Who Will Hear Your Secrets?

by Robley Wilson

  He stopped and slipped into the jacket. It was his pale blue Palm Beach, and Petra noticed it had a tiny grease spot on one of the lapels. He saw it, too, and dabbed at it with one finger. They were standing at the back door of the shed.

  “Damn you, Petra. The whole point is that I don’t remember all that.” He followed her into the cool darkness of the shed, into the smell of old wood and of cut weeds moldering on the blades of mowing tools. “Most of what I know about those days comes from Aunt Louisa.”

  “Don’t curse me,” Petra said. “Why don’t you just send Aunt Louisa to Aaron and be done with it?”

  * * *

  A WEEK EARLIER PETRA HAD MET HER FRIEND Susan for lunch at a Lebanese restaurant in the East Thirties. The weather was oppressively hot; a single ceiling fan turned above their heads, making a token disturbance in the heavy air.

  “At least I’ve got the packing done,” she told Susan. “I don’t have to go home to more of that.”

  “Should we get more wine?” Susan said.

  “Not for me. Not in this heat.”

  “But you must be looking forward to it just a little. Aren’t you? Good lord, it’s Maine. You’ll be out of this hot-box city.”

  “It’s such a love-hate thing,” Petra said. “I love the family manse. It’s a big old rambling house with high ceilings and pine floors, and lightning rods at the roof peaks, and hundred-year-old lilac trees outside the front door. And the setting—a meadow of wild flowers, and a blueberry field, and from the upstairs windows you can see the ocean.” She poked at her food with a fork. “I don’t know why I keep coming here,” she said. “I hardly ever know what I’m eating.”

  “If somebody invited me up to Maine,” said Susan, “I’d say yes in a minute.”

  “I always go with him,” Petra said. “And it’s down to Maine, not up.”

  “Down, then.”

  “But poor Donald—it sends him into such a spin. He’s bad enough in the city, it offends him so and he so needs to escape to someplace where he can breathe. He drives me up the walls; I can’t stand being used that way. I can’t bear having to mother him, to put up with his depressions, to be continually patient with him. I’ve finished with all that; I’ve raised my kids and booted them out into the world, and now I want to tend to myself. You know?”

  “I know.”

  “So I want Donald to go home to the sun and the seagulls and that lovely salt air. But what that family does to him …”

  “I don’t see why you can’t go to Maine without going to the annual reunion,” Susan said.

  “Oh, God,” Petra said. “Picture that. He’d accuse me of cutting him off from his roots.”

  “Tell him it would be a good thing.”

  “No, he’s got a passion for finding out who he is, and what he is; it’s the one passion he has left.”

  “You should tell him that if he finds out too much, he’ll let the past dictate the present. Tell him it’s better to live without intentionality.”

  Petra studied her. “I don’t think that’s true,” she said. “And anyway, I couldn’t tell him such a thing. I couldn’t knock the props out from under him.”

  “Then suffer,” Susan said.

  “Thanks.”

  “The fact is: I think you pussyfoot too much around Donald’s precious ego. I think you ought to leave him and have it over and done with.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I ought to. Maybe one day I will.”

  “What did we decide?” Susan said. “More wine or not?”

  * * *

  THE KITCHEN SMELLED OF STRING BEANS. They were heaped on a table top whose porcelain veneer had begun to wear away to the black metal underneath. Aunt Louisa was snapping the beans into short lengths, an aluminum saucepan cradled in her lap to hold them. Petra sat across the table, drinking iced tea. She felt her presence had interrupted something significant, but she had given up staying away; for a half-hour she had borne with a cousin’s discussion of cemetery plots and perpetual care. Donald was hunched over the back of a chair in which he sat the wrong way, rubbing idly at one of the spots worn through the porce-lain.

  “When I was small, I used to think these were flies,” he said.

  “How small?” Petra asked.

  “Four, five, I guess. An age when I didn’t understand the difference between animate and inanimate. It was a great mystery to me: Why didn’t these flies ever leave the table?”

  “He used to slap at them,” Aunt Louisa said. “When he was older he tried to fill in the spots with mashed potato.”

  “Did I really?” Donald said.

  “Always the perfectionist,” Petra said. She sipped from the humid tumbler. The smell of the tea mingled with the smell of the string beans. The summer before, Petra had helped; she remembered the moist, shiny cross-section where the beans broke, and the tiny white seeds inside the pods.

  “Oh, Donnie was a sketch,” Aunt Louisa said.

  Donald looked sidelong at Petra and winced.

  “He spent every summer here, at least a month. He and Stephanie would go down at low tide to dig for quahogs, and splash around after mussels in the tidal pools …”

  Petra felt her attention drifting away. Now Aunt Louisa would ask Donald if he remembered when she raised collie dogs; did he remember the old Chevrolet; did he remember the Fourth of July when his Uncle Frank set off a stick of dynamite in Tom Bibber’s potato field? Oh, Donald, she wanted to say, you’re not digging any deeper. You’re only moving back and forth over the same old ground. I’ve heard your past so many times, I almost believe it’s my own.

  She bowed her head and rested the cold glass against her forehead.

  “But when was that?” she heard Donald say. “When did my mother do that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Aunt Louisa. “It might have been just after the war. Or—no, the war was still going on.”

  She brushed a wisp of hair out of her eyes. “It was so long ago, Donnie. You mustn’t trust my poor recollection.”

  “But I don’t remember anything about it,” Donald said. “Just tell me what you think was happening.”

  “Well …” She carried the saucepan to the sink and ran water into it, then set it on the back of the stove. “You know it was never much of a marriage,” she said.

  “I knew there was a problem because they were living in Nana Lowe’s house.”

  “That was part of it; no doubt of that. My sister was a strong woman, a willful woman, and she and your father’s mother were at it hammer and tongs most of the time.” She sat at the table and poured herself a glass of tea. “If the truth were known, Sarah Lowe was not a likable person. So I believed most of what your mother was telling me in those days.”

  “Why did she leave Father?”

  “There was an ultimatum. Annie told him she was fed up with being a servant to his mother, of being ordered around in the kitchen, of being treated like a poor relation. She told him she was moving out, lock, stock, and barrel, and if he wanted his wife and son back he had better find a home she could call her own. That was all there was to it.”

  “And she came here.”

  “She came here, and you and she took over the front room. She clerked at Bailey’s for a while, and then she clerked in Brunswick, at Senter’s store.” Aunt Louisa put her tea aside and wiped her hands on her apron. “Annie paid her way while she lived here. She always paid.”

  “How long were we here?”

  “Oh, all summer. From late spring almost until fall—I remember there was some talk about you going to school here, and a visit to Harold Cole, who was on the school board in those days.”

  “But that didn’t happen?”

  “No, you went back to Scoggin, Labor Day weekend. Your father’d rented an apartment. ‘God bless him,’ Annie said, ‘he does love me.’” Aunt Louisa sighed as if what she remembered had just taken place. “That’s as may be,” she said. “At least it postponed the divorce by ten years.”

  “But
there was nothing else special about that summer?” Donald said.

  He looked desperately at Petra, who thought: He wouldn’t even mind if she made something up. Aaron wouldn’t mind, either.

  “It was a nice summer,” his aunt said. “Your mother did a lot of gallivanting, looking up old school chums. You and I had a few special times while she was gone.”

  “Did we?” he said.

  “We’d go down to the Point and climb on the rocks and look for sailboats. Sometimes we’d pack a picnic lunch. You used to peel my hard-boiled egg for me—Lord, you were so slow and so deliberate about it—and we’d talk.”

  “That’s funny,” Donald said.

  “You’d ask me the darnedest questions,” Aunt Louisa said. “How old was your mother? Why didn’t Cousin Stephanie like you?—but she always did, you know. Where was your daddy? Why didn’t you have a sister?” She stood up from the table and repositioned a bone hairpin in her hair. “But I can’t carry on like this,” she said. “I’ve got all those mouths to feed. You two go along.”

  “Could I ask just one question?” Petra said. “Why isn’t Don’s mother’s name on the family gravestone?”

  Aunt Louisa appeared surprised.

  “Why,” she said, “I really don’t know. I guess no one ever got around to making the arrangements.”

  * * *

  WHEN SHE CAME UPSTAIRS after helping the other women with the supper dishes, Petra found Donald face down on the brass bed. He was in his shirtsleeves; the Palm Beach jacket hung scarecrow-like on a bedpost. The sunset cast long shadows from the gable window onto the far wall.

  “Are you asleep?”

  “No.” He didn’t move, and the word muffled itself in the pillow.

  Petra sat on the edge of the bed. “How old do you think Louisa is?”

  “I don’t know.” He turned his face toward her. “She’s got to be late sixties, maybe early seventies.”

  “How come she never got married?”

  “How the hell do I know?” He reburied his face and hugged the pillow.

  “Tonight after supper she was talking a lot about your father. Did she used to have a thing for him?” Petra slipped off her shoes and pulled her legs up onto the quilt. “Did you know your father courted her before he finally decided to make your mother miserable instead?”

  Donald rolled onto his back. “You have a way with words,” he said.

  “Why didn’t you remind Louisa that your mother moved back home because your Nana Lowe conveniently died?”

  “Tact,” he said. “Good old-fashioned tact.”

  Petra slid off the bed and went to the curtained closet. She took her blue nightgown from its hook.

  “I like this room,” she said. “I like the old maps on the walls, and that old treadle sewing machine under the window.”

  “It’s charming.”

  “It must mean a lot to you—this old house.”

  “It means something.”

  “What’s the matter?” she said. “If you don’t want to talk to me, just say so.”

  “I was remembering,” Donald said.

  She unclasped her earrings and laid them on the dresser. “Is it a breakthrough?” she said. “Is it something to tell Aaron?”

  “Aunt Louisa told me I murdered my sister.” He looked at Petra. “Can you imagine?”

  She couldn’t. She wanted to say: You don’t have a sister. But she said: “Today? She told you that today while I was planning the hereafter with your cousin Bartlett?”

  “Before,” he said. “That summer she was talking about, when she used to take me down to the Point and I asked all those questions. One afternoon she told me that if I hadn’t been such a difficult birth, my sister wouldn’t have been stillborn.”

  “That’s cruel,” Petra said. “Even if it’s true, it was a cruel thing to say to a—what? A twelve-year-old.”

  “I’d forgotten it.” He turned away from her and wrapped his arms around the pillow. “Totally forgotten it.”

  “Don’t make too much of it; let it stay forgotten.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You’ve done it for years,” she said. “There’s nothing gained by brooding over it now.”

  “Nothing for you,” Donald said.

  She watched herself in the dresser mirror, a woman in evening shadow taking off a white blouse. “Let’s sleep,” she said. “We’ve got a long drive tomorrow.”

  * * *

  PETRA LAY IN THE DARK knowing Donald was still awake, his mind pivoting on the discovery of the day, the revived memory he would carry back to the city. Souvenir of Maine. How these family visits stimulated his quest. Or his invention—she could never quite be sure.

  She propped herself on one elbow and smoothed the pillow into a different shape. The small spine of a goose feather pricked her finger; she worked it out through the weave of the pillowcase and put it aside. She imagined it floating to the floor, lodging invisibly between wide pine boards.

  “Can’t sleep?”

  “Speak for yourself,” Petra said.

  “Now can we talk?”

  “If you want.” She lay on her right side, to face him.

  “What would you think about getting away from each other for a while?” Donald said. “Separating.”

  “Because you murdered your sister?”

  “Don’t,” he said. “It isn’t funny.”

  “Then why?”

  “Because I obviously have more things to learn about myself. Because, just as obviously, I upset you in the process.”

  “Have I complained?” Petra said.

  “You don’t have to. I can read you—your discontent.”

  She bent the pillow double and sat up against it. “You can’t even read yourself,” she said. “Are we talking divorce?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then what happens? I go back to the city by myself, and you stay on with the family?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Let me think about it,” Petra said.

  She leaned her head back against the brass uprights of the bedstead and listened. She heard the sea, far off through the pine trees; she heard the wind in the old shutters; she heard her own heart. She thought: Never mind all the times I’ve wished to be away from this man. It frightens me, the prospect of living alone.

  “‘You cracked your mother open like a walnut,’” Donald said. “That’s what Aunt Louisa told me on the rocks that day.”

  “My good God,” Petra said. “Will you let up?” She clenched her fists in her lap. “Spare me all the secret-keepers of your life—your sainted mother, your wicked Nana….” She stopped herself, amazed at her anger.

  Donald was silent.

  “It kills me, what you expect from us,” she said.

  “Who’s ‘us’?”

  “Women. Wives. Me.” She hugged her bare arms. “When I think of your mother,” she said, and let her voice fall.

  “What?” Donald said. “What about her?”

  “How she wanted me to stay with you, no matter what. She made me promise it.”

  “When was that?”

  “The day before she died,” Petra said. “On her death bed.” Emphasis.

  She sat upright and turned on the lamp. Donald was staring at the ceiling; he was frowning, and his jaw was set.

  “I cannot believe my mother would do that to me,” he said after a while.

  “Do what?”

  “Bind me to marriage. Oblige me to hold on to a thing that destroys me.”

  “Is that what Aaron tells you? That your marriage to me is destroying you?”

  “No, of course not.” He drew the hem of the sheet up as a shield against the light. “Of course Aaron doesn’t tell me that.”

  “Then what?”

  “He doesn’t tell me anything. He asks. He keeps urging me to work things through.”

  “I’d like to know what Aaron thinks holds me,” Petra said, “and whether I’m being destroyed, too.”
She thought of the relatives, the cousins and uncles and aunts, the croquet-playing children who reminded her how she had ceased to be a mother when her own children left home for college and the army. What marriage had done since then was burden her with lists of names she had at last managed to memorize, to put faces to, and now Donald had decided to want a divorce. “Is it your mother who’s breaking us up?”

  “No,” he said. He turned onto his side, away from her.

  “You’re not trying to follow in her footsteps?”

  “Leave my mother out of this,” he said.

  “You make me sick,” Petra said. “You imagine every woman in the world is hiding some special knowledge that you need in order to understand yourself.”

  “Maybe I do,” he said. “What of it?”

  “But the truth is that the difference between men and women isn’t a matter of what we know, but when we know it. Your mother’s Caesarean was nothing unusual; it’s no fault of yours that she was torn up by having you.”

  “I’m happy to hear it.”

  “The thing about women is: When we’re hurt, we feel the pain right away—not thirty or forty years afterward.”

  “I suppose that means I’m insensitive?” Donald said.

  His flippancy irritated her. “No,” she said. “Just damned earthworm slow.”

  * * *

  WHEN SHE WOKE UP LATER it was beginning to be daylight, and she could hear someone talking in the front room. She listened; it was Donald. For just a moment she thought he was talking to himself, but then she realized that of course he was on the telephone, bragging to Aaron.

  The Decline of the West

  The waiter hovered while the two men studied glossy menus.

  “I’ll start with a martini,” the thin man said. “Sapphire, with a twist.”

  “Oh, should I?” said his companion. “My gut’s been giving me fits lately.”

  The thin man, whose name was Andrew and who was visiting San Francisco for the first time in several years, sighed and looked out the window. The city revolved slowly beneath him. A pale haze— perhaps it was fog—obscured the Bay and the bridges whose names he had never been able to keep straight. He could not see Alcatraz; he could not see the Coit Tower. Presently the TransAmerica building was passing by, but as a tourist landmark it seemed to him raw and unworthy—like a freshman trying to bluff his way into the fraternity.