“Kind of,” he said honestly. “But I’m mostly sad, for me, and all of you.”
“Will we be okay?”
“We’ll be very okay, we just have to help each other. I’m going to try and be mommy and daddy to all of you.”
Kendra frowned at that. “Are you going to wear Mommy’s clothes?”
“No, I’m not. But I’ll have to learn to do the things she did for you.”
“The nannies do everything for us,” Kendra said, and they all knew it was true.
“Well, that’s good, and that won’t change.”
They talked about it for a while, and then Max told Kendra to go upstairs and check on Daisy and the baby, and when she left he handed Hélène her mother’s letter. She read it and tears filled her eyes and ran down her cheeks as his heart ached for her. She looked up at her father when she finished it and she was sobbing as he pulled her tightly into his arms.
“It sounds like we’re never going to see her again. Why did she leave us, Daddy?” She was hiccupping on her sobs, but trying to be brave.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly, and he was crying too, for his daughter’s loss, not his own. He couldn’t bear to see her in pain. He knew that Julie’s leaving would mark her forever. “I guess I screwed everything up for all of us. I traveled too much and she got lonely. I think we’ll see her again, I just don’t know when, and it could be a while.” Hélène nodded and wiped the tears off her face. “We just have to be big guys about this. I know it feels terrible, but there’s nothing else we can do.” It was like a death, but he didn’t say that to them. They had lost their mother, the one person who should never abandon a child, and she had.
He had tried to call her on her cellphone all night and it had gone to voicemail. He had left her a million messages and she hadn’t called him back. And he doubted that she would. She had cut the cord to all of them.
He and Hélène made breakfast for her and Kendra. After that he called Julie’s sisters. They didn’t know where she’d gone either and they were shocked at what she’d done. Not that she had left him, that happened with couples, but the fact that she had abandoned her kids and didn’t want to be their mother anymore was unthinkable, even to her own sisters.
“Poor kids,” her younger sister, Belinda, said, “she wasn’t happy about the last baby, but that was as much her fault as yours. If she felt that strongly about it, she should have had her tubes tied. You don’t just walk out on four kids.” She was furious with her sister. They both were, but it didn’t change what she had done. It was the kids who were going to pay the price. He wondered if it was her way of getting back at him and punishing him, by hurting their children. But if that were the case, she was truly sick. He didn’t think it was meant to be punitive, for any of them. She wasn’t an evil person, she just wanted out. And that was exactly what she’d done, stepped out of her role as wife and mother and walked away. She had broken their children’s hearts and he knew he would never forgive her. And she had injured his and returned it, like the emerald ring sitting on his desk.
* * *
—
As Max was explaining the situation to the children, and after that to the nannies, Richard and Julie had just gotten to his boat, which was tied up at the dock in the old port in Antibes. It was a brilliantly sunny morning, and the yacht was gleaming. They had everything spic-and-span for him. He had the crew put her luggage in one of the guest cabins as her dressing room, and she would be sleeping in the master cabin with him. They were going to leave the dock at noon and head toward Italy. He wanted to take her to Portofino, and Corsica, and Sardinia after that. They were served coffee and croissants for a late breakfast, and Richard was standing with an arm around her as they started up the motors and the elegant yacht pushed away from the dock and motored out of the port, mindful of the small boats around her.
The sea was as flat as glass and the air was fresh as they caught a breeze as they picked up speed and he looked down at her with love and gratitude in his eyes.
“No regrets?” he asked her, worried for a moment. She could have changed her mind at any moment, but she hadn’t. She was sure of what she’d done.
“None,” she said, and he kissed her as they headed out to sea. Her prison sentence was over. She was free.
Chapter 20
A week after Julie flew to Nice with Richard, Max received the papers that Julie’s lawyer had filed to begin divorce proceedings, at her request. She had her lawyer simply mail them to him, since she didn’t want him to have the humiliation of a process server. There was no hostility on her part. In addition, she had signed a document relinquishing custody of their four children, granting sole custody to Max. He sat staring at the papers in his hand. She was serious about this. Their children now belonged entirely to him.
The first month was hard on all of them. Max had trips set up and had to travel, although he canceled those he could. And he was startled by all the things he had to pay attention to now. He had to go to ballet recitals, and school fairs, order school uniforms for Hélène and Kendra, which he asked the nannies to do. He tried to redistribute the responsibilities, and he realized that, as his mother had said, Julie hadn’t done much with or for the kids and was rarely at home before she left. Practically, with four nannies, he was covered, and they had plenty of other help in the house. But, he had a two-year-old who had no idea where her mother had gone and kept looking for her in every nook and cranny, and calling for her at night. Kendra started wetting her bed, and Hélène had nightmares. And he had a two-month-old baby who needed more than nannies, he needed a mother and father to love him, or at least one of them. So Max gave him his bottle and held him every chance he got. He wore him on his back or in a sling around the house.
Max thought he was doing a lousy job at first, and he knew he drank too much. He would drink half a bottle of scotch at night after the kids went to bed, and Hélène would tiptoe out of her room late at night and find her father dressed, with the lights on, passed out on the couch in his study, with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue next to him. She would cover him with a cashmere blanket and turn off the light. She did it for many months until he finally started to go to bed at night in his pajamas again, turn off the light, and not leave a whiskey bottle next to his bed. It was a hard adjustment for all of them, and impossible for them to understand why she’d done it, and even incomprehensible to him. He put her letters in the safe for the younger children, and promised himself he’d give her letters to them one day when they were older, no matter how angry he was at what she’d done to them, and to him.
He still tried to call her on her cellphone and left her messages, and he thought Hélène did too, but Julie never returned the calls or answered her phone, and eventually her lawyer called him and said that Ms. Morgan did not wish to receive messages from him or the children, and if she wanted contact with him she would do so through her lawyer. He didn’t have the heart to tell Hélène, but he never left a message for her again. He was bitter about Julie for many years, and he had a hard time trusting women. His anger and bitterness came through his pores.
When Steve MacMillan called him from London, and asked him to be best man at his second wedding, he was stunned when Max refused. He told him what had happened with Julie, and he said that the best advice he could give him was not to get married and not to try having babies with the woman he wanted to marry, and to run like hell and head for the hills. The one thing Julie appeared to have shattered forever was his belief in the institution of marriage. His parents had been the rare exception, but other than that, he no longer believed in marriage and wouldn’t encourage anyone to try it. The only thing Max Stein believed in after Julie left was his kids.
Steve apologized to him for the call and was sad for his old friend. He wasn’t the same man anymore, and probably never would be again.
Chapter 21
By the time
Hélène was entering her junior year in high school, seven years after her mother had abandoned them, Max had his life, work, household, and children pretty much in control. He ran a tight ship.
The same nannies had stayed with them, and lived in the same house, the kids had moved on to the next schools appropriately. Their life hadn’t fallen apart, as all of them had feared at first, but they’d had a hell of a time for the first year or two, and maybe Max most of all. He’d finally gotten control of his drinking and didn’t pass out drunk on the couch every night, with Hélène ministering to him, and covering him with her favorite cashmere blanket. He still traveled almost as much for business, but his trips were of short duration, he stayed in constant contact with the kids while he was gone, and if there were any kind of serious problem, from a high fever to a run-in with a teacher in school, he flew home. He was not the father he had been when he was married to Julie, he was twenty times the father, and ten times the man. He had learned from his mistakes.
Julie had delivered what she’d promised when she left them. She had seen them six times in seven years. It was agony for the children the first time they saw her, and Kendra and Hélène had begged her to come back. Daisy just stared at her, confused, and Simon didn’t know her. And Julie was visibly uncomfortable, looked at them like strangers and didn’t stay long, and hadn’t seen them for a year after that. For a while, Max hated her for it. But it was easier the next time, they had fewer and fewer expectations. She called them once in a while but not often, and usually at Christmas, and they had all been shocked to read in The New York Times that she’d gotten remarried a year after she left them, as soon as the divorce came through. They’d had no hint of it until then.
It made the front page of almost every newspaper when Richard Randall married an unknown woman named Julie Morgan. Max was livid when he read it. He would have liked to know if the romance was recent, or if she’d been cheating on him with Richard before she left, after they met at Gracie Mansion when she was pregnant with Simon. But there was no way to find out. The article said that they had homes in London and Hong Kong, an apartment in New York and one at the Ritz in Paris, and they were building a house in Sardinia, and they had a two-hundred-foot yacht in the Mediterranean where they spent their summers, mostly in Italy or Greece.
Max was curious about whether she had traded him and their children in for Richard. But she’d kept her distance from her children ever since she left, and had very little contact with them. Max was there when she visited the children, to support and protect them. And he and Julie hardly spoke to each other. He was too angry to say more than a few words. She was leading a glamorous jet-set adult life now with a handsome older man, and she was not going to soccer matches, ballet, or the orthodontist. She clearly had no desire to be her children’s mother anymore, just as she had said. She had been honest with them, and herself. Max had been bitter about it for years. After five years, he had finally started to calm down. After seven, he was almost happy about it. Almost.
His children scolded him for it when he was bitter. He couldn’t pass a happy couple on the street, anyone kissing or holding hands, hear about a wedding or talk about a date, without making acerbic comments about what fools they were and how someday they’d regret the relationship they were engaged in. It had become a cause célèbre with him.
“Dad, you have to stop!” Hélène would yell at him when he did it. “People are going to think you’re weird. You sound like you have Tourette’s about romance, or you’re paranoid or something.”
“I’m not paranoid or weird, I got burned.”
“You have to let it go. It’s been seven years.”
“I can hang on to it for as long as I want. I’m officially a bitter old man now. It’s part of my identity.”
“First of all, you’re not old, you’re fifty-one, and second of all, you’re still hot, but you’re never going to get another date if you keep talking like that.”
“I have lots of dates,” Max said, looking defensive.
“Yeah,” said Kendra, who was twelve now, “first dates. When was the last time you had a second date? No one will go out with you again. You have a chip on your shoulder the size of the Empire State Building.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing to have.”
“Yeah, right,” Kendra said and walked away. They were used to his angry, nasty comments about romance, and indirectly about their mother, but the women he occasionally invited out to dinner were not. And just as Kendra said, they almost never went out with him for a second date, not that he cared.
“I like first dates,” he continued the argument with Hélène, who had just turned sixteen, and kept her siblings in good order as the senior member of the team. They were down to two nannies for Daisy, who was nine now, and Simon, who was seven. Daisy was the self-appointed family eccentric and thoroughly enjoyed it. She couldn’t wait to be old enough to get pink hair, a belly-button ring, and a tattoo. Simon was seven, and loved everyone he met. He was the easiest child on the planet and his sisters doted on him. They all took care of each other. Simon had just entered second grade, and Daisy was taking remedial reading. They had just discovered that she was severely dyslexic, but she didn’t seem to mind. She had taught herself to play the piano by ear and loved everything about music and particularly rap. She gave a great imitation of Snoop Dogg, including the bad language, which drove her father insane.
They’d all turned out to be truly good kids and very different. They had their own personalities. Hélène, deep and calm, reminded Max constantly of his mother. She was seriously engaged in the study of Judaism and went to a Reform temple every week on her own. She read everything she could lay her hands on about the Holocaust, to learn more about what her grandparents and their contemporaries had gone through, and she knew every fact available about Buchenwald, where they had been and met. She wanted to work for some kind of museum about Judaic art or a Holocaust museum. In essence, she wanted to be her grandmother when she grew up. Mamie Emm was her role model in life. And Kendra’s hero was her father. She wanted to help him run his thriving land development empire when she grew up, and she loved everything involving numbers and business. Daisy wanted to be anything that involved music, preferably African American and a rapper. And Simon just wanted to be happy. He wanted to be a policeman or a fireman, he hadn’t decided which, or maybe a baseball player, or a vet, depending on the day.
And even though Max was sure it would affect them in some way forever, none of them seemed to have suffered deep psychological scars because their mother had abandoned them. It was far from an ideal situation, but they had weathered it surprisingly well, in great part thanks to Max, who had stepped up to the plate after Julie left, and Hélène was an enormous help.
Even Julie’s sisters had been outraged, but they lived in California, too far away now to see much of the kids or be of any real assistance. They sent greetings from time to time. They weren’t in touch with their sister either. She had dismissed all of them, but worst of all her kids, with the exception of her rare visits to them. As far as her ex-husband was concerned, it was an unforgivable crime, particularly if she’d dumped them to run off with an even richer guy. She had been married to Richard for six years, and she looked happy when they saw her.
The only place where Max could see that it had affected them was that none of his children seemed to believe in marriage. Hélène said she didn’t believe in it because it never worked and you’d just wind up with a broken heart. Kendra, the family math whiz/financier/economist, said marriage was stupid and expensive and you had to pay alimony and who cared about being married anyway. Daisy said she definitely wanted to get married and she wanted to have fifteen bridesmaids in rainbow colors with matching tattoos, so her mother’s genes were in there somewhere, given the number of bridesmaids, or she wanted lots of babies and no husband. And Simon said he wanted to marry one of his sisters, which one
varied according to the day, and in response to which, they all made a face and said “yeegghhhhh.” None of them had boyfriends yet, which was a great relief to their father. But all in all they were doing well, everyone was getting good grades, except Daisy, who was battling her dyslexia.
Since all their grandparents were gone, the only living relative they had in their lives was their father. They went to three different schools. Hélène was in high school, Kendra was in middle school, Daisy wanted to go to music school but was in lower school with Simon. So they had pickups and drop-offs and after-school activities, which kept Max busy when he was in town, and the two remaining nannies busy full-time when he wasn’t.
That he hadn’t had a serious relationship in the last seven years had kept Max’s home life simpler, as Kendra said to her older sister, “We love him, but no one else will put up with him. He has to stop bashing women because of Mom. They must think he’s a total jerk.” But the truth was he’d been gravely wounded, and he was no longer even sure if he had loved Julie, or just the illusion of her he’d created. In either case she was gone. He had dated other women after the first few years, but hadn’t had a serious relationship and didn’t seem to want one. He said he was too busy with his kids.
They all had dinner together every night, unless someone had a school event, a birthday party on the weekend, or their father had a business meeting. Dinner was considered their sacred time, which Max had established as a house rule as soon as Julie left. He figured it would stand them in good stead in the future when they wouldn’t want to eat at home or with him anyway. So he was enjoying them while he could.
They were having dinner and eating tamales, enchiladas, and chili rellenos when Kendra looked across the table at her father and reminded him that she had signed him up for Career Day in her class the next day.
“Oh shit!” he said. “I forgot completely.”
In His Father's Footsteps Page 28