Keeping Secrets (20 page)

But Emma didn’t want to hear about it. “Oh, Momma,” she’d say, “it’s not like that today.” It most certainly was. It was the same money, except it cost a lot more. Well, maybe not so much, since the tuition at State was free and Emma had a scholarship to pay for her books. But if she’d gone away? Lord only knew how much that would have been.

She’d explained all this to Emma, who had just stared at her with that expressionless face she put on when she didn’t like what she was hearing. Where had the smile gone, Rosalie wondered, that used to light up her face when she was a little girl? Then Emma had said, “All right, then I’ll just have to do it my way.”

Which meant that she’d zipped through Cypress State too as if it were a kindergarten, racing toward graduation in three years.

“
This
time I’m going to do it right,” she’d announced at the beginning of her last year. Eighteen then, she was only nineteen when she finished, and already she knew her mind as if she had a picture of what she wanted her life to be hidden in her room.

“I’m going
away
to graduate school, Momma,” she said while licking stamps for applications—to Georgia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York.

Atlanta was where she’d won the biggest fellowship, and though her face had broken into a grin as she waved the offer like a flag of victory, Rosalie knew that Emma was really disappointed. Atlanta was the closest of all to home.

What
was
it Emma was looking for? What was she running away from?

Was it Bernie? That shouldn’t be so hard. Emma’s tongue had never been shy when she had something on her mind. No, it was something more than that. It felt like there was something about home that she just despised. The older she’d grown, the colder she’d gotten. It made Rosalie shiver when she thought about it.

Why, only this past Thanksgiving, when they’d gone to Atlanta to visit, Emma had said to her, how could she, “If you don’t like Daddy, cut him loose. I’m probably not coming home again. Don’t stay with him for me. I’m gone.”

“Why, whatever are you talking about?”

“For years you’ve complained about him. You were just telling me how lazy he is. About how you can’t stand the yelling when he’s mad. What I’m saying is you don’t have to put up with anything for me any longer. Do what you want.”

Rosalie had left the room then, walked down the hall of Emma’s dorm blindly bumping into walls. But then she had to come back because she was afraid if she went any farther she’d get lost.

How could Emma say those things to her? What was she so angry about? She’d gotten more and more like Jake, quiet on the outside, but furious inside. It had gotten worse and then never any better—when was that?—sometime around Rosalie’s momma Virgie’s funeral.

I didn’t know it was going to be this way, she thought. Is it all over so soon? Did I get so little for my bargain with Jake? Of course, Emma didn’t know about the bargain, but still, Rosalie had always thought, even if unspoken, her investment would bring her interest in return. Wouldn’t you think so?

Well, she couldn’t say that to Emma. But they didn’t say much of anything for the remainder of that Thanksgiving in Atlanta, because, within minutes after that hurtful conversation about Jake (Rosalie hadn’t even dried her tears) the announcement came over the radio—John Fitzgerald Kennedy was dead.

The whole Thanksgiving visit had gone that way, just one awful thing after another.

It had started with Bernie, who was going to Atlanta to see Emma, too, not wanting to share the trip. She couldn’t imagine why he’d want to drive all that way by himself, waste all that gas. But then, he’d never had much to do with them, just poking his head in and saying hello to be polite.

Once in Atlanta, Rosalie knew there was something up between him and Emma, even aside from the assassination that put everybody in a terrible mood. They were all crammed together, watching Jackie grabbling over the back of that limousine in that blood-smeared pink suit. But there was a tightness in Emma’s mouth that didn’t have anything to do with the President, and no matter how he tried, Bernie couldn’t seem to get his face straight, either.

When Emma stood that last rainy morning on her dorm steps, waving them all goodbye, Rosalie had seen the tension in her face loosening. It was only a couple of weeks later, in that space between Thanksgiving and Christmas, that Miz Graubart had first come to visit.

Rosalie had served pound cake and coffee to her and made polite conversation. Jake sat, and, as usual, after hello he didn’t say a word.

“I guess you know that Bernie and Emma haven’t been getting along,” Mary Ann began.

Rosalie nodded. Yes, she’d suspected as much.

And then as if that nod had turned a switch, the woman spit out, “She’s sending him to Vietnam. She lied to him, broke his heart, and now he’s being drafted!”

Rosalie didn’t know what to say. Mary Ann raced on. “He dropped out of ROTC two years ago. His father and I didn’t want him to. It was his insurance. As an officer, he could go to Europe, Taiwan, somewhere other than the war. But no. Emma didn’t want him to. She wanted him to take his chances so they could get married. But now she’s changed her mind. Bernie says now that she’s gotten away, she doesn’t think he and West Cypress are good enough for her.” Her voice cracked. “He’ll never come back. I know it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I don’t know what?” The look she threw at Rosalie was sharp as a razor. “I don’t know that he won’t come back in a box with a flag for a blanket? Or with one leg? Or blind? I’ll tell you who doesn’t know.
You’re
the one who doesn’t know a damned thing!”

Rosalie’s heart, which had been picking up speed, began to race now as if it could run away from these words that she knew she didn’t want to hear.

“You don’t know how she got him, do you? Your precious daughter, Emma?”

“What are you talking about?” Jake’s voice was froggy, like a seldom-opened door. Both the women turned and stared at him. They had forgotten he was in the room.

“What do you mean?” he repeated.

Mary Ann’s face was scarlet now. Her mouth worked. Even in anger, the words didn’t come easy to her. “I mean she…she…
slept
with him.”

Rosalie turned away, a hand to the side of her face as if she’d been slapped.

“How do you know?” Jake asked flatly.

“I know.” Mary Ann set her mouth in a prim straight line of defense.

“Well,
I
want to know!”

Watch out, Mary Ann Graubart, Rosalie thought. Watch out when Jake is riled.

“I read her letters,” Mary Ann spat. “Dirty letters. Trash. And if you paid attention, you’d know. She’s your daughter, isn’t she?”

“And
your
son!” Jake was shouting now. “Isn’t he your son? Who’s ruined her?”

Rosalie stood up and ran out of the room. She’d heard enough. Then there was the back door slamming, a car door, and Mary Ann Graubart was gone.

It had taken her days to get over that. Well, really, she never would. But she’d decided to let it go for a little while, at least not to mention it to Emma until Christmas, until she came home.

* * *

Rosalie sighed at that memory and took one last swipe at the weeds around her pole beans—too hard, too close. The tall wooden stake fell down, the green-bean tendrils grasping at the earth as if in seconds they would take a new hold there, sink roots, then fight their way back up.

I’m like those pole beans, Rosalie thought. Cut me down. Throw me in the dirt. I keep on struggling. Jake and his daughter aren’t made of the same stuff. They think life is easier, sweeter than that. They think you can have anything you want if you want it bad enough. They don’t seem to know that life is going to cheat you at every turn. Emma’s young. She has an excuse, though God knows I’ve tried to teach her differently. But Jake, Jake’s lived through the hard times, the hungry years, just like me. You’d think he’d know.

It was just like she’d explained to him in that first letter she’d written him. The world is a terrible place. Cold and hard and cruel. No place to bring an innocent child into. But if you already have one, if you have a baby who needs a mother as much as I want a little girl, then that’s what I’m looking for.

You’d think Jake had never understood a word she’d ever said. You’d think that life was just one long dime store novel. He sat there, at the kitchen table, on the sofa, and watched life flicker by like images in a book, dipping into a paper bag now and then for a bite of chocolate. Jake liked things sweet.

And comfortable. Rosalie’s eye fell now on the green metal yard chair he’d moved to the edge of the garden the last time he mowed the yard.

“You can sit here and watch your garden grow,” he’d said.

What on earth was the man thinking about? Gardens weren’t for watching. You had to work at them, bend your back, break your fingernails in the dirt. Hard work and survival, that’s what gardens were all about.

Rosalie had finished with the pole.
There, now.
She patted down the dirt with her foot. It was straight again, firmly rooted in the ground, green and tall, almost as high as her head. A Christmas tree in June, her beans.

Then the Christmas just past tugged at her thoughts again. She saw the silver tinsel tree she’d bought on sale at the last minute at the five-and-dime.

“But it doesn’t smell like a tree,” Emma had said, walking in the night before Christmas Eve, the all-day drive thrumming around her as if the miles and towns across Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi were slipping beneath her yet.

“I don’t know how you do it,” Rosalie had said, remembering that awful trip they’d made in the other direction at Thanksgiving, only a month before.

“You know I love to drive,” Emma answered.

But not now you don’t, not now that the journey is over, Rosalie thought, looking at Emma’s face which snapped shut as soon as she stepped in the door. You don’t love it now that the adventure is over. Because this trip was in the wrong direction. You’re happy when leaving, not coming home.

Two minutes in the door, and she was complaining about the tree. She always crabbed about Christmas, as if Rosalie never got it quite right.

Well, Rosalie had a few things she wanted to complain about, too. But she’d waited this long; she could wait a bit more.

She followed Emma into her bedroom, stood and watched her unpack. Emma was holding a cream-colored lacy undergarment that Rosalie had never seen before. It was like a teddy, the kind of one-piece vest and step-ins Rosalie had worn as a young girl.

“What’s that?” she asked, reaching out for it.

Emma pulled away and quickly tucked the garment into a drawer.

She’d always acted like that about her underthings. As if Rosalie hadn’t changed her diapers as a baby. As if she hadn’t bought her her first brassiere.

Of course, she’d carried on as if the falsies Rosalie had pinned inside were meant to hurt her rather than to make up for her still-flat chest. Emma had tucked the bra into the bottom of a drawer just like she was hiding this lacy thing now. What else was she hiding with it, Rosalie wondered, what else that Mary Ann Graubart had warned about?

“Well,” said Emma then, closing the dresser and the closet doors, “I’d better make a few phone calls.”

Not five minutes in the house, Rosalie thought, and already she’s trying to get away. Rosalie followed her up the long dark hall.

She reached for a saucepan in the kitchen, filled it with exactly three cups of water and put it on to boil. She could use a cup of tea. Emma was on the phone now, leaning against the refrigerator door.

And as she rang up first one friend and then another whom she hadn’t seen since September, the bright excitement colored her voice. Rosalie thought she could almost see her words glowing against the dimness of the single kitchen light. She and Jake sat at the kitchen table, pretending they were doing something else but listening to every word.

“Tomorrow,” Emma was saying. “Tomorrow about one, and then we’ll go to Delia’s and open all our presents there.” She laughed then, a high-trilled laugh as if she knew a secret. Her cheeks were bright red. The phone connected her with an energy that electrified her in this quiet room where the only other sound was that of the gas flame.

Emma had complained that she was cold, so Rosalie had turned on the oven for a moment. She listened to the sound of the gas, the sound of money burning.

“I can’t wait to eat some of Snooks’s chili,” Emma was saying. There was a pause. “
Of course
Bernie will be there.” Then she lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’ve got to talk to him again. He’s taking this something awful.”

Such assurance, little miss, that you can toss him out and then come back and see him again? What is it that makes you think you have that power? Is it the thing that Bernie’s mother whispered, her words hissing like this gas?

Rosalie watched Emma filling in the spaces in a little book that said “Hallmark” on the cover. She leaned it against the refrigerator and wrote in names and times.

“Come and sit,” Jake said when Emma finally got off the phone. “Have a cup of tea.”

Emma smiled then. She smiled at her daddy and sat right down. Like him, she stirred milk and a couple of teaspoons of sugar into her cup.