Secrecy (37 page)

He sounded almost cheerful, and she thought she understood why. Just as during a war people forget their personal problems, so a great storm unites people against the common menace. And they waited for daylight while Charlotte made pancakes and Bill fiddled with the radio.

When full morning came, they looked out. The ground, now almost bare of snow, was covered with the debris of broken branches. Few cars passed, and only one neighbor had emerged as yet to struggle on the walk with his chow, who cringed against the rain that drenched his orange hair. Down the sloping street a stream fled toward the river.

Later, Emmabrown telephoned. “It looks bad out, Charlotte. Your dad won’t mind if I don’t come today? There’s plenty of food in the freezer. Take out the chicken pie. Put a spoon of vanilla ice cream on the apple pudding, your dad likes that. I’ll get to see you before you go back, maybe even tonight, when it lets up. It can’t keep on like this all day. Never does.”

Charlotte thought, I’ll miss Emmabrown. I’ll miss many things. There’s altogether too much parting
and giving up in life. However, there’s no use being philosophical, is there? Better to go to work.

She had brought a briefcase full of notes and sketches for the low-cost housing project. And now, laying these out on the dining-room table, she began to resume where she had left off the day before. But concentration did not come easily today. There was, to start with, a pervasive sense of uneasy change in the house. Added to that was the drone of the radio, to which Bill seemed to be fastened in the kitchen.

Above all, there was the rain; eventually, by the fourth or fifth hour, she was used to the monotonous background splatter, although intermittently a violent gust of wind would send it drumming against the window, demanding attention. She could not remember when or whether she had ever seen such rain.

Once Bill came wandering in and, looking over her shoulder at her work, asked a few suitable questions, telling her yet again how proud of her he was. Yet she knew that his heart was not in his words, and his thoughts were elsewhere.

“I wonder how Cliff is doing,” she said.

“The same as we are,” he replied, and wandered back into the kitchen.

He had infected her with his restlessness. She got up and, going to the window, looked out upon the water-soaked afternoon. The wind that had so furiously been whipping the trees was now visibly dying down, while the rain, impossible as it might have seemed that morning, was actually increasing. Like a screen or curtain it was almost opaque, so that, before
Charlotte’s eyes, the landscape was dimmed like a faded photograph.

As if mesmerized, she was still standing there when Bill came back with a cup of coffee for her and a grim report.

“All hell’s broken loose upriver. The Smithtown Bridge is submerged, and the highways are closed. The Bradley Road collapsed, and two cars went into the river. Five dead. Eleven inches so far.” They stood silently at the window until he resumed, worrying, “The river will be rising over flood level here, too, if it doesn’t let up soon. Last time it flooded was about fifty years ago, wasn’t it? I don’t remember.”

Emmabrown phoned again from Kingsley, talking fast. “It’s a mess here. You wouldn’t believe it. They’ve got firefighters running extra buses to take people to shelters in the schools and churches. But no shelter for me! I’m loading the car, overloading it, with grandkids, three dogs, and a hamster, going to my relatives uphill toward Walker. If we don’t leave this minute, we won’t be able to get out. Other side of Main Street, cars are already sunk up to the windows. Take care. I’ll keep in touch.”

“I’m calling Cliff,” Charlotte said.

“What for? He’s all right. He’s as high up as we are.”

“I’m calling him all the same.”

She had barely spoken when a terrific crash blasted in the backyard; the windows rattled, and in the front hall Elena’s fancy crystal chandelier jangled frantically.

“A tree’s down,” Bill cried. “Look! The ash tree’s gone.”

There it lay. Over a century old, taller than the house that it shaded, it was stricken and fallen. Its roots, ripped out of the soil, were a soldier’s torn, bleeding wound, and the topmost branches, reaching as far as the fence line, were his pitiful, broken arms.

“Thank God,” Bill said in awe, “it fell away from the house. Imagine, the ground’s too sodden to hold it up.” Then, squinting through the rain, he reported, “The telephone line went with it too. Look.”

A moment later the lights went out and the room turned dark blue. The furnace, which had been humming, went silent. All up and down the street the lights were out.

“Power lines must be down all over,” Bill said with some lessening of his first exhilarating sense of adventure. “Let’s get the candles and flashlights out right now before night.”

They ate cold chicken pie by candlelight. The house grew gradually colder. Charlotte, trying to read by candlelight in sweater and outer jacket, gave up and, having anyway been awake since before five that morning, decided to go to bed.

“Well, at least they promised that it would stop by tomorrow morning,” Bill said cheerfully.

It did not. At seven o’clock the rain was still coming in cascades and cataracts. The sky was drowned. The ground was a waste of barren brown grass spotted with islands of mushy snow.

News came from the little transistor radio in the kitchen. People were being rescued from rooftops,
this was the worst calamity in they weren’t able to hear how many years, and the governor had declared a state of emergency.

“Thirty-six hours now, and no letup,” Bill said. “No letup in sight either.”

Again, Charlotte spread out her work on the dining-room table. For a few minutes Bill watched her, considerately refraining from interruption, then walked away and went down again to the radio in the car. After a while she heard him come up, rummaging for some cold food in the kitchen. He did not know what to do with himself. And she went to him, saying gently, “Why don’t you just give up worrying? There’s nothing you can do about this, so you might as well accept it.”

“I wish I had work to do as you do.”

“Get a book. Sit down and pass the time with a book.”

“No,” he said suddenly, “I can’t sit still. I’m going out.”

“Out! For heaven’s sake, where to?”

“Just out. I need to move around.”

“In this torrent, this—this tempest? This all-time record? Are you crazy?”

“I’m not crazy. I just need to go.”

She stood there while he pulled on his boots and fastened his raincoat.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” she burst out. “There are fallen wires all over. You’ll be electrocuted, if you aren’t drowned first.”

“I’ll watch where I’m going. I know what I’m doing.”

“Then I’m going with you,” she said.

“No, no, not you!”

“I’m as determined as you are, Dad.”

Yes, she thought, I know what you’re thinking. And following him, she did not have to question what direction he would take. She knew that too.

From the door he turned left toward the river. Except for a huddle of sodden, pathetic sparrows in some naked shrubs, there was no life on the street. There was no one, either, at the top of the bluff, where they halted to look down on the darkened river. Tons of earth, and the Dawes mill with it, had toppled and washed into the torrent. The dirty mountain of trash had been swept away, to be carried along with the devastation from the north. A crate of drowned chickens, a dead cow, a live dog struggling to swim, branches, broken lumber, a lone tire—all whirled downstream. Behind the place where the mill had stood, the land stretched flat and spongy under a shallow film of muddy brown water.

“Scraped almost clean,” Bill said, as if to himself.

Rivulets ran down their yellow slickers as they stood. Their boots slid dangerously, and the rain beat into their faces. Here was nature gone wild, and fear gone wild within them both.

Charlotte was looking at Bill’s woolen scarf, the same brown-and-yellow plaid scarf he had been winding around his throat for as long as she remembered. Now it was inside out with the name tag showing clearly. Elena’s meticulous name tags and monograms …

A helicopter clattered overhead. “Rescue work,” Bill said. “I ought to help.”

“You can’t fly a helicopter.”

“There’s other work. The radio said that the deputy sheriffs have called for volunteers. I’ll drive the car as far as it can go and get into a rowboat. They have boats ready.”

“If you go, I will too.”

“No, you go home.”

“I told you I’m as determined as you are, Dad.”

She was thinking that she would not let him out of her sight, For who knew how long—?

That field behind the mill was almost bare.

In separate boats they went downriver through Kingsley and beyond. In Charlotte’s boat, along with a brawny male, there was another female, her former swimming coach, still young and strong. Together, they hauled in a stranded mother and child, reached for a terrified cat in a carrying case, and rescued two exhausted boys who had themselves been rescuing others all day. They worked their mission, going six miles downstream, until it was nearly dark. Only then, with the rain still beating down, did they return.

Bill was waiting at the car with Cliff, Charlotte was pleased to see, beside him. Perhaps this experience today had softened them.

“Cliff has nothing in the house but crackers,” Bill said, “so I invited him to go back with us.”

She smiled. “Good. I’ll make sandwiches. Without hot coffee you’ll have to make do with beer. Or whiskey might be more like it in this weather.”

At home they sat in their coats. Candlelight that in other situations could cast so lovely a glow was now merely melancholy. There was no pleasure in the simple meal. They were only hungry and very tired.

Suddenly Bill spoke to Cliff. “You saw our place, I suppose.”

“Yes. Nothing much left of it.”

“That acreage in back,” Bill began, and stopped.

Charlotte’s heart began to pound. It was uncanny that she could be so absolutely sure of what he was about to say! And she looked at her father, asking a question with her eyes.

“All right, Charlotte,” he said. “The time has come. And, Cliff, I have something to tell you. Listen.”

The candles were almost burned down, and Charlotte got up to replace them. In the fresh flare of light the men’s faces came clear, with all their fear and sadness and disbelief revealed.

The muscles in Cliff’s cheeks were taut. At last he said, “If you had told me this while Claudia was alive, I would have been—I would have wanted—”

“You would have wanted to kill me,” Bill said.

Cliff struggled for words. “I can’t imagine what it would have done to her. She lived to the very last for his return.”

“I knew that. And each time her hope turned out to be false, I felt her agony.”

Cliff interrupted. “How she suffered because of him! He was a devil.”

“A devil? No, it’s more complicated. I’m no psychologist,
so I can’t explain why people do the evil things they do. I only know that it’s more complicated than that.”

Charlotte, feeling a deep compassion, looked from one face to the other. “So now you understand,” she told Cliff, “why all the plans fell through.”

“I understand.” Cliff rose, went to his brother, embraced him, and spoke softly. “Whatever happens, we’re here for you. We’ll do—” Then he choked on the words.

On the third morning the rain began to slacken. Faint light seemed about to break through the sky, so that looking upward one no longer felt as if one were at the bottom of an aquarium.

Cliff went to the car phone to call a man he knew at the newspaper office. When he came back upstairs, he was very sober.

“They found a body on the edge of the property. It got washed up near the road. That’s all I know.”

The three sat down. I’m going to be sick, Charlotte thought, and dared not meet her father’s eyes; he was studying the carpet at his feet.

Cliff’s preliminary cough was false, a sound made to fill a blank space in time and to cover his emotion. “This was no ordinary northeaster. They say that twenty-five billion gallons flowed into the river. Not million;
billion
,” he repeated.

No one answered because no one cared. The rain had ceased, making them aware of another kind of silence, for they had become accustomed to the rush and spatter. Now past the window lay waste and
quiet water, while beyond the wintry trees, down the hill and in the stunned town, lay terror, a great beast waiting.

“I guess I’ll go home,” Cliff said. “If I can find a way to get into town and find out more, I will. The river won’t be rising now, and with my wading boots I might get down Main Street to the paper’s office.”

“Thanks,” Bill said.

Charlotte, too, had to fill the emptiness, even with trivia. “They’ll be out working on the power lines, I’m sure. They do that right away in a disaster area, don’t they? So maybe we’ll be able to use the stove soon. I’ll make some coffee.”

“Thanks,” Bill said again, there being nothing else to say.

He took a book and sat at the window in the brightening light, pretending to read. Charlotte went back to the dining-room table, on which her work was still spread, and tried to fix her mind on it. Toward noon, when the lamps turned on, she went to the kitchen and made coffee and cereal, which she carried in to Bill.

“Dad,” she said gently, “you need to eat, or you won’t be able to—to do anything for yourself. Besides, we don’t know anything yet about that body, whose it was or—”

“I’m only thinking about you. You have a career, I know, I know. But you will be alone.”

“Look!” she cried. “The telephone people are in the yard already. Isn’t it amazing how promptly they get to work on repairs?”

“You don’t have to exert yourself with all this
cheerful talk to divert me. We’re not fooling each other.” And he gave her the old “fatherly” smile.

“Okay, Dad. I’ll let you be. Maybe I’ll go to the kitchen and do something about dinner, something hot for a change.”

Bless Emmabrown, she thought, as she searched the freezer and found a beef stew. There were enough greens in the refrigerator for a salad. They would eat in the kitchen. The dining room was too big and dreary for the two of them in their despair. Nevertheless, in spite of the despair, she moved efficiently about the kitchen, mixing a salad dressing according to Claudia’s recipe. Biscuits would go well with the stew. These, too, she would make as she had learned from Claudia. Bill needed sustenance.…