The Paramour's Daughter

by Wendy Hornsby

  “How nice, then,” Mom said, smiling prettily at Guido as she untied her big chef’s apron and headed for the swinging door into the dining room. “You’ll be staying the weekend. Margot, if you’ll keep an eye on things.” She tapped the master plan on the refrigerator door as she looked me in the eye, a warning to pay heed to the plan. “I’ll just get Guido’s room ready upstairs. Won’t take a minute.”

  “Don’t bother,” Guido said, embarrassed to have caused additional work for Mom. “A couch will do. Or a warm corner by the stove.”

  “Not at Gran’s house, it won’t do,” Casey said. She took her grandmother by the shoulders, turned her away from the door and tied her big apron back on her. “I’ll go, Gran. Which room?”

  I saw a look of panic cross Mom’s face. She obviously was not prepared for the rest of us to see the condition the unused parts of the house had fallen into. And cleaning an additional room would take far more than a minute.

  I said, “Mom, put Guido in my room. If it’s okay with you, I’ll bunk with you. We’ll eat popcorn under the covers and stay up all night talking; a regular slumber party.”

  She sighed, truly looked relieved. “I’d enjoy that. Good idea.”

  “Guido,” I said, wrapping an arm around his shoulders, “upstairs, second door on the right. Don’t go looking in drawers for my old diary; I burned it. Max, you’re in the usual. Casey, Gran put you and Zia in the room with twin beds.”

  “Woo-hoo,” Casey said. “We get our own bathroom.”

  Sleeping arrangements settled, the kitchen crew went back to work. Guido was given the jobs of filling water glasses, opening the red wine on the sideboard to breathe, and then, later, serving chilled, bubbly Prosecco wine in tall flutes to guests as they arrived. Max was designated paterfamilias and given charge of removing the turkey from the oven when it was ready and carving it. With essentials prepared, the kitchen crew was dismissed to go upstairs to dress for dinner.

  Guests began to arrive, each of them bearing a contribution for the meal.

  Gracie Nussbaum, the widow of my dad’s best friend who was our longtime family doctor, Ben—the doctor who delivered me—arrived first, bringing her special no-mushroom-soup green bean concoction. Jane and Jake Jakobsen, the next-door neighbors—Jake had taught in the math department for years, but was the graduate dean at the time he retired, Jane aided and abetted my mom’s political activism—came bearing pies, a fat double-crust apple and a pumpkin.

  “Lyle, Lyle, crocodile,” Casey exclaimed when she opened the door and found our former housemate, Lyle Green, and his partner, Roy, on the porch. Until the last big earthquake, Lyle was our across-the-alley neighbor when Casey and I still lived in San Francisco. California earthquakes are capricious things. They show up without warning and destroy randomly. During the last quake, our house came through intact, a few new cracks, but still standing. Lyle’s house was reduced to rubble. We took him in, just until he could rebuild. He quickly became our resident mensch, and we became his family. The arrangement worked for all of us.

  We stayed together until Mike and his son and Casey and I became a new family, in Los Angeles, and Lyle found Roy. Lyle and Roy bought the house from me, and they are still there.

  Lyle’s meal contribution was an assortment of cheeses to accompany dessert. Some of the cheeses were fairly stinky; I could smell them halfway across the room as I approached to greet him.

  Jane Jakobsen, elegant in cranberry velvet, her steel gray hair cut into an assertive bob, took the cheese tray from Lyle’s hands and looked it over, searching for something. “Did you remember to bring sharp cheddar to go with my apple pie?”

  “Of course, Janey, dear.” He pointed out a thick, dark orange wedge. “An aged Vermont, sharper than a farmer’s long-johns come spring.”

  And so on, friends old and new and a couple of strays arrived; each was handed a flute filled with Prosecco, and swept into the fold. The final seat count was eighteen, and the table was so laden with food that it truly was a groaning board.

  Mom seemed to be in her element. Happy, relaxed once the food was on the table. But toward the end of the meal, I thought she began to flag.

  After lingering over dessert, Casey, Zia, Guido and I claimed kitchen clean-up duty and left Mom to relax with friends in the living room with coffee and a decanter of very good port that Max found at a winery in Paso Robles.

  The food was all put away and the dishwasher humming through its first load, and we were almost ready to rejoin the others, when the telephone rang. I reached for the kitchen extension, but stopped before picking it up. Mom’s house, Mom’s caller.

  “Margot, dear.” Mom pushed through the swinging door. “Call for you. That nice friend of Mike’s, Detective Longshore.”

  “Rich?” I said into the receiver. Rich was a sergeant with the LA County Sheriffs, assigned to the Homicide Bureau, and had been one of Mike’s closest friends. “Nice to hear from you. Happy Thanksgiving. Did you have a good meal?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “Happy Thanksgiving to you, too.”

  Mom took a glass out of the cupboard and filled it with water, but then left it on the counter. Was she hovering? Snooping? It wasn’t every day that a homicide detective called her house.

  “Sorry to interrupt your party, Maggie,” Rich said. “I got a message that you called the Malibu substation this morning with a possible tip about a hit-and-run victim.”

  “I did. Have you identified the victim?”

  “We have. It would have taken us longer if you hadn’t called in with information. Thanks.”

  “Oh, dear.” The twinge of guilt I had felt earlier descended, a weight on my chest. “It was her? That woman?”

  “Mom?” Casey looked up from the silverware she was drying. “Is the dead woman...?”

  I nodded. My mother, brow furrowed, wanted to know: “What dead woman?” As I tried to focus on what Rich was saying to me, Casey filled in her grandmother about my encounter the night before at the market.

  I heard Mom say, “My Lord,” a couple of times. For good reason, when in the course of my work I get into a dust-up, I don’t usually tell my mother about it.

  Guido and Zia came in from making a trash run and Casey explained to them what was happening.

  “You alerted us to Deputy Ray Valdez,” Rich said. “Valdez was off duty this morning, hadn’t heard the news yet when I called him. He filled me in on the market incident. Last night, the woman told him her name and where she was staying, the Surfrider Beach Club in Malibu, a funky little hotel less than a quarter mile up PCH from where we found her. Her purse with her I.D. was in her room.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Isabelle Martin. Did you know her?”

  “Isabelle Martin,” I repeated, writing the name on the message pad beside the phone, in case seeing the name jogged something. It didn’t. My mother pulled out a chair and perched on its edge, chin on hand, blatantly eavesdropping right along with Casey, Zia and Guido. Mom looked pale. Exhausted, I thought; time for company to go home. I set her glass of water on the table in front of her and watched her take a sip.

  I told Rich, “I meet a lot of people. Most of them, I don’t pay very much attention to, but if I see them again there is at least some glimmering of recognition. But the woman’s face, her name, they just do not ring any bells.”

  “She had a French passport, arrived about a week ago, Paris to LAX via Virgin Air. No scheduled return,” he said.

  “Visiting family?” I asked.

  “No, Maggie,” he said. “Visiting you.”

  “What makes you think so?” I heard the skepticism in my voice; what he said simply did not make sense.

  “In her room we found a map with your studio’s location circled and a French tabloid that had a picture of you on the front page.”

  “Oh, shit.” I leaned against the counter and rubbed my eyes with my free hand. “Let me guess. The picture of Tiffy sitting on my lap?” This also was explained to
Mom by Casey.

  “That’s the one,” he said. “My high school French isn’t so good, so I rounded up a translator. The caption says something like, Filmmaker Maggie MacGowen gives bad-girl rock star Tiffy a soft landing outside a supermarket in the mega-star nest of Malibu, California. And then there are some comments about her lack of underwear and hopes that you delivered a much-needed spanking to her bare bottom.”

  “The box boy at the market last night warned me. He said now the nuts know where to find me.” Mom took Casey’s hand and held it. “So, this Isabelle Martin who said she was looking for her daughter Marguerite sees a tabloid photo of someone named Maggie and flies across the Atlantic to stake out the photo’s location, hoping her daughter will come by. You know what Mike would call her?”

  “A fifty-one-fifty,” he said.

  “That’s the short form.” I tore the page with the woman’s name off the message pad and crumpled it into a ball.

  Uncle Max pushed through the swinging door, leaned in. “Betsy, guests are ready to leave.”

  Instead of standing to go with him, Mom put a finger to her lips and nodded toward me. Max looked at me with curiosity, shrugged, and came into the room to eavesdrop with the others.

  “How did she die?” I asked Rich.

  “Who died?” Max demanded. Mom shushed him, but reached out, took the crumpled notepage from my hand and gave it to him.

  “Hit by a car,” Rich said. “Then run over, either by the impact vehicle or one that came along later. She was found by the bridge where Malibu Creek goes under PCH, on the parking lot of the Cross Creek Center. Coroner won’t do the cut till sometime early in the week, so I won’t have details about actual cause of death for a while, but it’s pretty clear from the appearance of the body what happened. We’re checking security cameras in the area to see if any of them caught something.”

  I realized I had been holding my breath while he spoke. In my mind’s eye, I already saw the incident and its ugly aftermath unfold as if I were watching it happen on slow-motion film, the effect of many years behind a camera. When I spoke, my voice sounded reedy to my own ears.

  “Last night, when I wanted her to go away and leave me alone, I never wished her harm,” I said. “I never imagined something like this would happen to her.”

  “Of course not,” Rich said. “But, Maggie, whatever her issues were, she won’t ever bother you again.”

  4

  “Beautiful meal, Mom.”

  We settled into the big leather chairs flanking the fireplace in the den, feet up on the ottoman between us. She tipped her glass toward me; we were drinking some very good Pinot Noir left over from dinner. Fire blazed in the grate.

  The last of the dinner guests were gone, the kitchen was clean again, the rest of the house party was tucked in upstairs. Norah Jones’s sweet, smoky voice—“Sunrise, sunset...”—played in the background. I sipped my wine and relaxed into the deep cushions of my chair, feeling content, happy to be home and in that room again, alone with my mother.

  The den was small and dark, the walls lined with books, framed family photos on the shelves. When I was a kid, for about an hour before dinner every evening—whether we had guests or not—my dad would sit down in the chair where my mother now sat, fire in the fireplace if it was at all cool enough, and read. Usually, I would join him for at least part of that hour. When I was very little, I would climb into his lap, my body tucked in the crook of his arm, my head on his fortress of a chest—the safest place in the world, in my father’s arms—and he would read to me. Didn’t matter if he read to me from his own book or one I brought to him, snuggling on his lap was the important part. When I was too big to sit on his lap, I moved into the chair opposite his, where I now sat, and read my own books; Dad never minded interruptions for questions. Eventually, I grew tall enough to share the ottoman, a milestone of my youth.

  It occurred to me belatedly that while Dad and I passed that lovely evening idyll, Mom was in the kitchen making dinner, often for guests my dad had invited at the last minute. Her world had been so different than mine became. I glanced at her, saw her gazing dreamily into the fire, lost to her thoughts.

  “You must be exhausted, Mom,” I said, breaking the silence.

  “Not at all.” She smiled softly, shifted her focus to me. She said her knees were bothering her just a little, which I multiplied by some factor of her pride plus denial to mean that she was in agony. “Good to have the house full of people again.”

  “Gracie Nussbaum looks fine,” I said.

  Mom nodded. “She still has some weakness on her left side from the stroke, but she compensates well, I think. And she’s very consistent about going to therapy.”

  “Mmmm.” I took a sip of wine, put my head back and watched the fire.

  “Margot, dear?”

  I turned toward her, found an odd look on her face.

  “When you were a little girl, did you ever feel, well, left out of things? By the family, I mean.”

  “Funny question, but, sure, sometimes I did.” In the flickering firelight, I couldn’t read her expression. “Perfectly natural, considering that Mark and Emily were so much older than me. What were they, fourteen when I was born?”

  She nodded. “Yes, fourteen.”

  “They were so smart, interesting, and lordy, they were tall. Mark was nearly six-five before he graduated high school, Emily almost six feet in the end. You and dad, both tall. I always felt like a pipsqueak around here; the tall genes skipped me.”

  “Both of your grandmothers were average height.”

  “Didn’t help that I was the baby,” I said. “No matter how hard I tried to keep up or catch up, well, I just couldn’t. The fact that Mark and Em were twins—hell, they left everybody out to some degree. By the time I might have been in the least interesting to them, they were off into the world, Mark at war, Em in med school. So, yes, sometimes I felt left out.”

  “Did you ever feel Dad or I...?”

  I shook my head; what had brought this on? “After Mark died in Vietnam, we all lost you for a while, Mom. I was a little kid, but I understood you were grieving. Dad always tried to compensate, gave me extra attention, had special treats for me. My God, I had a pony. Mark and Em never had a pony. Nobody I knew had a pony.”

  “Excuse me.” Guido hovered at the door.

  “Join us,” I said, turning toward him. “Bring a glass.”

  “Tempting,” he said. “But it’s been a long day. I just wanted to say good night. Thank you, Betsy, thank you, Mag, for taking me in.”

  “You’re always welcome, Guido,” Mom said.

  He had deep circles under his dark eyes. When he leaned over to kiss me, I put my palm against his stubbly cheek and looked into his face. “You okay, my friend?”

  “Yes.” He thought about it. “Maybe I’ll do what you keep telling me to do, find a woman my own age.” Then he smiled, firelight dancing in his big brown eyes. “But, damn,” and I knew from our many conversations on the topic of his history with women that he was thinking about Shasta, the intern who dumped him, and her predecessors, beautiful, bright, supple, and young, every one. “With that, I wish you good night.”

  When he was gone, Mom asked, “Is his heart really broken?”

  “Ego certainly hurts,” I said. “He keeps bringing in these kids that have stars in their eyes about making movies. They latch onto Guido as their conduit to dream fulfillment. They decide they’re in love with him, and he doesn’t discourage their feelings; he’s flattered by the adulation. After a while, they grow up a bit, dump him flat, move on to the next guru.”

  “I am only too familiar with the phenomenon. Remember, I was a faculty wife for nearly four decades,” Mom said, a grim set to her mouth. “You know, Margot, there are very well-defined rules meant to protect students from inappropriate behavior by faculty. But there is nothing to protect the faculty from predatory students.”

  “Predatory students, Mom?”

  “You kno
w Guido’s history. Guido leaves himself open, but who generally is the initiator? And who comes out feeling abused?”

  “I see your point,” I said. “But...”

  “I know the ‘but.’ ” She sipped her wine, eyed me over the rim of her glass. “The only thing old Henry Kissinger said that I ever half agreed with was that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. And your ‘but,’ I’m guessing, was going to head off in the direction of the potential abuse of power by faculty authority figures over their vulnerable student minions.”

  “Something like that.”

  “But, Margot, I offer you the old faculty wife’s corollary.” She sat forward, wagging her index finger for emphasis. “For men of a certain age, the ultimate aphrodisiac, the ultimate power, is youth. To wit, your poor Guido’s plight.”

  “That corollary applies only to men?”

  “Well, not always.” She smiled, gazed off again toward the fire, but I knew her focus had trailed off somewhere I couldn’t follow, probably into her memory.

  “Spill it,” I said.

  She brought her eyes back to me, thought for moment, seemed to make a decision. With a girlish toss of her head, she said, “I had an affair.”

  “Mom?” As horrified as I was by that bald statement, I studied her face, softened by the years and the firelight, and remembered how pretty she had been once, was still. And because I absolutely knew the answer—the nose I inherited from my father had been edited by a plastic surgeon early in my television career, but I was still his spitting image—I dared to ask, as a tease, “You aren’t going to tell me that Dad isn’t my biological father, are you?”

  She blushed. “No, dear. This was much later. Emily was somewhere in the east, already saving the world, you were in high school, off at that boarding school down in Carmel.”

  “Who was it?” I asked, appalled less than I was curious, running through the husbands of all of their friends, finding every one of them dull compared to my father.