Lovers (16 page)

Lori brought Victoria up to be a neat, obedient, healthy child who did her nurse credit when her parents looked in on her for a few minutes each evening before they hurried out to cocktails or dinner. Dan Frost was a junior account executive at a large agency, and his job description included a great deal of socializing.

The Frosts were divorced by the time Victoria was two. Dan drifted off to Chicago, and then to Milwaukee, his child-support checks tapering off until they stopped entirely and Millicent found herself financially responsible for her daughter. Fortunately, at twenty-four, her rapid rise at Abbott, where she was now vice-president in charge of the entire copy group, enabled her to continue to afford Lori as well as a part-time cleaning woman, a private nursery school for Victoria, and weekly trips to get her hair done at Saks.

Lori remained with Millicent Frost while Millicent’s success increased month by month. One day, when Millicent was thirty-one, astounding her employer almost as much as herself, Lori took her sizable nest egg out of the bank and returned to Switzerland to shop for the husband she had most certainly earned.

“You’re going to love boarding school, sweetie,” Millicent
assured Victoria, who still couldn’t believe that Lori had actually left her.

“Why can’t I stay here?” the girl asked imploringly. “I love my school.” She was tall for ten, almost as tall as her trim mother, and skinny, with regular features and long, dark brown hair. Not pretty, Millicent knew, but certainly not homely. Neither cute nor interesting looking, just an ordinary, well-behaved ten-year-old—although perhaps she had a certain unusual dignity—with the normal possibilities any ten-year-old has, possibilities it was her duty to maximize.

“Victoria, you’ll never make the right friends here, you can’t learn to ride, you can’t learn French properly, Central Park hasn’t been a decent place to play for years, your weekends aren’t organized the way they were when Lori was with us, there’s no one to supervise you—oh, for heaven’s sake, Victoria—you can’t do yourself justice unless you go away to a first-class school.”

“Justice?”

“Sweetie, you’re going to have a wonderful time. I wish I’d had your chances,” Millicent Frost said unyieldingly.

Victoria was going to go to the expensive New England boarding school Millicent had had so much trouble getting her into, whether she understood why or not. The girl was decidedly too old to be cared for by another governess, for that was what Lori had virtually become over the years, and yet too young to be entrusted to a live-in, full-time housekeeper, even if such a person could be found now that the supply of young European women had dried up.

Millicent worked long, demanding hours. She left Abbott when Victoria was six for Doyle, Dane, Bernbach, the hottest agency in the business, where she was one of a number of vice-presidents. Her nonstop social life was largely client-related and absolutely necessary in her position. Her time simply was not elastic enough to include helping a child with homework or arranging for sleep-overs or worrying if her daughter had clean clothes for school
the next day. To Millicent such a possibility had become utterly grotesque.

Victoria Frost was sent to the boarding school, which was near Boston, and to the very best summer camp in Maine. During school holidays and in the weeks between the end of the school year and the beginning of camp, if Victoria was not invited to stay with a friend, Millicent found a series of pleasant young female graduate students who needed part-time jobs, to keep her daughter occupied and entertained.

Millicent Frost was careful always to attend parents’ weekend at school and camp, she never missed instructing her secretary to send wonderful presents to school for Victoria’s birthday, and she became famous for the catered Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts to which she invited all of her unattached friends from the office, parties at which her daughter was pleasantly, if quietly, in evidence. Other women at Doyle, Dane wished they were as good at combining motherhood and career as Millicent Frost obviously was, judging from the composure of tall young Victoria, who had learned to conceal her hatred of her mother so well that no one was aware of it but she herself.

Until Lori went back to Switzerland, Victoria had been content enough in her closeness to her governess to accept without too much question the cult of her “wonderful mother” that Lori enthusiastically espoused, seeing how hard pretty little Mrs. Frost worked without a man to take care of her. For a while Victoria was too busy adjusting to the life of her well-run school to think about her mother, but soon she became aware of the amount of attention her new friends received from their mothers, the loving letters and the long phone calls.

Occasionally she too received a brief, brisk letter her mother had dictated to her secretary, responding to the two weekly letters the school obliged its students to write home, but, as she visited her school friends and observed their family lives through hungry eyes, she realized painfully that although no other girl she knew was as thoroughly
and carefully supervised as she, year in and year out, she was almost entirely neglected by the one person who could not be paid to spend time with her.

There was absolutely no one with whom Victoria shared this observation. She absorbed it slowly, incorporating it into her essence as she passed through puberty and entered her teens. Her mother was the source of everything she possessed, every expensive party dress and school uniform, every ticket to the ballet and the theater, every sailing lesson, every hour on horseback, every ruffled pink-and-green plaid pillow in her recently redecorated bedroom. Each costly detail of her privileged upbringing had been paid for by her mother’s brilliant achievements.

Of course, she knew that it was not enough. Without an expression of maternal love, without her mother’s desire to spend time with her, it could never be enough. It was unforgivable, utterly unforgivable, now and forever.

During the fall of 1968, soon after Victoria’s sixteenth birthday, while she was in her sophomore year of high school, Millicent Frost, who looked no older at thirty-seven than she had a decade before, surprised herself and everyone who knew her by falling deeply in love with a man nine years younger than she, Angus Caldwell, a rising star at BBD&O. At twenty-eight, Angus was known as the most seductive account supervisor in a business in which no man, much less one who dealt with clients, could survive without possessing some strong aspect of seduction. Angus Caldwell was a man of great and undeniable charm, a tall, graceful man, the son of generation after generation of sheep-raising Scots who had moved easily over their acres, altogether a sandy man with rather rough, freckled skin and sandy, silky hair that fell forward over his forehead, a man whose dark gray eyes had an appeal he didn’t seem to realize, whose charm lay partly in a hesitant smile that was both shy and slightly melancholy, and partly in his look of an overgrown schoolboy. Yet Angus Caldwell was fully as ambitious as Millicent Frost, a self-made man whose heritage had been nothing more than a decent mind, a love of
books, and the ability to inspire trust in everyone who met him. Millicent’s love was returned, the difference in their ages was of no importance, and although they had only known each other for a few months, they made plans to get married as quickly as possible.

Millicent would have preferred to keep Victoria away at school for the wedding. In her judgment the girl had grown up to be respectably good-looking, even what was often called “handsome” in an earlier day, because of her fine height, her upright figure, the unblemished clarity of her pale skin, which was creamy, not sallow, the gloss of her thick brown hair, and the clarity of her well-placed brown eyes with their surprisingly long, dark lashes under dark brows. The money she’d spent on Victoria showed, Millicent congratulated herself. She’d produced an aristocrat.

But she was an unsettlingly mature sixteen, and that dignity which had been charming in a child of ten made her daughter seem too mature for Millicent Frost’s liking at this particularly romantic moment in her life. Victoria hadn’t looked like a genuinely young girl for years, leaping past the awkward age in one bound, never needing braces or slouching or evidencing any of the normal and adorable awkwardness that one looked for in a teenager. Nor, to her mother’s critical eyes, was she particularly endearing. Coupled with her height, she had developed a cool and withholding presence, a self-possession that entirely lacked the sweet youthfulness that Millicent felt she had every right to expect from such an expensively cultivated bloom. Aristocrat or not, Victoria simply had no charm, Millicent told herself, and she reflected, with a sigh of disappointment, that all the good skin and hair in the world couldn’t match the value of a touch of charm. She didn’t even use the gift of her amazing lashes, but preferred to look at people as unblinkingly as possible.

Still and all, Victoria had to be brought down from school, even in the middle of her midterm exams, or people would wonder why she wasn’t at her mother’s side at
the church ceremony that had been hastily but carefully planned to include everyone of importance on Madison Avenue. Fortunately, among Victoria’s party dresses bought for prep-school dances, there was one that would be entirely suitable, a forest-green velvet minidress with its own short, flaring jacket.

Victoria had an exam on Saturday morning, which would just give her time to change, make the plane from Boston, and get to New York in time for the ceremony. Millicent arranged for her to be met at the airport by a chauffeur and driven to the St. Bartholomew’s on Park Avenue so that she could meet Angus before the wedding started.

The plane was a half hour late and Victoria arrived, flustered and apologetic, only just in time to walk down the aisle in front of her mother, who had held up the wedding as long as she could. Angus Caldwell waited for them calmly, his longish sandy hair well brushed, his dark gray eyes gentle, yet full of anticipation. He turned to Victoria, bending down toward her, and took her nervously shaking fingers in both of his big, warm hands. He held them tightly, looking into her startled eyes with kind concentration, lifted an eyebrow in appreciation, grinned shyly, and gave her the smallest of winks. Then he turned to his bride. During the ceremony Victoria was unable to look away even once from Angus Caldwell’s face. She had fallen instantly and utterly in love with him, her first love, her only love, a love that she knew, with all her lonely soul, would endure for a lifetime.

Angus and Millicent Frost Caldwell resigned from their respective agencies as soon as they returned from a brief honeymoon, and formed their own agency, Caldwell & Caldwell. Within a day of the announcement of their partnership, Angus received a phone call from an old friend, Joe Devane, owner of Oak Hill Foods, a medium-sized company he had started ten years earlier. Until then, Oak Hill had been considered safe at Ogilvy & Mather, but now
that Angus was in business for himself, Devane intended to move his account, with Angus’s word that he would always handle it himself no matter how big Caldwell & Caldwell got.

From that first day on, Millicent and Angus climbed, almost effortlessly, it seemed, from success to success. An astonishing number of creative people from every giant agency flooded them with portfolios containing their best work in the race to become an early part of the Caldwell team. Large accounts fell in over their transom without solicitation, flooding them with challenging problems that their joint ambitions and talents were superbly prepared to meet. It was a stampede that only the success of Wells, Rich, Green several years earlier had equaled.

When Victoria graduated from boarding school, a year and a half later, Caldwell was doing seventy million dollars a year in billings, and employed more than a hundred people. Victoria applied to three respectable colleges, and was accepted by two of them. As a graduation present, Millicent Caldwell planned to give her a summer traveling in Italy, but she refused to leave New York.

“The only thing I want is a summer job at the agency.”

“But that’s not a present, Victoria. The kids we give those jobs to are prepared to work hard as hell all summer long—weekends too, if necessary.”

“So am I. Please try me, Mother. I’ve never wanted anything so much.”

“Absolutely not. It wouldn’t be fair to someone who really needs a job.”

“What about next summer?” Victoria begged.

“Look, sweetie, it’s commendable of you to want to work, but you’ve had a busy senior year and now it’s time for you to have some fun. When I was your age, I would have given anything for the kind of summer you’re going to have. For girls like you, summertime should be spent enriching your life, socially and culturally. Not only that, but I’d be accused of favoritism if I gave you a job, and I can’t have that.”

Nor, thought Millicent Caldwell, could she have an eighteen-year-old daughter camping in the apartment for three months, right on top of Angus and her. Good Lord, they were practically newlyweds! Had Victoria no sensitivity to the possibility that her mother might enjoy being alone with her husband, without a hulking teenager around to spoil things? No, of course not, children, no matter how old, never allowed themselves even to touch on such thoughts about a parent.

The next summer Victoria was sent to a riding family in the English countryside, and the following summer she spent in Greece. After that, Millicent sent her to France for her junior year abroad at the Sorbonne, and made sure that she spent that summer touring Italy. She never spent more than two or three nights in a row under her mother’s roof. Christmas and Thanksgiving brought her home to New York, but the other college vacations took her to the homes of friends, where the welcome was warmer than at her mother’s.

When Victoria graduated from college, she managed to get a summer internship at Hill Associates, a small advertising agency, where her relationship to Caldwell & Caldwell was regarded as a glamorous plus.

At Hill Associates, Victoria ran errands, made coffee, and delivered mail; she watched, she listened, she absorbed and remembered every detail she was able to observe of how their business was conducted. She talked as much as possible to the people who had time to talk to her. It was not surprising how many of them there were, and how long and informatively they were willing to chat, when they found out whose daughter she was, a detail she mentioned in the most unassuming way possible. At the end of the summer she again asked her mother for a job.