Everything and More (67 page)

The door chimes sounded.

Sari ran to answer, after a minute returning to introduce Charles to her half-sister.

“Hello, Charles,” BJ said, adding archly, “come take a look at Sari’s great-nephew.”

Charles bent his head attentively over three-by-fives of the infant. “Very healthy-looking.”

“He’s an absolute beaut,” said BJ, shuffling packages. “Here’s one of me holding him—oh, that bald gentleman is Maury, Sari’s brother-in-law, the grandfather.”

“Come on, Charles,” Sari said in a choking voice. “Let’s get Elena to fix us a picnic.”

“Well, well,” teased BJ, raising one black eyebrow. “Your antique sister putting a crimp in your style, Sari, babes?”

Sari, blushing furiously, pulled Charles in the direction of the restaurant-size kitchen.

“So that’s Althea’s son, our own American Prince Charles,” said BJ
sotto voce.
“Obviously he has a big thing going with Sari.”

“Mind your dirty mouth, Beej,” ordered Joshua, his anger scarcely veiled.

“Now, Daddy, you aren’t living in the forties anymore. Different daughter, different time.”

“It’s not like that,” Marylin said.

“Listen, I might be a grandmother, but my sight’s not failing. I
saw
those starry eyes.”

“You might be a grandmother, Beej,” Joshua rumbled, “but I can still turn you over my knee.”

BJ gave her loud, good-natured laugh. “Plenty of padding now, Daddy.” She reached for a snapshot. “Take a look at this one and tell me that baby isn’t all Fernauld.”

The weather had warmed: Joshua, BJ, and Marylin lunched on the patio that opened from the breakfast room.

Elena was bringing out the coffee when the phone rang. It was the author of a bestseller that Joshua was attempting to option, and he disappeared into the house for a long-distance conference.

BJ opened her big, worn Gucci purse. “I didn’t want to show this pack when Daddy was around,” she said. “Linc flew in from Rome for the
bris.”

Marylin fumbled as she opened a folder of slick prints. From the top one, Linc smiled at her. Her foolish, romantic heart beat faster, and a soft answering smile curved her own lips.

“He never changes. . . . ”

“Sure he does, but he stays the same shape,” said BJ, complacently patting her large, grandmotherly hips.

“How is he?” Marylin asked. She invariably put this same half-embarrassed question to BJ when BJ (after all, her stepdaughter) returned from Europe.

“All the jobs he wants. But how on earth can he be content to dig up the details for other people’s books? Where’s his ambition?”

“That Japanese prison camp cut his life in two,” Marylin said softly. “What else?”

“He broke up with that Marjorie I told you about, the nice English one who looked a bit like Gudrun.”

“Was it rough on him?”

“Who knows. He
seems
happy.”

“Oh, BJ.” Marylin shook her head, smiling. “That’s the tone you always use about single people.”

“Well, what kind of life is it, divorced, no children—nothing.”

Marylin’s small hand was fanning the stack. All the photographs included Linc. In this one he held the infant, in the next he stood with rolled-up shirt sleeves in front of a cabin. Here he was posed between BJ and Maury, here he draped an arm around the new mother, his niece. “Did he . . . mention me?”

“He knows all about you.”

“How? BJ, were you telling him about me—?”

“Stop sounding so indignant, Marylin. I didn’t say a word. But you’re not exactly the Nobody Kid, you know.” BJ spooned sugar into her coffee. “Now, if you’re asking whether he still cares, of course he does.”

“Has he told you?”

“No.”

“Then it’s a sheer guess.”

“Why do you think he’s divorced? Why else has he never come home?”

“Don’t say that, BJ.”

“It’s true.”

“I can’t bear to think of him exiling himself because of me.”

“You don’t need to sound so guilty, Marylin. Honestly you’re too good to be true. Who else would put up with Daddy’s
meshugas,
all that bluster and spending? I always say to Maury that Mother got the better of the deal. I really mean it. He might have cheated constantly on her, but at least she didn’t have to work her tail off to support him.” The caring expression on BJ’s full face showed that this speech was not one of daughterly disdain, but rather evidence of affectionate compassion for her best friend’s plight. “He hasn’t been drinking since I left?”

Joshua had always been a heavyweight in his vices, and drinking was no exception. BJ exaggerated the importance of his occasional benders, while Marylin, in hopeless wifely pity, defended them. “A couple of Scotches now and then,” Marylin said. “How long was Linc in Israel?”

“A long weekend. Those kibbutzniks can be prickly with outsiders. It was nothing short of miraculous how they fell for him.”

BJ boasted nonstop about her brother’s conquest of the kibbutz until Joshua’s distant conversation ceased; then she grabbed the photographs from Marylin’s hand, shoving them pell-mell into her purse.

After BJ drove off, Joshua went up to his cottage to rework the option while Marylin prepared for Monday’s show, when John
Fowles would be the prime guest: she was thoroughly enjoying her homework of reading
The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

The phone rang again. After a minute, Elena came in to announce it was for Señor Charles.

Marylin took the brief call.

She hung up carefully, then went into the stone-floored room originally intended for flower arranging, now used to store the old raincoats and shoes that the family used on the grounds. Changing her high-heeled sandals for Adidas, she hurried up the canyon toward the old adobe shack. At the footbridge she met Sari and Charles.

“I was coming to get you, Charles,” she said, her beautiful sea-colored eyes moist with sympathy. “They just called from the hospital.”

“Grandfather?”

Marylin put her hand on his forearm. “I’m terribly sorry, Charles,” she said, and her voice broke.

For one moment Charles’s posture stiffened with fathomless, grief-stricken guilt. Recovering, he said, “I better get over to the hospital. They’ll need me.”

  
62
  

The Coynes had a special permit to bury their dead in the family’s upper New York country place, now Coyne State Park. Atop a gently rolling hill stood a replica of the Athenian Erechtheum, a perfect copy in every detail save one: above the shapely marble caryatids was incised: “
GROVER TIBAULT COYNE
.” On slightly lower ground were the nearly as outrageous tombs of his three wives—the death dates of the first and third Mrs. Coyne were nearly seven decades apart. Scattered in widening circles down the hill were the
Carrara marble obelisks, onyx domes, roseate
Winged Victory
s, and Moorish cupolas that marked the burial sites of his sons and daughters (all lay here, with the exception of Mrs. Cunningham), his in-laws, five of his grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. The cemetery, tended by a task force of gardeners, enclosed from park visitors by a high and seemingly endless white stone wall, was jokingly called Mount Olympus by the family.

Though Harry Cunningham had passed most of his years in Beverly Hills, though he had never fitted in with his terrifyingly self-assured in-laws, Mrs. Cunningham determined to lay him to his final rest here.

With the ease that wealth facilitates, Charles made the arrangements.

The morning following death, the baggage compartment of Grover T. Coyne III’s DC-10 had awaited Harry Cunningham’s massive pewter coffin. The widow had retired to one of the perfectly appointed bedroom cabins—her maid in attendance—and thus far on the trip eastward, had wept continuously.

Althea and Charles sat in the stateroom.

Althea gazed down at the brilliant, endless cloud field. A dull ache throbbed across her forehead, and there was a rawness behind her eyeballs. She felt as if tears alone could alleviate her physical distress, yet her emotional responses were horribly awry. She could summon up neither honest sorrow nor a flicker of indecent glee that he was dead, her enemy, her lover.

She rapped her emerald on the inner glass.

All at once her teeth began to chatter, and her hands could not hold still. She was trapped by a phenomenon that transcended memory. She could actually feel the silky Egyptian cotton of her pajamas, see the pitch-darkness, experience the heart-stopping horror of something unknown in the dark room with her, and as
it
moved closer, terror choked her so once again she could not breathe or cry out. She could smell the liquor, feel the hands pawing at her hairless body, again she experienced her thrashing struggles to escape.

A whimpering groan escaped her.

Charles came over, resting his hands on either arm of her chair, looking down at her, his reddened eyes filled with concern. “What is it, Mother?”

She leaned back, shaking, unable to speak.

“Shall I get you a drink?”

She nodded. When he returned with the highball her hands shook too much to take it. Placing the glass on the small table, Charles sat
on the chair arm, bending down to cradle her shoulders with his arm. Her son’s gesture was balm for her ravaged state.

He’s a wonder, my Charles, she thought.

And into her mind popped a corollary: I’m not about to let him throw himself away on that plain, cheap little movie girl.

She ignored the fact that her lover was Sari’s brother and that this weekend Billy was coming to New York to console her. In her pain she recognized only that Charles was the one person alive not her natural enemy, and she must see that he had the best of the best.

The jet passed smoothly above a break in the clouds. After a minute or two, her hands were steady enough to hold the glass. She took a long drink. “Exactly what I needed,” she said. “Thank you, dear.”

*   *   *

The family, or those of them who were in the country, felt it an incumbent duty to show up at the funeral on that rainy, chill afternoon. Immediately following burial they rushed back to the “cottage.”

With the death of the third Mrs. Grover T. Coyne, the immense country place, with its high gilt-and-crimson ceilings, oppressive dark marble, and priceless
quattrocento
Italian furnishings, had been donated as a museum to the state of New York. The Coyne family, however, had retained the largest guest house, which they used only on these mournful gatherings. Around the sitting room’s immense Gothic fireplace, fifteen black-clad people drank cocktails and chatted with imperturbable smiles. Gertrude, unnerved by her family at the best of times, retired immediately to her bedroom—she had the one with the famed Cardinal Mazarin bed. Althea, in her black St. Laurent orphan’s weeds, played chief mourner.

Her inferiorities surfaced when she had to face the Coyne tribe en masse, and besides, since the episode on the DC-10 she had been plagued by that imbalance, as if every floor tilted at a minuscule degree.

She therefore buckled Charles to her arm as her shield. He had mercifully inherited the damnable Coyne certainty. (She had never connected this assured aspect of her son with Gerry’s strength.) Even with Charles, tall and bone hard at her side, she found herself fighting desperately to prove her worth, talking knowingly of Vietnam, David Hockney, and the Paris showings—it would have been unseemly in a Coyne to mention the deceased.

At five, excuses were made and custom-built European cars departed crunching over wet gravel.

The funeral rites had officially ended: the mortal parts of Harry
Cunningham were considered laid to rest.

Charles asked, “Will you go to New York tomorrow?”

The thought of staying at this gloomy place longer than necessary sent a shudder through her. “Yes, of course.”

“I’m flying back to California with Grandmother.” Charles sank into a chair, his long legs stretched out in front of him, his expression drained. After Firelli’s death, his grandfather had been the adult male of his life. “Tomorrow.”

The room tilted more ominously. “Charles,” she said, “don’t leave yet.”

“But you’re doing so fabulously,” he said. “You outshone everybody.”