Secret Language Read online

  “A NOVEL THIS GOOD—

  REALISTIC AND HOPEFUL AT ONCE—IS A MARVEL.”

  —Maine Progressive

  “Monica Wood’s Secret Language is beautifully done—her language is gorgeous. She’s one of the few writers I know who can take a long, serious journey through a dark place and come out—convincingly—on the side of redemption.”

  —DAWN RAFFEL

  “Unforgettable … A graceful and insightful literary debut, brimming with emotion and depth. With simple and subtle language, Wood captures the complex relationship between two sisters.”

  —The Boston Phoenix

  “Deft and delicate … I can think of no more impressive recent debut of a novelistic voice, one that speaks not to our minds, but to our hearts.”

  —Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

  “Powerful … Wood tells the story of Faith and Connie Spaulding with such compelling honesty, this reader was lifted out of her seat and into the hearts of these sisters. I believed it all.”

  —Maine in Print

  “The prose is crisp and not a word is wasted. Wood has taken a long, deep look at life in our time and provided fresh insight into human nature.”

  —Maine Sunday Telegram

  “[Wood] has written pitch-perfect dialogue, rendered the sustaining rhythms and tones of family life, and demonstrated with understated wisdom and beautiful language some of the rules that govern the human heart.”

  —Casco Bay Weekly

  “Fiercely lyrical … [Wood] writes with sensitivity and intuitive insight about relationships coming apart and the walls people erect to keep others out.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Praise for Monica Wood

  and My Only Story

  “Luminous … Monica Wood has brilliantly captured the human need to love, the heart’s desire to nurture, and the soul’s urge to sacrifice.”

  —ANDRE DUBUS III

  Author of House of Sand and Fog

  “[An] accomplished new novel … Wood’s command of voice holds a reader all the way through to the last page, where … she holds up a mirror and encourages us to recognize ourselves.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A thoroughly captivating book: warm and wise and beautifully written.”

  —RICHARD RUSSO

  Author of Straight Man

  “One of the best novels I’ve read in the past year … A slender book that unfolds as gracefully as the petals of a rose … A small gem to be read, reread, and, yes, treasured.”

  —The Roanoke Times

  “Engaging … Wood skillfully works the competing threads of motivation into a tight, surprising knot of a story.… Wood’s generous vision is uplifting as well as entertaining.… Full of the best human longings.”

  —The Maine Times

  “A compelling and unusual tale that combines humor with tragedy, heartbreak with promise.”

  —Booklist

  “Recommended … At once bittersweet, funny, and moving.”

  —Library Journal

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1993 by Monica Wood

  Reader’s Guide copyright © 2002 by Monica Wood and The Ballantine Publishing

  Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Originally published by Faber and Faber, Inc., in 1993.

  Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Ballantine Reader’s Circle and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.randomhouse.com/BRC/

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2002090619

  eISBN: 978-0-307-49065-0

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  I. CONSTANCE

  II. FAITH

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  III. RITUALS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  IV. ISADORA

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  V. SECRET LANGUAGE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  VI. MUSCLE MEMORY

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  VII. SILVER MOON

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  VIII. OPENING NIGHT

  A Reader’s Guide

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  I

  CONSTANCE

  For the longest time, Connie thinks the house in Connecticut is two houses. The one they used to live in with Grammy Spaulding had a pretty yard with giant white flowers growing next to the door, and window boxes with smaller flowers, pink, spilling over the lip. It had a shiny wooden floor in the upstairs bedroom where she and Faith used to skate in their socks. It had places to hide: big closets that smelled like cotton, and an open shape behind the stairs, not the cramped, creepy places of the house they’re in now. Connie hasn’t seen that other house since Grammy went away, and she longs for it, the snow filling in the windowsills, Grammy’s crooked finger tracing their names on the cold pane.

  “What happened to that other house?” she asks Faith.

  Connie is three. Faith is big; she’s five.

  “What house?” Faith says. She is sitting on the dull floor, her legs splayed in front of her, reading a book with butterflies on the cover.

  “That house where it snowed and had pink flowers.”

  “We didn’t have a house like that. Flowers don’t grow in snow.”

  “Oh,” Connie says. She waits a minute. “Where’s Grammy?”

  Faith looks at her book, hard. “In heaven,” she says. “I told you.”

  Connie knows Faith won’t talk to her anymore now that she has mentioned Grammy.

  “Grammy took care of us when I was one,” Connie says, but Faith won’t answer. “I was one years old.”

  The house is silent and too small. The other house was big.

  “Fix my pants?” she asks Faith.

  Faith puts down her book with the butterflies. Connie trails her to the bathroom, yanking her rubber pants and wet panties down to her knees, walking bent over her bare feet.

  “Did you go number one or number two?” Faith asks, stepping onto the toilet to reach the sink.

  “Number one.”

  Connie lies on the bathroom floor—her ruined pants next to her in a shameful heap—and watches Faith wet a washcloth. Faith’s hair has a snag in the back, but the rest of it is combed just right. Faith knows how to do everything. She steps off the toilet, one hand on the sink for balance. “Go like this,” she says, wiping Connie’s bottom. Connie does, then Faith wipes her again and dries her with a towel.

  Connie stays on the floor while Faith gets clean panties. “Can I have powder?” she asks, hoping she doesn’t sound too much like a baby. Faith shakes some on. She puts Connie’s feet through the legs of the clean panties and pulls them up, then follows with the
same pair of rubber pants. “All done,” she says, and goes out to find her book.

  Connie’s rubber pants smell funny but she doesn’t care. She follows Faith, remembering that other house, the one Faith says they never lived in. But they did. Connie remembers everything, even the flower smell of Grammy’s lap, and the stories Grammy used to read over and over from grown-ups’ books, and her songs about animals. Billy says Grammy used to sing like a rusty hinge, but she didn’t. Billy and Delle sing all the time in bird voices, tall, mean, beautiful birds. Sometimes they sing their own names—Billy and Delle, Billy and Delle—up and down the scale. Connie wonders if everybody’s mother and father sing like that.

  “Faith?”

  “What.”

  “Faith?”

  Faith tips her head up. “What.”

  “Look at me.”

  “I’m looking.”

  But she isn’t really, and her head tips down again into her book. Connie wishes she could read. She stares out the window over the bumpy lawn. That other house had pink flowers, and snow. She knows it did.

  Connie has trouble with time. She always has to stop and think a minute: how old is she now? Is that smell in the air winter coming, or spring? Faith always seems to know, though her life is the same as Connie’s: back and forth to theater towns all over. The same dingy food, the same noisy sidewalks, the same cramped suites in the same hotels, too cold or too hot. Nothing moves forward. Sometimes they go to school, sometimes not, though they always have books to read: big packets of books that Armand sends to them in every city. Armand is Billy and Delle’s lawyer, the only person they know who likes children.

  The hotel they’re in now, where they are watching Billy and Delle run lines, is hot. Not because of the weather, which is cold, but because of the steam heat they can’t control. This is Cleveland, or Columbus—Connie keeps forgetting. Next comes New York, Broadway, weeks and weeks in the worst hotel of all, the noise of the city battering the windows and walls.

  Connie can remember being here in Columbus or Cleveland once before, with a different show, when she was seven, or five. She remembers the lady downstairs who does nothing all day but suck on lollipops and smile politely and check people in. She likes Connie and Faith, brings them sandwiches when Billy and Delle don’t, tells them all about her romantic husband. Connie also remembers this sofa, its lurid orange flowers. Today it feels like wet sweaters. Faith is shifting next to her, lifting her sticky legs.

  “Charmed,” Billy says from the exact center of the room, extending his hand. He is a count who can’t remember where he hid some important papers; Delle is the countess. Her amber eyes slide over.

  “Enchanted,” she says. She rises from a chrome chair she retrieved from the kitchenette. In the play it’s a red velvet divan.

  Billy filches a pitch pipe from his pocket, blows one note, and they begin to sing. They sing two verses and a chorus, then break to perform a complicated two-step, counting softly as the imaginary orchestra plays. Connie thinks she can hear it. The song picks up again, then fades off the ends of their voices, the harmony lingering.

  Connie doesn’t clap until Faith does. Billy and Delle bow deeply, showing the hard gleam of their teeth. For an instant Connie is flattered by this extravagance, but she senses their looking beyond, sees their eyes sweep past her and her sister into the imaginary second balcony.

  “You balled up that same line, Delle,” Billy says. Connie hears the huff of the couch as Faith drops back against it. Billy and Delle are nervous and high-strung because the tour is going badly. They are the same way, only more, when a tour goes well.

  “Well, listen to you,” Delle says. “You haven’t had a new line in three weeks.” Connie watches her mother’s neck redden, blushing up into her cheekbones. She is beautiful.

  “Don’t start, Delle.”

  “How many times can they rewrite this part?” Delle says. “My God, Garrett can pick some losers. What does he care, he gets his cut.” She gathers up the script in a messy heap and shakes it at him. “You think the Lunts would take a dog like this? You think Helen Hayes would look once at this thing?”

  “So Garrett’s a bastard.” Billy ticks the edge of Delle’s script with his thumb. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  Delle sighs theatrically, her chest heaving with the effort. “We won’t last a week in New York.”

  Billy smiles the thin smile that means trouble. “Not unless you get top billing, Countess?”

  Delle holds up her finger as if it could shoot a bullet. “Don’t give me that. Don’t you give me that.”

  Connie is invisible, silent on the sofa, next to her invisible sister. Her parents begin to fire words back and forth. Their voices pick up, their faces pulse blood, the words they use sound whipped and snapped and dirty.

  A flutter of paper explodes from Delle’s hands, and now they’re screaming at each other amidst a tornado of pages. Connie freezes. The speed with which these storms start and stop always shocks her. She thinks her parents might have some secret mechanical parts, so that when they talk of pushing each other’s buttons they mean real buttons.

  Faith is on the floor, gathering the spilled script one page at a time. Connie slips off the sofa and crouches next to her, imitating her precise movements. At the toe of her mother’s white pumps, cold, black, typed lines of dialogue stare up at her, their composure marred by smeared crossouts and writeovers in different colors of ink. She takes the sheets between her hands and taps them against the clammy carpet, listening hard.

  Everything goes quiet, except for another burst of steam from the radiators. Delle is at the window, seething, her jaw tilted out toward the street; but her carriage, the subtle turn of her shoulder, shows her to be fully tuned, wholly there. She’s wearing a navy blue dress with a boat neck and fitted waist and tapered skirt. Her ears are dotted by white button earrings. Billy goes to her, his stride effortless, as if the horrible air weighed nothing at all. They murmur to each other, then kiss deeply, for an embarrassingly long time. He touches her shoulder near the neck and she lists into his hand, a tableau they’re known for on the stage.

  Finished, they cross to the sofa, where Connie sits with Faith, the rescued script between them in a stack so even it might have been run through a paper cutter.

  “We’re going to the Stardust for a bite,” Billy says. Connie’s cheek is warm where he holds it.

  “Can’t we come, Billy?” she asks. She is hoping so hard it feels like a little animal in her stomach.

  “It’s a bar,” Delle says. “They don’t allow children.” She smiles hugely, as if to make up for not inviting them. Her hair is chestnut red, piled up on her head. Her mouth is also red, but deeper, bloodier.

  Billy runs a hand over his forehead. “Jesus, I have to get out of this heat. It feels like goddamned Cuba in here.”

  “We’ll be quiet,” Connie says. She turns to Faith. “Won’t we, Faith?” She can almost hear the turn in Faith’s stomach. Faith hates to beg.

  Faith moves to the window and sits on the wide, low sill. She isn’t going to help.

  “Please, Billy,” Connie whines. “Please please please pleeease.” She contorts her face, tucks her fists up under her chin. Though it never gets her anywhere she does this almost every single time.

  “Don’t whine, Connie, for God’s sake,” Billy says. “It makes your face look ugly.”

  Delle slips into the white and navy topper that goes with the dress. She stops in mid-sleeve, frowning. “We’ve got to get them into a school,” she says, as if she’s just now thought of it. She looks toward the window. “Remind me tomorrow, Faith.”

  Connie trails her to the door, still begging, but it’s no use.

  “Back soon,” Billy says. He stops at the mirror to pat his hair close to the sides of his head, then they’re gone.

  Connie turns to Faith, forgetting that Faith is disgusted with her. “Is my face ugly?” she asks.

  “How should I know?” Faith says
darkly. She’s still looking out the window.

  “He always says that.”

  “Then don’t listen.”

  Connie never understands Faith’s directions. How do you not listen? “He never says it to you,” she says.

  “I don’t beg.”

  Connie moves to the window next to Faith to watch for Billy and Delle on the street below. They’re always easy to spot, and there they are, Billy’s bright yellow hair appearing like a streetlamp on the sidewalk.

  “Do you wish you were that lady downstairs, Faith?” Connie asks. “That lollipop lady?”

  “No.”

  “She’s not very pretty.”

  Faith doesn’t answer.

  “She has that romantic husband.”

  Faith doesn’t answer.

  “Are you going to get married someday, Faith?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Faith sighs. “First you have to find somebody who wants to marry you, that’s why not.”

  “Oh.” Connie hadn’t thought of that. “Do you think somebody will want to marry me?”

  “If you stop asking a million questions about everything.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Faith gets up and pulls the drape hard, hiding the grimy city. “Your face isn’t ugly,” she says.

  “He said it was.”

  Faith points to the mirror next to the door. “Look for yourself.”

  Connie does. To her surprise her face looks just the way it did the last time she looked in a mirror. It looks a lot like Faith’s.

  “See?” Faith says.

  “See what?”

  “How pretty your face is.” She has moved to the sofa and picked up a book. “No matter what he says.”

  Faith is reading now, their conversation is over. Connie wanders around the room, flips the TV on and turns the dial, but nothing good is on. She returns to the window, opens the drape, and looks out at the big, sad city. She’d like to ask Faith how you’re supposed to know if somebody is lying, but Faith is done talking, Connie can tell. It’s getting dark, and the evening will be long, and Billy and Delle won’t come back soon even though they said they would. In the wavy reflection of the window she can see Faith hunched over her book, a world away, solid and focused. She runs her hand over her face, over her nose and mouth, and decides not to believe Billy, to believe Faith instead.