by Nancy Thayer
This was only normal life, she told herself. People got married, went on honeymoons, bought houses, every day. People had done it for years. She was not so different from every other human on the planet, after all. She really could have a husband, a home, a family. Most people accepted that as naturally as their breath.
“Hello, Catherine.”
She looked up.
Piet stood at the open door to her office. His white linen suit was exquisitely civilized, but when he smiled, his eyes flashed like a gypsy’s.
Catherine surprised herself. For the instant she saw Piet, she wanted to touch him, to run her hands over his face, his hair, his chest, to kiss him. The sight of him made her heart glad.
God. What was wrong with her?
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Piet said.
“What?”
Piet nodded at the high-backed swivel desk chair that Catherine had pulled in front of herself, as if for protection. She looked down to see her own hands gripping the back of the chair so tightly, her knuckles were white.
Catherine laughed and released the chair. “Well, this is a shock,” she said. “Come in. Sit down.”
“How are you?”
“I’m well, thank you.” She moved in front of her chair and sat down. She waved Piet onto the chair across from her. She couldn’t help the formality, the stiffness, with which she moved. “I’m going to be married next week. To Kit Bemish. A lawyer. We’re going to Venice for our honeymoon.”
The darkness in Piet’s eyes deepened. “Congratulations.”
For one brief moment they stared at each other. Then Piet smiled.
“It’s a good thing I got here before you left. I’ve finally gotten all the loose ends tied up, and I now have a serious proposal to make.” He waited one wicked beat of time before adding, “A business proposal.”
“Oh?”
He leaned forward. Now he was intent, all business. “Catherine, what I’m going to say is just between you and me. I’ve been working all year on this. It could be very big. In the next few years the flower business is going to change dramatically. Refrigeration and communication technology and air freight will make it possible for a better-quality and a larger variety of flowers to be shipped from Amsterdam than will be available locally. Land on Long Island is becoming more and more valuable for developers, and eventually flower growers there will sell their land. They’ll have to. Most of this country will buy their flowers from all over the world, shipped into and out of Holland.
“I have set up my own wholesale company. I want you as my partner. I will work out of Aalsmeer and Amsterdam. You will call me at, say, nine in the morning your time, to tell me what flowers you need. I will buy them at the flower auction, have them packed and flown to you. Because of the time difference the flowers you order in the morning will arrive that same afternoon. For your shop, for Blooms, you will have the finest quality of flowers, and a huge variety, unusual flowers. In addition, you will cut out the cost of the wholesaler.
“But more than that, I want you to branch out. I want you to wholesale flowers from Holland to the other New York florists. We will start simply working from a truck. Our prices will be competitive, and the flowers will be high quality. We will be the first to offer an enormous variety and such an unusual selection.”
Catherine sat, thinking. “Won’t the cost of air freight be enormous?”
“Yes. But we will import such a large quantity that I, buying the flowers, will be able to get a price break that will more than make up for the freight cost. I have the figures to show you. With the volume of flowers Blooms uses, if you save even one cent a stem, you will be making good money. In addition to what you’ll charge as wholesaler to other florists.”
Catherine’s brain was already in high gear. “Perhaps it would be wise not to publicize to my competitors that Blooms is importing. Perhaps the wholesale business should be under a different name.”
Piet smiled. “So you are interested.”
Catherine returned his smile. “You knew I would be.”
* * *
It was night. Kit was furious. He was pacing the living room.
“I can’t believe you’re serious about this. How do you think I’ll feel, knowing your old lover is around you all the time?”
“I don’t love him anymore, Kit.” Catherine spoke as honestly as she could, confident that she could keep any fleeting desire for Piet under control. What she felt for Piet was undeniable, but Kit was necessary to her life, and she would never betray him. “Kit. I love you. I told you, he was just—a temporary thing. I haven’t even seen him for over a year! Isn’t that proof that we weren’t seriously involved? I shouldn’t have told you we were lovers, but I wanted no secrets between us. Look. Piet won’t be around me all the time. He won’t be around me at all. He’ll be in Holland.”
“And what about our new life? Our marriage? Why do you want to take on a new time-consuming, ambitious project like this just when we’re beginning our life together?”
“That’s not fair. I’m not asking you to give up practicing law in order to give all your time to me.”
“Women’s lib.”
“No. I’ve never been part of a herd, and you know it. Look, Kit, you have to understand what Blooms means to me.”
“I do understand. I’ve never suggested that you give it up, or sell it, or even stop managing it. What I don’t understand is your desire to take on more. Importing and wholesaling flowers is a major undertaking, Catherine. You’ll need more employees, accountants, truckers—it’s like starting a whole new business. I’m not asking you to give up what you have. I’m only asking you not to take on more at this point in your life. In our lives.”
“I promise you I won’t spend any more time at Blooms than I already do. I’ll delegate more. I’ve got Jason, Carla, Sandra, and now Shelly, all of whom are completely reliable and who can run Blooms without me. I’ll give them new positions, more responsibility, larger salaries, and they’ll be motivated to work harder. Kit, I really want to do this.”
“Why? Is it money?”
“Partly,” she admitted. “I like having money. I want to make more money, for us, for our children. So they never have to go through what I went through—that feeling of the bottom of the earth falling out from beneath their feet.”
“You can’t trust me to provide for that?”
“Kit, be realistic. Haley is getting everything you have in the divorce settlement.”
Catherine was silent then, but her thoughts lay unspoken between them. It was Catherine’s money from Blooms that they’d used for the down payment on the Connecticut house. When Kit’s parents died, he would inherit the Maine house, the Boston house, and a great deal of money. Until then, in all likelihood, Catherine would have more money from Blooms than he did from his legal practice. Catherine had been proud of him for not letting money come between them. It was a potentially more sensitive and more destructive matter than anything else.
“Kit. I’ve loved you ever since I met you. I’ve never stopped loving you. I never want to hurt you or make you unhappy. But I need you to understand how I feel about Blooms. It’s like—like a child to me, in a way. I love it. It’s mine. It’s not enough for me to let it just remain as it is. The business world is always changing. If you remain the same in business, you fall behind. If I didn’t do this for Blooms, it would be, oh, like not sending a child to college. Or not getting it proper medical care. Or not feeding it. It needs to grow.”
Kit didn’t reply. He stood at the window, looking out at the night. His back was tense.
Catherine went up and wrapped her arms around him. “I wish you knew how much I love you. How much I’ve always loved you. I’ve never been happier in my life.”
Still Kit remained tense, silent.
She nuzzled her head into his back. “Do you mean you’ll be happy only if I don’t go into the importing business with Piet? Is that what you want?”
She felt K
it’s muscles loosen.
“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t ask that much of you.”
Kit turned to face Catherine. He looked at her, then pulled her against him. Holding her tightly, he kissed the top of her head.
“I know you love me. I love you. I want you to be happy. I want you to be the way you are. So—go ahead. Do it.”
“With your blessing?”
“With my blessing.”
Catherine sighed and leaned against him. She had just taken a terrifying risk. If Kit had wanted her to, she really would have given up the idea of importing flowers with Piet. She loved Kit enough to do that for him. But God how glad she was not to have to make that choice!
* * *
In June Catherine and Kit were married in the garden at Everly.
It was not a fairy-tale wedding. The best that could be said for it was that it made their union public and official.
They were married in the garden by the lily pond. The weather was perfect. A flawless blue sky blazed with light. The air was warm but not yet heavy with the humidity that would come in late summer. Kathryn’s garden was a lush rainbow of roses, lilies, iris, peonies, foxglove, mock orange, and lilacs.
Catherine wore a dress of ivory peau de soie that fell from pleats at the shoulders and a floppy brimmed hat with the band trimmed in Maiden’s Blush roses. The wedding bouquet, which Jason had designed especially for her, was a mass of tiny pink roses, white roses, and gardenias and slipped with ivory ribbons onto her grandmother Kathryn’s white leather prayer book. Ann was Catherine’s only bridesmaid. She had flown back from the British Everly, where she was working, just for the wedding. Kathryn acknowledged the importance of the occasion by wearing her valuable diamond necklace with a silk dress; at the last moment she popped on her floppy straw gardening hat to protect her face from the sun. Catherine’s father, looking marvelously handsome—for this was the sort of occasion he excelled at—gave Catherine away. While the minister led Catherine and Kit through the vows, Marjorie Eliot squirmed, fanning away, exasperated, at nonexistent bugs.
Jason wore a lavender silk suit that probably cost more than Catherine’s wedding dress, and when Catherine said, “I do,” he cried more than anyone else at the ceremony. Catherine’s mother didn’t cry at all. Sandra and her husband had brought Carla out for the wedding. Shelly was there, of course, and Catherine’s beloved Mr. Giles. Kit’s parents had steadfastly refused to attend, but his friend Don and his perceptive wife, Janie, were there, and the law partners, Mr. Woodrow and Mr. Spiegel, were there with their wives.
When the ceremony was over, a champagne dinner was served in the dining room, with the doors thrown open to the gardens. It was a beautiful, elegant day, but not what Catherine had thought it would be like. She did not feel swept away on clouds of love. She had come out to Everly the night before with Ann. And all through the wedding Catherine couldn’t stop noticing how rundown Everly was. It needed painting. It needed another full-time gardener. Catherine made a mental note to see if she could convince her grandmother to let her help out, but still she could not dismiss the foreboding she felt.
Also, she didn’t feel well. For several days she’d vomited every morning. Nerves, perhaps, though she’d never been the nervous type. It was more likely, since her period was three weeks late, that she was pregnant.
Chapter 10
New York, 1976
The January 1976 issue of Vogue ran a photoarticle about Catherine Eliot Bemish in their series “Women We Admire.” The largest picture was of Catherine holding her son, Drew, three years old, and her daughter, Lily, nine months old. Catherine was wearing a voluptuous crimson, lavender, and gold silk caftan. Gypsyish gold hoops hung at her ears. Drew was wearing a blue plaid bathrobe. Baby Lily was naked except for a pink bow in her blond whale spout, but the billowing sleeves of Catherine’s caftan covered much of Lily’s tiny body, leaving only her legs, arms, and shoulder exposed in their rosy plumpness.
Supposedly Catherine had just finished bathing her children, but in fact it had taken them three hours to get this casual-seeming setup ready. And certainly Catherine could never have worn the caftan to bathe her babies. The winged sleeves would have drooped in the tub and become waterlogged and heavy, the silk ruined. Catherine really wore jeans and a sweatshirt to bathe her babies, or sometimes even got into the tub with them. Afterward she would put on a comfortable, often washed terrycloth bathrobe that she wore for the rest of the evening. But for the photo, she wore the caftan. She sat where the photographer posed her, on her dressing room sofa, where the rich chintz flowers gleamed against the apple green wall of Catherine’s dressing room at her White River home, instead of in the children’s bedrooms, which were always littered with toys.
Another photograph showed Catherine seated behind her desk at Blooms, talking on the phone, pen in hand. She was wearing a designer suit in a navy wool pinstripe, a mock man’s suit complete with white shirt and English rep striped tie. In another shot, Catherine and Kit were caught in a camera flash at a charity ball at the Met. Kit was in his tux, Catherine in a full-skirted emerald evening gown. Behind them towered a massive arrangement of flowers, done for the gala, of course, by Blooms.
“My secret?” Catherine was quoted. “Organization. A superb staff both at work and at home. I learned the hard way, by trial and error, in my business, to structure, delegate, and categorize. I just apply the same principles to my home life.”
* * *
“What a pack of lies,” Catherine said, reading the article. “But I’m the modern woman, I couldn’t say I owe it all to my delicious husband.”
“That would be a lie,” Kit said. “You are organized. You do delegate. You do have a good staff.”
“But if I didn’t have you, and time alone with you, I’d lose my mind,” Catherine said. “Oh, Kit, sometimes I feel like one of those poor criminals tied to four different horses, being pulled bodily in four different directions.”
“Roll over. I’ll give you a back rub,” Kit said.
It was a cold January Sunday. Before their children were born, Catherine and Kit had agreed that they would bring up their children themselves and not leave them solely to the care of governesses and nannies and maids. Sundays would be family time, they decided, but after Lily was born they changed their minds. Sunday mornings would be family time. Sunday afternoons would be reserved for the two of them to be alone, a luxury they sorely needed.
This morning they had been awakened by Andrew, who raced into their room and crawled into bed with them for tickles and hugs. Catherine had gotten Lily from her crib and changed her, and the four had gone down to the kitchen for a leisurely breakfast of pancakes and bacon. Then they’d all dressed and gone out to play in the snow. Kit and Catherine pushed the children on sleds down the slight incline at the side of the house. Kit and Andrew built a fort while Catherine watched Lily eat snow. The pony Santa had given Andrew for Christmas had whinnied and pranced back and forth in the ring, begging for attention. Kit and Catherine brought their children back into the house, gave them hot baths and warm lunches, then settled them into their rooms for quiet time.
Now it was early afternoon, and their nanny, Mary, who loved having Sunday mornings to sleep late, was on duty with the children, and Kit and Catherine were secluded together in their bedroom. They lay together, looking at the article about Catherine in Vogue.
Catherine rose to slip off her clothes, then stretched out naked on the bed. She was still nursing Lily, but Lily was also getting solid food, so her long large breasts were not uncomfortably full. She raised herself up on a pillow to keep from crushing her breasts, which were sensitive. She was so very tired. A back rub was just what she needed. As Kit moved his hands over her shoulders and back, she took deep breaths, relaxing, trying with each exhalation to breathe away thoughts of the world outside this bedroom.
Deep breath: first, their children. Lily was over her cold, and the antibiotics had cured the ear infection that had caused the l
ittle girl to wake screaming a few nights ago. As Catherine rocked Lily, she’d remembered the nurse who had been with her during her labor with Andrew. It had been a long hard labor. When the doctors and Kit had gone out into the hall to discuss whether to give Catherine a spinal or a C-section, Catherine had cried to the nurse, “It’s really not the pain I mind. It’s the lack of control. I hate not being in control.” The nurse had smoothed Catherine’s wet hair off her forehead and smiled down at her. “Oh, honey,” she’d said, “this is the easy part.”
Catherine had thought the nurse was nuts. Now she understood. Here at their White River home, she and Kit had a full staff: a housekeeper/cook and caretaker, Mr. and Mrs. Bunt, who lived in a suite on the first floor off the kitchen, and Mary, the nanny, who lived on the third floor. They’d hired a maid, Angela, to run the apartment in the city. Kit had told Woodrow and Spiegel that although he’d accept a partnership, he didn’t want the toughest cases, because he wanted time for his family, and Catherine had delegated more and more work at Blooms to Shelly, Sandra, Jason, and Carla.
But still every day was crowded, rushed, sometimes nerve-racking, always exhausting. Children were such mysteries, so fragile and dependent on the adults in their lives, and their health went through such dramatic changes: croup, colds, rashes, sudden pains, and even when they were in perfect health, Mary wanted to put Andrew on his pony, or Kit wanted to teach the children to swim. Suddenly to Catherine the world seemed a maze of dangers: ponies could kick, water could drown, on the most peaceful summer day a bee could sting.… Since Andrew’s birth, Catherine often felt she’d never been at rest except at night, when she knew both children were tucked away in bed, healthy, asleep.
But now they were safe and healthy. Vaguely, through the walls, she could hear their shrill laughter and thumps: they were building a house of blocks with Mary. They were safe.
Deep breath: Blooms. There had been all kinds of snags setting up GardenAir, the wholesale flower importing business, but now after three years most of the problems had been worked out and the profits were finally beginning to roll in and promised to increase dramatically in the coming months. Piet was always in Amsterdam, except for the executive meetings twice a year, so Kit had no reason to be jealous, and Catherine had no reason to feel guilty. She was too busy, too much in love with her children and her husband, to even remember how she had once felt for Piet.
