Too Much Too Soon (23 page)

Waiting for the Cadillac on the gravel driveway, she thought of Curt Ivory’s expression as he had stood above her. Young, vulnerable, and hopelessly ashamed.

A few minutes before seven on a fine morning in March of 1964, Joscelyn pushed open the sliding glass door of her bedroom, stepping onto the terrace, startling a nearby covey of quail. The plump, crested birds rustled heavily from the silver-wet lawn, flying low above the irregular carpets of spring flowers that climbed the canyon wall.

The gardens, Honora’s delight and obsession, a loving mixture of landscape styles, were at their best in the dawn stillness. Joscelyn, though, was not paying homage to the beauties of nature, but turning her left hand this way and that so the sun glanced off the facets of Malcolm Peck’s tiny round diamond. A softly amorous smile transformed her discreetly madeup, clever face.

It would require the meticulous scrutiny of an archeologist to uncover traces of the deplorably plain child in the woman Joscelyn had become. Those years of orthodontic misery had done the trick of correcting her overbite. Her thick glasses were gone, replaced by contacts that enhanced the clear, pale Cambridge blue of her eyes. The fineness of her hair was an
asset for a pixie cut. At just over five nine, she had the Sylvander fine-boned slenderness.

The ugly duckling had turned into a reasonable facsimile of a swan.

Joscelyn’s self-identification, however, remained tethered to that homely little girl. No matter how skillfully she fixed herself up, her mirror ultimately reflected a gangly, humiliatingly flat-chested woman. She grudged herself one good feature. Her legs. Long and nicely curved, they were well displayed by her Courrèges minidress.

The forces that had shaped Joscelyn—being motherless and virtually fatherless for her early years, the unsupervised custody of a series of aged, carpingly tyrannical nannies, having two lovely older sisters—had turned her into the harshest of self-critics. In order to feel worthy of the air she breathed, Joscelyn Sylvander must be the best. At Berkeley, one of only twelve female engineering students, she had ferociously honed her keen mind, making Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year, graduating Summa Cum Laude. At Ivory she had arrived early and lugged home a briefcaseful of work: within a year, without the Big Boss lifting a finger, she was promoted to project engineer.

Her career gave her deep satisfaction.

She relished the well-organized, mathematical thinking imposed by engineering. She took pleasure in facing concrete problems that couldn’t be altered by argument—as opposed to the decisions of, say, a psychologist or a lawyer. She enjoyed transferring thought to
fact. Her work so immersed her that at the conclusion of each project she was overcome by a depression that was almost like a premonition of death. Though she took pride in being successful in a man’s world, during her worst moments she would ask herself whether anyone with her drive and discipline could be truly feminine.

Unconsciously her left thumb rubbed her engagement ring, and she smiled.
You’re my woman
, Malcolm had said against her ear when he handed her the domed velvet box.

The Ivorys owned a Bel Air canyon whose sides were as steep as those of a bathtub. In the rich, narrow valley nestled the house—or rather, a series of structures: Joscelyn’s cottage, the servants’ quarters, the guesthouse and the seven-car garage were connected to the main building by this winding, pergola-covered walkway. The rambling architecture with its exposed beams and honey-colored stone had the cozy charm of a miniature Cotswold village. Curt had done the design himself, a complement to the country gardens that Honora had begun planting in 1953, the same year that he had floated an enormous loan to buy out the ailing, septuagenarian George NcNee. (Joscelyn admiringly saw Curt’s acquisition of thirty overpriced Bel Air acres at such a time as illumination of both his openhandedness and his boundless, optimistic self-confidence.)

She pushed open the glass door of the breakfast room. Her brother-in-law was eating scrambled eggs and bacon at the far end of the
rough-hewn Welsh table. The years had served Curt well. A few strands of distinguished white showed in his dark blond hair, which was thick as ever. The grooves in his tanned forehead and smile lines fanning out from his unusual topaz eyes gave him the look of mature strength that is a prerequisite for true power.

Glancing up from the
Los Angeles Times
, he nodded. He disliked early morning conversation, so Joscelyn slipped quietly into her chair, pouring herself coffee.

She was finishing her second cup when Curt, without comment, handed her the financial section.

Glancing down the columns, she saw what he intended her to read:
TALBOTT’S FIRST AMERICAN COMPANY TO CONSTRUCT HIGHWAY IN AFGHANISTAN
.

“What about the road we built last year out of Kabul?” she asked sourly. “That Crystal!”

Since the foggy evening she had slipped out of the Clay Street mansion’s side door, she had seen neither Crystal nor Gideon; she had never laid eyes on their two little boys.

So out of touch were the Talbott and the Ivory ménages that they might have existed in different galaxies, with Langley as the sole space traveler. On his frequent visits to the States, the paterfamilias stayed both in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and on the first of every month he received from the London offices of each of his warring sons-in-law substantial sums that enabled him to reside with an excellent cellar in a large Sloane Square
flat, and also to subsidize the delightfully early Victorian offices of Sylvander Press. Sylvander Press had thus far brought out five slender books of avant garde poetry and fiction, losing money on each, but when Langley clinked glasses with the flower of British publishing he was able to drop with casual modesty, “My house did the first Rupert Jacks, y’know.” Also he could tell himself that those monthly checks he deposited in his account were sound business investments for his sons-in-law.

Joscelyn scanned the long column about Talbott’s other new projects. “She really spews out the hype, doesn’t she?”

Curt’s eloquent lift of shoulders was as far as he would go in discussing anything connected to his estranged benefactor. He dropped his napkin on the polished old wood. “Tonight’s the planning pow-wow, isn’t it?”

Malcolm was coming to dinner so the four of them could discuss wedding plans.

“Tonight’s the night,” Joscelyn agreed happily.

Curt let himself out the glass door through which she had entered, cutting across an allee of lawn, his shoes leaving dark prints on the dewy grass.

Honora, wearing boots, jeans and a bulky old sweater, emerged from a coppice of wisteria trees. Curt held out his arms and she dropped her trowel, running to snuggle against him. Joscelyn felt a painful catch, reminiscent of the time she’d taken a train across the top of the Andes and her lungs had strained for oxygen
in the cold, thin air. She touched her diamond talisman again and her breathing eased.

*   *   *

Malcolm had been invited for seven, and the case clock in the hall was chiming the hour as he buzzed from the wrought-iron electric gates that protected the mouth of the canyon a third of a mile away. Joscelyn buzzed back and went outside to meet him. As Malcolm got out of his gray Volkswagen, she was engulfed by that familiar sense of disbelief. How was it possible that Joscelyn Sylvander had snagged a man this spectacular?

Malcolm’s boyish beauty could easily have made him a bit cheap, like a male model, but the gods had seen fit to mitigate his good looks with a few minor aberrations. His dark hair was untamable, rumpling foward to obscure the impeccable widow’s peak; his mouth, which was well chiseled and full without being petulant, had a faint white scar bisecting the lower lip, and on the bridge of his straight, masculine nose was a bump, as if a tiny bone had been broken during football scrimmage. The eyes were a pure gray darkened by the porch of his brow. (The deep set of his eyes made Joscelyn see a resemblance between Malcolm and Curt that was invisible to everybody else.) Her betrothed was a fraction over six feet: his wide shoulders, narrow waist and narrower hips made him seem taller.

When not worrying that Malcolm would desert her, Joscelyn fretted about the adverse effects of their age difference. At twenty-four
she was two years older—well, actually one year and eleven months.

Last spring, before his graduation from Caltech, Malcolm had been recruited by Ivory, and had become one of the hundreds of beginning engineers swarming through the Spring Street office where she worked. (Ivory, outgrowing its original McNee headquarters, had spread out into various downtown office buildings.) They hadn’t met until the fall. On the morning of November 22, when the news first came from Dallas, the corridors had been filled with bewildered, lost-looking people: Joscelyn and Malcolm had comforted one another for the wounding, then the death, of President Kennedy.

Malcolm was smiling as he came up the steps to her. The carriage lamp next to the front door shone on their embrace. Incredibly, he was as deeply in love as she, and far more open about showing it. He called her office several times a day, he brought sandwiches to her cubicle at lunchtime, he spent most evenings with her, and every weekend.

“My geisha, waiting outside,” he said, kissing her lingeringly.

Dizzied, she murmured, “Don’t get too accustomed to the good treatment, buster. It’ll never last.”

He nuzzled her cheek. “About tonight, okay if we tell them we want the wedding small and quick?”

“Exactly what I have in mind.”

“And soon.” He hugged her fiercely. “Christ,
am I ready.”

Malcolm had an old-fashioned streak.
Joscelyn, hon, I’ve always dreamed of having a virgin on my wedding night.
And, at the advanced age of twenty-four and a half, she was amazingly that, still a virgin. Not because of moral compunctions or anxiety about unwanted pregnancy, but because neither of her serious boyfriends—soft-voiced Steve Kayloch at Berkeley and Marty Lausch, an electrical engineer at Hughes—had been ready for marriage, and to hop into bed with an uncommitted partner would be one more example of her inferiority to her sisters.

She bit his earlobe gently, murmuring, “How soon is soon?”

“However long it takes to get a license and blood tests.”

The dinner table conversation covered everything but the wedding, slipping easily from chances of Ivory doing projects in new third world countries like Zambia and Tanzania to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam to Martin Luther King and the sit-ins in the south, to
Herzog
, which Honora was reading, to who would win the Oscars.

When Malcolm first had started dating Joscelyn he had come to the house wearing his Ivory working uniform, one of two narrow, dark suits with a white, short-sleeved shirt and black knitted tie, but now, like Curt, he had changed to jeans and a checked cotton shirt worn under a sweater. Then, he had said very little, his gray eyes fixed on each as they spoke,
giving Honora and Curt’s most trivial remarks his devout attention. Now, however, he appeared supremely at ease at the round dining table, laughing, interrupting.

After coffee they adjourned to the family room. Eucalyptus logs snapped and crackled in the enormous fireplace, giving off aromatic odors, and the two couples paired off in the long, chintz-covered flanking couches.

Curt lit a cigarette. “Let’s get down to business,” he said.

“Yes,” Honora said. Her eyes had lost that hint of melancholy and were glowing with excitement. “Have you set a date?”

Malcolm and Joscelyn shook their heads, and Joscelyn started to say that it would be sometime this month, but Honora was raising a cautioning finger.

“One sec,” she said. Miniskirt whirling around her slender thighs, she ran to the rolltop pigeonhole desk to fish out a calendar that advertised Westwood Nursery. “How does the last Saturday in May sound?”

“The end of May?” Joscelyn cried.

“Hey, hey, take it easy,” Malcolm said.

“But that’s nearly three months off!”

“Honest, gang,” Malcolm said, grinning. “There is ab-so-lutely no reason for the big rush.”

A flush rose from the bright scarf around Joscelyn’s throat.

Honora’s creamy skin was pink, too. “I didn’t mean to take over,” she murmured. “But a wedding does take time, and Curt and I would
like to give you a proper send-off.”

“Thanks, guys, but no thanks.” Joscelyn was still blushing. “All we have in mind is a judge, you two—and Daddy, of course, if he can make it over in time.”

Honora murmured, “What about your side, Malcolm?” She knew from Joscelyn that the Pecks had been killed in an automobile accident on the Hollywood Freeway two years ago: Mr. Peck, an executive with Texaco, and Mrs. Peck, a Junior Leaguer, had belonged to Annandale Golf Club; she wore mink, his clothes were tailored at Eddie Harth’s, they traveled, they entertained, they had no insurance. Once the debts were paid, including the third mortgage on the large Los Feliz house, their combined estates were scarcely enough to buy burial plots at Forest Lawn. Malcolm had financed his senior year at Caltech by parking cars at a restaurant on Lake Street. “Is there any family?”

“No—well, unless you count cousins in Providence, a dreary bunch I met once when I was ten.”

Honora’s head tilted sympathetically.

“Not that we don’t appreciate the offer,” Joscelyn said. “But we’ve made up our minds.”

Malcolm sat back in the couch, his eyes wistful. “Joscelyn, I know this sounds nuts for a guy, but I’ve always had a yen for the works. Church, flowers, bridesmaids, an enormous cake.” He jerked his hand upward, indicating numerous tiers.

His turnabout—his betrayal—hit Joscelyn
so hard that her mouth parched and the color drained from her face.

“I’d like my buddies to be there,” Malcolm said, adding softly, “I’d like to see you coming down the aisle in a white dress.”

“There’s a secret desire that never got on the drawing board,” she said in a thin voice.