Too Much Too Soon (68 page)

“I’m feeling pretty punk. We’ll talk about it some other time, okay?”

Crystal ignored the plea. Her words tumbled out over the edge of hysteria. “It’s
your
loss you never got to know him. There’s no guarantee that Honora can have this baby and you’ve got no other children.”

“Lissie’s my daughter,” Curt whispered, turning his head away. “Crystal, would you step into the hall? There should be a guy out there reading
Track and Field.
He’s my nurse. Tell him I need him, will you?”

“Alexander went to Morocco to find you, and you rejected him.” Her voice rose to a scream. “How could you have ignored your only son?
You bastard, you unspeakable bastard!
”

Her heart was pounding at an alarming speed. Her chest, legs and stomach—every part of her—throbbed with the banging beat of her pulses. The need to destroy that had come over her on the night of Alexander’s death was with her again. She darted to the nearest wall and yanked down a handful of cards.

Abruptly her fury drained. Once again she felt herself drowning in that icy, hideous sea where she was utterly alone, cut off from the rest of humanity. Falling on one of the couches, she broke into desolate sobs. She did not hear Curt get out of bed.

“Don’t, Crystal, don’t, honey.” He sat next to her, his hand moving lightly on her bent head.

“That’s . . . why he . . . got this hearing going . . . .” she sobbed. “I warned him . . . but he wanted to pay you back . . . for ignoring him . . . .”

“I wondered why he started it.” There was no reproach in Curt’s voice, only a heavy sadness.

“How am I going to live without him, Curt? How am I going to live?”

“You Sylvander girls are very strong—believe me, I know.” He continued stroking her hair.

“There’s nothing left for me . . . nothing.”

“You have another son, a grandson.”

“They’re not . . . Alexander . . . .”

“Christ, Crystal, how sorry I feel for both of us.”

Her eyes brimming with tears, she looked questioningly at him.

Frowning in bemusement, he said slowly, “Know something, Crystal? Until this moment I never realized how much I wish I could’ve saved him.”

“Before, you said it was a reflex action.”

“But it wasn’t.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“I have no past. He was my future. My son . . . .” Curt’s eyes closed and his face was a mask of misery.

She put her arm around his shoulders. They pressed their cheeks together for a long, mourning moment, and she could feel the heat of his fever.

“I’ve been running and hiding from the truth of just how much he meant to me ever since I found out about him,” Curt whispered. “Honora left me because of him, and I wanted no part of him. But there it was, Crystal. When the chips were down I wanted to save his life.”

“Things get buried very deep inside.”

“Exactly. Do you believe me when I say if it were possible I’d swap places with him right now?”

“I believe you,” she said gently. “It’s exactly the way I feel.”

“You said you came here to thank me, but there’s no reason that you should. I was his father.”

Blowing her nose, she went to the door to call his nurse.
If only Alexander were alive
, she thought bleakly,
he would have had what he always longed for—the recognition of his father.

From
The Wall Street Journal
, Wednesday May 8, 1985.

To celebrate the merger, Crystal threw a small reception.

By chance the date she circled on her calendar fell a week before the Clay Street house became the Alexander Talbott Historical Mansion, and so she decided to display her efforts to her guests—the family, Imogene and a few dozen other friends, the senior vice presidents of both companies with their wives.

In the years since Alexander’s death, Crystal had dedicated herself with evangelical fervor to
building memorials to her slain son. There was an Alexander Talbott Park on a ransom of land in the Financial District—the green and ferny gardens, planned by Honora, had become a favorite place for workers from the surrounding tall office buildings to enjoy their bag lunches. Already under construction was the Alexander Talbott Modern Art Museum in Golden Gate Park, for which Crystal had donated the initial five million. This house, however, sacred to her son’s boyhood, was her most hallowed project. For over a year, she had been tracking her size 4AA footprints in the sawdust and getting headaches from the whining saws as she directed European craftsmen in the uncovering of original woodwork that she had disguised.

*   *   *

Before dinner was served, the chief caterer caught Crystal’s eye, giving the meaningful nod that meant the buffet was ready for the traditional hostess inspection. Crystal glanced around. Her hint of hesitancy, like the small lines fanning from her intensely blue eyes and the streaks of white in her natural ash blond hair, added a beguiling softness to her beauty. Mitchell, sensing she might need him, hurried to her side.

As they walked across the hall’s magnificent parquet, under carpeting for many decades, he inquired solicitously, “What is it?”

“Everything’s so much like the first time I came here when I was churchmouse poor. It’s given me the willies.”

Mitchell alone fully understood how Alexander’s
death had unleashed Crystal’s prodding devils of self-doubt. “I’ve never heard so many compliments,” he said. “Your dress, the house.”

“You don’t think I’ve gone overboard on this global theme?”

“The occasion calls for something unique.” His tone deepened respectfully. “If Mr. Talbott were here, he’d tell you so, too.”

He opened the side door of the baronial dining room. On either side of the vast Waterford chandelier dangled a pair of enormous floral replicas of the planet earth. One for Ivory, one for Talbott’s. Various shades of roses portrayed the continents, and the oceans were blue-dyed marguerites. Both globes bristled with the sprays of white cymbidium that marked the projects of each company. (Ivory had regained its old momentum, and Talbott’s, under Gid, had prospered without bid-rigging or any such monkey tricks.)

To carry out Crystal’s theme, the menu was international. A turbanned Sikh stood behind a chafing dish of chicken curry, a sushi chef in a hapi coat presided over his art work—Crystal couldn’t for the life of her comprehend how anyone could eat seaweed and raw fish wrapped around cold rice, but the younger crowd relished it. There was a veiled lady for the b’stilla and the baby lamb simmered in the Lalarheini manner. In deference to the three little boys, a burly, beaming young black man wearing a Giant’s uniform held tongs over hot dogs.

“It’s in perfect taste,” Mitchell said, smiling down at his employer. “You’ve outdone
yourself.”

She patted his thin hand. “Thank you, Padraic.”

For years her friends had been after her to break this attachment to Mitchell. Imogene had told her point-blank, “Old men dote on their secretaries, not
gorgeous
things like you. Why, you could
marry
the
cream
of the financial crop.” Imogene’s argument didn’t hold water. Crystal had an enormous fortune of her own. Besides, what would some stranger, who saw only her admittedly ornamental exterior and put-together act, know of her idiosyncratic needs? Padraic had lived in this house with her that dreadful year after Alexander died, he had used a demitasse spoon to feed her purees, he had held her when her whole body trembled with chill.

And after she had moved to the penthouse condominium of a new Nob Hill high-rise, Mitchell had bought a small apartment in the same building to be near her, yet never in all the years had he so much as hinted at marriage or “going all the way.” Their relationship suited Crystal to a tee.

Together they admired the length of buffet for another moment, then Crystal smiled at the chief caterer, a signal for him to push back the ornately carved folding doors to the hall.

Over the rippling music of the trio and the party clamor came a child’s gleeful whoop that grew louder. One of the boys must be sliding down the highly polished banister.

“And I thought the magician would keep
them entertained,” Crystal sighed. “I’ll bet you anything it’s that little devil, Evan. Talk about uncontrollable.”

She said it lightly. Like the rest of the family, she considered the child spoiled, and like the others could not condemn the Ivorys. (The truth was they did not overly indulge their son: Evan was Evan, born with an incorruptible strength of will.)

Honora hurried into the hall just as Evan landed on his feet. Crystal could see her sister bending and talking to the child, who replied with a cocky smile that lacked any trace of contrition.

*   *   *

“Evan, Daddy distinctly told you not to do that,” Honora’s rebuke was ameliorated by a stroking back of dark hair from the boy’s domed forehead.

In appearance, Evan Ivory was all Sylvander, with narrow, attenuated bone structure, long face and round-lidded blue eyes—as a matter of fact, he looked very much like his grandfather.

Langley, now ensconced in the Ivorys’ Los Angeles house with three shifts of nurses, emerged from his querulous misanthropy only for this grandson. He pronounced Evan a little gentleman. This, Langley’s highest compliment, was a misrepresentation if ever Honora had heard one.

Evan shrugged away from her hand. “Didn’t you ever slide down when you lived here?” he asked.

“It’s a three-story fall from the top—”

“What’s going on?” Curt had come into the hall.

“I tried the banister,” Evan said.

“Didn’t I tell you specifically it was off bounds?”

“What do you think gave me the idea?”

Evan might look like her side, but as he stared up at Curt with that same truculent half smile, Honora knew which parent he honestly resembled.

Unable to stifle his laugh, Curt said, “You’ll really get it, buster, if you interrupt my toast.”

*   *   *

Most of the guests had congregated in the rear drawing room, with its small-paned but spectacular view of sailboats gliding homeward through the lavender haze of the Bay. Accordingly, Lissie Ivory had seated herself in the music room, sparsely populated, farthest from the crowd. She had flown home for the party from Washington, where she was working toward a masters in psychology at Gallaudet. At nearly five ten, and slim, with long glossy black hair, the childhood resemblance to Crystal was far less marked. Leaning back on one tanned arm, her legs thrust out in front of the poufed velvet piano bench, she might have been a model posing in the stylish, outsize white pantsuit, even to the expression of hauteur. Lissie raised a wall to prevent strangers from striking up a conversation and thus intruding on her handicap; however, with a family and close friends her manner was warm
and engagingly uninhibited. Her friendships and the three young men with whom she’d had relationships were all drawn from the lively if silent subculture of the deaf.

Joscelyn was sitting near her.

“What I can’t get over,” Lissie said, “is that Alexander grew up here. I had sort of a crush on him when I was little—he was the most hip, with-it person I could imagine. And could anything be more old-fashioned than this house?”

“Your aunt’s done a fabulous job at restoration, but don’t let it fool you.” Joscelyn set down her scotch to sign. “This is how the place was when she married Uncle Gideon. Long before Alexander was born she’d changed everything to what we used to call ultramodern in those remote days. Believe it or not, this house was perfect for the Pollocks and de Koonings that are going to Alexander’s modern art museum.”

“Art, mmm. Auntie Joss, Mother and Daddy showed me some terrific photographs of wild-flowers that your friend took.” Lissie’s arch smile proved what her intonation lacked. “He’s quite an artist himself.”

Pleasantly embarrassed, Joscelyn glanced toward the center drawing room, where Gid was talking to a robust man with thick, graying hair. “Her friend,” as the family called him, was Dr. Jack Steiner, a divorced New York pediatrician whose avocation was photography. She had met him two years ago when she was working on a high-rise project in Manhattan.
Dining alone at adjacent tables at a small Columbus Avenue Thai restaurant, they had struck up an acquaintanceship. Joscelyn’s unrelenting guilts, not to mention the searing memories of Curt’s rebuff, had kept her aloof for a long time. But the doctor had wooed her via long distance calls and by mailing her rare jazz albums and humorously captioned samples of his photography. She had succumbed cautiously. They had shared several bi-coastal weekends before she would consent to a vacation at the Mauna Kea. And after Jack had mentioned that he would be in San Francisco for a medical conference on the date of this bash, she had needed to work up a ridiculous amount of courage to invite him.

Jack caught her glance. He smiled, tapping his pipe against his nice square teeth to let her know that he was enjoying himself. Joscelyn half-raised her hand, smiling.
Doubtless Crystal looks down on him because he’s Jewish, but so what? God knows he’s far more presentable than that creepy secretary of hers.

“I think he’s great,” Lissie said. “And so do Mother and Daddy.”

“He
is
nice, isn’t he?”

“And very interested in you.”

“We’re just good friends,” Joscelyn said, reddening.

Imogene, bone thin and looking like death warmed over from her most recent face-lift, stood in the doorway calling that dinner was
served.

Jocelyn said to Lissie, “The buffet is officially
open. I understand from reliable sources that there’s a terrific curry.”