Princess Daisy (18 page)

8

W
hen Francesca had fled Lausanne with the twins and Masha, her only clear intention had been to get away from Stash. But, as she flew westward, to New York, she realized that the only people in the world who could help her now were the Firestones. As soon as they had passed through customs at Idlewild she telephoned Matty in Hollywood and asked her former agent to meet her at the airport in Los Angeles.

“Please, Matty, don’t ask me any questions. I’ll tell you everything when I get there,” she begged.

“But hon … never mind … we’ll be there, don’t worry.” I knew she’d be back, he thought, as he hung up the phone. I knew that shit would make her miserable. But none of his premonitions prepared either Matty or Margo for the sight of two babies. Their astonishment went beyond questions, particularly since Francesca and Masha were both so exhausted by the hours of travel that they were too tired to make sense. The Firestones drove the huddle of women and infants back to their home as fast as they could and fed them and put them all to bed at once.

“Now sleep! We’ll talk about it in the morning,” Margo ordered.

As soon as she woke up, Francesca told the Firestones the whole story, pouring out the words with fresh incredulity. During the achingly long trip, in order to shepherd her band to safety, she had had to concentrate on practical details and prevent herself from dwelling on the facts she had discovered so recently, but now, as she put the words together for Matty and Margo, she became hysterical.
Only Margo’s assurance that there existed a safe place for her and her children kept her from breaking down.

“We’ll go there tomorrow,” Matty said.

“No,
now!
I can’t stay here—he’ll find me here!”

“But it’s a six-hour drive, hon.”

“Can we make it if we leave in fifteen minutes? We haven’t even unpacked.”

Matty glanced at Margo, and then turned back to Francesca. “Sure—so we’ll arrive after dark—no big deal, we’ll turn on the lights.”

In Matty’s big Cadillac they drove up Route 101 to Carmel. There Matty turned back down the coast, taking Route 1, the narrow, twisting, dangerous coast road, and drove thirty miles to a vacation cabin he and Margo owned in the Ventana Wilderness of Big Sur.

The cabin, almost invisible from the steeply rising dirt road which climbed up to it, was built of weathered, local redwood. It had running water, electricity and heat since the Firestones had discovered that even in the summer Big Sur can be bitterly cold at night. Margo had furnished it with sturdy American antiques from Carmel and had used old quilts for bed covers and upholstery. From the small clearing of wild grasses in front of the cabin, which was tucked among redwoods, aspens and sycamores, there was a view straight out over the Pacific Ocean, a thousand feet below. At that height the wild waves and breakers flattened out and the ocean looked calm and harmless.

When Francesca gazed down at the sea on the following morning, she saw a coastline that is not equaled for elemental beauty anywhere on earth. She sensed that gods and goddesses had walked there and she felt an intimation of safety beginning to grow in her. She had never been to Greece but something about the absolute serenity of the steep wooded knolls that rose directly from the water made Francesca feel that this was a place protected by forces of which she knew nothing. The cabin was part of nature. After the Firestones went back to Los Angeles, blacktail deer began to appear at the edge of the clearing and the coast jays soon learned to join them when Francesca and Masha fed the babies outdoors, stealing food from their plates.

There, in the Ventana Wilderness, Francesca held her little household together. Sometimes in the all but overwhelming remoteness of the Big Sur country, Francesca thought that she had bitten right out into the very edge of
her soul and that the next day would find her with no more courage, no more patience, no more strength to give to her children, but she never broke.
Intact
. That was the word that was always on her mind. Year after year she kept them intact; Daisy, who crackled so with energy that when Francesca managed to capture one of her busy hands she expected to receive an electric shock, and Dani, who, at three and a half, could walk upstairs only if she held on to the railing, and then only by putting one foot on each tread and then the other so that it took her an eternity to creep to her bedroom; Daisy who sang long, rhyming songs to anyone who would listen and could name every animal in the picture books and every flower in the woods and could put away every object in the kitchen in its proper place and take her own bath and brush her own teeth; and Dani who built towers only two blocks high, who knew how to turn three or four pages of a book at once, but never managed one page at a time, and who understood only the simplest of verbal instructions.

Yet it was with Dani that Francesca found her most peaceful and harmonious moments. Dani’s eyes, like a baby’s eyes, seemed to remember something of a previous life which couldn’t be communicated, but which reassured and comforted her. Dani’s vulnerability was her strength, since no one saw her without feeling the impulse to protect her. Dani was never unhappy because she was never frustrated. If she couldn’t do something, she didn’t bang furiously on the table the way Daisy did when she first discovered that she didn’t know how to read. Dani didn’t ask endless questions, didn’t plague Francesca with demands to climb a tree, catch an earthworm, make cookies, train a hummingbird, take a walk in the woods and collect pebbles on the beach—all in the same breath, as Daisy did.

Every week Margo or Matty Firestone would telephone to find out how they were faring, and Francesca was able, with honesty, to tell them that all was well with her. She was so caught up in the intensity of her maternal feelings that she had no time to regret the years during which she had been a movie star or the months during which she had been a princess. Love for Daisy and Danielle—and fear for them—isolated her more than any other emotion she had ever known. She, who had had within her something as powerful as a huge magnet that had irresistibly attracted
many, many men into her field of force, now allowed that magnet to become just another piece of inert material. Occasionally she would consider briefly her solitary life, hidden from the world, and remember the days when she had loved Stash. She would murmur a few lines from Hamlet—

There lies within the very flame of love

A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it
,

—and return to the present, remembering only that Ophelia had always been a part she had disliked.

“I don’t understand her,” Matty said to Margo. “How can a woman like that not go totally bananas stuck up there all alone with only Masha and the kids to keep her company? What kind of life is it for her, I ask you? It doesn’t make sense.”

“She’s playing the greatest role of her life,” Margo answered.

“Bullshit. That’s what you said when she was doing the princess number.”

“Matty, you really still don’t get it, do you? That whole princess thing was a lightweight farce compared to being the tigress mother. Now she has those two precious babies to protect and bring up and she doesn’t
need
anything else—not men or acting or even friends. It’ll change as they get older, I guess, but right now she’s absorbed in them to the exclusion of everything. Nothing,
nothing
has any other meaning for her.”

“That was some great idea you had, to take her to Europe,” Matty sighed in incurable despair. “If it hadn’t been for that trip she’d still be the greatest star in the business …”

“Don’t look back, Matty. It doesn’t help.”

Daisy had started to talk a steady stream of jargon at about fifteen months, spaced with clear-cut, well-pronounced names and a few demands. By the age of two she was spontaneously combining words into short sentences, using pronouns and verbalizing her immediate experience. “Daisy not afraid of thunder,” she would announce, grabbing Masha’s hand and squeezing it hard. Anxiously, Francesca waited for signs of speech development in Dani, who could say “Mama,” “Asha” for Masha
and “Day” for Daisy, but instead she heard only occasional sounds which were utterly without meaning, gibberish composed of distorted and unarticulated syllables. She waited and patiently tried to teach Dani, but the little girl added only a few basic words—like “yes” and “no” and “bird” and “hot”—to her vocabulary. However, to Francesca’s horror, Daisy started to use Dani’s gibberish. She listened, fear cold in her bones, as the twins communicated with each other in the way of idiots. She was afraid to say anything about it to Daisy, hoping that if she didn’t mention the strange phenomenon it would go away. Instead, it got worse. Finally, when they had passed their third birthday, Francesca asked, as casually as possible, “Daisy, what are you and Dani talking about?”

“She wanted to play with my dolly but when I gave it to her she didn’t want it anymore.”

“Why do you talk to Dani that way, Daisy?”

“What way?”

“The way you just did—all those funny noises. Not the way you talk to me.”

“But that’s just the way she talks, Mama.”

“Can you understand everything she says?”

“Of course.”

“What else do you talk about?”

“I don’t know.” Daisy looked puzzled. “We just talk.”

That night, as she was putting the twins to bed, Francesca heard the strange sounds start up again.

“What did she say just now, Daisy?”

“Dani said, more kiss. That means she wants you to give her another goodnight kiss.”

“Couldn’t you teach her to say kiss, Daisy, the way you say it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Will you try?”

“Yes, Mama. More kiss for me, too?”

That night Francesca spoke to Masha about the twins’ strange form of communication.

“Yes, I’ve noticed it many, many times, Madame,” Masha answered slowly. “It reminds me of something from Russia—something I heard when I was growing up—it must have been about fifty years ago. There were twins—boys they were—who lived in the village nearest to ours and I still remember my mother and my aunt whispering to each other about them. The twins talked to each
other all the time in a language nobody could understand. People thought perhaps they were … they didn’t know—”

“Were they normal, Masha?”

“Oh, yes, Madame. They stopped doing it when they got older and by the time they were six or so everyone thought they had just forgotten it. They talked just like everyone else. But then I left, to go to St. Petersburg, and that’s all I can tell you—about them or about anyone else in that village,” she finished sadly.

Francesca knew few other people to consult about this problem, or any other problem in her life. She was living in the most isolated way possible, except for the phone calls from Matty and Margo. Francesca understood that if reporters were to come across the fact that Francesca Vernon Valensky lived in Big Sur with two identical twin children, she would be hounded to the ends of the earth, until the whole evil story was discovered. She was not protecting Stash, but protecting Daisy from ever knowing what her father had done.

Whenever she had to drive into Carmel for supplies that couldn’t be found in the tiny general store that supplied the few, scattered permanent residents of the area, she left both children at home with Masha and wore such concealing clothes and head scarfs and sunglasses that she was never recognized. She dared not make friends. No friends, old or new, could be trusted except Matty and Margo. She lived frugally, accepting the cabin without shame, for her children’s sake. One by one, through Margo, she sold the jeweled flowers in the crystal vases. Each object was worth only some fifteen hundred dollars to a Beverly Hills dealer, but fifteen hundred dollars could keep the four of them for six months. She guarded the lapis egg for last, when the flowers would be gone. Margo had described it to a salesman at
A la Vieille Russie
in New York, who said that if it were genuine Fabergé it might be worth up to twenty or thirty thousand dollars to them. That it was genuine Francesca didn’t doubt—it was her only security. She cursed herself to sleep night after night thinking of the jewels she had so proudly and foolishly left behind, thinking of the money she had made in Hollywood and casually spent, every penny of it, on clothes and cars and books and extravagant presents to her parents and friends.

From time to time Matty would send her a script some hopeful producer had given him to “pass on if you can.” For the first three years Francesca refused all these offers
without thinking about it because she couldn’t dream of leaving Masha alone to cope with the two children for months at a time.

Two years after Francesca’s flight, Stash had a letter from Matty Firestone. He was informed that Francesca believed that Daisy, now three years old, needed to know her father. She would permit him to visit the child four times a year, for three consecutive days, four hours at a time, provided that he do so without making any attempt to see Francesca or discover where she lived. He was told to go to the Highlands Inn in Carmel and wait.

Stash left London that same morning. A few hours after he arrived, the desk clerk told him that he had visitors. In the rustic lobby Masha was waiting for him with Daisy holding her hand tightly.

There was no sign of Francesca or Danielle. Stash asked Masha no questions, none at all, and she volunteered nothing but a quiet greeting to the man she had once suckled at her breast.

At the end of the first hours with his strong, brave and beautiful daughter, Stash drew pictures for her, stick figures of a man and a little girl adorned with big red hearts. He explained to her that whenever she received one of these in the mail it would mean that he had been thinking about her every day. He mailed one every two or three days until his next visit. The minute he was alone with her he asked her if she had received them.