“May I come in?”
“Of course.” Staring at him wasn’t the way to start this encounter. “May I get you something?” she asked when he was inside.
To his credit he didn’t answer, “Yes. My daughter.” Instead he murmured politely, “No, thank you. But I know I’m here at lunch-time. Go ahead and eat if you haven’t already.”
She shook her head and ran her fingers nervously through her hair. “Please sit down.”
They sat on the small sofa bed, which was the only seating in the room, since Bethany tried to keep the area clear so Abby would have more space to play. She watched Justin take in his surroundings, a feat that could be accomplished in less than twenty seconds. “Do you both live here?”
“Of course,” she answered. “It’s small, but we manage well.”
“Where does she play?” His voice was matter-of-fact and his face was expressionless, but Bethany had the chilling feeling she was on the witness stand.
“Anywhere she can.”
Light reflected from the surface of his eyes as though it too could not penetrate the depths of this man. “I noticed there’s no yard.”
“Justin, you know enough about the French Quarter to understand how these houses were designed. Abby rides her bike in the courtyard you walked through to get here. She plays with the neighbor’s cat there and climbs the little tree in the middle. When the weather’s nice she makes tents on the benches, and when it’s very hot, we stop up the bottom of the old fountain and she wades in it.”
“And you think it’s safe for her to be out there?”
Bethany controlled her voice, which was threatening to rise in anger. “She is always supervised, as any four-year-old should be, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“Tell me, Bethany.” He stood up and wandered to the window, taking in the view of slate roofs and colorful narrow buildings. “Do you think the Quarter is a good place to raise our daughter?”
“I think anywhere I am is a good place to raise her.” She took in the erect stance and the disdainful stare out the window. She was getting nowhere.
“Do you know the crime statistics here?”
“Get to the point, Justin.”
He turned and hooked his thumbs in his pockets. “I don’t want her living like this.”
“That’s too bad, because this is our home, whether you approve of it or not.” Her voice and temper were rising now.
“I’m not here to get into a shouting match. I’ve come to make you a proposition,” he said formally.
“The last time I took you up on one of your propositions, Justin, I became a mother.” The remark rang out like a nervous giggle at a funeral. It was an inappropriate response to a deeply felt emotion, but she was instantly ashamed.
“I’m serious, Bethany.” His darkly handsome face was, if possible, more stern than it had been. “I’ve thought about nothing else for the past week. It’s on my mind when I go to sleep at night and when I wake up.” He turned to stare out the window again. “I’ve asked myself a thousand times how this happened and how much of the fault was my own.”
“But that doesn’t really matter now, does it?’’ she said as she watched his shoulders straighten.
“I guess it doesn’t. What’s important is that we find some rational way to deal with the situation as it stands.”
“Abby is a child, not a ‘situation.’“ She heard the sharp edge in her voice again. “I won’t have her ‘dealt with’ like she was a bad case of the flu.”
“Please let me finish.” It was the familiar Justin whisper, the voice he used when he bucked no resistance. “Of course Abby is not a ‘situation,’ but there is a situation surrounding her. It goes something like this. A small child living alone with her mother in a section of town that’s not desirable for children has a father who wants to make her life better. Add a mother who is unreasonably demanding the father stay away from his daughter and a father who is fast losing patience with the mother, and you have our. . . situation.’’
She stared at him, pale cheeks warming. “Well?”
“I won’t beat around the bush, since it isn’t getting us anywhere.” He walked to the sofa, sitting so they were looking directly at each other. “The obvious solution to this problem is for us to get married.”
She shut her eyes and wished this man to another planet. Finally she said, eyes still closed, “That’s an interesting way to look at marriage. A solution to a problem. I wonder if that’s where everyone else has gone wrong. Maybe the divorce rate would be cut in half if everyone were as cold-blooded as you are.”
“Dammit, Bethany. Stop it. Do you think it was easy for me to come here and propose to you?”
“‘Propose’? You call that a proposal?”
“Under the circumstances, I thought a dozen roses, champagne and me on bended knee would be absurd. But it is a proposal nevertheless. I want you to marry me. Immediately. And next month, after I’ve finished straightening out business here, I want you and Abby to come to Chicago to start our life together.”
If I open my mouth I’m going to babble, she thought. She counted the panes of glass in the windows of the room. When she was finished, she counted them again, this time backward. Having always prided herself on being kind, she was shocked at the cruel things she wanted to say, and it was several minutes before she was able to trust the sound of her own voice. “No.”
She wondered if Justin was also counting panes, because the silence stretched interminably. “You don’t have to answer now,” he said finally. “I can see this surprised you.”
“I did answer. Did you miss it? No. I said no. That won’t change.”
“You’re being unreasonable.” His face was carved out of granite, and his voice, as hers had been, was expressionless.
“Perhaps. But when I marry, I’ll do it for love.”
His answer was a further tightening of his already-immobile face. As she waited for him to break the silence again, she thought about his offer. To marry him now was unthinkable, and the proposal confirmed what she had known at the time of her pregnancy. Had she gone to Justin with the facts, he would have insisted on marriage. As the much more insecure person she had been then, she wouldn’t have had the strength to refuse him.
One short letter, one brief phone call would have sent her life down a completely different path. She would now be Mrs. Justin Dumontier. Her daughter would live in a suburban Chicago house, play with expensive toys, attend an exclusive private school and have the cocker spaniel she longed for. Bethany would do volunteer work for the local art museum, attend club meetings and have a weekly bridge night. The life, even as clichéd as she imagined it, wasn’t the problem. Woven throughout the fantasy was the unsmiling face of the man who sat next to her.
Perhaps with Abby Justin would have let down his guard and showered the little girl with the love she deserved, but Bethany was sure their own relationship, built only on “doing the right thing” would have been loveless and barren. How long before sexual attraction had turned to nothing more than a casual kiss on the cheek before he left for a long day at his office? That kind of marriage had been unthinkable to her then. Now it was absolutely abhorrent.
“I don’t want to threaten you, Bethany, but you leave me no choice. I won’t be kept from my daughter. If you won’t marry me I’ll have to find another way, and it may be even more unacceptable to you.”
Here it was again, the threat that Justin would try to gain custody. “Is this a new version of the melodrama where the evil landlord threatens some dire harm if the sweet young thing refuses to marry him?” Why am I being flip, she thought despairingly. What am I letting him do to me?
“You’ve changed a lot in the past five years, haven’t you? I don’t remember ever hearing you resort to sarcasm before.”
“But, then, neither of us has ever been in this situation, have we?” she answered wearily. “I guess I don’t really know how to behave. I only know that I wish you’d leav
e.”
Justin rose and walked to the window once more. “I won’t have my daughter raised here. She deserves a real life, one without a massive exposure to the crazies who sometimes frequent this place.” His hand swept the scene before him. “And she deserves full-time consideration of her needs.”
Bethany jumped up, marched to the door to fling it wide open and gestured with her other hand. “That does it, counselor. Get out! I will not sit here and listen to you insult my ability to raise my daughter. Abby is a bright and charming little girl with better manners than her father. She’s happy here. She is now and always has been my first priority. The day I think this environment is going to damage her I will pack and move immediately. Until then, not you or anyone else will tell me where and how I should raise my little girl.”
“Shut the door, Bethany,” Justin said. “I told you I wasn’t here to participate in a shouting match.”
“Get out,” she repeated.
Justin marched toward her, eyes blazing in an otherwise unreadable face. His fingers clamped firmly on her shoulders, thumbs pressing on the fragile collarbone beneath. She had the sudden premonition he was going to shake her the way Abby sometimes shook her rag doll when she was angry. If he had intended to, he thought better of it. But his hands remained in place.
“Listen to me. You will stop trying to make this so difficult. Do you understand? I’m tired of you taking everything I say and twisting it to make me into some kind of a monster.”
She was sure the surprise she felt was reflected in her eyes. “What have I misunderstood?” she asked as calmly as she could manage. Justin angry was a Justin she didn’t know. But more than his anger was unsettling. She was too aware of the heat of his body and his warm breath on her cheek.
“I’m not accusing you of being a bad parent. I haven’t even spoken to my daughter, so I have no way of judging how adequate her upbringing has been. But I can see where she’s being raised, and I’m very concerned about it.”
“Not every child has to be raised in suburbia to emerge as a happy healthy human being.”
“And I am concerned that you seem to have no intention of letting me into Abby’s life,” he said, ignoring her response. She noticed, without wanting to, how Justin said his daughter’s name. It rolled off his tongue the same way that a teenager might say the name of his favorite rock star. There was a certain quality of wonder, of reverence in his voice.
What am I going to do, she agonized silently. It was so easy when she could cast Justin as the villain in their hopeless little melodrama.
“Bethany?” The pressure from his hands lessened, and finally they dropped to his sides. “You’ve refused my offer. What’s your solution?”
She reached deep inside herself for anything she could find to spur on her anger. “I don’t know, but I don’t want to talk about it anymore right now. Please leave.”
“You’ve had a week. I’ve been patient, but I’m not going to wait any longer.”
“Are you afraid a few more days will ruin your daughter completely?” she said acidly, but with little inner conviction she was in the right.
“I know you’re scared, and I’m sorry.” The words were spaced evenly, but there was a quality of concern in them, and she shut her eyes to avoid responding.
“Please leave, Justin.”
She felt rather than saw him go. When she opened her eyes a moment later she was alone. Alone with her doubts and her fear. Alone with the knowledge that she couldn’t hold him off much longer. Alone with the startling realization that a part of her didn’t want to hold him off at all.
CHAPTER FIVE
ON A WARM winter evening in New Orleans windows and doors were invariably thrown open. Later in the season, the loud hum of air conditioners would drown out city noises, but this night, a light breeze was cooling enough. Bethany sat on her living-room sofa, windows wide open, listening to the distant sound of the blues drifting from the famous Bourbon Street jazz clubs only one block away.
Madeline had asked permission to keep Abby for the rest of the weekend, and Bethany was alone. She had worked until ten o’clock, hoping she could fall exhausted into bed. But it was past midnight now and there was no hope sleep was going to come easily. She sat on the sofa, sipping a glass of iced tea as she looked out over the lights of the city.
At times like these she loved the Quarter the most. The haunting sound of blues woven with the raucous blare of Dixieland; warm air frequently punctuated with the sweet fragrance of native flowers; remnants of a mauve-and-gold sunset laced across the sky with wispy clouds—all these had merged in a vivid jumble in her head to provide an image entitled “home.”
She wasn’t a complete romantic. She knew there were problems here. Crime. Too much drinking. And not far away on Bourbon Street, side by side with the jazz clubs were strip shows.
No place was perfect, but New Orleans was far from being dull, which in Bethany’s artist’s soul was the greatest sin of all. Tonight, however, she found herself concentrating on all of the negatives.
What would Justin hear if he was sitting on the sofa listening to the night noises? Would he hear the provocative drifting music? Or would he hear the quarrel that had started in the street below between two drunks? Would he notice the steep roofs, angled over balconies so intricate their designs took her breath away? Or would he notice the trash collecting in the narrow alleys from the overflow crowd off Bourbon?
And what did Abby notice? Was she becoming so acclimated to life here that she thought this was normal? How much of the colorful atmosphere was the little girl absorbing? Bethany rose and walked to the tall windows, slamming them shut. The noise and the breeze had become irritants, like chalk squeaking on a blackboard.
It wasn’t the Quarter, the noise or the breeze that was causing her dark mood. Certainly Justin’s disdain for her surroundings had affected her perception of them. But where she lived was only a small part of their problem. That particular issue probably was important to him, at least on some level. But more important was the message behind it. In no uncertain terms Justin was telling her he was laying claim to his daughter. He was going to be involved in her life, and he was going to have a say over what happened to her.
It was time for Bethany to make a decision. For a week she had avoided dealing with him. She had deluded herself by thinking he might decide to forget he was a father. By pretending to be courageous and sure of her stand she had fooled no one, except possibly herself, and then only for a short time. Justin could prove Abby was his daughter. What judge, when presented with the results of a DNA test and the little girl’s remarkable resemblance to the man who had asked for it, would require more evidence?
Bethany’s decision, therefore, was fairly simple. She could go on pretending, try to call Justin’s bluff and hope he would quickly grow tired of the struggle, or she could graciously consent to allow him to be a father to his own child.
There was one other vital aspect of the “situation,” as Justin had called it. She, who prided herself on her openness and honesty, had cheated this man of his most basic right. Now it was time to take the first step toward settling the matter fairly. Justin had tried, in his own way, to solve their impasse by offering marriage. She couldn’t accept that alternative, but she could allow him unfettered access.
Perhaps as difficult as sharing the little girl was the knowledge that she was now allowing Justin back into her own life. She would be exposed to him no matter how hard she tried not to be. When he came to visit or to take his daughter out, she would have to make small talk in order to help reassure Abby that this man, her father, was not a monster.
Justin would of necessity be involved in all decisions about Bethany’s own life that might affect Abby. And she would have to discuss her plans for their daughter, report on her progress in school and in her daily life, consult him on any matters relating to Abby’s welfare. They would be irrevocably entwined until Abby was an adult on her own. Even then they would have to
share Abby and Abby’s own family at some holiday celebrations and family events.
Bethany knew she was losing part of her daughter. Almost as frightening was knowing she was losing a part of herself, too: that safe, inviolate space inside her that was walled off from memories. No longer could she bury reminiscences of Justin. They would be with her now in living color, and she tasted fear. The night stretched on, and even when she finally turned down the covers on the old-fashioned four-poster she wasn’t able to sleep.
* * *
JUSTIN SAT AT the table in the breakfast room off the sprawling French country kitchen of his family’s home on St. Charles Avenue. He was alone except for the Sunday paper spread in untidy heaps around his plate.
In Chicago Sunday morning had taken on a ritual quality. Rising later than his weekday 7:00 a.m., he had thrown on weather-appropriate jogging clothes and run the eighteen blocks necessary to buy the sampling of out-of-town papers he always read. With them under one arm, he had jogged another seven blocks to a small restaurant where he ordered coffee with lots of milk in it—a habit from his New Orleans childhood—and a ham omelet. There he had settled down to make his way through the front page of the New York Times. The rest of the day was spent in leisure activities, punctuated by spells of reading the half-dozen newspapers he had purchased.
The pattern had rarely changed. Sometimes he was joined for breakfast by a lovely companion who might spend the rest of the day with him; sometimes he spent the day alone. Always he had taken the time to comb the various papers, looking for a name, a picture; giving the arts section of each paper his special attention. Many times he had told himself that this habit was nothing more than a slightly deranged compulsion. Yet in spite of that assessment he had been unable to stop.
Coincidences did occur. He believed strongly in them. There had been times in his professional life when a name dropped casually, a face seen unexpectedly in a crowd, had made the difference between winning and losing a case. When he had made the decision not to have professionals search for Bethany after she left Tallahassee, a part of him had not given up hope that somehow, somewhere, he would stumble on her again.
The Unmasking Page 6
