“It’s true, isn’t it?”
He shook his head. “I really don’t want to think about that.”
“Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt,” Leah replied, repeating Erica’s words to her.
“Look, Father Patrick and I have an understanding-”
“You had an understanding before, but Erica ended up being initiated into the Mary Magdalenes anyway.”
“I know! I know!” Rob threw up his hands, stepping away. “I just didn’t anticipate her pursuing it on her own.”
“But that’s what I’m saying,” Leah pleaded, sliding off the desk and facing him, looking up to meet his eyes. “We have to anticipate what could happen. Donald said this could be a long and drawn out fight, right? Well Erica is out running around with boys, and she’s absolutely fearless because she knows she can’t get pregnant. It’s only a matter of time before tongues start wagging.”
Rob went to the closet, yanking off his tie and tossing it onto the closet floor. “I’ll talk to her.”
“It won’t help.” Leah went to him, touching his arm. “She’s rebelling, and who could blame her? She’s angry and she has a right to be, although I think that anger is being misplaced onto you…”
“Then you talk to her.”
“I tried.” Leah shrugged, turning up her hands. “She’s mad at me for loving you. But listen to me. What if she decides to defy you? Get back at you? She’s already pulling the
Rob paled, unbuttoning the top button of his shirt. “What do you want me to do?”
“We have to get rid of it,” she insisted. “All of it. And you have to stop. Are you still… involved?”
“Yes,” he admitted.
“You can’t do it anymore,” she cried. “It’s going to jeopardize everything!”
“If I stop, it will jeopardize everything.” Rob dug into his pocket, pulling out his key ring. He walked over to the tapestry, pulling it aside and unlocking the bolt. He motioned for her to follow, the door closing behind her from the weight of the tapestry alone. He flicked the switch, the fluorescents buzzing to life overhead.
Leah’s sense memory came to life at the smell of the darkroom chemicals. There were photographs of nude women hanging on the clothesline over the developing table. Full breasted women with roomy hips who spread their legs and let Robert Nolan photograph their most private parts, the looks on their faces orgasmic or teasing or seductive, but every one of them arousing.
“Come on.” He went around the developing table, finding the hidden latch in the wall and opening the door to the other room. Leah remembered the night she had first discovered it, how she had snuck in so quietly and had found Rob on the twin bed, a reel of film running on the projector, his erection in his hand as he watched the couple on the screen have sex.
Leah had watched too, touching herself-she couldn’t help it. Later, she would lose her virginity on that bed, lost in the bewildering, wondrous pleasure of her first time. Did we make Grace on that bed, she wondered? Or was it the time in the movie theater bathroom? Or one of the many times they’d made love in the backseat of his Cadillac.
“I met Susan in the summer of 1937.” Rob turned on the small lamp beside the bed and went over to the cabinet where Leah and Erica had found all those reels of film. “I was a young photographer, just out of college, and she was the most stunning beauty I had ever seen.”
Leah cringed at that, but she took it in stride. She’d known Susan Nolan, had come to think of her as a kind of surrogate mother over the years, because she spent so much time with the Nolans, and she had been a very beautiful woman.
“I asked if I could photograph her, and she agreed.” Rob squatted down, looking through the boxes at the bottom. “Here we go.”
He came over to the bed where Leah was standing, sitting down and patting the bed beside him. “Sit. I’ve got a lot to tell you.”
She sank down, watching him open the box and pull out an envelope. It was sealed and unmarked. Just the sight of it made her feel weak. She remembered asking her mother for honesty and then regretting it.
“When you said that, about Erica being fearless, it made me think of these. I took them on our third date. I thought of them as dates, but I don’t think Susan did. Not at first. But she was like that. Absolutely fearless. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know why.” Rob slid his finger along the envelope, breaking the seal and sliding the photographs out between them on the bed.
Leah squinted, picking up the first one in the set, holding it up to the light. She recognized the two of them instantly, although they were much younger than Leah ever remembered them. Patty Wendt was stretched out on a bed, head thrown over the side, her long dark hair hanging down almost to the floor. Rob’s camera had caught her moment of orgasm perfectly, her legs open, and Susan Nolan’s face between them, only her eyes showing, a sly, mischievous gleam in them.
“I saw some of these before,” Leah told him, picking up the photographs, not sure she wanted to see, but unable to stop herself. “I knew you’d all been together once. That’s why my mother thought that you were my father. I ran home that day, I don’t know if I was packing to leave, or packing to come live with you, I just knew I had to do something. I snuck in the house, and I heard you both, Rob. I heard my mother telling you that day in the kitchen, that I was your daughter, and after seeing these… why wouldn’t I believe it?”
“I didn’t know about the Mary Magdalenes when I took those.” Rob watched Leah’s face as she flipped through them, all explicit scenes of Patty and Susan, touching, kissing, embracing, spreading their thighs and rubbing their mounds together. Leah couldn’t look away, remembering what she and Erica had done, things so similar to this. Of course, Rob didn’t know about that, and he never would. It had been an experimentation Leah doubted they would repeat, spurred only by the titillating images and arousing films they’d discovered in this hidden darkroom.
“I didn’t know anything, I just knew that Susan was fearless and beautiful and that her best friend, Patty, loved and wanted her almost as much as I did.” Rob sighed, rubbing his eyes with the palms of his hands. “Many of the girls they call ‘The Marys’ end up entering the convent. They’re sterilized, so they can never be mothers, and back then, there were even less options in the world for them than there are now. Without marriage and a man, who could they become?”
“Nuns?” Leah asked, incredulous.
“Yes.” He nodded. “Some of them, like Susan, defied convention. She was twenty-three when she married me, and an old maid by most standards. But until then, she’d never met a man who would tolerate her relationship with Patty.”
“Her… relationship?” Leah blinked at him, setting the pictures down between them.
“They were lovers.” Rob took a deep breath before continuing. “They remained lovers until the day Susan died.”
“But you were married?”
“Yes.” He smiled. “We were.”
“But my mother loved
“No. She loved Susan, not me. She only tolerated me. Still does.” He gave a little, bitter laugh. “I was the one who made the bargain. I looked the other way. I loved Susan and she loved me. She just also happened to love Patty too. And Susan made it very clear, if I wanted her, I would have to accept her relationship with Patty.”
Leah tried to wrap her head around this new information, her brain spinning with it. She actually had to put her head in her hands to make it stop. Her mother had been in love with Susan Nolan?
Was it possible? Could it be true?
She lifted her head, looking at her future husband, trying to make sense of it.
“It happens, Leah. Some women… they just have a stronger affinity for their own gender than they do for the opposite sex. The world we live in calls this sexual deviancy. They label all of this-” Rob waved his arm around the room, at the photographs, the movie reels, all depicting some sort of sex act that society, the church or the government would consider deviant. “Offensive. Sinful. Criminal. But do you know what I see?”
