Read Online Secret Father by James Carroll - Free Book Online Page B

been laid to rest since the middle of the nineteenth century. We mourners were not actually to witness the interment, so custom dictated. But as the others were ushered by undertakers away from the casket and its mound of flowers, I stonily refused to move. The minister approached to touch my elbow. Edie's father looked at me with disapproval.
    I had not seen her die. It had never occurred to me I would not see her remains entrusted to the earth. How many times could I be missing from this woman's side when she needed me? Near the mahogany box that held her crushed body, I stood with no comprehension of anything but her absence. Edie's absence was what required my presence.
    Her parents' concentration had already been transported from the churchyard to the country club, where the caterers would have spread the collation. When Edie's mother took my arm, I was aware of it, but I must have shaken her off, because then she was gone, and so were the others. For some moments there, because Edie had ceased to exist, so had everything else—including Michael, which, when I realized it later, seemed a betrayal ofhim. I do not know with whom my bereft son drifted from the graveside back to the cars, or if he walked off alone. That my state was one of pure anguish does not change what else it was, a feeling in grief, which later seemed another betrayal, of being more intensely alive than ever.
    "Hello, Mr. Montgomery."
    She was standing behind me.
    I turned. "Hello," I said awkwardly, unclear for the instant what I was doing here, or who she was.
    She looked different, for one thing. Her hair was up from her neck, showing the long line that curved up from her shoulders to her face. She had changed from riding clothes and now wore a dress of some kind beneath a trench coat, with the coat's belt tightly cinched. She wore tan linen gloves, an item of style, not warmth, and she wore heeled sandals, which drew my attention to her shapely ankles.
    The odd thing to strike me was that she shaved her legs, which of course every American woman did. I had grown up assuming hair grew no more on female legs than faces, and though by then I knew better, nothing had cracked my self-presumed sophistication like the discovery that year that most German women did not shave their legs, not even some of the most fashionably coifed of those I'd met in Frankfurt. But Mrs. Healy did. Shaven legs, and the relatively compulsive hygiene they represented, would have been just one self-reinvention following her marriage to a well-placed American. Then the exotic aroma of her perfume hit me again. I deflected the sensation. She was the mother of Michael's friend, that's all.
    "I apologize, Mrs. Healy, for putting you in a difficult position."
    "Not difficult. Impossible."
    "I understand."
    "No, you do not understand, because you could not understand. When you came to our quarters this morning, you—what is the word—trespassed on a different realm."
    "Trespassed? And so one must be aware of being followed?"
    She shrugged. "If you are seen doing business with my husband, you become of interest."
    "To whom?"
    "Shadows who watch from shadows."
    "But there are no shadows on an American air base. Unless American. Who would have seen me coming and going except people under your husband's control?"
    She glanced at me, a quick dismissal. Shadows, she had said. Shadows in shadows. Spooks. "They watch you?" I asked.
    She snapped her head to the side, no. "I am taken for granted. I am the clock, the chair, the domestic pet, the
Frau.
Nothing to notice if I maintain my routine, which normally I do without thinking. Today I must think about it. That is why I made you wait. I had to take my horse out. The day must be like any other. It is why my husband goes to the office this morning, the golf course this afternoon. A Saturday like any other."
    "And your visit here?"
    She cast her eyes toward the golden domes. "My
kleine Kapelle.
An ordinary visit. I come often here.