“You little brat!” Cassie shot back. “Pick that sweater up now or you don’t get any dinner.”
“I won’t.”
“Go to your room.”
“I won’t.”
“Then I’ll just have to take you up there myself.”
So, with Heather kicking and crying, Cassie gathered her luckily feather-light, golden-haired niece in her arms and carried her up the stairs. There had been plenty of sniffling and pleading that night, but Cassie refused to let Heather out until she said she was sorry.
“Aunt Cassie, are you still there?” Heather demanded querulously a little after ten o’clock.
“Yes,” Cassie said, folding the newspaper she’d been reading on the landing a few feet from Heather’s door.
“Okay. You win. I’m sorry. Now can I have dinner?” A part of Cassie was tempted to demand a more heartfelt apology, but a wiser part of her prevailed: slowly but surely, she told herself, she would force this badly spoiled little girl into learning some manners. It had been slow all right, but not particularly sure. Clearly Heather needed a lot of help emotionally. She had the demanding, defensive tone of someone who was terribly insecure, and Cassie was smart enough to realize that nothing she could say or do would change that. Heather needed friends her own age. She needed to belong. But she had flatly ignored every attempt Cassie had made to get her niece to do things with girls her own age. At her wit’s end, Cassie had called on one of Heather’s teachers and several of the mothers of girls in Heather’s class. Then, a week ago, Cassie had started to hatch a somewhat desperate plan to celebrate Heather’s birthday.
In the weeks since Jason had been away the town house had undergone a series of subtle but, on Cassie’s part, purposeful changes. She’d never before lived in such a vast and luxuriously appointed house, let alone been asked to run one, and her first move was to seek rapport with the live-in staff. Charles, the talkative and warmhearted Jamaican chauffeur, had been easy to win over. It was clear he was devoted to Jason and the household; his only complaint was that he didn’t have enough to do when Jason was traveling. Henrietta, the cook from the Philippines, was a more difficult challenge. She jealously guarded the kitchen, pantries, basement, and wine cellar as her terrain and waged numerous internicine battles with Nancy, the downstairs maid.
“She’s a lazy no-good,” Henrietta complained to Cassie in somewhat garbled English one night after a particularly combative day with Nancy. “And Tom is a no-good, too,” she said, enlarging her scorn to include Nancy’s husband, who acted as the Darins’ butler and handyman. “Both no-good-for-nothing bodies.”
After another week or two, and a close monitoring of the household expenses, Cassie realized that Tom was purchasing certain items—expensive sanding equipment, an electric hedge clipper—that never actually found their way into the downstairs workshop. After consulting with a jubilant Charles and a victorious Henrietta, she gave the maid and butler their marching orders. And it was agreed that outside, part-time help would more than adequately cover the cleaning that Henrietta and Charles couldn’t get to themselves. Immediately the atmosphere in the town house relaxed and turned more friendly, and Cassie was able to enlist two grateful allies in her crusade to humanize her monster of a niece.
Cassie was the first to admit that she could never have planned Heather’s surprise birthday party without the two of them. Henrietta had been furiously baking for days. Charles had cleared the entire ballroom, carefully packing up the furniture and putting it into storage. He’d also arranged to have a friend of his pick up the twelve little girls Cassie and Heather’s teacher had targeted as the best possible friendship material for Heather.
The night before, Cassie, Henrietta, and Charles had been up well past midnight decorating the ballroom with hundreds of bright pink helium balloons, bowers of pink paper flowers, and thousands of tiny silver-and-pink lights provided by a specialty party outfit recommended by Marisa Newtown, the mother of one of the girls. A clown, magician, and organ grinder with a live monkey had also been procured for the event. It was the first time Cassie had thought to spend any of the money left to her by Miranda. And though she was smart enough to know that real friendship could not be brought, she was wise enough to realize that the vast fairyland they’d created in the ballroom couldn’t help but put a group of excitable little girls in a somewhat friendly mood.
“I want you to go take a look in the ballroom,” Cassie told Heather when they got home after running enough unnecessary errands to ensure that the guests had arrived ahead of them. Henrietta and the two or three mothers who had agreed to join the party were clearly doing a fine job keeping the girls quiet.
“Why should I go in the ballroom?” Heather began in her high whiny voice. “Mother never let me go near the ballroom. It isn’t allowed. I hate—” But Cassie cut her off.
“Your birthday present’s in there.”
“Why there? That’s a stupid place for it.”
“Well, it was too big to put anywhere else.”
“Oh.”
As they approached the closed ornately carved white double doors, Cassie said, “You have to knock first—very loud—okay? It’s important.”
“This is so stupid,” Heather said, but she did as she was told, and Cassie heard muffled whispers and scuffling as the guests hid behind the thick brocaded curtains.
“Okay, let’s see what’s in there,” Cassie said, pushing the door wide.
“Oh, it’s all dark,” Heather started to complain. “Nothing’s here. I don’t want—”
And then lights sparkled on—the ballroom chandeliers as well as the thousands of silver-and-pink pinpoint lights—and the pink-and-silver fantasy of paper and flowers flashed alive. In the middle of the room was a round table, set for thirteen, with a centerpiece designed by a specialty baker Marisa Newtown had also recommended: a large, perfectly sculpted pink swan cake.
“Surprise!” a chorus of excited voices squealed. “Surprise!” the girls cried as they raced out from behind the thick curtains to greet Heather whom, it was true, until now they’d always thought of as prissy and cold. But—between the amazing ballroom, the spectacular cake, and the enticing-looking party favors arranged around the room—Heather Darin was certainly starting to look like someone they could warm up to.
Fourteen
“I don’t know how you do it,” Cassie said with a sigh, slipping off her low heels as she sank gratefully against the chintz-covered pillows arranged on the velvety mauve-colored couch. Cassie didn’t spend much time in the living room. She told herself that its ultra-feminine aura—the preponderance of chintz, the fragile-looking coffee tables cluttered with porcelain objects, the gilt-framed original Audubon prints that crowded the walls—reminded her too vividly of Miranda. In fact, she found the atmosphere in the large, fussy room overly affected and uncomfortable. She kept worrying that she’d knock over one of the precious little knickknacks that always seemed to get in the way of her elbows. And she never quite knew what to do with her long legs: the couches were too soft and low to cross them gracefully, and yet the room seemed far too formal for her to tuck them beneath her on the cushions. Until she watched Marisa Newtown, seated across from her on a matching settee, do just that.
“You mean, raise Laurel?” Marisa responded with a laugh. “Oh, I get plenty of help. Which reminds me, Cassie, you seemed a little shorthanded today. What happened to Miss Boyeson? And … Nancy, wasn’t it?” Cassie studied the effortless way Marisa arranged herself against the cushions: one beautifully manicured hand reaching for the coffee cup Henrietta had laid out on the table in front of her, the other brushing back a stray wisp that had detached itself from her severely elegant French knot. Cassie was beginning to realize that it didn’t matter what clothes a woman wore—in Marisa’s case that afternoon it was a simple red blazer and charcoal-gray flannel trousers—but how she wore them. Marisa carried herself with the studied poise of royalty; each movemen
t, every gesture, seemed a minimalist ballet of perfection. Even her smile—a rather wide and toothy one—seemed calculated to inspire, perhaps not friendliness, but certainly admiration. Miranda had exuded the same quality: in a glance, you knew that she was somebody.
“I let them go,” Cassie told Marisa, tucking her legs up beside her on the couch. “It’s much more fun this way. With just Charles and Henrietta.”
“But, my dear…” Marisa hesitated, studying the woman across from her. She had changed somehow from the evening she had first met her in this very room at Miranda’s last party. Then, Cassie had seemed ridiculously naive, without a scrap of class. Now she was definitely more sure of herself, if not altogether at ease. She’d cut and shaped her hair to a far more becoming a style—though one could hardly deem that long, straight look she’d had before a “style.” The thick gold mass was now tamed into a shoulder-length cut with delicately feathered bangs. And though she still looked like she was dressing up in her older sister’s clothes, she was at least starting to select items from Miranda’s wardrobe that suited her, like the simple gray Calvin Klein jersey dress she had on at the moment.
The girl would never be a clotheshorse, Marisa decided judiciously, but at least she was smart enough not to do herself up like a painted pony. Inheriting a few million no doubt did wonders for one’s self-esteem. Though merely having money was not the point, Marisa had long ago realized. Knowing how to spend it—now that was the real art. “Who looks after Heather when you’re working? What will you do about the house in East Hampton? The Berkshire cottage? Does Jason know … what you’ve done?”
“Well, the houses, you know, are actually mine now,” Cassie said, feeling a little foolish. She hadn’t yet seen the two other enormously expensive showcase homes that she’d inherited; getting the town house under some semblance of control had been more than enough to keep her busy. “And I take care of Heather myself when I’m not working. She needs a lot of … attention at the moment, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
The birthday party, winding down noisily under Charles’s supervision in the ballroom at the end of the corridor, had seemed a great success. Heather, overwhelmed by all the attention and presents, had behaved in a manner Cassie would almost call shy if she didn’t know her niece any better. She’d mumbled thanks as she opened up her gifts. She’d been polite and helpful during the games. She’d clapped and laughed through the clown’s performance, sang along with the organ grinder as the monkey danced. She still seemed guarded, though, when it came to playing with the other girls; she spoke in whispers when everyone else felt free to shout. She’d taken a step in the right direction that afternoon, Cassie decided, though time must pass before Heather would let go of her inhibitions and go running full tilt into the hurly-burly of childhood.
“Poor little girl,” Marisa murmured, “losing her mother so suddenly. It was a terrible blow to all of us, of course. We miss Miranda dearly on the Parks Committee. In fact, Cassie, that’s one reason why I wanted to linger on this afternoon.”
“Oh?”
“We—the committee, that is—were wondering if you’d be interested in taking Miranda’s place on the board.”
“I … well … Jason!” Cassie had no idea how long he’d been standing in the doorway, his trench coat tossed over his shoulder, an oversize briefcase resting next to him on the carpet.
“Cassie,” he said. “What the hell is going on in the ballroom? It sounds like the tag end of a particularly horrible parade down there. Mrs. Newtown,” he added formally, nodding as Marisa turned around on the couch to greet him, her wide smile at full wattage.
“Heather’s birthday party,” Cassie started to explain as she extricated herself from the chintz-covered cushions. “It was a surprise … I wasn’t sure when you’d be getting in, or we would have waited.” Disconcerted by Jason’s sudden appearance, Cassie was already halfway across the room before she realized she was still barefoot. Somehow, when Marisa rose from the couch, her shoes were on. Cassie didn’t know what to do with herself. Should she kiss Jason on the cheek? Should they shake hands? What she really wanted to do was so impossible that she felt her cheeks flushing at the thought. With perfect aplomb, Marisa stepped around Cassie and pressed her cheek briefly against Jason’s.
“Good to have you home again, Jason, darling,” Marisa murmured, and then, after collecting Laurel and instructing Cassie to think about her request, she departed in a swirl of mink and Patou.
“Insufferable woman,” Jason said as Charles closed the door behind her. “What the hell was she doing here?”
“She helped me with the party,” Cassie replied, trying to adjust herself to Jason’s difficult presence. There was something about him that always threw her off balance, made it impossible for her to breathe normally, as though the very air surrounding him was denser, heavier.
“That doesn’t sound like the Marisa Newtown I know,” Jason replied, but his expression brightened when Heather came running down the hall toward him.
“Daddy, Daddy! I had the best birthday party ever!”
It took hours for Cassie to settle Heather down that night, another full hour before Jason convinced his daughter to close her eyes and at least try to sleep. Though exhausted himself, he came back downstairs to find Cassie in the ballroom, cleaning up. Henrietta was trying to repair the damage done to her kitchen, and Charles was busy returning the party things to the rental warehouse in Brooklyn.
“With all the parties we’ve had in here over the years,” Jason said as he leaned over to pick up a crushed pink party hat, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this room so thoroughly trashed.”
“That’s a big part of kids having fun,” Cassie said, sighing. “Destroying things, I mean.” She knew she didn’t have to explain herself to Jason; there was no need to apologize for what she’d done. Yet she couldn’t help but hear in his comment an implicit criticism of her party. Miranda, clearly, would never have allowed things to get so far out of control. She would never be as good a hostess as Miranda, Cassie knew, thinking back to the perfectly orchestrated evening she had first spent in this house. She would never be as good at anything as Miranda.
“It was really sweet of you to go to all this trouble,” Jason said as he sorted through the debris on the table. “What had this been … I mean, originally?” he was staring down at the remains of the birthday cake, now a mass of yellow cake crumbs surrounded by clumps of pink icing.
“A swan. I remember that I’d always wanted a swan when I was a kid. You know, for a pet. I was about Heather’s age then. I spent all my time drawing these stupid swans on anything I could find. Pink swans, until Miranda pointed out there was no such thing as a pink swan. I guess I’d gotten it all confused with flamingos.”
“Well, Heather had a wonderful time. I have you to thank for that, Cassie.”
“And Henrietta and Charles. They were both wonderful.”
“Charles told me you let Nancy and Thomas go.” Though his words were flat and uninflected, Cassie was sure she detected a note of reproach in them.
“I think Thomas was stealing, and Nancy couldn’t get on with Henrietta.” Cassie turned to face Jason, determined to stand up for her actions.
“You sound so defensive,” Jason said. “It’s your house now. You can do whatever you like with it.”
“You know that’s not true,” Cassie replied. “It’s your home. These are your things. I just did what I thought was right because you were away.”
“Cassie,” he interrupted her. “It’s okay.”
“I’m just not used to living like this,” she went on, gesturing toward the Steinway baby grand that had been pushed into a far corner, then up at the enormous chandeliers. “All these priceless things.”
“It doesn’t matter. Things don’t matter. People do. And you made one person very happy today.” Somehow he had found his way across the room to stand in front of her. They were the same height, just as Mirand
a and he had been. It took him until that moment to realize that something was different about her. Her hair had been cut for one thing, shorter, more stylish, her bangs lightly framing her face. She looked even more strikingly like Miranda now. Her large hazel eyes met his gaze, openly questioning.
“You look…” He took another step toward her. No, he told himself. Remember, he reminded himself. But he found his hand reaching out, touching the slight cleft at her chin. “Just great … I missed you.”
“And you look,” Cassie said, “like you haven’t slept for about three weeks.”
“More like a month.”
“Why? Was the trip that bad?” His hand had fallen away from her face though the place where he had touched her burned from the contact. She felt her body lighten and soften. She felt herself swaying toward him.
“No, business is great. It was … other things.”
Miranda, Cassie told herself, automatically taking a step back, away from him, as if to leave in reality the space her sister already occupied in Cassie’s mind.
“How’s the new job?” Jason heard himself ask.
“Oh, great, really,” Cassie replied, trying to think of how she could escape. She needed to get away from him, or she would make a fool of herself. How in God’s name had she thought they’d be able to live together under the same roof? She needed to touch him. That’s all. Just to feel the rough surface of his cheek beneath her fingers. Just for a second. No, this would never work. She felt panic rising in her like a fever.
“Really?” he asked, glancing by mistake at her lips, and knowing in an instant he was lost. “Really?” he repeated, but he knew he was asking about something very different. He took the step toward her. She met him halfway.
Fifteen
Jason had become so accustomed to Miranda’s demanding, impatient ways that he had almost forgotten what it was like to be with someone who thought of him first. Without realizing it, he had come to view sex—as so much else in his marriage—as just another weapon to be used in their endless, pointless war.
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