A Ruling Passion

by Judith Michael

  such a short time, she must be remarkable. I'll have to watch her sometime."

  "It was all donations," Sybille said. "Seven million dollars so far, and we'll have the rest soon. Of course she's remarkable, even though Nick doesn't think so. He canceled her show."

  "Not your style?" Carlton asked Nick.

  "It isn't what I have in mind for our network," Nick replied briefly.

  "What did you have in mind?" Valerie asked.

  "Something tougher and more interesting. At least that's what we're trying to do. We won't appeal to everybody, but we'd rather do what we think we can do best, and what we don't do best are programs full of easy explanations. We'll have a lot of entertainment, a lot of history, a fair bit of science, book reviews, and some different kinds of news programs that, I hope, have more integrity than our competition."

  "But not religion," Valerie said.

  "Our own." He smiled. "We'll pray we make it against all the competition. But that's all. There are plenty of stations offering preachers for just about any belief you can think of, and that's fine with me. Sybille does what she does very well; it's just not for us."

  "Even if they bring in big audiences?"

  "The world is full of aucUences. All we can do is try to find the right one for us."

  "I thought stations wanted to be right for the largest audience."

  He smiled again. "We're trying to turn that around. We're putting ourselves and our ideas out there, and if there are any takers we'll do all right. If not, I may have to find another job."

  'Tou mean you won't change your ideas or pretend to be something you're not," Valerie said.

  Their eyes held. "I think we've had this discussion before," he said.

  "We should order," Sybille cut in. She had been watching them as they spoke to each other. It was not possible that they would take up again after so long; she would not tolerate it. "If Chad wants to ride this afternoon, we'll have to hurry."

  "Fine with me," Carlton said, gesturing to the waitress. "I don't want to stay long, either."

  Nick turned to Chad. "Have you decided what you want for lunch?"

  Chad nodded and looked up at the waitress. "Roasted peppers with goat cheese in oil, please, and chicken chausseur."

  Carlton stared at him. Valerie's eyes danced. "I'll have the same. I like your taste."

  "My dad taught me," Chad said. "We eat out a lot." He had been watching Valerie with fascination since the moment they met; she was so beautiful he wanted to look at her forever, and her voice was wonderful, low and soft—like a kiss, Chad thought, trying to find words to describe it; or like she was putting her arms around you and holding you tight.

  "But doesn't your dad cook?" Valerie asked while the others were ordering. "He used to, when we were in college. He was the best cook I knew."

  "Sometimes he does, but he's awfiil busy. Were you friends in col-lege.>"

  'Tes. Good friends. We had a lot of fun together."

  "So how come you aren't now?"

  "We went different directions; your dad stayed in California and I moved to New York."

  "But you could write letters."

  She nodded. "We could. I'm sorry we didn't."

  "Me too," Chad said boldly. He tried to think of something else to say, to keep her fi-om talking to anybody else. She'd knelt and kissed him when they met, and given him a hug, saying she'd wanted to meet him for a long time, and how handsome he was and how much he looked like his dad, and Chad thought she was just the kind of person he wished his dad would marry: somebody with a nice laugh who didn't hate to be touched. She was already married, though. But she could get divorced; lots of people did. And Valerie's husband didn't talk much; he was probably boring to live with. "Did Dad cook for you in college?" he asked.

  "Sure," said Valerie, smiling. "I didn't know how—I still don't, in fact—so he had to do it all."

  "You must know how. All mothers do."

  "But I'm not a mother."

  "You're not?" He shot another look at Carlton.

  "Not yet. Tell me about going to restaurants. Which kind do you like best?"

  "Chinese and Italian and French and seafood and hamburgers and pizza. We'll try anything."

  Valerie laughed. "A pair of iron stomachs. What else do you do together?"

  "Oh, stuff. Frisbee and hitting a soft ball, and hiking, and we read together, and we go to movies and plays, and concerts sometimes at the—you know that place, the Kennedy Center, with this huge black

  head, like a hundred feet high, of President Kennedy?"

  "A bronze head, and not quite a hundred feet, but who's counting?"

  "Right. We go there; I like the bronze head. And all the lights."

  "You do a lot together," Valerie said, and there was a wistful note in her voice.

  "Yeh, Dad makes all these plans. He goes out a lot, though; he has all these women he takes places, and then I stay with Elena and Manuel. They're okay, they're just not as good as Dad."

  Valerie nodded, her eyes thoughtful.

  "I ride horses, too," Chad said, trying to keep Valerie's attention. "There's no room for any where we live, but Mother asks me, sometimes. How many horses do you have?"

  "Eight. And we board twelve more for our neighbors. Do you like to ride?"

  'Teh, lots. Do you ride all eight of them?"

  "One at a time," said Valerie with a grin.

  Chad grinned back. "Are they all different?"

  "Every one."

  'Who's your favorite?"

  "Oh, a sassy one named Kate. I named her for a character in a Shakespeare play. She's very stubborn, but she's proud and smart and trustworthy, and I really love her best of all."

  Valerie saw Nick watching her and knew he had heard her. "Perhaps you'd like to ride at Sterling Farms someday," she said, both to Chad and to him.

  "Oh, yeh!" Chad cried.

  "I don't ride much," Nick said. "But if we could find a way, of course Chad could."

  "My dad works a lot," Chad said to Valerie, thinking his dad hadn't been very nice about the invitation. "You know, he owns this television network and he's the most important person there, and he's got to be there a lot. At night too, sometimes."

  Valerie nodded gravely. "Ifs hard work, running a television network."

  "He comes home for dinner, though, and we read and talk and stuff, and then lots of times he goes back to work. He did that at Omega too. There's always something going on around our house."

  Valerie smiled. "But don't you like that? There's never enough going on around mine. I'm always looking for something new and different and exciting."

  "Try moving across the country. That's different and exciting."

  "Different and good?"

  "Yeh. I drought it wouldn't be—like, I didn't want to go, from San Jose?—but it's okay. It's great. School's great. And our house is great; you should see it. And Georgetown is great."

  "You live in Georgetown?"

  He nodded again. "N Street. You could come and visit sometime."

  Valerie met Nick's eyes. "I don't get to Washington as often as I'd like."

  "It would be something new and different," Chad said boldly. "Like you're always looking for."

  "The trouble with new and different," said Nick, "is that nothing stays new or different very long. As soon as they become old and familiar, they have to be replaced."

  "Thafs a littie judgmental, don't you think?" said Valerie. Her voice was light, but Nick saw the quick scorn in her eyes and knew she was thinking he had not changed: still narrow-minded and stuffy and bound to his work as she had thought him before. But why should I have changed? he asked himself. She hasn't; she's still looking for sometliing to happen, something to keep her from being bored and restless.

  We should never try to recapture the past, he reflected. We might find it was exactly as we remembered it.

  He wondered why he had been so insistent on meeting Valerie again. The surprise, he thought. The unexpe
ctedness of discovering that their lives had overlapped, against all odds; that they could meet once more and part once more, this time in uncomplicated fashion, as casual acquaintances; no more.

  Bullshit, he told himself. I wanted to see her because I've never been able to forget her.

  But now that was finally over: this meeting had finished off the tag ends of his adolescent fantasies. As soon as they could get out of here, Chad would have his ride, and then they'd go home. They'd read the Sunday papers and sit together while Chad ate dinner, and then Nick would go out with a pretty, quick-witted, hardworking magazine editor who had a busy life and didn't worry about being bored.

  A deep sadness filled him. It could have been different, he thought involuntarily. And he knew that his dreams were far more than adolescent fantasies, and that, whatever happened in the life he was making, he would not so easily wipe them out. He looked at Valerie. She was listening to Chad talk about school, and her attention was completely on him, absorbed in tales of fifth grade and soccer and computer pro-

  grams. It could have been different, he thought again. Then he pulled his thoughts back, and turned to Sybille. She could get them to the end of the meal with talk about herself. "Tell us more about your church," he said.

  At five o'clock, after Chad and Nick had left her farm, Sybille sat in the living room of her house, furnished by the previous owner in checks and plaids she hated but had not yet replaced because she thought she would be buying a bigger place any day She had tried to get the two of them to stay, so she would not be alone for the evening. Lily was in bed with a cold, and Sybille would have no one to talk to, but Nick had insisted on leaving. A date, probably, Sybille fumed. That's all he cares about. Women.

  She thought again about their lunch. Nothing would come of it. Valerie was married, and, in any event, Nick had outgrown her. But the signals had been mixed, and she couldn't be sure. I should be, she thought; after all, I understand the two of them perfecdy.

  But after ten minutes of thinking about it and imagining the two of them together, leaving her out, she was so tense and angry, and frantic at the silence, that she telephoned Floyd Bassington and told him he had to come over.

  He arrived half an hour later and accepted the weak drink she offered him. 'Tou always remember," he said, sitting beside her on the sofa. "So many people prefer not to think of someone's weak heart; they don't like to think of illness at all."

  'Tou're not ill, not to me," Sybille murmured. "You're one of the strongest, most dedicated men I know."

  He smiled and raised his glass to her. He was short and square and sat upright in a corner of the sofa, as if to make himself taller. With his bent nose, broken in high-school wrestling, his full lips beneath a heavy mustache as gray as his hair, and his thick, black-rimmed glasses, he had the look of someone who enjoyed attention, an actor, perhaps, or a politician. In fact he had been a minister in a prominent church in Chicago until, at fifty-seven, he had been discovered in the bed of Evaline Massy, his choir director, by Olaf Massy, her husband and the president of the board of directors of Floyd's church. Olaf Massy, energized by fury, investigated Floyd with dogged persistence, and found evidence of many women, and of embezzling: a bank account with close to two hundred thousand dollars, patiendy, methodically added to over thirty respectable years.

  Floyd Bassington retired from his pulpit. His wife divorced him.

  and he bought a small house in Alexandria, Virginia, where his son's family lived. He told his new neighbors an elaborate tale of a massive heart attack and orders from his doctor to retire and live quiedy, with no stress, and he began to garden. He gardened for a year until he thought he would go mad from boredom and insects and his grandchildren, who had seemed so charming from a distance. Finally, desperate, he took up volunteer work in shelters for the homeless. In the next year he became known for his good works, and was widely admired for coming out of retirement and risking another heart attack to help others. He had met Sybille at a party in Leesburg. Lily Grace had been there, too, and Floyd had been attracted to both of them: the one so strong and sophisticated; the other all goodness and innocence.

  "You said you were troubled," Floyd said. He sipped his weak drink, wondering if he could trust Sybille with the truth about his healthy heart so he might have a decent Scotch and water, and sat back in the air-conditioned chill that kept the July heat at bay. He admired the checks and plaids of the living room. Elegant and sharp, he thought; like Sybille. He had been there twice before, a guest at her dinner parties, but this was quite different: just the two of them, quiet, friendly, one needing help, the other poised to give it. "How are you troubled, and how may I help.>"

  "I have a great many plans," Sybille said. She leaned toward him intendy. "I'm afraid they may be too grand. I'm afraid I might seem ambitious when what I really want is to bring happiness and peace to large numbers of people."

  Floyd contemplated her. "Large numbers. Are you talking about your church at Culpeper?"

  "Cathedral. The Cathedral of Joy. Yes, but more; so much more. No one has any idea"—her voice faltered, then went on—"no one knows what I'm thinking of—I have no one close enough—it involves so much money, you see, it terrifies me; I can barely talk about it, even to you." She paused, as if marshaling her courage. "Floyd, I want to build a town around the cathedral. A real town; a place for thousands, hundreds of thousands, to visit. They could come for an hour, a day, a week, for as long as they need—with their families—to listen to Lily preach, to meditate, to relax with sports and games, to buy whatever they want in dozens of shops, to spend their time close to nature, away from the pressures and temptations of their everyday lives."

  There was a silence. "My dear," said Floyd at last. He put down his drink, and Sybille refilled it from a decanter on the coffee table; it was stronger than before. "My dear. Ambitious indeed."

  "Too ambitious," Sybille breathed. Her eyes were filled with apprehension. "Too much money, too much effort...does it show ambition more than goodness?"

  "No, no, that was not what I meant. How could I mean that, when you've told me your only reason for building this town is to bring happiness and peace... ?"

  Sybille nodded. "You do understand. But you're so good, Floyd; you don't know how many people are jealous of me and want to stop me. And they may succeed. I can't do this alone. I'm a very good businesswoman, you know: I usually get what I want, even if I have to be hard and cruel, sometimes underhanded—"

  "Nonsense; why do you speak of yourself this way? I believe that you're a good businesswoman, I believe that you're strong when you need to be. Certainly I beheve that. But nothing else."

  Tears filled Sybille's eyes; two of them spilled over and lay like glistening jewels on her olive skin. She touched her handkerchief to them. "I never cry," she said with an apologetic smile. "Strong businesswomen aren't allowed to, you know. But it isn't often that someone is as generous as you. Thank you, Floyd. I need to talk to someone like you now and then, to keep my perspective."

  "Whenever you wish. We don't stop being ministers, my dear, just because we retire from a pulpit; we always are here for those who need us."

  "I need you," Sybille whispered, but it came out barely a breath.

  "What was that?" Floyd bent closer.

  She shook her head. "Nothing. I shouldn't say... I don't allow myself weaknesses. I've learned over the years to do what I have to do; you only see the good in people, Floyd, but there's no way I could get anywhere without doing some things that aren't really me. People have said I'm tough, even ruthless, and I think they may be right. Not inside, but on the surface, you know; I can compete with anyone. I'm always sick, later, if I've hurt someone in a business deal or any other time; I can't bear it when I succeed at someone else's expense. I don't set out to do it, but sometimes things happen—"

  "Sybille." Floyd put down his drink and slid along the couch until he could hold her hand. His blunt fingers were cold from holding his glass. "We can talk a
bout this town you want to build, we can talk about the great sums of money you seem to be worrying about, we can talk of many things; but you must stop castigating yourself. I have an instinctive understanding of people, and I know you would never be ruthless. Things happen, as you say, and we may be forced to be-

  have in ways we might not have planned from the beginning, but it is not our fault. Intention is what matters, and your intentions are noble. Don't shake your head at me, you foolish girl. I know you better than you know yourself. Now, tell me the name of this town you want to build."

  "Oh." She laughed slighdy. "I'd almost forgotten it. I want to call it Graceville."

  "Ah. Well named. Lily must be pleased."

  'Tes, but overwhelmed too. And afraid. And so am I, every time I think of it. It's too big for one person, Floyd. You're right; I'm worried about the money; all that we'd spend and the huge amounts that would come in. There's just too much to think about. I can't do it alone. I need someone to help me with it, to advise me, to stand by me when I'm accused of..." She began to tremble. "... of competing... with... God..."

  "Good Lord! Who dared to say that to you?"

  "Some ministers—I won't give you their names, you mustn't ask me—and some financial consultants, when I mentioned the idea of a town. Nothing specific, I didn't even give a location, I just said how wonderful it would be to provide people with peace and quiet and time for contemplation, and the chance to meet others with the same needs."

  "And you were mocked."

  She nodded, her head lowered.

  Floyd put his hand beneath her chin and raised her head until she was looking at him. Her pale-blue eyes were unwavering and he thought he had never seen such pure honesty and longing for understanding. A strong, successful businesswoman making her way in a man's world, yet starved for love and a helping hand. And so innocent she had no idea how much money might be raked in through this town of hers. It was proof, Floyd thought, if he ever had needed it, that women might act tough, but, beneath their striped suits and cool facades, they would always be more fearful and vulnerable and naive than men.