Secret Language (17 page)

“I thought you might know somebody here,” Isadora says. “Maybe somebody who worked with Billy—with your parents.” She sounds casual, but her eyes don’t move from Connie’s face. “You know, a show biz type.”

Connie wheels back through time as a myriad of faces appears before her, dim and nameless. She tries to remember, desperate to come up with something. “I don’t know anyone but Armand.”

Isadora makes a face. “He was no help. He doesn’t run in those circles anymore.”

“Oh.”

“I thought maybe Billy had an agent or something.”

“He did.” Connie frowns. “Garrett Reese. But he was a theatrical agent. I don’t see how he could help you.”

“Connections, Connie,” Isadora says. “Believe me, these guys all know each other.”

“He must be at least sixty by now,” Connie says. “Probably retired. Besides, Billy and Delle weren’t exactly his favorite clients. He despised them at the end, and the feeling was more than mutual. He dropped them after they left
Silver Moon
.”

Isadora plunges one hand into her purse and comes up with an envelope and a pencil. “Anything’s worth a shot,” she mutters, writing down Garrett’s name. “Maybe I can get
something
out of being Billy Spaulding’s daughter.”

Connie steps back, blinking hard, as Isadora blathers on. “Being a performer is a bitch,” she says. “Maybe he wasn’t the nicest guy in the world, but I have a lot of respect for Billy, just for surviving. Your mother, too. They didn’t pick an easy path.”

But they
didn’t
survive, Connie wants to say. They’re dead. She catches an incongruous whiff of fields and earth from the market’s colorful harvest.

“It must have been exciting,” Isadora says, “growing up with all that
commotion
.” She sounds envious, as if she thinks with Connie’s life she’d be already famous.

“They were quite the days,” Connie says. “I sat in Marlon Brando’s lap when I was five.”

Isadora smiles politely. “Really?” Apparently Marlon Brando has lost some stature since the last time Connie told this story.

A car slows. Isadora’s hand goes up instantly; she’s been watching after all. Connie moves toward the curb, staring hard at the street, ashamed of her long-ago lie.

Settled on the porch steps, the dog’s soft head in her lap, Faith looks out over her yard: the bountiful feeders, the red impatiens crowding their pots, the hydrangeas’ snowball flowers already tinged with their dying pink. Mums and marigolds line the walk, solid and mute.

It sometimes occurs to her that, unlike most people she knows, she has no inner life, no poetic core of certainty, no burning dot of conviction from which springs a lifetime of heedless, unaccountable choices. But her flowers and trees contradict her: surely her inner life is here, in this tended yard, in these colors that are doomed to disappear after the cold of autumn. Come spring she will begin again, digging in the dirt. Planting is her private tradition, her secret belief that life, in all its passages, contains the possibility of beauty, even hope.

Before Faith hears the car, Sammy propels himself off the porch to wait at the end of the walk, ears pitched forward. More than once Faith has wished for an animal’s finely tuned senses, that talent for knowing what’s just ahead. Connie pulls over, waving out the window, her radio on. Since Isadora’s arrival in their lives, she has taken to dropping by Faith’s house unexpectedly, sometimes just for minutes, just long enough to say hello. Their conversations together are spare, as always, but Connie’s tone has become nonchalant, almost breezy, as if there were nothing between them but good fortune, as if the thing they had in common were happiness of an inherited kind.

“I was in the neighborhood,” she says, coming up the walk.

Faith smiles. “You live in the neighborhood.” She reaches for the dog. “Down, Sammy.”

“He’s all right.” Connie pushes the dog away gently, petting his head to calm him. “Where is everybody?”

“At the Fullers’. The end-of-summer barbecue.”

“You didn’t go?”

“I had things to do.”

Connie sits down next to Faith. “I’m going to New York tonight and wondered if you wanted anything.”

“What would I want?”

“I don’t know,” Connie says. “Some decent wine? Some good chocolate, maybe.” She looks out at the yard. Faith wonders what she sees there. She wonders if sometime far from now her children might see a chrysanthemum in full bloom and think of her.

“I don’t need anything. But thanks.”

Connie makes an odd gesture with her wrist—an exacting little flick—that Faith remembers from long ago. It means she is disappointed.

“Some chocolate would be nice,” Faith says. “Now that you mention it.”

“Great.” Connie rummages into her purse for a pad and pencil.
Chocolate for Faith
, she writes, then keeps the pencil poised. “Any messages for Isadora?”

Faith shakes her head. “She called here last night. Chris was the only one up.”

A goldfinch lights on one of the feeders, then another.

“Musicians’ hours,” Connie says.

“We keep regular people’s hours.” Faith pets the dog, glad of his smooth fur, his silent company. The phone rings inside the house, but she makes no move.

“Do you want me to get it?” Connie asks.

“Let it ring.” She knows it’s Phoebe, or maybe one of the boys, wanting her at the barbecue. She listens until it stops.

“Faith?” Connie taps the pad with her pencil. “Can you think of anything I could tell Isadora about Billy?”

“You mean something good?”

“Yes,” she says softly. She’s watching the finches, a band of them now, squabbling at the feeders. “Something good. A family story.”

A blue-black grackle descends, scattering the flock. “I can’t think of anything, Connie,” Faith says. She wishes she could, but it’s like looking into a store window at the perfect gift that’s thousands of dollars out of reach. “Really. I’m sorry.”

Connie keeps silent awhile, fidgeting on the step. “Didn’t they take us to a zoo or something once?” she asks finally. “I think I remember that.” Her tone contains that new nonchalance. An old image pierces Faith’s vision, an image of Connie trailing Billy, her blonde hair snarled behind one ear.

“I can’t think of anything,” Faith says again.

“I should go,” Connie says. But she doesn’t, yet. “Does she ever say anything about me?”

“Who? Isadora?”

“I just wondered.” She tucks her purse under her arm. “Sure you don’t want anything besides chocolate?”

“She said she thought you were sweet.” This is a lie, and Faith is amazed at herself for telling it. When Isadora calls she talks mostly about herself.

“Really?” Connie says.

“And brave, too, going all over the world the way you do.” Faith thinks a minute. “She says you’re lucky to have so many friends. She thinks it’s a good reflection on you, that a lot of people like you.”

“No kidding,” Connie says. She looks five.

“And she likes your hair. It’s beautiful.”

Connie takes a long swipe through her hair. “Well.”

Faith follows Connie to her car and then waves her down the street. It is late now, fall just days away, a chill sweeping in from the bay which she can feel this far into town. Fall used to be her best time of year, the boys coming home from school with their stories. She had taken every step of childhood with them, and as they grew up, so did she; she thought of herself as a slow bloomer, still a bud. Now it is different: their adolescence has turned more private, the remaining steps a mystery.

The finches are back, small and fierce and directed. She is suddenly cold. “Come on, Sammy,” she says. “Let’s go in.”

She thinks about the barbecue, the voices shouting back and forth across the volleyball net. As if it would be gone by nightfall, Faith again takes in the sight of her burgeoning yard. She snaps a pink-tinged hydrangea from one of the bushes, then hurries up the steps, the flat, painted wood yielding nothing under her weight. She considers how immobile a house is, how everything you put into it stays there, how immune it is to change, how much more solid than a person.

Winter comes swift and early. Fall is long buried, its auburn leaves lost under a few hard inches of snow. In the stinging cold of her back yard, Faith braces herself against the icy air, shivering, one glove on, the other hand bare and held out, a scatter of sunflower seeds shining like onyx on her palm. Still as death, clucking softly, she watches the chickadees flutter around their preferred feeder-three tubes with a cover and bowl—a few inches from her outstretched fingers.

This simple ritual, which she has been repeating twice a day, will, according to the book, bring the chickadees and perhaps the siskins to light on her hand. Bundled in an old, royal blue parka (
something in a bright, recognizable color so the birds will come to know you
, the book says), she stands the cold, the birds’ indifference, and the inherent foolishness of this act with the patience of one who has no time but a well—a whole canyon—of faith.

The chickadees dart back and forth, in their habit of taking one seed away at a time. Their lispy, quarrelsome voices connect her somehow to the world, and she loves them for their noisy presence, their beauty, their unflinching predictability. They give her an occasional glimpse of the world’s design.

“Mom, we’re leaving,” Ben calls from the house. “Dad’s here.”

It is Thanksgiving Day. She has told the boys she is going to Connie’s so they won’t feel bad leaving her alone. She returns to the house and shepherds them out the door with a couple of pies—her traditional contribution to the Fuller Thanksgiving—hoping to have them gone quickly, to spare them from witnessing whatever
she is bound to feel. This will be her first Thanksgiving without them. Joe lingers on the porch, full of silent questions.

“You know you’re welcome,” he says.

She shakes her head, looking beyond the front door to where Brenda sits waiting in a green car. Joe’s truck has been banished for the day, unable to accommodate them all. Last year at this time there was no Brenda, no one Joe wanted to take into the family. He’d been dating, but the women were just names. Marianne. Gail. Then Brenda. The boys must be talking to Brenda from the back seat, for she smiles and nods without looking at them. Her hair, black like Joe’s, sprays out from her face, aimless in the dry, staticky cold. A finger of resentment lays itself on Faith’s heart as she imagines this woman at Joe’s table, in his bed, talking and talking, arms permanently outstretched, making it all look easy.

Chris likes Brenda, Faith knows, but Ben will never say, thinking he’s being kind. She looks like a nice woman, and of course she must be.

“Don’t you have to go?” Faith tells Joe, lifting her chin toward the car.

“Right.”

“Say hi to everyone.”

Joe hesitates. “Are you okay?”

“I’m great. The day’s all planned.”

“I’m sorry I brought Brenda,” he says. “I didn’t know how else to do this.”

“For God’s sake, Joe, you’ve been living with the woman for months. Why are you apologizing?”

“I don’t know.” He looks perplexed. “Stupid, I guess.”

It still surprises her that he found Brenda, that it’s possible for a human being to surrender to love more than once. To again wander through the slow motion of turning toward and turning away, shaping out of words let go and words taken back a language you could both understand. Hadn’t that always been the difference between them? Joe would surrender again—and again, a believer.

He starts to leave, then turns back. “Don’t you ever miss me?”

She knows he expects no answer.
Yes
, she could say, but the specter of the road that had been their marriage—steep and dangerous,
full of switchbacks—freezes the word in her throat. After the divorce, their house seemed empty and forbidding, and she recognized all at once how little of it had ever been hers, how heavily she had borrowed from Joe’s life. He had taken little away—his clothes, his gadgets in the basement, a couple of pieces of furniture—but even with the boys still in it, the house had an echoey quality, the sound of moving day. She resorted to an old comfort, a superstition she’d devised as a child: in every new room of every new place on the road she would walk the whole of the floor in a crabbed, deliberate way, imprinting every square inch with the soles of her feet. It would take a long time, and a lot of concentration not to lose her place. Then she would hide something—a button, a penny, a marble—in a secret place, to be left there forever or until some lonely person found it. Even now it pleases her to think of the trail of treasures in places she has long forgotten. She repeated her childhood ritual in this house after Joe left, walking every inch—the space behind the stereo speaker, the narrow corridor between the bed and the dresser, each stair from side to side. But she hid no treasures here; her children were her treasures, and if she hid no others perhaps they would belong to this house forever.

“If you change your mind,” Joe says, “you know where we are.” He turns again and finishes his leaving.

She watches them drive away, the snow so dry it kicks up like flour behind the tires. Her sons’ dark and light heads bob against the back windshield.

The day endures. She reads, naps, walks the house. Finally she returns to her birds and stays there a long time. Her fingertips turn numb and bloodless, but she persists, in the waning sunlight, her second attempt in the day, holding out her gift to the ignorant birds. By now the turkeys at the Fullers’ have long since been cut, the white and dark meat doled out. She can almost see it, the aftermath, the decimated pies, wishbones drying on the stove, the sound of voices sparking out from various parts of the house.

This is Joe’s year to say the Thanksgiving grace. She pictures him standing at the table, his simple words of thanks, his good-natured voice. She sees the assemblage that she once tried to believe was hers, bowing their heads in some tacit and immutable notion of
themselves as a linked body. In years past she would open her eyes, raise her head, and peer over the fragrant abundance at the ring of good faces, as if to separate herself from their version of love.