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The Last Princess

Page 44

by Cynthia Freeman


  Lily felt a stab of fear. Cadeau. She had never considered the possibility that Melissa might someday demand to see her baby. The only other time Melissa had visited, she hadn’t so much as inquired about her. Instantly Lily knew that that meeting must be prevented at all costs. It was one thing for Melissa to give up a nameless baby she had never laid eyes on, and quite another to renounce a bright, adorable, precious child like Cadeau.

  What if Melissa decided to file suit to recover custody? It was Lily’s worst fear, her recurrent nightmare. After all, there were doctors in France who could testify to the true facts of Cadeau’s birth … her birth certificate was forged. Lily was on shaky ground, she knew, and she was all alone now, without Harry to help her fight back. She couldn’t go on living without Cadeau.

  But Cadeau was not lost yet, Lily told herself fiercely, and if she played her cards right, she wouldn’t be.

  Her mind working furiously, she calculated. Before the funeral, Ellis had taken Cadeau and Françoise to the apartment in Manhattan. They would stay there until she came for them. Even if her daughter guessed that they were at the apartment, Lily would have time to call and arrange for them to be spirited away before she could get there.

  But as she considered her alternatives, Melissa coolly demanded, “Mother, where is the baby?”

  Drawing on every ounce of courage she possessed, Lily answered calmly, “The baby is not here.”

  “When do I get to see her?”

  “What do you mean, Melissa? You said that you never wanted to see her. Not ever.”

  “That was then, Mother—this is now. I’m here, and I’d like to see her. After all, she’s my child.”

  “She’s not your child!” Lily suddenly blazed unexpectedly. “You may have given birth to her, but you didn’t want her and I took her. She’s my child now!”

  Melissa faced her defiantly. “Oh yeah? You know, I could take you to court and prove that she’s mine. I could really fight you on this thing.”

  “Why, Melissa? Why—out of love? Do you really want the baby? Are you suddenly feeling maternal? You want to play mother day in and day out?”

  For a moment Melissa felt taken aback. “Mother” sounded downright depressing, so staid and sober. She hadn’t gone quite that far in her thinking. After all, how could she take care of a baby in Paris? When she returned, she wasn’t even sure Jean-Paul would take her back. And it was certain he wouldn’t take in the baby.

  But as she stared at her mother’s pale, set face, Melissa felt a sudden surge of rebellion. Her mother was always telling her what to do, always trying to control her. Falling back on her earlier cant, she repeated defiantly, “It’s my baby. You have no right to tell me I can’t see it.”

  Lily felt as though her knees were about to buckle under her. She tried to sound authoritative. “It doesn’t even make sense, Melissa. You said that Jean-Paul won’t marry you. He dislikes children. What would he say if you brought the baby back to live in your apartment?”

  The painful reminder of Jean-Paul made Melissa suddenly flare up. “It doesn’t matter what he thinks!”

  “But it does, Melissa! Because it has to do with the kind of life you could give this baby. Let me ask you something. If he hated the baby, how long would your newfound maternal instinct last?”

  “Don’t you talk to me like that! How devoted were you when you gave us to nannies and governesses, and then shipped us off to boarding school so young?”

  Lily stared at her daughter in disbelief. This was what she had sacrificed her life for? Yes, she had sent the children to boarding schools, but what about all the years before, when her life had been devoted to them completely? What about all the picnics and taffy pulls and coloring at the kitchen table? Had none of that made any impression on the children? Had she really been such a bad mother?

  Looking at Melissa now, she thought how their family had really been. It pained her to have Melissa before her now, complaining and bitter. Had she truly forgotten all their good times?

  Well, it was too late for the rest of them—Harry was gone, Jeremy was gone, Randy was a stranger to her, and Melissa was the most incomprehensible of all—but it was not too late for Cadeau. Lily was never going to give her up—never!

  With renewed vigor, she said flatly, “Melissa, I explained all of this to you while I was in Paris. You will never be able to take this baby back. And there’s no chance in all the world I’ll give her to you. You listen to me, and listen carefully. I went through a great deal to get this baby. I lied to the world, and perpetrated a great hoax so that the baby would be legitimate. You’re not even thinking about what would happen to her if her true parentage were revealed. The truth is that you are an incredibly selfish, ruthless, self-centered person.”

  “You’re a fine one to call me ruthless!” Melissa burst into tears. “Taking away my baby! Well, I’ll fight you—”

  “With what?” Lily asked coldly. It was as if a different person were talking, so severe was her tone. Lily would never have believed she would speak this way to one of her children. “It takes a lot of money to file suit, particularly when it involves international issues. Where are you planning to get the money?”

  “I will have money from Daddy—”

  “No, you won’t,” Lily corrected her. “He left every penny to me. It’s all at my absolute discretion. And if you fight me, I’ll see to it that you get nothing, ever. A baby, and no money. Is that what you want, Melissa?”

  “You have everything,” she accused her bitterly. “Everything. All the money, all this grandeur, my baby—”

  Suddenly, Lily was crying and shaking. “Damn you, Melissa! Damn you! I’ve just lost your father. We’ve just come from putting him into his grave, and you tell me that I have everything! I have nothing—nothing except the baby! And just because of some foolish passing whim, you hit me with this today, of all days!”

  Stunned by the violence of her mother’s words, Melissa stepped back uncertainly. Suddenly the whole thing seemed to have been blown entirely out of proportion. She didn’t really want to be tied to a baby, after all.

  “I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “Forget I said anything.”

  As the door closed behind her daughter, Lily indulged in a burst of tears. The scene shouldn’t have surprised her. Melissa was a Goodhue, through and through. Violet, only with a touch of Charles’s ruthlessness. She would step on anyone to get what she wanted.

  But Melissa would not have Cadeau to treat as a toy, then toss aside when she had tired of her. At that thought, Lily felt a great sense of relief. She returned to the bathroom, splashed her face with cold water, then went out to rejoin her guests.

  Half an hour later, Melissa appeared at the doorway and announced, “I have a reservation for a flight back to Paris this afternoon. Can anyone take me to the airport?”

  “I will,” Ellis promptly volunteered, and Lily threw him a look of gratitude.

  After that, people began to drift away; by the time he came back Lily was alone with Mary.

  When she heard the roar of his Bentley in the courtyard, she flew to the door and ran out to the car. Just emerging was Françoise, holding a sleeping Cadeau. “Cadeau, darling, darling!”

  Sleepily, Cadeau’s eyes fluttered open. “Mommy,” she murmured happily, holding out her arms to Lily, and Lily buried her face in her baby’s hair, her heart too full for words.

  A short time later, Ellis came and found Lily sitting by herself in the dark in Cadeau’s room.

  “Is she asleep?” he asked quietly.

  When Lily nodded, he asked, “In that case, can you leave her for just a few minutes? Drew and Randy are leaving and want to see you.”

  Drew was going back to Harvard, Randy to his job at Goodhue Rubber. Each gave her a swift, comforting embrace. “We’ll be back to see you soon, Mother…. Call us…. We love you….”

  As the car rolled down the hill out of sight, Lily and Ellis turned away inside, and Ellis said, “How about a drink, and
something to eat? You look as though you’re at the end of your rope.”

  Wearily, she shrugged. After he had filled a plate with a few things he thought might tempt her, she allowed him to lead her into the now quiet study.

  He poured her a brandy and lit a fire, then came to sit across from her.

  After watching her for a few moments, Ellis said quietly, “You’ve shown so much courage today, Lily. You’ve been magnificent.”

  Raising her eyes to meet his, she shook her head and said slowly, “I’m not brave, Ellis. But I have Cadeau to think about. She’s lost her father now, and she can’t lose her mother too.”

  Her voice quavered and he asked, “What is it, Lily? Something happened today with Melissa, didn’t it?”

  “Oh, Ellis, it was dreadful. She said that she wanted Cadeau back.”

  “Oh, Lily, Melissa doesn’t want that baby. I’m sure it was just a whim. Today a baby, tomorrow a dress. She’s as unstable as could be.”

  “But Ellis, she threatened to take me to court! And what if she and this Jean-Paul decide to get married? Surely the courts would award the baby to its own married parents, not its widowed grandmother!” Her shoulders began to shake and the tears to stream down her face as she thought of the dreadful prospect.

  “Listen, Lily, I have to confess something. From time to time, whenever I’ve been in Paris, I’ve checked up on Melissa and her skier friend. And I can assure you that there’s absolutely no possibility that they’re going to get married. I’ve talked to the young man, and he has no intention of ever tying himself down to any one woman, let alone one with a child.”

  Ellis’s words brought overwhelming relief, but Lily was too ravaged by the day’s events. He drew her into his arms to comfort her, but that only made her break down completely.

  Finally, he said gently, “Lily, dear, this is just the accumulated strain of having been so strong for so long. You need rest, more than anything else.”

  He carried her to her room, where he found a mild sedative and made her take it. “Come on, now. Get some sleep. Things will look better in the morning. I’ll be here if you need anything.”

  After watching him retire to the nearby wing chair, she finally began to relax and shortly thereafter fell into an exhausted sleep. As soon as she stirred the next morning, Ellis woke from his uncomfortable position in the chair and went to summon Mary.

  After asking her to bring Lily a tray, he returned to find her awake.

  Sleepily, she asked, “What time is it?”

  “Six-thirty.”

  “When did you come back?”

  “I’ve been here all night.”

  “You seem to shoulder all my troubles, don’t you?”

  “My shoulders are broad enough to stand it. Now, Mary’s bringing you some coffee.”

  Weakly, she sipped the strong, hot brew. In the light of a new day, things seemed much clearer. The nightmares had receded somewhat.

  The dreadful truth—that Harry was dead—was still with her, but that was a fact she was slowly beginning to accept.

  Ellis spent the day with her, not pressing her to talk about her plans, but simply waiting. And then it came.

  “Ellis, about six months ago, I came to a decision. I knew that when Harry was gone, I would not want to live here in the city any longer. I want to go back to the farm. I know that before when I’ve gone back, it has been for the wrong reasons, but this time I don’t feel as if it’s an escape; it’s simply the place that reaches out to me. All of my hopes and dreams were born there. That’s where I want to raise Cadeau.

  “I don’t know, maybe it’s because I feel as if I failed with the other children and this is a second chance, a chance to redeem myself. There’s nothing here in Manhattan for me anymore. The only thing that matters is Cadeau.”

  Ellis tried not to feel hurt at her words: “There’s nothing here in Manhattan for me….” At this moment, she wasn’t thinking of him. Right now, all her love and longing were centered on the child. And he wondered: Would she ever want romantic love to come into her life again, or would she retreat into the fulfillment of being a mother?

  This retreat to the farm seemed to give him his answer, but trying to quell his ever devoted heart, he smiled down at her. “Would you like me to drive you?”

  At long last, spring had come. Harry had been gone nine months, and Lily’s acute bereavement had softened into a duller sorrow. The grief she had felt at his death was not the stab it had once been. She could think of Harry without pain. She was grateful for their last year together. It had been their best one.

  She and Cadeau were gathering wildflowers in the meadow. Lily almost laughed aloud when she looked at her. Her baby was now almost two and a half, and she was a sight to behold. Her burnished red hair shone in the sunlight. Her eyes were as green as the emeralds Harry had bought for Lily in Paris. The tiniest, most diminutive freckles were scattered across the bridge of her nose.

  To Lily, she looked like a child from a Renoir—simply an enchanting creature. Lily laughed at the sight of her capering through the knee-high grass.

  Lily picked her up and lifted her high above her head, all twenty-five pounds of her. Cadeau shrieked with delight.

  “You look so delicious, I could eat you!” Lily said.

  “No, Mommy, don’t!”

  “I said I could, but I won’t.” Lily laughed, kissing her rosy cheek. “Now let’s pick flowers.”

  As they gathered them, Cadeau peppered Lily with questions. “What’s this one, Mommy?”

  “That’s Queen Anne’s lace—like the lace on your petticoat.”

  “And what’s this one?” Cadeau asked, as she added another to her bunch.

  “That’s a …” But Lily didn’t finish the sentence. When she looked beyond the sycamores to the clearing, silhouetted against the sky stood a man. As he began walking toward her, she stopped short. She would have recognized that walk anywhere.

  She ran through the meadow, her skirts billowing out in the soft breeze, with Cadeau behind her. And just before she reached him, Lily dropped the armload of wildflowers, opened her arms, and ran into his extended ones.

  “Oh, Ellis, I’m so happy that you came!”

  Turn the page to read an excerpt from Cynthia Freeman’s A World Full of Strangers

  CHAPTER ONE

  WINTER, 1932

  SOON THERE WOULD BE a simple marker placed here with the inscription that would read

  HANNAH KOVITZ

  1898–1932

  Beloved Mother of Katie

  the words that bore witness that once Hannah had walked upon the earth. Standing in the dense gray London fog that enveloped her slowly, Katie lifted her eyes toward the heavens. She listened, but there was no sound in the silence—no celestial chorus of angels singing, not even the song of the mournful dove. In time the grass would grow tall hiding the marker with no one to protect this sacred plot for posterity: the last time she would stand here was now. Who would know or care that beneath the freshly turned sod that had become home for Hannah was all that remained of a life born in poverty, lived in loneliness, ended in agony, whose passing went unnoticed as though she had never been?

  Oh God, Katie whispered, is this all to mark the coming and the going of the genteel woman who had borne her life with dignity, who had buried two young sons and a beloved husband? Hannah, Katie remembered gratefully, had said it was she, the last surviving child, who had sustained her most of all. Hannah had prayed that she might live to see this child grow to womanhood, but even that was not fulfilled, for Katie was not quite a woman yet; tomorrow she would be seventeen. She called out softly, “Why, dear God, why? Please let there be meaning in my mother’s death, more than there was in her life, I beg you, dear God.” She picked up a handful of dirt, held the small, cold piece of earth close to her for a long moment, then threw it into the abyss. Giving in to blinding tears, she turned and walked away.

  That evening she packed her belongings. The next day sh
e took a train from Waterloo station, and at Southampton boarded a freighter that would take her to New York.

  The crossing seemed like an eternity. For days on end the ship pitched violently, leaving Katie ill and confined to the cabin, windowless and foreboding. She would lie in her bunk with only the bleak, uncertain future to contemplate and suddenly living seemed more frightening than dying. Although during those last inevitable months, with Katie sitting at her bedside, Hannah had tried to prepare her for the eventuality that soon she would have to find a new life, hopefully better and happier than the one that she now had, Katie found little solace. But for Hannah, comforted with the thought that somehow out of all travail God did provide, there were compensations. In her absence there would be Malka Greenberg, her dearest and oldest friend, to whom she could vouchsafe her child and with whom Katie would find a haven.

  However, when the time came Katie was not prepared. What would it be like, going to live as a stranger with Malka Greenberg and her family? She reached into her handbag and took out the faded photograph taken of Malka and Hannah so many years ago when they were small children in Poland, trying to read the face of her new benefactress. But nothing was revealed to indicate that she would really be wanted.

  Malka Greenberg and Hannah Kovitz had developed a friendship that went back to a small village in Poland where both had been born. Their young lives were inseparable until Malka, at the age of fifteen, met and married Jacob Greenberg. Shortly after their marriage, Jacob decided to leave Poland, where life was unbearably hard, and go to America. Amidst promises of returning some day and a pledge of everlasting friendship, the two clung together, tears streaming down their cheeks, saying their goodbyes, each knowing secretly that they would never see each other again, as the Greenbergs departed, by cattle boat, for New York.

  Ensuing years kept them in touch. They waited impatiently for a letter, a photograph. When Malka read that Hannah was dying, she wrote immediately that she was to put her mind at rest so far as Katie was concerned, that when the time came the child was to come to her as soon as possible. In spite of all her mother had told her about Malka, Katie realized that the two had not seen each other for many years, and that the years had a way of changing people. Katie thought perhaps Jacob Greenberg would object to her, even if Malka were willing. Maybe the two Greenberg children would not accept her. Maybe Birdie Greenberg, who was only a year older, would dislike having her around, and maybe Sammy, who was eleven years old, might resent having a stranger living in his house. Maybe she would be in the way. But the most important thing was that maybe Malka had merely made the promise as a gesture to a dying woman. And maybe she should have stayed in London; maybe she could have gotten a job and taken care of herself….

 

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