by Belva Plain
Connie, from her seat on the chaise longue, observing the change, remarked, “You like yourself. That’s good.”
“I’ve never had things like this before. My mother …” And Melissa stopped.
“Well. Now you know you must always wear lively colors, pretty colors, don’t you?”
“I’m going to wear this tonight. Daddy will like it.”
“I’m sure he will.”
Melissa is my heart, Martin had said.
The girl sat down on the edge of the bed and began to fold sweaters. Connie looked at her, round shouldered and ungainly still, in spite of the improvements. It was absurd that this child should be able to make her feel awkward. Never before, no matter where she had gone with Martin, no matter whom she had met, had she felt the slightest uncertainty or discomfiture. Yet here in this house, in the presence of his child and his earnest, ironic brother, who would surely be as disapproving of Connie as he was of the house itself, she was displaced. She was the outsider.
She was thinking of a way to make a smooth exit when Melissa spoke.
“Are you a special friend of Daddy’s?”
“I’m a friend. I don’t know what you mean by ‘special.’ ”
“Oh, special. A lady who lives here.”
Connie flushed; she had a sense that some unwelcome information might be forthcoming. Nevertheless, she pursued the subject.
“Why, do special friends usually live here?”
“Not always. But Daisy did. She was very pretty. But you’re even prettier, I think.”
The remark, and the girl’s frank look, were absolutely ingenuous. She was too timid, too unworldly, to be malicious, so this then must be the truth.
“So Daisy was a special friend, was she?”
“Oh, yes. When we left Daddy and went to live in Paris, I guess Daddy was lonesome, so Daisy moved in. But then I think he stopped liking her after a while.”
“What makes you think that?” asked Connie, keeping her voice careless, although her heart began to race.
“She didn’t want to go away, but Daddy told her to. I was here and I heard them.”
“I see. He told her to.”
“Yes. I think I’ll take this dress off and go swimming. Want to come?”
“Not just now. Maybe later I will.”
For long minutes Connie stood in the bathroom staring at herself in the mirror. The flush had receded, leaving her face pale and shocked. He told her to go. And holding her hand to her cheek, she contemplated the delicate fingers spread like a fan, the well-kept nails, and the darkly glowing ruby. Had that other woman, called Daisy, also worn a Harry Winston jewel? And had she stood here before the mirror, too, contemplating herself and her future? Had she, too, been “fond” of Martin Berg before she was cast out?
Outside a wind had risen, rattling the royal palms that stood about the lawn. She went to the window to watch them lash and struggle against the coming rain. For a long time she stood, absorbed half by the approaching storm and half by the storm of her own deliberations.
Finally, she fetched her cosmetic carrying case from the closet in the bedroom, took out the birth control pills, and poured them down the toilet.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Midway through the spring the doctor confirmed Connie’s guess.
“You’ll have a December baby,” he said.
Having heard tales of women who, after an abortion, had never again conceived, she was reassured. She thought how ironic it was that, pregnant for the second time in uncertain circumstances, she should now find herself in the opposite position. But it still remained for her to inform Martin, who might very well not be pleased at having fatherhood thrust publicly upon him by his unmarried lover. On the other hand, might not a man nearing fifty be delighted with such a reenactment and confirmation of his youth?
As it turned out, he was neither displeased nor delighted, but rather more astonished than anything else.
“But you were using the pill!” he exclaimed.
“I’m afraid it’s not infallible.”
A disturbing possibility came to her, that he might suggest an abortion. He looked thoughtful, while she endured an ominous silence and studied his face.
He asked then, “When will it be?”
“December.”
Martin nodded. “At least the timing is convenient.”
“The timing?”
“My divorce will be final in thirty days. I found out this morning. That’s why I picked this place for dinner. To celebrate.”
They were at La Grenouille, one of their favorite choices for dining out. She looked past his shoulders at a mass of yellow hyacinths, and beyond them to a family of voluble teenagers with their youthful, handsome parents. A solid family. A young family.
“We can be married over the Memorial Day weekend. We’ll have a seventh- or eighth-month baby.”
She understood. He had his dignified position to maintain. Modern times or no, the world of finance was not the world of the theater or the arts. And she had to ask herself now what he would have said or done if the divorce had not yet come to a final solution, or what would be happening if his desire for her had already waned, as apparently his desire for another—or others—had done.
But those were useless speculations. Those dangers were past.
“You look troubled,” he said.
“I guess I’m still in shock.”
“Well, so was I a moment ago.” He smiled. “But now that I’ve absorbed the shock, it’s really rather nice, you know. Let’s order champagne.”
They toasted each other. Martin became talkative; once he had accepted a reality, he always began to organize projects around it, jumping from one thought to the next.
“We’ll have to move into my apartment. Wait till you see it. It’s spectacular, a whole floor overlooking Fifth Avenue. Of course, it needs to be completely done over. I never liked the way it was done in the first place. Doris wanted her own way, but she knew nothing. And Melissa needs a proper room, no matter how seldom she uses it. Bear in mind a room for my son. Make it suitable for a young man. He may never sleep in it. He’s his mother’s boy, and he probably hates me. But do it, anyway. And guest rooms. I suppose now your sister will want to bring her family sometimes.”
“Perhaps not. She’s a country girl. And they’re so busy building up the business, anyway.”
Pictures flashed as a camera clicks through one view after another: Lara as she must look standing in the doorway of the new white house, standing with Davey in front of the proud facade of the Davis Company, Lara bringing her supper tray on the last night, Lara … The trouble was that the longer one waited to make a healing move, to write a letter or to pick up the telephone, the more difficult it became to do, until finally it became impossible, and one buried the grief at the bottom of one’s mind.
“Well, I’ll be having people fly in now and then. It’s nice, when a man comes in from Australia, not to have to put him up at a hotel.”
Still Connie’s thoughts went wandering. She was acutely conscious of the life that she was nurturing within her. It seemed of a sudden so remarkable that such a thing could be happening to her, so remarkable that she ought to stand up and announce it. And she thought again of what Lara would say if she knew. She thought of Peg. And, strangely, she thought of Richard. For a few fleeting moments a dark melancholy passed through her.
“We’ll have the wedding, a garden wedding at the place in Westchester. It will need a little freshening up, that’s all. Otherwise, it’s in good shape.”
“I wondered why you’ve never shown it to me, or the apartment either.”
“Because I didn’t remember much joy in either one of those places. But now you’ll bring joy. And beauty. And life.”
There were twenty-seven rooms in the apartment. Past piles of furniture draped in sheets Connie followed Martin into a gymnasium, a poolroom, a music room, a restaurant-sized kitchen, and more. The dining-room floor was marble, but the Vi
ctorian chairs were ugly, as was a dark, gigantic painting of men and horses whirling in battle among half-naked women pinned to the ground and ready to be raped. Connie wrinkled her nose in distaste.
Martin laughed. “Yes, it’s awful. Get rid of it. I want you to hire the best decorator in town and give him carte blanche. It’ll take a few million to do this up right, but it’s our home. His home.” He poked her gently in the stomach.
“Or hers.”
“The corner bedroom will be fine for it. The sun’s there for hours.”
“All right. It.”
And Connie felt again the excitement and acute awareness of the growing life. She looked about at the grand rooms. The new life, as yet unknowing, would enter the world in possession of all this, the safety and the grandeur.
The top decorator was an elegant young man with a faintly disdainful manner who moved rapidly through the apartment, approving and discarding, most often the latter. At Connie’s house, to her surprise, the only item that he found worth keeping was the old mirror that Richard had bought on Third Avenue.
“Whoever bought that knew what he was doing,” the man remarked.
Nor was he impressed by the words carte blanche. Carte blanche apparently was, in these lofty neighborhoods, merely to be expected.
“I shall of course be bidding for you myself at the important auctions,” he informed Connie, “but I’ll also keep my eyes open for things you can bid on. You’ll find that auctions are entertaining even when you don’t buy.” And then he cautioned, “Keep to the French. Important houses don’t furnish English.” So vanished Connie’s English country look, of which she had been so proud.
Now began a friendly rivalry between Connie and Eddy, who had long since discovered the lure of the galleries, “Although,” Martin grumbled good-naturedly, “I don’t understand how your brother finds time for such stuff.” And then he added, “I hope he’s on firm ground, Connie. He’s soared like a Roman candle.”
“Don’t worry about Eddy. He’s always known exactly what he’s doing and where he’s going.”
Often the brother and sister went together, seeking treasures. Connie bought a pair of Tang horses, eighth century. Eddy bought a Tiffany desk. She bought a Chinese vase for twelve thousand dollars. He bought a pair of Empire bibliothèque cabinets at forty thousand dollars each. She bought two jewel-studded Fabergé eggs, and he bought a Berthe Morisot painting of children in a garden. She also bought portraits, to be represented as ancestral, and, shamefaced, laughed a little at the intended deception.
“You have to help me with art, Eddy. I have to admit that unless something has a name that everybody recognizes or it’s frightfully expensive, I’m not sure whether it’s great art or not.”
“Great isn’t always what you need,” Eddy said gently. “I’ve learned that. Loving is the thing. Last week I bought for a few dollars a watercolor from a student in the Village. Maybe he’ll be great someday and maybe he won’t. But I don’t necessarily care. I can always buy ‘great’ things, and I do. This was a fine little piece, a cat drinking out of a puddle after the rain. You can tell it has just stopped raining, and it’s hot, because there’s a mist rising from the pavement. The feeling is extraordinary.”
Eddy had always had a sense of rightness. When he sent flowers, he specified what he wanted. Once, long ago, she had watched him buying flowers for their mother’s birthday, scarlet peonies with purple iris; the florist had said they didn’t go together, but Eddy had insisted, and they did go together, very beautifully too.
“You’re spending a fortune,” he said. “Berg doesn’t mind?”
“He told me to.”
The brother and sister stared at each other. “Can you believe what we’re doing? That it’s really us?”
“And that you’re going to be Mrs. Martin Berg?” cried Eddy.
Things changed. From having lived, albeit luxuriously, in the background of Martin’s life as an almost anonymous feminine companion, now Connie was made visible.
Early one morning she accompanied him to his office.
“Wall Street,” Martin said. “Do you know how it got its name? Because it ran inside the wall that the first Dutch settlers built around the city. Hard to imagine that now, isn’t it?”
They entered a long, wide hall leading to a private elevator. At intervals on the walls hung portraits of solemn gentlemen, smooth shaven or bearded, but all white collared, with some wing collared in the fashion of the nineties. The eighteen nineties. And now the nineteen nineties were approaching.
“The founding fathers. Look pompous, don’t they?” Martin remarked with some amusement. “But they were smart old birds. That one’s Frazier.”
“Where’s DeWitt?”
“You’ll meet him. He’s alive and well upstairs. We don’t put pictures up until people die. Come, I’ll show you the ‘bullpen.’ That’s the trading floor.”
Row upon row of desks faced a large electronic board across which numbers flickered in a continuous march. More lights blinked from telephones on the desks, at each of which sat a man with piles of papers in front of him.
“Block trading.” Martin spoke just above a whisper. “Huge blocks for institutions and pension funds. They can move millions of dollars in a couple of minutes. Fascinating, don’t you think so?”
He had a way of making a statement and then asking one to agree with it; she had to tell herself that, really, she had caught on to his ways remarkably fast. She also knew that he expected her to agree that block trading was fascinating, and so, although she thought it more static than fascinating to watch a man sit like a zombie with a telephone stuck in his ear, she agreed.
“When all is said and done, Connie, this is the core of the business. Trading, I mean. Mergers and acquisitions are the big thing these days, of course, and I’m in the midst of them, from Zurich to Tokyo, but I never forget that right here is where I began. Okay, let’s go on to mergers and acquisitions.
“Behind every one of these doors,” Martin continued as they walked through the floor above, “sits some bright young MBA working on a deal that can either earn millions for the firm or go bust. If too many of his deals go bust, he goes too. He’s got to produce, to earn his six hundred thousand a year, let me tell you. These fellows work, and I mean work. Twenty-four hours at a stretch sometimes when they’re near to a closing. Kids,” he said almost affectionately, “and think how they’ve changed the country’s face! Think of the ripple effect of their prosperity! Houses and condos, theater tickets, antiques and boats, restaurants, travel—it’s amazing. Well, here’s my lair.”
The room was modern, neat, and spare. It was utilitarian, with its own electric quote-board at one end. The only decoration was a ficus tree. This was strictly a workroom. It bore no resemblance to Eddy’s plush London club.
She walked to the bank of windows and looked out. She saw the narrow stretch of Manhattan from river to river, saw the harbor, the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and, small in contrast, the Statue of Liberty. Turning from these, her eyes fell upon the moving numbers on the screen; they seemed to be pulsing with a meticulous beat, like a heartbeat, as though they were in command of this body, this city with all its towers, and all its life. And she said so.
Martin smiled. “You speak more truly than you know. Well. Come meet my partner. He’s across the hall.”
Preston DeWitt stood up at his desk when they came in. He was very tall and thin; his well-shaven narrow cheeks were pink, and his lavish white hair sprang crisply on either side of the parting.
Martin, having made the introduction, announced, “I’m playing hookey this noon, Preston. Taking Connie to lunch at ‘21’ in honor of our engagement.”
“Splendid.” The accent was crisp, too, verging on the British, or more accurately, Connie thought, on the speech of Franklin Roosevelt that one heard in documentaries. “And when’s the wedding?”
“Memorial Day weekend in the country,” Martin said.
“You can bet I’ll be there, and so will Caroline if she’s up to it. It’s all just splendid.”
In these few moments Connie and Preston had appraised each other. Of his impression she could know only what she saw in his clever, keen black eyes, so odd in contrast to the fair skin; the eyes were calculating. Most probably he liked what he was seeing, since there was no reason not to like a young blond woman wearing a quiet, elegant beige broadcloth suit. Connie’s own impression was positive: He’s handsome, he’s really startling. His suit looked absolutely starched, as if he never sat down. Martin, on the other hand, was wrinkled an hour after putting on fresh clothes. The two men were the same age, although one would never guess it. Preston seemed fifteen years younger.
“He looks young,” she remarked when they were in the elevator.
“He takes care of himself. Riding, tennis, sailing, everything. He learned all that when he was a kid, he grew up with it. In Brooklyn, where I grew up, I didn’t have a sailboat, or a horse either.”
“What’s the matter with his wife? Is she sick?”
“Only when it’s convenient. She’s never sick when there’s a Social Register function, which our wedding isn’t, so we’ll see. Anyway, she’s a pill, and I don’t blame him for having a roving eye. Oh, how it roves!”
“So you don’t see each other socially.”
“Rarely. But don’t get me wrong, we like each other. I have a lot of respect for Preston. He works hard, and he doesn’t even have to. He inherited this firm, but he’s also got independent wealth from his mother’s family. Mines and lumber for at least three generations. Maybe he’s the fourth, I’m not sure.”
“It’s remarkable that you fit so well together, being so different.”
“Hey, I’ve quadrupled this firm’s assets since I came in! It was purely and simply a brokerage firm, and I’m the one who’s turned it into a powerful investment bank. I’m the one, and Preston knows it.”
