Family Secrets

by Judith Henry Wall

  Mama and Papa never talked about Patrick, at least not in front of their daughter. But one day Hattie found her father out in the shed crying over the box with Patrick’s toys that used to be in the corner of the kitchen. When he saw her, he opened his arms to her. His cheeks were wet with tears.

  Sixty-five years had passed since that day, yet Myrna could almost feel the wetness of her father’s tears. He had loved Patrick. And he had loved her.

  Twelve

  LILY and Beth had not been sure that they wanted to leave their friends and softball and soccer teams behind and spend the entire summer in France with their grandmother, and Vanessa felt as though she would wither up and die without her daughters for so long a time. But Penelope insisted that they had to come for the summer or not at all. She enticed her granddaughters with promises of visits to Paris and London, and, yes, she would take them to see where Marie Antoinette had lost her head. And where Anne Boleyn lost hers. And Penelope explained how the town where she and Jean Claude lived offered a veritable smorgasbord of exceptionally handsome boys just about their age, and that of a summer’s eve the residents of Château de Roc strolled about the town center visiting with friends and neighbors while the younger children ran about and the older boys and girls flirted with one another—all under the careful supervision of their parents and grandparents, of course. And their mother and aunts would be joining them at the end of the summer, and by then Lily and Beth would be knowledgeable enough about Château de Roc and the surrounding area to serve as their tour guides.

  When Penelope sent Lily and Beth’s plane tickets and flight information, Vanessa was surprised to see a generous and quite unexpected check from Penelope made out jointly to her three daughters with an accompanying letter explaining that the money was to be used for an early-summer getaway. For just the three of them. Out West, if they liked. Or a cruise. Or a beach house on Cape Cod. She wanted them to go someplace where they could put their day-to-day lives on hold and simply enjoy each other’s company.

  “I am so proud,” Penelope had written, “of the way Georgiana and Ellie supported their sister and nieces in their time of need and proud of Vanessa for having the sense to lean on them.”

  After she read the letter, Vanessa called her mother.

  “Is everyone all right?” Penelope asked.

  Her mother’s voice was full of concern, and Vanessa understood why. In the eight months Penelope had been a resident of France, she had been the one who placed the calls. Vanessa sent an occasional e-mail to her mother, but this was the first time Vanessa had called her.

  “Everyone is fine, I suppose,” Vanessa said.

  “You don’t sound fine. Please don’t tell me that you’ve changed your mind about letting Lily and Beth visit me.”

  “No. The reason I called is to set the record straight.”

  “Which record would that be?”

  “It is true,” Vanessa began, “as you pointed out in your letter that accompanied the surprising and quite generous check, my sisters helped me through a very bad time, but I haven’t seen them in months. They don’t seem to understand that, as a single parent, I no longer have the money or the time to lunch with them in some charming bistro or to join them for a night at the theater seeing some wonderful new play or to go shopping with them in trendy boutiques. Ellie e-mailed me yesterday to tell me about a face cream that she swears has made her skin look five years younger in just three weeks, and it only cost two hundred dollars! Georgiana spends hundreds of dollars every week looking after her hands and feet, and I can’t remember the last time I had a professional manicure or pedicure. I absolutely fell apart yesterday because Beth lost her lunch money.”

  “Does this mean you refuse to take a trip with your sisters this summer?”

  Vanessa took a deep breath. Was that what she was trying to say? Looking back, she wasn’t sure how she would have managed after Scott left without Ellie and Georgiana. But after she sold the house and moved into her new residence, her sisters seemed to think she no longer needed their support. “No, I suppose not,” she allowed. “I’d planned to ask you to let me use my share of the trip money to pay down my credit cards and let Ellie and Georgiana go off on their own. But then maybe you figured out that we hadn’t been seeing much of each other lately and this is your way of remedying the situation.”

  “Something like that.” Her mother sounded so close. Vanessa could even hear a clock chiming in the background. But her mother was not close. She was half a world away. “Vanessa, if things are as bad as you say, why haven’t you asked me for help?”

  “Pride, I guess.” Vanessa pulled a pillow out from under the bedspread that she had carefully smoothed over the bed this morning because she was the sort of person who made the bed every morning whether anyone else was ever going to see the bed or not and propped it against the headboard, kicked off her shoes, and leaned back. She’d had to purchase a new bed because the king-size bed she’d shared with Scott would have all but filled the so-called “master” bedroom of the cardboard town house where she now lived with her daughters except when they were with their father, which they were now, making her the lone occupant of the domicile. She grabbed the other pillow and clutched it against her middle. “Things are improving now that Scott’s making child support payments,” she told her distant mother as she studied her own image in the dresser mirror, an image of a lonely, worried, unhappy woman who wasn’t as young as she used to be. “And now, in addition to my regular job, I’m moonlighting as a fund-raising consultant for a private school in Montclair. It doesn’t pay a lot, but every little bit helps.”

  Vanessa hesitated, then asked, “Why a trip, Mother? If you want your daughters to spend more time together, why not just subsidize our having lunch together once a month and maybe an occasional theater night?”

  “Because I want you girls to have some time together in a more meaningful way,” Penelope explained. “You may not realize it, Vanessa, but your sisters need you. You are the oldest and the most sensible. When I’m gone, you’ll be the matriarch of the family. How close my daughters are to one another in future years depends on you, my darling.”

  Vanessa wanted to say that in a very real sense, her mother was already “gone,” but instead said, “I didn’t ask to be the firstborn.”

  “That’s true, but I’m so very glad that you were. Your father was, too.”

  Vanessa remembered her father’s last visit to Central Park. He’d told her that she had taught him how to be a father. Tears sprang to her eyes now as they had then.

  Vanessa had blown her nose and reluctantly agreed to take a vacation with her sisters and told her mother that she loved her, something she had not done since she’d learned that Penelope was moving to France. Not that she had stopped loving her mother, but not saying the words was a way to punish her. It had been a relief to end the moratorium.

  And maybe a trip with her sisters would be a good thing. Maybe Ellie and Georgiana did not fully appreciate how lonely and weary she was, but they had come through for her when she needed them the most.

  She would never forget how grateful she was to see her sisters sitting on her front porch the night after Scott left—the night after she’d found the note from him that changed her life. Ellie and Georgiana had taken charge. When Lily and Beth arrived home after their trip to the mall, Ellie and Georgiana ordered everyone to the kitchen table. Lily and Beth regarded their mother’s pale countenance and puffy eyes and exchanged fearful glances. Ellie nodded in Vanessa’s direction, indicating that it was time for her to explain to her daughters what was going on, but before she could convince her mouth to speak, Beth blurted out, “You and Daddy are going to get a divorce, aren’t you?”

  Somehow Vanessa found her voice and told them that she and their daddy were having some problems that had nothing to do with them. “Your father and I both love you girls very much, and he will always be your father and I’ll always be your mother even if we no longer live togeth
er, but I am hoping that will not be the case.” She said she was sure that their father would be getting in touch with them soon and inform them about his plans. She explained about his note and how he needed some time away to think. She hoped that she and their father could work things out and their lives would get back to normal, but that might not happen.

  Lily and Beth cried, of course. And they only picked at the meal that their aunts had prepared and served. Every time the phone rang, everyone jumped. Vanessa would feel four sets of eyes watching her each time she picked up the receiver. None of the calls were from Scott. One of his golfing buddies called. A neighbor wanted them to be on the lookout for a missing dog. The other calls were for Lily or Beth, who would tell their friends they had loads of homework and didn’t have time to talk.

  Three long days passed before Scott called—three days of worry and fear and anger and disappointment. Vanessa was in her office at the college. “Where are you?” she asked, struggling to keep her voice even.

  He ignored her question. “How are the girls taking this?”

  “How would you expect them to take it? They’re very upset. They miss you and want you to come home.” Then she realized that he was sobbing.

  “Oh, God,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.”

  Vanessa understood. He was debating whether he should come back home and be miserable or try to make a new life for himself.

  “Who is she?” she asked.

  “No one,” he insisted. “I just needed to—”

  “Yeah, I know,” Vanessa interrupted, her tone as flat and unsympathetic as she could make it. “You needed time to think. In the meantime, you need to at least call your daughters.”

  “I don’t know what to tell them.”

  “That makes two of us,” she said, then carefully—as though it were made of eggshells—replaced the receiver on its cradle. She waited for the tears to start flowing once again. But for now at least, the reservoir was dry, and she turned back to her computer:

  We here at the college want you to know how very grateful we are for your loyalty and support…

  She had wanted to be mad at Scott. To hate him. To find some way to punish him. Of course, she had an obvious weapon with which to do that. She could make it difficult for him to have a satisfactory relationship with their daughters. She could limit the time he had with them. And poison their minds against him.

  But she couldn’t do that to him or their daughters.

  The new woman in Scott’s life turned out to be the younger sister of his high school girlfriend, Nellie, who’d died in a car crash their senior year. The sister’s name was Dana. Eventually Vanessa learned the whole story. Dana had called Scott to tell him that her mother had died and how, in cleaning out her mother’s house and getting it ready to sell, she had come across Scott’s old high school letter jacket, his class ring, and the letters he’d written to Nellie from college. Dana offered to mail the items to him. They chatted for a time sharing fond memories of Nellie and exchanging information about themselves and their current lives. Dana lived in Brooklyn with her two young sons. Her husband was dead—a police officer killed in the line of duty. Scott decided he didn’t want her to go to the trouble and expense of boxing the items and mailing them to him and offered to drop by and pick them up. She suggested they meet someplace in Lower Manhattan.

  Vanessa could well imagine how things progressed. Dana reminded Scott of Nellie, his first love. No doubt he’d read the letters that he wrote to Nellie all those years ago, and they brought back wonderful memories of how it was to be young and completely in love and loved completely in return and to be filled with high hopes for the future. He probably convinced himself that he and Dana finding one another was meant to be. And maybe it was, Vanessa came to acknowledge. Maybe the end of their marriage was inevitable. If Dana hadn’t come along, some other woman would have.

  In the weeks after Scott left, Vanessa had spent a great deal of time with her sisters. The first two weeks they took turns staying with her. Then one or the other of them would come out on weekends to help with the shopping and cleaning and to do their best to convince Vanessa that life would get better and that she was not a bad person and her marriage to Scott had never been all that great. Of course, when Lily and Beth were around, they were careful what they said. Lily told her aunts that she wished they would stop reminding them at every opportunity that their father still loved them. “That’s for him to say,” she said in a very adult voice.

  Lily, especially, gave Scott a hard time, refusing to talk to him on the phone or spend time with him. The missing hurt too much, however, and finally she agreed to have dinner with him, but only on the condition that he wouldn’t talk about “that woman.” Scott brought along Dana’s two-year-old son, who apparently won over Lily with no trouble at all. Now her daughters were doting stepsisters to two young children. When Vanessa thought of the third baby she had never had because they could not afford it, the bile of bitterness rose in her throat. When she looked in a mirror, she hardly recognized herself. Bitterness was etched on her face.

  Selling the house brought tears and recriminations from her daughters, but she really had no choice since she could manage neither the upkeep nor the mortgage. In spite of the realtor’s insisting that location was everything, Vanessa was surprised and grateful that the house sold within a month of being listed. She’d leased a town house near enough to the girls’ school that they could walk.

  Scott saw the girls every Wednesday evening, and they spent every other weekend with him beginning after school on Friday and ending when he took them to school on Monday morning.

  The weekends Lily and Beth were away were the most difficult. At first, Vanessa would go into town to be with her sisters, but Ellie often wasn’t available in the evenings, and Georgiana would drop everything when Freddy came to town. Vanessa realized that her sisters considered her move into a new residence to be an indication that she was getting on with her life and no longer needed their constant support and concern. On one level Vanessa understood. Ellie and Georgiana had their own lives to lead. Now she seldom went into town. When her daughters were with their father, she used the time to get caught up on chores. And she would try to read or watch television, but she found it difficult to concentrate. It seemed as though she had a finite number of hours a week when her mind could function on a significant level, and she had to use those hours for her paying jobs. Not that she was doing those jobs well. Sometimes in the middle of a presentation, her mind would go blank and she would frantically sort through her notes.

  More and more she dedicated several hours every weekend to walking or bike riding. Her walks and rides got longer and longer. When she was challenging her body, she wasn’t thinking about how lonely and poor she was.

  The most fulfilling and the most frustrating part of her life was motherhood. At times she had some of the best moments with her daughters that she’d had since they entered adolescence. Other times they acted like such selfish little bitches that she looked forward to summer and her time away from them. She never lost her temper, though, which was amazing. Divorce had made her sadder and lonelier and poorer and more afraid of the future than ever before, but it had also made her calmer and physically stronger.

  The worst moments came in the night. Scott was not there beside her. It wasn’t sex that she longed for—although moments of need in that department sometimes came rolling over her like an avalanche, need that was far deeper and greater than she had felt in years—it was his presence. Or maybe it was just a presence that she longed for. Whatever. Wakefulness brought forth soul-searching.

  With all her focus on the present and getting through each hour and day and week and trying her damnedest to be a good mother to her daughters, Vanessa had long since lost interest in the mystery of Hattie.

  But suddenly Hattie became an issue once again.

  When she e-mailed her sisters that Penelope was bank-rolling an early-summer vacation for them,
Vanessa suggested they go someplace reasonably close to home. Charleston, South Carolina, perhaps, which she’d heard was a great place to visit. What she did not put in her e-mail was that a trip to Charleston would give her a chance to visit a potential donor who lived there, which meant she could charge her portion of the trip to her expense account and pocket part of her share of Penelope’s money.

  But Ellie and Georgiana both wanted to head for Montana and look for Hattie.

  Ellie e-mailed that she wouldn’t mind meeting “a nice, uncomplicated cowboy” while she was in Montana. And after a hectic spring, she was looking forward to leaving high fashion and the magazine behind for ten carefree days and hoped she would be inspired to write something other than over-the-

  top picture captions describing fashion-forward attire and accessories.

  While Ellie was fantasizing about cowboys, Georgiana was dreaming of taking “exhibition-quality photographs.” After a trip to the library to learn about Montana, she longed to photograph what early travelers to the region called the Land of the Shining Mountains. And she admitted that she got teary-eyed when she thought of the pictures she would take when they actually found their long-lost grandmother.

  Overruled two to one, Vanessa searched for bargain tickets on various Web sites, but there were none. In fact, they could fly to California for considerably less than it would take to fly to Helena, Montana. Any hope she had of having money left over from their sisterly journey vanished.

  Vanessa ran hot and cold when it came to the search for Hattie. It might be a joyous meeting they would remember all their lives. Or Hattie might be a hermit on a mountain who chased them off her property with a shotgun.