Diamond Girl (3 page)

So weekdays were always exactly the same except for football days. I was always in bed by seven and I never saw Daddy except at breakfast and at bedtime if he was home to kiss me goodnight, and I never saw my mother at all.

I might hear her if I stood outside doors after school and I could smell her because she wore too much perfume and was always trying to develop her 'signature scent', but I never saw her unless it was by accident, or in the summer. Since nobody at school ever talked about doing things with their parents, and Elizando never mentioned my mother, I didn’t know that we were different, I didn’t know that parents sometimes ate together with their children, or that mothers were the ones who woke up their kids and got them dressed. If I had known, I wouldn’t have wanted it anyway. Elizando took care of me during the week and Stacey took care of me on the weekends, and that is the way it was.

It was Stacey, who was not a regular servant at all, who first made
me realize that my parents didn’t like each other and that my mother was cold, even by the standards of the tribe I was born into, where child neglect has been raised to an art form. It was Stacey who first noticed I was sick, and I suppose she saved my life, for a while anyway, and I guess I should be grateful to her for that. 

Except for our chef and our butler, Louis, Stacey was the only white person who worked for us. Even up at Tamerlane all our help was Hispanic. So that made Stacey different right away and, on top of being white, she was young and super-pretty too. Stacey had even gone to my school, Chapin. I knew it was on a scholarship because she had told me so herself. The thing that was funny was that she laughed when she said it, which somehow I knew was different than how my mother would have said it.

It seemed like everything made Stacey laugh. She was studying to be a psychologist at NYU, and a professor of hers who knew someone who knew my mother had helped her get the job. Stacey said she wasn’t a real nanny; that she was an au pair. My sister Kelly was so little that she couldn’t pronounce au pair at first and pronounced it 'aper'. Stacey found that as hilarious as she found most of our antics and, for a month or so, would crack up Kelly and me, and George too, during the drives out to Connecticut by making ape voices and faces.

That didn’t last, though. Someone must have reported it to my mother, who must have talked to Stacey, because there were no more ape games. Poor Kelly was immediately enrolled in four-day-a-week after pre-school speech therapy and made to wear a mouth guard at night for a year. She was three then.

Anyway, it was Stacey who noticed that something was wrong with me.

Like every other little kid in the world, I loved candy and sodas and anything but what was on my plate. Being raised by nannies, though, and living most of my life four stories above the kitchen and attending the nutrition-based Chapin - which actually means
we promise to keep your children thin if you pay us forty thousand a year plus endowments for them to attend -
didn’t give me much of a chance to indulge my sweet tooth.

Weekends and holidays at Tamerlane were different. The cook there, Rosy, thought it was cute when Kelly and I would run into the kitchen and steal cake batter, or munch down on the cookies she made for us. Since Stacey liked to go into Greenwich on weekends and window shop and flirt with cute guys, she let us buy Cokes and candy bars so that we wouldn’t whine about being bored.

The first signs of the illness that would dominate my life showed much more clearly at Tamerlane than they did in New York because of these normal kid indulgences. In the city I was always thirsty too, but no one - well Elizando or my teachers anyway - remarked on it. It was Stacey who noticed that I was crazy thirsty sometimes, no matter how much I drank, or that I seemed to have to pee about thirty times a day. My riding instructor, Bill, would tell her that he was worried about me. He said I complained sometimes that I couldn’t feel the reins. Well who else was he going to tell?

Then, one afternoon in Greenwich after Stacey had taken Kelly and me for ice cream, I got really sick and so dizzy that Stacey had to carry
me back to the car.  I might have never been diagnosed with juvenile diabetes if left to my mother, because I know Stacey called her that day. I overheard her side of the conversation, and when she said, “Well, yes, Mrs. Kelleher, she seems fine now”, I could tell she was upset. She must have been because she took it upon herself to break my mother’s cardinal rule with staff:
never bother Mr. Kelleher about anything
. Stacey somehow wormed out of George my father’s private cell number and called him herself. I don’t know what they said to each other, but by Monday of that week, I wasn’t at school, I was at our family pediatrician’s, screaming in Elizando’s restraining arms as they tortured me with long painful needles that drew out so much blood I was sure they were trying to kill me.

Chapter 4

My diagnosis hit my mother hard. It had to have been really devastating for her because I thi
nk, by the time she found out, she had been able to convince herself her position was permanent, despite not having produced Kells VI which, after all, wasn’t her fault. I’m sure she reminded my father, and the other Kellehers, the sex of a child was dictated by the man, wasn’t it? 

Of course it was, she knew that, and she had produced two beautiful little girls, one of which – me - was a perfect spit of Kells, and he was clearly crazy about me, in as much as Daddy could be crazy about anything. Mother might have been feeling in the clear until the horrible news that her oldest child had a debilitating, incurable life-long, life-threatening illness. Any natural woman in my mother’s position would have been upset, and she was. My Aunt Georgia didn’t hesitate to point out that there had never been a case of juvenile diabetes in the Kelleher family yet, and so the only conclusion that could be drawn was …

”Well, darling, what else can we think? And poor Kells, so hard on him, his little girl, and this on top of having no son. I don’t know, I can’t imagine what he must be feeling.” Aunt Georgia, a true Kelleher by birth, and even by name, was not a subtle woman, and despite seven failed marriages, she still believed that everyone enjoyed hearing her opinions.

My mother wasn’t subtle either. She was the daughter of a large Kansas meat packing family, and by that I mean that both my
grandparents worked in the Spam factories there. My mother had made it out of Kansas and onto the pages of Vogue by dint of some serious good looks and some even more serious ass-kicking abilities. Her marriage to my father was a step up of almost unprecedented social climbing and she knew that, as a Kelleher wife, she would have to spend her entire life pretending to be as genteel and unworldly as one of the British Royals. Because she was not a born American aristocrat, she was forever banned from talking or acting in any honest way. If she did, eyebrows in New York would raise, Spam jokes would be made and once that starts, a disgraced New York trophy wife can end up pretty quick in a New Jersey McMansion ordering her spring wardrobe off QVC. It crippled her nature of stone-hard bitchiness and made her interactions with my aunt, a 'real' Kelleher, excruciating. 

But from one iron-hard bitch to another, she was smart enough to recognize the truth of my aunt’s observation and wonder what indeed her husband was feeling and, worse, what might he be planning.

In families like mine, there aren’t really pre-nups in the way people think of them today. As in the case of the Hearst family, or the Hunts, dozens of years ago the reigning head of the family sat down with a friendly group of twenty or so trust lawyers and built a wall around our family money so that strangers, i.e. people who married in, couldn’t get much of it. The way it works in our family is this: stay married to a Kelleher and, if you outlive one of us, you might get some very serious change. For example, my great uncle’s fifth wife, Bonita, who was twenty and a kennel worker at his estate, married him when he was eighty-two and he left her a flat billion dollars. My cousins contested it but the jury, not understanding why or how they saw themselves as destitute on their own half billion dollar trusts, sided with the lucky servant and now she is richer than many born Kelleher’s, though not those on Daddy's side of the family. Conversely, marry and be divorced by a Kelleher, and you might end up living in a kennel yourself, because once our trusts go into effect, they are impossible to break into or take much from. It would require an act of Congress to do so, and let me tell you, Congress is very fond of our family.

Knowing this before she married my father hadn’t stopped my mother from betting on herself. I’m sure, going
in, she planned to be the perfect wife. Maybe she even convinced herself that she loved him. He is very loveable, at least I think so. But once in, she lost sight of how she got in. She must have been dazzled, stunned, at just how much money there was. Want a plane? Why not buy and gut a 737, and cover the seats with extinct rhino and polar bear skins? Want a diamond? Well sure, all girls love diamonds, but if the current Kells’ wife wears a diamond, it can’t be any old diamond, because by virtue of her wearing it, it will forever be called the 'Kelleher diamond'. It must be a unique diamond, a blood diamond, literally: a thirty-two carat diamond with history, something cool like the Hope diamond, maybe a little royal blood on it, or a robbed Pharaoh’s tomb.

Having and spending this kind of money is a full-time job, at least it was for my mother. Yeah, there were two little girls, but I don’t think she was able to feel the warmth of acquisition when she looked at us. Rather we were the price of admission and now she found out one of her golden tickets was a phony. Her feelings of growing security as Mrs.
Kells V were thrown into disarray.

In her own defense she came up with a plan. If 'out of sight out of mind' was the banner for every woman in that tough town, then it might work for children too.

It was about a week after my diagnosis, and two days after my first shots. Like any little kid I was terrified of needles, and to be told, and to have been shown graphically, what my new disease meant in terms of them had sent me into a state of terror and hysteria. It was bedtime and my brand new nurse, Sylvia, was looking for me, needle in hand. Desperate to evade her, I scrambled down to the second floor, planning to hide under my parents' bed.

Their room was off-limits to all staff, excepting my mother’s personal maid. Since they were never home at night and never got home before midnight, I figured I could wait her out. I was shocked when I got to the double doors of their suite and heard their voices inside. I hesitated, but when I crept to the bottom of the stairs, I could hear Sylvia wandering around softly calling for me. I ran back and huddled against their doors, too afraid of my mother to go in - I knew she would just screech for Sylvia - and too afraid of the needle to go back upstairs. That is how I overheard them. It was an accident; no eavesdropper would want this much information, no one would choose to hear something that over twenty years later I still can’t forget.

My mother’s faux-genteel accent was slipping, her Kansas was showing. Whatever she was asking from Daddy that night was obviously taking a toll. I heard my name and the word 'Canada', and I listened more intently.

My mother said, “Darling, come on, Kells, this is right for Carolyn. Venta is the most wonderful school.”

My father’s angry voice slapped back at her. “Ellen, I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt. I will assume that you are unhinged with worry over Carey’s illness and I will try very hard to forget that you ever mentioned this in the first place. I will do this in the interests of my little girl if you never speak of it again.” 

“But, Kells, don’t you see, it’s the only thing we can do for Carolyn. This … this disease, it will set her apart from the other children at Buckley, and with her hysterical fear of needles, I mean, really, you cannot imagine the scene this morning. At any rate, it will give her new people and events to focus on, and a new world to explore.” She paused for breath and finished on a triumphant note while I chewed on my knuckles to keep my sobs from escaping. “Venta is an international preparatory academy. Carolyn is being given this chance in spite of her illness. I am certain that she will see it as the treat I envision it being for her.”

“It’s in Ottawa, for Christ’s sake, Ellen. It’s some nowhere and nobody school in Ottawa, in Canada, and though you may not be aware of this, Ellen, Kellehers do not go abroad for their educations, not that I would consider Canada abroad. My children are not going to be raised as Euro trash, my dear, glamorous as that might be to you. But no, this isn’t Le Rosay, is it, Ellen? It’s some Canadian preparatory academy established five years ago, doubtless the only place you could find that would be willing to take such a small child, and a sick one at that. Ahh, I’ve surprised you … yes indeed. I read the brochure, not because I had any intention of sending my child away but because I was honestly curious as to how far you would go to send a sick little girl away from her home.”

I hugged myself and sniffled. Those were more words than I had ever heard Daddy say at one time. My mother’s voice, when she answered, was high and plaintive. She sounded frightened … and I was glad of it.

“Kells, please darling, that isn’t what I was trying to do at all. It’s just … it’s very … difficult for me to see her like this, and I am sure that she picks up on my distress, and you know the doctor said that stress can exacerbate this illness.”