Crazy for Cornelia (39 page)

This was the woman who would reign over Cornelia’s wedding. In his heart he suspected that Madame had peaked about half a
century ago. Then she had served as one of the royal wedding retinue for the movie star Grace Kelly, soon to become Princess
Grace of Monaco. “Happily ever after” had seemed quite attainable to Elizabeth’s generation of debutantes, with the right
selection of husband and wedding planner.

So Elizabeth had chosen Madame Marie-Claude to spin their
own fairy-tale wedding—had it really been twenty-five years earlier? Chester had found the old tyrant insufferable even then.
But when Cornelia went through the photographs of her parents’ wedding and asked about the old crone, Chester encouraged his
daughter to hire her. Even this fragile connection to Elizabeth proved irresistible.

Chester followed Madame into the living room. He tuned out Madame’s hectoring of Cornelia’s bridesmaids, Tina French and other
childhood friends huddling around his daughter.

“Hey, Madame,” Tina greeted her, deadpan. “Torquemada called you. He wants his personality back.”

Chester regarded smirky, quirky Tina of the cylindrical body wearing a “Models Suck” T-shirt under a man’s dress shirt.

“Venez vite ici!”
Madame barked.

Chester marveled that each of the bridesmaids who slouched around his living room in a fairly unappealing collection of sloppy,
street-chic get-ups understood Madame’s command and dutifully jumped up to gather around the old fascist. Respect for wedding
planners must be burned in these girls’ genes, Chester mused, the way they leapt to her authority.

Except for Cornelia.

Cornelia sat before the hearth, frowning at the flames.

“C’mon, Corny,” Tina screeched at her.

His daughter finally smiled and stood up to join Madame. Though she seemed warm on the surface, undeniably calmer, Chester
keenly felt the dullness in her eyes as though it were his own emptiness.

How her sparkle had gone.

She no longer ran away. She never bothered to argue. Sometimes she hovered near her father in a tentative, almost fearful
way, as though he were the only person in a precarious land. And that had been his wish.

Be careful what you wish for
, Elizabeth would have told him.

Most of Cornelia’s memories would return in time, Loblitz promised. He felt a simmering of anger at the doctor. Loblitz neither
realized nor seemed to care about the passion that seemed lost, perhaps irretrievably.

Dr. Loblitz had brushed aside his concerns. He had immediately
begun with the jargon. Something about anterograde memory loss. Once Chester had cut through the hokum, Loblitz had admitted
that Cornelia would be confused and possibly suffer some minor loss of memory. But Chester felt ill-prepared for the depth
of her funk. When she tried to remember her past, even some of her fondest recollections of her childhood remained pockmarked.

The great positive, he supposed, was that Cornelia seemed to view Tucker as a new person in her life. At least she didn’t
reject him, or bring up her conspiracy theories. It was good that she could start with a “clean slate,” as both Dr. Loblitz
and Tucker had taken to calling her evacuated memory banks. Fortunately, she recalled nothing at all about the Tesla business
or the doorman.

Chester had sat her down several times and talked to her. He had omitted some thorny topics such as Kevin Doyle, shaded others.
He told her that she needed help dealing with painful memories of her mother’s death and had received it at the Sanctuary.
He belabored the loyalty Tucker had shown her. With a hazy and rather tragic gratitude, she had accepted Chester’s abridged
version of events. Sometimes she even seemed to fake recalling things to make him happy. Her genuine recollections, notable
by the glint in her otherwise full eyes, came infrequently. Each recaptured true memory seemed a small treasure.

Yet in the coldest and most practical terms, their plan—or he should say Tucker’s plan—had worked. In her halting way, Cornelia
seemed to enjoy occupying center stage as the bride-to-be in Manhattan’s Wedding of the Year.

He had defeated Corny’s rebellion, but at a terrible cost. And now his heart punished him.

Chester left Madame with Cornelia and slumped off to his study. At the door, he was taken aback to see Tucker working at his
English desk, a trophy plucked from the Rothschild banking house. The boy was treating Chester’s private sanctum sanctorum
as his own.

“Should I look into getting a partners desk?” Chester asked dryly.

Tucker looked up, startled. He pulled some papers together and tapped them on the desktop to smooth out the pile.

“Cornelia and I signed these yesterday in Edgar’s office. We’re going to beat the Kois, Dad.”

Dad
.

“Don’t look so depressed.” Tucker slapped his arm. “Loblitz told me an interesting mind thing. The closer you get to a goal,
the more you see the negatives.”

Tucker rolled his eyes playfully at the mysteries of the mind.

Chester’s heart skipped for some reason. “I didn’t realize that you and Dr. Loblitz were so close.”

Tucker cocked his head. “Close? Why would you say that, Chester?”

Suddenly he felt too queasy to stay in his own study. “I think I’ll step outside for some air.”

In the lobby, Andrew, the doorman, tipped his hat. “Congratulations, sir.”

“Thank you.” His own voice sounded high and tight.

Chester couldn’t walk through the lobby and see his own doorman now without the apparition of Kevin Doyle flitting through
his mind.

Doyle had been a hero at first. No question about that. Then, in the way of young people today, he had taken advantage of
the situation, forcing himself on his daughter. No better than a surly, overpaid professional quarterback who makes one good
play and—

Quarterback
. No. It wasn’t Kevin Doyle whose image leapt in front of him, but Tucker’s. Why had his grim doubts all turned in Tucker’s
direction lately? Perhaps Chester had overreacted to the boy’s sitting at his desk. But he had physically
recoiled
when his future son-in-law had called him “Dad” and touched him.

Was it possible that, although Chester had always known the awful fire of shame that burned the tips of his ears bright red,
he had never really felt
guilt
before? On his daughter’s wedding day, when he would get to keep Lord & Company, all of his troubles would be over. So why
did his world seem ready to collapse like a… what did they call those stars that imploded into themselves, becoming dead,
cold little raisins in the universe?

White dwarfs
.

Why did he feel like he would turn into a white dwarf?

Walking south on Fifth Avenue, he looked back at 840. For the first time, Chester found a hint of the Bastille in the limestone
tower. It had always been just “home,” familiar and unremarkable. Now it
looked old and ugly.
His daughter’s prison
. He turned abruptly into Central Park. The cold should bite his skin, but didn’t. He felt suddenly inured to sensation, as
though his body had turned to salt, like Lot’s wife, and could blow away in the wind.

Chester followed the path toward the entrance to the Central Park Zoo, looking up at the big stone gate. He saw the bronze
animals at the top, the bear ringing the bell. He had loved that bear as a small boy. Now it looked as grotesque as a gargoyle.

His bench-made English shoes kept moving toward Grand Army Plaza. The Plaza Hotel sparkled, fresh from its latest sandblasting
renovation. If only one’s spirit could be sandblasted, he mused, to rise up so tidy and renewed. The fountain in front had
been shut off for winter, perhaps just after Cornelia’s incident. Limousines huddled together under the hotel awnings in loud
colors that could only be commissioned by sultans and rock stars.

He felt so cold and alone that one of his worst childhood memories came back to him.

During his fifteenth summer, his dad arranged for him to crew on a competition sailing boat. Shivering below in the dark,
swinging in a net hammock under a skimpy blanket made of silver foil, he dreaded his first shift as night’s watch. The boat
pitched and brine swept over decks with only a six-inch-high railing, with nobody else to notice if he should go overboard
and drown. His crewmates laughed and shoved him on deck, then locked the door behind him. He slid across the bow as if it
were slicked with oil, and clung in terror to a cleat with his eyes closed until he was finally relieved…

“Oh, sorry.” He was clinging to the back of a park bench, a woman bustling her children away in fright.

He moved on, gathering speed. His feet found a groove, did his thinking for him. Everyone who he had trusted with Cornelia…
Tucker… the psychiatrists… had given him queasy waves of uncertainty lately, cold pockets of dread. With one exception. Only
one person in his recent memory had unburdened him with an act of goodness so pure and comforting, it still glowed inside
him, pulling him forward.

Chester found what he had come for across the street from the Plaza. There were already sparkling lights on in the trees at
the rim of
the park, and the hotels along Central Park South shone full of comfort and celebration. He could see the couples bundled
up under lap robes in the backs of the horse-drawn carriages, black coaches with gold fittings and red tassels, driven by
men and women in stiff white shirts and top hats.

The carriage stood out from the others, spanking white. What ambition it must take to sit up there. He walked toward Roni
Dubrov, towering over her black-leather driver’s seat, the black curls spilling around her shoulders. She wore round wire-rimmed
sunglasses with glossy black lenses today, a bit intimidating on her sharp cheekbones. As he approached, he noticed that her
skin kept its bronze warmth even in this thin winter sunlight. He breathed in the comforting horsy scent.

“Hello,” he called up to her.

She looked down in his direction, located him.

“Chester Lord,” she called happily. “Do you like?”

“Very much.” His eyes rested on her face.

She laughed raucously like a soldier in a barracks, a surprising sound from her womanly lips.

“No, Chester, the carriage.”

“Oh.” He admired the freshly painted black frame and patted the maroon leather, old but well oiled. “It’s quite magnificent.”

“Good. You paid for it. That was a nice thing. How is Cornelia?”

“Back from the hospital.” He tried to strike an optimistic tone to match her own. “And getting married.”

He expected her to gush a bit like everyone else, to offer some congratulatory bit of fluff. Instead, she removed her sunglasses.
Her eyes made him wither. They were as coal-black as the lenses she had just taken off, and full of distrust.

“What do you mean, getting married?”

“Well, just that. Actually, I came here to ask you to the wedding.”

“To drive the carriage?”

“No, I thought as a… guest.”

She looked so formidable up there, her tangle of hair in the light like a burning bush, judging him. “Mr. Lord, did you honestly
come to bring me a wedding invitation?”

“Uh…” Chester fumbled.

“You don’t look so right to me.”

“Listen,” Chester said. “Do you suppose I could hop up there and just talk for a while?”

She put her sunglass frame between her teeth and nibbled on it, unconsciously, her eyes drilling into him.

Chester froze in her stare, intimidated. But he did not feel like walking away.

She spoke crisply. “Do you remember what I told you about Cornelia, when I saw you at the hospital?”

“You said to help her.”

“I said that she was only a child.” Roni pointed her glasses at him, shaking them.

“We did. We found her professional help in a… uh, residential facility.”

“A mental hospital?”

“One with a lovely grounds and swimming pool.”

Suddenly he felt the enormity of his burden come rushing up like something bilious from his stomach.

“And she had shock treatments,” he blurted. “She’s lost her memory.

Roni Dubrov’s forehead plunged into angry furrows under the mass of curly hair. “She’s getting married in this condition?
Have you gone crazy, Mr. Lord?”

“It’s complicated.”

He wondered if he looked as lonely and exposed as he felt.

Finally, she gave him the look he now realized that he had come seeking, the one he had remembered every day since the horrible
night at Manhattan Hill Hospital.

“I think you’d better tell me about it.”

Kevin pressed his fingers and nose flat against the glass of the nurses’ station, reading the
New York Globe
headline upside down. The staff held a daily conference inside, with their backs turned to him. The newspaper lay on a table
just inside the booth.

“Corny: Crazy in Love?” The headline read.

And Kevin saw Philip Grace’s byline underneath the headline,
trying to make out the words while his heart pumped so hard, it almost shook the glass.

Grace’s story said,
“… private afternoon nuptials at the Lord penthouse on February 14…”

Valentine’s Day.

He turned around and crumpled into the closest chair. The patient sitting next to him rose up and walked away in quick, robotic
steps.

The nice student nurse, Ms. Babcock, stooped down to look at him, concerned. “What’s the matter with you, Kevin? Your face
is all red.”

“I’m trying to see if I can die if I hold my breath long enough.”

“Kevin, you stop that.” She helped him up. “You have a visitor.”

A visitor, good. He would pull himself together. Push Mr. Shit Out of Luck back on the shelf and take out Mr. Last Pitiful
Hope. He could beat this. It was only Chester, Tucker, and the New York Establishment again. He had already climbed into the
ring once. And he’d snuck into this hospital, sucker-punched them all. For a while, anyway.

And just when she was really getting better.

He flashed on an image of Cornelia as one of those tortured explorers he had seen at Bellevue—patients who had shock treatments
and lost their memories, looking for their lives in every corner of the ward. Were they married? Were their parents still
alive? He felt shattered for her, ached to be with her while she began to pick up those broken shards of her past. It could
be months before she would really be Cornelia again.