The Forgotten Hours(81)
Grumpy flapped an interview form in the air. He’d known about that one, he said. He discovered the affair by accident when he was in the bank executing a transfer. Grumpy called the woman’s father, Barclay Huntington, and the next day she put an end to the affair. It turned out John had been invited to their estate in Westchester twice for family dinners. No one had known about the existence of a wife or a baby girl back in West Mills.
“I often wonder if things would’ve been different had I told Charlie about that one. But he insisted, your father. He’d made a dreadful mistake; he was repentant.” Grumpy held her eyes with his yellowed, watery ones. She could barely register what he was telling her now. “He seemed sincere, and I believed him. I thought he’d strayed once and that would be it. I didn’t want to ruin my daughter’s marriage! It seemed cruel not to give him another chance.”
Page after page, there were women’s names, details, photos. The pictures and notes revealed an unassailable truth: This woman here, she was real; she was flesh and blood. She was a student, a mother, a businesswoman, a teacher, a socialite. She looked haughty or tender hearted. Perhaps she was clingy or perhaps standoffish. Her hair was long, short, brown, blonde.
Katie gripped her glass of water. She took tiny sips, but no amount of drinking could lubricate her throat or put her body back into its normal state. Where had all this happened? Where had he taken these women? Their faces crowded her mind, and in among those clamorous women was her father, throwing a smile at her in a messy kitchen after they’d made turkey meatballs. Watching her with an ecstatic look on his face as she twirled around in the dressing room at Macy’s, trying on Easter dresses. Shouting, louder than any of the other dads, on the sidelines when she scooped up a ground ball on the lacrosse field in middle school. That man, that man she loved, had had an entire life she’d known nothing about. She wondered: Had he loved his family at all?
“But why did you . . . I mean, was it—did Mum know about it? And about the investigator, the affairs?” she asked. The enormity of what she was learning was beginning to overwhelm her, how it changed reality the way nuclear transmutation changed chemical elements. This all seemed utterly impossible, yet it was not impossible at all—if anything, it was common. In some ways, it was the ordinariness of this betrayal that was so shocking.
“Not at first. But it was my duty, Katherine. I was her father. I was supposed to look out for her.”
She held Grumpy’s hand, and they sat for a while in strangled silence, his breath loud and labored. Under her fingers her grandfather’s skin felt as thin and dry as tissue paper. Her brain was racing, but it had nowhere to go; she was stuck in an infinite loop. Then she caught sight of a photo of someone she recognized: Constance Nichols, the woman who had garaged the Falcon at Eagle Lake. “Where did you get this one?”
“That?” said Grumpy. “Don’t remember. The investigator was terribly thorough. I imagine he interviewed the woman. Look on the back; perhaps it says there.”
“I already know who it is.” Constance had chiseled features and a nose that was a little too long for her face. In the picture, her hair was swept up in a loose bun, and a pearl choker lay at the base of her neck, tight against her skin. She had been an actress when she was younger.
When Katie thought of her parents during their marriage, she saw them dancing the tango in the clubhouse; driving on the highway with the roof down; diving, one after another, into the water, lean and athletic. Tanned shins and sandy toes. Her dad with his drink, eyes crinkling. Where did Constance fit into this picture? She barely looked like she’d have the energy for emotion. Not that long ago, David had told her how kind their father had been to that woman: It’s wrong to break your word; you’ve got to treat people right. It’s important to be honorable. And meanwhile, he’d been having an affair with her?
As a child, she’d seen the way people’s faces lit up when her father told a joke or complimented them. Now another piece of the puzzle was in place, and she saw what that might have meant for her parents’ marriage. She sat very still. It felt as though if she were to move, she might break. “My God, Grumpy. So you told Mum about all this?”
“Yes, dear. I had to.”
“And that’s when she decided to leave?” Katie asked. Her heart ached for her mother as she thought back to the prison visit when her parents had told her they were getting divorced. Katie had slammed down the receiver and run away, but the guards wouldn’t let her leave the visiting rooms. Thinking her mother was capable of that kind of disloyalty and selfishness had cut off something inside Katie, making it impossible for her to love in the same way anymore. What if Charlie had told Katie then about what she had known?
“I’m sorry, sunshine. I know this must be absolutely dreadful. Perhaps it was selfish of me to want to get it off my chest,” Grumpy said, “but it never felt right that you children didn’t know. Especially you, dear. You were so curious once.” His face was drained of color, his elastic mouth sagging. He closed his eyes and laid his arms by his side as though he were depleted, ready for sleep or death.
37
Running through the streets of Hammersmith later that night, Katie turned over memories of her father in her mind. She tried to drown them out in a tide of music, cranking the volume up so high that her headphones vibrated, but she saw him again and again: unassailable, unrelenting, sentimental. Teaching her to swim the crawl. Dancing on disco night at the clubhouse wearing a silver spandex shirt. Gathering Katie in his arms at the hospital when David was born, tears of happiness falling into her hair. Her feet pounded on the pavement as the memories consumed her.