Secrecy (36 page)

“Let’s get out of here,” Roger said.

They stood uncertainly on the street. Their afternoon, those precious hours away from work, was, for the first time, unplanned. They were in no mood now to fill it with love back in the apartment. All they really wanted to do was to get over this insurmountable hurdle, and they were baffled.

In their frustration they began to walk. Now and then they stopped to look at a store window, one filled with models of sailing ships and another filled by a huge aquarium. For a while they watched fish dart or idly glide among green grottoes and underwater caves.

“The colors. They look like jewels,” Charlotte said, not caring about the fish, feeling only the growing distance between Roger and herself that was producing these inane comments.

They walked on past thinning trees and browning chrysanthemums, crossed a wide avenue, and stopped with a sudden jolt as Roger turned to her.

“You told me once that your father had a personal problem.”

Ah, yes, her clumsy mistake! He remembered everything, even the most minute.

“It was completely unimportant. Nothing.”

“It was enough to make you come tearing back from Europe.”

“I didn’t ‘come tearing’! Why won’t you drop the subject?”

“Because I think it has something to do with what’s happened. Because you are not telling me the truth.”

“I am!” Her voice rose, and a man passing by turned about to stare. “Oh, please, Roger, can’t you drop it?” she pleaded.

“I may go bankrupt,” he told her, “and you ask me why I don’t drop it?”

He looked so grim! And they stood there on the street corner, just staring at each other.

Suddenly the drizzle turned into a downpour, and people ran for shelter.

“I want to go home,” Charlotte said.

“No. We have to talk this out first. We’ll go in there. It’s the Isabella Gardner Museum.”

A museum, she thought, when I just want to go home and shut the door.

They went in out of the weather to a courtyard. She was aware of sculptured stone, shrubbery, and Grecian heads. Wet and frightened, she trembled. And again for the sake of saying something, anything, to cut through this incredible hostility, she exclaimed, “The Grand Canal in Venice is lined with palazzos like this.”

“What are we going to do?” he asked, ignoring the inappropriate remark.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean … how can we marry each other when we can’t trust each other?”

“Oh, my God,” she whispered.

He was telling her here in the hushed elegance of this place, this place that she would never forget, that they were losing each other. She knew that surely.

Once more she met his eyes, which were pleading and tense. Don’t you know I would die for you? she thought.

But there are blood ties, and no one can possibly feel how strong they are until they are tested. Her father’s life … Even Elena—even Elena!—all these years had guarded it. For with that recent letter to Bill she had meant to protect her daughter. Blood ties …

“If I allowed myself to think it,” he said, “I’d think there must be another man.”

“Am I really hearing you say that, Roger?”

“I haven’t actually said it, have I? But if you cared about—us—you would let nothing keep you from being open with me. You insult my intelligence, you and your father, with an excuse that even a child might see through. No one believes it. The lawyers, Uncle Heywood, the Lauriers, too, no doubt. No one. But here you are, watching the ship head toward the rocks, and still you will not speak. What am I to make of you?”

“Make of me? I love you.” Her lips quivered and she stopped.

“There’s more to love than just making love,” he said quietly. “No, I cannot continue like this, Charlotte. That shouldn’t be hard to understand.”

“Take me home,” she said, “I need to get home.”

“Then wait in the doorway while I find a cab.”

Neither of them spoke in the taxi. The only sound was the rushing of traffic and rain.

That evening he telephoned. By his voice alone she knew that he was desolate, though his words were only a repetition of what he had so many times already said.

He wrote:
We have loved each other. Need I tell you what you have meant to me? Yet now I feel that I don’t know you
. And he explained again how impossible it was for a relationship to exist alongside of such enormous, damaging secrecy, to which she gave the lame reply that was the only one she had to give.

After a week or two she heard no more. So she returned his little ring that she had not once removed from her finger. Now it was back in its velvet box, wrapped and addressed to the man who had given it. Then all contact came to an end in silence.

Often Charlotte wondered about herself. Remembering that first-love episode with Peter, her wounds and spasms of weeping, it seemed strange that she could be dry eyed and quiet now. Perhaps she was simply too shocked to accept the fact and finality. Perhaps she was like those stone-faced parents at the funeral of a child who has met some kind of violent death.

Indeed, Pauline thought it was like that. “A heart can be too broken to show itself,” she said. She was being very kind and asked no questions, which was the greatest kindness of all.

She also said, “People heal, and work is the best healer.”

Well, Charlotte knew that. She passed her days at the drawing board, thankful for having work. She often stayed there late, and was thankful again for being tired when she went home. She had no desire for company, and had no contacts, anyway, since Roger and she had been too busy and too engrossed with each other during the past year to keep any.

As for her father, she could but wonder. There was a sore and heavy ache in her chest when she thought of him, alone now in the neglected house in these dark, short days of fall.

Most painful of all for him, she knew, was his sense of responsibility for her break with Roger. Again and again she had to assure him that his own conviction for murder would be far worse for her.

She was filled with a vast loneliness. The city, too, seemed to hold a loneliness that she had never observed before. In its parks she looked at the statues of its great, of John Adams with the troubled face, and Garrison, solemn in his stone chair, with wet yellow leaves on his long coat. She stood there thinking, Well, he had his troubles too. And turning, she beheld an old man, not stone, but alive, sitting on a bench with his arm around his dog. Lonely. Lonely.

“Do come for Christmas dinner with us,” Pauline urged. Since Charlotte was no longer “attached,” she had again assumed her motherly role.

The prospect of a lively dinner with interesting people had been cheering, but there was no doubt that Charlotte must go home instead.

*   *   *

There were just the two of them in Kingsley. Cliff was dining with friends. Bill had made reservations for dinner at a country inn, one of those Revolutionary saltbox houses with a spinning wheel in the corner and pewter tankards on the mantel over the original fireplace. The moment they walked in, Charlotte recognized it as the place where they had stopped for lunch on their journey back from the hospital in Boston so long ago. No doubt her father had forgotten.

The tables were filled with elderly people who were probably there because they had no other place to go. Here, also, there was too much loneliness.…

They tried to talk of neutral subjects: Charlotte’s work, the election, and Bill’s neighbor, who was being transferred to Texas. But the talk was false and finally died away. Back home again, they watched carol singers on television and then, both admitting to being tired, went to bed.

In her old room Charlotte sat on the window seat looking out at the empty night. It came to life when she turned off the lamp; lights glittered from scattered houses on the nearest hill, and above the farthest darkness shone the stars. And she wondered where Roger was tonight. Last year at this time—yes, just around ten o’clock—they had taken a walk together, crunching through the snow.

She turned the lamp back on and readied the bed. Elena, knowing that Charlotte would be spending Christmas here, had sent her usual bounty in a glossy box. It lay now on the bed, spilling its contents in
crackling tissue paper: a powder-blue cashmere sweater, an alligator handbag, and a silver picture frame with a note attached.

Darling, save this for the photo of your next lover. He’s out there. He always is. Brighten up, and go find him
.

All the agony that she had so determinedly controlled until now exploded and tore her apart. She burst into tears, lay facedown, and sobbed into the pillow, beating it with desperate fists. Nothing mattered anymore. If she could only lie there and die there! If only her heart would stop before morning!

After a while, a very long while, there were no more tears left. Her exhausted chest heaved in its final spasm, and she became aware of the cold. She got up, undressed, and crawled under the quilt.

In the morning she was calm again, but this calm was different from the contrived calm that she had had before. The outburst, the total collapse, had in some strange way cleared her head.

Some days later she went to Rudy and Pauline with a proposal. The firm had been commissioned to draw plans for a semisuburban housing project, where low-income families might purchase their own homes. She asked them now to let her work on it.

“I’ve been thinking and drawing pictures in my head. It seems to me that there should be a variety of facades, maybe four or five, all in harmony, but differing enough to be interesting. Maybe a few Victorian touches here and there?” She paused as if to wait for a reaction, but none came, and she continued.
“Each front yard should have shrubs and flowers. I’ve seen pictures of English towns where even the most modest houses have a front garden. It makes a greenbelt up and down the street, makes it all seem larger. What do you think?”

Pauline and Rudy looked at each other. They were smiling, and Rudy said gently, “We have, as a matter of fact, been wondering when you’d be ready to tackle another big job like that.”

And Charlotte smiled back. “I’m ready now,” she said.

L
ate in January, Charlotte had to return to Kingsley. Each of the brothers had been served with notice of foreclosure. The news, although long expected, came to her abruptly one morning when Bill telephoned, and for all the rest of that day she was filled with a melancholy nostalgia. With sad irony she thought how true, after all, were the trite icons of childhood and family life, the Halloween pumpkin at the door and the backyard barbecue on the Fourth of July.

Of the two homes Cliff’s was the one with the more valid treasures, things not all of them worth as much in money as in remembrances of three generations. He was asking Charlotte to come and take whatever she wanted before the rest was sold.

“I really don’t want to take anything,” she told Pauline. “It’s all too sad.”

“Nevertheless, you should take whatever you can,
those early American antiques you described, and the paintings—”

“There’s no place for them in my life,” Charlotte objected.

“There will be. You won’t always live in a tight little flat. When you’re married—”

“No,” she objected again.

Pauline smiled. “All right. When you’re a prominent architect living in a house of your own design—”

Charlotte threw up her hands. “Okay, you win. I’ll go next week.”

Snow was melting on the roadsides. Thick and grainy, it slid into puddles on Kingsley streets, where people walked with open collars, as if this were April instead of a January thaw. Over the landscape there lay an air of weariness, which was certainly not dissipated, when she arrived home, by the sight of cartons in the back hall, filled with discards.

“Amazing how much junk you can collect in twenty-five years,” Bill said. “Thought I might as well get to work on it gradually. Emmabrown’s taking all your toys for her grandchildren, unless of course there’s anything you want.”

“Only a few books,
Charlotte’s Web, Little Women
, stuff like that. I’ll sort them.”

“Don’t bother. I’ll sort them for you. I’ll know what you want to keep.” Bill smiled. “I ought to know.”

Yes, he ought. He was the one who had bought the books, had read them to her before she had
learned to read, and even long afterward; summer afternoons and winter evenings had been good times for reading aloud.

Heavyhearted, she inquired about Cliff. “Do you still not speak to each other?”

“As little as possible. What is there to say?”

Indeed, there was not much to say anymore between these brothers, or between Bill and herself, so their little supper was eaten in the kitchen, while
Tosca
, playing on the stereo, removed the need for a conversation that could only be depressing.

After a while Charlotte got up and went outside to look again at her old familiar hills. The sky was filled with whorls and shreds of dark clouds, deep gray-blue over glints of a cold silver sun about to disappear in the west. The evening felt ominous to her, although that was, of course, only her mood, the mood of the place and the circumstances. And she went back inside.

That night the rain began. It might have come on slowly, but by the time it woke her, it had the force of an open faucet splashing into a half-filled tub. Peering out, she could see water streaming down the roof of the porch and could hear it gurgling in the leaders. An eerie wind, roaring and shrieking, wrenched the apple tree near her window. It seemed to Charlotte that something extraordinary was happening.

She went back to bed, but the noise outside kept her awake and, in a sense, watchful, as though at any moment that noise would attack the house, which
was surely absurd. Yet, dark and early as it was, she got up again and dressed.

It was just past five o’clock by the kitchen clock. She was putting a pot of coffee on the stove when Bill, also fully dressed, came downstairs.

“A real northeaster,” he said. “Wind must be thirty miles an hour. This’ll take down a lot of trees, I’m afraid.”