Her Father's House (4 page)

Still, it was something that bothered him. By the time she woke up, he had decided to tell her.

“I had a bad dream. I felt that you were drifting away from me.”

“That's crazy,” she said with her head on his shoulder. “Absolutely crazy.”

“I guess it is. But I do wish you'd make some other friends besides people you've met through Chloe. I don't mean that you should give them up, only that it would be nice if you went out in the afternoons with some different people. A little variety . . . you know what I mean?”

“It's hard to make friends in this city. Everybody's too busy with their own affairs. I'm lucky that Chloe's done so much for me.”

“What about my little group? Ed's wife. Or Susan. Or Polly. You especially liked Polly, you told me.”

“I do see them now and then. But they all have a kid or two, or else they're pregnant and can't talk about anything else.”

He felt himself smiling up at the ceiling. “Maybe that tells you something. Or is it too soon?”

“Donald! We were married last September. What's the rush? Anyway, I'll be starting work on my degree. One thing at a time.”

Something compelled him to keep holding on to the subject. With his next remark, he surprised himself, for he had not planned to make it.

“You see quite a good deal of Cindy, don't you?”

“A good deal? No. But I do keep in touch with her. Why? Do you mind?”

“I would have no right to mind whom you see. But as it happens, I don't mind. I think it's interesting that you can feel comfortable with two such extremes, Chloe Sanders and Cindy. By the way, how is she?”

“The same. She finds a lousy job, she keeps it for a week or two, and loses it. If she could stop drinking—but she can't.”

“And you keep helping her.”

“She's a good soul. I can't stand by and let her drown.”

Kindness like this could not help but touch one's heart. “You wonder,” he said, “if Cindy had come out of Chloe Sanders's home, would she have been different? A question that everybody asks, and it has no answer. But if there's any way I can help your friend, I will. Just tell me.”

“You're a good man, Donald. So good that you're making me sad.”

“Sad? Good Lord, I want you to be happy. I want you to be the happiest woman in New York.”

   

Spring was late that year. Cold rain, driven by powerful winds, sped through the gray streets.

“Everything gray,” sighed Lillian, standing at the window. “It's depressing.”

She had been making these remarks all week, and he was tired of hearing them. “No, it's just winter,” he said firmly. “And there's nothing we can do about it.”

“Easy for you to talk. You'll get on a plane and fly away, come home, and fly out again.”

“I don't always enjoy it. Not always,” Donald said. “But I have no choice.”

“It seems to me that once in a while you could say no.”

“That's too ridiculous to deserve an answer. You know better.”

“All right, I do know better. But you can't imagine what it's like being alone here. It's horrible. You look out of the window and all you see are walls. If we were higher up, at least, you'd have—”

His thoughts interrupted her.
She never liked the apartment. She only pretended that she did.

“We miss so many things. I do, at least. Nobody asks a woman alone to go out for the evening. Those tickets for the Plaza dinner went to waste because they only gave you two days' notice to fly to Geneva.”

It was true that he had been away unusually often during this, the first winter of their marriage. Orton and Pratt had among its clients a company that had been defrauded of hundreds of millions by a man who was still at large. He had been seen, or reports had come in from people who claimed to have seen him, in places as various and scattered as Brazil, Switzerland, and Baluchistan. The company's subsidiaries had interests forming a complicated web that kept a dozen lawyers like Donald busy all over the globe.

“I work for an international law firm, remember? There's nothing I can do about it, Lillian. Or that I want to do, either,” he added.

He had not meant to be curt. He wanted peace and contentment, and since he worked for it, it seemed to him that he deserved to have it. And wanting just to shut everything out, he closed his eyes and laid his head on the chair's pillowed back while a heavy silence like a fog crept through the room.

When he woke up again, there she was, willowy in her slender skirt while one graceful hand toyed with her long necklace, reminding him somehow of one of her favorite paintings; as usual, he failed to remember the artist, some Frenchman, he was very famous. . . .

This has got to stop. I am too touchy, he thought, and surely not for the first time. Why do I let every little tiff trouble me so? Lighten up! What did I expect? A snug little love nest with never a cross word? People aren't like that. I'm not like that. She's not like that. This is marriage. This is life.

“I'll do what I can,” he said. “Don't you think I'd rather be here with you than anywhere else in the world? Don't you know that?”

With outstretched arms, she came to him. “When you talk like this, I feel so sorry, Donald, so ashamed of myself. You're too good to me.”

   

He did do what he could. In June, somebody who owned what was said to be a fabulous estate in Westchester was giving a party to which Donald and Lillian, no doubt by way of the Sanders connection, were invited.

Early in the month, he gave Mr. Pratt the date. “I was wondering whether, since we're probably going to have a meeting soon again in Geneva, whether it would be possible to work around that date a bit? My wife—well, you know how it is, she has her heart set on going to this party. I don't even know the people or anything about them.”

“You haven't heard about Tommy Fox? About the few billions he made in Mexico? No? Well, it's a couple of years back, and I guess you forgot.” Pratt twinkled. “Or you don't keep up with the social news. Well, tell your wife not to worry.”

So it was that on a fine, cool evening long before sunset, Donald and Lillian drove out of the city in a sumptuous, attention-getting, imported sports car. He had asked her to rent a car for the occasion, and this was her choice. It suited the occasion, she said. It was worth a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars.

“A hundred and seventy-five? It's not much larger than two trash cans tied together, in my opinion.”

“Well, it's a two-seater, what do you expect?” She laughed. “And it can go over one hundred twenty miles an hour, I'm sure you'll be glad to know.”

“Great! I'll try it as soon as we're off Riverside Drive.”

She was full of excitement. Her dress matched her eyes, he remarked. Not exactly, she said. The dress had violet mixed with the blue, and the color was called “periwinkle.” Around her throat lay a narrow diamond necklace about which there could have been some fairly heated discussion if he had not made up his mind that nothing would mar this event, or any event in the future.

“Chloe insisted on lending it to me,” she had explained. “You see, what happened is that Frank just gave her another one for her birthday. Of course it's very different from this one, but still she really didn't need it. So now she has two, and she said there's no reason why this one should go to waste when she wants to lend it to me for tonight.”

Donald's mother would have said that borrowed jewelry was tacky. It was funny how a man who seldom gave thought to his old life anymore could suddenly find a quirky memory like that one popping into his head.

Nevertheless, the necklace was an enhancement, drawing the eye to the pure curve of Lillian's chin, to the red of her plump lips and the blue of her eyes. Men would look at her this evening; they always did. Well, let them look. He reached over and for a moment or two held her hand.

The house that they reached was enormous and obviously quite new. White Corinthian columns gave it the look of a Southern plantation; the huge, double front doors, heavy and dark brown, were definitely Victorian, while from each side of the main building there jutted a flat-roofed wing that could easily be mistaken for a storage warehouse, he thought, except for its vast plate-glass windows.

Pretty awful, he thought. His work had taken him to some great mansions here and abroad, and none of them had ever looked like this.

At the rear of the house on a wide open space that apparently had been cleared out of the surrounding woodlands, a colorful crowd moved about, while waiters in contrasting white moved among them carrying trays.

“What a picture!” Lillian cried. “They've invited two hundred fifty people, I heard. Oh, Donald, look at that—”

That,
to their right down a gentle slope, was a sizable pond near the edge of the woodland. At its center rose a quaint gazebo of wooden filigree such as one may see in an old-fashioned garden.

“Do you swim out to it?” she wondered.

A man, passing and overhearing, replied, “No, it's just for water lilies and for beauty.” Laughing, he added, “For algae, too. But everybody wants a pond these days. They've already had their pools forever. By the way, am I supposed to know you? I'm Roy Fox, Tommy's brother.”

Introductions were made, hands were shaken, and the three walked on toward the enormous tent in the distance.

“We're very close old friends of Chloe and Frank,” Lillian said.

“Are you? Then we must have met before. I'm a people person, and yet I've got a bad memory.”

“Oh, there you are,” Chloe Sanders called out. “I said to Frank, those are the Wolfes in that stunning little Italian number. When did you get it?”

“We didn't. We rented it,” Donald said.

“To try it out,” Lillian explained. “To see whether we like it enough to buy it.”

Something trickled down Donald's neck. It was so warm that it could well have been a few drops of water, but it was not; it was shame. Why did she say things like this as if people couldn't see right through her remark? On the other hand and for all he knew, perhaps they didn't see.

Frank Sanders now came up. “Place is jumping. I never knew I knew so many people. Take two steps and there's old Ray, or Charlie, or somebody. It's a great crowd. They've got two top bands—I forget the names—but later on there's going to be entertainment by the Dig Down Wheezers. They cost a dime or two!”

“I'm starved,” said Chloe.

The crowd was drifting toward the tent. It was a huge construction whose walls were of sheer white silk. Losing touch with the only couple they knew, as the Sanders were immediately surrounded by friends, Donald and Lillian found themselves at a table with strangers. They were all strangers to one another.

Not the top echelon, he thought with some amusement. They're on the fringe, like us. They're the leftovers.

Lillian was perplexed that they were not sitting with any of the women with whom she had become acquainted at the charity luncheons, and he saw that she was hurt. She did not understand that status here was assigned according to net worth, but since this was neither the time nor the place to explain that, he merely said that it was nice to be meeting new people. A pretty young woman across from them was telling everyone that they had never before been at a party like this.

“It's so lovely of them to invite Rick and me. Our children go to the same day camp with theirs, that's how we know each other. Of course, we're neighbors, too, or sort of neighbors. Our house used to be the gardener's cottage on that big place across from here.”

Donald liked her honesty, and her husband Rick's simplicity. He was a lawyer, a sole practitioner here in town.

“Oh, Orton and Pratt,” he said when Donald, in answer to his question, had to give the name of his firm. “A lot of pressure must go with a job in a place like that, I imagine.”

“Donald is one of the partners,” Lillian said unnecessarily.

Why did she have to talk like that? She used to be so tactful. It was on his lips to tell her privately just how unnecessary and even boastful her remark had sounded, but thinking better of it, he drew her instead onto the dance floor and into the flow of the music.

“It's very smart of them to have two bands,” she said. “The rock band will alternate with this one every half hour or so. In that way everybody will be happy.”

Her face, turned up toward his, was like some gleaming tropical flower that he knew he had seen somewhere, perhaps in a botanical garden. The music lilted; he was swept into a sense of total harmony. How then was it that in a matter of seconds, this harmony could be broken by a trivial remark?

Lillian spoke softly. “We go well together, don't we?”

“We do,” he said.

“You're happy. You didn't think you would like it here this much.”

He smiled. “You read my mind, don't you?”

“I do. You mustn't take everything so seriously, Donald. That's your trouble.”

“No,” he said, “that isn't my trouble.”

Just then someone tapped him on the shoulder. “I'm cutting in. It's allowed, didn't you hear?” The man was slightly drunk, or not so much drunk as just “feeling good.” “Why should you monopolize the best-looking woman in the room?”

Because she consented to the man, Donald let her go. Back at the table he watched, and seeing that she was quite safe, rejoined the conversation.

At the far end of the table, a stout man who was probably younger than he looked was holding forth. “Have you any idea what an affair like this costs? First they get party planners to put all of it together. Twenty thousand for starters for the planners. Then after that, the sky's the limit. Take a look at the flowers on this table. Just the flowers. From Hawaii, five hundred minimum for twenty-five tables, it's safe to say. And that's peanuts. What about the caviar at all the bars? Prime steaks, lobster, anything you want. Did you see the other dance floor, the one they built on top of the pool?” The stout man, whose enthusiasm had begun to border on awe, was not about to wait for an answer. “Walk around. Take a look. Tell you something confidential. Later, when they're sure the kids are in bed, nobody prowling around downstairs, they're having a couple of strippers for entertainment, so don't leave too soon.”