The sign for water. Lissie rushed to the bathroom. Joscelyn swallowed hard. In six weeks shouldn’t she have become immunized to Lissie darting away from her? Why each time should she be stricken by this clammy drop of her stomach, as if she were hurtling into a bottomless hole?
Kimmy was whining and struggling to escape Honora’s arms.
“Put him down, why don’t you?” Joscelyn said.
“With all these papers?”
Joscelyn managed an answering grimace. “She was actually laughing. You’re Wonder Woman.”
“Come on, Joss—it’s been a family project.”
“I haven’t contributed one thing.”
Lissie returned, milk teeth biting on her perfect lower lip, both hands circling the white porcelain toothbrush glass. While Joscelyn arranged the stemless flowers, Lissie ran out on the terrace.
“Take a break, Joss,” Honora said. “We’re about to have a tea party.”
Your friendly family murderess at the feast?
“Veerhagen’s after me,” she said. “He wants my comments on these.” She gestured at the typed statements. “A lifetime job.”
Alone, Joscelyn removed the glasses, bending her face in her shaking hands. The instant that it had taken to raise the Venetian glass ornament was a malignant tumor that had spread to destroy all the future moments of her life. But the cancer must have been lying dormant before. When had it begun? With Malcolm’s punitive war-hero of a father? With her own parentless childhood and bone-deep inferiorities? Or would they, two immature, insecure people, have had a halfway healthy marriage had Lissie not been born deaf? Unwillingly summoning to mind that ultimate battle and what in retrospect seemed Malcolm’s irrational, liquor-hazed attempt to turn their daughter into what she could never be, a child with normal hearing, Joscelyn could feel the tears prickling again. Resolutely she rubbed her eyes with her knuckles, opening a drawer for a looseleaf notebook. Flipping through the pages, she came to a list that she had made during sleepless nights.
REASONS LISSIE IS BETTER OFF WITH HONORA AND CURT.
The penciled entries receded from her vision while the ballpoint written ones jumped out.
Curt isn’t dead.
Honora isn’t a murderess.
There’s two of them, the right number of parents.
Lissie adores them.
I terrify her.
She must be worrying I’ll crash a large vase over her, too.
The list spilled onto the next page. At the bottom, she wrote: I am not good enough to be her mother. Below she wrote: I am not good enough, finishing the sentence with ditto marks.
* * *
Curt jerked as Joscelyn touched his shoulder.
Wearing one of his hundred elegantly tailored suits with an incongruous yellow hard hat, Curt squatted next to an enormous hole. Fifty feet below them, earth movers roared and thick, strong-looking men drove or directed heavy equipment. The huge enclosure was shadowed by Ivory’s twenty-story Wilshire Boulevard home office. This would be the second phase of the Ivory complex.
He glanced up, saw her and pushed easily to his feet.
“Hi,” he said.
Joscelyn, also topped with a hard hat, squinted at the excavation. “That subsoil looks sandy to me.”
“Hey, lady, you sound like a pretty good structural engineer.”
They were talking loudly over the din rising from the excavation.
“How’s about a job?” she said. “When I get out.”
“Out? Veerhagen better buy himself a cart and start selling hot dogs if he can’t get you off. He has enough evidence of previous assault and battery. It’s a shoo-in for self-defense—and defense of Lissie.”
“We were struggling for her. I egged him on.”
“That wasn’t to put Malcolm down. If I could raise the dead, I would. I’m talking the law.” He paused. “I blame myself for promoting him out of his depth.”
She kicked at yellowish adobe soil. “Sorry, Curt. I have dibs on the guilt factor,” she said. “If I’m allowed to leave the city, would you give me an assignment?”
He took out his cigarette case. “Is this what you want?”
“Yes. As a matter of fact I’d prefer it be out of the country.”
“Then it’s settled. The London office. Near your father.” His expression, as usual showed none of his long-range bitterness toward Langley.
“What about a spot on the Mexican refinery project?”
“Me-hi-co?” Sheltering his match, he lit up. “You know that area around Vera Cruz. Hot, muggy, full of bugs. Everyone gets Montezuma’s revenge. It’s no place for Lissie.”
“She’d stay here.”
“You want to get away for a while? Great idea. We’ll keep her.”
“She’ll have a lot better chance with you and Honora.”
“You’re her mother, Joss.”
“You bet. And every time she looks at me she sees Mommy bashing in Daddy’s skull.” She drew a shuddering breath. “Would you adopt her?”
Curt’s cigarette fell from his fingers. “Adopt?”
“Sign documents that make you her parents.”
He stubbed out the butt with the dusty tip of his British cobbled shoe. The movement was casual, yet Joscelyn knew her brother-in-law well enough to realize that his faculties were tensed, alert.
“No,” he said.
“But you just said—”
“I just said we’d keep her. Six months, a year.”
“Curt Ivory, one of the richest self-made men in the country—” This had been Newsweek’s description of him in their in-depth February 9, 1969, article. “—doesn’t want somebody else’s child with his self-made name?”
“Let’s pretend you didn’t say that,” he said tightly. “What I don’t want is for you to rush into anything. You’ve never been impulsive.”
“Say that on the witness stand and there goes Veerhagen’s case.” She gave a little snort. “Besides, didn’t I walk out of Gideon’s house without even a coat to chase after you?”
Curt watched a truck filled with dirt grind noisily up the steep incline. “Honora’s your sister, why’re you asking me about Lissie?”
“That long, sad story begins when I was a nasty little girl and had this big, secret orange crush on you—”
“What makes you think you were so inscrutable?”
“You knew?”
“Joss, you did everything but carve our initials in the table. Hey, no scowls. Stay cool. In those days I was half-baked and conceited enough to enjoy any and all the adulation.”
“You’ve always been the only solid, strong male in my life. Remember? I wanted you in the labor room.”
“We’re talking paternity here,” he said stiffly. “We both know that Malcolm performed the rites.”
“That night I wanted you to help me through.”
“Honora and I love Lissie, and you know that we want a child more than anything else. But when somebody’s going through hell isn’t the time to rush into life decisions.”
“I could wait fifty years, but the facts aren’t going to change. Her father’s dead. I killed him.” Joscelyn turned to blow her nose, attempting to hide her tears.
Curt put his hand on her shoulder. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Yes, and I’m damn sick of begging.”
“Let me talk it over with Honora,” he said, tightening his grip. He paused, then spoke softly. “And Joss, thank you.”
“For what?”
“Giving her to us. You know how crazy we both are about her.”
Joscelyn hugged her arms around herself, shuddering as if an icicle had pierced her thin chest.
Six
1972
Honora
47
It was nearly noon before Crystal replaced the phone. She rotated her shoulders wearily: she had been in her office since before seven for a series of meetings connected with the plant that Talbott’s was building for Onyx in Richmond, and her ri
ght ear ached from this culminating hour-long conference call to Detroit with the Onyx CEO, Ben Hutchinson. Ben was a demanding perfectionist of a client, rough despite his having eyes for her. (Crystal used her smiles and wiles—but not her widow’s bed—to advance Talbott’s, viewing her male admirers in much the same light as the enormous contemporary paintings that lined the walls of her Clay Street house: good investments and signs of her net worth that did not touch her emotionally.)
A low grumbling sounded in her stomach. Her lunch meeting wasn’t until one.
She pressed the buzzer, and a feminine voice on the other end said, “Yes, Mrs. Talbott?”
“Would you please bring me some coffee. Oh, and ask Mr. Mitchell if he has those notes on the meeting of June 16 with the Onyx people.”
Mitchell was there immediately with the file. Arms tight to his narrow body, he smiled approvingly at her light-blue Adolfo suit. “If I may say so, Crystal, your outfit makes it officially summer.”
“Why, Padraic, aren’t you nice.”
She had come to cherish Padraic Mitchell. He was the one employee whose ulterior motives she never need search out; he was staunchly, adoringly on her side. No attack would ever come from him.
After he left, she sipped her black coffee, fanning his neat, precise notes on the cracking tooled leather of Gideon’s desk. Not a piece of heavily overcarved Victoriana had been removed from his office. Continuity had the priority over chic. In this same vein, she had kept all of the Bears, more or less taming them. Even with their cooperation though, Talbott’s had had rough sailing—the engineering and construction business is a rockbed of masculinity, no place for a woman to show her prettily powdered nose. The P&L for the quarter ending this month, June of 1972, would be the first to show a profit since Gideon’s death.
The door opened without a tap, and she looked up, her frown disappearing as she saw Alexander. He had on the requisite dark suit—another link to the successful past, no relaxation of Gideon’s dress code. Except for the suit, though, her son looked out of place in this gloomy office. With his highly shined jodhpur boots, his lean height, his large, tanned features, his sleek, pale hair cut in a long curve, he looked as though he should be strolling across a college quad.
Both boys were at Stanford, Gid an engineering major, Alexander in political science. Crystal, fiercely partisan to her younger son, did not realize that on campus Alexander was widely talked about. After he broke up with Kiki Van Vliet, one of the Van Vliet supermarket heiresses, she crashed her Karmann Ghia into a tree, requiring the services of two orthopedic specialists and a plastic surgeon. In the lecture hall he goaded his professors beyond their endurance, yet turned in flawlessly composed blue books that forced reluctant As from them. He would sequester himself for weeks in the Palo Alto rental that he and Gid shared, then abruptly gather up a crowd, whirling them through chaotic, nonstop partying.
Summers, he (like Gid) worked either here in Maiden Lane or at construction sites around the country: next week he would be on the Colorado Plateau where Talbott’s was co-venturing a uranium-processing mill for Union Carbide.
“Word is out,” he said bitterly. “Ivory got the contract for the Utah power plant.”
“He can’t have!” Talbott’s, having illegal inside information about the other bids, had gone dangerously low on this quarter-of-a-billion-dollar project.
“I heard less than two minutes ago.” His voice was restrained, deliberate, but his eyes were narrow topaz slits.
Crystal was convinced that she understood Alexander. She didn’t, not at all. She had briefly glimpsed him on the night of Gideon’s death, then banished the memory from her mind. Wishing her brother-in-law and his company nothing but ill, she believed that Alexander had assumed his hereditary burden of the Talbott-Ivory rivalry, and that this was what his embittered expression showed. She had never gauged the full, irrational dimensions of hatred that a bastard might feel for his uncaring natural father.
“Getting a project that size would have helped boost our prestige,” she sighed. “You know how we cut our profit to the bone on it.”
“That turd Ivory must’ve gotten to somebody and rigged the bids.”
“I don’t know about that.” Crystal shook her head. “He probably convinced them he’s more reliable.”
“A shame that when Auntie what’s-her-name went on her rampage she didn’t clobber him, too.”
Crystal played with her coffee cup. She took a certain nasty if human satisfaction in the disaster that had overtaken her brainy, irritating younger sister—Joscelyn had gotten off with two years’ probation, and Curt and Honora had taken her poor, defective child—yet at the same time a vestigal Sylvander loyalty made it unpleasant for her to hear anyone, even Alexander, talk about the murder.
“They’ve got the contract, there’s nothing we can do,” she said. Alexander’s long fingers were tensed, and he splayed them then closed them into his palm several times as if to relax himself. “Mom, okay if before I go to Colorado I take off a week?”
“I told you boys to.”
“Gid’s keeping his nose to the grindstone, but I’ll be using the Mamounia.” Talbott’s maintained an apartment in the world-famous luxury hotel.
“Marrakesh? At this time of year?”
“Think of it as getting acclimated for working in the Colorado desert.”
“Why not go to Cannes?”
“There’s that big Pan-Arab Conference in Marrakesh. Since the Ay-rabs won’t do business with a woman, what’s so wrong with letting them see a male Talbott?”
She tiptoed to kiss his cheek lightly. “Alexander, how lucky I am to have you,” she said.
He answered with a smile.
* * *
Despite the shadows engulfing the crowded, cacophonous alleys of the Marrakesh medina, the heat was so intense that the oddly jutting old houses with their silvery, ancient cedarwood screens wavered and appeared swollen out of proportion. Beneath her long-sleeved, beige cotton midi, Honora was perspiring freely, large drops oozing between her breasts and behind her knees into her linen boots. Even though Morocco had no draconian laws regulating women’s clothing, when in Islamic countries she outfitted herself decorously. She had lacked the heart, though, to muffle her six-and-a-half-year-old, so Lissie wore a skimpy white sundress. The child had left her hearing aids at the hotel.
The Ivorys had arrived the evening before. Early this morning Curt—accompanied by the Ivory senior vice president who had made the trip with them—had taken off for a meeting with Fuad and some other Lalarheini ministers here for the Pan-Arabic Conference. Honora had visited Marrakesh several times, but this was Lissie’s first time in the Mideast and she was wild with excitement, twisting around to take everything in—the newly dyed cloths hanging between buildings like bunting for a parade, the fat cloth merchant beckoning at them with bright-colored fingers, the skinny little apprentice no taller than she who darted by with a hanging tray of glasses filled with weedy mint tea.
Their short, stringy brown driver, walking a few yards ahead of them as their guide through the maze, had already passed the open space where five alleys met: at this moment the little square appeared empty. The brilliance of the penetrating Sahara sun blinded Honora to the two small, cross-legged figures in the deep shade of a green tile overhang. As her eyes adjusted to the vivid light, she saw them. She first thought they were twin children, then she made out the deep wrinkles carved into the powdery darkness of both faces. One little man caressed a flattish, closed basket. “Madame,” he called softly. “Mademoiselle.”
Lissie, unable to hear the singsong voice, caught the movement. She halted.
Immediately his comrade lifted the flutelike instrument, playing a slow, sinuous melody. The basket was opened. A cobra—was that what the loathsome snake was?—poked its spoon-shaped head out, rising on its body.
Gasping, Honora stepped backward. But Lissie transfixed as the reptile uncoiled. Swiftly, the owner grasped the jewel-faceted
skin behind the head, pulling the snake from the basket. In rhythm with the minor-key flute-wail, the creature wrapped symbiotically around the bare, bony arm. The man grinned toothlessly and the snake also parted its jaws, darting its forked tongue.
Honora met the serpent’s eyes, brilliant as black sequins in the dim light, an innocent, unknowing projection of evil.
The snake charmer took winding steps toward Lissie. The child let out her high, atonal scream.
Honora lunged, picking up her daughter. “Get away from us!” she shouted, trying to escape into the metalworkers’ alley, where the driver had disappeared.
The miniature man forestalled her, darting in front of them. “Mademoiselle?” His hissing burden uncoiled, defying gravity to extend itself toward Lissie.
Honora felt as well as heard the child’s rising screams.
Just then a masculine voice snapped a few words in Arabic. The snake charmer backed away, the flute ceased. As Lissie’s shrills of terror lessened, Honora looked shakily over her daughter’s head at their rescuer.
To her surprise he was the tall young man she had noticed near the massive stone entry arch of the medina. At that time she had thought he could have been stamped Made in USA, so much the archetypical young American did he look with his fair hair covering his ears, his long, lean legs encased in faded Levi’s, the sleeves of his white shirt casually rolled up. Even the dark glasses curving around his tanned face were the latest style in California. His command of Arabic, though, threw her off. Deciding he must be a French Moroccan, she said breathlessly in her schoolgirl French, “Merci beaucoup, monsieur.”
“Hey, like it’s no big deal,” he said in the familiar accent of the far western states. He tossed coins at the pair. “That’s how they make a living, snake charmers, terrifying women and little girls.”
The driver, having rushed back, was shouting and waving his arms menacingly as the two swarthy little men scurried for the still rolling coins.
Lissie’s face remained buried in Honora’s shoulder.
“Are you all right, honey?” the young man asked in a gentle tone.
“She can’t hear you,” Honora said.
Too Much Too Soon Page 35