Secrecy

by Belva Plain

  Besides, her head was filled with designs. She was only a beginner in the drafting room, yet she had lordly views of fabulous projects: opera houses, civic centers, and monuments so grand that she could almost laugh at herself—almost, but never entirely.

  One afternoon Pauline summoned her into her private office.

  “It must be hard to come to a strange city without knowing a soul,” she began. “I can’t imagine it. Rudy and I were thinking that you’re too smart and pretty to go to waste, which is my way of inviting you to a party. You don’t have to accept, though. We won’t be insulted if you say no.”

  Charlotte was certainly not about to say no to the boss.

  “We do this every spring,” Pauline explained. “You might call it a block party. All of our neighbors and other friends come together to celebrate the end of the winter. It’s kind of dressed up,” she added, and then, as if fearing she might be giving the wrong impression, corrected herself with a laugh. “Oh, not really dressed up. I mean—anything goes. You may see everything from diamond earrings to—well, not quite to jeans.”

  She was being considerate. No doubt she thought that Charlotte, on her limited salary, had probably a very limited wardrobe as well.

  Charlotte had to smile to herself. It was really funny. In her dingy little flat there was a closetful of expensive clothes, all bearing Italian labels. She owned diamond earrings, too, good-sized studs that had been Elena’s present on her twenty-first birthday. It had been quite a long while since she had worn them or had wanted to. But she would wear them to this party, along with a strand of pearls, a lime-green dress the color of April, and a pair of cream-colored shoes.

  Actually, it was the Lauriers’ house that allured her. It was one of those old, red-brick, Beacon Hill residences where the brasswork on the front door glistens and the window boxes drip cascades of fuchsias. Inside, Charlotte was pretty sure, behind the lavender-paned windows, there would be cog moldings and original mantels. Pauline said frankly that they could never have afforded to live there if the house had not been left to her.

  Apt to act motherly, she also said, “I have at least two men coming whom you might like.”

  “I’ll be happy to come,” Charlotte told her, “and thank you for asking me.”

  The house had all the charm that she had expected. Wandering through the rooms, she lingered before an eighteenth-century portrait of a woman in a mobcap and stood fascinated by an ancient map of the New World on which this continent was joined to Asia.

  There seemed to be few people present with whom Charlotte had much in common. Many of the guests were elderly householders who, having known each other forever, naturally gathered together. Young people seemed to have come in pairs; they were either married or might as well have been for all the attention, once past the first politenesses, that they paid to an unattached woman.

  A white-haired woman gave her an approving smile and a kindly compliment. “You look lovely, dear. What a pleasure it is to see a young girl not wearing jeans.”

  “Young girl” indeed! But I suppose, Charlotte thought, twenty-five and fourteen must look very much the same to her.

  A pair of quite attractive young men struck up an enthusiastic conversation, but it turned out that they were college sophomores who could have no more interest in Charlotte than she could have in them. As tactfully as possible, then, the three drifted, sophomores to the bar, and she in the direction of a corner where a group of women had collected.

  Pauline, intercepting her, was distressed. “This is perfectly awful, your standing here alone. I’m absolutely furious. Those men I mentioned made last-minute excuses just this morning. I could kill them. No manners. I wouldn’t have believed they could be so rude. Now we have at least four extra women. It’s awful.”

  “It’s not awful at all,” Charlotte said. “I can manage beautifully without men, so don’t worry. Really, Pauline.”

  It surprised her that a woman as competent as Pauline, one who was making her way in the world, should still be thinking in terms of Noah’s ark: a male for every female, with a few extra males for good measure.

  The women in the corner group were quite possibly the most interesting people in the room. They were a lawyer, a psychologist, a buyer of imported fashions, and a bright young mother of three. The conversation, quickly started up, began to bounce like a ball and was carried right through to supper, where the five sat together at the end of a long table. The talk sped from clothes to child care, from divorce law to historical preservation, and slid into gossip. The fashion expert, who went by the name of Birdie, had too sharp and flippant a tongue but was at the same time hilarious.

  “Take a look at the round table over there,” she whispered, “at the guy with the yellow tie. Doesn’t he look like a whiskey ad where the butler brings it in on a silver tray? Or else an ad for a BMW? It’s all there, graying hair, ruddy smirk, big stone house with a circular driveway, elderly wife, and, you can bet your Armani suit, a darling little secretary on the side.”

  “I don’t have an Armani suit,” Charlotte said, laughing.

  “Why haven’t you got one? You’re wearing a European dress. Italian, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. A present from my mother. She lives in Italy. I can’t afford things like this myself.”

  Now, why had she said that? She had said it because her eye, trained by Elena, saw that the others, with the exception of Birdie, were very inexpensively dressed.

  It’s your sensitivity, Claudia had always said, and would say now if she had been here. You always sense what other people must be feeling. It’s a fine trait if you don’t carry it too far.

  “Now, there’s a dress for you,” said Birdie. Like conspirators they all leaned toward her to hear her whisper. “Look at the white that’s coming now.”

  A tall couple were sitting down at the far end of the table, he a dark, impeccable young man and she a flashing person with regal posture. They were immediately greeted and noisily welcomed by all the other couples at the table.

  “Late again,” said Birdie. “She is one big nuisance. She comes in an hour late for her fittings and nothing’s ever right the first time, or maybe the second time either. Well, I suppose when you pay what she pays, you feel you have to throw your weight around. It must be kind of thrilling.”

  Charlotte was seeing, or rather trying not to see, the dark young man. Actually, she was seeing Peter, which was absurd, because they were so different. Red-haired Peter in his baggy shirts …

  Yet there must have been something else that her first glance had caught, something to cause this quick agitation. The couple had made a difference in the atmosphere. But perhaps it was only the woman by herself who, with her striking dress, had made the difference?

  “What do you think? Are they real or not?”

  Someone had directed a question toward Charlotte, who had not been paying attention.

  “Are what real?”

  “The earrings.”

  Like tassels, they dangled, glittering, almost touching the white spaghetti straps.

  “I don’t know. Probably not.”

  Birdie contradicted her. “Probably yes. Almost certainly yes. That’s brand-new money. With brand-new money you don’t wear imitation stuff, dear. You want the world to know you can afford the real thing.”

  Birdie was angry. Underneath the vivacious wit she was bitter and angry. What was her story? Charlotte wondered. For everybody had a story. Everybody.

  Ringing laughter came from the far end of the table, and she raised her eyes toward it. The dark young man was the only one not laughing. Whatever it was that had appealed so heartily to the rest of his group had not appealed to him. He was not one of them.

  He was pushing his cuff back to see his wristwatch. When he looked up again over the long room toward the windows, she had a full view of his face, which was aquiline and not like Peter’s at all; yet the slight smile, as private as the thought that had caused it, was Peter’s; someti
mes, at a pause in his lectures, he had looked toward the window with just such a smile, close lipped but soft.

  Damn! Damn memories.

  “The trouble with good-looking guys like him,” said Birdie, who, to no one’s objection, did all the talking among the women, “is, first, that they’re hard to catch, and second, that if you do catch one, it’s worth all your wits and energy to keep holding him.”

  “He’s very attractive,” remarked the psychologist, sounding wistful.

  The lawyer asked Birdie, “Who is he?”

  “I’ve no idea. She’s always got new ones on the string.”

  It would have been totally eccentric to say, or else Charlotte would have said: He’s not on her string! He doesn’t even want to be here, can’t you see?

  “Don’t look now,” Birdie said to Charlotte. “He’s looking at you.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  Birdie shook her head. “I have a hawk’s eyes, dear, and it’s not ridiculous. He noticed you about three minutes after he got here.”

  All this talk was inane. Girls in junior high school, giggling at the lunch table, nudging each other when a boy came near, behaved like Birdie, who was supposedly a sophisticated woman. Nevertheless, when Charlotte raised her eyes above the wineglass, they met unmistakably the full, thoughtful gaze of the man who sat beside the tasseled earrings.

  “You see?” said Birdie, who missed nothing.

  “No, I don’t, because there’s nothing to see,” Charlotte replied shortly.

  “If I were you, when we get up from the table, I’d meet him halfway. In spite of her it can be done.”

  “I know it can be done, but I don’t want to.”

  “Well, that’s your problem,” Birdie said with a shrug that dismissed Charlotte for the rest of the evening.

  She went home, having been one of the first to leave, in a queer mood, irritable and flat. She who was such an orderly person kicked off her shoes, dropped her dress into a heap on the floor, and went to bed.

  Dreams interrupted her sleep all night, bizarre flashes of people in places where they did not belong. She was having a tooth pulled without Novocain; the dentist was Peter. Rudy and Pauline balanced on a steel beam one hundred floors aboveground and stopped her heart; she went to a party at her own house in Kingsley, where Dad was offering a drink to the dark young man with the aquiline face who had been staring at her in Pauline’s house.

  She woke late with a headache. For the first time in months the solitary Sunday loomed empty and bleak. Undoubtedly, she had been working too hard, nose to the grindstone. She needed a rest. It was four months since she had been home. Tomorrow, she decided, I will ask for a week off without pay, and go.

  THREE

  The pleasant dining room in the European-style inn near the Thailand-Myanmar border was almost vacant, the last tourist group having departed after an early breakfast. Only one man remained alone at the far end of the room, so that Cliff and Claudia had the quiet space to themselves. She looked outward to the surrounding grove, where vines such as she had never seen and could not name twisted their purple flowers through dense shrubbery. An enormous banyan tree, whose trunk had the girth of six stout men, stood in a heap of its own snake-twisted roots. It must be at least a hundred years old, she thought, or maybe even two hundred. From somewhere came the bronze clang of a gong, so mysteriously different from the sound of ringing bells at home.

  Everything was strange here, the fat Buddhas with their placid gaze, the fruits in the markets, the dusty villages, the slender women with their rich, long hair, the curious sound of a cry in an unintelligible language, a tiny monkey sitting in a tree, the gold and scarlet of the temples—all were marvelous and strange.

  She knew quite well that Cliff had wanted this trip for her sake. Travel no longer had the allure for him when, in his twenties, he had gone wandering.

  “We can’t afford it,” she had objected.

  He had argued her down. “The advance for the next volume of my History of Industry will pay for it, and people do owe themselves something nice once in a while.”

  Careful as she was to conceal those periods of deepest sadness he must be aware that she had them. For, someplace on this globe, her son, too, was wandering, not as the youthful adventurer that Cliff had been, but as a guilty, wary fugitive.

  And Claudia shook her head as if to shake off an insect that was buzzing at her cheek. This was the last day here, and she must not waste the smallest scrap of it.

  “One more temple today,” said Cliff, “and then we’d better get back here right after lunch to pack, or we’ll miss the plane. You hate to leave, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I could do another week, or more,” she added, “but I know you’re thinking about what’s happening at home.”

  Things had been going rapidly downhill. The mill’s tenants, Premier Recycling, were a bad lot. And she remembered how Bill had been doubtful about them from the start. Perhaps she ought to have said something then, while the deal was taking shape.… But she had been a newcomer to the family, she had run a bookstore; so what could she know about a business of such magnitude? The old Dawes Textile Mill, for goodness’ sake! Nobody would have listened to her maunderings, especially when an esteemed firm of lawyers was advising the brothers. Now they were caught in a trap, caught by a long lease that no longer paid enough to cover the property taxes, which had more than doubled during these intervening years.

  “Everything’s heating up,” Cliff said. “I spoke to Bill last night while you were having your bath.”

  She was all attention. “What’s happening?”

  “There was a town meeting. Bill said it was a shocker, an attack. We have come from being the chief employers and main benefactors of Kingsley to being villains. Well, sad to say, we’ve known that for quite a while, and yet Bill said he hadn’t realized how high the feeling was running. It was like running a gauntlet, he said, and you know how sparingly he uses words.”

  “True. And yet sometimes he can be so emotional, so excitable. Of course I can’t possibly know his ways as you know them, but—hasn’t he changed awfully since everything happened, since Elena left?”

  Cliff sighed. “Yes, yes, he has. He’s hard to talk to some days. Changeable. Supersensitive. And now there’s this business on top of the rest. He told me that people got up and spoke, people he’d never have expected to turn against the Dawes family. They said it was a disgrace to have this filthy eyesore practically at the town’s front door, that the stench was hideous—which is true—and that we’re breeding disease—which may or may not be true—and that we, Cliff and Bill, should be ashamed of ourselves. We’re hypocrites, with Bill going around the state talking about the environment—”

  Indignantly, Claudia broke in. “Just what do they think you can do about it?”

  “Cease and desist, naturally. But we’ve tried to work it out with the tenants, haven’t we? You know that, and you know it’s been like talking to a stone wall. They deny that there is any hazardous waste. Why, they’re disposing of industrial waste, that’s all they’re doing. We signed a lease, didn’t we? It has nine years to go, hasn’t it? That’s their answer, flat out. Take it to court if you don’t like it.”

  “Well, can’t you?”

  “Have you any idea what that would cost, with appeals and the countersuits they would undoubtedly trump up? That’s to say nothing of the time it would take, with half Kingsley up in arms over it.”

  Claudia was silent. Even here on the other side of the world, your troubles found you. And her mind made a quick connection: My trouble too. Not that Cliff’s isn’t also mine, and God knows, mine is his. They, and we, are entwined.

  Cliff reached over and touched her hand. “I hope I haven’t spoiled the day with this tale of woe,” he said ruefully.

  “No, I’m fine. It’s going to be a good day.”

  “You looked sad for a moment. Or were you perhaps in one of your philosophic trances?” he teased, want
ing, she understood, to restore her early-morning enthusiasm.

  “Yes, philosophic,” she said, smiling back at him.

  “I forgot to mention something nice that Bill told me. Charlotte’s taking a week off. She’ll be getting home just about when we do.”

  “Oh, great! I’ve missed her.”

  “We all do. Okay, shall we start out? Where’s the camera?”

  “It’s in the room with my sun hat. I’ll run up for them and meet you on the veranda.”

  On the veranda when Claudia returned, Cliff was talking to the man from the dining room.

  “We’ve got a car coming to take us to our final temple. Can we give you a lift anywhere?” he was asking.

  “Thanks, but I’m going to sit here in the shade and go over these papers,” the man answered, indicating his briefcase.

  “They told me the car’s going to be fifteen minutes late,” Claudia reported.

  “Oh? We might as well sit here in the shade too.” Cliff said politely, “Cliff Dawes, and my wife, Claudia.”

  “Monte Webster. Glad to meet you.”

  Hands were shaken, and the pleasantries requisite when compatriots meet at a distant place were begun.

  “This temple we’re seeing is supposed to be especially grand,” Cliff said, “noteworthy for—what was it, Claudia?”

  The stranger provided the answer. “Some fine carvings. In fact, an entire wall of dancers in bas relief. You shouldn’t miss it. Go around to the north side.”

  Webster was a lean, tanned man, no more than thirty. He had an intelligent face, an easy manner, and nothing that would identify him as a tourist, no painful sunburn, no camera, and no jeans. In his pressed slacks and in spite of his casual shirt, he looked actually a trifle formal.

  “Interesting countries here in southern Asia,” he said. “This your first trip?”

  “Not mine. I went through here twenty-five years ago. Bangkok was thrilling to me then. Now it’s an imitation of New York, traffic jams and all. But it’s my wife’s first time. And I must say Myanmar—Burma—was a thrill for both of us. Twenty-five years ago you couldn’t even go in there.”