Secrets in the Land of Enchantment

All families have secrets.  They slumber uneasily beneath the ebb and flow of everydayness.  Children may sense their presence but not their identity.  Sooner or later, most secrets erupt like lava from a volcano scattering flames and ashes, scorching innocents or dusting them with random fallout.  Sometimes secrets seep noiselessly, cold and clammy, to permeate the present with growing stark realism.

Jacque de Sauter knew there was an unknown element in his infrequently overheard but numerous quarrels between his parents.  As a child he recognized something made his mother and father say mean things to each other.  He shrugged it off as something grown-ups did.  The adolescent Jacque’s interest was piqued when he heard phrases in their verbal battles he now understood:  “infidelity,” “so-called marriage,” “betrayed.”  That understanding caused him to look more closely at his parents.

Which one?

His mother with her anxious dark eyes, perpetually busy with the fussy details of her home, his younger sisters, his much younger brother, all their activities?  He knew, as children do, that he, Jacque, was his mother’s favorite.  No, she did not have the interest or emotional capacity to juggle an assignation, to indulge herself with an anonymous lover.

Yes, it was his father.  Tall, trim, imperious, a man who was willful with his parents, his wife, his children when he noticed them.

Young adulthood confirmed his rationale.  He returned home early from an unexpected class dismissal at the lyceum.  Through the open door of his father’s den, he heard his mother’s voice quivering with resentment.

“You say there was no child.  How do I know there isn’t a son somewhere who will be primogeniture instead of Jacque?”

At the mention of his name, Jacque paused before going into the library next to the den.  Primogeniture?  The rule that the eldest son inherits a family’s title and estate?  How quaint.  When he listened to his elders being pompous about their “historic” families, their outmoded titles, he always smiled.  All families are historic.  Everyone has generations unraveling back through the centuries.

In a voice heavy with the patient tone used to a recalcitrant child, his father replied,

“I have told you a thousand times my father found no evidence either here or in America of a son or daughter of mine.”

Jacque shook his head.  His mother was obsessed.  He was past nineteen, one month away from twenty.  She clung to the safety of twenty-one to make sure his primogeniture was air-tight legal in addition to the present legality of eighteen years old.

“You have also told me a thousand times you have never been unfaithful.  Hah!  This is different.  This is for my son.  He is close to twenty-one.  I have to be sure he is legally primogeniture.”  Jacque heard his mother sob.

“Not some common, low born from a loud mouthed American mother.”

“She was not a loud mouthed American woman.  She was a lady.”  Voice sharp with anger, he shouted, “She is dead.  Speak no evil of the dead.  We were married six months.  There was no child.”

Attention riveted, Jacque was stunned.  His father had been married before to an American woman.  For six months.  She had died.  His distraught mother thought there was a child.  Did he have a half brother or sister somewhere?  It had to be a brother.  He already had two sisters and a two-year-old brother.

He knew his father could be lax with the truth whenever truth was inconvenient.  How long ago did all this happen?  How did the American woman die?  Where?  When?  Where were they married?  The possibility of an unknown big brother was electrifying, accablant.  Where would his brother be?  Europe?  America?

If a brother existed, he