The Senator’s Daughter (7 page)

“I used to live here, Mother. In case you forgot.” Sylvia tried to ignore the hurt. “Where have you been?”

She gave Sylvia an impatient look. “Ah told you about the luncheon today for the tax-exempt fund to build a new battered women's shelter. You were invited.”

With a pang of guilt, Sylvia replied, “I'm afraid I forgot.” If she hadn't been moping about losing a chance at Lyle, she would have remembered. She'd planned to get involved in helping women make the break with their abusers.

“Too caught up in yourself to look beyond your own nose.” Laura checked out her brown hair accented with golden highlights in the wine compartment's glass.

Sylvia attacked. “Kenneth has cut your hair too short. Again.”

Laura turned away from her reflection as though she did not like what she saw, either. It took only a moment for her to muster her own parry. “Don't you dare try to subvert the real issue. Your father and I were mortified near to death when we saw you and that common lawyer puttin' on a spectacle.”

“Common lawyer?” Sylvia's cheeks warmed. “Lyle Thomas is one of the brightest stars in the prosecutor's—”

“Ah am serious!” Laura insisted. “It's widely known that Lyle, though educated, came from the worst kind of poverty, while your father has a respected and prominent place at the nation's highest level.”

Prestige, always prestige for the family. Nobody allowed to call her father Larry without permission. Nothing for Laura without a designer label. Finishing school for Sylvia so she'd be a good museum docent.

“Mother, have you forgotten Lawrence Chatsworth's much-publicized roots were that of a family who owned a dry-goods store?” When the press following his campaign had caught up with it, the dry-goods store had taken on all the rustic, romantic aspect of Lincoln's log cabin.

Laura ignored the thrust. Despite her husband's and her ancestors' Boston connection, her roots sprang from the soil of old Virginia where Civil War battlefields and talk of Lee and Stonewall were young history compared to Cornwallis at Yorktown and Pocahontas at Jamestown. “When ah think how hard ah've worked to establish my daughter—”

“Mother, darling.” Sylvia's voice rang with sarcasm at the pretended endearment. “You turned me over to a nanny the day I was born. You couldn't stand the idea of having any more kids. Neither you nor my father has ever cared in the slightest what I wanted.”

Laura pointed her finger like a dagger. “If your father were here, he'd tell you the same thing ah am. If we see you on TV again, disgracing the family, we'd as soon you disappeared like Tony Valetti.”

Sylvia mouth worked; she went hot all over. For God's sake, the man might be kidnapped, tortured, or dead. She stared at Laura as though she'd never seen her before.

“Be careful what you wish for, Mother.”

Sylvia snatched her keys from the stone countertop and headed for the garage. She got into her Jaguar, started it with trembling hands, and backed out of the steep driveway.

While she'd been sparring with her mother, overcast had rolled in, turning the day damp and gray. Out on Richardson Bay, it was difficult to tell sky from water.

Attacking the accelerator, Sylvia negotiated the steep turns leading from Sausalito's high hills onto Highway 101. Why had she bothered going home?

Questing for her old self, before she'd become a tabloid target? Searching for the room she'd decorated with rock band posters, concert tickets, and mountains of both dirty and clean clothes. The one Laura had redecorated in burgundy flame stitch and polished dark woods.

Sometimes Sylvia wished she'd been born into a different family. At other times she just wished her parents would approve of something she did.

At the 101 intersection, Sylvia almost turned north. Away from the City where roving camera crews sought her blood—to just drive away and say to hell with them all. How satisfying that would be.

But she had nothing packed and no plan.

When she drove onto the Golden Gate Bridge, a thick layer of fog obscured the burnt orange towers. She imagined the white-whipped tops of the waves working back and forth at haphazard angles below.

Like the crazy way Lyle had made her feel when she kissed him. How dare her mother call him a common lawyer?

Van Ness Avenue, once the widest in San Francisco, had heavy traffic, as usual. At the turn of the twentieth century, the area had been a quiet, prestigious neighborhood. But in 1906, most of the graceful mansions had been dynamited as a firebreak in the great disaster. Later the strip where people purchased every kind of car from Chevrolets to Mercedes, had more recently settled into a mix of lodging, shopping, and restaurants.

Sylvia parked and set out on foot. Ducking into a Mediterranean import shop, she pawed disinterestedly through a pile of embroidered blouses and finally bought a pair of silver filigree earrings she didn't care about.

Back on the street, she noted a fat man in a striped shirt fall in step behind her. Whether he was just a jerk, or doing something undercover for some lurid rag, she saw his video camera and her antennae went up.

She drifted over onto Polk Street. At the next corner, opposite a marquee offering Oriental massage and adult videos, a juggler in emerald satin trousers attempted to gather a crowd. Despite the smattering of tourists, the clientele of Polk Street largely weren't the balloon and juggler type. A bystander in a San Francisco 49ers ball cap called out, “Try Fisherman's Wharf, fella.”

The fat videographer drew closer and aimed his camera at Sylvia, just as a pair of thirty-something biker-jacketed men with head scarves exited a sandwich shop. Turning abruptly, she startled the bikers by slinging an arm around each of their shoulders and calling, “Say cheese.”

Sure enough, she caught sight of Julio Castillo bearing down on her, microphone in hand. “There she is folks, Sylvia Chatsworth, on a Sunday afternoon.”

Her middle finger itched to salute the reporter. He'd hurt so many people with his stories, trying to turn “On the Spot” into something as sensational as the tabloids in LA or London. The ones that followed celebrities to the supermarket in hopes of a shot of them looking slovenly while purchasing premium ice cream … or, worse, shadowed them to their analysts or rehab clinics.

But flipping off Castillo would do no good. To the people who watched the show, she'd appear to be giving the finger to the whole world.

Instead, she ducked behind the bikers and ran for her car. Halfway there, the rain began.

Fifteen minutes later, Sylvia slammed into her North Beach town house from the private garage.

Her hands shook. What a fool she'd been to strike a pose with those bikers, but on the other hand, what difference did it make?

What difference did any of it make?

Her last guy was happily married. Lyle, the man who might have been next, couldn't afford to jeopardize his career by being seen with a “tramp.”

Ever since she left her parents' place, she'd been on the edge, but now she lost it. A stabbing pain cut her chest, and the back of her throat closed. She folded down onto the carpet.

Not just Corinne Walker and her friends wanted her to leave town, her own mother and father wished she'd disappear like Tony Valetti. The redecoration of her room must have been a message. The Chatsworths had enough space for guests without trashing her full body pillow that she'd hugged and imagined to be her ideal man, her collage of concert tickets and posters of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

What had her mother done with them? She'd never said, and for some reason Sylvia refused to ask. She wanted to believe they'd been packed away with care, Laura's memories of her daughter being a typical teen.

Sitting cross-legged, Sylvia let her shoulders droop. The pose was an uncanny mirror of the one she'd adopted in first grade when she decided to hide in her closet forever because nobody cared. Her miscalculation had been that Lawrence and Laura were entertaining that evening and had neither the time nor the inclination to wonder where their small daughter was.

As the hours in the closet passed, her legs had grown numb. Six-year-old Sylvia wanted Mommy. To run to her and jump up, heedless of Laura's legs encased in sleek hosiery, to wrap skinny legs around her waist and bury her head into her shoulder. Mommy always smelled of soap, sachet, and perfume from one of the many colorful bottles on her dressing table. On rare occasions, she'd pull one of the ground glass stoppers, wave it about leaving a cloud of scent, and touch the cool tip behind Sylvia's ears, knees, and on her wrists.

Mommy was like a queen. Yet, Sylvia sometimes wished she were like other mothers.

Cathy Ferron's mom cooked all the meals for her family. When Sylvia visited, the kitchen was full of warm smells, of Toll House cookies fresh from the oven with the semisweet morsels nearly liquid, a huge pot of beans with a ham bone simmering, and delicious dry cornbread that crumbled when you tried to butter it.

Mommy said Sylvia wasn't to go there anymore because Cathy's folks weren't “their kind.”

Maybe Daddy would come and find her in the closet. He was so smart—everybody was always saying that. Though she'd been missing for hours, soon he must be able to detect her and walk right to where she was. Tonight, he'd be wearing his suit and tie with an immaculate shirt she mustn't rumple. But he'd be so glad to see her, he'd let her cuddle against him and not worry about his clothes. He'd wrap his arms around her and murmur she was his best girl.

She stared at the crack of light under the door and told herself they'd be sorry if she starved. When they found her dead, they'd drop everything that interested them so much and wonder how they could have been so stupid not to cherish her before it was too late.

Finally, after a child's eternity, someone snapped off the light outside. The closet went black, and Sylvia started to scream.

When the door opened, she cried, “Mommy! Daddy!” but her rescuer was their housekeeper.

Though she was no first grader anymore, the memory still slashed like a blade.

She told herself to grow up, but, as she had when she was a child, she remained on the floor. The inclement day gave way to evening and she sat in darkness, relieved only by the citrus glow of a streetlight. The wine splotch on the wallpaper, where she'd thrown the glass at Rory Campbell's exit, was a blacker blot on gray.

Somewhere this evening he and his wife were having dinner. She imagined them talking a little shop, as they were both in real-estate development, then setting aside work in favor of having a glass of good
vino
and winding down from the day together.

Sylvia wished she had somebody. But everybody branded her a bitch.

Hadn't she considered that in the bathroom stall at Ice? Shouldn't she have remembered the luncheon to help battered women? When her mother had baited her this afternoon, hadn't it been cruel to cut down her hairdo?

With a knot in her stomach, Sylvia wondered what time it was. At eleven, “On the Spot” would feature her again, the Senator's daughter hanging with bikers.

She tried to put things in perspective. There had been good times growing up, hadn't there? Walks with Mommy in the redwoods—Daddy came when he could take the time. Being swung to Daddy's shoulders on the east-facing terrace at their hillside Sausalito home, so she could see “all the way to Boston and Virginia.” Shopping with her mother for the white dress Sylvia wore at her “coming out” party, patterned after Southern tradition.

She needed to stay out of the deep end and act her age.

But her mother and father might already be staring at the TV and wishing her picture was on a milk carton.

She could get up; face the music. Watch the show, live or on her tiVo.

Sylvia sat on her floor, her legs as numb as they'd been when she was six.

Time passed.

She could brazen this out as she'd been doing. Laugh in the face of Julio Castillo, Corinne Walker, and their ilk. Grandstand the way she had with the male entertainer, albeit with blouse on; pose with the Polk Street bikers.