The Daughter-in-Law (7 page)

“I would like to meet your sister,” she said, and she knew instantly that she had given the perfect answer. But she also knew there was one more test looming: she had to pass muster with Alexandra, the lean authority figure in the photographs. And she had to show that she could fit in with the society page characters that apparently populated Jonathan’s life.

Bold as he liked to sound, Jonathan Donner still had his coattails caught under the same family thumb that kept his sister in place. He might enjoy his moments of liberty, falling from airplanes, diving on old wrecks, and running through the gears on his convertible. He could put down his father’s business, and make jokes about his
mother’s reign in society. But all that was show talk, played with great style to disguise the fact that he was still a member of the orchestra, still taking direction from his mother’s baton.

Nothing could be simpler than to walk into his father’s office in the morning and say, “I quit!” His father might even admire him for it. But that would cut off a generous flow of cash that he might not be able to replace. Or, he could simply make an announcement at table and say that he was heading down to the Caribbean to run a dive boat. Except that would end his life as a pampered child, and thrust him into an adult commitment where he might possibly fail.

The fact was that Jonathan had prepared himself for just one thing: exactly the life that he was presently living. So, if Nicole were to share his life, it would have to be on the same terms that he had accepted for himself. Those terms were dictated by his mother. And she would have to join him in his lifelong ruse, pretending to be venturous and independent while always keeping peace with a higher authority.

“If you don’t think I’d be an imposition,” Nicole answered.

“No, I’m generally the imposition. You’ll be a breath of fresh air.”

EIGHT

T
HE DRESS
had to send just the right messages. Taste! It had to be fashionable, showing her sense of style, but not so trendy that she seemed not to have a mind of her own. Quality! She wanted to show an appreciation of the better things, but not something overly expensive. Only pretenders confused price with quality. Sexy! She had a good body and the dress should show it without making a point of how much it was showing. Modest! The dress had to make it perfectly clear that nothing was for sale.

It had to talk to several audiences. Jonathan’s mother was the most important and she needed to be assured that Nicole was worthy of the family and a good fit to her social circle. Jonathan’s father, she had been told, wouldn’t remember her. But she suspected there was nothing that escaped his notice and little he didn’t remember. He had seen her playful side in her baseball outfit. The dress had to show him her womanly assets, which had seemed to be his center of interest.

It had to make Jonathan proud to have her on his arm. She had to be the belle of the ball without seeming to try, and he had to know that every man in the room envied him, that they all wanted her, but that they all understood that she was his alone.

And then there was his sister. It was Pam’s party, and Nicole had to be very careful not to upstage her. But still, she had to be the older sister that Pam would want to emulate.

It was quite a bit to ask of one evening dress.

Nicole wangled a day off so that she could devote the time to shopping, and made an uptown pilgrimage, starting with the small boutiques and finishing with the major department stores. By lunchtime she had visited twelve stores and tried on eight dresses. During the afternoon, she added seven more stores and tried on another eight. The range had run from church supper to Academy Awards, with cleavage everywhere from her Adam’s apple to her
navel. She was completely exhausted and still without a dress when she met Jonathan for dinner.

“I told the folks you were coming,” he reported.

“And?”

“Oh, they were delighted.” Then after a pause, “Jack even remembered you. He called you Jorge Posada. And Pam thought you sounded like fun.”

“What did your mother think?”

“My mother doesn’t think anything on hearsay. She likes to see for herself.”

The damn dress was going to be even more important than she thought.

She took a long lunch hour the next day, revisited one of the boutiques to try on a dress she had tried the day before. It looked even worse. She raced through two more small stores. “What are you looking for?” a frustrated sales clerk asked.

“I haven’t got any idea at all.”

By Thursday she was desperate. She had bought new lingerie in case she spent Saturday night with Jonathan and a cute pair of pajamas in case she was asked to bunk in with one of the other girls. But still, she hadn’t seen the perfect dress. She closed down an East Side department store, leaving three possibilities in the dressing room. Her standards were beginning to drop, but still she had found nothing.

On Saturday morning, certain that she had seen every dress in the city, she returned to the boutique where she had tried the same dress twice. It was wrong for a hundred reasons, but since she had gone back to it there must have been something about it that she liked. When she reached the shop, the owner was pinning a dress onto a window mannequin. It was a black, floor-length raw silk sheath with pewter accents at the neckline and a single line of pewter across the hips. The front was high with crossover straps disappearing behind the neck for a very modest, conservative first appearance. But the back was bare all the way to the hips, creating an exit that would leave them screaming for more. And, just in case they never got behind her, there was a center slit that would show leg to the thigh with every step she took.

She tried it on, liked the fit and then moved in front of the mirror. It was exactly what she needed. Tasteful and respectable, with
flashes of sensuality as she walked and turned. Ordinary as she stepped to the dance floor, and then wildly exciting when she moved to the music. The perfect blend of hot wife and respectable daughter-in-law.

Jonathan was in a white dinner jacket with a passé plaid tie and cummerbund. “Lovely,” he told her when she opened the door. “Alexandra will fall in love with you.” Then she turned and led him into her apartment, and he confronted her back and the hint of her breasts that moved under her arms. “Jack will try to take you on a tour of the wine cellar. You look absolutely delicious.”

“Is it too . . . bare?”

“No, just about perfect. You’re completely dressed and totally naked at the same time. It just depends on the point of view.”

He was talkative as they drove over the Triboro Bridge and fought the traffic on the Long Island parkways. He loved the house they were heading toward and knew that she would like it, too. But at the same time, he hated the house and hoped she wouldn’t find it too pretentious. He enjoyed driving the country roads on the North Shore. He hated driving in the continuous Long Island traffic jam. He enjoyed his mother’s parties. He wouldn’t be going at all except to have Nicole meet his family. Clearly, he was nervous, for some reason dreading the encounter with his mother. He babbled endlessly to avoid discussing what was frightening him.

There was a security officer at the entrance to the property who recognized Jonathan and saluted him through. Nicole saw the name of the estate, Rockbottom, engraved into the gateposts.

“Rockbottom?” she laughed. “Rockbottom?”

“Jack’s idea. It’s sort of a tribute to his meanness. He buys everything at rock bottom.”

They drove for several minutes on a landscaped road that toured through well-tended trees. There was a sunset shaping up ahead of them, and whenever they caught glimpses of the Sound, the water twinkled with fiery highlights.

The house that was suddenly visible ahead seemed quite modest, a square brick structure with a few white-framed windows. But then she realized that it was simply a gatehouse, probably a perk for the groundskeeper and his family. They drove between stone pillars
and continued to the northwest, keeping the sun in front of them. And then, without any real warning, they were in a circular driveway, with a lawn in the middle that could have accommodated a football game.

The house at the end of the driveway was an English manor house, Tudor in design, with multiple bays of brick, stone, and split-timber stucco. There were two stories below the eaves, and then a third story that showed among the sharply peaked roofs. Most pronounced were the groupings of huge, mullioned bay windows, some two stories high, one bank topped with a balcony. There were a half dozen clusters of chimneys, hinting at dozens of fireplaces within. The facade, rising from a simple stone wall and broken up into a major entrance bay with five adjoining bays, was at least a hundred and fifty feet long.

To the right, set back at the end of its own driveway, was the garage, a two-story replica of one of the main house split-timber bays, with five overhead doors on the ground level.

Jonathan continued driving past the garage entrance and turned off on a road that ran past the east side of the house. A new building loomed ahead, this one two stories of stone and brick with archways instead of windows. There was a glow of light coming through the arches and a musical beat rose above the trees. The fleet of cars anchored on the lawn indicated that the party had already started.

It was a pool house, with a dozen cabanas on the ground floor, and half a dozen apartments above. Beyond it was a broad terrace where the eight-piece orchestra had set up. A few of the younger couples were already dancing. Then came the pool, a perfect sixty-foot square with an infinity edge where the water seemed to vanish into Long Island Sound. The round guest tables were set up beside the pool, each with a white tablecloth and service for ten. The floral centerpieces matched the flowers that were floating in the pool.

There were probably two hundred guests, all the men in white dinner jackets, and the woman in a full spectrum of colors. The older people, presumably Jack and Alexandra’s friends, were to the left side, already seated at their tables. Pam’s friends were to the right, a tornado of activity that whirled from table to table, and at times threatened to toss some of the young people into the water.

As they came down the cabana steps, Nicole could feel the eyes turning to her from both sides of the water. She kept up an ani-
mated conversation with Jonathan, pretending to be oblivious to the fact that she was on display. Jack Donner came darting toward her, a smoldering cigar thrust from his jaw. “Nicole, isn’t it? The one at Yankee Stadium?” He took her hand and pulled her away from Jonathan and toward the table he had just left. “You look better without that mask,” he said, and then laughed at his own joke.

The slim woman from the photographs turned her head toward them, but made no effort to get up. Instead, she extended her hand and waited for Nicole to reach out and take it. “I’m Alexandra.” Her face, like her figure, was long and thin with a prominent straight nose and a pointed chin. The dark hair in the photographs at Newport was now silver-gray and pulled back into an elegant chignon. Her good looks were still there but it was more an aura of command that made her unforgettable. Her authority radiated from her eyes, large and liquid blue. They focused instantly and locked on permanently, seeming to take in everything for storage in a database.

“Wonderful to meet you, Mrs. Donner.”

“Alexandra,” she repeated. “And may I say that you are breath-takingly lovely.”

Nicole mumbled and blushed.

“Your dress,” Alexandra went on, “is absolutely gorgeous. Where did you ever find it?”

Nicole told her about the small boutique, making it sound as if they were her personal designers.

“You’ll make them famous,” Alexandra said.

Jonathan eased past her and kissed his mother’s cheek. “Well, was I exaggerating?”

“Not in the least,” Alexandra answered. “She’s very beautiful.” She glanced down at her guest list. “You’re at table six.” She rattled off the names of the others at the table. Nicole recognized the name of the conductor of the City Opera, and Tisdale, the real-estate developer who had been at the ball game.

She spotted Pam instantly, a young woman with her mother’s long face and piercing eyes, slim and energetic in a pastel gown that used a lace pattern to enhance her small breasts. She was coming toward them, walking too fast for the lines of the dress so that it seemed she might step right out of it. “Jonny,” she said to her
brother and lunged into his arms. “I got your present and it’s perfect. I just love it.” She wheeled out of the embrace and reached for Nicole. “And you’re Nicole. As beautiful as he’s been telling everybody.”

Nicole again mumbled and blushed. “Congratulations on your graduation,” she said. “It must be a big relief.”

“More like breaking the chains of slavery,” Pam told her. “An MBA was Dad’s idea. I hated every course.”

They gushed back and forth for a minute, fawning over one another. Then Pam excused herself, promising to see them later, and Jonathan led Nicole along the pool’s edge to their table. She recognized Tisdale, who introduced a Wagnerian wife, and the conductor who was with a young tenor from the chorus. The other couple was the county supervisor, an overweight man with a politician’s smile, and his wife who introduced herself as “his better half.”

“Ben is late, as usual,” Jonathan said, and Nicole remembered his jump partner, Ben Tobin, who apparently was going to complete their table.

The whole party walked down to the far edge of the pool to take in the sunset over Manhattan. From the top of the cliff, Nicole could look down at the miniature harbor below, with its own seawall and lighthouse. At the dock was a fifty-foot cruiser, bristling with fishing poles, and a forty-foot ketch with roller-reefed sails.

“Your navy?” she asked Jonathan.

“Part of it. The battleships are in Newport.”

A cannon fired when the sun disappeared behind the skyscrapers. The trumpet from the band sounded colors. Then the caterer’s carts rattled into place.

Ben showed up with the appetizer, wearing a collarless black shirt under his dinner jacket. The young lady who trailed after him was an Asian of indeterminate age, wearing a white sheath that set off her skin perfectly. “You look much better without a helmet and parachute,” he told Nicole. And later he allowed that “Jon was keeping what he saved,” reinforcing the notion that Jonathan was planning a long relationship. The evening was going better than she could have ever hoped.