Sybil took the money, and put it in her pocket, and turned, to hurry away. With no mind for who might hear him, Mr. Starr called after her, “You see, Blake? — Starr is true to his word. Always!”
4. Is the Omission of Truth a Lie, or Only an Omission?
“Well! — tell me how things went with you today, Sybil!” Lora Dell Blake said, with such an air of bemused exasperation, Sybil understood that, as so often, Aunt Lora had something to say that really couldn’t wait — her work at the Glencoe Medical Center provided her with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of comical and outrageous anecdotes. So, deferring to Aunt Lora, as they prepared supper together as usual, and sat down to eat it, Sybil was content to listen, and to laugh.
For it was funny, if outrageous too — the latest episode in the ongoing folly at the Medical Center.
Lora Dell Blake, in her late forties, was a tall, lanky, restless woman; with close-cropped greying hair; sand-colored eyes and skin; a generous spirit, but a habit of sarcasm. Though she claimed to love Southern California — “You don’t know what paradise is, unless you’re from somewhere else” — she seemed in fact an awkwardly transplanted New Englander, with expectations and a sense of personal integrity, or intransigence, quite out of place here. She was fond of saying she did not suffer fools gladly, and so it was. Overqualified for her position at the Glencoe Medical Center, she’d had no luck in finding work elsewhere, partly because she did not want to leave Glencoe and “uproot” Sybil while Sybil was still in high school; and partly because her interviews were invariably disasters — Lora Dell Blake was incapable of being, or even seeming, docile, tractable, “feminine,” hypocritical.
Lora was not Sybil’s sole living relative — there were Blakes, and Contes, back in Vermont — but Lora had discouraged visitors to the small stucco bungalow on Meridian Street, in Glencoe, California; she had not in fact troubled to reply to letters or cards since, having been granted custody of her younger sister’s daughter, at the time of what she called “the tragedy,” she’d picked up and moved across the continent, to a part of the country she knew nothing about — “My intention is to erase the past, for the child’s sake,” she said, “and to start a new life.”
And: “For the child, for poor little Sybil — I would make any sacrifice.”
Sybil, who loved her aunt very much, had the vague idea that there had been, many years ago, protests, queries, telephone calls — but that Aunt Lora had dealt with them all, and really had made a new and “uncomplicated” life for them. Aunt Lora was one of those personalities, already strong, that is strengthened, and empowered, by being challenged; she seemed to take an actual zest in confrontation, whether with her own relatives or her employers at the Medical Center — anyone who presumed to tell her what to do. She was especially protective of Sybil, since, as she often said, they had no one but each other.
Which was true. Aunt Lora had seen to that.
Though Sybil had been adopted by her aunt, there was never any pretense that she was anything but Lora’s niece, not her daughter. Nor did most people, seeing the two together, noting their physical dissimilarities, make that mistake.
So it happened that Sybil Blake grew up knowing virtually nothing about her Vermont background except its general tragic outline: her knowledge of her mother and father, the precise circumstances of their deaths, was as vague and unexamined in her consciousness as a childhood fairy tale. For whenever, as a little girl, Sybil would ask her aunt about these things, Aunt Lora responded with hurt, or alarm, or reproach, or, most disturbingly, anxiety. Her eyes might flood with tears — Aunt Lora, who never cried. She might take Sybil’s hands in both her own, and squeeze them tightly, and looking Sybil in the eyes, say, in a quiet, commanding voice, “But, darling, you don’t want to know.”
So too, that evening, when, for some reason, Sybil brought up the subject, asking Aunt Lora how, again, exactly, had her parents died, Aunt Lora looked at her in surprise; and, for a long moment, rummaging in the pockets of her shirt for a pack of cigarettes that wasn’t there (Aunt Lora had given up smoking the previous month, for perhaps the fifth time), it seemed almost that Lora herself did not remember.
“Sybil, honey — why are you asking? I mean, why now?”
“I don’t know,” Sybil said evasively. “I guess — I’m just asking.”
“Nothing happened to you at school, did it?”
Sybil could not see how this question related to her own, but she said, politely, “No, Aunt Lora. Of course not.”
“It’s just that out of nowhere — I can’t help but wonder why,” Aunt Lora said, frowning, “—you should ask.”
Aunt Lora regarded Sybil with worried eyes: a look of such suffocating familiarity that, for a moment, Sybil felt as if a band were tightening around her chest, making it impossible to breathe. Why is my wanting to know a test of my love for you? — why do you do this, Aunt Lora, every time? She said, an edge of anger to her voice, “I was seventeen years old last week, Aunt Lora. I’m not a child any longer.”
Aunt Lora laughed, startled. “Certainly you’re not a child!”
Aunt Lora then sighed, and, in a characteristic gesture, meaning both impatience and a dutiful desire to please, ran both hands rapidly through her hair and began to speak. She assured Sybil that there was little to know, really. The accident — the tragedy — had happened so long ago. “Your mother, Melanie, was twenty-six years old at the time — a beautiful sweet-natured young woman, with eyes like yours, cheekbones like yours, pale wavy hair. Your father, George Conte, was thirty-one years old — a promising young lawyer, in his father’s firm — an attractive, ambitious man—” And here as in the past Aunt Lora paused, as if in the very act of summoning up this long-dead couple, she had forgotten them; and was simply repeating a story, a family tale, like one of the more extreme of her tales of the Glencoe Medical Center, worn smooth by countless tellings.
“A boating accident — Fourth of July—” Sybil coaxed, “—and I was with you, and—”
“You were with me, and Grandma, at the cottage — you were just a little girl!” Aunt Lora said, blinking tears from her eyes, “—and it was almost dusk, and time for the fireworks to start. Mommy and Daddy were out in Daddy’s speedboat — they’d been across the lake, at the Club—”
“And they started back across the lake — Lake Champlain—”
“—Lake Champlain, of course: it’s beautiful, but treacherous, if a storm comes up suddenly—”
“And Daddy was at the controls of the boat—”
“—and, somehow, they capsized. And drowned. A rescue boat went out immediately, but it was too late.” Aunt Lora’s mouth turned hard. Her eyes glistening with tears, as if defiantly. “They drowned.”
Sybil’s heart was beating painfully. She was certain there must be more, yet she herself could remember nothing — not even herself, that two-year-old child, waiting for Mommy and Daddy who were never to arrive. Her memory of her mother and father was vague, dim, featureless, like a dream that, even as it seems about to drift into consciousness, retreats farther into darkness. She said, in a whisper, “It was an accident. No one was to blame.”
Aunt Lora chose her words with care. “No one was to blame.”
There was a pause. Sybil looked at her aunt, who was not now looking at her. How lined, even leathery, the older woman’s face was getting! — all her life she’d been reckless, indifferent, about sun, wind, weather, and now, in her late forties, she might have been a decade older. Sybil said, tentatively, “No one was to blame—?”