Social Death: A Clyde Shaw Mystery (34 page)

“I did know you in a way. Olivia kept me informed.”

“She did?”

He nodded. “She didn’t know why. I said it was because I found the stories about you entertaining.”

“Did I get my job here because of you?”

“I may have put in a word at the very beginning.” The right corner of his mouth rose once again. “Everything else you accomplished on your own.” Charles sat up a little straighter on his pillows. “I tried to help more. My offer of financial assistance was declined.”

So my father had known.

“I had planned to leave you a good sum, Cornelia.”

A pit opened in my stomach. Delphine had killed Olivia to keep her from telling Charles about me, or so she’d said. My conviction was that she’d wanted
all
of Charles’s money, not just whatever portion of the pie that would have been set-aside for me. Still, finding out about me seemed to have sparked in Delphine’s mind the idea that she was entitled to more than she was getting.

Charles looked out the window. “I was so sorry to hear about your mother’s passing. I sent flowers.”

I didn’t remember much about my mother’s funeral. I remembered what I wore—a navy dress and matching tights, the black patent Mary Janes that pinched my toes. I remembered my father’s bloodshot eyes and his hand gripping my shoulder as they lowered her casket into the grave, the leftovers from the catering company that crowded our refrigerator until finally, when there was mold growing on everything, I threw them out. I remembered my father opening the refrigerator and seeing it was clean, and starting to cry. Right there, on the floor of our kitchen, with the refrigerator door open. He cried until there was nothing left.

I stood to leave.

“Going so soon?” he asked gently.

I nodded. Suddenly, all I wanted was my dad, the one who raised me. I’d thought learning the truth from Charles would comfort me. But it hadn’t. It couldn’t. He’d given me answers, and it turned out they weren’t what I needed.

I paused with my hand on the door.

Charles regarded me sadly. “I am sorry, my dear.”

I
drove back with my father upstate. He picked me up outside Lennox Hill Hospital in his silver truck. He was dressed in his usual uniform—plaid flannel shirt, Levis, and scuffed brown boots—and greeted me with worried brown eyes. “I thought the doctors said they wanted to keep you under observation for another day,” he said, popping my door open.

“They’re just being overly cautious.” I said, trying not to wince as I climbed into the cab of the truck. “I’m fine.”

He gave me a dubious look before putting the truck in gear. “You don’t look it.”

I gestured at the bandages around my head, ribs, wrist, and hands. “These are just for show.”

“Should we swing by your place? Pick up some things? You’ll need a heavy coat. Forecast says snow tomorrow.”

“I’d rather not, if that’s OK,” I didn’t have enough energy to face my apartment. Alex had brought over what I’d left at his home, which amounted to a few changes of clothes, some toiletries, and my handbag. A trip to Walmart in Greenport would have to fill in what I couldn’t borrow from Dad. “You’ll loan me your Patagonia?”

“Sure, kiddo.”

It took us two hours to make it to Hudson, New York, a little town that had started as a whaling community way back when. After falling on hard times, it was rediscovered by antiques dealers, foodies, and other New York City transplants, who helped revive local commerce and cultural landmarks. Dad’s place was a little more than five miles outside of town but he said he wanted to swing by Olde Hudson, our favorite little grocery store on Warren, the town’s main drag, to pick up some bread and cheese for dinner. I stayed in the truck while he went into the market. Ten minutes later, he came back out with two huge bags filled with goodies for us. “Hope you’re hungry,” he said, placing the bags by my feet.

We drove along half a dozen tree-lined country roads before pulling into Dad’s little two-story. In one direction it overlooked an apple orchard, in the other, a cornfield. The field wasn’t his, but the neighbors let him hunt on the land— wild turkey in the spring, deer in the fall. He never shot the does. He never said it, but I was sure it was because he didn’t have the heart to take a mother from its fawn.

I shrugged off my bag in the living room. Stone fireplace, old wood floors, some couches and chairs that were as beat up as Dad’s truck. Milton, a Norwich terrier, lifted his head from the fleece-lined dog bed by the fireplace. His fat little body jumped into my arms. I let him lick my chin and scratched his round belly. I called out to my dad, who was unpacking the groceries. “Who looked after him while you were gone?”

“The neighbor,” he said.

Not a girlfriend, then. “You’re overfeeding him again.”

“Am not,” he protested.

I put Milton back down and joined my father in the kitchen. Dad had bought the house about ten years earlier and made few adjustments in that time. The kitchen, for example, was still papered in a yellow floral print the previous owners had selected. There were etched-glass light fixtures, green-painted cabinetry, and an old stove that looked like it was on its last legs but still worked just fine. I gazed out the bay window at the desolate field below and took a seat at the round oak table after setting it for dinner. We were having a light dinner, just cheese, cured meats, some crusty bread and a cucumber salad. Tomorrow, Dad planned to make his Beef Wellington and roasted new potatoes.

He sat down in the chair opposite me. “You ready to talk about it?” he asked.

In the hospital I’d told him that I wasn’t ready. I needed some time to get over the shock and process some of the emotions I was feeling. But it had been three days since I’d learned the truth about who my real father was, and I still wasn’t sure how I felt. Or what I was supposed to feel.

Dad flipped his blue-checkered napkin onto his lap. Later, we’d rent a movie off the cable service. Milton would fall asleep at my feet. I wanted to fast-forward to that and get over with
this
, but it was time to put the elephant out of its misery. “You knew,” I stated.

My father’s chin dipped to his chest. “Of course I did.”

I could have been mad. I probably
should’ve
been mad. But I wasn’t. I loved my dad. He’d taken good care of me, stood by me when a lot of other parents might not have, and considering I wasn’t even his flesh and blood, that meant double to me now. “Did Mom tell you?”

“I can do math, Cornelia. It wasn’t a matter of weeks.”

“She didn’t try to make you believe I was yours?”

He half-smiled. “I can tell why you’re good at your job.”

I rolled my eyes. “Please, Dad.”

He clasped his hands together under the table, straightening his posture against the hard back of his chair. “Yes, in the beginning. I think she hoped I wouldn’t put two and two together.”

“Why didn’t you leave her? She tried to trap you.”

The corners of my father’s mouth sagged. “It was no trap. I was in love. Your mother told me she had no contact with the man who had gotten her pregnant. It was a short-lived affair.”

I balked, angry at him for not being more upset with my mother. But this is how it had always been between us—him defending her, her “choice” to take her life, while I’d condemn her as a selfish coward. “Fair enough,” I finally said. “But my understanding was that it wasn’t a passing fancy. Mom wanted him to leave his wife.”

He shrugged. He didn’t care.

“She never told you it was Charles Kravis who had gotten her pregnant?”

“I’m sure she would have if I asked. I didn’t want to know.”

“But you did find out.”

“Several years later. After your mother had died and you’d gone to stay with Olivia on Nantucket. Charles figured it out, and I was terrified he was going to take you away from me.”

“Charles told me he offered to give you money.”

“Through his lawyers, yes. I said no thank you, through mine, and that was the last we heard from him.” He rapped the grained surface of the table with his knuckles. “Listen kiddo, are you mad at me for not accepting his help?”

“No. That’s not it. I just wish you’d been honest with me.”

“Long ago your mother and I decided to leave the past where it was. You were—and are—as much mine as any child could be. So what if you didn’t share my DNA? That didn’t matter to me. And in the eyes of the law, I was your father. My name was on your birth certificate.”

I reflexively touched the bandage on my head. It still hurt, as did my hands and ribs. “I’m sorry, Dad, but I still think I had the right to know.”

“Yes, of course,” he replied calmly. “Of course you did. But at first you were too young, and then, once your mother passed, there were other considerations. You’d already lost one parent, I didn’t want you to feel like you’d lost another.” He got up to arrange the cheese platter. “You were all that I had left in the world once your mother left us. What if knowing the truth made you want to leave? What if you wanted to go live with your grandparents?”

“I barely knew them. The last time I saw them was at mom’s funeral. Why would I have wanted to go live with them?”

He shook his head. “It was my biggest fear, losing you. I didn’t want to take any chances.”

I sighed. “I forgive you. But it’s harder to forgive Mom. She lied to Charles and told him I was going to be aborted, and then she lied to you and to me, and then she killed herself, leaving all of us to clean up her mess. If she’d been honest from the start, Olivia wouldn’t have died trying to make right her wrong.”

My dad was quiet for a long time. I’d gone through an angry period in my teens and after college and whenever we fought—about grades, boys, curfews, and later my drinking and spending habits—we’d always end up here: Me, furious with my mother, blaming her for everything; and my father, furious with me for invoking her name with such hostility and disrespect. After a while, we just stopped talking about her and everything wrong I was doing with my life.

“I’m sure Charlotte had her reasons,” my father finally said. “We all do.”

I’d hoped to find peace in the truth, but all I felt at that moment was the heaviness of my father’s sorrow and the same low-grade anxiety that had followed me my entire life. I beat my fist against the table in frustration, startling Milton. “Let’s just talk about it once and for all, Dad. Will you just put all the cards on the table? Why did Mom kill herself? Was it because of me? Did she regret having me? The life she had to choose for my benefit?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then was it you? Was she unhappy in your marriage? Did she hate
you
?”

He jolted back, wounded.

I should have apologized, but I didn’t want to.

“What your mother wanted was a way out of her life,” Dad said. “Not the one she built with me, but the one she wanted me to save her from. If she were here today, I believe she would tell you that.”

I regarded him with skepticism. “What did she need saving from? Boring cocktail parties, bossy housekeepers?”

“Her family,” he said, his chin jutting out an inch. “They were not kind people.”

I snorted, still skeptical. I don’t remember much about my grandparents other than what my father had told me about them over the years, which was never positive, and the few photos of them in one of our family albums. I didn’t even know if they were dead or alive. “That’s an awfully vague statement, Dad.”

“Your grandfather wanted a divorce, but your grandmother wouldn’t give him one.
They
had a terrible marriage. Your grandmother became a very angry woman. She was abusive to your mother. Mostly verbal but there were a few physical incidents as well.”

All this time I’d thought my mother was unhappy with her life with us, the smallness of it. I thought she’d killed herself because she couldn’t take it anymore.

“Before your mother died, she was in therapy,” Dad continued. “Working through the past, coming to terms with what she had seen and survived. I thought she was making progress. So did the psychologist. We were going to try and have another child, a sibling for you. The doctor decided to adjust her medication, actually, to decrease it. But your mother did not respond well. The way she died, Clyde, that wasn’t Charlotte. She was a very private woman. She wouldn’t have done it like that, for everyone to see. That’s how I knew she wasn’t thinking straight.” His shoulders slumped. “She wanted to get better. And she loved you more than anything. She believed you saved her. Once you arrived, she had a reason to live.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me this about her?”

“She made me promise not to. She didn’t want this to be your legacy.”

“But she gave me her name. Why would she make me a Shaw if she didn’t want any part of her family?”

“There was a gift.”

“Financial?” I asked.

He nodded. “They agreed to create a trust for your education. We didn’t want to deny you that opportunity. And, personally, I didn’t care what your last name was.”

“If I’d been truly yours, would you have felt differently?”

“You
are
mine.” He reached his hand across the table. “You have the right to be upset and confused by all of this. But if I had to do it all over again, I would.”