Secrecy (18 page)

Her father was looking at her, hoping for an answer to his unspoken question, but she had none to give, and now, grown suddenly silent, they started home.

It seemed to Bill that he had long known he would eventually confide in Claudia. The more he knew her, the more he liked her. She was a lovely woman, calm and courageous. Slowly and tentatively during these last weeks of summer, Charlotte and she, the one fifteen, the other more than twice that age, each needy, each separated from the other and at the same time connected by a common disaster, had begun to come together.

A subtle change was visible in Charlotte. She had gone back to swimming every morning and was losing weight. Instead of spending solitary days at home reading, she was cautiously venturing out with her old neighborhood friends. Bill had no doubt that Claudia was responsible for these changes. One afternoon he went to tell her so.

“And I’ve come with a question. What do you think I should do about school? Charlotte doesn’t seem to know what she wants. You see,” he explained, “her fears conflict with each other. She hasn’t told me so, but I feel it.”

“For one thing, she must be afraid that Ted will be brought back.”

Respecting Claudia’s honesty, he returned it in kind. “That’s true.”

“You don’t conquer your terrors overnight, Bill. It’s taken me almost a year to conquer my particular terrors, even to walk into the supermarket with my head up. I couldn’t bear knowing that I was being pointed out or whispered about, even sympathetically. It was awful.” As she spoke, the color on her pink face grew deeper. “Awful,” she repeated.

“But if you have done nothing wrong,” Bill said, “if you can live with yourself, that’s really all that matters in the end, isn’t it? And God knows, Charlotte has done nothing wrong.”

Who would believe, he thought, that we two would be able to talk like this? And yet, how civilized it is that we should do so.

“Tell me, then, what we should do about her, Claudia.”

“Keep her home. Strangers in boarding school can’t restore her strength the way you can.”

“Or you,” Bill said steadily.

“Oh, I don’t know. I hear myself talking like a ridiculous know-it-all, I, who don’t even understand why my own child went wrong.”

“You were and are a mother, not a miracle worker.”

Claudia’s hands made a gesture of helplessness. “I did the best I could.”

“That’s all any woman can do. Some, of course—well, that’s past and gone,” he said roughly, looking
away for fear that his eyes would fill. “I’m afraid Charlotte will have to get used to that particular loss.”

“She will weather it. She’s going to be an exceptional human being. She’s intelligent and sensitive, probably too sensitive. She’s been wounded badly, and she needs to be healed. And she will be.”

“So I will tell her that I want her to stay home.” He looked directly at Claudia. “And will you help with the healing?”

“You know I will.”

Still he persisted, “Will you be her mother?”

“Yes,” said Claudia. “Yes, I will.”

N
either of us has any real comprehension of the other; to her, life always looks so easy, Charlotte thought. And yet, there must be plenty of other people in New York’s tower hotel suites, with a view of both rivers and the city below, with hush-foot carpets and potted azaleas in January, who do not find everything so easy. Elena’s particular kind of ease was her own. Not only her words revealed it, but also her shrug and the way she wore her diamonds with her plain black dresses.

“Ten times in ten years,” Elena wailed, “and I’ve always been the one to go to you. Every single summer, to say nothing of all the Christmases and other times in between, I’ve begged you to come to Italy.”

Now that the first tearful embraces were past and they had come to the end of their vacation, she was repeating her customary complaint.

Although Charlotte had expected it, the need to respond to it yet again was tiresome. She was tired
anyway, simply from five days of following Elena through the shops—“Things are so much cheaper here than in Italy”—to theaters, and fashionable restaurants. A little of that sort of thing went a long way for her.

Nevertheless, she answered patiently, “I keep telling you, and you know, that I’ve worked every summer through college and graduate school—oh, what’s the use! You don’t understand that there just isn’t enough money for travel.”

“That’s nonsense, Charlotte. Time and again I’ve offered to send you the fare.”

“I can’t afford to take the time off from work. I’m very lucky to have even a bottom-level job in an architect’s office where I can see what’s going on.”

“How can things be all that bad? I don’t understand it.”

“There’s no mystery. Nothing’s changed. Dad lives on the rent money from the mill, the small salary he gets from the state commission, and on Uncle Cliff’s repayments. It’s a finite amount. He can’t stretch it.”

“Cliff should have sold that house. Two people rattling around in that huge barn! He should have gotten a good job for himself, anyway, instead of writing books that nobody reads.”

“People do read them, Elena. His book on textiles got a lot of praise, even though it didn’t make a fortune. And he has a contract for two more, on Third World industry.”

Elena was not so easily defeated. “Well, each to his own. I still say that Bill, with his brains, should
go back into business, too, instead of working for the government for peanuts.”

“Dad is doing something important, something he loves to do. And he wants Cliff to stay in the house. It’s the kind of place that should be preserved, it’s a treasure in itself, it’s a bird sanctuary and the trees are a century old,” Charlotte said, rather hotly.

When Elena laughed, her curls shook and her bracelets tinkled.

“Aren’t you a Dawes, though! You’re just like them, with your head in the clouds. But you’re very, very sweet, all the same. And so pretty. I never dreamed you’d turn out to be so pretty. You were such a
large
kid, weren’t you? Here, let me show you something.”

She got up and crossed the room to the table where she had placed the photographs that always traveled with her. One was of the husband whom Charlotte had never seen; a dark man with elegant features, he looked both intelligent and sardonic.

“Mario hates traveling,” Elena had always explained, “so that’s why I have to come here alone. Besides, he is such a busy doctor. He has a tremendous practice. We never go very far from Rome.”

She said now, “Look at our new apartment. It’s in the seventeenth-century palazzo near the Piazza Navona. Those are our windows on the second floor.”

Here, indeed, was something worth seeing. The wonderfully balanced, serene facade was ornamented with simplicity and grace, as if to temper the
truth that the structure was strong as a fortress, built for protection in a bloody time.

“Beautiful,” Charlotte murmured, adding, “It’s only a few hundred years, not long as history goes, when people lived behind those walls in fear of being attacked.”

“It’s not too different from New York today, my dear. Each year when I come here, I think it’s the same, only more so. Do you get here often?”

“No, very seldom.”

“You should. There’s so much going on here in spite of everything. And it’s practically next door to Philadelphia.”

Charlotte smiled. “There’s plenty going on in Philadelphia too.”

“I do hope you’re not burying your nose in work, Charlotte. Of course, it’s marvelous and I’m proud you’re doing what you always wanted to do. I only mean that architecture, a career, isn’t everything for a woman. There’s more to life than work.”

She sees me as a grind, hopelessly dull and hopelessly unlike herself, thought Charlotte. But maybe I like being what she calls a “grind.” I probably could have squeezed out a few days and a few dollars to visit her and her Mario; the fact is that I haven’t wanted to. She makes me uncomfortable.

Her gaze wandered out to the somber, wintry sky. And suddenly, without forethought, she asked, “Are you happy, Mama?” using the name she had not used in years, ever since her mother had asked to be addressed as Elena.

“What a question! Life’s a great bag, Charlotte.
You stick your hand in and see what you pull out. You unwrap it, and if you don’t like it, you try again, that’s all. You go from happiness to unhappiness and back, if you’re smart. Anyway, let’s not be so deep. Tell me the news. What’s going on at home? How’s my friend Claudia, who doesn’t approve of me?”

“She never says a word about you, Elena.”

“Okay, don’t be indignant. I meant nothing. I know you love her.”

Love. How many kinds are there, anyway? Charlotte wondered. The kind I feel for you, Mama, is mingled with an old, old ache. I try not to let it be judgmental, but I don’t always succeed. My love for Dad is total trust, companionship, and gratitude; he has always been there for me and always will be. As for Claudia, she is my friend, my teacher, and my therapist. At fifteen I had turned away from the world, and she led me back into it.

You can do anything with your life that you want to do, Charlotte. You can be beautiful. You can be unafraid
.

All this she did for me when she herself was beset.…

“Life must be very hard for her.”

“They’ve had their troubles. Nuisance troubles, magazine writers wanting interviews, and even TV interviews, which they won’t give. And there was even a letter from Ted, but of course it was a hoax. The police told Claudia right away that it was, but she didn’t want to believe them. It was typewritten, sent from England. Somebody reported the kids who had sent it. It was cruel. They thought it was funny.”

“She ought to give up and accept the inevitable.”

“Nothing is inevitable. After fifteen years they found a man who had murdered his whole family. He’d been living in the United States all the time. And it’s even easier to hide abroad. The Interpol people aren’t going to make it any priority to find Ted. They’re looking for big-time crooks. Oh, he’s out there someplace, that’s sure.”

Curiously, Elena asked, “Does it—does he not haunt you anymore? I mean, you’ve never said so much to me about him in all these years.”

“You have to come to terms with reality.”

“I see. It’s good that you have. It means that you’re gradually forgetting. Or am I wrong, being terribly tactless, as I can sometimes be?”

“I don’t think much about what happened anymore, not consciously, anyway.”

Ah, but it was continuously with her! It was the albatross around her neck, hidden under her clothes and her smiles.

“Well, I’m glad. I do sense a new kind of lightness in you that I never saw before. And I repeat, you look lovely. I can’t get over your hair. I never thought you’d color it.”

“That was Claudia’s idea. She thought I should lighten it.”

“Well, it was a good idea. But I’m surprised. I wouldn’t have expected her to care about such things.”

“You don’t know her at all, Mama.”

“I know that she’s been good to you, and I accept that.”

Please let us not end with any strain or bitterness, however masked, thought Charlotte.

Apparently Elena was having the same thought, for she brightened her expression and, brightening her voice as well, said briskly, “I’d like an enormous late-afternoon tea right now, so I won’t have to tackle dinner on the plane. Let’s go down to eat. Then I’ll catch the plane, you take your train, and we’ll say good-bye till next time.”

The parting was to be, as it always was, a moving ceremony, symbol of this strange relationship woven out of dream and memory, hopeless opposites, and its own steady love.

In a way, Charlotte would have liked to tell Elena about Peter. Perhaps she had been too wary of possible comments, for Elena had once made a remark that had seemed cutting—although again, maybe it had not been cutting at all, but merely Elena’s singular brand of humor.

“I can see you married to a professor with leather patches on his elbows. You’d be snowed in somewhere in a town like Kingsley, except that there’d be a college on the outskirts. And you’d have parties on winter nights, with everyone sitting around earnestly discussing the world’s problems from
a
to
z
.”

On the other hand there was as yet not very much to tell about Peter. He was not a professor, but a young associate, one of the best she had ever had as a graduate student. In her first year she had taken his course on the History and Evolution of Architecture; she had been fascinated by Viollet-le-Duc, who had
restored Notre Dame, by Le Corbusier’s pioneer “modern” cities, but most of all by Peter Frank himself.

He was red haired and expectedly, though only slightly, freckled. He was very tall, with a fresh, outdoor look, as if he had just come in from very cold weather. He had wit, used vivid adjectives, and moved his hands expressively, so that as he spoke, art and stone took shape in the air before him.

And he had not ever noticed Charlotte Dawes, who sat in the second row and worshiped him all through Architecture and Construction in the Modern World.

Then, six weeks ago, they had met in the cafeteria during that dead time between three and four in the afternoon when there is hardly anyone there. Charlotte had been holding a coffee cup in one hand, while in the other she turned the pages of a text. He came over and sat across from her.

“So you’re going to be an architect,” he said abruptly.

Finding the remark rather odd, she answered lightly, in a tone that revealed her surprise, “Why, yes, yes, I hope so.”

“I’ve been giving you A’s, and if there had been anything higher than A, I’d have given you that.”

As if she were standing outside observing herself, she knew she was hiding her feelings very well. “Oh, I have been designing houses in my head ever since I was in junior high school,” she said, laughing.

“Did you have that braid halfway down your back when you were in junior high school?”

“No, I had a ponytail.”

Then he laughed too. “I must tell you, whenever you turn your back as you leave the room, I have the worst temptation to pull your braid. It’s a Chinese man’s old-time queue, except that it’s blond.”