Family Secrets Read online

  Vanessa looked again at the postmark on the envelope. Her father would have been little more than a week old when it was written.

  Once again the living room was filled with silence. Vanessa became aware of the street sounds eight floors below. A distant siren. Squealing tires. Horns honking. Laughter.

  “I thought about putting the letter back in the Bible or maybe just throwing it away,” Penelope admitted. “But the woman who wrote it is your grandmother.”

  “She’s probably dead by now,” Ellie pointed out.

  “Maybe,” Penelope said with a shrug. “Or maybe not.”

  “So what do you think we should do about the letter?” Vanessa asked.

  “That’s up to you girls,” Penelope said.

  “I think we should take a trip to Montana and look for her,” Georgiana announced with an emphatic shake of her curly mop. “That’s what Daddy would have expected us to do.”

  “I’ll bet the single men in Montana are all straight as arrows,” Ellie observed in a wistful voice.

  “We can’t just go traipsing off to Montana looking for an old woman named Hattie,” Vanessa pointed out.

  “Why not?” Georgiana demanded with a wave of a perfectly manicured hand. “Lots of people who were adopted find their birth parents. I don’t see why we can’t find our birth grandmother. I’m sure there are Web sites that explain how to search for long-lost relatives.”

  “Well, I have a family to look after,” Vanessa reminded them. A family that should have been here with her tonight, but the girls had been invited to a slumber party, and, as was usually the case, Scott had some reason not to accompany her into Manhattan. Tonight he’d claimed that his throat was sore when she knew that he really wanted to watch a baseball game. And what she really wanted was for just her and her sisters to watch their mother unwrap the portrait and witness her delight from the gift itself and from her daughters’ thoughtfulness.

  Their mother’s reaction had been tepid. Not one of delight. Vanessa took a deep breath fighting against a wave of disappointment. Bitter disappointment. And even anger.

  The mysterious letter and its envelope now sat on the coffee table next to the portrait. Why had her mother chosen to show it to them on her birthday?

  Now that Vanessa thought about it, Mother had seemed preoccupied all evening. And when Vanessa had used the bathroom before they left for the restaurant, she noticed a stack of cardboard boxes in her parents’ bedroom. The top box was opened, and she recognized various items of her father’s clothing folded inside. Vanessa picked up his favorite cardigan and buried her face in it. Of course, she didn’t expect her mother to hang on to her father’s clothes forever. Probably seeing them still hanging there in his closet made her sad. The clothes would be sent to some charity, which was the correct thing to do.

  But the thought made Vanessa momentarily ill. She felt as though her father’s memory were being erased.

  Vanessa had not looked in her father’s study, but she wondered if her mother had also been going through the desk, file cabinets, and bookcases deciding what should be kept and what should be disposed of. That’s why she’d come across Vera’s Bible and the letter hidden away among its pages.

  But why this sudden rush of activity after living among Daddy’s things for the last year? Vanessa took comfort in them. His presence still permeated every corner of the apartment.

  Then a disturbing thought crossed her mind.

  “You aren’t planning to sell the apartment, are you?” Vanessa asked her mother. After she’d spoken the words, she realized that they had sounded accusatory. Ellie and Georgiana both looked startled that she would ask such a thing.

  Penelope shook her head. “No, but I am planning to rent it.”

  “Rent it! Why would you do that?” Georgiana asked, puzzlement in her voice.

  “Because I don’t want to live here anymore,” Penelope said with a small shrug, “and rentals being what they are in this part of town, the apartment will provide a nice income for me.”

  “I don’t understand,” Vanessa said. “Why don’t you want to live here anymore? It’s our home.”

  “It was your home,” Penelope corrected. “It’s where your father and I raised our three daughters, but you girls live elsewhere now, and as much as I loved your father, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life living with his ghost. You girls are welcome to whatever you want of all this stuff,” she said with an airy wave of her hand apparently indicating the entire contents of the living room and the rooms beyond. “I plan to get rid of the rest. The painters and carpet layers are scheduled next month. And I guess I’ll have to do something about the antiquated kitchen.”

  Her mother didn’t want to keep anything? Vanessa was stunned.

  “I know my decision comes as a surprise to you girls,” Penelope continued, “but I wanted to wait until I was absolutely sure before I said anything. And I wanted the three of you together when I told you about my plans.”

  “Where will you live?” Ellie asked, her voice quivering.

  Penelope’s arms were resting on the arms of the chair. Her chin was high, her gaze distant. A tiny smile was playing with her lips. “I plan to live in a lovely old farmhouse in the south of France,” she said.

  “France!” Ellie and Vanessa exclaimed in unison.

  “You can’t be serious,” Georgiana said. “Why would you want to live in France?”

  “Because I’ve lived my entire life in this city and would like to live someplace else before I die,” Penelope said, then added with a girlish shrug, “and because it makes be happy to be there.”

  “How could you know that?” Vanessa demanded, not even trying to keep the disapproval from her voice. “You’ve never been to France before.”

  “Oh, but I have,” Penelope said with an enigmatic smile that would have done the Mona Lisa proud. “I was there just last week.”

  Vanessa exchanged glances with her sisters. Their mother was losing her mind. She could not possibly have gone to France on her own and without any of them even knowing about it.

  “You must be thinking of Montreal,” Vanessa suggested.

  “No, my dear, I was thinking of France. A small village in Provence. It’s called Château de Roc.

  Two

  ELLIE waited until the elevator door slid closed before announcing, “Mother has met a man.”

  “That’s absurd,” Vanessa snapped.

  Ellie felt a wave of irritation at her older sister. Vanessa could be such a know-it-all. “You’re right,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Mother just woke up one morning and out of the blue decided to get rid of everything she owned and leave behind her daughters and granddaughters and friends of a lifetime and move half a world away from the only city she’s ever lived in.”

  “She probably met him online,” Georgiana said with a sigh.

  “How disgusting for you even to think such a thing,” Vanessa told her sisters with her shoulders square, her chin high, her voice filled with indignation. “Sixty-year-old widows still grieving for the love of their life don’t violate their dead husband’s memory by going online to find a man to run off with.”

  Then Vanessa burst into tears.

  Ellie and Georgiana immediately put their arms around her and tried to soothe. “Come on, Nessa, it’s not the end of the world,” Ellie said.

  As the elevator door opened, Ellie thought about suggesting they find a quiet bar and discuss this surprising turn in their lives, but she had other plans for the rest of the evening. And Georgiana would be heading for the club where her nerdy musician boyfriend was playing. Besides, while a part of Ellie would like her mother to be the keeper of the family shrine for the rest of her days, she could understand how even a sixty-year-old woman might want something more in her life.

  On the sidewalk in front of the building the sisters hugged each other, then Georgiana headed for the subway entrance and Ellie stepped to the curb to hail a cab. “You want a ride
to Grand Central?” she asked Vanessa.

  Vanessa shook her head. “No, I think I left my cell phone in the apartment,” she said over her shoulder as she headed back toward the building entrance. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  Oh dear, Ellie thought. Now Vanessa’s going to go give poor Mother the third degree. Momentarily she thought about following Vanessa and acting as an intermediary or whatever. But when a cab pulled up to the curb, she got in.

  “JoJo’s on Lafayette,” she told the driver, and went about the business of transforming herself, removing her chic Marc Jacobs jacket to reveal a strapless, red-satin bustier, using hair spray to give her hair a more tousled look, adding a heavy coat of glossy red lipstick and an ample dusting of blush.

  Growing up, Ellie had assumed that she would someday fall deeply in love with a man as kind and loving as her father had been and have children with him. But throughout the third decade of her life she’d seen what marriage and motherhood had done to her older sister, who used to be beautiful and loads of fun. Now Vanessa was a worried, frazzled mother of two and the wife of a nice-enough-but-

  somewhat-ineffectual man who claimed to be marketing business property online but didn’t seem to be contributing much to the household budget. Ellie found herself wondering if she really wanted to share her domicile with anyone—male or female, adult or child, two-legged or four-legged.

  But something began happening to her about the time she turned thirty. She wasn’t sure if it was hormonal or societal or just plain insanity, but she started taking notice of babies. Really noticing them. Wherever she came upon babies—in restaurants, on the street, in a park, on the subway—she couldn’t take her eyes off them. Babies were like magnets. Ellie felt an almost worshipful reverence for them and found that she adored baby toes, baby shoulders, baby thighs. She wanted to be a mother. She could actually feel the emptiness of her uterus.

  Just about the time she started going nuts over babies, she began noticing something about the babies’ fathers, who were delighted to show off their offspring and who were the sort of earnest, wholesome-yet-sexy-in-a-sweet-vulnerable-way kind of guy she’d been looking for. Maybe fatherhood turned inconsiderate, self-centered, egotistical men into decent guys who sincerely loved their wives and children. Maybe a girl just had to take a man on faith no matter how much of a jerk he appeared to be and hope for the best.

  The problem was the straight guys in her day-to-day life were few and far between. Ellie’s domain was the world of fashion, and most of the men she worked with—fashion designers, graphic artists, hairdressers, makeup artists, photographers, and the like—were gay. Actually, she preferred the company of gay men, but they weren’t much good when a girl was horny. Or when she wanted to get married and have a baby.

  By the time the cab had reached its destination, Ellie had completely transformed her look from stylish career woman into sex kitten on the prowl. JoJo’s had been described in the Village Voice as a hot singles nightspot for the overthirty crowd. Ellie had been to many such nightclubs since beginning her quest and hated them all. Hated putting herself on display. Hated wearing attire that had nothing to do with the sleek, fashionable woman she really was. Hated the blatant, over-the-top flirting. Hated the entire scene. And kept vowing that she wasn’t going that route ever again. But a friend of a friend had set her up with an “all but divorced” guy named Boone—Ellie wasn’t sure if that was his first name or his last name. Apparently JoJo’s had been Boone’s suggestion. She’d told the friend of a friend to tell Boone that she’d be wearing a red dress and a white gardenia in her hair.

  The gardenia!

  She paid the cabbie, then fished the fake flower out of her Chloé leather tote and clipped it over her right ear as she made her way through the milling crowd on the sidewalk.

  She left the tote with the hatcheck girl, then waited for her eyes to adjust to the dim light and the pulsating strobes. The music was deafening. The dance floor was a gyrating, arm-waving mass of humanity. Ellie closed her eyes and allowed the music to take her. Her body began to sway. Her arms floated over her head. Please let Boone show up. And please let him be thoughtful and kind and attractive and smart and not looking for a one-night stand but for a woman to cherish and spend the rest of his life with and make a baby with.

  Georgiana sat alone at a small round table just outside the spotlight illuminating Trisha Bell, a plump, middle-aged singer who’d had a huge hit decades ago. “My One True Love” was still being sung at weddings and was familiar to most adults of a certain age. The bar on Houston in the West Village was packed with older tourists for whom the name Trisha Bell had some meaning. A band of six was accompanying her with Georgiana’s boyfriend, Freddy, on the electric guitar.

  The waiter appeared with a vodka tonic. Compliments of Freddy, he told her. Before she could tell him to bring water instead, the waiter was gone.

  She’d had a glass of wine at the restaurant and champagne with the birthday cake. To avoid fluid retention in her hands and feet, she never drank anything alcoholic or ate salty food forty-eight hours before a photographic shoot, and she had a shoot scheduled first thing Monday morning.

  And to make sure her feet exhibited no marks or redness, she wore only soft moccasins for twelve hours before a shoot. She also had weekly manicures and pedicures performed by Dr. Lou, an elderly Chinese podiatrist who’d been recommended by the modeling agency as the best in the business. Per Dr. Lou’s instructions, Georgiana buffed her nails and rubbed cocoa butter into her hands and feet several times a day and avoided shoes that might put undue pressure on any part of the foot. Dr. Lou told her that the longest any hand and/or foot model—even those who religiously followed his instructions—could expect to be successful was the early thirties, after which time the skin started to coarsen, veins became more prominent, and ridges began to appear in the nails. And don’t get pregnant, he warned. “Pregnant bery, bery bad for hands and feet. Make hands and feet puffy.”

  Georgiana’s plan had been to save half of the money she made so that by the time she was thirty she could carry herself over a lean year or two while she became established as a prominent creator of art photography but now worried that might not be a feasible expectation. Not that she wasn’t making a significant amount of money, but it took so damned much just to get by.

  Georgiana had really been into photography during high school and never went anyplace without a camera. At NYU she’d been a fine arts major with an emphasis in photography until the hand and foot thing came along out of the blue. A woman on the subway told her that she had beautiful hands and asked if she’d ever thought of being a hand model. The very next day Georgiana began calling agencies. It turned out that her feet were beautiful, too.

  Now that she was busy with her modeling career, she had little time for pursuing the art of photography, but she couldn’t pass by a photographic gallery without going inside. And she was always looking at the world through an imaginary lens framing imaginary pictures. She was a purist using only black-and-white film and developing it herself and was no more tempted by digital technology than a painter would be.

  Even now as she sat at the tiny nightclub table, she imagined how she would photograph Trisha Bell in the smoke-filled column of light. Then her attention moved to the shadows. To Freddy’s barely illuminated form. Every sinew of his body was concentrating on the music. It didn’t matter that he was playing sappy ballads from the sixties and seventies. His job was to make music, and just as Georgiana had a fascination for images captured with a camera—from the faded snapshots she’d come across in shoeboxes and albums at junk stores to Ansel Adams landscapes in pricey galleries—Freddy had a passion for all music from hillbilly to classical. She knew that her sisters didn’t understand why she hung in there with a guy whose occupation required him to make music into the wee small hours of the morning and who didn’t care diddly-squat about clothes and money and impressing people unless it was with his virtuosity. But Freddy was sweet and
lovable, and their relationship was as comfortable as her favorite pair of bedroom slippers. And that counted for a lot, she told herself. Except sometimes she wished he were as good with words as he was with melodies.

  Georgiana took just a tiny sip of the drink, which tasted wonderfully crisp and cool, and thought of the hundreds of nights she’d spent sitting at a table or standing backstage as she watched Freddy play his guitar with whatever trio or combo or group of which he was currently a member.

  When they’d first started hanging out together, Freddy was the best-looking, smartest, most popular boy in the tenth grade. No one from those days would even recognize him now, what with the long hair, piercings, tattoos, and the scrawny body that he’d acquired after he’d left home and no longer ate meals regularly. She’d had other boyfriends off and on over the years, but she hadn’t gone out with anyone else for almost two years, long enough that it irritated her when one of her sisters asked if she was “still seeing Freddy.”

  Trisha Bell was singing a ballad about a convict escaping from prison so he could see his dying wife one last time. It was hokey as hell, but Georgiana found herself dabbing her eyes with the tiny, stiff paper napkin that came with her drink. After the convict had been shot dead by the sheriff’s men and the song ended to loud applause, Trisha threw kisses, made her exit, and the lights came up. Freddy blinked a few times, then came over to the table.