The Rothman Scandal (37 page)

“It's a very pretty dress.”

“But did you see what the others were wearing? Blue jeans. Swimsuits. Bare feet. I couldn't even take off my shoes because I'm wearing
hose!
” She sobbed again. “A beach party,” she said. “I had no idea what she meant by a beach party. We don't have beach parties in Britain. And so I came dressed—like this!”

“I think you look just fine,” he said.

“People were giggling about me behind my back. I just know they were. They had to have been. I just had to get out of there. The hostess—this Mrs. Van Zuylen—I don't even know her!” She dabbed at her eyes behind the big glasses. “It's just too humiliating,” she said, and then, “Forgive me for carrying on like this. I shouldn't even be sitting here in your car.”

“I just came back to see if my dog needed water,” he said, looking back at Cronkite who lay sleeping peacefully across the back seat, his head between his front paws.

“Your pooch and I have become great friends,” she said with a little sniffle. “His water dish was getting a little low, but I filled it from that little stream that runs through the garden.”

“That was nice of you.”

“Sheep dogs are my favorite breed. So lovable.” She reached behind her and scratched Cronkite's nose. His eyes blinked open, then closed. “I must go,” she said. “I need to call a taxi. But I don't know where to find a telephone. I don't want to go back into the house, dressed like this.”

Mel looked briefly at his car phone. Then he said, “Would you like me to drive you home?”

“Oh,
would
you?” she said eagerly. “That would be terribly kind of you, Mr. Jorgenson! That would be just the kindest thing.”

“Where're you staying?”

“It's a place called Gurney's Inn,” she said. “It's on—I believe it's called the Montauk Road.”

“I know Gurney's Inn,” he said. He glanced at his watch. Gurney's Inn was at least a twenty-five-minute drive in each direction. “Okay, let's go,” he said, and hopped into the car beside her.

“You really are too kind,” she said.

“Don't mention it.”

“You see,” she said, as he pulled the car out of the lot and started down the Van Zuylens' long drive toward Gin Lane, “I really don't know Mr. and Mrs. Van Zuylen, and that's what makes it so much worse—to come to someone's house, someone you've never met, dressed all wrong. At least it does to me. To someone who's supposed to know a
little
about fashion, to come dressed all wrong to someone's house you've never met. Or does that seem like a terribly silly form of female vanity to you, Mr. Jorgenson? Can you understand a woman's vanity?”

“I guess I can,” he said. “By the way, how'd you know my name?”

“My goodness, you're famous from the telly. I recognized you right away!”

“Aha!” he said.

“She called me yesterday out of the blue, this Mrs. Van Zuylen,” she said. “And asked me to her party tonight. Out of the blue. I'd no idea who she was.”

“That will happen in New York,” he said. “Once your name is in Mona Potter's column, everybody in town wants to meet you. It doesn't matter whether they know you or not. They'll invite you to their parties to check you out.”

“You see? That's what I meant. I knew I was to be checked out tonight, and that's why I couldn't bear to stay, dressed as I am. Anyway, I rang up my friend Mr. Herbert Rothman, and he told me that Mrs. Van Zuylen is one of your most important hostesses, and that I should by all means accept. He neglected, however, to tell me what I ought to wear for this ‘party at my beach,' as she put it,” she added with a little laugh. “Obviously.”

“Herb Rothman wasn't invited?”

“In fact, he was. But Mr. Rothman is in San Francisco this weekend, on some sort of company business. He urged me to come alone. He recommended this hotel called Gurney's Inn, where I'm stopping.”

He turned out onto the Montauk Highway, and she fell silent.

“Tell me about yourself, Miss Fenton,” he said at last.

“Please call me Fiona.”

“All right. Tell me about yourself, Fiona.”

“Oh, you don't really want to hear about me, Mr. Jorgenson.”

“And I'm Mel.”

“You don't really want to hear about me, do you, Mel?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Well—” She seemed to hestitate. “I had a fairly typical English girlhood, I suppose. Brought up, rather strictly, by nannies, in a picture-postcard little English village—nannies who kept me carefully protected from the facts of life. Two doting parents, and—
oh!
” And suddenly he realized she was weeping again.

“What's wrong?” he asked her.

“I can't—I just can't,” she sobbed.

“Can't what?”

“I just can't go on telling all these lies, Mel!”

“Lies? What lies?”

“The lies I've told everyone … the lies I've told Mr. Rothman. The lie I've made of my whole life … I just can't go on …”

“Care to tell me about that?” he said, interested.

“If I tell you the truth—the real truth—the truth I've never told another living soul, will you promise not to tell anyone? Will you promise not to tell Mr. Rothman?”

“Promise,” he said.

“Because it isn't a pretty story.” She blew her nose into her hanky, and dabbed at her eyes. “How well do you know England, Mel?” she asked him then.

“I've been to London often. But the rest of England—not well at all.”

“Have you heard of Viscount Hesketh?”

“No.”

“Viscount Hesketh's name is known in England, but very little is known about the man himself. He is famously reclusive, and hardly ever leaves Hesketh Castle, where he lives. Few people outside his family have ever seen him. I guess you could describe him as one of our famous English eccentrics. There's a certain mystery about him.”

“Hm,” he said.

“Viscount Hesketh is my father.”

“Oho,” he said.

“My mother left him when I was a very little girl. I hardly have any memories of my mother, though I do have photographs of her. She was very beautiful. She left him—ran off—to Spain, we think, though we don't know. She disappeared, and no one has ever seen or heard from her again.”

“Another man?”

“Perhaps. No one knows. But we think she left him because she found out what was going on.”

“Oh? What was going on?”

“I have an older sister, Bridget. Two years older, who lives in Australia now. She escaped. I wasn't so lucky. It started with Bridget. Then it was my turn.”

“What started?”

“It started when we were little girls—first Bridget, then me. I don't even remember when it started with me, I was that young. Three, perhaps. He would ask me to touch him in—intimate places. Then he would ask me to do other things, intimate things—things that were—degenerate.”

“How awful,” he said quietly.

“But no,” she said. “No! It wasn't awful! I loved my father! I worshipped him! I adored him—I thought he was a god! I was raised by nannies, and they told me my father was a god! He was Viscount Hesketh, Earl of Langdon! He could do no wrong! Of course they never knew about the things we did together. That was our secret, Pater's and mine. And I loved the secret things we did together, loved them more and more as the years went by, and I'm sure Bridget loved them, too. I looked forward to our secret times together—I grew to crave them! I thought he was the most wonderful father a girl could ever have. I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world to have a father who loved me so much, and in that special, wonderful way! It wasn't until later—much later—that I learned that what we had done was considered evil, that it was called a sin against God and man, and that there was a word for it—incest. And that, in the eyes of every civilized society in the world, my beloved father was a degenerate, morally polluted, perverted in the most contemptible of human ways.”

He glanced at her and, in the lights reflected from the dashboard, he saw that tears were standing in her eyes.

“That was when the guilt set in—guilt in knowing that I'd enjoyed my sin, enjoyed my willing share of his evil, encouraged the evil, helped bring the devil into our house. I felt I was going to explode with guilt! Can you understand how I felt?”

He nodded. “Yes, I suppose I can,” he said.

“Bridget had already gone through the same thing. She had made her escape. I knew I had to escape from that evil house. I tried. I was seventeen, and I went to London, found a job, and tried to hide from him, from the past, from everything, but I knew he was still after me, with detectives hired to find me, and bring me back. Then—”

“Then?”

“Then, in London, I met the most wonderful young man. He was a soldier, stationed at Aldershot. We fell in love, and I thought—at last, escape! He asked to marry me, and we were married at the Post Office registry office. We were so much in love, and those few months we had together were the happiest in my life. But my father found out about it. Even though most people thought of him as a harmless old eccentric, he had friends high up in the War Office. He had influence. After all, he was Viscount Hesketh, Earl of Langdon, a Peer of the Realm! The Order of the Garter! All his mates from Eton were in the War Office. In Britain, the old school ties mean everything—more than human life itself, it sometimes seems. This was just before the Falklands War, and so, when the war started, my father saw to it that Eric was ordered there, and placed in the front lines. And so—and so—my beautiful young husband never came home from the Falkland Islands. He's buried there—and I—and I—they sent his uniform home to me in a box, wrapped in a British flag. It's all I have left of him, his uniform, and the flag they draped his coffin in.”

“What a terribly sad story, Fiona,” he said. “I'm—awfully sorry.”

“His head was blown off by machine-gun fire. But why am I telling you all of this? I never even told Eric about my father and myself. I was certain, if I told him about any of that, he would stop loving me, that he would be repelled by me, that he would think me a less than worthless person, a piece of spoiled and damaged goods. And the guilt was still exploding inside me. It still is. Sometimes, when I think about it too much, I think my whole being will explode with guilt. And on top of that was my guilt over Eric's death, because if he hadn't married me he would still be alive.”

“You mustn't think that, Fiona.”

“But I do! I do. But why am I telling you all of this—you, almost a complete stranger?”

“Sometimes it helps to share your feelings with another person.”

“Perhaps it's because you were kind enough to let me blubber in your car, and offered to drive me home,” she said. “Anyway, after Eric died, I got another job. I worked for a little fashion publication called
Lady Fair
—just an advertising giveaway sheet, really, with offices in Maida Vale. Nothing at all like
Mode
. Then, for a while, I worked in a dress shop in Sloane Street, which was where I began to learn a little bit about fashion. Then, last December, I happened to meet Mr. Herbert Rothman in London, where he was on business, and he seemed to take a fancy to me—nothing romantic, of course, but he seemed interested in my fashion philosophy which, if I do say so myself, is a bit different from others, and he asked me if I would like to come to America to work for
Mode
. Of course I was thrilled! The chance to work with the great Alexandra Rothman, who is such a legend. Mr. Rothman seemed like my salvation at last—my savior. He arranged everything. I had no passport, no green card to work in America—he took care of all of that. Suddenly, it seemed as though I had a fairy godfather. At last I could escape. I thought if I put an ocean between myself and my guilt, perhaps it would go away. It hasn't.”

“It will, in time, Fiona. You were just a child. What happened was wrong, but it wasn't your fault.”

“You're Alexandra Rothman's fiancé, aren't you?” she said.

He laughed softly. “
Fiancé
is kind of a pompous word for a man my age,” he said.

“Her beau, then. You know, I was so excited at the prospect of working with her that I didn't give much thought to the logistics of it. But now it doesn't look as though it's going to work out—at all. I know she's terribly upset—I could see it in her face at her party the other night. The whole thing was handled very badly. Sometimes, for all his good qualities, Herbert Rothman lacks a certain amount of—sensitivity.”

“Yes,” he said grimly.

“I begged him not to handle it that way, but he assured me she'd be pleased as punch. But she wasn't. And so, I guess, there it goes—my dream. And I'll be heading home for England soon.”

He said nothing, but stared straight ahead at the path of his headlights on the Montauk Highway.

“I thought, perhaps if I saw her at the party tonight, I could talk to her, and explain to her how badly I feel about the whole thing, and the way it was handled, and perhaps we could work things out. But then—well, nothing seems to work out for me, does it?”

He still said nothing.

“I mean, it doesn't have to be co-editor-in-chief, or anything as grand as that, for me. Even if I were to be just a little editorial assistant, that would be thrill enough for me. Just to work for her, and learn from her, would be thrill enough to me.”

“Let me talk to her,” he said. “Maybe something can be worked out.”

“Would you do that?” She touched his arm. “That would be most awfully kind of you. It would make me feel so much better about the whole thing—just to know she'd heard my side of it. You are a very kind man, Mel. Alexandra Rothman is very lucky to have a man like you.”