Second Child

by John Saul

  “Well, can’t you just take showers?” Phyllis Holloway called back. “You know Tag shouldn’t be using the pool.”

  Melissa reddened with embarrassment. Her mother could see that Tag was standing right there! And why shouldn’t Tag use the pool? Then she remembered that she and Tag hadn’t been planning to go swimming anyway. “All right,” she called back. She started to turn away, but once more her mother’s sharp voice cut through the quiet of the afternoon.

  “I want you in the house in five minutes!”

  “Yes, Mother,” Melissa replied.

  She quickened her step, catching up with Tag just as he disappeared around the corner of the pool house. Though he said nothing, Melissa could tell by his expression that he’d heard every word her mother had said.

  “We can use the pool if we want to,” she offered. “Daddy said we could.”

  “Sure,” Tag replied sourly. “And right after we got done, she’d make me drain it and scrub it.” His eyes rolled scornfully upward. “Us servants aren’t too clean, you know.”

  Once more Melissa flushed with embarrassment. She wanted to deny that that was what her mother had meant, but what was the use? It was exactly what her mother had meant, and they both knew it. “You and Cora aren’t servants,” she said. “Cora’s just like my grandmother, too.”

  Tag rolled his eyes. “Don’t ever tell your mom that.” They were at the front door to the little house now, and instinctively they both looked back. But from where they stood, Phyllis’s window couldn’t be seen. Feeling like conspirators, they slipped inside the house.

  “They’re in the drawer on the end table,” Tag said. He tossed his beach towel at the foot of the stairs and moved into a living room sparsely furnished with a worn sofa and a pair of sagging easy chairs. A moment later he handed Melissa a small album.

  Melissa stared at the album’s cheap plastic cover for a moment, feeling a strange hesitancy about looking in it. Finally, she opened the book and studied the first picture.

  It was of a toddler, no more than two years old, clutching the hand of an unseen man. The little girl wore a blue dress with white socks and patent-leather Mary Janes, and her pale blond hair was capped by a wide ribbon with a bow on one side.

  The little girl in the picture didn’t look much different from any other two-year-old, and Melissa, suddenly feeling better, flipped quickly through the album to the last picture.

  Her heart sank.

  She stared at the image of a tall and slender young lady whose hair, cut stylishly short to leave her perfect features unobstructed, was only a few shades darker than it had been when she was a baby. Her features themselves were elegant but delicate, and her blue eyes, spaced well apart, seemed to gaze out at Melissa with the kind of self-confidence Melissa herself had never felt.

  Almost against her will, her eyes left the picture and went to the mirror that hung above the mantelpiece. She silently began comparing her own features to those of the girl in the photograph.

  Her hair, an unremarkable brown, hung lankly down her back. She tried to tell herself that it was only because she’d just gone swimming, but knew it wasn’t true—no matter how much she brushed her hair, it always seemed unwilling to come to shiny life.

  Her own features seemed hopelessly plain—her nose just a little too large, her brown eyes, almost lashless, a little too close together.

  And there was a slight puffiness about her face that she was positive, no matter what her father told her, was not merely baby fat.

  “She—She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Melissa managed to say.

  Tag nodded. “Grandma says she looks just like her mother.”

  Melissa’s eyes drifted back to the image in the album. She studied it carefully and began to think that maybe things weren’t going to be so bad after all. Even though she’d never imagined that Teri would be so beautiful, she could also see that Teri knew how to dress and how to do her hair.

  On Teri, clothes looked right.

  On herself, they always looked as if they’d been bought for someone else.

  Maybe Teri could teach her how to do her own hair, and how to pick out clothes that would look good on her.

  And, she reminded herself, no matter how beautiful Teri was, she was still her sister.

  But what if Teri didn’t like her?

  She put the thought out of her mind and handed the album back to Tag. “I—I better go back to the house. Mom said—”

  Before she could finish, there was a loud rap at the front door, which instantly opened to reveal a glowering Phyllis Holloway.

  “What are you doing in here, Melissa?” her mother demanded.

  “I—Tag was just showing me something.…”

  “Was he?” Phyllis asked, her accusing glare shifting to Tag. “I don’t like your bringing Melissa in here,” she went on. “I’ll speak to Cora about it.” Without waiting for Tag to reply, she took Melissa’s arm and steered her out of the cottage. “What am I going to do with you?” she asked as she led her daughter back toward the main house. “I know Tag is your friend, and I certainly don’t object to it. But you have to keep in mind that he is also a servant, and there are limits.”

  “But Mother—”

  Abruptly, Phyllis dropped Melissa’s arm and smiled at her. “No buts,” she said. “And I don’t think we ought to fight on your birthday. Besides, you have to get ready for your party.”

  Mellissa stared at her mother in disbelief. “What party?” she asked. “I’m not having a party.”

  “But I am,” Phyllis announced. “And believe me, it wasn’t easy, putting a proper birthday celebration together at the last minute. But I knew how disappointed you were when your father had to leave, so I explained the situation to all your friends’ mothers …”

  Phyllis chattered on about the children she’d invited, but Melissa heard no more With a sinking feeling, she realized what her mother had done.

  The Cove Club.

  Phyllis had called all her women friends at the Cove Club and insisted they send their children over to Maplecrest for Melissa’s birthday. And, of course, after Phyllis had explained what had happened, and why Melissa’s dad had suddenly left, everyone had felt sorry for her, and agreed that she should certainly have a party.

  And they’d all show up, but they’d do the same thing here that they all did at the Cove Club.

  They’d talk to each other, and ignore her.

  “And it’s going to be wonderful, darling,” she heard her mother saying as they went into the house. “You can wear your pink organdy, and I’ve even hired a disk jockey so everyone can dance. It will be such fun for you. After all, you’re a teenager now, and it’s time you started doing more things with the crowd. What better time for you to start than on your birthday?”

  Though she already felt faintly sick, Melissa knew there was no point in trying to argue with her mother.

  Silently, she went up to her room and started getting ready for the party.

  Melissa sneaked a look at the clock as she escaped into the small powder room under the main staircase and locked the door. It was only four, which meant that the party was going to go on for hours yet—the disk jockey hadn’t even arrived, and the caterers from the club had just started setting up the buffet on the terrace around the pool. And yet to Melissa it seemed as if the afternoon had already gone on for an eternity.

  She’d at least saved herself the humiliation of wearing the pink organdy dress her mother had picked out for her. She’d had it on, had even been ready to go downstairs, when she’d heard a car pull up in front of the house and seen Brett Van Arsdale arrive in the black Porsche he’d gotten for his sixteenth birthday two weeks earlier. There were six people crowded into the little car, and as they untangled themselves, Melissa had seen what they were wearing.

  Tennis whites.

  The boys’ shirts were still soaked with sweat, and it had been obvious to Melissa that they’d come straight from the club, not even bothe
ring to change first.

  As she heard the door bell ring, immediately followed by her mother’s voice commanding her to come downstairs, she’d rushed back to her room, wriggled out of the dress, and pulled on a pair of shorts and a blouse, which she realized as she fumbled with the buttons had fit fine last summer but was too tight now. She’d shoved her feet into a pair of sneakers and started downstairs, but had to stop to tie her laces when she tripped and almost fell the last ten steps. When she looked up from her shoes, the kids were already in the foyer, staring up at her.

  Among them was Jeff Barnstable, on whom Melissa had had a secret crush for the last two summers. Next to him—holding his hand—was Ellen Stevens.

  “We already played tennis,” Ellen said, pointedly staring at Melissa’s shoes. “We thought we’d take a swim now.”

  Without waiting for a reply, the kids had trooped through the house and out to the pool, where they’d found bathing suits in the pool house. By the time Melissa had gone upstairs to change, a game of water polo was in progress.

  Melissa had stood silently at the edge of the pool, waiting for one of the teams to invite her to join them.

  Neither had.

  When her mother had come out to watch a few minutes later, and asked Melissa why she wasn’t playing, Melissa had insisted she didn’t want to.

  But she could see clearly that her mother knew the truth.

  The next two hours had been more of the same. Now, Melissa wondered how long she could stay in the powder room. It wouldn’t be long, she knew, before her mother would come looking for her.

  Suddenly she saw the doorknob turn, the impatient rattling immediately followed by the sound of Ellen Stevens’s voice: “Well, is this dismal, or what? First we have to come over here for a mercy party, and now you can’t even get into the bathroom.”

  “Let’s go upstairs,” Cyndi Miller replied. “Maybe I can find one of Melissa’s lipsticks.”

  The powder room echoed with Ellen’s sharp laughter. “Melissa’s? Even if she has one, it’ll be some terrible color. Why don’t we just leave?”

  “We can’t,” Cyndi answered. “My mother said we have to stay until at least nine, no matter how bad it is. Otherwise she’ll have to listen to Mrs. Holloway talking about how rude we were to her precious little daughter.”

  Suddenly Melissa had enough. She pulled the door open and stared at the two girls, willing her tears not to overflow and run down her cheeks. “You don’t have to stay,” she said in a low voice. “I never wanted you to come in the first place.”

  The two girls, only a year or so older than Melissa, glanced at each other. It was Cyndi who finally spoke. “You shouldn’t have been in there listening to us,” she said.

  Melissa felt her self-control slipping away. She hadn’t done anything to them, hadn’t tried to hear what they were saying. But they’d just stood there, talking about her. Why was it her fault? And then she saw her mother coming down the stairs, stopping to look at her.

  “Is something wrong?” Phyllis asked.

  Melissa started to shake her head but was too late.

  “I think we’d better go home, Mrs. Holloway,” Ellen Stevens said as if she were trying to find a nice way to handle the situation. “Melissa just told us she didn’t want us here.”

  Seeing the look of cold anger that flashed into her mother’s eyes, Melissa fled up the stairs to her room. She flopped onto the bed, her body wracked with sobs, her fists pounding the pillow with frustration.

  But soon her sobs subsided and her anger toward Cyndi and Ellen and the rest of the kids died away.

  After all, it wasn’t their fault—they hadn’t wanted to come any more than she had wanted them to. And they wouldn’t have, if her mother hadn’t called their mothers and begged.

  So the anger dissipated, only to be replaced by fear. For after what had happened this afternoon, she was certain that sometime tonight, sometime after Cora had gone to bed for the night, her mother would come into her room.

  Come into her room, for one of her little “talks.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Charles Holloway had the same feeling of vague disorientation that always came over him when he arrived in Los Angeles. Part of his confusion was caused by the fact that all the freeways seemed to run north and south, even when they crossed at right angles. But at last he’d worked his way out into the vast suburban morass of the San Fernando Valley, turning onto the block where the MacIvers lived only a little more than an hour and a half after leaving the airport in his rented car. It was the first time he’d ever seen this part of the valley, and he knew immediately why it had attracted Polly.

  The houses in this area all had a feeling of permanence to them, their yards dotted with large shade trees, their gardens having the look of being carefully tended for decades. Nowhere here did he see the too-bright green of freshly laid sod or the patches of “beauty bark” with which the newer subdivisions were littered. No, this particular area had a look of stability to it, a certain middle-class solidity that would have appealed to Polly.

  To himself, of course, it simply looked dull, like a California version of all the small towns in the East that he had always found unutterably boring, but to which Polly had always been drawn like an iron filing to a magnet. “At least they’re real,” she’d said over and over again in those first few months of their marriage, when he’d still hoped it was going to work out. “I just can’t stand the idea of raising children in Manhattan and Secret Cove—it’s so horribly insular!”

  In a way, of course, Charles had understood what she meant. Certainly, both of them had grown up with a lifestyle greatly different from that of the vast majority of people. Charles had always simply accepted it, and when he’d married Polly, he’d assumed that she had, too. But the truth, he’d soon found out, was that Polly had resented both the wealth and position of her birth. Not that the Porters were as wealthy as the Holloways. They weren’t, and never had been. Nor had they thought the same way as the Holloways and most of the rest of the “Secret Cove Crowd”—as they tended to think of themselves, complete with quotation marks—though Charles hadn’t really been aware of it when he’d married Polly. Oh, he’d known Polly had gone off to Berkeley when the rest of them had headed for Harvard, Yale, Bennington, and Vassar, but he hadn’t realized how much she’d been affected by the West Coast until long after they’d married.

  “But if you didn’t like the way we lived, why did you marry me?” he’d asked her after the divorce had become final.

  “Because it was expected of me,” she replied. “Good God, Charles—we both knew we’d get married from the day we were born! And I really thought it would be all right! But after Berkeley, the whole thing just seems so unreal! I mean, Lenore Van Arsdale not only doesn’t know what’s going on outside of Secret Cove, she doesn’t even care!”

  Charles’s mouth dropped open. “Lenore is your best friend! You grew up with her.”

  Polly had smiled ironically. “I know. But I grew away from her, and you, and everything else in Secret Cove. I can’t spend my life planning parties that cost three times as much as the money they raise for whatever cause the Crowd has fastened on each year. I can’t keep spending piles and piles of money on clothes when I know how many people can barely afford clothes at all.”

  “So what are you going to do?” Charles had finally demanded. “Give it all away?”

  To his shock, that was exactly what Polly had intended and exactly what she had done. After the divorce she’d set up a foundation, picked a board of trustees that hadn’t included a single member of the Secret Cove Crowd, and then turned over every asset she had to the foundation. There’d been no one to stop her—her parents had died in a skiing accident three years earlier, and though Charles had considered at least fighting her over custody of the infant Teri, in the end he hadn’t. Polly, after all, had never been anything but a devoted mother, and Charles was less willing to put his tiny daughter through a protracted legal battl
e than to allow Polly to raise her as she saw fit. Indeed, he’d even approved of the adoption after Polly had married Tom MacIver and moved west, where both Polly and Tom had built careers in the university system.

  He, on the rebound from the divorce, had promptly married Phyllis, whom Polly herself had first brought into their life as Teri’s nurse. Though not born into the Secret Cove Crowd, Phyllis had at least respected its values; and the marriage, if far from perfect, had allowed him to continue the lifestyle he’d grown up with and hoped to die with. Only a few months after the marriage, Phyllis presented him with a baby girl who had quickly filled the void left by the loss of Teri. For all of them, things had worked out.

  But now, as he gazed at the charred remains of the MacIvers’ house, he knew that everything had changed once more. Teri was about to be transported across the country and thrust into an unfamiliar environment, filled with unfamiliar people. And he suspected that Polly had never prepared her daughter for what life would be like in the East. After all, why should she have?

  He turned away from the blackened pile of rubble and crossed the street to the house bearing the address he’d scrawled on a scrap of paper earlier that morning. It was no different from the rest of the houses on the block—a small frame structure, modest, but substantial-looking. As he mounted the short flight of steps to its front porch, he found himself wondering if it would burn as fast as Polly’s house had.

  He suspected it would.

  Charles pressed the button next to the front door and heard a soft chime sound inside. A moment later the door opened and a plump woman peered out at him. “Mrs. Barrow?” he said through the screen door. “I’m Charles Holloway. Teri’s father.”

  Instantly, the door opened wider, and Lucy Barrow pushed the screen door open, too. “Mr. Holloway,” she breathed, her relief apparent in her voice. “Thank God—I just don’t know what to say. It’s all been so terrible, and when Teri told me to call you—” She broke off and stood almost still for a moment, her fluttering hands betraying her confusion. “I—Well, I’m afraid none of us even knew you existed. I mean, Polly and Tom never told us—” Once again she fell silent.