How was I supposed to know!
It’s hard to believe, even now. Richard, my straight arrow knight, hooking up with my slut of a sister. Other than the obvious signs that he practically hit me over the head with, he didn’t seem different. I’d have thought that a man in the middle of an affair would seem happy or relaxed or at least looser, not so tightly controlled. Still….
He was a man, after all, not a boy anymore, and heaven knows, he liked sex, and he had gone without for longer than I cared to remember.
I can just imagine the web Francie spun around him.
~•~
Francie made herself scarce at Easter, when we went home to look at houses. I wanted something nice and modern that could take care of itself, but of course, the worst possible home buyer is an architect. Nothing measured up to Richard’s idea of what he wanted; he didn’t like the ceilings, or he hated the layout, or he found the property lacking in some way. So he and Philip made a deal about Ashmore Minor, and before I knew it, I found to my horror that I was going to be living a stone’s throw (OK, half a mile) from my in-laws.
“This way, we won’t need a mortgage,” said my pinch-penny husband, and ignored my glare.
He went out alone a lot, so maybe he met Francie then. All I remember is, I hardly saw her, and when I did, she seemed smug, but then she always did. She had been accepted at Juilliard and took every opportunity to rub it in. I made sure she knew that I hadn’t bothered to send in my papers.
Laurie was actually the one I was interested in, at that time.
She was so keyed up…. I couldn’t understand why only Lucy and I saw it. I thought sometimes, if I said the wrong thing to her, she’d come apart, she was that tightly wound up. But I also noticed something else, something perplexing. Richard helped her with her math, and instead of falling all over herself to please him, or just soaking up his exalted presence as she usually did, she seemed to shrink from him. She wouldn’t even look at him.
Even weirder, he gave her some searching glances, but, at least in my hearing, he didn’t ask her if anything was wrong.
Like maybe he knew.
I wondered if they had quarreled.
Then I wondered how the hell she ever got up the nerve to quarrel with him.
“Did you like Monticello?” I asked her casually, making sure that Daddy was out of earshot.
So an easy question, you’d think. She nearly jumped.
Deer in the headlights – no, more like Danger! Danger! Danger! She looked so scared that you’d think I’d asked how she liked robbing that bank. More weirdness.
“Oh, I loved it,” she said after a moment or so, and she wasn’t the actress that she is now. “The dome room was great. That was wonderful of Richard to take me up there and show me around.”
“No, it wasn’t,” I said idly, already starting to lose interest. “He just wanted another acolyte to worship at the shrine of Thomas Jefferson. I hope he didn’t bore you.”
Something bugged me about that conversation… and then later, I remembered. Tourists aren’t allowed in the dome room; the fire marshal won’t even let you go upstairs because of those cramped staircases. Richard and I, as young engaged lovers, had often teased each other about sneaking in and making love at night under the dome so that the stars could shine down on us, but, of course, we never did.
Richard graduated with his M.Arch. I finished my one and only year of teaching and started my seminar in composition. Lucy finished her first year of law school, thankful that the worst was over, and volunteered to watch Julie for us all summer. Francie and Laurie graduated from high school, and Laurie took a summer job as a typist, in addition to her job at the bookstore.
I wondered when she was planning to make her break.
~•~
Then, on June 11, the blinders came off.
I was packing for the move home, and I had told Richard that morning, before he left for a meeting in Richmond, that I would tackle his desk. He never blinked, so clearly he thought nothing of it.
That’s because he thought like an Ashmore, not an Abbott.
He had his cassette tapes stacked up all around the desk, hundreds and hundreds of them, and that’s where I found it. Boïto’s Nerone, one of the most obscure operas ever written, and a 1949 performance at La Scala, at that. Daddy had picked up a pirated copy in Italy several years before; it had never been released in this country. So what was Richard doing with a copy—?
(And why on earth would he want one? Why would anyone, except Daddy?)
And a tape with Daddy’s handwriting all over it?
So I popped it in the cassette player.
Francie’s voice. “Oh, my darling, how I wept to leave you. What a wonderful day this was, it will live forever in my memory, I will remember it as I lie dying….”
What idiotic drivel was this?
“I loved that we were there alone at Monticello, Richard, no one else around. I felt so close to you, as if we had stepped back in time before Diana ever was….”
“Oh, Richard, when you kissed me in the dome room, I knew I was yours forever….”
“Darling, you are like Jefferson, after all. Wasn’t Sally his sister-in-law, too?”
“How did you even know to do that to me in the forest, Richard, who would ever think that you knew how to use your tongue like that….”
“Your body was a warm blanket, I can still feel you over me….”
“My breasts are still tingling and sore….”
I let it play all the way to the end.
I was in shock. My skin was cold; my ears were humming.
I played it again.
And then – I ripped it out of the machine. I ripped it out so hard that the tape snapped. Stupid me, I didn’t think. I didn’t tell myself that this was the best evidence that was ever going to come my way. I didn’t see that now, after all these years, Richard and I were on a level playing field. I didn’t think at all, I just reacted. I yanked the tape out of the cassette, grabbed a lighter off his desk, and held the flame to the tape.
No wonder he no longer looked at me as if he’d been locked out of heaven! No wonder he brought his damn plane up to Charlottesville! No wonder that bitch looked so smug at spring break! No wonder Laurie acted as if he had the plague. And where the hell was that bastard anyway!
He had left the number of the Richmond conference hall where he was attending a seminar, in case I needed him for Julie. I called, of course, and discovered that the seminar had let out at noon, not six as he had told me. So I called Daddy’s house, and Laurie answered.
And no human being ever sounded guiltier than she did.
“Where is she?”
“Who?” Laurie was stammering, clearly playing for time while she thought. “You mean Francie?”
“Yes, I mean Francie,” I said nastily. “Or Richard. Either one. I assume they’re together.”
“I – I don’t know—”
“The hell you don’t,” I said, and slammed the phone down across her anguished “Di! Wait! Don’t—”
And that was the last time I talked to Laurie for fourteen years.
I picked Julie up from day care, buckled her into her car seat, and made record time to Richmond. As I drove, I cursed and screamed and cried. I cried more than I had in years. And when I ran out of tears, I rummaged around in the glove compartment and found a joint I hadn’t quite finished.
I knew his favorite haunts in Richmond, I knew that park where we had gone as teenagers, I remembered that little meadow where an amorous couple could find privacy. I parked in close, because I certainly didn’t intend to drag Julie around – who knew what I might find! – but no sooner did I pull up than I saw them, my husband and my sister, standing under a tree, not touching, but for all the world like lovers in their own little world.
I saw them, and I knew.
Francie was crying quietly, and he laid his hand alongside her face, the sort of tender gesture he had not given me in three years. She w
as staring down, and his back was to me, so neither one saw me until I tapped him on the shoulder. The shock on his face and the guilt on Francie’s confirmed anything and everything I could ever have suspected.
Richard’s hand dropped immediately, but I didn’t care.
The blackest fury I’d ever known seized me.
I scarcely even saw him. I looked at her, and I saw Daddy’s little flirt, the tormentor of my early years. I saw she who had made so much of my childhood a hellish competition.
I saw my sister, who had slept with my husband, who knew my husband’s body, who enjoyed the kisses I no longer knew.
Whose breasts tingled because my husband had enjoyed them.
And I blew up.
I don’t remember what I said, but it surpassed even my two major explosions years before. I screamed. I threatened to kill Francie. I threatened to castrate Richard. And I did it at the top of my lungs. I truly don’t know all what I said. It’s hard, all these years later, to recapture the depth and heat of the rage inside me. Richard told me (years later, when I was trying to pry a confession out of him) that I sounded like a madwoman.
Lucy asked me once, when I was replaying what I remembered of the scene, why I got so mad at Francie, who after all just moved into a void, instead of raging at Richard, who had broken his vows to me. Answer: I had it coming. I had insulted him, cheated on him, kicked him out of bed, and that’s the fastest way to make a man fall out of love with you. I guess I deserved anything I got with him. Hell, I don’t know if I ever expected Richard to remain faithful forever, it seems like most men cheat sooner or later, but at least you should always be able to count on your family.
But Francie! We had the same parents. We had the same heritage. But it didn’t matter to her. That bitch had it in for me from the time she could talk. I never did anything to deserve it. She had no excuse! Did she think I didn’t know what she was doing? Did she think I didn’t know she planned it all?
She was just using him to get back at me.
So I screamed, and then Francie started screaming back, and that’s when, without another thought, I reached right past Richard and smashed my fist into her face. She staggered back, and I pushed her. Hard. Right down into the dirt. Just like we were kids again.
Managing to knock her head against the tree for good measure as she went down.
And two things happened, simultaneously.
Richard grabbed me, hard, around the wrist, and swung me away, I guess before I could reach Francie again. That’s the only time he ever hurt me.
And, back at the car, Julie started screaming.
In an instant, Richard changed from the guilty confronted husband to a raging protective father.
“Julie’s here? You brought Julie?” And he shook me hard enough to make my teeth hurt. “God damn you, you left my daughter alone in the car—”
“She’s my daughter, you bastard!” I screamed, but he had already tuned me out, and was helping Francie up. She was clinging to him, her face pasty with shock.
“Are you all right?” he said in a low, urgent voice. “You hit your head.”
She swayed for a second, trying to focus on him, and then she caught sight of me. Her look became sharp.
She was going to have a wonderful bruise on her face.
“I’m okay,” she whispered, and started to lean towards him. He was holding my wrist so tightly I was afraid to move for fear he’d break it. A pianist can’t afford a broken wrist.
“Go home, Fran,” he said, and with his other hand smoothed her hair back. “Call me when you get home, or do you want to call Laurie to come get you?”
She looked alarmed, and shook her head. “Please, Richard—”
I said nastily, “He’s not going to help you. He’s just interested in saving his own ass.”
Dead silence among us.
Richard said very quietly, “Fran, would you please go watch Julie for a moment? I want to talk to my wife.”
I can’t even describe how he said that word. He made it sound as terrible as it had been to me for years, and that’s when I knew he truly hated me.
She walked away, stumbling, heading towards the car, where Julie was yelling her head off. She didn’t want to go, you could tell by the slumped shoulders and the sobbing under her breath, but she went, because the great god Richard Ashmore had told her to.
“By the way,” I yelled after her, “you need to go on a diet. You’re getting fat!”
She didn’t even look back at me.
Before I knew it, he had me backed up against the tree, in the same position Francie had been in a few minutes before. But he had no tenderness as he looked at me, he didn’t touch my face gently, and his eyes were cold and hard.
I wished – how I wished – that I’d had time to smash his face in too.
“You listen to me, Diana, and you listen up good,” he said, and his voice chilled me. “You don’t know what you saw here today, and before you go screaming or flinging accusations around, you get a few things straight. I’m not beholden to you, wife. I don’t owe you a god-damned thing. You left me, remember? And then you compounded it by doing about the worst thing a human being can do. Every time I’ve reached out to you, you’ve made it abundantly clear that you want nothing to do with me. So don’t ever try to hold me or Francie accountable to you.” He paused. “Not unless you want a divorce.”
“Yes,” I said without missing a beat, “I do.”
“Fine,” he said, and he never hesitated either, “I’ll make it easy for you. Just give me Julie, and you can do what you want.”
I drew in my breath. “Julie? What do you mean, Julie?”
His eyes, those eyes that had caressed and loved me, that had glowed when he saw me, burned right through me then, the way ice burns through skin.
“I mean,” he said, “that Julie is my daughter. By your own choice, she’s mine. I’ve raised her, I’ve been ten times the parent you’ve been. You’re not taking my daughter away from me.”
His words hit me physically, and broke my fury right in half.
“You can’t,” I whispered, because the fear in my throat kept me from talking any louder. “You wouldn’t.”
“Oh, wouldn’t I?” He looked at me contemptuously. “My God, Diana, you reek of pot. You drove down here with her, all the way from Charlottesville, and you must have toked up the entire way. Is that your idea of taking good care of her – getting stoned in front of her?”
“Is that your idea of taking good care of her,” I said, “fucking my sister?”
He straightened then, and I breathed easier. Just for a second.
“Whatever I’ve done,” he said flatly, “I haven’t involved Julie. And you don’t know, do you, Diana? You really don’t know.”
Fourteen years began of the unfaithful husband’s credo: deny, deny, deny. I didn’t know that this moment, when he was emotionally off-balance from the shock of discovery, was the closest he would ever come to a confession, or I would certainly have pressed him harder. But even in his shock, Richard, clever Richard, had outmaneuvered me.
“I know,” I said. “You fucked your own sister-in-law.”
“Prove it,” he said.
In my mind’s eyes, I saw a tape, disintegrating in flames. I knew then, sick at heart, that my only evidence was gone, destroyed by my own hand, and nothing else was out there. Richard was always too damn clever for me.
“I drove down,” he said, “so I’ll take Julie back with me. Get yourself under control before you come home. I don’t want Julie upset again.”
And then that bastard, that utter hypocrite, turned and walked away from me.
I saw him stop and say something to Francie, slumped against the side of my car. Whatever it was, she grabbed his hand and held it hard. He touched her hair, just once.
And I never saw Francie again.
~•~
I was so shaken from my explosion and Richard’s threat, I wasn’t fit to drive, and I managed to
rack up a speeding ticket before I made it back to Charlottesville. Thank God the cop didn’t pay attention to the joint smoldering in my ashtray, or all Richard’s dreams would have come true. Me, busted for drugs, him proved once again to be the long-suffering, superior husband. I sat in the driveway, terrified to go in. What if he really divorced me? What if – and the idea made me ill – he really wanted Francie? What if he inflicted the ultimate humiliation on me and left me for my sister?
What if he took Julie away from me?
I stayed out there in the car most of the night, smoking dope and sitting in frozen fear.
By the time he finally came out and told me to come inside, I was out of my mind, and I stayed that way. Richard didn’t speak to me again. I overheard him once on the phone, canceling a planned weekend home, telling Peggy that we were too busy to come down.
Not a word passed between us.
I don’t remember anything else until Daddy called ten days later.
I didn’t answer the phone, Richard did. And for a minute, his voice was clipped and short. He wasn’t even trying to hide his contempt for Daddy or me.
Then, in the space of a few seconds, he changed. He said, “Hold on, Dominic,” and he said to me, “Have you heard from Laurie?”
I was stunned to hear his voice, and even more stunned to hear his words. “Laurie?” I said, “no, why?”
“Your father seems to think she’s staying with us.” He turned back to the phone. “No, she’s not here. Diana hasn’t heard from her… no, I saw Lucy yesterday, and she didn’t say anything… what does Francie say?”
My mind flashed to Laurie, and her taut, secretive face.
“She what?” Now Richard looked really alarmed. “No, we haven’t seen her… Baltimore? Good God, Dominic, have you called the police?”
All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) Page 50
