The Jewels of Tessa Kent

by Judith Krantz

  Tessa fell silent in wonder. The necklace that had looked so similar to her old necklace was quite different as it lay on her neck, reaching just below the hollow between her collarbones. There was something softly mysterious about it, as if a light were gleaming from deep within each pearl, which made them seem slightly larger than they were. But the lapels of her suit held her shirt too close to her neck for her to get the full effect, so she shrugged her jacket off quickly and flung the silk collar of her white blouse backward, so that she could see as much as possible. Still her hair obscured many of the pearls, so Tessa fumbled in her handbag for the wide elastic band she kept there and quickly made a ponytail.

  “Ahhh, that’s better,” the salesman approved, with what little breath remained in his lungs after watching Tessa take off her jacket. Just a girl, yes, but those breasts … how … how … splendid.

  Still Tessa said nothing, too absorbed in the effect of the pearls to speak.

  “Not exactly what you have in mind? Here, try these,” the salesman said, whisking the necklace away and replacing it with another. “They have a slightly more creamy tone. The others leaned slightly toward the pinkish.”

  “Mmm,” was all Tessa could manage.

  “Not these either? Now here’s a strand with a definite silvery quality,” he said, replacing the second necklace with the third.

  “They all look pretty much the same,” Tessa commented, finding a crisp tone from somewhere, unwilling to commit herself to anything until she found out what they cost.

  “I’ll go and get a few more strands. You’ve just begun to look,” the salesman offered immediately. As soon as she was alone Tessa examined the tiny white price tags that hung by a thin string from each necklace. Each one was the same price, three thousand four hundred dollars. Shocked and dismayed, she sat back, trying to decide what to say to make a graceful exit. She wished she’d never let herself get trapped in a private room. Oh, what on earth was she going to do? Especially since she’d taken up so much of the salesman’s time? But before she had time to find the right words, the salesman was back with three more necklaces.

  “These are between twelve and twelve and a half millimeters each. Also, they’re South Sea pearls, not Japanese. With your height, the length of your neck, and the width of your shoulders, I suspected that you’d probably be happier with something larger, something more important. Now,” he asked, as he closed the clasp of one of the new necklaces, “tell me if I’m right or not.”

  “Oh,” Tessa said, fighting down a hysterical laugh, “you’re right. These do more for me, there’s no question about that.” And they did, oh, they did! These were exactly the pearls she’d had in mind, these were her dream pearls, gleaming with a pink-white magnificence, precisely the right size, a size that made the other necklaces seem … dinky.

  She lifted her ponytail above her head with a recklessly lovely gesture that made the salesman restrain a gasp, and turned her head from side to side, preening. “Do you have a hand mirror?” Tessa asked. In for a penny, in for a pound, she thought. “I’d like to see these from the side.”

  He produced a hand mirror from the desk and she looked at herself for long minutes, expressionless. “How much are they?” she asked simply. That, it had suddenly come to her, was the question any normal woman would ask.

  “Fourteen thousand five hundred.”

  “But they’re only three millimeters larger than the others. Why should they be so much more expensive?” Tessa asked, the necklace giving her the courage to sound as indifferent as a duchess who had happened to notice a sudden rise in the price of eggs.

  “It’s a question of time: the years and years it takes to lay down all those layers of nacre, and then, of course, to find such a perfect match, such luster.”

  “There’s one problem.”

  “I know. You want earrings to go with them. That won’t be a problem at all.”

  “It’s not that. I have only three thousand dollars in my checking account and I don’t have a credit card. So I’m afraid I’ll have to leave these here,” Tessa sighed. She should have known better than to let him put them around her neck. She’d never forget how they looked. “Perhaps they’ll still be here when I come back … or something like them.”

  “But, Miss Kent, we wouldn’t dream of expecting immediate payment! The manager is opening a house charge for you as we speak.”

  “He is?” Tessa said blankly.

  “Yes, he told me who you were when I went out to get these necklaces. I have to admit I didn’t know … I rarely get to the movies. I didn’t even watch the Oscars, but please accept my congratulations.”

  “A house charge? A charge account at Tiffany’s?” Tessa breathed, unable to believe his words.

  “You can keep them on and wear them right out to lunch. I’ll just remove the price tag for you,” he said, as he quickly snipped the thread. “Now, they’re yours! You’ve made the perfect choice, if I may say so. Perfect! Now, shall I bring you some earrings? Simple studs, perhaps?”

  “I think I’d better come back later for the earrings,” Tessa said, smiling freely for the first time since she’d entered Tiffany’s. She knew she hadn’t needed Fiona. “I’m having lunch with my business manager and I don’t want him to have a heart attack.” She got up, put her jacket back on, and took the band out of her hair, combing it with her fingers.

  Tessa Kent walked out of the private room, wearing her first real pearls, straight into a burst of applause. Dozens of people had gathered around the door and were waiting to see her emerge.

  Startled, she stopped, but almost immediately she threw her head back and began to laugh triumphantly. “Thank you,” Tessa said, as she walked easily and happily through the crowd, stopping now and then to sign an autograph. “Thank you all, thank you so much.”

  8

  Agnes Horvath stood by the stove in her kitchen while the water came to a boil for tea, listening to the confusion of laughter and squeals that came from Teresa’s room, where her daughter and Fiona Bridges were packing for Teresa’s flight to London the next day. There she would rendezvous for costume fittings and makeup tests with David Lean and the cast of his new film, an epic set in sixteenth-century England, in which Teresa would star as the young Mary Queen of Scots. Peter O’Toole and Albert Finney would be playing her second and third husbands, and Vanessa Redgrave would play Queen Elizabeth, Mary’s first cousin and nemesis. Or rather, Agnes thought with the ever-deepening affront she had learned to mask, Tessa Kent was packing for London. Tessa Kent the phenomenal young star, Tessa Kent, Agnes told herself with a burst of bitterness, for whom her own name was not good enough.

  Teresa Horvath, that ingrate, her now recently-turned-twenty-year-old daughter, had allowed herself to be rebaptized by her agent, Aaron Zucker, an agent handpicked by Roddy Fensterwald. Zucker had the audacity to consider himself an expert on finding the perfect names for his clients, if, like Teresa, they bore a name he didn’t consider a good fit with the actor’s persona. “Kent,” for a girl who was half-Irish, half-Hungarian? “Kent?”

  Zucker and Fensterwald, Agnes thought, provoked almost beyond endurance—that unholy twosome had been entirely responsible for the film she’d seen the previous night at a cast-and-crew screening. They’d been not only responsible, but delighted with themselves. Again Fensterwald had directed Teresa—Fensterwald, that wicked, manipulative creature who had attached himself to her daughter’s career. Agnes felt only vast suspicion and dislike toward him, although Teresa insisted that it was entirely normal for him to feel responsible for her success and to consider her in many ways his creation.

  Gemini Summer, it was called. An occasion of mortal sin, she’d call it, this piece of filth, hand-tailored for her daughter.

  In Gemini Summer, she’d been cast as a temptress born, a shameless, hot-blooded child-woman discovering the extent of her powers as a femme fatale. Teresa played a waitress at a summer colony for distinguished creative people, who plunged simu
ltaneously into love affairs with two older men, a great writer, played by Robert Duvall, and a great painter, played by Robert Mitchum, leading Duvall to kill himself over her.

  In her too-tight waitress uniform and the ultimately seductive shorts, T-shirts, and bikinis that wardrobe had invented for her to wear during her liberal time away from the kitchen, Teresa’s lush young body had been revealed more tantalizingly than if she’d been naked. Agnes had been so deeply shocked the previous night that she’d been literally unable to speak after the film ended, and, in any case, Teresa had been too surrounded by the adulation of the audience to have listened to her. Who was interested in the reactions of a mere mother, anyway?

  Her feelings were totally unimportant. The film was made, they weren’t going to remake it because she thought it was as vile and tawdry and immoral a spectacle as she’d ever seen. Her position about anything had ceased to have the slightest meaning from the minute she’d taken Teresa to that first audition. From the instant Peggy Westbrook laid eyes on Teresa, Agnes had become a nonperson. She wasn’t even treated with the attention due the goose that laid the golden egg, she thought, her rage festering. She was less than an inconvenience; she simply didn’t exist for them any more than the straw of a bird’s nest, once the bird has flown on its own.

  She, Agnes Riley Horvath, who’d given up her own life to make her daughter a star—a star who owed that Oscar to her mother, not to Roddy Fensterwald, if any truth still existed—was left without any reward more tangible than her sisters’ excitement, transmitted by telephone from three thousand miles away.

  Her sisters hadn’t even been envious of her, Agnes had realized bitterly. They’d been glowing with reflected glory, basking in it, enjoying it thoroughly, just as they thought she must be. Teresa’s spectacular change of fortune had been far too overwhelming to inspire any emotions in the Riley family except astonished delight.

  It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair! The thing she’d wanted so badly had happened, happened beyond her possible imagining, and all she felt was emptiness and loss. Her life was so small now, in comparison to Teresa’s, so pitifully minor key. Utterly diminished, without even her dreams of the future to keep her going. Yet she was only thirty-nine.

  There was no justice on the face of the earth. What was left to her now? A pious husband of fifty-six whose career had settled into an unexciting groove, and a noisy, messy five-year-old to bring up, a daughter with no touch of the star quality that Teresa had possessed from the very beginning. Maggie was just starting kindergarten and was gone much of the day, a happy, friendly, pudgy little creature who was as ordinary as a child could be. True enough, she gave Agnes no trouble, but no woman who had been the mother of Teresa Horvath could comfort herself with daydreams about Maggie’s future.

  Was this life, this barren life, all she’d earned from her years of planning and sacrifice? Where was justice? she cried out to herself. Surely there must be some accountability somewhere, some reward for having behaved with perfect judgment and foresight, some acknowledgment of all her sacrifice. Oh, she knew what a priest would say. He’d blather on about accepting the will of God and not looking for her reward here on earth. Sandor, too, would probably tell her to wait for Judgment Day, she thought grimly. That was the predictable way his mind worked. He’d missed his vocation, more’s the pity.

  True, Teresa had wanted to buy them a house and a new car and heaps of toys for Maggie as soon as she’d heard the amount that Zucker had negotiated for Gemini Summer, but Sandor had refused everything but the toys, and only allowed a few of them at that. He’d conferred with Teresa’s business manager, Steve Miller, who also handled Fensterwald’s and Zucker’s money, and once he’d been satisfied that the man was highly qualified and honest, he’d informed Agnes that he had always earned enough to support his own family and he had no intention of taking a penny from his daughter. She must invest her salary sensibly, and as much of it as possible, for who knew how a career in acting might turn out in the passage of time?

  Agnes added sugar to her tea and held the cup so that it warmed her cold hands. Still, the laughter came from above, shutting her out, just as she’d been shut out of everything else. When Teresa had started working on Little Women she’d become so busy that she might just as well have left home. She’d left school abruptly and against their wishes, but there was nothing they could do since she was over sixteen. Whatever little time she wasn’t needed on the set was devoted, under Zucker’s decree, to continuing her lessons in fancy new activities; ballroom dancing, driving a car, horseback riding, and tennis.

  Her own role, Agnes reflected as her tea grew cold, had long ago been reduced to running a bed and breakfast, nothing more than a necessary convenience for a daughter who grew more independent, more self-assured, and more sophisticated every day. It seemed as if a glittering scarf of Teresa’s triumphs, a wide mantle of sparkling stars and silvery moons, flashed perpetually about her shoulders. This image burned into Agnes as she watched the happy girl dashing here and there on the rounds of her indisputably important life. At her parents’ insistence, Teresa lived at home, but there was almost no time in her existence for her family, except the meals she ate at home.

  Yet, until a few months after the release of Little Women, Teresa’s life had possessed some element of stability. Until she won the Oscar in her first film role, the development of her career, even the time-devouring lessons, were on a level that could be comprehended.

  But after the win, media madness had taken over and Teresa, unforgivably, had blossomed visibly every day yet maintained her poised excitement during every second of it, as if all the attention, flattering as she laughingly admitted it was, were only normal, only justified, only her right. She was consumed by the blaze of glory and the flourish of trumpets that the movie industry reserves for its newest royalty.

  A Town Car and driver were at her beck and call. Fiona Bridges worked with the fashion designers whose clothes Teresa wore for her frequent appearances at premieres and award shows, chose her escorts, directed the girls who answered her mail, arranged time for journalists and photographers from all over the world, all with the advice of the publicity firm Roddy Fensterwald had recommended.

  And now Teresa would be off, flying away to England with more brilliant success in sight … Mary Queen of Scots and Queen of the Isles, that most tenacious of Catholic queens, that passionately devout Queen … just the sound of the words was deeply romantic. Agnes sighed heavily, unable to bear her own dreary life.

  “We’re starving, Mother,” Teresa said, bounding into the kitchen. “Is there anything to eat? Packing is hungry work.”

  “Finished already? But you’ll be gone for months and months.”

  “All done! Fiona decided that almost all of my clothes just won’t do, and anyway, I can buy whatever I need over there. I’ll be in costume much of the time and she can always shop for anything I need. For big nights, designers will send me stuff.”

  “How convenient,” Agnes said, glaring at Fiona, who didn’t pay the slightest attention in her bland blondness, her impudent good humor, the efficiency that nothing blunted. It was Fiona who’d taken the place that rightfully belonged to Agnes. She was the lucky one who had all the fun and excitement of being intimately associated with a star, without carrying the burden and expectations of having to be the star herself. She, Teresa’s mother, could have done anything Fiona did and done it better, Agnes thought in cold hurt.

  “Mother? Food? I don’t see anything interesting in the fridge, only boring old leftovers and the stuff you’re making for dinner tonight—at least I guess that’s what it is.”

  “Try calling room service,” Agnes snapped and left the kitchen abruptly.

  “Agnes,” Sandor said that night, after Maggie had been put to bed, “What happened with you and Teresa this afternoon?”

  “Nothing ‘happened.’ I barely saw her. You spent more time with her than I did before she and that Fiona creature went off together, w
ho knows where?”

  “She told me that you’d been upset with her because she and Fiona invaded your domain demanding something to eat and she thought you were absolutely right, that you shouldn’t be expected to cater to her when she’s almost never home. She asked me to tell you that she was sorry to have been so thoughtless. She also said that when this next picture’s over and she gets back to Hollywood, she’s going to move out, get her own place, and become responsible for herself the way she should be at her age.”

  “High time,” Agnes said stonily, refusing to betray her feelings of rejection.

  “I didn’t agree. I believe that it’s only appropriate and proper for a young woman to live under her parents’ roof until she gets married, and I told her so.”

  “So?”

  “She made a case for herself. She said that first of all, legally now that she’s twenty, there’s nothing wrong with her living in her own home with Fiona to keep her company. But even more important was the fact that it doesn’t make the slightest sense for us, in this small house, to be bothered with her constant phone calls. What’s more, she needs space for bigger closets, a guest suite for Fiona, and space for a secretary to work. She wants room to entertain and a private space for business conferences. Obviously they’d both talked it all out, every detail. Finally I realized that Teresa made sense, much as I don’t like it. We simply don’t live in the style to accommodate the traffic and service a movie star has reason to expect. There’s every reason why Teresa needs her own establishment and some sort of staff.”

  “ ‘Establishment’—I imagine that’s a highfalutin word she used, or did she learn it from that degenerate, that pervert, Roddy Fensterwald?”

  “Agnes! What does he have to do with her moving out? I disapprove totally of what he is, but I believe that he sincerely wants the best for Teresa—he’s devoted to her—he’s used all his skills to advance her career. How could she possibly have won an Oscar without his casting her and directing her?”