Family Secrets

by Judith Henry Wall

  And there was an album devoted to documenting the life of Matthew Wade Wentworth, beginning with a picture of him as an infant propped up on a pillow and ending with him as a young man with five-year-old Vanessa standing on the front step of the farmhouse that no longer existed. Intermingled with the photographs were his baptismal certificate, report cards, and newspaper clippings chronicling his exploits as a high school baseball player, along with a clipping announcing his graduation with honors from the West Virginia University.

  Vanessa had invited her sisters to accompany her to this rural, northeastern corner of West Virginia—just for a couple of days, then they could catch a bus or train back to New York and she would drive on to Lynchburg, Virginia, to attend a meeting of private-college development officers being held on the campus of the women’s college there. She thought her sisters would jump at the chance to get out of the city for a time and enjoy the scenery and fall foliage and see the town where their father grew up. Although Ellie and Georgiana both thought it was a wonderful idea for Vanessa to search for information about the mysterious Hattie, they had both declined her invitation.

  Vanessa had already made contacts in the town. During a telephone conversation with the secretary at the church where Vera Wentworth had been a lifelong member, Vanessa learned that the pastor who presided over the church during the last two decades of Vera’s life still lived in the community. And the county agricultural agent had given her the name of a retired farmer who once owned the property adjoining the Wentworth farm.

  She filled up her vehicle at the truck stop and used the restroom before driving back to town. She had no trouble locating the Queen Charlotte Bed and Breakfast, where she had a reservation. After she’d checked in, she asked for directions to the Golden Age Retirement Home.

  The retirement home director led Vanessa down a corridor to the Reverend Reuel Ruston’s room. The aged clergyman was dozing in his recliner.

  The woman gently shook him. “You have a visitor, Reverend. This nice lady drove all the way from New Jersey just to talk to you.” She adjusted his chair so he was more upright and pulled a side chair over for Vanessa.

  It took the old man a few minutes to process that information and open a window to the past. Vera Wentworth? Yes, of course, he remembered her. And the boy. Matthew was his name. “So Matthew Wentworth is your father,” he said.

  Vanessa explained that her father had died more than a year ago and accepted the reverend’s condolences. Then she listened while the old man recalled how Vera and her boy were always there in the third pew on the right every Sunday until Matthew went off to college. “I’ve never seen a youngster with better manners,” the minister added.

  Reverend Ruston recalled how, after Matthew left for college, Vera stopped coming to church and became a bit of a recluse. “I think she missed the boy. I’d always heard that she’d been a loner before she adopted Matthew, and with him gone I reckon she just slipped back into her old ways.”

  Vanessa explained that she was interested in tracking down her father’s birth mother and wondered if he knew anything about the circumstances of his birth and subsequent adoption. She told him about the letter written to “Aunt Vera,” by someone named Hattie, which made her think her father’s birth mother could have been a relative of Vera’s.

  “Your father was around nine or ten when my wife and I arrived in Pikesville,” the elderly minister said, leaning back in his chair. “And Vera Wentworth wasn’t much of a talker. I knew that she’d inherited the farm from her father and had raised the boy since he was a newborn. If my predecessor at Bethany Lutheran had anything to do with placing the boy with Vera, I never knew about it, but let me tell you, young lady, it was a blessing to Vera and the boy that they got paired up. He received a good upbringing, and Vera had someone to fuss over.”

  Vanessa explained that she had come with her father to Vera’s funeral. “I don’t remember much about the service except that my daddy cried and it was really cold.”

  Reverend Ruston couldn’t recall Vera’s funeral. So many folks he’d buried over the years. Hundreds, maybe more than a thousand. Some of them he knew well and others he didn’t know at all.

  Vanessa ate dinner at a small café on Main Street, drawing several stares from the locals while she ate her solitary meal.

  On the way back to the bed-and-breakfast, she stopped at a convenience store. She’d wanted to buy a New York Times but had to settle for a USA Today, which she read after bathing in a tub with clawed feet and crawling into a canopied bed with eyelet curtains and a mountain of fluffy pillows.

  She had a hard time falling asleep. The old house creaked around her, and the canopied bed was distracting. It was a bed more suitable for couples on their honeymoon or celebrating a special anniversary. She felt a bit stupid about coming to this town at all. She’d thought it would be an interesting excursion for her and Ellie and Georgiana, and the three of them hadn’t been together since their mother had left for France more than two months ago. Georgiana had come to Lily’s birthday party, but Ellie was in charge of a special edition on affordable fashion and couldn’t get away. Or at least that was what she said. Vanessa had been in Manhattan on business last month, but only Ellie was free for lunch. In her usual business suit, Vanessa felt matronly next to her fashionable sister in her spike heels and perfectly accessorized outfit. All Ellie could talk about was her latest boyfriend. A guy named Boone. His divorce was proving to be lengthy and wouldn’t be final for some time, Ellie explained, but something in her tone made Vanessa wonder if the man was on the up-and-up. Ellie admitted that he had not yet mentioned marriage, and she didn’t know if he would be willing to father another child or two since he already had two by his first wife. She was still feeling her way with him, Ellie explained. By the time Vanessa could get a word in edgewise and mention the possibility of a sisterly trip to West Virginia in search of their roots, Ellie was already glancing at her watch. “Next month is just impossible,” she said, “but I’ll be anxious to hear what you find out.”

  Georgiana had seemed more interested in making the trip, but her hands and feet were booked for photo shoots on the days that Vanessa planned to be gone.

  Vanessa hadn’t realized just how instrumental their mother had been in keeping her and her sisters connected. Without their mother acting as facilitator, the three of them were already drifting apart.

  Penelope sent infrequent e-mails addressed to her three daughters but made a point to call each of them every week. She always sounded relaxed and happy. “I’ve gained a couple of pounds and don’t even care,” she’d admitted to Vanessa. Mostly she asked questions—about her granddaughters and son-in-law, about Vanessa’s latest projects at work, about the weather in New York and if she’d spoken to her sisters recently. Vanessa couldn’t bring herself to inquire about details of her mother’s life. She could hear the sullenness in her own voice and was sure her mother did, too. “How long are you going to punish me for being happy?” Penelope had asked during her last call.

  “Don’t be silly,” Vanessa snapped. “I’m just tired.”

  And she had been. Tiredness was a condition of her life.

  She hadn’t told her mother about her plan to visit West Virginia. At that point, she wasn’t even sure that she would really go. It meant she would be away from home four days instead of the two it would take to attend the conference in Virginia, and she would return to even greater mayhem at home. But the mystery of her father’s birth had piqued her interest and put her in the mood for a sentimental journey. And maybe a break in her hectic routine would be restful.

  But it wasn’t restful enough for her to fall asleep in the canopied bed. She turned on the lamp and read herself to sleep.

  The next morning, she took flowers to the cemetery.

  Vera Wentworth had been buried alongside her parents with four generations of the family nearby. Vanessa put the flowers on Vera’s grave and said, “I wish I could have known you better. Thank you
for raising my father. He thought the world of you.”

  Her words brought tears to her eyes, and she had to fish a tissue from her purse to blow her nose.

  From the cemetery, she sought out the elderly farmer whose land had abutted Vera’s. Judson Mallory was ninety-two, wheelchairbound, and now lived in a trailer home with his widowed daughter, Felicia. His memory had failed years ago, but Felicia agreed to tell Vanessa what she remembered about the Wentworth family. A small, pretty woman with wiry gray hair, Felicia explained that she and Matthew were the same age and had grown up together. She seemed genuinely sorry to hear that Matthew had “passed on.”

  “You must be putting together a family tree,” Felicia commented as she filled a kettle with water.

  “Not exactly,” Vanessa said. Then she explained how the letter her mother had found in Vera Wentworth’s Bible sparked her interest in family ties.

  Vanessa waited while the woman wheeled her father into his bedroom for a nap. When she returned, Felicia poured the boiling water into a blue teapot. “Were you the little girl that Matthew brought to Miss Vera’s interment?” she asked as she took two mugs and a sugar bowl down from the cupboard.

  Vanessa nodded.

  “Terrible weather for a burial. I felt so sorry for you with your bare little legs. I sent my husband to the car for a blanket to put around you.”

  “And I’ve remembered that kindness all these years,” Vanessa said.

  Felicia put a plate of cookies on the table and filled two heavy, white mugs with tea.

  Felicia picked up her mug with both hands, as though she were warming them, and got a thoughtful, remembering expression on her face. “Vera was a woman past fifty when she took in your father,” she began. “The story goes that one Sunday morning, the minister announced from the pulpit that Vera had taken in a foundling and asked for donations of clothing and a crib. Vera always called him Matthew Wade, but at school he was always just ‘Matthew.’ If I have the Wentworth family history correct, there was a terrible depression in the late 1800s, and Vera’s father and his brother went to work in the mines up in the Northern Panhandle. Lots of men from these parts did that to keep family farms afloat. The brother was killed in a mining accident. Mr. Wentworth married a Hancock County girl, and Vera was born up there. When Mr. Wentworth’s father died and he inherited the farm, he moved back to Pikesville with his wife and Vera, who was a grown-up woman by then. Both of her parents died before I was born and before Matthew came into Vera’s life.”

  “Did Vera have any siblings?” Vanessa asked.

  “Yes, she did,” Felicia said with a nod of her gray head. There was a framed photograph of Vera’s parents and her as a young woman and a young boy of about nine or ten on the mantel. I remember her saying the boy was her brother and that there had been bad blood between her father and her brother, and Vera hadn’t seen him for years. When I told my mother about that picture, she said that Vera’s father had been a mean, cantankerous old man that no one liked and she could see how he might have run off a son. Isn’t that sad? I wonder if he ever regretted being that way.”

  Felicia paused to take a sip of tea before continuing. “My mother always thought that Matthew’s birth mother must have been a relative of Vera’s, possibly the daughter of her long-lost brother. Why else would anyone give a baby to a woman of Vera’s age, especially one who’d never had children of her own? Course, Matthew could have been the baby of some local girl from around here who’d gotten herself in trouble and her parents kicked her out—folks did that back then—and for some reason only known to the doctor or midwife who delivered him or maybe the mother herself, Miss Vera was asked to take him in. And maybe that made some sense. Other folks had children of their own to raise, and Miss Vera, being a spinster lady, had only herself to look after. She wasn’t rich by any stretch of the imagination, but she was better off than most folks in these parts, especially back then,” Felicia said as she refilled Vanessa’s mug.

  Felicia rambled on a bit more telling how she and Matthew had ridden the school bus together and been in the same grade at school. “He was hands down the smartest one in our grade. That boy always had his nose in a book, and he was a good baseball player. It always seemed peculiar to me how a really smart boy could be such a good baseball player.”

  While eating another solitary dinner at the Main Street Café and later while trying to fall asleep in the canopied bed, Vanessa struggled to figure out some way in which the information she had gleaned that day could help her discover the identity of her father’s mother.

  But did it really matter whether she ever found out the reason why her father ended up being raised by a spinster aunt? Was it going to give her any meaningful insights into her own on-the-surface-

  reasonably-good-but-deep-down-not-so-happy existence on this planet? Or provide some understanding as to why she loved but often did not like her own sisters? Or help her figure out why her mother—the woman who married the smart, athletic boy that Miss Vera Wentworth had raised and dearly loved—had not been totally devastated when he died? Not that Vanessa would have wanted her mother to spend the rest of her life consumed by grief, but she’d never broken down, never been inconsolable.

  Of course, Vanessa fully realized that if Scott died, she would be sad, especially for her daughters, but not inconsolable. She would sincerely grieve, then get about the business of remaking her life. But even with this acknowledgment, she could not forgive her mother and maybe never would.

  Six

  NAVIGATING the narrow, steep path with its tight switchbacks was somewhat harder than it used to be, but Myrna still made her way down the incline each day to her mailbox. The daily climb up and down her mountain kept her body and mind strong and sound and confident.

  For almost twenty-five years she had been making the trek—ever since she’d built her home in the Elkhead Mountains in Colorado’s Park Range. Eagles Nest she called her home, a totally unconventional, light-filled dwelling anchored firmly into solid rock on the mountain’s southwest face with spacious decks cantilevering breathtakingly outward. Myrna had conceived the design herself, imagining what Frank Lloyd Wright would have done if asked to design a house tucked high against the side of a mountain. Then she had hired the best architects and engineers to execute her vision. Constructing the private road that wound its way up the mountain was almost as expensive as the house itself. Always a private person, she’d originally used Eagles Nest as a weekend retreat, but as she became ever more prominent in the business world and ever more wealthy, she was uncomfortable with the attention such success garnered and began to spend most of her time here, ruling her family and her business empire from her lofty dwelling.

  Fall was in the air, and she paused to zip her jacket before carefully making her way downward, always keeping a hand firmly on the iron railing bolted to the stone face of the mountain. She stopped frequently to admire the view and take great inhales of the invigorating mountain air. Physicians had told her for years that there was no cure for the asthma brought on by all the coal dust she had breathed as a child, but they were wrong. The mountain air had cured her. She felt invincible as she made her way down her very own mountain and planned the day that lay ahead.

  The first thing on her agenda was preparing her remarks for a meeting of her company officers this afternoon. The men and women who managed her empire, including two of her four children, came six times a year to pay homage and give their reports and either bask in her praise or cower under her displeasure. As always, when she strolled into the room, she would be wearing a black pants suit custom-made for her by a London tailor who came twice a year to Eagles Nest to show her his sketches and fabric samples and check her measurements, which were always the same. He marveled at that. And her posture. She had promised herself that the day she could no longer stand erect was the day she would turn the reins of her business empire over to her younger son or one of her daughters.

  She had other plans for her older son
.

  As Myrna descended, she considered the remarks with which she would open the meeting, pausing for a time to watch a red-tailed hawk circling high in the sky, the master of his world. She knew how that felt.

  When she reached the bottom, she unlocked the gate in the security fence and continued down the path another twenty yards to the large metal mailbox. She inserted a key into the lock and placed the mail and newspapers in a backpack and secured it on her back. When there was too much mail for the backpack, Willy, her longtime “girl Friday,” would drive down to fetch the rest.

  Climbing up the path was easier on her knees than coming down, but it required more frequent pauses to catch her breath.

  Once she had reached her house, Myrna headed for her office, where a carafe of freshly made strong, black coffee and a freshly baked whole-wheat muffin loaded with nuts and berries and still warm from the oven were waiting for her.

  She unloaded the backpack on her desk, stacking the newspapers and then sorting the mail and placing the envelopes in the precise order in which they would be opened and read. That done, she seated herself in her high-backed desk chair, poured coffee into her favorite mug, enjoyed that first delightful sip, and took the first bite of the warm muffin. Then she expressed her contentment with a sigh and allowed herself to think how far she had come in her life. A story of rags to riches were she ever to tell it, something she had no intention of doing.