Honora stroked the wet blond hair. “Crystal, darling, what are you saying?”
“I know, I know. But how can my beautiful boy be dead when I love him so?”
“Hush.”
“Curt tried to save Alexander . . . .”
“Of course he did,” Honora soothed.
“Is he all right?”
“The doctors don’t know. It could go either way. But he’s so weak, he looks as if any minute he could . . . Crys, I am such a coward, I can’t even say the word.”
They wound their arms around each other, pulling as close as they had when, in another decade on another continent, they had once before gasped out their terror and heartbreak in the face of death.
* * *
Gid fulfilled his promise, having Honora back in the ICU waiting room before her next visiting time.
Curt’s drug-hazed eyes remained open for the entire five minutes and this seemed an improvement. One of the thoracic surgery team—a red-bearded younger man whom she had not met before—came in to examine the dressing on Curt’s chest, and when she mentioned the positive omen, he warned her it was far too soon to draw conclusions.
* * *
The next visit Curt was delirious, mumbling unintelligibly. His legs and arms twitched and he would have flung himself around on the taut, sweatdamp sheet if it hadn’t been for the restraining straps on his legs and arms. Joscelyn, who had accompanied her sister (TWO FAMILY MEMBERS) stood in the corner, covering her face, unable to look, but Honora bent over the bed, murmuring encouragingly as if her husband could comprehend what she said.
The next visiting hour he was weak but lucid.
72
The electric bed was adjusted to tilt up Honora’s hips.
Although this July morning was torrid and muggy in Washington, the air conditioning kept the Talbott’s Georgetown house pleasantly cool, and she wore a silky bedjacket over her nightgown. She lay holding the latest New Yorker, but her attention had wandered from the short story, first to her omnipresent worries about Curt and then to her luck at being in this comfortable, well-managed house. Crystal, leaving Washington with Alexander’s body, had been maddened with grief, incapable of coherent thought, so it was Gid who had suggested to Honora that she stay here rather than the hotel.
Just as well I took him up on his offer, Honora thought, nibbling another graham cracker to quiet her uneasy stomach.
Unbelievably, incredibly, she was pregnant!
After all these years, at her advanced age, having a baby.
Ten days ago, when the urologist whom she had consulted about her symptoms—a pressure on her bladder and a vague but persistent nausea—had referred her to a gynecologist, she had decided that he was shunting a patient suffering from the psychosomatic symptoms of stress onto another medical man. But the tests had proved her condition. The gynecologist had immediately ordered her to bed with her pelvis elevated so that the pull of gravity didn’t force the baby out before its term.
In this position she would find herself thinking: Another chance, another chance, and laugh out loud. Today, though, her exultation was dimmed by her frantic urge to be at the George Washington University Hospital.
Curt was having another of his fevers.
His tiptop physical condition plus the indomitable strength of his will had resulted in a rapid initial recuperation. Less than three weeks after the shooting he was walking around the floor, vigorously, without any hint of a convalescent shuffle. Then, suddenly and inexplicably, his temperature had shot up to 105. He was pinned to his bed, shivering violently while nurses wrapped him in wet sheets. The baffling fever. It had recurred less violently five times. His team of doctors had pronounced that setbacks had to be anticipated after crucial, delicate thoracic surgery, but when they shook Honora’s hand they would hold it a moment too long, subtle proof that they, too, were worried about this immensely rich patient whose medical bulletins went out on Associated Press.
Honora set down the magazine, sighing. Were Curt’s relapses somehow connected to the rotten state of affairs at Ivory? Although officers of other multinational corporations now were being roasted in the Morrell Subcommittee’s hot seat (the country was gasping over bribes so large that the cash had to be shipped in wooden crates), and although admiration for Curt’s act of heroism had been voiced everywhere, several clients had tried to weasel out of existing contracts with Ivory. Worse, there had been no new jobs. Joscelyn and the other Ivory vice presidents flew constantly around the globe, cementing relationships and promoting goodwill, so far without results. Were these rejections weighing on Curt’s subconscious, hampering his recovery?
The door opened and Lissie stood there. She and Vi had been in Washington since the day after the shooting, their presence a soothing comfort to Honora.
“Mommy,” the child said, and instead of coming to sit on the bed as she usually did, she hung back in the doorway. “There’s a lady here to see you.”
“Ask one of the maids or Vi to talk to her,” Honora sighed.
“Vi’s out getting her hair done. The lady says she’s my aunt. She’s very beautiful—”
“Honora?” It was Crystal’s high, pretty voice. A moment later she brushed past Lissie into the room.
The sisters had not been together since this room had been strewn with mutilated clothing, and now Honora examined Crystal with that awful morning in mind, noting that her magnificently cut black silk blouse and skirt hung too loosely, faint shadows showed under her eyes, the hollows below her cheeks made the bones seem more pronounced, and her impeccably set hair was somehow softer in color—yes, a few random, pearly white strands showed near the roots. But what Honora found most alarming was Crystal’s expression of uncertainty as she glanced around the room. The antithesis of the youthful Crystal who had radiated purposeful assurance.
Then Crystal smiled. “So it’s true,” she said. “When Joscelyn told me, my mouth dropped open. I told her flat out that I didn’t believe her.”
Honora beamed back. “What sane person would?”
“It’s a total miracle.”
“Oh, I’m not all that unique. My doctor says he’s safely delivered several crones older than me.” Honora beckoned to Lissie, and the child came over to stand shyly by the bed. “Lissie, darling,” she said. “This is your Auntie Crystal.”
The child signed, “Alexander’s mother?”
Honora nodded.
Lissie swallowed several times, clasping her arms around herself. “Aunt Crystal,” she said aloud. “I was very sad about Alexander. We had fun together in Morocco.”
Honora put her arm around the child’s shoulders, a hug of loving approbation. How rare it was nowadays for Lissie to communicate orally with anyone but Vi and her parents—and this included Joscelyn.
It took Crystal several moments to comprehend Lissie’s speech. The lovely features worked and for a moment Honora worried that her sister might once again break down into those awful sobs of maddened grief. But Crystal said slowly and loudly, “Thank you, dear. I had fun with him, too.”
“What brings you to Washington?” Honora asked. “Do you have business here?”
“No, Gid’s been taking that off my hands.” Crystal did not elaborate further on her presence during the city’s least pleasant season.
“Having you here’s a terrific break for me. I’m stuck like this—not that I’m complaining. But Crystal, this is your house. Stop acting like a visitor—sit down.”
Crystal remained at the foot of the bed. “Honora, there’s something I’d dearly love to do while I’m in town, if it’s all right with you. May I visit Curt?”
“Curt? He has a fever right now.”
“I haven’t thanked him yet for trying to save Alexander,” Crystal said, turning to watch the shadows of lilac branches move on the walls. “But I can understand that you don’t want me seeing him.”
Her embarrassment and faint expression of culpability made Honora realize that Crystal was beggin
g permission to visit Curt not because she, as wife, was custodian of his physical condition but because he had fathered Alexander. Honora’s sympathy dimmed. Even now, with her nephew dead, she could not stifle a nasty, carping quiver of jealousy.
Lissie had been watching them closely, trying to follow the conversation.
“Lissie,” Honora said aloud, giving the little girl another hug before signing, “will you ask the cook to send up some iced tea and lemonade for all of us, and some of those little spritz cookies?”
As the child left, Crystal said, “She’s exquisite.”
“The black hair’s like Malcolm—he was quite the gorgeous man—but except for that, Crys, she’s the image of you.”
“She is?”
“Don’t you see it? The chin, the nose, the mouth, the color of her eyes.”
Crystal looked blank. She was gripping the footboard as if she were lost in a fog and desperate to hang on to something.
The compassion Honora felt for her sister was physical, as if a hand had reached into her chest and were roughly squeezing her heart. She touched the bed’s control, the mechanism whirred and her head raised a few inches. “Crys,” she said softly, “of course it’s all right with me if you go to the hospital. But Curt does have a fever.” She sighed. “He keeps getting them.”
“From the shooting?”
“There’s no other explanation. He never had fevers before.”
“That awful, awful Lalarheini murderer!” Crystal burst out.
Though the so-called “Capitol Murder” remained unsolved, and the identity of the self-slain killer unknown, Crystal had high-up friends in the CIA who were convinced that the assassin had been a disciple of Khalid’s. To fortify this belief they pointed out to her that Harold Fish had disappeared on the same day, and despite many weeks of an intensive search, had not been found. It seemed only reasonable to believe that one of Khalid’s faithful had given his life to protect his prince’s reputation.
“Crys, before you came in I was going to call the hospital to see how he was.” Honora reached for the telephone on the bed table. “Let me see if he’s up to company.”
The male nurse answered, telling her that Mr. Ivory was in the bathroom, his temp was down to a hundred and he was looking forward to seeing Lissie and Vi this afternoon.
During the brief conversation, Crystal was whispering, “I’ll only be there a minute, just long enough to thank him.”
“Tell Mr. Ivory he’ll have another visitor,” Honora said into the instrument. “My sister’ll be by before lunch.”
* * *
As Crystal walked along the recently mopped linoleum of the hospital corridor, she was wishing with all her heart that Alexander were at her side to tell her how to express her gratitude to Curt. That her son had loathed Curt and would have used his best persuasions (and oh, how clever he had been) to prevent her from rendering any such admission was beside the point: Alexander’s death had destroyed her inner compass, the part of her which had unerringly pointed toward the attainment of her pragmatic goals. And not only did she have the same indecisiveness that had temporarily plagued her after Gideon’s death, but at times she could scarcely function on a physical level. There were days when swallowing food was an impossibility, nights when she slept less than an hour. When she was with people, even Mitchell or Anina, her mind would start to flutter around and then go blank so that she lost the threads of contact. She no longer knew how to behave.
A man with spindly white shanks showing below his bathrobe was glancing at her. She moved more swiftly toward 407. That was the number Honora had given her—or was it? She fumbled in her purse for the slip of paper. Yes, 407.
She pushed open the heavy door.
She had expected to see Curt ill, drained, vanquished, with nurses hovering around him. Instead he was alone, sitting up in the high-propped bed, wearing horn-rim glasses and writing on a set of specifications with his ballpoint pen.
Who was Curt Ivory, her lifelong enemy, to be alive and working prosaically while her beautiful young Alexander lay in a massive bronze coffin beneath the cold, damp earth of San Francisco? A great wave of fury gathered inside her, rising and crashing down, inundating every trace of her gratitude.
“Crystal,” he said.
At his old, faintly caustic smile, her heart raced with anger and she had to fight her urges to howl, to rip down the hundreds of get-well cards and telegrams Scotch-taped to the walls, to smash the gift books from the bureau, to hurl down the massed plants and floral arrangements.
“Honora told me you had a high fever and were very ill,” she snapped in an accusatory tone.
“Recovering slowly is a better way of putting it. How is my wife? A great pair we are, both of us in hospital beds.” Taking off his glasses and folding them, he said with a youthful grin, “A baby, how about that?”
“She looked fine,” Crystal said.
His eager happiness changed to concern. “There’s nothing wrong they’re not telling me, is there?”
“It’s extremely critical for a woman her age to have a baby,” Crystal snapped. “Our mother wasn’t nearly as old, and she died having Joscelyn.”
“Look, Crystal, if you came here for warfare, you’ve won. I’m all out of nuclear devices.”
“She’s my sister,” Crystal said coldly. “I’m worried about her.”
“I know all the dangers, but there’s no point even thinking about them. Honora’s absolutely set on having this baby.”
He lay back in the pillows. Though he now looked satisfactorily haggard, her fury was unassuagable.
She took several convulsive breaths. Why was she in this hospital room with her bitter rival? Oh, yes. “I came to Washington to thank you for trying to save Alexander,” she said in a clenched voice.
“I’d like to take credit,” he said. “But it was pure instinct. I saw a Smith and Wesson aimed and I reacted. A reflex action.”
“And you’d have done the same if the gun had been pointed at somebody else?”
He squinted at her in an oblique way, as if a space of darkness lay between them. Was he peering down the tunnel of years to that long ago night in San Rafael, or was he recollecting the insults he had shouted over the phone when she had admitted Alexander was his child?
“I’ve told you the truth unvarnished. I simply responded. There was a gun. I tried to shove the victim out of range.”
“So what you’re saying is you’d have done the same for a streetcleaner?” Why was she so impelled to prod out of Curt Ivory what Alexander never had managed to get, a confession of paternal attachment?
“Crystal,” he said in a low, weary voice, “for years now I’ve tried to figure out what I felt for Alexander.”
“What a rotten thing to say!” she cried. “He was the most wonderful son in the world.”
“I’m feeling pretty punk. We’ll talk about it some other time, okay?”
Crystal ignored the plea. Her words tumbled out over the edge of hysteria. “It’s your loss you never got to know him. There’s no guarantee that Honora can have this baby and you’ve got no other children.”
“Lissie’s my daughter,” Curt whispered, turning his head away. “Crystal, would you step into the hall? There should be a guy out there reading Track and Field. He’s my nurse. Tell him I need him, will you?”
“Alexander went to Morocco to find you, and you rejected him.” Her voice rose to a scream. “How could you have ignored your only son? You bastard, you unspeakable bastard!”
Her heart was pounding at an alarming speed. Her chest, legs and stomach—every part of her—throbbed with the banging beat of her pulses. The need to destroy that had come over her on the night of Alexander’s death was with her again. She darted to the nearest wall and yanked down a handful of cards.
Abruptly her fury drained. Once again she felt herself drowning in that icy, hideous sea where she was utterly alone, cut off from the rest of humanity. Falling on one of the couches, she broke
into desolate sobs. She did not hear Curt get out of bed.
“Don’t, Crystal, don’t, honey.” He sat next to her, his hand moving lightly on her bent head.
“That’s . . . why he . . . got this hearing going . . . .” she sobbed. “I warned him . . . but he wanted to pay you back . . . for ignoring him . . . .”
“I wondered why he started it.” There was no reproach in Curt’s voice, only a heavy sadness.
“How am I going to live without him, Curt? How am I going to live?”
“You Sylvander girls are very strong—believe me, I know.” He continued stroking her hair.
“There’s nothing left for me . . . nothing.”
“You have another son, a grandson.”
“They’re not . . . Alexander . . . .”
“Christ, Crystal, how sorry I feel for both of us.”
Her eyes brimming with tears, she looked questioningly at him.
Frowning in bemusement, he said slowly, “Know something, Crystal? Until this moment I never realized how much I wish I could’ve saved him.”
“Before, you said it was a reflex action.”
“But it wasn’t.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“I have no past. He was my future. My son . . . .” Curt’s eyes closed and his face was a mask of misery.
She put her arm around his shoulders. They pressed their cheeks together for a long, mourning moment, and she could feel the heat of his fever.
“I’ve been running and hiding from the truth of just how much he meant to me ever since I found out about him,” Curt whispered. “Honora left me because of him, and I wanted no part of him. But there it was, Crystal. When the chips were down I wanted to save his life.”
“Things get buried very deep inside.”
“Exactly. Do you believe me when I say if it were possible I’d swap places with him right now?”
“I believe you,” she said gently. “It’s exactly the way I feel.”
“You said you came here to thank me, but there’s no reason that you should. I was his father.”
Too Much Too Soon Page 53
