The Jewels of Tessa Kent (17 page)

Oh, how she wished that she’d married an ordinary man and never left Bridgeport, an ordinary man who would have given her a pack of ordinary kids who would have all been under her maternal rule, living in an ordinary house in which she would be the queen. In a home like that, creatures like her daughter would be so alien to her way of life that she’d either be too busy to read about them or she could idolize them in a casual void the way people had idolized Grace Kelly when she got married. Oh, yes! The woman she envied was the simple woman she had not been since the day she met Sandor Horvath. She envied Agnes, the prettiest, youngest Riley sister. You couldn’t be accused of envying your own younger self, could you? That couldn’t possibly be a mortal sin, especially when your younger self didn’t want anything special except what all the other girls she knew had expected and received.

Agnes fell into a reverie from which she was aroused by one name. Grace Kelly.
Princess Grace
was giving her daughter’s wedding reception! Princess Grace, who represented the ultimate dream of every Irish Catholic girl, Princess Grace who was living that dream every day. That was it, that was the envy she’d known it was impossible for her to feel toward her own flesh and blood. If she envied anyone it must be Princess Grace, and that kind of envy was too silly to even mention to a priest. It would be as ridiculous as telling him you had sinned in the moment or two you spent scrutinizing a beautiful model on the cover of a magazine.

As she composed herself, more and more of the details Teresa had given her in the last minutes of their phone conversation returned to Agnes. Private planes; the Hôtel de Paris, which must be the best hotel in Monaco or Monte Carlo or whatever they called it exactly; a wedding luncheon in the palace—she’d be at the bride’s table with Princess Grace and Prince Rainier. The mother of the bride was always the most important person at a wedding besides the bride and groom themselves. And her sisters knew nothing yet!

Oh, this would destroy them, this would cap everything, this would put them away for life, they’d never recover, she thought, suddenly full of energy. Her sisters had been thrilled when Teresa won the Oscar for
Little
Women, but that was nothing, nothing compared to this!

Who could remember who’d won last year’s Oscar for Best Supporting Actress? Nobody. Who could forget that your sister’s daughter had been given a wedding by Princess Grace? Nobody. It would be the high point in the lives of the entire Riley family, the story that would be told over and over until everyone who had been there was long gone.

Agnes was poised to pick up the phone to call her eldest sister when she suddenly remembered Teresa saying she wanted Maggie to be her flower girl. Oh, no, Teresa, she thought, you’re never getting married in
church before a priest with your illegitimate daughter walking before you, strewing flower petals, with no one in the world to suspect. No, my girl, sinner that you are, that’s not going to happen while I’m alive to prevent it. You’re not getting away with that the way you got away with everything else. That would be a sin indeed, a sin in the eyes of the Holy Mother herself. She didn’t have to consult a priest about something so self-evident. Yet, what could she do to stop it?

Hastily Agnes ran over various scenarios. She knew Sandor would agree with her about this; he’d think Teresa’s brazen plan even more a defiance of the sacredness of the Sacrament of Marriage than she did. She’d tell Maggie that it was a grown-up party and children weren’t invited. She’d get somebody trustworthy to take care of Maggie for the few days that they’d be away. Perhaps Helen Kelly. After all, she was Maggie’s godmother. Whether she liked Helen or Helen liked her was unimportant. Helen would be fine to deal with Maggie for a short time. And she’d tell Teresa that Maggie had developed a high fever and something that the doctor suspected might be German measles the day before the flight. There was nothing more terrifying to any group of women, if even one of them was possibly pregnant, than German measles.

There was nothing she could do to prevent Teresa from marrying a man she barely knew in a religious ceremony in front of her entire family with Princess Grace gloriously, unbelievably, conferring her unspoken blessing on the whole hasty, misbegotten procedure. But Teresa wasn’t going to be allowed to have absolutely everything she wanted. Someone would be missing, someone whose absence would be noted. Maggie wasn’t going to be part of this … this … sacrilege.

P
romise me it’s over,” Tessa demanded faintly, out of her haze of exhaustion as she and Luke drove up the Moyenne Corniche on their way to Luke’s farmhouse just below the high-perched town of Èze-Village, where they were going to spend their honeymoon. “Promise me we never have to do
that
again.”

Luke glanced at her profile. Tessa’s splendid head was thrown back on the leather seat. Her eyes were closed, and the faint mauve shadows that he could glimpse on the tender skin under her lower lashes were infinitely touching. Her lips, so ardently, alluringly prominent, were parted slightly in fatigue. Only Tessa’s flashing waves of hair, liberated from their elaborate wedding updo and taken by the wind, still seemed to possess any spirit. In the light of the approaching sunset, he thought he could see an occasional red glint in the darkness of its strands.

“Not unless you insist on repeating our vows on our tenth anniversary,” he answered her tenderly. “In which case I’d have to agree. Of course I’d try to talk you out of it. I’ll say ‘paparazzi’ over and over again until you’ve changed your mind.”

“You’d just have to say it once,” Tessa sighed, thinking of the outrageous mobs of photographers and journalists who had only been held in check by Monaco’s formidable police force. “We should have eloped, Princess Grace or no Princess Grace. I’ve learned my lesson. Never let anyone give you a wedding no matter how generous she is. No, make that, especially if she’s generous. I couldn’t have taken one more minute of being a bride. Is a person supposed to enjoy her own wedding?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t think so, darling, I’ve never heard of anyone who did.”

“Then why did we do it?”

“It’s a rite of passage or something.”

Or something, Tessa silently agreed. Something she should have had the imagination and good sense to have avoided. And most of it was her fault. The wedding itself, this morning, had been a dreamlike blaze of white: clustered garlands of white flowers spilling down from large baskets suspended under dozens of splendid crystal chandeliers, high banks of white flowers and tall white candles at the altar. Her progress down the center aisle of the vast stone cathedral had seemed like a promenade in a garden, a slow, proud promenade toward her beloved. Oh, the wedding was a dream and the only details she could remember about it were the times she’d peeked at Luke’s face as he knelt on his prie-dieu during the ceremony and the joyful strength of his voice when he answered that he took Teresa for his lawful wife, according to the rite of their Holy Mother the Church.

If she hadn’t had the idea of inviting all her family, every last aunt, uncle, and cousin, maybe the three days preceding the wedding might have been delightful. Maybe they could have been just a question of being responsive to everybody, of thanking people over and over again for their good wishes, unconcerned about what they were really thinking or feeling—since brides only had to be suitably bridal to fulfill their role. But no,
she’d been greedy, she’d wanted them all to witness her happiness, and that’s where she’d gone so very wrong.

It had never occurred to her that her relatives would feel utterly out of place from the minute they arrived in the Principality of Monaco. Her concept of family gatherings were those of a child or a teenager, memories of a relaxed clan of giggling, gossipy, warm-hearted women and beer-drinking, joking men, all good-natured and feeling at home in their skins. But during the entire time in Monaco they’d been on their best behavior, as stiff as if they’d been stuffed, wretchedly self-conscious in their obviously new clothes, afraid to make any kind of gaffe, and solemn and careful of speech in a manner more suitable to a funeral than to a wedding.

They’d all but turned to stone in the presence of the prince and princess at the rehearsal dinner Luke had given at the International Sporting Club; they’d danced so sedately at the wedding luncheon in the palace itself that it was hard to remember them pulling up the rugs at home and showing off their prowess. They hadn’t even dared to have one glass too many of the champagne. She and Luke and even Princess Grace had worked hard to jolly them up, but it was her own small Hollywood contingent and Luke’s executives and their wives, almost all of them Australian and not burdened with awestruck preoccupation with the icon of Grace Kelly, who managed to rescue the rehearsal dinner and wedding reception and provide some suitable note of joie de vivre.

And even the wedding lunch wasn’t the worst of it, Tessa reflected, too frazzled to open her eyes and look at one of the world’s most thrilling views of the Mediterranean as Luke drove skillfully up the steep, twisting mountain road to Èze. The single worst thing of all was the way her aunts had treated her mother. It had started when her parents had arrived without Maggie, on a different plane than the one that had brought the rest of the family. Maybe if little Maggie, sick at home, had been there, too, her humanity would
have made her aunts realize that their sister Agnes had not been transformed into the Queen Mother.

Much of Tessa’s time had been spent at the Hôtel de Paris with her mother and her aunts, and it had grown more and more painful to watch the … reverence, there was no other word … with which her mother’s sisters surrounded her. Her mother had been elevated beyond any sisterly relationship.

Agnes Horvath had become the closest thing to a Grace Kelly that the Riley family possessed, and oh, how her mother had rubbed it in. She’d taken every chance to glorify herself, to position herself on a different level from the others, to indicate in a dozen ways, both verbally and with her dignified body language, that she was, quite simply, better than they were. More successful, more sophisticated, and infinitely more blessed, not by God, but by her own hand, her own will, her own vision. She had somehow, over the years, caused this entire event to take place, she was responsible for this grandness-beyond-anyone’s-dreams. She, Agnes Horvath, was the center of the wedding as far as her sisters were concerned.

She wouldn’t have begrudged her mother a second of her glory, Tessa thought, if she hadn’t known how she really felt. Luke, in the unenviable position of a man who was marrying a much younger bride, had made a special effort with her parents, and she could see her father taking his measure and judging her choice a wise one, in the same dry, suspicious way he had finally approved of her agent and her business manager. Her mother had not so much warmed up to Luke as she had cooled down from the anger of their phone conversation. He was different from what she had expected, so unpretentious, so charming and friendly, so attentive to her, that Agnes had finally whispered to Tessa, “Well, I must say I can see why you made this foolish, hasty decision.” Those words were as close to a blessing as she was likely to ever receive from her mother, Tessa realized.

As for her cousins, the very same cousins she used to have so much fun with, they hadn’t managed to feel any comfort with her, Tessa realized. It wasn’t as if they treated her as someone who was better than they were, it was as if she had become so
different
from anybody they could possibly have a conversation with that there was absolutely no common ground, no way to be human together.

And all their little children! The ones she’d so grandly insisted on including—was that the way kids acted now? Constant squabbles, whining, teasing, talking back to their parents, showing no signs of manners?

There had been too many occasions when she’d been ashamed of her family, Tessa admitted to herself, ashamed of having been ashamed.

She’d always been the petted baby of the family, but now her cousins and their spouses and their children looked at her with eyes big with wonder and awe and too much admiration to be comfortable for them and certainly for her.

Is that what winning an Oscar did to you, she wondered? Did it happen in the families of everybody who’d won? Or was it because of Princess Grace giving the wedding? Or was it her engagement ring, which none of the women would try on, no matter how much she tried to get them to? Was it the visible difference between the Teresa they’d known when she was fourteen, before she’d moved to California, and the way she looked now, six years later, Tessa Kent grown up, after all, and the product of the constant polishing process that is professionally imposed on any working actress?

Families, she thought, families. They remained the same in your mind, but you yourself weren’t allowed to change more than some predetermined amount or you didn’t belong to them anymore. They cast you out once you’d left their unspoken but clearly defined frame of reference, once you’d gone too far up or too far down.