Trust Fund Babies

by Jean Stone

  “Is it close to Norlens?”

  “No.”

  “I live in New York. With Daddy and Grandma Oliver and Uncle Bob. Is Italy close to New York?”

  “No. It’s on the other side of the ocean.”

  Molly seemed to consider the answer. She picked out a dark pink crayon and colored the fringe around Barbie’s ball gown. “Does she have a Barbie?”

  “No,” she replied.

  “Why not?”

  Gabrielle watched Molly carefully color. “I don’t know,” she replied. She did not explain that there were no Barbies that she knew of in their small village, that they were sheltered from the world, insulated from its influence, the good and the bad. A wonderful place for keeping secrets. Until the world came in. Until reality surfaced.

  Gabrielle untied the long ribbon that held her own ponytail. “Would you like me to braid your hair?” she asked.

  Molly stopped coloring. She shrugged her small shoulders. “Sure,” she said. “Okay.”

  Molly sat down and Gabrielle pulled back her curls, silky hair like Rosa’s, soft curls of innocence so receptive to a bit of love. Slowly she wove them, a bit at a time, wondering when the last time was that Molly had been mothered, and if it would help make her feel better, if only for right now, and if it would help make Gabrielle less lonely for Rosa, if only for this moment, if not the whole day.

  When she was finished she tied Molly’s braid with the blue ribbon from her hair and wondered what Rosa was doing right then and if she was missing her mama too badly and wondering when she’d be home.

  Mary Beth had dragged Carla outside as if she were a servant, or at least someone on the payroll. She ordered her to stand at one end of the lawn with a measuring tape while the man from Tent City made notes on a pad and Mary Beth shook her head this way and that.

  “Be a dear and move just a tad to the left,” Mary Beth instructed Carla, who did not, of course, mind being a dear because it made her feel part of the party, like one of the invited guests Mary Beth had mentioned last night.

  The Dickinsons of Breckenridge and Palm Beach.

  The Colrains of Westchester County.

  The Swedocks of Darien.

  Carla knew the names, of course. She’d seen their faces countless times in the photos where Lester appeared: Mr. and Mrs. Theodore J. Swedock III enjoy a moment at the Autumn Fest; or John and Sally Colrain share hors d’oeuvres with the Matthew Dickinsons. The captions weren’t very clever but the names were always spelled correctly.

  “We’ll want a smaller tent by the butterfly bushes,” Mary Beth announced. “That’s where the cake will go.”

  Carla moved where Mary Beth pointed, toward a long row of bushes with lilac-blue flowers. She wanted to ask why they were called butterfly bushes—did they attract butterflies or had someone thought the flowers looked like butterflies?—but it was apparent that Mary Beth would not appreciate the interruption.

  When the tent man was finished, the harpists arrived, followed by the manager and bass player of a twelve-piece orchestra. Apparently, the bass player doubled as a DJ for the after-dinner listening and dancing pleasure of the Swedocks, the Dickinsons, and the Colrains.

  After everyone left, Carla asked if they could have some lunch, because it was past three and she might be having fun pretending to be one of them, but it wasn’t worth starving to death.

  They went into the house, where Mary Beth showed Carla the refrigerator, said to help herself, then picked up her cell phone and started talking again.

  Carla sighed and poked through the shelves, coming up with only a package of cheese and a questionable loaf of what looked like last week’s bread. She wondered if rich people ever “ate in,” unless they had someone to do the cooking, which right now it appeared Mary Beth did not.

  When Mary Beth got off the phone, she said to Carla, “Sam wants you over at Nikki’s camp. He has a computer and wants to know if you can find things on the Internet. He thinks he might have some software to help track down Lester. Whatever that means.”

  Closing the refrigerator door, Carla smiled. “Sure,” she said, “I know the Internet. Lester paid for me to take a night course.” Until now, she’d forgotten about that, that Lester hadn’t been all bad, that he hadn’t only used her to pick up his dry cleaning and keep his office together.

  Without warning, Mary Beth practically collapsed on the stool by the counter. “Oh, God,” she said, “this is exhausting.”

  Carla nodded. “Planning a wedding,” she said. “Yes, it must be.”

  Mary Beth shook her head. “It’s not the planning, it’s the paying. I never knew how much I took my money for granted.”

  Carla didn’t know what to say, because she had no idea what that concept felt like.

  “What am I going to do, Carla? I spent the rest of my cash today, giving these yahoos deposits so they will show up. I have nothing left. I’m not even sure if I can afford to get back to New York to finish everything on that end. And next week my daughter and God knows who else will arrive and be here until the wedding and I’ll have to feed them and keep them in cocktails, plus find seventy-eight thousand dollars for His Highness, Phillipe, and I just don’t know how I shall do everything, and do you think we’ll find Lester by then?”

  Carla just stared at her because she couldn’t believe this was Mary Beth Atkinson talking to Carla DiRoma that way. Talking to Carla DiRoma at all! “You used an American Express card last night. It looked like a platinum card. They don’t have a limit.”

  “No limit?”

  “Well, that doesn’t mean you can use it forever. Sooner or later, you have to pay up.”

  Mary Beth’s eyes quickly brightened. “Sooner or later we will find Lester.” Then she waved her hand. “Unfortunately, my caterer is demanding cash.”

  “What about your jewelry? Weren’t you going to sell some?”

  Mary Beth laughed. “I did. It was enough to pay for a month for my mother in that home.”

  Oh, Carla thought, remembering Dorothy Atkinson and how Mary Beth had placed her in Harriman House—the country club of the well-to-do elderly.

  “You’re poor,” Mary Beth said, and Carla did not take it personally. “What would you do if you had to raise money? I just have no idea. I’ve never done it before.”

  Carla shrugged. “You own other stuff, don’t you? You’ve got that Lincoln, and your apartment. And you must have some stuff. China, antiques, I don’t know, stuff?”

  Leaping off the stool, Mary Beth started pacing. “That’s it!” she shrieked. “I have some Louis the Fifteenth pieces and Ming vases and Aubusson rugs.” She circled the butcher-block island once, then twice. “I could call Sotheby’s or Christie’s. I could say I’m doing some redecorating, and have decided to do away with some tedious antiques that surely some other family would enjoy.” She headed from the kitchen and Carla followed. “Yes! It’s done all the time! Besides, it would be good to get rid of some of the junk, the stuff that cluttered my mother’s life, the stuff I kept because I thought I was supposed to.”

  They ended up in the drawing room, where Mary Beth uncorked a bottle of wine. “It’s not as if my mother will ever go back there, so she’ll never know, right?”

  Carla nodded, then shook her head when Mary Beth poured a glass of wine and offered it to her. Mary Beth slugged it down in one gulp.

  “You’re a genius,” she said. “I’ll go back to the city tomorrow, if Sotheby’s or Christie’s can get there that soon. But first we’ll call Nicole and see if someone can pick you up, if you don’t mind helping Sam, even if it means you have to stay a few extra days?”

  Did she mind? Well, Carla said, as a matter of fact, she did not.

  17

  I’d like to see her,” Gabrielle said when she and Nikki returned to the lighthouse after dinner at the dining commons—ham and baked beans and lots of happy background music of small voices having fun.

  “Who?” Nikki asked, as she turned off the ignition an
d followed Gabrielle’s gaze up to the big house.

  “Aunt Dorothy.”

  Nikki frowned. “I’m not sure that she’d know you.”

  “I’d like to see her anyway. For me. Before I go home.”

  “Carla said Mary Beth plans to go back to the city tomorrow. We could go for a couple of days, too. I could see my agent and try to sell more paintings if I ever make the time to get back to work. We could visit with Aunt Dorothy.”

  Outside the car the crickets chirped while Gabrielle considered the idea. “I’d like that,” she said. “I don’t know when I’ll ever come to the States again.”

  Nikki hesitated, then added, “For lack of funds, we could stay with Mary Beth, a supreme sacrifice for me, but I’d do it just for you.”

  Gabrielle laughed. “I think it’s all marvelous, except the part about staying with Mary Beth. She’ll be crazy with this wedding. I have some money with me; we can get a hotel room. How about the Plaza?”

  “Oh, right,” Nikki said with a smile and opened the car door, “I keep forgetting that one of the Atkinsons still has a husband who is solvent.” She was pleased to see Gabrielle respond with a grin.

  Though it was Ben Niles’s wife who owned the 1802, it was her twenty-one-year-old daughter, Amy, who ran it. The tavern, after all, had been in the family for nine generations, now ten, except for a hiatus of a few decades when it was owned by Charlie Rollins, who might as well have been family.

  That’s how it was on the Vineyard: Most year-rounders knew each other and knew they belonged, a closed society that took care of its own. Which was why later that night, when Nikki went down the alley and in the tavern’s back door, Amy spotted her, waved, and said, “Yeah, he’s upstairs.”

  He was sitting at the table, an unread newspaper in front of him, a large mug of coffee that Nikki would have bet was cold.

  “I thought you might be lonely,” she said, as she bent down and kissed the top of his head.

  “That all depends,” he said. “Did you bring me clean underwear?”

  Nikki laughed and sat down. “You’re hardly a fugitive, Mack. But, no, I didn’t bring you clean anything. It’s bad enough I had to sneak out to see you.” She did not add that it reminded her of when she was young, with that boyfriend named Henry who lived in Oak Bluffs. “I told Gabrielle I had to go to camp to juggle the books.”

  He did not laugh.

  “Mack,” she said, “are you sure you don’t want me to talk to her? Paris was a long time ago.”

  “And England,” he said, dropping his gaze to the mug. “The first time I tried to see her, she was just finishing school. She wouldn’t even speak to me then.”

  “And later in Paris she told you to leave.”

  Mack simply nodded, as he’d become so adept at doing.

  She took his hands in hers. “I am so sorry, Mack. I am so sorry about Rose and so sorry about my mother …”

  He cleared his throat.

  She squeezed his hands. “Gabrielle and I are going to New York for a few days. She wants to see Aunt Dorothy, and I’m going to try to stir up some more work.” She did not mention that Mary Beth would be there as well, that she was going to sell off her belongings to pay for a wedding. “I have a feeling that when we return, Gabrielle will go home.”

  He did not respond.

  “Don’t you want me to at least tell her you’re here?”

  He lifted the mug then set it back down.

  “Gabrielle is your daughter, Mack.” She tried to keep her voice as gentle as she could.

  He stood up and dumped the coffee into the sink, the old cast-iron sink that had probably been forged a century ago, hauled to the Vineyard on an old wooden boat, then installed in the tavern. At some point the old sink made its way to the upstairs. Like most of them of a certain age, it had seen other places but had ended up there.

  “Nicole,” he said, and she felt herself tense when he called her “Nicole” because it reminded her of her ex-husband, or worse, of her mother. “I made a vow to your mother that I would not interfere with Gabrielle’s life.”

  “You made a vow to my mother? What on earth for?”

  “It was between us.”

  “Well, she’s dead.”

  “It had—it has—nothing to do with you.”

  Suddenly Nikki felt like a child again, a child in the presence of the adults. And as often had happened to Nikki, the child, her defenses quickly took hold. “Gabrielle is my cousin,” she said with slow-growing anger. “I never thought I’d see her again. She has suffered terribly because of this family, and I have no idea why. Excuse me for caring.”

  Mack returned to his chair.

  “She killed herself,” he said. “Did you know that?”

  There was a heartbeat of a pause while his words drifted to her brain, which slowly grasped what he had said. “What?” she asked even then, though the message had been clear.

  “Rose. She committed suicide.”

  The air grew thin inside the room; she felt a bit lightheaded.

  “Your mother sent Gabrielle to England as soon as Rose was buried. She said if I told anyone the truth, she would tell the police I’d pushed Rose from the lighthouse, that I had killed my wife for her money. She also said if I went after Gabrielle she’d cut off her inheritance. Gabrielle would not only think her father was a murderer, but she’d also be left without a penny.”

  Nikki tried to absorb his words. “Rose killed herself?” she asked. “No. She stumbled on the jetty. The rocks were dangerous.… It was not an … accident?”

  “Your mother made everyone believe it was.”

  Her brain churned again. “But why did she send Gabrielle away? And why did she cut her off from the rest of us?”

  “Because Gabrielle knew,” he said. “And so did I, because she told me. She saw it happen. My little girl saw her mother leap from the lighthouse and crash onto the rocks. And I was too devastated to do battle with your mother. It’s a tremendous guilt I’ve carried with me all these years.”

  From the corner of the room, a ship’s clock struck twelve bells.

  Nikki then spoke. “Aunt Dorothy must have known.”

  Mack nodded slowly. “As flighty as your aunt Dorothy appeared, she was totally dependent on your mother.”

  Nikki shook her head. “She visited Gabrielle in England.”

  Mack was surprised. “Dorothy?”

  “Every year on her birthday, while Gabrielle was at school. They secretly spent a week together in London.”

  A smile of sorts passed over his face.

  “I can’t believe my mother was so hateful,” Nikki added.

  “She thought she was protecting the rest of the family.”

  Nikki folded her arms. “And no one else ever knew?”

  “As far as I know, only one other person. Your mother told him so that if I revealed what had happened—even after her death—Gabrielle would be cut off. He was paid very well to be my watchdog all these years.”

  She did not have to ask to whom he was referring. “Lester,” she said, and Mack confirmed it. “But now Lester is gone and so is my mother and so is the money. Can’t you go to Gabrielle now, Mack? Can’t you tell her the truth and try to start over?”

  But his pain seemed to get in the way of an answer.

  Black. Who cared if it was June? New York was New York and black always counted.

  Nikki folded the long black skirt and shuddered to think she was actually considering what counted and what did not. But as long as they were going to be in the city, it wouldn’t hurt to try to see Dee. She’d love for her daughter to meet Gabrielle; she wondered if Dee would love her the way they’d loved Aunt Rose.

  Aunt Rose. It was so hard to believe she had killed herself, even though she had been so sad so much of the time, even though she’d confided about her abortion. But Aunt Rose had had Mack, and she’d had Gabrielle, and why would she have left them?

  She shuddered again and tried not to let herself
think of that now, but instead to think happy thoughts like the fact that Dee might be pleased to see that her mother actually remembered how to get off-island. For all their differences, Nikki knew she should be grateful that Dee was bright and energetic, and motivated enough to “make something” of herself. Nikki wondered when she would ever stop trying to mold her daughter into her own image, which she clearly was not, and when she would accept that once and for all.

  Unlike what her mother had done with her.

  Digging into the back of her small closet, Nikki found the perfect New York/Dee top: a black tunic with layers of fringed beads, in case anyone forgot that she needed acceptance too, acceptance as an artist first and an Atkinson last.

  She stared into her suitcase and wondered if she’d get to see Dee, and if Dee would apologize about the abandoned dinner and if China would be mentioned.

  Nikki had been to China, back in the eighties, when she’d gone around the world two or three times, trying to decide if she should stay married to Connor or have the courage to go off on her own. Somewhere between Fiji and the Falkland Islands she realized she was spinning faster than the globe. She disembarked the cruise-ship-of-the-month, hopped a shuttle to Rio, then a jet to New York, and stopped at her attorney’s office before going home.

  She could have told Dee all about China if her daughter would have listened. But Dee wasn’t interested in the sights and sounds and people; she wanted to know their business acumen, for God’s sake, this daughter of hers.

  The positive side of going to New York, of course, was that Gabrielle would be with Nikki so maybe they could have fun. Nikki could show her Manhattan, such as she remembered; they could explore SoHo and the new Times Square. She did not know if she would—could—go with her to see Dorothy. She might be too inclined to harass the woman into an explanation about why Rose had killed herself and why Dorothy had not had the guts to protect young Gabrielle.

  And what good would it do to harass poor Dorothy, who probably no longer knew who any of them even were?

  Zipping her suitcase Nikki envied Gabrielle her freedom and her life and her home that was five thousand miles away.