“Sometimes I feel like I missed his first few months,” she had told Brad more than once. “I was in such a haze of misery I don’t remember anything.” She had packed up the other baby’s things, and taken the little girl toys out of the room. She’d put everything away in a big box marked “Grace,” and Brad had put it in the attic, because she didn’t want to give it away, didn’t want to forget, wasn’t ready to let go when she did it.
But by the time their anniversary came, she felt like herself again, and she looked it.
“Well, life certainly hasn’t been dull this year.” She smiled. Last year they had known they were having twins, and she’d been pregnant.
“At least you’re not pregnant this year,” he said, but she still hadn’t wanted to go out. She liked staying home with him, and she’d been exhausted for the past few weeks after a difficult case she’d been preparing. He accused her of getting soft when she admitted how tired she was. “Used to be you’d tear me apart in court and then want to go dancing.”
“What can I tell you?” She shrugged with a grin. “I’m two thousand years old.”
“What would that make me?” he mused, and she laughed. She was forty-five, and he was sixty-four, but he still didn’t look it, and he was busier than ever. She felt as though she had aged a lifetime in that year, but he insisted she didn’t look it. It was only lately that she was dragging, but she put it down to the fact that she was still nursing Christian, and working. She had waited so long to have this child that she wanted to savor every moment with him.
Two weeks after their anniversary though, she was still tired, and she had taken on three new cases. One was a difficult adoption case, which interested her, the others involved a lawsuit at a restaurant, and a major squabble over some expensive real estate in Montecito. All three cases were interesting and varied, and the people were extremely demanding.
She talked to Brad about all three of them late one night, and he was concerned about her. She looked wrung out, and in the middle of their conversation she went to nurse the baby.
“Don’t you think you’re wearing yourself out?” he asked as he came into the nursery and sat down. “Maybe you should stop nursing him, or cut back at work or something.” It was rare for Pilar to look so tired.
“I’m using the nursing as birth control.” She smiled, since it wasn’t entirely true. She loved nursing him, and he was thriving. “I’d rather give up work than this,” she said honestly as he watched her. There was a wonderful bond between mother and son that always touched him.
“Maybe you should give up work again, until he’s a little older.”
But she shook her head. “I can’t do that, Brad. It wouldn’t be fair to my partners. I’ve been sitting on my behind for over a year, and now I’m only working mornings.” But she was taking files home, and doing work on a number of other cases.
“Well, you look like you’re working overtime. Maybe you should go see the doctor.”
And finally, in July she did, and told him her symptoms. She reminded him of how old Christian was, and that she was still nursing. There was no question of a pregnancy, unfortunately, since she and Brad had agreed not to do any more heroics, and Dr. Ward had told her that after forty-five it was almost impossible that she’d get pregnant. She’d never had a period again since his birth anyway, which they said was because she was nursing. She wondered sometimes if she’d just slip right from this into menopause, which seemed a little odd, but stranger things happened.
The doctor ran a few simple tests on her, and called her at the office to tell her that she was anemic, probably still from her delivery. He prescribed some iron pills for her, which made Christian complain about her milk, so she stopped taking them and forgot it. He had found nothing more serious, and she felt better in another week, until they went to watch the regatta, and standing beside Brad, she looked up at him with an odd expression, and then fainted.
He was horrified, and she went back to the doctor again, they did more tests, and this time when she got the results, she was shocked into silence. She had never thought it possible, never even dared to dream of having another child, but she was pregnant. The doctor had called her with the news just before she left her office at lunchtime to go home and feed Christian, and he told her that now she would have to stop nursing. He also warned her of the risk of miscarriage at her age, and all the other dangers and pitfalls she knew only too well: Down syndrome, chromosomal defects, a stillbirth, the veritable minefield she had to run at her age in order to produce a healthy baby. And in the end, it was all the luck of the draw … fate … and whether or not you were destined to have this baby.
She stood in the courtroom watching him, as he rapped his gavel to recess for lunch. He was hearing a criminal case and the defendant was led away by the bailiff. Brad was surprised to see her when he looked up, she was standing at the far end of his courtroom.
“You may approach the bench,” he said resoundingly as the courtroom cleared, and she walked slowly toward him. It reminded her of their days together in court so long ago. She had met him nineteen years before, and they had come so far together, and shared so much, tragedies and ecstasies, and precious moments.
“What do you have to say for yourself?” he said sternly, as he looked down at her, and she smiled at him, feeling suddenly young again, and that life was very funny.
“You look cute in your robe,” she said, looking very undignified, and he smiled in answer.
“Want to come visit me in my chambers?” he said, looking very wicked as she laughed.
“I might. But I’ve got something to tell you first.” He just wasn’t going to believe it.
“What is this? A confession? Or a statement?”
“Possibly both … and sort of a joke … and maybe a shock … and in the end a blessing …”
“Oh, God. You cracked up the car, and you’re trying to tell me it was an old wreck anyway and we needed a new one.”
“No, but that’s very creative. I’ll remember that the next time I need it.”
She was suddenly beaming as he watched her, never suspecting for a moment what she would tell him.
“What have you done?” he asked firmly, suddenly wanting to reach down and kiss her. Everyone else was gone, and they were all alone in his courtroom.
“I’m not exactly sure it’s what I’ve done … I think you helped,”
He frowned as he looked at her, confused by what she’d said.
“I think you’ve been watching dirty movies again and you didn’t tell me.” She wagged a finger at him.
He laughed out loud as he looked down at her. “What does that mean?”
“It means, Your Honor … that without heroics, or hormones, or anyone’s help but yours … I’m pregnant.”
“You’re what?” He looked stunned as he stared at her.
“You heard me.”
He came down off the bench and walked down to her, looking at her with a smile, not even sure what he felt or why, or whether or not he wanted to go through it again, and yet in an odd way he was happy.
“I thought we weren’t going to do this again,” he said, looking tenderly at her.
“So did I. Looks like someone else figured it differently.”
“Is that what you want?” he asked gently, he didn’t want her to go through it again if she didn’t want to.
She looked at him long and hard, she had thought about it a lot on the way to meet him in his courtroom. “I guess like everything else in life, as Dr. Ward said … it’s kind of a mixed blessing … but yes … I want to …” She closed her eyes and he kissed her then, and he held her for a long time, thinking that he had always wanted to do that to her, in his courtroom. It had taken nineteen years, but he had finally done it.
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FROM
DANIELLE STEEL
COMING OUT
Olympia Crawford Rubinstein has a way of managing her thriving family with grace and humor.
With twin daughters finishing high school, a son at Dartmouth, and a kindergartener from her second marriage, there seems to be nothing Olympia can’t handle … until one sunny day in May, when she opens an invitation for her daughters to attend the most exclusive coming out ball in New York—and chaos erupts all around her …
From a son’s crisis to a daughter’s heartbreak, from a case of the chickenpox to a political debate raging in her household, Olympia is on the verge of surrender … until a series of startling choices and changes of heart, family and friends turn a night of calamity into an evening of magic. As old wounds are healed, barriers are shattered and new traditions are born, and a debutante ball becomes a catalyst for change, revelation, acceptance, and love.
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COMING OUT
Chapter 1
Olympia Crawford Rubinstein was whizzing around her kitchen on a sunny May morning, in the brownstone she shared with her family on Jane Street in New York, near the old meat-packing district of the West Village. It had long since become a fashionable neighborhood of mostly modern apartment buildings with doormen, and old renovated brownstones. Olympia was fixing lunch for her five-year-old son, Max. The school bus was due to drop him off in a few minutes. He was in kindergarten at Dalton, and Friday was a half day for him. She always took Fridays off to spend them with him. Although Olympia had three older children from her first marriage, Max was Olympia and Harry’s only child.
Olympia and Harry had restored the house six years before, when she was pregnant with Max. Before that, they has lived in her Park Avenue apartment, which she had previously shared with her three children after her divorce. And then Harry joined them. She had met Harry Rubinstein a year after her divorce. And now, she and Harry had been married for thirteen years. They had waited eight years to have Max, and his parents and siblings adored him. He was a loving, funny, happy child.
Olympia was a partner in a booming law practice, specializing in civil rights issues and class action lawsuits. Her favorite cases, and what she specialized in, were those that involved discrimination against or some form of abuse of children. She had made a name for herself in her field. She had gone to law school after her divorce, fifteen years before, and married Harry two years later. He had been one of her law professors at Columbia Law School, and was now a judge on the federal court of appeals. He had recently been considered for a seat on the Supreme Court. In the end, they hadn’t appointed him, but he’d come close, and she and Harry both hoped that the next time a vacancy came up, he would get it.
She and Harry shared all the same beliefs, values, and passions—even though they came from very different background. He came from an Orthodox Jewish home, and both his parents had been Holocaust survivors as children. His mother had gone to Dachau from Munich at ten, and lost her entire family. His father had been one of the few survivors of Auschwitz, and they met in Israel later. They had married as teenagers, moved to London, and from there to the States. Both had lost their entire families, and their only son had become the focus of all their energies, dreams, and hopes. They had worked like slaves all their lives to give him an education, his father as a tailor and his mother as a seamstress, working in the sweatshops of the Lower East Side, and eventually on Seventh Avenue in what was later referred to as the garment district. His father had died just after Harry and Olympia married. Harry’s greatest regret was that his father hadn’t known Max. Harry’s mother, Frieda, was a strong, intelligent, loving woman of seventy-six, who thought her son was a genius, and her grandson a prodigy.
Olympia had converted from her staunch Episcopalian background to Judaism when she married Harry. They attended a Reform synagogue, and Olympia said the prayers for Shabbat every Friday night, and lit the candles, which never failed to touch Harry. There was no doubt in Harry’s mind, or even his mother’s, that Olympia was a fantastic woman, a great mother to all her children, a terrific attorney, and a wonderful wife. Like Olympia, Harry had been married before, but he had no other children. Olympia was turning forty-five in July, and Harry was fifty-three. They were well matched in all ways, though their backgrounds couldn’t have been more different. Even physically, they were an interesting and complementary combination. Her hair was blond, her eyes were blue; he was dark, with dark brown eyes; she was tiny; he was a huge teddy bear of a man, with a quick smile and an easygoing disposition. Olympia was shy and serious, though prone to easy laughter, especially when it was provoked by Harry or her children. She was a remarkably dutiful and loving daughter-in-law to Harry’s mother, Frieda.
Olympia’s background was entirely different from Harry’s. The Crawfords were an illustrious and extremely social New York family, whose blue-blooded ancestors had intermarried with Astors and Vanderbilts for generations. Buildings and academic institutions were named after them, and theirs had been one of the largest “cottages” in Newport, Rhode Island, where they spent the summers. The family fortune had dwindled to next to nothing by the time her parents died when she was in college, and she had been forced to sell the “cottage” and surrounding estate to pay their debts and taxes. Her father had never really worked, and as one of her distant relatives had said after he died, “he had a small fortune, he had made it from a large one,” By the time she cleaned up all their debts and sold their property, there was simply no money, just rivers of blue blood and aristocratic connections. She had just enough left to pay for her education, and put a small nest egg away, which later paid for law school.
She married her college sweetheart, Chauncey Bedham Walker IV, six months after she graduated from Vassar, and he from Princeton. He had been charming, handsome, and fun-loving, the captain of the crew team, an expert horseman, played polo, and when they met, Olympia was understandably dazzled by him. Olympia was head over heels in love with him, and didn’t give a damn about his family’s enormous fortune. She was totally in love with Chauncey, enough so as not to notice that he drank too much, played constantly, had a roving eye, and spent far too much money. He went to work in his family’s investment bank, and did anything he wanted, which eventually included going to work as seldom as possible, spending literally no time with her, and having random affairs with a multitude of women. By the time she knew what was happening, she and Chauncey had three children. Charlie came along two years after they were married, and his identical twin sisters, Virginia and Veronica, three years later. When she and Chauncey split up seven years after they married, Charlie was five, the twins two, and Olympia was twenty-nine years old. As soon as they separated, he quit his job at the bank, and went to live in Newport with his grandmother, the doyenne of Newport and Palm Beach society, and devoted himself to playing polo and chasing women.
A year later Chauncey married Felicia Weatherton, who was the perfect mate for him. They built a house on his grandmother’s estate, which he ultimately inherited, filled her stables with new horses, and had three daughters in four years. A year after Chauncey married Felicia, Olympia married Harry Rubinstein, which Chauncey found not only ridiculous but appalling. He was rendered speechless when their son, Charlie, told him his mother had converted to the Jewish faith. He had been equally shocked earlier when Olympia enrolled in law school, all of which proved to him, as Olympia had figured out long before, that despite the similarity of their ancestry, she and Chauncey had absolutely nothing in common, and never would. As she grew older, the ideas that had seemed normal to her in her youth appalled her. Almost all of Chauncey’s values, or lack of them, were anathema to her.
The fifteen years since their divorce had been years of erratic truce, and occasional minor warfare, usually over money. He supported their three children decently, though not generously. Despite what he had inherited from his family, Chauncey was stingy with his first family, and far more generous with his second wife and their children. To add insult to injury, he had forced Olympia to agree that she would never urge their children to become Jewish. It wasn’t an issue anyway.
She had no intention of doing so. Olympia’s conversion was a private, personal decision between her and Harry. Chauncey was unabashedly anti-Semitic. Harry thought Olympia’s first husband was pompous, arrogant, and useless. Other than the fact that he was her children’s father and she had loved him when she married him, for the past fifteen years, Olympia found it impossible to defend him. Prejudice was Chauncey’s middle name. There was absolutely nothing politically correct about him or Felicia, and Harry loathed him. They represented everything he detested, and he could never understand how Olympia had tolerated him for ten minutes, let alone seven years of marriage. People like Chauncey and Felicia, and the whole hierarchy of Newport society, and all it stood for, were a mystery to Harry. He wanted to know nothing about it, and Olympia’s occasional explanations were wasted on him.
Harry adored Olympia, her three children, and their son, Max. And in some ways, her daughter Veronica seemed more like Harry’s daughter than Chauncey’s. They shared all of the same extremely liberal, socially responsible ideas. Virginia, her twin, was much more of a throwback to their Newport ancestry, and was far more frivolous than her twin sister. Charlie, their older brother, was at Dartmouth, studying theology and threatening to become a minister. Max was a being unto himself, a wise old soul, who his grandmother swore was just like her own father, who had been a rabbi in Germany before being sent to Dachau, where he had helped as many people as he could before he was exterminated along with the rest of her family.
The stories of Frieda’s childhood and lost loved ones always made Olympia weep. Frieda Rubinstein had a number tattooed on the inside of her left wrist, which was a sobering reminder of the childhood the Nazis had stolen from her. Because of it, she had worn long sleeves all her life, and still did. Olympia frequently bought beautiful silk blouses and long-sleeved sweaters for her. There was a powerful bond of love and respect between the two women, which continued to deepen over the years.
Mixed Blessings Page 35
