Secret Language (15 page)

Faith tells a little, for Ben. She understands that he wants to be proud of her. Isadora looks interested in a way that seems like an effort, but the boys are paying attention, their generosity an unexpected gift.

“Mom’s a computer nerd,” Chris says, grinning. He taps her arm, as if to say
You’re doing fine
.

Eventually the boys and Isadora take over the conversation: music they like, movies they’ve seen, teams they follow. Isadora reveals herself to be an avid baseball fan; she and the boys pass names back and forth, waiting for each other’s reactions.
They’re playing catch
, Faith thinks. She feels her life giving way beneath her like loose rock. She sits there, helpless, watching the future change.

Isadora has a friend—she seems to have friends everywhere—who works the Yankee Stadium box office, and after a minute’s discussion Connie agrees to let Isadora take her to a game that night with the boys.

“Is that all right, Faith?” Connie asks. Her face is flushed; happiness looks peculiar on her, like a costume.

“I suppose so,” Faith says. She’s outnumbered, choiceless.

“Come with us, Mom,” Ben says. “You’ll have fun.”

“I only have fun when you play.” She forces a smile, but her head is pounding. When she gets up from the table her bones shiver ominously, ready to fly apart and take up residence in a more accommodating body.

Faith has Joe on her mind—a vague and troubling sense of him, of their worst times, the times at the end of their marriage when he would rail at her, frustrated beyond his considerable limits, telling her to
face things
. “Why are you letting this happen?” he would shout, his face transformed by anger. “I can’t do it all myself!” Then, as now, she would find herself immobile, unable to act, not even in her own interest.

There was so much she hadn’t told him for so long, back when telling might have made a difference. How her baby boys had terrified her! She was stricken by love, and feared its unbuckled force, as if it might kill her; she feared it in the most literal way, her heart making dangerous fluttery pats just under her skin.

“Tell me something,” Joe used to ask her. They’d be sitting somewhere, at the beach, say, watching the boys clamor in the surf. He’d look at her, desperate: “Tell me something.”

She told him nothing, for everything she knew embarrassed her. Everything she didn’t know embarrassed her more. She had taken him once to a snowy field—for an owl she wanted to see—and found herself walking behind him, setting her feet one after another in his deep prints. She was grateful for them, and at the same time troubled by the sense that this was the way her life worked.

She lies in the dark on top of her tightly made bed in the hotel, her sister and her sons wedged somewhere into the thin-air section of Yankee Stadium with Isadora James, all yelling their heads off at a couple of baseball teams. She closes her eyes and tells herself, in Joe’s voice, to
face things
: Connie wants a different sister.

She gets up and goes to the window. From the eerie gradations of dark below comes the suggestion of movement. She saw the hope
in Connie’s face. The need. What ever happened to Rule Number One?
Dump them before they dump you
. Faith sighs. Connie was never good at following even her own rules. A sudden, tender flash stalls her thoughts: Connie, cross-legged on the floor of Chris’s bedroom before Chris was born, when the room belonged to Connie. She had six or seven airline brochures laid out like a hand of solitaire in front of her. They were exactly the same size and almost all of them had a red border. “These are my plans,” she said, picking up the brochures one by one until they came together as a small deck in her hands: neat and finite, with a precise weight and order, with red edges. Faith wonders now if Connie sees Isadora James as a plan she can pick up and hold in her hands.

She hears them in the hallway outside her door, scuffling and whispering. Chris and Ben are in high spirits, and Connie sounds surprised by her own laughter. They rap softly on the door. Faith remains at the window, hugging herself, until they go away.

The phone is ringing when Connie comes through the door.

“Don’t say a word,” Stewart says. “I’m on my way up and I want every last detail.”

“Stewart—”

“I called every hotel in New York.”

“We were at the Sheraton Centre.”

“Except that one. Damn!” He pauses for breath. “Just tell me one thing—is she or isn’t she?”

“Well—”

“No, no, don’t say it! I’m on my way. Should I bring cannoli?”

“Stewart, I’m exhausted. It’s been a long four days.” She checks her watch. “There’s no way you can get here before ten.”

“But I’ve been
dying
here.”

“I’m practically unconscious, Stewart. How about tomorrow instead?”

“Connie, don’t do this to me.”

She gives up. “All right.”

“Two hours, sweetheart.”

She hangs up, then rises heavily, wandering around her apartment, struck by what she thinks of as its hardiness. She hasn’t been gone long enough for the apartment to need her. There is food in the freezer and milk in the fridge. The furniture is exactly as she left it and there is no dust. Her coleus plant, long accustomed to sporadic watering, hasn’t even begun to droop. This is how her apartment looks in her absence. She lifts one of the plant’s leaves: it would take a long time for something to die here without her.

By the time Stewart arrives she is desperate for company and flings open the door. “Jesus, you look awful,” she says.

“Why, thank you.” He hands her a box of cannoli and two bottles of wine.

“I’m serious, Stewart. Are you sick?”

“Listen to the Mistress of Doom.” He smiles faintly. “I’m not sick, just depressed.”

She follows him into the kitchen, where he immediately finds a couple of plates and a corkscrew. It pleases her unreasonably that he knows his way around. He has not come for the story of Isadora James; he has come for solace to this apartment, these self-sufficient rooms.

“What’s going on in Boston?” she asks.

He divides the cannolis and puts three on each plate. “Everybody’s out of town.” Stewart has a lot of friends, gives a lot of parties.

“Lonesome?” she asks.

He shrugs. “James and Michael moved out to Brookline, can you believe it?”

“A regular Ozzie and Harriet.” She sits down next to him at the table. “You want some dinner? I thawed some chicken.”

“Nah.”

“Come on, Stewart, what is it?”

“Forget it. Is Isadora James your sister or what?”

“I think so.”

Stewart’s eyes fly open. “Oh my God.”

Connie laughs. “I know, I can’t believe it either. She’s only about five feet high, but other than that she looks just like us.”

“Then she must be gorgeous.” He’s trying.

“She sings blues, can you imagine?” Connie can’t stop smiling. “I’m supposed to call her tonight, late, after her gig. She wants to make sure I made it back safe, isn’t that sweet?”

“Sweet,” Stewart says. “This is amazing. I was sure she’d turn out to be some kind of wing nut with a theater fixation.” He pours some wine, staring into the glasses. He looks up, frowning. “Listen, are you working Thanksgiving?”

“I guess so,” she says, puzzled. She always works holidays. “Stewart, Thanksgiving’s almost five months away.”

He hands her a glass. “With all this business about long-lost sisters in the air I’ve been thinking about my own family.”

“And?”

“Things haven’t been the greatest since I came
bursting
out of the closet last year. I mean, I think Mom still loves me”—he offers a sheepish smile—“but I’m not so sure about Dad and David. David the house builder, David the procreator, David the real man.”

“They don’t think that.” But they probably do. People think all kinds of things.

“I offered to come home for Thanksgiving—it’s been years—and I got the brush-off from my own mother.”

“Ouch.”

“David’s going to be there, of course, with his precious wife and precious son. And Aunt Hallie, who still thinks I’m looking for the right woman. I guess Mom figures I’d rain on everyone’s parade.”

“She knows this five months ahead of time?”

“It might as well be five years. Some things don’t change.”

Connie looks at Stewart’s eyes, his frail blonde lashes. “We could have Thanksgiving together, Stewart. I haven’t spent a holiday on the ground in years.”

He brightens. “You think?”

“Sure. We can invite Isadora, too.” It’s an exhilarating thought.

“Jesus, a real holiday. Would Faith come? And her kids?”

“I doubt it.” She picks up the plates of cannoli and sets them on top of the refrigerator.

“Hey,” Stewart says.

“First you have to eat some real food.” She takes some chicken out of the fridge and places it on the counter.

“Do you have any idea how compulsive you are?”

“Yes,” she says, chopping the chicken into neat cubes.

“I think it’s neurotic. This place is so clean it’s creepy.”

“You’re a fine one to be talking neurotic, Stewart.”

“Too true.” He gets up, opens a cupboard, and slides the wok from its shelf. “So, what about Thanksgiving? You, me, and Isadora? That’s it?”

“Faith always goes to the Fullers’.”

“Even though she’s divorced?”

“Old habits, I guess.” She pours some oil in the wok. “Besides, Faith isn’t exactly sold on Isadora.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. You should have seen her, Stewart. You’d think Isadora had fangs.”

“Maybe she’s jealous.” He pauses. “I am, a little.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Maybe she thinks Isadora will take you away from her.”

Connie gives Stewart a kiss on the cheek. “Stewart, you always make me feel wanted.” He smiles. “Anyway,” she says, “Faith’s not jealous.”

“How do you know?”

“Because we’re not like that.” She throws the chicken into the wok and steps away as it hisses against the oil. Phoebe taught her to do this long before woks were popular. She remembers learning fondue, how elegant she thought she was, dipping pieces of bread in hot cheese.

“But it’s been just the two of you, Connie, and now you’re three.”

“Just the two of us doesn’t mean what you think, Stewart. It’s two chairs in the same room—sometimes I think it’s no more personal than that.” She’s amazed at how this sounds. “That’s just the way it is.” She thinks of the day she left Faith and Joe’s for good, her inexplicable sadness.

“All right, it’ll be just you, me, and Isadora. Oh, this is going to be great! We’ll get a big turkey, some pumpkins—give me a piece of paper.”

While Stewart writes out a detailed menu for a five-months-away dinner, Connie sets out two place mats, some silverware, and cloth napkins. She scoops out some food from the wok and arranges it just so. She sets the steaming plate in front of him. “Here, eat this.” She gets a plate for herself and lights a candle.

Stewart stops writing and raises his glass. “Here’s to finding it.”

She clicks her glass with mighty purpose.

Long after they have eaten, Connie closes herself in her bedroom and places a call to Brooklyn, her hand tight around the receiver, afraid to find Isadora changed overnight.

“Isn’t this just the most amazing thing,” Isadora says. “Here we are talking on the phone like any sisters anyplace in the world, and a week ago we hardly knew the first thing about each other.”

“It is amazing,” Connie says, relieved. She loves Isadora’s voice; it’s so dark and musical. “I was just telling my friend Stewart that.”

“I’ve thought of a thousand questions since you left, Connie,” Isadora says. “I’ve been looking at the pictures of Billy, and somehow after meeting Chris I can
see
him better, I can see just what he must have been like in person, so tall and dashing, and his voice, I can imagine that, too, smooth and syrupy, a music-hall voice, not a bar voice like mine, but just as strong, as sweet and golden as a voice can get.”

“I suppose so.”

“Did he sound like that?”

“It’s been such a long time, Isadora.”

“Was he a tenor or a baritone?”

“Tenor.”

“Democrat or Republican?”

“I think—actually, they weren’t much on politics.”

“Did he bring you gifts when he came back from a tour?”

“No.” She hears Isadora waiting. “They brought us with them.”

“No kidding? Wow, that must have been something, going to all those cities, meeting all those people …”

“Well—”

“Did you ever meet anybody famous?”

Connie is getting the feeling that Isadora has her thousand questions written on a piece of paper. “Well—”

“How did he dress? Did he dress up? I bet he dressed up—I love that.”

“Everybody did in those days. It was all a lot more formal.”

To Connie these questions have nothing to do with Billy. What does dressing up have to do with a man whose presence could be remote and stultifying at the same time? What do gifts have to do with the things she ached for?

“What famous people did you meet?”

“Let’s see … Helen Hayes once. And Jessica Tandy. Hume Cronyn was in—”

“Aren’t those people all dead? Did you meet anybody who’s still alive?”

“Actually, they’re not all—”

“Did he sing you to sleep? I can just imagine being sung to sleep by a
singer
. My father’s voice was about as musical as traffic.”

“Speaking of music, how did your gig go?”

“The manager stiffed me for half the pay.”

“Isadora, that’s awful.” Connie draws herself up like a mother cat, ready to protect and defend. She’s glad Stewart isn’t here to see how foolish she looks.

Isadora laughs. “I’ll make him sorry someday when he’s dying to book me. So, did Faith like me or what?”

“Well—”

“I know she didn’t. I’ve been racking my brain ever since but I can’t imagine why not.”

“It’s not that she doesn’t like you, Isadora. Faith does everything slow.”

“Well, you’d know better than me.” She stops for breath. “Was Billy religious?”

And round they go, until Connie is exhausted from evading answers. Finally they run out of talk.