Secret Language (30 page)

Tracy’s head swivels back. “Is that true?”

“No,” Connie says, bewildered. “She never even knew he existed.”

“You can’t imagine how I felt, finally meeting my sisters! To finally see them in person! It was like we’d known each other forever.” Isadora touches the woman’s hand. “We’re
very
close.”

“Well of
course
,” the woman says, her hair swaying. “It’s the most natural bond in the world.”

“Exactly,” Isadora says. “When I was laid up for a while over the winter with a broken leg, they took me in and nursed me back to health.” A palpable silence descends upon the room. For a moment the sound blinks off, leaving Isadora’s lips moving desperately. When it returns she’s still going. “… while I was healing it gave me a chance to teach my nephew how to play blues guitar.” The woman murmurs something, then Isadora plunges on. “Yes, oh my God, he’s unbelievable. An absolute natural.”

Chris howls with laughter.

“Shut up,” Ben says, his face flaming.

“Save it, guys,” Joe warns them.

“It’s in the blood,” Isadora says. She twists her hands together like a child. The camera holds her a moment, then closes in on the brunette.

“Thank you, Isadora James.” She turns to the camera. “Isadora will appear later this summer in the Broadway revival of
Silver Moon
, a show that originated almost thirty years ago with her father, actor Billy Spaulding,”—she falters slightly—“the father she knew only as a voice on the line.”

The show is over. As the credits roll, the camera lingers on a long shot of Isadora and her interviewer, just shadows now in a darkened studio.

Connie is afraid to look anywhere. On the floor Ben is sitting up, stunned as a bird that has just hit a window. Chris is whispering explanations to Tracy. Finally, Connie steals a look at Faith. She’s leaning against Joe, who still holds her around the waist. Her fingers are gathered loosely over her mouth and her eyes are riveted to the
screen as if she were watching one of her sons perform dismally in a big game.

Chris snaps off the television but the room does not come to life. Ben looks miserable, having been falsely exposed as an eighth-grade blues prodigy.

“She wasn’t so far off about you, Ben,” Connie says, but she sees that her lie is worse than Isadora’s.

“None of your friends watch this, anyway,” Chris says.

“How do you know?” Ben snarls.

Chris shrugs. He did his best.

“Let’s get out of this room,” Faith says. “Connie, are you staying for supper?”

“Thanks,” Connie says quickly. She doesn’t want to be anyplace else tonight, least of all alone in her apartment.

Faith turns politely to Tracy. “Tracy?”

“Gee … no, thanks,” Tracy mumbles, as if aware of being caught inside some family business she’s not quite ready for. “I have to get home,” she says.

“Are you sure?”

Tracy nods. “I’ll be back later.”

She gets up quickly and Chris trails her to the door, where they kiss furtively for a few minutes before she leaves. A resigned look passes silently between Faith and Joe. He winks at Connie. “We’re getting there,” he says.

They all file into the kitchen, and the mechanism of dinnertime clacks into motion. Water hisses on the stove, the refrigerator groans open and closed. Ben is muttering to himself.

“Isadora only said that because she likes you, Ben,” Faith says.

“Think if she
didn’t
,” he grunts. “Boy, can’t she tell some whoppers.”

“Remember when we first met her?” Chris says. “All that stuff she supposedly knew about baseball?”

“What about it?” Joe says.

Ben shakes his head. “She didn’t know beans, Dad. She had the names all mixed up.”

“I don’t know what to say to her after this,” Connie says.

Faith turns from the stove. “I don’t think it makes much difference. She’s not what I’d call a good listener.”

Connie pauses. “I suppose not.”

“Why’d she make up all those stories?” Ben asks.

“I don’t know,” Faith says. “At least she didn’t mention us by name.”

The phone rings.

“Hello,” Faith says. She looks at Connie. “Yes, we saw it … No, Isadora, it’s all right—No, I understa—Isadora, it’s all—” She hands the receiver to Connie. “I’m sorry, she just exhausts me.”

Connie takes the phone. Isadora is still talking. “Isadora, it’s Connie.”

“Connie! You’re there, too? Did you see me on TV?”

“Yes. Where are you?”

“I’m standing right here in the studio. You should see this place! Listen, are you mad about what I said? The part about me and Billy, that’s just publicity. Garrett thought of it, it wasn’t my idea. Are you mad?”

“No. No harm done, I guess.”

“I don’t blame you if you’re mad. I didn’t even know what I was saying, it just came out on automatic.”

“It’s all right.”

“Are you sure? Are you still coming to the opening?”

“I don’t know about opening night. I’d rather wait until Faith can drive down with me.”

“No! You have to come to the opening, Connie, both of you!” She pauses for breath. “You’re mad, aren’t you? It was the broken leg, wasn’t it. Was that it?”

Connie closes her eyes. “Isadora, I’ll call you back tonight.”

“You’re not mad?”

“No.”

“Is Bob all right?”

“He’s fine.”

“Does he miss me?”

“I’m sure he does.” How is she supposed to tell?

“Promise you’re not mad?”

“Promise.”

She hangs up to find everyone looking at her. She sits down. “Isadora thought we might be mad,” she tells them.

They stay quiet, all of them, all through dinner. Down the street someone is calling a dog. The distant drone of a lawn mower drifts in and out of hearing. It seems to Connie they sit closer to the table than usual, and closer to each other. It seems to her they stay longer, and eat more heartily, as if to fortify themselves against Isadora’s version of the truth.

Bob has been missing for a day and a half. First Connie looked around the tidy grounds of her condominium complex, under the boxy hedges and behind the dumpster, then along the white paths of gravel that connect the squares of rear patios. She enlisted Stewart and Adam, who made a grim pilgrimage to the frog pond at the center of the complex in case Bob had drowned. Ben checked both sides of Brighton Avenue in case Bob had gotten hit. Faith and Joe walked the length of their street and the curving roads leading back to Connie’s in case Bob had gotten lost. Tracy drew a picture of Bob that Chris hung up at the Shop ’n’ Save in case Bob had gotten far lost. Phoebe and Joe Senior stopped over to walk the complex again, check the hedges again, peer around patio fences again, in case Bob was just hiding.

But the cat is gone.

Connie wakes late on Sunday and in her bathrobe goes out to check around the door, the walk, the little bush at the foot of the lamppost. She slams back into the house and calls Stewart.

“He’s still missing.”

“Don’t worry,” Stewart says. “Cats always find their way back home.”

A horrifying thought seizes her. “Oh my God, he’s probably walking to Brooklyn.”

“Take a bath, Connie. Drink some tea.”

The knot keeps its grip on her stomach. “She’ll never forgive me, Stewart.” She fiddles with the broken screen on the window through
which Bob escaped, cringing at the ragged edges. Had he wanted out that badly?

“That’s what she gets for palming the critter off in the first place,” Stewart says.

“She loves that stupid cat, Stewart. ‘How’s Bob,’ she asks me, the second I pick up the phone. She doesn’t even say hello.”

“Take a bath.”

She laughs a little. It sounds like old times. “I’m going out to look. At least I won’t be home if she calls.”

Connie has gotten used to walking, and knows all the turns of the neighborhood now. She walks slowly, calling “Bob … Bob …” in a self-conscious stage whisper. She has no real thought of finding him; he has never been outside, either here or in Brooklyn.

“Lose your dog?” someone asks, an old man standing in his yard with a pair of pruning shears.

“Cat,” she says. “Big brown cat, no tail.”

“I’ll let you know,” he says, and she knows he will, for she sees him out in his yard every time she comes this way.

She trudges on, trying to appear nonchalant while she rubbernecks back yards and half-open garages, hoping to see a pair of haughty yellow eyes. Ahead of her looms the specter of loss: not of the cat, but of Isadora somehow. The creature entrusted to her has disappeared. She’s not sure what the protocol is about losing your sister’s cat. Say you’re sorry? Buy a kitten? Say he turned up dead on the bedroom rug? In any case, she has bungled her sisterly duty. She stops calling for the cat and makes the rest of the circuit to Faith’s house.

The front door is open. “Faith?” Connie calls, but no one answers. She sticks her head inside but the house is silent. She knows this silence, its hidden comforts.

“Faith?” she calls again. She mounts the stairs and spots the attic ladder hanging down like a prop in a funhouse. She hears a faint scuffing above her.

When Connie pokes her head through the opening, she has to blink back a gauzy beam of sunlight coming through the south window. Faith is there, her pink blouse the only identifiable color in the
dusty, unpainted room. Among the ordinary odds and ends of a household stands an extraordinary object: a great, gilded traveling trunk with a rounded top, ornate as a treasure chest. Faith is on her knees, rummaging through it.

“I’m looking for something to give Chris,” she says. “I thought the baby should have something.”

Connie gazes into the trunk’s vast opening. “I’d almost forgotten this thing existed.” She remembers hauling it out of the trailer with the help of Faith’s new family.

“He’s been asking about Billy and Delle,” Faith says. “His upcoming fatherhood has put all sorts of notions in his head. Not to mention Isadora’s performance on that talk show.” She grimaces. “Heritage and destiny are his new favorite words.”

“Look at all this,” Connie murmurs. Although Faith has already removed one layer of things and stacked them on the floor, the trunk is still full.

“I know. I can’t imagine what he might want. I’d was hoping “I’d find something of Grammy’s in here.”

Connie’s mouth opens. A thought streaks across her consciousness like a riff of music. “It just dawned on me, Faith. This baby’s going to make you a grandmother.”

Faith laughs, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “How does ‘Great Aunt Connie’ sound to you?”

“It sounds old,” she says, “but I guess I don’t mind.”

“God knows they aren’t ready,” Faith says, “but I can’t help feeling happy.” She begins to sift idly through the trunk. “I’d never mention this to Chris and Tracy, of course, but I feel like I’ve got some kind of claim on her.”

“Her?”

“I’m hoping for a girl.”

“A baby girl,” Connie says. She crouches down to help Faith look for this baby girl’s present. The backstage scent of costumes and old wood permeates the room, rising like steam from the heap of belongings. Connie watches Faith extract one item after another from the chest, stunned by the clarity with which they return to her.

Faith holds up a pink feather boa. “
Mister Mistake
,” she says.

Connie nods. “That’s the one that closed in Seattle. Aptly named,
as I remember it.” She pulls a red velveteen cape from underneath a nest of photographs. “This is from
Count Your Change
.”

“
Smythe and Smythe
, the courtroom scene,” Faith says, lifting a pink gavel and laying it on the floor.

“It was endless, wasn’t it?” Connie says. “Always one more show.” She picks up the yellow bowler hat from
Same Old Song
and plucks a thread off its rim. The hush of the attic settles like hands on her shoulders. She takes a stack of photographs from a fat envelope and lays them down, one on top of another, exchanging brief, wordless glances with her sister as the chameleons that were her parents mug and preen from old glossy squares.

On and on, through the layers of the great trunk: newspaper reviews with lines blacked out and superlatives underlined in red ink; playbills and smeared musical scores and parts of scripts and pressed roses and small props; dozens and dozens of photographs, most of them publicity shots, including the one Isadora presented a year ago in Armand’s office, the gold heart laid flat against Marie Lazarro’s chest.

“Look at this one,” Faith says. She hands Connie another photograph. An ordinary snapshot, probably from Armand’s camera, of Billy and Delle under the marquee of
Silver Moon
, their hands elegantly poised on the shoulders of two stiff little girls. Their frilly white dresses look foolish as frosting on their stalwart postures. They are already tall.

“There we are,” Faith murmurs.

“We don’t look very happy,” Connie says. She stares into the picture, remembering that white dress, its prickly constrictions. Billy and Delle look shorter than she remembers, and not as mean. “I hated those dresses,” she says. “Those stupid shoes. Even back then I knew a prop when I saw one.” Faith’s breath is cool on her neck as she leans in to see the picture again.

“We were sort of pretty, don’t you think?” Faith says.

Connie places her hand on her heart, staring at the two little girls as if they were strangers she might once have tried to help. “But Faith, we were so unhappy.”

Faith takes the photograph in both hands. “You wanted everything to be different,” she says softly. She’s holding the picture close
to her face, her head bent down, her voice a small and distant thing. “My God, you were heartbreaking.” She seems to be speaking directly to the child in the photograph. “They should have named you Hope.”

Connie hugs herself. “It feels like they’re here.”

Faith looks furtively around. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“I do,” Connie says. “I believe in anything that can hurt me.” A timid, curiously intimate smile from Faith, which Connie takes as understanding, calms her.

Faith sets the photograph down on the floor, so precisely that Connie realizes that she means to sort in earnest, to lay these things out as if laying out bones. Within a few minutes they have three careful piles: one for Chris, one for Ben, one for Isadora. Still no present for the baby.