Maggy's Child (13 page)

Sending her a kind, handsome multimillionaire who proposed marriage on the spot was the kind of miracle Saint Jude was renowned for.

So she had said a prayer of thanks to the saint and married her millionaire the same afternoon. As soon as the ring slid on her shaking finger, her life was altered as drastically as if she’d been Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole. Nothing was to remain the same, not even her name.

“Magdalena?” There’d been no mistaking the distaste in Lyle’s voice when he saw the name she gave on their marriage license. “At the restaurant they called you Maggy.”

“People do, sometimes.”

“As my wife, I prefer that you go strictly by Maggy. Magdalena is not a name for a Forrest.”

She’d married him anyway, never even seeing his dislike for her name as the warning sign it would have been to an older, wiser woman.

Her name was only a small issue. There were other, larger ones. Lyle knew what he wanted in a wife, and he made no bones about remaking her to fit his wishes. Within twenty-four hours of their wedding, when she briefly protested having the dress she got married in thrown away and he went into an icy rage, she learned that her life would be smooth only as long as she did precisely as he wished.

A control freak, that was what he was, among other, even worse, things, though it had taken her years to identify them all. Maggy shook her head at her younger self as she remembered how naïve she had been, and the lengths to which she had once gone to appease him.

Their honeymoon had been spent in wonderful, fantastic places that she had never even imagined visiting—
London, Paris, Rome, Geneva, New York. Lyle made no bones about the fact that he considered her ignorant, uneducated, and, as he put it, as lacking in culture as a mule. He was determined to remedy that. Consequently, she hardly saw the cities themselves. Instead, during the days while he conducted business, she toured every museum and cathedral and art gallery in the area while a hired escort lectured all the time. When there were no museums, she had lessons in etiquette, lessons in table manners, lessons in walking and sitting and standing, lessons in how to dress, how to apply makeup, how to shake hands, and even a brief lesson in using foreign rest rooms (she’d never seen a bidet in her life, and after inadvertently making one’s acquaintance didn’t care if she never saw one again). She learned how to make small talk, which books to read (or say she’d read), which painters, politicians, writers, and movies to express appreciation or disapproval of.

At night she stayed alone in the hotel, which in itself was not a hardship. They were five-star hotels with room service and every imaginable and previously unimaginable luxury, and she would have been less than human had she not enjoyed them. She did enjoy them. The only problem was that when she was left alone for any length of time, homesickness threatened to overwhelm her. But she never told Lyle that, because the idea of her being homesick—for what? he would have asked with a contemptuous laugh—infuriated him.

While she stayed in, he went out with associates to conduct deals over dinner. (She was not yet “ready” to meet his associates, he said.) The few times they dined together, he curled his lip over her lack of appreciation of fine food and wine and deplored the fact that she was a gourmand, not a gourmet like himself.

What he didn’t understand was that she could remember scavenging her dinner from garbage bins. Having enough food, much less such wonderful stuff, all swimming in cream sauces and thick with mushrooms, was
such a treat that, looking back, she had to admit she’d made something of a pig of herself. After watching her eat a few times, Lyle had even threatened her with dire consequences (divorce had seemed dire to her then) should her gluttony ever make her grow fat. This threat had taken on increasing potency as her pregnancy began to be obvious, and her stomach began, quarter inch by inevitable quarter inch, to expand. The situation worsened when her husband made no effort to conceal the fact that he was repulsed by her increasing girth.

It seemed almost funny now, when Maggy remembered how much she had feared he would divorce her.

But she hadn’t
known
, then. Hadn’t grasped the full implications of what she had done when she married Lyle. She had been too young, and, just as he accused her of being, too ignorant. Only it wasn’t education she so sorely lacked, but knowledge of what really mattered in life.

Well, she had learned, and the learning had been slow and painful.

Snatched from dire poverty where the only future she could foresee grew bleaker with each passing day, thrust into a world of unbelievable luxury, she had been insecure, overwhelmed, frightened—and determined to be the best wife she could be to her new husband. Despite his distaste for her rounding body, he was happy about her pregnancy. He fiercely wanted a child.

She hadn’t been precisely happy during those long-ago days—despite her best efforts to forget about her previous life as Lyle insisted she do, Nick and her father were too often in her thoughts for that, and she found herself missing the most ridiculous things, like the smell of the cabbage that was always being cooked by the family in the apartment next door—but she hadn’t been miserable, either. She had been too dazzled by the 360-degree turn her life had taken. Having money to spend was a thrill
that she was sure would never grow old. Calling up and ordering things from even the most ordinary of catalogs, going out to stores and buying whatever she wanted and saying grandly “Charge it,” even having the money for an ice-cream sundae or a new pair of panties when she wanted them was such a novelty that it made up for a lot. Also, as the child inside her made its presence felt, her every thought began to focus on the coming baby. He was going to have everything life could give him, everything Maggy herself had never had, she vowed inwardly. He was going to be a little prince.

So she and Lyle returned to Windermere, not too unhappily, on a foggy November day. Maggy had been awed into silence as the chauffeur-driven Mercedes dropped them off in front of the house. She’d never seen it before. Her eyes had grown wide as she climbed out of the car, and she could remember as if it had just happened yesterday how she had felt standing on the cobblestoned driveway looking up at her new home.

“Well?” Lyle had asked, glancing down at her, impatient as she paused.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, and it was—so beautiful that it scared her. She’d seen places like it only in movies or magazines. The blue slate roof with its many gables, the ivy that twined like twisted green ribbons over the pale stone facade, the dozens of glistening, lead-paned windows, the huge, round white columns that soared up for two stories to support the porch roof, were ritzier than anything she had ever imagined. She, who had grown up in a two-room apartment in which the plumbing had worked only fitfully and where the joke of all the residents was that the only pets allowed by management were fleas and roaches, would now be living in a house with twelve-foot ceilings and Oriental carpets and gleaming mahogany furniture that she learned later was all antique.

Ah, the workings of Saint Jude. As she had walked through Windermere for the first time, she silently vowed
that she would publish her thanks in the newspaper the very next day.

Lyle, saying that she spoke English less well than most people for whom it was a second language, was telling her that he had already hired a vocal coach for her to continue her lessons in elocution as he led her through a maze of connecting rooms. Maggy was able to register only fragmented impressions of the house, because she was busy listening to Lyle. The walls—smooth plaster walls painted or papered in exquisite colors—bore massive oil paintings that looked as though they belonged in a museum. Ornate cabinets were everywhere, bursting with gleaming collections of china and crystal. The upholstered furniture—a pair of brocade couches here, wing chairs on either side of a fireplace there—were fat and pristine, as if no one had ever even thought about sitting down. There seemed to be a fireplace in every room, enormous chandeliers hung from every ceiling, and vases of fresh flowers bloomed on stands in all the corners. Maggy felt very small as she absorbed her surroundings, and completely out of her element. It was unbelievable that this mansion that Lyle was herding her through so unceremoniously was, from that day forth, to be her home.

Then Virginia had emerged from somewhere in the bowels of the house.

“Lyle …” Virginia had looked as surprised to see them as Maggy was to see her. Maggy hadn’t even known who she was. Lyle had never mentioned the other residents of the house, or that his mother lived with him.

Virginia’s eyes focused on Maggy, slid over her once, then darted to Lyle. Maggy simply stared at her, so scared upon being confronted with this white-haired patrician that her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and her knees started to shake.

“Mother, this is Maggy. She’s my wife—and she’s going to be the mother of your grandchild.”

Thus Maggy found out that Lyle hadn’t bothered to
inform any of his family about his marriage or the coming baby.

Lyle’s mother paled, her hand flying to her throat.

“My God, what have you done?” she whispered.

Virginia’s words, and the stricken expression that accompanied them, had returned to haunt Maggy many times since. Virginia knew everything there was to know about Lyle, of course, far more than Maggy could ever have imagined at the time. But Maggy thought she was protesting her son’s unsuitable choice of wife. If she had been alone, just herself, she probably would have slunk away from Windermere like a whipped dog right there and then. But there had been her baby to think of. No one,
no one
, was going to make her baby feel
less than
. Maggy had felt that way all her life, and for her child’s sake it was time to stop. They—the two of them—weren’t
less than
anymore. Never again. Her baby was going to be a Forrest, and the Forrests were the richest, most powerful family in Louisville.

For the baby’s sake she had stood her ground. Her chin had come up, and her knees had stopped shaking.

“How do you do, Mrs. Forrest?” she’d said in the best superior manner she’d so recently been taught by one of Lyle’s etiquette experts and held out her hand. Both Lyle and his mother had stared at her. His mother had been surprised, while Lyle was clearly dumbfounded. Then Lyle had laughed and put his hand on her shoulder in approval. Though she still looked shocked, Virginia had very slowly come forward to take her hand.

If Maggy had only known then what she knew now, she would have turned at that moment and run screaming as far from Windermere as it was possible to get.

But she hadn’t known, and so she allowed Lyle to escort her in to lunch with his mother, and the web began to inexorably tighten around the unwary little fly that she had been then.

Maggy stopped outside the very same rooms where she had eaten lunch that first day and knocked.

“Come in,” Virginia called from the other side of the door.

Maggy turned the knob and went inside.

V
irginia’s apartment consisted of a sitting room, two bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a bath. The upholstery was all cheery English chintz, and the Savonnerie rug on the sitting room floor was cream and rose and pale blue. Long windows opened out onto the back lawn. Curtains in a rose-colored floral print on a deep yellow ground had been drawn across the windows. Virginia, clad in a pink satin robe, reclined on a small, overstuffed chaise longue in front of them. A pale blue afghan lay across her legs. She had been reading by the light of a single floor lamp that stood at her elbow, though she glanced up as Maggy entered. The rest of the apartment was dark and quiet.

“Has David already gone to bed?” Maggy asked, glancing around. Bed before nine was enough unlike her son to worry her.

Virginia shook her head, looking surprised. “He’s spending the night with the Trainors. I assumed you knew.”

Mitchell Trainor was David’s dearest friend. Maggy didn’t really object to her son sleeping over at his house—but she did object to not being consulted about it.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Mitchell called and invited him after David got home from the Club, and David called Lyle. Lyle said he could go.”

“Lyle just neglected to inform
me
.”

Virginia looked at her steadily. “Men can be thoughtless.”

Maggy gave an unamused little laugh. “Can’t they just?”

Virginia’s brow furrowed. She glanced down at her book and then up at Maggy again. “You’re home very early. Where is Lyle? Did anything—happen?”

For an instant Maggy stared at her mother-in-law, tempted to tear away the veil of pretense that had always existed between them and tell the exact, unvarnished truth. The words bubbled to the tip of her tongue, but she bit them back. Virginia was old, and in frail health, and she didn’t really want to know.

Besides, there was nothing Virginia could do to help her. She had no control over her son—and, though she might deplore some of Lyle’s actions, she was ultimately on his side, at the expense of Maggy or anyone else who might get in Lyle’s way. Maggy knew her mother-in-law well enough to suspect that any serious accusations Maggy raised against Lyle would be passed on to him, probably in a chiding way as his mother asked him if his wife’s stories were true. Virginia would no doubt mean it for the best, but the harm she would cause would be enormous.