Eliza Starts a Rumor(81)
That the whole town now knew what had happened to Eliza was one thing; that her parents knew felt infinitely worse.
“No, just send her in.” She turned to the kids. “Give me a few minutes with Grandma, OK?”
They were both happy to escape that conversation.
As Birdie sat at the end of the bed, visibly rattled, Eliza noticed that her once-glamorous thinness now came across as fragility. She actually felt bad for her. If anything remotely approaching her experience had happened to Kayla, Eliza knew she would have been enraged beyond imagination. So she was surprised her mother’s first reaction was one of guilt.
“I’m so sorry, so, so sorry,” Birdie said, unfamiliar tears escaping down her face. Eliza’s eyes welled up in response.
“Don’t blame yourself, Mom. How could you have known if I never told you?”
“But . . .” She cried some more, swallowing her words.
“Kids hide things from their parents all the time. It’s not your fault, Mom, really.”
But there was something that was very much Birdie’s fault, and they both knew it.
“Please, Eliza, let me say what I have to.” It was so hard for her to speak that she couldn’t meet her daughter’s eyes. She looked down at the tissue that she was twisting in her hand and continued. “Daddy and I read what you wrote on the Interweb. The part about no one saying you were pretty before then. I’m sorry that I was always so critical of you, Eliza. I just wanted the best for you, but your father said that maybe if I had told you that you were beautiful you wouldn’t have looked for that attention somewhere else.”
Her father finally stood up to her mother, but it was way too late in life to matter really—and his blaming her mother for what happened was as ridiculous as blaming her seventeen-year-old self. Eliza had accepted her mother’s limitations long ago. She had come to terms with the incessant criticism and knew that her mother couldn’t see beyond her own vision of what her daughter should be like to see her for who she was. She chose to put Birdie out of her misery and responded generously.
“Mom, stop. That’s not why this happened. It happened because a man was a monster. It’s not your fault any more than it’s mine. I know that, and so should you.”
More tears trickled from Birdie’s eyes and she was having trouble catching her breath.
“You look tired, Mom. Want to lie down a bit? Rest your eyes?”
She patted Luke’s side of the bed and her mother looked at her as if she’d suggested they share a Whopper with fries. The disparity between her relationship with Birdie and the mother-daughter relationship she shared with Kayla was never more evident. Lying in bed with her daughter, chatting or napping or watching TV, was second nature for Eliza, while this scenario felt completely foreign. To her surprise, Birdie pushed through her discomfort, walked around the bed, and lay down. She rested her hand on her daughter’s, and although it felt more awkward than comforting to Eliza, as they both drifted off, she felt loved by her mother. It may have been the first time.
CHAPTER 45
Amanda & Eliza
By the time the play rolled around on Sunday, the whole town knew of Roy DeLuca’s horrific actions, and as is typically the case with such predators, more women had already come forward with similar accusations. The school board called an emergency meeting and voted to take down the dedication plaque and open up an investigation into the charges against Mr. DeLuca.
At the start of the play, Mr. Barr gave his own soliloquy:
“Tonight the Hudson Valley High Shakespeare Troupe presents its thirtieth annual production, Measure for Measure. This play was first performed in 1603, yet ironically it represents many of the same troubles and power struggles found in our society today. While at first, I thought it might be too racy for high school students, I’m now confident that there is no better age to point out its ideals. I hope it leads to further discussion in your homes. This play was written over four hundred years ago, and I believe William Shakespeare would agree that time is most definitely up! Without further ado, I present Measure for Measure.”
While Amanda had been present at many rehearsals, it was only when watching it now that she saw the parallels between men like her husband and Mr. DeLuca with Angelo, the play’s villain.
Determined to enforce a law regarding immorality, Angelo sentenced a man named Claudio to death for impregnating his fiancée. Claudio’s sister, Isabella, who was about to become a nun, begged Angelo to spare her brother’s life. At first, he flatly denied her request—the law, he said, required an execution. But Angelo was overcome by lust for Isabella. He threatened that he would only pardon her brother if she had sex with him.
Even in the dark, with Sadie sitting between them as a buffer, Amanda could tell that Carson was struggling with the play’s content. Clearly he had made the connection between himself and Angelo, and to make matters worse, his very own daughter was playing Angelo’s prey, Isabella. Seeing her placed in the same position in a power struggle that his victims had experienced was a head trip of epic proportions—though that was not how Shakespeare would have described it. When Isabella (Pippa) swore to tell the world that Angelo wanted to trade sex in exchange for releasing her brother from prison, Angelo responded with:
Who will believe thee, Isabel?