Separate Beds (4 page)

Her preliminary silence nearly made her reply redundant. “Oh, you'd like that, wouldn't you? Then your conscience would be clear. No, I wouldn't take money for any abortion!”

Long before she finished, he felt like a confirmed pervert.

“All right, all right, sorry I asked.” He couldn't tell yet if he was worried or relieved by her answer. He sighed. “Well, what are we going to do about your father?”

“You're so smart, you figure it out.” Catherine knew that after tomorrow, when Herb Anderson's pregnant little trump card disappeared, his ship would lose the wind from its sails. But she was damned if she'd tell Clay Forrester that. Let him stew in his own juices!

“I can't,” he was saying almost contritely, “and I'm not that smart and I'm sorry I called you ignorant and I'm sorry I called you promiscuous and I shouldn't have gone flying off the handle like that, but what man wouldn't lose his temper?”

“You might be justified if I were making demands, but I'm not. I'm not holding a gun to your head or forcing you to do anything. But neither am I going to sip from your tarnished silver spoon,” she ended sarcastically.

“And what is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that maybe my father was right to resent you because you're rich. It means that I resent your thinking you can sweep it all under the rug by an offer of a quick abortion. I'd have respected you more if you'd never suggested it.”

“It's legal now, you know.”

“And it's also murder.”

“There are conflicting views on that too.”

“And obviously yours and mine conflict.”

“Then you plan to keep the baby?”

“That's none of your business.”

“If it's my baby, it's my business.”

“Wrong,” she said with finality, the single word stating clearly that it was useless for him to try to get anything more from her. The silence waged war with Clay's conscience while he sat disconsolately cradling the wheel. When next he spoke, the words told more truth than either of them had expected.

“Listen, I don't want that kid raised in the same house with your father.”

You could have heard a leaf drop from the blackened branches that drooped above the road. Then Catherine's voice came quietly into the dark.

“Well, well, well . . .”

For answer he started the engine, threw the car into gear and tried to drive away his frustration. Brooding, he drove again one-handed, allowing the car just enough excessive speed, but not too much. She leaned back, silently watching the arch of trees spin backward above the headlights, losing all sense of direction, shutting out thoughts momentarily. The car slowed, turned, nosed along the street where he lived.

“Do you think your parents might still be here?”

“I have no idea. A madman like him just might be.”

“It looks like they've gone,” he said, rolling past, finding no sedan in the driveway.

“You'll just have to take me home then,” she said, then added while turning her face toward her window, “. . . so sorry to put you out.”

He came to a halt at a stop sign and sat waiting with feigned patience. When she only continued staring stubbornly out that window he was forced to ask, “Well, which way?”

Under the blue-white glance of the streetlight she noted the effrontery of his insolent pose: one wrist draped over the wheel, one shoulder slightly slumped toward his door.

“You really don't remember anything about that night, do you?”

“I remember what I
want
to remember.
You
remember that.”

“Fair enough,” she agreed, then settled her expression into one of indifference and gave him a street address and brief directions on how to reach it.

The ride from Edina to North Minneapolis took some twenty minutes—long, increasingly uncomfortable minutes during which their angers diminished at approximately the same rate as the speed of Clay's driving. With verbal combat forsaken, there was only the sound of the car purring its way through the somnolent city with an occasional streetlight intruding its pale, passing glimpse into their moving world. Within the confines of that world an uninvited intimacy settled, like an unwanted guest whose presence forces politeness upon his host and hostess. The silence grew rife with unsaid things—fears, dreads, worries. Each could not be more anxious to part and be rid of this tension between them, yet for both a final separation seemed too abrupt. As Clay turned a last corner onto her street the car was nearly crawling.

“Whi . . .” His voice cracked and he cleared his throat. “Which house?”

“The third on the right.”

The car rolled to a stop at the curb, and Clay shifted into neutral with deliberate slowness, then adjusted some button till only the parking lights remained on. She was free to flee now, but, curiously, remained where she was.

Clay hunched his shoulders and arms about the wheel in the way with which she was already growing familiar. He turned his eyes to the darkened house, then to her.

“You gonna be all right?” he asked.

“Yeah. What about you?”

“God, I don't know.” He laid back and closed his eyes. Catherine watched the pronounced movement of his Adam's apple rising and falling.

“Well . . .” She put her hand on the door handle.

“Won't you even tell me what your plans are?”

“No. Only that I've made them.”

“But what about your father?”

“Soon I'll be gone. I'll tell you that much. I'm his little ace-in-the-hole, and with me gone he'll have nothing to threaten you with.”

“I wasn't thinking about me when I asked that, I was thinking about you going in there now.”

“Don't say it . . . please.”

“But he—”

“And don't ask any questions, okay?”

“He forced you to come to the house tonight, didn't he?” His voice was strained.

“I said, no more questions, Mr. Forrester,” she said in a distractingly gentle tone.

“I feel like hell, you know, letting you go this way.”

“Well, that makes two of us.”

The vague light from the dashboard cast their eyes in shadow, but somehow the intensity conveyed itself. She looked sharply away from his face, for she would not be haunted by the conscience-stricken look she saw there. She opened her door and the overhead light came on and he reached out to stop her. Silence fell while the heat of his hold burned through the arm of her coat. She pulled, slowly, steadily, inexorably away from him, turning, straining toward the door. But her neck arched sideways, revealing under the mellow light three purple bruises strung there in a row, each a finger's width apart. Before she could prevent it, the backs of Clay's fingers glided over the spot and she cringed, lowering her jaw into her collarbone.

“Don't!” Her eyes were wide, fierce, defiant.

In a strident voice, Clay asked, “He did that, didn't he?”

Denial would have been useless, admission folly. All she could do was avoid answering.

“Don't you dare say anything sympathetic or sentimental,” she warned him. “I couldn't take it right now.”

“Catherine . . .” But he didn't know what to say, and he couldn't sit here restraining her any longer. He didn't want to be involved in her life, yet he was. They both knew it. How could she get out of this car and carry his child away into some hazy future without both of them realizing how fully he was already involved in her life?

“Could I give you some money anyway?” he asked, almost in a whisper.

“No . . . please . . . I want nothing of you, whether you believe it or not.”

By now he believed it.

“Will you get in touch with me if you change your mind?”

“I won't.” She raised her elbow, pulling it by inches out of his fingers until he no longer commanded her.

“Good luck,” he said, his eyes on hers.

“Yeah, you too.”

Then he leaned over to push her door open, the back of his arm faintly brushing against her stomach, sending goosebumps shimmying through her, radiating outward from the spot.

Quickly she stepped out onto the sidewalk.

“Hey, wait a minute . . .” He leaned across the seat, peered up at her with a curiously sad expression about his eyes and mouth. “I—what's your last name again, Catherine?”

His question swept her with the insane urge to cry, an urge she'd felt earlier in the foyer when he'd failed to recognize her.

“Anderson. It's Anderson. So common it's easy to forget.”

Then she turned and ran into the house.

But when she was gone, Clay Forrester folded the arms of his expensively tailored sport coat over the wheel of his expensive sports car, laid his well-groomed head upon them, knowing he would never forget her name as long as he lived.

The only light burning on the lower level was the lamp on the console table. Reaching for it, Clay caught his reflection in the mirror. A troubled frown stared back at him.
Catherine Anderson,
he thought,
Catherine Anderson.
Not liking what he saw, he quickly snapped the light off.

Upstairs the door to his parents' bedroom suite was ajar, casting a pyramid of brightness into the hall. He stopped, arms akimbo, staring at the floor in the way he was wont to do when troubled, wondering what to say.

“Clay? We heard you get home. Come in.” His father moved into the open door. From the shadows Clay studied him, his heavy velour jacket shaped like a short kimono over his trousers. The older man's hair lay in soft silver waves around his healthy face. Momentarily Clay had the desire to grasp his father's neck and bury his face in the silver waves, feel that tanned cheek against his own as when he was a child and came running in for a morning hug.

“I didn't mean to keep you and Mother up.”

“We'd be up in any case. Come in.”

The ivory carpeting swallowed his slippered steps as Clay followed, to find his mother, wearing an ecru Eve Stillman dressing gown, her feet tucked up into the corner of a powder blue chair of watered silk.

It was like stepping back twenty years. Coming and going in their separate adult pursuits, they had little occasion to cross each other's paths except when dressed in street clothes. Gone now were the impeccable suits, high heels and jewelry from the woman curled protectively into the corner of that chair. Clay again experienced the strange sensation he'd had in the hall. He wanted to bury his head in her lap and be her little boy again.

But her face stopped him.

“We were having a glass of white wine to soothe the frayed nerves,” his father said, crossing to fill his glass from a crystal decanter while Clay took the chair that matched his mother's. “Would you like one?”

“No, none for me.” Sardonically he thought, wine, tricky wine.

“Clay, we assume nothing. Not yet,” his father began. “We are still waiting for your answer.”

Clay looked at his mother's anxious face, at that guardian-like pose which cried out that she didn't want to learn what might be true. His father stood, swirling the wine around and around in his glass, staring at it, waiting.

“It looks like Catherine is right,” Clay confessed, unable to tear his eyes away from his mother's shifting expression, her widening eyes which gaped momentarily before seeking her husband's. But Claiborne studied the expression on his son's face.

“Are you sure it's yours?” Claiborne asked forthrightly.

Clay worked his hands against each other, leaning forward, studying the floor. “It seems so.”

Stunned, Angela expressed what both she and her husband had been thinking for the past several hours. “Oh, Clay, you didn't even know her today. How can it possibly be true?”

“I only met her once, that's why I didn't recognize her at first.”

“Once was apparently quite enough!” Claiborne interjected caustically.

“I deserve that, I know.”

But suddenly Claiborne Forrester, father, became Claiborne Forrester, counselor. Silently he took up pacing for a moment, then stopped directly before his son, brandishing his wineglass as he often brandished a finger at a client too quick to admit his guilt. “Clay, I want you to make damn sure you are the man responsible before we take this thing one step further, do you understand?”

Clay sighed, stood up and ran four lean fingers through his hair. “Father, I appreciate your solicitude, and . . . believe me . . . when I first found out why she was here, I was just as surprised as you. That's why I took her out for a ride. I thought maybe she was just some kind of gold digger trying to stake a claim on me, but it seems she isn't. Catherine doesn't want a thing from me, or from you, for that matter.”

“Then why did she come here?”

“She claims it was all her father's idea.”

“What! And you believe her?”

“Whether I believe her or not, she doesn't want one red cent from me.”

His mother said hopefully, “Maybe she's had a sudden attack of conscience for blaming you unjustly.”

“Mother,” Clay sighed, gazing down at her. How defenseless she looked with her makeup cleansed off this way. It broke his heart to hurt her. He crossed to her chair, reached down to take both of her hands. “Mother, I won't make much of a lawyer if I can't cross-examine a witness any better than that, will I?” he asked gently. “If I could honestly say the baby's not mine, I would. But I can't say that. I'm reasonably sure it is.”

Her startled eyes pleaded with her son's. “But, Clay, you don't know anything about this girl. How can you be sure? There could . . .” Her lips quivered. “Could have been others.”

He squeezed the backs of her hands, looked into her despairing eyes, then spoke in the softest of tones. “Mother, she was a virgin. The dates match up.”

Angela wanted to cry out, “Why, Clay, why?” But she knew it would do no good. He, too, was hurting now—she could see it in his eyes—so she only returned the pressure of his hands. But without warning, two tears slid down her cheeks, not only for herself, but for him, as well. She tugged at his hands, reaching to pull him down and kneel as she held him.

He felt a keen, sharp pain at having disappointed her, a deep welling love at her reaction.

“Oh, Clay,” she said when she could speak once more, “if only you were six years old this would be so much easier. I could just punish you and send you to your room.”

He smiled a little sadly. “If I were six, you wouldn't have to.”

Her own wistful smile trembled and was gone. “Don't humor me, Clay. I'm deeply disappointed in you. Give me your hanky.” He fished it out of his pocket. “I thought I taught you”—she dabbed her eyes, groping for a graceful phrase—”respect for women.”

“You did, you both did.” Abruptly Clay stood, plunged his hands in his trouser pockets and turned away. “But for God's sake, I'm twenty-five years old. Did you really think I'd never had anything to do with women at my age?”

“A mother doesn't think about it one way or the other.”

“I'd be abnormal if I were pure as the driven snow. Why, you and Father were married already by the time he was twenty-five.”

“Exactly,” Claiborne interjected. “We were responsible enough to put things into their proper perspective. I married your mother first, no matter what my baser instincts advised me while we dated.”

“I suppose you'll preach me a sermon if I say things are different now.”

“You bet I will. Clay, how could you let a thing like this happen on a
blind date,
and with a girl like that! It might be understandable if you were engaged to the girl or had been seeing her for a while. If you . . . if you loved her. But don't stand there and ask me to condone your indiscriminate sex, because I will not!”

“I didn't expect you to.”

“You should have had more sense!” the older man blustered, pacing feverishly.

“At the time sense didn't enter into it,” Clay said dryly, and across the room Claiborne's eyes blazed.

“That goes without saying, since you obviously hadn't enough wits to see that she didn't get pregnant out of it!”

“Claiborne!”

“Well, dammit, Angela, he's an adult who
has
used the brains of a child to let a thing like this happen. I expect a man of twenty-five to display twenty-five years' worth of common sense!”

“We each assumed the other had taken precautions,” Clay explained tiredly.

“Assumed! Assumed! Yes, you've assumed yourself right into the hands of that obnoxious, money-hungry father of hers with your stupidity! The man is a raving idiot, but a shrewd one. He has every intention of taking us to the cleaners!”

Clay couldn't deny it; even Catherine had said it was true.

“You're not liable for my actions.”

“No, I'm not. But do you think reasoning like that is common to a man like Anderson? He wants restitution made for his little girl's seduction and he won't rest till it's made to suit the figure he has in mind.”

“Did he mention how much he wants?” Clay asked, afraid to hear the answer.

“He didn't have to. I can tell his mind works best with big, round numbers. And Clay, something else has come up that bears consideration.” The glance he gave his wife told their son it was something Angela, too, knew about. “I've been approached by members of a local caucus to consider running for county attorney. I hadn't mentioned it to you because I thought it best to wait until you'd passed your bar exams and become part of the firm. But frankly it's something your mother and I have been considering quite seriously. I don't have to tell you how detrimental a little muckraking can be to a potential candidate. It won't matter to the voters who the source is.”

“Catherine said she has her plans made, although she won't tell me what they are. But once she leaves home, he won't have a leg to stand on as far as a paternity suit is concerned. She refuses to be a part of his scheme.”

“Quit fooling yourself, Clay. You're almost a lawyer, and I am one. We both know that a paternity suit is one of the hardest nuts in the bucket to crack. It's not the outcome of a suit I'm worried about, it's the reverberations it can stir up. And there's one more issue we haven't touched on yet.” He looked down into his glass, then into Clay's eyes. “Even if the man does decide to back down and cease his demands, there is a moral obligation here that you cannot deny. If you do, I will be far, far more disappointed in you than I am right now.”

Clay's head came up with a jerk. “You aren't saying you expect me to marry her, are you?”

His father studied him, dissatisfaction written on every line, every plane of his face. “I don't know, Clay, I don't know. All I know is that I have attempted by both example and word to teach you the value of honesty. Is it honest for you to leave the woman high and dry?”

“Yes, if it's what she wants.”

“Clay, the woman is probably scared senseless right now. She's caught between a stranger she doesn't even know and that raving lunatic of a father. Don't you think she deserves every bit of cooperation she can get from you?”

“You've said it for me. I'm a stranger to her. Do you think she would want to marry a stranger?”

“She could do worse. In spite of the thoughtlessness and insensibility you've displayed recently, I don't think you're a hopeless case.”

“I would be if I married her. Jesus, I don't even like the girl.”

“In the first place, don't use profanity before your mother, and in the second, let's stop calling her a girl. She's a full-grown woman, as is entirely obvious. As a woman, she should be willing to listen to reason.”

“I don't understand what you're driving at. You can see what kind of a family she comes from. Her father is a lunatic; her mother is browbeaten; look at the way they dress, where they come from. That's obviously not the kind of family you'd like me to marry into, yet you stand there talking as if you want me to ask her.”

“You should have considered her background before you got her pregnant, Clay.”

“How could I when I didn't even know her then?”

Claiborne Forrester had the innate sense of timing peculiar to every successful lawyer, and he used the elongated moment of silence now to speak dramatically before he cinched his case. “Exactly. Which, rather than exonerate you, as you think the fact should, creates—in my estimation—an even greater responsibility toward her and the child. You acted without a thought for the repercussions. Even now you seem to have forgotten there
is
a child involved here, and that it's yours.”

“It's hers!”

His father's jaw hardened and his eyes iced over. “When did you turn so callous, Clay?”

“Tonight when I walked in here and the buzzards swooped down.”

“Stop this, you two,” Angela demanded in her quiet way, rising from her chair. “Neither one of you is making sense, and you'll regret this later if you go on. Clay, your father is right. You do have a moral obligation to that woman. Whether or not it extends to asking her to marry you is something none of us should try to decide tonight.” Crossing to her husband she laid a hand on his chest. “Darling, we all need to think about this. Clay has said the girl doesn't want to be married. He's said she's refused his offer of money. Let's let the two of them settle it between them after everyone has cooled down a little bit.”

“Angela, I think our son needs—”

She placed her fingers on his lips. “Claiborne, you're running on emotions now, and you've told me countless times that a good lawyer must not do that. Let's not discuss it anymore at the moment.”

He looked into her eyes, which were luminous with emotion. They were large, lovely oval eyes of warm hazel which needed none of the artifice she used daily to enhance them. Claiborne Forrester, at age fifty-nine, loved them as much now devoid of makeup as he had when he was twenty, and she'd used it to woo him. He covered the hand which lay on his chest. There was no need for him to answer. He bowed to her judgment, giving her a reaffirmation of his love with a gentle pressure of his warm palm.

Watching them thus, Clay felt again the security which emanated from them, which had emanated from them as long as he could remember. What he saw before him was what he wanted in his life with a woman. He wanted to duplicate the love and trust shining from his parents' eyes when they looked at one another. He did not want to marry a girl whose last name he'd forgotten, whose home had been fraught with the antithesis of the love he'd grown up with.

His mother turned, and behind her, his father's hands rested upon her shoulders. Together they looked at their son.

“Your mother is right. Let's sleep on it, Clay. Things have a way of becoming clearer with time. It lends perspective.”

“I hope so.” Clay's hands hung disconsolately in his pockets.

To Angela he looked like an overgrown boy in that scolded pose, his hair far from neat. Intuition told her what he was struggling with, and wisely she waited for him to get it out.

“I'm so damn sorry,” Clay choked, and only then did she open her arms to him. Over her shoulder he sought his father's eyes, and in a moment the arms of the velour robe were there to rub his shoulders in brief reassurance.