Behind Closed Doors

by Susan R. Sloan

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Behind Closed Doors [Paperback] Sloan, Susan R.

Release date: May 4, 2017

Publisher: Sphere

Print pages: 480

Sample

 

A HUSH SETTLED over the fourth-floor courtroom, the kind of hush that always came at the end of a trial, before the verdict, when the frantic battle of adversaries was over, and there was nothing left to do but wait.

The San Mateo County Hall of Justice was a utilitarian building, with none of the warmth or charm or history of the Old Courthouse next door, which had been turned into a museum. The courtrooms in the new eight-story structure were functional, not grand, making the justice meted out in them seem more mechanical than traditional.

On one side of the bar in this particular courtroom, four rows of flip-down upholstered seats accommodated spectators to the show. On the other side, the bench, backed by the state seal and flanked by American and California flags, was impressive in its size, but unremarkable in its design. The jury box held twelve well-padded armchairs. Behind the bar, the floor was linoleum. In front of the bar, it was carpeted. All the walls were paneled. All the wood was mahogany. Everything else was gray.

For reasons of security or privacy or both, the room was windowless. Recessed into the ceiling was a huge bank of fluorescent lights. Two thirds of the lights had been turned off, and court personnel were quietly removing all traces of the proceeding that had just been concluded—charts, documents, photographs, pieces of evidence, put into cartons and carried out. The jury box and the spectator seats had long since emptied.

Valerie O’Connor Marsh sat quietly at the defense table, a polished mahogany rectangle just inside the bar, in a simple gray dress that almost matched the color of her hair, and the color of the courtroom. It was a few minutes past three o’clock on a Thursday afternoon in early June, and there was no real reason for her to be sitting there, she knew. It could be hours, or even days, before the jury decided her fate. There was a little room just down the hall from this one, where she could wait in privacy with her attorney and her family. Or she could even go home. The court clerk would notify her attorney when the time came, and he would notify her. But it was as if the mere act of standing up was too much for her even to contemplate.

The past four days had left her drained, drained and curiously detached. Not unlike the way she had felt that night in the kitchen, almost eight months ago. A night that now seemed a lifetime away, and in many ways was, because it marked the end of the life that Valerie had lived for almost forty-four of her sixty-two years, and the beginning of the life that she would live from then on.

It wasn’t the verdict that worried her, because she had no control over that. Her fate was in God’s hands. Well, God and a dozen men and women she had never laid eyes on until last week. No, of far more concern to her was how she would ever be able to hold her head up in her small, coastal community . . . now that everyone knew.

Valerie had pleaded with her attorney not to go to trial, to make some deal with the district attorney, but he had been adamant, assuring her that they could win. Only, in his effort to save her, he had thrown open the door to her most private life and shone a harsh light into every corner, for everyone to see. And it had been so unbearable for her to sit there, helplessly, as every agonizing moment of her life with Jack was played out in front of strangers, that the only way she could get through it was to pretend that he was talking about some other person and some other family that had nothing to do with her.

But of course, it did. She saw the looks she got from the people in the courtroom, read the accounts of the trial in the daily newspaper, watched the recaps on the local television channels, and her face grew hot with embarrassment. If suicide had not been a mortal sin, she knew she would have put an end to her life sooner than sit there in such anguish.

“Tell me, Mrs. Marsh, had your husband ever beaten anyone to death before the night of October 26?” The prosecutor’s strident voice echoed in her ears.

Valerie had held in her anger. “Not that I know of,” she said.

“Then why did you think he was going to that night?” Valerie had not replied. She simply sat there and glared at the man. “Your Honor, will you please instruct the witness to answer the question?”

“Mrs. Marsh,” the judge said, kindly enough. “You must answer the question.”

“I don’t know, I wasn’t sure,” she was forced to say, her fists clenched so tightly in her lap that her fingernails cut little half moons into the palms of her hands. “But my husband was a violent man, and when he was drinking, there was no way of knowing what he might do. I couldn’t take the chance.”

“What chance couldn’t you take, Mrs. Marsh?” the prosecutor pressed. “That you might never have had a better opportunity to do what you had been wanting to do, perhaps for years?”

Her attorney objected to that, of course, but it was too late. The damage had already been done. She could see it in the eyes of the jurors, and hear it in the gasps of the spectators. So she sat at the empty defense table in the empty courtroom, staring at nothing, with her arms wrapped tightly around her shoulders to keep herself from falling apart.

One

VALERIE O’CONNOR fell in love with Jack Marsh the first moment she set eyes on him. It was at her sister’s North End apartment in Boston, where she had come to visit from her home in Rutland, Vermont, the summer after high school, the summer of 1955.

Marianne was Valerie’s oldest sister and, if truth be known, her favorite. Marianne’s husband, Tommy Santini, was a sweet and gentle bear of a man, a cook in a local Italian restaurant called Bertolli’s, who had promised his wife that one day they would have a little place of their own.

“We’ll call it the Irish Italian,” he would tease, “and we’ll serve corned beef and cabbage pizza.”

Tommy was deaf in one ear and always spoke in a booming voice, with exclamation points at the ends of his sentences. He had lost his hearing during a bombing raid on the MASH unit in Korea where he was a cook for two years, and he never seemed to run out of loud mess hall stories. It was on a hot night in July, right in the middle of one of Tommy’s worst tales, that the doorbell rang, and when Valerie went to answer it, there was Tommy’s younger brother, Joey, with his buddy, Jack Marsh, teasing and cajoling and looking for a free meal.

“These two hell-raisers were in Korea together,” Tommy said to Valerie after the introductions. “Now they’re working over at Federal Airlines. They were smart. Did their Army ser-vice in aircraft maintenance. Never got near a front line. Kept their butts nice and safe. And now all the commercial airlines are hot for their bodies.”

Valerie looked at Jack Marsh’s body, at the muscles rippling beneath his thin shirt. It was hard and powerful. She felt weak.

Marianne set two more places at the dinner table. There was always enough food. Joey and his friends came around often. But Valerie barely ate a bite. She couldn’t take her eyes off the young man across the table. He was as dark as she was light. His hair was black, hers blond. His eyes were strangely yellow, hers pale blue. His skin glowed like a chestnut from working outdoors, hers turned painfully pink if she were in the sun for more than ten minutes.

Valerie heard very little of the conversation that was bandied around the dinner table that evening. She caught phrases like “the jet age,” and names like Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, and something about jet-propelled aircraft being the way of the future, and Jack seemed very excited about it all, but it meant next to nothing to her.

She didn’t think he had noticed her at all. He hardly glanced in her direction, and certainly didn’t have more than ten words to say to her all evening. But a week later, he called and asked her out to a movie. She was almost too nervous and excited to accept. But she did, and for the occasion, she wore a striped sundress with a halter neck and a sweater to cover her bare back. He had on jeans, a tight T-shirt, and a lightweight windbreaker.

He put his arm casually around her during the picture, and they held hands afterward as they walked along Tremont Street to the soda fountain. They caught a reflection of themselves in a darkened shop window and made funny faces at one another, but she hardly recognized herself. She looked even smaller than she was, standing there beside his strength. It made her feel giddy. She thought he would be able to keep her safe from whatever awful things might be waiting for her out in the big world.

They saw each other almost every day after that, often going to the movies or walking the narrow little North End streets that looked and sounded like they belonged in Italy more than in America. They browsed through Paul Revere’s House and the Old North Church. They strolled along the banks of the Charles River. Once, right after payday, Jack took her to dinner at the extravagantly expensive Locke-Ober Restaurant, and several times they went over to the Boston Common to hear the catchy calypso music that singers like Harry Belafonte were making popular.

One afternoon, they crossed over the Charles River to Cambridge and wandered around Harvard Yard, sticking their noses in the air and pretending they were summer session students at the university, and just as good as anyone else. Actually, Valerie didn’t like Harvard very much. The buildings looked cold and unwelcoming.

Sometimes they went out with Joey, or other buddies of Jack’s from work, and had a boisterous good time. But mostly, they went out alone, preferring to be quiet with each other. On occasion, when she really encouraged him, he would talk. He told her a little about his mother, who had died, and his father, who had more or less abdicated, and she told him a lot about being in a family of nine.

“What was it like not having a mother, and not having your dad around very much?” she asked.

“Free,” he replied. “What was it like having so many sisters and brothers?”

“Crowded,” she replied, and they laughed together.

He told her a little about growing up in Kansas City and she told him all about Rutland.

“Why did you join the Air Force?” she wondered.

“I spent a lot of time down at Heart Airport when I was a kid,” he answered. “The planes always fascinated me. Or maybe it was the idea of getting on one of them and going someplace far away.”

“Where did you want to go?”

“I didn’t care,” he said. “I had this after-school job, see, at the stock pens. And one day, the manager comes over and asks me if I’d like a full-time job after high school. I had this picture of being stuck in that two-bit town for the rest of my life. So the minute I got out of school, I got on a plane and went as far away as I could get. As it turned out—it was Korea.”

“I guess I never felt that way,” she said thoughtfully.

“You like Rutland, huh?”

She had never really thought about it quite like that, but now that she did, the answer was simple. “Rutland is home,” she told him. “Wherever I may go in this world, whatever I may do, or wherever I may live, Rutland will always be home.”

“It must be nice to feel like that about a place,” he said slowly. “Tell me more.”

If it was like pulling teeth to get him to talk about himself, he could talk forever about airplanes. She spent hours listening to all the finer points of wingspan and air pressure and descent rates.

He kissed her for the first time at the end of their third date. Almost, it seemed, as an afterthought. They had garlic on their breath, from the spaghetti dinner they had eaten at Bertolli’s, the place where Tommy worked. Garlic mixed with Chianti. She thought she had never tasted anything so good in her life. It wasn’t the first kiss she had ever had, but it was the first that ever made her feel hot and cold and dizzy all at the same time, and she didn’t want it to end.

Marianne and Tommy were not too sure what to make of the relationship, nor were they convinced that they should encourage it. Although he was a friend of Joey’s, Jack Marsh was different somehow, older, slicker. Nice enough, maybe, but not the right man for Valerie. Marianne was secretly glad when summer ended, and Labor Day came, and her sister went home to Rutland.

But Valerie was heartbroken. In her wildest dreams, she had never imagined that anyone as attractive, or as worldly, or as wonderful as Jack Marsh clearly was could possibly have any interest in somebody as unsophisticated as she. Yet, he had.

It was true, they never actually discussed the future in terms of the two of them being together, but she was sure that he felt about her as she did about him. Why else would he have kissed her so urgently, and touched her the way he had? More than once she had struggled to control herself, and him, before they went too far. He didn’t argue the issue very strenuously on those occasions, as he watched her hurry to readjust her clothing, and he always came back the next day.

They may have known each other only six weeks, but they had spent nearly all of it together. Certainly, it was time enough for him to speak of a future for them. But he didn’t. He just said goodbye, and that he would write to her, maybe, or come up to see her, if he could. She was miserable. She hadn’t come to Boston to find a husband, but she felt like she was going home a failure.

As autumn began to paint the Vermont foliage in brilliant gold and russet, Valerie pondered what she was going to do with the rest of her life. She knew she was expected to marry and raise a family, but the Rutland boys she had grown up with seemed so young to her now, and so dull. She never said a word about Jack to anyone, but she wandered around the big house, which had been old when her mother had come to it as a bride, with a listlessness that caused her parents to worry.

Then, on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of November, after church and visiting and dinner were done with, and it was time for the family to gather in the living room on overstuffed sofas and sagging wing chairs and threadbare rugs, he appeared, out of nowhere. And when her father went to the front door in answer to his knock, he sucked up his courage and said, “Hello, sir, my name is Jack Marsh, and I’ve come to marry your daughter.”

She would remember everything about that day, that moment. Who was there, where they sat, how they looked—her father dismayed, her mother delighted. She would remember every word of what they said, what they wore, what she wore—the pink wool dress with the lace collar she had sewn herself. And she would remember the blazing fire in the fireplace set against the brisk day, and the blazing fire inside her.

She felt just like the princess shut away in a tower who had been rescued by her prince. Except, of course, that life was no fairy tale. Her father had told her that often enough. He had taught her that it was all about hard work and disappointments and making compromises and doing the best you could, and hopefully finding a little happiness somewhere along the way. And maybe, if you didn’t do it too badly, you could have the fairy tale in the next world. At least, that’s what Father Joseph, her parish priest, always said anyway, and Valerie believed it.

She had been amused by the wide-eyed, dewy, dopey expressions her sisters had worn when, one by one, they fell under the spell of the “right man,” totally oblivious to all his warts and imperfections. She thought them silly and shortsighted and she knew that she would never be so blind. Surely, she was not blind, was she? as she watched her father usher Jack Marsh into the living room.

“Do you know this man, Valerie?” he barked. “He says he’s come to marry you.”

“Yes, Daddy,” Valerie replied breathlessly. “I know him.”

“Then suppose you tell us what this is all about.”

“I met him in Boston,” Valerie said, blushing furiously.

“We were introduced by your daughter Marianne,” Jack added. “I’m a friend of her husband’s brother, Joey.” From behind his back, he whipped a bouquet of flowers he had been clutching, and managed to pick out Valerie’s mother in the crowd. “Will you accept these, Mrs. O’Connor,” he asked smoothly, “at the very least as an apology for barging into your home like this?”

“We saw a lot of each other in Boston,” Valerie continued, after all the oohing and aahing and twittering had abated and the family’s attention once again fixed on her.

“We fell in love,” Jack declared.

Valerie turned to him in surprise. “You never said that.”

“I guess I didn’t realize it until you were gone,” he replied, flashing his devastating smile. “After that, Boston just seemed to lose all its charm.”

“We fell in love,” she said.

Jack turned to Valerie’s father. “So I’ve come, hoping you’ll give me permission, sir, to marry your daughter.”

Martin O’Connor was a shrewd barrel of a man, quite bald, with bristling eyebrows and piercing eyes that had scared many a suitor right down to his socks. He had recently celebrated his own thirtieth wedding anniversary and had so far married off five of his nine children. Valerie was his youngest, an uncomplicated, obedient girl, with a vulnerability that he didn’t see in any of the others. “Well, I’ll just have to think awhile on that, now won’t I?” he said.

A fair man, but strict and set in his ways, Martin brooked no argument from anyone in his family. His word was always final. Raised on the Bible by his father before him, he firmly believed that sparing the rod did indeed spoil the child. As a result, all nine of his children knew what the back of his hand or the snap of his belt felt like, as often as he deemed necessary.

Many a tender behind had to go to school and endure a hard wooden seat throughout the years, but no one ever talked about it. “What goes on in this house, stays in this house,” Martin would tell them. “That’s what being a family is all about.” Of all the lessons Valerie was meant to learn about life, growing up in her parents’ home, this was perhaps the one that most stuck with her.

Through diligence and hard work, Martin had turned the nearly idle granite quarry he had taken over from his father into one of the more promising businesses in Rutland, persevering even through the flood of 1947 that had devastated so many others. Over the years, he had dealt with all kinds of people and had earned himself the reputation of being tough, honest, and a good judge of both man and marble. And he wasn’t so sure about the brash young man who had presented himself so candidly at the front door. It was nothing he could put his finger on, exactly. The boy was good-looking enough and charming enough and seemed smart enough and smitten enough, and Valerie was certainly taken with him, no doubt about that. But there was something about Jack Marsh that bothered Martin, and his instincts had stood him in good stead now for fifty-five years.

It seemed, however, that on this particular issue, at least, he was a minority of one in his own home. His wife, Charlotte, normally a very sensible woman and in many ways just as shrewd as himself, had been swept right off her feet by the young man. She had fairly fluttered in his presence. Even his two oldest boys, Marty and Kevin, both sober and steady to a fault, had laughed broadly at Marsh’s jokes and offered to take him out and show him what the town of Rutland had to offer. And Valerie, well, that poor besotted child had drifted in and out with a goofball expression on her face and never seemed able to touch a toe to solid ground.

“Whatever you say, Martin,” Charlotte said obediently, as they settled down in bed much later that night to discuss the turn of events. “But he seems a fine young man to me. Of course, Valerie’s the youngest, and it was always going to be hard for you to let her go.”

Martin considered that. He respected Charlotte’s opinion. She was perceptive in ways that he was not, especially about the girls. He fell asleep examining his conscience and his heart.

But when he awoke the next morning, the misgivings were still with him. He carried them around all day, through his appointment at the bank, and his luncheon at the Knights of Columbus, and his meetings with customers. He finally left work two hours early, something he never did, just to come home and walk with Valerie through the fields behind the house, as they had often done when she was a child.

“I don’t think he’ll make you happy, Cornsilk,” he said, using his pet name for her because that’s what her long, pale hair always reminded him of. “He’s not our kind.”

But Valerie turned shining eyes and a dazzling smile on him as she replied. “He’s already made me happy, Daddy. Can’t you see that?”

And of course, he could. “But what do you know about him?” he pressed her. “What do you know about his people?”

“There’s not much to know. Jack’s an only child. His mother came from a farming town in Iowa and his father came from an orphanage in St. Louis and worked for a meatpacking house in Kansas City where Jack was raised. They’re both dead now.”

“Still, six weeks,” Martin persisted. “That’s not a very long time.”

“Are you going to forbid me to marry him?” she asked, biting her lip nervously.

He wanted to. He knew he could. It was right there on the tip of his tongue. “In six weeks, what could you possibly know about the kind of life he’s had?” he asked instead.

“I don’t think it was an easy life,” she said. “He’s been on his own for a lot of it. But what does it matter? I know that he’s sincere and respectful and hardworking. Marianne and Tommy will tell you that, too. And I think he’ll take good care of me.”

“I suppose that’s something,” Martin conceded. “But don’t forget, marriage is for a very long time. For as long as you live. Good or bad. We’re Catholic, we don’t have the luxury others have of making a mistake and getting to go back and fix it.”

“Don’t worry, Daddy, I’m not making a mistake,” Valerie assured him with the supreme confidence of the young and inexperienced. “Jack may not be the man you expected me to pick, but he’s the man I want to share my life with and who wants to share his life with me, whatever it may be. For better or worse, I love him, and I believe him when he says he loves me. And that’s a pretty good beginning, isn’t it?”

They were married right after the new year, during Sunday morning mass at St. Stephen’s, the parish church where her parents had been married, and where her three sisters and two of her brothers had been married, and where she had been baptized, and christened, and had made her first communion, in front of the whole congregation that had watched her grow up.

Jack had been born to Catholic parents. Had his mother lived, he would probably have been reared in the faith, and may even have been an altar boy. As it was, he had never been inside a church and had no use for religion. But he promised to let Valerie raise their children, if they had children, however she wanted. He said it didn’t matter to him, one way or the other.

So Father Joseph agreed, if somewhat reluctantly, to marry them in church. Valerie was immensely grateful. Her faith was very important to her, and being married in her church with all the sacraments meant everything. If she had had to marry Jack someplace else, she certainly would have, even if it meant finding the courage to run away from home and her father to do it. But it would not have been as perfect, and she wanted the first day of her new life to be as perfect as she could make it.

There wasn’t much time for preparations, so Valerie wore her sister Cecilia’s wedding gown, which she herself had helped to make, taken in two sizes. It had yards and yards of silk skirt and lace embroidery, and she fairly floated down the aisle in it. With her silky hair and radiant smile, she looked every inch a princess, and Jack, looking dark and dashing in his rented tuxedo, might very easily have been taken for a prince.

And all around them, people whispered, “It’s a fairy-tale romance . . .”

“A fairy-tale wedding . . .”

“The beginning of a fairy-tale marriage . . .”

Two

THE NEW MR. AND MRS. MARSH spent their wedding night at the Château du Lac, overlooking Lake Champlain, in a suite that was larger than Marianne’s whole apartment in Boston. Furnished with Early American antiques, including an intricate rolltop desk, a beautifully carved armoire, and a huge four-poster bed that was very like the one her parents had, Valerie could well imagine George Washington having slept there, although she knew the Château du Lac hadn’t even existed when Washington was alive.

Staying there was a terrible extravagance, and a serious drain on Jack’s savings, but it was the place Valerie had dreamed of spending her honeymoon all her life, and it made him feel big to give it to her. Besides, it was off-season, being the middle of winter, and the rates were almost reasonable. Then, too, it was just for one night. Early Monday, they would drive to the airport just outside of Burlington for a flight to Seattle, the home base of Federal Airlines, where Jack had been transferred to the jet maintenance school.

That was the bad part. Except for visits to Marianne in Boston, Valerie had never been more than half an hour away from home. Excited though she was to start her brand-new life, she was desolate at the thought of leaving Rutland and her family behind.

Jack, on the other hand, was delighted. The last thing he wanted was to have a dozen other people sticking their noses into his marriage.

There were hugs and kisses and tears all around.

“I thought you were going to be in Boston, near Marianne,” her father said when he heard, more unsure than ever about his decision to let her marry someone they knew so little about.

“So did I,” Valerie said, thinking that Seattle must surely be at the other end of the world, as well as the country. “But this is what Jack really wants, and he says it’s an opportunity he can’t pass up.”

Martin sighed. “Well, I suppose you have to go where his work is,” he conceded. “But I wish you were going to be closer.”

They reached the Château du Lac a little before ten o’clock.

“You’re still in time for dinner,” the manager assured them. “We serve until ten-thirty.”

But they were still full from the lavish reception and six-course luncheon that had followed their wedding, and declined the meal.

“As you wish,” the manager said with a polite bow.

They were shown to their suite, and then left graciously alone. A silver tray with a huge bottle of champagne in a bucket filled with ice and two exquisite cut crystal flutes waited on a little table in the sitting room. A silver-edged card propped against the bucket read, Compliments of the Management, and the new bride blushed furiously when she saw.

“Do you think they know?” she whispered.

Jack chuckled. “Know what? That this is our wedding night? Of course they know. This is the honeymoon suite, isn’t it? What else would we be doing here?”

But Valerie didn’t think it was very funny, strangers knowing what they were about to do. Now that she thought of it, had the desk clerk looked at them with a very smug expression when they checked in? Had the manager bowed just a little too politely? And had the bellhop who brought up their bags looked as though he were trying to smother a smile when Jack tipped him? She had a sudden picture of the whole staff smirking at them behind their backs, because of what they were about to do. She rushed into the bathroom, her cheeks burning.

“It could be worse, you know.” Jack’s words came through the closed door. “They might have thought we weren’t married.”

Valerie hadn’t considered that. She pictured the local sheriff bursting into the suite, summoned by the suspicious desk clerk, placing them under arrest for whatever the crime of sharing a room unmarried was called. And Jack calmly producing their marriage certificate, and demanding satisfaction for the insult to his bride. The idea made her giggle, even as she realized that from now on, whatever might happen, Jack would be there to take care of her.

There was a soft knock at the bathroom door. He was standing there, smiling expectantly when she opened the door. He had removed his coat and tie and was beginning to unbutton his shirt.

Valerie was suddenly shy. She had seen him many times without a shirt, in his bathing suit at the river, on hot August evenings on Marianne’s tiny balcony, on steamy afternoons when he would work on his Chrysler. But this was different, so very different. All of a sudden, she found she couldn’t look at him. Instead, she looked down at her ivory shantung traveling suit.

“Just give me a moment,” she murmured, closing the door against him. Her mouth was dry, her tongue felt thick and furry. Her fingers fumbled with the buttons on the silk jacket. It occurred to her for the very first time that the man on the other side of the door was almost a total stranger to her, someone she had met barely five months ago.

Who was he, after all? What was she doing here with him? And what was she about to do? Valerie had been so caught up in the idea of the wedding that she hadn’t stoppe