Secret Language (29 page)

“Bad day?” she asks him.

Chris shakes his head, rubbing the stains on his hands. Lately everything she says to him must be measured first by the teaspoon. It always amazed her that, through the transmutations of adolescence, he still liked her. Now she’s not so sure.

“You’ve picked a fine time to turn into me,” she says cheerfully, but he chooses not to hear her. Joe’s coming back must surely please Chris (Ben, for his part, literally jumped for joy) but he seems bent on making them guess. His silence is eerie, and maddening. In the
balance that has always marked this household, they might be exchanging skins.

Outside she hears the clink-clink of Joe pawing through his socket set. She can see only the top of his head now, over the murky engine hold of the Corvair. Her eyes drift once again to Chris, who startles her by staring straight at her, his eyes just a faint wash of green in this light.

“Mom,” he says. He takes a breath. “Tracy’s pregnant.”

Her mouth opens. “Oh my God.”

“We’re getting married.”

A blizzard of ruined images falls before her. “Chris. Oh—” The table top seems to be turning under her hands; the floor shifts viciously. “Chris, you just turned eighteen.”

He won’t look at her. “Her mother said we can live in one of their apartments for a while. Rent free, while we get on our feet.” Numb, Faith listens. “I figure I can work during the day and go to school at night.”

“Chris. Honey, there must be some other—”

“No,” he says. “No abortion. No adoption. This is my baby we’re talking about, Mom.”

She freezes, stunned into silence, as if caught in headlights. His eyes shine back at her, sincere and resolute. Helpless, she watches the baby who once frightened her witless make his final transformation into a man. “How long—”

“She’s due in November.”

“November.” She tries to make the word mean something. This is June, his high school graduation days away. “How long have you known?”

“A while.” He grimaces. “I didn’t have the guts to tell you.”

A grandchild.

She stands at the sink, drinking a glass of water. How did she get here? She finds her son standing near her and gathers him, big and loose-limbed, into her arms.

“Mom.” She hears the gritted teeth. “I’m scared.” She knows exactly how his life must look to him, a vast cavern with nothing in it but things he doesn’t know. His big hands grip her around the
waist and she thinks of those hands on a basketball, the graceful arc on release.

“You know a lot more than you think you do, Chris,” she tells him. She pets his soft hair. “Believe it.” He drapes his arms across the back of her shoulders. He is tall, but it’s clear this time who is doing the holding. “When you were a baby I was scared to death,” she tells him. “I thought the whole world knew a big secret.” She presses on his back. “But there’s no secret, honey. It’s just one foot in front of the other, that’s all it is.”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” he whispers. His need is a palpable thing.

By the time Joe comes in, wiping his hands on a rag, Chris is deep in his room and Faith has grown accustomed to the thought of a grandchild, even as she grieves for her son’s lost chances. She imagines a little girl with her grandfather’s black hair.

“Chris needs you,” is all she says, and Joe disappears up the stairs.

She decides to give them time. She gazes out at the convalescing Corvair, its body repaired, parts of the engine still broken. The phone rings.

“Broadway, Broadway, here I come!”

Faith puts her fingers to her forehead. “Isadora, this isn’t a good time.”

“Didn’t you hear me? Faith! August twenty-fifth at the Palace Theater. We did it!”

“That’s great, Isadora. Congratulations.”

“Will you come to the opening?”

“I—”

“August twenty-fifth, are you free?”

“Isadora, this isn’t the best—”

“I need an answer. Connie won’t fly, so I thought you could drive down together. All of you.”

“I don’t know. Ben has baseball camp that week.”

“So?”

“Chris is working.”

“You and Joe can come, then.”

“We have to be around, Isadora. If we have to go get Ben, if something happens …”

“Then come alone. With Connie, I mean.”

“Isadora, this really isn’t a good—”

“Faith, you
have
to come.” Faith sighs.

“So you’ll come? Faith, I don’t have anybody else. Believe me, you find out who your friends are when you make it to the top.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Think hard, okay?”

After they hang up Faith goes upstairs. From Chris’s room comes the chop of Joe’s voice and Chris’s stark retorts. She opens the door. They are facing each other, two men: their bodies rigid, planted, as if they’d each been struck. Joe turns to her.

“It’s goddamned
raining
condoms in here and Tracy’s pregnant.”

“I know.”

“He’s goddamned eighteen years old.”

“Shh. I know.”

He turns back to his son. “Do you have any idea how much responsibility you’re taking on here, pal?” His pupils are big and black. “Do you have any idea how much work, how much time, how much of your goddamned
soul
you’re about to give over?”

“Joe—”

“A goddamned avalanche, that’s how much. And sometimes no matter how hard you try, no matter how hard you work and pray, sometimes no matter what the goddamned hell you do, it doesn’t
work
. Do you have any idea—”

“Shut up!” Chris says. His face is red and tight and shaking. “I haven’t got a clue, are you happy now? I’m not like you, Dad, I don’t have a fucking road map for everything!” He makes a sound, a deep, manly groan, and slams out of the room.

Joe sinks to the bed and slumps forward, elbows on knees, hands dangling like mittens on a string. Faith sits next to him and lays her arm across his shoulders. “You’re missing a part,” she tells him.

He closes his eyes, shaking his head gently. “What’s that?”

“Sometimes no matter what the hell you do, it works out anyway.”

He gropes for her hand. “Aw, Christ.” He lies back on the bed, taking her with him. “I had such hopes for him.”

“You still do,” she says. “You know it.”

They lie there, holding hands, staring up at the ceiling. It is marred by old tape marks from the days when Chris used to hang big, black posters of rock bands named after reptiles. Faith’s first thought is to paint it over, a fresh white start. For whom? This room will soon be empty. Her hand is warm and moist where Joe holds it. She decides to leave the ceiling as it is, scars and all.

Isadora’s cat has ripped the white chair, the one near the window, to smithereens. “No!” Connie yells, and swats the cat on the nose, but Bob doesn’t flinch. He simply stares at her, a silent, smarmy, yellow-eyed pronouncement on her life.

Ben gives her pointers. “Pick him up like this, Aunt Connie,” he says, showing her. He puts Bob down again, petting his brown head. “Now you.”

She imitates him, scooping her hand under the cat’s big feet, lifting him under the chest with the other. He stays in her arms.

“There,” Ben says. “See?”

Ben has a way of surprising her with all kinds of knowledge. He has taken to stopping by for short visits, usually on his way home from somewhere: school, his friend Rick’s house, or Phoebe and Joe Senior’s, where he and Rick practice with their band in the garage. She’s always glad to see him, and it seems he arrives each time with information of some kind: how many men on a hockey team, the difference between a country scale and a blues scale, Reggie Lewis’s field goal percentage, how to pick up a cat. She listens to him, considering his company a gift she has done nothing to deserve but doesn’t mind taking. After her long convalescence, Ben is her best sign of life.

“I wouldn’t mind getting a cat,” he says. “I think Mom and Dad are weakening.” He says “Mom and Dad” with a certain intonation, a mixture of surprise and satisfaction that implies a mom and dad who sleep in the same bed.

“How’s the band?” she asks.

He sits heavily on the ruined chair. “We sort of broke up.” He sighs like an old man. “Nobody likes the blues.”

Connie smiles. The broken-up band notwithstanding, Ben’s body seems to pitch forward with the anticipation of a school year winding down, a summer ahead, the whirl of high school waiting beyond that. She envies him his forward motion, even though she likes her new job, its daily-ness, its distance from danger. At noon every day she leaves the office and walks to Monument Square, where she sits under Lady Victory with a sandwich and a couple of colleagues, watching the homey, noontime bustle. One of the women in the office also used to fly, and Connie thinks they might become friends. She feels young, but not in the way of the youngsters who come to her to be interviewed, their hair done in certain identical ways, a certain collective knowing in their carefully made-up eyes. She feels young in the way of a having a second chance, young in the way of learning a new neighborhood, young in the way of acquainting herself with the landmarks of life on the ground.

“How about I give you a ride home,” she says to Ben. “I haven’t seen your mother in a while.”

They leave Bob to wreak havoc in private, closing the door on his willful face.

“Wanna hear a joke, Aunt Connie?” Ben asks as Connie pulls her car onto Brighton Avenue.

“I love your jokes.”

“It’s about the Patriots.”

“Baseball, right?”

He looks to the car roof for mercy. “Scratch this one, Aunt Connie. Guaranteed you won’t get it.”

Connie reaches over and cuffs his hair. “You should’ve known better.”

When they get to Faith’s, the house is quiet except for the murmur of the television in the den. Faith appears in the hall when Ben calls out.

“Isadora’s on TV,” she says dryly.

“You’re kidding!” Ben shouts, and races into the den. Faith follows him, and Connie follows Faith without a word. Chris and Tracy are sprawled on the rug, close to the screen. They look tragically
young, Connie thinks, stripped of their adolescent hardiness. Ben stretches out next to them on his stomach, one fist tucked under his chin, the other arm slung over the dog.

Connie recognizes the show: “Heart to Heart,” an entertainment program that comes on before the news: gossipy stories about TV and movie stars, and once a week a live interview with a New York stage actor to spruce up its image.

A statuesque brunette sits in one of those slate-blue interview swivel chairs, chatting with Isadora, who is perched in a matching chair that’s too large for her. She’s wearing a small black dress, the familiar glossies of
Silver Moon
spread out on her lap. Connie misses her. She hasn’t seen her in months.

“What’s—”

“Shh!” Ben says, without turning.

“… the same show where my mother met Billy Spaulding,” Isadora is saying. “I can’t tell you what a thrill it is to bring this show back, just the way it was.” She looks directly at the brunette in a way the woman seems to find endearing. On television Isadora’s eyes look unnaturally green.

“They’ve restored all the original songs,” Faith whispers. “The moon is silver again.”

“Isadora said that?” Connie whispers back.

Faith nods. “When all was said and done they couldn’t bear to alter a classic.” The corner of her mouth flickers in the blue light of the TV screen, and it takes Connie a minute to realize they’re sharing a family joke. She remembers Billy and Delle, suddenly fired, lamenting their “classic” being ruined by Garrett and a new director and a brace of understudies who had the temerity to show up sober for every curtain.

The brunette swivels her chair toward the camera. “Theater buffs will remember him as one half of Billy and Delle Spaulding, the acting duo whose career was cut short by personal turmoil, alcohol, and premature death.” She begins to quote from reviews of the original
Silver Moon
, asking Isadora how she thinks the revival will compare. Each snippet rustles in Connie some half-formed memory, and she can feel Faith tensing next to her. They could be standing
under a marquee somewhere, side by side and not touching, nine and eleven years old.

The camera flits back and forth from the interviewer to the interviewee. Something is happening in Isadora’s face. Her eyes take on a ferocious wanting, her whole body seems to swell. Connie finds this physical attitude unsettling, for it is reminiscent of Billy and Delle at their worst, so stuffed with themselves she feared they might literally burst. Connie turns, begins to say something to Faith’s implacable profile.

“Shhh!” comes a voice from the floor. Chris this time. “They’re talking about you guys.”

“… as if the fates brought you face to face with your heritage and your destiny at the same time,” the woman says, tapping Isadora’s wrist for emphasis.

“Wow,” Chris murmurs. He moves even closer to Tracy.

Isadora lifts her eyes slowly. For the first time it crosses Connie’s mind that Isadora can probably act.

Joe has slipped into the room. He smells of machinery, though he has shed his coveralls and his hands are more or less clean. He touches Connie’s shoulder, whispers hello, then stands behind Faith, twining his arms around her waist. She tilts her head back and says something to him.

“Sh-shhhhh!”

“And then when I met my sisters, we
literally
fell into each other’s arms and cried,” Isadora is saying. Her fingers are moving like butterflies. “They’d been looking for me for
years
.”

Ben and Chris turn as one face, their mouths half open, but before Connie or Faith can say anything they are all riveted back to the set by Isadora’s voice.

“Billy told them about me the night he died.” Isadora casts her eyes down. “It was just like he … knew … he wouldn’t be coming back.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Faith says.

The camera moves in tight on Isadora’s face. “For some reason, though, he never told me about them.”

“You
knew
him?” the interviewer asks, her eyes flickering over her notes.

“Oh, yes. It was a secret, of course. He used to call me a couple of times a week, at night.” She smiles. “Sort of like tucking me in.”