“In a museum?” Everett Chase snorted his disdain. “Gary, now—he’s well on his way up the ladder on Wall Street. His wife’s the perfect hostess, helps him along, you know.”
“Gary and Dawn have very different interests from mine.” Hilary tried to settle back into the chair. Every bony projection on her body cringed, while the pads of flesh between them had long ago gone numb. She decided the hospital provided uncomfortable furniture in an effort to drum up more business. Turning the piece of sweater in her lap, she began another row of stitches, wrists snapping, needles flashing. This particular shade of teal would look very nice on Mark, sparking his clear gray eyes with blue and green.
Everett looked like a tortoise flipped onto its back and propped up in a hospital bed; his jaw disappeared into a crepey neck, his mouth turned down in a frown and the expression in his eyes moved ceaselessly from suspicion to belligerence and back. His color was better today, but he still looked sickly around the edges. This morning he’d demanded that his hair be restored to its usual tidiness, parted just so above the distinguished gray at his temples. Hilary had done her best with comb and gel while he grumbled at her ineptness.
The door opened, admitting Hilary’s mother. The lacquered crash helmet of her hair accentuated the thinness of her face, while its artificial mahogany color emphasized the pallor of her complexion. The jewelry she was wearing today was from the line designed for Tiffany by Paloma Picasso; after every trip to New York Everett would produce yet another velvet jeweler’s case from his attaché case and announce, “Only the best for my wife!” The huge earrings, necklace, and bracelet, combined with her fashionable oversized shirtwaist, made Olivia looked like a child playing dress up.
“Everett,” she said, “here’s Dr. Nye to check you over.”
“I’m fine,” said Everett. “I have to get back to work. I have a family to support, a business to run.”
Nye was as sleekly handsome as a soap opera character. Applying his stethoscope to Everett’s chest, he said, “You had a myocardial infarction, Mr. Chase. A mild one, yes, but still a heart attack. You won’t be going home until Thursday, at the earliest. And that’s only with strict instructions. You need to lose twenty pounds.”
“I’ve studied the list very carefully,” said Olivia. “A low-fat diet. No more cigars. Exercise. We’ll outfit a gym in the conservatory.” She looked from her husband to the doctor, bright-eyed and eager.
“Doctors,” said Everett, his frown becoming a scowl. “Take the steak right out of your mouth. A man needs a piece of meat now and then. None of this pantywaist salad and quiche stuff. A man needs a good cigar. You have any idea what a Havana goes for these days?”
“The doctor knows what’s best, dear,” Olivia said. “We want you to be nice and healthy again.”
With a sunny smile, Nye turned and checked Hilary over. “What’s this pretty thing? Yours?”
“This is our little girl,” Everett said with a proprietary smirk.
Olivia beamed, flattered. “Baby, say hello to Dr. Nye.”
Hilary felt like a doll in a frilly dress, a key sticking out of her back. Defiantly she conjured up the image of a woman in a black sheath holding her own with the Coburgs. She pictured Nathan trusting that woman with the Regensfeld artifacts. “Hello Dr. Nye,” she parroted.
“I’ll bet she attracts men like honey attracts bees.” Nye slipped out the door. The room went so silent that the burst of music from a TV commercial detonated like an artillery shell.
Olivia’s mouth pinched shut. Everett’s smile curdled into disgust, and he kicked peevishly at his covers. Instantly Olivia was at the bed, loosening the blankets and then tucking them in again. If Hilary’s knitting needle had been plastic it would have snapped in the spasm of her hand. It wasn’t because I’m pretty! I don’t care what Ben said, he didn’t do it because I’m pretty!
“There, is that better?” Olivia asked Everett.
“Give me one of those magazines.”
“Time? Business Week? Golf Digest?”
Everett accepted the Business Week and his reading glasses.
With a shuddering breath Hilary smoothed the stitches on the metal needle. Everett might have preferred one of the issues of Playboy and Penthouse he kept in his den, but Olivia never acknowledged they were there. As a teenager, Hilary had looked through them in appalled fascination. Now she gagged at the very thought. Those magazines were tame compared to the sleaze the police had found in Ben’s apartment.
Olivia took a pitcher from the bedside table and started watering one of the flower arrangements on a nearby shelf. The only flower Hilary could identify with certainty was the rose, and there were no roses among the blooms brightening the monochrome of the room. One arrangement had cheerful red bell-like flowers, another blue globules and little schoolbus-yellow puffs. A couple of people had sent green plants which had already wilted in the artificial light. Hilary sympathized with them.
Olivia pulled a card from a bunch of spiky purple things. “Oh look, dear. John Linton sent you some flowers. Isn’t that nice?”
“Am I supposed to know a John Linton?” Everett demanded.
“Oh. I think that’s what the card says. It’s kind of a scribble.”
Everett took the card. “Oh for the love of God, Livvie, it says James Lytton. From the office. I’ve worked with him for fifteen years. James Lytton,” he repeated, like Mr. Rogers enunciating a word for his pre-school audience.
With the dignity of a martyr, Olivia drew herself up and replaced the card in the plant. Hilary swore between her teeth—how unfortunate that patricide wasn’t a socially acceptable form of self-expression—and crammed her knitting into its bag. When she stood up, pain rolled up her back and crashed into the spot between her brows, tightening her head in a vise. “Let’s go on home, Mother. Daddy’s had his supper, but you haven’t eaten a thing. Ruth left some lasagna in the fridge for us.”
“Lasagna’s so rich,” said Olivia. “Look at how big Ruth is. Disgraceful, the way she’s let herself go.”
“Daddy,” Hilary went on gamely, “I have to go back to Fort Worth tomorrow morning. Call me when you get home, let me know how you feel.”
“Tomorrow’s Saturday, baby. You don’t have to work on Saturday.”
“I need to get back,” Hilary repeated. Before I self-destruct, she added to herself. She leaned over to kiss her father’s forehead. Her lips touched stiffened hair gel.
Like the cavalry appearing over the horizon, a nurse opened the door and carried in a tray of pills and potions. “Here we go, Mr. Chase.”
Grudgingly Olivia picked up her purse and sweater. “Well….”
Everett looked at the pretty nurse appraisingly. But he couldn’t dance with her the way he danced with the young second wives of his cronies at the country club. Hilary wondered if he had a prospective second wife, assuming he and Olivia really did divorce. No one had mentioned the subject since her arrival. Her parents had gone through an alcohol abuse program together, but maybe they weren’t ready for marriage detox.
“Take care, dear,” Olivia said to Everett.
“I need some water for these pills. My glasses are smudged…”
The nurse set down her tray. “I’ll take care of him, Mrs. Chase.”
Everett’s face caved in, the flesh shrink-wrapping itself to the bone. Hilary felt a twinge of pity; the blustering old bully was losing his power. His son, his daughter, his wife, his health, were no longer his to control. He gazed unhappily after Olivia like a toddler left for the first time in a day care center. He was hurting. Hilary could hardly hate him for that.
She steered her mother out the door. “He’s going to be all right. You need to take care of yourself.” Olivia didn’t seem convinced, but she let Hilary walk her through the hallways and into the elevator.
Two floors down, the car stopped and the doors opened. Outside stood a girl of perhaps eighteen, holding a baby with a crumpled red face. She sported a jaunty ribbon in
hair that was much the worse for wear, but on her face she wore an expression of panic, as though she wanted nothing more than to leap onto the departing elevator and flee.
The doors closed, and the car began again to descend. Hilary could still see the girl’s stricken, bewildered eyes. Shuddering, she thought, But for the mercy of God that could be me, holding Ben’s baby, knowing even if I give it up, an invisible umbilical cord will forever bind me to it and to him.
“She made her bed,” Olivia harrumphed, “now she has to lie in it.”
“That baby has to have a father,” Hilary remonstrated.
“Boys will be boys,” said Olivia in the same tone of voice she reserved for such eternal verities as “Ladies don’t wear white shoes before Easter or after Labor Day.”
Boys weren’t necessarily jerks, Hilary thought. Mark had cared for his child. But he wasn’t a typical man. That was why she trusted him.
Outside it was full night. The low clouds over the city gleamed with reflected light. A chill breeze sped Hilary and Olivia to the Chase’s Lincoln Town Car. They purred into the darkness, the lights of the hospital winking out behind them.
Hilary felt as though she were riding in an upholstered tank. Olivia seemed strangely small behind the steering wheel; perhaps she’d shriveled, drained by propriety and convention, a caterpillar sucked dry before it ever became a butterfly. In the dashboard lights her carefully made-up eyes were as empty as Osborne House’s front windows. No, not empty—haunted. What had Jenny said about someone else’s memories? Olivia lived on Everett’s success, Gary’s ambition, and Hilary’s beauty, and died in her own despair.
Then there was Dolores Coburg, Hilary thought. As fair as porcelain, not pale; confident in her intelligence and competence. She had been a second wife. If she’d sold her soul to Arthur, she’d retrieved it when he died. It was Felicia whom Arthur had discarded like a used tissue.
“Are you going to back to your art and your music after the divorce?” Hilary asked her mother.
Olivia stopped the car at a red light and waited until it turned green before she answered. “I’m not sure we’ll be getting divorced. Thirty-five years of marriage is a lot to throw away.”
“It would be hard to break up such a long-running act,” said Hilary, adding to herself, Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. Snow White and Grumpy. “But you wouldn’t be throwing the years away. You’d be moving on.”
“Your father needs me.”
“I wouldn’t put it past him to have had a heart attack on purpose, just so you’d have to go on taking care of him.”
“It’s my fault,” Olivia said, so quietly Hilary almost didn’t hear her. “He did have the heart attack because of me.” She waited in a left hand turn lane until the closest headlights were in the next county.
Years of car-pooling with other people’s kids, Hilary thought. Dance and music lessons, soccer, Little League, Scouts—everything Everett’s money could buy, except his time. “What do you mean, your fault?”
“Last December I withdrew some money from one of the money market accounts. The accountant found out about it on Wednesday. He called Everett. Everett was shouting at me when he clutched his chest and fell down, right there at my feet. Norman called the paramedics.”
Her bald recitation hardly did justice to what must have been both a ludicrous and ghastly scene. For a moment Hilary regretted that Norman, the household factotum and the husband of Ruth the housekeeper, had been so quick to act. But no, it was hardly right to regret her father’s survival. “The country club dues are pretty steep, and Daddy just bought himself a Porsche. He doesn’t have any right to complain about your spending habits.”
“But it wasn’t for me. I took enough for a fast food franchise for Ben.”
Hilary’s shoulder blades contracted. “What?”
“He was on parole, he had to have a job. I thought this time, after—everything—he’d make something of himself.”
“We’ve been giving him money, finding him jobs, and paying for detox programs for years. He’s never stayed with anything. Some nerve, coming back to you now.”
“I know, I know. But I had to help him. He’s my brother.” Olivia stopped at another traffic light and stared fixedly up at it.
Hilary’s shoulder blades were so tense they were pulling her ribs apart. She was the sacrificial victim at a pagan ritual. An obsidian blade was cutting out her heart. “Daddy told you never to give him anything again.”
“That’s just the point, Baby. It’s my fault.”
Everett’s exact words had been, “After all I’ve done for that son of a bitch, still he helps himself to my daughter.” Hilary knew Ben had gone on an alcohol, cocaine, and gambling bender back in January—that was what had put him back in prison. She hadn’t known about Olivia’s role in it. “You were just enabling him, Mother. With us to fall back on, why should he ever learn to take care of himself.” What was the point of lecturing the poor woman about it now? That was as bad as the self-righteous sermons Everett had inflicted on Ben before handing over each check.
Hilary looked out the window, forcing her shoulder muscles to relax. The ghostly shapes of trees and houses passed in the night.
“Enabling?” asked Olivia with a tentative laugh. “That’s one of those psychology words, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, that’s one of those psychology words.”
“I went back to that counselor a couple of times—the one you asked me to see with you. But she kept telling me I had to do things for myself. That’s selfish. She shouldn’t tell people that.”
“She was talking about self-esteem, not selfishness,” Hilary said. “Like not making yourself responsible for Daddy’s health. Or Ben’s.”
Olivia didn’t answer. She turned into the driveway of stately Chase Manor, an island of mock Tudor in a sea of manicured lawn, as isolated as Alcatraz. Everett’s Porsche hunched desolate in the garage. The house was dark. Its scent of Pine-Sol and cigar smoke, an uneasy mingling of feminine and masculine elements, made Hilary’s nostrils close like gills.
Olivia went upstairs to change. Hilary checked the answering machine and found a message from Gary. “Hey Mom, Kid, how’s it going? Glad the old man’s still clipping his coupons. Dawnie and I are off to the theatre—front row center seats for Les Miz—if you need us, leave a message. Bye-bye.”
When Hilary had called Gary Wednesday night, he and Dawn had been out. She’d left a message. Thursday night, ditto. She’d tracked him down at his office this afternoon, but his secretary had apologetically explained he was taking a meeting. She stuck her tongue out at the inoffensive face of the answering machine and turned to the refrigerator.
The lasagna went into the microwave and a container of salad onto the table. Hilary would have liked a glass of wine with her meal, but there was—theoretically, at least—no alcohol in the house. She’d had two glasses when she’d eaten lunch with some girlfriends yesterday, the better to swallow their tales of new lovers and brilliant careers. Of course, she herself was doing well in the career department, and after mentioning Mark a time or two, had probably left the impression she was dating Indiana Jones.
Beyond the kitchen, the door into Ruth’s and Norman’s apartment was shut; Friday night was their night out. It had been shut the Tuesday night Ben had found Hilary studying in her bedroom. The servants said they’d never heard her scream. She’d always wondered whether they simply hadn’t wanted to get involved. Working for the Chases had to have given them a jaundiced view of the upper crust—a crust that should be vented with steam holes, like a pie. No wonder Lucia spoke so wryly of the Coburgs.
When Olivia reappeared, silk housecoat swishing, Hilary served her the lasagna and mouthed her mother’s usual refrain along with her: “That’s too much. I couldn’t possibly eat all that.” Bad girls, Hilary thought, do drugs and sex. Good girls have eating disorders. Rebelliously she cleaned her plate.
Olivia shoved her food around, piled the dishes in the sink, and d
rifted away murmuring something about an article in National Review. In the hall she paused to straighten a framed cover of Fortune depicting Everett Chase, Captain of Industry, in his Brooks Brothers suit. “Your father is very successful,” she said, repeating her favorite mantra.
Hilary strolled through the darkened house like a sightseer. Olivia’s out-of-tune baby grand loomed in the living room, beneath the watercolor landscapes she had painted before her marriage. One wall of the study was lined with Everett’s leather-bound classics—he disdained best sellers. The other rooms resembled displays in an upscale furniture store, expensive and soulless. Hilary thought of abandoned Osborne House. But its furnishings belonged to another day’s taste, and its atmosphere tingled with unresolved emotion. In its front parlor, two Coburg wives had entertained Death. Hilary scurried upstairs to the safety of the guest room.
She brushed her teeth and massaged her brows, trying to loosen the vise that was squeezing her head. Remembering that she wanted to take some books back with her, she went down the hall to the room that had once been hers. If any room in the house was haunted, it was this one. Hilary’s stomach tightened, sending an acrid wave of tomato sauce into her throat, but she forced herself to walk through the door.
Only her mother would have left the room a shrine to Hilary’s shattered childhood, the bubble gum trinkets and dolls of the girl on one side, the desk and bookcase of the scholar by the window. A bulletin board displayed grade-school crayon drawings and university copies of Leonardo and Durer. Stuffed animals sat in plump patience on the bed. The bedspread was pink and red, patterned with full-blown, almost wanton, roses.
From her parents’ room down the hall came the faint strains of a piano concerto; Olivia had hesitated for months before buying herself a CD player. Shaking her head, Hilary extracted The Atlas of British Historical Sites from the bookshelf. She’d been wondering why Jenny’s mention of Waltham Cross rang a bell. A few bells would be a pleasant distraction. She found the entry and read:
“Waltham Cross. Situated on the A10, the London-Cambridge road, this Essex market town is noted for the Four Swans Inn, dating to 1260. To the west is Waltham Abbey, burial place of King Harold.” Okay, Hilary thought, but what…. Aha! There was a photograph of an intricate Gothic tower supporting a stone cross, resembling a spire gone astray from its church. The caption read, “The perhaps rather too sharply restored Queen Eleanor memorial in Waltham Cross now finds itself in the centre of a frantic traffic junction.”
Garden of Thorns Page 15
