Who Will Hear Your Secrets?

by Robley Wilson

  “You truly don’t remember?”

  “Truly.”

  “About two months after you came back to the States? God, you were in tears. You made me promise to give the pillow to the Salvation Army. You wanted me to swear that no new lover’s head would lie on your precious pillow; you said you couldn’t bear the thought of it. You assumed that of course I had a new lover—which I did not.” She sipped her drink; her tongue attended to the grains of salt on her upper lip. “You don’t remember all that carrying on?”

  “I do now,” he said.

  “You are so sentimental,” she said. “So maudlin.”

  “How come you broke your promise? About donating the pillow to the Salvation Army?”

  He tried to meet her killing eyes squarely.

  “How come you’re still married?” she said.

  5. FATHERS

  “Why don’t we forget about the ball,” the young woman said. “Why don’t you just take a drop?”

  The man, considerably older, was in the short rough just off the seventh fairway. He was walking carefully, looking down, swinging the head of a two-iron across the tops of wild flowers.

  “It’s a Titleist,” he said.

  “It’s not as if you couldn’t afford a new one.”

  “You just want to add a stroke to my score.”

  “You won’t break forty anyway,” she said. “Take a drop.”

  “I can maybe break eighty if we play a second nine.” He rested the club on his shoulder and looked broodingly into the scrub pine that separated the seventh fairway from the sixth. “You suppose it’s in there?”

  “I haven’t a clue. You hooked it so badly I couldn’t follow it.”

  “I sliced it,” he said. “After all this time I should think you’d know the difference.”

  “There isn’t any difference,” she said. “Either way, you can’t find the ball.”

  “You should learn to tell a hook from a slice,” he said.

  “Maybe you ought to play one of those new orange balls,” the young woman said. “It might be easier to find.”

  “I couldn’t,” he said. “It would be like knocking a tangerine around the course.” He came back toward her, still carrying the club on his shoulder. “Maybe I’d better take a drop,” he said. “I don’t suppose there’s any point in hanging around here all day.”

  * * *

  THE SEVENTH GREEN WAS AT THE TOP of a broad hill, trapped on both sides and at the back. From the foot of the hill where the man’s fourth shot had landed, the flag was hidden, and he stood for a long time pondering. His golf bag—plaid, its leather trim badly scuffed—lay on the fairway behind him.

  “What do you think?” he said.

  “I think it’s to the left and toward the back of the green.” She sat on the grass nearby, pulling her crossed ankles under her. “If I were the pin, that’s where I’d be.”

  “I mean do you think a seven-iron or what?”

  “Seven or eight.”

  He stooped to haul the iron out of the bag. “Seven,” he said. “I don’t think I can reach with an eight.”

  “Not unless you hit it squarely,” she said.

  He addressed the ball, which lay in a dark green patch of clover. After a few moments of settling his feet, dancing the club head behind the ball, assessing the long sweep of the hill, he straightened up and stepped back.

  “I think I’ll go take a look,” he said.

  He trudged up the slope, the club in his right hand. The grass was green to the eye, but down near the soil it had a brownish cast and felt brittle underfoot. He climbed until he could see the flagstick, the flag made of stiff red plastic with a white numeral; it was set in the back left corner of the green, about ten feet in from the frog hair.

  He stood, leaning on the club, and looked back down the hill to his ball. The young woman waved; she wore bright yellow shorts and a white blouse, and her hair was held back from her face with a narrow yellow headband. The ball was a white dot not far from her bare legs. It looked like an eight-iron shot after all.

  * * *

  WHEN THE BALL DROPPED over the rim of the hole, it rattled in the cup with a sound like crockery in a dishwasher. The woman fished it out and tossed it back to him. Then she reset the flag and followed him off the green.

  “Double bogey,” he said. “I’ll be lucky to come in with a fifty.”

  “Think of the fresh air you’re getting,” she said. “Think of the dew on the greens and the nice exercise.”

  He hitched the bag onto his shoulder. “You really don’t like this game, do you?”

  She shrugged.

  “Next time why don’t you rent some clubs and try it yourself? If you started to enjoy it, I could buy you a set of your own.”

  “Maybe,” she said. She held out her hand to him. “Here, this is for you.”

  “What is it?”

  “A four-leaf clover. I found it down the hill.”

  He took it, looked at it, put it carefully in the pocket of his shirt.

  “Thank you,” he said. He reached out to draw her against him and kissed her on the forehead. “Let’s just do the nine holes and call it a day.”

  * * *

  THE EIGHTH HOLE WAS A PAR THREE, a hundred and ten yards from the high tee to a green nested in a natural bowl. The hole was trapped all around. There was scarcely any fairway; instead, the steep hill was sandy and rocky, as if in a permanent state of disrepair. Because the green was invisible from the tee, the young woman had been sent down the hill, and now she stood at a halfway point so that if the ball caromed, or buried itself, or went far off-line, she could keep it in view. She positioned herself beside a dead oak and waited. The man appeared above her, standing at the lip of the hill, shielding his eyes against the sun.

  “You ready?” he called.

  “Ready,” she answered.

  He stepped out of sight. After a short time she heard him call out “Fore,” and heard the whack of the club head. In the same instant she saw the ball; it was hit short, and landed in the rough just above her, but it was moving at great speed and bounced past her toward the green. A little farther downhill it struck something solid—a large rock, an old stump, she could not tell—and took renewed flight. It landed just at the edge of the green, danced toward the hole, and struck the flagstick straight on. She watched the ball vanish into the cup.

  “Did you see where it landed?” The man had found a path from the back of the tee, down through the trees to where she stood. “Am I in trouble?”

  “It landed about there,” she said, pointing at the hillside.

  “In all those damned rocks,” he said. “Wouldn’t you know it. Did it ricochet?”

  “Straight toward the green.”

  “Thank God for small favors,” he said. He started downward, lugging the bag like a valise. “Tell me how far.”

  She followed after. “You’ll be surprised,” she said.

  “I’ll bet.” He stood at the front of the green, looking down into the trap. “Where is it?”

  “In the hole,” she said.

  “Don’t tease me.”

  “No, really.”

  He laid the bag down and walked to the hole. He reached in alongside the pin and took out the ball.

  “You put it there,” he said.

  “How could I?”

  He studied the ball. “It actually went in? It’s actually a hole-inone?”

  “Actually,” she said. “It wasn’t the most wonderful shot I ever saw—it must have hit every rock on the hill coming down—but it did the job.”

  “What do you know,” he said. Abruptly, he turned away from the young woman and flung the ball with all his might at the tops of the trees behind the green. She took this to be an expression of joy.

  * * *

  “WHEN I STARTED PLAYING GOLF, I had to use my father’s clubs,” he said.

  They were sitting over drinks in the clubhouse. The decision to stop at nine holes was sound; he
had gone over the last green with a clumsy pitch, then three-putted, and he took his failure at the ninth as an evil portent. With a decent pitch, he would certainly have made par.

  “The clubs had funny names: mashie, niblick, brassie. You didn’t call them by number. It was as if they had distinct personalities. And they were wooden-shafted. The heads were held on to the shafts with this heavy winding of gutta percha twine, and the whole club was varnished to a fare-thee-well.”

  “What kind of wood?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Something resilient. Hickory? You could feel the wood sing when the club head made contact. And the shafts weren’t really true; they all had a bow in them. You felt like W. C. Fields playing billiards.”

  The young woman smiled. “And did you wear knickers?” she said.

  “No,” he said. “But I went in for argyle socks and sweaters.” He pondered the scorecard open beside his Collins glass. “Forty-six, even with the eagle on eight,” he said. “Can you imagine it?”

  “Did your father teach you the game?”

  “After a fashion. He wasn’t much of a golfer, I’m afraid—though it took me a while to realize just how bad he was. I think he learned his swing from watching baseball.”

  “You’re quite a good golfer,” the young woman said. “In spite of him.”

  “How one generation resists the faults of another,” he said. “Anyway, it’s an old man’s game.”

  “Nonsense. You’re not old.”

  He took a last wistful look at his scorecard.

  “Who’s going to believe this ace?” he said.

  The young woman took up both his hands and kissed them gently.

  “I am,” she said. “Who else do you need?”

  6. WEDDING DAY

  It was Benjamin Howard’s wedding day, the second of his life and, he hoped, the last. Annette, the bride-to-be, was asleep in the bed he had just left; her two daughters were in the kitchen, quarreling amiably over the last blueberry muffin. The orange cat dozed on the picnic table outside the sliding door of the bedroom, mandarin-like, forepaws folded under. Above and beyond the cat, the family mockingbird—he considered it a part of the house rental—was singing from a braided-wire cable that cut the backyard diagonally in half. The cable, coated with a patina of light rust, was a dog-run; the leash was still in place although the dog had died long ago, and every morning around six the mockingbird alighted and began its repertoire. The repertoire was considerable and impressive, and it had grown wider in recent days. This was late May, and Ben imagined the bird’s singing had gained new breadth from its recent mating. Over a period of three weeks there had been a flurry of contention between two of the neighborhood’s several mockingbirds, and now the fighting had ceased. The world’s in love, Ben thought.

  He padded down the long hall in his bare feet and poked his head into the kitchen.

  “I’m taking a shower,” he said. “Nobody run water.” Not that women ever listened to him, no matter their ages. By the time he finished his shower, the water pressure had dropped off on three occasions, and each time the temperature had wavered between scalding and freezing.

  Toweling off, shivering, in the middle of the bathroom, Ben heard the mockingbird going strong: trills, chirps, warbles, riffs that broke off just before they became melodies, successions of joined notes that sounded like the double- and triple-tonguing he had learned when he played trumpet in the high school band. He marveled at the bird’s skill, and thought he understood its impatience, its refusal to stick to one song.

  In the bedroom, Annette was still asleep—or feigning. She had waked him at three in the morning for love; now she had gone back to pursue her postponed dreams.

  He pulled on his underpants. “Anthrax,” he said. “Up and at ’em.”

  “Mmph,” she said, motionless and out of sight.

  “Come on,” he said. “Today’s the day we make each other honest.” He sat beside the covers where she was buried, leaned over and kissed a barely exposed ear. She smelled of warmth and of sex that crept out from under the sheets like a fog, and he remembered the a.m. perfume of their lovemaking peeling off him and swirling down the shower drain.

  “Go away,” she said. “Today’s my wedding day.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “You’d better put your clothes on,” she said. “God knows what the groom-to-be will do if he finds you hanging around.”

  He slid his arms under the bedclothes and caressed her in vulnerable places. “Something like this?”

  “Oh, God,” Annette said, opening to him. “Be sure the door’s closed.”

  The daughters’ voices were far away and sounded like the language of a different country. Coming back to the bed he heard the mockingbird singing on and on and on, trying out everything.

  Petra

  In the middle of the afternoon, long after the photographs and the volleyball, Petra missed her husband. He was not in the parlor with the grand piano, where some of the uncles and cousins were laughing over a family anecdote she recognized—by the names it contained—as one she had heard at earlier reunions, nor did she see him when she looked out the bay window of the dining room onto the side lawn where the children had just begun the croquet. Not that she was surprised by his absence—it was habitual with him at some point in the annual visit to the farm at Harpswell to drift away from this abundance of relatives to recover himself, “to relax and regird,” he told her. One year he had taken the car to the marina at Basin Point and sat for an hour in the small, paneled restaurant, drinking coffee and smoking one cigarette after another until he ran out and chose not to buy a fresh pack. The first reunion he had ever brought her to, he left her with his cousin Steff for Stephanie— and jogged all the way to Bailey’s store and back, stumbling into the front hall red-faced and drenched in perspiration. The worst time— last year, it was—she had found him upstairs in what had been his mother’s bedroom, sitting in the wicker chair under the window, pale and hypertense, breathing like some beached sea creature. Now she poked her head into the kitchen.

  “Has anyone seen Donald?”

  Three women lifted their faces toward her. Two of them looked blank. The other, Aunt Louisa, shook her head.

  “That man,” Aunt Louisa said. “He’s predictable as tides.”

  Petra went out to the croquet match. “Has anyone seen your Uncle Don?” she said.

  No one had.

  * * *

  SHE FOUND HIM, FINALLY, in the family burial ground in the overgrown pasture far behind the house. He was sitting near its center, his suitcoat folded under his rump like a stadium cushion, his necktie looped untied around his neck, his chin resting on his cradled knees. He was staring at the family monument, a large blue-granite stone in a shape resembling a chair-back.

  “I wondered where you’d got to,” Petra said. “Are you okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “I thought you might have decided to jog to Brunswick and back.”

  He smiled slightly. “Too hot,” he said.

  “Well. I just wondered what was up.”

  “I couldn’t remember what year my grandmother died,” he said. “I keep telling Aaron—” Aaron was his therapist “—that my mother left my father the year my grandmother died, and he keeps saying: ‘What year was that?’ and I can never tell him.”

  “What year was it?”

  “See for yourself; 1945.”

  “Does it help?” She sat carefully on the browned grass and arranged her seersucker skirt over her knees. “Does it all come back to you?”

  “No,” he said. “Is that sarcasm?”

  “Certainly not.” Though she was not entirely sure: It might very well have been sarcasm. More and more her true response to her husband’s search for himself, his past, lay somewhere between indifference and impatience. When he started it, nearly five years ago, she had encouraged it, as if it were a quest—as if Donald were a medieval knight, and she the earnest damsel whose token he wore
. Now … in the thirsty grass under her hands she found a single green weed, a small yellow flower blossoming out of it. She uprooted it, examined its petals.

  “I was twelve years old,” Donald said. “It baffles me that I can’t remember; it isn’t as if I was an infant.”

  “It sounds like something you don’t want to remember.”

  “I know that,” he said irritably. “I’d just like to know what’s so damned awful about it. Why have I buried it so?”

  Petra had no answer. She let her eyes stray to the family monument—that ugly granite lump; it was hard to imagine such bad taste in a thing so important. At her first-ever reunion Donald had brought her here and she had walked around it, reading the names of his grandparents, their brothers and sisters, the birth and death dates. The list hadn’t changed; his mother’s name was still missing, though she had been dead for seven years.

  “Did they have a fight?” she said. “Did they break the crockery and swear and hit each other?”

  “No,” he said. “There was never anything like that. Just words.”

  “No cursing at all?” Not like us, she wanted to say.

  “A damn or a hell was extreme for them both. When my dad was really furious with me, he’d say something like ‘What the deuce is the matter with you?’ That was one step up from ‘What the dickens …’” He stood and picked up his suit jacket. “Let’s go back,” he said.

  He extended his hand; she got to her feet without its support.

  “What about your grandmother?” she said. “Were there scenes? Between her and your mother? Between her and you?”

  Donald dusted off his jacket and carried it over his shoulder as they walked toward the farmhouse.

  “She was savage enough,” he said. “But there weren’t what you’d call outbursts. She was very tough on my mother. Mother was a kind of servant in the house, I realize now, but Nana applied a constant pressure, a relentless force of will. It was her house, after all. My mother was always off balance because of that; she had no place to stand and resist.”

  “If you remember that sort of conflict, I don’t see why you can’t remember everything. That’s pretty subtle for a twelve-year-old.”