Keeping Secrets (22 page)

And he had—well, almost.

* * *

Rosalie didn’t sleep a wink that night, except sometime in the early morning, she must have dozed off for just a second. And in that second Emma had dressed and was gone.

A few days later a long letter with an Atlanta postmark arrived. It read: “Dear Daddy and Rosalie, Why didn’t you tell me? Explain to me what the secrecy was about.” Then she went on to talk about the coloreds and school and how she’d said goodbye to Bernie and how she felt like she had to be free to grow.

Rosalie didn’t know what she was talking about. Jake guessed.

In her reply Rosalie didn’t address Emma’s first question. Instead, she wrote how Emma was way over her head, how she was going to have to pay for her sins, how she’d ruined herself with Bernie, and now what did she think she was going to do? Rosalie didn’t think she was pretty enough to make up for it; Bernie had probably been her only chance. And now that she’d turned away from him, she’d better be prepared to get by on her brains. She had plenty of those, if she’d only use them. If she’d only wake up and smell the coffee and see the error of her ways. Maybe Bernie would even forgive her, take her back. She could return to West Cypress, settle down with him, and teach school.

Emma ripped the letter to pieces. Then she’d leaned over the wastebasket and shouted into it, “Don’t you tell me what to do. You don’t know me. You don’t know me at all!” She stared at the black metal basket for a few minutes, then picked the shreds of the letter out of it, tore them even smaller, and burned them in an ashtray, cremated them a few at a time. She poured the ashes into a plastic bag from the Kroger’s, walked over to the lake by the university president’s house, and tossed the ashes of the letter across the water until they were all gone.

That had been January. Now it was June. In that time, Rosalie and Jake had heard from Emma exactly five times. She wrote a one-page letter the first of each month as if she were paying a bill. The words filled the page, but they didn’t say very much.

She was fine. School was fine. The weather was fine. She wouldn’t be home for vacation; she was working a part-time job for a caterer, had discovered she had a knack for cooking, was going to summer school.

She never mentioned Bernie. Rosalie wondered whether she knew that, just as his mother had predicted, the Army had called his name. He’d been in Vietnam since March, since right after his birthday.

* * *

Now Rosalie stood in her garden and stretched. Her back hurt from the leaning over. Her squash was looking good. So were her tomatoes. Maybe she’d make a sack of vegetables to give to Mary Ann Graubart when she came to call.

Why
was
that woman coming here again today, a little over six months after her first visit? Was she coming to tell her that Bernie was dead, that, just as she’d predicted, Emma had laid waste to more than his heart?

“Rosalie!” That was Jake now calling from the back door. He was standing with the sliding screen door pushed aside, still wiping sleep out of his eyes in the bright morning sun.

“I’ve put the coffee up. Come and get some.”

He was pouring hot water into the plastic cups, the instant coffee foaming as she came inside. She was blinded for a moment. After the sun’s glare, it seemed so dark. She’d pulled the screen door to with a bang, hoping he’d notice and remember that he should close it, too.

There was another sound then, the slamming of a car door. Rosalie peeked out. There was Bernie’s old two-tone green Ford in the driveway. She was here, Mary Ann Graubart.

Now she was rapping on the screen door.

Rosalie, still wiping the sweat off, welcomed her in.

“No,” Mary Ann refused coffee. She wouldn’t even take a chair. She stood there, once again in their kitchen, her feet planted firmly, her jaw set like a bulldog’s. It was like a rerun, like watching the same television program over again.

“Herman’s ill,” she said, “probably dying. So they’re sending Bernie home. With Herman gone, I’ll get to keep Bernie, because he’s an only son. It’s a trade-off. I don’t get to keep both.”

Having said her lines, she was back out the door now, standing in the carport which was only a tad cooler than being out in the blazing sun. The heat made her look wavy, her image disappearing in the carport’s dark. Rosalie blinked. Looking at Mary Ann made her eyes hurt, which in turn gave her a stomachache.

I’m going to be sick, she thought, as a yellow taste filled her mouth.

“You be sure and tell Emma that.”

Rosalie couldn’t see Mary Ann anymore. It was like listening to a ghost.

“Tell her she’s helped kill Herman, and Bernie doesn’t want her anymore.”

“You get out of here!” Suddenly Jake was yelling. “Emma never killed anyone in her life.”

His head was out the screen door now. “She never killed anyone. Do you hear me? It’s not her fault.”

He yelled those words,
It’s not her fault, fault, fault,
over and over. They echoed out into the hot June morning, as if the words could save Herman, as if they could bring back the long-dead Helen, the image of whose body lying in a long-ago bedroom, quiet except for the wails of the infant Emma, never disappeared. His words rumbled through the air long after Mary Ann Graubart, that hit-and-run artist, was gone.

9

Los Gatos, California

1970

Jesse and Clifton sat at the long bar of the Claremont House in the little town of Los Gatos, seventy miles south of San Francisco, having a late-afternoon drink.

“Another?” Jesse caught Clifton’s eye in the mirror.

Clifton stared back at the younger man’s reflected face. Jesse was looking better and better every day.

“Sure. I told Maria I’d be a while.”

“How’s she doing?”

“Fine. Fine.” Clifton leaned back on his bar stool. “I’ll tell you, coming up here and marrying your landlady is the best thing I’ve ever done.”

Jesse slapped him on the back and laughed. “Things going pretty good for you, old man?”

“Hell, Jesse, I hear you’re not doing too badly yourself. Not from what you just showed me over at Montalvo. How’s it feel, son, to be having a retrospective of your work at thirty-two? What did that reviewer in
Art News
call you, ‘The Redwood Tree of Craftsmen’? Not bad at all for a little colored boy from Watts.”

And Clifton was right, for both Jesse’s skill and his fame had grown. Two of his pieces were in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He had spun his furniture back to his sculptural roots, crafting trompe l’oeil pieces, wardrobes hung with clothes so realistic that it took a close look to discover that they too were carved of wood. Both the Metropolitan and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts were asking for works from this newly opened Montalvo show.

“Yep, I sent Lucretia a clipping. She called and said, ‘Boy, you’re stepping in high cotton.’”

“What’s next?”

“Think I’m going to take a break for a while.”

“A break! You made it to the big time and you’re laying off? No time to stop.”

“I’ve been working like a madman since I was a boy, Clifton. Think I want to take some time to do something for myself.”

“Humph. Don’t sound like the Jesse Tree I know. You got something in mind?”

“I just closed the deal on an old inn up Highway 17 from my house. Think I’m going fix it up.”

Clifton shook his head. “Houses eat you alive, boy, you know that even with your little place. An inn, you say? How big is that?”

“Oh, about fifty thousand square feet.”

“Sheeeit! You mean you’re going to hire some men to do the work.”

“Nope. Think I want to do it all myself.”

“Have you lost your mind?”

“Maybe. I just feel like I want to get out of the rat race for a while. Still make art, but coast. Maybe it’s the scale of this that appeals to me.” Jesse spread his arms. “Miles and miles of woodwork.”

“Yeah, well, by the time you finish it,
Art News
is going to have forgotten your name. I think you’re making a mistake.”

They drank in silence for a while, each man pondering his and the other’s words.

“You know what’s wrong with you, Jesse?”

“I didn’t know anything was, but what?”

“You need to settle down.”

Jesse threw up both his hands. “Jumping Jesus H. Christ! You are infuckingcredible. You sound just like my grandma.”

“Lucretia always was a smart old broad.”

“You call her that to her face.”

“Nah. I may be bad, but I ain’t stupid. Anyway, what I said is true.”

“I’ve settled down before. It didn’t take.”

“Marrying a woman for three months because she tricks you into thinking she’s knocked up ain’t my definition of settling down.”

Jesse smiled. “Well, it counts. It makes me divorced.”

“We’re not talking about what the State of California calls it. We’re talking about your stopping all this tomcatting around. You’re getting too old for it.”

“Mr. Marmaduke here don’t think he’s too old.” Jesse was looking down past the front of the starched white shirt to the pressed jeans, together, his daily garb.

“I ain’t talking about your dick, no matter what you call him. You too old to be thinking with you dick anyways.”

“You know when you get mad you talk like a street nigger?”

“Next thing I know you gone tell me when I get mad I’m cute. Is that what you tell the women right before you break their hearts?”

“I don’t break their hearts. I just don’t make any promises I can’t keep.”

“And why’s that? Why can’t you just find some nice woman and settle down?”

“I think this is where I came in. We gonna sit here all night and argue?”

Clifton muttered under his breath.

“You say something, old man?”

“I said, ‘Shut the fuck up and drink.’”

Jesse laughed. “You always were the sorest loser on earth.”

Clifton pulled on his beer for a while before he started in again.

“Jesse, I want to talk about this. Serious.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“Being married don’t mean that you’re tied down. If you got the right woman it
adds
something to your life, not subtracts from it. But the way you do it, how could you ever tell? Never been without a woman since you were fifteen, but none of them worth the time of day. They’re like this inn you’re talking about, reclamation projects.”

“What do you mean?”

“Did it ever dawn on you that the women you spend your time with are not exactly what you’d call the cream of the crop?”

“Watch it, old man. I let it go once. Don’t push me now.”

“I mean it. Maybe if you thought about upping the quality of the company you keep, you’d find someone who was more your style. Somebody you’d want to come home to.”

“You saying I go with trash?”

“Nawh. I’m not saying that. But I do think you’re afraid to get tangled up with a woman who can give you a run for your money.”

“And why do you think that is?”

Clifton leaned back on his bar stool and gave Jesse a long look. “You really want to know?”

“Yes, Professor Freud. They been letting you teach art up at the university on the hill so long, you think you know it all. Lay it on me.”

“I think you’re afraid if you let a real woman, a smart woman, get close to you, she’ll run off. So it’s just easier to hang with the good-time girls and never have to know.”

* * *

At a table just across the room, Emma Fine tasted a bowl of cioppino and her face lit up.

Not bad, she said to herself. Not bad at all. The fish soup could use just a touch less tomato and a hint more oregano, but it was good. Now, if aioli were served alongside the sourdough— but that would be asking too much. If you want that kind of cooking, Miss Fine, you ought to go down the street to your apartment and make it yourself.

But she didn’t have time for that. That’s why she was here grabbing a bite, because she didn’t have time for anything these days.

How could she have gotten herself into this? What had made her think she could juggle two full-time jobs?

She looked at the list of things she had to do today.

She’d already driven the fifteen miles into Santa Clara and taught her two writing classes at the junior college. Her satchel was stuffed with compositions to be graded.

She had to pick up the wheel of Brie.

The bakery was going to close before she got there if she didn’t hurry up.

She needed to call the butcher and remind him to butterfly the lamb.

Why did she think she could cater a sit-down wedding dinner for thirty-five in the middle of the week?

Don’t you ever stop? her friends at school asked.

Nope, never.

But now she did. Just now, as she looked up from her list.

She ran her gaze down the bar, and then it stopped dead.

That, thought Emma, that is the goddamned handsomest man I’ve ever seen in my entire life.

She shook her head, took another look.