The Ashford Affair (45 page)

“There was still Teddy,” said Aunt Anna. “Teddy would have been one or two at the time. The laws regarding legitimacy didn’t change until 1976. Until then, even if the parents married each other after, the child was still legally a bastard.” She spoke with the grim certainty of someone who had studied her subject. “So you see, Addie had a reason for making sure Bea stayed lost.”

“But what about Bea?” Clemmie asked logically. “If she were alive, wouldn’t she have tried to get back to you?”

“Unless Addie paid her off—or threatened her. Who knows? But I know my mother was there, in Nairobi, that day. I know she tried to come back to us.”

Something about the way she said it sent a shiver down Clemmie’s spine.

“I was too young, then, to do anything about it. My father and Addie had the final say.” Aunt Anna stared out over Clemmie’s shoulder, a million miles and sixty years away. “But I always knew my mother was out there, somewhere. I went looking for her, later.”

Clemmie looked at her aunt. “Did you ever find her?”

“No.” Aunt Anna ground her cigarette into the ashtray. “No.”

TWENTY-SIX

New York, 1971

“Thank you, you’re very kind.”

If one more person told her how sorry he was, Addie would scream. She would scream and scream until the china ornaments on the mantel shattered and the glass in the pictures cracked, until the windows dissolved into tiny pools of sand and salt and the wind howled through the open apertures from the park beyond.

Her son was dead. Her baby boy. How was that right or fair or just? It had been a heart attack, they said, on Metro-North. One moment he was sitting there, with his briefcase and his paper; the next he was flat out on the floor, gasping for help that didn’t come, his own body turned against him.

Why Teddy? He was one of life’s golden creatures, good-natured to a fault, open and kind. Admittedly, he had married a creature of quite staggering vapidity, but that wasn’t the sort of mistake that killed; one didn’t die of boredom or suffer heart attacks from it. He’d been a big, bluff, hearty man, Teddy, fond of his drink, but equally fond of the golf course and the tennis court. He should have outlived them all.

Who had ever heard of heart trouble in their family? Addie’s was still going strong, for all that it felt like breaking. As for her own father and mother, they hadn’t lived long enough to tell. It was staggering to think that they, forever old in her imagination, had been younger than Teddy when they died. It crawled over her like a creeping chill, the knowledge that she was older than her parents had ever been, older than her son would ever be, her son, her son, the only child of her body.

“At least you have something to remind you of him,” said the particularly vapid wife of Addie’s stockbroker, looking sentimentally at Teddy’s children, arranged prettily around their mother, the girls in neat black dresses, Ed in a black suit that looked as though it pinched.

“Yes,” said Addie. “They’re a great comfort.”

They reminded her of Teddy not at all. They were all Patty’s. Addie had never liked Patty.

She liked her just as little now, although one would think they’d be linked in their common grief, if nothing else. But Patty’s wailings had set Addie’s teeth on edge, nothing about Teddy, about his loss to the world, but all her own woes; how was she to survive, how was she to live, now that Teddy had gone? Addie had patted Patty’s hand mechanically, blotting out her selfish cries, the endless repetition of “me,” “I,” “me.” Such a selfish kind of grief.

Addie’s grief was selfish, too, she supposed. All grief was, in the end.

She grieved for all the things Teddy might have done and hadn’t: the grandchildren he would never dandle, the tennis matches he would never play, the stars that would never shine for him again. She grieved for the children who had never been, the younger siblings Teddy had never known, two of them, one after the other, barely formed, not even recognizable as babies, too early for headstones, bundled out of the house and buried in the garden. Teddy had only been told that Mummy was sick; he’d sat on the edge of her bed and babbled at her in his own childish patois while she’d tried not to let him see how she was weeping, the tears seeping soundlessly down the side of her face.

After the last miscarriage, the doctors in Nairobi had told her she couldn’t have other children. She’d told Frederick she didn’t mind; three was more than enough for them, what with school fees and the like. They had their two girls and a boy; anything else would be sheer excess.

Their girls. They were always very careful to treat all the children equally. At least, they tried. It wasn’t an effort on Frederick’s part; he loved them all equally, his children, although Addie had always suspected that he had a special place in his heart for Anna, his wild child.

Anna had come back from Hawaii for the funeral, bringing with her the latest husband, a playwright of some sort, with a bristly reddish brown mustache and a mustard-colored velvet blazer over wide-legged tweed pants. His skin was violently sunburned beneath the extraneous facial hair, a relic of their barefoot beach wedding.

On Anna, the sun didn’t burn so much as kiss; she was a fashionable pale biscuit color, her hair strikingly blond against her tanned face. Her minidress wasn’t at all the thing for a funeral, but at least she’d worn black. Addie had wondered if she would. Anna liked to provoke, sometimes just to provoke, but she had known better this time.

Addie’s heart felt as though it would crack, as though everything in it would leak out through the broken shards until there was nothing more than a puddle on the hardwood floor, a puddle and a confusion of black clothes and Bea’s diamond clip sparkling in the midst of it all.

Anna murmured something in the playwright’s ear. In her ridiculously high shoes, she was tall enough that she had to lean to speak in his ear. She had Frederick’s height, Anna—Frederick’s and Bea’s. Next to them, Addie had always felt like a charwoman who had strayed into Olympus. Even now, her stepdaughter could make her feel the same way.

They’d brought the playwright’s son, nine and solemn, with a bowl haircut and a bow tie. Seeing him made Addie think painfully of Teddy at that age. Not that Teddy had ever been quiet or solemn; he had always been outgoing and assured. But, then, Teddy had had the advantage of two parents who openly adored him, sisters who cosseted him, not like this poor boy, dragged willy-nilly into an alien tribe, caressed and cooed at by a mother he had known for a month.

Anna stroked the boy’s head in a careless caress. She played at mother the way small girls played house, dropping the doll as soon as a more entertaining toy came along. Addie would have thought that Anna, of all people, would have known better, would have remembered how much it hurt to be left behind.

Perhaps it might have been different if Anna had had one of her own; perhaps then her mothering instinct might have been more, well, steady. Addie wondered about that, from time to time.

At the time, it had seemed so simple.

Anna had come to her in confidence. The father was married, she said. One of her professors. She hadn’t apologized, she’d simply stated the facts, and Addie had been reminded, again, of Bea, who was always most brazen when she knew herself most likely in the wrong. Anna wanted the child “taken care of” and she assumed that Addie, with her connections to natal hospitals, would be able to help—without telling Frederick.

She had arranged it all: the flight to Switzerland, the clinic. Frederick had thought Anna was skiing with friends. It had hurt Addie terribly, lying to him—he was her other half, a piece of herself—but Anna had been adamant; her father wasn’t to know. If Addie wouldn’t promise, Anna would take care of matters herself. So Addie had promised, telling herself that it was for the best, that it freed Addie to have the chances that Bea hadn’t. Besides, there would always be more children, children with the right person.

But there had been no children after that. Anna had dropped out of art school and grad school and the curatorial training program at Sotheby’s. She had flitted from career to career, setting herself up as an interior decorator one month, a fashion designer the next. Mostly, she did exactly what her mother had done. She married and married and married again.

Addie wondered how long this one would last. Anna had made short work of the first four. In the case of the last one, the divorce had taken longer than the actual marriage.

And then there was Marjorie, moving efficiently through the crowd with her tray of canapés, making sure glasses were placed on coasters and used napkins discarded. She was a fighter, Marjorie. Addie just wished she hadn’t had to fight quite so much. She had wanted so much more for her, for both Bea’s girls. At least Marjorie was back in New York now, not out in California with that dreadful Bill. And she had brought Clemmie with her.

Clemmie was holding out a tray of canapés, her mother’s chosen delegate. “Would you like a cheese puff, Granny Addie?”

For a moment, Clemmie looked so like Bea that it staggered her, not Bea as she had been at the end, but Bea as she had first met her. They’d had velvet dresses like that for best, she and Bea, black velvet with a broad white lace collar and thick stockings underneath. Nanny had tied back their hair at the sides with broad velvet bows.

“Granny?” Clemmie said, and the accent was wrong, American, slightly nasal, not Bea’s cut-glass tones, not Bea at all, but Clemmie.

“No, thank you, darling,” Addie said. “Have you brought one to Grandpa?”

Clemmie dutifully trotted off, holding the tray very carefully, making sure the cheese puffs didn’t skid. She took her duties as passer of hors d’oeuvres very seriously. She took everything seriously, not at all like Bea, who, even in her and Addie’s childhood, had blazed through life with careless panache.

Addie watched as Clemmie held out the tray to Frederick, and the expression of love on his face made her heart twist. He bent, painfully, to take a cheese puff from the tray. He never could say no to any of the grandchildren.

He looked so old, her Frederick. Those lines, when had they had the time to etch themselves so deeply in his face? When had his back begun to stoop, his chin begun to sag? She hadn’t noticed it until now, until Teddy’s death took the certainty from Frederick’s step and the smile from his face. It was like viewing a distorted mirror, on the one side the Frederick she remembered, forever twenty-one, a young man in evening togs holding out a mouse, on the other side this strange old man, twisted and gaunt, bent double with a hacking cough that wouldn’t go away. She’d tried to get him to see a doctor, but he’d sworn it was nothing, it would clear up soon enough. Cough and cough and cough, all through the long, sleepless night.

Overnight, they were old, truly old. It boggled the mind to think that if Bea had lived, she would have been old now, too. Addie remembered how panicked Bea had been, at the ripe old age of twenty-eight, to be losing her bloom. Perhaps it was kinder that she hadn’t lived, hadn’t lived to see her skin sag under her chin, as Addie’s did, hadn’t lived to see her belly crease with babies who were never born, hadn’t lived to see her children die before her, a pain almost beyond bearing.

Over the long, prosperous years, Addie had felt sorry for Bea, for all she had missed—sorry and a little bit afraid, as though, if she weren’t careful, she might glance over her shoulder and find Bea following her, come to demand her forfeit, her price for all those years of happiness Addie had stolen from her, her husband, her children.

Was Teddy the price?

She was being absurd. It was only in Victorian fairy tales that one found such direct equivalencies, a child for a child, a loss for a loss. It did seem frighteningly neat, though; she had been so scared for Teddy’s sake, all those years, chivvying her family from Nairobi to New York, always afraid for Teddy, for Teddy’s place in the world. She had felt so guilty sometimes, so guilty for being grateful that her cousin was dead, her cousin whom she had once loved more than anyone else in the world; she had felt guilty for the thrill of panic she had felt when Anna called Bea’s name in the Nairobi bazaar, for the late-night pacing and planning that followed. Addie had refused to entertain the very possibility; she had shut her eyes and her ears—for Teddy, for Teddy’s sake.

But Teddy was gone.

She wondered what Bea would look like now, what sort of lines life might have driven into her face, lines from joys and griefs and everything in between. Would she have grown into herself eventually? Would she have quieted, in her older age, from that madcap thing she had become? Or would she have gone the route of so many of her friends, taking ever younger and younger lovers, her elegance a thing of paint and illusion, addicted to the drugs that had once been playthings?

It was nothing but speculation, of course. Bea had been gone forty-four years now: three years longer than Teddy had been alive.

But Addie couldn’t stop remembering, after all these years, a child’s cry in the Nairobi bazaar and a discarded shoe that ought to have been green instead of blue.

New York, 2000

Clemmie loitered outside the faculty offices in Fayerweather Hall, pretending interest in a bulletin board that advertised historical Pictionary for grad students, extra tutoring for undergrads, and ten bucks a pop for inclusion in someone’s psych experiment.

In her heavy jeans and sweater she felt like she was unsuccessfully undercover. Male and female alike seemed to wear the same uniform of jeans and sweatshirt, women with their hair twisted into scrunchy buns, a handful of the men sporting the goatee du jour. A harried grad student, dressed all in black, coffee cup in one hand, armload of papers in the other, hurried along the hallway, miraculously managing to keep her coffee upright while juggling fifty-odd midterms.

The door in front of Clemmie was a careful inch ajar, just far enough that she could hear the murmur of voices, one young and very unhappy. The card on the door read: JONATHAN SCHWARTZ, and under it, in smaller letters,
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
.