Unbreathed Memories Page 8

  At nine, dressed in jeans, a white turtleneck shirt, and a warm tweed jacket, I left the house and headed up Prince George Street toward College Avenue. At the replica of the Liberty Bell I turned left and cut across campus on the grass. There was probably some rule against walking on the grass, but nobody was around to stop me.

  The St. John’s College Library loomed large before me, a square brick building trimmed in white that had once been the Maryland Hall of Records. Now extensively remodeled, the dark, claustrophobic lobby of the old state archives had been transformed by an atrium that suffused the building with light. A grand staircase bisected the atrium, where counters of variegated granite contrasted attractively with warm cherrywood shelves. Interior windows offered glimpses of the main reading room and portions of the book collections just on the other side of the wall. I felt marginally cheered and decided it wouldn’t be such a hardship to work at St. John’s full-time.

  I nodded to the circulation assistant on duty, then passed through the glass-enclosed office of the assistant librarian, through a workroom, and into a room they had assigned me in the southeast corner of the building. There the Bromley books lay stacked on carts and strewn about on a round gateleg table. From overhead, light fixtures like ice cube trays cast a stark, white light over my project. I draped my coat over a chair and decided to see what I could find out about childhood sexual abuse. I tapped the terms into the library’s online catalog, but got no meaningful results, unless you count an obscure book about a case of child abuse in the eighteenth century, a handful of books about Sigmund Freud and something by Piaget. Not surprising for a college whose curriculum is based on concentrated study of the classics, like Aristotle, Copernicus, and Descartes, in their original texts.

  I launched Netscape instead, typed the terms into Lycos.com, and sat back in my chair, stunned by the enormity of it all. I needed some way to narrow down this mountain of information. I needed an expert, is what, someone to sort through all the gobbledegook, but I didn’t know any experts and I didn’t feel like waiting around for Paul to locate Iris Templeton.

  I was resting my chin on my hands, staring at a bronze bust of Dante Alighieri on a tall cabinet and thinking how little he resembled my son-in-law, Dante, when a student aide poked her head through the door. “Coffee’s fresh.”

  I looked up, startled. “Thanks, Laurie. I’ll get some in a minute.”

  “Done!” She held out a mug of steaming coffee.

  “You read minds?” I set the mug on a folded paper towel so as not to spoil the finish on the antique table.

  She chuckled. “Daily.” She took several seconds to look around the cluttered workroom. “So, tell me what you’re doing.”

  I turned away from the computer, blanking the screen almost guiltly, and pointed to the books.

  “Well, first I sorted them by publication date, but the British, German, and Japanese editions of any particular title all came out in different years, so that got messy. Finally, I decided to put them in alphabetical order by English title, but that wasn’t easy either.” I picked up two books, one in each hand—Tangled Web and A Talent to Deceive. “Look. Here are two editions of the same novel.” I waved the British edition in the air. “You wonder what could have been wrong with a title like Tangled Web that would compel Bromley’s American publisher to change it.”

  “You got me.” Laurie pivoted on her heel and headed toward the door. “Well, back to work. I live to shelve!”

  I looked closely at the book in my hand. Tangled Web, I noticed, had first been published in 1949. On the cover a raven-haired beauty appeared caught in a giant spiderweb, her hand splayed palm out before her face, her mouth a bright red “O.” Oh, lady. I know just how you feel. I turned the book over. Pictured on the back, in a casual pose with a Jack Russell terrier, was Ms. Bromley. She had been a handsome woman in ’49. I wondered if she still wore her hair in that postwar bob, brushed back from her forehead and curled softly around her ears.

  The next book on the cart had hit the best-seller list thirty years later—Triple Jeopardy. It was the sailboats pictured on the cover that first intrigued me. I turned to the jacket flap, curious if the boats had anything to do with the plot or were just some illustrator’s fantasy:

  When Tony met Amy on a package tour of Mexico, he thought he’d found the girl of his dreams. How could he know, when she became his bride three months later, that he’d married Lisa and Veronica, too. Soon Tony’s quiet world was turned into a nightmare of doubt and suspicion when her memories of a troubled childhood, long suppressed, threatened not only his marriage but his life.

  There was more about an illegal adoption and a missing will, but it barely registered. I skimmed quickly through the pages. Amy believed she had been sexually abused by her uncle. It wasn’t until after the poor man committed suicide that Amy and the reader learned it wasn’t true. I sat and digested that bit of cheerful news. I wondered if the novel had been based on a true story. Ms. Bromley was famous for her meticulous research. She’d often spend months gathering background material before she began writing. If this Amy character was anything like Georgina, maybe Ms. Bromley could offer me some real-life background information or point me in the right direction. I decided a visit to Ginger Cove was in order.

  When I telephoned, saying I wanted to talk to her about her books, Ms. Bromley surprised me by inviting me to join her for lunch. Thanking my lucky stars that I didn’t have to punch time clocks anymore, I hurried out Riva Road, turned left at the big Greek church, and wound down the narrow road that led to the waterfront retirement community.

  Ms. Bromley’s apartment was on the second floor of building eight. When I knocked, she opened the door so quickly I thought she might have been standing just behind it, waiting. She was of average height and wore a simple dark blue skirt and a pink turtleneck. A colorful silk scarf was held together at her breast by a silver slide. Her hair was a little shorter than in her book jacket photo, slightly curlier, and almost entirely gray.

  “Ms. Bromley?” I extended my hand.

  She grasped it firmly. “Delighted to meet you, my dear.” Behind her I glimpsed a small, comfortably furnished living room. Just beyond was a dining nook, where dozens of flowering plants hung on hooks or were arranged on racks under an enormous bay window. A cheerful kitchen was on my left. I was puzzled that the counters were spotless, with no sign whatsoever of lunch being prepared.

  Ms. Bromley opened a closet and pulled a gray wool cardigan from its hanger. “Let’s talk over lunch. I’m starved.” She followed me into the hall, pulled the door behind her, and jiggled the knob to make sure it locked. “Don’t know why I didn’t move here years ago,” she confided as we strolled down the hall. “A certain number of meals in the residents’ dining hall come with the price of admission,” she told me, a smile spreading across her face. “I can cook or not. Mostly it’s not.”

  We continued down the carpeted corridor to an elevator, which carried us, with excruciating slowness, to the ground floor. When it finally disgorged us, I sprinted ahead to hold the door, more out of politeness than any need to assist Ms. Bromley, who was the spriest eighty-two-year-old I had ever seen.

  She breezed past. “When it rains, I can get to the dining room through the corridors of the building.” She waved a hand. “They’re all connected. But it’s so beautiful out today.” She stopped and turned her face full into the sun, eyes shut. “Ahhhh! I can’t wait for spring.” She resumed her purposeful pace over the sidewalk that crossed the croquet field, and I scurried to keep up. “I discovered people are either summer people or winter people. Which are you, Mrs. Ives?”

  “Call me Hannah, please.” I paused for a moment, considering her question. “Summer,” I said. “Definitely summer. In fact, if anyone ever tells you that I’ve retired to Maine, you will know that aliens have come and taken over my body.”

  Ms. Bromley’s shoulders shook with laughter and her face wore a lopsided smile. At the community building,
she tugged on an outer glass door. I held it open and watched as she entered, walked across a small vestibule, and inserted her house key into a slot. When the inner door opened, I followed her along a corridor hung with artwork, some of it, she said with pride, created by the residents.

  She paused and stood before an accomplished watercolor of a cat curled up on a chair. I thought I recognized the window. “Yours?”

  She nodded.

  “Impressive.”

  She ran a fingertip along the aluminum frame as if checking it for dust. “Art is my pleasure now. What do you do in your spare time, Hannah?”

  “Read mostly, or sail, but not at this time of year. My husband’s sister has a boat.”

  When we reached the dining room, I had to mask my surprise. Each of the waitstaff, clad in black trousers, white shirts, and bow ties, greeted my hostess by name. The tables were set with quality china on white tablecloths; red napkins, elaborately folded, sprang from each water glass like astonished birds. Because there were no leaves on the trees, a pleasant view of the South River lay beyond the window. There were restaurants in Annapolis not nearly as attractive as this.

  A petite blonde, her hair held back at the crown by half a dozen miniature butterfly clips, showed us to a table set for two by the window. Her name tag said “Trish.”

  I settled comfortably into a chair while Trish held Ms. Bromley’s chair and scooted it closer to the table. Once the elderly woman was comfortably seated, Trish laced her neatly manicured fingers together and held them against her chest. “The specials today are spaghetti Bolognese and shrimp scampi. I’d recommend the scampi,” she announced with a grin. “And if you clean your plates, ladies, there’s our famous apple pie.”

  “The scampi will be fine for me. Hannah?”

  “The same.”

  “And some tea, too, Trish.”

  “Okeydokey!” Trish flounced away and returned almost immediately, carrying a teapot and a saucer of lemon slices. She set the teapot on the table with a flourish, knocking over the bud vase in the process. A puddle of water spread across the tablecloth. “Oops! Sorry. I’m a butterfingers today.” She handed me the lemons, then dabbed at the water with a napkin she’d snitched from an adjoining table.

  Ms. Bromley seemed unruffled. “Never mind, Trish.” She pulled the napkin from the waitress’s hand and waved her away. “We’ll take care of it.” She folded the napkin in half and laid it carefully over the stain.

  When Trish was safely back in the kitchen, Ms. Bromley poured a cup of tea for each of us. “So you’re the young woman they’ve saddled with all my children.” She dropped a thin slice of lemon into her cup and watched it float to the surface.

  I chuckled. “And I’m honored.” I slipped a sugar cube into my tea and mashed down on it with the tip of my spoon, persuading it as gently as possible to dissolve.

  “You said on the telephone that you had some questions to ask me.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Goodness! I feel old enough without you ma’aming me. Call me Nadine, please. Or Naddy.”

  I could no more call this famous woman I had just met “Naddy” than I could call my grandmother Laureen. I decided I’d avoid the issue altogether, if I could manage it. “I’m making good progress on your collection, getting all the titles together. Are all your books included?”

  “Every blessed one. Including a few in Portuguese.” She noticed that the level of the tea in my cup was a tad low, lifted the pot, and raised an eyebrow.

  I nodded, and she topped it off.

  “And your short stories?” I asked.

  “They’re all on the list I gave St. John’s. But I’m afraid I didn’t always keep copies of the short stories.”

  “I’ve located sources for most of them and arranged to get photocopies through interlibrary loan.” I sipped my tea. “The newspaper and magazine interviews are more difficult, but I stumbled across an article in Parade magazine that was fascinating.”

  “I remember that one. A near disaster. Carrie—that was my dog—nipped the reporter on the ankle and drew blood. We had to report the naughty girl to dog control.” She leaned back in her chair, her face alive with the memory.

  Remembering my husband’s unfortunate experience with the press the previous spring when reporters had lurked about on the street outside our house, ambushing him whenever he appeared, I said, “Give the pooch a medal.”

  Ms. Bromley crinkled her nose thoughtfully. “I wrote a radio play once for NPR, but it was never produced.”

  “I don’t remember running across any of your plays.”

  “And you won’t, my dear. There was only the one, and it should stay well and truly buried.”

  The waitress brought our food at that moment and the conversation turned to children (mine) and pets (hers) and grandchildren (hers and mine). I confess I even dragged out my wallet-size photos of Chloe, aged one month and already cute as a button. When our plates were taken away and Trish went off to fetch the world-famous pie, I figured I had beaten around the bush long enough. “I was interested in one of your books in particular.”

  Ms. Bromley looked up from her tea. “Oh, yes?”

  “Triple Jeopardy?”

  Ms. Bromley cast her eyes upward as if what she was about to say was written on the ceiling. “Ah, yes.” She laid her elbows on the table, made a tent with her fingers, and rested her chin on her thumbs. The eyes studying my face were green, flecked with brown. “That was an interesting one. I spent some time with a woman in Charleston whose therapist claimed to have identified twenty-three distinct personalities. She wasn’t so much a woman as a club!” She straightened her back and leaned forward, confidentially. “Can’t imagine what I’d do with all those people cluttering up the place. I have a hard enough time managing the one personality I’ve got.”

  Trish set a thick slice of pie crusted with cinnamon in front of each of us. Ms. Bromley took a bite from the pointy end and chewed it thoughtfully. “I wrote that back in the days when multiple personalities were all the rage. You probably remember Sybil?”

  I nodded.

  “But before that, there was The Three Faces of Eve.”

  “Joanne Woodward,” I said.

  “Exactly.” She took another bite of pie. “That theory’s been largely debunked, though.”

  I was surprised to hear that. If you believe what you see on Lifetime TV, one woman out of three is harboring multiple personalities. “It’s not the multiple personalities I’m curious about, actually. It’s the idea that memories of things that never happened—like sexual abuse—can be recovered.”

  I watched her face carefully when I said that. I didn’t want her to think that I had been sexually abused.

  “The two are related,” Ms. Bromley said matter-of-factly. She dabbed her lips with her napkin, then rearranged it in her lap. “Some therapists theorize that abused children develop these alternate personalities as a coping mechanism to help them deal with the abuse. The only way to integrate these individuals, they feel, is to help them remember the traumatic experiences that triggered the split.” She leaned back in her chair and studied me thoughtfully. “I suppose there may be genuine instances of memories being deeply buried, then remembered sometime later, but unless we are to believe that there’s been a recent epidemic of child sexual abuse, most experts now discredit this theory, too.”

  I felt my spirits soar. “They do?”

  She nodded. “Experiments have shown how easy it is to create false memories in even the most levelheaded of people. I think you’ll find a lot of background material on this in my files.”

  She laid down her fork. “And there have been recent cases …” She looked thoughtful. “… a big article in The New Yorker, even. They’ve coined a term for it—false memory syndrome.”

  What a relief! If Georgina’s symptoms had a name, maybe there was a cure.

  Ms. Bromley folded her hands on the table in front of her. She spoke so softly that I had to lean fo
rward to hear her. “Hannah?”

  “Yes?”

  “This isn’t one of those I-have-a-friend-who conversations, is it?”

  When I didn’t answer right away, concern clouded her face. “Were you …?” She paused, as if unwilling to put words into my mouth.

  I considered how much to tell this woman I’d just met. Maybe I had read so many of her books that I just felt that I knew her. Maybe she reminded me of my grandmother. For whatever reason, I instinctively knew she would be discreet, so I decided to trust her.

  “No, not me. I was curious about your character Amy, Ms. Bromley, because she reminded me of my sister Georgina.” I pushed my pie aside and leaned toward her over the table, my voice a whisper. “She has just accused our father of sexually abusing her while we were living in Sicily.”

  Ms. Bromley reached out and laid her hand, warm and soft, on mine. “I’m so sorry, my dear.” I felt so relieved! She really understood.

  “And it’s obvious to everyone in our family—except for Georgina and her husband—that these so-called memories are totally false!”

  “Have you tried talking to your sister?”

  “Several times. At first I didn’t know what she was getting at. She kept asking me all these weird questions. By the time I figured it out, her therapist had been murdered, and now we’re all in a fine pickle.”

  “Murdered?” Her teacup grazed the edge of its saucer. “Is this the therapist up in Baltimore that I heard about on the news?”

  I nodded.

  “You poor thing!” She shook her head. “I’ve written about murder all my life. I’ve stabbed ’em, shot ’em, poisoned ’em … even threw a victim out of an airplane once, but it was all the fruits of an active imagination. Never hit me close to home, thank goodness.” She reached over and patted my hand, which was nervously converting what was left of my roll into tiny crumbs.

  “The police suspect my sister, I’m afraid, although they also questioned my father.”