Lace II (4 page)

Feeling increasing guilt, Judy turned to Sandy. “We’d better not call the police. We don’t want to upset the local people and we don’t want to look foolish if Lili, if she only…” she paused.

“Exactly,” agreed Sandy.

*   *   *

As soon as Judy woke, she telephoned Lili’s suite. No answer. In her red silk dressing gown, Judy hurried down to the reception desk. The clerk, a nervous new boy on the daytime shift, refused to give her the key to Lili’s rooms. Judy demanded to see the hotel manager and, together, they hurried up the marble staircase. An anxious Sandy waited outside the double doors of Lili’s suite.

They rushed across the empty drawing room and threw open the bedroom door. The billowing pink silk canopy of the elaborate antique bed was caught back with golden rope, but the plump velvet pillows in their lace coverings were undented and the ivory chiffon sheets were still as smooth as when the maid had turned them down the night before.

Sandy ran into the dressing room and opened the closets. “Her clothes are still here.” She pulled open the bathroom door. The makeup was scattered on the marble counter, as Lili had left it.

Sandy dashed back to the sitting room, to see Judy, on her knees, tearing at a cylindrical brown-paper parcel on the floor. She pulled out an exquisite silk rug. “Lili must have bought that after she left me in the Bazaar.”

“Maybe the man she went out with was a rug merchant?” suggested Sandy.

“Maybe she met someone in the Grand Bazaar?” Judy worried aloud.

Sandy always told people what they wanted to hear. “Lili might have taken up with some good-looking guy and decided to have a little fun,” she soothed.

The discreet tap at the door made both women jump, then hurry toward it. Judy was the first to reach the handle. “Lili, thank God you’re … oh!” Outside stood a hotel page boy, carrying a gigantic bouquet of red roses.

“Who would send us flowers when we’re leaving tomorrow?” Sandy wondered, as she unpinned the tiny envelope and handed it to Judy. She pulled out the card, and read it, then gasped, “Oh, no!” and dropped the card.

Sandy snatched up the card and read it aloud. “Wait in your hotel suite to hear from Lili’s father. He must pay the ransom.” Slowly she turned to Judy. “So now we know. Lili’s been kidnapped.”

October 15, 1978

S
TANDING, DAZED, IN
her hotel room, gazing at the beautiful bunch of red roses which had accompanied the kidnap letter, Judy said nothing. But she thought, this is my fault. Once again I have been responsible for a disaster in my daughter’s life. Why, oh why, doesn’t God stick up red flags when you accidentally do some little thing that’s going to lead to calamity?
I
persuaded Lili to come with me on this tacky trip because I never had enough
time
for her back home in New York; there I told myself that it wasn’t my responsibility, I hadn’t been expecting a long-lost daughter to drop in on me. I had a magazine to run and a business to run and my charity commitments, and my lover to look after. But that article on Lili in
VERVE!
was my idea. I should have known that article was asking for trouble—and that we’d all get it in shovelfuls. I wish I could turn the clock back to a year ago, to that first meeting at the Pierre Hotel.

*   *   *

It had been a warm October evening; nevertheless, a log fire had burned softly in the quiet, cream hotel suite, with the spectacular view across the purple dusk of Central Park. Firelight had flickered across the faces of the two women as they moved toward each other. Judy had felt the strange animal magnetism that emanated from Lili. Looking at Lili’s
black, soft curls, falling to the folds of her white Grecian tunic, Judy felt a new appreciation of that world-famous oval face, with the high cheekbones that looked both innocent and predatory, the thickly lashed chestnut eyes that always glistened as if tears were about to fall. Judy found it hard to believe that her daughter, believed dead, was alive—let alone that she was Lili, the most famous professional waif since Marilyn Monroe. It was impossible to match this sensuous creature with the image that Judy had treasured, of a well-behaved six-year-old girl with braided hair.

Judy had always imagined that her long-lost daughter would look exactly like herself, but their only resemblance lay in the slim-boned frames of their bodies. The three other women in the room sat motionless—hypnotized by the drama of the moment—as Lili took a hesitant step toward Judy. Pagan, elegant in pink wool, suddenly noticed that Judy and Lili had the same doll-like hands. She leaned across to the green-eyed woman in the mulberry suit. “Do you think we should leave?” she whispered to Kate, who was sitting next to her on the apricot-silk sofa.

Kate Ryan shrugged her shoulders, unable to take her eyes off Lili. She found herself mentally taking notes, as if writing one of her articles, as Lili moved toward Judy, but Judy stood motionless and silent. Kate opened her mouth to say something but the third onlooker, an elegant blonde in blue silk, lifted her fingers to her lips, as all three women watched the mother and daughter hold each other in a nervous embrace. Sharing a natural impulse to dissolve the pain and embarrassment of the moment by reaching toward physical contact, they were hugging each other, but not kissing each other, Kate noticed.

As she held her daughter, Judy realized that this was the first time she had touched Lili since the sad moment when she had handed her three-month-old baby to her foster mother, that morning years ago, in the Swiss hospital where Judy’s illegitimate child had been born. As she held Lili close to her heart, Judy realized that, since that day, they had shared a physical need for each other that was close to hunger; their embrace was an expression of that need, rather than of warmth, of affection, even of liking; but both women realized that this was an expression of goodwill.

This is my daughter, thought Judy, as she felt the trembling warmth of Lili’s body; this voluptuous woman once came out of my body; those wild brown eyes and slanting cheekbones—once they were a part of me, I made them. She looked down at Lili’s gold-skinned forearms and thought, that is flesh of my flesh.

She does not
feel
like my mother, thought Lili, hugging the slender Judy, in her brown velvet suit. A mixture of resentment and relief swirled in Lili’s mind; she had built up her unknown mother’s identity into a romantic mystery because the alternative was to face her mother’s brusque rejection of her as a baby. When she finally met her mother, Lili had expected to feel as protected as a child, but when she looked into Judy’s eyes and saw pain, fear and guilt, Lili felt unexpectedly protective toward her mother.

Oblivious of the three seated women who watched, Lili was also near to tears as she remembered her deep-rooted restlessness, the profound anxiety and uncertainty that had shadowed her adult life. Now she instinctively recognized it as a sense of loss—sad and constant—even though it was for a woman that Lili had never known, her
vraie maman
, as Lili used to think of her mother, in the little Swiss village where she had been raised by the local seamstress. “Mother?” Lili said the word softly, as if forming it for the first time, and then tried it again. “Mother.”

The two women drew back, gave tearful laughs and simultaneously said, “You’re not what I expected!” Then Judy added, “How did you find us?”

“It wasn’t difficult,” said Lili. “I hired a detective. He discovered that my mother had been one of four teen-age girlfriends who had been students in Switzerland, and then he followed the trails until he identified you.” She turned to the green-eyed woman in the mulberry suit. “You were the most difficult to track down, Kate, because the world is full of Katherine Ryans. But, once he did find you, my detective couldn’t discover
which
of you four was that teen-age mother, which is why I arranged this confrontation.” She hesitated, and nervously bit her lower lip. “I hope you’ll forgive me; I do so hope you’ll understand why I had to know who my parents are, why I had to know
who I am.”

The last thing Kate had expected to feel for this sex goddess
was a sudden rush of affection and pity. Gently she said, “We do so hope, Lili, that you will understand why Judy couldn’t keep her baby. In 1949, a sixteen-year-old girl from a poor family, who had to earn her own living, couldn’t also look after a baby.”

Anxiously, Judy said, “Did you … were you … did your foster mother look after you?” She added in a rush, “I can never forgive her for taking you to Hungary, after the Russians occupied it.”

Lili said, “I shall always love Angelina. She loved me and she never lied to me; she always told me that one day my
vraie maman
would come for me.”

“She did come for you.” The elegant blonde in the blue silk dress spoke, for the first time, in an unmistakable French accent. “We knew you were on holiday in Hungary and when we heard there’d been a revolution, Judy flew over to Europe and we went straight to the Hungarian border. The situation was chaotic: a hundred and fifty thousand Hungarian refugees were pouring over the Austrian border into camps for displaced persons. We visited every one of them. But nobody could trace you.” Maxine remembered Judy’s frenzy and self-accusation as they stood in the snow outside hut after hut, waiting to see yet another refugee committee official.

As Judy remembered her constant self-accusation for having abandoned Lili, for not having done enough to find her, she sat down heavily on the apricot-silk sofa and buried her face in her hands; her little gulps, splutters and sniffs were the only sounds to break the silence.

Kate picked up the ivory telephone, and said, “Champagne is what you celebrate a new baby with, isn’t it? D’you think they have any Krug ’49?”

“I would prefer you to order our champagne,” said Maxine firmly. “Ask for a magnum of Chazalle ’74.”

After a great deal of emotion and champagne, Pagan suddenly said, “How is the press going to react to this news? Do you think we should keep it secret?”

“It’s bound to get out somehow,” said Maxine, “we’re all public personalities as we all live our lives in the spotlight. Why, within a week, someone would have overheard a telephone conversation, stolen a letter, and sold the story to
the
National Enquirer
for a meager fifty dollars.” She turned to Kate. “You’re a journalist, right?”

Judy remembered the cruel descriptions that she had quite enjoyed reading about Lili, as maliciously enjoyable as any tidbit about Elizabeth Taylor, Farrah Fawcett or Joan Collins. “We’ll be able to set the record straight, Lili, we’ll print your
true
life story, as told by you.”

“No!” Lili looked frightened and anxious. “You know the lies, the filth that’s published about me, they’ll all just dredge it up from their files again.”

“Don’t worry, Lili,” said Kate. “I’m the editor of
VERVE!
magazine, so you can control the story. We’ll print whatever you want. She turned to Judy for confirmation. “If we get in first with an exclusive story and splash it big enough, we’ll have scooped the rest of the world; nobody will want to run it after that.”

Lili said, “It’s quite a story.”

As Maxine poured champagne, all four women listened to the quiet voice of Lili reciting the tale of her life since 1956, the success story of the Paris porn model who became an international movie star, the sad story of an exploited, lonely girl as incapable of controlling her own destiny as the autumn leaves that fluttered from the trees below them in darkened Central Park.

*   *   *

It was two o’clock in the morning before Kate let herself into her apartment. She stood in the doorway of her huge living room, rubbing her tired eyes as she looked across at the man who lay asleep on the thirty-foot-long, beige suede sofa that ran along one wall. Above the sofa hung a collection of antique paintings and engravings of tigers. On the floor below the man lay a pair of loafers, a pair of socks, a crumpled copy of the
Wall Street Journal
, and a silver salver upon which was a slice of cold, leftover pizza and a half-empty glass of beer. Tom would never be a gourmet, no matter how many elegant meals she served him, thought Kate, as she tiptoed over to her husband and gently shook him awake. “Bedtime, darling,” she whispered, as he leaned against her, blinking, then suddenly hugged her in a hard grip. “How’d it go, darling? Did you reach an agreement with Tiger-Lili?”

“Tell you in the morning. Everything’s fine, but right now
I’m exhausted and I just want to be in bed. How I wish that someone would invent a machine with a button that you press and suddenly you find yourself undressed, showered and in bed with your teeth cleaned.”

“With me.”

“You’d be an optional accessory. Very expensive.”

*   *   *

In her softly lit bathroom at the Plaza Hotel, Maxine carefully broke open three glass ampoules, mixed the clear liquids together, then patted the solution carefully around the delicate skin of her eye socket. She used a pink cream to remove her makeup, a clear solution to exfoliate her skin and a white preparation to stimulate cell renewal while she slept. Along the fine lines of her forehead, no more definite than the veins on a leaf since her face-lift, she traced a tiny paintbrush dipped in a solution of synthetic collagen. Finally, her generously rounded right buttock, smooth as a peach thanks to regular treatments to dispel la cellulite, received a slimming injection. Carefully, she hung up her blue silk dress, then Maxine wrapped herself in an oyster-silk peignoir edged with point-de-Chazalle lace. She brushed her hair with a hundred strokes, then climbed into bed, opened her maroonleather traveling office and dictated half a dozen memos to be telexed to her secretary on the following day. Then, in her large, loopy handwriting, she thanked Judy for making her so welcome in New York and wrote an encouraging note to Lili. She always wrote her thank-you notes at night, when she was still feeling grateful, no matter how late the hour. Maxine never considered it an excuse to neglect her body, her business, or her gift for expedient politeness.