Bittersweet (45 page)

Boats were bobbing violently at anchor, and a few of the owners had come down to secure them. She could see them working feverishly, and as she looked out to sea again, her breath caught as she saw him. He was standing on the deck in his foul-weather gear, and there were two men with him. They were close enough to see now. She assumed the men with him were crew members, and they seemed to be moving with great speed, as he pointed to things and worked with them. But there was no doubt in her mind now it was Paul. She recognized him easily, and as she watched, he suddenly turned toward her. They were very near now, and attempting a complicated maneuver to bring them safely into the harbor.

She stood as still as she could in the wind, her eyes never leaving him, and he waved at her. And as she squinted against the storm, she saw him smiling, and she lifted her arm and waved in answer. He was standing on deck, waving back at her, and in spite of her raincoat, she was soaked to the skin. But she didn't care. She didn't care if he disappointed her again, she just
wanted to know now. She had to know why he had come here.

She saw the whole crew come on deck then, and he stopped waving at her to give them more orders. They seemed to be struggling with things she couldn't see, and he furled their sails and turned on the motors. He was determined to get as close as he could, and she saw them throw out the anchor, as two of the men lowered the tender, and she wondered what he was doing. The waters weren't as rough in the harbor, but she still didn't see how he would get to the shore in the tender without capsizing. She held her breath as she watched him. But all she could remember was what she had told him in Rwanda, about wanting a man who would come through a hurricane for her, and she knew he had remembered it from his P.S. on the postcard about the slicker. She was certain now that that was what he had been saying to her on the phone … it was something about a slicker. But what was the rest? Was he only teasing her? But as she saw the tender approach, and saw him wrestling with it, she knew he was deadly serious about what he was doing. And she was terrified that he would capsize and drown as she watched him.

It seemed like hours as he crossed the short distance to the steps of the yacht club, but it was only minutes. And as he came closer still, she saw him watching her, as she ran down the steps to meet him. He threw the line to her and she caught and held it, as he jumped out of the tender and tied it to one of the rings. And then he took one long stride to the step where she stood, and looked at her intently. There was a look in his eyes she had seen before. It was like a voice calling to her from
the distance. It was the voice of her dreams. The voice of hope. It was the bittersweet memory of what they had had and lost so quickly. She wanted to ask him what he was doing there, but she couldn't speak. She could only stand there looking at him, as he pulled her to him.

“It's not a hurricane…. but will this do?” he said, close enough to her ear for her to hear him. “I tried to call you.”

“I know,” she said, and he heard her. “I couldn't hear what you were saying.” She looked into his eyes then, afraid of what she would find there. Afraid she was wrong, and that the dreams had never existed.

“I said I was coming. It's not a hurricane, it's just a storm.” But it was a good one. “If you want a hurricane, India …I'll take you to Newport … if you want me …” he said, his tears mixing with the rain that washed his cheeks. “I'm here. I'm sorry it took me so long to get here.” It didn't seem long as she looked at him. It didn't seem long at all. It had taken them a year to come through the storm. A lifetime to find each other. The dream had come true finally. They had found it. She touched his cheek with a trembling hand, as she saw the
Sea Star
just behind him. They had both been lost for so long. And by some miracle, through life's storms, they had found each other.

She smiled up at him in a way that told him all he needed to know. And she knew he had come home to her at last, as he pulled her into his slicker with him, and kissed her.

Olympia Crawford Rubinstein
was whizzing around her kitchen on a sunny May morning, in the brownstone she shared with her family on Jane Street in New York, near the old meat-packing district of the West Village. It had long since become a fashionable neighborhood of mostly modern apartment buildings with doormen, and old renovated brownstones. Olympia was fixing lunch for her five-year-old son, Max. The school bus was due to drop him off in a few minutes. He was in kindergarten at Dalton, and Friday was a half day for him. She always took Fridays off to spend them with him. Although Olympia had three older children from her first marriage, Max was Olympia and Harry's only child.

Olympia and Harry had restored the house six
years before, when she was pregnant with Max. Before that, they had lived in her Park Avenue apartment, which she had previously shared with her three children after her divorce. And then Harry joined them. She had met Harry Rubinstein a year after her divorce. And now, she and Harry had been married for thirteen years. They had waited eight years to have Max, and his parents and siblings adored him. He was a loving, funny, happy child.

Olympia was a partner in a booming law practice, specializing in civil rights issues and class action lawsuits. Her favorite cases, and what she specialized in, were those that involved discrimination against or some form of abuse of children. She had made a name for herself in her field. She had gone to law school after her divorce, fifteen years before, and married Harry two years later. He had been one of her law professors at Columbia Law School, and was now a judge on the federal court of appeals. He had recently been considered for a seat on the Supreme Court. In the end, they hadn't appointed him, but he'd come close, and she and Harry both hoped that the next time a vacancy came up, he would get it.

She and Harry shared all the same beliefs, values,
and passions—even though they came from very different backgrounds. He came from an Orthodox Jewish home, and both his parents had been Holocaust survivors as children. His mother had gone to Dachau from Munich at ten, and lost her entire family. His father had been one of the few survivors of Auschwitz, and they met in Israel later. They had married as teenagers, moved to London, and from there to the States. Both had lost their entire families, and their only son had become the focus of all their energies, dreams, and hopes. They had worked like slaves all their lives to give him an education, his father as a tailor and his mother as a seamstress, working in the sweatshops of the Lower East Side, and eventually on Seventh Avenue in what was later referred to as the garment district. His father had died just after Harry and Olympia married. Harry's greatest regret was that his father hadn't known Max. Harry's mother, Frieda, was a strong, intelligent, loving woman of seventy-six, who thought her son was a genius, and her grandson a prodigy.

Olympia had converted from her staunch Episcopalian background to Judaism when she married Harry. They attended a Reform synagogue, and Olympia said the prayers for Shabbat
every Friday night, and lit the candles, which never failed to touch Harry. There was no doubt in Harry's mind, or even his mother's, that Olympia was a fantastic woman, a great mother to all her children, a terrific attorney, and a wonderful wife. Like Olympia, Harry had been married before, but he had no other children. Olympia was turning forty-five in July, and Harry was fifty-three. They were well matched in all ways, though their backgrounds couldn't have been more different. Even physically, they were an interesting and complementary combination. Her hair was blond, her eyes were blue; he was dark, with dark brown eyes; she was tiny; he was a huge teddy bear of a man, with a quick smile and an easygoing disposition. Olympia was shy and serious, though prone to easy laughter, especially when it was provoked by Harry or her children. She was a remarkably dutiful and loving daughter-in-law to Harry's mother, Frieda.

Olympia's background was entirely different from Harry's. The Crawfords were an illustrious and extremely social New York family, whose blue-blooded ancestors had intermarried with Astors and Vanderbilts for generations. Buildings and academic institutions were named after them, and theirs had been one of the largest “cottages” in
Newport, Rhode Island, where they spent the summers. The family fortune had dwindled to next to nothing by the time her parents died when she was in college, and she had been forced to sell the “cottage” and surrounding estate to pay their debts and taxes. Her father had never really worked, and as one of her distant relatives had said after he died, “he had a small fortune, he had made it from a large one.” By the time she cleaned up all their debts and sold their property, there was simply no money, just rivers of blue blood and aristocratic connections. She had just enough left to pay for her education, and put a small nest egg away, which later paid for law school.

She married her college sweetheart, Chauncey Bedham Walker IV, six months after she graduated from Vassar, and he from Princeton. He had been charming, handsome, and fun-loving, the captain of the crew team, an expert horseman, played polo, and when they met, Olympia was understandably dazzled by him. Olympia was head over heels in love with him, and didn't give a damn about his family's enormous fortune. She was totally in love with Chauncey, enough so as not to notice that he drank too much, played constantly, had a roving eye, and spent far too much money. He went to
work in his family's investment bank, and did anything he wanted, which eventually included going to work as seldom as possible, spending literally no time with her, and having random affairs with a multitude of women. By the time she knew what was happening, she and Chauncey had three children. Charlie came along two years after they were married, and his identical twin sisters, Virginia and Veronica, three years later. When she and Chauncey split up seven years after they married, Charlie was five, the twins two, and Olympia was twenty-nine years old. As soon as they separated, he quit his job at the bank, and went to live in Newport with his grandmother, the doyenne of Newport and Palm Beach society, and devoted himself to playing polo and chasing women.

A year later Chauncey married Felicia Weatherton, who was the perfect mate for him. They built a house on his grandmother's estate, which he ultimately inherited, filled her stables with new horses, and had three daughters in four years. A year after Chauncey married Felicia, Olympia married Harry Rubinstein, which Chauncey found not only ridiculous but appalling. He was rendered speechless when their son, Charlie, told him his mother had converted to the
Jewish faith. He had been equally shocked earlier when Olympia enrolled in law school, all of which proved to him, as Olympia had figured out long before, that despite the similarity of their ancestry, she and Chauncey had absolutely nothing in common, and never would. As she grew older, the ideas that had seemed normal to her in her youth appalled her. Almost all of Chauncey's values, or lack of them, were anathema to her.

The fifteen years since their divorce had been years of erratic truce, and occasional minor warfare, usually over money. He supported their three children decently, though not generously. Despite what he had inherited from his family, Chauncey was stingy with his first family, and far more generous with his second wife and their children. To add insult to injury, he had forced Olympia to agree that she would never urge their children to become Jewish. It wasn't an issue anyway. She had no intention of doing so. Olympia's conversion was a private, personal decision between her and Harry. Chauncey was unabashedly anti-Semitic. Harry thought Olympia's first husband was pompous, arrogant, and useless. Other than the fact that he was her children's father and she had loved him when she married him, for the past fifteen years,
Olympia found it impossible to defend him. Prejudice was Chauncey's middle name. There was absolutely nothing politically correct about him or Felicia, and Harry loathed him. They represented everything he detested, and he could never understand how Olympia had tolerated him for ten minutes, let alone seven years of marriage. People like Chauncey and Felicia, and the whole hierarchy of Newport society, and all it stood for, were a mystery to Harry. He wanted to know nothing about it, and Olympian occasional explanations were wasted on him.