Still Waters (12 page)

In spite of herself, Jenna found herself warming at Adam’s words of praise. She bit her lip and mentally shored up her earlier resolution: she had to define her position, to herself as well as Adam.

She said the first thing that came to mind. “How’s your Latin?”

Adam laughed. “What?”

“When I was younger, I used to sometimes get confused between the words ‘fidelity’ and ‘integrity.’ But then Lucien explained to me that ‘fidelity’ comes from Latin word
fidelitas
, which means faithful. And ‘integrity’ comes from the Latin word
integritas
, which means whole. That’s when I finally understood that in order to have integrity, one must maintain wholeness, the fullness of self. Do you know what I mean?”

“Not entirely,” Adam confessed.

A flush of frustration shot through her. She had never been any good at explaining herself. “I mean that life has many parts to it, and integrity is all about seeing how those parts of life fit together, and then maintaining it as a whole.” She heard the words come out of her mouth, and she knew she was making a garbled mess out of her metaphor. “Does that make any sense?”

“You’re saying that for you to keep your integrity, you need to maintain the life that you’ve made for yourself, and not let anything break it apart.” Adam’s voice was neutral.

“Exactly,” Jenna said gratefully. Adam always seemed to know what she meant to say. “Sometimes I feel like my life is a crystal ball: strong and solid, but full of hairline cracks. I have to be strong and hold it just right in both my hands, or the cracks will widen and the whole thing will fall apart.”

“And with you holding your world together so carefully, you’re not sure how I can fit in.”

“Well, it sounds pretty cold and awful when you say it like that, but you’re right as usual. I don’t know how you can fit in — or
if
you can at all, for that matter.”

He digested that with characteristic silence. “I understand.”

“Do you?” This time it was Jenna who stopped. They faced each other in the murky light. “I wish you could explain it to me, then. Because I seem to be in a complete mess about you.”

Hope flickered in his face, and she knew that she should have kept that last statement to herself. “That’s encouraging,” was all he said.

She shook her head emphatically. “No, it’s not. At least, it wasn’t meant to be.”

Jenna looked up and down the empty street. Adam caught the meaning behind the gesture. Another metaphor. “Do we keep going forward, or do we go back?” He pointed up the street. “It’s dark up that way, and there’s no telling what we’ll find. Back that way” — he pointed the opposite direction, towards Bill and Kitty’s house — “we know the road. Me, you, Bud — we’ve been over it a million times, and it never really changes. Maybe it’s time we walked forward into the dark, to see what else might be out there.”

Jenna’s voice was hard. “After all these years of running, I would’ve thought you’d know what’s out there.” Memories glinted in the darkness: The silver badge of the kind officer who had knocked on her door one morning and told her that her husband had died. An old photo, showing the man she had loved embracing another woman and a child. A hole dug in the ground for Bud’s coffin, like the hole in her heart, filling up with pain. “It’s just more road, Adam. It’s just more road. I’m
sick
of the unknown. All I want now is to raise my son in peace.”

Tears threatened behind her eyes, and she summoned her anger to push them away. “You can go on exploring your dark paths if you want to. But I’m going this way.” She turned and started back towards Bill and Kitty’s house. Her words floated over her shoulder in the darkness. “I’m going back to my family. I’m going home.”

* * *

Adam watched her walk away. Her slender figure cut through the night like a sword, until she was swallowed up by shadows. Eventually he started after her, his footsteps slow and resigned. He had ruined the moment. Again.

He hadn’t set out to make this a “moment.” When he’d invited Jenna to walk with him, what he’d really wanted to tell her was that he understood why she’d let everyone think that Christopher was Bud’s son. She’d had no other option available to her. Even if Adam had somehow achieved the impossible and been able to return to Virginia right after Bud’s funeral, would either of them have been able to admit to Bill and Kitty that Christopher was Adam’s child? It was doubtful. Very doubtful.

“I’m going back to my family,” Jenna had said, right before beating a hasty retreat down the street. And although she might not have been conscious of it, to Adam the underlying meaning was clear. She had a family that did not include him. The pain of that knowledge cut him deep, and although he groped for comfort, he could find none.

The next morning, he was up early. It was Sunday, which meant Bill and Kitty would be urging him to accompany them to church. He knew he wasn’t up for that, but he decided to make himself useful by starting breakfast.

The smell of bacon and coffee soon brought the other inhabitants of the house down to the kitchen. Christopher was a delight in his cotton pajamas, hair sticking up in all directions. The little boy’s presence cast a cheerful, normalizing glow over their morning meal.

Kitty allowed Adam to beg off from church with a minimum of fussing, especially when he promised to return for a longer visit in the next couple of weeks. “And see if you can bring that young lady to visit sometime soon,” she added. “I want to get a good look at her.”

Inwardly he winced, but he gave her his best smile and said he’d see what he could do. Kitty, like Jenna, was trying to hold her precious world together with both hands, and the piece labeled “Adam” had been slipping out of place for years.

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

W
HEN
F
RANK ARRIVED AT THE
A
NACOSTIA
Naval Station early on Monday morning, the three phones on his desk were all ringing at once. He set his briefcase carefully on the floor and seated himself in his chair, prepared to start his day.

The phone at the far left usually carried the most important calls, so he answered that one first. That caller turned out to be a general, who spit out a question, waited in tense silence as Frank answered, then hung up with the barest acknowledgement. The next phone call was from an aide to a different general, and the third phone call came from a colonel. Frank answered all their questions as accurately as he could. When he finally hung up the third phone, silence reigned in the small office.

On Monday mornings, Frank liked to be at work by six. And since his secretary didn’t get in until eight, it wasn’t unusual for him to walk into a storm of ringing telephones. It could be unsettling, to say the least. Especially since these phone calls always seemed to carry the insinuation that disaster was around every corner.

Of course, the world was a frightening place just then, so maybe the insinuation wasn’t far from the truth. The constant Soviet threat loomed in the hearts and minds of the people, especially those charged with the defense of this great country. After the hellish nightmare of World War II, Frank thought that American citizens deserved a little peace and quiet. But such was apparently not the natural way of Man.

Frank swiveled his chair so he could gaze out the windows. From his desk, he could see the Potomac River, all the way across to the George Washington Parkway. He drummed his fingers on the desk. His co-workers all thought that he’d been lucky as hell to get this particular office, but luck had nothing to do with it. The person who assigned offices was a friend of his, and Frank hadn’t been ashamed to use a little bit of leverage to get what he’d wanted.

“Give me a place to put my lever, and I shall move the world.” Archimedes hadn’t known how right he’d been when he’d said those words. Frank had learned about leverage from an early age. It had, in fact, been what enabled him to marry his late wife Evelyn.

They’d met in college. She was a strikingly handsome and brilliant woman, and although she had a reputation for being moody, her cup had overflowed with beaus. Frank had taken one look and known that they belonged together.

It didn’t hurt, of course, that her father was Dr. Arthur Kidd, a psychoanalyst of some renown who occasionally taught at the university. Frank had cultivated Dr. Kidd’s acquaintance, then had gone after Evelyn. Having her father’s approval had given him the edge over her other would-be suitors. It was an old tactic, but that didn’t make it any less effective. Leverage.

Not long after he and Evelyn had married, the country went to war, and life as they knew it changed forever. Frank had been secretly relieved when an old injury had kept him from enlisting in the service. He was no coward, but he didn’t relish the idea of dying on a battlefield. He’d felt that his destiny lay elsewhere, and it turned out that he was right, as usual. In 1942, government recruiters had swept through every university in the country, looking for brainpower to help with a top-secret project. Although no one had said the words out loud, Frank had instinctively realized that the project must’ve involved nuclear power. He had leapt at the chance to be on the cutting edge of this new science.

So before they knew it, Frank and Evelyn had found themselves relocated to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Previously a sleepy little hamlet consisting mostly of farms, Oak Ridge had been co-opted by the government and turned into a harried community of roughly 75,000 souls. And although the rest of the populace had been unaware of it, on November 4, 1943, the very first nuclear reactor went active, right in their little town.

Evelyn had committed suicide the following week. The note she left behind had revealed little except a quote from Shakespeare: “I shall the effect of this good lesson keep, as watchman to my heart.” It was a line uttered by the tragic Ophelia in
Hamlet
. Her body had washed up on shore a few days later. She had drowned, as Ophelia had drowned.

Frank had not known that he was capable of such anguish. He had thrown himself into his work, grateful for the long hours. After the war, he’d been offered this job in DC. It was a good position, well-paid and highly respected. He’d taken the post and reconciled himself to the fact that he would be a bachelor for the rest of his days. But when he met Jenna, he realized that he had been wrong. At least about that.

He heard the outer door to his office open and close again. His secretary must have arrived, which meant that it was already eight o’clock. Where had the morning gone?

The intercom on his desk buzzed, and Darla’s voice came fuzzily into the room. “Good morning, Dr. Malloy. Would you like your coffee now?”

Frank reached out and depressed the lever. “Yes, thank you.” He let go, then immediately pressed it again. “How’s your mother doing, Darla?”

“Oh, she’s much better, sir. Thank you so much for your help.”

“Of course, of course.” It embarrassed Frank to be thanked, although it gratified him to know he had done something worthy of thanking. He could picture Darla chattering about him to the other secretaries: “Imagine a big, important doctor like that taking an interest in an old colored woman like my mother! Why, he sent his own physician over to check on her last week! Men like that don’t come around too often….”

No,
they don’t. And more’s the pity.

His father-in-law had been just such a man, and it was probably his influence that had caused Frank to take such an interest. As Dr. Kidd once said, “It’s the responsibility of the intellectually-advantaged to take care of those who are, through no fault of their own, inferior.”

Frank smiled to himself as he thought of how Jenna would bristle at the word “inferior.” In her eyes, all people were equals, an idealistic notion that had been planted by her father and nourished by years of travel amongst all sorts of common folk.

But human beings were not all equal, and that was the truth. From an early age, Frank had realized that he was smarter than most people. He wasn’t particularly proud of this fact, any more than he was proud of his eye color or shoe size. He simply saw it as an elementary truth, something that had neither to be insisted upon nor questioned.

Darla bustled in with his coffee, her ebony face calm and cheerful. She pulled out her steno pad, and they went over the schedule for the day. As she was about to bustle out again, she cast an appraising eye over him and ventured to ask, “Are you all right, Doctor? You look a bit peaked this morning, if you don’t mind my saying.”

He smiled wanly. Thinking about Evelyn always sapped his strength. “I’m fine, Darla. Probably just working too hard.”

She nodded. “I have no doubt about that. Can I do anything for you?”

“No, but thank you.” He watched as she quietly departed the room. Darla was a treasure, and Frank knew it. He wouldn’t trade her for all the world.

When he was alone again, he tried to get some work done, shuffling papers, filling out forms, doing random calculations. But his thoughts kept drifting, and eventually he gave up trying to work. He drained his coffee cup and crossed the room to stand at the windows. Outside, the sun shone. The river, a soothing ribbon of gray, glimmered in the mid-morning light. He put a hand against the cool pane of glass, and he sighed.