The Mulberry Tree

by Jude Deveraux

  “What do you mean that he’s left it all to them? All what?” I asked Phillip. I wanted to think about anything other than what my life was going to be like without Jimmie.

  “I mean that James willed all his stocks, his houses, real estate around the world, the airlines, all of it to your brother and sister-in-law.”

  Since I hated each and every one of the houses that Jimmie had purchased, I couldn’t comprehend what was so bad about this. “Too much glass and steel for my taste,” I said, giving Phillip a bit of a smile.

  Phillip glared at me. “Lillian, this is serious, and James is no longer here to protect you—and I don’t have the power to do anything. I don’t know why he did it, Lord knows I tried to talk him out of it, but he said that he was giving you what you needed. That’s all I could get out of him.”

  Phillip stood up, then took a moment to regain his calm. Jimmie said that what he liked about Phillip was that nothing on earth could upset him. But this had.

  I tried to get the picture of my future out of my head, tried to stop thinking about a life without Jimmie’s laughter and his big shoulders to protect me, and looked up at Phillip expectantly. “Are you saying that I’m destitute?” I tried not to smile. The jewelry that Jimmie had given me over the years was worth millions.

  Phillip took a deep breath. “More or less. He’s left you a farm in Virginia.”

  “There, then, that’s something,” I said, then I took the humor out of my voice and waited for him to continue.

  “It was a breach of ethics, but after I wrote the will for him, I sent someone down to Virginia to look at the place. It’s . . . not much. It’s—” He turned away for a moment, and I thought I heard him mutter, “Bastard,” but I didn’t want to hear that, so I ignored him. When he turned back to me, his face was businesslike. He looked at his watch, a watch that I knew Jimmie had given him; it cost over twenty thousand dollars. I owned a smaller version of it.

  “Did you do anything to him?” Phillip asked softly. “Another man maybe?”

  I couldn’t stop my little snort of derision, and my answer was just to look at Phillip. Women in harems weren’t kept under tighter lock and key than James Manville’s wife.

  “All right,” Phillip said, “I’ve had months to try to figure this out, and I haven’t come close, so I’m going to give up. When James’s will is read, all hell is going to break loose. Atlanta and Ray are going to get it all, and what you get is a farmhouse in Virginia and fifty grand—a pittance.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “But the one thing I can do is see that you receive as much as you and I can buy between now and the moment that James’s death is announced to the public.”

  It was hearing those words, “James’s death,” that almost did me in.

  “No, you don’t,” Phillip said as he grabbed my arm and pulled me upright. “You don’t have time for grief or self-pity right now. You have to get dressed. The store manager is waiting.”

  At five-thirty on that cold spring morning, I was pushed inside a huge department store and told that I was to buy what I needed for a farmhouse in Virginia. Phillip said the man he sent couldn’t see inside the house, so I didn’t even know how many bedrooms it had. The sleepy store manager who’d been roused from bed to open the store for James Manville’s wife dutifully followed Phillip and me about and noted down what I pointed at.

  It all seemed so unreal. I couldn’t believe any of it was happening, and a part of me, the still-in-shock part, couldn’t wait to tell Jimmie this story. How he’d laugh at it! I’d exaggerate every moment of it, and the more he’d laugh, the more flamboyant my story would become. “So there I was, half asleep, being asked which couch I wanted to buy,” I’d say. “ ‘Couch?’ the little man asked, yawning. ‘What’s a couch?’ ”

  But there was not going to be any storytelling with Jimmie, for I was never going to see Jimmie alive again.

  I did as I was told, though, and I chose furniture, cookware, linens, and even appliances for a house that I had never seen. But it all seemed so ridiculous. Jimmie had houses full of furniture, most of it custom-made, and there were great, enormous kitchens full of every imaginable piece of cooking gear.

  At seven, when Phillip was driving me back to the house, he reached into the back of his car and picked up a brochure. “I bought you a car,” he said, handing me a glossy photo of a four-wheel-drive Toyota.

  I was beginning to wake up, and I was beginning to feel pain. Everything seemed so odd; my world was turning upside down. Why was Phillip driving a car himself? He usually used one of Jimmie’s cars and a driver.

  “You can’t take the jewelry,” Phillip was saying. “Each piece has been itemized and insured. You may take your clothing, but even at that I think that Atlanta may give you some problems. She’s your size.”

  “My size,” I whispered. “Take my clothes.”

  “You can fight it all, of course,” Phillip was saying. “But something’s wrong. About six months ago, Atlanta hinted that she knew some big secret about you.”

  Phillip looked at me out of the corner of his eye. I knew he was again asking me if there were other men in my life. But when? I wondered. Jimmie didn’t like to be alone, not even for a second, and he made sure I was never alone. “ ’Fraid the bogeyman will get me,” he said, kissing my nose, when I asked him why he avoided solitude so diligently. Jimmie rarely—no, Jimmie never gave straight answers to personal questions. He lived in the here and now; he lived in the world around him, not inside his head. He wasn’t one for pondering why people were the way they were; he accepted them, and liked them or didn’t.

  “I was a virgin when I met him,” I said softly to Phillip, “and there’s only been Jimmie.” But I looked away when I said it, for I knew that there was a secret between Jimmie and me. Only I knew it, though. Atlanta couldn’t know—could she?

  But she did.

  By eight, my comfortable, safe world as I knew it had collapsed. I don’t know how Atlanta heard about Jimmie’s plane going down so soon after it happened, but she had. And in the time between when Atlanta was told and the press heard of Jimmie’s death, she had accomplished more than in all the other forty-eight years of her life combined.

  When Phillip and I returned from our crazy shopping expedition, we were greeted at the front door of what I’d thought of as my house by men carrying guns, and I was told I wasn’t allowed to enter. I was told that, as Jimmie’s only surviving relatives, Atlanta and Ray now owned everything.

  When Phillip and I got back into the car, he was shaking his head in wonder. “How did they find out about the will? How did she know James left it all to them? Look, Lillian,” he said, and I noted that up until Jimmie’s death, he’d always called me Mrs. Manville, “I don’t know how she found out, but I’ll find the culprit who told and . . . and . . . ” Obviously, he couldn’t think of anything horrible enough to do to someone on his staff who’d leaked the contents of Jimmie’s will. “We’ll fight this. You’re his wife, and you have been for many years. You and I will—”

  “I was seventeen when I married him,” I said quietly. “And I didn’t have my mother’s permission.”

  “Oh, my God,” Phillip said, then he opened his mouth to begin what I assumed was going to be a lecture on my irresponsibility. But he closed it again, and rightfully so. What good would it do to lecture me now that Jimmie was gone?

  The next weeks were horrible beyond anything I’d ever imagined. Atlanta was on TV just hours after Jimmie’s death, telling the press that she was going to fight “that woman” who had so enslaved her beloved brother for all those years. “I’m going to see that she gets everything she deserves.”

  It didn’t matter to Atlanta that Jimmie’s will stated I was to get nothing. Not even the farmhouse was mentioned in the will. No, Atlanta was out to avenge all the things she imagined I’d done to her over the years. She didn’t just want money; she wanted me humiliated.

  Yes, of course she’d found out that my marriage to Jimmie h
adn’t been legal. It couldn’t have been difficult. My sister knew. She and her husband had divorced because she couldn’t bear to stay in Morocco, but her husband wouldn’t give up all that cash and luxury. My sister blamed me for her divorce. Maybe she called Atlanta and volunteered the information that I wasn’t legally married to Jimmie.

  However she found out, Atlanta waved my birth certificate before the press, then showed them the photocopy of my marriage certificate. I was only seventeen when we’d married, but I’d lied and said that I was eighteen, and therefore legally in charge of my own fate.

  No longer did I have Jimmie to protect me from the press. Now every reporter who’d been mistreated by him—i.e., all of them—dug through his archives and pulled out the most unflattering photos of me he could find, then slapped them across every communications media there was. I couldn’t look at TV, a magazine, or a computer screen that didn’t feature all my chins and the nose I’d inherited from my father. I’d told Jimmie about a thousand times that I wanted to have my over-large nose “fixed.” “Removed!” is what I said, but Jimmie always told me that he loved me as I was, and, eventually, the right hook of my nose didn’t seem to matter.

  When I heard what was being said about me, my ugly nose was the least of my concerns. How can I describe what it felt like to see four respected journalists—three men and a woman—sitting around a table, discussing whether or not I had “trapped” James Manville into marrying me? As though a man like Jimmie could be trapped by anyone! And by a seventeen-year-old girl whose only claim to fame was a handful of blue ribbons won at the state fair? Not likely.

  Lawyers talked about whether or not I was legally entitled to any of Jimmie’s money.

  But when the will was finally read and it was seen that Jimmie had given it all to his brother and sister, I was suddenly the Jezebel of America. Everyone seemed to believe that I had somehow ensnared dear little Jimmie (the youthful Salome was the comparison used most often) but that he had found out about it and had used his will to give me “what I deserved.”

  Phillip did his best to keep me away from the press, but it wasn’t easy. I wanted to get on a plane and go away, to hide from everything—but that was no longer an option. My days of jumping on a plane and going anywhere in the world I wanted were over.

  For six weeks after Jimmie’s death, while the courts dealt with his will and the press hashed and rehashed everything they heard, I stayed locked inside Phillip’s sprawling house. The only time I left during those horrible weeks was when I went to Jimmie’s funeral, and then I was so shrouded in black draperies that I may as well not have been there. And I most certainly wasn’t going to give the press or Atlanta and Ray the satisfaction of seeing me weep.

  When I got to the church, I was told that I couldn’t enter, but Phillip had anticipated such an event, and seemingly out of nowhere, half a dozen men the size of sumo wrestlers appeared and surrounded me.

  That’s how I entered Jimmie’s funeral: walking in the midst of six enormous men, my face and body covered with black cloth.

  It was all right, though, because by that time I had realized that Jimmie was actually never coming back, and nothing anyone did mattered much. And, too, I kept imagining that farmhouse he’d left me. One time Jimmie had asked me to describe where I’d like to live, and I’d talked of a cozy little house with a deep porch, tall trees around it, and a lake nearby. “I’ll see what I can do,” he’d said, smiling at me with twinkling eyes. But the next house he’d bought was a castle on an island off the coast of Scotland, and the thing was so cold that even in August my teeth were chattering.

  After the will was probated, I made no move to leave Phillip’s house. With the press still hovering outside and with Jimmie gone, it didn’t seem to matter where I was or what I did. I took long showers, and I sat at the table with Phillip and his family—his wife, Carol, and their two young daughters—but I don’t remember eating anything.

  It was Phillip who told me that it was time for me to leave.

  “I can’t go out there,” I said in fear, glancing toward the curtains that I kept drawn night and day. “They’re waiting for me.”

  Phillip took my hand in his and rubbed his palm against my skin. For all that I no longer had a husband, I still felt married. I snatched my hand away and frowned at him.

  But Phillip smiled. “Carol and I have been talking, and we think you should . . . well, that you should disappear.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said, “suttee. The wife climbs onto the funeral pyre and follows her husband into the afterlife.”

  From the look on Phillip’s face, he didn’t appreciate my black sense of humor. Jimmie had. Jimmie used to say that the more depressed I was, the funnier I was. If that was so, I should have gone onstage the day of his funeral.

  “Lillian,” Phillip said, but when he reached toward my hand again, I withdrew it. “Have you looked at yourself lately?”

  “I—” I began, intending to make a sarcastic remark, but then I glanced into the mirror over the big dresser across from the bed in the guest room in Phillip’s house. I had, of course, noticed that I’d lost some weight. Not eating for weeks on end will do that. But I hadn’t noticed how much I’d lost. My chins were gone. I had cheekbones.

  I looked back at Phillip. “Amazing, isn’t it? All those diet programs that Jimmie paid for for me, and all he had to do was die and bingo! I’m finally slim.”

  Phillip frowned again. “Lillian, I’ve waited until now to talk to you. I’ve tried to give you some time to come to terms with James’s death and his will.”

  He started on another lecture about my stupidity in not telling either him or Jimmie that I’d been seventeen when we married. “He would have given you a huge wedding. He would have loved doing that for you,” Phillip had said the day after he found out. “It would have been so much better than the elopement you had the first time.”

  But I’d heard that lecture before and didn’t want to hear it again, so I cut him off. “You want me to disappear?”

  “Actually, it was Carol’s idea. She said that as things stand now, the rest of your life is going to be one long press interview. People are going to hound you forever to tell them about your life with Jimmie. Unless—”

  “Unless what?” I asked.

  Phillip’s thin face lit up, and for a moment I saw the “little fox” that Jimmie had always said the man was. “Do you remember when I told you that I’d tried to talk James out of writing his will as he did?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “I did persuade him not to put the farmhouse in the will. I said that if he was so afraid of what his sister would do, then she’d probably try to take the farm too. At that time I hadn’t seen the place, and I thought it was—”

  “Was what?” I asked.

  “Valuable,” he said softly, looking down at the floor for a moment, then back up at me. “Look, Lillian, I know the farmhouse isn’t much, but it must have meant something to James, or he wouldn’t have kept it all these years.”

  “Why did he buy it in the first place?”

  “That’s just it, he didn’t buy it. I think he’s always owned it.”

  “People have to buy things,” I said, confused. “People just don’t give real estate away, at least not while they’re alive.” It was then that understanding began to hit me. “You mean you think that Jimmie might have inherited this farm?”

  For the first time, I felt some interest spark inside me. All three of them, Atlanta, Ray, and Jimmie, were maddeningly secretive about their childhood. When questioned, Ray evaded and changed the subject. Atlanta and Jimmie out-and-out lied. They would say they were born in South Dakota one day, and in Louisiana the next. I knew for a fact that Jimmie had given me four different names for his mother. I’d even secretly read all six of the biographies that had been written about him, but the authors had had no better luck than I had in finding out anything about the first sixteen years of James Manville’s life.

  “I don’t know for sure,�
� Phillip said, “but I do know that James didn’t buy the place since I’ve known him.”

  At that statement, all I could do was blink. Jimmie and Phillip had been together from the beginning.

  “When I said that Atlanta and Ray might try to take the farm away from you, all I can tell you is that James turned white, as though he were afraid of something.”

  “Jimmie afraid?” I said, unable to grasp that concept.

  “He said, ‘You’re right, Phil, so I’m going to give the place to you, then when the time comes, I want you to sign it over to Lil. And I want you to give her this from me.’ ”

  That was when Phillip handed me the note written by Jimmie. It was in a sealed envelope, so Phillip hadn’t read it. He’d kept it and the deed to the farm in Virginia in his home safe, awaiting the day when he’d turn them both over to me.

  After I read the note, I folded it and put it back into the envelope. I didn’t cry; I’d cried so much over the last six weeks that I didn’t seem to have any more liquid inside me. I reached for the deed to the farm, but Phillip pulled it back.

  “If I make this out to Lillian Manville, then register the property transfer, within twenty-four hours, you’ll have reporters—and lawyers—on your doorstep. But—” he said, drawing out what he wanted to say as though I were a child he was enticing to be good.

  I didn’t take the bait, but just stared at him.

  “All right,” he said at last. “What Carol and I thought was that maybe you should change your identity. You’ve lost so much weight that you don’t look like James Manville’s fat little wife anymore.”

  That remark made me narrow my eyes at him. I did not want to hear what he and the rest of Jimmie’s staff had sniggered behind his back. I guess I’d not spent all those years near Jimmie for nothing, because I could see Phillip beginning to wither under my gaze.

  “All right,” he said again, then let out his pent-up breath. “It’s up to you, but I’ve already done a lot of the work, such as get you new documents of identification. I needed to use James’s connections while they still remembered him. Sorry to be so blunt, but people forget fast. Now, it’s up to you to accept it.”