Who Will Hear Your Secrets?

by Robley Wilson

  Once she flew to Havana with Ginger Pierce and Ginger’s boyfriend and Ginger’s father, who owned a Cessna. Ginger and her boyfriend were giddy and lovey-dovey and drank too much in the garish nightclubs where the brass sections of the mambo bands were like the war against Jericho, but Ginger’s father, Franklin—Franklin Pierce, like the president—was a dream of courtesy and tact and every other gentlemanly quality Sarah could think of. He taught her to gamble, urging her away from the roulette tables, explaining the strategies of blackjack. He staked her at the craps table, standing behind her with his hands lightly at her waist while she bit her lower lip and flung the dice against chance and shrieked when she made her point. She grew dizzy from heat and cigarette smoke; the smiles of the players, their shouts of encouragement, their cries of despair, the feel of the hard corners of the dice in her damp hands—all these excited her. When she felt Ginger’s father reach around her to place his extravagant gold chips in some lucky box on the green table, she leaned back so as to confirm the closeness of their bodies and she wondered where the night would end.

  This was in nineteen-fifty, and the social and sexual behaviors were complex. It was acceptable for college women to be naked in bed with a boy—Sarah had undressed and lain with boys from Dartmouth and Williams and Yale and, once, UConn—but it was unacceptable for the pair to go all the way. That was the great leap; one did not make it lightly.

  Sarah trusted that Ginger’s father understood the conventions well enough, and so he did. When they left the casino it was two in the morning, the night moonless and perfumed by tropic flowers whose names she could not have known, the air palpable, silken on her cheeks and bare shoulders. They held hands; she called him “Franklin” for the first time.

  Franklin knew of a place where there were candles on the tables, a piano and bass combo whose repertoire was rich with Ellington compositions, an ambience quiet enough to talk in. He introduced her to old-fashioneds, made a humorous speech about the importance of the correct bourbon, the precise amount and kind of sugar. He went on to compare the merits of the old-fashioned and the mint julep, weighed the virtues of the manhattan against those of the perfect manhattan. He made Sarah laugh at what he referred to as his “bartender’s view of life”; she finished her drink, ate the orange slice, offered Franklin the cherry. He laughed and took it from her. When they returned to the hotel, Ginger and Ginger’s boyfriend were still out on the town, although it was now nearly four in the morning. In the end, partly because both she and Franklin were already naked together in his bed, they made love.

  Afterward, her life changed. It really had been love, and now she spent most of her weekends with Ginger’s father. She would have spent every hour with him if business matters hadn’t sometimes occupied his attention. When he was free, Franklin took her to Boston and New York, where she had often been, and to Chicago and Los Angeles and Seattle, which were new to her. Sometimes they traveled in his Cessna, but for longer flights Franklin would charter a plane, or they would fly commercially, in a DC-6 or a graceful Constellation. At Christmas they flew to Rome, then back to Miami for New Year’s Eve; on New Year’s Day they set sail with a friend of Franklin’s to St. Barthelmy, and from the friend’s house on the beach at Baie St. Jean, Sarah swam topless because that was the way it was done on French St. Bart’s. Bared to the light, her small breasts felt cool and weighty and perfect.

  At Easter time, Franklin took her to Paris and London and, finally, Dublin, where they stayed at a white hotel in Dun Laoghaire and ate mussels and crab in a tiny restaurant that overlooked the Strand. In every city he bought her gifts, sometimes jewelry but more often dresses, suits, shoes, extravagant hats. At the end of six months with Franklin, Sarah’s closets held more clothes than she had owned in her whole life.

  After the last final exam of her junior year she took the train to Boston to meet Franklin, who was flying back from a business trip to Istanbul. The idea was that the two of them would spend the summer together—he had promised her Lebanon, “a country so green and lovely and civilized, you will never want to come back to the States,” he said—but his flight never arrived. The plane fell into the ocean in a storm off the Azores; no one survived.

  * * *

  HER LIFE CHANGED AGAIN. During her last year of college she shared an apartment with Ginger Pierce’s former boyfriend, who was scornful of her innocence about her dead lover.

  “All the time you spent with him,” he said, “and you never asked him what business he was in?”

  “I asked him once.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “Import-Export,” Sarah said.

  “So,” said Ginger’s ex. “Did you know what that meant?”

  “No.”

  “It meant drugs,” he said. “Whenever he was away on business, he was flying to places like Beirut and Islamabad. Didn’t he ever tell you where he’d been?”

  “I didn’t meddle,” Sarah said. “I was in love with him.”

  “Opium,” the ex said. “Reefer.”

  Ginger’s former boyfriend was named Don-John. He was the drummer in a swing band, and one year he had traveled with the Charlie Spivak orchestra. He wore horn-rimmed glasses with lenses so thick it was like being watched by an owl. He’d been around, claimed to know all the big-name musicians. He spoke of them in familiar terms; he called them Woody and Les and Stan, and referred casually to “the Duke” and “the Count.” He also knew most of the girl singers of the day—knew them intimately. You could name a famous girl singer and he would nod and look wise. “Oh, yeah,” he would say deprecatingly, “that one’ll spread her legs for anybody who’s got the price of a drink.”

  Don-John was often on the road. When he was in town, he lay around and drank rum and smoked reefer. He told stories about the big-band business, the pupils of his eyes big as nickels behind his lenses; all the stories were about fucking the teenaged girls who stood in front of the bandstand and looked googly-eyed at the musicians. The fucking took place between sets, in parking lots outside the dance halls—the girls giggling and moaning in backseats, or pushed, helpless, against trunk lids, or bent over front fenders like the carcasses of shot deer while the musicians of their fantasies humped and cursed.

  Sarah didn’t much like Don-John, but he let her stay in the apartment rent-free because she’d been Ginger’s roommate. He thought Sarah might put in a good word for him with Ginger, who had become wealthy after her father’s death.

  Every once in a while, when she was depressed, Sarah wished Franklin Pierce had left a will that took their love affair into account, but mostly she simply put up with her everyday sadness. When she heard Eddie Fisher sing “Wish You Were Here,” or Jo Stafford singing “You Belong to Me,” or—especially—Frankie Laine’s recording of “We’ll Be Together Again,” she wept and thought about Ginger’s father when he was alive. She was certain she would never meet another man as considerate and attentive as he had been.

  * * *

  WHEN SHE GRADUATED FROM COLLEGE Sarah went to RISD, to learn practical applications for her talent as an artist. She studied illustration and design and began doing freelance work for department stores in Boston and New York. She did fashion illustrations for Jordan Marsh and Lord & Taylor, elongating the women’s figures on her easel, frowning at the suits and coats that hung on hangers beside her while she taught herself to draw textures of fur and fabric.

  After a year in Providence she moved to Boston and took a job with the advertising department at Filene’s. The art director was a man named Wiley Galvin, an Irishman with a high forehead rising toward baldness. Galvin took her under his wing, taught her layout and introduced her into his circle of friends: men and women in their twenties and thirties who were artists and dancers and writers. “It’s an arty-tarty crowd,” Galvin warned her, “and some of their talents are puny, but here and there you’ll find a gem whose polishing you might decide to take upon yourself.”

  They were sitting in Galvin’s Cambrid
ge apartment when he made this speech, a bottle of Bushmills and a pitcher of ice water between them; it was the first time they had drunk together, and the first time Sarah was able to notice how he lapsed into brogue when he was drinking. He was in his late forties, her father’s age and Franklin’s, and years later, when she looked back upon it, she thought she might have made too much of both connections. For whatever reason, she stayed that night with Galvin and began visiting his apartment regularly. She soon found that he was not much interested in sex—indeed, he rarely took her to bed unless she forced herself on him—but he was kind and comfortable, more like a teacher than a lover. That was fine; she could cherish Franklin’s memory, the passion of it, the material and palpable quality of it, so much the more easily.

  Over the months that followed, Galvin encouraged her to branch out, not to confine herself to what he called her “chores” at Filene’s. He put her in touch with the men who managed the Boston theaters and concert halls, introduced her to administrators at Harvard and the New England Conservatory, took her around to gallery owners up and down Tremont Street. She did posters and broadsheets for plays and concerts, illustrations for the covers of programs, title boards for productions of Brecht and Ionesco and Beckett. SE in the corners of public artwork became a kind of hallmark of visual quality. Pencil, pastels, gouache, silk-screen, collage—with Galvin urging her, she indeed “branched out.” She was like a tree devised and nourished by a mad-genius gardener, too tall to be ignored, too full for its shade to be escaped.

  She met everyone. One afternoon after a symphony rehearsal she drank cappuccino with Koussevitsky and William Kapell. It was a day she never forgot; when Kapell was killed within the year, in a plane crash into a California mountain, she lay sobbing in Galvin’s arms, saying over and over, “Franklin is dead, Franklin is dead.” If grief had confused her, what was the difference? It seemed to Sarah that talent and beauty and love and all hopes for the future were doomed on this earth.

  * * *

  BY THE END OF THE NINETEEN-SIXTIES, Sarah was the assistant art director at Filene’s, working only half-time, spending the rest of her week in a rented studio overlooking the Charles, not far from the museum. Wiley Galvin was still in her life and still encouraging her “to widen her circle of friends, expand her influence, enlarge her horizons.” These were his words, delivered soberly and without accent. He introduced her to a man he thought she should marry— though she was not yet aware of the destiny that would keep her from becoming a wife. The man’s name was Perry Adams. He was an older poet—fiftyish, like Galvin—teaching at B.U., his talk full of names like Lowell and Plath, Starbuck and Sexton, claiming a distant connection to Henry Adams. He was outspoken, political, ambitious for celebrity, and at first Sarah disliked him. She protested to Galvin.

  “Why are you throwing me at him?” she said. “He makes me uncomfortable.”

  “You’ll get used to him,” Galvin told her. “He’s really quite a good poet, and anyway, I think you need an adventure—as do we all.”

  He continued, against her wishes, to invite Adams to his increasingly frequent parties; he arranged for himself and Sarah to be invited to other gatherings where Adams appeared. He was bent on managing Sarah’s “adventure” for her.

  Sarah tried to shrug it off. She wasn’t at all sure why she needed an adventure, but on those nights when she lay beside Galvin, untouched and pondering her relationships with men, it occurred to her that each of the men in her life had been a loner emotionally and spiritually—that she had touched each of them only materially. She wondered if perhaps Galvin saw herself and Adams as soul-mates, if he had an insight into the pair of them that she lacked. How novel to be loved deeply and genuinely! Having weighed these thoughts, she would turn and reach out to Galvin—her hand provocative, her breath hot against him—knowing the considerable odds that he would recoil from her. Finally, on a night when the fog that had settled over Boston seemed also to have obscured her reason, she stayed away and went to bed with Adams, knowing how much pleasure it would give to Galvin.

  * * *

  PERRY ADAMS WAS A DIFFERENT SORT of law-breaker, not petty like Roger, not a thrill-seeker like Leblanc. The war in Asia obsessed him; when he was not teaching or writing, he was marching or attending read-ins or organizing the burning of draft cards. He seemed to have an endless supply of such cards; one day he confessed to Sarah that he had broken into a Selective Service office in Braintree and stolen a handful of them. Whenever any young man made a speech against the war, the draft card he pulled from his pocket and set afire had been supplied by Adams. Adams kept a scrapbook, which held dozens of muddy newspaper photographs of this plural disobedience. He called himself “the godfather of conscientious objection.”

  At this time of her life, after the march on Washington but just before the horror of Kent State, Sarah was dividing her time among three addresses, Perry’s and Galvin’s bachelor apartments and her own Brookline Avenue flat. It was both rootless and exhilarating, this butterfly existence that had chosen her; she felt she belonged everywhere and nowhere. Flibbertigibbet, her mother would have called her. When she was at Galvin’s she was hostess, serving wine and beer, emptying the battered Nash hubcap that served as the apartment’s only ashtray, taking in the discussions among the poets and painters and dancers Galvin favored as friends. Death preoccupied them; failure attracted them.

  “We see a truth others turn away from,” Perry declared. “Poets wear the courage that turns to madness.” “The horror that makes suicide desirable,” said a brunette young woman in a violet leotard. “That’s what Sylvia saw,” she said. “I had classes with Sylvia,” Perry told them. “She was a witch without a broom.” “Driven,” someone said. “Damned,” added someone else. Drivel, Sarah told herself.

  At Perry’s place she was the overseer of politics and polemic. She marveled that he could adopt a persona entirely unlike his literary self, coldly setting forth a plan for this demonstration, that protest, parceling out the necessary tasks: who would provide signboard, who would paint the slogans, who would negotiate with the police for arrests without injury.

  “Cold passion,” she told him one night after they had made love. “That’s what you have.”

  “Is that praise?” he wanted to know.

  “It makes your poems too logical,” she said, “and your politics too radical.”

  “Screw you, my dear,” Perry said, and turned his face to the wall.

  * * *

  ONE EVENING AFTER WORK she went to Wiley Galvin’s apartment and rang the bell. At first there was no response, and then she heard movement and voices inside. When the door opened at last, Galvin greeted her in his bathrobe and slippers.

  “Hello,” he said. “You caught me making supper.”

  Perry Adams was in the kitchen, sitting at the table with its oilcloth cover, smoking a cigarette. A glass of red wine was in front of him. He was barefoot.

  Sarah sat across from Perry, who raised the wine glass toward her. His face wore an expression that dared her to comment. Over his shoulder she saw the bedroom door open, the bed unmade, men’s clothes folded in a wicker chair under the window. The air was thick with unspoken knowledge; she had to force herself to break the silence, realizing that if she didn’t, she might not be able to breathe.

  “I think I’d like a drink too,” she said.

  Galvin was at the stove, stirring what smelled like a fish chowder. He laid the spoon beside the saucepan and took a stemmed glass down from the cupboard. “Consider it done,” he said. “Everything under control.”

  Fair enough. Of course she went on seeing him, at work and once in a great while at his apartment with others, but Perry Adams dropped out of her life. A few months after Kent State he was arrested inside a Selective Service office and convicted of criminal trespass. By the time she learned that he had served his time and moved to California, Lowell was dead, Sexton was a suicide, the war that had so obsessed everyone was over and done with u
nless you had fought it and been poisoned by it.

  Galvin always tried to put the best possible face on his involvement with Adams. “It was so casual,” he told her. “It hardly counts.” But what that meant—by what system of reckoning the two men accounted for themselves—Sarah could not determine.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she told Galvin. “We go on.” She was thinking not about infidelity or perversity or any other definition of self-betrayal, but simply about the force of circumstance—how it steered one’s life off course, then let it veer back, helter-skelter.

  She was into her late forties now, and successful enough with her illustrations to be able to resign from Filene’s and devote herself to her private career. She produced a series of Boston clichés—the skyline, the Public Gardens, Faneuil Hall—airbrushed to a hard edge and printed in limited editions. Displayed at a gallery on Tremont, they made her enough money to buy clothes she hadn’t felt able to afford since Franklin vanished from her life so many years earlier. She thought perhaps she had turned a corner at last, that she was on the verge of leaving the unsatisfactory path her life had followed since the terrible day her lover’s plane plunged into the Atlantic.

  * * *

  ONE EARLY APRIL, unexpectedly, she took sick. Though it was officially spring in Boston, the March lion had chosen to extend its territory, and as she made her way up Tremont Street toward her gallery, new work under her arm, the wind buffeted her, so that she had to maneuver the portfolio like a sail, making constant corrections in order not to be flung against shop windows. By the time she arrived and stood, breathless, inside the gallery, her lungs ached and her head throbbed with pain.

  Megan, the gallery owner’s assistant, was immediately concerned, putting an arm around Sarah’s shoulders, steering her to a chair in a near corner.