Birthday Girls (3 page)

“The holiday special is important, Edmund. It coincides with the release of the cranberry book.”

His nod was one of resignation. He sipped his coffee from a nineteenth-century cup with practiced, proper respect for the fine china. “I talked with Sondra this afternoon.”

Swirling the brandy in her glass, Abigail replied “Yes.” She took a small taste. “So did I.”

“She doesn’t think you’re pleased.”

Abigail did not answer.

“You’re her stepmother, Abigail. She wants you to be excited for her.”

“I’ll have some Belgium lace sent for the nursery,” she bristled. “Unless you’d prefer to pick it up while you’re there.”

Edmund rose. “I’m going to my study.”

Abigail laughed. “Of course! Run away! Don’t bother to ask why I’m not thrilled at the prospect of becoming a grandmother to a child of two immature parents.”

He stopped. “Maybe this is the responsibility they both need. And maybe it will keep their marriage together.” His tone was flat.

Abigail sensed he had stopped short of saying that if she had relented years ago, maybe
they
could have had a child together, maybe
they
could have kept their marriage “together.”

She masked her guilt by glaring at him.

“Honey,” he said, moving toward her. “I know this upsets you. But once the baby arrives …”

“Once the baby arrives there will be one more mouth for me to feed.”

“That’s not fair. I earn a decent living.”

Abigail closed her eyes. “I know you do, Edmund. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that you do not want my money.” Once, she’d been flattered by his macho need to pay his own way. Today, his disinterest in her growing millions made her feel not independent but distant. As though she had sculpted a world he neither needed nor wished to enter. It almost made her wonder why she had bothered.

He rested his hands on her waist. “You also need to know that Sondra and Craig will be fine.”

She did not ask how much he intended to increase their allowance.

Stepping away from his hands, she took another swig from the snifter and walked to the French doors. The sun rested on the horizon, casting a warm glow over the rose trellises in Edmund’s garden, Edmund’s passion. For years he had insisted on designing and tending the multitiered
grounds with little help—creating rolling, flower-scaped beauty befitting the National Gardens. She wondered what her viewers would think if they knew that the blossoms in her magnificent floral arrangements were not the product of her own soil-free hands but had been cultivated by her sensitive, caring husband, the one whose heart did not freeze when his daughter cried. She raised the glass again, the brandy hot on her lips, stinging with the realization that small talk was safer with Edmund lately, more comfortable than discussing Sondra. Or feelings.

“How long will you be gone this time?”

“A couple of weeks. Later in September there’s an auction in Rome.”

He did not ask if she’d like to go with him; she did not ask if he’d be home in time for her birthday.

“I’m going to do some work,” he commented.

She nodded and watched him retreat to his study, wondering if either of them would ever admit to the other that they were miserable.

When he
was gone, Abigail settled into a deep-cushioned chair with the bottle of brandy and a new pack of cigarettes. She suspected it would be another long night.

She smoked and drank and gazed around as if it were her first time here. Within the huge, high-ceilinged room thousands of books were encased in mahogany cabinets; muted, fifteenth-century Flemish tapestries hung between the silk-draped windows.

As a child she had played the sleek grand piano that was tucked at one end of the room. She had played because Grandfather insisted she take lessons. “Culture,” he’d said, “is a crucial part of being a Hardy.” It had been years now since the keyboard was opened.

Slowly Abigail’s eyes drifted to the dark portraits that hung over the mantle: Grandfather William, Great-Grandfather
Robert—both white-haired and stern-looking, both exuding power and wealth, both decidedly dead. Yet their presence, their power, still lingered.

Abigail ran her palm along the deep green, damask-covered arm of the chair and wondered why her father—and mother—had had to die in that avalanche in St. Moritz.

Quietly she reached down. Slowly she unsnapped the locket that hung from her bracelet. Inside, framed by a rim of heart-shaped gold, was a faded photo of Jonathan Hardy, heir to it all, the sandy-haired, wide-smiling Hardy who had never reached thirty-five. Beside him was his beautiful, raven-haired, equally smiling young wife—that “damn Leslie-woman” as Grandfather had called Abigail’s mother—without whom Jonathan would not have been skiing like a jet-setting gypsy.

But they had married. They’d had to, of course, because that damn Leslie-woman was—
they
were—pregnant.

Abigail closed the locket and thought again about their deaths. It was the reason, of course, that she’d not wanted children. There would no orphaned eight-year-old child of hers to be fussed over—or not fussed over—by strangers. Strangers who knew that if she had not been conceived there would have been no dead heir; strangers who always looked sad when they saw her, who took her to Radio City once a year, who brought Christmas and birthday gifts as if stage shows and presents could re-glue her heart.

Birthdays
, she thought, then sipped her brandy and remembered that the calendar was quickly moving toward her forty-ninth.

The grandfather clock at the far end of the room began to strike midnight, as if to mock her. She closed her eyes and tried to shut out the sound, and the inevitable reality that next year … next year she would be fifty. Fifty years old. With nothing to show but material things and the fulfillment of dreams that had once seemed so important.

“Would you like anything before I retire?” Louisa’s voice interrupted Abigail’s thoughts.

She looked up at the elderly woman but did not respond that the one thing Abigail wanted, Louisa surely could not provide. “No, Louisa. Good night.”

The housekeeper departed.

Abigail toyed with her bracelet, her thoughts shifting to Louisa. The woman had worked at Windsor-on-Hudson ever since Abigail—the scared, abandoned child—was left on Grandfather’s reluctant doorstep. It was Louisa, olive-skinned and portly, efficient and kind, who had become her parent. Louisa who had ridden each day in the Rolls Royce that transported Abigail to school at Arbor Brook; Louisa who had allowed Abigail and her friends to bake cookies, have parties, and stay up late. Louisa was there, but she wasn’t her mother. Not like the mothers of her friends.

Her friends. Maddie. Kris. Betty Ann. A small ache gnawed at her heart as she thought of them now.

Like Abigail, Maddie and Kris would turn forty-nine this fall.

Next year, they too would be fifty. She wondered if they were feeling the pull of time, dreading the other side of middle age.

She hadn’t seen Maddie in years. She wondered if Maddie was still as eccentric as the photographs she created, or if the divorce had tempered her spirit.

The last she’d heard from Kris was a brief note many winters ago, commenting that wasn’t it providence that they each had a book on the bestseller list and what must the literary world be coming to.

As the grandfather clock stopped bonging, a small smile crept across Abigail’s face. They had been friends, so long ago. Friends who grew up together, laughing and crying and sharing their awkward young lives. Friends who stuck by one another, connected with a bond she’d since been unable to duplicate in her crazy, artificial world.

She sucked on her cigarette and wondered if she should get in touch with them again. Maybe together the old friends could face fifty; maybe together they could fight back.

And maybe, just maybe, Abigail would get the one thing she wanted … with the help of her friends.

On the
corner of 57th and Lexington, Maddie Daniels stood motionless, staring at the magazines that stared back at her.
Savior
, of course, was there, with the dynamite black-and-white cover shot of Marlon Brando leaning against a streetcar named Desire. It had taken her days to get the lighting just right, to capture, in the aging actor’s eyes, the same spirit, the same rage he had instilled in the legendary Stanley a half-century ago.

But it wasn’t
Savior
that caught her attention now.

She took the latest issue of
Our World
from the rack, pushed a ten-dollar bill at the man behind the makeshift counter, and stuffed the magazine into her leather backpack. She’d read it tonight on the train back to Westchester, then file it in the back of her darkroom with the other reminders of how wonderful her life could have been if her asshole ex-husband had not walked out.

Adjusting the billow of the cotton gauze skirt around her full hips, Maddie hoisted her backpack, secured the elastic chin-strap of her wide-brimmed straw hat, and schlepped toward the headquarters of
Savior
magazine to discuss her
next cover assignment.
Savior
might not be
Our World
, but it was reality, and it paid the mortgage.

“We want
something different, Maddie,” Brian Dixon, the savvy,
Savior
editor-in-chief, exclaimed across the glass-topped conference table.

“Brando was different.”

Dixon smiled. “That was Brando. We need something more … scintillating for Madonna. It’s the December issue. Big-bucks advertisers.”

She stared out the window of the thirty-fourth floor and wondered what could possibly be scintillating to the gray world below, the world that had, as time slipped toward the twenty-first century, been there and done that. Then again, maybe the world hadn’t. Maybe it was just her.

Leaning back in the chair she examined the ruffled cuffs of her high-necked, ivory blouse, the one she’d picked up in the antique shop on West 43rd. Life, she deduced, must have been easier in Victorian times, when all the gentry had to worry about was Parliament and religion and butter sandwiches to serve with tea.

The eyes of the editorial board tunneled through her, as though the harder they stared, the more quickly inspiration might surface.

Silently she stared back and studied the faces: small-eyed, sharp-nosed Virginia; intense, numbers-crunching Leon; the quiet, mousy brunette whose name escaped Maddie no matter how many times they’d been introduced; and head honcho Dixon, whose only job was to make others work. She wondered if any of them had ever had an original idea in their lives.

Madonna
, she suddenly thought. The epitome of outrageousness. The American mistress of ATTITUDE.

An outrageous seed of its own began to take hold. “We could always do a Madonna and child thing,” Maddie said.
“Set it up like a stable. Hay. A couple of sheep. Maybe a donkey.”
Or a horse’s ass
, she wanted to add.

Sharp-nosed Virginia practically leaped across the table. “My God!” she screamed. “You’re a fucking genius!”

Maddie suppressed a chuckle. She didn’t have the guts to say she’d only been kidding.

It was not until Brian nodded enthusiastically that the others concurred that Maddie’s idea was brilliant. Office politics, it seemed, were never out of style, especially at
Savoir
, where style reigned.

“We’ll fly you to the coast,” Brian said. “ ‘You’ll shoot it there.”

Maddie groaned silently. She detested L.A. All that godforsaken sunshine. All that healthy food served in elfin portions by those blue-eyed blondes who looked like Sharlene. “Can’t she come here?”

“No. She’s raising her daughter in seclusion.”

“Right,” Maddie answered.

“She’ll have her own makeup people and stylists, of course,” Virginia interjected, as though Madonna were her very best friend. “Our people out there will provide you with lighting.”

“And props,” Maddie said.

“Props.”

“Live animals. Not taxidermy jobs.”

Virginia scribbled.

“And a camel. There must be a camel.”

“For the wise men,” the mousy brunette chimed, apparently just realizing what they were doing.

Leon, the numbers man, frowned. “The cost could get prohibitive …”

“Screw the cost,” Dixon said. “We’ll make it up in ad sales.”

Maddie folded her hands and smiled. She loved the energy, loved the electric sparks that flashed across the table as one seemingly banal idea was nourished, germinated,
then came alive. It didn’t matter if the idea had been hers; Maddie simply thrived on the creative process, the back-and-forth ping-pong of divergent minds.

Suddenly Virginia checked her watch and dropped her pen. “Moving on to editorial …” she said abruptly, then peered over her half-glasses at Maddie. “Which means we’re through with you. Denise will contact you about the arrangements.”

Maddie knew when she’d been dismissed. She hesitantly picked up her backpack, bid a cheerful adieu, then meandered toward the elevator that would carry her away from the fun, from the place where all things came together, where people thought she was a fucking genius. But Maddie’s place was not here; it was back in her studio, back in her darkroom, where the world was shut out and her masterpieces were created in solitude.