Judith Krantz (18 page)

She got up and locked the hotel room door, without knowing why, and returned to her chair, huddled into a ball, trying to gather her wits, trying to find out where, precisely, she stood.

While Liddy was waiting out the time for her divorce, she and her daughters had lived with her parents in Quaker-founded Philadelphia, a city run by men so conservative that they made old-line Bostonians look frivolous. If she had made her debut, as had been planned before her marriage, at The Assembly Ball in the Bellevue-Stratford, she would have been bowing to society at a ball that was founded in 1768, a ball to which no divorced and remarried people were ever invited. Philadelphians loathed nothing more than public scandal; Philadelphians took no pity on people betrayed by romantic love, an emotion that
played havoc with the preservation of family and class.

Liddy had taken great pains in the way she had presented her coming divorce to her circle of friends and family. Over tea at the Acorn Club on Locust Street, the female equivalent of the aristocratic Philadelphia Club, she had confided, one by one, in each woman she knew, from her great-aunts to her Fox-croft classmates.

“I was so young and inexperienced when I met Mike that I made the worst mistake of all—I married a man with whom I had nothing in common,” she had admitted, knowing that each of them would shudder at this unthinkable gap in a city in which common interests were the coinage of most marriages. “I thought that he’d try to change, he promised me he would, but now I’ve faced the fact that he simply hasn’t got it in him. I would have endured it for myself, but it isn’t fair to my daughters to bring them up without any cultural opportunities, without the right kind of education.”

She had painted a picture of a husband who, for all his decent personal qualities, had no life beyond his cattle, no imaginative life, no artistic interests, no interests in the ruling Philadelphia hobbies of art, literature, antiques, gardening, and that great gourmet cooking which was almost always the domain of the husbands.

Each of her women friends and relatives had been warmly understanding and sympathetic, doubly so as they silently congratulated themselves at having avoided such a fate. Liddy had been willing to be pitied rather than cast out of the world to which she belonged, and could belong again in spite of her divorce, with any luck, for there were a multitude of bachelors in Philadelphia.

How those women would be gossiping about her now! Gossiping in the deadly nice Philadelphia way that almost couldn’t be called gossip: a few hushed words exchanged just before a meeting of the Board of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; a discreet conversation
carried on in an antiques shop on South 17th Street as two women considered a piece of Chinese export porcelain; another heart-to-heart talk at Bailey, Banks & Biddle as engraved invitations were ordered; a murmured discussion during the intermission of the Friday afternoon concert at the Academy of Music, or over a lunch table set for two in a house in Chestnut Hill. Every woman who mattered in Philadelphia would read today’s newspapers and remember her words of explanation with scorn.

If Mike Kilkullen was the hopeless clod, the country bumpkin Liddy said he was, then exactly how had he managed to win the heart of the fascinatingly elusive Swedish star, the child of Stockholm intellectuals as they all had read, the great actress, the great beauty?
How and when?
Everyone had to believe that she had been lying. They had to assume that Mike had fallen so hard for Sylvie Norberg that he’d been willing to break up their marriage to marry her, to marry her only a few hours after it was legal.

Liddy moved to the dressing table and studied herself in the mirror. She was only thirty-one and far more striking than she had ever been. She was still marked with all the desirable, impossible-to-imitate stigmata of someone born to the old-money inner circle of the East Coast upper classes. There was nothing wrong with her at all, Liddy thought, except that she was damaged goods. She’d been dumped, as publicly and as humiliatingly as any woman could be dumped.

Every man in Philadelphia who didn’t know it this morning would learn before dinner tonight that Lydia Henry Stack, the woman who, only twelve years ago, was about to reign over her debutante year, the girl who could have married any bachelor in the city, had been thrown aside for Sylvie Norberg. Yes, Sylvie Norberg, the movie star, the women would say excitedly to their men, is there
another
Sylvie Norberg? Liddy certainly had me fooled, they would add. Poor Liddy, why did she bother with that pathetic charade about her husband when she must have known that it was all going to come out anyway?

If she had only known
. Nothing on earth would have convinced her to divorce Mike if she had imagined for a minute that he would remarry someone like Sylvie Norberg. She would have left him and taken the children, but kept him chained to her, chained forever with no recourse at all, rather than let him put her in this position. No wonder he’d agreed to the conditions of the divorce without a struggle. Her own lawyer had advised Liddy that in his opinion she was asking too much, but she’d insisted that he make the attempt to obtain the maximum in alimony and child support. If
only she had known
.

Liddy got up and began to walk around and around the room. The time to leave for the airport was approaching, but she knew absolutely that she must never go back to Philadelphia. That was the one place on earth in which she would never show her face. She called the airline, canceled her flight and told the phone operator that she’d take calls now.

Where could she go? Philadelphia was self-absorbed, God knew, but not so stick-in-the-mud that its citizens didn’t gossip with their friends in other cities. Any place on the Eastern Seaboard was out of the question for a few years. Europe, of course, but where in Europe? Money was not a problem. Her half of the ranch’s profits had come to a substantial sum, and last winter she’d received an inheritance that gave her an income of an additional ten thousand dollars a year. With thirty-five thousand dollars a year she could live very well in Europe.

When the phone rang again, she was ready.

“Mrs. Kilkullen, this is Hank Jamison of the
Herald Examiner
. Would you mind if I asked you for a few comments on your former husband’s marriage to Sylvie Norberg?”

“Not at all, Mr. Jamison.”

“What’s your reaction to the news?”

“I hope that they’ll be very happy. In fact I’m sure they will be.”

“Did you know this was going to happen yesterday?”

“Naturally I did. My former husband and I remain very good friends.”

“What do you think about Sylvie Norberg?”

“I haven’t met her, but I admire her work enormously. She’s talented and lovely.”

“So you’re not upset about the age difference?”

“I’m a modern woman, Mr. Jamison. Why should it matter to me if it doesn’t matter to her?”

“What do your children think?”

“That’s hard to say now. They’ll have to get to know her first. You know how children are.”

“In other words, you have no hard feelings?”

“Mr. Jamison, I was the one who asked for this divorce. I left my husband long before he met Miss Norberg. My reasons were purely personal and private. I want him to have a happy life, and I’m sure he wants the same thing for me.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Kilkullen. It’s a pleasure to talk to a real lady.”

“Thank you, Mr. Jamison.”

No matter how well she handled reporters, no one she knew in Philadelphia would believe what they read in the papers, but this story would be seen on every continent, and one day, when it had been repeated often enough, it would become the truth.

Soon after Sylvie and Mike Kilkullen were married, Sylvie was amazed to discover that she was going to have a baby. “But I’ve never wanted a child before, I’ve never even thought about it,” she told him, as bewildered by this unexpected development as if she had suddenly developed a taste for playing high stakes poker or breeding Great Danes.

“I’m willing to bet that you unconsciously wanted to have a baby,” Mike told her, gleefully watching the beginning of his private predictions of change coming true.

In January of 1961, their daughter was born and named Juanita Isabella after Mike Kilkullen’s great-great-grandmother, at Sylvie’s insistence. She craved that continuity with the family and the land to belong
to her daughter in a way it could never truly belong to her. Sylvie turned her back on Hollywood after her child’s birth, for she had a longing to experience motherhood.

Ten months later she had assimilated the experience and duties of motherhood. It was delightful, but no longer a novelty … no longer … quite … 
enough
. The itch to return to her work began to trouble Sylvie as she played with the lively, pretty blond baby she and Mike had decided to call Jazz. Impatiently, Sylvie brushed the familiar craving aside for weeks, until it became so strong that she realized she must fulfill it if she wished to be true to herself.

Every woman
must
have a baby, Sylvie told the press of the world as she finished her new film in London. It was a brilliant experience. Absorbing, unique. No woman could realize her full potential until she had given birth.

Did she plan to have only one child? Ah, but who could answer such a vastly difficult question, she replied, with her low and wonderful laugh. She reserved her right to have a dozen children, oh, certainly, a dozen, if she wanted them. Everything was possible—marriage, motherhood and necessary work—because she was married to a unique man, a man who understood a woman’s need to fulfill herself as a creative artist. Yes, her husband was more than strong enough to make a new pattern of life, a new way of being married, which permitted her to leave home from time to time to make a film while he stayed on the land he loved. When she made a film in Hollywood she lived in a little apartment near the studio and spent weekends at the ranch. As for her baby, Jazz was beloved and happy in that stable environment everyone knew was necessary for a child’s development.

Everywhere women envied her.

When Sylvie returned to the ranch between pictures, she changed every room she entered. Her mere presence gilded the atmosphere of the hacienda more brilliantly than sunlight, and the life of everyone who lived there danced to a thrilling rhythm. Sometimes
she stayed there for a month or two at a time, occasionally a little longer. During these periods of relaxation, Mike and Jazz were the center of the enchanted universe she had arranged for herself.

Her imprint was everywhere, like the fragrant smoke of a scented candle: books and magazines lay open on the floors; the music of the new records she brought home filled the house; her marvelous dressing gowns were flung about like tapestries over the arms of her favorite chairs; the armfuls of flowers she cut from the garden stood artfully thrown together in containers on every table; she baked large Swedish cookies and simmered rich Swedish stews and turned dinner into a festival. She sat in the old family rocking chair on the patio, took Jazz in her lap, and told her ancient folk tales and fairy stories for hours. Even Susie Dominguez, who disapproved of Sylvie’s absences, fell under her spell. Often, after Jazz had learned to ride a pony, Sylvie rode with her on the bluffs above the beach, cantering alongside the fearless child, controlling her own mount with hands so light that no horse, no man, no child could gainsay her.

Sylvie happily entertained the neighbors at dinner parties; she loved to hang out at the Swallows bar, where Liddy had refused to set foot; she was a superb hostess at the annual Fiesta, and she never missed Jazz’s birthday party, even if she had to fly across oceans and continents for those two occasions. She visited her parents at least once a year, and on three occasions, when she knew she was going to be at the ranch for a six-week period, she sent them tickets to fly over from Sweden so that they could spend a few weeks getting to know their son-in-law and their granddaughter. When Jazz started school, Sylvie joined the PTA. She got to know every member of the families of the vaqueros on the ranch. She refurbished many rooms of the Hacienda Valencia, without dimming any of their evocative Spanish Colonial character, and she worked side by side with the gardeners to restore the gardens to their full splendor, as much the
mistress of the ranch as the wife of any Kilkullen had been before her.

Yet, inevitably, one day her agent would dare to interrupt Sylvie Norberg’s country idyll, sending her a script that she would push carelessly away. Another script would come in the mail a week later, and again she wouldn’t open it. After a pile of scripts had lain on her desk for a while, under Jazz’s anxiously watchful golden eyes, the day would come when Sylvie Norberg would reach for one, feeling the prompting of that glorious, edgy desire she knew so well, a life-giving desire she could not help but welcome. She’d read the script and throw it aside with an exclamation of disdain. Soon she’d read another, and then another, until the day came when she found a script that contained a role she wanted, a role that would take her away from home for months. Soon she would begin to pack the bags she had never unpacked for good. What she wanted, she would have.

Every marriage is a bargain, almost always unspoken. When Sylvie Norberg, who did not believe in such tacit pacts, had told Mike Kilkullen exactly what to expect before they married, she had not misled him by one word. His tragedy was that he had not believed her. His fate was to live with the bargain he had made.

“Wave good-bye to Mommy,” her father’s voice said in Jazz’s first clear memory. He held her high and moved her hand back and forth. She could remember nothing more, not where or when it happened or what her mother looked like at the time. Only her father’s arms and his words.

Many other similar memories were superimposed on this first one, many sharper memories of her mother’s longed-for returns and painful departures. Jazz could never recall a time in her childhood during which she hadn’t lived with the understanding that whenever her mother was home, there would come a day on which she would go away. Her father told her, when she was old enough to ask questions, that for almost a year after Jazz’s birth, in 1961, her mother
had remained at the ranch, and turned down all scripts in order to be with her new baby. “But you were tiny then, of course you can’t remember,” Mike Kilkullen would add, and lose himself for an instant in the past.