Life Sentences (26 page)

“Secrets are like floodwater, Donna,” Cassandra said. “They're eventually going to find a place to breach. You can't control Callie anymore. You can't embarrass me. I've always told the truth about myself, unattractive as it may be.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I'm sure.” She couldn't help flushing. She had several things she preferred to keep secret. Not so much the affair with Reg—she was resigned to that becoming public if she took on the Howards. But there was Bernard, and Bernard's wife.

Donna walked over to an antique secretary, a fussy overwrought piece, the kind of item that decorators called “important,” a euphemism for
hideous.
A truly confident woman, someone secure in matters of taste, would never have allowed it to be foisted on her. Donna removed a manila folder from one of the desk's cubbyholes and brought it to Cassandra.

“What—” It was a police report, no more than two pages. A police report dated April 6, 1968.

“Read it out loud if you like.”

Cassandra chose to read it to herself:
Police received a call to the 1800 block of Druid Hill Avenue for a report of an assault. Patrols found a number one male beating a naked number two male while a number one female tried to intercede. The assailant, Manfred Watson, told police he had found the victim, Cedric Fallows, in bed with his girlfriend. The victim fled the couple's apartment
—“This is bullshit.”

“Your book was bullshit. Check a timeline, Cassandra. Next month marks the fortieth anniversary; there's no shortage of information available. There were a few incidents early in the weekend, but not in that neighborhood. The real violence started late that afternoon. Your father sneaked out to have sex with his girlfriend and got his ass kicked by her common-law husband. He used the riots as a cover.”

Stunned as she was, Cassandra couldn't help realizing that these bare, utilitarian sentences threaded a tiny needle. Her father's insistence
on the errand, her mother's thin-lipped tension. The cake—Annie worked at Silber's bakery. She had probably made Cassandra's mermaid cake. He might have met her two months before, buying that hideous Washington's Birthday cake for her mother. Here was the reason her usually articulate father had never been able to convey the assault with any real sense of drama, why Annie had been awkward and diffident when Cassandra met her in the hospital. Only—it was not her father who had spread the story. Cassandra was the one who had carried it into the world. He was simply too proud to call it back.

“My family's privacy for your family's privacy,” Donna said. “Not that your family really has any privacy left, but you know what I mean. Your version can stand, uncontested. But not if you start talking about Callie.”

Cassandra's mind raced, overwhelmed. She wanted to argue that there were significant differences between their fathers. Yes, Cedric Fallows had lied, but it was a lie meant only for his wife and daughter, not the world. Andre Howard had lived a much larger lie, indifferent to the people he hurt as long as he could maintain his reputation. Her father's story was only part of her first book, which at least had the merit of being utterly sincere. Yet, wasn't Cassandra, too, taking advantage of Callie in a sense?

“It's not always a shameful thing, keeping secrets,” Donna said. “And it's not hurtful, not in this case. Callie Jenkins killed her son, and she spent seven years in jail. Your father told a lie. My father succumbed to blackmail.”

Cassandra found her voice again. “People who allow themselves to be blackmailed usually have something to hide.”

“Cassandra, everyone has something to hide.”

She was not being facile or glib, Cassandra realized. Donna was on intimate terms with secrets, and not only her father's.
What happened in your first marriage?
Cassandra wanted to ask.
Why is it such an untouchable subject, even for Reg? Is it the reason you can't have children? Can you really be
that cavalier about Reg's cheating? Doesn't it get exhausting, being you, keeping track of all the things you're not supposed to talk about, maintaining this perfect façade?

She said, “I'll get back to you, Donna. Obviously, this is not my decision alone. But this much I can tell you—I'm passing on the offer of your husband.”

She left Bolton Hill and drove across town, seeing and not seeing the familiar streets, absently cataloguing the few landmarks that had survived her childhood. The zebra-striped house; the shady avenue through Leakin Park, where the trees were starting to bud; the long-vanquished Windsor Hills Pharmacy, overtaken by the adjacent gas station and a minimart. Gravel crunched beneath her tires, summoning her back to the world. Her mother, drawn by the sound of a car, came out of the garage, wiping her hands on a rag.

“Cassandra,” she said. “I thought we had agreed to meet at the restaurant. Besides, you're hours early.”

“More like forty years late.”

LENORE WAS STRIPPING A SMALL
end table in the unheated garage. “Excuse me if I keep working but it's almost too cool to be doing this, and I don't dare use a space heater, so I have to keep going.”

“I don't recognize that table,” Cassandra said, trying to find a dust-free spot on which to sit, or at least lean.

“I trash-picked it,” her mother said with evident pride. “There's still a lot of dumping in the park. Hard to tell if the wood on this piece is good enough to stand on its own, but I can always paint it.”

The solvent smell was familiar, if not exactly soothing. As a child, Cassandra had been embarrassed by her mother's thrift—trash-picking, shopping at the Purple Heart and garage sales. Once Cassandra began
making good money, she had reveled in buying what she wanted when she wanted it, refusing to clip coupons or wait for sales. And she adamantly refused to learn how to repair anything. She recalled her mother's first project, in which Lenore had decided to install a shower fixture in the old bathroom adjacent to Cassandra's room. It had required three trips to the hardware store over the course of a rainy Saturday and the result had been a Rube Goldberg contraption, with multiple—well, Cassandra didn't know to this day what those pieces of hardware were called. The new fixture had extended out almost six inches and she was forever bruising herself on it. But Lenore improved. Today, she could install a garbage disposal, put up molding, lay a new floor—using adhesive tiles, but still, she could do it. She could even handle projects requiring wiring. But she was in her seventies, her hands losing strength and dexterity. What would her mother do, who would she be, when she could no longer fix things?

“I know,” Cassandra said. “About Daddy and Annie.”

Lenore didn't even look up from her work. “Did he tell you, then? He has been worrying about it.”

“How—”
The phone calls.
That's why her parents had been talking to each other. Cedric hadn't been needling Lenore about Cassandra's visits with him. He had been confiding in his ex-wife, the only living person who knew his true story. “Did you know always? From the beginning?”

“Not from the
very
beginning,” Lenore said, starting on the table's legs, sighing a little. “I always forget how hard legs are, relative to the top. I say I'm going to do the legs first, save the easy part for last, then I forget. It's so much more rewarding, stripping a flat surface.”

Cassandra was not going to let the matter drop. “When, then?”

“Not long after he left for good. I had my suspicions before, of course. His insistence on getting out of the house the day of your birthday party, then seeing Annie at the hospital. But she was such a different type for him, after all those bony faculty wives. I tried to tell myself he
couldn't possibly love her. I'd think,
She doesn't even read the
New York Review of Books
!
”

Cassandra couldn't help laughing and Lenore joined in, once she realized that Cassandra's amusement was not at her expense. Her mother's objections mirrored her own long-standing confusion over her father's choices.

“Did you ever see the police report?” Part of her hoped that her mother would say,
Police report? There was no police report.
What did it matter? Her mother had all but confirmed the report was accurate.

“I had a copy at some point, thinking it might give me leverage, financially. But you can't get blood from a stone, as your father liked to say, and there simply wasn't that much money.”

“But why did you let me believe his…version of things? Why would you let him get away with lying to me, when—when—”

Lenore didn't need Cassandra to finish the question. It had probably been uppermost in her mind for years.

“When I could have swayed you to
my
side? Well, even when I hated your father—and I hated him for a long time, Cassandra—I didn't want you to hate him. Your father had bestowed quite a legacy of issues on you. But also—also—”

Lenore's eyes began to tear and she had no hands with which to wipe them, given the heavy rubber gloves, the fingertips coated with paint thinner. She tried to press her eye to her shoulder, a futile gesture that almost made Cassandra cry. “You were always a daddy's girl, Cassandra. I could have made him look bad in your eyes, but that was never what I wanted. I only wanted you to think that I was interesting, too.”

“I do,” she said. “I think you're extraordinary.”

And just because she had never said it aloud didn't mean it wasn't true. Her mother
was
extraordinary. Cassandra thought back to the opening of her first book, the story of how she had found speech. How quickly Cassandra had skimmed over her mother's role in that beloved anecdote, the unnerving choice she had made when she pointed the family car down the icy slope of Northern Parkway. What was it like to
be home alone with a small child—a silent one at that—while one's husband moved in a world of ideas and clever talk? Was her mother really that different from Callie, depressed and overwhelmed, yearning for a man she could never have? Cedric had courted her and wooed her, recited Poe's “Lenore” to her—then moved on. Long before he met Annie, he had, in essence, abandoned Cassandra's mother. Yet she had refused to use her knowledge to turn Cassandra against him.

Lenore shook her head, refusing the compliment. “No, I was silly and embarrassing, the one you tolerated. That wouldn't have changed if I let you find out your father was lying to you. I didn't want your
relative
admiration. I wanted the real thing.”

“I never thought you silly.” She had, though. “And I was only embarrassed when I was a teenager. Every teenager is embarrassed by her mother.”

“Perhaps
silly
isn't the right word. Boring, I guess.
My Father's Daughter.
The title alone makes it clear. It was as if you hatched from an egg, as if that elephant, you know, had brought you to life.”

Her father would have invoked Zeus and Leda, Cassandra knew, but she liked the fact that her mother chose Dr. Seuss. “Horton?”

“Yes, Horton, that was the one. As if the elephant hatched the egg while I was off gallivanting.”

Lenore recovered herself, more or less, and returned to her work. Her shoulders twitched a little, as if she was still holding back some strong emotions, but she was otherwise composed.

“I came here first, the moment I learned,” Cassandra said. “You should know, there's…someone threatening to make this public, but I can keep that from happening. It's your decision.”

“More your father's, I would think. Go talk to him.”

“I will. But his counsel will be steeped in self-interest. He made his choices. You didn't. What should I do, Mom?”

She realized it might well be the first time in years that she had sought her mother's advice out of something more than politeness.

“Are you asking if I'll be humiliated if that old story comes out? A
little, I suppose, but nothing compared to what your father will experience. At the same time, I think he'll feel relieved. He's been dreading this thing at the Gordon School.”

“Shit.” Cassandra had quite forgotten the fund-raiser. Whatever she decided to do, she couldn't go forward with that farce. But if she canceled, she would have to offer a plausible explanation, perhaps even cover whatever money the school had already spent in preparation. Secrets are like floodwaters, she had warned Donna. But that was before she knew she had her own secret to protect.

“Why didn't Daddy say anything before the book came out?”

“It was too late. It's not like you came to us first and said what you were going to do. It was already done and sold. Of course, we didn't imagine that so many people would read it—”

“Of course.” Funny how galling that still was, being reminded that her own parents had not expected her to be successful.

“Even if we had, he never would have made you pull it back.
You
believed every word, after all. You took your father's story and made it something lovely. And it was true, in the important ways.”

“How can you say that?”

“He and Annie did love each other. He risked his life for her. Her boyfriend went after her first, and your father defended her. To him, it didn't matter if he met her in the middle of a riot or buying that stupid Washington's Birthday cake at Silber's bakery. It was love at first sight, a transforming event. He liked seeing that in print. Besides—he was proud of you, honey.”

“Proud when the book began selling, you mean.”

“No, proud that you finished a book. He couldn't get over that. In fact, that was the first time we spoke in years. He read that early copy you gave us—”

“The galleys.” She remembered that plain little book, bound in a matte blue cover, with great affection. The day she had taken her advance copy out of the Federal Express envelope, life had been all sheer
possibility. In many ways, life had exceeded the dreams and hopes she had that day. So why wasn't she happier?

“Right, and he called me, probably for the first time since you left high school, and said, ‘Can you believe this daughter of ours?' Oh, he was downright obnoxious, going all over town about what a good writer you were.”

“Really?”

“Really. I was the one who said—what about the, um, fact that it's not exactly true? And he said, ‘She wrote it so beautifully that she made it true.'”

Too little, too late. “That's the advantage of being duped,” Cassandra said. “One is nothing if not sincere.”

Indifferent to the dust and dirt, Cassandra slumped on an old kitchen stool, a relic from her mother's Swedish phase, possibly the very stool on which Callie had sat forty years ago. It was quiet on Hillhouse Road on a Sunday afternoon, quiet enough to hear her mother's steel wool moving up and down the table leg, the wind in the trees, the thrum of traffic on Forest Park Avenue below. She looked at the table. The grain was mottled, cheap pine most likely. Her mother would end up painting it. Her trash-picked find would cost her dozens of hours, and in the end, she would have a table that she could have purchased for fifty or sixty dollars at any midprice furniture store. But she worked with what she had. Everyone did.

“What are you going to do, Cassandra?”

“I'm not sure, Mom. There are financial implications, legal implications. At the very least, I owe a book, and if I don't deliver it, or something in its place, I have to return a rather large amount of money.”

“Do you have it?”

“Maybe. My financial situation is complicated by the fact that I have memoirs out there posing as nonfiction, when the very spine of the story is false. If they recall it, pulp it—well, I'll lose a big chunk of income that I thought I could count on for years.”

Her mother looked stricken at this. Scandal she could weather, but financial problems still unnerved her.

“It will be okay,” Cassandra assured her. “Somehow. I could sidestep the whole problem by writing a book about you.
My Mother's Daughter.
I'll set the record straight and make you the hero.”

She was joking. At least, she was pretty sure she was joking.

“No thank
you,
” Lenore said. “Besides, you'll be fifty next week, Cassandra. Whatever you are, whatever you write, you're your own person by now. Or should be.”