“Maxi is spoiled because her father gives her everything she wants and you spend all your available time with Toby. She’s trying terribly hard to get her mother’s attention and, since you asked me to speak out, she’s using her father as a substitute.” Before Lily could begin to reply Miss Hemmings left the room and went upstairs to pack. In a long and honorable career she had never spoken her mind so clearly, and as miserable as she felt about leaving Maxi she was rather pleased with herself.
Toby’s English nanny, Mrs. Browne, was made of sterner stuff than Miss Hemmings. She took over Maxi, referring to her as “our two-year-old” in a way that explained away everything. Lily, unwillingly stung by Miss Hemmings’s remarks, now made a point of reading to the little girl almost every evening before the child’s dinner, and of letting Maxi play with her jewels for half an hour on Sunday mornings, perched shoeless in the middle of Lily’s antique lace wedding cake of a bed. No one can ever accuse me of being a neglectful mother, she thought, raging with resentful boredom as she read aloud.
It was soon after Tobias’s fourth birthday that he began falling out of bed. For two years he had occasionally awakened in the middle of the night and gone to the bathroom when he had to, treading carefully along the familiar route so as not to disturb anybody.
“Could I have a night light, Mother?” he asked Lily one day.
“Oh, my darling, you haven’t had one since you were a tiny thing. Did you have a bad dream? Is that it?”
“No, it’s just that when I wake up I can’t see anything. I can’t tell where I am in bed unless I feel around and if I’m near the edge I fall off. And I can’t find the bed lamp in the dark. It’s happened a few times and it hurts when I fall.”
“Perhaps it is too dark in your room.”
“It … it never has been. There used to be enough light on the street to see by … but, I don’t know, I don’t seem to see in the dark anymore.”
“Well, I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about,” Lily said, her heart beating heavily, “but I’ll take you for a checkup to Doctor Stevenson. You probably need to eat more carrots, my baby.”
The pediatrician gave Toby a thorough going-over. “He’s a fine young man, Mrs. Amberville. As for the falling out of bed, I’m sure it’s not serious but, just to be on the safe side, I think you should have his eyes checked.”
“But you just looked into his eyes,” Lily cried.
“By a specialist. Merely to be on the safe side.”
“To be on the safe side?”
“Please don’t worry. Children have all sorts of passing symptoms, particularly when they’re growing as quickly as this young man; but it’s always a good idea to follow up on them, even if it proves unnecessary.”
The famous ophthalmologist, Dr. David Ribin, to whom Dr. Stevenson sent Toby, gave him a complete eye examination. Lily sat in the waiting room trying to read a magazine as the time passed. Suddenly she looked up and saw Zachary standing by her chair.
“No!” she screamed. She knew, the instant she saw her husband, that the doctor had telephoned him to come.
“Lily, Lily.” Zachary enfolded her in his arms. “Whatever it is, medicine can cure it. They can do anything with eyes, it’s the most advanced field that exists, Lily, I’ll take care of it, don’t worry. Come on, the doctor is waiting to talk to us. A nurse is keeping Toby busy, I saw them as I came in.”
“I’m deeply sorry to have to tell you this,” Dr. Ribin said, as they sat before him. “But Toby has retinitis pigmentosa. We don’t know the cause of this disease. Night blindness is often the first symptom.”
“Disease—what sort of disease?” Zachary asked, taking Lily’s hand.
“First of all, Mr. Amberville, I should explain that the retina is a thin membrane that lines the inner eye. It contains rods and cones, which are the structures that are sensitive to light. The rods are the receptors used in dim light, which is why an alteration in their functions, as in Toby’s case, causes night blindness before anything else.”
“Doctor Ribin, what’s the treatment that’s used in this sort of thing?” Lily asked, maddened by the length of the doctor’s explanation.
“We have no treatment, Mrs. Amberville. The nerve cells of the retina cannot be replaced if they are damaged.”
“No treatment? You mean no medicine?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Surgery then? Will he have to have surgery?” Lily cried.
“We have no surgical techniques for retinitis pigmentosa,” Dr. Ribin said gravely.
“It’s not possible! I won’t believe it! Everybody can be treated! He’s only four years old, a little boy, just a little boy,” Lily said fiercely, refusal still stronger than grief.
“What’s going to happen to Toby?” Zachary asked, holding her hand so tightly that it hurt.
“It’s a progressive disease, Mr. Amberville. The sides of the retina are normally affected in the beginning, and although Toby’s central vision may stay fairly stable for many years, there will be a progressive narrowing of his field of vision as he grows older. Eventually, we don’t know exactly when, he will have only a pinpoint of vision left. But that may not happen for many years. He’ll have a long time, I hope, until then, but I can’t promise how long.”
“Forgive me, Doctor, but couldn’t it possibly be something else?” Zachary had to ask, although he knew the answer from the doctor’s expression.
“I wish it could be. For your own sense of sureness I’d advise you to get another opinion, but unfortunately the disease, though rare, is unmistakable and quickly diagnosed. There are clumps of pigment scattered throughout the retina, and the vessels of the retina are narrowed. I hate to be so certain. I wish I thought I was wrong, Mr. Amberville.”
“But how could he have caught it?” Lily cried in her anguish. “How, oh, tell me, how did it happen?”
“When children have retinitis pigmentosa, unlike its appearance in senile degeneration, it can only be hereditary, Mrs. Amberville.”
6
Cutter Amberville was almost tempted to remain in California after graduation. At Stanford, he had made many influential friends and grown to agree with the local superstition that Harvard was second to Stanford in excellence. Sarah Amberville visited her youngest child several times a year but Cutter spent his holidays and summer vacations on the West Coast. He went on to Stanford Business School and, after graduation, worked for a few years at Booker, Smity and Jameston, the San Francisco investment banking firm, whose president was his roommate Jumbo Booker’s father, a lean, fit, small man, a passionate tennis player who had delighted in taking a number of games off young Amberville.
However, in the early months of 1958, when he was twenty-four, Cutter decided to move to Manhattan. He had discovered that even in California, there was no one whom he was likely to meet who wouldn’t ask him about his brother. Perhaps, Cutter thought, if he moved to China he could escape the inevitable question, but otherwise there was no avoiding the association. Since it existed, he might as well take advantage of it, for the center of all investment banking was in New York City, and to be an Amberville couldn’t hurt his career. He intended to make a great deal of money. Zachary must not be the only rich Amberville.
Cutter had been steeped in the Stanford–San Francisco traditions of manners and culture and an aristocratic attitude that extended to the business world. He found it difficult to adjust to the collective frenzy of Manhattan. Who were all these people? Why did they run instead of walk? Why couldn’t they conduct conversation at a civilized decibel level? Was there really not enough of anything to go around or did they just act as if there weren’t?
Within a week he decided simply to ignore most of the city, not to begin to try to understand it in all of its distasteful manifestations. He had discovered that after all, on certain streets his kind of people lived, and his friends from Andover, Stanford and San Francisco had provided him with instant entry to the homes of the only people in Manhatta
n with whom he could feel at home.
Cutter Amberville was, indeed, more than welcome wherever he went. He was tall, six feet two inches, with a body molded by those sports which build the kind of long, elegant muscles that make a tailor purr. The distinctive looks that had made him outstanding as a boy had matured as he grew older, and now Cutter was an unusually handsome man. He was deeply tanned and his hair was bleached by the sun of California summers. His nose was large and perfectly shaped between eyes as blue as the sea in Sicily, as cold as the water of a fjord, and he had an ascetic, keenly etched mouth that no woman could ignore. He didn’t have bulk but he had power, and there was a strong suggestion of what Byron called “the light-limb’d Matadore” when Cutter walked into a room. For all his blondness he had a bull-killer’s sternness and dark purpose, he moved with an assurance and a self-esteem so ingrained that no one would ever believe that he had trained them into his stance, with as much will as he had trained warmth and sincerity into his smile.
His undeniable charm of manner was now completed, part of his core, his essence; that pleasing, flattering, necessary charm of an envious man whose life was dedicated to gaining the attention and affection he believed had been so unfairly denied him as a child.
The eleven years that separated Cutter from Zachary had come to seem like more than a generation to him. Although nothing could ever happen to make him give up the deep, gnawing hatred he felt toward his brother for overshadowing his youth; although no amount of personal success in his own world could ever compensate for the eternal loss of what he knew had been due to him, his hatred had become so familiar that, from time to time, he could almost put aside his litany of injustices, almost allow the worm in his heart to sleep.
Yet even if Zachary and Zachary’s enormous success, success following success as if to torment Cutter, could be temporarily ignored, there was no possible way to simply take them for granted, to come to terms with being Zachary Amberville’s younger brother. Cutter could never make himself feel, in his profound self, that Zachary’s success did not subtract something essential from his own life. He was diminished forever, unfairly diminished, and it had to be Zachary’s fault. Cutter, for all his singular appeal, a handsomeness that verged on beauty, was a man who wore invisible bitterness as permanently as if it had been tattooed onto his heart. He nourished and cherished his hatred; if it had disappeared he would have had to restructure his world, explain it in some other way. But there was no chance of that, not with the Amberville publications appearing weekly and monthly on the newsstands, their brilliant new covers beckoning, growing thicker with advertising month by month, not with T. V. Week an automatic purchase made by millions of Americans each week, visible next to the television set in every library into which Cutter walked.
When Cutter first arrived in New York it had been a year since Tobias’s disease was diagnosed, yet except for his night blindness, he seemed to continue to see as well as ever, as far as Lily could tell. She and Zachary had told no one, not even Nanny, about their visit to Dr. Ribin. They had consulted another specialist who confirmed the diagnosis, but since there was nothing anybody could do, they kept their silence. They couldn’t endure any discussion of Tobias’s future, not even with each other. Particularly not with each other.
“Hereditary.” Both doctors had agreed. There was no blindness in the Ambervilles’ family history, nor in that of the Andersons, the Dales or the Cutters. But there had been a blind Marquis who had been Lily’s maternal grandfather, and a blind uncle, also on her mother’s side of the family. No, they couldn’t possibly discuss Toby, for the only words either of them could think were words they would never say. Her genes, thought Zachary. My fault, thought Lily. Unfair, utterly and absolutely unfair. They both knew those words were unfair, but they could not, not think them.
The enormous silence, the void that was created by this silence penetrated into the heart of their life together and they were as aware of the unspoken words as if they were palpable, a glacier that was inexorably creeping over their always fragile intimacy.
By the time Lily was twenty-four she was recognized as the most impressive woman to emerge in several generations of New York society. Women thirty years older than she, women of wealth, cultivation and immense standing, went to great lengths to meet her, for not only was she the daughter of Viscount and Viscountess Adamsfield, but she was Mrs. Zachary Amberville, wife of the man who had just given a million dollars to the Metropolitan Museum’s collection of American paintings, and contributed two million dollars to Columbia University for its general scholarship fund; gifts he gave in Lily’s name.
Lily entertained so discreetly and yet so lavishly, with piles of money exquisitely spent, that she stayed out of the newspapers, yet when she departed from New York for a trip to London or to France it was felt as a loss, a diminution of the luster of Manhattan. When she returned every fashionable florist had a dozen orders to send her baskets of welcoming blooms, the homage that was her due, and the pace of the life of the city’s society took on a quickness that made her large circle feel that things were in place again, that a gala season had started.
Lily was a generous patroness of every ballet company, and took her hour at the barre every morning without fail. She led in all of the anointed cultural events that brought New Yorkers of a certain class together, yet she was rarely a member of any committee; her mere appearance at a benefit or opening night as delicately dominant as a rising moon, always dressed in Mainbocher, her hair worn back from her face in a heavy chignon, was enough to stamp an evening as significant.
Brisk New Yorkers, quick of speech, rapid in calculating social weights and measures, appreciated the quality of Lily’s initial diffidence and understood, with their canny, native perception, that it represented the kind of superiority that they were willing, in fact pleased, to acknowledge. Her superiority only enhanced their own. The mere fact that she had decided never to use her “Honorable” gave them the delight of telling the uninitiated that she was a Viscount’s daughter, a nineteenth Baronet’s daughter. Soon not telling became a matter of pride to those who knew her—who thought that they knew her—best.
Long before Toby had shown any signs of disease, Lily had abandoned the notion that there existed some passionate physical pleasure that she would finally experience. She believed that she was made by nature so that she didn’t need the kind of sex for which some women seemed to live. There were degrees of everything after all, and some women actually lived for chocolate and others for martinis. Lily wasn’t rebellious about her lack of desire since life contained so many delectable and obtainable objects for which she had an endless appetite that never failed, no matter how much she acquired.
Zachary, for his part, had gradually come to think that Lily’s coldness was incurable. He never lost his gentle patience, but nothing seemed to bring her to sensual life. She had never turned away from him, but his passion for her grew less as he understood that it couldn’t be returned. His love only deepened as it was tinted with a pity for his wondrous girl who never complained.
“This one,” said Maxi, pointing to a word on the Racing Form. The four men, seated with her in a box at Belmont Park, looked at the little girl questioningly.
“So the kid can read, Zack?” Barney Shore wondered in amusement.
“Can you read, Maxi?” her father asked. Anything was possible with a three-year-old. She might have taught herself.
“This one,” she repeated.
“Maxi, why that one?” Nat Landauer wanted to know.
“I like that one, Uncle Nat,” Maxi replied.
“Why do you like that one, young lady?” Joe Shore asked in a quiet voice. All four men fell silent, waiting.
“I just do, Uncle Joe,” Maxi said imperturbably. “That one.”
“What’s its name, Maxi … can you tell Uncle Joe its name?” he persevered.
“No, but I like it.”
“The young lady can’t read,” Joe Shore announced w
ith authority.
“But maybe she can pick a horse … maybe she’s a … you know, an idiot savant, like those guys who can tell you when it’s going to be Thursday a thousand years from now,” Barney Shore said in excitement.
“Please, a little respect for the young lady,” his father commanded. “What kind of expression is that to use in front of a child?”
“Sorry, Dad. Maxi, do you like any of the others?”
“No, Uncle Barney, just that one.”
“To win, place or show?” Barney persisted.
“To win,” she responded immediately. She hadn’t known that there were games where you could just choose to win.
“Come on, Barney, you’re not taking this seriously, are you?” Zachary protested halfheartedly.
“It can’t hurt to listen to Maxi. The four of us put together can’t handicap a mouse. Maybe we just need a fresh point of view. Woman’s intuition, Zack. You’ve always been a believer.”
“And how much could it cost?” added Nat Landauer. “Two dollars each, that’s not too much to lose … last year I figure I dropped ten thousand.”
“Two dollars to win for each of us, my treat,” Zachary proposed. After all, Maxi was his responsibility.
“I’ll go buy the tickets,” Barney volunteered.
“Can I have a hot dog, please, Daddy?” Maxi asked. Zachary looked at her perched composedly in her seat, a little like a Japanese doll with her straight black bangs and her thick hair neatly trimmed in a circle just at the nape of her neck. She wore a yellow dress with a white collar, smocked at the yoke and at the cuffs of its short sleeves, white socks and black patent leather Mary Janes. The piquant, droll deliciousness of her face astonished him no matter how often or how long he looked at her.
“Daddy? Please, a hot dog?”
Nanny would kill him if she found out. “No, darling. I’m sorry but the hot dogs here aren’t good for little girls.”
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