For Miranda, like so many beautiful and successful women before her, there was only one mountain left to scale before she could feel she had truly made it in Manhattan: the social one. Britain has its royalty; America has its very, very rich. Those who sit on the museum boards, who head the charity drives, who attend the ballet benefits. Although at first glance it would seem that this wealthy world was open to whoever could meet the price of admission, Miranda had learned painfully fast that this was simply not so.
“Can you imagine?” she’d overheard one social matron whisper to another in the ladies’ room after a committee meeting for the Metropolitan Opera fund-raiser Miranda had attended when she had first tried breaking into New York society. “That Darin woman wanting to televise the performance? How tacky can you get? The whole point of a benefit is that you can be assured the slavering masses are kept at bay.”
Yes, in the beginning, Miranda had made her share of mistakes. She’d tried too hard. Pushed a little too much. Volunteered too often for too many things. She learned that beauty, intelligence, money, and fame alone weren’t enough to help her squeeze into that tight little world. It took time. And patience. Astor, Vanderbilt, Harriman, Rockefeller, Whitney; these were names that had been in the upper echelons of the social register for generations. That Miranda Darin had climbed as far as she had in the past two decades was something of a minor miracle. That she had launched herself so successfully without the help of her financially brilliant yet socially backward husband was a subject of much respectful discussion among those who cared about such matters.
“I’ve never met him myself,” Lucinda Phipps confided to Marisa Newtown on the phone the morning of the Darins’ party. “Although I’ve been told he’s quite gorgeous in a badly groomed sort of way. Poor Miranda—she’s always so perfect.”
“Well, I did run into him once,” Marisa said, “when he was picking little Heather up from Dalton. My Laurel’s in her class, and when I heard Heather say ‘Hi, Daddy!’ I just barged right over to his car and introduced myself as one of Miranda’s dearest friends.”
“And?” Lucinda demanded. “What was he like?”
Marisa inhaled deeply and sighed, letting the suspense mount “He rolled up his window without saying a single word.”
“No!” Lucinda said. “How horrible. Poor, poor Miranda. No wonder she goes everywhere with Vance Magnus … not that that’s such a hardship in my opinion.”
“Mine either,” Marisa agreed. “We should both be so lucky to have Magnus for an escort. Though, I have to admit, Lucinda, that there was something very attractive about that awful man Miranda married. In a dark and dangerous kind of way.”
“Oh, do point him out to me tonight,” Lucinda said. “If he’s there.”
At that moment, in an airport waiting room in Baltimore, the question of who was—and wasn’t—going to attend Miranda’s party was also very much on Cassie’s mind. A freak early spring snowstorm had stalled air traffic up and down the East Coast, and Cassie had spent the night in the airport waiting room after her connecting flight from Raleigh to New York had been canceled. Her neck ached, her eyes burned from lack of sleep, the new rayon suit she had bought especially for the plane trip was wrinkled, and her breath tasted sour. For the fourth time in the last hour she tried to phone Miranda’s house; each time she got a busy signal. This time, finally, the call went through.
“Who is it?” a girlish, breathy voice answered. Cassie was quick to note the lack of a welcoming “Hello.” If she had answered the phone like that when she was a girl, she would have been grounded for a week.
“It’s your aunt Cassie, Heather,” she replied. “Is your mom there? I need to talk to her.”
“I’m waiting for an important call,” Heather replied. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to keep the line free. Call back in half an hour.”
“No—wait—Heather!” Cassie cried, but the phone went dead. Cassie slumped against the phone booth and closed her eyes tight to keep the tears back. Ridiculous of her to feel like crying. But she felt so tired … and disappointed. Even if she got to New York in time, she would arrive looking like the rumpled backward country mouse Miranda assumed—and Cassie secretly feared—she really was.
Damn, she should have listened to Kenneth’s advice. Sensible as always, he had counseled: “Why not go sometime when it’s convenient for you, Cass? It seems to me you’re just accommodating Miranda’s whim to have you there—on mighty short notice—and throwing our own plans to the wind. You know how much my parents were looking forward to meeting you…”
Cassie made her way back to the row of hard plastic molded chairs and sat down. No, she hadn’t listened to Kenneth. She had hardly even taken his words into consideration. Because, ever since her sister’s call, she had been consumed with the question of why she had been asked to make a command appearance at Miranda’s. Cassie knew enough about her sister to know that nothing she ever did was motivated by what Kenneth called “whim.” Miranda calculated pros and cons and put into action only that which she considered most effective. Miranda had never, as far as Cassie remembered, done anything on impulse. Or just out of curiosity. That was Cassie’s style. And, present case in point, it was a tendency that more often than not got her into trouble. Unlike Miranda, she just wasn’t one to think a thing through.
For far too long now, Cassie realized, she had been drifting. Moving from thing to thing, following the course of least resistance. Even her relationship with Kenneth was something easier to continue than to end. He professed his love … and she accepted it. Her lack of focus and direction spilled over into her work as well.
“The trouble with you, Cassie,” her assistant city editor had told her recently when she had been passed over for a story she’d really wanted, “is that you just kind of waffle around on important assignments. You skirt the crux of the story … albeit you always come up with plenty of color. This story about the new zoning laws—we really need someone who’s going to go in there and dig.” No, she knew that her ACE—as the assistant editors were called—was right. The reporters who got ahead were those who went after stories like bloodhounds on a scent. Cassie tended to collect too many unrelated facts, to research everyone’s side of a particular story, to end up with pieces that were long on narrative … and short on plot.
Cassie yawned, stretched, and closed her eyes. Exhaustion lulled her. She felt herself floating on a bright, busy river. She heard people chatting vaguely to her right and left, the sound of newspapers crackling, the noise of a loudspeaker reverberating: “Flight 127 to La Guardia now boarding at gate number…”
With an effort, she woke, fished around for her dog-eared boarding pass, and shuffled with the others onto the newly de-iced plane. It took less than an hour before they landed in New York … and another two hours before Cassie was finally forced to face the fact that her luggage had not made the trip with her.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” a haggard lost-and-found clerk reported “Your bag seems to have gotten rerouted to Denver. Fill this form out, and we’ll deliver it to wherever you’re staying in New York no later than Sunday night.”
“Great,” Cassie said, “just in time for my return flight home.” She found a ladies’ room and did what she could to wash up, using liquid soap and the hot air blower. The once crisp and well-tailored slate-gray suit that she had been so thrilled to find on sale now looked tired and cheaply made. Cassie, who tended to dress in turtlenecks and jeans and other throwbacks to the sixties, had thought when she bought it that the suit gave her a serious, professional aura. In the harsh bathroom light she could see what she hadn’t noticed at the department store: the fabric made her complexion look sallow, and the lipstick she applied to counter her paleness was far too bright. When she leaned over to adjust her hem, Cassie’s wristwatch snagged in her panty hose. A half-inch-wide run spread from midcalf to waist as she straightened up again.
She bought another pair of panty hose at a conces
sion in the airport and, as she waited in the taxi line, tried to figure out how she was going to get them on before reaching Miranda’s house. It was already nearly four-thirty in the afternoon, and the party would start at five. She contemplated a return to the ladies’ room until she saw the long line that had formed behind her at the taxi stand.
And so Cassie arrived at one of the more glittering cocktail parties of the Manhattan Easter weekend late, poorly dressed, seriously tired, and with a decided limp. As she climbed the curved marble steps to the Darins’ ornately decorated wrought-iron front door, she practiced turning her leg with the snagged stocking in and away from view.
Before she could ring the bell, the huge door silently swung open. A man, dressed in white tie but with the slightly sardonic attitude of a head waiter, eyed her critically. On closer inspection, Cassie saw that the man’s tuxedo fit poorly, bunching at the waist, too short at the cuffs. Obviously rented.
“Yes?” he demanded, as though he already knew she didn’t belong. Cassie could hear the tinkle of glasses, a murmuring sea of conversation in the background. If she’d had any other place to go, she would have turned and fled at that very moment.
“I was invited,” Cassie told him weakly. “I’m a guest. For the weekend. All my things went to Denver. Rerouted. Oh, damn,” she muttered as she heard the sound of approaching laughter.
“Don’t hold the door open, for heaven’s sake.” Cassie heard Miranda’s distinctive voice. “It’s freezing. Who is it anyway?”
“I’ll take care of it,” the man said. “You, come here,” he added, grasping Cassie’s right arm. “This way.” She saw a blur of beautifully dressed people, cream-colored enameled walls, chintz-covered furniture. She stumbled a little as he pulled her up curving back stairs, an aroma of expensive hors d’oeuvres drifting up from below. She followed him down plushly carpeted halls scented with furniture wax and freshly cut flowers. He switched on a light, and the loveliest bedroom Cassie had ever seen was flooded with a soft peach-tinted glow. Miranda, or her interior designer, was clearly mad about chintz: a Clarence House pattern covered the walls and the magnificent nineteenth-century mahogany four-poster. A dozen or so antique white lace pillows had been arranged on the bed with artful grace. A pair of English decoupage lamps on small yet ornately carved night tables flanked the bed. Only the white enameled ceiling, wainscoting, and pale cream-colored carpet offset the lush feminine patterns of the room.
“How beautiful!” Cassie said. Her own bedroom was comprised of a double mattress covered with a plaid cotton comforter and a desk made of two filing cabinets bridged by a battered oak door. Cassie had been very proud of the handmade desk. Her portable computer fit very snugly into an inlay of the old oak plank.
“Here.” The man opened a door at the far end of the room. “Take what you need,” he said, leaving the door ajar and walking back toward Cassie. He looked at her again with the same ironic smile as when he first saw her and added, “You’re about her size. Borrow whatever you like.”
Cassie walked across the room and stared into the small chamber. It was a dressing room, chintz-covered, of course, in a light pink geranium pattern. A plush crimson-covered day bed took up the far corner; the rest of the room was filled with rack after rack, shelf after shelf of dresses, skirts, sweaters, pants, shoes, hats, scarves—a full boutique of designer clothes.
“Are you sure she won’t mind?” Cassie called back to the man who had shown her upstairs, but he was gone.
Miranda must have told him to bring her here, Cassie assured herself. No doubt Miranda had explained to the butler or waiter or whatever he was that her sister was expected to arrive late and that he should show her up to Miranda’s room and tell her to make herself feel at home. Cassie kicked off her shoes and flopped back on the chintz-covered bed with a sigh. Did she really dare do what the man had suggested? She looked down at her gray ruin of a suit … and recalled the expensive clothes of the guests below.
She smiled as she stepped out of her bedraggled skirt. “I just didn’t want to embarrass you,” Cassie would tell Miranda later, “in front of all your important friends.” Then, feeling surprisingly happy and confident, Cassie walked barefoot into the famous Miranda Darin’s dressing room … and started to try on her sister’s things.
Three
It wasn’t as if Cassie hadn’t been to some pretty fancy parties before: big weddings, proms, the Christmas bash the paper threw at the country club every year. It’s just that no one there rubbed elbows with Morley Safer. Or sipped champagne next to Beverly Sills. Or accidentally jabbed a high heel into one of Senator Anthony Haas’s Italian-leather-covered toes.
“Oh, sorry,” Cassie said as the Senator turned to see with whom his foot had collided. It was him, in the flesh, Cassie realized, the man who had personified for her parents all the deepest values of the liberal ideology. He was a little shorter than his photos suggested, his face flushed and somewhat puffy. But his blue eyes had the same aggressive expression that Cassie remembered from television debates and magazine interviews. His beautifully tailored Savile Row suit could not disguise his burly working-class physique. He must be in his early sixties now, Cassie thought, as she felt his eyes on her. His sand-colored hair was thinning, exposing a broad powerful brow. His chin and neckline were starting to soften. But Cassie could still feel the famous charisma emanating from the older man. This almost sexual thrall had motivated her parents and hundreds of thousands like them in the sixties to march, to protest, to stand up for what they believed in.
“Miranda—no,” the Senator replied somewhat thickly, frowning and looking Cassie over more closely. “But you must be related somehow, yes?” He held out his hand in welcome.
“I’m her sister,” Cassie answered, grasping his hand. “Her half sister, really. My parents were tremendous admirers of yours, Senator.” How thrilled they would have been to know that Cassie had met this man, to realize that Miranda actually knew him personally! For the first time since being invited, Cassie felt grateful that she’d accepted Miranda’s invitation.
“Where is that lovely woman, anyway?” the Senator replied, looking around the crowded living room. “I haven’t seen her since I got here…”
“I haven’t either, actually,” Cassie began before she realized that someone else had grabbed the Senator’s attention. He was bending down, cupping his hand against his ear, listening to what an older woman in a wheelchair was saying. The woman was dressed in a dark blue sequined evening dress, and ropes of pearls circled her neck. Cassie could tell by the way the Senator treated her that she was someone special. But after the Senator turned away, Cassie once again felt lost. Stepping carefully, she continued to drift through the noisy crowd, searching for Miranda, a small smile fixed firmly in place.
People nodded and smiled back. Obviously she looked familiar to them. The fact that Senator Haas had nearly had mistook her for Miranda secretly thrilled her. Thank God, she told herself, she had had the sense to change into Miranda’s things. Dressed in a powder-blue tailored Yves St. Laurent dress with an intricately patterned Hermes scarf draped around her shoulders, Cassie felt slim and pretty. She even fit into Miranda’s shoes, choosing an elegant pair of low-slung suede Bottega Veneto pumps. Cassie had drawn the line at trying on Miranda’s jewelry, though she had peeked into the antique Japanese chest where her collection was stored. Each cherry-wood drawer contained a small glittering bounty: in one, a nest of gold loop earrings in various sizes and styles; in another, the interweaving strands of a black pearl necklace; still another contained nothing but a small dark blue box. Cassie had opened it to find a flawless octagonal sapphire flanked by tiny diamonds set on a platinum band. The ring alone was undoubtedly worth more than what Cassie earned in a year.
Money … Miranda’s town house literally smelled of it: the unmistakable scents of Patou and Chanel, the rich mustiness of carefully aged tobacco, the almost sticky sweetness of freshly cut hyacinths arranged in an
antique pewter urn at the foot of the stairs. Two of the several downstairs fireplaces were lit—one in the living room, the other in the crimson-walled library—adding a pungent layer of wood smoke to the other mingled aromas.
“Yes, you look much better,” said a vaguely familiar voice at Cassie’s side. She turned to find the man who had first let her into the house and shown her up to Miranda’s room. He held out a glass of champagne.
“Thanks,” she said, taking the crystal flute in both hands and smiling at him. He smiled back, and for the first time Cassie registered the fact that he was quite handsome. He was slightly taller than her with coal-black hair, in some need of cutting, combed back from his forehead. His skin had the hardened cast of a construction worker—someone who spent most of his time outdoors, who worked with his hands. But for all that, his eyes were a keen, observant golden-brown, and his smile had a knowing intelligence to it. Cassie decided that he was probably an actor, supplementing a difficult stage career with his catering job.
“Are you having a good time?” he asked. His voice was deep and rough, as though he used it sparingly.
“Well, it’s a little difficult since I don’t know anybody,” Cassie replied. “Though I managed to introduce myself to Senator Haas over there by trampling on his toes.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” the waiter said with a laugh. “He’s too far gone to feel much of anything.”
“You mean…” Cassie stared across the room at the famous politician. “He’s drunk?”
“Nothing that vulgar,” the man explained. “I’d say he’s about as meticulously inebriated as he is well dressed. Mind you, he takes great care never to stumble or slur his words. But he’s actually blitzed, been drinking vodka since breakfast.”
“How would you know?” Cassie asked, unhappy with the news that her parents’ idol had feet of clay. She didn’t like the waiter’s sarcastic tone, yet when she looked again across the room at Senator Haas she could now see the truth in what the man had said: the Senator’s gaze was unfocused, his smile slow and a little dazed. And, Cassie remembered sadly, he’d mistaken her for Miranda.
Heart and Soul Page 2
