Marylin spoke her lines skillfully, but Sari, of course, caught the placatory note.
She sighed and said nothing.
Marylin asked, “Have you heard Billy’s car?”
“No—maybe he’s still with Mrs. Stoltz. Him she likes. He cracked her up all through dinner.”
“He did?”
“I think he made her forget her father,” Sari said, rising to hug her mother, a dismissal that was firm yet not uncharitable. “Good night.”
At the top of the stairwell, Marylin gripped the hand-carved banister. Under normal circumstances, she brooded about her too-sensitive daughter and seldom gave a concerned thought to Billy—other than his draft status. Billy had emerged unscathed from a near-fatal head injury not to mention lesser broken bones and a ruptured appendix. Billy was a tough, wisecracking survivor.
Billy’s only twenty-four, and Althea has a son his age, Marylin told herself. It was a kind gesture for him to drive her home. Now stop being ridiculous.
With stoic effort Marylin blocked these worries from her mind and slowly descended the stairs.
* * *
Althea had just broken down in a storm of tears.
She and Billy were in Belvedere’s music room, surrounded by stereo components that had been installed by Firelli’s top sound engineer. She had set a recording on the balanced turntable, and as the bouncy, perfectly recaptured notes had filled the room, she had recalled—too late—that this Dennis Brain recording of Mozart’s horn concerti included Number Two in E Flat Major, the piece that had accompanied that monstrous, losing battle with her parents.
As tears poured from her eyes, she snatched up her purse for a handkerchief.
“Hey, Althea, hey there.” Billy’s voice, lacking its aggressive humor, sounded oddly subdued.
She yanked the stylus from the revolving disc. “It’s my father. . . .”
“I know, I know.”
“His favorite . . . record . . .”
“Listen, it’s okay to cry. I do it myself sometimes.”
The devastating complexities of Althea’s love-hatred for her father had always tormented and baffled her, and the only way she could bring herself under control was to count backward from a hundred. By the time she reached the fifties, her sobs subsided.
“Better?” Billy asked gently.
“I keep expecting the phone to ring,” she said.
“Your father’s that bad?”
“He’s just lying there, a corpse already.”
“The usual medical heroics?”
“To the hilt.”
Billy was sitting at the far end of a couch, his loafers resting on the low tray table. “It’s ugly,” he said sympathetically.
“Why in God’s name can’t people just die anymore?”
“In my opinion the answer has something to do with our medical fraternity’s profound respect for life,” Billy retorted. “How can you rack up a profoundly respectable Beverly Hills lifestyle if your patients conk out pronto?”
Althea smiled faintly, then began to weep again.
“In Dad’s movies,” Billy said, raising his horn-rims, “when this situation came up, the male lead usually put his manly arm around his tear-stricken costar. Critics of the time wrote that his scripts showed a deep knowledge of human behavior. Do you think that analysis holds up?”
She wiped her eyes. “Possibly.”
He shifted across the couch, resting his arm around her. He was bony, thin, and she could smell his deodorant and sweat, the comforting odors of masculine youth. She leaned her head on his T-shirt.
“You have sort of an outré relationship with your father, don’t you?”
“Did Charles tell you that?”
“You mustn’t keep underrating me, Althea. True, I write jokes for the idiots to snicker over, but that doesn’t mean my mental processes are deficient.” His fingers rubbed her shoulder soothingly. “Your father’s been ill for years, and you should have adjusted, but you’re still on the rocky edge. Want to dump on me—or do you save that for your shrink?”
“I don’t have one. Sometimes I think I need one. But the thought of having somebody’s dirty little eyes prying into me is—” She shuddered.
“My sentiments exactly.”
“Billy, get out of here. When I’m shook, I do things I’m sorry about later.”
“I’ll take my chances. Since I was fourteen and a half you’ve been the heroine of my wet dreams.”
“I bet you tell that to all the girls,” she said.
“Yeah, but with you it’s true.” He nuzzled her ear.
Althea’s affairs were carried out with mannered discretion and absolute secrecy. The minute any relationship threatened to go public, she ended it. Her innate and demanding instinct for privacy had been strengthened as if with a steel spine by her admiring love for Charles. It was deep necessity that she appear pristine and untouched—save by her legally wedded spouses—to her son. She could not risk seeing disgust in those clear hazel eyes.
She said carefully, “I’m a good deal older.”
“Venus must be at least four thousand and sixty if she’s a day. And if she materialized, I’d have a hard-on too.” Billy pulled away so he could look at her.
Dismayed to even briefly lose the warm comfort, she admitted that she was diverted by and attracted to this thin, humorously clever young man.
“Nothing like coming right to the point,” she said.
“Well?” he asked with a faint tremor. “Are you going to order me forth?”
“The castle keep’s no place to conduct an amour,” she said.
He put his arm around her shoulder again. “You wouldn’t want Charles to catch on, is that it?”
“Precisely.”
“He won’t, I promise you.” He nuzzled her ear again. “Mmm. Nice.”
Althea, responding instantaneously to the flick of his tongue in her ear, caressed the tendons of Billy’s neck. They stretched embracing on the long couch.
Suddenly the side door, which led onto the porte cochere, slammed. She jerked swiftly to her feet, going into the hall. “Charles,” she called. “We’re in here.”
The hall chandelier shone on Charles’s pale hair, which for once was not smoothly combed, and in the bright light she could see his expression clearly. He looked dazed, as if he had just been aroused from sleep—or reverie.
“Oh, Mother, hello.” Recovering, he strode swiftly across gleaming marble to her.
With an intense surge of denial, she told herself that there had been nothing out of the ordinary in his manner.
She could not bear any additional losses.
* * *
The Del Monte, a two-story pink stucco apartment complex on Wilshire Boulevard with lush tropical foliage surrounding a kidneyshaped pool, offered daily maid service and catered to out-of-towners who paid a minimum of attention to their neighbors. A few days later Billy moved out of his parents’ house and rented a one-bedroom unit in the Del Monte.
61
At the beginning of April, two weeks later, thick gray clouds from the north clamped over the Los Angeles basin. Although the air was chill and heavy with moisture, Charles and Sari remained sitting on the bare, tamped earth by the stream. Charles sat with his back spear straight, Sari angled toward him with upthrust knees so that her poncho fell around her, forming a gray tepee from which her hair emerged like soft black smoke.
Marylin could see them from her window.
As she had promised Sari two weeks earlier, she now saw Charles with a clear vision, simply for what he was. And what sane mother could pick fault with a tall, intelligent, superrich, internationally well-educated paragon who voiced his opinions with a confidence that inspired absolute faith? Yet Marylin could not silence the small, naggingly disloyal question: what did this flawless gem see in her unspectacular though dear child? And each time she came up with only one answer: in this time of trouble, Charles needed some of Sari’s boundless loving kindness. Beyond this understandable l
arceny, there was nothing to rouse the least maternal distrust. His treatment of Sari was a mixture of comradeship and sang froid politeness. Wouldn’t he display a hint of shamefacedness if he were “taking advantage”—whatever that meant nowadays—of her daughter?
Marylin and Joshua had been forced to accept that Charles approached Sari as a genuine swain, Billy having with characteristic restlessness decamped into a service apartment on Wilshire. Charles dropped by the house every day, often joining them for lunch, dinner—a couple of times even for breakfast. He hiked with Sari, he listened to her records. An old-fashioned kind of romance that, as NolaBee put it, was right cute.
Charles picked up a pebble and skimmed it over the stream; a live oak branch hid the small stone’s trajectory, but from the window Marylin could see Sari lean closer to touch the white cable stitch of Charles’s sleeve. He nodded, pushing to his feet, extending his hand to help her rise before he brushed off his slacks. They started along the shell-lined path that led up the canyon to where a derelict adobe, Sari’s old hideaway, marked the end of the property line.
Marylin’s breath clouded the windowpane as they disappeared from view.
* * *
The next morning, Saturday, BJ came to visit. Maury and their two younger daughters had returned nine days after the baby’s birth, but BJ (mother of three girls) had been unable to tear herself from the miracle of a grandson. She had stayed on, arriving back in Beverly Hills on Thursday, and used the next two days to recover a bit from jet lag and have her photographs developed. With Joshua, Marylin, and Sari she sat in the den, opening package after package of color prints. “Will you look at this one,” she kept saying in her loud, cheerful voice, boasting about every inch of her grandson, about Annie’s immediate recovery from the birth (“Remember, Marylin, we stayed in the hospital a full week and then came home in an ambulance?”), and about the enormous party on the kibbutz for the baby’s circumcision.
The door chimes sounded.
Sari ran to answer, after a minute returning to introduce Charles to her half-sister.
“Hello, Charles,” BJ said, adding archly, “come take a look at Sari’s great-nephew.”
Charles bent his head attentively over three-by-fives of the infant. “Very healthy-looking.”
“He’s an absolute beaut,” said BJ, shuffling packages. “Here’s one of me holding him—oh, that bald gentleman is Maury, Sari’s brother-in-law, the grandfather.”
“Come on, Charles,” Sari said in a choking voice. “Let’s get Elena to fix us a picnic.”
“Well, well,” teased BJ, raising one black eyebrow. “Your antique sister putting a crimp in your style, Sari, babes?”
Sari, blushing furiously, pulled Charles in the direction of the restaurant-size kitchen.
“So that’s Althea’s son, our own American Prince Charles,” said BJ sotto voce. “Obviously he has a big thing going with Sari.”
“Mind your dirty mouth, Beej,” ordered Joshua, his anger scarcely veiled.
“Now, Daddy, you aren’t living in the forties anymore. Different daughter, different time.”
“It’s not like that,” Marylin said.
“Listen, I might be a grandmother, but my sight’s not failing. I saw those starry eyes.”
“You might be a grandmother, Beej,” Joshua rumbled, “but I can still turn you over my knee.”
BJ gave her loud, good-natured laugh. “Plenty of padding now, Daddy.” She reached for a snapshot. “Take a look at this one and tell me that baby isn’t all Fernauld.”
The weather had warmed: Joshua, BJ, and Marylin lunched on the patio that opened from the breakfast room.
Elena was bringing out the coffee when the phone rang. It was the author of a bestseller that Joshua was attempting to option, and he disappeared into the house for a long-distance conference.
BJ opened her big, worn Gucci purse. “I didn’t want to show this pack when Daddy was around,” she said. “Linc flew in from Rome for the bris.”
Marylin fumbled as she opened a folder of slick prints. From the top one, Linc smiled at her. Her foolish, romantic heart beat faster, and a soft answering smile curved her own lips.
“He never changes. . . . ”
“Sure he does, but he stays the same shape,” said BJ, complacently patting her large, grandmotherly hips.
“How is he?” Marylin asked. She invariably put this same half-embarrassed question to BJ when BJ (after all, her stepdaughter) returned from Europe.
“All the jobs he wants. But how on earth can he be content to dig up the details for other people’s books? Where’s his ambition?”
“That Japanese prison camp cut his life in two,” Marylin said softly. “What else?”
“He broke up with that Marjorie I told you about, the nice English one who looked a bit like Gudrun.”
“Was it rough on him?”
“Who knows. He seems happy.”
“Oh, BJ.” Marylin shook her head, smiling. “That’s the tone you always use about single people.”
“Well, what kind of life is it, divorced, no children—nothing.”
Marylin’s small hand was fanning the stack. All the photographs included Linc. In this one he held the infant, in the next he stood with rolled-up shirt sleeves in front of a cabin. Here he was posed between BJ and Maury, here he draped an arm around the new mother, his niece. “Did he . . . mention me?”
“He knows all about you.”
“How? BJ, were you telling him about me—?”
“Stop sounding so indignant, Marylin. I didn’t say a word. But you’re not exactly the Nobody Kid, you know.” BJ spooned sugar into her coffee. “Now, if you’re asking whether he still cares, of course he does.”
“Has he told you?”
“No.”
“Then it’s a sheer guess.”
“Why do you think he’s divorced? Why else has he never come home?”
“Don’t say that, BJ.”
“It’s true.”
“I can’t bear to think of him exiling himself because of me.”
“You don’t need to sound so guilty, Marylin. Honestly you’re too good to be true. Who else would put up with Daddy’s meshugas, all that bluster and spending? I always say to Maury that Mother got the better of the deal. I really mean it. He might have cheated constantly on her, but at least she didn’t have to work her tail off to support him.” The caring expression on BJ’s full face showed that this speech was not one of daughterly disdain, but rather evidence of affectionate compassion for her best friend’s plight. “He hasn’t been drinking since I left?”
Joshua had always been a heavyweight in his vices, and drinking was no exception. BJ exaggerated the importance of his occasional benders, while Marylin, in hopeless wifely pity, defended them. “A couple of Scotches now and then,” Marylin said. “How long was Linc in Israel?”
“A long weekend. Those kibbutzniks can be prickly with outsiders. It was nothing short of miraculous how they fell for him.”
BJ boasted nonstop about her brother’s conquest of the kibbutz until Joshua’s distant conversation ceased; then she grabbed the photographs from Marylin’s hand, shoving them pell-mell into her purse.
After BJ drove off, Joshua went up to his cottage to rework the option while Marylin prepared for Monday’s show, when John Fowles would be the prime guest: she was thoroughly enjoying her homework of reading The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
The phone rang again. After a minute, Elena came in to announce it was for Señor Charles.
Marylin took the brief call.
She hung up carefully, then went into the stone-floored room originally intended for flower arranging, now used to store the old raincoats and shoes that the family used on the grounds. Changing her high-heeled sandals for Adidas, she hurried up the canyon toward the old adobe shack. At the footbridge she met Sari and Charles.
“I was coming to get you, Charles,” she said, her beautiful sea-colored eyes moist with sympathy. “
They just called from the hospital.”
“Grandfather?”
Marylin put her hand on his forearm. “I’m terribly sorry, Charles,” she said, and her voice broke.
For one moment Charles’s posture stiffened with fathomless, grief-stricken guilt. Recovering, he said, “I better get over to the hospital. They’ll need me.”
62
The Coynes had a special permit to bury their dead in the family’s upper New York country place, now Coyne State Park. Atop a gently rolling hill stood a replica of the Athenian Erechtheum, a perfect copy in every detail save one: above the shapely marble caryatids was incised: “GROVER TIBAULT COYNE.” On slightly lower ground were the nearly as outrageous tombs of his three wives—the death dates of the first and third Mrs. Coyne were nearly seven decades apart. Scattered in widening circles down the hill were the Carrara marble obelisks, onyx domes, roseate Winged Victorys, and Moorish cupolas that marked the burial sites of his sons and daughters (all lay here, with the exception of Mrs. Cunningham), his in-laws, five of his grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. The cemetery, tended by a task force of gardeners, enclosed from park visitors by a high and seemingly endless white stone wall, was jokingly called Mount Olympus by the family.
Though Harry Cunningham had passed most of his years in Beverly Hills, though he had never fitted in with his terrifyingly self-assured in-laws, Mrs. Cunningham determined to lay him to his final rest here.
With the ease that wealth facilitates, Charles made the arrangements.
The morning following death, the baggage compartment of Grover T. Coyne III’s DC-10 had awaited Harry Cunningham’s massive pewter coffin. The widow had retired to one of the perfectly appointed bedroom cabins—her maid in attendance—and thus far on the trip eastward, had wept continuously.
Althea and Charles sat in the stateroom.
Althea gazed down at the brilliant, endless cloud field. A dull ache throbbed across her forehead, and there was a rawness behind her eyeballs. She felt as if tears alone could alleviate her physical distress, yet her emotional responses were horribly awry. She could summon up neither honest sorrow nor a flicker of indecent glee that he was dead, her enemy, her lover.
Everything and More Page 46