Secrecy

  The barrage of questions was exhausting. A five-mile jog or a complete housecleaning would be nothing compared with this total drain of energy.

  She said calmly, “I saw Roger for only a few minutes. He wants to bring some experts to convince you that you’re wrong about the wetlands. I asked him please not to do it because you have these personal problems and shouldn’t be troubled right now.”

  “Problems like what, for heaven’s sake? Not terminal cancer, or a clinical depression?”

  “No illness at all. Of course not. Just something personal.”

  “It was a big mistake to bring up any ‘personal problem’ business, Charlotte.”

  “I had to explain why I went to see you the minute I got back from Europe, didn’t I?”

  “You needn’t have told him you had been here.”

  “I don’t want to lie to Roger.”

  “Well, all right, let it go. But why object to his bringing some experts to change my mind? Let them come.”

  “But I wanted to spare you.”

  “I understand, and it was thoughtful of you, but I think you must let them come. I can listen and still not change my mind.”

  “Then you’ll look like a fool. You’ll look irrational.”

  “Huh! Cliff already thinks I am. He hardly talks to me, just stares at me and shakes his head. Actually, I know he’s furious, but being Cliff, won’t show it.”

  “Roger is furious, too, although he hasn’t shown it either.”

  “Why wouldn’t they all be furious?” Bill asked bitterly. “Oh, I’m sick with guilt, Charlotte! Sick with it! Not over that … other business, but about what’s happening now, the destruction, the senseless destruction. If only those library people, the town council, all those people hadn’t thrown a monkey wrench into everything with their idea!”

  “I know.”

  Charlotte’s eyes moved around her small apartment. With plants, books, and pillows, at small expense she had filled it with color and comfort. Now suddenly it had become meager and cold. Beyond the open door the bed, too large for the space, was forlorn. And she thought that it would have helped her so much if Roger had stayed here tonight. They had been apart for ten days.

  “I’ve decided,” Bill said. “There’s only one decent, logical thing to do, only one way out of the wilderness: Tell the truth.”

  “What truth?”

  “The truth. To the appropriate parties.”

  “You can’t mean what I think you mean.”

  “I can mean it.”

  “That’s masochism, Dad, or martyrdom.”

  “It’s neither. It’s practical, a commonsense solution for the benefit of the majority. I can’t go on this way, Charlotte, can’t sit back and watch things disintegrate. So I want you all to go ahead as planned. I’ll say Elena had nothing to do with it, or she wasn’t even there. I’ll manage something. And I’ll take my medicine, whatever it may be.”

  Whatever? Oh, maybe they wouldn’t find the shoes or the initialed money clip. And maybe Eddie at the gas station would not remember seeing Bill at dawn. But they would and he would.… And would her father be able to survive?

  She thought of the headlines: PROMINENT CITIZEN INDICTED IN DEATH OF YOUTH. And so on, and so on. Toward what? Toward murder, or certainly toward manslaughter at the very least. Then prison and total despair.

  She said quickly, “Dad, this is no subject for the telephone. We’ve said enough for tonight. But promise me you won’t do anything until we talk again.”

  “I’ll have to use my own judgment about that, Charlotte.”

  “Please promise me.” And she brought out her most potent weapon, a plea on her own behalf. “You’re making me sick, Dad. I don’t feel well and I need to sleep tonight.”

  “All right, I promise. I want you to sleep. I’ll hang up.”

  Trapped between two huge rocks, she trembled. Wherever she turned, she would have to batter her head against the rock that was Roger and the one that was her father. And wishing that Elena had never drawn her into this secret, she at once regretted the selfish wish. At once she felt an overwhelming need to talk to Elena about it. But, no, you never could be sure about crosswires, thousands of conversations, skimming through the air. So instead, in the midnight chill, she wrote out the story of her predicament to be sent by express mail to Italy.

  With the disconnected sentences and hasty running script that was so appropriate to her, Elena replied: Don’t let him do it! I am mailing a letter to him today. That monster is not worth his suffering. It would be damnation, and what sense would it make? The whole thing would be too complicated for a stupid jury to know whether he meant to or didn’t. And what difference is it now, anyway? As for your man, let me tell you, they’re none of them worth a father. You’ve known him one year, for God’s sake! How can you put Bill’s fate into his hands?

  On the telephone, but cautiously, Charlotte tried to convince Elena. “You don’t understand. You don’t know Roger. I can vouch for him, I swear it.”

  “You already have sworn it, and I’ve already told you that the secret does not belong to you. Good God, I should never have revealed it. My mistake!”

  “If you hadn’t, I would still be very angry at Dad, so it’s better that you did reveal it.”

  “You gave me your word, you know.”

  “I know. And I’ll keep it, Mama.”

  Charlotte sighed. And the great intake and expulsion stirred her with a wretched, deep foreboding.

  If Roger was not completely frantic after so many days of frustration, she realized, it was only because he was keeping extraordinary control of himself.

  “I’ve been on the telephone all day,” he said. “It’s been ringing off the hook. Everybody wants to know what’s happening, and I have no answer to give except that we’ve run up against a barrier in the road, a stop sign. And then they all want to know why I can’t remove it.”

  His pause contained a question. The only answer that came to Charlotte was a weak apology.

  “You can’t know how I feel because it’s I who got you into this.”

  “You didn’t get me into anything, and I won’t have you feeling guilty. I did it myself. It was, and still is, a great idea.”

  They were having a late supper in her kitchen. They had not been there together for more than a week, since Roger had been keeping late hours, trying to fend off all the various parties concerned with the project.

  “Uncle Heywood calls twice a day. Kingsley is on the calendar for early fall ground-breaking, ahead of the snow. We’re wrecking his schedule.”

  While she was listening with total comprehension, she was also wondering whether he would stay all night. It was not desire that she felt. How true it was that anxiety kills desire! First you must have relief from anxiety. First you must have consolation.

  “I hate to see what this is doing to you,” Roger said.

  “Why? Do I look so awful?”

  “You look worried and tired, that’s all. Go on to bed.”

  “I wish you would stay. If you want to,” she added quickly.

  He glanced at her and, replying as quickly, said, “Of course I want to. Charlotte, this is a crazy time, abnormal, critical—it has nothing to do with us, with you and me. But it’s bound to affect our moods and our energy.” He stood up and put his arms around her. “Come on, Charlotte. Leave the blasted dishes and let’s get some sleep.”

  They lay close in a silent, perfect intimacy, and she was wishing for a magic carpet on which they might fly away and leave everything behind forever, when he spoke.

  “I can’t make any sense out of your father. When those men—one of them is an expert on wetlands, he’s worked all up and down the East Coast—when we were up there, they got nowhere with him. I hate to say this, but he made a fool of himself. His brother even told him so. With all the background experience he’s had, his ignorance astounded them. Maybe you should go back home and plead with him. Let him really see what harm he’s
doing. Maybe he’ll finally listen to you.”

  “I’ve already tried,” she said.

  “Well, try again. It’s our only hope.”

  She had no choice but to concede. Still, she made a slight demurral. “I’m in the middle of a job at the Lauriers’. They may not like my asking for time off.”

  “What’s more important right now, your job or all these debts that are piling up? My credit record, my good name! Talk of respect and reputation! What’s going to be left of mine? And speaking of debts, I imagine that the Lauriers, too, would like to be paid for all their work on this damn job.”

  “I’ll go next week and see what I can do,” Charlotte said.

  The peace was shattered.

  “There’s even talk in the town council of a lawsuit,” Bill reported. “Nonperformance. Something the lawyers dreamed up. It seems that the town, because of the deal with us, missed out on another desirable property for the library. I don’t know how far they would get with a suit, but in any case it means trouble and money that we haven’t got.”

  In the white light of the kitchen’s fluorescent bulbs, he looked haggard. And Charlotte was remembering the walkway, bordered with flowers, up to the door of the Dawes mill. It was queer, what trivial things you remembered. She thought that, sad as it must be never to have achieved anything, it was sadder still to have achieved everything and to lose it all.

  “I’ve a letter here from your mother. Do you want to read it?”

  “No, just tell me what it says.”

  Her head was full. It was as though the single subject that had for weeks now been whirling there as in a centrifuge was now hardening into a solid mass, prepared to burst.

  “She reminds me that if I do reveal myself, there’ll be an army of investigative reporters on the case. Somebody will remember the name, and somebody will talk, maybe the nurse at that doctor’s office where you went first. Or people at the hospital in Boston. Yours wasn’t a case they see every day. Your age, the family name, et cetera. It was barely eleven years ago, after all, not very long as memories go, especially memories for scandal. Elena’s right, you know. She’s very clever and always was.…”

  So it never ends, Charlotte thought. She took a drink of water, paused for a long minute, and spoke. “I could bear it. If that were all that’s at stake, I could. I committed no crime. I was only a victim, and at my age I should have learned enough to know there’s no shame in being a victim. I do worry about you, though, and about Mama. You can’t be absolutely sure you can keep her out of it.”

  “True enough. But you are still the chief reason why I haven’t done what I want to do.”

  “I could bear it, I said. What I could not bear is your going to prison. What do you think that would do to me?”

  “You would bear that, too, Charlotte.”

  “No, not that.”

  She was silent. Then after a minute she asked, “By the way, what is the latest news from Southeast Asia? Are they still hot on his trail?”

  “Nothing lately, unless Cliff knows something. I don’t know. We haven’t talked in over a week.” Bill reached for one of the cigarettes that Emmabrown kept near the table, remembered that he had given up smoking more than three years before, and put it back. “I blame myself. I should have confessed the whole business to Cliff long ago.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I’ve told you. It was because of you, and your mother also. Beside that, the thought of telling Claudia how her son had died was appalling to me. And then after she herself died, it seemed no less appalling to admit to Cliff that I had allowed his wife to keep on hoping, while all the time I knew her hope was useless. I wanted to protect you all, and now look at the mess.”

  Lonely night-sounds jarred the recurring silence; a dog gave a short warning bark nearby, the furnace rumbled, and wood creaked as the house settled.

  “Roger,” Bill said abruptly, “I suppose he’s still unforgiving? But that’s a stupid question. Of course he is. Why wouldn’t he be?”

  There was such a cold, hollow place between her heart and her stomach!

  “I don’t know what he’s going to do,” she said.

  “He’s a very fine young man.… I hope this fiasco won’t cause any upset between you.”

  He was asking a question and waiting for her to assure him that no sorrow would touch her.

  “We’ll be all right,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

  Of course they would be. Admittedly, the atmosphere during these long weeks had not been bright with the gaiety and celebration of lovers on the way to their wedding. But that was only a sorry, temporary hitch. They would survive it and get back to normal. Of course they would.

  “The costs must be pretty large.”

  Did he want her to say they wouldn’t be?

  “I wish I had the money to settle everything myself, but as it is …” Bill’s voice faded.

  As it is, she thought, he is one step away from the end of the long downhill slide that began when the Dawes mill closed. This house would surely go; it had been mortgaged to the hilt. More importantly, Cliff’s house, the old family home of the generations, would go, too, and that would really hurt. It would hurt them all deeply, even those who did not live in it.

  Still, millions of people had lost everything they owned and gone on living. It wasn’t the end of the world. Yet what good did it do a terminal cancer patient to tell him how many other patients beside him were suffering too?

  They had reached the end of the discussion. Another word would only be repetition. And so once again, Charlotte went upstairs to sleep in her old room, now grown so strange. Early in the morning she would return to Boston.

  “So nothing was accomplished,” Roger said.

  She had been back for three days, and on each of them their conversations had been held in mounting tension, ending with the same hopeless refrain.

  “No, nothing,” she repeated.

  They were sitting in a coffee bar. It was Saturday afternoon on a graying fall day of warm, intermittent drizzle, a day, Charlotte thought as she gazed out through the steamy window, completely suited to their dismal mood.

  He was staring with a most puzzled expression into her face. “What is it? What are you hiding?” he demanded.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I have told you a thousand times, nothing that you don’t already know. You’ve talked to my father yourself.”

  “Yes, and all I’ve heard is a cock-and-bull story about the destruction of ecological balance, a story that he doesn’t believe and you don’t either.”

  “But could he perhaps be right? I have lately been thinking that. He really might be, after all.”

  Roger shook his head. “No. There’s something missing here. And I—we—are victims of some deception. You can’t convince me otherwise.”

  “I know you are desperate,” she said. “Don’t you see that I’m desperate for you? Is this what I want for you whom I love? I want to help you. At least I can pay the Lauriers’ fee. They’ve already said I can pay it off gradually.”

  “What, live on cornflakes and canned soup while you’re doing it? Don’t be absurd.”

  The wedding, she thought. Did he mean that they would both be “living on cornflakes” together, or did he mean something else? And she felt her eyes begin to fill with tears, bitter ones made out of sorrow, humiliation, and anger.

  The anger was surely not directed at her father. Nor could it be directed at Roger, who, from his point of view and from anyone’s who did not know the situation, was justified in his anger. It was only fate, life, or whatever you wanted to call it, that enraged her—that and the fact that she was unable to do anything at all about it.

  “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 th
is 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?”