by Amanda Brown
Becca’s cab was a few minutes behind Adrian’s. She was still pinching herself at the incredible good luck of landing in this tropical tangerine parade. What a perfect avenue for escapism! She had even slept on the flight, a better rest than she had gotten for several nights. She laughed, watching the photographer struggle against this tittering circle of fabric models. They were holding as still as a hive of bees. She envisioned herself in this hilarious Minnie Mouse getup. She hoped to keep her picture out of the society pages. Dick Davis would never let her live this one down.
Becca’s presence in the dressing room went unnoticed. In her smooth black Donna Karan pantsuit, she moved like a cat behind the blooms of this orange grove. Finally, she spoke up.
“Who’s the boss here?” she asked the crowd.
“Idiot!” cursed the bride, furious that Becca didn’t recognize her. Spotted tutus quivered with laughter.
“Take it easy,” Becca cautioned her, extending her hand in greeting. “I’m the new girl. Alex says you have my dress?”
The bride flung a scowl at Becca.
“She’s too tall,” Rosita declared. She looked sharply at Haze, expecting his veto.
“She’s better than Kitty Meow,” Haze hissed at her.
“She’s perfect,” agreed Adrian, flouncing across the room with the signature, can-do ebullience that Rosita had retained at his premium fees. “So get her dress.” He paused, allowing the magenta feathers of his collar to be admired by the assembled wedding army. “Go on, go on,” he said, waving his hands away from his body. “Chop, chop, little ladies. The master is speaking to you!”
Rosita clapped her hands and was attended by several nieces, who brought Becca her glorious gown. The dress stood up on its own! Becca felt exhausted, relieved, and bewildered, all at the same time, but when she saw her dress, all her feelings coalesced into a sense of the ridiculous, which she hid until Oolong shot an ironic glance at her—at that point she laughed so hard she cried.
Rosita pointed an orange fingernail at Becca. “Help her with the zipper,” she ordered her nieces, ignoring Becca’s outburst.
Becca stepped into the polka-dotted tutu with the help of four Ewok-sized nieces chattering in Portuguese. One of them took a moment to massage the muscles of her neck. Now this was a vacation!
“Rosita! Ayudame!” Victor Azul, the makeup artist, screamed at Rosita for help.
The maiden of honor, Dolores Mas Dolores, had grabbed the Vixenish Violet eye shadow reserved for the bride. He was battling her for control. Rosita hurried to the scene. When she heard what Dolores had done, she nearly slapped her false friend.
“Betrayer!” she shrieked, holding her hand back with a ferocious effort. She directed the weeping bridesmaid to the corner of the room, to snuffle in shame. Vixenish Violet was the bride’s color. The bridesmaids wore Alluring Aqua, like it or not.
She turned to give Victor a tongue-lashing too. “You upset her. Don’t let it get to this point again. I’ll have no tears! No salt streaks!” And then, at the sight of Becca, Rosita herself burst into tears.
Her bridesmaid’s dress was too short. “It was supposed to be a ball gown,” she shrieked, “floor length!” She pointed at Becca. The gown hung awkwardly in the air at a point just below her knees. She covered her face, wailing miserably. “This ruins everything!”
Adrian came running to control the damage. He promised to pin some fabric onto Becca’s dress to make it hit the floor, if that would make his little pollito happy. Becca, who did not help matters by talking on the phone while Rosita hyperventilated, plugged her ear to listen to two new messages.
Emily and Edward, speaking together, left her a cheery hello from the car. They were visiting the kennel, then tomorrow would be off to Sternwood, the Kirklands’ house in the Hamptons, for his wedding. Emily was excited to see the horses that Edward’s parents kept on the twenty-five-acre property. She laughed that the house had a name, and wanted to know if she could shake its hand. Both of them seemed so carefree, so full of animation and the jolliness of being together. They missed her, Edward said plainly. They wished she would come back soon.
Becca turned off her phone. She didn’t check her other message. The giddiness of her escape had been shattered. She felt empty, realizing that she would not be able to let Emily go without suffering. Her face had grown pale, and Becca hardly noticed when Adrian crouched at her knees to pin a swath of fabric around the bottom of her dress.
She felt urgently that she should leave. She longed to be with Emily.
Dully she noticed, as Adrian buzzed around her legs, that he was tickling her.
“Come on, sweetie, don’t let the jet lag get you down,” he chirped. “Look alive! We all should be glad we’re here, and not at Bunny Stirrup’s wedding this weekend.”
Becca gasped, which Adrian took as a sign she was relaxing with deep breathing exercises. He walked her over to the corner.
“That’s it, in and out. Listen, get a load of this, to make yourself feel better,” he whispered. “I’ve met a witch! This ice queen Bunny Stirrup had me working like a slave on her hitch to some rich kid, Kirkland, I think,” he said with pity. “Boy is he in for it. I can’t even laugh about it—and that’s saying something, sweetie, believe me! Poor little lamb, I don’t think he’ll ever laugh again.”
Becca was different from the other girls, a Wall Street friend of the groom, and such a fish out of water that he adopted her naturally as a confidante. She held her breath and listened, not revealing anything she knew. She felt a pressing need to discover all that she could about Edward’s wedding.
He had shuttled Becca next to the sewing table where he could reach all the pins stuck in Rosita’s custom orange cushion, which the on-site seamstress would alter to fit Becca. They were far from the other girls, who were waiting together for Victor to do their makeup.
Becca laughed, showing Adrian that his story relaxed her. “Go on,” she said. “I could use something funny, especially about weddings. And I used to think my job was stressful.”
He smiled, gratified that she recognized what he suffered. “Oh, she’s typical, in some ways, has a little basket of kittens for bridesmaids, bats them around”—he paused to remove a pin from his teeth—“like that one.” He nodded his head to indicate Rosita. “But I hate to think of what she says behind my back, because every time someone leaves the room I see her turn from Yin to Yang, you know what I mean?”
“Not exactly,” said Becca, allowing Adrian to turn her feet in a new direction as he traveled the endless circumference of her gown with his pins.
“Like she falls all over the poor guy’s mother, calls her Mum and compliments her tea and crumpets, and then as soon as she’s in the next room she curses her soul and counts the days until she dies and dumps her fortune of diamonds and furs into Bunny’s lap. She says she’s got the old bat hoodwinked on the prenup, and I wouldn’t put it past her.”
Becca’s face grew white. She felt nauseous and blinked as if waking from a dream. Edward was walking into that? She squared her shoulders, trying to imagine facts she didn’t know, something to better explain it. Edward was a big boy, she told herself, and it was stupid to listen to gossip. He knew his fiancée best, she told herself, but she knew Edward Kirkland better than that. He was as honest as the day is long, and half as innocent.
“Yikes,” she managed, to keep Adrian talking.
Adrian withdrew a pin from his mouth. “Oh, she’s crass, and she absolutely hates everyone who doesn’t bow to her, and even most of the people who do, but it’s a shame to have the little kid involved. I suppose it’s for the best that the ice princess is shipping her off to Zurich first thing. She’ll be safer the farther she is from Bunny.”
Becca’s heart jumped into her throat. Her impulse was to tackle the feathered Adrian and shake every word of gossip out of him, but she held her place, breathing quickly, pulling her hands close to her, in fists, as she spoke.
“Zurich?”
She heard Adrian laugh. “Oh, you should hear her! She’s absolutely delighted with her cleverness. Bunny got the kid in mid-semester to some year-round boarding school out in Switzerland. She says they’ll visit her in ski season, maybe,” he imitated her voice, “except the Alps are so passé, they simply might not.”
Becca was trembling. Her heart had gone cold. She stepped back, her face white. Adrian looked up at her with surprise.
“Oh, dear,” he said hurriedly. “My mistake! Sorry, darling. I didn’t mean to scare you. I go a little postal on Bunny, I know. I should have waited to unload on my analyst. It’s just that I hate her so. The kid will definitely be safer in Switzerland.”
He giggled. It felt good to get it out.
Becca staggered backward.
“Why—” she began, faltering on her words. “Why do you think it’s good for Emily to go away?”
“You know her name,” the wedding consultant said slowly. He took a deep breath. Something more was going on here than he knew. It had probably been wrong to speak that way about a client. But he saw Becca’s face suddenly go pale—she obviously cared for children. He realized that telling the truth wouldn’t hurt him a bit. Who knew—perhaps the woman could do something to help the little girl. She traveled in Kirkland and Stirrup’s circle, obviously, or she wouldn’t be here. If telling the truth hurt Bunny, he smiled, what did he care?
“All right. Keep in mind,” he said in a low voice, “that I don’t know if she was kidding. With her, you know, I really couldn’t tell.”
Becca supported herself with her hand against the sewing table. Her face, at first drawn and white, became flushed with sudden energy. She had her eye on her Prada bag in the middle of the room. Her mind whirled. The plans she had made, had cancelled, had remade, her assumptions, her values—everything whistled in her ears. She didn’t know anything. I have to get to my phone, she thought. Emily needs me. She didn’t see the bridesmaids, involved in a heated argument over whose shoes were whose, though all the shoes were exactly the same. She didn’t see the makeup artist whiling away his ennui by painting the photographer. Emily needed her.
“I have to go,” she cried, shaking.
Becca ran for her bag and was a flash of orange out the door before Adrian could say another word. The last thing he saw was a trail of half-pinned fabric, dangling from her dress as she turned the corner.
She rushed toward the paddock, the first place she saw with cars. Who could she pay? Who could help her? She saw men leading horses into a convoy of white trailers. She thought how Emily would love to see these horses.
Fearing she might never see her little seahorse again, Becca’s mind went into four-wheel drive thinking of a plan. Quickly, she grabbed the mane of the horse that the men were about to load into a trailer. Barging into their conversation, she dangled an American fifty dollar bill in the air and pointed to the trailer keys. The two men hesitated for just a moment, then handed her the keys. They could always say she was dressed like a bridesmaid, so they assumed she was acting on behalf of the bride.
She opened the driver’s seat door with a crash, repeating the Spanish word for airport over and over, hoping the Portuguese was something similar. She dug her hand into her purse and thrust more money in front of her. Airport, please, please, quickly, she was saying, in any language that occurred to her, hoping the money would talk. A portly, middle-aged stable worker, wet with perspiration, stepped forward and Becca led him quickly toward the door. He took the wheel, but she pushed him aside, taking the wheel herself. In seconds the trailer skidded away, with a frightened Brazilian polo pony pressed firmly backward against its locked gate.
Becca raced through the dusty, hot streets, flying past signs she didn’t understand, pulling her navigator’s hands to the wheel as she dialed her phone. She wired cash to the airport in Rio, which she knew would clear her only path home. When she arrived at the airport, she crashed through its crowds scattering dollars like seeds in topsoil. It took three thousand dollars to buy the first class seat of an English-speaking businessman, but everyone believed from her gown that she was a celebrity, and crowds parted with curious faces turned toward her. Tense as a wire, Becca got home.
In Miami she called Philippe as she was changing planes. He had the task of picking up Becca first thing Saturday morning at JFK International Airport. She was heading for the Hamptons, she explained to Philippe, as a surprise for Emily. Her voice was tense: She snapped her answers to his questions. He asked if she were all right, and she finessed the question as best she could without bursting into tears of exhaustion. Everything whistled and ripped past her ears; her eyes were blurry from crying. She could hardly fasten on any thought in her panic about Emily.
But she did remember to ask Philippe one last favor, and he was sure by then that she had gone crazy.
“Bring my mother.”
CHAPTER 29
October Showers
There was a time when Bunny Stirrup, like the other thousand women who turned out in spring silks and broad-brimmed hats for the Conservancy Luncheon, thought that the extravagant celebration marked the pinnacle of Manhattan’s midday scene. She had come so far since then, Bunny realized. The champagne brunch that was spread in her honor beneath the gleaming, orchid-filled tent on the Kirkland lawn was easily as important as that B-list affair. It was attended by the most luminous and envied socialites in New York City, maybe even the world, since some of the guests were foreign. She had invited her bridesmaids and fifty of her most photogenic friends to join her for this intimate get-together. Tonight, at the white tie wedding she had always dreamed would be hers, under the soft, lustrous glow of stars and outdoor candles, they would all witness her triumph.
Adrian Parish’s plan (implemented by his lovely henchman, Jo-Jo, whom she regarded as her private butler) had organized this reception on the enchanting green front lawn of Sternwood, the Kirkland’s twenty-eight-room beach cottage. The home had been built in 1891 for Edward’s great-grandfather, who preferred leisure to labor, and consequently had a little railway car built behind the house to move steamer trunks and boxes from the yacht landing to the main quarters. The railway had long since been dismantled, but a few stones of the track remained like ancient ruins in the rolling hill that led down to the water.
The busy photographers were impressed, Bunny could see, at the A-list vintage of her guests. The graceful ladies swept from air-kiss to air-kiss with lovely, shimmering ebullience. The weather was delightfully clear. Everyone had caught the wave.
Both Bill Cunningham from the Times and Mary Hillard from Vogue were on the lawn shooting hundreds of pictures. Bunny felt giddy from the mere sight of them. She had, after much internal debate, decided to forego her daily pharmaceutical cocktail, and was elated that the sweet mood in which she fluttered this afternoon was actually her own. How could she feel less than total joy? In hours she would be in a position to look down on most of the guests at this brunch. She would luxuriate—by right, and not just by invitation—with the well-bred rich, the multigenerational rich, whose beds were feathered by inherited money and whose culture was bred in the bone.
She had already gotten some good advance press. The Times piece was a nice touch; she had to credit Adrian with its execution. He had flown in Yoshi, a wedding proposal specialist, known as a “romance concierge,” from the Ritz-Carlton in Osaka. Together, the three of them brainstormed a fabulous story of Edward’s proposal to Bunny.
All knew that Edward was an adventurous sailor and fisherman, so Bunny kept him in character, telling the press that he had hired and piloted a seaplane to take them to a secluded part of Peconic Bay. He knelt, of course, no small feat in the cramped quarters of the plane, and proposed with this stunning ring, which simply slid onto her finger as naturally as Cinderella’s slipper dropped onto her tiny little foot. Afterward, they enjoyed a picnic of champagne and sandwiches.
The Times had eaten it up. It went out on the wire service, so Bunny was prominently
featured in more second-rate papers across the country than she could count, but it wasn’t her job to count. It was her private secretary’s job, and Cecil Barnaby had been busy every minute since she engaged his services last week. He would pull her clippings, and she would decide which to frame.
Bunny couldn’t tell the story enough, and had actually come to believe it, in a sort of what-should-have-been sense. She was extending her hand to show the ring once more to a gasping audience, preparing to tell the delightful tale again, when she noticed Edward’s car making its slow progress along the half-mile brick driveway that ended in a horseshoe in front of the graceful house. She scowled when she remembered that Emily was with him.
Seated together in the roomy leather back seat of the Bentley, playing tic-tac-toe and hangman on the spiral notepad that he had discovered on a bookshelf in the car, Edward and Emily turned to the window as the car entered the Sternwood grounds. Fresh and happy from winning all the games she had played, Emily watched with wide eyes as Edward showed her the big house where he had spent time as a little boy. The car passed the grass tennis court and trellises climbing with roses and trumpet vines. When the shingled mansion came into view, Emily shrugged her little shoulders.
Hmm, she said. She thought it would be fancier, with turrets and moats or something. Or at least a tower. She yawned, stretching her little fists in the air. “Can we play again, Eddie?”
Edward laughed, grateful for the child’s honesty. Sternwood, he had been reminded unceasingly by his parents, was the crown jewel of East Hampton. Surrounded by three miles of private roads, the twenty-five-acre estate had water views in all directions across Georgica Pond and out to the ocean. The stables, small enough for family and guest use, consisted of eight stalls with a tackroom, an indoor dressage ring, an outdoor ring with brightly painted practice jump fences and a small cottage for the use of the groomsman and his family in season. Wooded trails wound throughout the estate’s acreage, around two of the five fingers of the pond, and above the ocean on one spectacular bluff, which the family’s thoroughbred horses knew blind.