Five Women (25 page)

“I'm just trying to be helpful,” Eve said. “Actually, I'm too young to have a daughter her age. No one will believe it. Maybe Nicole should be my half sister, and now she's an orphan, so she comes to live with me. If I was mean to her the fans would hate me even more.”

“They hate you enough,” Anna said. “Go away.”

Since her good ideas fell on deaf ears Eve went to the producer. “Ira, my part is getting to be just peripheral,” she said. “You aren't even using me. I have so much more to give. I think you should have a story line with me and my daughter.”

“What daughter?”

“My real daughter, Nicole, who you know and love. Everybody likes her; she has real charisma. She should be Xenia's long-lost little sister in the show.”

“I don't think your part is peripheral,” Ira said. “You have a very strong personality. If Xenia's role was too big it would overshadow the other characters and skew the show.”

“Did you say ‘screw'?” Eve asked, annoyed.

“No, I said
skew.
As in tilt, make unbalanced. A little of Xenia goes a long way.”

“That's only because of the way I play her,” Eve said.

“That's what I just told you.”

She backed off for a while, trying to think of new ideas to present to him and Anna. Then, one morning, as she was approaching the coffee and food table, Eve overheard Ira Stebbins talking to Patsy Marlin, the actress who played Susan, who was his best friend. Eve had often wondered if they were having an affair, or if they once had.

“The thing about Eve,” he was saying quietly, chuckling, “is that she doesn't even have to act. There's something about her that's so intrinsically annoying that she could play Xenia in her sleep.”

“I wish she would,” Patsy said.

They don't like me! Eve thought in surprise. Why don't they like me? They must be jealous. These people are such hypocrites. They all pretend to be a big happy family and act like they love each other, but way down deep I bet they're all out for themselves. Well, they're all scared for their jobs, that's what it must be. They know if I had a decent chance I could run away with this stupid show, and they don't want that to happen.

But it still stung that there were people she had to work with who disliked her. Eve didn't know what to do about it so she willed herself to forget about it, and after she had turned her power onto her own well being for a while she found she was able to put them out of her mind.

This didn't mean she gave up trying to have Xenia become a bigger part, or that she didn't approach Anna Malkovit from time to time with new ideas she'd had (which were always rejected), or keep after Ira Stebbins with the hope of wearing him down. It only meant she was able to do it with calm and confidence. Everybody really likes me, she told herself, as much as they can considering how scared and jealous they are. If I had to make the choice I'd rather win an Emmy than have them invite me to the dinner parties I know they have because they talk about them the next day. Nobody ever said this wasn't a tough world, and it takes the strong to win in it. I have always been strong.

After she had been on the show for a year Eve had her own small fan club and answered all their letters herself. People started recognizing her on the street—or at least they recognized Xenia Braddock. “Xenia!” they would call after her. Her fans were mostly young women. Sometimes they knew she was an actress and told her they watched her faithfully, but sometimes they told her she was a bitch. Eve understood that was a compliment, even though they didn't.

Mack was a success too, on his show, with his own coterie of young women fans, who told him they loved Farley, his character. “Don't marry Larissa,” they would warn him. “She's cheating on you.” He and Eve would laugh about it.

She knew they didn't spend much time together anymore, but the sex, when they had it, was still good and a bond between them, so it didn't occur to her that anything was wrong until the night she came home from work and found him packing his things.

“I'm moving out at the end of the week,” he said. He looked nervous and creepy, as if he was getting ready to dodge some physical violence on her part. “I've rented my own apartment.”

“What?” Eve screamed.

“I'll leave you my share of next month's rent because I didn't give you any notice,” he said meekly. “You can keep all the furniture and the stereo.”

“I should hope so,” Eve said. She wasn't upset because she loved him—because she didn't love him—but she was furious at this unexpected betrayal. “Why are you leaving me?”

“I've wanted to for a while,” Mack said.

“Why?”

He hesitated. “To tell you the truth, I'm afraid of you,” he said finally. “You're a dangerous woman.”

“How am I dangerous?” Eve demanded, knowing it was true.

“You just are. There's an anger and violence in you that scares me.”

“You love it,” Eve said.

“No,” he said. “I don't know if I loved it. But I know I don't anymore.”

“Where are you moving to?” she asked. She had never been ditched before and she began to feel a little nauseated.

“The East Side.”

“Couldn't get far enough away, huh?”

“I'll miss Nicole,” Mack said. He was packing his rolled-up balls of white socks in neat rows in his suitcase as if he were packing eggs.

“Sure you will. You don't know she's alive.”

“I spend more time with her than you do.”

“Then why don't you just take her?”

“Will you tell her goodbye?” Mack asked.

“Do it yourself.”

“She's not my daughter, you know,” Mack said. “She's the daughter of my . . . ex-girlfriend, I guess you are. It's your place to explain to her what happened. I know it's going to be hard on her, but you can explain that I was a transient date and things didn't work out.”

“Don't you tell me what to tell her,” Eve snapped. “You have about as much insight as a frog.”

“I really feel badly about her,” Mack said. “I know she likes me.”

“She doesn't like you,” Eve said coldly. Actually, she thought Nicole was very fond of him. “She's an actress, like her mother.”

“Have you been acting too?” Mack asked.

“Which means what?”

“Do you love me?” He had asked her that before, from time to time, and she had said yes, but it had been the necessary reply, since he had also said that he loved her.

“You should know that I do,” Eve said. “Although now I'm beginning to change my mind.”

“You always said you did,” Mack said. “But somehow I never really believed it.”

“Why not?”

“I don't think you're capable of loving anybody but yourself.”

“Why would you ever think that?” Eve said, insulted.

“It's just how I perceive you.”

“You've been saying those trashy lines too long on your show,” Eve said. “You're beginning to turn into your character.”

“Maybe I am,” he said.

“You're weak.”

“I guess I used to be.”

She drew herself together and marshaled her inner resources. “So now you're going to leave me
and
insult me?” she said. “You don't have to wait until the end of the week. You can get out tonight.”

“Okay,” he said, and he sounded relieved.

When he got to the front door with his suitcases Nicole came out of her room. Her face was streaked with tears and Eve realized she had been listening. She had always been a sneaky little thing under all that sunniness.

“Your mother and I have decided to break up,” Mack said to her. “It's in no way your fault. You have nothing to do with it.”

“I hope you come back,” Nicole said softly. They hugged each other. He did not hug Eve and she made no move to touch him. He gave her one backward, inscrutable look, and then he was gone.

After Mack left, for a few angry weeks Eve felt as if he had trashed her life. She took over his closet space and drawer space as quickly as possible so she would find an advantage to his absence, and she told Nicole she was not to mention his name because he was a liar and a bad person. Since the party who is cheated on is usually the last one to know, it took Eve that long to discover that Mack had been having an affair with an actress on his show, the one who played Larissa. She was a totally plastic-looking blonde, and Eve was sure she wasn't very good in bed. They had apparently moved in together after he left; so that was the apartment on the East Side. Eve wished them both a miserable early-morning commute across the park and a rotten life.

Whether or not she had loved him didn't matter. Mack had been her boyfriend and another woman had taken him. But Eve felt that because she had been with him before he met the interloper she had put her mark on him forever, as if she had branded him, so that no matter where he went, no matter who he ended up with, he would be roaming with her name of ownership on him. He should have waited until she got tired of him before he tried to go away. Now she would always hate him, and hate was a negative vibration that hurt the hater as much as the hated, perhaps more, so she had something else to be angry at him for.

It also rankled that she had to pay the full rent herself every month now. It was a lucky thing the apartment was rent stabilized. Of course, she was making a lot of money, and investing it wisely and conservatively, but half the rent was half the rent. She tried to look at the good side. Although it was true she would never have chosen such a nice apartment if she thought she and Nicole would have to be living in it alone, it was also true that as a woman on her way up in the world she deserved a pleasant place to live, and to have it without being dependent on a man's help was even better.

At Christmas, as they always did, Eve and Nicole went to Florida to see her mother, who was now living in a pink-painted Art Deco building near the beach. Every year Eve swore to herself it would be the last time because she was so bored and the visit brought up so many unhappy memories. But Nicole was happy. She liked seeing her grandmother and she loved swimming in the apartment's small pool. Her grandmother had treated her to swimming lessons the first year they came to visit.

Eve's mother, who had always looked like a man, had been reincarnated as a Miami Beach matron. She had let her hair grow and dyed it a reddish blonde, and had it set into a stiff, petaled shape that made her head look like a spun-sugar artichoke. She was wearing makeup now, and it got into her wrinkles and made them look worse, and her no-nonsense steel rimmed eyeglasses had been replaced by fanciful oversized sunglasses with glittery rims. The overalls had been replaced too, by pastel-colored polyester pants suits, worn with floral or psychedelic printed blouses. Her nails were manicured and painted red. She had a lot of friends, for the first time in her adult life, all widows or divorcées her own age, and her social calendar was always full.

“Val,” the other women would beseech, “we need a fourth for bridge; Val, we want to go to the Flamingo for happy hour, come with us!” Eve had not heard her mother called by her first name by anyone for years, not since her father had left, and she sometimes thought that whatever had happened in her home when her father was with them were only fantasies, not memories. Her mother's new look and name made her seem more distant than ever.

“So where's Mack?” her mother asked.

“Gone.”

“No loss. You didn't need him.”

She didn't ask who had left whom, and for that Eve was grateful. Now that Mack was out of her life she sometimes thought she loved him after all. Sometimes, walking on the beach alone at the end of the day, when the sunset made gold and silver streaks in the sky above the eternal waves, she felt a sad, sweet longing that was like pain. Maybe it was just being in Florida and missing her father—another memory that was probably a fantasy. Mack had been kind to Nicole. But these warm nights made Eve miss Mack more than she ever had in New York.

She thought about the good times, the way he had made her laugh, how he had clowned around, how he had listened to her sympathetically whenever she complained. She remembered holding his long, slim body while they slept and thinking how that very act always made her drowsy. She had picked on him and yelled at him and he had never gotten mean about it. He had loved her. Other men had too, but Mack was different. She had never known that until now when it was too late and he was gone.

Why hadn't she noticed how lovable he was? What was wrong with her? They could have been happy together.

After she got back to New York, Eve began to watch Mack's soap again on the days she wasn't working, hoping to get a glimpse of him. She hated watching his love scenes with that bitch he was having love scenes with in real life, too, but she missed him, and having him on her television set made her feel closer to him. She was beginning to wonder why he had really left her. He had said it was because she frightened him, so maybe they were ill-fated from the beginning after all, but still, she found that hard to understand. What Mack was really afraid of, Eve decided, was not her but himself, not her control over him but the fact that he secretly liked it. One's own weakness was always terrifying.

She had to believe that or else she would just feel too sad. But despite everything she did to console herself, whenever she thought about losing him her eyes would fill with tears.

Chapter Twenty-two

K
ATHRYN'S MOTHER
had been languishing in jail for five months. Bail had been denied because she was suicidal. Although Kathryn had asked her uncles to help her find a good defense lawyer, she had not heard from them again in all this time, not even to tell her if they had hired one, and by now she and her brothers were sure that they had deserted them. She knew their uncles had to be angry about the murder, even though they were well aware of what her father had been like, and she was afraid to call them, hoping they might get over the worst of it with time. It was bewildering and upsetting, but she realized she would have to face the fact that they not only probably wanted her mother to be electrocuted, but they didn't care what happened to the rest of their family either.

It had been a strange funeral; everyone acting proper and sad and hypocritical. Her father had had very few friends at the end, and this nearly empty church was what he deserved, Kathryn thought.

Her brothers Donal and Kean had come home for the funeral. Afterward Kathryn talked with Donal in the kitchen. She was pouring coffee with a steady hand into a row of cups on a tray for him to take out for their visitors. “You're glad he's dead, aren't you?” she said.

“I don't know. I mean, he was my father.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “Bullshit.”

“We're going to have to live with this,” he said.

“So what?”

“You've always been this way,” Donal said. “You make up your mind and you just
know.”

Kathryn shrugged.

“What makes you so sure of everything?” Donal asked.

“I'm not sure of anything.”

“But then what makes you so strong?”

“It's just the way I am,” Kathryn said. “Dad picked on you three boys because he could tell you were weak.”

“I guess we're all glad he's gone,” Donal said. “Might as well admit it. I look in the mirror sometimes and I see his face, but it's me. I hate that I look like him.”

“Don't dwell on it,” Kathryn said. “You don't act like him, and that's what matters. Don't forget the cream.”

Kathryn realized that if she didn't start looking for a lawyer for her mother on her own, the court would give her a public defender, and Kathryn was sure that meant a death sentence. You could not kill a cop and expect to get away lightly, even if you were his abused wife. Once a week she went to visit her mother in jail. Her mother was in the psychiatric ward now, and looked terrible.

“I'll never forgive your father for not getting me a nurse when I was so sick,” her mother kept saying. “That was the worst thing he ever did to me. It was the Valium that made me shoot him. If he had gotten me a nurse, the way I wanted him to, I wouldn't have been so sick, and I wouldn't have needed a tranquilizer. I'll never forgive him for the Valium. I wasn't myself. It was just an accident. I took his gun because I was so afraid of him. I thought the safety was on. I wasn't thinking right. It was the Valium.”

Kathryn had found out the whole story. Her mother had followed her father for eight hours, and finally had hidden in the backseat of his car, under his policeman's heavy raincoat. She had taken the gun. She knew he was going to pick up his girlfriend, and she figured that way she would be able to find out who the woman was and where she lived. But Brendan picked up his girlfriend, Dorothy, at the coffee shop where she worked, and then he took her to the Avalon Ballroom, the scene of his long-ago romantic evenings with Sheila. Those evenings when he had been an attentive suitor seemed so long ago now that the Avalon Ballroom had no special meaning to his battered wife; it was simply one of the places one went on a date.

It had been very cold that night, and Dorothy was chilly. Brendan had told her there was a warm raincoat in the backseat and she should put it on, so she had reached back to get it and had discovered Sheila. Dorothy screamed. Brendan stopped the car with a screech of brakes. Dorothy jumped out of the car and ran away, still screaming. Brendan turned around and saw his wife. Sheila raised the gun with trembling hands and shot him, and because she was so close, she shot most of his head off, showering the inside of the car with brains and blood.

After the murder, Dorothy went into the Avalon Ballroom, where they called the police, but after that, the story became unclear. She was definitely the witness. She was probably the unidentified woman who called Kathryn to tell her that her mother was in trouble. Until the police came, Sheila apparently stayed beside the car with her husband's body in it, in a state of shock. When the police and the ambulance came, she was so covered with blood that they thought at first she was another victim, until they saw the gun in her hand.

Sheila did not remember anything between the time of the shooting and the time she was taken to the police station, and given something else to wear because her clothes had become state's evidence. It occurred to Kathryn that her mother's mug shot, a staring, terrified face covered with blood, was not unlike the way her mother had sometimes looked during those long years of her marriage, but this time the blood was Brendan's, not her own.

Fortunately Kathryn was not completely alone during this dismal time of waiting to see what her mother's fate would be. Ted and his parents rallied around her and the two babies. They were there to help, to shop for food, to baby-sit, to be family. This was comforting since she no longer seemed to have much family of her own. Kathryn still wanted her divorce as much as ever, but she let it slide for now because everything was such a mess, and let them take care of her.

Then finally, five months after the murder, when her uncles had made up their minds what to do, or when they had decided their brother's children had suffered enough, or when they had pulled the strings that had to be pulled—Kathryn didn't know which and certainly wasn't going to ask—her uncle Brian called and said he was coming over to see her.

Her three uncles arrived at the apartment together. They were handsome, dark-haired men, broad shouldered and fierce, intimidating in their policemen's uniforms, and equally so in the civilian clothes they were wearing for their visit, and they seemed so large that their presence filled the entire living room.

“The problem of your mother is taken care of,” her uncle Brian said. “We have a lawyer for her and the trial will be a hearing in front of a judge, which is a lot easier and shorter than a jury trial. She'll plead not guilty by reason of insanity. The judge is our man, Linwood Budgie. He'll do what we told him to do. She'll get some time in a mental hospital and that will be that. The trial is next month. We'll tell you when.”

“Thank you,” Kathryn said. She breathed a sigh of relief. She had known they could fix it with just a word. The world of the powerful blue men was back in place. “Thank you so much,” she said again.

Her uncles nodded.

“How are the kids?” her uncle Patrick asked. He had always been the nicest and friendliest of her three uncles.

“Fine. They're sleeping. How are yours?”

“Still hell-raisers,” he said proudly, and smiled.

“Mine, too,” Kathryn said.

“They take after you, then,” her uncle Michael said. “As I remember it, your mother had to send you off to boarding school to keep you under control.”

“I guess so,” Kathryn said.

“Yes, indeed, she did,” her uncle Brian said, but he looked pleased. Now they were all smiling at one another. “I guess we'll be going now,” he said.

“Would you like a drink, or some coffee?”

“No, no. We're off. I'll call you.” And they were gone.

* * *

The trial was held on a gorgeous day in spring, the kind of day that makes you feel impatient and cheated to think of wasting a minute indoors, not to mention years in a mental hospital. Kathryn's only previous experience with a murder trial had been what she saw in the movies, so she wore a demure black dress with a white collar. She thought for a moment that she looked more like the murderess than the bereaved in that outfit, because that was what the accused always wore to look like a good person, and she particularly thought so when she saw that her mother was wearing the same thing. But of course it was too late to change.

Even though she had been reassured by her uncle Brian that everything had been taken care of, Kathryn was a little nervous. Their lawyer's name was Wilson. He looked innocuous when she had wanted someone fiery to really convince everyone that her mother was not guilty because she had no comprehension of what she had done. Kathryn wondered if he knew the trial was fixed. The prosecutor looked pompous because he probably thought he was going to win. She knew he was going to ask for the death penalty. The judge who would be on their side and save her mother, Linwood Budgie, was a jolly, little, old, white-haired man who looked, in his black robes, like an overage choirboy. Their choirboy . . .

Kathryn glanced around the courtroom. No one in the family was there except herself and her three brothers. Her father's family had never liked her mother and now they liked her even less, and her mother's family had been estranged from her for years. There were, however, some reporters and several rows of scandal-hungry strangers, because the murder had been given quite a run in the press. Her alcoholic father, who had only managed to stay on the force all those years because of political corruption, had been changed overnight into a hero cop. Her pathetic mother was now a cold-blooded killer. Kathryn could hardly wait for the whole thing to be over so they could disappear back into their anonymous lives which were far too dramatic to begin with.

Her father's girlfriend, Dorothy, was there. Kathryn recognized her from her picture in the newspapers. She too was dressed in black, with a big picture hat and dark glasses, and she was sobbing. Kathryn wanted to shake her. It annoyed her that her father's girlfriend was feeling so sorry for herself, when it was partly her fault that this had happened in the first place.

The hearing began. It took less than two hours. Unlike murder trials Kathryn had seen in the movies, there were no surprises, nor had she expected any. Everything had been well rehearsed, well planned. Dorothy was an important witness. Her mother, who had been tranquilized, was not allowed to testify. It was as if everyone but the prosecutor had already decided she was incompetent. She looked a little dazed. Once in a while, after her moment of glory on the stand, Dorothy continued to give a muffled sob and honked into her handkerchief. Colin was chewing his lip, and his eyes were big and round. He'd been through a lot for a kid, but at least this would be the end of it.

Behind the bench the judge was scribbling away, taking notes. He didn't have to go away to deliberate. “I'm ready for sentencing,” he said. “Please rise.” Kathryn's mother stood up and everybody looked at her with interest. The end was always the good part. “Sheila O'Mara,” he began. “The court finds—”

“I did it,” Sheila said. Everybody gasped. Kathryn's heart nearly leaped out through her throat. “I killed him,” Sheila said, “and I want to die.”

My mother is going to die in the electric chair
, Kathryn thought, stunned. The courtroom was in an uproar.

Judge Linwood Budgie was banging his gavel to try to get the courtroom back in order. He looked a little as if he would like to leave. Kathryn could clearly see the confusion on his face. He was supposed to pronounce her mother innocent, but the defendant herself had said she was guilty. How the hell was he going to deal with that?

The judge cleared his throat. The room had gone silent. There was a long pause, or at least it seemed long to Kathryn. “The court finds the defendant guilty,” he said, finally. “And I am putting her on probation for five years and remanding her to the custody of her daughter.”

The people in the courtroom exploded with astonished gabbling. Kathryn just sat there in shock. She couldn't believe what had happened. Since the bewildered judge obviously hadn't known what to do, this was what he had done. Nothing like this had ever occurred before.

She's safe, Kathryn thought. It's a miracle. Thank you, God, for this astonishing last-minute rescue.

But then she realized what it meant. I'm just a twenty-two-year-old kid with two babies to take care of, she thought, and now I have custody of a suicidal murderess. What am I going to do?