Secrecy (7 page)

It was wonderful the way the words came pouring so smoothly now. She wasn’t the least bit self-conscious anymore with Ted. He sat there listening and watching her so respectfully, so closely.… It was lovely.

Once he reached over to refill her glass, but when she objected, he said, “You’re imagining things. This is the half you didn’t have the first time. Do you think I want to get you drunk?”

She giggled. Of course he didn’t. He was Claudia’s son and, by now, practically Uncle Cliff’s son too.

“Let’s have some music,” he said abruptly. “Some dance music.”

She got to her feet. Dancing in the afternoon! Yes, it was all lovely.

But when he took her in his arms, guiding her into the slow rhythm of the music, she said, “Not this kind of dancing. I don’t know how to do this old-fashioned stuff.”

“You’d better learn, because it’s coming back in style. It’s really nice, you’ll see. Just follow my steps.”

His firm hold tightened until there was no space at all between their bodies. Her head was pressed against his chest so that she felt him breathing. The music was soft and yearning, a little bit happy and also a little bit sad. Her eyes filled with tears.

“You’re so sweet,” Ted murmured. “I never thought when I first saw you—I thought you were only a little kid. But when I looked again, I saw something else. You’re very adult for your age.”

As they moved around the room, the walls began to spin slowly, as when a merry-go-round starts rolling. Her legs felt heavy, but it wouldn’t be right for her to break up the dance, so she clung to him to keep from falling.

“So sweet,” he murmured again. “Tender and sweet. And here I am in this beautiful house with a beautiful girl. Lucky me. I never thought I’d be so lucky. I haven’t had the easiest life, Charlotte.”

“Oh, I know, I heard,” she whispered back.

All the happiness was melting into sadness. Life was hard. Poor Ted, he had had his troubles too. They had killed his father. And poor me. Poor Dad.
Elena too. The world was so sad, so beautiful and sad. A little sob stuck in Charlotte’s throat.

“Can’t dance on this carpet. Let’s sit down,” Ted urged, and kissed the top of her head.

“Yes, let’s. I feel a little dizzy,” she said.

Back on the sofa he put his arm around her. “Lay your head on my shoulder. You’ll be all right in a minute.”

“Dizzy,” she said again, “and sleepy too. It must be the wine.”

“No, no. Those few sips wouldn’t do that to you. It was dancing in circles that did it. Lie back.”

He was so gentle. His firm fingers began to stroke her shoulders. When he slid his arm around and scratched her back, it felt as good as the Chinese back-scratcher she had won long ago at a fair. She told him so, and giggled.

“You’re like a cat,” he said. “I had a cat once that would lie there all day and purr if you rubbed its back.”

Gradually, his fingers had slid down along her leg. When they reached her feet, he took off her shoes and massaged her soles. She floated; sunlight dazzled through the Venetian blinds, and she closed her eyes against the glare.

“I’m like that cat you had,” she murmured. “I’m falling asleep.”

“Good. That’s good.”

So she lay—she could not have said for how long—until suddenly, with no warning at all, he lunged. His enormous, crushing weight pushed her flat on the sofa. His wet, crushing mouth clamped on hers.

“What are you doing?” she cried, struggling to raise herself.

Twisting beneath him, she pushed his face away. She did not understand; a second ago she had been sleepy and warm while he stroked her so gently, so gently.… What was he doing? What did he want?

In her squirming struggle to free herself, she saw him withdraw far enough to undo his clothes. And glimpsing then his astonishing, terrifying flesh, she screamed. The scream tore her throat.

“No! No! No!”

Again he thrust her back. His hand covered her mouth, while his other hand probed her body, rolled her skirt roughly up around her neck, and pulled her underclothes down.

“What are you doing?” she said, and when he didn’t answer, she pleaded, “Don’t, don’t.” Then she called out, “Oh, God, somebody help me, please.”

Sweating and breathing out the sour stench of wine, he moved upon her. She was stifled. Her fists were impotent and her teeth, with which she would have torn him, could only graze his chest, which was hard as a board. There was nothing there for teeth or hands to seize. He was going to kill her. Claudia’s son was going to kill her. He was a maniac, the nice, quiet murderer you read about. He was going to strangle her. And with all her strength she fought. Her shrieks pierced her ears. Surely somebody, somewhere, would hear!

But there was no one, and her strength was going. Her voice was dying into a whimper. Her heart was
going to stop. There was no one to help her, no one at all.

Suddenly, as abruptly as it had begun, it ended, and he released her. For an instant, before he could turn his back to rearrange his clothes, she saw again that shocking, terrible flesh. It was hideous. It sickened her stomach. And she pulled down her skirt so that he might not look at her. She wanted to kill him. And because she knew she had no way to hurt him, she could do nothing but sob. The sobs raged in her chest and ripped her apart.

Shaking, she lay there in her rumpled skirt. Turned facedown, she cried into the pillow and beat the armrest as she had wanted to beat Ted. Finding one of her shoes, she hurled it across the room. The sound of her weeping was turning into a peal of hysterical laughter. And she heard it from far away, as though in a distant room someone was losing control of her mind, heard it and was unable to stop it.

“You’ve got to quit this,” Ted said. His voice was very quiet. “You’re making yourself sick.”

She whirled about. “What did you do to me? What did you do?”

“Nothing, Charlotte. Here you are, all in one piece. There’s nothing wrong with you.”

“There is! You hurt me. You ought to—to go to jail, you rotten, rotten bastard. You hurt me.”

She cried and cried. Her nose ran. He gave her a tissue and stood watching her.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” he said after a while. “Nothing happened at all, Charlotte, I didn’t hurt you. And don’t go home and shoot your mouth off.”

A tremendous exhaustion drained her. After a while she was too weak even to cry anymore. She lay quite still with her eyes closed, listening to Ted’s footsteps strike the floor between the scatter rugs as he paced. When she opened her eyes, she saw the cake and the wineglasses on the table. She felt cold and closed her eyes again.

He was standing over her; without looking she felt his presence.

“You’re all right,” he repeated. “Remember, nothing happened.”

“I have to go home,” she said, wiping her nose.

“You can’t go, crying like that.”

“I’m not crying anymore.” Then the thought struck her that perhaps he wasn’t going to let her out of the house, and she screamed again. “I have to go home.”

“Fine. No problem. Just wash your face and comb your hair, and I’ll take you.”

On the brief ride to her house, neither of them spoke until the car stopped and Ted said, “I think you’d better not come again.”

His tone was flat, but she understood his meaning. He was afraid of her now; he was in terror. In any case she had no intention of going near that house again, ever.

She walked in softly on tiptoe. At the end of the hall the door was open, revealing her father on the porch. She wanted only to hide in her room, but had barely set foot on the stairs before he heard her and called out.

“Where in heaven’s name have you been? Come in here, I want to talk to you.”

“I’m sick,” she mumbled, forestalling the question he would surely put when he saw her.

He rose from his chair, confronting her in the full blaze of afternoon light, and demanded, “What is wrong with you?”

“I feel like throwing up. I must have eaten something.”

“ ‘Must have’! What do you mean? You know what you ate. Where were you? It’s after five. I’ve been home since half past two. I called all your friends where I thought you might have gone, and then I had to give up. Where were you, I asked?”

“Ted and I took the dogs for a walk,” she said, looking down at her shoes.

“Ted. I told you yesterday that I didn’t want you there. I don’t like him. I have an uneasy feeling about him, Charlotte, and maybe that sounds crazy to you, and maybe I’m all wrong, but dammit, I’m your father, and I have a right to sound crazy. And I have a right to know why you went there when I told you not to.”

She had never seen her father so angry. Even during those overheard arguments with Elena, it had been she who had the hot temper, never he. And she waited in silence for him to finish.

“What does he want with a kid like you? He’s not right for you, he’s not honest, it’s written on his face. I don’t like this, Charlotte, I told you I didn’t and I’m telling you again. If you have any more dates with him, you’ll be in real trouble with me. Real trouble.
And it seems to me that we’ve got enough troubles under this roof already.”

She trembled. A chill ran through her again; nausea filled her throat, and in a whisper she pleaded, “Dad, I have to go to the bathroom. I’m sick.”

She lay flat on her back, flung out, her body sore and bruised, until the nausea passed. If only she had someone to talk to. It had to be a woman, and there was none. Emmabrown would only scold like a fury. Claudia, who would not scold, was obviously out of the question, and Elena was far away. Maybe, though, she would be coming home soon. If only she would come home soon!

Two cold tears slid to her temples and lost themselves in the tangle of her hair. She felt terribly alone, lost in a strange place with no one to help her.

Presently the door opened, and her father came in, looking anxious. “Are you feeling better? Get up, honey.” And when she nodded, “I know I yelled. But it wasn’t really yelling. It was just being emphatic. You had me terribly scared. I didn’t know what might have happened to you.”

She got up and redid her hair in the familiar ponytail.

“Now you look like yourself,” Dad said, coaxing her, wanting her to smile and assure him that everything was all right again.

How could everything be all right? Over and over, all that week and beyond, she relived the terror and humiliation of that afternoon. She sat in class and she lay in bed, reliving the scene on the sofa in Claudia’s
living room. She was outraged. And in a strange way she was angry, too, at Elena.…

“Do you want to fly to Florida over Memorial weekend?” Dad asked one evening. He hesitated; the words came hard to him. “Your mother wants to talk to you about herself and me, about your feelings.”

“She can come here.”

“She thinks it would be good for the two of you to be alone.”

But Mama should be here, at home, in this house. She should have been here before this thing happened; then probably it wouldn’t have happened.

“I’m not going,” Charlotte said. “You can tell her.”

There was a silence.

There were many silences now. Dad at mealtimes, becoming aware of one, would turn from the distance into which he had absently been gazing to ask Charlotte what had happened in school that day. She knew that he was doing it for her sake. His mind was filled with his own worries: down by the river, the vacant building that was draining his pocketbook, and most of all the vacant chair at the opposite end of the table.

What if he knew what had happened to her. He must never know.… Her hand shook, spilling half a glass of milk.

“W
e signed a lease today,” Cliff told Claudia one evening after dinner.

“Well, that should be a relief,” she said.

“I don’t know. I hoped so much that we could sell the place and get it off our hands. Bill worked hard over two deals that looked promising, but no use. This last one almost went through, but then their engineers told them we were too close to the river. One big flood, they said, and we’d slide right into it. Good Lord, the building’s been standing since 1910, and the river’s never flooded yet. It was probably just an excuse to back out because they weren’t able to come up with the money.”

“Who are these tenants?” Claudia asked, seeing that he was to some extent troubled and needed to talk.

“They’re a big company that does waste disposal—stuff left after demolitions, for instance. They say
it’s a clean recycling process. I hope so.” Cliff frowned. “Bill has some idea in the back of his head that this firm isn’t exactly first class, but we’ve had no other offers in two years. We have no choice.”

“Why, what does he think?”

“Thinks maybe they’re a front for somebody, or might have some mob connections in the Midwest. I don’t know. But Bill tends to be suspicious. Our lawyers told us to go ahead, so I’m not going to worry. And the income’s mighty welcome. We’re not used to penny-pinching, either of us.”

Claudia smiled at these brothers’ definition of
penny-pinching
. Still, after a lifetime of comfortable living and famously generous giving, it must be very painful to retrench.

“What are you men going to do with all your time now?” she asked.

“Bill’s going to stay with the Environmental Commission. They want to make him director, he says. That’ll mean a salary and I can keep teaching a couple of courses at the business college. We’ll manage. I’ll still be able to spend enough time on my book too. The history of textiles is really the history of civilization, you know.”

“I have to get you a better desk lamp,” she said, “a three-way with a green shade.”

She wondered how long it would take her to become used to all this comfortable domesticity. Perhaps she never would. It was just as well, though, not to take any good things for granted; in this uncertain world they were rather to be savored, every single day to be treasured, every hour like this one, the two
of them in peace on the cool side porch with their after-dinner coffee in a beautiful pewter pot.

“Where’s Ted gone? He rushed out of the house as if a bee had stung him.”

“You’re not used to boys, darling. Don’t you remember that when you were his age you only wanted to get out with your friends?”