Family Secrets

by Nancy Thayer

  Al told her a little about the submarine training he was involved in, including some dangerous survival maneuvers. Jean listened with genuine interest. In turn, Al asked her about her job and how she liked it, and then, casually, he said, “Where’s Erich Mellor these days? Didn’t your parents let you invite him?”

  “I’m not seeing him anymore,” Jean answered truthfully. “I don’t even know if he’s still in Washington.”

  “My God, that’s good news for me, Jean!” Al said, smiling. “I thought you were going to marry that guy.”

  “Oh, no,” Jean replied.

  Al pulled the car over to the side of the road. He switched off the ignition and turned to face Jean. He was such a handsome man, so pure and shining; he was a man who deserved happiness.

  “Jean. You know I love you.”

  She had desired him when she was younger. She had yearned for him then. She had always been fond of him. She could imagine living a good life with him. If she could not have what she wanted, she was certain that she could make him happy, and that knowledge reassured her of her own worth in the world. And she was superstitious enough to believe that perhaps if she was very good for a long time, she could make up for any harm she’d done when she took that slip of paper from her father’s safe.

  Still, because she did really care for Al, she wanted to be forthright, and so she said softly, looking out into the dark night, “I don’t deserve your love, Al. I’m not what you think I am. I’ve done some … silly things in my life.”

  He put his hand over hers and leaned forward. “What silly things?”

  “Well, I belong to a pacifist group in Cambridge. I write for a journal called War Stories.”

  “I know all about that. Bobby told me. That’s no sin, Jean. I can understand it. I wish the world could have peace, myself.”

  Jean turned to look directly at Al. “And I thought I was in love with Erich.”

  Al smiled. “I know. I can understand that, too. I’ve thought I was in love with other women, too.”

  “You did?” For some reason this was amazing to Jean, and a flame of desire and jealousy shot up inside her. “When?” she demanded.

  “Oh, it doesn’t really matter. It was nothing—nothing compared to what I feel for you. We’re right for each other, Jean. I know we are.”

  She studied his handsome face, seeing him for the first time as a man of experience and at the same time seeing in him the deeply satisfying comfort of his trustworthiness. He would never betray her. He kissed her then, chastely, and she returned his kiss, and was pleased to discover how eagerly her body responded to his, how a happy heat bloomed and flowered within her as she wrapped her arms around him and breathed in his breath and felt his cheek brush hers. She cast all her other secrets on the winds of Fate. She could not bring herself to tell him she’d taken something from her father’s safe. She could not disillusion him that much. She wasn’t that brave.

  Al pulled away from her, caught his breath, and smoothed her hair, then ran his hand along her face and traced the curve of her lips with his fingers. He reached down and took both her hands in his. “I wanted—I hoped for a more appropriate time, a more romantic moment, but I’ve got to go back to Norfolk in two weeks. Jean, will you marry me?” When she hesitated, he said urgently, “Please. Say yes.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  The passion with which he moved across the car, and gathered her to him, and kissed her, surprised her. Mild-mannered, equable Al White devouring her so ferociously with his hands and mouth shocked and even frightened her. She hadn’t imagined that love with Al would be so physical. She found herself pushed up into the corner of the car, her head pressed against the window, her raccoon coat pulled halfway off, her skirt pulled up almost to the top of her thighs.

  “Please,” she gasped. “Not like this.”

  Immediately Al withdrew his hands and returned to his side of the car. In silence they straightened their clothing. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I—I’ve been waiting for so long, Jean.”

  “There’s my apartment—” she offered shyly, but Al shook his head. “No. We’ll wait until our wedding night.”

  “All right.” Jean smiled in the dark at such a sweet thought.

  Al turned on the engine and flicked the heater to high. “If we get our blood tests tomorrow, we can be married before I go back to Norfolk. We might even manage to have a double wedding with Bobby and Betty.”

  Jean smiled. “Betty would kill us. No. Let’s just get married quietly, by a justice of the peace.”

  “Won’t you mind not having a big formal wedding?”

  “Of course not. I just want to be your wife.”

  “Mrs. Albert White.”

  “Mrs. Albert White.”

  That evening, when they told Commander and Mrs. Marshall they were getting married, while Mrs. Marshall wept with joy, while Commander Marshall went down to the cellar to find a bottle of celebratory champagne, while the four of them sat drinking, discussing their plans, Jean sat in a daze. What was she doing? It was, suddenly, as if Erich Mellor had been just a dream. Was it possible that she could be happy and safe, while at the same time secretly atoning for having betrayed her father?

  Commander Marshall did not seem to have realized yet that something was missing. Jean knew her father well, how he moved through the house like a thundercloud when he was upset, how her mother bustled even more rapidly in her housekeeping when she knew something was bothering her husband. He seemed relaxed. So perhaps the slip of paper had not been important. When she thought of how vital it could have been, she felt nearly ill. If this was life’s way of letting her balance out the scale, she was lucky.

  She and Al took their blood tests and applied for their license. Her parents had suggested, and Al had thought it only wise, that Jean give up her room at the boardinghouse and move back in with her parents again, into her old room, until Al came home from the navy. It made good wifely sense to do so; Jean would keep her job but instead of spending her money on rent, she’d save it for some nice piece of furniture for the house she and Al would eventually buy. Al was eager for her to be safely ensconsed with her parents. Jean’s father was delighted by his daughter’s snap back to sanity and treated her accordingly. He gave her back her car. It was tacitly understood that she wouldn’t continue to write for War Stories, not with a husband in the navy.

  Two days before they were married, Al and Jean drove to Georgetown to gather up her things. It was early March, and sunny, but unseasonably cold and windy, as if winter were struggling against spring to keep its hold on the weather. Jean grabbed her raccoon coat from the closet and tied a silk scarf around her head.

  At M Street, she explained her happy news to Mrs. Connors and insisted she keep the full month’s rent.

  “You are a dear girl, and I wish both of you a life of happiness,” the landlady said, sniffling sentimentally into her hankie. “Oh, by the way, dolly, there’s some mail here for you. Now where did I put it?”

  Jean’s heart lifted and flipped like a kite in the March wind.

  “Al … darling … perhaps you could bring in the packing boxes from the car,” she suggested as winsomely as she could. She didn’t think she wanted him to see her mail.

  Mrs. Connors handed her a small package tied with brown paper and string without a return address. While Al went out to the car for the empty boxes, Jean hurried to the second-floor bathroom. Blessedly, the door had a lock on it.

  Savagely ripping off the paper, breaking a fingernail in her haste, Jean uncovered a small black velvet jeweler’s box.

  She opened the box. It made a tiny click. Nestled on violet silk was a small gold heart-shaped locket on a gold chain. Inscribed on the back of the locket were the words:

  For Jean,

  With Love

  E.M.

  Inside a small white envelope was a card. It read: “I’m returning to you what isn’t mine.”

  She was stunned with his arrogance, w
ith the insult—returning her heart to her because he no longer wanted it.

  She tossed the paper and box and locket in the trash. Damn him! And thank heavens for Al and his reliable, decent love.

  She had her hand on the knob of the bathroom door when something—a wave of memory, of pleasure, of sweet regret—swept over her. She went back, bent over the wastebasket, and lifted out the shining gold heart. It was over, but she was not sorry it had been. Running her fingers over the cool gold, she slid her thumbnail into the tiny space between the two halves, intending to open the heart, to see what Erich had put in it, if anything.

  “Jean?” Al knocked on the door. “Are you all right?”

  A shiver of guilt ran through her. “Fine! I’m coming!” she called back.

  She dropped the locket in the left pocket of her raccoon coat, unlocked the door, and went out to join the man who would be her husband. Together they carried her belongings from the one room in her life where she’d been neither child nor wife, but for a brief while lover, and writer, and revolutionary.

  Jean and Al were married by a justice of the peace, with Bobby and Betty and Commander and Mrs. Marshall and a red-nosed, weeping Midge in attendance. For their wedding night, they drove out into the countryside of Virginia, to an inn that once had been a stopover for horse-drawn coaches and hadn’t changed much since those days. Their bedroom had a fireplace where a log fire roared, throwing shadows across the four-poster bed and its hand-sewn quilt.

  Al waited politely while Jean undressed; she took off her robe, draped it over the chair, and slipped into bed, still wearing her sheer, white, lace-trimmed nightgown. Al came out of the bathroom in his plaid dressing gown, lit the two candles waiting in their brass candlesticks, then slid into bed next to her.

  “My darling,” he said, turning to her, and Jean reached up her arms and embraced him.

  What she experienced that night with Al was not the same sort of oceanic, fainting, nearly unbearable bliss she had been brought to by Erich. Instead she felt … warmed. From the tips of her toes to her fingertips she felt relaxed and enriched and rosy, as if a blush of health had risen up from her blood. For the next few nights, until Al had to leave to go back to Norfolk, they stayed at the Carlton Hotel, and Jean was secretly amused and flattered by the attentions Al gave to preparations for their lovemaking. He kept candles to light every night—not on the bedside table but across the room on the chest of drawers so that the light they shed was soft and flattering. Close at hand, on a nearby chair, or the footboard of the bed, he draped, in advance, a towel. If these considerations seemed a bit conscientious, Jean gradually learned during her married life that they were also just terribly nice. She was grateful to whatever manual he’d read or woman who’d taught him, for Al thought that it was a man’s duty to pamper a woman during lovemaking. Often he liked to give her a back rub before or after, and he always took his time, concentrating on bringing Jean pleasure. On their wedding night he did not remove her gown but merely raised it up to her waist, and it wasn’t until later that she realized he never would remove her gown. She took it off and was delighted to see that this was enormously exciting to Al. He always believed that having access to her body was a privilege not to be taken lightly.

  On her wedding night, and every night thereafter, Jean was glad she had married Al. He made her happy, he kept her safe, he cared for her deeply, and she sensed that they were right together. She had no regrets.

  Not until many days later, after the wedding and the wedding night, after the emotional good-byes when Bobby and Al left for their bases, not until she was alone, a married woman, in her childhood room, did she remember the locket. When she looked for it, it had disappeared from her coat pocket. She sat on the end of her bed, mentally retracing her steps. She remembered opening the package in Mrs. Connors’s bathroom, and feeling guilty and disloyal to Al at the sight of the golden locket. She remembered tossing it into the wastebasket, and she remembered taking it out, putting it in her coat pocket, and then rushing out to join Al in packing up her things. Had she somehow slipped it into the box of jewelry and accessories she kept in that little bedroom? Had it fallen into one of the suitcases she’d packed? It occurred to her now that perhaps the locket held the slip of paper she’d taken from her father—or perhaps that was only wishful thinking, and she chided herself for wanting to believe that Erich had returned it to her.

  “Jean, dear!”

  Jean jumped at the sound of her mother’s voice. Even thinking of the locket made her feel that she was being unfaithful to Al.

  “Darling, another wedding present has arrived. Come open it.”

  “All right, Mother. I’ll be right down.” She’d have to search for the locket another time. Now she clattered down the stairs to the dining room.

  Her parents’ dining room had become a repository for the gifts she received: silver, linens, ice buckets, cheese plates and, from her parents’ many friends stationed overseas, hand-painted tea sets, wool blankets, carved wooden candlesticks.

  Now a long, heavy package wrapped in canvas and tied with rope had arrived, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Albert White. Jean unwrapped it to find an Oriental rug, predominately red, intricately woven, fringed, obviously valuable. Enclosed was a card with the printed words: “Congratulations on your marriage,” but there was no signature.

  That evening Jean sat with her parents as they tried to decide which of their friends had sent the gift. Someone stationed in the Orient, or in the far-eastern Mediterranean … Odd, they couldn’t think who it could be. This was embarrassing. It would be rude not to acknowledge such a magnificent wedding present. Yet they could only wait for someone to ask if the gift had been received.

  Every night Betty drove over to the Whites’ to spend the evenings embroidering bed sheets and pillowcases and hand towels with Jean and her mother. Betty was miffed at the sight of the rug—she hadn’t received anything nearly so valuable, and Bobby was older than Jean.

  Within a month it was obvious that Jean was pregnant, and Betty was miffed at that, too. She stabbed her needles into her embroidery frame as if the printed pattern were Jean’s flesh. Clearly it wasn’t fair that Jean should get pregnant first. Jean lay on the sofa, a cool cloth over her eyes, listening to the radio, ignoring Betty’s glares.

  “Clever Al,” Jean’s mother said about the baby, as if Al had done it by himself. “Won’t he be over the moon about this!”

  So the days went by. Jean’s thoughts turned with hope and love to the baby growing inside her—really a remarkable thing, she thought, really a miracle. The months went by, and she almost never thought of Erich Mellor. All that had been a sort of lark, the kind of thing you do when you are young. She forgot about the locket completely. Then Diane was born, and her real life began.

  Chapter 9

  Julia

  Late Wednesday afternoon Julia splashed cold water on her face, then studied herself in the splotchy mirror in Mrs. Overtoom’s bathroom. Her eyelids were swollen from sleeping all afternoon, and her eyes were red from crying. Sitting on the side of the bathtub, she forced herself to breathe deeply. She really had to get herself under control.

  Little laughing yellow ducks with red umbrellas and black galoshes danced around the room on the sun-faded wallpaper. The window curtains were white cotton edged with a fringe of white balls; through them Julia saw the backyard, where her clean clothes stirred slightly in the breeze. Smiling wryly, she told herself she’d accomplished something today. She’d take the laundry in when they got back from eating dinner. Her clothes would smell of fresh air and sunshine.

  A bottle of lavender toilet water stood on the small white wicker stand in the corner of the bathroom. Julia sniffed it and dabbed some on her wrists and on the back of her neck, deeply inhaling the comforting, familiar old scent.

  “Julia? Are you okay?” Sam’s voice came from the other side of the door.

  Julia stood up, pulled the door open, and smiled at him. “I’m great. Just
had to smell this.” Playfully, she reached out and touched the tip of Sam’s nose. “That’s what my grandmother’s house smells like.”

  “Nice,” Sam said. He grabbed her hand. “Come on. I’m starving.”

  Side by side she and Sam walked up toward the campus. It had grown colder during the day. Autumn leaves carpeted the streets and sidewalks and drifted down around them as they climbed the hill. In one yard three small children rolled in a pile of leaves, shrieking with glee.

  “More! More!” they yelled. The mother, watching as she leaned on her rake, smiled and began to rebuild the pile.

  Without speaking, Sam and Julia stopped to watch the children. As the mother gathered the leaves, two little boys with curly brown hair chased each other around the yard while the third child, a toddling girl whose hair glowed bright red, bent over to inspect something moving among the flowers.

  “Ready!” the mother called.

  She was a good mother, Julia thought. She probably had gingerbread and apple cider waiting in the house.

  What would a child of hers and Sam’s look like?

  She leaned against Sam’s body, squeezing his hand, washed over with fond desire, but to her surprise, Sam abruptly moved away, releasing her hand. He strode, almost ran, up the hill.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” she called.

  Sam kept on going. He held his back stiffly, hands jammed into his jeans pockets.

  “What’s wrong?” Julia asked, running to catch up with him. “Sam?” She linked her hand through his arm and searched his face.

  “Nothing. I’ve got a lab tonight. I don’t have much time to eat.”

  Julia walked in silence next to Sam for a while, trying to figure out what had triggered this sudden coldness.

  The children playing on the lawn …

  “Life was easier when we were kids, wasn’t it?” she asked. When he didn’t reply, she thought of something else that the sight of children might have sparked. “I’m not pregnant, Sam.”