Dirty Little Secrets(Barry) Saturday morning when she came downstairs, Maurine Crowley found her mother in the kitchen fixing breakfast. “The crocuses and tulips are all up in the garden.” Mrs. Crowley poured her daughter a fresh cup of coffee.” Here, see for yourself.”

At the window over the sink one could clearly see smallish purple buds emerging alongside the much taller, willowy golden flowers. “I love these early spring days,” Maurine mused, “with their promise of better things to come.” In her mid-twenties she was a slender, willowy woman with brunette hair cut short in page boy style that only enhanced her decidedly feminine charm. “Who’s that old man sitting on the bench in the Abram’s backyard?”

Mrs. Crowley placed a generous scoop of scrambled eggs laced with cheddar cheese and diced scallions on a plate along with pan-fried sausages. “Oh, that’s a sad story.” Glancing briefly out the window, she shook her head kindheartedly before returned to the stove. “Mr. Abram’s mother passed away a year and a half ago and then Morris – that’s the father’s name - suffered a mild stroke.” Retreating back to the counter, she gingerly teased a slice of scali bread pitted with sesame seeds from the toaster slathering it with butter. “It didn’t take but a handful of weeks for the old man to regain use of his limbs along with all his mental faculties but with one minor exception.”

“Which was?”

“Speech. He hasn’t been able to utter a single word since the stroke.”

“That’s unusual,” Maurine shot back, “I always was under the impression –”

“The neurologists,” Mrs. Crowley foraged ahead, anticipating her daughter’s train of thought, “can make no sense of it either. Aphasia – that was the term the medical staff used to describe Morris’ predicament. Fortunately, the language disorder hadn’t affected his ability to read or write and clearly his intelligence remained intact.” “The doctors are hoping that Mr. Crowley’s speech will reemerge as the healing progresses.

“Problem is, the poor soul is in his early eighties.” Mrs. Crowley, who had sat down next to her daughter rose again and drifted over to the window a second time. “The Abrams gave him a pencil and a pad of blank paper so he can continue to express himself in a limited sort of way.” “Here, see for yourself.”

Maureen joined her mother at the window. The white haired Morris sported a small rectangular pad dangling from his wrinkled neck on a white string with a yellow pencil sticking out of his front shirt pocket. “Ask the poor unfortunate a question and he scribbles a response as best he can.”

“Well, at least that’s something”

“Not really,” her mother replied. “Sometimes he only nods his head up or down by way of a reply. Other times he may keep them waiting for several minutes before he eventually jots down nothing more than a word or two. Occasionally, the smallish pad is filled with gibberish.”

“Gibberish?”

“Intellectual nonsense.”

“Geez!” Maureen muttered.

“In his formative years he was quite distinguished.” As Mrs. Crowley explained, Mr. Abrams’ father taught Hindu mythology and philosophy at a local college. “All that scholarly wisdom reduced to broken sentences and linguistic drivel!”

*****

A half hour later as Maureen was brushing her teeth, Mrs. Crowley stuck her head in the bathroom door. “There’s a slight problem. The cat went out on his normal morning run and decided to check out the new neighbor.”

Maureen spit the sudsy paste in the sink and rinsed her mouth with clean water. Eight years the Crowleys doted over the thankless, cantankerous feline and yet they still had to know where their hands were at all times when ministering to the psychopathic creature. “Horace is in the neighbor’s yard?”

“Worse yet! Sitting on Morris’ lap.”

“Oh, dear!”

Rushing down the stairwell, Maureen crossed the lawn and was standing in front of Morris who was gently rubbing the orangey cat behind the left ear. “Horace can be rather finicky… borderline feral on occasion, and I wouldn’t want him to harm you.” She lifted the cat cautiously into her own arms.

The old man simply nodded his head, his lips spreading in an affable grin. Morris Abrams was a short man, thickset but muscular with tuffs of white hair spreading pell-mell around an otherwise bald skull. The lips were wide beneath a squat nose. “Just the other week, Horace scratched my Aunt Helen, who was visiting from Cincinnati.”

Reaching for the small pad, he plucked a number two Ticonderoga pencil from his shirt pocket and scribbled away furiously. When finished, the verbiage covered two sheets of paper, front and back.

“Your Aunt Helen from Cincinnati… is she a pleasant woman?
Does she make favorable first impressions? Many animals can
intuitively sense when a person harbors ill will, hostility, malice,
grudge, cruelty, hatred, animosity, antagonism or spite. These
seemingly primitive creatures can often exhibit a prescient
wisdom bordering on the clairvoyant far exceeding our feeble
human comprehension.”

Maureen, who was caught off guard by the rather peculiar response, replied, “Funny you should suggest such a thing. Aunt Helen is rather tyrannical… domineering.”

Mr. Abrams shook his head up and down, pleased with the accuracy of his speculative impression. Maureen placed the cat, which was purring like a freight train, back on the older man’s lap, and it nestled down contentedly closing his huge hazel eyes.

Maureen felt as though her brain was misfiring. Hadn’t her mother said that the old man could only respond with head nods, sentence fragments and gibberish? Before she could pursue the issue she noticed her fiancé, Travis, stepping onto the deck of her parent’s house, saunter down the stairs and cross the yard to join them.

“Morris, this is Travis. We’ll be marrying in early September.”

Turning to Travis she continued, “Morris is staying here while he recuperates from a mild stroke. He hasn’t regained his speech yet, but can understand pretty much everything you say.”

“Loss of speech,” the young man noted glibly. “In my line of work that would prove a major disadvantage,” He stood an inch over six feet with a compact, athletic build, the ample blonde hair brushed back in fashionable waves.

“Travis is an attorney,” she added filling in the missing detail.

All three chuckled then Morris puckered his lips together, rubbing his thumb and index fingers together and pointed at the young attorney’s pricey shoes.

“Yes, these Christian Louboutin lace-ups set me back a pretty penny. I got at Neiman Marcus for under a grand during a legal seminar in New York.”

Grabbing his pad Morris scribbled, “And the fancy-schmancy three-piece suit?”

“It’s Armani… made in Italy.” Travis opted not to mention anything more about cost. He bought the virgin wool designer original marked down to seventeen hundred from a little over two grand. The forty percent discount was bogus. The manufacturers simply inflated their prices ridiculously high then offered equally absurd discounts to convince the buyer that he wasn’t getting ripped off.

Wrapping his arms around his future wife, Travis kissed her cheek. “I’m on my way to give a deposition at the courthouse so I thought I’d stop by.” “Hope you enjoy your stay here and get your voice back,” he remarked, turning his attention to the older man resting on the cedar bench. Cutting diagonally across the lawn Travis fired up his car and was gone.

Morris grabbed up his writing pad. “Where does he work? What firm?”

“Travis owns his own law business, Armstrong Associates.”

“That’s swell!” he dashed off a couple of words.

*****

Later that night Maureen found her mother in the kitchen sorting through a heap of baking supplies she wasn’t using anymore. “I need to store these away in the shelf over the refrigerator. Could you get me the stepstool?”

“And where might that be?”

Her mother ran her fingers over a maple rolling pin. “Look in the garage.”

Maureen went out to the garage and located the stepstool wedged up against the rusty and dilapidated bike her father had bought for Maureen’s thirteenth birthday. She ran her fingertips over the corroded metal. When she squeezed the silver chime on the handlebars, the thin lever hardly budged and the bell never sounded.

Maureen had asked her father for a five-speed bike with a handlebar-mounted braking system, but the family was living hand-to-mouth. Times were tough and Mr. Crowley balked at the proposition. “Too expensive,” he replied.

“Three-speed?”

“Not manageable.” He rubbed his chin and stared wistfully at the floor. “Best I can afford in these rough times is a used bike and can of paint.”

The notion of painting her own bike appealed to the adolescent girl. “Yeah, that’ll do.”

The birthday bike was one speed. In lieu of a set of handlebar brakes, one simply exerted backward pressure on a pedal. The bike was ugly. Maureen painted it a garish turquoise, which made it even uglier, but she cherished the homely bike, riding throughout her high school years.

And now she was marrying a man who shopped Neiman Marcus and wore thousand dollar shoes along with handmade, Italian suits. A few weeks earlier confronting Travis about his flamboyant spending habits, he fluffed her off. “You want to attract money, you need to inspire confidence and look the part.” There was always a hint of sophistry coupled with flagrant snobbishness in his terse rebuttals. He wasn’t so much having a congenial give-and-take with the future mother of his unborn children as he was refuting some bit of judicial minutia before the jury in a court of law.

One sultry afternoon in late June of the previous year, Maureen told Travis about her turquoise birthday bike. They were dining at Davio’s Restaurant at Patriot’s Place in Foxboro. Whether it was his photogenic good looks or the fashionable flair of his casual clothes, as they were shown to their seats half the women stared appreciatively. When Maureen finished talking, he sipped at his glass of Dom Perignon Vintage and noted, “I applaud your father’s Calvinist work ethics, but the man sold washing machines and dryers at Sears Roebuck for a living. Markup was minimal.” He spoke with a patronizing poise. “That was then, this is now.”

*****

Over the following week Maureen only saw Morris intermittently. She had been visiting venues where she might hold the wedding reception, speaking with caterers, florists and photographers. They still hadn’t decided on whether to hire a DJ or live band for the music. On a Wednesday toward the end of the month, Maureen noticed the elderly Mr. Abrams resting in his favorite niche close by the bird feeder.

“So nice to see you again.” She settled in on the bench next to Morris.

They watched as, like the Mongol hoards descending on Western Europe, a hoard of blue jays ravaged the bird feeder. Reaching for his pad, he scribbled, “Can you keep a secret?”

“What might that be?”

“You must agree not to share what I tell you with anyone else.” Scribbling away frenetically, Morris had added several smudgy exclamation marks at the tail end of the sentence.

“Yes, I agree.”

Morris crooked his wizened head to one side. “The rain in Spain,” he spoke in crystal clear tones, “falls mainly on the plane.”

Maureen was aghast. “But I thought -”

“I can talk just fine when there’s something worth saying.” Once the initial shock wore off, Morris threw the pad aside and continued, “I taught courses in Hindu mythology and religion at the local college. “In ancient India, mauna is a sacred practice of limiting one's speech; of being intentionally silent, a discipline through which spiritual experiences can arise, typically characterized by quieting mind, and an increased receptivity towards sound.”

“In ancient India, observing maun vrat, a vow of stillness… silence in both word and thought, was a way of life for both civilians and monks. While lying in the hospital, I thought I might like to become mute, because in Hindu belief, voluntary silence is key to mental discipline and higher consciousness… sort of like hanging a ‘closed for spiritual maintenance’ sign outside your door.

Maureen grinned self-consciously and patted him on the knee. “Perfect analogy!”

“There is no reality except the one contained within each of us,” Morris continued in a gentle singsong voice. “When I ignore this elemental truth, the outside world can annoy me at best and overwhelm me at worst. That is why so many people live such bogus lives. They mistake the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.”

Morris moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue. “The German existentialist, Hermann Hesse said that most people, the herd, have never tasted the stark solitude of silence. They leave father and mother, but only to crawl to a wife and quietly succumb to new warmth and new ties. They are never alone, they never commune with themselves.”

Morris fell silent. Reaching for his pad, he scribbled, “That’s all I’ve got to say for now.”

“Well I’ve a modest secret of my own,” Maureen announced darkly.

“And what might that be?”

“I won’t be marrying Travis Armstrong.”

As she said this Horace emerged from behind a bed of daffodils and trotting across the lawn leaped into Morris’ lap. Flopping down, the cat proudly splayed his razor–sharp nails full length while purring with close-eyed contentment. “I experienced the same reaction to your former fiancé that Horace displayed toward your Aunt Helen from Cincinnati.”

“Always quite the charmer, I loved Travis early on.”

“But you never really liked him.”

“No, not really. All the fancy clothes, the glib tongue… the pretense and posturing were beginning to grate on my nerves. I was no more than a trophy wife.”

“Another glitzy acquisition.”

“The slick charm, confident swagger, … it blinded me to the more damning telltale signs that my future soulmate was damaged goods.” “It wasn’t that I didn’t love him anymore. Rather, I cherished the missed opportunity… the what might have been if Travis Armstrong possessed a moral center or a shred of common decency, which, of course, he never did.”

Reaching into a rear pocket, Maureen withdrew a slim cell phone. “I recently discovered a flood of complaints registered against his law firm and that proved the final straw.” Bringing up a website, she scrolled through several pages.

“It was a simple enough divorce. My wife and I had already
come to terms regarding the settlement, but Travis Armstrong
dragged the proceedings out with numerous delays and petty
procedures, bilking me for twice the modest price he originally quoted.
What a crook!

“Delightful sentiments!” Morris chuckled.

“Unfortunately, there’s more,” Maureen muttered scornfully.

“We played endless telephone tag as he seldom bothered
returning my phone calls and always seemed in a frantic
hurry, rushing me in and out of the office because he needed
to manage some unexpected emergency. In court his
paperwork was filled with errors, which wasted additional
time and money. When I questioned him about these matters,
Travis became belligerent, acting as though I was being
totally unreasonable.”

“He’s already gone before the bar association’s disciplinary council… once for charging a client for legal work which didn’t appear on any billable time sheets and another instance for sloppy paperwork plus fraudulently misrepresenting a client’s personal assets.”

“That lace-up footwear that he bought at Neiman Marcus,” Morris observed, “came with an additional price tag.”

She held up her left hand, splaying all five fingers. The engagement ring was missing. “I’ll stop by my former fiancé’s office later today to drop off the ring, and when I return, perhaps you’d like to join me for a celebratory lunch at a nice restaurant.”

“And what exactly are we celebrating?”

“Your vow of silence and my sidestepping a matrimonial minefield.”

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