“So am I. Where were we? Oh yes, Adam. He was one of those annoying people who was good at everything. He seemed to achieve what he wanted with remarkably little effort. I remember we did Much Ado About Nothing the following summer. I was Beatrice and he was Benedict. You know how I love that play. The banter. The energy. It mimicked our real-life relationship. Ruth was forever intervening and begging us to stop arguing. She was a gentle soul.”
Liza lay back on the bed, picturing it. “I didn’t know you loved drama.” She was learning so much about her mother.
“Only at college. After that I never stayed in one place long enough to commit to rehearsals.”
Because of Adam and Ruth. Because her mother had walked away from that part of her life. This had to be a tough conversation for Kathleen. “I bet you were an incredible Beatrice.”
“I believe feisty was a word that came up in more than one of the reviews.”
She could easily picture her mother in the role. “That must be where Caitlin gets her love of drama.” She diffused some of the emotion by steering the conversation away from the personal for a few minutes. Her mother wasn’t the only one who needed a breather. Liza did too. She was struggling to hold it together, but she knew it was important that she didn’t overreact or make her mother uncomfortable by revealing her own feelings. And hers were complicated, of course. For her it wasn’t only about what she was hearing, it was about how it finally felt to have her mother’s trust. “We can blame DNA for all those stage-worthy moments.”
“Perhaps. Although she seems to give her best performances away from the stage.”
They both laughed, and Liza pulled the phone a little closer. She was laughing with her mother. Laughing! And it felt good. “She does indeed. Tell me more about you and Adam.”
“We were a cliché, really. Our romance onstage spilled offstage. But Ruth and I were inseparable. I wasn’t going to be one of those people who ditched their friends when they fell in love, so invariably we ended up doing things together, the three of us. Ruth had gone to buy a picnic the day Adam proposed to me on the riverbank. Our exams had ended that day. I’d had a glass or two of champagne and was feeling excessively cheerful and optimistic about life. He produced a ring.”
Liza heard the wistful note in her voice. “The one in the drawer.”
“Yes. I believe it’s valuable, although I don’t know for sure. You’re probably wondering why I still have it.” Kathleen paused, as if she wasn’t sure of the answer herself. “He refused to take it back, and I couldn’t bring myself to sell it. I don’t quite know why. Maybe I thought it might act as a caution.”
At some point Liza would urge her to store it in a safer place, but that wasn’t the priority. Right now her thoughts were only for her mother. “You accepted his proposal. So where did Ruth come into the story? How did that happen?”
Her mother didn’t immediately answer. “I was naive. I believed Ruth to be impervious to his charms. She was the one person he didn’t seem able to impress. And Adam, being Adam, would have felt compelled to convert her into an admirer. I’m sure he would have done the hard work, because Ruth would never have proactively gone after him. Not that I’m absolving her of blame. But I see how it might have happened. Adam was godlike, and she would have been flattered. But it turned out her feelings ran far deeper for him than I’d thought.”
Liza’s chest ached as she thought about how her mother must have felt. Her fiancé and her best friend. The betrayal had upended her life in every possible way.
“Had it been going on for a long time?”
“No. It was after the Summer Ball. I was due to go with Adam. Ruth hadn’t planned to go at all. She didn’t enjoy that kind of thing, but then I ate something that disagreed with me—it won’t surprise you to know that I lacked caution in my eating even back then—and went down with a vicious bout of food poisoning. So Adam took Ruth instead.” There was a pause, and the sound of her mother taking a breath. “And that was it. They didn’t tell me right away, although I suspected something because they both behaved differently around me. And then a few weeks later Ruth discovered she was pregnant. And in those days being a single mother was greeted with horror and judgment of course.”
“Oh you poor thing.” Liza found it hard to imagine. “How did you cope?”
“It was hard. I’d lost my lover and my best friend. Ruth was distraught. She was worried about telling her parents. Worried about how she would survive. Guilty at having hurt me. Adam came to see me and begged forgiveness. Until you read the letter, I didn’t know he’d told Ruth. He said it was a silly mistake.” There was a hint of irritation in Kathleen’s voice. “But that ‘silly mistake’, even if that’s what it was, couldn’t be easily undone. Ruth was pregnant. She needed support. Her parents wouldn’t give it. I could hardly give it. That left Adam. I told him he had to do the responsible thing. Then I packed up all my thing
s and left. I didn’t believe their relationship would sustain, or even that Adam would be there for her, but I knew there was more chance of that happening if I wasn’t in the picture.”
Liza closed her eyes. As a child she’d seen her mother as being apart—almost detached—as she pursued her own life, with her family an adjunct to that life. To her great shame she’d often considered Kathleen to be bordering selfish in her decision making, and yet here was an example of the most selfless behavior Liza could have imagined. Would she have been as strong willed in the same circumstances? She didn’t know. All she knew was that she now had a very different view of her mother. “Did Dad know all this?”
“Yes. I avoided close relationships after that, as you might imagine. Both male and female. I was fortunate to fall into a job that I found exciting, and then came The Summer Seekers. I had a life that didn’t allow me time for more than the most superficial of friendships, and that also absolved me of all need to reflect on my life. Had your father not been the steady, persistent man he was, I doubt I would have married at all.”
“I’m glad you told me. I’m glad we’re reading these letters together.”
“I should have done it before, but I preferred to keep the past in the past. I’ve given you the impression that it was easy, and it wasn’t. It really was the most terrible mess. Of course in those days we didn’t have mobile phones or email, so communication wasn’t as instant and continuous as it is now. That made it easier. Martha has Steven’s name popping up on her phone all the time. I didn’t have to handle that. No wonder the poor girl needed to escape.”
Martha had been escaping from a bad relationship?
Liza had suspected there was something. She also knew that her mother probably shouldn’t have told her something so personal, so she didn’t pursue it. Everyone had their own story, didn’t they? Things were rarely as they appeared on the surface.
Her mother was obviously enjoying Martha’s company, and Martha had made this trip possible. For that, Liza was grateful.
“I’m sure you’re right that it was easier to make a clean break.”
“I worried about Ruth terribly. I was angry of course—I’m not a saint, but I did worry. I was afraid Adam would leave her alone with that baby. Maybe she lost the baby. I don’t know. I didn’t want to know. But now—I suppose I’m about to find out—”
Liza heard her mother’s voice wobble and tightened her grip on the phone. “We’re about to find out.” She was part of this story now. She wanted to know how it ended.
“I’m afraid reading them might be something I regret. What if I did the wrong thing, Liza?”