Family Secrets

by Judith Henry Wall

  “Hi, doll,” he said, leaning over to give her a kiss. A very nice kiss. He sat next to her and she pushed the drink toward him. He removed the straw and downed it in one gulp. “You staying for the next set, aren’t you?”

  She shook her head. She wanted to tell him that she was upset. That her Mother had not shed a single tear when she’d seen the portrait and was getting rid of all the family possessions and moving to France. And that even though she had defended their mother’s right to make such a drastic change in her life, it was disturbing to realize the home of their childhood would be lost to her and her sisters—and shocking to think of their mother with a man other than their father.

  “What did you think of that last arrangement?” Freddy asked. “I talked Trisha into letting me update some of her stuff. The old girl still has a great set of pipes, but she’s stuck in the dark ages when it comes to music.”

  “Do you love me?” Georgiana asked.

  He reared back in his chair a bit and scrutinized her. “Silly girl,” he said, punching her arm. “You’re my one and only.”

  Then he took a second look and realized he had not provided the correct response to her query. “You are my one true love, Georgiana Wentworth, and always will be.” He took her hands in his and kissed first one palm and then the other.

  Three

  VANESSA rang the doorbell, then inserted her key into the lock. “It’s Vanessa,” she called out as she stepped inside. “I forgot my cell phone.”

  “I’m on the phone,” her mother’s voice called from her bedroom.

  Vanessa reached into her purse for her cell phone and waited with it in hand. Her mother was laughing. Girlish laughter.

  Vanessa considered moving closer to the open bedroom door and eavesdropping a bit but resisted the urge, going instead to the kitchen for a drink of water. Then she went back to the living room and perched on a sofa arm.

  Finally her mother appeared. “Oh, are you still here?” she said, her face a bit flushed. “I see that you found your phone.” Then she paused and regarded her oldest daughter’s face. “But that’s not really why you came back, is it?”

  “I came back because I’m in shock,” Vanessa acknowledged.

  “And the reason you’re in shock is because…?” Penelope asked as she headed for the wing chair.

  “Because I assumed you’d always be here in our family home,” Vanessa said with a wave of her hand indicating the entirety of the apartment, “being my sisters’ and my mother and Lily and Beth’s grandmother.”

  “Do you really think that my moving out of this apartment means I’m relinquishing my position as mother and grandmother?” Penelope asked, her head tilted to one side.

  “Well, you certainly seem to be changing your priorities. Ellie and Georgiana both think you’ve met a man—probably some guy you found online.”

  “I did read several articles about online dating services and actually roamed around some of the sites,” Penelope acknowledged, “but I met Jean Claude walking down Madison Avenue. It was a cold, windy day, and he looked lost. I asked if I could help. He was searching for the quilt store. He said he wanted to buy a genuine American quilt to take home to his sister. He bought a quilt. We had dinner. There were numerous transatlantic e-mails and phone calls. He made a return trip to New York.”

  Penelope paused, a soft, remembering kind of smile playing with her lips. “And then he sent me a plane ticket. I suppose I should have let you and your sisters know right away what was going on, but first I wanted to keep the secret all to myself—to savor and enjoy. Then I worried that you girls wouldn’t approve, and I can tell by the expression on your face that, at least when it comes to my oldest daughter, I was correct in that regard.”

  “How can you be with someone else so soon after Daddy’s death?” Vanessa said, rising from her perch. She began to pace, the cell phone still in her hand.

  “So, would you feel all right about my being with ‘someone else’ if I’d waited another year?” Penelope asked, using a calm, reasonable tone of voice that Vanessa found infuriating.

  “Or how about five years?” Penelope continued. “Or ten? I don’t consider myself old, Vanessa, but I don’t have so many good years left that I have the luxury of wasting them.”

  “Did you know before Daddy died that you’d marry again?” Vanessa demanded, still pacing. She felt like an attorney in a courtroom interrogating a witness. She paused beside the coffee table to stare down at the birthday-present portrait. She wondered what would happen to it. It certainly wasn’t going to accompany her mother to France. Maybe she’d put it over her own mantel, Vanessa thought, except she wasn’t sure she wanted it. The portrait was about forever and ever, and maybe there was no such thing.

  “Who said anything about marriage?” her mother asked with a shrug. “I don’t want to be Jean Claude’s wife, but if we get along and both stay healthy, I would like to have a nice long relationship with him. He inherited a farm with a charming house that has a lovely view from the terrace. We plan to grow roses and vegetables and keep dogs and cats and chickens. I will write some, but not as much as before. Jean Claude loves to cook, and I love to drink wine while I watch him cook.”

  “I will rephrase my question,” Vanessa said in a testy tone. “Did you know before Daddy died that you would enter into another relationship should the opportunity present itself?”

  “Before your father left to cover the war in Bosnia, we discussed the possibility of his getting killed.” Penelope’s voice was calm, her body relaxed. “Several journalists already had lost their lives, and he said that he would expect me to get on with my life if that happened to him. We had the same conversation and came to the same conclusion before he left to cover the war in Afghanistan. He expressed that same sentiment again when he first became ill.”

  Her mother’s composure irritated Vanessa. She wanted her to be ashamed. To show some contrition. “You and Daddy were my role models. I’ve never known anyone who had a happier marriage than you guys.”

  Penelope’s expression grew thoughtful as she absently played with a strand of her silky, dark hair. “It was a good marriage,” she agreed, “probably better than most, but it was not perfect, Vanessa. Your father and I had our differences and came close to divorce on two different occasions. Maybe we didn’t do you girls a favor by never letting you see the undercurrents.”

  Wordlessly, Vanessa stood and walked down the hall to the bathroom. She closed the door and leaned against it.

  Her parents had come close to divorce. Twice.

  How could that be? She had held her parents’ marriage up as her ideal and carried a deep sense of failure that she had not managed to have the same sort of marriage. Except maybe she had such an idealized notion of marriage that no man could ever have measured up to it.

  She glanced at her watch. She needed to get herself back to New Jersey, and it was getting late, the trains running further and further apart. She had an early meeting in the morning. And in spite of her written instructions on the kitchen counter, she doubted if Scott had put the trash container in the alley for tomorrow morning’s pickup or checked over Lily’s math assignment. The girls would have done a half-ass job cleaning up the kitchen. And no one would have taken the dry clothes from the dryer and folded them, nor would they have moved the wet clothes from the washer to the dryer and put in another load. But she could not make herself move. Her body was frozen in place while an avalanche of thoughts went tumbling through her mind. She allowed one especially poignant memory to perk to the surface.

  The last months of his life, her father would have bad days and not-so-bad days and an occasional reasonably good day. Vanessa was focusing on one of the latter. A Sunday. As soon as she arrived at the apartment, he announced that he wanted to go to the park. Just the two of them.

  The two-block walk to the park entrance left Daddy exhausted, so they climbed into one of the horse-drawn carriages. Their family had always taken advantage of their re
sidence’s proximity to Central Park, but this was the first time she and her father had ever ridden in one of the carriages.

  It was a glorious summer day with just enough of a breeze to keep it from being hot and to move puffy, little clouds across a vividly blue sky. It was the sort of day that made people comment on how great it was to be alive. Vanessa knew that it might well be her father’s last visit to the park and was overwhelmed with suffocating sadness. Her shoulders began to shake as she fought to keep the tears from coming.

  Daddy took her in his arms. “My darling, Vanessa,” he said, and planted a kiss on her forehead. “You were our firstborn and taught me how to be a father and have always been so very special to me. I know how difficult this is for you, but this is the way of things, honey. I would have preferred to have another decade or two, but children are supposed to bury their parents.”

  Vanessa wanted to jump out of the carriage and run away from his words and any responsibility on her part to acknowledge her father’s impending death. She withdrew from his embrace, rubbed away her tears with the back of her hand, and said in a voice that came out gruff, “Don’t talk like that.”

  He leaned back and lifted his face to the sun. “I’ve had a most satisfactory life thanks to your mother and you girls. And to Miss Vera Wentworth, who for some reason known only to her took in a nameless foundling in the sixth decade of her life and managed to live long enough to get him raised. I married the woman I loved and I have loved being a father. And I’ve been a pretty good journalist and finally got my book done after a decade of procrastination. So I have no quarrel with the Fates, and I don’t want you to either.”

  But Vanessa did want to quarrel with the Fates or with God or whatever power in the universe it was that gave her father a terminal illness. She wanted to curse and scream at all of them. And beg. Make bargains. Anything that would let her keep her father for a while longer.

  “I think it’s going to be harder for you than your sisters and mother,” her father said. “You always seemed to think that if you just worked hard enough and were a good enough girl, everything would turn out okay.”

  They were passing by the open-air Delacorte Theater where they attended plays in the summertime. Her father reached for her hand. “So many good memories,” he said.

  Vanessa nodded, then used her free hand to wipe away the tears.

  When the ride ended, he was too weak to walk back. Vanessa hailed a taxi.

  Little more than a week later, he entered a coma from which he never returned. And now, almost a year later, her remaining parent had decided to relinquish her mothering role and raise chickens in France with some man who was probably a gigolo.

  Her mother was tapping on the bathroom door asking if she was all right. Vanessa didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of an answer, but she mumbled a bit and turned on the faucet.

  When she finally emerged from the bathroom, she went into her parents’ bedroom and removed her father’s cardigan sweater from the open box and stuffed it in a plastic bag.

  Her mother was standing by the open French doors.

  “Okay, so you want a man in your life,” Vanessa said, “but couldn’t you at least find one who lives here in the city?”

  Penelope turned. “I feel young again, Vanessa. I know that’s difficult for you to understand. I am embarking on a great adventure. Maybe it will be a disaster, and maybe not. But I am thrilled at the prospect of living in France with a delightful man who also wants to make the most of the rest of his life. And there are telephones and e-mail and airplanes, you know. We shall talk and send messages often and visit back and forth. I’ll be able to help with plane tickets when I get the apartment rented, and I expect you and your sisters to come at least once a year, and I’d like my granddaughters to spend next summer with me. In fact, I insist that my granddaughters spend next summer with me and subsequent summers as well. I want them to learn French and perhaps attend a French university when the time comes.”

  “That’s bribery,” Vanessa accused.

  Penelope cocked her head to one side. “Perhaps, but you will allow your daughters to come because the experience will enrich their lives. And you and your sisters will come as well.”

  “Perhaps,” Vanessa said, parroting her mother’s word. Then she walked over to the desk and picked up the well-worn Bible that had belonged to the woman who had raised her father. “Where did you find it?”

  “In a box with Vera’s papers that I found on the top shelf of the closet in your father’s office.”

  “Could I have the box?”

  Penelope shrugged and led the way down the hallway, which was covered with pictures of generations of her mother’s family. Vanessa’s grandparents had moved into the apartment when the building was brand-new. She and her parents moved here when her grandparents moved to Florida. That was when Vanessa was just a toddler.

  She was shocked at the disarray in her father’s study and realized what a formidable task her mother had undertaken. How could a man’s professional life be reduced to a mess like this? For years, her father had covered wars, political upheavals, and natural disasters all over the globe. Now his files filled bulging trash bags that were piled in one corner, and boxes were stacked two and three high wherever there was room for them.

  “He said he didn’t want anyone going through his first drafts and false starts and planned to get rid of all this himself after he finished his book,” Penelope explained, “but he didn’t have the strength or the will to undertake the task.”

  “You’re just throwing it all away? Without even going through it?”

  “It is what he asked me to do, Vanessa,” she said in her this-is-not-negotiable voice.

  She watched while her mother moved boxes around, finally unearthing a sturdy carton with the word EGGS written on the side.

  “I remember helping Miss Vera gather eggs,” Vanessa said.

  “Yes, your father used to take you with him when he visited her.”

  “And I went with Daddy to her funeral.” Actually it had been just a graveside service on a really cold day. Vanessa held her daddy’s hand as they made their way across the frozen ground toward a casket waiting by a precisely dug hole. Someone had produced a blanket to drape around her shoulders.

  Penelope nodded. “Ellie had strep throat, so I didn’t try to go. Your dad and I argued about whether or not you should accompany him. I thought you were too young.”

  “Daddy cried,” Vanessa recalled.

  “He loved his Miss Vera and was very grateful to her.”

  “Did you like her?”

  “I didn’t know her very well,” Penelope said. “She was a painfully shy woman and seemed very uncomfortable when I was there. She kept apologizing because she didn’t have a dining room, and we had to eat in the kitchen. I think she thought that because I was a ‘city girl’ I looked down on her. Your father finally gave up trying to get her to come visit us.”

  Vanessa put Vera’s Bible in the plastic bag with her father’s sweater and placed the bag on top of the box’s yellowing contents, then stooped to pick it up.

  “Can you manage it on the train?” Penelope asked.

  “I think so. Good night, Mother.”

  “Could I give you a hug?”

  Vanessa shook her head and headed back up the hallway. Penelope did not follow her.

  Vanessa took a cab to the station. The train ride seemed longer than usual.

  She continued to nurse her anger. Did her mother’s decision to leave the country and abdicate the throne of motherhood mean she didn’t love her family as much as they thought she did? Would the day arrive in Vanessa’s own life when she wanted to fly away and live just for herself?

  She was too exhausted to come up with any answers and tried to concentrate instead on her schedule for tomorrow at the private women’s college where she was the overworked development officer. She had to make a day trip to Philadelphia to call on a prominent alumna and propose that she m
ake a major gift to the college, then make it back to campus for a meeting with the senior-class officers to discuss their class gift. And she was behind on correspondence. Behind on returning phone calls and e-mails. Behind on visiting prospective donors.

  When the train arrived at her station, she got off and carried the box with Vera Wentworth’s papers across the dimly lit parking lot to her SUV.

  Scott had asked her to buy something on the way home. Milk? Bread? She couldn’t remember. She stopped at a convenience store and bought both. When she got home, two unopened gallons of milk were in the refrigerator and loaves of both white and whole wheat were in the bread box. Then she remembered. It was orange juice he’d wanted her to buy.

  Vanessa emptied the dishwasher and wiped off the counters. The Formica was coming loose around the sink. And the cupboards needed painting. The entire room needed painting. The whole house inside and out.

  She put Vera’s box on a shelf in the basement and her father’s sweater on a shelf in her closet.

  Scott woke when she came to bed.

  “Nice evening?” he mumbled.

  “It was okay,” she said. “Did Lily finish her book report?” “Uh-huh.”

  “Scott?”

  “Mmmm?”

  “My mother is having an affair with a Frenchman and is planning to move to France. Maybe I should feel happy for her, but the truth of the matter is I am very angry.” The only sound from Scott’s side of the bed was a soft snore.

  Vanessa rolled away from him. And to think I once loved him more than anything, she thought. Of course, she still loved him. A great deal. He was her husband and the father of her children.

  She had never thought of untidiness as being much of a character flaw until she married Scott. How much effort did it take for him to hang up a towel or put his dirty clothes in the hamper or put the milk carton back in the refrigerator or close a drawer? And Lily and Beth were becoming more like him every day.