Tides of the Heart (10 page)

It was Jess who had found Phillip, Jess who had brought him to meet her, Jess who had been responsible for those months of special love that Phillip had found before P.J. died.

“Jess,” he said quietly. “Gosh. It’s so good to hear from you. How are you?” He quickly brushed something away from his cheek; he was not surprised that it was a tear.

“I’m fine, thanks. And you’re doing well. A law firm in Manhattan?”

“Well,” he laughed, then glanced up at the wall again,
suddenly remembering that his future was in the hands of the clock. “It was my father’s. We’re struggling, but it’s going okay.”

“I know. I got your number from your … mother. She’s very proud of her boys.”

“Yeah, well, mothers are like that.” And, he reminded himself, Jeanine Archambault
was
his mother. It had been Jeanine Archambault who had raised Phillip, sacrificed for him, loved him every day. Loved him as much as she did his brother, Joseph, who had also been adopted, who was also “special,” a chosen child. He was glad he’d never told Jeanine that he’d met P.J. He would not hurt her for anything in the world. Besides, telling Joseph had been stupid enough. “So what can I do for you, Jess?”

“I need to see you, Phillip. Are you free for lunch, maybe next week?”

“Sounds serious.”

“It is. It’s business, I’m afraid. Though I’d love to see you even if it weren’t.”

He remembered the small, gentle woman who had been so kind when he had been so scared. Looking at his calendar, Phillip said, “I can’t make it until Thursday. Is that okay?”

She paused a moment, then said, “Thursday is fine. I’ll come into the city. Shall I meet you at your office?”

“No,” Phillip said abruptly, not wanting to take the chance that Joseph would be there, that Joseph would demand to know why Jess had come and what trouble she intended to stir up this time. “Let’s meet at Tavern on the Green. Say, one o’clock?”

“I’ll see you then, Phillip. And thank you.”

After hanging up, he wondered what Jess wanted. Surely she had a bevy of attorneys at her disposal: people with the kind of old money Jess had inherited needed lawyers the way sick people needed doctors—a lot of them and often.

No, he could not imagine what business Jess Randall would have with him. He did, however, know why he’d
chosen to meet her at Tavern on the Green: The restaurant was on the west side, close to where P.J. had lived. And sometimes just walking by the building where Phillip had first met his birth mother comforted him, made him feel more at peace, even though P.J. was gone, even though he’d never see her again.

He sighed and glanced at the clock again. It was 3:42. Maybe he should get out of the office, stop waiting for the phone to ring. Maybe he should go uptown and walk by P.J.’s apartment now. Maybe it would make him feel better again.

McGinnis and Smith be damned.

The building looked the same. It had been nearly five years since he’d stood there with Jess; five years, and yet it looked the same: brown brick with beige trim, in the style of the 1930s, when only the very fortunate were allowed to look out over Central Park West, when women in furs and men in top hats had stepped into limos stretched along the curb. Today there were BMWs and cabs waiting, and yuppies who moved in and out of real estate, rich for a time, perhaps, then downsized or outsized and credit-carded to the max.

Turning up his collar against the early March wind, Phillip counted the windows from the ground floor up to the twelfth: P.J.’s floor.

It had been fall when he’d come here, the late afternoon sun losing itself to the Hudson, as it was now. A dim yellow light already glowed in the twelfth-floor living room window—light from a lamp that was no longer P.J.’s. Phillip closed his eyes and pictured the inside the way it had been—the high, ornately carved ceilings so perfectly preserved; the plush, curved, celery-colored sofa and matching soft-tinted walls; the sleek marble-topped tables; the classic paintings and sculptures that accented the rooms. It had been a sharp, inviting contrast to the dark mahogany tables
with lace-crocheted doilies, the upholstered recliners, and the braided oval wool rugs of the house in which Phillip had been raised—the house of Donald and Jeanine Archambault, upper middle class for the era in which they lived, meaning there was always enough to pay the bills and a little extra for such things as college educations for their two adopted sons. There was always enough, but there were no paintings, no sculptures. So as Phillip stood in P.J.’s living room on Central Park West surrounded by the elegance, the grace, and the glamour, he had shifted from one foot to the other, waiting to see if P.J. would welcome him and wondering if she would be disappointed in him.

It had been difficult.

“No!” she had screamed when Phillip and Jess entered the bedroom, P.J.’s sickroom domain. She pulled the comforter over her turbaned head.

“I wanted to see you,” Phillip answered, his voice trembling, his legs jellylike. “I wanted to meet my mother.”

Slowly, she pulled the comforter from her face. “Well, take a look,” she’d hissed. “If you want to look closer, I’ll take off this rag and you can see the bald freak that’s your mother.”

He did not know where his courage had come from. Maybe from years of wondering who his birth mother was, maybe from hours he’d spent drawing and painting and wondering if his mother, too, was an artist, if his creative genes had come from her. Whatever it was, it had definitely been courage that helped him move toward her bed, helped him sit on the edge and move closer to her. “Your eyes,” he said. “I’ve got your eyes.”

And he did have her eyes, her clear emerald eyes that had not been faded by the cancer.

Then he handed her the rose, the one he had bought many hours earlier, when he’d hoped she would come to Larchwood Hall. “It’s a little droopy,” he apologized. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, God,” P.J. cried, taking the flower. She shivered
and started to cry. She reached out and touched his face. “You are so handsome,” she said. “My God, you are so handsome.”

A light mist of snow sprinkled against Phillip’s face now. He let it moisten his cheeks, his brow, the lashes of his emerald eyes. He was so grateful to have met her, to have known her, if only for those few months before she died, before the breast cancer took her too fast, too soon.

And now, on Thursday he was going to see Jess again—the woman who had enabled him to feel so much joy, joy that had culminated in such deep sorrow. Phillip put his gloved hands in his pockets. It seemed that life was merely a string of good times and bad, held together by spaces of nothingness in between—hours, days, weeks, years of doing things like practicing law while waiting for the next good time or bad time to come along.

He turned from the building and walked slowly toward the subway that would take him downtown to the train bound for Fairfield. It was Wednesday night, after all, when dinner was shared at the mahogany table that stood on the braided wool rug.

“Call your brother on his cellular telephone and let him know you’re here,” Jeanine Archambault said as soon as Phillip stepped inside the house. “He’s been frantic trying to find you.”

Phillip hung up his coat in the back hall off the kitchen, smiling at the stilted way his mother referred to the “cellular telephone” as if it was an important invention that necessitated a respectable proper name, like “automobile” or “mathematics.” At least she hadn’t chosen tonight to include a guest for dinner, some eligible young woman who would make Phillip a nice wife. Nor had his mother fussed over him with her usual questions—how was the train ride out from the city, had he had anything decent to eat all day, and why hadn’t he brought his laundry—she really
wouldn’t mind doing his laundry because he must be so busy and she had plenty of time. Perhaps things weren’t typical tonight because Phillip had been “bad” and big brother was angry.

He loosened his tie and walked past the stove on his way to the phone, stopping to lift the lid of the black enamel pot that simmered deliciously with the promise of dinner. “Hmm,” he said. “Beef stew.”

“And rolls.” His mother took the lid from his hand and stirred the stew. “Now call your brother. Ask him what time he and Camille will be over.”

Joseph and Camille, Phillip knew, would be there at seven-fifteen, the same way they were every Wednesday night. Seven-fifteen on Wednesdays, two-thirty on Sunday afternoons. Phillip’s brother and his wife were as predictable as Jeanine’s making whole wheat rolls for dinner tonight to go with the beef stew that she would put in the dark blue tureen and serve in the matching blue bowls. Phillip wondered what had ever made him suggest a few years ago that Jeanine sell the house and move to a condo. His mother would no more leave this rambling old place than she would play bridge on Wednesdays instead of cook for her grown-up sons.

The tinny voice of a recording told Phillip that the Bell Atlantic customer he was calling was not available at this time. He glanced at his watch: 7:06.

“They must be on their way,” he said, then pictured the Bell Atlantic customer behind the wheel of his BMW, his wife by his side, as he explained to her that the reason he was not answering his phone was because Phillip had taken off for God only knew where this afternoon and had totally pissed him off. “The biggest goddamn deal of our lives at stake,” Phillip could almost hear his brother sputter, “and he leaves the office without so much as a good-bye.”

Camille would listen and nod but not interfere. The two had been married long enough for her to know not to wedge her opinions between the two brothers. And she was
probably too preoccupied with awaiting the results of their third attempt at in vitro fertilization to care about the latest rift between the brothers.

Still, the phone would keep ringing and Joseph would not move to answer it. “Well, little brother,” he’d bark at the black plastic rectangle, “you can just sweat it out. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you know what happened any too soon.”

That, Phillip assured himself, was what Joseph was saying right now. And to make matters worse, Phillip couldn’t blame him. He should have stuck around for the McGinnis-Smith verdict. He should have pulled his head out of those go-nowhere clouds and not let himself get so … sentimental. Sentimental and stupid. Like the little kid he sometimes still felt that he was.

“Want me to set the table?” he asked his mother, the same as every Wednesday night.

“If you want,” she answered the same answer, then added, “I think we’ll use blue bowls tonight. The ones that match the tureen.”

Phillip nodded and went into the dining room to get the dishes from the china closet.

“I can’t believe you bailed out,” Joseph said, his voice low so their mother and Camille would not hear. “You just up and bailed out when we were waiting for the biggest break of our career.”

Phillip leaned against the china closet, feeling small and naughty, trying not to look at the snarl on Joseph’s otherwise chiseled, fair-skinned face, the face that could have come from Irish heritage or Polish—Joseph had never cared to find out.

“Sorry. It was business.”

“Business? You didn’t even tell Marilyn you were leaving.”

Phillip moved past his brother and straightened the soup
spoons beside the knives. “It’s Sandy, not Marilyn. If we had a decent secretary instead of those temp girls, you might keep the name straight.”

“Well, not that you care,” Joseph said haughtily, “but we can afford one now.” He turned and began to leave the room.

Phillip blinked and went after him. He grabbed his arm. “We got them?”

The anger on his brother’s Irish-Polish-whatever face melted into a smile. “We’re going uptown, little brother,” he said. “We’re in with the big guys.”

Phillip’s hands flew to his face. He had done it.
They
had done it. He let out a whoop and smacked Joseph’s high five. “McGinnis and Smith,” he hollered. “Unbelievable!”

“Un
-friggin’
-believable!” Joseph exclaimed, then threw his arms around his wayward little brother and together they laughed and hugged and danced around the braided rug like two little boys who had won their first Little League game.

As the yellow cab barreled up Sixth Avenue, dodging people and bicycles and other yellow cabs, Jess stared out the dirt-filmed window and thanked God that the week had finally passed. It had been one of those weeks when most things that could go wrong did, and when things one never dreamed would happen had.

It started when she arrived home from the Cape. Wendell, the dining and banquet room manager of the country club—
the
country club, Fox Hills of Greenwich—had called asking her to quote on new draperies and decor for the ballroom.

At first she was flattered.

“Celia Boynton’s dining room is the talk of the club,” Wendell had said. “I need someone I can trust, and I know you’ll come through.”

Of course he did. Wendell had watched Jess come through for function after function over the years, volunteering her time because she had so much of it, doing whatever was asked, making Charles look good.