Family Secrets Read online

  “You’ll come up with something,” Lisa assured her. “You always do.”

  Diane dropped her pencil and walked over to look out her window. “I hope so. I’ve certainly got my energy back. But my mind keeps running in circles.”

  “You need a vacation.”

  “I’ll be going to the Vineyard for two weeks in August.”

  “With your family.”

  Diane turned to stare at Lisa. “You know, you’re right. With my family. No wonder my ideas are juvenile—I’m always with my children!”

  “Perhaps you should go somewhere by yourself. Someplace you’ve never been before. Someplace wild!”

  “I went to the international jewelry convention last year.”

  “That’s hardly wild. That’s one night in New York. You go there all the time.”

  “Well, where should I go?”

  “God, anywhere!”

  Diane rubbed her neck. “I don’t know, Lisa. It’s so hard to leave the children.”

  “Well, if you don’t go now, when will you?”

  “You really think I need a trip, don’t you?” Diane asked.

  Lisa smiled. “I really do.”

  “Well, I’ll think about it. I know you’re right. A change would do me good.” Pulling open the window, she leaned on the sill and let the cool spring air sweep in, making her shiver. “I’m going to somewhere exciting!”

  And she had, for a while.

  She’d paid for it dearly.

  Was she still paying for it now?

  Chapter 5

  Jean

  Jean decided she could quite easily become addicted to the life of a traveler. It was not what she saw outside the walls of her hotel room that pleased her as much as how she felt inside those walls.

  She felt so free. She was free. It was not her responsibility to see that the sheets were changed, the bed made, the small sink scrubbed, the carpet swept, the trash emptied, the windows washed, the insurance on this building paid on time, the roof repaired, the gutters cleaned out, the walls freshly painted.

  This was also different from her life in the condominium. There, too, someone else took care of the basic building necessities. The difference was that residence in a condominium implied permanence of a very limited nature: a giving up, a settling down, a closing in, a narrowing of life to small rooms and small routines performed within them. Life in a hotel, on the other hand, implied movement, change, fresh starts, new discoveries, infinite possibilities.

  On any morning Jean might awaken and decide to lie in bed reading a Maigret mystery or to dress quickly and spend the whole day at the Louvre. She could leave for Versailles for a day or two, keeping this room, or depart for good for Rome, because the weekly rates were so low that it wouldn’t trouble her to lose the money. She was becoming very fond of her little hotel room in Paris, however, and found herself simply curling up in various corners to watch the way the sun entered at different hours of the day. The afternoon light against the white plaster walls was as brilliant as snow. The wooden legs of the upholstered armchair near the window were scratched and gouged, but the headboard of her bed was a thick, scrolled dark walnut. Nothing in the room quite matched. The fake Oriental carpet was mostly wine-colored, the skirt around the little sink a garish pink, the cushions of the armchair a splotchy blue and green, and her duvet a deep rose; yet she wouldn’t change a thing. It was her room.

  Here in her charming, shabby hotel room she pondered the nature of belonging. In all the spacious houses she’d lived in for forty years and left this summer, she’d never had one room that suited her so well.

  This summer, when she and her children packed up the house, she’d sensed how her touches were everywhere, but no one room was only hers.

  Al had had a private room, his study. When she and her children went through Al’s study, it had taken days, because they had spent so much time exclaiming over discoveries. Her husband had had a secret life. Everyone has a secret life, but Al had a room for his. They found nothing shocking or obscene—no old Playboy magazines hidden beneath his atlas, no love letters in his files. Of course Al had known he was dying, and probably had been wise enough to discard anything repellent or offensive—if he’d had anything like that; as probably, because of the sort of man he was, he hadn’t.

  Still, he surprised his family. They knew that he had had an enduring, even obsessive, love for the United States Navy, and the walls of his study were hung with beautifully matted photographs and drawings of various battleships and submarines; the shelves of his study were stacked with giant, glossy coffee-table–type books on the history of the navy, which his wife and children had given him over the years for Christmas and birthday presents.

  What they didn’t know and were amazed to discover was that he had kept, hidden in a locked filing cabinet, a multitude of newspaper clippings and magazine articles about the navy. The label cards on the wooden doors of the file read “Insurance and Will” or “Warranties and Service Information,” but all that pedestrian household stuff was crammed together at the bottom of the filing cabinet under a section headed “House.” The rest of the chin-high cabinet held an orderly array of files, arranged chronologically, month by month, year by year, the file folders headed “June 1981,” or “December 1989.” Inside each folder was an article about the navy and at the top of each article, in Al’s clear, determined handwriting, the name and date of the publication: “The Nation, June 1986”; “U.S. News and World Report, August 1986”; “Life, September 1987.” The files seemed to have begun in 1981, the year Al retired from his law firm, although they found in a large box in the bottom of his study closet a mass of uncatalogued clippings dating from the fifties.

  “Oh, Mom! Poor Dad!” Susan had cried out. She, like all the children, knew that her father had wanted to be a career man in the navy but had relented in the face of Jean’s pleas for a more normal life. He had resigned his commission after World War II, finished law school, and joined a firm near Washington.

  “What if your father had had a passion for Antarctica or Borneo?” Jean had responded. “Would you have wanted to spend your life there? We were all much better off with his having the navy as his hobby rather than his life!”

  This summer, packing up the house, and for the fifty years beforehand, Jean had been adamant in her righteousness, but now in her rented room in Paris she gave herself the freedom to reconsider, at least to imagine how it might have been. If Al had stayed in the bavy, there would have been no spacious sheltering colonial to provide stability and refuge; instead, there would have been a series of houses of varying sizes throughout the world, wherever Al was sent. The family would not have accumulated so many possessions; they would not have had one house standing as a museum of their lives. If Al had stayed in the navy, he would have been a happier man, there was no doubt about that. And Jean would not have had to work so hard to please him, to make up to him for what he had sacrificed for her. Their marriage would have been completely different.

  Jean had not insisted that Al resign from the navy because she wanted a grand white house and a sheltered, stable life. She hadn’t insisted because she didn’t want to spend her life paying court to the wives of her husband’s superiors, as her own mother had done. She had insisted that he resign because she knew that the life of a military man could be dangerous, and she wanted him to live.

  No, she was not sorry for the life she had imposed upon Al.

  In any case, his life had not been totally within her control or even within her knowledge. In the bottom drawer of his desk, under some L. L. Bean catalogues, was a miscellaneous collection of photographs and descriptions of pipes. Al had obviously begun this collection when he learned he had lung cancer and was forced to give up smoking. It was this hidden cache that made Jean weep. The physical pleasures of the last few years of Al’s life had, because of his illness, grown more and more restricted. The image of her husband sitting alone in his study at night, secretly running his fingers o
ver the cold and printed lines of a meerschaum, imagining the sweet taste of tobacco and the tug of his lips at the heated stem, seemed infinitely sad. He had never, to her knowledge, smoked a pipe; but this, at least, was not her fault. When he gave up cigarettes, he did not try cigars or pipes or chewing gum. But the well-thumbed pipe catalogues were proof that he had spent hours dreaming of smoking just as a woman might look through fashion magazines, fantasizing about romance.

  Other secrets surfaced when Jean and her children dug deep to the bottom of Al’s desk drawer. Al had been a handsome and dignified man, distinguished even, and much admired. Anything he considered a weakness in himself he kept as well hidden as he could, and so Diane had been astonished at the number of medications he kept locked in his middle desk drawer. Salves for hemorrhoids and arthritis, thick, milky potions and chalky pills for indigestion and constipation, blood-pressure pills and antihistamines. Pain pills. Jean knew about most of these medicines and had always guessed he kept them hidden in his study because they were not in the medicine cabinet in their bathroom—too available to the eyes of a cleaning woman, a houseguest, or a curious grandchild.

  By contrast, Jean’s life in that house had been spread out on display for everyone to see. Her medicines were in her bathroom cabinet, her skin cream on the bathroom counter, her diet drinks on the kitchen shelves, her checkbook, personal correspondence, and embossed stationery in the unlocked desk in the den. Her life had always been an open book for her family to read at their own whim. When the children were little, it had been only common sense that she establish her desk in the room where they played, because then she could pay bills while still keeping a watchful eye on them. Never in the fifty years of her marriage did she receive one letter she would not have shown to her husband or most innocent child. Eventually, after they moved into the big white colonial, she had a room of her own, but it was a sewing room, and there could hardly be anything secret in the smocked dresses she made for her daughters, the Halloween costumes she created for her sons, or the embroidered flannel skirt she decorated for the Christmas tree. She never shut the door from the hallway into her sewing room. Perhaps there had been days when she had rested there, putting her feet up on an ottoman as she bent over her mending, but everyone in the family always had instant access to her and to that room. No one would ever have thought to knock before going in; yet they always knocked before entering Al’s study and waited for him to give permission: “Come in.”

  All her life she made lists organizing her time; these lists were public property, held by a magnet to the refrigerator door or left on her desk in the den. Her children had given her memo pads adorned with humorous quotes on which to write her lists. Why, then, was Jean moved to tears when she discovered in her husband’s study a list locked in the middle drawer of his desk? The list read:

  Clean out fishing tackle box, label lures, send to Susan’s boys

  Remind Art—tactfully—he still owes it to his family to get some health insurance

  Golf clubs—? Salvation Army? All those damned joke golf gifts

  Write Jean a letter

  Call Corkins for a tune-up for the Volvo

  Château Frontenac in July—visit Diane & Co. and Art & brood on the way up?

  Al had died before July, before getting the Volvo tuned or sorting out his tackle box or taking Jean on a romantic trip to Quebec or writing her a letter of good-bye. It was possible he had called or written Art about health insurance; Jean decided not to inquire; Art was a grown man now, living with a woman who had had two children by him even though they weren’t married, living in upstate Maine pretending to be a farmer, for heaven’s sake. Joy, the woman Art had lived with for the past eight years, claimed she was a spiritual healer and a good witch; and although Joy hadn’t managed yet to find an herb that would reduce her rather remarkable excesses of cellulite, it was still a good bet that she’d vow she would, with her own spells, keep Art so healthy that he’d never need health insurance.

  The golf clubs, expensive ones in a leather bag, had been in the garage. Jean had donated them to a neighborhood school fund-raiser. The abundant collection of misshapen, cartoonish, rather hideous golf figurines—the mug shaped like a golf ball, printed with the words “Golf is a beautiful walk spoiled by a small white ball,” the suede bag holding golf tees with Al’s name printed on them, the golf club cleaner in solid beechwood, the several golfing caps, the golfing videos—all these Jean quickly swept from the shelf in Al’s study and into a plastic trash bag that she carried out to the curb herself. In their foolish abundance they had seemed like an insult to her husband. That such a powerful man had come to this, to receiving from his four children and eleven grandchildren such pathetically stupid gifts! Oh, well, any man was hard to shop for, but these things showed a lack of imagination, a lack of genuine interest in him. She’d been silently angry for days at each one of her children.

  Susan and Diane, who were there at that time, had thought Jean’s dark mood resulted from embarrassment at her own stupidity: Jean knew the combination to the small safe in Al’s study but could not remember it, or rather could not remember it correctly. On a sunny summer morning, not yet too humid, she and her daughters had gathered in the study after a pleasant, hearty breakfast. Jean had knelt on the floor and worked the combination lock through the three clicks she knew as well as she knew her own name. The lock had not opened.

  “I must have done it too quickly,” she said and turned the knob again, more deliberately.

  Again it did not open. “This lock is getting to be like me, old and cranky and difficult!” She laughed.

  For quite a few minutes she continued to try it, still not losing her temper, and when Diane in frustration said, “Mom, let me!” she pleasantly moved aside and told her daughter the numbers. The lock didn’t open for Diane, either.

  “Oh, Mom, you must have the numbers jumbled in your mind!” Diane said, not hiding her impatience.

  Jean did not miss the look that passed between her daughters. Of course she was as exasperated with her memory as they were.

  “Look,” she told them, “obviously I’m remembering it incorrectly. Let’s go do something else. Let’s go sort through your father’s clothes in the bedroom closet. You know how it is—the harder you try to remember something, the more it hides. If I think of something else for a while, no doubt the right combination will pop into my mind.”

  The girls agreed, and they spent the rest of the afternoon upstairs, accomplishing so much that they decided to treat themselves to dinner out and a movie. Jean was tired. She did not like to let her daughters know how tired she got these days; she didn’t want to worry them. They were used to her as a sort of windup toy of a grandmother now, whirring about with cookies and milk and hand-knit blankets for their children, always cheery and smiling. While she couldn’t quite achieve that, now—and they wouldn’t expect it of her after the death of her husband—still she did not want them to know the extent of her exhaustion.

  So she was grateful for the cover of darkness in the movie theater. She closed her eyes and entered a state that was not quite sleep, and after a while she realized why she had gotten Al’s safe combination wrong. She had been working the combination to a similar small safe that had been in a similar spot in her own father’s study so many years, so many decades, before.

  1939

  War Stories

  Jean Marshall’s family was among the group of old, monied, aristocratic families known in Washington in the thirties as the Cliff Dwellers. But certainly they did not dwell in cliffs. Their houses were beautiful, and luxuriously comfortable. Jean’s room was a girl’s dream of a room, in polka-dotted dimity and rose-papered walls. Her family ate dinner every night in the dining room, seated at a long linen-covered table, using silver and china, though not the good china; the food they ate was cooked by the black cook and brought to the table by their father’s “man.” The Marshalls had only two servants: Agate, a calm black woman who came by bus e
very day except Sunday to cook and keep the kitchen clean, do the washing and ironing, and help Mrs. Marshall with the heavy housework—and Stafford. Stafford lived in an apartment over the garage. He was their butler, chauffeur, gardener, and handyman. Wherever Commander Marshall had been stationed, he had arranged for help in his house—paid for by his wife’s inheritance, if necessary. Jean and Bobby had grown up with Agate and Stafford and felt comfortable with having help in their house.

  In fact, Jean and Bobby were accustomed to having all sorts of people going in and out of their home. Their mother was the head of various charitable organizations, which necessitated committee meetings and teas and wreath-making parties. Both parents were serious bridge players and held bridge evenings at home at least once a week. In addition, the Marshalls had a seemingly endless stream of old friends they had met while Commander Marshall was on tour in the navy, and navy friends and civilians they had known in Malta or California or Guam came to visit for as much as a week at a time. Often these people were accompanied by their children, in which case Jean was politely pressed into babysitting or, worse, entreated to entertain some hapless adolescent.

  Bobby and Jean were also used to their father’s receiving more businesslike visitors at any and all hours of the day or night. Often these men were the same ones their parents met socially for golf or a dance, but when they showed up, without their wives, these men had a gray cast about them that spoke of business. Then Stafford, if he happened to answer the door, or Mrs. Marshall, or Jean or Bobby, would automatically interrupt Commander Marshall at whatever it was he was doing, and the two men would go into his study and shut the door.

  It was no secret from anyone in the house that Commander Marshall was involved in naval intelligence work, or that when the gray men came to be closeted with him in his study they were discussing issues of importance. In fact if Jean had been told that her father secretly ruled the world, she wouldn’t have been much surprised because her mother was forever impressing on her the significance of her father’s work, making her practically tiptoe and bow whenever he entered a room.