I'd Rather Be in Philadelphia by Gillian Roberts Page B

“perchance rightly, perchance not, less than eager for people to know everything about oneself.”
    The more she approached her secret, the more archaic her expressions. I had to intervene before we were back to Chaucerian English or caveman grunts. “Maybe,” I suggested, “if people knew, people could help.”
    She arched her eyebrows, then lowered them into a frown. “You already know, don’t you?” she whispered.
    “I believe so.”
    Martha’s expression was bleak. “I was afraid you did.”
    I rehearsed my speech about how she had to stop feeling ashamed, that this wasn’t her fault, but his. I was ready to commiserate about how scary it must be to dare to change after all these years. I would assure her that she had lots of happy, tap-dancing nights left.
    “I suppose you were horrified.” Her voice was no more than a whisper.
    “I was shocked, and upset, of course. Anybody with a shred of decency would be,” I said.
    “Oh, dear, oh, dear!” A sparkle of tears filmed her eyes. “But how could I have known? Main Line Charities seemed so anonymous and safe. I would have never—if I’d known an English teacher!”
    “Excuse me?”
    She took a deep breath and pushed the wrinkled napkin aside. “At my age, one worries. Disaster strikes without warning. Strokes, broken hips, heart attacks.” She leaned closer. “I couldn’t sleep, worrying what would happen if my children or grandchildren had to come care for me and they found out. And Oliver worried, too.”
    I tilted my head, hoping to catch the sound waves I was obviously missing. “Oliver?” She nodded. Was she saying that she’d underlined a confession of battering, but had donated it to charity only so that her grandchildren never found out? That she and the batterer colluded on this? “Mrs. Thornton,” I said. “I don’t understand.” I reviewed the entire conversation in my head, to see where I might have misunderstood, or whether we were burying ourselves in euphemisms again. Something about this discussion felt like a rerun. I’d had this misunderstanding before.
    “Isn’t it understandable that Oliver would worry even more than I did?” Martha asked. “He’s a man of the cloth. People would talk.”
    “But…but so what? Isn’t worrying about something like that hypocritical?”
    She turned her head away as sharply as if I’d smacked her. “Try to understand, even though it must be hard for you. It’s shameful, but once it’s started, where do you stop?” She shook her head. “It’s been going on since we first married, and I’m as much a party to it as he is.”
    “Mrs. Thornton, please. Stop assuming responsibility for a situation your husband created. It isn’t your fault.”
    She waved away my words. “Please, dearest.” She finally looked me in the eye. “I beg you, even if you are shocked, even if you can’t understand or approve—please, get rid of them and don’t tell anyone.”
    “Them?”
    “I would never have put them in a collection box for a school. ”She looked up through the pickled air to heaven. “I should have burned them or thrown them in the compost heap.”
    Them. I repeated the word to myself a few times.
    “But,” she leaned across the table, “the terrible truth is, I thought somebody else could, um, enjoy them the way we did.”
    I added the word enjoy. Enjoy them. What the hell were we talking about?
    “I never dreamed an English teacher! Why, ever since Miss Letterbelt and God’s Little Acre. About how smut corrupted you, poison through the eyes, she said. About how she had to take a bath after reading it.” Martha Thornton was talking to herself, her eyes focused inward. “My own fault, of course. I should never have brought it to school, but I promised a friend, and it fell on the classroom floor. In front of her, and I knew she could see right through me, could see into my corrupted brain and know that I’d read others just as bad. But to send me home—in front of