Secret Language (32 page)

“Are you okay?” Faith says.

“I think so.”

She moves her hand and Faith takes it up. “Good.” Their fingers twine around each other, the same fingers.

Suddenly Faith laughs. “You’ve got company.” Connie looks toward her front door, painted gray like all the other units in the complex. Plumped beneath it, with the self-possession of a visiting prince, sits a big brown cat.

“I don’t believe it,” Connie says. She slips out of the car and tiptoes down the walk, clucking softly, afraid of startling Bob into disappearing again. But the cat clearly has no such plan. He settles deeper into his own fur, plump as a tea cozy, staring. Connie reaches for him, picking him up exactly the way her nephew taught her.

“See?” she says, holding up the cat to Faith like a sign: this remarkable animal who, having never once seen this place from the outside, somehow found the way home.

It is a night like so many she remembers, the marquee lit up like a merry-go-round, a whirl of showy dresses sweeping through the theater doors. Armand is waiting just inside, fussily dressed—for
them
, Faith is pleased to recognize—in a silk suit with a handkerchief fluffed out of the breast pocket. Connie reaches him first, wending through the crowd easily from years of maneuvering through airports. Faith arrives in time to catch the powdery scent of Connie’s perfume on Armand’s wrinkled cheek.

“How was the drive?” he asks.

“It didn’t seem long,” Faith says. She glances at Connie, who raises her eyebrows good-naturedly. Seven hours in a car, miles of highway landscape, conversation patterned after the monks’ in Ben’s favorite joke. And yet she can see Connie agrees with her: It didn’t seem long.

“Have you seen Isadora?” Connie asks.

“No,” Armand says. “She had some notion it would be bad luck.” He squints up at the ceiling. “It’s crossed my mind that it might not be an altogether marvelous evening.” He pauses. “Things in the air, you know. A few ghosts.”

He looks different to Faith now—his Santa Claus face seems burdened by kindness, lined with a trail of wrongs he could not right. She pats his arm. “It’s all right,” she says. “Let’s go in.”

Armand shepherds them to the front row. Faith looks around self-consciously, suddenly aware of being gawked at.

“People are looking at us,” she whispers to Connie. “Why on earth would anybody care?”

Connie turns her head, scanning the crowd. “Garrett must have put out the word.”

Faith sighs. “God only knows what he said.”

“Brace yourself, here he comes.”

Faith is surprised to find Garrett so little changed. He’s wearing a handsome tuxedo that doesn’t quite fit. He kisses her hand, his thin lips dry on her skin. She remembers suddenly that Billy used to kiss ladies’ hands, an affectation he took on after playing an archduke.

“We’ve got a hit on our hands, friends,” Garrett says to them. “A hit like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Is that so,” Armand says genially.

“We got the last of the bugs worked out in Pittsburgh. It’s a gold mine, mark my words.”

“So marked.”

“You ladies will want to pose for some shots backstage,” Garrett says. “The three sisters and all that jazz.” He moves his shoulders inside his tux and pulls down the sleeves. “The press is hot for it.”

Faith blinks. “I don’t think so.”

“You’ll change your mind,” he says, rapping on her chair arm. “Enjoy!” The house lights begin to dim and he disappears into the hush of the crowd.

After a sluggish, meandering overture and the requisite applause, the curtain rises. The set is thrillingly huge, a seemingly endless expanse of sky and field. At the fading edge of the applause enters Isadora, stranded stage left in pink gingham, no bigger than a locust against these tricks of the eye, miles and miles of waving, sun-glinted corn stalks. Already Faith can see that the show is a failure. Next to her Connie’s breathing stutters, as if this recognition has passed like a current from one sister to the other.

Oblivious, Isadora propels herself through each scene, hurling her lines over the footlights as if she were begging for mercy. When the leading man appears out of the burnished corn rows—a dark-haired, six-foot bear of a boy—Isadora seems to shrink even further into the scenery, nothing but a husky voice to prove her presence. They look strange together, stranger still when they sing: the boy’s notes float from his thick throat in a delicate, incongruous tenor,
while Isadora’s warm, whiskey-soaked tones give her farm girl a disquieting air of the street.

Faith can’t bear to watch. She turns away, focusing instead on Connie, whose profile shimmers in the creamy light coming off the stage, her eyelashes casting a spidery shadow on her cheek.

“Faith,” Connie whispers, staring straight ahead.

Faith turns back to the stage. “I know.” She closes her eyes, letting the show wash over her—the familiar score, the remembered melodies, the flurry of dialogue. Listening, but not seeing, she allows herself to spiral back into time. Even then,
Silver Moon
was just another silly musical, yet Billy and Delle had possessed enough talent, heart—
something—
to transform it. She remembers their faces, ruddy with joy, singing their plain intentions, two kids trying to save the farm. How did they do it? From what pocket of their exhausted souls did they retrieve this sweetness, this simple yearning? She remembers watching in wonder, remembers her fleeting belief that these wholesome lovers were the real Billy and Delle.

It is possible to live an imagined life. This Faith knows. She begins to believe Billy and Delle could have had a cache of sweetness stored somewhere, held in reserve for their life on stage. And what might she herself have hidden, in her own reserves?
Willingness
is the word that comes to her; a virtue far short of courage, but, in the business of ordinary living, more practical. She holds to this thought, suddenly missing Joe.

The show is over. The audience, irritable from suffering ninety minutes with no intermission, offers a halfhearted rumble of applause. Isadora takes the final bow, a bouquet of roses bunched in her arms, her eyes flickering over the front row, full of questions. By the time the house lights begin to come up, most of the audience is already moving, gathering wraps and purses, a steady, querulous murmur circling through the rows. “Ill-bred bunch,” Armand says. The curtain is not quite down, the house lights not quite up.

An instinct for escape seizes Faith as she looks frantically for the exits, but the doors are clogged with theatergoers making their way out. At the back of the crowd she spots two tiny women, each with identical rolls of silver-blue curls arranged like hats on their heads. They are ancient, stooped, obviously sisters, decrepit in exactly the
same way, walking deliberately, cautiously, arms hooked together for purchase. Faith watches their slow progress, resisting the inclination to help them. All evening she’s thought of nothing but thirty years past, yet here before her is a glimpse of thirty years hence. Two sisters left after a spate of sorrows, the inevitable string of losses: Phoebe and Joe Senior; Armand; one of the brothers, perhaps, or two; one of the wives, a child, a grandchild—all of this unthinkable, yet she thinks it—perhaps even Joe himself, or one of her own sons.

In this view of the future, she and Connie remain. She can imagine a front door, not the front door of the house she lives in now, but another house, one like the Connecticut house before her grandmother left it. She can imagine the doorstep of that house on an ordinary day, a visit from her sons and their children. They will be standing at the door in a cluster—Isadora is there, too, she’s surprised to see—all of them holding something: a baby, a round of bread or some flowers, a birthday present. The sky will be streaming down on them, lighting the tops of their heads as they wait for Faith and Constance to open the door.

“Do you think we can do this?” Connie says. Faith turns, startled, and sees that Connie intends to go backstage. “She’ll be looking for us, Faith. We have to go.”

Armand hangs back, leaving it all to her. Faith lets out her breath. “We’ll just tell her she was wonderful.” All at once it seems easy. “We can say she lit up the stage.”

Connie nods solemnly. “That’s just what I was thinking.”

Faith glances back at Armand. “You coming?”

He shakes his head. “I’m not a brave man.”

“Wait for us, then,” Faith says, and begins to move up the aisle, Connie at her elbow.

Backstage the air is sparked with a current of recrimination, but this is Broadway: the room is filling anyway, with cast members and friends from the new and original
Silver Moon
. To Faith some of these people look familiar, but she cannot recall what they might once have meant to her. She stands still, trying to orient herself to the blur of faces, feeling for the nearness of Connie, whose shoulder bumps against hers. She sights the yellow top of Isadora’s head flitting
through the crowd. “There you are!” Isadora calls, moving through the thicket of bodies.

Faith lifts her hand just as Connie lifts hers, in the same shallow arc. The gesture is involuntary, precise: an offering they are making together. Faith watches, fully present, as Isadora reaches for them, flattens herself against them, holding on as if they were the last living things.

The crowd presses in: warm, insistent, curious. Faith allows it, she is willing; the rush of voices wheels around her, a cloud of sound. Already she can see the way home, the seven-hour drive, the hushed capsule of space, the peaceful drone of the engine, the quiet of Connie’s company. Their silence is a mystery they need not solve. It is simply a way of being together, the way birds fall silent in autumn, their work done, nothing to do but leave one place for another. They lift themselves from the earth, their destination a secret they know without knowing, the blue distance before them a pure and perilous thing.

M
ONICA
W
OOD

A Reader’s Guide

Debra Spark
is the author of the novels
Coconuts for the Saint
and
The Ghost of Bridgetown.
She teaches fiction writing at Colby College and Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers
.

Debra Spark:
You dedicate this book, your first novel, to Anne Wood, your sister, and, you write in the dedication, your “guardian angel.” I know that two of your siblings (a brother and a sister) are quite a bit older than you (and your other two siblings). Indeed, Anne was your high school English teacher. Can you tell me a bit about her and her influence on your writing?

Monica Wood:
You just asked me about one of my favorite subjects! Anne
was
my high school English teacher. She was—and is—the center of our family.

Let me tell you a story about Anne, an emblematic story.

I grew up thinking I was some kind of child prodigy, and the evidence for this was some letters I wrote to Anne, when I was five or six years old, and she was in college. Over the years, Anne mentioned these letters as proof positive of my talents. Recently, I was going through my mother’s cedar chest and found the letters. They said things like, “Hi, Anne. How are you? I am fine. I miss you.” That was basically it. All of them were pretty much the same.

“Are these the letters you’ve been telling me about?” I asked her.

She said, “Oh, yes,” all misty-eyed, and I’m saying, “Are these ALL the letters?” I kept hoping there was a secret stash somewhere.

DS:
Could you tell me a bit more about the rest of your family?

MW:
It’s an Irish-Catholic mill family from Mexico, Maine. My grandfather, father, and brother worked all their lives in the paper mill. My father was born and raised on Prince Edward Island, and my mother’s family also came from there, so there’s a strong Canadian influence. For example, we didn’t grow up with strong Maine accents—you can hear maritime Canada as much as western Maine in our speech. Also, my family is kind of unusual in that there are two generations of kids with the same parents. Anne and my brother Barry are fourteen and nineteen years older than Cathe, Betty, and me.