Good Little Wives (4 page)

It took a moment for Bridget to understand what he had said. “What?”

“I said I will go to France to pick up our daughter. There's no need to thank me, it's what I want to do.”

He turned and left Aimée's closet, with Bridget still standing, clutching a Ralph Lauren.

The funeral was orchestrated by Premiere
Parties, which had done Caroline's daughter's engagement festivities and the holiday museum ball.

Lauren arrived at the cemetery in a Marc Jacobs silk sheath with embroidered shrug because the outfit was navy and therefore seemed appropriate. She was glad it was only a graveside service. Vincent, after all, hadn't been a churchgoer, so Yolanda had spared everyone the pomp and procession.

In the backseat of the limo Lauren shivered to think Yolanda was the one making such decisions. Yolanda, who, with her youth and her looks and the wiggle in her walk, had stolen Vincent's attention from her.

The driver opened the door for Bob, who stepped into the
sunlight, buttoned the center button of his gray Jon Green suit, and inhaled the spring air as if it were an outing and they had all day. Lauren held on to her wide-brimmed navy hat, took the driver's gloved hand, and emerged outside next to her husband.

“Everyone's already here,” she whispered, and Bob nodded because it never bothered him to be late to the party, never made him nervous or shy to walk into a room—or in this case, a graveyard—surrounded by others, friends, strangers, everyone. She wondered if that was because he was usually the oldest one there.

He took Lauren's elbow and guided her toward the mourners, who, instead of looking at the minister, were now looking at them.

“Hello,” Bob said quietly here and there. “Hello. How are you?”

She leaned into his shadow, wishing she'd invented a migraine and refused to come. Even without the bizarre circumstances, Lauren had simply never liked funerals. They were too reminiscent of her angst-driven childhood when the family all gathered for births and for deaths and for milestones in between, which mostly provided a soundstage on which to critique one another, especially her. “She's too thin,” “She's too quiet,” “She's not nearly as smart as Harold, Celia, or Marge,” Aunt Clara would mutter to Aunt Bertie and Aunt Bertie would pass on to Aunt Jane.

It had been at Lauren's grandfather's funeral that Uncle Raymond had fondled her at the back of the hearse, when he'd lured her to peer past the dark velvet drapes that hung, slightly parted, at the rear window. When Lauren leaned down, he
swooped in from behind her, clasped his hands around her, and caressed her twelve-year-old buds.

No wonder she didn't like funerals.

Bob led her over the uneven grass to a small opening between Dana and Steven and Caroline and Jack, who stood next to Bridget and Randall. It wasn't strange, Lauren thought, that they were all there. Most times the people who were gossiped about were the ones who didn't show up. Besides, she realized, it wasn't as if any of them was crying.

Across from the metallic blue coffin that held what was left of Vincent DeLano and the deep pit that was poised to swallow him up, dozens of potted lilies were positioned as if it were Easter and resurrection were near. Behind the plants stood Yolanda, draped in layers of frothy black. It would be too much of a farce, Lauren supposed, if Yolanda tripped over the lilies and fell headfirst into the grave.

Lauren straightened her back and tried to pay attention.

“Vincent was a devoted father,” the minister began, and all eyes turned toward Kitty's homely proctologist son, who propped up Yolanda on her right side, and toward the supermodel daughter who flanked her right. Just because the kids were Kitty's blood, that was apparently no cause for allegiance.

“He was a wonderful provider,” the reverend continued, though Kitty might have protested if she were in attendance.

“And he was also proud of his Italian heritage.”

Italian heritage?

Lauren sucked in one corner of her lower lip and gently bit down with her teeth.

“The guys in the high school locker room called me the
‘Italian Stallion,'” Vincent had said to her once. “What do you think? Does it fit?”

Though they'd both been naked and he had just climaxed, Lauren was embarrassed. Yes, his penis was big. Yes, it was hard, and yes, it had more staying power than Bob's ever had to her knowledge. But as much as she liked it—indeed, as much as she coveted the very
thought
of it when she was at home in her bed, eyes closed, feeling herself grow damp way down there—Lauren did not want to
talk
about it, at least not to Vincent. She would have
loved
to tell Dana or Bridget or even Caroline at one of their lunches after a glass of wine, but Lauren couldn't, wouldn't, do that because, after all, she was married to Bob, and Vincent had still been married to Kitty, and as delicious as her secret was, it just couldn't be shared.

Besides, what would she tell them? That Vincent had a dick the size of an Italian flagpole?

She felt Bob's eyes on her; she realized she had giggled. Well, at least the minister's words had helped take her mind off Aunt Clara and Aunt Bertie and Uncle Raymond with the traveling hands…and off the fact that a small part inside her felt sad that Vincent was dead, and angry at Yolanda because he'd no doubt still be alive if she hadn't come to New Falls and ruined the one great thing in Lauren's life.

They said the Lord's Prayer and then it was finished quite fast, unlike Vincent. The minister told them to go with God, but before they went a loud wail erupted from behind a tall granite tombstone, and everyone knew who had wailed it.

 

“Mom!” cried Marvin, the proctologist, as he raced toward the tombstone. “Mom! Don't!”

And there stood Kitty, maniacally waving something in her hand, something black, something shiny.

Everyone ducked, including the minister.

“No!” shouted Yolanda just as Kitty's daughter grabbed her by the arm and yanked her in the opposite direction.

“Mrs. DeLano!” the minister shrieked. “Please! Stop!” No one seemed sure if he was addressing Kitty or Yolanda.

“NO, NO, NO!
” Yolanda's voice echoed as supermodel Elise dragged the woman away, her chiffon fluttering like an obscure apparition.

From the tombstone came another big wail.

Heads poked up to see Marvin restrain his mother, then pluck the black, shiny object from her hand. Kitty collapsed against him and sobbed. One by one, the mourners began to emerge from their crouch.

“God help her!” the minister shouted again.

“God help
us
!” someone, maybe Jack Meacham, muttered.

Life returned to the group. Steven stepped forward because he was always the one who was willing to help.

“Kitty,” he said, “it's all right,” and Dana nearly wept because she felt so proud.

The rest of the crowd remained half standing, half stooping, frozen in the moment. Then they backed up as Steven moved toward Kitty and Marvin, who slowly approached. Marvin cradled his mother with one arm. “It was her purse,” he said to Steven, as if all the others were gone. He waved the black, shiny thing that Kitty had waved. “It wasn't a gun. It was her purse.”

Dana recognized Kitty's patent leather, Bottega Veneta handbag that Kitty had bought at Bergdorf 's last year. It was nice that she hadn't lost everything in the divorce.

“I just want to say good-bye to my Vincent,” Kitty quietly said. “Please, let me say good-bye.”

The crowd remained frozen, none speaking, as if they'd been paused on a big plasma screen.

Steven guided Kitty to the blue coffin, where she placed both her palms on the lid. She bent her head and simply said, “Vincent, you bastard. God help me, I loved you. God help me, I still do.”

Then she shook off Steven's hand and ambled away from the people who had once been her friends before she'd lost Vincent and everything changed.

The post-funeral luncheon was served at Alio's
because the house Vincent had bought for Yolanda hadn't been decorated yet. They had, after all, been married only five or six months.

Dana would have bet that most of those in attendance would have preferred to go home. But Yolanda had somehow composed herself and Kitty was nowhere in sight, and apparently the mourners had decided to continue this charade to the end.

At Yolanda's direction, Premiere Parties had arranged an eight-course degustation of Vincent's favorite dishes: antipasti, osso buco, pasta vongole, and other items Dana did not recognize and would not eat, certainly not at noon and definitely not while surrounded by the sickish scent of lilies that
Yolanda insisted be hauled from the grave and distributed around the banquet room.

As soon as Dana had seen Kitty's compelling display of sorrow at Vincent's casket, she knew she must talk to Lauren. It was too hard to believe that Kitty had pulled the trigger.

Between the fourth and fifth courses, Dana leaned across Steven and caught Lauren's eye and asked if she needed to use the ladies' room.

The men half stood as the women got up because they knew their wives peed with each other. They'd long ago given up stupid jokes about that.

Not surprisingly, the ladies' room was decorated in black, red, and gold. Dana knew Kitty would have been horrified, that she would have held the event at a place with a less boisterous color palette.

Then she remembered that Yolanda was not Kitty and this wasn't a party.

“Well, this has been positively awful,” Lauren said once they were inside. “Who ever expected Kitty would show up?” She seemed more demure than usual.

“Vincent was her husband almost thirty years,” Dana said. “He was Marvin and Elise's father.”

Lauren offered no response.

Dana went to the vanity and set down her purse. She straightened her hair, which had been confined under her small hat. She adjusted the collar of her deep pewter weskit. It was easier to straighten and adjust, after all, than to address what needed addressing.

“Lauren,” she said, eyes transfixed by the mirror. “I need to know about you and Vincent.”

Lauren took a step back the way everyone had at the grave when they thought Kitty would shoot them all, too. Dana thought if she were closer she might see Lauren grow pale; she might witness the pinkness drain from Lauren's forehead the way the blood in an IV bottle empties during a transfusion.

She's going to deny it
, Dana surmised.

But Lauren regained her footing and tightened the ribbon that held back her hair. “Oh, Dana,” she said with a bewildered smile. “His dick was the size of an Italian flagpole.”

Bridget drove Caroline home because Jack had
convinced Randall to go to the club and play golf.

“No sense wasting a beautiful day,” Jack said when the funeral drudge was finally completed. “You girls go have a good time.”

The men went in Jack's car because the Meachams had more money than the Hayneses.

When Bridget directed Caroline to Randall's silver Mercedes, she knew they would not have a “good time” because Caroline never laughed when she was in the passenger seat.

“I'll just go home,” Caroline said once they were belted into the soft leather.

Bridget pulled out of the lot, then drove a few blocks,
past the Episcopal church and the Protestant church and the Catholic church Randall supported. “It was a nice turnout,” Bridget said, because it would have been absurd to say the funeral itself had been nice.

Caroline's twice-lifted face was turned toward the churches and not toward Bridget. “I must change the seating for the hospital gala. Vincent and Yolanda were supposed to sit with us.”

Us
, of course, meant Caroline and Jack, Bridget and Randall, Lauren and Bob, Dana and Steven. The funeral now over, Caroline had clearly moved on.

“Can't we be eight at the table, not ten?” Bridget asked.

“Heavens, no. A successful fund-raiser should never appear to have more comforts than the paying guests.”

It was amusing how Caroline danced the dance.

“Well, who then?”

“Chloe and Lee. Do you think the others would mind?”

Though Bridget often made fun of the New Falls hierarchy, it didn't seem right to have Caroline's daughter and her fiancé sit where Vincent and Yolanda should have been.

“Lauren's stepchildren might feel slighted.”

“Well, there are seven of them and only two chairs.” She snapped her head toward Bridget. “What else can I do? Cover Vincent's chair in black velvet? Besides, Lee is perfectly suitable.”

It went without saying that Chloe's betrothed had more money than the rest of them put together. Bridget sighed. “Forget the gala,” she said. “I'm worried about Kitty.”

Caroline moved her eyes back to the tree belt. “Kitty will be fine.”

“Fine?
Mon dieu
. Did you see her today?”

Caroline said nothing. Several minutes passed, as did two SUVs and a Subaru station wagon.

“Well,” Bridget said finally, “I intend to be supportive. I plan to go with Dana and Kitty to see the lawyer on Monday.” She'd told Dana that, when they'd been at the funeral, right after Kitty made her dramatic appearance. If Bridget couldn't be in France, she might as well be in Tarrytown.

“Do as you wish,” Caroline remarked, tiny icicles forming at the corners of her newly done mouth. Then, as the car turned up the long Meacham driveway, she added, “And I will seat Chloe with us.”

A few weeks ago, Bridget had planned—a declaration from Luc that he still, indeed, loved her and would leave his wife and remarry Bridget notwithstanding—to return from France in time to go to the gala. Randall would not want to miss it. Who would? They'd go with their checkbooks and buy their visibility in the form of black and white snapshots for the local newspapers and, if they were lucky, for the Sunday style section of the
Times
.

The images would be clipped and pasted into thick scrapbooks that would serve as a standard for the next generation of
dégout
snobs.

It was, indeed, pathetic.

“It's only a damn gala, Caroline,” Bridget said abruptly as she stopped the car at the front entry. “It's hardly as important as Kitty—who once was your friend, and who now has to fight for her life.”

Caroline waited a moment, as if expecting a driver to open her door. “Bridget,” she said, “you're right about one thing. I used to be one of Kitty's friends. Just as I am one of yours. But be careful, my dear. This is too small a town to take the wrong side.” If her voice hadn't cracked in the middle of the last sentence, Bridget might have suggested that Caroline go to hell.

Instead she simply watched Caroline exit the car, clearly not having had the good time her husband had instructed.

 

Thank God that was over.

Caroline swept into her foyer and called out to Jennie, who hadn't been waiting at the entrance. One would think that after working five years for Caroline, the young woman would know better.

She moved into the music room as Jennie materialized in a simple black dress with a white, starched collar, and black, on-your-feet shoes. At the end of the month, her attire would change to warm-weather light gray. Caroline always felt that if one bothered employing servants, they might as well look the part.

“Be a dear and bring my new trinkets,” Caroline instructed, floating to the settee and sliding out of her shoes. What with the murder and the funeral and the chaos it all wrought, she hadn't had time to open her rite-of-spring luncheon gifts. “Oh, and Jennie,” she called out, “please remove the cemetery dirt
from my navy Ballys.” Caroline rarely referred to her shoes as pumps or stilettos or slip-ons. Instead she called them by name, as if they were pets or children. Bally, Jimmy, Lulu.

Chloe, of course, did the same, because everything Chloe did mirrored her mother.

Caroline plucked at the gold choker that haloed her neck. For all the things she'd done wrong, for all the pain it had cost to shield the things that needed shielding, she had, at least, raised Chloe right.

Now twenty-four, Chloe was engaged to Lee Sato, an Asian man, which was where everyone knew today's money was: technology, minerals, most of America's manufacturing. What was wrong with outsourcing a love life, too?

When he had proposed, Chloe whined (“Mummy, he says I'll have to live in Kyoto for a year or two”), at which time Caroline gently explained that a good marriage often meant compromise, that even she—even Caroline Davis Meacham—had begun her married life in Connecticut, hadn't she?

Then Caroline told Chloe she'd be able to use the sacrifices as leverage in later years when she wanted a country house, a year in Europe, or separate bedrooms.

Life, after all, was just a game, and winning was everything. Sometimes the prizes came as trinkets, like the ones that Jennie now rolled in on the dessert cart. Caroline smiled because the cart was so apt.

“Sit down and help me open my goodies.”

Jennie sat and oohed and aahed while Caroline undid the bows, pulled off the lids, and extracted one bauble after another: a small Steuben piece from Katherine Ramsey, whose husband was chairman of Ramsey and Potter; an Orrefors nut dish from
Vera Stanley, married to Richard Stanley of the Newport Stanleys; a Correia perfume bottle from Meredith Gibson, wife of Jonathan Gibson, president of Freedom Securities. The most fun, of course, were turquoise boxes from Tiffany's because something fabulous was guaranteed to be inside.

Not that Caroline threw parties for the trinkets.

But like chairing the committees for the hospital gala in spring, the library fund-raiser in autumn, and the holiday museum ball, it was more fun to keep the façade alive than to look in the mirror each morning and glimpse who she was when the spotlight was off.

“Oh, look,” Jennie said, “this one's from the new Mrs. DeLano.”

It was a ceramic wall plaque shaped like a duck.
Friends make life ducky
was painted on its wing.

Caroline looked at Jennie.

“Well,” Jennie said, because even Jennie had more sense than Yolanda, “it's the thought that counts. And besides,” she added, “while she was at your party, her husband was being murdered.” As if that had anything to do with any of this.

Caroline sighed. She did not want to think about Vincent. It had been too painful to stand at his funeral and stare at the ground and not at the mourners for fear she'd lock eyes with the only true love that she'd ever known.

The only real love.

The only honest lover.

The only person for whom Caroline Meacham had almost given up everything.

She did not want to think about it because it made the ache worse.

Without a word she set the duck back in its box and handed it to Jennie. Then she stood up. “I can't do this right now,” she said, tossing aside the papers and the ribbons. “I must rework the seating charts for the gala.”

She left the music room, her trinkets forgotten, her mask safely back in its place.

 

It wasn't until Bridget had stopped at Dean & DeLuca's to pick up dinner (her cook Lorraine worked only Monday through Thursday) and wheeled into the garage at her own mini mansion, that she was struck by a bolt of inspiration.

“My God,” she shouted in English, not French, because no one was around. “Why didn't I think of that before?”

Snapping off the ignition, she started to laugh, because if it hadn't been for Caroline, Bridget might never have figured out the answer to all—well, some of—her problems.

 

At times like this Dana wished she had never quit smoking.

As Grand Central Parkway merged into I–278, she barely watched the road while she ransacked the glove box. Finally she located a stick of old gum. Unwrapping it quickly, she shoved it into her mouth.

Chomp, chomp.

She had her cell phone but not her headset, and in the great State of New York one wasn't allowed to drive while holding the phone. If she'd been in her own car, she could have called Bridget and shocked her with Lauren's confession.

But she wasn't in her own car because she'd driven Steven to LaGuardia after the funeral and the luncheon because he was headed for Cleveland, on the road again.

Of all her friends, Dana figured she was the one with the most time and opportunity to have an affair.

But Lauren?

God, she'd helped raise—was still raising—Bob's kids; well, a good part of them. Forget the moral and emotional parts, how had she handled the logistics?

“It was like magic,” she explained to Dana. “You know how that goes.”

No, Dana didn't know how that went.

Then, as if someone had pulled the plug from Lauren's mouth, she spewed forth too much information.

He touched me in places no man ever touched me!

He entered me from the front and the back and once upside down!

He loved to bury his face between my legs. Imagine! He did that for me!

Dana refrained from commenting that now Vincent was buried again, this time in another damp, unfamiliar location.

She hadn't listened to the blah-blah of the remainder of Lauren's verbal marathon. Instead she closed off her ears and studied her friend, the way her lips curved and curled, the way her slate-colored eyes twinkled like glitter, the way her body lilted and swayed as if she were reenacting one sexual foray after another.

She probably thought it was safe to disclose her secret now that Vincent was dead and it would be her word against no one's.

But when she said he really had been an Italian Stallion, Lauren's eyes glazed over and her body stopped lilting and she started to sob. “It's not fair,” she cried. “He shouldn't have left me for her.”

Mistress or not, the woman was scorned.

“I'm sorry,” Dana said, after an awkward minute of solace. “But I must get Steven to the airport.” She kissed Lauren's cheek and departed the ladies' room, feeling guilty that she was grateful to escape from a friend in distress.

She didn't tell Steven about Lauren's confession.

And now, driving up the highway, she thought about Vincent and his flagpole of a dick. And about the fact that he'd left Kitty for Yolanda, though he hadn't left Kitty for Lauren. And that Lauren—despite her timid, saccharine veneer—was mightily pissed.

Dana rolled the gum around in her mouth and decided that, on her way home, she must stop at the New Falls police station. If they knew another woman had once slept with Vincent, they might not be so quick to judge Kitty.

Besides, Dana reasoned as she exited onto Route 87 North, they couldn't force her to tell them Lauren's name.