The Trophy Wife (45 page)

“Molly … Tim?” Ellie asked.

Neither gave any indication that they had heard her voice.

“I have … actually, your father and I have a question that we want to ask you.”

Molly looked up with attention while Tim kept knotting one of die mooring lines.

“We're thinking of hiring a full-time mother's helper for the summer. A girl who would be living with us, and with you all the time.”

Gordon focused on her. Very fair, he thought. She could have used words like
babysitter,
or
different kind of girl,
or
new girl,
which would have instantly prejudiced them against the idea. Instead, she was putting the idea in a positive light. Someone who would be with the family for the summer, and with them whenever they needed supervision.

“What about Trish?” Molly asked, seeing through the inoffensive wording of the question. “Is she going to take Trish's place?”

“No,” Ellie lied. “Trish will still be there to take you out. But she has things of her own to do. She can't be with you all the time. This girl would be around all the time with nothing to do except be with you.”

Gordon found himself smiling, not so much to sell the idea, but rather in admiration of Ellie's skill. She was the politician, able to make any decision sound pleasing to all the diverse constituencies. He knew she didn't like the plan, but she was giving it every chance to win favor.

“I like Trish,” Molly decided. “But, if the other girl is around just when Trish can't be, that's okay.”

“What if they both were around sometimes?” Ellie asked, unwilling to let her daughter think that the new girl would function only as a pinch hitter.

Molly shrugged her indifference.

“Then should I invite her over so that you can meet her?”

“Sure!”

“And what about you, Timmy?”

He looked up blankly from the rat's nest he was tying into the mooring line.

“Would you like to meet her?”

He rubbed his nose on his sleeve. “Meet who?”

“The new girl who might be with us on the Cape.”

“What new girl?”

Ellie looked up at Gordon, smiled, and shook her head. “I don't think he cares one way or the other. Probably doesn't even remember Trish from last summer.”

Gordon leaned across the wheel so that he could whisper to her. ‘Thanks, for the way you handled it.”

She accepted the compliment.

“Okay,” he called out to his crew. “Let's get the sail up.”

Ellie slipped aft and took her station at the wheel, keeping
Lifeboat's
bow into the wind and the telltales blowing astern. Molly unlocked the mainsheet so that the wishbone could move freely. Gordon began cranking in the main halyard, lifting the sail up the mast where it began to unfurl and snap with the wind. Ellie turned a few points to starboard so that it would billow into the shape of the wishbone.

“Ready about,” said Ellie on Gordon's signal. Molly and Tim scampered into the cabin, safe from the lines that would be moving across the deck. “Hard alee,” Ellie called as she turned the lumbering boat across the wind and aimed it down the channel. She slowed the throttle while Gordon trimmed the sail. Then she switched the engine off. The instant quiet was overwhelming, her first chance to get in touch with herself since Gordon had announced his candidacy.

Ellie hadn't wanted him to run for Congress, nor had she been enthused over any of his earlier grabs for power. She had married the well-to-do heir to a profitable and honored business, expecting that his position would allow him more time with her and their family. And, for the first year, that was how it had been. But then inflatable boats had become too small a kingdom for her prince. He had sought and won the presidency of local business organizations, headed state commerce commissions, and chaired redevelopment programs and trade commissions. Gordon was perpetually involved and he seemed to thrive on the exposure. Gradually, Ellie had realized that she occupied only one small compartment in her husband's express train to the top.

It was a pleasant compartment. When he was with her, his love seemed genuine. He was solicitous of her pregnancies and proud of his children. On days like this, the quiet moments between his public activities, he was a perfect husband and devoted father. But as his career broadened, the days between commitments had become fewer. Other interests demanded more and more of his time.

She hated politics and the blind ambition that it seemed to nurture. But the campaign had at least reestablished her place by Gordon's side. Congressmen had to be sold to the public, and the family image was considered an essential part of the sale. She and the children had been brought forward, and despite the frantic campaign schedule she was seeing more of her husband.

For the first time in her marriage, she knew that she was needed. She had rationalized Gordon's dalliances with other women, but now his faithful devotion was mandatory. She was his only love interest. He had shown little awareness of Ellie's career in education, but now her role as an advocate for children was invaluable. His arm was around her at nearly every public event, and she suddenly was being treated like the queen of his expanding empire. She would prefer his admiration in the privacy of their family, but there was no longer any privacy in her family. So she would accept it in public even though its sincerity was always tinged with comments about how important she was to his image.

“Ellie?” It was Gordon's voice from the front of the cockpit.

She smiled in embarrassment, realizing that her mind was back somewhere in their wake.

“It's so lovely,” she answered.

He looked over the side at the silver water reflecting the golden clouds, and then to the rocky shoreline colored with spring. “It really is,” he said as if he had suddenly found time to look outside of himself. “Fantastic.”

“You were going to ask me something,” she reminded him when he turned his attention back to her.

“Just the girl. You will at least consider her, won't you?”

She nodded without any great enthusiasm. “It seems to be okay with the kids.”

“Because it's important. Henry thinks it will help erase the blue blood stigma. He thinks it will give me a much broader following.”

Henry, she thought, taking care not to show her exasperation. His strategy was intruding into every corner of their relationship, even to the choice of her children's companion. God, but how she hated politics.

Ellie was as nervous as if she were the one being interviewed. She paced the hallway, glanced down at her watch—which didn't seem to move at all—and peeked out through the panel windows at the empty driveway. Theresa Santiago wasn't scheduled to arrive for another five minutes, but Ellie had been fussing and pacing for the past twenty.

For Gordon's sake, she wanted the meeting to go well. Ideally, Theresa would charm her, the kids would be thrilled, and she could go to Gordon and agree that her nanny and his olive branch to the minority community were one and the same person. But her instincts argued that the meeting was going to be a disaster. Molly had already decided that she wanted Trish Mapleton to be their summer babysitter. She was a year older now, and Ellie suspected that she wanted another chance to find out what was going on under that blanket. Timmy had gone one step further, announcing that he wanted his mother to spend the summer minding him, and he wasn't going to be nice to either Trish or Theresa. And, of course, the minority poster child was Henry Browning's idea. As a result, Ellie was predisposed to dislike Theresa. She had planned a productive, yet relaxing, summer interrupted by only a few obligations to Gordon's campaign. Now she was awaiting the arrival of the young woman who might foul up everything? She saw the car as soon as it turned into the long
driveway. Instinctively, she went to the window and pressed her nose against the glass, hoping that the girl's manner and appearance would be a ray of sunshine. But her spirits sunk as the car moved closer and came into focus.

It was an old car, two design eras behind the industry's current aerodynamic styling, and painted in a color that could have been anything between a dirty gray and a faded black. Japanese, she thought immediately. One of those cookie-cutter, faceless coupes that tried to pass itself off as a European roadster. As it pulled to a stop in front of the porte cochere, she could see the worn edges of the tires and the faded rims that were missing wheel covers. On the Cape, the car would have been towed into the harbor and sunk as a permanent mooring.

Then Theresa stepped out and glanced up at the front door, catching Ellie in the act of peering down at her arriving guest. Ellie winced; the hair was deranged, and the dress was a nightmare. The young girl, who stepped around the front of the car clutching a purse that she had probably borrowed, was floating in space between two generations. She had traded the jeans of her contemporaries for the formal business dress of her elders, and her discomfort was apparent.

Ellie fixed her warmest smile and threw open the door. “Theresa?” she said, using the name as a question. The young girl stopped dead, as if she had been caught carrying a television out of a broken storefront. “Yes. I'm supposed to see Mrs. Acton.”

“I'm Mrs. Acton. Please come in.” Ellie stepped aside, clearing the doorway, but still Theresa managed to keep as much space between them as the dimensions of the entrance-way allowed. Then, as she moved inside, her face stretched out ahead of her body so that her saucer eyes could take in the size and appointments of the living room.

“Go right in,” Ellie said pleasantly. “I'll get us some refreshments. Would you like a soft drink? Or a lemonade?”

Theresa kept staring into the living room as if she were looking through the bars of the heavenly gates. “Sure. Thanks,” she answered off into space.

Oh God, Ellie thought. Disaster. Worse than I could have imagined. She filled two tumblers with ice, and poured a can of Diet Coke over cubes. “Have you eaten? Can I fix you a sandwich, or get you a snack?” she offered as she entered the living room.

“No thank you,” Theresa said from the center of the sofa on the other side of the huge coffee table. She was still clutching the purse under her folded arms as if she were carrying her paycheck through a dark alley.

Theresa's physical assets were instantly visible. She had smooth tan skin of mulatto coloring, a perfectly proportioned face, and incredibly light blue eyes. Caucasian, with perhaps a black slave anchoring her genealogy, and clear evidence of an Irish overseer who had gone through the cabins. She was a world child, the ideal recipient of adulation by a politician who needed to be a man of the people. But her liabilities were equally visible, and far more numerous.

First, was her hair. It stood out from her head forming an oversized frame for her face. It needed pruning.

Then there was the dress. The gray and blue pattern was tastefully conservative, certainly appropriate for a secretary in a law office. But the neckline was edged in white lace that was heavily embroidered and well over the top. It seemed almost like a trellis as it rose into her hair. The same lace outlined the patch pockets and finished off the hem. The stockings were gray, and the black shoes were right out of a shoe box.

She seemed a bit overweight, not for an adult who would have been comfortable in the dress, but rather for the young woman that went with the face. Her figure was obvious and attractive, but more mature than typical
Cosmo
covers. The girls on the Cape, who had personal trainers and flaunted their anorexia, wouldn't recognize her as a contemporary.

“Well, tell me something about yourself,” Ellie tried as a starter.

Theresa cleared her throat, and kept her eyes fixed on her hands, which were now folded across the captive pocketbook.
“I'm a high school graduate,” she began, “in the top ten percent of my class and on the honor roll.”

“I heard you were your class valedictorian,” Ellie prompted her.

Theresa nodded. Then she suddenly opened the purse and took out a sealed business envelope. “I have a letter of reference from my principal.” She stretched across the table to hand the letter to Ellie, who took it, opened it, and made a great show of reading it carefully.

“You were first in your class,” Ellie blurted out, as she read the school official's comments.

Theresa nodded.

“And you held down a job after school and on weekends?”

Another nod.

“What kind of job?”

“With Digital Electronics in Fall River. I'm there full-time now. I'm a quality inspector on the circuit board production line.”

Ellie couldn't hide her surprise. “That's a very responsible job. Do you like it?”

“It's kind of boring. And you never finish. The boards are coming down the line when you get there, and they're still coming down the line when you leave.” She smiled at the irony, which gave Ellie a reason to laugh.

“Then why did you choose it?”

Now Theresa seemed surprised at the density of the question. “The money. It pays much better than retail jobs. It's a union shop…” She trailed off just after she said “union,” remembering that the word was very offensive to the people who lived on Ocean Drive.

“What about school activities?” Ellie wondered.

“I'm in junior college now. And there aren't any activities. But in high school I was in the orchestra. I play the flute.” She went back to staring at her hands until she remembered that there was salvation in her purse. “I have a recommendation from my music teacher.” She pulled out another official envelope and delivered it across the table.

Ellie read quickly, then stopped, and read again. “This says that you were first chair. And that you were soloist in the annual concert.”

Again, Theresa nodded.