Bruno stood in a corner frowning, his dark yoke of eyebrows slashing across his brow, above his high-bridged, distinguished nose, his small, full mouth tight with anger that he should find himself so confused. Marie came into the room wearing a slim, floor-length, strapless dress of heavy white silk. Her long black hair had been braided into a coronet around her impeccably shaped head, enhancing the proud, slender shape of her neck. From her ears hung long pendant earrings, swaying sprays of old rose-cut diamonds with great cabochon rubies at their centers, and she had pinned a huge matching brooch in the center of her bodice, just at the point where the ivory skin of her shoulders rose from the top of her dress.
Marie’s jewels were so magnificent that only inheritance could justify someone so young wearing them, yet she carried them with the same ease as she wore the inconspicuous gold earrings, the gold chain and watch that were the only other jewelry Bruno had ever seen her wear. He bit his lip in impotent emotion. As much in love as he was, he raged at the sight of Marie’s unexpected and matter-of-fact possession of family jewels that had nothing to do with him. She should not be allowed to wear anything, not so much as a pair of shoes, that he didn’t give her; she must never surprise him by appearing in an incarnation he did not expect, did not control, no matter how beautiful. Oh, if he owned her, she’d learn!
Dinner was a long, elaborate torture for Bruno, who found himself at the other end of the table from Marie. She sat between John Allen and one of her professors, looking happier and more animated than he had ever seen her. With sixteen people at the oval table, general conversation was impossible, and Bruno was forced to devote himself to his neighbors, while he tried to watch Marie, without being rude to either of the ladies at his right and left. She had not placed him next to her. Obviously she’d been in charge of the seating, just as she had been of the invitations. She had not even tried to catch his eye, he said to himself grimly, as they finished the birthday cake. The most accomplished flirt in the world could not have treated him with more cunning than the supposedly guileless Marie de La Rochefoucauld. Oh, if he were her master, he’d teach her not to dare to play such tricks on him!
After dinner, while coffee and brandy were served in the drawing room, Bruno tried to sit next to Marie, but found the other place on the love seat casually preempted by the younger of her two professors, the one who had not been seated by her at dinner. The man couldn’t be more than thirty-five, Bruno thought, as he stood, balancing his demitasse and savagely studying this scholar who had chosen to make Chinese ceramics his life’s work. He didn’t have the fussy, dusty look that Bruno imagined a professional academic should have. He was obviously well bred and, judging by the elegance of his wife, must possess a substantial private income. The blond professor kept Marie laughing and parrying his irreverent remarks about the entire graduate school, until Bruno was forced to turn away in order to hide the grimace of vengeful jealousy he felt forming on his features.
Was it possible that here was the reason she had returned from the summer without accepting some French suitor? Was it conceivable that she was in love with this fellow who shared her deepest interests? Had she invited him tonight with his wife, to dispel suspicion? What a treasure of opportunities they could find to be together in the course of any day, Bruno thought, remembering how easy it had been for his mistresses to deceive their husbands. Did the two of them meet secretly in the stacks of the library, in the workrooms where fragments of ceramics were studied, did they have lunch together, and after lunch … No!
If Marie belonged to him, she would have no such vile liberty! He would dispose of her every minute, he would make sure that she had no intimate friends, no interests that he did not find suitable for her, not one aspect of her life that excluded him would be permitted. He would gain control of her nights and her days, slowly, moment by moment, with such dexterous care that she would never suspect how she was being trained, until it was far too late to struggle against it. La Vicomtesse Bruno de Saint-Fraycourt de Lancel would never be given leave to sit in a drawing room and giggle like a schoolgirl. She would learn what he would permit her to do, and she would not risk doing anything of which he did not approve.
“More coffee, Bruno?” Marie de La Rochefoucauld asked him, startling him because he had been so lost in thought that he hadn’t seen her get up and come toward him. The light caught the green flecks in his brown eyes as he looked down at her.
“Thank you, Marie, no. I like your hair around your head that way. It makes you look almost fifteen.”
“I think I look too dignified. Don’t try to tease me,” she commanded him, so calmly, so self-assuredly, yet so charmingly that his heart yearned as he looked at her, although his manner, powerful, easy, invisibly armored as ever, betrayed nothing. “Thank you for Alice,” she continued, “it’s the most enchanting present anyone has ever given me … how did you find it?”
“That’s a secret.”
“Bruno, do tell me,” she insisted. “It’s not the sort of book you can find in any bookstore. And I hate secrets, don’t you?”
“You seem to have a few secrets of your own with that professor of yours,” Bruno said lightly, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the blond academic.
“Joe? Isn’t he amusing? I adore him, in fact everyone does. And his wife, Ellen, is one of the most charming women I’ve ever met—did you get a chance to talk to her? No? That’s a shame—they’ve only been married for a year—she just told me that she’s expecting a baby—it’s wonderful to see two people so happy. Perhaps …”
“Perhaps what?”
“Joe and Ellen are giving a party for a group of students next week. Would it amuse you to come with me? I warn you, the other guests will all be from the Department of Oriental Art, but I think you’d like them and … I know they’d like you.”
“What makes you think so?” Bruno asked. “I don’t share their specialized interests.”
“Bruno, sometimes you can be so … so obtuse! They’d like you because you’re you and …” She hesitated, and, it seemed to Bruno, she had thought better of saying the words that came to her mind.
“And,” he probed, “and what?”
“For heaven’s sake, Bruno, they’ve … heard about you,” Marie said, looking flustered. “I suppose they’re … curious. Some of them don’t think you exist, they think I’ve invented you.”
“So you talk about me with your classmates?”
Marie tilted her head upward to meet his eyes squarely with her ineffably candid gaze, her calm self-assurance stripped away by her honesty. She spoke with a seriousness and a flame he had never seen in her.
“I can’t help it, Bruno. How could I keep you to myself?”
“You are the most wonderfully law-abiding driver I’ve ever known,” Freddy said to David, as he maneuvered his navy-blue Cadillac town car along the almost deserted stretch of Sunset Boulevard, where long, lusciously carved curves seemed to have been engineered to tempt drivers to swing and sway around them. “Did you ever go over the speed limit?”
“Probably, in college, but not on purpose, darling. When you see enough car crash injuries in the emergency room, you lose your interest in getting there a minute faster or passing the next guy on the right.”
“I can certainly understand that,” Freddy agreed. When she had first driven with David out to Jack’s at the Beach, two months earlier, she’d imagined that his careful observance of the most detailed precautions known to the Department of Motor Vehicles had been due to his knowledge of her fear of venturing outside the world of the hospital. She’d assumed that he was taking special care of her, that he knew she was experiencing a shock of vertigo, a dizzy, phobic fear caused by the sheer openness of the world after the months she’d spent inside protecting walls. She thought that he was forcing himself to hold his powerful car down to a legal speed limit, which no other Californian she’d ever known had obeyed. Now, after two months during which she’d seen David at least three times a week, s
he realized that vehicular decorum was part of his personality.
Freddy smiled indulgently to herself. He was such a beautifully organized man. Would any woman dream that a doctor who did such daring things to people’s nervous systems would be the kind of gourmet cook who followed every complicated recipe to the letter, never throwing in a pinch of this or a dash of that, without a debate as to the exact size of the pinch or dash? What patient of his, she wondered, who had been the recipient of his innovative, imaginative use of medical art, would suspect that in his own home he arranged the books in his library not just by author, but by title, as alphabetically as the words in a dictionary, and never, ever left one lying open, facedown, for even a few minutes, because it wasn’t good for its binding? If he heard someone in a bookstore opening a new book and cracking the spine, David had to be restrained from protesting out loud. He was adorably boyish when he got all hot and bothered.
As for his phonograph records! He’d taught Freddy how to hold them always by the edges, with the palms of her hands, so that no fingerprints would mar their black, grooved surfaces; he explained why they had to be replaced in their protective paper sleeves before being put back inside the album covers, after they’d been meticulously wiped off with the special cloth that picked up every last speck of dust. Their only disagreement was whether a record, once on the phonograph, had to be kept there until it came to an end. Sometimes Freddy wanted to stop the music in the middle, for one reason or another, but David insisted that they wait till the arm of his Magnavox lifted the needle off the record mechanically. “It’s virtually impossible to be sure that you won’t scratch the record if you pick up the needle by hand,” he’d explained, and she’d realized that he was absolutely right, shuddering at the memory of the shameful way she and Jane used to play snatches of one tune or another on their little, hand-wound machine, changing favorite records as casually as if they were playthings.
David had really shaped her up, Freddy reflected, as he slowed down far in advance for a red light, the Cadillac whispering to a stop so smooth that it couldn’t be felt. She’d always had a small corner of disarray in her bedroom, her “rat’s nest” where she would sling magazines, sweaters, letters, newspaper articles that she’d torn out, bills she wasn’t ready to pay, shoes that needed to be reheeled, and snapshots she intended to put into her album someday, all mixed together in one awful mess that served as a surprisingly effective if informal filing cabinet. Whenever Freddy couldn’t put her hands on something where it was supposed to be, she looked in the rat’s nest and found it. But when she’d started to establish a small away-from-home rat’s nest in David’s bedroom, for she spent so much time with him, he’d been admirably firm.
“It’s a minor bad habit, darling,” he’d said. “It would be just as easy for you to put things away immediately or hang them up as soon as you take them off. I know it’s a bore. I know I’m a monster about neatness—in an operating room, you’d have to know exactly where everything is at every second.” She could understand his reasoning perfectly, Freddy thought, and, what’s more, it hadn’t been all that difficult to keep her things in order once she started reminding herself to do it. She still had a rat’s nest at home, but now she felt guilty every time she rummaged in it. She’d soon get around to eliminating that lazy habit completely, she decided firmly.
In fact, IF they were going to get married, she thought, wrinkling her nose in perplexity, she’d better start in right away, and start riding herd on Annie too, who’d inherited the rat’s-nest habit. Could it be genetic?
Once she’d left the hospital, Freddy realized that it was out of the question for Annie to stay in England for a year of school. She’d miss her far too much. Her daughter had been back home since the start of classes, although it wasn’t easy to carry on a romance when an observant nine-year-old expected to have breakfast with her every day. She and David hadn’t slept together for a single entire night; they’d never awakened in the same bed together, for he drove her home at a fairly respectable hour of the evening, particularly since he almost always had to be at Cedars early the next morning.
He was the most considerate lover a woman could dream of, she thought happily, glancing at his profile as he concentrated on the road ahead. Tender, sweet, gentle, as concerned with her pleasure as he was with his own … or more concerned? She only had two other lovers to whom she could compare David, and she couldn’t remember if Tony, or Mac, all those years ago, had ever been as bent on making absolutely sure of her satisfaction as was David. Did David have a unique, built-in sensitivity to women, or was it his knowledge of her neurological responses? And wasn’t she a little disgusting, even to be thinking this way, when she was always so fulfilled after he made love to her?
Would David never grab her and rip off a tumbled, hotheaded, ill-timed and delightful quickie, the sort that makes a sexy secret to share all through an evening, Freddy wondered, or was that too unlike him? Probably he would, once this courtship period was over, IF they got married—or was it just a question of when?
David had been as good as his word. He hadn’t said another thing about marriage, just as he promised. He hadn’t put the slightest pressure on her to make a decision. So why did she feel as if, somehow, there was some subtle invisible force that was causing her to lean toward saying yes to this man who was so good for her, who took such marvelous care of her, who showed his love in so many ways? Probably, Freddy told herself, it was because he was obviously a man any woman would be insane not to marry.
It was only this dinner tonight, she realized, that was making her nervous. Dinner with David’s mother. It was an invitation she’d already wriggled out of twice, until finally she’d had to accept. Dinner with someone’s mother was not a formal announcement of intention to wed, Freddy reminded herself. It was a compliment to be invited. Nothing more. Not pressure. After all, he hadn’t taken her around to meet his sisters, although she imagined that having sisters was the reason that he was so good with Annie.
He’d assured her that tonight was nothing out of the ordinary, just the usual weekly dinner he’d been having with his mother for years. “I’m that ridiculously unfashionable thing known as a good son,” David had told her, his dark eyes alive with self-mockery. “It’s not my fault that she’s a good little mother, is it?” She had a good little mother too, Freddy had reminded him, as well he knew, and if Eve didn’t live six thousand miles away, she and her mother would no doubt be just as devoted as Eve and Delphine now were.
Susan Grunwald Weitz, widowed for three years, lived on one of the green and private streets of luxuriously secluded Bel Air, not very far east of Brentwood. They turned off Sunset and soon arrived at her house, a finely proportioned white mansion of Virginian elegance, lying well hidden behind tall gates.
“Hmm,” observed Freddy, impressed and rather surprised. David’s own house was bachelor-sized. “I thought your father was a doctor too?”
“His hobby was investing—oil and real estate. He managed to combine all his interests.”
“What beautiful gardens,” Freddy noticed, lagging behind, feeling just a little reluctant to commit herself to meeting David’s mother, no matter how good, no matter how little.
“Mother’s hobby. Come on, darling, she really won’t eat you.” He greeted the maid who opened the door and led them toward the living room. Freddy had a quick impression of a wealth of paintings and sculpture and bowls of massed flowers everywhere, before she realized that the living room seemed to contain more people than the one good little mother she had been prepared to meet.
Susan Weitz, who was almost as tall as her son, rose, composed and friendly, to greet them. There was not so much as a single streak of gray in her smooth, ash blond hair, her pearls were the best Freddy had ever seen, her blue dress simpler and more expensive than any that Freddy, who now could recognize these distinctions in one glance, had ever seen a Los Angeles woman wearing. Freddy’s first thought was that she must have had her dress ma
de in Paris. Her second was that Susan Weitz must have been the late doctor’s second wife, for she certainly didn’t look old enough to be David’s mother.
However, as she was introduced to the other people in the room, Freddy had to admit that the women in their thirties, David’s three married sisters, bore a family resemblance to Susan Weitz and to David himself. With their three husbands, they made an exceptionally tall, exceptionally lean, exceptionally attractive group, all cordial, yet not one degree overly cordial. They did not seem to be looking Freddy over in any covert or significant way. Just a simple little family dinner, she said to herself, assuming her Honorable Mrs. Longbridge smile. Everyone in the room absolutely loomed over her, for Gods sake. She felt like a Munchkin.
“Mother, you didn’t warn me that you were having the girls,” David protested in surprise.
“Well, darling, your sisters were free and dying to come—you know I can never resist them.”
“I told you about my little sisters, didn’t I, darling?” he murmured to Freddy. “Sorry about this.”
“They seem to have grown up since you mentioned them.”
“Well, I’m the oldest, by light-years. Mother had me when she was eighteen. To me they’ll always be kids,” he said, giving her a drink.
The Weitzes, as Freddy thought of them, for she had caught none of the sisters’ married names, carried on an easy discussion in which they included Freddy so naturally that she soon found herself feeling as if she were a normal-sized human being. Anyway, they looked shorter sitting down.
After the gay, chatter-filled dinner, they all went back to the living room, where Freddy was claimed by Barbara, who announced that she was the baby of the family.
“You have only the one sister, don’t you?” Barbara asked, her kindness evident in her smile.
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