Secrecy

by Belva Plain

  She was right, of course. Having passed through this last terrible half hour, she was already putting it behind her, and was able to laugh.

  “Go to sleep. You’ve heard enough.” Silk rustled as Elena rose and placed a kiss on Charlotte’s forehead. “Do you want something to help you sleep?”

  “No, thanks. I’ll sleep.”

  “Get a good night’s rest so we can make an early start in the morning. We’ll put this behind us. Venice is a fairyland. I wish we had a month to walk around in it.”

  She did not sleep. Her mind raged; it raged backward and forward, round and round. And the next two days, while following her mother into museums and churches, over arched bridges, down narrow alleys, her mind, in mourning, was scarcely able to believe itself.

  Elena, though, had always been able to dispose of burdens at will. “I told you Venice was a fairyland! An idyll,” she exclaimed. Having said everything that needed to be said about the burden, she had no need to say more.

  Yet there was so much remaining.… It was only beginning. Bill’s unimaginable anxiety, the public resentment when the project should be abandoned—and it would have to be—the untangling of investors’ accounts, all these went whirling and churning within Charlotte while Elena played guide.

  “There’s the most enchanting little square I must show you. After lunch we’ll go and watch the children coming out of school. We haven’t crossed the Rialto Bridge yet either.…”

  It was as if the conversation on that first night had never happened. And still, along with this apparent unconcerned frivolity, there was that loyal, deep concern for Bill whom Elena did not even love and had, very likely, never loved.

  As so often in the past but more acutely now, Charlotte asked herself what had made Elena the person she was. There was no answer. Or if there was one, it was not divulged to her. She had often wondered at and, growing older, had been astonished at, but was now in one shocking instant aghast at, how little she knew about her mother. Who was she? An orphan, abandoned to the vague relatives who had reared her? She had always had more money than anyone could ever really need. So much had been glossed over, and so many questions evaded! After a while one lost interest and ceased to ask.

  Poor Mama, Charlotte thought now. You have been afflicted. You must have been.

  “The next time you come, you and Roger, I’ll have my situation all straightened out. You’ll stay with us in Verona.” The chatter flowed. “Now, when you get to Florence, don’t make it all study. It’s a goldsmith’s heaven. I’ll give you some money to buy something nice for yourself.”

  “No, thanks, Mama. I don’t want anything.”

  The original plan to rent a car again and visit Palladio’s villas on the way to Florence had lost its zest. She would go by train. So, on the morning of the fourth day, she stood at the station with Elena, saying good-bye.

  They embraced, made cheerful commitments for future celebrations, and embraced again as if everything were perfect in the most perfect of worlds. Charlotte’s last glimpse of her mother as the train rolled away was of a gay, scarlet figure under a flowery, wide straw hat.

  In Florence, in another hotel room, she set down her suitcase and took out the folder in which the lectures on Renaissance architecture were listed. But these, too, had lost their zest. So, gathering her few possessions once again, she left the room and, with less than an hour to spare, caught the next flight for home.

  TWELVE

  A few nights ago, on the edge of the Grand Canal in Venice, the story had begun. Now, a world away on the familiar back porch, it continued as her father’s voice merged with the ceaseless music of katydids and crickets.

  “My hatred became so hot that I could have killed him. Yes, yes, I could. And maybe I did kill him. I knew how dangerous it was there in the muck, in the dark. And I myself knew where the boundary was and where to stop. So I could have warned him, although he was in such a rage that he might not have listened. But up against his body, a football player’s body, young and powerful, all I saw was him with my little girl.”

  The voice faded. Darkness was thick, and no one had turned on a lamp, so that Charlotte was able to see only the outline of Bill’s shape, his forehead leaning on his hand. She wondered whether the conversation was a total agony for him or whether, since this was the first time that he had ever spoken these words, it might not in a way be a catharsis.

  On the long drive from the airport she had labored over the best way to broach the subject to him, and at the end, after all her labor, had virtually blurted it out. Through the long evening they had been sitting here in a state of shock, each of them more or less thinking aloud.

  “And you,” Bill said, “you being wheeled on the gurney into the operating room. I saw that too. I saw your little pigtail.… And in a flash they came, those pictures. He was a savage, a brute. Those girls, the one whose nose he broke—he threatened them both if they should ever tell. The fool! How did he think she could hide her nose?”

  The old wicker chair creaked when he stood up and switched on a light. He handed Charlotte a magazine.

  “Here, look at this tabloid trash. Big article about Ted Marple: ACCUSED RAPIST TRAILED TO SOUTHEAST ASIA. Et cetera, et cetera. Damned idiots! Nothing better to do with their time than to fabricate sensational yarns. Want to read it?”

  “No. I can imagine it.”

  Bill sat down again, choosing this time a rocker that creaked even more loudly as he moved and mourned.

  “Claudia used to say to me sometimes, ‘I’m so ashamed of what my son did. How can I look you in the face?’ Poor woman. She used to tell me how ‘large minded,’ how forgiving, I was. And all the while I knew what I had done. It was locked up in here.” He held his fist to his chest. “A big, hard knot of conscience. Whenever Cliff told me how she longed to see her son again and how she hoped to ‘reform’ him, and whenever another foolish, mistaken report of sightings was heard, the knot grew bigger.”

  He knew, too, Charlotte thought, how I dreaded Ted’s return, how terrified I was. “Don’t worry, you’ll never need see him,” he used to tell me, wishing only, I’m sure, he could tell me the truth instead.

  Abruptly, Bill stood again. Plainly unable to be still, he walked to the edge of the porch and, with his back to Charlotte, spoke into the air.

  “I’ve often thought I should just report the whole thing. And then I never did it. Cowardly, I suppose. And still I hadn’t thought of myself as a coward. In the army …” The words drifted away.

  “You’re not a coward, Dad. You’re also not a murderer. But they would not have believed you.”

  “I know that. But what I really feared was the fallout, the damage to Claudia and to your mother. I tried to protect them.… I tried to protect you.”

  “I know.”

  In the lamplight his smile now turned to her. “You understand that?”

  “Elena told me you said you would be all right because you had to take care of me.”

  “How is she? I should have asked you before.”

  “Very well, lively as ever.” There was no point in reporting Elena’s current situation.

  “No, liveliness was never her problem.”

  Her father’s expression puzzled her. Was it bitterness or ruefulness that she was seeing and hearing?

  “Did you mean that literally? Does Mama have a problem?”

  Indeed, Mama had very obvious problems. But those were not the ones Charlotte meant.

  “I would think so. Whatever it was, she kept it to herself, as people do. We hardly knew each other when we were married, and when she left us, I still didn’t know her.”

  The sadness, thought Charlotte, Elena’s, and Bill’s, and mine. It hung heavily upon the air. She felt the chill of it on her skin.

  “I hope,” she said, “that you aren’t angry at her for telling me all this.”

  “No, in a way it has even clarified things. You can see now, I hope, that I am not simply an unreasonable fool abo
ut this property.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “If they dredge, they will find him.”

  “With your money clip and your shoes.”

  “There’s more. My shirt was almost ripped off when we fought. When I got back from the airport late that afternoon, I had to stop for gas in town. ‘You’ve had a long day,’ Eddie said. ‘I was opening up this morning when I saw you driving down the mill road, out to the highway. You got up ahead of the chickens.’ I said, yes, I’d gone to Boston and back. I remember being worried about my ripped shirt and hoping he hadn’t noticed it. But of course, he must have. He’s a nosy type, notices everything.”

  It appeared in Charlotte’s mind to be a tenuous case. But she was no lawyer, and it might not be so tenuous after all. A skillful prosecutor, or an unscrupulous one—depending upon your point of view—might use those scraps of information to turn Bill Dawes into a vengeful murderer. And Elena had been with him. That man might have seen her. There could be no predicting the outcome. In any event the connection with the rape cases would fill headlines and talk shows to infinity.

  Her gentle father. He, a country dweller who had never shot and could never shoot a deer. The thought of him exposed to the criminal courts, to that inevitable cruel glare, was unbearable. And sitting there in the suddenly fallen silence she had a quick vision of Bill’s years; moving pictures fled past her; she saw his disappointing marriage, his failing business and lost esteem, his devoted fatherhood, and last, the lonely years since her own departure from their home. One would expect him to have found a woman to love; but then, with this threat hanging over him, he must have been hardly in the mood.

  His voice cut into the silence. “Cliff and your Roger have been after me to change my mind. Roger even brought a lawyer and one of the investors from Boston. Heavy artillery.”

  “I know. They think you’re being a damn fool.”

  “I can’t blame them.”

  “Dad, I thought so too. But now I’m sorry I was so nasty on the telephone before I went to Italy.”

  “You were entitled to be angry. My arguments don’t make any sense. They sound fanatical.”

  He paused. Seeing him there in such distress, it was hard to believe that a man of his strength and bulk could actually seem frail.

  “This means so much to you. And Roger. He’ll be so terribly disappointed. You’ve both put your hearts into this.”

  Hearts, thought Charlotte, my own is thudding in my ears. Regardless of what he says, Dad can’t understand what this truly means to Roger and to me. A whole year’s work gone down the drain! Disappointment was hardly the right word.

  It was late. The night air carried a first faint harbinger of summer’s nearing end. Bill said, “It’s late and you must have jet lag. Let’s go in.”

  “Yes, I want to leave early tomorrow. Good night, Dad. I hope you won’t worry too much.”

  And wasn’t that an impossible hope! After the abandonment of the project, the wreck of the mill would still stand with its dreary acres around it, and ruination would return.

  In the morning as Charlotte approached the site, she slowed the car for a last look. Surveyors’ stakes were planted where Dawes Square was to rise beside the riverwalk. They looked jaunty there, like a little troop of marchers on their determined way. And with a sinking spirit she thought of Roger.

  But the body that lay beneath the ground behind Dawes Square was the determinant. Nothing mattered but to keep that body’s silence. No happy inspiration, no ambition, no money, pride, or satisfaction could possibly be measured against the value of that silence.

  * * *

  “When I got your message, at first I didn’t know what to think,” Roger said. “Then I thought something must have happened over in Italy, and that’s why you came back and went rushing up to Kingsley.”

  He himself had come rushing in to “their” hamburger place down the street and was out of breath.

  “No, Italy was lovely. But I was lonesome, and I wanted to be home with you.” All day she had been mulling over what to say and how to begin it. The absolute necessity of lying to Roger was terribly painful; it frightened her, increasing her heartbeat and muddling her speech. “Then there were things—personal affairs of my father’s—he had telephoned me—I felt I had to go see him.”

  “What is it? Is he sick?”

  “Well, not exactly, not physically. It’s—it’s things on his mind.”

  “I should think so,” said Roger with a grimace. “We were up there while you were away. We laid everything flat out on the table. Old man Jessup, who’d brought in three more investors, a total of over three million dollars, was burnt up. He didn’t spare any language, I’ll tell you that. Even Cliff didn’t know what to make of his brother. All we got out of him was the same totally inane and inaccurate argument about the wetland.”

  Charlotte took her time eating food that her stomach did not want to accept. Using up more time, she took a long drink of water. A reply of some sort was expected, and trying to think of one, she floundered.

  “Yes. Yes, it’s very hard.”

  Curiously, with an edge of impatience, Roger regarded her. “What’s hard? If you mean trying to deal with the man, it sure as hell is. What’s his trouble? And what has it got to do with the project, anyway?”

  “It’s hard,” she repeated. “Hard to say. It’s a very personal matter, and I can’t talk about it. I wish I could, but I can’t.”

  Roger nodded. “Confidential.”

  And Charlotte nodded. “Yes, very. Darling, I’m sorry I can’t say any more. I’m so sorry.”

  “But what can be confidential that’s connected with the project?”

  It occurred to her that she had clumsily confused the issue, and she answered, “I didn’t say it was connected.”

  He considered that for a moment, and said then, “In that case the existence of a private problem need not affect Kingsley Village. I’m sorry that your dad’s having troubles, because as you know, I like him. But that’s no reason why I can’t straighten him out about our project. I’m arranging to bring a group of ecological scientists from the universities, maybe three or four people, to straighten out his thinking so we can stop this foolishness. I’m sure it’ll do the trick.”

  A committee to face her father! Again she saw him as she had never seen him before, propped against the porch railing, bewildered and frail—frail, at six feet four! Alarm made her cry almost piteously, “Oh, don’t do that! Please don’t, Roger. He mustn’t have to handle anything like that right now.”

  “When, then? We can’t wait forever. Everything’s ready to go—money, lawyers, corporate papers, filings, zoning, you name it. Do I have to describe it to you, of all people?”

  There was such a lump in her throat that she could not possibly pretend to be eating a normal meal or to be under full control of her voice.

  “I’m in a very difficult position,” she said, “and I hate it. Can’t you see how I am?”

  “Yes,” he replied as he studied her face. “I do see, and it scares me. What is it? Is it about yourself? Is it that you’re sick and you don’t want to tell me?”

  “Darling, no, I’m perfectly well and I would tell you in a second if I were not. This concerns my father and not me.”

  Reaching across the table, he laid his hand over hers and gently urged, “You saw your mother in Italy and she told you something. Isn’t that so?”

  My God, he is clairvoyant, Charlotte thought, replying only with a shake of the head and a whispered “No.”

  “I don’t understand why you can’t speak freely to me,” he urged, still gently.

  “I could,” she replied with emphasis on the I, “but I’m not speaking for myself.”

  “Don’t tell me your father’s robbed a bank and he’s in hiding,” Roger said as if some jocularity would ease her.

  But far from easing, it tightened every nerve instead, so that she clapped her hands to her face, crying, “Please, pleas
e. Do we have to?”

  “Well, I suppose we don’t have to do anything,” Roger said, turning instantly serious, “since you have no doubt worked out in your mind just how we are going to retreat from what’s been started without leaving a bunch of bleeding bodies on the field.”

  For a moment she saw the boardrooms, the long tables, and the long, dour faces of the moneymen; and she saw whiskered old gentlemen in carved gold frames, walls of tan books, and stacks of smooth white papers to be signed and witnessed in the halls of the law. She knew exactly what Roger meant.

  “So you must have it all worked out,” he repeated.

  His tone had become ever so slightly sharp. He was sparring with her. A mutual frustration was growing. They were, for the first time, on the verge of annoyance with each other.

  “No,” she said. “I see that it will be very hard, and I wish I could prevent it.”

  “Your beautiful idea going to smash! How can you accept that so easily?”

  “I’m not accepting it so easily, but I am accepting it, since neither I nor anyone else can change my father’s mind.”

  The silence between them was eerie, a silence that comes while people await portentous news. It did not last very long, probably because it was too painful for both of them.

  “May we talk about this tomorrow?” she asked.

  He stood at once. “Of course. You will have time overnight to relax and give it more thought. Anyway, you must be feeling jet lag. I’ll sleep at my place.”

  A sketch of the most recent ground plan for Kingsley Village was propped against a pile of books next to the telephone. There was no way when using the telephone that Charlotte could avoid being stabbed by the sight of it. Yet she still had not put it away.

  She was staring at it while her father’s anxious voice rang into her left ear.

  “So you got back all right, Charlotte? Did you have a chance to see Roger today? I’m so worried about you.… The situation’s impossible. How did you explain it?”