Who Will Hear Your Secrets?

by Robley Wilson

  WHO WILL HEAR YOUR SECRETS?

  JOHNS HOPKINS: POETRY AND FICTION

  John T. Irwin, General Editor

  Also by Robley Wilson

  NOVELS

  The Victim’s Daughter

  Splendid Omens

  The World Still Melting

  SHORT FICTION

  The Pleasures of Manhood

  Living Alone

  Dancing for Men

  Terrible Kisses

  The Book of Lost Fathers

  POETRY

  Kingdoms of the Ordinary

  A Pleasure Tree

  Everything Paid For

  Who Will Hear Your Secrets?

  Stories by Robley Wilson

  This book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of the G. Harry Pouder Fund and the Writing Seminars Publication Fund.

  © 2012 Blue Garage Co.

  All rights reserved. Published 2012

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  The Johns Hopkins University Press

  2715 North Charles Street

  Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363

  www.press.jhu.edu

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wilson, Robley.

  Who will hear your secrets? : stories / by Robley Wilson.

  p. cm. — (Johns Hopkins, poetry and fiction)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-0462-2 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

  ISBN-10: 1-4214-0462-1 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

  I. Title.

  PS3573.I4665W47 2011

  813′.54—dc23 2011026155

  A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or specialsales@press.jhu.edu.

  The Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible.

  FOR STEPHEN MINOT

  (1927–2010)

  friend & mentor

  CONTENTS

  The Dark

  An Age of Beauty and Terror

  Charm

  Mind’s Eye

  The Phoenix Agent

  The Tennis Lover

  Six Love Stories

  1. Visits

  2. Weights and Measures

  3. The Word

  4. Pillow Talk

  5. Fathers

  6. Wedding Day

  Petra

  The Decline of the West

  Period Piece

  Crooked

  The Climate in Florida

  Acknowledgments

  WHO WILL HEAR YOUR SECRETS?

  The Dark

  The first time Brian Varney, tourist, drove past the orange gate in the rented Opel, a number of automobiles were parked at the edges of the drive leading to the gate, and others were pulled off on both sides of the dirt road beyond. Brian counted seven cars in all.

  “Whoever lives there is throwing a party,” he told the woman beside him.

  “So it seems,” Delia said.

  It was a Saturday evening, half past eight, the Irish sky still vividly alight as it would be until after ten, so the party hypothesis made sense. It was only in the following days that the two Americans realized the cars belonged to hikers, who parked them near a trail entrance in the morning and reclaimed them at the tired end of each day—long days, fifteen or sixteen hours in July.

  They began to speculate about who lived behind the orange gate. Wealth was involved, Brian said, for you could see the several dormers of a rambling house that must hold a dozen rooms at least. Perhaps an Irish dot-com millionaire who cashed in before the market collapsed. Wealth, yes, Delia agreed, but inherited, a retired British couple choosing to settle in this evergreen countryside, safe from all social distractions save the occasional black-faced sheep trespassing innocently.

  One noon they walked up the graveled drive for a closer inspection of the brightly painted gate. The gabled house seemed deserted; the only sound was of the wind in a grove of tall pines beyond. Beside the gate was a wooden kiosk, a kind of sentry box with an intercom system, the kiosk as orange as the gate itself. At either side of the gate, invisible from the road, barbed wire extended to left and right through the brush and goldenrod. Above that wire was another, thinner, attached to white porcelain insulators on fence posts in both directions.

  “Let’s not disturb these folks today,” Brian said.

  Delia punched him playfully on the arm. “Idiot,” she said. “Were you seriously thinking of calling on them?”

  “I thought it was a possibility,” he said. “‘Hello, we’re renting the cottage just down the road. We thought we’d make a neighborly visit.’”

  “Idiot,” she said, and she punched his arm again.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  She took his hand as they strolled away from the gate. Halfway back to the road Brian pointed out a thin black cable laid across the drive.

  “Early warning,” he said. “This owner is super security-conscious. Maybe he’s a retired godfather.”

  * * *

  IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED they did the usual: overnight trips to Galway, to Tipperary, to Killarney and the Ring of Kerry; a dreadful visit to Cork and its mad insular traffic; a tour of Waterford Crystal and a detour to Kinsale, where Brian had roots. Each night, in their rooms at one or another hotel or “modernized” castle, they went to bed early and read the Irish Times, trying to make heads and tails of events in the North—murders, petrol bombings, Protestant marches past Catholic ghettos; Unionists, R.U.C., Sinn Fein, I.R.A., splinters and spokesmen whose motives were baffling to them.

  “I give up,” Brian would say. “Screw both sides.”

  Then they switched off the lights and dreamed the dreams of tourists, which frequently involved the appearance of persons who had long been dead, and who spoke to them as if there were no boundary between death and life.

  “Ancestors,” he said one morning after they had shared their dreams.

  “But no river of forgetfulness and no ferryman.” That was Delia: literary to a fault.

  So their holiday passed evenly and swiftly. When they woke in the morning, sometimes there was sun to make the dew glisten on the leaves of the buttercups behind the cottage. If there was rain instead—as often there was—the yellow blossoms bowed dully, the grasses around them laid flat with wet. On the dry mornings they went walking along the one-lane road that took them to a layby overlooking the lakes of Killarney, or through the fields in the shadow of Torc Mountain dotted with foxglove and daisy, dandelion and clover, the black-faced sheep on the trail jostling one another aside to avoid the walkers. They talked to the sheep, Brian especially. On the rainy days they drank coffee and played chess and made lazy love while Radio One did interviews and quizzes whose big prizes were always trips to Orlando or New York City.

  Afternoons they drove to castles and waterfalls and mountain vistas. They photographed each other against the postcard backgrounds, drove to Tesco or Dunnes for their kitchen necessities. Late in the day they ate pub suppers and drank stout; if there was music, sometimes they stayed on into the evenings and drove home pleasantly but not dangerously drunk. They fell into bed secure in the knowledge that they had done—and would go on doing—exactly what American visitors were expected to do.

  * * *

  ONE MIDNIGHT, as they were driving home from the local pub, a deer emerged from the profusion of ferns alongside the road to the cottage. It stood at the roadside, ears alert, great eyes inquisitive,
unmoving as stone. It was a fawn; in the oblique headlight of the stopped car its markings were like a double row of pale silver coins on the side turned toward them.

  “Look how lovely,” Delia said.

  “I hope it doesn’t decide to jump in front of us when we move on,” Brian said.

  He put the car in gear. The fawn remained motionless, watching as they went past.

  “That was something,” Delia said. “That was a high point.”

  Brian shifted into second, then third. He had never tried fourth gear on this road, partly because he would rather not be moving too fast if he met an oncoming car and had to veer left onto the overgrown slope. Still, the speedometer read 30 miles an hour, too fast for him to swerve or stop when another deer—this one not a fawn, but adult, perhaps half again the size of a big dog—appeared from beside the road and crossed close in front of him. The right front fender struck the animal; Brian saw it knocked down, exactly at the driveway to the orange gate, saw it in the headlight glare struggle to its feet in an awkwardness of delicate slender legs. He saw it run on up the drive and disappear.

  “Jesus,” Brian said.

  “Oh, my God.” Delia was clutching his shoulder with both hands.

  “I couldn’t stop. It just came out of nowhere.”

  “What do we do?”

  “I don’t know.” He opened the glove compartment and took out the flashlight they had brought from the cottage. “We don’t know how badly it’s hurt.”

  “But it jumped over that fence,” Delia said.

  “Did it really? Or did it just seem to? Maybe it plowed into the bushes in front of the fence.”

  “It looked like it went over.”

  Brian got out of the car.

  “Oh, Brian.” Delia got out of the car on her side and walked around to the front. The car idled; the headlights were still on. Brian was crouched at the fender that had struck the deer.

  “The headlight glass is smashed,” he said. “I don’t see any blood.”

  “Maybe it’s really all right.”

  Brian straightened up and switched off the flashlight. “Hop back in the car,” he said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Tell whoever owns the house what happened.”

  “It’s so late,” she said. “We shouldn’t disturb them.”

  “I’d hate to think of it just stumbling around in the woods. Maybe dying by degrees.”

  “It’s fine,” Delia said. “Really. It went over the fence.”

  “We have to tell somebody.”

  “What good will that do?”

  But Brian shut his door, waited for Delia to shut hers, and turned the car into the driveway. “I can imagine what the rental-car people are going to stick us for that headlight,” he said.

  * * *

  HE STOPPED THE CAR AT THE GATE and got out. On the other side of the fence, light showed in the front windows of the house.

  “They’re awake in there.” He said it over his shoulder to Delia, who stayed by the idling car.

  At the front of the kiosk, sheltered from the elements under a miniature pitched roof, was a metal speaker, and beside the speaker was what looked like a doorbell. Brian pushed it. For a full minute nothing happened, so he pushed it again.

  The speaker hummed and crackled. “Who is it?” A man’s voice.

  Brian cleared his throat. “You don’t know us,” he said loudly. “We’re renting the cottage down the road from you—they call it Fern Cottage. We were driving home and we hit a deer. The deer ran onto your property. I think it might be badly hurt—maybe a broken leg.”

  There was a brief silence. Then, “A deer, you say? Its leg broke?”

  “Yes. We think possibly.”

  “And what did you want me to do about it?”

  Brian looked back at Delia. “Not a thing,” he told the voice. “But we wanted you to know.”

  Now there was a longer silence. Delia left the car and stood beside Brian.

  “What’s happening?” she said.

  “I guess nothing.”

  The speaker hummed. “Shut down your engine,” the voice said. “I’ll come to the gate.”

  * * *

  THEY WAITED IN THE DARK for the embodiment of the voice to present itself.

  “I’m scared,” Delia said. “I hope it’s the eccentric millionaire, and not the godfather.”

  Unexpectedly, the area inside the fence blazed into white light. Floodlights under the eaves of the house had come on, illuminating the night around the building. A couple of minutes later a man appeared. He opened one side of the gate and gestured them inside. With the light behind him he stood in patient silhouette; a holstered pistol was plainly visible at his left hip.

  He played the beam of a flashlight over them, head to foot and up again to read their faces. Apparently satisfied by what he saw, he lowered the light.

  “Come,” he said, and when they obeyed he locked the gate after them. “I’ve seen no evidence of your injured animal. If she’s truly in a bad way, God will do with her what he must.”

  He walked ahead, his shadow cast back to them. Details of man and house were obscure, though they could see that the man’s hair was white, and at the house the windows were comforting yellow rectangles of lamplight. Off to the left was an open shed, slant-roofed, and under it they could make out the slatted grille of a white Jeep.

  At the door the man paused. “Now you’re here,” he said, “you’ll stay for a nightcap. We’ll raise a solemn glass to your unlucky deer, be she dead or alive.”

  “That’s generous of you,” Brian said.

  They followed into a long hallway, where their host found a switch that returned the world to midnight behind them. He unbuckled the belt of the holster and hung it from a peg on the wall beside other pegs that held coats, a couple of short jackets, assorted caps and hats and a pair of black binoculars suspended from a worn leather strap.

  “Come,” he said.

  He opened the door into a lighted room—the room with the reassuring windows—and ushered them inside. In this normal atmosphere the man became accessible: average height, ruddy-faced and clean-shaven, with a head of close-cropped white hair. A thin mouth; ice-blue eyes. Brian put him in his late sixties, an elderly man who clearly took proper care of himself, heavyset but not overweight.

  The man offered a large blunt-fingered hand. “Kerry Monaghan,” he said. “I thought it best to defer the civilities until we’d achieved a civilized setting.”

  Brian shook Monaghan’s hand. “Brian Varney,” he said. “This is Delia.”

  “A pleasure,” Monaghan said. “Beauty is ever welcome.”

  “Thank you,” Delia said.

  “Please.” Their host indicated a sofa and several chairs both pillowed and caned. The spacious room featured a fireplace and a large Oriental carpet over a pine-board floor. On the fireplace mantel were photographs, and on end tables and a long, low coffee table a variety of magazines and pamphlets. “Be easy,” Monaghan said. “I’ll look to see what’s in the drinks cupboard.”

  The two of them took to the sofa while their host disappeared into the hallway.

  “He’s hospitable,” Brian said.

  “Not what you’d expect from somebody who carries a gun.”

  “Eccentric,” Brian said. “It’s your word.”

  They looked around. Under the windows was a low bookcase, its shelves occupied by thin volumes in dull dust jackets. At the opposite end of the room stood a small square table with chess pieces set up as if a game were in progress.

  “At least he plays chess,” Brian said.

  “So he can’t be all bad?”

  “Something like that.” He picked a magazine off the coffee table and leafed through it.

  “He certainly isn’t interested in the injured deer,” Delia said. “Which is why you’ve got us here.”

  “You heard him. God disposes.”

  “If any.” She stretched and wandered behind t
he sofa to look at the photographs displayed on the mantel. She stopped at one, leaned to study it.

  “Oh, my goodness,” she said. “He’s a priest.”

  “He’s what?” Brian joined her.

  “He’s much, much younger,” she said. She turned the picture toward him. “See here? A Catholic priest.”

  * * *

  WHEN MONAGHAN RETURNED he was carrying a wooden tray laden with bottles and cordial glasses. He set the tray before his guests, pushing the stack of magazines aside.

  “There’s Baileys for the lady,” he said, “or a little Drambuie from the top shelf. For the gentleman, brandy, or perhaps my own guilty favorite, grappa.”

  “I’ve never tried that,” Brian said.

  “I was introduced to it on a long-ago visit to Rome. I’m told it’s a distillation from the fermented pulp left behind in wine-making.” Monaghan poured two grappas and a Baileys. “I rarely take stronger drink than wine,” he said. “This seems an occasion.”

  “But not a happy one,” Delia said. “Nobody seems to give two hoots about that poor hurt deer.”

  Monaghan, who had already taken a seat across from the two of them, set his glass aside. He looked over at Brian, then back to Delia. He slapped his knees and stood up.

  “Well then,” he said, “let’s have a serious look round.” He waited for Brian to follow his lead. “For the sake of the lady, who will excuse us.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Delia said.

  “No, no. We’ll not be long,” Monaghan told her. “It’s little enough territory to be covered.”

  In the hall, Brian waited for his host to buckle the pistol belt and switch on the outside floods. Monaghan took two heavy flashlights from a cupboard under the coats and handed one to Brian. Then the two men descended the front steps and walked toward the gate.

  “Delia can be abrupt,” Brian said. “She likes things to be resolved.”

  “No need for apology.” Monaghan stopped and rested his hand on Brian’s shoulder. “Now you see: here’s a beaten path just within the fence line. It goes full circle. If you follow it that way, and I this, we’ll meet somewhere farthest from the gate. Keep playing your torch into the growth. If you see your damaged deer, give us a call out.”