Riverside Park (35 page)

THE PAINTING OF
the Arab, the camel and the vulture that scared the Stewart children fetched sixteen thousand dollars at the Christie's auction. “I made a sixteen hundred dollar commission!” Celia Cavanaugh told her parents. (“Don't forget a Schedule C on your taxes next year!” Mr. Cavanaugh told his daughter.)

While Celia's life has not miraculously sorted itself out she is definitely a promising work-in-progress. With the encouragement of her parents, her roommate and Amanda Stewart, she has created the rudimentary outlines of what might one day become an antiques business. In the meantime she's sold things on eBay and some of Amanda's items through an auction house.

The really, really big news is that Celia took two classes at Columbia over the summer with plans to re-enroll full-time in the fall with a dual major in history and business. She was also pleasantly surprised to be offered the three most lucrative shifts at Captain Cook's while she attends school.

Shortly after Jason DiSantos really did turn eighteen he returned to Captain Cook's to wait tables over the summer. He was by this time in love with his classmate Allyson and Celia became his confidante and romance counselor. When Jason started making noises over the summer that maybe he didn't want to go to Penn after all, but to a school closer to where Allyson would be, in Massachusetts, it was Celia who got Jason back on track before his mother went completely off the deep end.

With the exception of Jason's ever-changing love life Rosanne's summer was an extremely busy but happy one. She resigned from her job at the hospital and took immediate charge of Samuel (although his grandmother was more than eager to take him). Since Rosanne had never been able to be a full-time mother to Jason she is somewhat fascinated by the experience. In the park she has bonded not with the nannies but with the other mothers who like to talk about what career paths they might pursue when the children are older. Rosanne has picked up some good ideas and is almost positive it will be a business of her own, having to do with the placement of LPNs, nurses' aides, housekeepers and companions in the homes of the elderly.

In the beginning of July little Grace Stewart began arriving at ten in the morning and that's when things became interesting. Still, on Saturday nights, Rosanne sees Randy and she's beginning to wonder if perhaps there might be a future there after all.

Althea Wyatt negotiated a limited partnership at her firm so that she has a relatively reliable schedule to care for her son. Her parents are still planning to take early retirement but it becomes increasingly doubtful how much time they'll actually spend away from Manhattan while their grandson is living there.
Never having had a son of his own, Sam is amassing a rather formidable collection of sporting equipment for the future, which he always claims is on sale.

The situation with Samantha Wyatt will take time to heal. She only came home once over the summer and did not go to see Samuel. She is living in an off-campus apartment and the Wyatts are upset because they think Steve Culmathson is still on the scene. But Sam and Harriet just keep calling and writing to Samantha, telling her their news and expressing their love for her. Althea sends a card to Samantha once in a while, but doesn't talk to her; Althea has no desire to talk to her sister, she says, until Samantha at least acknowledges that Althea is a mother.

Amanda Miller Stewart has seemingly been reborn since the day her family was permanently reunited under one roof. (Her happiness does much to smooth the family's readjustment to living in significantly less space.) She has put her book on the court of Catherine the Great aside to assist two writers in the adaptation of her biography into a script. She drops Grace off with Rosanne and Samuel at around ten in the morning and picks her up at four.

The naive excitement of striding through the halls of Bennett, Fitzallen & Coe as editor in chief wore off in about five minutes for Howard Stewart (after legal brought him up to speed on the plagiarism suit against the publishing house being notoriously played out in the headlines), but he still knew at once how much he had missed being on the publisher side of things. He also is enjoying the enormous difference of being an editor in chief instead of the powerless young editor he had been the last time around.

Amanda and Howard sometimes look at one another and try to remember how they could have ever felt anything except blessed in their marriage. After the house was sold to cover
their debts they now spend a half hour each week going over their finances. Oddly enough there seems to be a correlation between them working as a team on their debts and money falling out of the sky. (Howard says he will never use anything else but bartenders to sell antiques from now on.)

Emily and Teddy are settling in well and are playing in a Manhattan soccer league. The big difference now, which sometimes makes Amanda want to weep for the sheer joy of it, is that their father is almost always there to watch them.

Hillings & Stewart has reverted to the agency's original name of Hillings & Hillings. The agency's most exciting deal at the moment is the development of Amanda Stewart's biography of Catherine the Great as a movie vehicle starring Georgiana Hamilton-Ayres.

Over the summer Georgiana surprised the world by announcing her engagement to Lord William Edward Mortimer Douglas, future Earl of Worthington. When Lord Douglas was asked how he felt about his glamorous fiancée's highly publicized bisexuality, he said, “Georgiana and I love each other above all others. Our pasts are exactly that—past.” The couple intend to make their home base in Surrey, UK, and Bel Air, California.

The news of the divorce action between media mogul Jackson Darenbrook and DBS President Cassy Cochran came as a stunner to the industry. The corporation itself seemed to go into a kind of mourning. Once people saw, however, that Jackson and Cassy did not seem to bear animosity toward one another, the nervous anticipation of some sort of corporate cataclysm in the broadcasting division began to dissipate. The Board of Directors, however, are beside themselves that their brother is back on the “hoo-ha” babe pages of the tabloids.

Jackson is living in a hotel on Fifty-seventh Street and has
put the penthouse on the market. Cassy has been staying with Alexandra Waring until she finishes renovating and remodeling a brownstone on Riverside Drive. It remains to be seen what the reaction will be when it becomes known that Alexandra Waring is the co-owner. In the meantime Cassy carries on with a greater degree of energy and happiness than people have ever seen. People also agree that Cassy is still very beautiful and will no doubt marry again.

They just don't know yet to whom.