• • •
In May, when Oslo’s many fruit trees blossomed and sailboats scudded across the blue fjord, Adam Stevens and the recently divorced Alice Hollister arrived in the spring-happy Norwegian capital from different directions. Their presence went unnoticed.
Three days later, while Juanita clasped Alice’s fragrant bridal bouquet of hyacinth, the couple were married in the home of a retired Anglican priest. There was a spectacular view of the fjord from the open window, which admitted a crisp, salty breeze. The pink-cheeked, forgetful old minister called the bride Edith and the groom Alan, but his flat-voweled English accent was loud and vigorous as he intoned the vows, which they repeated shakenly: “With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with my worldly goods I thee endow.”
The rings in question didn’t match, but both were several centuries old, with the workings of the heavy gold worn equally smooth—the couple had discovered them at Kaare Bentsen, Oslo’s best-known antiques shop.
After they were pronounced husband and wife, they turned, gazing at one another until the breeze whipped a strand of her hair against his lips as a sort of reminder, then he pulled it aside to kiss her lightly, tenderly.
• • •
“Alyssia, Alyssia, Alyssia!” cried her loyal French fans when she emerged from the Carlton Hotel to attend the out-of-competition screening of The Baobab Tree at the Cannes Film Festival.
After returning from Cannes, she and Juanita packed an enormous quantity of clothes and furs while Hap crated the pieces of painted antique Scandinavian furniture they had bought in Oslo. After shipping their possessions by rail, the trio, in a new Volvo, drove leisurely across Norway and Sweden to Stockholm. They rented a spacious nineteenth-century apartment overlooking Lake Malar. Following their plan, in January they moved again, this time to Copenhagen. They found a narrow, four-story house near the Tivoli Gardens—this being winter, the famous amusement park was closed.
Hap’s second marriage had made him more content than he’d ever been, yet paradoxically he felt claustrophobic at being trapped in the identity of Adam Stevens, the invention of a passport forger. Nevertheless, he was seldom out of sorts, his equability serving as a buffer between the sisters, who despite their abiding affection, had a tendency to bicker. His restlessness he worked off by limping for hours through the snow-covered brick city.
In February, Alice Stevens, the name printed in her newly issued, dark-blue United States passport, flew to New York, where Alyssia del Mar was to take part in a PBS fund-raiser called The Night of Stars.
The day after Hap saw her off at Kastrup Airport, a Saturday, was bitterly cold, but Juanita ignored the weather. A swap-meet buff, she seldom missed the weekly flea market held at Israel Plads. As she buttoned her heavy brown coat, Hap came into the hall, knotting his muffler—he was on his way to the class in English he gave gratis for the neighborhood children.
“There’s something I been meaning to ask,” Juanita said in a low, diffident voice. “You’re teaching them kids to read English. Is it hopeless with somebody as old as me?”
“You’re really interested, Nita?” he asked, surprised.
“If I don’t catch on,” she muttered, concentrating on the top button, “I’ll just drop it.”
“We’ll start this afternoon,” he promised.
A superlative teacher—patient, tolerantly firm, enthusiastic—he succeeded in dissolving Juanita’s lifelong humiliation about her illiteracy. Freed of tensions, she caught on rapidly, and was devouring English and American paperback romances long before Alice left for the Yugoslavian Film Festival in Dubrovnik.
Alyssia del Mar surfaced not only for show-biz events, but also for occasional society functions, and wherever she appeared her progress was diligently recorded by the press. English newspapers showed Princess Anne saying something in her ear at the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, Vogue printed a photograph of her in a blue Egyptian wig as Cleopatra at the Gambaras’ annual costume ball in Puerto Vallarta. Cameras kept zooming in on the low-cut decolletage of her ice-blue satin Valentino as she sat in the audience of a televised recital at the White House—she was there by personal invitation of President and Mrs. Reagan.
As Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times, “The public’s fascination with Alyssia del Mar is rooted in the same ground as its enduring interest in Marilyn Monroe. Both stars made exits clouded in enigma. Why did Monroe take those pills? Why has del Mar abdicated her career at its peak?”
• • •
“You haven’t had an attack since we got married,” Hap said. The two of them were reading in bed.
“And you’re letting up on the nightmares. What a good sex life will do for people.” She gave a chuckle, then her expression changed and she bit her lip thoughtfully. “I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure we’re going to have a baby.”
“I’ve been counting, too, love, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up. You sometimes used to skip a month.”
“There’s other symptoms,” she said.
“Yes?”
“I always have a spot of indigestion; I can’t ever seem to get enough sleep. That’s how it was before.” Her voice clogged.
He took her novel, putting his arms around her. “If it’s true, I’m glad,” he said against her ear. “So very glad.”
• • •
The pregnancy proved a watershed in the way they viewed their nomadic life.
Alice, having spent her own childhood without roots, became obsessed about a permanent home. Hap saw his idleness with a new intolerant eye, and privately longed for his child to be American-born, a hope he was afraid to voice lest it bring about a recurrence of Alice’s attacks.
One night at dinner as they discussed whether or not their next move should be to Helsinki, Juanita, who seldom intruded, said, “You could work, Hap, if we were back in America.”
“Go home?” Alice glared at her sister over the Royal Copenhagen soup tureen. “There’s a brilliant idea.”
“Nobody’s hot on our trail, Alice,” Juanita said calmly.
“If they were, they’d have tracked you and Hap down ages ago.”
After a brief hesitation, Alice shrugged assent. “Okay, Lang’s not actively looking for Hap—but if we jump out at him, he’ll sure find us.”
“Juanita knows that, love.” Hap set down his large, European-style soup spoon and looked questioningly at his sister-in-law.
“I been thinking a lot how quick you taught me to read,” she said. “Hap, there’s a lot of kids who grow up believing they’re dumb because nobody took that kind of trouble with them.”
“You mean a school for farm workers?” he asked.
“Are the two of you insane?” Alice cried. “We know a million people in California—and they know us!”
“There’s plenty of other states,” Juanita said.
Hap’s expression of eagerness was not lost on his wife.
By the following day it was no longer whether they would go back, but where.
• • •
They finally decided on the tobacco-growing eastern Piedmont part of North Carolina, a state where none of the three had set foot. Hap flew back to the States alone, scouting the area around Durham. That first weekend he found exactly what they wanted a few miles out of town. The fifty-year-old house had no particular style, but the rooms were large and there were three big screened porches. The upstairs they kept for themselves, using their Norwegian antiques and comfortable, inexpensive upholstery. The downstairs rooms, except for the big, square kitchen, which was dominated by their major extravagance, a restaurant-size Wolf stove, they gave over to floor pillows and bookshelves and reasonably indestructible toys and a pair of Radio Shack computers with reading-aid programs.
At first the quasi school remained empty; then Alice came up with the idea of offering a child-care program at a price so low it barely covered the cost of the hot meals.
Within a month they were attracting not only pre-sc
hoolers—transient and local—but older children and adults, too.
Alice Stevens had a tendency to brag about her resemblance to Alyssia del Mar, keeping a boxful of clippings about the star, confessing that maybe this was dumb of her, but she had changed her first name to one more like her idol’s. Astonishingly, her identity was never questioned—but then again, Hap would think, maybe it wasn’t so strange. After all, who expected a world-class legend to be wearing a maternity smock from Sears as she stood in line next to you at the A&P, or ate a Big Mac, or held up the reading cards to a group of pre-schoolers, or huffed and puffed with the other pregnant mothers in her Lamaze class?
After a brief, completely unsedated labor, Ross was born. Strong, agile and quick, by the time he was three he knew the alphabet and insisted on playing with the older children, who more or less kept him in line.
• • •
On November 17, 1986, Hap sat at the breakfast table with the Durham paper propped on the milk carton in front of him. A paragraph on the obituary page caught his eyes.
“Robert Lang, Las Vegas businessman and owner of the Fabulador Hotel in that city, died yesterday after a lengthy bout with cancer. His father was the underworld figure Bartolomeo ‘Bart’ Lanzoni. Though Lang shunned the limelight, he had a keen interest in the film industry. His corporation, Meadstar, produced several films including the classic The Baobab Tree, Harvard Cordiner’s last directorial stint.”
Ross was mashing his grits around the plate, and rather than risk a spate of unanswerable questions, Hap handed the paper to Alice, holding his thumb at the obituary. She read, then looked up.
“Think it’s okay to go back?” he asked.
He understood, of course, that without Lang they would be in no physical danger. What he wanted to know was her reaction. Clammy sweat broke out on her torso as she re-experienced the grief and terror-struck bravado of that awful morning in PD’s office. How could she face Our Own Gang, who had cast her as scapegoat and eternal outsider?
The gray eyes remained fixed questioningly on her. She knew how intensely he yearned to make contact with what remained of his family. (When Desmond Cordiner had died in the summer of 1983, and Rosalynd had suffered a fatal heart attack on Thanksgiving night in 1984, Hap’s long mourning periods had been exacerbated by his inability to attend the funerals.)
If I go back, maybe I’ll lose him again. Maybe I’ll lose Ross, like I lost my other baby. That her fears were absurdly irrational did not make them any the less real, and pains twinged through her chest.
Yet, after only the briefest hesitation, she proved that Alyssia del Mar still lived. “Sure it’s okay,” she bubbled excitedly.
BEVERLY HILLS, 1986
Maxim continued to bang urgently against the glass door. “Let me in!” he shouted.
The glass slab to his left moved. Alyssia stood there with a very young, jeans-clad boy whose tow-white hair flopped across his eyebrows. Maxim ignored both the woman and the child. His attention was riveted on the large man whose gray eyes were fixed on his.
Maxim took off his dark glasses. In his life he had never before experienced so profound a disbelief in his own witness. This bearded man with long legs in beige cords, the sleeves of his cotton shirt rolled up to show strong forearms, his blond hair darker underneath, this man could not be the incorruptibly just older brother who had ruled over his childhood. His brother was bleached bones under a marble cross in the garden of the wide-verandaed little house that was the relief center. He himself had selected the marble, had arranged for the simple engraving:
HARVARD CORDINER
BORN LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, 1938
DIED ZAIRE, 1980
As an act of love—and contrition—he had made the long, difficult journey with the tombstone to personally see it set in the mulch-rich African earth.
“Hey . . .” he whispered.
“Hey, hey.”
A greeting they had invariably exchanged when they passed in grammar school hallways, and had never used thereafter.
Hap limped forward.
Maxim took a step. As Hap’s arms went around him, he hugged his brother, experiencing a tribal completion, a profound sense of being part of a larger whole. He felt the moisture on Hap’s bearded cheek and his own eyes were wet, too.
“Daddy,” the boy was shrilling. “Daddy! Is this my uncle?”
The threesome on the patio had stood poised like waxwork figures, peering into the living room at the masculine embrace. At the child’s question, they came to life.
Beth, lifting a hand to her pulsing throat, sank back into her chair. The ladylike blusher stood out in slashes on her bloodless cheeks. Barry released his grip on his pipe, and it clattered on the stones as he pressed a hand to his stomach. His shock was visceral, striking him with an ulcerlike pain. How could the admired and envied cousin who had put the horns on him have returned to the land of the living? PD crossed himself, and a croak that was meant to be “Hap?” came from within his well-muscled chest. Then he crossed himself again.
The brothers pulled apart, Hap rubbing his knuckles over his eyes, Maxim blowing his nose.
“Hap, we thought you were dead. . . .” Beth whispered, still grasping at her throat. “Everybody thought—”
“I didn’t mean to blow your minds like this,” Hap said. “But we couldn’t figure out any easier way—”
“Daddy!” The child stamped a sneakered foot.
“Yes, Ross, this is your Uncle Maxim. Maxim, this impatient guy is our son, Ross.” He ruffled the boy’s hair affectionately. The child squirmed away, scowling. In this irate moment, in spite of his near-white hair and blue eyes, he bore a striking resemblance to his dead grandfather, Desmond Cordiner.
“I’m very happy to meet you, Ross.” Maxim, still pale, squatted and gravely extended his hand. “But you’re going to have to help me out. I never had a nephew before, so tell me what I should do.”
“You take him to Disneyland, silly!”
The adults burst out laughing, not so much in amusement but as a release.
Hap reached an arm around Alice’s waist, drawing her closer. “And this is my wife,” he said.
“That at least I did figure.” Maxim embraced her. “Welcome to the good branch of the family.”
Hap’s cousins had surrounded him; Beth’s kisses leaving pink lipstick on his jawline; PD pounding his shoulders, then kissing him, too; Barry continuously shaking his hand.
Voices throbbed.
“I can’t believe it, I just can’t believe it. If only poor Aunt Rosalynd and Uncle Desmond—and Irving—could be here.”
“We’re talking miracles, Hap. Major miracles!”
“Words fail me—a phantasmagora come to life.”
A thick white cloud had passed over the sun, graying the unpruned garden and casting a film over the heart-shaped pool.
“Come on, Ross, let’s go inside,” Alice said, giving her son a poke between the shoulder blades.
“He hasn’t had his snack yet, Alice,” Hap called.
As the door slid shut after them, Barry asked, “Do you have to use pseudonyms?”
“We did,” Hap said. “But Alice is her real name.”
“Alicia,” Barry muttered.
“Barry, it’s always been Alice,” he said. “And Juanita’s her half sister.”
“Juanita has the same surname, but there the relationship ends—she came to work for us in France,” Barry protested. Then, under Hap’s sympathetic gaze, he flushed and mumbled, “Alyssia—Alice never told me.”
Maxim drew a breath as if forcing himself to speak. “Hap, stop me if I’m wrong, but is the timing of your return connected to a recent ball score: cancer one, Lang zip?”
Beth, Barry and PD swallowed sharply, averting their eyes from Hap and one another. Like Maxim, each was once again reliving that quintessential betrayal scene when Lang had terrified them into ignoring Hap’s murder.
Hap sat on one of the rusty garden chairs, his bad l
eg thrust out straight in front of him. “Exactly,” he said, ignoring the change in mood. “Lang’s death is why we were able to come back here.” Briefly he outlined his knowledge of Lang’s complicity in the so-called accident, how the other man was killed in the jeep and been buried as Hap Cordiner while he had become Adam Stevens. He touched his leg. “While this was being patched up in Switzerland, Alice found me.”
“And the two of you have been hiding out in Europe?” Beth asked, her voice caring and serene, her hands tensed on her purse.
“No, we came back before Ross was born. We live in North Carolina. Part of the house is a kind of school we run for farm workers. With all the moving from crop to crop, they don’t get much of a crack at an education.”
“Perfecto.” Maxim’s smile had a plastic quality. “You, in your long robe, arms outstretched, suffering the little children to come unto you.”
PD jumped to his feet. “Screw off, Maxim!”
“That was brotherly awe,” Maxim said. “I never speak ill of the dead.”
“It’s a remarkable concept,” Barry said overpolitely as he stooped to get his pipe. “How did you arrive at it?”
“Actually Juanita had the idea—she’s running the place while we’re gone. She and Alice didn’t get much schooling—as kids they picked up and down California.”
Barry, about to refute this with the Lopezes’ rich family life in El Paso, changed his mind. “When you came back to this country, weren’t you concerned Lang might find you? I know only too well you can’t hide an identity like Alyss—like Alice’s.”
“She admits to being a look-alike,” Hap said.
The glass slid open and Alice stood there. She had washed off the Alyssia del Mar makeup, tied back her hair, changed to a white jumpsuit with running shoes, and it was possible to see that, away from the precincts of the rich and famous, she might easily pass as a look-alike.
She glanced at Hap and he nodded.
“If you can,” she said, smiling, “we’d like all of you to stay for lunch.”
Beth said, “This is one meal I wouldn’t miss for worlds.” But her face was yet more drawn with apprehension.
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