“It’s an article of faith among Coynes that Daddy married Mother for the money.”
Roy asked sympathetically, “Do they neglect you, your parents?”
Althea blinked, and there was a wild expression, almost like fear on the smoothly tanned face. Then she laughed, an ugly sound. “Stop thinking in clichés, Roy. Why assume the rich neglect their children? Some do, some don’t—not by a long shot.” She gave another peal of that discordant laughter and slipped into the water. Facedown, arms extended motionless over her head, she kicked viciously across the pool.
Roy watched the water bubbling and splashing. Her bewilderment at Althea’s secrecy had disappeared. In a quick flash it had come to her that even in a rich community like Beverly Hills, wealth as vast as the Coynes’ set you apart. Althea had experienced the same separation that had been dictated to Roy. As Roy had suffered in school for her crumpled brown lunch bags and cloddy hand-me-downs, so had Althea borne the brunt of reprisals for Belvedere.
Roy, though, had never blamed NolaBee for her situation. Althea seemed bitterly, unhappily resentful of her parents.
After a minute Roy jumped into the pool, swimming like a frog in her YWCA-learned breaststroke over to a red-and-blue inflatable ball. “Catch,” she shouted, managing a feeble hurl at Althea.
The tension broke. The girls floundered in the heated water, sailing the beach ball back and forth.
The brown-and-white-striped pool towels were sheet size, indestructibly thick, and “Belvedere” was woven into the selvage. They were sunning themselves on lush terry when a tall, round-shouldered woman stepped down the terraces.
“The doyenne of the castle,” said Althea.
“Your mother, you mean?”
Althea, without replying, rolled onto her stomach and pressed her narrow, arched nose into her towel.
Mrs. Cunningham wore no lipstick, and with her old-fashioned flat-waved hairstyle and her loose pinstriped shirtwaist, she looked, even for a mother, dowdy, without sparkle, plain. And yet somehow she was distinguished. Three times as distinguished as thin Mrs. Fernauld for all her smart clothes and carefully coiffed dyed blond hair. But why? And would I think Althea’s mother so impressive, Roy wondered, if I didn’t know she was Grover T. Coyne’s daughter?
Mrs. Cunningham had reached the pool deck. Her height, shapeless bosom, body build, and receding chin gave her a marked resemblance to Eleanor Roosevelt.
Althea did not budge from her prone position. Roy, though, forcibly instilled with Southern courtesy toward elders, had jumped to her feet.
“Mother, this is my friend, Roy Wace.” Althea used a cold, balky tone. “Roy, my mother, Mrs. Cunningham.”
“How nice to finally meet you,” said Mrs. Cunningham, clasping her hands together. Her only jewelry was a broad gold wedding band.
Roy said, “It’s a real pleasure to be here, Mrs. Cunningham. This house is . . . Belvedere is really a showplace.”
“How kind of you, dear.” Mrs. Cunningham looked up at one of the enormous staghorn ferns that hung outside the poolhouse as she inquired, “Will you girls be lunching with us?”
“No,” Althea said sharply.
“Your father and I would enjoy it,” Mrs. Cunningham said.
“I told Luther we’d be eating down here,” Althea said.
Roy didn’t have the foggiest notion who Luther was, but she knew Althea was lying. Althea had spoken to nobody but her since passing through the wrought-iron gates.
“I do hope you change your mind, then,” said Mrs. Cunningham with a clipped, old-fashioned politeness. “Roy, I am delighted to have met you.” She held out a large, soft hand to be shaken.
Roy watched the tall, dowdy figure cut across the grass terracing to a greenhouse with a domed roof. “Why did you have to act like that?” she asked.
“Like how?” Althea retorted dangerously.
“Rude.”
“This’ll come as a shock to you, but not everybody swarms all over her mother like a puppy begging for a little love.”
Roy’s face burned, but she persisted, “I was only suggesting you could have been a tetch nicer. She’ll blame me because you’re fresh.”
“We have a private war going, Roy, Mother and me. You’re not any part of it.”
“What about your father?”
A shadow flickered in Althea’s eyes. “I do believe,” she said, “that you’ll have a chance to judge for yourself.”
It was about 11:30 when a tall man wearing a white shirt and gray trousers came down from the house. From him Althea had inherited her streaked light hair and oval, handsome face. Althea tanned a lush ocherous brown, though, and his face was ruddy in the manner of fair-pigmented sailors. He was not exactly handsome, yet he had an unconscious attractiveness that Roy did not generally connect with older men. Swoon, swoon, she thought, contrasting him with his round-shouldered, dowdy spouse. It’s an article of faith among Coynes that he married her for her money. At his heels trotted a large collie with a plumy tail and very full ruff.
Althea sat up. “Hello, Daddy.” Smiling guilelessly, she looked younger, a little girl almost.
“Well, here I am,” he said. “Ready for presentation to the mysterious Miss Wace.”
Roy, who was already standing, giggled.
Althea made the introductions, adding, “That’s Bonnie Prince Charlie.”
“He’s beautiful,” Roy said, holding out her hand. “Shake, Bonnie Prince.”
The collie backed away.
“Don’t take offense. He’s like that with everyone but me,” said Mr. Cunningham, pulling up his trouser knees as he sat on a wrought-iron chair. “Roy. That’s an unusual name for a girl.”
“My grandmother was a Roy, and we’re from the South,” Roy explained shyly.
“Whereabouts?”
“Greenward, Georgia—actually, I’ve never been there . . . I was born in San Bernardino. The truth is, I’ve never been out of California.
With flattering interest, he took off his dark glasses. His pale hazel eyes alert, he questioned her about herself, her mother and sister. Most of the time Althea answered for Roy. The Cunninghams were bouncing quips backward and forward as if they were contemporaries rather than father and daughter, yet at the same time, Althea continued to smile with that juvenile joy.
Despite Mr. Cunningham’s easy charm, Roy found herself tonguetied. She did not know if this shyness were caused by Belvedere or by Althea’s bewildering, wholehearted affection toward her father, which was a complete about-face from her recent embittered antiparent tirade.
“Tell me, Roy, what can Mrs. Cunningham and I do to persuade you to join us for lunch?”
Althea’s expression turned guarded and sullen. “So Mother sent you?”
Mr. Cunningham smiled whimsically at Roy. “You see, do you, Roy, how my child respects me? She doesn’t believe I have a single idea of my own.”
“Mother was down here an hour ago.”
“She wanted to meet Roy.” He raised his very light eyebrows. “You have no idea, Roy, how cut off we parents feel when a child moves into a life of her own.”
“Alas for Althea, she’s been with me, not living it up in a den of iniquity,” Roy said. In the brief ensuing silence, Mr. Cunningham glanced away while Althea, who often made infinitely more risqué remarks, stared at the diving board. Roy felt like a coarse, crude peasant. “We don’t do anything much,” she finished lamely.
“We would be happy if you’d join us,” said Mr. Cunningham, stroking Bonnie Prince Charlie’s ruff.
“All right,” Althea said. “But after this, Daddy, we’d appreciate a little privacy.”
“I understand,” he replied gravely. “I’ll explain how you feel to your mother.”
15
When Gertrude Coyne was born in 1895, her father, Grover T. Coyne, at sixty-four, was one of the two richest men in the United States, and her mother, his plumply vivacious, nineteen-year-old third wife, had already embarked on a career of fer
vid spending concomitant with her position, throwing herself into a rivalry of extravagance with her stepchildren, two of whom were several decades her senior.
Amid the unprecedented, unparalleled ostentation, Gertrude was a cowed, nervous wraith. A woefully plain little girl with her father’s receding chin (hidden in his case by a bushy white beard), she attempted to disguise her height by slouching, a habit that nurses and governesses were ordered to break with a torturous iron-stayed jacket to be worn below the exquisitely stitched-jeune fille clothing.
Her parents ceaselessly voyaged across the Atlantic in the Lyonesse, their steam yacht. Her two sets of adult half-siblings ignored her, as did her brace of lively full brothers. Clumsy and shy, Gertrude suffered insomnia and indigestion prior to the inexorably formal birthday parties given for the children of her mother’s clique. A high fever of unknown origin necessitated the cancellation of her coming-out ball—after the half-million white roses were in place.
When her father died leaving her five million dollars outright and an inviolable twenty-five-million trust fund whose capital she could not invade but from which she would receive an income of approximately eight hundred thousand a year, she said, “Now I’m going to live simply.”
The summer of 1916, her younger brother was tutored by Harold Cunningham. Harry, the name he preferred, was a handsome young man with fair hair that flopped over his high forehead. Though Harry came from a respectable-enough Boston family, he was churchmouse poor—his widowed mother had sold her house, then her engagement ring and pearls to send him to St. Mark’s and Harvard. In 1917, when the United States entered the war, Harry enlisted: a sepia photograph of him in his high-collared officer’s uniform sat next to Gertrude Coyne’s gilded Empire bed.
Harry had been in a few drinking scrapes, and besides, he was too demonstrably impoverished and altogether too charming to be a fit consort for Gertrude’s trust fund. Society gossiped endlessly, and the papers were full of “The Heiress and the Tutor.” Had old Grover T. Coyne been alive, there would have been no marriage. But his widow, still plumply attractive, had her sights fixed on becoming the Duchess of Rochemont, and a lackluster daughter in tow fitted in not at all with her plans.
She threw a squandrously splendid wedding.
The newlyweds debated where to set up housekeeping. Harry, caring only to be comfortable and adored, shrank from the Coynes and their exalted circle, who had him pegged as a fortune hunter. Therefore they counted out New York. Boston would forever reverberate to the scandal of their marriage. Gertrude believed the South to be sloppily decadent. Europe, too, they discarded, for neither was adventurous enough for expatriate life.
Then Gertrude recollected, “When I was ten we wintered out West. California was lovely, the mountains, the sea, the sunshine.”
Beverly Hills delighted the Cunninghams. It was entirely lacking in social glue. The mansions strewn in the green landscaped hills north of Sunset Boulevard were inhabited by people that Gertrude considered the middle-class fringe: film stars, producers, retired Midwest industrial magnates, oil millionaires—each household minding its own business.
“This is it,” the young couple agreed. They set about planning and building Belvedere.
It took a number of years for their union to be blessed. Over the drawing-room fireplace hung a Danilova portrait of Gertrude, her homely face radiant as she gazed down on the pink-and-white infant in her arms. Her maternal delight proved short-term, for the genes were there. Early on, Althea showed the Coyne arrogance mingled with Gertrude’s own lamentable timidity. Harry adored the child, who had an attenuated, feminine version of his fair good looks.
Gertrude blocked her jealousy as unflaggingly as she denied to herself the possible meaning of certain distant sounds that occurred during Harry’s infrequent, drink-induced bouts of derangement. Her love had deepened to worship. And like many adoring wives, she formed a membrane of self-deception that thickened, thus permitting the marriage to flourish.
Because of this shadowy, hidden area, neither parent chose to gainsay Althea. They granted her a remarkable amount of freedom, acquiescing to her whims. They gave in to her about attending the public high school, they permitted her friendship with this impoverished little Wace girl.
* * *
The rear of Belvedere was banded with two levels of broad porch. The upper, Althea explained to Roy, was used only for dinner; lunch was served on the lower veranda, which was actually part of the gardens. The mist had totally burned away, and the sun blazed down, but here, under trellised vines, the murmurous green shade was pleasant. A manservant named Luther, who had strands of mouse-colored hair combed across his bumpy head and wore a loose white linen jacket, maneuvered in and out through the French doors with grapefruit halves followed by cold lamb, creamed peas, and little new potatoes.
Mrs. Cunningham sat at one end of the table, Mr. Cunningham at the other. Althea and Roy, in their shorts, side by side, faced toward the golf course. “It’s only six holes,” deprecated Mr. Cunningham. Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham recounted their mornings. He had been in the kennels. “You’ll have to let me take you through this afternoon, Roy,” he said with amiable warmth. “Althea, did I tell you Silent Night had her litter?” Mrs. Cunningham had worked with orchids in her greenhouse, which she did not offer to show.
Roy scarcely knew what she ate. She lifted heavy sterling cutlery, the nerves of her fingers tingling with her effort to avoid a hideous gaffe. Yet despite her heebie-jeebies, Belvedere touched her imagination and she could not control her surreptitious glances at its proprietors.
Mrs. Cunningham, dowdy, timid of manner, monstrously rich—a Coyne! Mr. Cunningham, charming and easy. If he had, indeed, married for money, it was not apparent. He smiled often at his wife, and when he spoke to her, there was affection in his voice. Conversing with him, she gazed into his dark glasses, her lipstickless mouth twisting with enthusiasm.
Althea spoke only to her father.
The Cunningham family, Roy reflected, was like three telephone poles, the two farthest apart—Mrs. Cunningham and Althea—connected only through Mr. Cunningham. Still, mothers and daughters go through brittle times, and this was a mild eccentricity.
Mr. Cunningham said to his wife, “Did these delicious peas come from your garden, Mutty?”
“Of course, Ducky.”
“Come on, Roy,” Althea said in a shaking voice.
The Cunninghams glanced at one another. Mr. Cunningham said, “Althea.”
“We’re finished, Daddy.”
“But Mother and I aren’t. And I’m sure Roy is looking forward to dessert.”
At this lightly spoken paternal reproof, Althea looked desolate, ostracized, frightened.
Luther served them crystal bowls of sliced fresh peaches, fruit also nurtured in Belvedere soil. Althea watched impatiently as Roy spooned up the last sweet, juicy slice. “May-we-be-excused?” she blurted.
Again the parents glanced at each other. Mr. Cunningham said, “Sure thing, Toots. Roy, you make sure you have a good time.”
Roy thanked her host and hostess, repeating “scrumptious” several times, then barged inside the French windows, where Althea waited.
Althea walked several steps ahead, leading the way through a paneled hall as high and large as the lobby of the Fox Beverly, up a broad staircase, along a gallery-corridor whose aromatic odors of floor wax could not drown out the faint must from the tapestries of hunting scenes. She opened a door and when they were both inside pressed the bolt. In her whole life Roy had never locked the door of a room.
They were in the ultimate girl’s bedroom. A fireplace, a big bay window with a curve of pillowed window seats, wallpaper of the same charming blue forget-me-not pattern as the chintz bedspread, curtains, and upholstery. A glass-fronted cabinet displayed a collection of demure china and crystal horses. A chaise longue waited temptingly in the alcove shelved with books and record albums.
Althea, who still had not spoken, took out the Firelli-co
nducted recording of the final movement of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, stacking the four records on the big Magnavox. The mournful chords added to Roy’s uneasiness. When she was no longer able to bear the turgid atmosphere, she murmured below the music, “They don’t seem such monsters.”
“What did you expect?” Althea retorted. “Fangs?”
“I mean, a lot of people fight with their mothers, I do myself at times. It’s not exactly the collapse of the Allied armed forces.”
“Is that your considered opinion?” Althea asked.
“All I have to say is that for a parent hater, you’re a real Daddy’s girl.”
The next record dropped. “You don’t understand one single thing about us,” Althea said, expressionless.
“Most girls would die for a room like this.”
“That just proves what morons most girls are.” Althea blew her nose, a muffled, unhappy sound.
Sympathy clogged Roy’s own sinuses. “Althea,” she admitted, “I did feel sort of eerie at lunch, but then again, I’ve never eaten a meal served by a butler. Is it really so infested around here? I mean, your parents seemed very close. They aren’t getting a divorce, are they?”
“A divorce? Don’t be such a child, Roy. What could be more ordinary than a divorce?”
NolaBee often stated with great pride that there had never been a broken marriage among any of her wide-flung connections. “Don’t blame me for not understanding the problems of the feelthy rich,” Roy said, “but life here can’t be any weirder than in my home, can it?”
Althea knew a few details of poor Marylin’s romance, and though Roy had disclosed nothing about the abortion, maybe Althea guessed. “Consider this,” Althea replied with odious acidity. “If all were perfection at Belvedere, do you imagine I’d have my own way about going to a public school, spending my days every which way I want?”
“Never thought of that,” Roy said, her eyes round. “Can’t I help?”
“The perfect definition of solipsism. Roy Wace believing she can alter the inescapable.” Althea sat on the window seat gazing out.
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