by Rona Jaffe
They should have talked about everything.
Daphne closed Teddy’s journal and put it in its hiding place where she had found it. She went to her bathroom and washed her face. On Sunday evening she would take Elizabeth back to the home as always, but this time it would be for good. She would visit Elizabeth, but Elizabeth would not have to come here any more to be used as something she was not.
And then they would talk, all of them. They would start all over again, and if they could not be completely happy, at least they would try to help one another.
No more lies and secrets.
She couldn’t tell Richard at dinner that this was probably the last time he would be seeing his daughter, because he had called to say he would be eating out with a client he had met at the club. She did tell the boys. They nodded solemnly, agreeing it was for the best; not showing how relieved they were, or how sorry they were—if indeed they were sorry. Daphne thought that their feelings about the whole incident might be one of the things they would all discuss in the future, since they would be talking about everything that happened to them. She wondered what Teddy would write about this tonight in his journal. But she wasn’t going to look in it again. She was on her own.
They had eaten early so she could bring Elizabeth back in time for her bedtime. It was a long drive. Elizabeth was happy in the car. She had her suitcase, her dolls; she knew she was going home. “I won’t make you come back with me anymore,” Daphne said. “I love you, and I’ll miss you, and I’ll visit you just the way I used to. I’ll bring you presents.”
“Jane,” Elizabeth said happily.
“Yes, you’re going to see Jane.”
So much for presents.
Daphne hadn’t told Jane that she was secretly planning to keep Elizabeth, so there was no need to tell her she had changed her mind. She merely said she was changing the schedule. Jane understood. It was not the first time this had happened with a family, and in this particular case she had long expected it. Daphne kissed Elizabeth good-bye and stood for a moment alone under the starfilled night sky, breathing the summer country air, listening to the sound of chirping. Then she drove home.
Richard still wasn’t there. It was unlike him to be so late on a night when he knew he had to get up early the next morning. Daphne wondered if he had gone to a restaurant or stayed at the club, but in either case, even though she was a little concerned, she would never call looking for him. The boys were watching a horror movie they had rented for their VCR. She went upstairs to the bedroom to read.
At one o’clock she was really concerned. Richard hadn’t even called. Thoughts went through her head of auto accidents, drunk drivers … but someone would have phoned. Teddy had gone to sleep, and Matthew and Sam were watching yet another movie. They would stay up all night if you’d let them. She was tired and would have loved to go to sleep, but the moment she undressed and got into bed she was wide awake. She wasn’t used to sleeping without Richard. Maybe he was having such a good time that he’d forgotten how late it was. She hoped that was all.…
When the phone on her bedside table shrilled in her ears Daphne jumped. “Daphne?” It was the nasal, laconic voice of their family doctor. “This is Dr. Price. I have Richard here. He’s had a slight heart attack, but he seems to be in good shape. We’re keeping him in the CCU for observation.”
She felt herself turn icy cold with terror. “Heart attack? Where is he?”
“New York Hospital.”
“Why did you take him all the way to New York?”
“He was in New York.”
That was odd. “What time did it happen?” she asked.
“About eight o’clock. He’s been quite stable for a while now, but I do want to watch him for a few days.”
“I’m coming in,” Daphne said.
She told the two older boys, trying to make it sound minor, and then dressed quickly and was in her car, driving to the city. Richard had always been in good health, but at his age he was a prime prospect for a coronary. She remembered his warning: This family can’t take any more stress. Had he been hinting about something he wouldn’t tell her? Then it was her fault.…
She was chain-smoking as she drove, thinking about the irony of it—she should have been the one who had the heart attack, not he. But Richard kept his tension inside, not losing his temper, not provoking fights, just staying out of the house whenever he could, trying to make the best of things. Daphne felt like a villain. She didn’t know anyone her age who was a widow. She would have been the first of all her friends … it made her too aware that they were getting older. Oh, Richard, she thought, filled with love and fear and regret, I’ll make it all up to you. Things will be better now.
At the hospital a nurse told her she would have to wait because Richard had just had a visitor and he had to have quiet interludes. “But I’m his wife,” Daphne said in a reasonable tone that implied the nurse was being ridiculous.
“Oh,” the nurse said. What was that look that flashed across her face and then was gone? She checked her watch. “Just sit down in the waiting area and I’ll come get you in a few minutes.”
Daphne chose instead to stand in the hallway outside the Coronary Care Unit. There was a big sign: Oxygen. Do not smoke. She paced.
Another woman had brought a chair into the hall and was sitting on it, right in front of the CCU. She was in her early or mid-thirties, blonde and very beautiful, and something about her was disturbingly familiar. A former model? An actress, perhaps, or a movie star made unrecognizable out of context? The woman was watching her, too, and Daphne noticed the same glance of puzzlement cross her face. Then she realized why the younger woman looked familiar: they both looked alike. She was Daphne ten years ago—how strange. Daphne smiled at her to apologize for staring. The woman gave her a polite little half smile and then turned away.
“Mrs. Caldwell,” the nurse said, walking down the hall. “You can go in now.”
The other woman, the younger Daphne, drew in her breath in the faintest, almost imperceptible, gasp of pain, and then looked away again. Daphne rushed in to see Richard.
He had a little pronged thing in his nostrils that was supplying him with extra oxygen, and he was hooked up to monitors, but otherwise he didn’t really look sick. It was hard to tell if he was pale under his carefully tended tan.
“Oh, Richard,” Daphne cried, “are you all right?”
“Sure,” he said, to cheer her up. “Just that it scared the hell out of me at the time. I’m sorry you had to come rushing into town.”
“Sorry?” Daphne said. “Did you think I’d leave you here all alone? You know I love you. I was terrified. I really blamed myself, sweetheart. There’s been so much pressure on you lately. But everything’s going to be different now.” She took his hand and he returned her grasp.
“I love you too,” he said.
“Elizabeth isn’t going to come home anymore,” she said. “I realize it was a mistake.”
He nodded. “But you didn’t have to decide that for my sake.”
“I did it for all of us.” There was more she wanted to tell him, but it would have to wait until he was better and home again. Little by little she would repair their marriage, as he repaired his health. “You look uncomfortable attached to all those gadgets,” she said.
“I am.” He smiled. “But I’m here.”
“Thank God for that.”
“Yes …”
She stood there holding Richard’s hand and looking at him with concern and tenderness until the nurse came in to say that he needed to rest. “Why don’t you go home, Daph,” Richard said. “I’m only going to sleep anyway.”
“We’ll see,” Daphne said noncommittally. She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. “I love you,” she said.
“I love you,” he murmured, and closed his eyes, dismissing her.
Daphne walked quietly out of the room. As she passed the young woman who was still sitting in the hall, the woman spoke to her.
“Yes?”
“I’m Melissa. Melissa Loring?”
The woman thought Daphne was supposed to know her. “Yes?” Daphne said again.
“Could we talk?” Melissa Loring asked.
Before Daphne could answer she was out of her chair, propelling her gently down the hall to the visitor’s lounge. Then they were facing each other on the couch, looking to anyone who might happen by like two sisters, an older and a much younger one.
“If it would be more comfortable for you,” Melissa said, “we could arrange to visit him at different times.”
And then of course she did know who this woman was.
No false step, no real clue, had prepared her for this, but then she had not been prepared for anything that had happened to her lately, and she had not been looking. Richard’s girl friend … lover … mistress … whatever it was called. Apparently Richard, too, had secrets. I can’t bear it, Daphne thought; I just can’t take another thing. She lit a cigarette, her hand shaking, and said nothing. She thought if she opened her mouth to speak she would start to scream and never be able to stop.
“Look,” Melissa said. “This is difficult for me, too.”
Daphne finally found her voice; it came out of her in a calm, controlled manner, the way she had been trained to speak since her earliest childhood, the way her would-be replacement was speaking to her now. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know who you are.”
“I thought Richard told you.”
“I would like you to tell me.”
“We’ve … been seeing each other.”
“You must have been the one who called the doctor.” She had to know if Richard had had his heart attack in this woman’s bed. She didn’t even know why she wanted the truth when it might be so terrible, or if it would ever be offered, but she had to know.
“I knew he shouldn’t have gone bicycle riding in this heat. So much exertion. He didn’t feel well.”
“In the park?” Daphne asked coolly.
“No, he was fine in the park. It was afterward. We were getting ready to go out to dinner. He complained of chest pains and shortness of breath, and I of course, immediately, called his doctor.”
Getting ready to go out to dinner. Having gotten out of bed. Possibly not. Possibly simply after taking a shower before dinner. After bicycle riding. After making love. Daphne closed her lips in a little Mona Lisa smile to hold back the screaming.
“How long have you been … seeing my husband?” she asked.
“He said you knew,” Melissa said. “I’m sorry this had to happen here … now … I believed that you knew.”
“How long?” Daphne asked again, in that same calm voice.
“A year and a half.”
Before Elizabeth came to live with us. Before Jonathan died. Before anything that could have been considered an excuse: guilty by reason of insanity. He chose her before any of it happened. “Are you married?” Daphne asked.
“No.”
“Do you have children?”
“No.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a lawyer.” She mentioned the firm. It was one of the most prestigious in the country. Of course.
“I would prefer it if you didn’t come here anymore,” Daphne said.
“I’m afraid that would be impossible.” Melissa’s voice was as controlled as her own. “The doctor said Richard is not to have emotional turmoil of any kind. Richard asked me to stay. If I don’t come to see him he’ll be upset. I would be glad to set up my schedule to accommodate yours, as I said before.”
“All right,” Daphne said. There was one more question. No, there were two, but she would only ask one. “Are you in love with Richard?” she said.
“Very, very much.”
She was not going to ask the other.
Driving home in the predawn darkness Daphne still refused to allow herself to fall apart; she was waiting for the safety of her own bedroom, behind locked doors. You did not have hysterics at the wheel of a moving vehicle when you had children who still needed you. She felt raw with the pain and humiliation of the encounter, and the shock of Richard’s betrayal, but she wouldn’t let it take over yet. She would have loved to kill that woman. Perhaps the woman felt the same way about her, but Daphne really didn’t care. She drove on doggedly, teeth clenched, waiting for her house. Finally she saw it, rising up out of the trees, familiar and solid, silhouetted against the purplish-black sky.
She was home. This was what she had wanted all those years and thought she had achieved: to live in the country with Richard and a houseful of happy children. She had never wanted more. Now she thought she had wanted too much.
Here she was, home. Her home, once a refuge of safe tranquility, then a place of always to be remembered horror, and now only a beautiful shell.
Chapter Seventeen
At the end of May Emily was still living in her own apartment. She didn’t like that it had other people’s furniture in it, but she did like that she was accountable to no one but herself. She was still not sure what she wanted to do with her life. Ken kept asking her to come back to him, promising that everything would be better. A part of her knew he only wanted to avoid an expensive California divorce with its disastrous (for him) community property law, but another part of her refused to believe something so painful, even though he had made it abundantly clear that he had no use for her and couldn’t stand her. She kept remembering the old, nice Ken, their happy times, and wondered if she could salvage something again; and then she would tell herself to stop living with long-dead dreams. Dreams had been her undoing.
If she did divorce him, she could find a permanent place to live, and fill it with her own things: a concrete admission at last that she had a new life. She didn’t know … All she knew was that she wasn’t lonely, and that was a surprise for someone who had never been alone before and had always dreaded it. And yet hadn’t she been totally alone so often while she supposedly had a family?
Kate had landed a part in a movie—a theatrical she called it, as opposed to a television movie, and seemed excited about it. Peter was looking for a summer project, preferably a job that would pay more than a pittance, but there seemed to be nothing for college students, even one who had gotten an A for his paper on “Starting a Small Business.” Adeline showed up once a week to clean Emily’s apartment, but Emily would not let her cook, saying she was hardly ever home lately anyway. When the children came for dinner Emily cooked, usually something simple, always followed by her famous cookies, and when she was alone she ate whatever and wherever she pleased, at whatever time suited her, and felt free.
Before, when she had been living with Ken, she had been in limbo much of the time, waiting for him to come home. Now that she wasn’t responsible to anyone (except the children at the hospital) she found there were a lot of things she wanted to do: go to the movies, to a new play, to lunch or dinner with a friend. She was no longer either waiting for something or waited for. She wasn’t unhappy but she wasn’t really happy either—it was more as if she were on vacation, letting her bruised ego heal.
Her son was being unusually attentive lately, and Emily wondered why. Peter never did anything without a well thought out reason. One day he called and asked if he could bring a friend to dinner that week, and if Emily would be sure to bake her butterscotch chip cookies. She was so surprised and flattered that she made enough cookies for both Peter and the friend to take home afterward. His friend was a polite, clean-cut boy from Peter’s class, who obviously had rich parents: he drove the same kind of little two-seater Mercedes convertible that Emily owned, but his was new. Peter always chose rich friends.
Three days later Peter called and asked if he could come over again. “You don’t have to go to any trouble cooking, Mom. I’ll bring a barbecued chicken. I want to talk to you about an idea I have.”
He wanted something; she should have known. Oh well, she could always say no. She had become muc
h better at saying no lately.
He arrived at six, handsome, sleek, and charming, carrying not only the barbecued chicken, hot in its paper bag, but a chilled bottle of Dom Perignon (from his father’s refrigerator she supposed) and a folder filled with papers. When she kissed him hello he actually put his arm around her.
“I am about to change our lives,” he announced triumphantly.
“Oh?”
“I have a terrific summer job, with the possibility of it becoming a permanent job, and you have a career.”
“I do?” Emily said, amused. He was virtually glowing. “And what is my career to be?”
“You remember my friend Jared who was here the other night. Have you ever heard of the Mills Tool Company?”
“Not unless I play tennis with the wife,” Emily said.
“Well, that’s his father,” Peter went on. “His father invented something, some little thing you can’t send up a plane without. He’s got millions. Anyway, I wrote a prospectus and took it to his father, and I brought your cookies, and we now have a loan to start our own business.”
“What business and who’s ‘we’?” Emily asked. “You and I?”
“You, me, Jared, about a dozen kids from school …” Peter sat on the couch and put the folder of papers on the coffee table in front of him. “Sit down, Mom.”
She sat.
“This is the prospectus and some papers you have to sign,” he said. “You can look them over tonight after I leave, but I’m coming back to get them early in the morning. Meanwhile I’ll explain everything to you simply, because this is written in language that may be a little confusing—it’s got charts and stuff, and lots of figures. Number one: You make the best butterscotch chip cookies in the world. Everybody says so. Number two: You have a genius for a son.” He smiled. “I found us a location for a small cookie factory …”