When she turned off Route 4, she was surprised to find that the dirt road had been paved and was no longer a narrow road. A few new and large houses had been added near the Daigle place. She barely recognized where she was. Cindy was in the kitchen, which seemed even smaller than the last time Annie had come home, and when Annie bent to kiss her, Cindy just stood without moving. Their mother, said Jamie, was upstairs; she would be down after the kids had talked. Annie felt the physical, almost electric, aspects of alarm and sank slowly into a chair as she unbuttoned her coat. Jamie spoke carefully and directly. Their father was being asked to leave the home he was in; he was abusive to the orderlies, Jamie said, making sexual passes at all the men, grabbing at their crotches, and was altogether disruptive. A psychiatrist had seen him, and their father had given permission for their talks to be shared, though how a man with dementia could give permission Jamie did not understand, but as a result Sylvia had learned that for years Elgin had had a relationship with Seth Potter, they were lovers, Sylvia said she had often suspected this, and Elgin was, demented as he might be, referring to himself as a raging homosexual, and he was very graphic in things he said; they would most likely have to put him in a far less pleasant place, there was no money unless they sold the farm, and no one was buying potato farms these days.
“All right,” Annie finally said. Her siblings had been silent for many minutes, and their faces had seemed so young and sad although they were middle-aged faces with middle-aged lines. “All right, we’ll deal with this.” She nodded at them reassuringly. Later she went next door to see her grandmother, who seemed surprisingly unchanged. She lay on the couch and watched her granddaughter go about turning on lights. “You came home to deal with your father? Your mother’s had a hell of a time.”
“Yes,” Annie said, and sat in the big chair nearby.
“If you want my opinion, your father went mad because of his behavior. Being a pervert. I always knew he was a homo, and that can drive you insane, and now he’s insane, that’s my opinion, if you want it.”
“I don’t,” Annie said gently.
“Then tell me something exciting. Where have you been that’s exciting?”
Annie looked at her. The old woman’s face was as expectant as a child’s, and Annie felt an unbidden and almost unbearable gash of compassion for this woman, who had lived in this house for years. She said, “I went to the ambassador’s home in London. They had the whole production there for dinner. That was exciting.”
“Oh, tell me everything, Annie.”
“Let me sit for a minute.” And so they were silent, her grandmother lying back down like a young person trying to be patient, and Annie, who up until this very day had always felt like a child—which is why she could not marry, she could not be a wife—now felt quietly ancient. She thought how for years onstage she had used the image of walking up the dirt road holding her father’s hand, the snow-covered fields spread around them, the woods in the distance, joy spilling through her—how she had used this scene to have tears immediately come to her eyes, for the happiness of it, and the loss of it. And now she wondered if it had even happened, if the road had ever been narrow and dirt, if her father had ever held her hand and said that his family was the most important thing to him.
“That’s right,” she had said earlier to her sister, who had cried out that were it true they would have known. What Annie did not say was that there were many ways of not knowing things; her own experience over the years now spread like a piece of knitting in her lap with different colored yarns—some dark—all through it. In her thirties now, Annie had loved men; her heart had often been broken. Currents of treachery and deceit seemed to run everywhere; the forms they took always surprised her. But she had many friends, and they had their disappointments too, and nights and days were spent giving support and being supported; the theater world was a cult, Annie thought. It took care of its own even while it hurt you. She had recently, though, had fantasies of what they called “going normal.” Having a house and a husband and children and a garden. The quietness of all that. But what would she do with all the feelings that streamed down her like small rivers? It was not the sound of applause Annie liked—in fact, she often barely heard it—it was the moment onstage when she knew she had left the world and fully joined another. Not unlike the feelings of ecstasy she’d had in the woods as a child.
Her father must have worried she would come across him in the woods. Annie shifted in the big chair.
“Did they tell you about Charlene?” her grandmother said.
“Charlene Daigle?” Annie turned to look at the old woman. “What about her?”
“She’s started a chapter for incest people. Incest Survivors, I believe they’re called.”
“Are you serious?”
“Soon as that father died, she started it. Ran an article in the newspaper, said one out of five children are sexually abused. Honestly, Annie. What a world.”
“But that’s awful. Poor Charlene!”
“She looked pretty good in her picture. Heavier. She’s gotten heavier.”
“My God,” Annie said softly.
Cindy had said quietly, “We must have been the laughingstock of the county.”
“No,” Jamie had said to her. “Whatever he did, he hid.”
Annie had seen how their distress showed in their guarded faces. “Oh,” she had said, feeling maternal, protective, toward them. “It doesn’t really matter.”
But it did! Oh, it did.
Back in the main house, Sylvia sat with her children for supper in the kitchen. “I heard about Charlene,” Annie said. “It’s unbelievably sad.”
“If it’s true,” answered Sylvia.
Annie looked at her siblings, but they looked at the food they moved into their mouths. “Why would it not be true? Why would someone make that up?” Jamie shrugged, and Annie saw—or felt she saw—that Charlene’s burdens were nothing to them; their own universe and its wild recent unmooring were all that mattered now. Sylvia went upstairs to bed, and the three siblings sat talking by the wood stove. Jamie especially could not stop talking. Their once silent father in his state of dementia seemed unable to keep himself from spilling forth all he had held on to secretly for years, and Jamie, who had been silent himself, now had to tumble all he heard before them. “One time they saw you in the woods, Annie, and he was always afraid after that that you’d find them.” Annie nodded. Cindy looked at her sister with a pained face, as though Annie should have more of a reaction than that. Annie put her hand over her sister’s for a moment. “But one of the strangest things he said,” Jamie reported, sitting back, “was that he drove us to school so he could, just for those moments, be near Seth Potter. He didn’t even see him, dropping us off. But he liked knowing he was close to him each morning. That Seth was only a few feet away, inside the school.”
“Oh God, it makes me sick,” Cindy said.
Jamie squinted at the wood stove. “It puzzles me, is all.”
The vulnerability of their faces Annie could almost not bear. She looked around the small kitchen, the wallpaper with water stains streaking down it, the rocking chair their father had always sat in, the cushion now with a rip large enough to show the stuffing, the teakettle on the stove that had been the same one for years, the curtain across the top of the window with a fine spray of cobwebs between it and the pane. Annie looked back at her siblings. They may not have felt the daily dread that poor Charlene had lived with. But the truth was always there. They had grown up on shame; it was the nutrient of their soil. Yet, oddly, it was her father she felt she understood the best. And for a moment Annie wondered at this, that her brother and sister, good, responsible, decent, fair-minded, had never known the passion that caused a person to risk everything they had, everything they held dear heedlessly put in danger—simply to be near the white dazzle of the sun that somehow for those moments seemed to leave the earth behind.
Gift
Abel Blaine was late.