Always and Forever (25 page)

Kathy walked into the house—the front door was never locked until evening—and up the stairs to the room she shared with Phil. She was so tired, she thought, though she’d done nothing for days except sit by Jesse’s bed. Bella was right; she needed to rest, for Jesse’s sake. She was too exhausted even to think clearly.

She undressed, pulled on one of her white silk mousseline nightgowns—the matching, lined negligée draped across the foot of the bed. In moments she was asleep, caught up in disturbing dreams that revolved about Jesse.

She came awake slowly, reluctantly, then all at once she was wide awake. That was David’s voice calling to her from the other side of her bedroom door.

“I’ll be right there, David.” Trembling, she reached for her negligee, and pulled it on as she crossed the room to the door.

“Kathy, everything’s all right,” he told her, his face alight with relief. “I called the hospital the moment I arrived here. They were just about to call you. Bella said to let you sleep, but I had to tell you. Jesse is all right. And there’ll be no side effects from the polio.”

“Oh David, thank God. And thank you for being here,” she said shakily. “I don’t know how I would have seen this through without your standing by with me.”

“You and Jesse are both very precious to me—” David drew her to him in a gesture of mutual relief that Jesse had come through this ordeal.

“And you’re precious to us—” Kathy was conscious of her heart pounding wildly. His face close to hers. “I’ve missed you so much through these years, David—”

Then all at once his mouth was seeking hers, and everything was forgotten in the joyous release of emotions long hidden.

“Kathy, this is wrong,” he said in quiet torment after a moment.

“Don’t say anything, David,” she whispered. “Just hold me.”

Again, his mouth found hers, and she knew there would be no holding back now. His hands swept away her negligee while his mouth burrowed in the hollow between her breasts. It was as though, she thought in exquisite pleasure, this was the first time a man had ever made love to her.

They lay together on the bed, touching, kissing with a long denied hunger. A different kind of love, she thought in soaring delight as he sought his way within her.
Let her make this as good for David as it was for her.

David sat at the side of the bed, his face revealing his pain.

“How could I have allowed this to happen, Kathy? You’re Phil’s wife.
I was out of my mind.
Can you ever forgive me?”

“There’s nothing to forgive, David. I’m just as much to blame as you. It was just that we were both so relieved that Jesse’s all right.” She was stammering, searching for the right words. David would never allow this to happen again. He’d forever be on guard. “We’ll forget it ever happened.” She was his cousin’s wife, there could never be anything more for them. She drew the silken sheet about her. The wonderful parcel of time with David was over.

“I’m sorry, Kathy—”

“Don’t be,” she urged. “This mustn’t stand between us. You’ll always be my very dear friend.”

“I couldn’t bear losing that,” he said quietly.

“You never will,” she promised.

David left her to return to his own room while she called the hospital and talked to Bella.

“It’s so wonderful!” Kathy said. “The whole world looks wonderful now. Tell Jesse I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Have dinner with David, before you come to the hospital,” Bella ordered. “He was so happy when I told him about Jesse.”

“We’ll have dinner,” Kathy agreed.

Only for the first few minutes at dinner did she feel, an uneasy self-consciousness with David. This was David, whom she loved—and who loved her.

“I hope you’ll take yourself off for a week or two,” David said gently. “Away from familiar scenes.”

“I’ll take Jesse and run out to California for a while.” Maybe Phil had not been lying when he said he’d gone out to dinner with friends and drank too much to hear the phone when she’d called. Maybe. But she knew she must put distance between herself and Phil for a while if their marriage was to survive.

She’d call Marge and say she’d be out in a month or so. Phil couldn’t object to that. He might even be pleased.

David slept little on the flight across the Atlantic. Being with Kathy for those days, seeing her with Jesse, had emphasized his loneliness, his aching need for family. The concentration camp had robbed him of that. Perhaps the time had come to think about building another family. A memorial to those he had lost. But he couldn’t let himself think of Kathy. Never again would he lose his self-control like that, no matter how much he yearned for her still. He would have to search elsewhere, he told himself. Either that or remain alone.

He wasn’t in love with Gretchen, but they had much in common. She was pretty, bright, compassionate. Not right away, he stalled, but he would think about pursuing her. Instinct told him he would not have to pursue very hard.

Not every marriage was based on love. That would come later. He dreaded the empty nights in his drab apartment. He’d told himself that work would fill his life—but seeing Kathy, making love with her, seeing her with Jesse, told him that work was a pale substitute for family.

He would ask Gretchen out for dinner in a few days. He wouldn’t rush her—they both must be sure that a relationship would work for them. He doubted that Kathy’s marriage was a good one. Too many poignant indications that she was unhappy. Yet she was his cousin’s wife, and he had no right to intrude on their marriage.

Late in October Kathy flew with Jesse and Alice to San Francisco. Marge met them at the airport, accompanied them in the taxi that was taking them now to the elegant Hotel Fairmont, where Kathy had reserved a suite.

“God, you live in style,” Marge said with uninhibited candor. “Don’t you feel absolutely decadent, with a suite at the Hotel Fairmont?”

“I’m learning to enjoy it,” Kathy said, feeling herself out of prison. “Bella’s teaching me.”

“You’re hitting it off well with your mother-in-law?”

“We’re close, Marge. In the beginning I didn’t expect it to be that way.” She was intrigued now by the salt-scented fog that hung over the road, lending an eerie air to the landscape. “But tell me about your job,” she ordered.

While they drove from the outskirts of San Francisco into the city itself—up and down endless hills—Marge talked about her continuing affair with designing, her determination to open her own shop one day. Self-conscious at first, Kathy admitted to the exhilarating satisfaction she was finding in the classes she was taking at F.I.T.—the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Then they were pulling up beneath the huge porte-cochère of the square-block Fairmont. While Alice supervised the transferal of their luggage into the hands of hotel personnel, Kathy and Marge walked into the palatial lobby.

“I come here when I’m depressed,” Marge confided laughingly. “Just to walk over these miles of gorgeous carpet and to see the marble staircases, those marble pillars, and the mirrors. I can’t afford to stay here, like some people,” she teased, “but once in a while I get taken to the Top of the Mark—you know, on the top of the Mark Hopkins—for a drink at sunset. We’ll go there for sure,” Marge promised exuberantly.

Not until they were in the posh suite at the Fairmont—atop Nob Hill and across the street from the equally famous Mark Hopkins—did Kathy confess to boredom with her so-called good life.

“One of these days I’ll break out of my prison,” Kathy warned. “I’ll do something more exciting with my life than being a semi-parasite.”

“I wish you were living out here,” Marge sighed. “And that we had a shop of our own. Selling mostly casual sportswear,” she pinpointed.

“That’s going to be the big market in the years ahead,” Kathy predicted. “It’s the kind of clothes that fit in with suburban life, and let’s face it, Americans are rushing to the suburbs.”

“Mommie—” Jesse returned from his tour of the suite with Alice. “Alice says those funny trains down in the street are cable cars. Can we go on one?”

“You bet, Jesse,” Marge answered for her. “And we’re going to the zoo and Golden Gate Park and, oh, lots of places.”

Marge took two days off from her job to show them San Francisco. After that Kathy roamed about the city with Jesse and Alice. Jesse was fascinated by the cable cars, though Alice good-humoredly admitted to some trepidation about this fanciful mode of transportation.

Each evening—once Jesse was settled in for the night and Alice chose her television fare—Kathy met Marge for dinner and a walk about the city. Each night Marge chose a different restaurant, delighted that Kathy insisted on picking up every check and that they dine in the best San Francisco restaurants.

Not until their third night—when Marge took her to the glass-domed, multi-chandeliered Garden Court in the historic Palace Hotel—did Kathy talk with candor about her marriage.

“I was sure it wasn’t the ideal marriage,” Marge confessed, her beef pie
bourguignonne
ignored now. “I know you too well not to recognize that.”

“I’m not sorry I married Phil,” Kathy said slowly. “I wouldn’t have Jesse if I hadn’t, and I love him so much, Marge. But once Jesse is eighteen and in college, I’m leaving Phil. Of course, I’ll be—what? Forty-one,” she calculated and laughed. “Still, I’ll be a free forty-one.”

“It doesn’t seem fair for you to have to waste all those years,” Marge rebelled.

“I have to do it for Jesse,” Kathy insisted. “There’s no way that Phil would give me a divorce. He’d fight me—fight me dirty—to gain custody of Jesse. I’m Jesse’s mother—he belongs with me.”

“You can fight dirty, too,” Marge pointed out. “Hire a detective to get evidence of adultery.”

“I couldn’t bear an ugly divorce. I don’t want Jesse to know, ever, about Phil’s chasing after other women. I want him to believe he’s had a normal childhood.”

“My mother always pretended my father was a devoted husband. She never guessed my brothers and I knew about the string of floozies that kept him away from the house a couple of nights a week almost to the day he died. She still doesn’t know.”

“Jesse won’t know,” Kathy vowed. “I’ll make sure of that. He’ll think that his father works very hard at his business, and some nights he can’t come home.
I’ll
always be there for him. But once he’s off to college, I’m off to a life of my own.”

“I hope you’re squirreling away money,” Marge said bluntly.

“Some,” Kathy conceded. “And once Jesse’s in school full time, I mean to move out into the business world. Phil can carry on all he likes. I’ll try for a job.”

“On Seventh Avenue,” Marge guessed. “That’s why you’re taking classes.”

“At first I just signed up for a course to fill my time. Then I knew it was what I wanted to do. I got the bug from you, Marge,” she scolded affectionately. “But I’m glad.”

Julius stared at Phil over a steak at Toots Shor’s.

“Why the hell should I invest in a Broadway play? Because of some slut you want to
shtup?
She’ll get a part in the play if I put up money?”

“It’s a sharp move, Dad.” Phil ignored his father’s jibe. He’d been to three auditions of the play already, Carol wasn’t bad. And she had every guy in the room overheated. “If it’s a hit, you make a bundle. If it folds, then you have a tax write-off. And you’re moving in the right circles.”

“I’ll talk to the accountants,” Julius said after a moment. He liked the idea of being an investor, Phil guessed.

“He’ll tell you this is a no-lose deal. You win either way. And it’ll be fun. We’ll go to the opening when the play comes into town, wait for the reviews at Sardi’s. And you’ll meet some gorgeous broads.”

“I said I’ll talk to the accountants,” Julius repeated. “When’s Kathy and the kid due back from San Francisco?”

“Tomorrow night.”

“Your mother wants Kathy to go with her to Palm Beach in January,” Julius told him. “The girls are going down to Cuernavaca this year.”

“She’ll want to take Jesse,” Phil warned.

“So she’ll take Jesse,” Julius shrugged and inspected his son through narrowed eyes. “When are you going to have a second kid?”

“We’ve never discussed it.” Phil was startled by the question. “Why do we need another kid?”

“It pays to keep the little woman occupied with children. They don’t get the wrong ideas in their heads.” He grinned. “You were born when your mother started to look at me with a weird glint in her eyes.”

“To tell you the truth, I think Kathy’s so wrapped up in Jesse she doesn’t want another kid.” He squinted in thought. He wasn’t crazy about the image of himself as the father of two.

“She’s at the stage now when she turns her back to you in bed,” Julius guessed. “Wives—they’re all alike. The first year or two, before you get ’em pregnant, they’re always ready. After that, it’s the part of the marriage they’re happy to forget about. I remember your old lady—I used to call her Miss Ironpants. But we understood each other. She has what she wants, and I have what I want.”

“Don’t wait too long about investing in the play,” Phil warned. “They’ve already got half the money up.”

The next morning over breakfast at their usual restaurant Julius told Phil he’d invest in the play.

“My accountant says go ahead. It’s like the Income Tax Bureau is financing the theater. When do you want the money? And when do
I
see a backers’ audition?”

“Tomorrow night there’s another,” Phil told him. He’d see Carol, of course, and get the message. But so what? Dad wasn’t running to tell Kathy. Any more than he told Mother about the
zaftig
little bookkeeper Dad had been screwing for the last four years. “We’ll run over here for dinner, then I’ll take you down.”

The second week in January, Kathy flew to Palm Beach with Bella, Jesse and Alice. They were to stay until the end of the month at the “cottage” of Bella’s friend, Genevieve, who was sunning herself in Nice before going on to the couturier showings in Paris, the “cottage” being a fourteen-room villa directly on the beach.

Kathy relished the seclusion of the beach house, with a staff of servants who made themselves almost invisible. Here there was none of the constant comings and goings of the beach house at Southampton. Bella and she lounged on the deck alone, reading or engaging in lazy conversation, while Jesse played on the sand under the watchful eyes of Alice, at intervals playing with a small neighbor, also in the care of a nursemaid. Their meals were served on the deck, with the ocean lulling Kathy’s tense nerves into a semblance of relaxation.