No photographs of the wedding of Melanie Blake and George Conte. Not a one.
No photographs, so far as Sybil could see, of her father “George Conte” at all.
There was a single snapshot of Melanie with her baby daughter Sybil, and this Sybil studied for a long time. It had been taken in summer, at a lakeside cottage; Melanie was posing prettily, in a white dress, with her baby snug in the crook of her arm, and both were looking toward the camera, as if someone had just called out to them, to make them laugh — Melanie with a wide, glamorous, yet sweet smile, little Sybil gaping open-mouthed. Here Melanie looked only slightly more mature than in the graduation photograph: her pale brown hair, many shades of brown and blond, was shoulder-length, and upturned; her eyes were meticulously outlined in mascara, prominent in her heart-shaped face.
In the foreground, on the grass, was the shadow of a man’s head and shoulders — George Conte, perhaps? The missing person.
Sybil stared at this snapshot, which was wrinkled and dog-eared. She did not know what to think, and, oddly, she felt very little: for was the infant in the picture really herself, Sybil Blake, if she could not remember?
Or did she in fact remember, somewhere deep in her brain, in memory-traces that were indelible?
From now on, she would “remember” her mother as the pretty, self-assured young woman in this snapshot. This image, in full color, would replace any other.
Reluctantly, Sybil slid the snapshot back in its packet. How she would have liked to keep it! — but Aunt Lora would discover the theft, eventually. And Aunt Lora must be protected against knowing that her own niece had broken into her things, violated the trust between them.
The folders containing personal material were few, and quickly searched. Nothing pertaining to the accident, the “tragedy”? — not even an obituary? Sybil looked in adjacent files, with increasing desperation. There was not only the question of who her father was, or had been, but the question, nearly as compelling, of why Aunt Lora had eradicated all trace of him, even in her own private files. For a moment Sybil wondered if there had ever been any “George Conte” at alclass="underline" maybe her mother had not married, and that was part of the secret? Melanie had died in some terrible way, terrible at least in Lora Dell Blake’s eyes, thus the very fact must be hidden from Sybil, after so many years? Sybil recalled Aunt Lora saying, earnestly, a few years ago, “The only thing you should know, Sybil, is that your mother — and your father — would not want you to grow up in the shadow of their deaths. They would have wanted you — your mother especially — to be happy.”
Part of this legacy of happiness, Sybil gathered, had been for her to grow up as a perfectly normal American girl, in a sunny, shadowless place with no history, or, at any rate, no history that concerned her. “But I don’t want to be happy, I want to know,” Sybil said aloud.
But the rest of the manila files, jammed so tightly together they were almost inextricable, yielded nothing.
So, disappointed, Sybil shut the file drawer, and locked it.
But what of Aunt Lora’s desk drawers? She had a memory of their being unlocked, thus surely containing nothing of significance; but now it occurred to her that, being unlocked, one of these drawers might in fact contain something Aunt Lora might want to keep safely hidden. So, quickly, with not much hope, Sybil looked through these drawers, messy, jammed with papers, clippings, further packets of household receipts, old programs from plays they’d seen in Los Angeles — and, in the largest drawer, at the very bottom, in a wrinkled manila envelope with “MEDICAL INSURANCE” carefully printed on its front, Sybil found what she was looking for.
Newspaper clippings, badly yellowed, some of them spliced together with aged cellophane tape—
So Sybil Blake learned, in the space of less than sixty seconds, the nature of the tragedy from which her Aunt Lora had shielded her for nearly fifteen years.
Her father was indeed a man named George Conte, and this man had shot her mother Melanie to death, in their speedboat on Lake Champlain, and pushed her body overboard. He had tried to kill himself too but had only critically wounded himself with a shot to the head. He’d undergone emergency neurosurgery, and recovered; he was arrested, tried, and convicted of second-degree murder; and sentenced to between twelve and nineteen years in prison, at the Hartshill State Prison in northern Vermont.
Sybil sifted through the clippings, her fingers numb. So this was it! This! Murder, attempted suicide! — not mere drunkenness and an “accident” on the lake.
Aunt Lora seemed to have stuffed the clippings in an envelope in haste, or in revulsion; with some, photographs had been torn off, leaving only their captions — “Melanie and George Conte, 1975,” “Prosecution witness Lora Dell Blake leaving courthouse.” Those photographs of George Conte showed a man who surely did resemble “Mr. Starr”: younger, dark-haired, with a face heavier in the jaws and an air of youthful self-assurance and expectation. There. Your father. “Mr. Starr.” The missing person.
There were several photographs too of Melanie Conte, including one taken for her high-school yearbook, and one of her in a long, formal gown with her hair glamorously upswept — “Wellington woman killed by jealous husband.” There was a wedding photograph of the couple looking very young, attractive, and happy; a photograph of the “Conte family at their summer home”; a photograph of “George Conte, lawyer, after 2nd-degree murder verdict” — the convicted man, stunned, down-looking, being taken away handcuffed between two grim sheriff’s men. Sybil understood that the terrible thing that had happened in her family had been of enormous public interest in Wellington, Vermont, and that this was part of its terribleness, its shame.
What had Aunt Lora said? — she’d been in therapy for some time afterward, thus did not want to relive those memories.
And she’d said, It all happened a long time ago.
But she’d lied, too. She had looked Sybil full in the face and lied, lied. Insisting that Sybil’s father was dead when she knew he was alive.
When Sybil herself had reason to believe he was alive.
My name is Starr! Don’t judge me too quickly!
Sybil read, and reread, the aged clippings. There were perhaps twenty of them. She gathered two general things: that her father George Conte was from a locally prominent family, and that he’d had a very capable attorney to defend him at his trial; and that the community had greatly enjoyed the scandal, though, no doubt, offering condolences to the grieving Blake family. The spectacle of a beautiful young wife murdered by her “jealous” young husband, her body pushed from an expensive speedboat to sink in Lake Champlain — who could resist? The media had surely exploited this tragedy to its fullest.
Now you see, don’t you, why your name had to be changed. Not “Conte,” the murderer, but “Blake,” the victim, is your parent.
Sybil was filled with a child’s rage, a child’s inarticulate grief— Why, why! This man named George Conte had, by a violent act, ruined everything!