Keeping Secrets (43 page)

“I never grew up to be a lady in one of those mansions, did I?” Emma went on. “But you know, I think that their lives must be pretty much as I imagined as a child. Rounds of tea parties and luncheons where they smile all the time and say things like ‘Isn’t she the sweetest little thing? And doesn’t she make the loveliest sandwiches?’”

Her blonde hair glistened in the sunlight. He had always loved her hair. He had been sorry when Rosalie cut it, but now Emma wore it long and curling, falling free as she had when she was a little girl.

“But behind those Junior League smiles, behind those same smiles that they wore at their high-school-sorority initiations, their coming-out parties, their weddings, what kinds of things do you think they hide?”

Jake’s attention perked. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t you think everybody hides something?
Lots
of things, probably? I mean, nobody’s exactly what they seem on the surface.”

What the hell are you talking about, Emma? she asked herself. A beer and a half and you’re running off at the mouth like you’ve come home to spill your guts.

Jake thought, Why was she talking about people hiding things? What had he said? He’d said
something
that had triggered her talk about deception, but he couldn’t remember what. It must be the alcohol that was making him dizzy. He hadn’t had so much as a beer since that night so long ago he’d come home drunk and Rosalie had thrown him out of bed—that night he’d spent in the backyard swing. Jake felt the sweat begin in his armpits, trickle down his sides. Emma knew something.
That’s
why she’d come home.

She needed to change the subject, she thought, to rescue herself, because it was getting mighty tempting, it was right there on the tip of her tongue, to spill the beans, to tell her daddy what she’d been thinking about all the way across country, all about Jesse, because he
was
her daddy. That’s what daddies were for, no matter how old you were, to listen to your problems, offer you a shoulder to cry on, to pat you on the head and tell you it was all going to be okay. Wasn’t it? Especially Southern daddies, that handsome, devil-may-care, Bourbon-flavored rapscallion breed who ruled their roosts without question and bought their darling daughters Coupe de Villes and white tulle debutante gowns even though it meant putting the homestead on the line with a second mortgage.

But her daddy wasn’t that kind of daddy, and she wasn’t that kind of Southern girl. She hadn’t stayed home. She hadn’t been dutiful and obedient. She hadn’t done any of the things she was supposed to do. So now it was a little late, wasn’t it, to try to revert to a type she’d never been?

But wouldn’t it be nice if she could? Just now, wouldn’t it be lovely to be able to take all her troubles, as if they were a load of dirty laundry she’d brought home from school, and dump them? As if they’d be washed and folded, squeaky clean, in the morning?

But that wasn’t going to happen, not in a million years. Not here. So she’d better get on with changing the subject. She did. She switched into what had always been a routine for her visits home—trying to get Jake to tell her more about Helen.

“Daddy,” she said lightly, swigging from her beer, “did you ever tell me what it was my momma, Helen, did for a living when she was living in New York?”

There. He knew it. She was easing up on it, but nonetheless closing in.

“She worked in an office. I told you that.”

“As a clerk?”

“I’m not sure. I think so.”

“I can’t believe you never talked about it.”

“It was a long time ago, Emma.”

“I know, but when you first met, didn’t you talk about what you did? You had to talk about something when you went out on dates.”

Closer.

“We didn’t go out on many dates.”

“How long
did
you date before you got married?”

Closer still.
He could feel where she was heading, as inexorably as a bullet that had been fired from a gun. Who had told her? Ruth? No, Ruth wouldn’t. George? It didn’t matter. Maybe she’d just figured it out. Or maybe it
had
been something he’d said. He felt so lightheaded. Hadn’t the doctor warned about his medication and alcohol? He’d laughed then. Yet here he was, the irony of it all, a Jew, who, like most, hardly ever touched the stuff, tripped by demon rum.

“Two weeks,” he said.

“I know you’ve told me that before, but I just can’t imagine it.”

Why not, Emma? she thought then. How long did it take you to decide to move in with Jesse? One night. It happens.

“Why not? I married your stepmother after three days.”

“Yes.” Emma frowned. “But that was because of me. You didn’t marry Helen because of me.”

And then there was a silence—a big deep silence that you could have driven twelve eighteen-wheelers through. You could have run both the Coupitaw and the Mississippi through that hole. You could fit Baltimore, West Cypress, Atlanta, New York, California, all of Emma’s past and present in that space, and it wouldn’t have filled up. And in that silence Emma listened to a bird sing on a branch overhead, and in that moment that was hanging, frozen, still, she thought of herself and J.D., poor dead J.D., together on a blanket beneath a tree, beside the water. And then she saw herself and white-blond Will, making love in the forest beside a stream, that weekend they’d gone to Gatlinburg. She and Minor, rocking on the ocean. Then Jesse, above her, the two of them outside, many times, many places. Then that hanging, frozen moment of time became a tunnel that went back, far back, and Emma saw, as clearly as her hand holding the yet unopened beer bottle in her lap, Helen’s face that she’d come to know from the photographs Jake had given her once the secret was out, Helen’s blue eyes smiling, her soft brown hair spread out beneath her on a blanket like an aureole, her head twisting and turning as a man pleasured her in the fresh air beside a pond, a lake. And that man wasn’t Jake.

“You did.” The words flowed from her lips like water, so gently that she wasn’t sure she’d said them. “You did marry her because of me, didn’t you?”

“No,” Jake answered, looking up, looking her dead in the eye, now that like a thunderbolt on this bright cloudless day it came to him that the secret was no longer worth keeping, the secret that had cost him so much. “No, I married her because I loved her.”

“But she was pregnant.”

“Yes.”

Emma turned away, her eyes filled with sudden tears. They were so hot, those tears, they scalded. She put a finger to her cheek, sure it was boiling.

“I’ve counted up the months before…” she went on breathlessly, for if she said it quickly, maybe it wouldn’t hurt. Or it wouldn’t be true. Maybe it would just be a story she was telling, an anecdote about someone else’s life.
I knew this woman once, and
… But it was
her
life, wasn’t it? “…the months between the story you told me—about getting married at City Hall with her in a dress of pale blue and you in a suit that looked like vanilla ice cream—and my birthday. And I thought, Premature. But I was an awfully big baby for that.” Over seven pounds, that certificate had said, the one she’d found in the hall closet in the little suitcase, the same one that had told her about Helen.

Jake just nodded.

“Yet if you got married only two weeks after you met, then…” And then, and then, she faltered.

Jake reached over and, in a completely uncharacteristic gesture, took her face in his hand. Then he said it. The words tumbled out.

“Emma, I’m not your father.”

Inside her head everything went dead still and bright white. She stood, jumped up, and the beer bottle fell from her lap and rolled down, down, bouncing into the Coupitaw, where it floated, heading south now on a journey of its own.

Emma ran down the levee’s other side, across River Road without looking, between two magnolias onto the sidewalk that promenaded before the mansions where in upstairs ballrooms debutantes in long white dresses had come out into the world. She ran in the same direction as her beer bottle floated, and had she been in the position of the bird she’d listened to earlier on the branch above her, she’d have seen that she and the beer bottle ran a head-to-head race, even when it hit a snag for a moment, and at that same instant she hesitated, hearing Jake calling from atop the levee, standing now, “Emma, Emma, stop!”

But she didn’t. She ran even faster then, as if he’d yelled, “Keep going, girl, you can do it,” as if he were urging her on in the race. She passed the cornerstone of the line of mansions, the glass-enclosed aviary of the local Coca-Cola bottling heir’s home. She leaped, again without looking, across the two lanes of the boulevard that marked the beginning of River Road Park. Tires screeched. A horn honked. On into the park she ran, past spreading live oaks bearded with Spanish moss. And in her head there were no thoughts, just a whirligig of shock. She heard her breathing. She heard her footfall. She heard her name,
Emma, Emma,
though not in Jake’s voice.

She had cruised this park at fifteen, part of a carload of giggling girls. At sixteen, she’d been half of one of the couples she’d been spying on a year earlier, a parker snuggled in beside Bernie in his two-tone green Ford.

Emma, Emma,
the voice called, and just before she tripped and fell across the end of a seesaw—a teeter-totter she’d played on as a child, Jake balanced midway down the end of his side so that she could lift him, but all the while wishing that she weren’t an only child, wishing that her momma and daddy had had some more children so she wouldn’t feel so alone—just before she tripped and fell flat on her face, sprawled, she realized that the voice she heard calling her name was her own.

The bottle flowed on down the Coupitaw. It had won. Eventually the bottle would float into the Red, hang a left at the intersection of the Atchafalaya into the Mississippi, past Baton Rouge, past New Orleans, where Emma and Bernie had spent that weekend in the Monteleone, past the brewery just on the other side of the French Quarter levee where it was given birth, on into the Gulf.

The bottle had gone only about a half mile more of that slow, low-water journey when Jake finally reached Emma and leaned over her, brushing gold-and-red leaves out of her hair. She didn’t move. She murmured into the earth, “Why, Daddy?”

“Why what, Missy?” He hadn’t called her that since she was about four.

Why did you marry her? Why didn’t you tell me? Why am I both a motherless and fatherless child?

“Who?” she asked instead.

“I don’t know. Helen never told me her lover’s name. And I didn’t care. All I knew was that I loved her. I didn’t even care that she didn’t love me back at first, though I think she came to. I didn’t care that she tricked me, that she married me because she needed a father for you, because what else was a girl in trouble to do? I didn’t know anything. And I didn’t care.”

“But who am I?”
she screamed then into the fallen leaves and the dirt.

“Why, Emma. You’re still Emma Fine, of course.”

On the drive back to the house in West Cypress, Jake said it all over again, as if once he had started talking he couldn’t stop. “I love you, Emma, and I loved Helen.”

She reached over from the steering wheel and patted his hand, pulling out of herself and into him for a moment because he sounded so pitiful. But she couldn’t answer. She couldn’t say a word. She just nodded and kept driving slowly. As they approached their house in which she’d never lived, she saw Rosalie’s little car in the carport.

And then she found words. “I can’t go in,” she whispered.

Jake nodded.

Another question occurred to her, and it wasn’t why, or who, or what.

“Does she know?”

He shook his head. “No.”

Suddenly Emma laughed. She laughed so loud, so strong, from so far deep down inside herself, that she had to pull the car off to the side of the road.

Jake looked at her with frightened eyes. He was afraid she had lost her mind. But he was also afraid that she was going to tell on him, that she was going to tell his secret, now
their
secret.

She gripped his arm. “Well,
I’m
sure as hell not going to spill the beans!”

Jake managed a little embarrassed smile, the same one as when he paid a compliment or when someone complimented him, though in Jake’s life those latter occasions had been few and far between.

“Listen,” Emma said then, dropped once more to a whisper as if Rosalie could hear them, though she couldn’t even
see
them unless she stepped out into the front yard, and she might just do that, any second, she just might. “Listen, Daddy, I’m not going to stop. You get out of the car right here.”

“No!”

“I’m all right,” she said and smiled to prove that it was so.

“Where are you going?”

Where was she going? Emma Rochelle Fine Tree, no mother, no husband, and now no father, where the hell do you think you’re going?

“I’m not sure,” she said. “But I’ll call you when I get there. I’ve got to be alone and think about this. You understand, don’t you?”

Well, he did, but he wished he didn’t.

“Quick now,” she said. And then she sounded like herself again. “Go. Git.” She reached across him and opened the car door.