Fancy Pants

Authors: Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Tags: #Contemporary

FANCY PANTS
Susan Elizabeth Phillips

To my parents,
with all my love
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My special thanks to the following people and organizations:
Bill Phillips—who plays a terrific eighteen holes and steered me away
from the bunkers. I love you.
Steve Axelrod—the best there is.
Claire Zion—a good editor is a necessity; one who also has a sense of
humor is a blessing.
The Professional Golfers' Association—for so patiently answering my
questions.
The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation—keepers of the flame.
The management and staff of WBRW, Bridgewater, New Jersey—a small radio
station with a 50,000-watt heart.
Dr. Lois Lee and Children of the Night—God bless.
Charlotte Smith, Dr. Robert Pallay, Glen Winger, Steve Adams.
Rita Hallbright at the Kenya Safari Company.
Linda Barlow—for her continued friendship and many helpful suggestions.
Ty and Zachary Phillips—who truly do light up my life.
Lydia Kihm—my favorite sister.

Susan
Elizabeth Phillips

Send
these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me ...
—Emma Lazarus,
"The New Coiossus"
Prologue

"Sable sucks," Francesca Serritella Day muttered under her breath as a
series of strobes flashed in her face. She ducked her head deeper into
the high collar of her Russian fur and wished it were daytime so she
could slip on her dark glasses.
"That's not exactly a popularly held opinion, darling," Prince Stefan
Marko Brancuzi said as he gripped her arm and guided her through the
crowd of paparazzi that had stationed themselves outside New York
City's La Cote Basque to photograph the celebrities as they emerged
from the private party inside.
Stefan Brancuzi was the sole monarch of a tiny Balkan principality that
was rapidly replacing overcrowded Monaco as the new refuge for the
tax-burdened wealthy, but he wasn't the one in whom
the photographers were most interested. It was the beautiful
Englishwoman at his side who had attracted
their attention, along with the attention of much of the American
public.
As Stefan led her toward his waiting limousine, Francesca lifted her
gloved hand in a futile gesture that
did nothing at all to stop the barrage of questions still being hurled
at her—questions about her job, her relationship with Stefan, even a
question about her friendship with the star of the hit television
series, "China Colt."
When she and Stefan were finally settled into the plush leather seats
and the limo had pulled out into the late night traffic on East
Fifty-fifth Street, she groaned. "That media circus happened because of
this
coat. The press hardly ever bothers you. It's me. If I'd worn my old
raincoat, we could have slipped
right through without attracting any attention." Stefan regarded her
with amusement. She frowned reproachfully at him. "There's an important
moral lesson to be learned here, Stefan."
"What's that, darling?"
"In the face of world famine, women who wear sable deserve what they
get."
He laughed. "You would have been recognized no matter what you'd worn.
I've seen you stop traffic
in a sweat suit."
"I can't help it," she replied glumly. "It's in my blood. The curse of
the Serritellas."
"Really, Francesca, I never knew a woman who hated being beautiful as
much as you do."
She muttered something he couldn't hear, which was probably just as
well, and shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her coat,
unimpressed, as always, with any reference to her incandescent physical
beauty. After a long wait, she broke the silence. "From the day I was
born, my face has brought me nothing but trouble."
Not to mention that marvelous little body of yours, Stefan thought, but
he wisely kept that comment to himself. As Francesca gazed absently out
the tinted glass window, he took advantage of her distraction
to study the incredible features that had captivated so many people.
He still remembered the words of a well-known fashion editor who,
determined to avoid all the Vivien Leigh cliches that had been applied
to Francesca over the years, had written, "Francesca Day, with her
chestnut hair, oval face, and sage green eyes, looks like a fairy-tale
princess who spends her afternoons spinning flax into gold in the
gardens outside her own storybook castle." Privately, the fashion
editor had been less fanciful. "I know in my heart that Francesca Day
absolutely never has to go to the bathroom. . . ."
Stefan gestured toward the walnut and brass bar tucked discreetly into
the side of the limo. "Do you
want a drink?"
"No, thanks. I don't think I can tolerate any more alcohol." She hadn't
been sleeping well and her British
accent was more pronounced than usual. Her coat slipped open and she
glanced down at her beaded Armani gown. Armani gown . . . Fendi fur ...
Mario Valentino shoes. She closed her eyes, suddenly remembering an
earlier time, a hot autumn afternoon when she'd been lying in the dirt
in the middle of a Texas road wearing a pair of dirty blue jeans with
twenty-five cents tucked in the back pocket. That day had been the
beginning for her. The beginning and the end.
The limo turned south on Fifth Avenue, and her memories slipped further
back to those childhood years in England before she had even known that
places like Texas existed. What a spoiled little monster she had been—
pampered and petted as her mother Chloe swept her from one European
playground to another, one party to the next. Even as a child she'd
been perfectly arrogant—so absolutely confident that the famous
Serritella beauty would crack open the world for her and make all the
pieces fall back together into any new configuration she wished. Little
Francesca—a vain, feckless creature, completely unprepared for what
life was going to hand her.
She had been twenty-one years old that day in 1976 when she lay in the
dust on the Texas road. Twenty-one years old, unmarried, alone, and
pregnant.
Now she was nearly thirty-two, and although she owned every possession
she had ever dreamed about, she felt just as alone now as she had been
on that hot autumn afternoon. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to
imagine what course her life would have taken if she'd stayed in
England. But America had changed her so utterly that she couldn't even
envision it.
She smiled to herself. When Emma Lazarus had written the poem about
huddled masses yearning to breathe free, she certainly couldn't have
been thinking of a vain young English girl arriving in this country
wearing a cashmere sweater and carrying a Louis Vuitton suitcase. But
poor little rich girls had to dream, too, and the dream of America had
proven grand enough to encompass even her.
Stefan knew something was bothering Francesca. She had been unusually
quiet all evening, not at all like herself. He had planned to ask her
to marry him tonight, but now he wondered if he wouldn't do better to
wait. She was so different from the other women he knew that he could
never predict exactly how she would react to anything. He suspected the
dozens of other men who had been in love with her had experienced
something of the same problem.
If rumor could be believed, Francesca's first important conquest had
occurred at age nine on board the yacht
Christina
when she had smitten
Aristotle Onassis.
Rumors . . . There were so many of them surrounding Francesca, most of
which couldn't possibly be true . . . except, considering the kind of
life she had led, Stefan thought that perhaps they were. She had once
told him quite casually that Winston Churchill had taught her how to
play gin rummy, and everyone knew the Prince of Wales had courted her.
One evening not long after they had met, they had been sipping
champagne and exchanging anecdotes about their childhoods.
"Most babies are conceived in love," she had informed him, "but I was
conceived on a display platform
in the center of Harrods' fur salon."
As the limousine swept past Cartier, Stefan smiled to himself. An
amusing story, but he didn't believe a word of it.

The
Old World
Chapter 1

When Francesca was first placed in her mother's arms, Chloe Serritella
Day burst into tears and insisted that the sisters at the private
London hospital where she had given birth had lost her baby. Any
imbecile could see that this ugly little creature with its mashed head
and swollen eyelids could not possibly have come from her own exquisite
body.
Since no husband was present to comfort the hysterical Chloe, it was
left to the sisters to assure her that most newborns weren't at their
best for several days. Chloe ordered them to take away the ugly little
imposter and not come back until they had found her own dear baby. She
then reapplied her makeup
and greeted her visitors—among them a French film star, the secretary
of the British Home Office, and Salvador Dali—with a tearful account of
the terrible tragedy that had been perpetrated upon her. The visitors,
long accustomed to the beautiful Chloe's dramatics, merely patted her
hand and promised to look into the matter. Dali, in a burst of
magnanimity, announced he would paint a surrealistic version of the
infant in question as a christening gift, but mercifully lost interest
in the project and sent a set of vermeil goblets instead.
A week passed. On the day she was to be released from the hospital, the
sisters helped Chloe dress in a loose-fitting black Balmain sheath with
a wide organdy collar and cuffs.
Afterward, they guided her into a wheelchair and deposited the rejected
infant in her arms. The intervening time had done little to improve the
baby's appearance, but in the moment she gazed down at the bundle in
her arms, Chloe experienced one of her lightning-swift mood changes.
Peering into the mottled face, she announced to one and all that the
third generation of Serritella beauty was now assured. No one had the
bad manners to disagree, which, as it turned out, was just as well, for
within a matter of months, Chloe had been proved correct.

* * *

Chloe's sensitivity on the subject of female beauty had its roots in
her own childhood. As a girl she had been plump, with an extra fold of
fat squaring off her waist and small fleshy pads obscuring the delicate
bones of her face. She was not heavy enough to be considered obese in
the eyes of the world, but was merely plump enough to feel ugly inside,
especially in comparison to her sleek and stylish mother, the great
Italian-born couturiere, Nita Serritella. It was not until 1947, the
summer when Chloe was twelve years old, that anyone told her she was
beautiful.
Home on a brief holiday from one of the Swiss boarding schools where
she spent too much of her childhood, she was sitting as inconspicuously
as possible with her full hips perched on a gilt chair in the corner of
her mother's elegant salon on the rue de la Paix. She watched with both
resentment and envy
as Nita, pencil slim in a severely cut black suit with oversize
raspberry satin lapels, conferred with an elegantly dressed customer.
Her mother wore her blue-black hair cut short and straight, so that it
fell forward over the pale skin of her left cheek in a great
comma-shaped curl, and her Modigliani neck supported ropes of perfectly
matched black pearls. The pearls, along with the contents of a small
wall
safe in her bedroom, were gifts from Nita's admirers, internationally
prosperous men who were only too happy to buy jewels for a woman
successful enough to buy her own. One of those men had been Chloe's
father, although Nita professed not to remember which one, and she had
certainly never for a moment considered marrying him.

* * *

The attractive blonde who was receiving Nita's attention in the salon
that afternoon spoke Spanish, her accent surprisingly common for one
who held so much of the world's attention that particular summer of
1947. Chloe followed the conversation with half her attention and
devoted the other half to studying the reed-thin mannequins who were
parading through the center of the salon modeling Nita's latest
designs. Why couldn't she be thin and self-assured like those
mannequins? Chloe wondered. Why couldn't she look exactly like her
mother, especially since they had the same black hair, the same green
eyes? If only she were beautiful, Chloe thought, maybe her mother would
stop looking at her with such disgust. For the hundredth time she
resolved to give up pastries so that she could win her mother's
approval—and for the hundredth time, she felt that uncomfortable
sinking sensation in her stomach that told her she didn't have the
willpower. Next to Nita's all-consuming strength of purpose, Chloe felt
like a swans-down powder puff.
The blonde suddenly looked up from a drawing she had been studying and,
without warning, let her
liquid brown eyes come to rest on Chloe. In her curiously harsh
Spanish, she remarked, "That little
one will be a great beauty someday. She looks very much like you."
Nita glanced over at Chloe with ill-concealed disdain. "I see no
resemblance at all,
sehora
.
And she will never be a beauty until she learns to push away her fork."
Nita's customer lifted a hand weighted down with several garish rings
and gestured toward Chloe.
"Come over here,
querida
.
Come give Evita a kiss."
For a moment Chloe didn't move as she tried to absorb what the woman
had said. Then she rose hesitantly from her chair and crossed the
salon, embarrassingly aware of the pudgy calves showing beneath the hem
of her cotton summer skirt. When she reached the woman, she leaned down
and deposited a self-conscious but nonetheless grateful kiss on the
softly fragrant cheek of Eva Peron.
"Fascist bitch!" Nita Serritella hissed later, as the First Lady of
Argentina departed through the salon's front doors. She slipped an
ebony cigarette holder between her lips only to withdraw it abruptly,
leaving
a scarlet smear on the end.
"It makes my flesh crawl to touch her! Everyone knows there wasn't a
Nazi in Europe who couldn't find shelter with Peron and his cronies in
Argentina."
The memories of the German occupation of Paris were still fresh in
Nita's mind, and she held nothing but contempt for Nazi sympathizers.
Still, she was a practical woman, and Chloe knew that her mother saw no
sense in sending Eva Peron's money, no matter how ill-gained, from the
rue de la Paix
to the avenue
Montaigne, where the house of Dior reigned supreme.
After that, Chloe clipped photographs of Eva Peron from the newspapers
and pasted them in a scrapbook with a red cover. Whenever Nita's
criticisms became especially biting, Chloe looked at the pictures,
leaving an occasional chocolate smudge on the pages as she remembered
how Eva Peron had said she would be a great beauty someday.
The winter she was fourteen her fat miraculously disappeared along with
her sweet tooth, and the legendary Serritella bones were finally
brought into definition. She began spending hours gazing into the
mirror, entranced by the reed-slim image before her. Now, she told
herself, everything would be different. For as long as she could
remember, she had felt like an outcast at school, but suddenly she
found herself part of the inner circle. She didn't understand that the
other girls were more attracted to her newfound air of self-confidence
than to her twenty-two-inch waist. For Chloe Serritella, beauty meant
acceptance.
Nita seemed pleased with her weight loss, so when Chloe went home to
Paris for her summer holiday, she found the courage to show her mother
sketches of some dresses she'd designed with the hope of someday
becoming a couturiere herself. Nita laid out the sketches on her
worktable, lit a cigarette, and dissected each one with the critical
eye that had made her a great designer.
"This line is ridiculous. And the proportion is all wrong here. See how
you ruined this one with too much detail? Where is your eye, Chloe?
Where is your eye?"
Chloe snatched the sketches from the table and never tried to design
again.
When she returned to school, Chloe dedicated herself to becoming
prettier, wittier, and more popular
than any of her classmates, determined that no one would ever suspect
that an awkward fat girl still lived inside her. She learned to
dramatize the most trivial events of her day with grand gestures and
extravagant sighs until everything she did seemed more important than
anything the others could possibly do. Gradually even the most mundane
occurrence in Chloe Serritella's life became fraught with high drama.
At sixteen, she gave her virginity to the brother of a friend in a
gazebo facing Lake Lucerne. The experience was awkward and
uncomfortable, but sex made Chloe feel slim. She quickly made up her
mind to try the whole thing again with someone more experienced.
In the spring of 1953, when Chloe was eighteen, Nita died unexpectedly
from a ruptured appendix. Chloe sat stunned and silent through her
mother's funeral, too numb to understand that the intensity of her
grief sprang not so much from her mother's death as from the feeling
that she'd never had a mother at all. Afraid to be alone, she stumbled
into the bed of a wealthy Polish count many years her senior. He
provided her with a temporary refuge from her fears and six months
later helped her sell Nita's salon for
a staggering amount of money.
The count eventually returned to his wife and Chloe set about living on
her inheritance. Being young,
rich, and without family, she quickly attracted the indolent young men
who wove themselves like gilded threads through the fabric of
international society. She became something of a collector, dabbling
with
one after another as she searched for the man who would give her the
unconditional love she'd never received from her mother, the man who
would make her stop feeling like an unhappy fat girl.
Jonathan "Black Jack" Day entered her life on the opposite side of a
roulette wheel in a Berkeley Square gambling club. Black Jack Day had
received his name not from his looks but from his penchant for games of
risk. At twenty-five, he had already destroyed three high-performance
sports cars and a significantly larger number of women. A wickedly
handsome American playboy from Chicago, he had chestnut hair that fell
in an unruly lock over his forehead, a roguish mustache, and a
seven-goal handicap in polo. In many ways he was no different from the
other young hedonists who had become so much a part of Chloe's life; he
drank gin, wore exquisitely tailored suits, and changed playgrounds
with the seasons. But the other men lacked Jack Day's reckless streak,
his ability to risk everything—even the fortune he had inherited in
American railroads—on a single spin of the wheel.
Fully conscious of his eyes upon her over the spinning roulette wheel,
Chloe watched the small ivory ball jostle from
rouge
to
noir
and back again before finally
coming to rest on black 17. She permitted herself to look up and found
Jack Day gazing at her over the table. He smiled, crinkling his
mustache. She smiled back, confident that she looked her very best in a
silver-gray Jacques Fath confection of satin and tulle that emphasized
the highlights in her dark hair, the paleness of her skin, and the
green depths in her eyes. "You can't seem to lose tonight," she said.
"Are you always this lucky?"
"Not always," he replied. "Are you?"
"Me?" She emitted one of her long, dramatic sighs. "I've lost at
everything tonight.
Je suis miserable
.
I'm never lucky."
He withdrew a cigarette from a silver case while his eyes trailed a
reckless path down her body. "Of course you're lucky. You've just met
me, haven't you? And I'm going to take you home tonight."
Chloe was both intrigued and aroused by his boldness, and her hand
closed instinctively around the edge of the table for support. She felt
as if his tarnished silver eyes were melting through her gown and
burning into the deepest recesses of her body. Without being able to
define exactly what it was that set Black Jack apart from the rest, she
sensed that only the most exceptional woman could win the heart of this
supremely self-confident man, and if she was that woman, she could
forever stop worrying about the fat girl inside.
But as much as she wanted him, Chloe held herself back. In the year
since her mother's death, she had grown more perceptive about men than
about herself. She had observed the reckless glitter in his eyes as the
ivory ball clattered through the compartments of the spinning roulette
wheel, and she suspected that he would not highly value what he could
obtain too easily. "I'm sorry," she replied coolly. "I have other
plans." Before he could respond, she picked up her evening bag and left
the room.
He telephoned the next day, but she gave her maid orders to say she was
out. She spotted him at a different gambling club a week later and
after giving him a tantalizing glimpse of herself, she slipped out the
back before he could approach. The days passed, and she found she could
think of nothing else but the handsome young playboy from Chicago. Once
again he telephoned; once again she refused the call. Later that same
night she saw him at the theater and gave him a casual nod, a hint of a
smile, before she moved away to her box.
The third time he telephoned, she took the call but pretended not to
remember who he was. He chuckled dryly and told her, "I'm coming for
you in half an hour, Chloe Serritella. If you're not ready, I'll never
see you again."
"Half an hour? I can't possibly—" But he had already hung up.
Her hand began to tremble as she replaced the receiver on the cradle.
In her mind she saw a spinning roulette wheel, the ivory ball skipping
from rouge to noir, noir to rouge, in this game they were playing. With
trembling hands, she dressed in a white wool sheath with ocelot cuffs,
then added a small hat
topped by an illusion veil. She answered the door chimes herself
exactly half an hour later.
He led her down the walk to a sporty red Isotta-Fraschini, which he
proceeded to drive through the streets of Knightsbridge at breathtaking
speed using only the fingers of his right hand on the steering wheel.
She gazed at him out of the corner of her eye, adoring the lock of
chestnut hair that fell so carelessly over his forehead as much as the
fact that he was a hot-blooded American instead of someone predictably
European.
Eventually he stopped at an out-of-the-way restaurant where he brushed
his hand against hers whenever she reached for her wineglass. She felt
herself aching with desire for him. Under the intensity of those
restless silver eyes, she felt wildly beautiful and as thin inside as
she was outside. Everything about him stirred her senses—the way he
walked, the sound of his voice, the scent of tobacco on his breath.
Jack Day was the ultimate trophy, the final affirmation of her own
beauty.
As they left the restaurant, he pressed her against the trunk of a
sycamore tree and gave her a dark, seductive kiss. Slipping his hands
behind her, he cupped her buttocks. "I want you," he murmured into her
open mouth.
Her body was so replete with desire that it caused her actual pain to
let him go. "You're too fast for me, Jack. I need time."
He laughed and tweaked her chin, as if he were especially pleased with
how well she played his game; then he squeezed her breasts just as an
elderly couple came out of the restaurant and looked their way. On the
drive home, he kept her amused with lively anecdotes and said nothing
about seeing her again.
Two days later when her maid announced he was on the telephone, Chloe
shook her head, refusing to take the call. Then she ran to her room and
indulged in a passionate fit of weeping, fearing she was pushing him
too far but afraid to risk losing his interest by doing anything else.
The next time she saw
him at a gallery opening, he wore a henna-haired showgirl on his arm.
Chloe pretended not to notice.
He showed up on her doorstep the following afternoon and took her for a
drive in the country. She said she had a previous engagement and
couldn't dine with him that evening.
The game of chance went on, and Chloe could think of nothing else. When
Jack wasn't with her, she conjured him in her imagination—the restless
movements, the careless lock of hair, the roguish mustache. She could
barely think beyond the thick, wet tension that suffused her body, but
still she refused his sexual overtures.
He spoke cruelly while he traced the shape of her ear with his lips. "I
don't think you're woman enough for me."
She curled her hand over the back of his neck. "I don't think you're
rich enough for me."
The ivory ball clattered around the contours of the roulette wheel,
rouge
to
noir, noir
to
rouge
.. .. Chloe knew that it would
make its final drop soon.
"Tonight," Jack said when she answered the telephone. "Be ready for me
at midnight."
"Midnight? Don't be ridiculous, darling. That's impossible."
"Midnight or never, Chloe. The game's over."
That night she slipped a black velvet suit with rhinestone buttons over
a champagne-colored crepe de chine blouse. Her eyes shone brightly back
at her from the mirror as she brushed her dark hair into a soft
pageboy. Black Jack Day, clad in a tuxedo, appeared at her door exactly
at the stroke of midnight. At the sight of him, her insides felt as
liquid as the scented lotion she had stroked over her flushed skin.
Instead of the Isotta-Fraschini, he led her to a chauffeured Daimler
and announced that he was taking her to Harrods.
She laughed. "Isn't midnight a little late to go on a shopping
expedition?"
He said nothing, merely smiling as he settled back into the soft
leather seats and began chatting about a polo pony he thought he might
buy from the Aga Khan. Before long, the Daimler pulled up to Harrods'
green and gold awning. Chloe looked at the dim lighting glowing through
the doors of the deserted department store. "Harrods doesn't seem to
have stayed open, Jack, not even for you."

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