The Jewels of Tessa Kent (60 page)

Now, on a honeyed Sunday in early September, glazed with topaz light that unmistakably trembled on the verge of autumn, Daisy was a little more than three months old. All of her short life had been spent in a restored farmhouse in Fairfield County, Connecticut, surrounded by her court of Maggie, Tessa, and Sam. Only Barney went to the city each day, riding his bike back and forth, and even he took three-day weekends.

After the March auction, Tessa had kept herself busy house-hunting in the countryside for weeks, until she’d discovered this old farmhouse with its forty overgrown but flourishing acres, its wealth of noble trees surrounded by low stone walls. She’d known at once that it was destined to be hers, and then Maggie and Barney’s. She bought it overnight and quickly made it totally habitable by giving Mark Hampton carte blanche if he guaranteed to finish in two months.
Barney and Maggie hadn’t found a larger apartment yet, and Tessa wanted to give them the house so that they could move into it as soon as the baby was born.

It was a home place; it had been a home place for more than two hundred years, and its last owner had been careful to restore the plumbing and add a new kitchen without disturbing its old-fashioned charm, a charm of nooks and corners and dormers and wide porches and cool, low-ceilinged rooms with wide floorboards and huge fireplaces. It was both a rambling and an embracing house, easily large enough for a big family, an unplanned masterpiece of sheltering calm, casually done in an informal style that offered deep comfort and gaiety, and an abiding sense of repose.

It was, Tessa knew, more than a bit of a grand gesture, to give a young couple a newly done-up country house, but she had made a pact with herself to do absolutely everything she wanted most to do, and not ask permission of anyone.

Once the auction was over, Tessa felt recklessly free and rambunctious, as if she’d been let out of school after a long, difficult day of detention. She arranged for the bills for the future upkeep of the house to be paid by her estate, and made no apology for the sheer amount of pleasure it gave her to be able to think of her family spending summers and weekends and long Christmas and Easter vacations here for decades—even generations—to come. After all, who could question the right of a grandmother to celebrate the birth of her first grandchild?

Every morning and afternoon, for three-quarters of an hour, at what had been identified as Prime Daisy Time, after her need for sleep had been satisfied and before she grew hungry again, Tessa and Daisy were left alone together, communing with each other on a wide porch swing heaped with pillows. Daisy alternated between lying on a baby seat that supported her back and held up her head so she could recline at ease and look out regally at the world, and a place in the curve of
Tessa’s arm, where she snuggled, nuzzled, chuckled, slavered, and cuddled contentedly, until she felt the need to exercise her limbs and grab anything of interest—Tessa’s hair, Tessa’s pearls, Tessa’s fingers, Tessa’s eyelashes, Tessa’s clothes, and, lately, Tessa’s green diamond ring, which she had taken to sucking avidly.

“Don’t you wish it weren’t September, Daisy?” Tessa inquired in the low, intimate voice she always used with the baby. “Don’t you have the feeling that the summer has come and gone in a flash, that swift, splendid July, that basking, brilliant August—over already? I can hardly believe it. I wish I could tell what’s going on in your mind, you preserve a fascinating mystery by not speaking, Daisy; it’s the old Garbo ploy, isn’t it? I realize you’re not old enough yet to measure time in any conventional way. Perhaps a month is but an hour to you, perhaps a lifetime, but I’m convinced that you know more than anybody gives you credit for. If you keep this up the boys are going to say that Daisy Webster’s wise beyond her years, are you prepared for that?”

Daisy, in her chariot, held out her arms to Tessa with a little cry. Carefully Tessa undid her tiny seat belt, lifted her up, and tucked her into the cradle of her arm. The baby immediately snatched Tessa’s finger and put the ring in her mouth.

“I do believe you must be teething, Daisy,” Tessa told her in admiration. “So young to start, or are you right on schedule? And just why do you look at me like that? Why is there an ever-so-faint indication of indignation in your gaze? No one has questioned your immense dignity … no one would dare. I don’t know anything about infant development, my blue-eyed girl, but I wish I understood why you have so many questions in your unblinking eyes. Is it because there’s so much to learn, or could it be that I interest you? If you’re about to have a tooth, shouldn’t your hair be longer? Not that I’m complaining, but the women of this family rather pride themselves on their fine heads of hair. Aha, so that’s
what you wanted to hear, so that’s what inspires your smile? A compliment in advance of performance—I can’t say I’m surprised.”

She’d see Daisy sit up, Tessa thought, as she returned the baby’s smile and let her play tug-of-war with her finger. She was a strong child. At the rate at which Daisy was growing, she’d certainly be sitting up on her own sometime in the next few months.

She’d see Daisy crawl. But would she see her struggle to her feet holding onto a piece of furniture? Or take her first step? Or totter from one piece of furniture to another? Tessa willfully blinded herself to all but one conviction:
It was not impossible
.

She’d recently graduated, if you could use such a word, Tessa mused, from the simple pain patch to M.S. Contin, a form of time-release morphine sulfate that lasted from eight to twelve hours. Between the two she kept herself pain-free and she’d adapted her schedule so that she felt most alert between Prime Daisy Time and that precise moment in the afternoon when the infant started to fret and it was time to let Maggie whisk her away.

Baby time suited her as well as Daisy, Tessa reflected. Naps had become a frequent refuge for her, even if they didn’t have the effect they had on the tiny girl, for whom a nap meant a total transformation. Daisy had two distinct personalities, divided by sleep: divine and horrible. She was privileged to enjoy only the divine.

If only she were one-tenth as hungry as this baby! Maggie was breast-feeding Daisy six times a day, and her appetite was a never-ending astonishment. Sometimes Tessa stretched out in an old wicker chair and watched companionably as Maggie nursed Daisy on the porch, but at other times, when it was more convenient for Maggie to nurse her in the big, cozy kitchen, she drifted away, unobtrusively.

Kitchen smells, even those that had once been most delicious, had grown intolerable. She kept a supply of vanilla ice cream loaded with butterfat in the freezer,
and if she allowed small spoonfuls to melt on her tongue, one after another, until she could hold no more, it was the easiest way to absorb nourishment. Carlie, the cook who did for them all, along with a local woman who came in to clean four days a week, had a way of making a chicken sandwich that was almost as easy to eat as ice cream, concocted of poached chicken breasts sliced thin, on triangles of delicate white bread without crusts, thickly layered with mayonnaise. She’d also developed a flawless vichyssoise, rich with heavy cream. White food, almost odorless food, that Tessa made herself eat in spite of a powerful disinclination.

Although she refused to climb on a scale, or look at herself naked in a mirror, Tessa knew by the way her clothes fit that she’d lost an enormous amount of weight. Months ago she’d taken to wearing her full linen shirts outside of trousers, tightly belted so that they wouldn’t fall off her hips. Her clothes floated around her, hiding her outline. Every day she made sure to get enough sun to maintain a glowing tan. She used the brightest red lipstick she could find, and she let her dark hair float in its deep, shining waves without restraint.

A girl of summer, she mocked herself, as she looked quickly in the mirror and then looked away. She had the same lack of interest in the still-undiminished beauty of her face as she had in the pile of scripts that lay, growing daily, on the porch near her swing. She hadn’t told Fiona the truth, hadn’t told Roddy, hadn’t told Aaron, hadn’t told Mimi, with whom she’d never lost touch. They all thought it was her refusal to be separated from Sam, by a year of location filming, that had made her decide not to play Cassie. Better that than their shock, their solicitude, their pity, and their inevitable phone calls, Tessa thought, jealously hoarding her energy for the people she loved the most.

As July and August had passed, a general agreement had been reached, almost without discussion, that they wouldn’t move back to New York this year. Sam
worked on his new book for hours every day. Maggie spent some of her time, while Daisy napped, communicating by fax with Dune Maddox, whom she had easily lured away from S & S to work as her primary assistant on the start-up of the foundation. Only Barney commuted to New York to attend to business.

What bliss it was, Tessa realized, to look at the old trees that surrounded the house, already showering a lazy leaf from minute to minute, and know that she didn’t have to leave this place just because the wheel of the year was about to turn. They’d settle into the seasons, Tessa thought dreamily as she delicately smoothed the wisps of dark hair on Daisy’s head. Soon they’d be in the middle of the slowly exploding fireworks of a New England autumn … then the snug, snowy, easeful, firelit winter … the delights of spring lay ahead … too far ahead to bother to anticipate … today was enough; each second was enough.

Sam, who had grown up in the country, had already ordered a vast supply of firewood and a snowblower for the driveway. Maggie had bought extra blankets and a wardrobe of larger, warm baby clothes, even a tiny snowsuit. Carlie, who had so recently finished with their Labor Day celebration, was already looking forward to Thanksgiving. Barney had become an instant captive to the big vegetable garden he’d created on a whim from well-grown seedlings a few months earlier. Now he’d sent for a dozen seed catalogs and commandeered Sam’s services for the harvest, and he checked his pumpkin patch for signs of growth every morning.

Daisy’s head moved restlessly and Tessa looked down to see the baby’s vivid blue eyes with their long dark lashes fixed on her with extraordinary concentration.

“If you were a man, Daisy, I’d say you must be in love with me, but that seems unlikely, given your gender and your tender age.” Daisy reached for her finger and began to gnaw vigorously again on the diamond.

“But when you’re older, and you ask your mother about her mother—and you will—Maggie can show
you the auction catalog instead of some faded photo album … it’s all in there, Daisy, at least the part I wanted the public to know. Your mother can tell you the rest, the part I wanted her to know. Then there are the things a woman never tells, but if you’re so smart, you’ll figure that out for yourself. Will my life be something you can’t imagine leading, Daisy? There are so many moments now when it seems like that to me. Strange … it didn’t truly begin, you know, until one afternoon in 1971, when I danced a polka with Roddy and everything changed in an instant. It was twenty-three years ago … that wasn’t so terribly far away, was it, Daisy? And yet … and yet … it was forever … forever …”

Daisy looked up suddenly, turning her head alertly, and Tessa wiped a little drool from her chin. “What a sense of timing you have,” Tessa said admiringly, as she watched the small figures of Maggie, Sam, and Barney hurry across the bright lawn, each of them carrying a basket of newly picked vegetables.

“Yes, Daisy, yes, they’re all coming, just as fast as they can.”

Since the publication of her first novel,
Scruples
, J
UDITH
K
RANTZ
has been one of the world’s best-selling novelists. Born and raised in New York City and a graduate of Wellesley College, she and her husband, Steve Krantz, live in Bel Air and Newport Beach, California. They have two sons and two grandchildren.