Blessing in Disguise (7 page)

“What do you
want
from me?” Mom asked, sounding irritable.

Hannah struggled to find words to fit this great booming hollowness inside her. “I just want ...” she stopped. Exactly what
did
she want? For her mother and her suddenly to be best friends, like Kath and her mother, who did practically everything together and sometimes even wore each other’s clothes? No, she decided. What she wanted was just to feel needed. She sucked in a deep breath. “I was wondering if maybe you and I could go out sometime. You know, to one of your concerts or something.”

“Oh, that. Sure, anytime, sweetie.” Mom seemed a bit relieved as she waved a hand airily, and went back to poring over her samples. Hannah knew that would be the end of it, because that’s what Mom always said when she had no intention of following through.

Tears filled her eyes. If only she had someone to be with—someone who loved her and wanted her just for herself.

She thought of Conrad, and remembered his telling her that his parents were away for the weekend, and what a bummer it was that he had to slay home and babysit for his little brother. At this moment she didn’t care where it might lead; all she could think of was having his arms around her, holding her tight ... so she
could feel
that she was real, that she wasn’t invisible.

“I’m going out.” Hannah stood abruptly, and retraced her steps to the coat closet. All of a sudden her stomach didn’t hurt anymore.

“Hannah, just
where
do you think you’re going? For heaven’s sake, you just got here!”

She could hear the clicking of her mother’s high heels against the floor, then only a muffled tapping. Grabbing her coat, Hannah made a dash for the front door, yelling over her shoulder, “I’ll be at Kath’s.” Her best friend lived only a block away, on Irving Place, so it was no big deal for her to go over there at ten o’clock at night.

“Are you nuts?” Kath squealed when Hannah called from a phone booth to ask Kath to cover for her. She dropped her voice to a throaty God-forbid-my-parents-should-overhear-this whisper. “I mean, come on, Hannah, Con’s been after you for weeks to ... well,
you
know. What’s he going to think, you showing up this time of night, with his parents away for the weekend?”

“I don’t
care
what happens,” Hannah said, fiercely blowing her nose into the crumpled Kleenex she’d fished out of her coat pocket. “I need to see him.”

Deep sigh. “Okay, I just hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I don’t know if I’m really going to ... well, you know. I haven’t made up my mind about that part.”

“Okay, but, if you do, promise you won’t let me in on the juicy details. I’d be too jealous.” Kath, who was sure she was going to end up a nun if she didn’t find a boyfriend in the next twenty-four hours, sighed again.

Five minutes later, after phoning Conrad, Hannah was on a train heading uptown to his apartment. Daddy would have a fit if he knew she was riding the subway this time of night, she thought. But, if he cared so much, he’d be around to
see
where she was going and what she was doing, instead of just hearing about it two or three days later. Or, in this case,
not
hearing about it.

Hannah started feeling sick to her stomach again. Then she remembered what Grace had said about her parents.

While Daddy was helping Grace put dinner on the table, she’d heard them talking about the book Grace was writing. Something about her father and mother having what Grace called an “unusual” marriage. The two of them never fought, she claimed, never even exchanged a harsh word. They were really crazy about each other ... except for one thing.

Most of the time they didn’t live together.

All the years Grace’s father was away in Washington being a senator, her mother lived with Grace and her sister in their apartment in New York. According to Grace, the arrangement had worked out perfectly. Her mother had had her charitable work and her positions on various boards to keep her occupied. Her parents saw each other on weekends and holidays, when Grace’s father came home or they took the train to Washington to be with him. And whenever it looked as if he might be coming home for good, he’d get elected to another term.

Grace told Daddy that
she
was the only one who hadn’t been happy about it. But maybe that had been the secret to her parents’ success, Hannah thought. Maybe the real truth was that people weren’t meant to be together all the time. If families didn’t spend so much time around each other, they wouldn’t get so attached.

Hannah thought about Grace’s father dying when Grace was almost fourteen, and decided that, as tough as it must have been for Grace and her mother and sister, the fact was that, in a way, he’d already left them. Because, whether it was a father being buried or merely walking out the door, it boiled down to the same thing: your dad not being around when you needed him.

“There’s just one little problem.” Dan Killian leaned back in his swivel chair, his hands forming a steeple over his bulging purse of a belly. “To be perfectly honest, it
could
be a rather sizable problem. Now, don’t get excited, Dellie, not till you’ve heard me out.”

“I’m listening, Dan.”

Cordelia Clayborn Truscott did not allow herself to wilt back into the masculine leather embrace of the wing chair opposite Dan Killian’s scrolled walnut desk, nor did she give in to the urge to toy with the rope of pearls that hung straight as a hangman’s noose down her bosom.
I won’t let him see me squirm,
she thought. Instead, she sat up even straighter, fixing Dan with a pleasant, attentive gaze that was in direct defiance of the wild hammering of her heart.

Don’t you dare back out on me, Dan Killian ... not YOU, of all people.
Dan, with whom she’d hunted tadpoles in the creek below her house when they were both young enough to run about half naked without anyone’s batting an eye. And who, by the time they were sixteen, had become downright
fascinated
with the hidden fruits of her formerly flat chest, even going so far, one moonlit April evening in the greenhouse, as to unhook her brassiere. To this day, she couldn’t smell peat moss without recalling the guilty thrill of Dan Killian’s pale, trembling hand on her breast. She’d loved him then, as much as any sixteen-year-old can, which, she realized now, was about as close to true love as their wading in the creek at age five was to swimming.

Was he going to renege on his promise simply because she’d refused to lie down with him all those years ago? Was this brought on by some long-simmering resentment of his?

Cordelia caught herself smiling at the thought. Heavens, the very idea! Dan, with his three chins and five grown children, married forty-odd years to the Robert E. Lee High Dixie Queen of 1948.

No, his abrupt about-face had to have been spurred by something far more recent. She could sense what he was about to say, and she had to fight to keep from jamming the heels of her hands against her ears. To be so close to having her dream realized, only to have the rug pulled out from under her—oh, how could she bear it?

She could see it in her mind so
clearly:
Gene’s library, a cathedrallike building filled with sunlight and books, and with his speeches, letters, articles, the laws he’d stayed up to all hours drafting. An image so real to her that she could almost envision it springing full-blown onto the lovely grassy rise at the south end of the Latham campus, where the old Henley dorm had burned down several years back.

Cordelia could think of no stone she’d left unturned in attempting to raise the six million or so it would cost. As chairwoman of the Eugene Truscott memorial committee, she had approached more foundations than the Lord knew existed and had gotten money from dozens of them, had even managed to wrangle a small federal grant. She’d been to banks, oil companies, gotten a nice little gift from Gene’s old fireman union. But she was still short more than a million—eight hundred and fifty thousand of which had been promised to her by Dan Killian—and she was tired. Lately, she’d been at meetings like this where she momentarily forgot what she was going to say. She didn’t know how much longer she could keep it up.

Cordelia adjusted her ivory gabardine skirt, lining up its pleats with the same care with which, each spring, she marked with string the rows of tiny seedlings to be planted in her herb garden. For a delicious second, she let her mind drift ahead to thoughts of the mild fall afternoon that awaited her at the end of her present ordeal. She imagined herself, in her gardening pants and floppy straw hat, kneeling in the rich soil of her garden, working side by side with Gabe as they harvested the last of the summer’s herbs.

Gabe ...

In Dan’s darkly masculine office with its faint but pervasive odor of cigar smoke, Cordelia nevertheless felt as if a fierce sun were burning her face, heating her whole body. She willed herself not to think about Gabe. She must concentrate on what was happening here,
now;
on Dan Killian and the nasty little bomb she could sense he was about to drop. ...

She watched Dan’s meaty hand stir among the papers on his desk and finally haul up a newspaper clipping that fluttered restlessly in the tepid air from the ancient air-conditioner.

“Right out of the
Constitution,”
he pronounced, as if it were the founding fathers’ great document instead of just a silly newspaper. “Says here, Dellie, that your Grace—who you know we’re all just so proud of she might just as well be right smack in the middle of Jackson Park, bronzed and with a plaque at her feet—says here that Grace is writing a book, a bi-
o
-graphy,” he added sententiously, drawing one word out into three. “About her daddy. About Eugene.”

“This is hardly news to me, Dan,” interrupted Cordelia. She’d known about the book long before Grace had ever set a word down on paper, had been
excited
about it even, until this ... this ... Oh, the unfairness, the cruelty of it!

“Most of it complimentary, from what I understand,” he went on. “But there is some stuff that’s downright disturbing. Something about—hell, I’ll come right out and say it—Gene being involved in a man’s killing. A
black
man.” He kept his head low, tucked into the loose chins wattling his neck, his pale eyes peering mournfully above the gold rims of his spectacles. “Excuse me, Dellie, but that’s just what it says.”

“I
know
what it says, Dan.” She immediately regretted letting her impatience show. She heard her mother’s voice in her head:
A lady is polite and well mannered at all times, even when subjected to undue pressure.
“I get the
Constitution,
too, delivered right to my doorstep. Though, if you ask me, with half what’s in it these days, they might as well just toss it straight into the trash can.”

“But surely—”

“I have discussed this with Grace, and have given her my thoughts on the subject,” Cordelia said, her tone as precise as the snipping of secateurs on a particularly thorny bush.

Inside, though, she could feel her heart slipping like new shoes on icy pavement, and with it her careful composure. She steeled herself. No, she
wasn’t
going to let Dan Killian, who had once felt her breast in a hothouse, see her fall apart now. Instead, she replayed in her mind last week’s phone call from Grace. The outrageousness of her dragging that long-ago tragedy into the light again! And now the newspapers making Gene out to be some kind of ... of murderer. Or, at very best, a liar.

Oh, yes, she knew what had really happened that day. Gene had confided in her immediately afterwards. How could he not? They’d shared everything. She alone knew how tortured he’d been, for months on end, wracked with misery and self-doubt. But she didn’t have to have been there to know he hadn’t murdered that poor man ... that he’d only done what she, or anyone, would have expected of him. Why, he’d risked his own life to save Margaret’s!

But if he’d told the truth? With Gene’s integrity in question, his enemies on Capitol Hill would have snatched at the excuse to kill the Civil Rights Act he’d been pushing for. The press, too, would have been on him like jackals. And the public? Come election day, even his staunchest supporters would have thought twice about punching a hole in the ballot beside Gene’s name.

And where, Cordelia wondered, would this country be today if Gene had allowed that to happen?

“The
truth
is,” she went on, struggling to control the quaver she could feel building at the back of her throat, “that Gene was the finest man I’ve ever known.” She fixed Dan with an unwavering gaze as she said it. “And I’m confident that when Grace comes to her senses she’ll set the record straight.”

“Are you saying that Grace didn’t actually
see
this killing, like it says here?”

“I’m saying that Grace always was prone to exaggeration. And in this case ... why, she wasn’t much more than nine years old at the time. I’m choosing to believe her imagination simply became
overheated.”
By no means was that an excuse for her daughter’s present lack of discretion, but Dan Killian didn’t have to know
everything
that went on in her family.

Cordelia squeezed her hands together in her lap, feeling overheated herself and even a bit faint, though no doubt it was a good deal cooler in here than it seemed. Her pulse stepped up its shallow, flighty rhythm.

She wanted to scream at Dan, force him to end this torturous foot-dragging and say whatever it was he planned on saying. But then, when he finally
did
speak, she longed to run from the room, slam the door on him.

“Well, now, Dellie, I wish I could believe all this was going to blow over. But it’s not as simple as all that.”
At least he has the decency to look ashamed,
she thought. Watching him heave his bulk from his chair, Cordelia felt acutely aware of her own diminutiveness—what others, she knew, often mistakenly perceived as fragility. “I phoned this reporter fellow in Atlanta, and he says he got it from a reliable source. Not only that, but the wire services have picked it up. By tomorrow, people all over the country are going to be talking about this over breakfast. Shoot, Dellie, you know how I felt about Gene. He was a fine man, a
great
man. But this ...”