Bitter Truth

34

I WAS SITTING AT MY DESK, staring at the message slip as it glowed pink in my hand. My secretary’s handwriting, normally only barely legible, was this morning a series of mystical hieroglyphs. I had to squint to make it out. “Rev. Custer,” it read, atop a phone number. I called out to her from my desk. “Who the hell is this, Ellie?”

She scurried into my office and stood behind me, peering over my shoulder at the slip of paper. “Your reverend.”

“I don’t have a reverend, Ellie, I’m Jewish, remember? We have mothers instead, and mine’s in Arizona.”

“Well he said he was a reverend, he said, Rev. Custer, just like that. You don’t know him? He only left a number.”

What I figured just then was that this Reverend Custer guy was one of the wackos in Beth’s cult, calling about the meeting Beth had set up for me with Olea

“Hello,” she said, “you want my mommy?”

“No, sweetheart,” I said, pronouncing my words with utter care in that a

“Mommy’s in the shower.”

“What about the reverend?”

“In the shower.”

“He’s in the shower too?”

“Mommy.”

“No, the reverend.”

“Are you a stranger?”

“I don’t know, am I?”

“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

Click.

I had a headache and my eyes were blurry and I hadn’t slept nearly enough. The night before we had opened the box disinterred from the garden behind Veritas and read together, Beth, Caroline, Morris, and I, the self-selected excerpts from the diary of Faith Reddman Shaw. That would have been exhausting enough, but afterward Caroline insisted on spending the whole of the night in my apartment. It was not sex she was after this night, which was too bad, actually. Instead she was after solace. Solacing is up there with having a toothache as the least pleasant way to stay awake through the night. I had to stroke her hair and wipe her tears and comfort her when all I really wanted was to sleep, but some things we suffer for money and some things we suffer for love and some things we suffer because we’re too polite to kick her out of bed.

Ignore that last crack, it was only my testosterone speaking; besides, I am not that well ma

In the middle of our long late night conversation, as we lay in my bed, still clothed, she reached around and gave me a hug. “I’m glad you’re here for me, Victor,” she said, out of nowhere. “There’s no one else I can talk to about this. It has been a long time since anyone’s been there for me.”

And it had been a long time since I had been there for anyone. I smiled and kissed her lightly on the eye and I wondered if now might be a providential time to mention the fee agreement she still had not signed, but then thought better of it.

“This is harder than I ever imagined,” she said. “Finding Aunt Charity down there and then that diary, my grandmother’s words, reliving such tragedy. It’s like the entire foundation of my life has shifted. Things that were absolutely true have turned out to be lies. I thought I had my life’s history figured out, organized in a way that made sense, but it doesn’t make as much sense anymore.”

“Should we stop digging? Should we give it up?”

She was silent for a moment, a long worrying moment, before she shook her head and said, “No, not yet,” and held me closer.

Her hair tickled my nose uncomfortably and made me sneeze. I had the urge to roll away, onto my side, to sleep, but I didn’t. While the bounds of the relationship we were easing into were still narrow and unclear, they at least encompassed money and sex and now, I was learning, solace. But it wasn’t as though she was faking her distress. Even as she held me she shook slightly, as if from a cold draft blowing in from the past, and it is no wonder.

Family histories are a series of myths, embellished and perpetuated through gossamer tales retold over the Thanksgiving turkey. They are blandly reassuring, these myths, they give us the illusion that we know from whence we came without forcing upon us the details that make real life so perfectly vulgar. We know how Grandmom met Grandpop at a John Philip Sousa concert at Willow Grove Park but not how they lived unhappily ever after in a loveless marriage and fought like hyenas every day of their lives. We know how Daddy proposed to Mommy but not how he first plied her with tequila and then co

She had listened to her grandmother’s voice come forth from the grave and she believed she could understand now all the misery her grandmother had suffered, and why she had suffered it. She was certain that her grandfather, the moody and ofttimes soused Christian Shaw, had only agreed to marry Faith to save his family’s fortune. After proposing to Faith, he had started playing around with Charity, seducing the sister of the woman to whom he was engaged without a care in the world, and then, when Charity found herself inconveniently pregnant, had found it more convenient to murder Charity and bury her in the fertile oval beside the statue of Aphrodite than to tell the tale to her father, the man who was poised to save the Shaw Brothers Company from bankruptcy. In his marriage he had been mostly absent, often drunk, primarily abusive, and Caroline couldn’t help but notice how sister Hope’s health took a turn for the worse when Faith was forced to her bed with premature contractions and it was left to Christian to nurse the ill woman. She could figure why the rat poison was in the kitchen cabinet even if her grandmother couldn’t. With Charity and Hope both gone, the whole of the Reddman fortune demised to Christian Shaw and his heirs, another convenience. It seemed to Caroline that the best thing that could have happened to her family was the accident that rainy April night in 1923 when her father shot her grandfather, except for the crippling guilt her father carried from that day forward. That was how Caroline saw it that night in my bed, explaining her version to me through clenched teeth and tears.

I wasn’t quite sure I bought it. Her interpretation of what we had heard sounded like the plot of a bad feminist novel from the seventies, where the women would all be just fine if it wasn’t for those murderous men who engaged in the foulest of schemes to further their own ends. There was something too calculating, too controlled, in the voice of the woman who spoke to us from the dead that night for her to be so i