The Jewels of Tessa Kent

by Judith Krantz

  “A gallon of orange juice, bacon and eggs, piles of toast, strawberry jam, tea, oh, my God, what time is it?”

  “Two in the afternoon. I’ll open the drapes and order for both of us.”

  “If I had morning sickness, I must have slept through it. You can’t get it after lunch, can you?”

  “All I’m certain of is that it’s not something you can sleep through,” Tessa said, as the springtime sunlight of Brazil flooded the room, “and I’ve never heard of anything called afternoon sickness, although I have heard of rare women who have all-day sickness from day one through the delivery.”

  “They must be passionate to have a baby, to put up with feeling hideously queasy and throwing up for nine whole months.”

  “Umm.”

  “That means you’re wondering how passionate I am about it, aren’t you? Do you think I don’t know what that noncommittal sound means?”

  “Umm.”

  Tessa threw up her hands and indicated that there was no more she was going to ask.

  “Oh, Tessa, I’m dying to have a baby! I didn’t know it until I thought I was going to have a miscarriage, but I want a baby with Barney more than I want anything else in the world. I honestly can’t imagine how I got pregnant—it certainly wasn’t on purpose—but, now that it’s happened, I’m blissed out! I never expected to feel this way. It wasn’t in my plans, at all. Of course, now we’ll have to get married, which will make Polly’s day.”

  “Polly Guildenstern?”

  “You ought to know, you and your private eyes, you know perfectly well who Polly is, you probably have her Social Security number and her psychological profile. Just the other day she hinted at a wedding because she knows all about Barney, and I promised Polly she could give it if we ever had one. Oh. Lord, do you think we have to invite Tyler and Madison?”

  “There’s no way out of it,” Tessa said, her heart jumping in jubilation at this question. It was the first time Maggie had asked her advice in many years.

  “Well, they probably won’t stay long, if they even show up. I’d give a lot to see Madison’s face when she finds out I’m going to be her daughter-in-law. Mrs. Barnaby Alcott Webster. I love it! I’ll order calling cards and leave her one someday, when I’m sure she’s not at home. Oh, here’s breakfast, or is it lunch? Doesn’t it look good?”

  Maggie was half-finished with her eggs when her hand flew to her mouth.

  “Sick?” Tessa jumped up, alarmed, immediately ready to help Maggie to the bathroom.

  “I just remembered! Marta Pereira! I’m supposed to meet her at three.”

  “She’ll call up from the lobby. I’ll explain that I’m taking your place. Trust me, I’m good at making up convincing excuses, as well as a demon at checking arrangements. I’ll pretend I’m you and I won’t be satisfied with anything but pure perfection.”

  “That’s all very well for today,” Maggie admitted, glad to be vanquished, “but Tessa, tomorrow! The press conference and the gala reception at night. Every single potential important bidder from all over South America! What am I going to do?”

  “Guess?” Tessa asked, repressing a smile.

  “I’m going to stay here in bed, flat on my back,” Maggie muttered, “and let you handle everything, which you’re perfectly capable of doing, as I’m aware, without anyone’s help. After all, you’re Tessa Kent and, more than the jewels, Tessa Kent is what they’re coming to see, like that day at Elm Country Day.”

  “I have three books you can read, and I can get you magazines from the newsstand in the lobby.”

  “Maybe later. Aren’t you going to finish your breakfast? Look, you left half of it. Because if not … thanks. You know, if you’d let me get up very, very carefully, just to brush my teeth, I think I could go back to sleep for a while.”

  “I’ll get the maids to change the bed while you’re in the bathroom. Just don’t try to get fancy. No baths, whatever you do,” Tessa said warningly. “You’re allowed to give yourself a sponge bath, but, Maggie,” she said, feeling the most delicious sense of matronly power, “you have to promise me to be careful, to do everything very, very slowly. Here’s a fresh nightgown.”

  “And a very sexy one too. Thank you. I promise, cross my heart, to make no sudden moves. After all, Tessa, I’m almost as involved in this baby business as you are. I wonder what the divine Doctor Roberto will think when he sees me in this … he’ll know it couldn’t be mine. Had you noticed that he has the hots for you?”

  “Maggie!”

  “Mamãe!” Maggie retorted, laughing, as she drifted as slowly as a turtle toward the bathroom.

  38

  Taking great care to make no noise, Tessa opened the door of her suite, late on Monday night, only to find Maggie lying in bed, still reading.

  “I couldn’t possibly sleep,” Maggie explained, putting down her book, “until you came back and told me how it went.”

  “It was a fantastic success, a brilliant, glorious gala!” Tessa exclaimed, excitedly flinging down the cape of silver lamé that swirled in pleated folds around a bare, slender column of silver satin. “Oh, Maggie, I was riding so high I could have personally auctioned off every last piece in the exhibition for twelve times its high estimate, but Marta wouldn’t let me. She’s still down there making appointments for women to come and try on the jewels—they’re keeping the pieces here two extra days because they can’t handle the requests in less time than that.”

  “But—”

  “No, don’t worry, she called New York and cleared it. We’ll go back as we planned. Oh, I wish you could have been there! Such glorious people, such superb clothes. They really know how to dress up … it was the way I imagine Hollywood must have been in the fifties. I felt a bit of a country mouse.”

  “Poor thing,” Maggie mocked, “you should have borrowed some jewelry, instead of having nothing to wear but your skin, since you can’t count that dress. Did Doctor Macho take you up on your personal invitation?”

  “Of course. We tangoed—divinely, of course—and then he bent over and whispered in my ear, ‘Tell Maggie that she’s been a very good girl and Doctor Roberto is pleased with her.’ ”

  “You get to tango and I get to stay in bed and be a good girl. What’s wrong with that picture, I ask you?” Maggie complained wickedly. “I supposed he kissed your hand too?”

  “Possibly, possibly. It’s only fair, considering the process that landed you in bed. You can’t get gravida from the tango, at least not immediately,” Tessa replied, pulling out the pins that kept her hair swept up high and letting it tumble down around her flushed face. “Since I don’t believe Sam knows how to tango, I made the most of it.”

  She’d made the most of the entire evening, Tessa thought. She’d never flirted before, not really. Luke and Sam weren’t flirtations but headlong, mutual flights into love, and there had been no one before Luke or after him until Sam. She could have, should have, made a career out of flirting, Tessa thought, if she’d had time, if she hadn’t met Luke, if she’d had a few free years she would have flirted with an army. Now her entire knowledge of her amazing power to flirt would be forever compressed into illuminating a ballroom of willing South American men. Better late than never, she told herself, smiling at Maggie.

  “So Sam isn’t perfect?” Maggie asked.

  “He is, with that one exception. Does Barney tango?”

  “Not unless they taught it in dancing school, along with the box step.”

  “Oh, Maggie, I’m so glad it’s over,” Tessa said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “The press conference, the gala—everything a triumph—now all that’s left is the ultrasound and the flight back home. Won’t you go to sleep now? There’s nothing left to worry about, and with this first trip under your belt, speaking loosely, you know the others will simply be more of the same. You can finally relax.”

  “But you must be exhausted. You’ve been on your feet for two days.”

  “Oh, maybe just a little, but it doesn�
��t matter … you only live once.” Tessa yawned and stretched, and unzipped her dress, letting it slither to the floor. Maggie lay back with her eyes half-closed until she heard Tessa return from the bathroom in her bathrobe and sit at the dressing table to take off her makeup. Maggie pulled herself up on her pillows with quiet determination, while Tessa, her back turned, concentrated on silently turning the lid of a jar of cleansing cream.

  “Who was my father?”

  “Oh! Good God! You scared me! I thought you were sleeping.”

  “Who was he?” Maggie demanded firmly. “I want to know all about him, every last detail. Don’t leave out a thing. I would have asked sooner but I didn’t want to get into it and probably upset you before the big night.”

  “Your father’s name was Mark O’Malley and you look very much like him. He was tall and beautiful and as Irish as they come, and he had your curly dark hair and your marvelous big blue eyes, and he was seductive and confident and had a charm no one could resist. Like you. He was a local hero, Maggie, the captain of the high school football team. I was besotted with him for two years. I promise you, I was violently in love and I know how that feels.”

  “Two years? You had a two-year romance with him?”

  “Hardly that,” Tessa answered soberly, remembering. “He didn’t know I existed … my love was a mad, completely one-sided passion. I adored him from a distance, I dreamed of him night and day. It was first love, and there’s nothing like it. All-consuming. You ought to know, you and your Barney. Finally, when I had just turned fourteen, a friend and I crashed a party at his house and I met him. I told him I was eighteen and he believed me. I looked much older than I was and I dressed the part. He took me upstairs and he … more or less … seduced me. He never knew my name, he never knew I’d gotten pregnant, he never saw me again.”

  “You mean … he could be alive?”

  “Well, of course.” Tessa laughed. “He’s probably a perfectly nice forty-one-year-old guy with a wife and four football-playing kids somewhere.”

  “That son of a bitch!”

  “No, no Maggie, don’t say that! I had on a lot of makeup, he thought I knew what I was doing; I led him on, actually, he certainly didn’t have to force me, so you can’t blame him. Blame me, I’d had too much to drink and I wanted to.”

  “Is that what you mean by he ‘more or less’ seduced you?”

  “Well … no.”

  “Then you mean you seduced him?”

  “Not that either.”

  “So how in the name of God did you get knocked up?” Maggie asked impatiently.

  “Do you absolutely insist on knowing?”

  “I do.”

  “I warn you, it’s quite improbable.”

  “I have a right to know,” Maggie insisted sturdily.

  “He was … overly … aroused … and when he … ah, when he … penetrated me, he only managed … about an inch … before he had an orgasm, and that was that.”

  “An inch! That’s how you had me? An inch! You were still a virgin, for Christ’s sake!”

  “I was, but who would believe me? Your grandparents didn’t want to know a single detail; they knew I was a sinner and that was enough.”

  “So I owe my existence to a horny high school hero with super sperm who suffered from premature ejaculation and a horny high school girl who let him put it in! Where were you when they taught sex ed?”

  “In deepest Catholic school.”

  “Great. Just great.” Maggie shook her head at the ways of yesteryear.

  “Well, think of it this way, if it hadn’t happened, you wouldn’t be alive.”

  “Oh, God,” said Maggie, “an inch, an inch, one lucky inch …” and she began to giggle so hard that the mattress started shaking. Soon she began to howl with laughter. “An inch, an inch, I owe my life to just one inch …”

  “Stop it, you’re getting hysterical,” Tessa begged, beginning to laugh herself. “Please, please stop it, Maggie, honestly it wasn’t funny at the time, but you made me tell you all the details … oh, oh, I admit it’s really … too ridiculous … when it doesn’t happen … to you, oh, an inch, that’s all it was, an inch … not … not that he didn’t have … much more … oh, oh …”

  “I assumed … he did … dear old Dad … oh, oh, poor Mamãe … what a rotten break, what lousy luck, I always knew I was special but I never guessed I was the product of a virgin birth. Oh, you’re right, it is improbable … but I believe you, even if nobody else ever did.”

  Maggie and Tessa gave full rein to their fill of mirth until they both fell silent with the realization that this discussion wasn’t over.

  “When I got that letter from my grandfather,” Maggie said, solemnly, “what just about killed me was not the whole teenage mom story, because anyone would understand that, but the fact that when you could have acknowledged me, you didn’t. I totally get it that when you became famous at sixteen you couldn’t be allowed to have a kid, but what about when you married Luke and my grandparents died? That’s where the whole thing sucks! Since I was supposed to be your sister anyway, not some stranger, why didn’t you and Luke just take me instead of sending me to the Websters?”

  “There are a dozen answers to that, none of them any good.”

  “Yeah? Well, tell me a few, just for my information.”

  “Luke never knew you were my child, that was the beginning of it. ”

  “You never told him?”

  “I … he wanted to marry a virgin. It was terribly important to him, a real obsession.”

  “What right did he have to want a virgin!” Maggie sputtered with rage. “Luke was a hundred years older than you, he’d had a million women, what gave him the goddamned right to have the fucking nerve, to want a virgin? Was he some kind of god who demanded a virgin sacrifice?”

  “Oh, Maggie, if only I’d dared to ask him that! I was too stupid, too much in love, too young, I wanted him too much, I believed he could keep me safe. Oh, how I needed to feel safe! It was like suddenly being able to breathe fresh air after being underground for years. I was desperate. I’d never felt safe in my life, especially after I got pregnant … I don’t expect you to understand or forgive me, I’m just telling you exactly the way it was. I was afraid to lose Luke, so I lied by letting him believe it, and then, afterward, I couldn’t even consider telling him the truth because it was such an enormous and fundamental lie, Maggie, I believed our life together was founded on his believing me. Depended on it. Even on our wedding night—I played up to it.”

  “But you’d had a child, couldn’t he tell?”

  “The doctor who delivered you assured me that he’d done me a favor and stitched me up so that I was ‘as good as new.’ I found out what that meant the first time Luke and I made love.”

  “Okay, so you got away with passing as a virgin. But the man totally, absolutely adored you, I know that, so why couldn’t you admit it sooner or later, once he couldn’t live without you? All those years, Tessa! Why couldn’t you face up to telling a lie? Tell him to take his belief in you, and stuff it? That’s what I would have done!”

  “I was a criminal coward, Maggie. Luke was a very selfish man. I always knew it, even when he was alive. He had a terribly jealous temperament and he hated my career, but he let me have it anyway. I didn’t want to disturb that delicate balance we’d created. Luke was demanding, and controlling, but even though his world revolved completely around him, I had become the most important element in it. He was incredibly generous in so many ways, to so many people.”

  “He bought people,” Maggie said in a low voice.

  “Yes, he did, one way or another, Maggie, but he didn’t buy me. I allowed him to set the terms of our life because I liked it that way. I didn’t have to do it, don’t you understand, I wanted to! Deep down, I wanted to be dominated, to be all the things Luke wanted me to be. I told you, it made me feel safe, and I thought I couldn’t live without that. I wasn’t as brave as you would have been. I took the easy
way. The lying way. The protected way. The longer I did it, the more it became the only way.”

  “But after Luke died, why couldn’t you have told me then?”

  “That’s the one thing I got right, Maggie, the one action I’m proud of. I was a basket case, nothing would have helped but time and getting through the grieving and loss by myself. I knew I had to just set my teeth, keep busy, and do my mourning alone. If I’d let you sacrifice your last year in school to be with me, it would have been thoroughly wrong and horribly unfair to you. I’m certain about that. As soon as I discovered that I was able to make plans again, my first thought was to claim you. But you’d received that letter … and it was too late.”

  “More than five years ago … I can’t believe it,” Maggie murmured.

  “Maggie,” Tessa said, “you do believe, don’t you, that I never understood how you felt about the Websters? I thought you were happy with them.”

  “I never wanted you to know.”

  “But I should have guessed!”

  “You couldn’t have, not possibly. I’m a pretty good liar myself, and I can keep it up for years, like you. Maybe it’s a talent that runs in the family … your mother, then you … and me.”

  “You don’t have to let me off the hook.”

  “Maybe I want to,” Maggie said impetuously, “maybe I’d rather have a mother I can love, than a sister I won’t look at and don’t speak to.”

  “Maggie, oh, Maggie, do you mean that?”

  “Isn’t it time?” Maggie asked, with a sob, opening her arms and pulling Tessa close, so that she could lay her head on Tessa’s shoulder and feel the sweet, necessary, longed-for comfort of her mother’s embrace.

  39

  When?” Dr. Helen Lawrence echoed Maggie’s question. “I’d guess in about six months, more or less, but I wish you had some clue as to when you got pregnant. It would take a lot of the guesswork out of this.”

  “I always used my diaphragm,” Maggie laughed, pocketing the ultrasound photographs Doctor Roberto had given her to take to her own gynecologist in New York for comparison.