“But Luke, Maggie’s in kindergarten now, she’s already had two years of preschool, and next year she starts first grade. Children need to be ‘socialized’ from practically day one, not three or four years from now.”
“They do?” Luke looked blank. “Socialized?”
“I honestly didn’t remember either, until you started making those sweet, impossible, mixed-up plans. I’d forgotten what it was like when I was little, all those happy hours throwing sand into the other kids’ eyes, playing games, making friends. Look, all of my mother’s sisters want Maggie to go and live with them.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“I think that the most important thing is for her to be brought up in a family with kids roughly her age, so she has a normal family life. Each of my aunts assured me that Maggie would be treated like a little princess, and I know only too well what they meant.”
“What, exactly?”
“She’d become a fabulous, glamorous orphan, someone to concentrate on completely now that most of their own children are grown and out of the house. She’s the little sister of a movie star, protected by a man, her brother-in-law no less, who has more money than they can begin to imagine, a man who naturally would want Maggie—and, by extension, themselves—to have the best of everything. A new house, a new car, and all expenses paid for them. For Maggie, private schools, riding lessons, ballet lessons, beautiful clothes—”
“Well, of course she should have all those things,” Luke said indignantly.
“It would make Maggie the power in the house, the center of everything, overwhelmed by attention and spoiling, and she’d understand the dynamics quickly enough. It would be the worst thing possible for her. And any aunt we decided to send Maggie to would queen it over the others, just the way my poor mother acted with her sisters at the wedding. You missed seeing that, but I didn’t. It was ghastly.”
“But there’s no other answer,” Luke said, shaking his head.
“I can’t say I liked my cousins at the wedding, but at least some of them are the right age, with young families. I think that while you’re in Australia I should take a trip back East, take Maggie with me, and get to know them better, spend time with each of their families. There’s got to be one family Maggie could fit into happily.”
“Hmm,” Luke murmured. “Let’s talk this over in the morning. I promise you we’ll find a solution. It’s too complicated to settle tonight, and anyway, you look so exhausted. I bet if you went to bed and I held your hand, you’d be asleep in minutes.”
“I’ll try,” Tessa agreed, yawning.
“What an accommodating girl you are.”
As Luke watched Tessa fall into a profound sleep, he thought about her cousins, a bunch of unfriendly, impolite, classless oafs, in his opinion, with a mob of ill-mannered, unappealing kids. Perhaps they’d been totally intimidated by the whole occasion, perhaps they were the salt of the earth in their own homes, but he didn’t mind admitting to himself that snobbish or not, he had no intention of letting his wife’s sister be brought up with yobs. There was, thank God, another solution.
Very early the next morning, Luke got up quietly, leaving Tessa still deeply asleep. He called his stepbrother, Tyler Webster, who was due to fly home in a few hours, woke him, and asked him to meet him in a half hour in the dining room.
“Good of you to have dressed so quickly, Tyler.”
“Least I could do, Luke.”
“No, Tyler, it’s only the beginning.”
“Huh?”
“Tyler, there’s something very, very important you can do for me.”
“Just ask,” Tyler replied, with his sweet and thoughtful smile.
“It’s something that won’t go unrecognized, in fact, something that will be most highly rewarded, even by your standards.”
“Luke, come on guy, you already do more than enough.”
“I’m aware of that,” Luke said, concentrating on spreading marmalade carefully on a piece of toast.
The Webster family lived entirely on Luke’s largesse. Charming Tyler combined fatal bad judgment with a talent for laziness. He had never been able to keep a job for more than two months. Luke’s father had thrown him out of the family business in less time than that, afraid of what promises his bumbling, incompetent stepson might make on no authority but his own desire to please. However, because Dan Blake loved his American second wife, Tyler’s mother, he had made Tyler a generous allowance, so generous that Tyler was able to concentrate on his one serious passion. Riding horses beautifully was the only occupation for which Tyler was fit, and horses were the only thing he cared deeply about.
After his father’s death, Luke had continued the allowance, and when an unresisting Tyler had been married by Madison Grant, a plain Jane of a good family, a clever girl who saw Tyler clearly and knew that he was her best chance at a good life, Luke had increased the allowance and bought them a handsome stud farm near Madison’s family’s home, in the New Jersey hunt country. There Tyler could live as one in that line of old-fashioned country gentlemen whose gene pool he had too liberally inherited. Luke paid for everything, from the children’s schools to Madison’s beautiful clothes and the parties she gave so well. The Websters’ neighbors, horse people like themselves, assumed that they had a large private income and Tyler’s mettle and judgment were never tested. The stud itself, even under a qualified manager, just about broke even, but in years when it lost money, Luke made up the difference without flinching.
“Luke, what’s up? You look so serious.”
“I want you and Madison to bring up Maggie, Tessa’s sister.”
“What!”
“There’s no one else who’ll do. Maggie’s aunts are too old and her cousins aren’t suitable. She’s a dear little girl and she needs to be in a good, stable, loving family environment. Tessa and I aren’t going to be leading that kind of life—there’s a worldwide business to run and there’s Tessa’s career; we’ll rarely be in one place for long. How old are your children now?”
“Uh … wait a minute … right, Allison’s eight, Candice’s ten, and Barney’s, gosh, four and a half.”
“Spot on. Does Barney have a nanny? Excellent, he can share her with Maggie. As I remember you have a guest suite, right? Good. Plenty of room for Maggie. What I’d appreciate your doing, right now as a matter of fact, is calling Madison and telling her to pack herself and the kids up and fly out here today. They can take the company’s New York plane; they’ll gain three hours, so they can be here before dinner.”
“Today!”
“The sooner Tessa knows that Maggie’s going to be happy in her new home, the better for everybody.”
“Oh, sure, I can understand that. Gosh, I wonder what Madison’s going to say.”
“She’ll understand, Tyler. You won’t even have to explain when she knows how important it is to me. Essential, as a matter of fact. Waiter, could you bring a phone to the table please?”
Madison Webster and her three children walked over the bridge in front of the entrance to the Hotel Bel-Air, as unrumpled as if they’d just driven over from Beverly Hills. Maggie stood shyly, but holding her ground, as the introductions were made.
“Well, well, so this is Maggie! What a dear little girl you are,” Madison said, bending down to kiss her cheek. “I’m so glad to meet you.”
“Thank you,” Maggie mumbled.
“Barney, why don’t you shake hands with Maggie,” Tyler suggested nervously.
“How old are you?” Barney demanded, looking Maggie in the eye.
“Five.”
“You’re older than I am but I’m taller than you. Much taller,” he announced with satisfaction, a big, warm, friendly grin splitting his freckled face. He took her hand in his and squeezed it tightly, pumping it up and down. “Wanna play?”
“Play what?”
“Just play, Maggie. Come on, I’ll show you. I know lots of good games, fun games, maybe we’ll build a tree house, you’ll
like that.” Barney didn’t bother to say hello to his uncle Luke or his new aunt. Without letting go of Maggie’s hand, Barney tugged the little girl away into the gardens, both of them soon breaking into a run. Maggie’s laugh rang out as they rounded a corner and vanished from sight.
“Me Tarzan, you Jane,” Tessa said, smiling for the first time in days.
16
Before Maggie Horvath came to live with them, Madison Webster had formed for herself a number of complicated rules of domestic economy. All of her singularly expensive, marvelously simple clothes were bought at Bergdorf’s, but she took care of them beautifully and wore them forever; she’d never indulged in redecoration of their large country house, but instead cultivated the shabby English look. If a piece of furniture was on the verge of becoming too shamefully worn, she replaced its fabric with the same pattern, remaining consistent to the style already established.
She bought no jewels at all, contenting herself with those few simple pieces Tyler had inherited from his mother; she used a third-rate caterer for her parties, making all the most important dishes herself, for she had taken several Cordon-Bleu courses and could cook beautifully, although none of her friends knew it. She learned to care for indoor plants so she never had to pay for fresh flowers except for entertaining. She could still use her grandmother’s invisibly darned, heavy lace table linen for parties as well as the heavy, old-fashioned silver she’d inherited directly when her grandmother died, along with a number of dark, impressive family portraits, which she’d hung carefully in places of honor.
She made sure that her station wagon and Tyler’s Jaguar were regularly serviced and then washed daily by one of the stable boys, so they could keep their cars until they became classics. Her sheets and towels were bought at white sales, all of her daughters’ clothes were bought on sale, she used drugstore makeup and supermarket generic brands of soap, toilet paper, paper towels, and canned goods. One of the maids was delegated to clip coupons, and Madison did all the shopping herself, never trusting her cook to find bargains. She kept two fridges, one for the help’s cheap food, one for the family’s. All four of her dogs came from the pound.
However, she spared no expense on certain details. She made it a point to have at least one more waiter than necessary whenever she entertained so that her parties ran with smooth perfection; her cellar was so excellently stocked that Tyler passed for a wine collector; she went for a trim every three weeks to the best hairdresser in New York; she never bought an item of leather that wasn’t from Hermès; her cocktail napkins and guest towels came from Frette; a chipped Waterford glass was promptly replaced with another; and her daughters both attended the hideously expensive Elm Country Day School, while Barney was destined for Phillips Andover.
This combination of invisible thrift and conspicuous luxuries was not imposed on Madison by the limitations of the allowance Luke made to Tyler. She could have spent far more money than she did and still stayed well within its yearly amount.
Luke didn’t know, and Tyler didn’t notice, that Madison steadily saved healthy amounts each year, investing them in a deeply conservative, no-load mutual fund with a steady performance record. Her personal dreaded rainy day would only come if Luke died. Without him, the Webster family would have no income at all. Not a bean. Unlike her grandmother, her parents could leave her nothing, and Tyler … well, Tyler was a gentleman, not a businessman, to put it as gently as possible.
Maggie’s arrival four years earlier had been a guarantee that as long as the little girl lived with the Websters, they could count on receiving far more money from Luke, or his estate, than they had before—a guarantee made in writing by the chief partner in the law firm Luke employed in Manhattan.
Why couldn’t she like Maggie, Madison asked herself in irritation. Why couldn’t she feel even a flicker of genuine warmth for the nine-year-old who had made it possible for her to invest so much more than ever before? Maggie’s presence in their house had, from the day she arrived, ensured a minimum of thirteen years of respite from any rainy day, since she would certainly live with them until she was eighteen. Even when she went off to college, Madison told herself, Luke would unquestionably agree that she’d need a home to come back to for school vacations, no matter how often she was able to visit her sister.
It simply wasn’t possible that she could be so stupid as to still resent the imperious, high-handed, arrogant way in which Luke had taken it for granted that she would welcome a strange child into her home. He hadn’t even had the courtesy to ask her to do it as a favor to him … yet she could never forget that oversight, try as she had. To be perfectly honest, his presumption had, in the most cold-blooded way, rubbed their noses in their indebtedness to him. It was not as if there had ever been any question that they owed him everything … but could they be blamed for not liking to be reminded of it? It made her feel so … powerless, so deeply humiliated, Madison told herself, as she had done far too many times in the past four years, ever since Maggie had been dumped on their doorstep.
True, Luke had never asked them to do anything for him before. Perhaps those early years of scrupulously hands-off treatment had dimmed her understanding of the ignominious position her husband was in, a position which, in moments of gloom, made her feel exactly like the wife of a worthless remittance man.
But even now, every time she laid eyes on Maggie, she was reminded of how much she owed Luke, or was it how much she owed Maggie? One thing came down to the other, if you considered it with any precision—which, thank you, she would prefer not to have to do, although she couldn’t help being obsessed by it. God knows, Tyler never gave their position a thought. But then Tyler didn’t consider anything with precision, and she’d always known it, so why should she resent being made conscious all over again of the deliberate bargain she’d made? She had, sensibly, preferred marrying an incompetent fool to remaining single. What woman wouldn’t?
But there was no getting away from it: when Maggie called her “Aunt Madison” she rejected the term in her mind. When Maggie’ came to live with them, they had decided it was the least confusing form of address for a child of five who was—too ridiculously for words—Tyler’s stepbrother’s wife’s sister. Or, to make it more confusing, her own brother-in-law’s sister-in-law. But she wasn’t Maggie’s aunt, damn it, and Tyler wasn’t her uncle. They weren’t the slightest relation to Maggie. Maggie didn’t come from their kind of background, she didn’t come from a family heritage you could respect, and nothing could change that. Under normal circumstances she would never have taken Maggie into her home to live, and she knew her neighbors had raised many an eyebrow when she’d tried to explain the tragic circumstances that had, so suddenly, made Maggie a part of their family.
She’d put the best possible face on it, but she knew that many members of the bridge club, the hunt club, and the tennis club wondered why Maggie occupied the guest suite, when her own daughters shared a room. What would they say if they knew that she’d never dared to severely reprove Maggie, although the girl drove her crazy with her inability to keep her blouse tucked into her skirt or her pants, to say nothing of the way she managed to get spots on clean clothes within minutes of putting them on. She was such an unfeminine thing, always dashing around with Barney as if she were another little boy, her unruly hair looking as if it had never been brushed, her face as if it had never been washed. None of the exquisite, and totally inappropriate, party dresses or fine sweater sets that she brought back from her visits to her sister had ever survived more than a few weeks of Maggie’s treatment, but then they were entirely unsuitable for a child in any case, and infuriating when she had to imagine what they’d cost. The money that was lavished on that child! It was unseemly, in her opinion, utterly unseemly.
You could always tell when Maggie was in the house: the sound of her bold laugh, entirely too loud and too frequent, the sound of her feet—couldn’t that child ever walk instead of running up and down stairs?—and then her boisterous entrance int
o any room, with the expectation of a hungry puppy, bursting with observations and questions. She seemed to need attention and, worse, long for affection that Madison didn’t, couldn’t possibly be expected to feel and would have to be a skillful actress to produce. Really, it was too much! Affection on demand! Maggie took up more air than any nine-year-old should be allowed to do. Didn’t she have any decent sense of self-consciousness? Couldn’t she learn to be less visible? Maggie acted as if she owned the place, Madison thought bitterly, and although the child couldn’t possibly realize it, in an indirect way, she did, for every acre of their handsome property belonged to Luke, and Luke and Tessa had no heirs other than Maggie.
Madison sighed, thinking of her own daughters: Candice, the exceptionally pretty one, who was now fourteen, and Allison, who might or might not become the extraordinarily beautiful one, but was now, at twelve, merely promising. What satisfactory children they were! Neat, polite, modest, ladylike girls with perfect manners, who hung up their clothes, polished their riding boots, kept their bedroom and bathroom tidy, and got their homework in on time without her prompting. If only some of their breeding had rubbed off on Maggie!
But, one had to admit, breeding didn’t “rub off,” it was innate. Tyler came, as she did, from a long line of what she could only term “American aristocrats,” every last one of them Protestant, every last one of them proper, every last one of them quietly, admirably at ease in his social environment. Well, all she could say was that whatever momentarily fortunate mix of Irish and Hungarian genes had produced the ravishing Tessa hadn’t been in operation when Maggie was conceived. Everything about her high coloring, with skin so white, and cheeks so red, with her thick thatch of black curls and the fierce blueness of her eyes, screamed “Black Irish.”
The Jewels of Tessa Kent Page 17
