“Good. I’m glad, Maxime. Very glad. I wouldn’t have offered the job to you if I didn’t think you could do it,” Lily said calmly, yet with a deep note of tenderness. “The sale was always possible, it is still possible. But I’d like to keep Amberville Publications in the family. I was once told that I’d sacrificed my life to the company, that I’d been deprived of my freedom by all the different ways in which I helped your father while he was running the magazines. I believed that interpretation of my life. I thought that my birthright, whatever that means, had been taken away from me.” She paused for a moment, as if pondering the meaning of “birthright.”
“Father believed in you,” Maxi said, “or he wouldn’t have left you control of his business. He would never have done that unless he’d thought you were worthy of the responsibility.”
“I don’t know about being worthy, Maxime, but I’ve done a lot of thinking in the last day, enough for years, and I know now that the magazines have enriched my life. Being part of them has become part of my life, a part that is much too meaningful to permit me to sell them to strangers, to see them pass out of Amberville control. I’m proud of the magazines, Maxime, damn proud and I want them to be better than they’ve ever been before—”
“Mother!” Maxi interrupted, “do you have any idea—”
“Indeed I do, more than an idea. I spent the morning with Pavka. I know what’s been going on behind my back. That’s over, once and for all. All those disgraceful orders have been revoked. But no others have been given. I was waiting to see what you’d decide. Now the only person who will give orders in the future will be you. You’ll have Pavka’s guidance, but I imagine you’ll have to earn the support of the old editorial board. Some of them may very well resent you. I won’t interfere—but you can always use me … for window dressing. I’m very, very good at it.”
“Don’t say that!” Maxi protested. “You gave up a great career as a prima ballerina! Oh, Mother … you could have had that.”
“Not necessarily,” Lily murmured, with a small, mysterious, inward smile. “Not necessarily. I’ll never know, never have to know. Surely that was the point?” She shook her head and came back from the past. “However, as window dressing I was the very best and I intend to continue to be. Every window needs dressing, otherwise it’s just a bare and naked piece of glass. Never underestimate the power of window dressing.” Lily sounded matter-of-fact now, but there was a newly perceptive expression on the perfect oval of her face and a mourning, rueful look in her gray-green-blue eyes, a look that contained all the shrewdness that she had always hidden, the shrewdness that she now shared with this daughter whom she admitted to her confidence for the first time in their lives.
“Angelica once told me that Father said that she was the only one in the family with a head for publishing,” Maxi confided.
“He was wrong about that … even Zachary Amberville could be wrong. Even I can be wrong on occasion,” Lily said with a gossamer smile, in which relief vied with the beginning of self-mockery.
“The trouble with you, Mother, is that you always like to have the final word on any question,” Maxi said.
“Like you.”
“Like me. Just like me. Come on, Mother, give me a kiss.”
“Toby,” Maxi asked, “would your feelings be hurt if Angelica and I moved out of your attic? Now that I’ve got job security and a regular paycheck I can afford to pay rent. Nothing fancy, but just a little bigger. More closet space of course, a bigger room for Angelica, somewhere to put a few bits and pieces.”
“A few? You never had ‘a few’ of anything,” Toby retorted.
“Well, I will have,” Maxi insisted. “You know that I never did get around to auctioning anything? Even the furniture hasn’t been sold yet. I’ve decided to keep only the very few things I like best. Now that I’ve gotten used to living without all those objects I’m going to try the pared-down look for a while … just a couple of marvelous pieces, each one set off by its relationship to the space around it. Of course I’ll need a really top lighting designer …”
“Spare me, please spare me your decorating plans,” Toby begged. “Don’t you have Ludwig and Bizet to discuss this with? I thought they did all your places for you.”
“They used to but I feel as if I’m ready for a change.”
“Does it make the slightest sense to undertake a job that’s going to consume your life and try to redecorate a new apartment at the same time?”
“Put like that, no,” Maxi answered. Toby was lying in his favorite Eames chair, his feet up, his arm in an embroidered sling that India had somehow fashioned out of one of her sacred pillowcases, ruthlessly wielding a pair of scissors while Maxi vainly offered any scarf from a drawer full. “Still, we do have to move, now that the emergency is over. Angelica is miserable about it. She loves being here and the Troop really enjoys your pool.”
“It would have been nice if they’d brought their own towels, but somehow they never remembered to,” Toby said thoughtfully.
Maxi ignored him. “I don’t really want to move either. It’s so cozy up there and the leftovers are even better than the meals, and, oh Lord, you’re right about the job. I won’t even have time to do a proper job of apartment hunting. I won’t have time to do anything until I get the job under control. I’d better start going in early and staying late and working weekends and …”
“Don’t be dumb. You’re having an attack,” Toby cut in. “A stupidity attack. It comes over people when they’re faced with enormous changes in their lives, especially people like you who are all-or-nothing people, no compromises, no halfway measures, no doing things a little bit at a time. Now it’s your compulsive career. It used to be the compulsive search for fun, so that means that if you work it has to be compulsive work without any time off.”
“My compulsive career, as you charmingly call it, also happens to be the most marvelous fun in the world,” Maxi sputtered, outraged. “Instant analysis—disgusting.”
“May I remind you,” Toby said, “that you’re only almost thirty—”
“Why does everybody pick this time to remind me of my age all of a sudden?”
“Thirty,” Toby continued, “in the prime of life, with, I should imagine, from my memories of your scandalous past, a normal need for male companionship.”
“Men,” Maxi snorted.
“You sound just like Dad,” Angelica piped up from her place on the floor at Maxi’s feet. “That’s what he says, ‘women’ in that same contemptuous tone of voice. He isn’t even dating anymore. Remember the girl I used to tell him smelled like vanilla? Well, she’s been gone for months and actually she wasn’t bad if you don’t mind funny smells. And that exceptionally pretty one I told him I just instinctively knew was a wrong broad, he hasn’t called her in ages, and she wasn’t really all that bad, just not my type. And there were a whole bunch of others who were after him because he’s so successful—at least that was my opinion—or only interested in his looks. Superficial ladies. I always let Dad know my true feelings about them so he wasn’t in danger of being taken in—well, he’s not seeing anybody at all now. I wonder if I gave him some sort of complex?”
“Adolescence,” India ruminated, “was invented by a psychologist named G. Stanley Hall in a book he wrote in 1905. Eighty years ago, Angelica, before we knew about adolescence, somebody would have put you in the corner or made you write things on the blackboard a hundred times, like ‘I will not meddle in my father’s love life.’ Or maybe put you on bread and water. Even the ducking stool. I don’t know which you would have hated more.”
“I didn’t meddle, I just made observations. If he hadn’t paid any attention to me, like a regular father, it wouldn’t have affected him. And ‘love life’ is such an old-fashioned expression. He was just seeing them.”
“ ‘Seeing,’ ” Toby growled bitterly. “Now it’s become a word for all sorts of relationships, from the casual to the engaged-to-be-engaged. Just yesterday one of your gossips told me that
Julie Jacobson was ‘seeing’ that young art director at B&B—does that mean nightly, semi-nightly, twice a week? I wonder what damn fool invented that miserable perverted usage of a word?”
“Well, whoever did, I don’t know about Julie and Brick Greenfield but all Dad was doing was casual seeing,” Angelica answered him as Maxi and India exchanged worried glances. “It wasn’t as if he’d saved one of their lives and he was seriously in love, like you are with India. Anyway, I have to get dressed. Dunk is coming to pick me up in half an hour. We’re going to a revival of Wuthering Heights.”
“I’ll come help you dress,” Maxi said hastily, ignoring Angelica’s surprised eyebrows. She knew how to dress, for heaven’s sake.
“Well, you did, you know,” India said after a pause.
“So you’ve mentioned. Several times. Does saving your life make me your captive?”
“If you were Chinese and you’d saved my life you’d owe me all sorts of things because I’d become your responsibility or something like that.”
“I’m not Chinese.”
“No, you’re a full-fledged member of the Running Wounded,” India said angrily. “I’m going to pack. I’m sick of not being appreciated.”
“What the hell is that—the ‘Running Wounded’—what’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know what the walking wounded are—soldiers who’ve been wounded but don’t have to be carried off the battlefield. You’re different—you’re wounded but you’re running away from it, running around in meaningless circles, running so hard that you don’t feel the pain or you can pretend that it doesn’t exist. I’d thought you were different. You seem to have come to terms with being blind and you can do more than most men who can see. You’ll always be able to do more. Blindness is finite … it’s not going to get worse. But you’ve decided to cut yourself off from the rest of life. The harder part maybe. The human part. The part where I come in. I’m not interested in your reasons anymore! I’m only interested in what it does to me to be in love with you. Without hope. I’m not willing to put up with it. I refuse to become one of the Running Wounded myself.”
“Doctor Florsheim?”
“I haven’t seen her for months. My analysis is finished. I’m leaving you, Toby. For good.”
“Hey, wait a minute.”
“Now what?” India said from the doorway.
“Are you taking your sheets?” He looked meditative, with the beginning of concern.
“Of course.”
“Pillowcases? And all the little baby pillows with the scalloped edges?”
“What is the point of this?” India snapped. “Just because I finished my analysis doesn’t mean that I have to give up my bed linen. One thing has nothing to do with the other.”
“I don’t think I’d be comfortable sleeping on no-iron, fifty-percent manmade fiber anymore,” Toby grinned, as if he’d solved a weighty problem that had bothered him for years.
“Oh?” India’s heart started to beat so loudly that she thought that even a man with sight must be able to hear it.
“So let’s make a deal. We’ll get married and I’ll get custody of your hope chest.” Under his casual words was the tensile strength of a stubborn man who had finally changed his mind.
“My hope chest? Do you mean my linen?” India asked, approaching him slowly, carefully, so as not to betray her sudden tumult, the wild fluttering of her hands.
“Aren’t they the same thing?”
“I don’t believe so. Certainly not. Hope chest indeed!” India said, sounding deeply affronted, in the best acting of her short but glorious career.
“Well, let’s get married and sleep on your sheets.” He spoke with his habitual tone of command but India could detect a tremble in his voice.
“Is that your idea of a proposal?” She almost achieved a sneer but failed, failed utterly.
“Yep.”
“You can’t do better than that?”
“I saved your life, didn’t I?” he said, too impatient to try for courtliness.
“You can’t use that line forever, Toby Amberville,” she whispered, the sweet wine of her voice denying her words.
Toby got out of his chair and walked over to her and held her tightly against him with his good arm. He gazed at her intently, his amber-brown eyes happier than she’d ever seen them, abandoned to utter tenderness. “If there were a moor nearby, I’d take you up on it and fill your arms with heather and tell you how much I love you, Cathy … but there’s only Central Park. I love you, Cathy, and I want to live with you forever and ever and have a dozen children and take my chances with life.”
“Heathcliff!”
“Does that mean yes?”
“I’ll have to call my agent first, but … I think we can work something out.”
In San Francisco, two weeks later, Jumbo Booker’s secretary buzzed him.
“It’s Mr. Amberville,” she said, “calling from New York. Shall I put him through?”
Jumbo was not surprised by the call. He’d been expecting it ever since the word had reached him that Cutter was out of Amberville Publications. During the two years that had passed since Cutter had left his job with Booker, Smity and Jameston, of which Jumbo was now president, he had all but lost touch with his high-flying former employee. However, the extraordinary news of Cutter’s unannounced, abrupt and unexplained departure from the publishing world had reached him through the corporate grapevine, a grapevine just as effective as the one that had passed on the knowledge of Cutter’s sexual exploits during his marriage.
Jumbo was perfectly aware that Cutter had not been able to find another job in all of investment banking. Cutter had had a dozen job interviews but nothing had materialized for him and Jumbo knew why even if Cutter did not. A third grapevine had slowly operated on the highest levels of San Francisco society and many influential people had become gradually aware that Candice Amberville had killed herself. A number of them had guessed why, and from that number arrows of gossip had flown to Manhattan; gossip that would always be contained within a small group; gossip that would never leak beyond a certain circle; gossip so shocking, so vile, that it made anyone who heard it unwilling to ever have anything to do with Cutter Amberville again.
It no longer suited Jumbo Booker’s needs for superiority to do favors for his former roommate. He wished that he had never laid eyes on the man, that he had never had any association with him. It was embarrassing, no, worse than embarrassing. It was shameful to be known as his friend.
“Tell him I won’t take his call, Miss Johnson,” Jumbo said to his secretary.
“When shall I tell him he can reach you?”
“Tell him he can’t,” Jumbo answered.
“I don’t quite understand, Mr. Booker. Do you mean you’ll be out all day?”
“No, I mean that I will not speak to him on the phone now or at any time in the future. Not on the phone and not in person. Make it perfectly clear, Miss Johnson.”
“Oh,” she said blankly, astonished and not sure what to do.
“Don’t worry about being rude. Just repeat what I’ve just said and then hang up the phone. Don’t wait for an answer.”
“Mr. Booker?”
“And if he ever calls again, under any circumstances, tell him the same thing.”
“Yes, Mr. Booker, I’ll remember.”
“Thank you, Miss Johnson.”
Cutter put the phone down slowly. During all the humiliations of the past days he’d prevented himself from calling Jumbo Booker. He d counted on Jumbo all along. He had felt certain that he would welcome him back to a job, if not his former job, then another, equally good. He’d made money for Booker, Smity and Jameston in his years with them, he’d always had Jumbo in his back pocket, but he’d grown tired of being patronized by someone he’d known too long. After giving the orders and running the show at Amberville Publications he had preferred to deal with strangers than to go to Jumbo with his hat in his hands; Jumbo, that talentless, boring, st
uffy man who’d lived through him for so long; Jumbo, who had everything only because he’d been born an heir; Jumbo, who even now lacked the guts to insult him and had made his secretary do it for him.
Cutter lay back on the bed in his hotel room. It was all Zachary’s fault, of course, as it always had been. Zachary’s fault that he’d gone to San Francisco in the first place; Zachary’s fault for marrying Lily; Zachary’s fault that he’d had to marry Candice; Zachary’s fault for being so unbearably forgiving and smugly understanding, so sickeningly unmoved by the revelations about Lily and Justin. It had been necessary to smash him up, necessary to leave him to die. Yes, to die. Yes, to die finally, because there was no other way to get rid of him, no other way to get even at last. It had been only fair, only just, only what he deserved.
Justin. Yesterday, in some gossip column, he had read that Justin had come back to New York to do the pictures for Toby’s wedding to that actress. What had the columnist written about him? “An American Lord Snowden shooting the marriage of the year,” something like that. Justin. The child Lily adored, Justin who didn’t know that his real father wasn’t dead, Justin who owed him life.
An hour later Justin answered his doorbell and found Cutter standing there, looking as confident as if he were an eagerly awaited guest at a party. Justin recoiled and Cutter took advantage of his movement to walk into the living room and shut the door behind him.
“Hello, Justin,” he said, putting out his hand to be shaken. Justin moved backward another step. “All right, Justin, I understand if you’re hostile, believe me I do. I know what’s been going on since I had that flare-up with your mother … she hasn’t wanted to see me, she’s probably been saying things about me to all of you children that aren’t true, poisoning your minds against me, but it isn’t her fault, Justin. She had a bad shock, a serious trauma that was caused by hearing a pack of lies when she went up to Canada.”
Justin stood still, not looking at Cutter. “I decided that I should leave her alone long enough for her to realize that nothing she had heard would stand up under the exercise of common sense, or even under any investigation. God knows she was free to make one if she’d chosen. Now listen, Justin, I’ve come to talk to you because I think you’re the most sensible and the most sensitive of all of Lily’s children, and I’m worried about her.”
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