“Sorry to bother you with this on a Saturday,” I say after she answers. “But I need to talk to you about this story. I think we need to take it in another direction.”
“Don’t apologize,” she says. “I’m in the office. What’s up?”
“Well,” I say, pausing to take a deep breath and settle my nerves. “I hardly know where to start.”
Thirty-One
“Did you see it?”
“Oh, yes, I saw it! I’ve read it four times.”
“Can you believe it?”
“No, I can’t. I swear, my jaw is on the floor.”
Thirty-Two
WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE
“A Daughter’s Homecoming”
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2018
Susannah Greyhill Lane—or Cricket, as she’s known to some around here—has come home. Just over a year ago, following the death of her husband, the billionaire Teddy Lane, Susannah shocked everyone in this town of barely seven hundred by announcing that she was returning to Esperanza, the once grand home where she was raised. It overlooks Greyhill, Virginia, the charming Shenandoah Valley hamlet that she was away from for more than five decades.
Esperanza means “hope” in Spanish. And Ms. Lane, now seventy, says hope is all she has left. And in fact, it’s why she’s returned.
“I came back here because of my father,” she says, revealing a secret she hasn’t shared with anyone in her adult life, including her husband of nearly fifty years.
“The mayor?” I ask, referring to former mayor Wallace Greyhill. According to Susannah and most everyone in town, Mayor Greyhill and his wife, Amelia, essentially left her to fend for herself throughout her childhood.
“No,” she says, a smile spreading across her face. “My real father.”
In Susannah’s home office, originally the sun room, is a trunk. One side of it is occupied by Ms. Lane’s diaries—gold, crocodile-skin-covered journals she used to order in bulk from the Smythson shop on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. On the other side is a box teeming with photographs: old black-and-whites from decades ago, Polaroids and shiny color Kodak prints from the 1970s and ’80s. To pore through them with Ms. Lane is to witness the incredible life she’s led. There are photos of her as a child with her late sister, Margaret—as toddlers in Easter dresses, in green velvet next to the Christmas tree. There are photos of Susannah with her famous husband in St. Tropez, Barcelona, Hong Kong. And there are photos of parties—so many parties—and the parades of famous actors, authors, and dignitaries she has hosted in her homes.
“Ah,” she says, straightening up. “Here it is.”
Ms. Lane declares that this is her most treasured photo. She keeps it encased in a small envelope, pale pink, from a card her husband gave her one Valentine’s Day. The photo itself is small, a three-by-three square, and upon first glance it looks like a throwaway. The photo is yellowed, overexposed, and blurry. It features an image of a man standing on parched grass. He is tall and rugged, in a wrinkled button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the kind of pants a man wears to work when his work involves getting dirty. The man is not smiling. In fact, he looks troubled, almost angry, which makes a lot of sense, once you learn who he is and what he’s been through.
Of all the men Susannah Lane has known over the course of her life—her father, the mayor; Teddy Lane, the famous husband—it is this man, a man she hardly knew when he was alive, who is responsible for all the choices she’s making now, in the twilight of her life. The man, whose reputation is well-known in Greyhill, is Timothy Martin. He is the father of Henrietta Martin, Susannah’s best friend from childhood, whose tragic death when she was just seventeen shook this small community. But the fact that he was her best friend’s father is not what makes him so important to Susannah. What makes him so treasured is that this man, Timothy Martin, was actually Susannah’s father, too.
She discovered the family secret when she was just fourteen, and now, at seventy, Susannah Lane says she feels compelled to reveal who she really is, in large part because she believes that doing so will help close the rift that began between herself and the community after Henrietta’s tragic death.
“My mother had an affair with Mr. Martin when he was doing some work on our house,” she explains, holding the picture in two cupped hands as gently as if it were a robin’s egg. “When I discovered that he was my true father, I was desperate to tell somebody, especially Henrietta, who had always been more of a sister to me than my own, but my mother threatened me and told me to keep it quiet.”
She discovered the secret while snooping in the back of a drawer in her mother’s bedroom. She found there a love letter from Mr. Martin dated the year of her birth. A letter, she says, that she was amazed to find still hidden in her mother’s things when she came back to the home last year. “I know we can’t be together,” it reads (see photo, page 17). “I know that this is my only choice . . . just know that I will love you, from afar, for the rest of my life. We will always know the truth, and hopefully the brief time we’ve had together—hopefully it will be enough to sustain us.”
Ms. Lane confronted her mother about the affair immediately after she discovered it. “You have to understand, the news was a boon for me! At least initially. All my life, I’d felt like an outsider in my own home. My mother treated me like I was a blight on her life, my father completely disregarded me. Now I knew why. I’ll never forget the look on her face when she saw the letter in my hand,” she says. “Mother sat me down and told me everything. As far as my father, the mayor, and Mr. Martin knew, I was the mayor’s daughter. She hadn’t told either of them the truth about me—at least, that’s what she claimed, though from the disdainful way my Greyhill father looked at me, I don’t doubt that he knew the truth. Mother said that if I ever told anyone, she’d make me regret it for the rest of my short life. She said that nobody would believe me anyway, which was true. Nobody would have had the nerve to doubt my mother, who was a fixture at the Methodist church in town. She was hardly the type.”
“And Mr. Martin?”
“He quickly become my obsession,” she says.
Her mother’s threat kept her from ever revealing the truth to Mr. Martin or her best friend, Henrietta—her half sister, she now knew.
“I know it’s unbelievable. But I just couldn’t. Despite how I hated my mother, I still wanted her approval. It’s only natural. And something about this secret, twisted as it was, bound me to her in a way that I couldn’t give up.”
Mr. Martin led a life marred by tragedy. His wife committed suicide when their daughter, Henrietta, was just an infant, an event Susannah believes might have been related to Mr. Martin’s affair with her mother. And then, at just seventeen, Henrietta was killed by a fatal fall during a graduation party, ostensibly after drinking too much and wandering off.
Ms. Lane left Greyhill just weeks later, a fact that has led many to believe she is responsible for her friend’s death. In a way, Ms. Lane says, she accepts the accusation, but she says the real reason she never returned was that it was just too painful. “People want to believe that something far more sordid happened—that I pushed her or something ridiculous like that—but the truth is that we had had an argument just before she ran off. I had said horrible things to her, things I had never revealed. And I told her who my real father was. And I said—I didn’t mean it,” she says now, tears falling from her face. “I told her that her own mother died because of me.”
She left Greyhill racked with guilt.
Timothy Martin, meanwhile, spent the rest of his life trying to convince the local community that there was something more to his daughter’s death, but the mayor—Susannah’s presumed father—wouldn’t hear of it. Mr. Martin, along with dozens of other members of the community, mostly the rural residents who make up the town’s working class, protested this for years, begging the local government to investigate Henrietta’s death. When they wouldn’t, something in Greyhill changed.
You wouldn’t kn
ow it, of course, strolling the quaint downtown. A perennial fixture on those “America’s Best Small Towns” lists, bucolic Greyhill draws hundreds of day-trip visitors from surrounding cities each year.
But if you look beyond the cobblestone streets and quaint shops in the downtown business district, you’ll discover that the legacy of Henrietta’s death is an unfortunate fracture between the town’s haves and have-nots. Those who live in town—the shop owners, teachers, doctors, and town council members—seem to prefer their insularity, even referring to the rural members of the community as “Others,” a coarse term that came into use soon after Mr. Martin began his crusade to discover the real cause of his daughter’s death.
“I didn’t know the true extent of what he was doing—he even went so far as to implicate me—until my mother called me to tell me he’d died,” Ms. Lane says now.
“I remember the phone call like it was yesterday. I was standing in our apartment, in front of the big picture window in our bedroom that overlooked Central Park. The lights had just gone on at Wollman Rink, and from where I stood on the fifteenth floor, the skaters looked so tiny. We had just had the first snow of the season. The first snow always made me feel a little melancholy because I knew what it signaled: the deep settling in, months and months of cold and gray, dark descending on the city. Winter.
“It had been years since my mother and I had spoken. She asked me how things were in the city, as if we were accustomed to chatting regularly. She was calling to relay the news. That’s how she put it: ‘I am calling to relay the news that Timothy Martin has died.’
“I asked her about his memorial service, and she stumbled. My mother had never once faltered with her language, that’s one thing—maybe the only thing—I admired about her. Her speech was so elegant and effortless that it was always as if she was reciting a script. I wanted to attend, but of course that was impossible. It would have made a spectacle of things. My mother then—she did something shocking.
“She told me she was sorry. That infuriated me. It was what I’d wanted to hear my whole life, but once it was out there, I couldn’t take it. I’d already lived with the weight of regret for so many years, but when this happened, it was as if somebody was doubling the load on my back. Why hadn’t I taken the time to tell him that I knew that he was my real father? Why didn’t I tell him what I’d said to Henrietta right before she died? He deserved to know. He would have been so much better off. We all would have.”
When Ms. Lane decided to return to her hometown after her husband’s death, she anticipated that her homecoming might not be smooth—and she was right, though she might have underestimated just how unhappy the townspeople would be about her return. When she announced that she would be selling off much of her family’s land, over three hundred acres that surround the city limits, many residents balked, worrying how the potential buyers might change the fabric of the community.
But in the midst of making these decisions last summer, Ms. Lane was injured in a car accident outside of town. “My return hasn’t been what I had hoped it would be,” she laughs. She says she’s now begun to reconsider the sale of the land, and that she plans to take the property off the market. “I’m hoping that by sharing my story, and by announcing that I am going to forego the property sale, at least for the time being, the community might begin to regard me with new understanding.
“I left Greyhill because of the pain of losing my best friend,” she says. “And later, I stayed away because I lost the father I never knew. I know I’ve been gone a long time,” she says. “But as the only living Greyhill—in name, anyway—and as Timothy Martin’s daughter, I feel a responsibility to every member of this community to reveal myself as I truly am. Greyhill is a wonderful place, and I want it to make all my ancestors proud. I hope Henrietta is looking down on me, along with our father, and I hope they can see a happy future for all the people here. I hope for that more than anything you can imagine.”
Thirty-Three
Bess
By the time I pull the roast out of the oven, I realize I’m a little drunk. I put the pan on top of the stove and shut the oven door with my foot.
“It needs to rest, Bess,” Diane says, turning to me from the other side of her kitchen, where she’s sprinkling parsley over her potato dish. “The foil’s in that drawer beside you.”
I know, I say to myself, and reach for my wineglass. I know, Diane.
“What time did you say you’re meeting William for dessert?” she says.
“Not until eight,” I say.
“Good,” she says, walking to the sink and wiping her hands on a dish towel. “That will give you time to sober up.” She gives me a look.
“Now, now,” I say, smiling. “No need to micromanage me.”
She laughs. “Okay, okay,” she says. “You’re right.”
I put my glass down, winking at her as I do, and start out of the kitchen. “Where are the kids?” I say, sitting across the couch from Bradley. “And Cole?”
“I think they went out back,” he says, his eyes pinned to the football game on the television.
“Bradley,” I say, fortified by the wine, “what did you think?”
“Think about what?” he says, his eyes still on the game.
“You know,” I say. “The story.”
He sniffs hard, like he has a cold.
“I hope it didn’t make you uncomfortable,” I say, lowering my voice.
“Nah,” he says, reaching over to pat my hand. “Like I told you when we talked, I’m happy to put all this behind us. I’m sorry you got roped into it, is all. I know it’s not the kind of thing you wanted to deal with when you moved here. Although, now you’re a local celebrity. That story is all anyone’s talking about in town.”
“For better or for worse,” I joke, thinking of how I’ve been received around Greyhill since the piece came out. Everywhere I go—the grocery store, William’s, pickup at Draper—people pepper me with more questions, wanting to find out what else I know. The stuff you couldn’t fit in the article, some have said, sidling up next to me. “I’d almost prefer that everyone go back to snubbing me.”
“Oh, it’s all for the better,” Bradley says. “Definitely for the better.”
“Well, thank you.” I study him for a moment. “Susannah told me what she thinks really happened. Up on the Cliffs that night.”
He nods, his eyes back on the TV, and I get the sense he wishes I hadn’t said anything.
“She thinks Henrietta really did just wander off. She apologized for what she said to me, trying to pin it on you.”
“Well . . .” He sucks in his bottom lip, his eyes gazing to some far-off place. “Susannah’s a very fragile person, as we all know by now. I should really apologize to you. For not warning you what you were getting yourself into.” He looks toward the kitchen. “You don’t think she’ll keep going with this accident stuff, do you?” he whispers.
“I don’t think so, Bradley,” I say. “I really don’t. I think she wants to let everything rest, once and for all.”
“Good,” he says, and then suddenly he claps, the Cavaliers having made a play he’s pleased with. He takes a sip from his tumbler of Diet Coke. He’s done with this conversation, I can tell.
I hear Cole and look out the window. His arms are in the air, and Livvie’s are, too. She’s jumping up and down, a gleeful smile on her face, pumping the football in her hand over her head. “Touchdown!” Max yells, running across the yard.
“Bradley?” I say, reaching over to pat his arm. “Maybe someday you can tell me what she was like.”
“Who?”
I raise an eyebrow.
He smiles, his eyes twinkling from the reflection of the TV. “She was one of a kind. Never let anyone get to her, you know?” He winks at me. “Never let anyone tell her who to be.”
I look up and see Diane leaning against the threshold of the door.
“Elizabeth, come on,” she says, turning back toward the kitchen. “
This dinner’s not going to cook itself.”
Thirty-Four
A couple of weeks after my story is published, I’m home alone on a Saturday afternoon. Cole’s at the inn, and the kids are out at Lauren’s farm with some friends from school, celebrating her birthday. I’m tinkering around the house in my socks, half-heartedly writing out a menu for the holidays, something to look forward to now that the story is behind me, especially because my parents are coming to visit.
I hear a thump on our front stoop and go out to see what it is. A small manila parcel rests on our top step. I pick it up, bring it inside, and sit cross-legged on the couch with the envelope in my lap, glancing up at CNN to a shot of a reporter standing outside the Capitol building. It is a beautiful, blue-sky day, and I feel a stab of envy, watching her. But it’s not for the reasons that would have dragged on me just a few months ago, when I would have pined for her hustle and purpose. Now, I just envy the fact that she is there. That she gets to run along the Potomac, eat at my favorite Ethiopian place on Ninth Street, walk among the lit-up monuments at night.
The fact is, I still miss DC, I always will. But it’s not enough to go back. There’s no going back now. Greyhill is home.
I flip the package over in my lap and notice there’s no return address. In fact, on second glance, it looks like it wasn’t sent through the mail at all. Did somebody drop it off? I close my eyes, trying to remember whether I heard a delivery truck or someone’s car . . . I tear the tape off and reach inside, and when I do, I gasp out loud. It’s like I have a grenade in my lap.
For a minute or two, I can’t move at all. I sit there, staring at it, my hands on either side of me, braced against the couch like I might tip over. Like all the rest of them, the journal is gold, the cover engraved with SGL.
I open it up, and find when I fan through the pages that there is only one entry, just two pages long. It isn’t dated, so it’s impossible, at first glance, to know when it was written, whether it was recent or years ago. Her penmanship looks just like you’d guess, elegant and feminine, and once I start reading, I realize that just like her, this is far more complicated than it appears.
Half of What You Hear Page 28
