Family Secrets

by Judith Henry Wall

“He’s not, but he went anyway.”

  “You want me to come look after things until you feel better?”

  Her sister’s offer brought tears to Vanessa’s eyes. “Thanks, honey. That’s sweet of you. I’ll feel better after coffee and a couple of aspirin. I’ll call you in a few days. Okay?”

  “Okay, but do you care if I nose around the Internet?”

  “Be my guest. I’ll be anxious to hear what you find out,” Vanessa said, trying to sound a bit more chipper. She hadn’t lied. She was sick. Sick at heart.

  And now she was starting to feel anger. And fear. What if Scott never came back? How in the hell was she going to manage on her own?

  She was already overwhelmed, and if Scott was out of the picture, everything would be up to her. He wasn’t the greatest husband in the world, but he was a good father.

  “One more thing,” Georgiana said tentatively. “I really need to tell you something.”

  Vanessa squelched a sigh and rubbed her forehead instead.

  “Nessa, are you still there?”

  “Yeah. I’m still here.”

  “That Boone guy that Ellie’s seeing called me after the picnic. He wanted to come over.”

  Vanessa felt a wave of weariness wash through her body. Not now, she wanted to say. I’ve got major problems of my own. “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him to go to hell. But what about Ellie? She needs to know that the guy’s a jerk. But if I’m the one to tell her, I’m afraid she’ll blame me somehow. You know, ‘kill the messenger.’ I thought maybe if you could talk to her and let her know that I didn’t encourage him in any way. I didn’t, Nessa. You were there. You know that I didn’t. You know that I wouldn’t do something like that. Actually the man made my flesh crawl—trying to come on to me while Ellie’s knocking herself out to be nice to him. We can’t let her get hooked up with a lowlife like that. He’ll break her heart. She’s always telling me that I need to find a guy more up-scale than Freddy. I know that Freddy has his faults, but he’s loyal. As for the creepy Mr. Boone, I doubt if there’s a loyal bone in his body.”

  “Look, Georgiana, I really can’t deal with this right now. I’ll call you in a day or two.”

  “What kind of sick are you? You don’t sound so good. Are you sure you don’t want me to come out?”

  For a heartbeat or two, Vanessa considered calling in sick and accepting Georgiana’s offer. She could break down and cry in her baby sister’s arms. But she had to get Lily and Beth to school and was scheduled to meet with the college president and the department heads this morning to present her plan for the upcoming Reach for Excellence Fund Drive.

  “I really appreciate the offer, but I’m fine,” Vanessa insisted. “I’ll call you later in the week. I promise.”

  Beth was already in the bathroom. Vanessa sat on the side of Lily’s bed and smoothed her hair. “Wake up, baby.”

  “Just five more minutes,” Lily murmured, her eyes still closed.

  Lily had dark, thick hair from her mother and grandmother. She also had Penelope’s wonderful cheekbones, brown eyes, and olive complexion. With her long legs and lean body, Lily was on her way to being sleek and elegant, whereas younger sister Beth was blond, on the plump side, dimpled, and cute. “Sorry, honey. It’s time to get up,” Vanessa said, planting a kiss on her daughter’s forehead.

  Lily’s eyes fluttered open. “Is Daddy back yet?”

  “He called from Richmond after you were in bed,” Vanessa lied. “He drove down to meet with a prospective client and had car trouble. He may be stuck there for a few days.”

  Georgiana sat there for a time staring at the telephone. All was not well in New Jersey. And unless Vanessa had lost her job or one of the girls was sick or had run away, the problem was probably marital. Scott was a nice guy, but he and Vanessa had never seemed like the perfect match. Nessa was uptight like Ellie, and Scott was laid-back.

  She called Freddy on his cell phone. He was in California. Trisha Bell and her band were playing a two-week gig at a nightclub in Santa Monica.

  “Yeah,” he answered, his voice groggy.

  “Do you love me?”

  “You called in the middle of the night to ask if I love you when you already know the answer?” he mumbled.

  “It’s not the middle of the night,” she said. Of course, Freddy never got up before early afternoon. She tried to remember if it was earlier or later in California. “Do you think we should get married?”

  “Whatever you want, baby. Now, can I please go back to sleep?”

  “Do you have sex with other women?”

  “What brought that on?” he muttered.

  “According to a survey taken by Ellie’s magazine, thirty-two percent of married men have cheated on their wife, forty-six percent of engaged men have cheated on their fian-cée, and fifty-nine percent of unmarried and unengaged men with a steady girlfriend cheat on her.”

  “And you think I’m one of the fifty-nine percent guys?” Freddy demanded. “What the hell happened to trust? And what about the female side of the equation? What percentage of women cheat on their husband or boyfriend?”

  She hung up.

  Now why had she done that? Georgiana asked herself as she poured a glass of orange juice.

  But she knew why, and it had nothing to do with Freddy. That a man her own sister had fallen in love with and thought was in love with her and maybe even wanted to marry her and make babies with her was putting the make on Ellie’s own sister had given Georgiana pause. As had the survey published in Ellie’s magazine. Of course, it had not been a scientific survey, and only two hundred men between the ages of eighteen and forty had been interviewed, but the results were enough to make a girl wish she were a lesbian.

  Freddy wasn’t the type to play around. But how could she know for sure?

  Georgiana thought about pulling on some clothes and heading to her neighborhood coffee shop for a latte and muffin.

  But instead she went to her computer.

  She typed “Deer Lodge, Montana” on the search line. Less than a half hour later, her heart was pounding. “Oh my gosh!” she said, and reached for the phone.

  Nine

  AFTER the picnic, Ellie had done some laundry, dined on leftover food from the picnic basket, then checked her calendar for the upcoming week, which included fashion shows on Wednesday and Thursday, and on Friday she was to be interviewed on a local television show about the latest trends in women’s fashions.

  She decided on an outfit and accessories for each day, including a fabulous Tracy Reese outfit for the TV interview, then tidied up the apartment, changed the sheets, took a shower, and put on a silk peignoir set. Boone had said nothing about stopping by after he did whatever he was doing with his kids, but she had let him know that she would be at home this evening.

  She wondered if he was really doing something with his kids.

  Or maybe it was his kids and his wife with whom he was spending the evening. Marlene was the wife’s name. Maybe Boone and Marlene had tucked the kids in bed and were now having sex while she was sitting here in a slinky peignoir and gown for which she had spent a fortune at Barneys. Boone insisted that his reconciliation with his wife was not working out, and he was apartment hunting.

  Just in case Boone did show up, she lit candles, put a really nice Chablis on ice, and curled up on the sofa to watch Casablanca for the umpteenth time.

  The movie made her cry. Unrequited love always did. But at least the two star-crossed lovers would never fall out of love. Never see each other grow old. Never disappoint one another.

  She wasn’t in love with Boone. Not yet. She had promised herself that she wasn’t going to allow herself to fall in love with another man until she was absolutely certain they had a future together.

  She changed into a pair of well-worn pajamas and took two over-the-counter sleeping pills, slid between the freshly laundered sheets, and waited to fall asleep. But she kept thinking about Boone and wondering where he was.
She had been thrilled out of her gourd that he’d come to the picnic. His presence there meant something. She was certain of that. And whenever they had sex, he told her how good they were together and how much he loved making love with her.

  But sometimes she worried that Boone was not a truthful man.

  And that made her wonder if she really wanted him or any other man messing up her domicile and her life. Maybe she should forget all about motherhood and continue living her focused and quite satisfying life.

  After a restless night, Ellie woke early and decided to head to the office and get a few things done before the phone started ringing.

  With her promotion to associate editor, she had moved from a cubicle into a real office. It was smallish but had a wonderful view of the Chrysler Building, and she had redecorated it, of course. Her desk was built-in and made with cheap-looking fake wood, but she’d had it recovered with a handsome laminate that looked like Moroccan leather. And she’d found an elegant camelback love seat with claw-feet at a used-furniture store in the East Village and had had it upholstered in distressed black leather. The coffee table was an authentic Hans Wegner that she’d spotted in an antique store near Vanessa’s house in Jersey.

  She’d spent more decorating her small office than decorating her three-room apartment, but more people saw the office and she spent more time here than at her apartment. And she always got a thrill when she walked into the room, which—like her name on the magazine masthead—was a tangible sign of her success.

  Working on a top-tier fashion magazine was a heady experience, and Ellie had never minded the hard work and late hours. Once a month, when she had the latest edition in her hands, she took great satisfaction in knowing that she and her colleagues had pulled off yet another miracle and took great pleasure in knowing that all over the English-speaking world and beyond, stylish women would enjoy the fantastic magazine that she had played an important role in creating and find inspiration and useful advice on its pages.

  She had come to the magazine as a journalist and missed the pleasure that came from creating a carefully researched, creatively crafted piece. And while she now did only incidental writing—cover copy, cutlines for photographs, and the like—she had learned a great deal about the craft of writing from the hundreds of articles she had assigned and edited. Ellie’s job was to smooth, cut, rearrange, and sometimes ask for more information. She had to decide when a piece was lacking if it was salvageable and how that might be accomplished. When a particularly challenging or interesting topic came along, she sometimes wished she could write it herself instead of deciding which of the magazine’s stable of free-lancers—or “contributing editors” as they were listed on the masthead—would get the assignment. But with her promotion, she had no time for writing.

  Of course, if she ever rose to “editor in chief,” she would have her own monthly column and become a recognized arbiter of style and a real force in the fashion world. Such women did not go around with a baby on their hip and a diaper bag over their shoulder even if the diaper bag had a designer label.

  Ellie had reached a point in her life when she had to decide what her ultimate goal should be. Editor in chief or motherhood? Of course, in theory, she was supposed to be able to do both. But were there enough hours in the day to do justice to both?

  With that thought, she stashed her Marc Jacobs handbag in the bottom drawer of her desk, logged on to her computer, checked her calendar for the week, answered the most important of her e-mails, then began editing an article on a Peruvian footwear designer and manufacturer. Ellie had paused to look through some of the photographs supplied by the designer when the phone rang. The operator asked if she would hold for a conference call. Soon Georgiana’s voice said, “Ellie, Nessa, are you both there?”

  Ellie pressed the speaker button and replaced the receiver. “I’m here,” Ellie responded, wondering what was so important that Georgiana had placed a conference call. After all, they had just seen each other yesterday.

  “Me, too,” Vanessa said. “What’s going on? My secretary called me out of a meeting in the president’s office to take the call.”

  “I had to talk to you both at the same time,” Georgiana said, excitement evident her voice. “I just discovered that female convicts in Montana used to be incarcerated at a prison in Deer Lodge. The prison originally was built to hold just male prisoners, but they had to have some place for women so they put up a wooden building for females inside the prison walls.”

  Ellie waited for Georgiana to say more. When she didn’t, Ellie asked, “That’s it? That’s why you made a conference call?”

  “That letter from Daddy’s birth mother had a Deer Lodge, Montana, postmark,” Vanessa reminded Ellie in a voice that sounded weary. And distracted.

  “Well, just because the town had a prison doesn’t mean that Hattie was ever incarcerated there,” Ellie pointed out as she resumed her perusal of the Peruvian photographs. The boots were absolutely stunning. And quite expensive. But already she knew she had to have a pair.

  “If Hattie was in prison when Daddy was born, it would explain why she gave him away,” Georgiana pointed out. “Maybe her parents had disowned her or were dead, and Hattie decided that she wanted to have a relative raise the child rather than having him end up in an orphanage or with a total stranger.”

  “She may have something, Ellie,” Vanessa said, sounding a bit more interested. But tired. Definitely tired. Ellie was going to ask her if she felt all right when Vanessa added, “I need to get back to my meeting. We’ll have to talk about this some other time.”

  “Hattie also could have been an ordinary, un incarcerated young woman—an unmarried schoolteacher or a waitress or even a schoolgirl—who ended up pregnant,” Ellie added as she continued her examination of the photographs, which included handbags along with the boots and shoes. “Back then, there was such a stigma against unwed mothers that most girls either had a backstreet abortion or gave the baby up for adoption. Maybe in addition to a prison, there was one of those places in Deer Lodge where girls went to have babies in secret.”

  “Perhaps, but I don’t think we can just rule out the possibility that the prison had something to do with Hattie’s situation,” Georgiana said. “Apparently Deer Lodge was just a small town back then, and the prison would have been the town’s major industry. The women’s prison is in Billings now. I just talked to a woman in the warden’s office there, and she said that any existing records from the Deer Lodge prison would be in the state archives in Helena. So I called the number she gave me, and a very nice woman named Janet said that, yes, what remained of the Deer Lodge records were stored there. But she said it wouldn’t be a big deal to go through them since very few women were incarcerated back then. In fact, only seventeen female inmates were at Deer Lodge the year that Daddy was born. So I asked Janet if maybe she could look and see if any of them were named Hattie. She called me back to say that one of the female inmates was named Henrietta, and that she was pretty sure that Hattie could be a nickname for Henrietta.”

  Ellie put down the photographs. The Hattie story had just got more interesting.

  There could be a story here, she decided. Of course, with no fashion angle it wasn’t anything that Stiletto could use. But maybe one of the traditional women’s magazines would be interested. She envisioned a bonding story about three sisters who were drifting apart until they took this journey into their beloved late father’s past.

  “Well, it may be something we want to pursue,” Ellie said. “You’ve been awfully quiet, Vanessa. What do you think about Georgiana’s discovery?”

  “Maybe it really doesn’t matter who Hattie was and why she gave Daddy away,” Vanessa said. “It was a long time ago, and as we keep saying, she’s probably dead by now anyway.”

  “But what if she’s not?” Georgiana insisted. “She’s probably wondered about the baby she gave away all of her life—I know that I would if I’d given away a baby—and now as she approaches the en
d of her life, she might be really grateful to find out that her baby grew up to be a good, kind man and had three daughters who loved him very much, so much that they wanted to find his birth mother and thank her for making sure he had a good home.”

  “Perhaps,” Vanessa said. “But I must go. Maybe we can talk about this some other time.”

  Ten

  GEORGIANA listened to the click from Vanessa’s phone. “What’s going on with Nessa?” she asked Ellie, slumping in her chair. She’d been so excited when she’d discovered that a woman who was possibly their Hattie had once been incarcerated in Deer Lodge, Montana. But obviously Vanessa was not interested.

  “I’m not sure,” Ellie allowed. “She sounded tired, and maybe you just caught her at a bad time.”

  Something in Ellie’s voice made Georgiana ask, “Do you know something I don’t know?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Explain please.”

  There was a pause before Ellie said, “Well, it may be nothing, but I saw Scott in town a couple of weeks ago. We were doing a photo shoot down in the Financial District. I ran into a coffee shop and was waiting in line to buy something mostly so I could use the bathroom and realized that he was sitting at a table in the back corner with a woman.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “No, I was in a hurry to get back to the shoot and didn’t have time for introductions and chitchat.”

  “So what are you implying?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Ellie said, wishing she hadn’t mentioned the incident. “They seemed to be kind of deep in conversation. But no touching or anything inappropriate. It was just so surprising to see Scott in Manhattan without Vanessa and the girls. And then he wasn’t with them at the park yesterday when Vanessa had said that they all were coming.”

  “What did the woman look like?”

  “Early thirties. Attractive. Shoulder-length brown hair. She was wearing a navy pants suit with a white blouse. Probably she worked in the neighborhood. There was a box on the table.”