Daisy dearest,
Isn’t it frightful! I’m in such a state of shock at the news. Honestly, I know just how the Minister of Aviation felt when he spoke in the House last week—“never in my wildest dreams or nightmares did I dream it was as bad as all this.” I can imagine how you feel, too—Rolls-Royce in receivership! It simply does not seem possible—only three months ago the government said that they were going to simply pour money into the company—but when they saw the books!! I’ve been wiped out, of course, financial idiot that I am—but I assume that Ram got your money out ages ago. I hate to say it but when he told me to sell I thought he was too young to change Stash’s investments, but it’s no good even thinking that way. Do you know what he put your money into? I detest asking a question like that but, darling Daisy, there’s a reason. Although your father and I never married, I considered myself responsible for Danielle’s upkeep and, from the income of the stock he left me, I’ve been paying her bills since he died. When the stock became worthless I went to see Ram. Daisy, I know what you’re thinking but it was the only possible thing for me to do. I had to tell him … after all, she’s his half-sister too. It was almost impossible to convince him that she existed. And then he refused to do anything! He said that if Stash had never seen fit to bother him with Dani he must not have wanted him to know about her … he even said that as far as he was concerned she simply wasn’t real. She was no responsibility of his. And he’s rolling in money … simply rolling! He categorically rejected contributing a shilling to her school bills. Forgive me for telling him, Daisy, but I was sure he’d help, fool that I was. I should have known how he’d react, but I had to try.
Anyway, I’m going to have to retrench severely. I’m selling Eaton Square and moving permanently to La Marée. With the few investments I still have and the sale of my paintings and the Fabergé animals there should be enough of a nest egg so that I can invest it in something safe and live off it for the rest of my life. Even a modest income would be enough, particularly if some of the friends who used to visit me will want to come and stay as paying guests. Well, darling, next summer I’ll find out.
The problem isn’t what’s to become of me—of course I’ll manage one way or another—but what will happen to Danielle?
The school has sent in their quarterly bill for what amounts to almost five thousand dollars in American money and I find that I simply can’t put my hands on that sum. I just can’t believe it! It’s no more than I used to spend on underclothes without thinking twice. How our vanities catch up with us. But, oh, it was glorious while it lasted. Never forget that.
Now, to business. Can you take over some—in fact most—of the Queen Anne’s bill? I do hope that Ram invested wisely for you? But enough of this. I’ve never thought for so long or written so much about money in my life. It makes me fairly lightheaded—how can people stand to be bankers? And to think that I still must spend a whole afternoon with an estate agent about Eaton Square! I find I don’t mind selling this house as much as I thought I would—the idea of living all year in La Marée is so appealing. You’ll be coming at Easter, of course, my pet, won’t you? Perhaps all the apple trees will be in bloom as they were last year … but that was an early spring.
My dearest love always. Je t’embrasse très fort!
Anabel
Daisy read the letter over three times before it made complete sense to her. She hadn’t bothered to look at a daily newspaper in weeks, and this was the first she had heard of the bankruptcy of the Rolls-Royce Company. Ram had never, in the letters she had read before she started throwing them away, again suggested that she sell her stock, but she had always assumed that she possessed more or less what the stock had been worth right after her father’s death, when it had amounted to roughly ten million dollars.
Daisy realized with wonderment that she had not the faintest idea of where her money was. Even though she had cut off communication with Ram, she had remained in his power financially. What had he said in the letters she had found too distasteful to open?
Daisy went to her desk and wrote Ram a brief note asking for a complete statement of her financial position, and then wrote a much longer letter to Anabel saying how unhappy she was about the changes Anabel was going to have to make in her life, but assuring her that she must not worry about Danielle’s future expenses. From now on, Daisy wrote, she would be responsible for her sister. It was out of the question that Anabel should beggar herself for Dani—her generosity had been already enormous. She’d had no idea where the money for Dani’s bills was coming from or she would have taken them over long ago. And of course she understood why Anabel had told Ram. As for La Marée at Easter, she wouldn’t dream of missing it.
She posted the two letters and rushed off to the playhouse where she was already a little late for a dress rehearsal of Hamlet performed entirely in mime and jazz dancing. All the parts were being played by females, and Elsinore had been relocated to the island of Lesbos.
Daisy felt a persistent uneasiness as she waited for Ram’s reply, but she dismissed it and immersed herself in work. Five days later she received a cablegram.
HAVE WRITTEN THREE TIMES IN LAST YEAR FOR PERMISSION TO SELL YOUR STOCK HAD NO REPLY SO ASSUMED YOU INSISTED ON HOLDING UNFORTUNATELY, COMPANY IS NOW NATIONALIZED STOCK WORTHLESS UNLESS GOVERNMENT REIMBURSES BUT DOUBTFUL SINCE YOU HELD COMMON STOCK NOT PREFERRED HAVE ADVANCED FROM PERSONAL FUNDS MONIES FOR ALL YOUR EXPENSES FOR PAST FOURTEEN MONTHS SINCE ROLLS INCOME NOT SUFFICIENT INTEND TO CONTINUE TO SUPPORT YOU CONSIDER IT APPROPRIATE IN VIEW OF OUR RELATIONSHIP. R.A.M.
Daisy dropped the cable on the floor and ran to the communal bathroom. She felt as if someone had come upon her in her sleep and hit her head with tremendous blows. She reached a toilet stall just in time before she started to vomit. She hugged the chill bowl as if it were the last refuge on earth. After the final dry heaves had stopped she remained kneeling in the bathroom, mercifully empty of students, clutching the friendly porcelain. She felt that there was still an unexpelled mass in the back of her throat, a solid ball of disgust and panic, like some monstrous embryo clinging to her breathing passage as it might cling to a womb. Her aching stomach muscles tried to clench again but failed to dislodge the mass. There was nothing left, not even bile, to throw up. Her sense of life being safe and good had evaporated in the lethal gas of Ram’s message. She felt as if she had fallen far down into one of those dark places, unbearably sad, filled with danger and threat and fear of the unknown, the places she had lived in for so long after her mother had disappeared, after Dani had been taken from her, when her father had died—all the great and sudden losses of her life seemed concentrated again in the news she had just received. All the victories she had won, all her stubborn refusals to be controlled, felt hollow and tawdry now that she knew Ram had been giving her everything she thought she had paid for with her own money. She was in his debt now, God help her, and her stock was worthless. Why hadn’t he simply sold without her permission? As her trustee he could have done so and he must have known what was happening to Rolls-Royce. Was it possible that he had let this happen just to put her where she was now? She would never know, Daisy realized, and it really didn’t matter. She had to manage somehow. With this thought her fighting spirit began to return. She stood up, her flesh and bones so sore that they seemed to be in conflict, and went to one of a row of washbasins to brush her teeth and splash her face with cold water. She met her eyes in the mirror and willed them to be undefeated, and they were. She left the bathroom and went to her room to think.
There were four more months until graduation and the chance to get a job. That meant, Daisy told herself, that she just wouldn’t graduate—she didn’t have the luxury of time. She had one asset and one only, the lapis egg which still sat in its box in the bottom of her chest of drawers, the egg Masha had given to her as she lay dying six years before, the egg Masha said that her father had given her mother when she found out she was pregnant. The time to sell the egg had come—it
would buy at least a year, perhaps a little more, for Danielle.
A job. She knew enough about the theater to know that she stood almost no chance of finding employment except in an experimental playhouse which would pay almost nothing. The only time in the last four years that anyone had mentioned any other form of employment was last fall, when that woman commercial producer, Bootsie somebody, had told her she’d make a good production assistant. Whatever that was, precisely, it had to pay more than the theater. Get the name of the commercial company from Kiki or that nice fat man, Zip Simon, who worked for Mr. Kavanaugh, call what’s-her-name, and ask for a job. What do I have to lose? thought Daisy. The worst they can say is no. And maybe they’ll say yes. Even if they never did say thanks.
13
The catfood people called again,” Arnie Greene, business manager of Frederick Gordon North’s commercial studio, said hopefully.
“And?” North asked.
“This time it’s for six spots, thirty seconds each, big, big budget. Easy to do—no way we couldn’t make lots of very pretty money.”
“How many times have I told you, Arnie? No catfood! There’s no budget big enough to make me shoot that stuff. I can’t stand the way it looks.”
“And what should I tell Weight Watchers? They want us to bid on their new business.”
“You can tell them to stuff it. I saw the story board they’re going with—spaghetti, cheeseburgers and strawberry shortcake in drippingly edible closeups with a voice track saying that if you join Weight Watchers you can enjoy your favorite treats and still break the habit of eating fattening foods—and those sadistic bastards are going to run the spots at night, after dinner, just when fridge orgy time starts. I’m not against it on humanitarian grounds—I think the concept’s basically bad and while I can choose, I choose not to do Weight Watchers.”
Arnie Greene sighed mournfully. He was in charge of all financial transactions at the studio, and he turned down more work than North could possibly turn out without expanding his operation from its present size, but he still hated to send a potential client packing.
“Where’s Daisy?” he asked, looking around the conference room.
“She’s out nailing down the Empire State Building for the Revlon hairspray spot—then she’s through for the week—it’s Friday, remember?” North answered. “Why do you want her?”
“She’s got the bills from the catering service. She took them home last night to check them, said we were being overcharged. Won’t let me pay them until she found out where. Honestly, North, I think she’s paranoid—she always says they’re ripping us off on Jewish fish. I told her we have to give the clients smoked salmon for lunch—they come all the way in from Chicago, they expect smoked salmon. Four years now and she’s still checking the bills.”
“It keeps her off the streets,” North said curtly. It irritated him, for no rational reason, to think that Daisy still had the determination and willingness to spend her free time worrying about bills after the exhausting days she put in on the job … it irritated him almost as much as the weekends she frequently managed to spend in the countryside enclaves of the horsy set Leave it to Bootsie Jacobs to hire a production assistant who turned out to be some kind of White Russian princess with revoltingly classy friends. If she weren’t so fucking good at her work, he’d never have given her Bootsie’s job when it became available. But then, who would have thought Bootsie had it in her to get knocked up? And want to keep the brat? Of course she had been married ten years, so he guessed she was entitled.
“North,” Arnie said, handing over two checks, “sign these please and just don’t bother to look at them.” North signed the two alimony checks grimly. Arnie went through the don’t-bother-to-look-routine every month.
“Can you tell me why I married the two most beautiful models in New York and why they both turned out to be raving neurotics in less than a year and why I have to support them?”
“Why ask me, do I look like a shrink?”
“You look so much like the shrink I went to with the same questions that you could be his brother—probably are for all I know.”
“Well—what’d he say?”
“I didn’t wait around to find out.”
“Why not?”
“He asked too many personal questions.”
“Yeah, that would do it.”
Frederick Gordon North was known simply as North because he wouldn’t permit the use of his first two names, foisted on him by family-proud parents from old and comfortable Connecticut families, and Fred, Freddy, Rick, Ricky, and Gordy had all been ruled out as well. A timid movement at Yale to dub him Flash—which would have suited him best—had only lasted one day. His parents still called him Frederick, but he was North even to his brothers and sisters, who, in any case, only had occasion to use the name at Christmas and Thanksgiving since they were an unclannish family, of which he was the most unclannish member.
He had been a loner almost from birth, and throughout Andover and Yale he had been persuaded to perform only a minimum of the obligatory extracurricular activities. The first thing he ever set his solitary heart on belonging to was the Yale Graduate School of Drama. His goal was clear to him—he wanted to direct: Shakespeare, O’Neill, Ibsen, maybe even a little Tennessee Williams. But he had set his course without understanding his own inner pace. The mounting of a theatrical production takes many months, and North’s viciously concentrated attention span demanded quicker results.
Soon after graduation he met a third-rate veteran commercial cameraman who was willing to try him out as director on a commercial with a budget so low that any profit that could be wrung out of it would have to come from using a nonunion crew and director, all at bargain-basement rates.
That first commercial, a thirty-second local spot for a chain of discount clothing stores, caught North as firmly as if it had been a chance to work with Lord Olivier at the Old Vic. He had found his métier, a medium that throbbed with a beat that matched his pulse, his heart and his inner eye. Now that he knew what he really wanted to do, remorselessly North jettisoned his baggage of the world’s greatest playwrights and headed straight for Madison Avenue where he spent four years learning all the technical ropes at the knee of Steve Elliot, the dean of commercial directors, a violin-playing, bulldozer-driving, Renaissance man who, with his brother Mike, had been among the first commercial directors to get their cherished cameraman’s cards back in the early 1950s. The Elliot brothers had founded Elliot, Unger and Elliot, a firm which later became EUE/Screen Gems, then and now the giant of the commercial-making industry.
At twenty-five, North went out on his own, living for the first six months on money he’d saved, hustling every contact he’d made at EUE, until a few small accounts came his way. By the time he reached the top he was only thirty. When Daisy went to work for him, she was barely nineteen and he was thirty-two, a scratchy, cantankerous, impatient perfectionist of extraordinary talent and equally astonishing charm, which he saved for the rare times he had unavoidable social contact with his most important clients, and the frequent times he had deliberate carnal contact with a long and lovely parade of women, two of whom he had had the bad judgment to marry. He was no more of a joiner in a marriage than he had been when his father had tried to get him to become a Boy Scout, but, fortunately, he had avoided having children, as Arnie Greene frequently reminded him when it came time to sign the alimony checks. “At least there’s no child support, you should knock on wood.”
Daisy, once she was assured that there would be no further problems with Mr. Jones, supervisor of the Deck of the Empire State Building, headed downtown to the SoHo apartment she shared with Kiki.
Something about the arrival of spring had put her in a reminiscent mood that even the subway ride couldn’t modulate. She found it hard to believe that four years had passed since she had left Santa Cruz.
Bootsie Jacobs had answered her letter immediately. They not only needed another production assistant, they w
ere desperate for one. When Daisy found out what the job entailed she realized that their desperation was permanent and well-deserved, since few people lasted more than two months in the incredibly demanding and underpaid job. However, she had had no choice. She was paid one hundred seventy-five dollars a week for the nonunion job at which she worked at least twelve hours a day, but it was enough to live on and still save money for Danielle’s bills, provided that she lived on next to nothing, a style of life she had perfected until it had almost become an art form. Of course, without the thirty thousand dollars that she had received for the lapis lazuli Fabergé egg she could never have met the bills until she developed another source of income aside from her job. Thank God, thought Daisy, for kids on ponies.
She remembered how it had started. Jock Middleton, who had played polo with her father, had received a letter from Anabel asking him to keep an eye on Daisy in New York. He’d invited her out for a weekend with his family in Far Hills, a horse-crazed part of New Jersey which rightfully belongs in the Bluegrass country. Daisy had packed her riding clothes, just in case they had a mount for her, and spent a happy Saturday riding with a flock of Middleton grandchildren. At an elaborate dinner party that night, Mrs. Middleton had introduced her to everyone as Princess Daisy Valensky. On Sunday, when Daisy had made a sketch of the oldest Middleton grandson on his pony, as a thank-you present, she signed it as she had always signed her work, with a simple “Daisy.”
A few weeks later she’d had a letter from Mrs. Middleton. The sketch had been so much admired that she wondered if Princess Daisy would consider doing one of a neighbor’s ten-year-old-daughter, Penny Davis? Mrs. Davis was willing to pay five hundred dollars for a sketch, or six hundred and fifty for a watercolor. Mrs. Middleton made it plain that she was embarrassed to mention money to Prince Stash Valensky’s daughter, but Mrs. Davis had insisted. Mrs. Middleton blushed to make such a commercial proposition, but her neighbor had just not given her a second’s peace. Daisy had only to say no and she wouldn’t be bothered again.
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