Search the Shadows, page 1
Search the Shadows
ELIZABETH PETERS
WRITING AS
BARBARA MICHAELS
TO OLIVIA BLUMER
with heartfelt thanks for her professional brilliance
and personal charm
Contents
one
Nineteen sixty-five wasn’t the worst of years in which to…
two
I wish I could say that confrontation cleared the air…
three
After I reached the turnpike, I had to switch on…
four
I woke at the crack of dawn and couldn’t get…
five
I had intended to apply myself to my studies all…
six
I was in my bare feet and sans make-up when…
seven
Someone had twisted a cord tightly around my head. I…
eight
Since I had a favor to ask, I made a…
nine
Despite my improved status, I had not been given keys…
ten
Hell is for all eternity, and that hellish interlude seemed…
eleven
When Mrs. Dunlap spoke again, her voice was cool and…
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Barbara Michaels
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
one
Nineteen sixty-five wasn’t the worst of years in which to be born, but it certainly wasn’t the best. It was, among other things, the year of Selma and of Watts. Martin Luther King went to Alabama that year; they met him with tear gas and with dogs. In Chicago they met him with night sticks. But the Voting Rights Act became law in 1965. You have to call that a plus.
It was the year of the “Great Society,” which would eliminate poverty in America. An A-plus idea—if it had only worked. On a lighter level, the Rolling Stones hit it big with a song called “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” and Simon and Garfunkel swept the charts with “The Sounds of Silence.” Diet Pepsi was introduced to the lucky American public; and in December, the month of my birth, Mary Quant unveiled the miniskirt.
On the minus side, there was that little far-off police action in Vietnam. By the end of 1965, U.S. planes had begun the bombing of the north, and there were over 400,000 American troops fighting, bleeding, and dying in actions that were never called a war. One of the ones who died was a boy named Kevin Maloney. For over twenty years I thought he was my father.
I don’t remember anything about the trip home from the doctor’s office. Not one blessed thing. I must have bought a ticket and gotten on the train at Thirtieth Street station. I must have left the train at Wayne, my usual stop, and walked home. The house was only a mile from the station and it was a pretty spring day. I do remember the weather. Partly because the sunshine and soft blossoms were in such bizarre contrast to my mood, partly because the pale pink petals sprinkling Pooch’s black fur made him look so odd—like a painted porcelain statue of a cat.
He came out from under the azaleas in the front yard to bump against my ankles and mew his greeting. I had to respond—it would have been rude not to—and the necessity of acknowledging a friend shook me out of my stupor. I discovered that I had the front-door key in my hand. I put it in the lock, opened the door, and stepped nimbly aside to let Pooch in. It was pure reflex, like everything else I had done in the past few hours. Pooch weighed eighteen pounds, and he had no manners to speak of. If you didn’t get out of his way, he ran right over you.
He headed for the kitchen. I stood looking around the familiar hallway, wondering why it looked so strange. I knew every object in it; I could have found my way in the dark. I had lived there for nineteen of my twenty-two years. Everything was the same—except me.
Jessie wasn’t home from work yet. She had raised me from a pup, as she liked to say; she was my aunt, my mother’s sister. At least I had always assumed she was…. We had our ups and downs—a lot of downs in those early years, and again when I moved into the typical schizophrenia of adolescence, as Jessie called it. I was a rotten kid. So Jessie said; it had become the lead line in one of our favorite routines. “God, you were a rotten kid, Haskell.” Then I’d say, “Impossible. How could a rotten kid turn into such a perfect human being?” And Jessie would say, “The credit is all mine. It took a lot of nagging and spanking to turn a rotten kid into a perfect human being.”
She had nagged—at least that’s how I would have described it at the time. But she had never laid a hand, or a hairbrush, on me. For a single woman, dedicated to her career and having at best tepid feelings about children, she had been a superb mother substitute. I adored her. If she didn’t adore me back, she was the world’s greatest actress. How could she have lied to me? She must have known. She, of all people…
From the kitchen, Pooch’s voice rose and fell in piteous complaint. His food dish must be empty. Instead of rushing to comply with his demands as I usually did, I went up the stairs. My feet automatically avoided the worn spot in the carpeting that Jessie always meant to fix. We never closed doors in that house. Hers stood open. I went into her room.
It was an austere bedroom, almost monastic in its lack of feminine furbelows. She always made her bed before she left for work; the plain white spread lay smooth and unwrinkled, marred only by a stubborn scattering of black cat hairs. The dresser top held her brush and comb and an eight-by-ten photo of me. The desk was organized with the same efficiency; a compartmentalized file held bills and unanswered letters. I sat down and opened the top drawer.
I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I was still looking for it when I heard the sounds of Jessie’s arrival—the scrape of the key in the lock, the slam of the door, a thud as she dropped something, and a loud “Damn!” She was as clumsy physically as she was well organized mentally, always dropping things and banging her shins on the furniture.
I had left my purse on the table in the hall. Jessie must have seen it; she yelled, “Hey Haskell, I’m home,” and then continued, scarcely drawing breath, “All right, you damned pushy cat, give me a break, will you?”
I went on searching the drawers. The lowest on the left was twice as deep as the others, containing files. Methodically I went through them—insurance forms, papers on the car, tax returns, receipted bills. Downstairs, Jessie’s footsteps clumped from room to room, accompanied by the rattle of utensils as she fed Pooch and mixed her evening martini. She called again as she started up the stairs. “Haskell—where are you? Are you coming down? Do you want something to drink?”
Impatient as always, she didn’t wait for answers. She went to my room first. Hers was farther down the hall, away from the head of the stairs. I was looking through the file marked “Legal Papers” when she came to the open door.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
Her voice was mildly curious rather than outraged, though she had every right to be angry. We respected one another’s privacy; she hadn’t opened a drawer or a closet door in my room since I was thirteen.
She stood staring from the doorway, her glass in her hand. She was an inch shorter than I, exactly five feet four; and until a few years ago, we had worn the same dress size. Recently she had begun to put on weight. Her graying hair waved naturally. It was cut short, not as a statement of anything in particular, but to save time. Her gray pin-striped suit and tailored white blouse suited her position as head buyer for a large Philadelphia department store. I stared back at her as if I were looking at a complete stranger.
Her nose wrinkled and her eyes narrowed. She was getting nearsighted but hated to admit it; she refused to wear glasses except when she drove. But she knew me too well to miss the signs of distress.
“What’s the matter?”
“I went to the doctor today.”
“I assumed you had, since you told me this morning that your premarital exam was scheduled.” A typical, cool Jessie response, but the deepening wrinkles around her eyes and a betraying tinkle of ice cubes from the glass she held were substitutes for the agitated questions another person might have asked. I could read the fears boiling up in her mind. An embarrassing social disease? A grislier, more ominous set of symptoms?
I said, “I have it. Tay-Sachs.”
“What the hell is…Oh, you mean that exotic disease your future mother-in-law insisted you be tested for?” Jessie’s full cheeks darkened as relief and rising anger replaced concern. “What are you trying to do to me, Haskell? You can’t have Tay-Sachs. If you did, you’d be dead—years ago. Babies who get it don’t live past two or three.”
“You looked it up.”
Jessie shrugged.
“I never heard of the damned thing till Mrs. Feldman mentioned it. Of course I looked it up. Sorry I did; of all the awful, ghastly diseases…And there’s no cure.”
I might have expected that Jessie would “look it up.” That was one of her most admirable characteristics—a need to know the truth, find out the facts, however unpalatable, and face them head-on. I hoped it was one of my characteristics too. Like Jessie, I had looked it up.
I said flatly, “Eighty-five percent of Tay-Sachs victims are children of eastern European Jews. The Jewish community started screening for it in the seventies and reduced its incidence enormously. Mrs. Feldman was right when she insisted we both be tested; it’s a genetic disease and it does occur, rarely, in other groups. A cruel disease—no cure, no treatment. Blindness, paralysis, mental deterioration, death within two to four years of birth.”
“I know,” Jessie said. “You don’t mean…You’re a carrier?”
“Yes.”
“What about Jon?”
“He isn’t.”
Jessie let out a long breath.
“Well, that’s all right, then. It’s a recessive gene: unless both parents carry it, there is no risk to their children.” Her face had cleared, but she was still annoyed with me. Glancing at her glass, she announced irritably, “My damned drink is half water by this time. I’ll have to throw it out and start again. Come downstairs and talk to me.”
“Where did I get it?”
“What do you mean, where did you get it? You ought to know enough basic biology to answer that one. Children get their genes from their parents, who get them from their parents, and so on, ad infinitum.”
“Most carriers are eastern European Jews. Ashkenazim.”
My aunt, the child, like my mother, of Pennsylvania Dutch stock, contemplated me—whose father had been named Maloney. At least that was what the birth certificate I was holding claimed.
She knew what I was driving at, but she clung to the pretense of bewilderment. Her eyes shifted, her tone was truculent. “Most doesn’t mean all. There are exceptions. The book I read mentioned them. A group in Nova Scotia—”
“It isn’t just that. Look at me. Look at them.” I gestured, stupidly, at a photograph that wasn’t even in the room, but on the piano in the living room, where it had been for years. A wedding picture, in full color: Leah Emig, fair-haired and blue-eyed, her square jaw softened by the froth of lace framing her face; Kevin Maloney, lean and fit in dress uniform, unruly red hair blazing, green eyes bright with laughter. A nearby mirror reflected my image, if I had needed to see it—eyes so dark they looked black, olive skin, heart-shaped face framed by masses of thick black curls.
Jessie sighed. “Are you going to start that again?”
“You make it sound as if I brought the subject up once a week. I haven’t mentioned it for years.”
“That’s right. You got over it. A lot of kids, especially those who are orphaned early, develop fantasies about their ‘real’ parents. Think they’re the long-lost heir to the throne of France or something. You forgot that nonsense—”
“I was brainwashed into forgetting it, by you and Dr. Whitaker. Maybe she believed it was a typical adolescent fantasy, but you knew better. You must have known. No, don’t interrupt, let me finish. I’m well aware of the fact that statistics are meaningless when applied to individuals. I realize that though it is a rare occurrence, two light-eyed people can have a dark-eyed child. I know that although Tay-Sachs is a hundred times more common among eastern European Jews, I could be one of the exceptions. I know all those fascinating facts; what I don’t know is the name of my real father.”
Jessie’s lips parted, but she didn’t speak.
“You must know,” I went on. “She was your own sister. My mother. Or is that a lie, too? Am I a casual and inconvenient souvenir of a brief encounter—hers…yours…”
Moving briskly and without her usual clumsiness, Jessie stepped forward and slapped me across the face.
We stared at one another in mutual consternation. I’m sure she was as surprised and horrified as I.
“You’re hysterical,” she said hoarsely. “How dare you say that?”
“I’m not hysterical. I’m just very confused.”
Leaving the file drawer open, I stood up and walked out of the room.
Over the years, my bedroom had been redecorated several times. Posters of rock stars had replaced prints of Winnie the Pooh and Mr. Toad, to be replaced in their turn by Degas dancers and Monet water lilies. I had grown up in that room—soaked the pillows with bitter tears of frustrated adolescent love, giggled and whispered with friends, consumed countless bowls of milk toast and chicken soup during bouts of normal childhood ailments, studied and dreamed and played.
Memories permeated that room, memories good and bad. But mostly good.
The kitten under the bed. I was eight years old. Jessie had always refused to let me have a pet. I was too young to understand her reasoning—“Baby, we’re both gone all day, me at work, you at school and at the sitter’s; it wouldn’t be fair to an animal.” So when the hungry, bedraggled kitten followed me that day, it didn’t have to follow far. I kept it hidden for almost twenty-four hours before Jessie discovered it. I should have known she’d wonder why I spent so much time in my room that sunny Saturday. She was afraid I was ill or unhappy. The kitten was sitting on my lap when she walked in. She let out a loud whoop of sheer surprise and, in sheer surprise, the kitten promptly wet all over my jeans. I screamed, the kitten lost control of another vital bodily function, and Jessie collapsed into a chair and laughed till she cried. Pooch had been a member of the family ever since and Jessie often said she didn’t know how we had managed without him. “But, oh, Haskell, the look on your face when he pooped on your lap…” Both of us had laughed about it many times since.
Sitting on the edge of the bed I heard Jessie’s retreat, quick blundering footsteps descending the stairs. I knew she was angry at herself, bitterly regretting her impulsive blow. I didn’t resent it. It had not been a hard or calculated slap. She had an explosive temper and had delivered quite a few tongue-lashings when I was younger, but she had never struck me in the face. I wasn’t angry; I felt nothing except a vast bewilderment. I couldn’t remember my parents. I had lost both in infancy—my mother in an automobile accident, my “father” in war. Worst of all, I had lost myself. I didn’t know who I was.
The photographs had hung on the wall, one on either side of the dressing table, ever since I could remember—the first things I saw when I woke in the morning, the last things I saw before I turned out the light. Hers was a studio portrait, taken on her twenty-first birthday. As the day of my own majority approached and passed, I had studied her young unmarked face, trying to see a resemblance to my own. Except for a vague similarity in the curve of the smiling lips, I couldn’t find one. A light behind her made her hair glow; in the black-and-white photograph, it looked like silver. I had never thought she was pretty, but I liked her face; it had strength and humor and a touch of veiled melancholy. Or was that romanticizing, knowing as I did that the fair hair would never turn true silver, or the smooth cheeks be marred by wrinkles?
The face of Kevin Maloney had been enlarged from a snapshot, so it was a little blurry, but it was a far better likeness than a posed studio photograph. His head was thrown back in laughter, strengthening the lean line of the jaw, exposing even white teeth. A handsome face, heartbreakingly young and happy; in every picture I had ever seen of him, he was laughing or smiling. Below the photograph, set against black velvet, was his Congressional Medal of Honor—posthumously awarded. How I had idealized that face, and the gallant young man who had earned his country’s highest award by sacrificing his life for others.
The tears were streaming down my cheeks. I heard footsteps and reached for a tissue.
After a moment’s hesitation, Jessie sat down on the bed—not too close, a careful distance from me. “I’m sorry,” she muttered.
“I know.”
“Want something to drink?” From behind her back, with the air of a puppy offering a cherished bone, she produced a glass of white wine. Seeing my expression, she went on, “Or a cup of tea? Or—”
“No, thanks.”
Jessie looked at the glass with faint surprise, as if it had just materialized in her hand. She raised it to her lips and drained it in one gulp.
I started to laugh. At least I thought I was laughing, until the sounds turned harsh and ugly and tears splashed darkly onto the fabric of my skirt.
