Free Secret Father by James Carroll

I say a prayer. I light a candle. I am alone. The place has the advantage of being too obvious to be observed." Without moving from where she stood, she thrust her gloved hands into the pockets of her coat, a definitive gesture.
    She let her gaze come surely to mine. Nothing uncertain in her, yet her eyes skittered away, the domestic pet made to scat. An ambushing qualm, I felt it, too. Strangers, yet from the moments in the dining room of her refusal to second her husband, and of my instinctive memorizing of a telephone number, we had taken a plunge into the surreptitious.
    Nothing to do against a climate of deceit but openly declare whatever comes to mind. "I went into the chapel, Mrs. Healy. Candles, you said. No one lights candles in there, not in ages."
    With that, she took her hand out of her coat to display a small white candle about two inches thick, four inches high. Stubs of such candles were what I'd glimpsed in the vigil rack before the icon, wrongly taking them for an ancient vestige of devotion. Was it also my mistake to have assumed her readiness, like her husband's, to lie?
    As if reading me, she looked away. This rendezvous, all at once, could seem to be aiming at anything. I became more conscious still of her exceptional attractiveness, how life had ushered her, whether gently or not, out of the round lightness of youth into the far edgier gravity of a woman who knows what time it is, knowing what time is doing. It was a trajectory I had tracked once before in watching Edie across twenty years. For a brief while the previous summer every woman had reminded me of Edie. Then none had.
    "My husband is afraid that our son has stumbled, how to say, into his arena. That is why my husband is not telling you. He cannot."
    "But you can."
    "But I know less than he."
    "A clock, you said. A chair. Furniture is witness to everything. Your husband confides in you."
    "Not as you mean it. But in front of me he takes calls. For meetings in the middle of the night, people come to our house."
    "Last night."
    "Yes."
    "This morning. Someone was at the table just ahead of me at breakfast."
    "Yes."
    "And you listen?"
    She did not answer, but I sensed that this was what she had come to speak of. "You listen," I said quietly. "Because this time it's not the U-2. It's your son."
    She gave me a look. "How do you know about my husband and the U-2?"
    "General Healy's weather reconnaissance wing? Is that still secret?"
    She laughed. "Not from the Russians."
    "How long was it secret from you?"
    "You should perhaps understand something, Mr. Montgomery. My husband tells me nothing. And I need to know nothing."
    "How does that work, if you don't mind my asking? Your husband suddenly is a weather forecaster, and you don't wonder?"
    "To the U-2 I never gave a thought. But this is different."
    I saw that this was what I'd walked into that morning, the fierce electric air between them. This
was
different, because Rick could not have stumbled into his father's arena without bringing in his mother. To which the general had said, practically in front of me, no.
    And then I saw something else, a simple matter of arithmetic that all but an oaf would have calculated at once. An eighteen-year-old boy would have been born in 1943, of an American father or a German mother—not both. "Rick is
your
son, and not the general's."
    She shook her head, denying not my point but its unhappy implication. "That has nothing to do with this. In all ways that matter, my husband is Rick's father."
    The crisp certitude of her statement reminded me once again of Edie: the antidote to doubt is assertion. If Edie, in her anger at me, took a curve on that mountain road at sixty miles an hour, it was because she knew there would be nothing coming at her from the other side. Surely not a ratty pickup truck being driven by a kid who'd been at his father's moonshine.
    "So 'Rick' is short for—?"
    "Ulrich. I told you that."
    "And his biological father—?"
    "Killed in