The rain clouds had given way to blue skies with a few small, benign woolly puffs: though the temperature was only in the high forties, the sunshine made the day seem warmer. Marylin and Linc took a hike on the Downs. The thick, low grasses were sodden, and they hewed single-file to the gouged, narrow path whose underlying chalk gleamed whitely with yesterday’s rain.
When the steep angle of ascent leveled out and the path widened so they could walk side by side, Marylin asked, “Whereabouts do you live?”
“In Parioli, near the Borghese Gardens. Do you know Rome?”
“I’ve never been to Italy,” she said. “They offered me Roman Holiday, but I—well I couldn’t be there and not see you.”
“So it was Audrey Hepburn who won the Oscar.”
“Oscars. . . .” Marylin looked at a blackberry bramble. “I guess we’re both thinking of the same thing,” she said.
“Dad.” Linc paused. “BJ told me he was pretty impossible at the end.”
“Getting old was very hard on him.”
“It must have been.”
“I cared a lot, Linc. Not love maybe, but real caring. Even when I didn’t want to, I couldn’t help myself. Joshua was like that. He put his mark on people.”
“Don’t I know it!” The remark burst out of Linc with amusement and perplexity.
They began talking about Joshua, his openhandedness, his vigor, the way he had of taking over every situation, his rumbling voice, his ruthless tennis serve, the incredible talent that had propelled him, a very young man, to the topmost rungs of a fiercely competitive industry and kept him there. By the time they reached Beachy Head and gazed down at the sea (“It matches your eyes,” Linc said), they had not exactly laid Joshua’s ghost to rest but had placed it in a comfortable position of repose.
Linc told her about Gudrun. “Afterward I realized how unfair it was to her, the marriage. When I saw Roy in Rome—”
“She never told me. When was it?”
“Before I got married—she’d just bought the store. Anyway, she warned me. But I cared for Gudrun, so . . .”
“BJ said she was a terrific lady. She remarried, didn’t she?”
“Yes. She has a five-year-old, a boy. I get a big kick out of buying him Christmas gifts.”
They walked slowly back to the house in time for high tea. The caretaking couple put on a spread—rashers of gammon, soft-boiled eggs, toast, sponge cake, hothouse strawberries and rich clotted cream. Marylin served herself another dollop of cream, lingeringly savoring its textured richness.
“That’s how you ate ice cream,” Linc said, smiling. “You’re the only person I ever knew who could enjoy a small scoop for a half-hour.”
It was dark long before they finished the meal. They went into the drawing room, which was the house’s least drafty place, sitting on the well-worn Oriental rug to get full benefit of the electric logs.
“What I don’t understand,” he said, “is how you’re even more beautiful.”
“Flattery,” she said.
“Truth,” he retorted, tracing the curve between her thumb and index finger, lightly, as if he were touching an iridescent soap bubble.
They had not touched before, and the headlong violence of her reaction to this slightest of tactile pressures frightened Marylin. Her heart raced, she trembled. An electric awakening that was fraught with peril. These past difficult years, the carnal side of her had been extinguished by work, worry, and by Joshua’s repeated failures. Sex had become a defeated battleground, and even now she cringed from it. (This did not alter the fact that she was crazy in love.)
“Linc,” she asked, her soft voice shaky, “do you know the poem that ends, ‘I only know that summer sang in me/ A little while, that in me sings no more’?”
He moved his hand from hers. “Edna St. Vincent Millay,” he said. “One of her best sonnets, and the saddest, I think.”
The caretaking couple tramped through the hall, calling out, “Good night, Mrs. Fernauld, Mr. Fernauld.” They made their home in the carriage house. The side door slammed shut, loud, cheerful English voices momentarily mingled with the rustle of big old rhododendron bushes in the garden, there was the bang of a more distant door. Then Marylin heard only the final couplet of the Millay poem inside her own mind.
Linc, too, seemed preoccupied with morbid thoughts. “Let’s face it, my wife was caring, generous, bright, and so were Margaret and Jannie. I should’ve been happy with any one of them—except I never got over you.”
“Linc. . . .”
“Just because I feel exactly the same about you as I did when I was twenty-three, that doesn’t mean I’m going to jump on you the minute we’re alone.”
The redness of the electric logs shone on her face. “I wasn’t worrying about that,” she said. “It’s me, Linc. I’m not . . . I’m not the same as I was. About . . . you know, about sex.”
There was a long pause. “But you do still feel we belong together?”
“Of course I do.”
“Dad’s old age was really rough on you, wasn’t it?” Linc’s expression was twisted with sadness. “The Fernauld children left you to support his boozing and extravagances, didn’t we?”
“I was his wife,” Marylin said. “And there’s been that sad mess with Billy.”
“Billy?”
“He was involved with Althea.” Marylin sighed.
“So it was true. I read it in the headlines and figured it was just more of their usual junk—the case made a huge stir in Italy. Were they together long?”
“Only a few months. I know I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead—but Linc, she destroyed Roy’s husband and a German art teacher. Naturally I was worried sick about Billy. I went to New York, talked to her. Somehow I managed to break it up. A couple of weeks later she went to Roy’s house with that gun.”
“Do you know why?”
Marylin shook her head. “Roy says she was sort of deranged about her father. Billy blames me. When he got back from Vietnam, he asked Charles to get him into Coyne New York Bank. He lives in Manhattan.” Marylin’s lips quivered and she gazed up at Firelli’s portrait. “Since Joshua died, Sari’s been a doll about the telephone calls. Billy’s never once called. He’s married—a cousin of Charles’s, actually. I’ve never met his wife.”
“Ahh, Marylin.” Linc lifted his hand, as if to touch her shoulder, then splayed his fingers on the rug.
Marylin’s flesh tingled painfully where he would have touched her, and she was very close to tears. Was she doomed to be fragile bric-a-brac, a useless ornament that could not be touched? But I love him, I love him, she thought.
It took all her courage to lean forward until the darkness of Linc’s eyes filled her vision. She touched her lips to his.
His hand curved tenderly around her head, holding her mouth there. The trembling began again, and she twisted around so her breasts rested against his chest. Drawing her closer until the pressure of her double-strand pearls dug into her flesh, he covered her cheeks and eyelids with small kisses. Her nipples were as tender as they’d been when she was eighteen, her body felt as if it were melting, yet even now, caught in a riptide of physical pleasure, she could not repress her unhappy thought: This’ll be another defeat.
To drown out the misery of it, she pulled at Linc’s shoulders and waist, easing him down so that they could cling together on the rug.
“My love, my love,” he said, hoarsely, tenderly. “Let’s go upstairs.”
“No,” said Marylin. “Here.” She pulled him closer, not recognizing her own voice because of the blood drumming in her ears.
When he went into her, she gasped, thinking: It’s still summer. Then she thought no more. On a dusty rug woven in Shiraz, warmed by love and fake logs, Marylin Fernauld canceled out the years.
* * *
A week later Marylin and Linc were married in this same old-fashioned, memento-packed room, a ceremony witnessed by Sari, Charles, the baby, BJ, and the caretakers.
BJ, t
he matchmaker, was first to hug the bride. “You’re the two nicest people I’ve ever known,” she chortled happily. “How can it possibly work?”
Epilogue
Family and friends converged on September 25, 1983, to celebrate NolaBee’s eighty-fifth birthday. From Georgia came white-haired, shrunken cousins, from London Sari and Charles and their three children, Billy and his wife from Manhattan, Marylin and Linc from Rome.
Roy and Marylin threw the party, giving carte blanche to Per Hennecken, the feloniously expensive “in” Beverly Hills caterer. He tented the entire back garden, decorating his clear plastic bubble with rented crystal chandeliers, tubs of European blooms. Gilt chairs and small round tables draped in matching emerald cloths circled a dance floor. As always with any Wace party, though, an irrepressible note intruded, a sloppiness that couldn’t be blamed on the caterer—or the hostesses. After all, Marylin and Roy could hardly not serve the big, honey-cured Georgia ham brought by a Greenward kissing cousin, and neither could they ignore the cheesecakes and chocolate-mousse pies presented at the door by NolaBee’s friends, so the ham found a place of honor on a folding card table and the desserts were displayed on the hastily dragged-in barbecue table.
After the buffet, most of the adults sat talking while the children—led by the Firellis and BJ’s troop—gyrated in joyful, unpartnered confusion across the waxed boards. Sari and Charles shared a table with Billy and his slow-voiced wife.
Sari retained that look of a leftover flower child, with the untrammeled cloud of dark hair and Frye boots showing below the anachronistic ruffles of a lace skirt that she had discovered at a Knightsbridge antiques shop. Billy, though, had suffered a sea change. The curly brown hair had receded, and an additional thirty pounds were held in by his staidly tailored dinner jacket, the only formal masculine attire at the party. Billy had never forgiven Marylin. His magic gift of humor had disappeared someplace in Vietnam’s blood-dyed rice paddies—or maybe in Althea’s Fifth Avenue co-op. Charles had made the initial arrangements for him to enter the Coyne New York Bank, but after that Billy had skyrocketed on his own power. Within a year of his entry into banking, he had courted and wed Grover T. Coyne III’s sweetly stupid daughter—and her prodigious trust fund. When Three had succeeded Archie Coyne as ruler of the Holy Coyne Empire, William Fernauld wore the purple shoes of heir to the imperial throne—the goal Althea had envisioned for Charles.
Billy’s wife, wearing black enlivened by a strand of magnificent pearls, sat close to Charles.
Like Sari, Charles showed remarkably few changes: he still possessed the build, the lean command that goes with an immense fortune, but his old expression of aloofness was gone, replaced by a near-visible aura of contentment. His career of disbursing funds for Coyne International Relief and his marriage to this slight, love-filled woman had lifted him from his old stiffness.
At a nearby table, Marylin and Linc held hands under the green tablecloth, laughing with Roy and a pewter-haired lawyer named Cary Armistead. Roy had finally reconciled herself to her curly hair, and the graying fluff formed a nice halo to a freckly, pleasant face that was quite youthful—when not adjacent to her older sister’s flowing loveliness.
Per Hennecken approached the co-hostesses, whispering that his staff was primed for the cake cutting. Rising, the sisters wound around the tables, bending over chairs of kith and kin. “It’s time, it’s time,” they chorused, moving through the flower-swagged French windows into the dining room.
In the quiet living room a few of NolaBee’s circle chatted, while Mrs. Cunningham, her recessive chin drawn down, nodded in agreement. These now were her friends, too. An unlikely friendship had grown between the raffish, still-juicy NolaBee, who had not a cent beyond the support of her daughters, and Gertrude Cunningham, a timid browser on the edge of her immense fortune. Several times a week the Belvedere chauffeur delivered NolaBee for lunch or dinner, happy visits when each widow elevated her dear departed to sainthood and NolaBee repetitively embellished enjoyable anecdotes about “the dear children”—as they called their mutual great-grandchildren.
Marylin, smiling to the elderly group, laid a hand on the rounded shoulders. “Aunt Gertrude,” she said loudly, for Mrs. Cunningham had grown hard of hearing, “Mama’s going to cut the cake.”
Mrs. Cunningham, as best friend, led the teetering ladies to the plastic tent.
Marylin paused to examine a framed painting, Thea’s birthday gift to her great-grandmother, a watercolor picnic scene that for all its joyous, ebullient primary colors was far from naive, a remarkable accomplishment for a twelve-year-old.
“Where on earth does Thea get it? I can’t even draw a stick figure.” Marylin spoke ruefully to cover her pride. “Nobody on either side of the family that I know of ever painted.”
“Althea did when she was young.” Roy spoke too loudly. “And don’t they say all the arts are one? You’re an actress—”
“Was,” Marylin interjected.
“And look at Joshua’s Oscars.”
“Let’s not forget Firelli,” said Marylin. “Firelli was the genius among us.”
Roy’s cheeks and earlobes went yet pinker, and she hastily changed the subject. “That Valentino is fabulous on you, Marylin. Everybody’s saying you’re more gorgeous than ever. A walking ad for matrimony.”
Marylin winked. “Now, if only I could cook.”
In the Parioli flat, the mustached Giulietta managed magnificent pastas and veal dishes while her daughter handled the laundry and cleaning. Marylin Wace Fernauld Fernauld for the first time in her adult life did not work: in the nearly ten years there had been one cameo appearance in a Costa Gavras film. The Rain Fairburn Show residuals and the lease money from the estate on Mandeville Canyon brought in far more than enough for her obligations to NolaBee. Marylin indulged herself with reading or puttering in the mornings while Linc researched. Afternoons, the couple would stroll hand in hand like children through Rome’s ancient, narrow streets, either shopping or browsing or visiting the antiquities for Linc’s work—he took photographs on request of his clients.
“And what about you?” Marylin asked. “I really like that Cary. Mmm?”
“I told you, Marylin, he owns the unit next to mine, and that’s all.” Roy was blushing again.
After Althea’s death, the journalists and writers had stormed her house with their insinuating questions about the gunshot, a persistent harassment that had distorted and fed her own doubts. She had needed five hours a week with Dr. Buchmann. The psychiatrist had suggested that in her fragile state the reporters were too much for her. Selling the tract house, she had bought an opulent condo in a Beverly Hills full-security building. Recently the next unit had changed hands and the new owner, a well-to-do middle-aged widower, had become a frequent guest in Roy’s bay-windowed dining ell. He gave her red roses and suspense novels, he took her out to movies. Roy, whose masculine friendships consisted of expense-account lunches with hearty-smiling designers or manufacturers’ reps, didn’t know what to make of Cary Armistead’s undemanding affection—or her emotions toward him. She knew only that for the first time in many years she looked forward to going home at night. “Just a neighbor.”
“I reckon he figures he’s a mite more.” Rain Fairburn was not entirely dead—Marylin’s fond, arch mimicry proved that.
“Well, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men,” said Roy.
BJ poked her head into the room. “So here you guys are,” she said. “I’ve been looking all over. What a fabulous party! I’ve been having such a ball I forgot to show you the valuable heirloom.”
“Heirloom?” Roy said, laughing. “We’re all heirlooms.”
“This one has to do with my first triumph—and yours, Marylin.” BJ slowly, portentously opened her purse to draw forth a yellowed photograph folder imprinted with a palm tree and the words “Sugie’s Tropics.”
“Ye Gods!” Roy cried. “Where did you dig that up? There hasn’t been a Tropics for thirty years.”
Marylin reached for the folder. The sharply black-and-white glossy showed four smiling girls crowded into one side of a booth. Their shoulders were padded, their lips darkened. Roy and Althea had flowers tucked into their tall pompadours. “The night of the junior-class play . . .” she murmured.
Roy took the photograph. Althea’s proud, happy young face smiled up at her. Fifteen years old . . . or were we fourteen? The irreconcilable grief for the dead came to squat like a toad on Roy’s heart. Oh, Althea, best friend, worst enemy, rival, I would give everything I possess to have you here tonight.
Those charming, radiant young faces. . . . How come we were so positive we were dogs? We were all really quite pretty. Marylin, of course, was spectacular. What’s that clunky pendant she’s wearing? Of course, Linc’s ring. Poor thing, that’s why her smile is so heartbreakingly sad. She thinks he’s dead.
Roy held the photograph to a lamp, scrutinizing it in an attempt to recapture what had occupied the hearts and minds behind those callow, unlined faces.
Love, she thought.
We wanted to love and be loved. Love’s what we talked about endlessly, conjectured about, yearned for.
Maybe it was a flicker in the electricity, but Althea’s plucked, arched brows seemed to raise, sardonic and knowing.
Am I being sentimental? Roy asked herself.
No, she answered herself firmly. No. Love’s what we wanted then, and love’s what we’ve searched for ever since. Materially, we’ve had everything—and more. But our careers, our worldly successes, have always played second fiddle to the search for love. Old-fashioned, maybe, cornball, yes, but true. BJ appeared to have found the warmth early on. Marylin took most of her life to find real happiness—but now, oh how the joy shines from her. Althea’s inscrutable wounds denied her love. And I . . . I got to the center of the mystery, only to have love devour me alive.
She touched the slick paper. These four girls smiling with dark-lipsticked mouths would intermingle their dreams, their frustrations, their hopes, their lives, their blood. And in the end, all that would remain of them was this chemical imprint—and the mortal products of their love.
Everything and More Page 55
