The Mulberry Tree

by Jude Deveraux

  He handed me a passport, and I opened it. There was no photo inside, but there was a name. “Bailey James,” I read aloud, then looked up at Phillip.

  “It was Carol’s idea. She took your maiden name and James’s first name and— You don’t like it.”

  The problem was that I did like the idea. A new name; maybe a new life.

  “Carol thought that with your weight loss, and if you got your hair cut and lightened, and if you . . . Well, if you . . . ”

  I looked at him. What was he having such a hard time saying? But then I saw that he had his eyes fixed on my nose. I’d gone down headfirst on a playground slide in the first grade and had managed to knock my nose permanently to the right. “No wonder,” sixth-grade Johnnie Miller had said as I stood there gushing blood. “Her nose is so big that it hit the ground half an hour before she did.” I still remember the teacher holding me and oozing sympathy even as she tried hard not to laugh, even as she made Johnnie apologize for his remark.

  “You want me to get a nose job,” I said flatly.

  Phillip gave a curt nod.

  Turning, I looked at myself in the mirror. If Jimmie had left me his billions, I could have made a prison with high fences and locked myself away from all the gigolos and hangers-on that orbit around money. I didn’t have the billions, but I did have the notoriety. I knew that, eventually, in ten years or so, Jimmie would fade in people’s memories and I’d be left alone, but during those ten years . . .

  I looked back at Phillip. “It’s my guess that you have a surgeon all set up.”

  “Tonight.” He looked at his watch, the twenty-thousand-dollar one that Jimmie had given him; Atlanta was now wearing mine. “If you’re ready, that is.”

  I took a deep breath. “As ready as I can be, I guess,” I said, then stood up.

  That was two weeks ago. My nose had healed enough that I knew it was time to step outside Phillip and Carol’s big house. It wasn’t Lillian Manville who was to greet the world, but someone I didn’t even recognize in the mirror, someone named Bailey James.

  During the time I was recovering from surgery, I’d come to know Carol somewhat better. In the past she’d attended the parties that Jimmie liked to give, but he had always warned me that it was better not to get too chummy with employees, so I was courteous, but there were no secrets shared between us. I didn’t share secrets with anyone other than Jimmie.

  The surgery had been done in the doctor’s office, and a few hours later I was driven back to Carol and Phillip’s house. The first night a nurse stayed with me, but the second night I was alone when Carol tapped on my door. When I answered, she tiptoed in and sat on the edge of the bed. “Are you angry?” she asked.

  “No, the doctor did a fine job. Nothing to be angry about,” I answered, pretending that I didn’t know what she was talking about.

  She didn’t fall for it; she stared hard at me.

  “You mean, am I angry that I spent sixteen years giving my entire life to a man, only to be cut out of his will?”

  Carol smiled at my sarcasm. “Men are slime,” she said, then we smiled together, and when I touched my sore nose in pain, we laughed. It was my first genuine feeling of humor since I’d last talked to Jimmie.

  “So what are you going to wear?” Carol asked, folding her legs and sitting on the corner of the bed. She was about ten years older than me, and I’d be willing to bet that she was no stranger to the surgeon’s knife. She was blonde and pretty, and extremely well cared for. I knew what that meant because I, too, used to spend a lot of my time looking after myself. I may have been plump, but I was a well-coiffed, well-tended plump.

  “Wear where?” I asked, and felt my heart jump a bit. Please, I silently prayed, someone tell me that I wasn’t going to have to go again to some courtroom and hear Atlanta and Ray accuse me of “controlling” Jimmie.

  “On your new body,” Carol said. “You can’t keep on wearing my sweats, you know.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Sorry. I guess I haven’t thought much about clothes lately. I—” Damnation, but tears were coming to my eyes. I wanted to be the brave little soldier and believe that, whatever Jimmie had done had been done out of love. But when I was confronted with issues such as the fact that the only clothing I now owned was what I’d put on the night Jimmie died, and the black shroud that Phillip had given me, I didn’t feel very brave.

  Carol reached out to touch my hand, but then she pulled back and moved off the bed. “I’ll be back in just a minute,” she said as she left the room. In seconds she returned with a foot-high stack of what looked like catalogs. She’d taken so little time to get them, I knew she must have had them piled outside.

  She spread them across the bottom of the bed, and I looked at them in wonder. “What are these?”

  “Phillip owes me five bucks!” she said in triumph. “I bet him you’d never seen a catalog. In nor—uh, most households, catalogs come through the mail at the rate of about six a day.”

  I knew she’d been about to say “in normal households,” but she’d stopped herself. In Jimmie’s houses, a servant brought me my few pieces of mail on a silver dish.

  I picked up one of the catalogs. Norm Thompson. Inside were the kind of clothes that appeared in my closet now and then, especially in the two island houses. Jimmie had someone he called a “shopper” who made sure that we had whatever clothes we needed in every house.

  Carol picked up a catalog and flipped through it. The cover read “Coldwater Creek.” “You know, I used to feel sorry for you. You always looked so alone and lost. I told Phillip that—” Breaking off, she bent down toward the catalog.

  “You told him what?”

  “That you were like a lightbulb, and you were only on when James was around.”

  I didn’t like what she’d said. Not one bit. It made me sound so . . . so nothing, as though I weren’t a person at all. “So what did you have in mind with these?” I asked, making my voice sound as cool as possible.

  She understood my tone. “It’s my opinion that we owe you for the wedding gift that you gave Phillip and me, so I thought we might order you some new clothes and whatever else you might need in your new life. We’ll charge it all to Phillip; he can afford it.” She lowered her voice. “He’s going to be one of the attorneys for Atlanta and Ray.”

  At that my mouth dropped open, then I winced because my new, smaller nose hurt at the movement. I wanted to scream, “The traitor!” but I didn’t. “Remind me. What did Jimmie and I give you for your wedding?”

  “This house,” Carol said.

  For a moment I couldn’t speak, and I had to look away so she wouldn’t see my eyes. He gave a house to his attorney, a man he thought was his friend, but now that so-called friend was going to work for the enemy. I picked up a catalog. “Do you have one of these things for jewelry? I need a new watch.”

  Carol smiled at me; I smiled back; a friendship was formed.

  Two

  Phillip watched Lillian get out of the car and walk slowly toward the house. For all that she’d had a quick burst of tears when she first saw the place, he thought she was holding up well. Considering what she’d been through, she was holding up extremely well. Shaking his head in disbelief, he remembered all he’d done to prevent this moment. He and three of his associates had spent two afternoons and one morning trying to persuade her to fight James Manville’s will—a will Phillip had come to see as immoral and possibly illegal.

  But he hadn’t always felt that way. When James had told Phillip what he wanted to put in the will, Phillip had raised his eyebrows. He hadn’t dared let James know what he was thinking—that, obviously, James had found out that his young wife didn’t deserve his money; that she was probably having an affair. But instead of speaking his mind, Phillip had tried to talk James out of causing what would surely be years of court battles. It never crossed his mind that James’s widow wouldn’t contest the will. Phillip told James that if he wanted to leave his brother and sister money, then he sho
uld split the fortune three ways; there was enough for everyone.

  But James didn’t seem to hear Phillip. His only concern had been how to make sure that Lillian got some farmhouse in Virginia. “She’ll love it there,” James said in one of his rare self-revelatory moods. “I stole a lot from her, and this is the way I can give it back.”

  To Phillip, cheating a woman out of billions of dollars didn’t seem to be repaying her; it seemed more like a punishment. But he kept his mouth shut.

  It wasn’t until after James’s death, when Phillip saw the true nature of Atlanta and Ray, that he wanted Lillian to fight. He wanted to head a team of the most clever, most conniving lawyers in the United States, and he wanted to take every penny away from those two greedy worms. In the weeks since James’s death, Phillip had never seen anything like what had been done to Lillian, both by the media and by people he’d thought of as James’s friends.

  But Lillian wouldn’t budge. Nothing anyone said could make her file suit. Phillip and the other lawyers told her that she could give the money to charity after she won it, but that still didn’t make her change her mind.

  “Jimmie was very smart about business,” she said, “and he did this for a reason. There’s something he wants out of this, so I’m going to abide by the will.”

  “Manville is dead,” one of the lawyers said, his face red with exasperation. His thoughts were written on his face: What kind of woman could turn down billions of dollars?

  After the third meeting, Lillian had stood up from the table and said, “I’ve heard all your arguments, seen all your evidence that shows that I could win, and I still won’t do it. I’m going to abide by my husband’s will.” She then turned around and walked away from them.

  One of the lawyers, a man who hadn’t known James and certainly didn’t know his wife, snickered and said softly, “Obviously, she’s too simple to know what money means.”

  Lillian heard him. Slowly, she turned around and looked at the man in a way that was so like James Manville, Phillip drew in his breath. “What you don’t understand,” she said quietly, “is that there is more to life than money. Tell me, if you were a billionaire and you died and left your wife nothing, would she fight for it? Or would she love the memory of you more than the money?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but turned and walked out of the room.

  The other lawyers hid their faces from the man Lillian had just told off, unable to contain their laughter. He had in fact just been through his third very nasty divorce, and his ex-wife had fought him down to who got the antique doorknobs.

  In the end, Phillip had given up trying to persuade Lillian to fight. The night of the last meeting, he’d fallen into bed beside Carol and said, “I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Help her,” Carol said.

  “What do you think this has all been about?” he’d snapped at his wife.

  Carol was unfazed; she didn’t even glance up from the magazine she was looking at. “You’ve been trying to make her into what she isn’t. You’re a worse tyrant than James was.”

  “Yes, and I can see that you’re terribly intimidated by me,” he said sarcastically. “So what’s in that pretty little brain of yours?” After twelve years of marriage, he could almost read her mind, and he knew when she wanted to tell him something. As always, she’d waited for him to fail; only then would she offer her help.

  “You’ve got to help her do whatever it is that she wants to do,” Carol said.

  “Any ideas what that is?” he asked, looking at her with skepticism. “She stays alone in the guest room and doesn’t talk to anyone. All those so-called friends that James used to fill the house with haven’t so much as called her to say they’re sorry about his death.” His voice was filled with disgust.

  “I don’t know her very well, but it seems to me that when she was with James, she tried very hard to have a normal life.”

  Phillip snorted. “Normal? With James Manville? Carol, did you have on blinders? They lived in vast houses all over the world; they were surrounded by servants. I took her into a department store right after James died, and I swear she’d never seen one before. Or at least not since she ran away from home and married him.”

  “That’s all true, but what did Lillian do when she was in those houses? Give parties?”

  Phillip put his hands behind his head and looked up at the ceiling. “No,” he said thoughtfully. “James gave the parties, and Lillian put in an appearance. I don’t think I ever saw anyone more miserable than she was at those functions. She used to sit in a corner all by herself and eat. Poor kid.”

  “Did you ever see her happy?”

  “No, not—” Phillip began, then stopped. “That’s not true. One day I took some papers to James to sign, but after I left his house, I saw that he’d missed one, so I went back. When I got there, I could hear voices, so I went through the house toward the back, and I saw them. They were alone, just the two of them, no guests, no servants, and—”

  He closed his eyes for a moment in memory. It had been one of James’s multimillion-dollar houses, “all glass and steel,” as Lillian had said, and the voices had come from a room Phillip had never seen before. It was off the kitchen, and since the door was open, he looked inside. As he was standing near some flowing draperies that some designer had put up, he knew they weren’t likely to see him. He knew he was playing the voyeur, but he couldn’t move as he looked in on the scene.

  Lillian, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, not the designer clothes that he’d always seen her in, was serving James dinner. They were in a small sitting room with a tiny round table at one end. From the look of the room, no designer had touched it. The sofa was covered in a rose chintz; near it was a plaid chair. The table was pine and scratched; the two chairs with it looked like something from a country auction.

  None of the furnishings had that fake look that designers managed to achieve. There was nothing “arranged” in this room. Instead, it looked like half the living rooms in America, and the couple in the room looked like what other American couples hoped to be. As Lillian filled James’s plate from the food set out on a buffet, James was talking nonstop. And Lillian was listening closely. When she turned and put the plate in front of him, she laughed at what he was saying, and in that moment, Phillip thought she was beautiful. She wasn’t just the billionaire’s plump wife who never had a word to say, but a real beauty. As she began to fill her own plate, she started talking, and Phillip was astonished to see James listening to her with an intensity he’d never seen in him before. James nodded as she talked, and Phillip could see that he’d asked her opinion about something and she was giving it. Partnership was the word that came to his mind.

  Silently, his paper unsigned, Phillip tiptoed away. How many times over the years had he heard people say, “Why doesn’t Manville ditch the dumpling and get a woman who isn’t afraid of her own shadow?” But obviously, as in everything else, James Manville had known what he was doing.

  On that day, as Phillip walked back to the car, he thought that in all the years he’d known James, he’d never been jealous of him. Thanks to James, Phillip had all the money he wanted, so he didn’t envy James his billions. But Phillip realized that when he looked in on that scene, he’d felt a hot wave of jealousy. Carol hadn’t looked at him like that or listened to him in that way since the first year they were married.

  Phillip had looked at the unsigned paper and was glad he hadn’t made his presence known. It would be better if James didn’t know that his private moments with Lillian had been observed.

  “Yes,” Phillip said to Carol. “I’ve seen her happy.”

  “Oh?” Carol asked, her voice full of curiosity. “When was that?”

  James might be dead, but Phillip still couldn’t bring himself to betray his friend by telling what he’d seen. The memory of it, though, just made him more confused. If James loved his wife so much, why hadn’t he at least left her enough money to protect herself from the press? “You have som
ething you want to tell me,” he said to his wife, “so why don’t you spit it out?”

  “On the way to James’s funeral, Lillian asked me if I’d seen the farmhouse that James left her.”

  “So?” Phillip asked. “What does that mean? The place is a pigsty. It’s horrible. The countryside around it is beautiful, but the house ought to be torn down, and only a bulldozer would help the landscaping.”

  “Hmmm,” Carol said, closing her magazine. “Nobody made as much money as James did without being able to plan. What do you think his plan was for that farmhouse?”

  “Insure it for millions, then burn it down?”

  Carol ignored him. “How can she ever live there in peace? She’ll have reporters setting up camp in her front yard. She’ll . . . ” Trailing off, she looked hard at her husband, as though she expected him to figure out the rest of her idea.

  Phillip was too tired to play guessing games. “What?” he asked.

  And that’s when Carol revealed her idea to change Lillian’s looks, and even her name.

  Now, as Phillip got out of the car and watched Lillian—no, Bailey, he reminded himself—look at the ugly old place, he had to admit that she certainly looked like a different person. He remembered one day when James had slammed a book down on a desk and said, “I can’t concentrate. Lil’s on one of those damned diets again.” Then he’d yelled for his secretary to come into the office—no intercom system for James Manville. He’d ordered his secretary to send Lillian a pound of every kind of chocolate the nearest Godiva store had. “That should do it,” he had said, smiling. “Now let’s get back to work.”

  Without her husband’s sabotage, Lillian had dropped a lot of weight in just a few weeks. When Phillip told his wife what James used to do to keep Lillian off her diets, she’d said, “So that’s the secret to losing weight,” then she’d put her hand on her hip. “I’ll remember that the next time you get on a plane.”