“Her name was Helene.” Your face softens when you say the name so that it comes out like a sigh. “It fit her perfectly. She was like a fine piece of porcelain—beautiful but not meant to be handled every day.” The light in your eyes fades and your voice goes flat. “She got sick when I was little.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. And I am. Because I already know what’s coming. I’ve heard things. And not only from Goldie. Still, I have to ask, because you can’t know I know. “What happened?”
“She had a sort of episode one night at a dinner party my father was giving for some important investors. There was an awful scene. The doctor came and gave her something to calm her, but the next day she went away . . . to a hospital. A sanitarium. She never came home. A year later, we got a call that she died.”
Your voice falters and you stop talking. I know there’s more, but I don’t push. Instead, I wait. When you continue, your eyes are bright with unshed tears. “I never got to say goodbye.”
I reach for your hand, watching you closely as I fold your fingers into mine. “It must have been terrible for you to lose your mother so young. And your father—he must have been shattered when the call came.”
“Shattered,” you repeat woodenly, staring at our joined hands. “Yes, I’m sure he was. The talk after she went away was bad enough. A wife losing her oars in the middle of a dinner party is appalling, but dying in a madhouse and having it printed in all the papers was nothing short of a disaster for a man who’d spent most of his life managing appearances. Still, he knew how to play it. Long-suffering husband turned tragic widower. The tabloids ate it up. Most of them, at any rate.”
It’s the first time I’ve heard you utter a word against your father, and the harshness of your tone makes it doubly surprising. “You don’t like him very much, do you?”
You flinch at the question, as if realizing you’ve said too much. “Please forget I said any of that. I was a child and I was hurting. I needed someone to blame.”
“And your sister?”
“What about her?”
“How did she take the news?”
You offer another of your evasive shrugs. “People deal with loss in different ways.”
“Were the two of you close?”
“She raised me,” you say, not quite an answer. “After my mother went away. She had just turned seventeen, but she stepped into my mother’s shoes as if she’d been training for it all her life. She dedicated every waking moment to taking care of my father, running his house, writing his letters, hosting his dinner parties. She became indispensable to him.”
There was something vaguely discomfiting about the description, not blatantly unsavory but not quite natural either. “A little odd, isn’t it? A seventeen-year-old playing lady of the manor? At that age, most girls are worried about clothes and boys, not approving the weekly menu and playing hostess.”
You smile, a brittle smile that leaches the warmth from your eyes. “Cee-Cee was never most girls. She was so driven, even then, willing to throw herself on a live grenade if my father required it of her—which he did from time to time. We were never close—not before my mother died or after—but she took care of me. She took care of everything. It’s hard to fault that kind of loyalty.”
“And yet, something tells me you do.”
“Of course I don’t.”
“It’s just us,” I say gently. “You don’t have to defend her. Or your father. Not to me.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I just mean you seem a little protective. You button up the minute I ask about either one of them. And if you do happen to slip and say what you think, you immediately backpedal.”
“Privacy means a great deal to my father. And loyalty. In fact, they’re everything. Family first. Family last. But he has good reason.”
“Does he?”
“My father’s a very wealthy man, and there are people who don’t think that’s okay. They’d love nothing more than to see him taken down a few pegs.”
“Who are . . . they?”
“Business rivals, mostly. And the papers.”
“Like the one I work for,” I remind you. We’re getting into tricky territory now. “Why should the newspapers want to take down a private citizen? Has your father done something to warrant being taken down?”
“Over the years, there have been . . . stories. Rumors.” You drop your eyes then and look away. “Not nice ones.”
“What kinds of rumors?”
You pull your hand free and look at me with your mouth clamped tight. “You sound like a newspaperman.”
“Or a man who wants to know all about you.”
“And which are you?”
Your frosty mantle is back in place as you study me. Still, I’m dazzled as I look at you, the way the sun creates shadows beneath your cheekbones, the play of the breeze as it lifts your hair off your face. “The latter,” I say quietly. “Very much the latter.”
I reclaim your hand, winding my fingers through yours, then lean in to kiss you. I feel your distrust as our lips touch, your rekindled wariness, then feel it melt away as your mouth gradually opens to mine. I lay you back on the scratchy blanket and kiss you until I’m dizzy, and some part of me realizes we’re careening toward a point from which there will be no going back. It’s all I can do to pull away, to remember that you’re not mine, that you belong to another world—and another man.
How I wish I could say that’s what stopped me that day, that my restraint had to do with some noble twinge of conscience, but it was nothing of the sort. I stopped because I knew you would regret it—regret me—and the thought of being a regret, a reckless lapse in judgment for which you would one day feel remorse, was enough to bring me to my senses. That and the absolute certainty that I wouldn’t survive it when you did. Would that I had remembered it later on. Because you did come to regret me, didn’t you? Though not nearly as much as I came to regret you, dear Belle. Not nearly as much.
Forever, and Other Lies
(pgs. 29–36)
September 22, 1941
Water Mill, New York
You speak of regret. You of all people. As if you’re the only one with cause for such a thing. I assure you, I have causes enough of my own, all of them beginning and ending with you. That you could bring up that day—of all days—astonishes me.
When I think of how you wheedled things out of me. Coaxing me with that smile you have—that very practiced smile—that says you want to know, need to know, all about me, and in every tiny detail. The way you pretended to care. The way you lied. That mouth, so skilled. Words. Kisses. All false. You ask if I remember. Of course I remember. How could I not?
It’s just us. That’s what you said.
But it wasn’t true, was it? She was there with us. Your lady bountiful with her string of newspapers. That day and from the very beginning. Whispering in your ear. Pulling your strings.