current of recrimination, but this is Broadway: the room is filling anyway, with cast members and friends from the new and original Silver Moon. To Faith some of these people look familiar, but she cannot recall what they might once have meant to her. She stands still, trying to orient herself to the blur of faces, feeling for the nearness of Connie, whose shoulder bumps against hers. She sights the yellow top of Isadora’s head flitting through the crowd. “There you are!” Isadora calls, moving through the thicket of bodies.

  Faith lifts her hand just as Connie lifts hers, in the same shallow arc. The gesture is involuntary, precise: an offering they are making together. Faith watches, fully present, as Isadora reaches for them, flattens herself against them, holding on as if they were the last living things.

  The crowd presses in: warm, insistent, curious. Faith allows it, she is willing; the rush of voices wheels around her, a cloud of sound. Already she can see the way home, the seven-hour drive, the hushed capsule of space, the peaceful drone of the engine, the quiet of Connie’s company. Their silence is a mystery they need not solve. It is simply a way of being together, the way birds fall silent in autumn, their work done, nothing to do but leave one place for another. They lift themselves from the earth, their destination a secret they know without knowing, the blue distance before them a pure and perilous thing.

  Secret Language

  MONICA WOOD

  A Reader’s Guide

  A Conversation with Monica Wood

  Debra Spark is the author of the novels Coconuts for the Saint and The Ghost of Bridgetown. She teaches fiction writing at Colby College and Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers.

  Debra Spark: You dedicate this book, your first novel, to Anne Wood, your sister, and, you write in the dedication, your “guardian angel.” I know that two of your siblings (a brother and a sister) are quite a bit older than you (and your other two siblings). Indeed, Anne was your high school English teacher. Can you tell me a bit about her and her influence on your writing?

  Monica Wood: You just asked me about one of my favorite subjects! Anne was my high school English teacher. She was—and is—the center of our family.

  Let me tell you a story about Anne, an emblematic story.

  I grew up thinking I was some kind of child prodigy, and the evidence for this was some letters I wrote to Anne, when I was five or six years old, and she was in college. Over the years, Anne mentioned these letters as proof positive of my talents. Recently, I was going through my mother’s cedar chest and found the letters. They said things like, “Hi, Anne. How are you? I am fine. I miss you.” That was basically it. All of them were pretty much the same.

  “Are these the letters you’ve been telling me about?” I asked her.

  She said, “Oh, yes,” all misty-eyed, and I’m saying, “Are these ALL the letters?” I kept hoping there was a secret stash somewhere.

  DS: Could you tell me a bit more about the rest of your family?

  MW: It’s an Irish-Catholic mill family from Mexico, Maine. My grandfather, father, and brother worked all their lives in the paper mill. My father was born and raised on Prince Edward Island, and my mother’s family also came from there, so there’s a strong Canadian influence. For example, we didn’t grow up with strong Maine accents—you can hear maritime Canada as much as western Maine in our speech. Also, my family is kind of unusual in that there are two generations of kids with the same parents. Anne and my brother Barry are fourteen and nineteen years older than Cathe, Betty, and me.

  DS: One of the reasons I’m curious about your family has to do with what your novel seems to say about families, about how we are shaped—irrevocably—by who we come from. This seems as much an issue of nurture as nature, since Isadora has inherited so many traits from the father she never knew, and since both Faith and Connie have been damaged by their parents and saved—to a degree—by their childhood coping mechanisms which continue into adulthood.

  MW: The central notion in Secret Language is that we’re shaped more by shared experience than by blood. Isadora’s never going to fit in the way she wants to, because she didn’t share a childhood with Faith and Connie. They’re going to take her in, but that’s not the same as absorbing her into their experience.
Not surprisingly, sibling dynamics have always fascinated me. For example, I love my older brother, but because he joined the air force the year I was born, I have a different relationship with him than with my sister Cathe, with whom I shared a bed for eighteen years. Because I never lived with my brother, he was always more of an uncle figure than a brother figure. He has children my age. On the other hand, because my brother and I are the musicians in the family, we share something unique.

  DS: You strike me—you’ll excuse me for being personal—as a very loving person.

  MW: Oh, thank you.

  DS: And yet your novel is about people who need to learn how to love, who can’t quite articulate either their needs or their affections. I wondered where that came from, the interest in that subject.

  MW: As I look at my work over time, I realize that a recurring theme for me is of replacing things that have been lost. People assemble families out of scraps sometimes, since everybody needs some kind of family. For some people, family is the family they were born into and never manage to shake. For others, it is a family that they later assemble. Or a work environment that is somewhat circumscribed.

  DS: Connie creates a family with Stewart.

  MW: And Isadora, who is trying to collect on something she thinks she missed out on. Life is a series of losses for everybody, and we just keep filling up holes as we get older. Some people have to start at a very early age.

  DS: I happened to read your second novel, My Only Story, before I read your first novel, Secret Language. They’re very different books, though I’m struck by one rather profound similarity. In both books, there is a woman who is an observer of a very connected, noisy family. In the case of My Only Story, it’s Rita, the hairdresser/narrator who wants very much to claim the Dohertys as her own. In Secret Language, Faith marries into a family very much like the Dohertys, and yet she’s overwhelmed by them. It all makes me think of the famous Tolstoy quote about how happy families are all alike, but unhappy families are each unhappy in their own special way. Do you agree with Tolstoy?