Family Secrets

by Judith Henry Wall

  “What sort of box?”

  “Just a brown cardboard box,” Ellie said.

  “You don’t think Nessa and Scott are having problems, do you?” Georgiana asked. “She didn’t sound like herself on the phone.”

  “Maybe Lily and Beth have been acting out or one of them is having trouble in school.”

  “Oh, God,” Georgiana gasped, “I hope Nessa hasn’t found a lump in her breast or something awful like that.”

  “No. She’d tell us if it was something like that. You know, that day in the coffee shop—at first I thought the man at the corner table was some guy who looked like Scott. He seemed younger and more engaging. I’d thought about having a private moment with Scott yesterday in the park and asking him about it. But then he didn’t come. He never seems to show up at family gatherings anymore. I can’t remember the last time I saw him.”

  “At Daddy’s memorial service,” Georgiana said.

  When the meeting in the president’s office finally ended, Vanessa hurried back to her office and went through her phone messages.

  Scott had not called.

  She sat staring out the window for a time at the students strolling across the campus with autumn leaves blowing about and squirrels scampering. It was just the sort of scene found in the college’s recruitment bulletins. And in the annual reports she sent to donors.

  Finally she sighed and pulled out her sack lunch.

  She’d hardly slept at all last night and was so exhausted she felt ill. Staying awake during the weekly meeting of the President’s Council had been painful. Just being at the weekly meeting of the President’s Council had been painful. Even after that strange conference call with her sisters, it took all her concentration to keep from nodding off.

  Her stomach was growling with emptiness, but she could not bring herself to take a bite of the smashed peanut-butter sandwich. She glanced at her watch. It was evening in France. She thought about calling her mother, but she wasn’t ready for that. Not yet. Maybe Scott would come back home. Maybe he really did need time to think.

  She hadn’t eaten any breakfast and was beginning to feel light-headed. She forced herself to take a bite of the sandwich and managed swallow it with the help of a sip of water.

  Then she took another bite.

  The girls were going to want to know how long their father was going to be away and why he wasn’t answering his cell phone. She would tell them that he’d forgotten it. But she had no answer as to how long he would be away. She wondered if she should admit that all was not well or keep up the pretense.

  She wanted to be mad at Scott for putting her through this, but she was too afraid to be mad. She had been less than content with their life for a long time now, but she’d never stopped to think what life would be like if he left her. If they divorced.

  They didn’t have enough money to lead separate lives. They would have to sell the house. And arrange for shared custody. There would be days and nights when she wouldn’t see her daughters, when she wouldn’t be able to make sure that they were dressed appropriately and wouldn’t always know where they were and whom they were with and what they were doing.

  In the night she had looked back over her entire marriage in an attempt to reach some sort of understanding as to why this had happened. Was it her failure or Scott’s? Maybe she should have been more sympathetic when his computer business failed. She hadn’t said, “I told you so,” but he knew she was thinking it. She had wanted him to stay at the bank and earn a regular paycheck.

  Maybe he would come back home on his own. If he did, she would be more encouraging and help him regain his self-confidence. He’d always been involved in the girls’ school and athletic endeavors. Maybe he could be a schoolteacher or a coach.

  But this other voice was bouncing around ideas in her head. She wasn’t happy with her lot either. Her job was stressful and demanding and no damned fun. She had to suck up to people she didn’t particularly admire.

  She had never liked her job and never would. But she was vested in the college’s pension plan and had health insurance for herself and her family, and while she didn’t get summers off, she was able to cut back and have more free time. And there was always that free tuition for her daughters. If she and Scott were divorced, Lily and Beth might have no choice but to attend there.

  She choked down the rest of her sandwich, answered the rest of her e-mails, then wrote a presidential letter thanking a recent graduate who had made a two-hundred-dollar donation to the drama department. I especially recall your sterling performance as Katharina in The Taming of the Shrew…

  The ring of the phone made her jump. Please let it be Scott, she begged the Fates. Please.

  It wasn’t.

  The president was in the midst of signing the stack of donor thank-you letters Vanessa had left with her this morning. “This letter to Margaret and Fred Stinson—shouldn’t you have mentioned their daughter’s recent engagement?” she asked.

  “It was their niece Cynthia Stinson who got engaged,” Vanessa pointed out. “Margaret and Fred’s daughter is named Beverly.”

  “Oh, yes. The rather large girl on the field hockey team.”

  “That’s the one. Cynthia plays softball.”

  She hung up and turned to her computer. Ten donor thank-you letters, she promised herself. Then she needed to make a few phone calls. There was a reception at four for the new members of the Alumnae Council, but with Scott gone, she would have to leave early to pick up the girls.

  She finished the letter to the library donor and started another.

  Dear Dr. and Mrs. Martin:

  Thank you so very much for your generous five-hundred-dollar gift to the Hamilton Hall Renovation Project. It is because of loyal supporters such as yourselves that we are able to provide a superior education for talented young women like your granddaughter…

  She stopped to reach for a tissue. The tears in her eyes were blurring the words on the screen.

  She drove around the block to make sure Scott’s car wasn’t waiting in line to pick up Beth and Lily. At precisely three thirty, the door opened and a river of girls in white blouses, navy sweaters, and navy pleated shirts, each with a backpack slung over one shoulder emerged.

  Her heart turned over as she watched her beautiful, healthy daughters racing toward the car, hair flying, and Lily’s shirttail half-out.

  Beth opened the door and stuck her head inside. “Isn’t Dad back from his trip yet?” she demanded.

  “Not yet,” Vanessa told her.

  Lily’s head came in beside her sister’s. “Can we go to the mall with Jenny and her mom?” she asked breathlessly.

  “Pleeeze,” Beth begged. “Jenny wants us to help her decide what dress to buy for her cousin’s wedding. She’s going to be the candlelighter.”

  “What about homework?” Vanessa dutifully asked.

  “We’ll do it right after dinner,” Lily promised. “No television or time on the computer until it’s done.”

  Jenny’s mother waved from her SUV. “I’ll have them home by dinnertime,” she called.

  Vanessa gave them each money for a snack. She considered going back to the office and writing some more letters, but she thought of the empty refrigerator at home and headed for the grocery.

  Wandering aimlessly up and down the aisles, she tried to visualize what was in the pantry and refrigerator but ended up randomly grabbing this or that. Grocery shopping was no longer her province. Nor was the day-in-and-day-out preparation of meals. Or transporting the girls to and from school and to their after-school activities.

  How in the world was she going to manage with Scott gone?

  But he wasn’t gone, she told herself. He was just away. He would come back, and they would talk. They would work things out.

  After a complete circuit of the grocery she had only a loaf of bread, ketchup, popcorn, and orange juice in the basket. Dinner, she told herself. Get something for dinner. And for the rest of the week.

&nb
sp; As she headed home, driving down tree-lined streets past well-kept houses and lawns, she wondered how long it would be before their neighbors began to complain about the dead oak in their front yard and the peeling paint on their house. She and Scott had bought the house as a fixer-upper and had only got partway down their list of repairs and renovations. The house still needed new windows. The floors still needed refinishing. The oven was still in need of a functioning thermostat. The garage door still was on its last legs.

  As she turned the corner and her neglected home came into view, she realized someone was sitting on the front step. Two someones.

  Her sisters. Ellie and Georgiana were sitting on her front step.

  They stood as she turned into the driveway. And Vanessa felt the resolve that had kept her afloat throughout the long day flowing from her body. Somehow she remembered to put her foot on the brake. To put the car into park.

  She put her head against the steering wheel and felt her body go limp. She was aware of her sisters opening the car door, pulling her out, hugging her, then supporting her as the three of them walked toward the house.

  “How did you know?” Vanessa asked between sobs. “How did you know?”

  Eleven

  FOR days, the memory of her father singing “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” in the park had continued to come unbidden to Myrna’s mind. Such a bittersweet memory. The last truly happy memory of her childhood. The remembering came with a price, dragging from the deep recesses of her mind the darker times that came after that day.

  Usually she was able to squelch these girlhood remembrances when they threatened to erupt. She hadn’t been that girl eating an ice cream cone in the park for more years than she wanted to count. Her parents had been dead for so long that she was probably the only living person who had any memory of them. They had been poor people, and the poor leave no legacy. And when she was gone, they would be truly dead and completely forgotten for all time.

  She had known two things growing up—she would do anything to keep from being poor and she would live only for herself. Children robbed their parents of options, and she wanted nothing to stand in the way of success. Fatherhood had brought her papa an early death.

  But the time came when Myrna realized she needed children to carry on the empire she was creating. And what an empire it turned out to be. Not just mining. She owned an oil company with its own fleet of tankers. She owned hotels, shopping malls, a chain of grocery stores, and a company that manufactured and exported munitions throughout the world.

  It was more than a commercial empire, however, that she wanted to leave behind. She wanted to be remembered as the founder of a great American family. She wanted her progeny to be not just captains of industry but also statesmen and ambassadors. She wanted one of her children to be elected president of the United States. Her oldest son was a congressman and, according to plan, would soon announce that he was entering the race for governor of Colorado. The governorship would be his stepping-stone to the White House. If he should fail, her other son would step up to the line. She would do whatever needed to be done to make one of her two sons the most powerful man in the world. A man whose name would endure as long as history was being written. A man whose mother would be remembered as a powerful person in her own right, a mother who had paved the way for her son the way Joseph Kennedy had done for JFK. And when a son of hers took the oath of office on the Capitol steps for all the world to see, she would be there with him. It would be the culminating event of her lifetime. Erasing all evidence of her past had been the first step in fulfilling that dream.

  Her past now existed only in her memory. Remembrances of those other times had flitted through her brain from time to time, but of late she had been preoccupied by them. Which she found disturbing.

  Hattie’s father had left for Alaska shortly after they ate ice cream cones in the park. He had made her mother promise to write often even though she had only gone as far as the seventh grade and writing was difficult for her.

  Papa had tried to schedule Patrick’s operation before he departed but had to leave that for Mama to take care of. Poor Mama, who’d never driven anyplace except Coal Town on her own, left twelve-year-old Hattie with a neighbor lady and drove to Billings with Patrick in the backseat with a pillow and a blanket and his wooden truck.

  The neighbor lady, Mrs. Simpson, was elderly, skinny, didn’t hear well, and had whiskers on her chin. Hattie knew her from church but had never been in her house, which had a parlor with upholstered chairs for when the preacher came. Mama had instructed Hattie to weed Mrs. Simpson’s garden, which she did. And she washed the windows and scrubbed the floors without being asked.

  And when she wasn’t doing chores, Hattie carried a book to the front porch and read as long as the light was good, looking up every time a vehicle drove by, hoping it was Mama and Patrick returning from Billings.

  Finally the evening of the fourth day at Mrs. Simpson’s house, the old Ford pulled up out front, and Hattie went racing across the yard.

  Only Mama was in the car.

  “Where’s Patrick?” Hattie asked.

  Mama buried her face in her hands.

  Hattie sensed Mrs. Simpson coming up behind her. The women’s old, veined hand reached out and opened the car door. She took hold of Mama’s arm, pulled her out, and put her arms around her.

  Hattie grabbed her mother’s sleeve. “Where’s Patrick?” she demanded.

  Mama withdrew from Mrs. Simpson’s embrace and put her arms around Hattie. “We’ve lost him, honey,” she sobbed. “We’ve lost our sweet little boy.”

  Hattie knew what her mother meant, but she didn’t want to believe it. All she could do was say, “No,” over and over.

  Mrs. Simpson put a hand on Hattie’s shoulder. “Your little brother is with the angels.”

  They went into the house and sat at Mrs. Simpson’s kitchen table. And Hattie listened while Mama explained about Patrick. The doctor said his heart sounded just fine before the operation, but it had something wrong that couldn’t be heard with a stethoscope. The doctor fixed his foot, but they couldn’t get him to wake up after the operation.

  When Mrs. Simpson asked about a funeral for Patrick, Mama explained that it had taken most of Papa’s bonus money for the operation, and she didn’t have enough left to pay for an undertaker to bring Patrick’s body to Coal Town in a hearse, and the people at the hospital said it was against the law for her to bring him home in a car. Patrick had been buried in Billings in a corner of the cemetery set aside for the poor. Then Mama put her hands on the table and stood. “We’d best be getting home, Hattie.”

  Patrick’s chair was in its usual place at the table. Patrick’s toys were in a cardboard box in the corner of the kitchen.

  “Where’s the wooden truck Papa made for Patrick?” Hattie asked.

  “I buried it with him,” Mama answered, then sank into a chair and threw her head back and began making a sound unlike Hattie had ever heard before, a sound so hopeless and full of pain that she wondered if her mother was going to die, too.

  Hattie put her hands over her ears. “No, Mama, no,” she sobbed. When Mama didn’t stop, Hattie put her hands over her mother’s mouth and pushed with all her might to keep that terrible sound from coming out.

  Mama went limp and gradually her arms came around Hattie’s body and her head rested on Hattie’s shoulder. Then Hattie felt her take a deep breath and lift her head. “I bet you are hungry,” she said.

  Mrs. Simpson had sent food with them. Hattie set the table and Mama put out the sandwiches and fried chicken. But they both just sat there not eating and looking at nothing. Finally Mama got out a tablet and sharpened a pencil with a knife.

  Hattie offered to write her words for her, but Mama shook her head. She needed to do this herself.

  Hattie watched in silence while her mother labored over a letter to Papa telling him that their precious little boy was dead.

  She imagined her father up there in Alas
ka hoping every day to get news of Patrick’s operation. There was a pay phone at the Coal Town drugstore and probably other places in town, but most likely Mama didn’t have a number to call. She could have asked Mr. Sedgwick’s secretary to get word to him, but maybe Mama didn’t think of that or maybe she thought that she should be the one to notify her husband about their son’s death. She erased a lot and started over several times, but finally she folded a single piece of paper and put it in her purse. The next morning they went to the post office. Mama bought a stamped envelope. Hattie wrote the address on it and dropped it in the slot.

  For years, Hattie would find herself imagining how happy her poor father would have been to get his first letter from home. He would have just gotten off his shift and be covered with whatever kind of dust came from chromium mines. He would have ripped the letter open and eagerly read Mama’s printed words. He would probably have had to read it a second time to make sure he understood. Then he would have gone off by himself to cry. Even though he was a grown-up man, he would have cried and cried for his little dead boy. And there was no one to comfort him. Not his wife. Not his daughter. Not the preacher from the church.

  As it was, Papa did not return from Alaska when his year was up. There was an accident at the mine, and he’d been trapped underground for almost a week. Papa and one other man were the only ones who survived. The mine was closed. Papa was sent to a hospital on Kodiak Island for many months before he finally came home. Hattie and Mama picked him up at the train station in Billings. Papa was so skinny that Hattie didn’t even recognize him when he got off the train. He hugged them and sobbed like a baby, saying over and over how glad he was to be home. How much he had missed them. How he could hardly recognize Hattie, who had grown so tall.

  Even with Papa back in the house, it seemed eerily quiet and empty. That first night Mama stewed a hen and made dumplings, and Papa told her it was the best food he’d eaten since he left home. And Mama bragged about Hattie’s being the best student in the eighth grade. Then they just ate. Hattie had become accustomed to her and Mama eating their meals in silence, but she was surprised that first evening with her papa back home that no one seemed to have anything to say.