Maggie put Sandor Horvath’s letter carefully on her desk and slowly, being very careful not to tear it, slit the envelope open with the old wooden letter opener Barney had once whittled for her at summer camp. The letter paper was stiff and so heavily creased that it was hard to smooth out, but the elegant handwriting was as easy to read as calligraphy.
Beloved Mary Margaret,
I pray that you will never receive this letter. I am fifty-four years old and, given a merciful God, should be alive to be with you thirteen years from now, on your birthday. But there is no way of knowing the future and I am determined that you should be told the truth about your birth when you have reached the age of reason and, I hope, compassion. If it is within my power, I will tell you the following facts myself when you turn eighteen, but if I am no longer of this world, someone must tell you, and there is no one I trust but myself.
I believe deeply in my God and in the Church of Christ. You have been sinned against by a great lie, a lie told to you by me, by Agnes Horvath, my wife, and by Teresa Horvath, my daughter. I believe that this lie has caused you real harm, which thus constitutes a mortal sin. The only thing a good Catholic can do to try to make restitution for a mortal sin is to confess it and receive absolution. My daughter, Teresa Horvath, has confessed but a small part of this sin and has received the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
However, my wife has not confessed the greater part of the sin, for which she is responsible and for which I am equally responsible. On the contrary, she continues with the sin of presumption, of pride, to believe that she can save her soul without the help of Almighty God. We both continue to break the eighth commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor,” i.e., to tell a harmful lie. A harmful lie is a mortal sin in the eyes of the church. We have, I know, certainly lost sanctifying grace and our chance of eternal life.
I have discussed this grievous capital sin with my confessor, Father Vincent, and since you are only five years old, we have agreed that the only way I can make restitution to you for this sin is to confess it to you when you are old enough to understand it. He cannot give me the Sacrament of Reconciliation unless we stop the lie in which we live, which is not now possible since it would have grave consequences for our daughter, Teresa.
Mary Margaret, your sister, Teresa, is your mother. She gave birth to you when she was still but fourteen years old. We do not know who your father was. Your grandmother, Agnes, and I decided to bring you up as our own child. This was done for several, all-too-human reasons. First of all, we wanted to spare Teresa the great disgrace of bearing an illegitimate child. In the second place, your grandmother wished to keep all knowledge of this disgrace from her family, and I, for my part, wanted another child. For that reason we came to California to live, where everybody we know believes you to be our child, not our grandchild.
Your mother, now twenty years old and known to the public as Tessa Kent, is about to leave our home and go to Scotland to make a motion picture. At the age of sixteen, when you were only two, she became a film star. I do not know when she intends to tell you the truth about your birth, but I pray every night that it will soon become possible for her. On that day I will destroy this letter. Until that day, all three of us, your mother, Teresa, and the two of us, Agnes and Sandor Horvath, your loving grandparents, are mired in this lie, which deprives you of knowledge of your true mother.
You are a good, sweet, well-behaved child, Mary Margaret, and you have given me great joy, but I have never felt that I had a right to that joy with the knowledge I possess. I have always blessed you, and will always bless you, every day of my life. Forgive me if you can.
Your grandfather,
Sandor Horvath
As she read the letter, Maggie had instinctively risen from her desk chair and retreated to the bathroom, where she could lock herself in. She reread it twice more and then once again, seeking time to absorb the shock. At the first reading she had grasped it as clearly as a single headline, but she hadn’t allowed herself to know it. During the next two readings, she’d willed herself to pick her way among the complications of the story, as if they might change its message, but after the final reading she had to allow the contents of the letter, and all it meant, to pour, pounding and irrefutable, into her open, unprotected consciousness.
Long before the final reading, Maggie’s emotions had galloped ahead of her mental process and assumed a vile, jagged, threatening shape that filled her chest and abdomen and pushed inward on all her vital organs, making it almost impossible to breathe. There was a growing constriction in her throat, a tightening and an ache in the length of her neck, especially under her chin, as if she were wearing a cruel leash.
She was overcome by an intense desire to hide, to disappear from a world that contained this story of betrayal and secrets and lies, all directed at her since she had been born. She felt crushed, flayed, utterly incapable of sustaining a personal identity, stripped, mocked. She was a nothing crawling on the face of the world. A cipher, unwanted, unwanted, unwanted. She was without rights, without a place of her own, a fraud, a mistake everyone could lie to, manipulate, put down or take up at will, a sin to be confessed, a throwaway toy, a disgrace, a thing to be hidden but never acknowledged. A thing, a thing, not a person.
For a long time Maggie knelt on the carpet, sitting on her heels, the letter scattered by her side, bowed over so that she could rest her head on the floor and protect it with her hands, gathered into the smallest space she could take up, too beaten down for the relief of tears, a solid wad of pain. Gradually her mind slowed and all but stopped working for a timeless period, a self-protective period in which she knew, in her slow-moving, almost dreamy consciousness, that her life had changed forever. She existed in the moment, with no past or future, enduring the darkness and the shame, panting, unable to draw a normal breath, content to stay in the darkness, content to be motionless, nonexistent.
Slowly, gradually, from a place she didn’t know she possessed, thoughts gathered, strength returned. She was Maggie Horvath, and Maggie Horvath was a person. No matter how unwanted she’d been, no one could take that away from her. Maggie Horvath existed, the five-year-old to whom that letter had been written had become Maggie Horvath, a grown-up woman, not poor little Mary Margaret. The web of the letter dropped away and Maggie was left with one piece of certainty: She existed and Tessa was her mother.
Maggie got up off the floor and looked at herself in the mirror. She looked like the same person who had awakened to such happiness this morning, yet now she was reeling with pure rage. She could smell it. It escaped from her pores into the air. The shape of pain inside her had condensed into an anger she could barely contain. Her eyes were bright with it, her cheeks flaming with it, her heart beat with the power of it.
She dressed for Manhattan in minutes. She packed a small suitcase, grabbed her handbag, and walked downstairs, pausing only to pick up the keys to Madison’s car from the hall table. She heard the sounds of lunch being served as she left the house. She hadn’t taken the test for her driving license yet, but she’d known how to drive expertly for years, and within an hour and a half she’d parked in an uptown garage near the Carlyle, her mind concentrated entirely on the route and on avoiding the attention of the police. She left her suitcase in the car, walked briskly to the hotel, and had herself announced at the reception desk.
“Please go up, Miss Horvath,” the clerk said, after he’d called upstairs. “Miss Kent is in suite nine hundred.”
“Thank you.”
As she got out of the elevator Maggie saw Tessa standing in the hallway at the door to her suite, arms open in welcome, her words tumbling out, her smile filled with excitement and hesitation and uncharacteristic apprehension.
“Maggie! Darling Maggie! Madison must have told you … I … I wanted it to be a surprise. I have so much to tell you … but I hardly recognize you, you’ve changed, you’re so very much more grown up than a year ago. Oh, give me a kiss, my Maggi
e.”
“I don’t think so,” Maggie said, walking past Tessa into the sitting room.
“You’re not too old to give me a kiss, are you?” she said, bewildered.
“You’re much too old, Tessa.”
“What?” The smile was still on Tessa’s face.
“You’re thirty-two. Isn’t that too old to lie to your daughter?”
They faced each other mutely. Maggie’s expression a fierce, frozen challenge as she searched Tessa’s face, watching the smile fade and the eyes fill with the beginning of comprehension.
“I came on purpose to tell you … I couldn’t before because—”
“Liar.”
“No, truly …”
“Lie! I’ll never believe anything you tell me, ever, ever, ever!”
“Oh, God! I can’t blame you, but Maggie, please, please lis—”
“Don’t you wonder how I know?”
Tessa was shocked into silence, unable to keep from turning her face away from Maggie’s look of flaming accusation.
“I had a letter from a dead man this morning. Sandor Horvath. Not my father, not the father I watched being buried—your father, Tessa. He didn’t trust anyone to tell me the truth—he knew you pretty well, didn’t he?—so he wrote me thirteen years ago and left the letter with my godfather to send. My first birthday present.”
“You can’t understand,” Tessa said, sinking down onto a sofa. “I don’t expect you to understand yet, but I was only fourteen. Fourteen. You should try, at least, to understand that, you’ve been fourteen, you know what it would have meant.”
“Of course I understand. He explained it all. Any fourteen-year-old girl would understand. It was perfectly normal. If you hadn’t been Catholic you might have aborted me. Why didn’t you give me up for adoption?”
“My father wouldn’t—” Maggie put her hand to her mouth in horror.
“He told me, he wanted another child. Otherwise you would have, wouldn’t you?”
“Probably. That’s what my mother wanted.”
“And you, what did you want to do with your child?”
“I don’t know, I don’t remember. I just wanted it not to have happened. How could I have taken care of you? I was only fourteen. I did what they told me. I had to obey them to survive, that’s all I remember. And you weren’t Maggie, you were just a baby.”
“I don’t blame you for any of that,” Maggie said in a level tone.
“Oh, Maggie …” Tessa turned to her with a look of hope beginning to flare in her lovely eyes.
“I blame you for everything else. I blame you for what you did to a little five-year-old child who hadn’t harmed you, who believed everything you did was wonderful. I blame you for sending me to live with those cold terrible people when you married Luke. I’ve seen the wedding pictures a hundred times … I wasn’t even invited to the wedding. I was only five, it wasn’t too late to become my mother once you were married. You could have kept me with you, I had no parents, you could have claimed me. But you abandoned me forever when you married Luke. How could you have been heartless enough to do that to a child, your own child? I blame you for sending me away for thirteen years to the Websters, people who never had a drop of love for me, people who weren’t my family, who treated me like an intruder. Except for Barney, the cook is my only friend in that house.”
“Maggie—”
“How much did you pay them to keep me? It must have been a fortune to keep Madison halfway civil, no matter how miserly she is. But you would have paid anything, wouldn’t you, to keep from having to take care of me yourself? You can’t deny it, you don’t even try. You were too busy being a star, too busy being married to a rich man, too busy jaunting around the world, too busy living for Luke, too busy being the famous Tessa Kent. There was simply no room in your wonderful, brilliant life for a child, was there? You and Luke didn’t even want one of your own. I grew up without love, except the little bit you spared me when Luke was away and you allowed me to visit, allowed me to play with your jewels. Your jewels around my neck instead of your arms. Stories of how to clean pearls instead of stories about my grandparents, my family, my place in the world. I grew up with no one but you and the crumbs you gave me. My grandmother had relatives, and one of them might have loved me, who knows? I’m not that unlovable, although that’s the way I felt, so ashamed that no one loved me but afraid to tell you because I thought you’d be disappointed in me.”
“You should have said something!”
“I should have said something?”
“I thought you were happy with the Websters.”
“Even if I had been, they’re nothing to me. You’re my mother. My mother! How could you leave me with them? How could you pretend to be my sister? How could you spend so little time with me?”
“Luke didn’t know,” Tessa whispered. “He never knew.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? What does that have to do with anything? Luke’s been dead for a year. Even if I believed you never told him, and I don’t believe it for a second, once he died you could have told me.”
“I couldn’t then,” Tessa cried. “It wouldn’t have been fair to you.”
“This is where I came in, Tessa,” Maggie said, taking off her pearls and putting them on a table. “I don’t want to see you again, ever. I don’t want anything from you, ever. I don’t want the money Luke left me, nothing will make me take it. Tell Madison I took her car and I’ll send her the claim check for it. And tell her to cancel the party, I won’t be going back there.”
She turned and walked toward the door as quickly as possible. It swung shut behind her as Tessa, immobile, was unable to try to follow her.
“I came here to tell her,” she told herself in a small voice, hugging herself and rocking back and forth. “I came here to tell her, but I couldn’t before, could I? Could I?”
23
A few minutes later Maggie found herself sitting on a bench in Central Park, so drained by the revelations and emotions of the morning that she couldn’t imagine how she’d ever get up again. Her brain was as empty as an eggshell from which the yolk and white had been suctioned out.
Only the sight of a soft-pretzel vendor aroused her to action. After three pretzels and two orange drinks had restored her blood sugar level, she found the strength to take a ball that a little boy put in her lap and toss it for him to retrieve and gleefully give back to her for another go. She could have spent the afternoon absorbed in this game, but when his nanny dragged him, protesting, from his new friend, Maggie’s mind began to work, reluctantly but efficiently.
The past was entirely past: over, finished, dead. College was out, because that would mean having her bills paid by Tessa, and any future relationship with Tessa was unthinkable. Even as she thought of Tessa, she felt absolutely nothing, no sense of loss, not even a flicker of anger, just an empty blankness devoid of pain. She was somehow insulated from emotion, Maggie realized. Her heart had withdrawn from her body and only clear facts were left.
The future was hers to invent. Her assets? The money, the eight hundred dollars she had planned to lend Barney, was still safe in her purse. She had a suitcase back in the car filled with whatever she’d packed this morning, she was dressed in her best light spring suit, and her shoes were beautifully polished. She had Barney’s address. All in all she was in a relatively rich position from which to begin a new life. She needed a job and a place to live.
Resolutely Maggie returned to the garage to get her suitcase, gratefully used their restroom, and took a taxi to Barney’s address, a brownstone converted into single rooms on a street between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues on the Upper West Side. The street showed no sign of the gentrification that was taking place in the neighborhood. No tempting little shops, no cafés or enticing ethnic restaurants, no polished brass doorknobs, no pretty curtains hanging in the windows, Maggie noted. Some of the houses didn’t have panes in the windows, much less window boxes.
Barney’s name w
as scrawled next to one of the buttons on the downstairs panel, but when he didn’t answer she sat on the second step of the short flight of outside stairs and waited for him. She welcomed this opportunity to decide what to tell him. Not a word about Tessa, she concluded instantly. The story, with its all-but-gothic complications and recitals of a grandfather’s mortal sins—a grandfather she barely remembered—could only be explained in its entirety or it didn’t make sense. It had nothing to do with Barney or her new life.
Madison and Tyler. They were reason enough, Maggie thought, watching, in an increasingly dreamlike state, the lively action of the crowded, noisy, dirty, and almost certainly dangerous street. Eventually, as she clasped her handbag tightly in one arm and threw the other around her suitcase, her lids closed over her weary eyes.
“Maggie!” Barney scooped her up and held her tight. “Oh, my Maggie, I thought I’d never see you again! How could you abandon me like that? Oh, sweetheart—”
“Barney! Wait, please wait. Shut up and listen to me and try to understand. You’ve got the wrong idea, I know how it looks, but I haven’t come to be with you. I’ve run away. I’m never going back, I’m on my own now. If Elizabeth hadn’t given me your address I’d have gone to a hotel.”
“Run away? It’s your birthday, you can’t run away on your birthday,” he blurted, totally confused.
“It’s as good a day as any other.”
“Maggie, for Pete’s sake, what’s going on?”
“I’ve had it up to here with your folks. I know you probably love them, but I had to get out. Your mother and I have always had problems with each other and when I realized I was eighteen and legally free, I got out. I gave them your message, by the way. Your dad’s plenty pissed, your mother said you’d be back when you ran out of money.”
The Jewels of Tessa Kent Page 25
