The Surrogate (8 page)

Ann Montgomery watched as Jamie headed down the hall and started up the stairs. Under other circumstances she might actually have allowed herself to like the girl. As it was, all she felt was wariness.

Ann unlocked the door and went inside her spacious apartment with its handsome rugs, custom-made drapes, and elegant furnishings. It was a beautiful room that usually gave her great pleasure every time she opened the door and stepped inside. Her pleasure was muted, however, by what Jamie Long had just told her.

Amanda claiming to be pregnant?

She went into her bedroom, which was austere compared with the living room. Her father had made the sturdy bedroom furniture for his only daughter.

She sat on the bed that she had first slept in as a girl, the same bed that she had shared with Buck Hartmann for more than twenty years. She and Buck had made love under this same quilt.

She looked at her ugly old face in the speckled old mirror that hung above the dresser. She had been beautiful back then. Buck would call her his “raven-haired beauty.” But the years had not been kind to her. Her once willowy body was now thick and buxom, her once smooth skin crisscrossed with a maze of wrinkles.

After Buck’s son, Jason, married, Mary Millicent came into Ann’s life and immediately began transforming the ranch house and making it her own. That was when the guests started coming. So many guests—mostly wealthy men and powerful politicians who came to hunt and play poker into the night.

Mary Millicent was often dismissive of Ann and never sought her advice, allowing both her personal maid and her secretary to usurp Ann’s authority at the ranch. But Ann was a faithful listener of Mary Millicent’s Sunday morning radio show. On her knees, she would pray along with Mary Millicent and ask the Lord to forgive her for welcoming a married man into her bed. She wondered if serving a woman of God would help balance out the transgressions in her life. And as the years went by, Mary Millicent came to rely on Ann more and more to look after things at the ranch and care for her children.

After Jason died, Mary Millicent once again took up her ministry, and Amanda and Gus were sent away to school but spent their summers and school vacations at the ranch.

Jason’s death had been more than Buck could bear. Not only had he lost his only child, he lost the dream that his son would one day be president of the United States. A month or so after Jason’s death, Buck went out to the paddock and managed to get his weak, old body on top of an unbroken colt. They found him the next morning miles from the ranch house, his neck broken, the colt grazing nearby.

Buck had promised to leave her enough money that she would never want for anything, but his last will and testament made no provision for the housekeeper whose legs he had crawled between night after night for decades. She chose not to hate him. He had just forgotten.

It was Buck’s grandchildren, her beloved Amanda and Gus, who made things right for her. Ann Montgomery wasn’t wealthy but she had all the money she would ever need and a home for life.

Ann allowed her vision to become soft-focus as she stared into the mirror. Instead of the formidable old woman she had become, she saw instead the raven-haired beauty who had loved Buck Hartmann. And continued to love his grandchildren.

Then she took a deep breath and reached for the telephone on her bedside table. First she called Freda. Then she called Gus. He answered on the second ring.

“My darling boy, there’s something I think you need to know,” Ann said.

Jamie was watching CNN—which she had come to think of as her best friend, after Ralph, of course—when she heard a knock at the door. When she opened the door, one of the housemaids handed her a cardboard box.

Jamie thanked the girl and shut the door. Inside the box was her correspondence course.
Finally,
she thought. She didn’t even mind that Miss Montgomery had opened the box and probably riffled through the lessons and textbooks. After all, she had to make sure that the University of Texas wasn’t sending her a stash of drugs or cartons of cigarettes.

Jamie wondered if the university had inadvertently omitted a cover letter from the professor or if Miss Montgomery had confiscated it.

That evening Jamie began reading the assignment for the first lesson. When she started nodding off, she picked up the remote control and scrolled through the channels until suddenly she was startled to see Amanda Hartmann’s face on the screen. “Oh, my God!” she said, causing Ralph to jump to his feet.

Jamie sank onto the sofa and stared at the screen. Amanda’s eyes were closed. She was telling God that more than seven thousand souls had gathered here this night to ask his forgiveness for their sins and offer him their souls. The prayer was accompanied by a harpist playing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

The camera was tight on Amanda’s face, which was even lovelier than Jamie remembered. She seemed to glow with an inner radiance. Or maybe it was just clever lighting. Whatever, the woman looked like an angel. Her voice was as beautiful as her face and filled with such hope and exultation as she promised the Lord’s forgiveness. All they had to do was ask, and their souls would be washed clean. They would live the rest of their days on this earth with joyful hearts, and when they died they would rise through the clouds and be welcomed by all of those who had gone before them and would see the face of the one true God.

Then the scene was shown through another camera’s eye, with Amanda a small kneeling figure in the middle of a huge stage at the front of a vast auditorium. Huge television screens, one on each side of the stage, showed close-ups of Amanda’s face.

A trailer running across the bottom of the screen announced that this was the Amanda Tutt Hartmann Crusade being broadcast live from Cincinnati.

Ralph slipped into Jamie’s arms, and she hugged him close, her eyes glued to the screen. The baby inside of her belonged to this woman. A holy woman. A woman pure of heart and soul.

I should be happy,
Jamie told herself.

S
INCE THERE WERE
only four guests, dinner was being served in the smaller of Victory Hill’s two dining rooms. The paneled walls and stone fireplace of the more intimate “petite salle” offered a relaxed atmosphere and did not call for formal attire, although Amanda was wearing a red silk gown with a plunging neckline that drew admiring if surreptitious glances from their male guests.

Gus always enjoyed watching the disconcerting effect his sister had on men, who were never quite sure how they should respond to a female spiritual leader with sex appeal, which she still had in abundance even though she was approaching her fiftieth birthday.

Of course, none of the men seated around this table were devout. At least Gus didn’t think so. Although he had known them for decades, such a topic had never been discussed. And even if they went regularly to places of worship with their families and celebrated holy days in their homes, he knew that these men practiced politics first, with religion a distant second if they practiced it at all.

Not that any of tonight’s guests were
politicians.
In the United States of America, politicians—whether they were believers or not—were now required to make a big show of their piety. They interspersed their public rhetoric with biblical references, expounded their faith at every opportunity, and equated belief in God with patriotism.

But Gus and the other men seated around this table had no need for public shows of faith. Few people even knew they existed. They called themselves the Committee of Five. Gus was their chairman.

No matter how diversified their holdings or how many disparate corporate boards they sat on, his fellow committee members were, in their hearts and souls, oilmen like Gus himself. Oil was their Holy Grail. They understood that oil was the world’s most important commodity and knew that governments, economies, and their own private fortunes could not endure without it. At its core, their interest in politics came from a need to make sure no law was passed and no regulation enforced that impeded the flow of oil into the pipelines and money into the coffers of oil companies. To accomplish these goals, it was necessary for those who controlled the oil industry also to control the White House and other key positions in the U.S. government.

Like Gus, the four guests seated around the table had been born to great wealth. Even though few in this country and abroad even knew who they were, they were among the nation’s most powerful individuals. They were the kingmakers who bought and sold politicians, who put them into office and cast them out. It was Gus who had brought them together. And it was Gus—through the Alliance of Christian Voters—who had provided the swing votes that had put their candidate in the White House.

Amanda understood all this at some level but did not concern herself with the details. Her motives were purer. She unequivocally believed that a nation in which everyone was a devout Christian—preferably of the evangelical variety—would be a better place for all. And to achieve that end, the United States of America needed a devout Christian electorate and a devout Christian in the White House. Her passion and sincere beliefs were what moved her flock, what brought people to their knees before a God who wanted them to regard voting as a holy sacrament.

Amanda had just completed a triumphant tour of ten cities, speaking in churches, auditoriums, and even sports arenas, mixing political ideology with religion as only she could do. After all, she wasn’t running for office, nor was her husband. Her motives were sincere. She envisioned a country where abortion clinics closed their doors because no one wanted or needed an abortion, where the rich fed the poor and the strong helped the weak and homosexuals repented. To achieve such a nation, voters must elect individuals to public office—from city hall to the White House—who believed as they did. Gus was always quite moved when he heard his sister preach, not because she made him want to praise the Lord but because he found her quite amazing and so very lovely. Her ability to reach people never ceased to astonish him. When she held out her arms inviting people to come forward and give their lives to Jesus, endless lines of them came, many on their knees, all with tears streaming down their faces, their arms lifted in praise,
hallelujahs
on their lips. Amanda, angelic in white, would descend from the stage and put a hand on their forehead or shoulder, telling them how much God loved them, how joyous God was that they were allowing Him into their hearts. Some would call out to her that her mother had saved their soul many years ago and they wanted to rededicate themselves to the Lord. And some came to be healed, and while Amanda had never presented herself as a healer, there were always those who swore that a touch of her hand had cured their arthritis, stuttering, seizures, infertility, or whatever. People would wait for hours to receive Amanda’s blessing. Afterward, she would be so drained that she needed help to walk to the waiting limousine. Now that she had Toby the muscle man as her consort, he probably lifted her in his arms and carried her.

The revival in Cincinnati had been nationally televised, and before dinner their little group had watched a video of the event over cocktails in Gus’s study. During the viewing, their guests would steal sidelong glances in Amanda’s direction, amazed that this slender, calm woman had turned an audience of thousands into a swaying, arm-waving, weeping, praying mass of humanity.

Of course, Amanda had learned her craft at the knee of a master. She was, after all, the daughter of Mary Millicent Tutt. And the granddaughter of Preacher Marvin Tutt. Evangelism flowed in her veins.

According to the stories Gus had heard about his and Amanda’s grandfather, Preacher Tutt had been a disgusting old man who loved drinking and whoring as much as he loved the Lord. But put a revival tent over his head and a Bible in his hand, and Preacher Tutt could quote entire chapters of Scripture. And he could speak in tongues, heal the sick, save souls, and even tame poisonous serpents—except for that last one, which had bitten him on the nose then disappeared under the side of the tent, never to be seen again. Gus regretted never having known the infamous old reprobate, but that serpent had ended his life long before Mary Millicent had married Jason Hartmann and brought their two children into the world.

With her father dead, Mary Millicent sold the tent and enrolled at a small Bible college in southeastern Oklahoma for a year or so—long enough to be ordained as a minister of the Pentecostal Church of the Brethren. During this period, she also wrote a book about her life as the daughter of a colorful, itinerate preacher who loved the Lord but sometimes strayed from the path of righteousness, with his loving daughter always helping him find his way back. In
Hell Bent for Glory
she chronicled their life on the road, going from one small town to the next throughout Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. She wrote about her mother, who had slipped away one night when Mary Millicent was only eight years old. Her father had not only raised her, he was her only teacher, with her only textbook the Bible.

Their arrival in a community generated a great deal of excitement since they went places where not even a shabby, one-ring circus with scrawny, mistreated elephants and tigers would go. People began to gather before the tent was even up. If her father was “indisposed,” Mary Millicent did the preaching, delivering her first sermon at the age of twelve.

Mary Millicent had included some of her father’s sermons in the book. Gus found them to be a wonderful hodgepodge of bullshit, Bible stories, visions, dreams, and vivid portrayals of the fate that awaited those who did not repent and accept the Lord Jesus Christ as their personal savior. After his sermon, Preacher Tutt would invite those assembled to come forward to confess their sins and get their souls saved. And he asked the town folk to “dig deep into their pockets and help this old country preacher keep on savin’ sinners from eternal damnation.”

Mary Millicent wrote that before her father died in her arms, he told her, “Sister, you’ve got the call. You’re the reason I was born.”

When no publisher would buy her book, Mary Millicent took it to Hollywood, where it was made into a movie starring Loretta Young, with Burl Ives memorable in the role of Preacher Tutt. When the movie became a box-office success, publishing companies came begging. With the money Mary Millicent received for the film and publishing rights, she bought a decaying old movie palace in downtown Dallas, and she enticed a local television station to broadcast her weekly services. Soon an Oklahoma City station also began to carry the services. Then other stations. By this time, she had written her second book,
The Road to Heaven.

Mary Millicent had been a statuesque, handsome woman with an orator’s voice. Her daughter was willowy and soft-spoken. Even so, Mary Millicent had realized early on that her daughter had the call and trained Amanda to follow in her footsteps.

In the beginning, Amanda tried to imitate her mother, but over the years, she developed her own style and tempered her mother’s message. Like Preacher Tutt before her and in spite of her own transgressions, Mary Millicent had evoked a sense of fear in people, convincing them that if they didn’t change their lives, they would suffer eternal hellfire and damnation. Amanda took quite another tack. She urged her followers to live better lives and help make the world a better place, a world that God could look down upon and smile. On the rare occasions when Gus challenged any of his sister’s beliefs, Amanda would smile benignly at him and assure him that God had told her it was so.

Gus had asked her what God thought of her decision to imprison their mother at the ranch rather than commit her to some posh sanitarium for lunatic elders who had developed a penchant for calling out obscenities and disrobing in public. Amanda said that God would expect them to hide his longtime faithful servant away from prying eyes and protect her reputation. And perhaps Amanda and God were right. Still, it did seem like a mean thing to do to one’s own mother.

Amanda had always known that she would bear a child to carry on the Tutt family’s high calling into the fourth generation. She claimed to have known from the minute Sonny was born that he was blessed of God and that he, too, carried “the call.” Gus had been more interested in the Hartmann side of Sonny’s heritage. Someday the boy would inherit the oil company founded by his great-grandfather and the vast Hartmann Ranch.

Now the Tutt-Hartmann bloodline would die. This child that his sister planned to bring into the world would be the child of a gigolo and a hired surrogate.

Or would it?

Toby had joined the group for cocktails and to watch the video, then excused himself, saying he had “pressing business” to take care off, which meant Amanda had suggested beforehand that he might be bored by the dinner conversation. Gus had to give the man credit; he did understand his place in Amanda’s life. He was her masseur, personal trainer, gofer, prayer partner, and lover, which left him plenty of time to pump iron, swim laps, and be fitted for the custom-made clothing and shoes of which he had grown so fond. Gus had never seen him overstep his carefully assigned boundaries, and he did seem to genuinely care for and respect Amanda. In fact, he seemed genuinely in awe of her, as well he should be.

At first Gus tried to tell himself that Toby was gay, but there was too much touching and sexual innuendo that passed between him and Amanda for that to be the case. Gus didn’t like the thought of his sister having sex with anyone, but it was something he had to live with. And having Toby take care of her sexually meant she was less likely to engage in unseemly liaisons with lowlife men.

Sex was one thing, however. Raising Toby’s child was quite another.

Gus realized that his sister was a pro at delusional thinking, but surely she didn’t believe that the child of Toby Travis and a girl who answered Bentley Abernathy’s newspaper ad could take Sonny’s place as the family’s heir apparent.

Amanda had eaten little of her meal, mentioning that she had been bothered by a queasy stomach of late. And while she never drank wine in public, in private she enjoyed it with her meals, yet she had drunk no wine this evening. And she was either a bit pale or had used a lighter shade of makeup than usual.

Gus knew that if she was planning what he thought she was planning, Amanda did not begin to understand the ramifications. But he would not stop her. If this was how she had come to terms with what happened to Sonny, if this was what it was going to take for her to let that dear boy finally die, then so be it. It was Gus’s job in life to look after his sister and remove pitfalls from her path.

He felt Amanda’s gaze from the other end of the table and met it. She smiled and mouthed the words “I love you,” and his heart swelled so painfully in his chest that he had to close his eyes and grasp the arms of his chair.

He did not believe in God, but he did believe in love.