Family Secrets Read online

  Diane sat in silence for a few moments then, reflecting. Peter Frost didn’t push her but waited calmly, watching the fire.

  “After my father’s death this year, when my mother sold their home in McLean, Susan and I went through the house with her. Arthur helped, too, for a day, but he had to get back up to Vermont, and of course Bert came for the funeral but left the same day. The boys”—Diane caught herself, smiled, gestured vaguely with one hand—“my brothers—well, they’re not boys anymore, of course. The men didn’t want anything from the house. Bert had already taken Daddy’s war scrapbook, his medals, and so on. Art wouldn’t have touched those things—he thinks that stuff is evil.”

  “But you and Susan took some things?”

  “We did. Lots of stuff, actually, everything we could. Not that any of it is terribly valuable, although some of the paintings and jewelry and silver are. But most of what we took has only sentimental value. You know”—Diane surprised herself once again by the way tears rushed into her eyes—“dividing up one’s childhood house is difficult. I had left that house as soon as I could and returned only for brief visits. Well, and then once we had the children, we started to take them to visit their grandparents and then it was different. The house was absolutely gracious. Peaceful. The atmosphere I’d hated as a daughter I loved as a mother.”

  She caught herself. Peter Frost was aptly named, she thought, with that luminescent white skin and cool blue eyes, his detached elegance. He made her shiver. “I’m babbling, aren’t I? I know I am.” She got up, looked at her watch. “My husband’s very late, and I haven’t eaten dinner yet, and I’ve had a tiring day. Have you spoken with my sister, Susan?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You should. She has some furniture she had shipped to her house, as do I, and boxes of stuff. As do I. And when Mother moved into the condominium, she didn’t unpack. She was so eager to travel—she just went! What I’m trying to say is that everything in her new home is still in boxes. If what you’re looking for is that important—and I assume it is or you wouldn’t be here—I’d be willing to sort through the boxes I had shipped back. They’re all up in the attic. You would be welcome to help me. Probably it would be excruciatingly boring for you, other people’s memorabilia.”

  “That’s exactly what I’d like to do. Perhaps you’d also be willing to go down to Silver Spring with me to search through your mother’s boxes.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that! Without her knowledge or consent?”

  “Of course we’ll try to reach her to get her permission. We’re doing what we can to reach her. But timing is rather crucial now. This needs to be done as quickly as possible.”

  Diane glared at Peter Frost. She sank back into her chair and fell forward, burying her face in her hands, elbows on knees. Her hair hung down around her face like a weight.

  His voice was soft. “I’m not trying to be difficult. I’m not being purposefully secretive. I’m telling you everything I’m allowed to tell you. And I’m asking you for your help.”

  “All right,” Diane said, lifting her head, taking a deep breath. “Look. Let me think about all this, and call Susan, and talk with my husband. You know I own a business. I’ll need to rearrange my schedule. I want to be with you when you go through my mother’s things.”

  “Perhaps you could also call your brothers, and any friends of your mother’s, to see if they’ve heard from her. A postcard, a letter—if we could find her, we could ask her directly about what we’re looking for and save everyone time and trouble.”

  “Yes, all right.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow morning.”

  “Fine.”

  She walked him to the door. He put on his raincoat, then turned to shake her hand.

  “Thank you,” he said. His hand was warm.

  Diane watched him hurry through the rain to his dark car, then went to the kitchen to take the lamb out of the oven. It was nine o’clock. She preferred lamb rare and juicy, not well done. Jim would eat it; he was not particular about his food—one of the blessings of their married life. She wasn’t particular about food, either, except that when she was tired, which was often, she had no appetite for anything healthy but craved sweets.

  Now she cut an enormous slice of the tart apple pie Kaitlin had baked that day, added a fat scoop of vanilla ice cream, and microwaved a cup of the rich, dark coffee her housekeeper always brewed fresh just before she left at five o’clock. Perhaps the coffee would speed up her sluggish mind.

  Sinking into one of the chairs ringing the big oak kitchen table, she tried to concentrate on the food. But the coffee tasted bitter, the pie and ice cream sickeningly rich. The tears came.

  Hormones. Perhaps. Certainly she had been ambushed by helpless tears more this year than ever before in her life. She had never been like her daughter Julia who easily dissolved into wholehearted sobbing over a broken heart, bad grades on a test, or even a TV commercial for dog food.

  But this year … this year was taking its toll. First had come the shock of her father’s death. She had loved her father but had disapproved of him. He was a male chauvinist of the most dangerous sort: charming, educated, suave, kind. Never demanding or arrogant, still he had ruled his home with an old-fashioned, gentle despotism. In her youth, Diane had rebelled against him, but she also deeply loved him. During the past decades, as she became a mother and he became ill, she had made her peace with him.

  And she had grieved for him. Greatly. When it was discovered, over six years earlier, that her father had cancer, she had grieved then, alone and with her family. She hated his being ill, dying. It hurt. When it finally came, his death brought more release, relief really, than pain.

  And when, last month, she and Susan had helped her mother sort, pack, and discard the collected objects of so many years, so many lives, Diane had grieved again. It was agonizing to take part in the breaking up of the household that had existed, in that gracious house, for almost fifty years. She almost believed she could as easily have watched the house burn to the ground.

  Later she realized, all by herself, that she now also had to face the fact that it was possible that her mother could die, too. Would die; her mother was in her seventies. Jean White was in good health but not eternal.

  All her life Diane had both scorned and adored her mother. She had adored her for her gentle goodness, her laughter, her graceful diplomacy, but she had hated her utterly for her submission to her father. Even before Diane knew enough to form such emotions into words, certainly before women’s liberation came along, Diane had resented the way in which her mother put herself into her father’s service. She saw her mother as a tree of flame, gloriously bright, leaping with ideas, desires, laughter, energy. Her father’s domination caused her mother to channel herself into a lesser object, a sturdy column of steady light burning throughout their household, but an object that was less, far less, than it could have been. That was why she was angry with her mother, because her mother had chosen to live a limited life. How could anyone with so much settle to live as so little?

  Diane took her mother’s subordination personally. She had been a haughty little girl with disdain in her eyes. Worse, when she was in her twenties, triumphant with her own early spectacular success as a jewelry designer and businesswoman, she’d written her mother a series of eloquent letters begging her to divorce her father and start her own life—her real life, before it was too late.

  Those letters had wounded her mother deeply, and enraged her.

  “You have no right to judge my life so harshly,” Jean Marshall White had written to Diane. “You know so little about my life, only what you saw through your prejudiced, insolent eyes.”

  Diane remembered clearly out of that whole long letter those particular sentences, because, oddly, they had hurt her. She thought her mother was being cruel to write them. For years after that, she and her mother had hardly spoken, communicating only obliquely through Diane’s brothers and sister. Diane had not gone back
to McLean for Christmas or Thanksgiving holidays; she did not set eyes on her parents for almost seven years. Not until the birth of her own son was there a truce.

  Diane looked like her mother. The colors that looked best on Jean Marshall White looked best on Diane White. They shared the same sense of humor. And because Diane was the first child, Jean had told her daughter tales of her own youth that she didn’t have time to share with the other children. The boys never sat still long enough to hear their mother’s stories, and by the time Susan came along, Jean had no time for strolls down memory lane.

  Diane assumed all her life that she possessed a knowledge of her mother that no one else did. She assumed that she knew the truth about her, the dark and brilliant, complex, woven fabric of truth. The truth of her mother’s life hung like a tapestry as a backdrop to her own life.

  Peter Frost’s visit had come like a slash of scissors, slicing a gap in that tapestry, exposing Diane to the presence of a vast, dark unknown. She shivered.

  Blowing rain battered the kitchen windows. Leaving her plate on the table, Diane went back into the living room where the fire needed more logs. She stoked it, then put on the most monotonous Bach she could find and settled onto the sofa. Folding her hands saintlike across her breasts, she closed her eyes and forced herself to concentrate on her breathing, counting as she exhaled, inhaled. The warmth of the fire was soothing, its snapping and cracking companionable.

  She was relaxed, almost asleep, when Jim came in the front door, bringing with him a gust of cold, wet air.

  “Don’t get up,” he said, setting his briefcase on the coffee table. “I’m sorry I’m so late. Actually, one of the lab technicians—I just couldn’t leave. Stay there. I’ll fix myself a plate and bring it in here by the fire.”

  “There’s roast lamb,” Diane murmured. “But it’s cold now.”

  “That’s all right. It’s still protein.”

  He went away. She lay still on the sofa, comforted by the sounds of her husband moving through the kitchen in much the same way she’d been comforted in childhood by the sounds of her mother’s steady progress through the house.

  Jim returned to the living room and sat in the chair that had been occupied by Peter Frost earlier that evening. Placing his plate on the coffee table, he leaned forward and ate, chewing absentmindedly. Diane knew he meant this as a companionable gesture, just as she knew his thoughts were still in the lab.

  She studied him with a critical eye. He was still slender, still handsome, and his hair was graying at the temples, giving him a distinguished look. He went through life peering out at the world through his flattering horn-rims, moving with a deliberate, mild, distracted air, as if he were listening to music of planets that normal people couldn’t hear. Tonight that air of preoccupation made him seem aloof, especially compared with Peter Frost’s intensity, and Jim’s soft brown eyes and thick brown hair seemed a washed-out version of the FBI agent’s blue-black hair and vivid eyes.

  She’d grown used to this half presence of Jim’s. She understood the demons that drove him: he was older, he was mortal, and still he had not found the cure for the disease that very well might have been passed on from his mother’s blood, through his, to his children’s. He’d always been intent on his work, but after he’d turned forty, he’d become obsessed. He was humorless and distracted. Even his one sport—jogging five miles a day four times a week—was not for pleasure but for the sake of keeping his heart in condition so that he could live longer and see his work come to fruition.

  He had loved her so passionately twenty years ago! He’d been the pursuer, carrying her into marriage with the force of his ardor. They’d been sexually explosive, and that fire had flared up again with pleasing consistency during the course of their marriage. Lately, though, for over a year, that part of their life together had been … ashes.

  Still he cared for her. And she for him.

  Quickly, she told him about Peter Frost’s visit. He was as amused and mystified as she, but not worried.

  “This will probably clear itself up fairly easily,” he said. “I can’t imagine your mother involved in anything complicated. Call Susan and your brothers tomorrow.”

  “Oh, God, that reminds me. I haven’t even listened to the answering machine.”

  “Don’t. If you listen to it, something’s bound to get your adrenaline going and you’ll be up all night. Let’s go to bed.”

  They scattered the embers and checked the fire screen, turned off the lights, then went their separate ways, Jim to the den, Diane to their bedroom. His way of unwinding was to watch the eleven-o’clock news. Diane hadn’t been able to look at news at night for years; it was always too dreadful, too upsetting—some poor person murdered, some country at war, some town shattered by a natural disaster. In order to live her life she had carefully, with enormous effort, erected a structure of belief in a universal good toward which humankind was working, and every night the news at eleven threatened to destroy that structure in a second. The placid, even pleasant expressions with which newscasters reported, for example, the abduction, rape, and murder of a young girl sent Diane into a weeping rage.

  So for the thirty minutes during which Jim watched the news, she lay in bed reading novels.

  Tonight, in spite of Peter Frost’s peculiar visit, Diane was drowsy by the time Jim crawled into bed next to her. His familiar heat, warmth, scent were reassuring. Often she was bitter about the way they shared the bed these days—like brother and sister, like a man and his pet—but tonight the bland familiarity was comforting. She let herself drift toward sleep.

  The phone rang.

  Diane had refused to have a phone in the bedroom. But it was almost midnight. This couldn’t be a casual call. She could feel Jim’s breath catch in surprise.

  “Probably a wrong number,” he said. “I’ll get it.” He stalked through the dark out of the room, across the hall, into Diane’s study, and picked up the phone. Diane heard him say, “Never mind the answering machine. I’m on.”

  Then she heard him say, “My God.”

  “My God,” he said again. Then, “All right. We’ll call Sam’s parents. Thank you. Yes. We’ll call you if—yes, of course. Thank you.”

  Diane pushed herself up on her elbows. Jim was a dark shape in the doorway when he said, “That was the school. They’ve called several times, but we didn’t listen to our messages. Julia’s run away with Sam. They’re going to get married.”

  Chapter 2

  Jean

  Jean was traveling through Europe without reservations.

  At first she thought it would be wisest to begin in England, where at least she spoke the language, but very quickly she changed her mind: she wasn’t going to let caution rule this trip. For the same reason, she chose to go alone. She wanted to go or stay where she wished, when she wished, at her own whim and no one else’s.

  For the first time in fifty years, she was living only by her own desires.

  Because as a college student she’d planned to live in France when she graduated, France was where she now began. Of course France had changed since 1940, and she had changed, God knew. Still, it was the beginning of making a dream come true.

  In early September she flew to Orly, rode a cab into Paris, and took a room at the Georges Cinq. But after only two days, she left. The big hotel was too anonymous, with its clerks and waiters who pegged her so perfectly, so insultingly in advance that as she approached the desk or table, before she opened her mouth, they addressed her in English, making it impossible for her to attempt her rusty French.

  She thought the Champs-Elysées was beautiful, but crowded, and she hated the feeling that everything she saw was on sale, as if this part of Paris were the world’s largest, if magnificent, department store. She found a small auberge on the Left Bank, with a view from her third-floor window of the Jardin du Luxembourg, and settled in.

  From the days of young womanhood, she had longed to see the grand old sights: the Louvre, Montmartre,
Notre Dame. But she found this arrondissement she’d discovered too enchanting to leave—and why she should rush off every day? Those monuments had waited fifty years for her to see them; they could wait a few days more.

  So she wandered around the Sixième, taking a late breakfast of café au lait and chocolate brioches in an outdoor cafe, sitting in the garden watching the pigeons for hours, browsing through used-print and book shops, picking up well-thumbed British editions of Somerset Maugham or E. M. Forster to read in her room late at night.

  She looked wonderful, and she knew it because of the way people smiled at her, stopped to sit next to her on the bench in the park, addressing her in French, expressing surprise when she answered in her faltering, mispronounced, Americanized French. That people would assume she was French was to her the highest compliment. She wore long, comfortable skirts, gorgeous silk blouses, loose jackets with deep pockets, and an assortment of jewelry that looked antique but that she’d bought purposely from a shop in Silver Spring that specialized in new “estate” jewelry. She didn’t want to worry about having anything stolen. Her outfit, she thought, gave her a rather intellectual look, but in fact she had decided upon it simply in order to wear her immensely comfortable, sporty-looking leather walking shoes.

  At forty, she’d had her long brown hair cut and styled in a belled pageboy, Louise Brooks–style, with bangs to hide the wrinkles on her forehead. Her hair was white now, or rather streaked with gray, white, and brown strands, because she’d stopped having it colored when Al died. She dabbed on powder and very light lipstick and went out into the world.

  Sitting on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens in the intense October sunlight, Jean enjoyed the sensation that she could be just anyone. She could have six grown children at home instead of four; she could have no children. She could be divorced many times over or never married. Kansas or California or northern Maine could be her home, where she taught sixth grade or college-level physics or where she ran her own boutique or painted watercolors.