The Daughter-in-Law (8 page)

It was a grand affair. The younger crowd from across the pool jumped into every rock number, filling the dance floor with their
arm-waving and stamping. The big band numbers drew from her side of the pool, following the lead of Jack and Alexandra who rose for every fox-trot. Jack danced mechanically, moving with the precision of a balance sheet. Alexandra moved to the music with an intrinsic grace as if she, too, were an orchestral instrument. Tall and slim, her coloring was perfectly complemented by a deep gray sheath that flared outward at her thighs. In her heels, she was an inch taller than her husband.

“Your mother is terrific,” Nicole said as she and Jonathan danced near his parents.

“I think she likes what she sees.”

“Me?” she asked.

“Us,” Jonathan answered. “She can tell you’re good for me because it’s nearly midnight and I haven’t embarrassed her yet.”

“How could you embarrass her?”

“Well, at her last affair I got blind drunk and walked into the pool. She told me frankly that for a few seconds she had hoped that I would drown. She was really ticked off at the people who jumped in to save me.”

Nicole answered, “You said she was difficult, but she couldn’t be more pleasant.”

“She’ll be just as pleasant when she’s blindfolding you in front of a firing squad.”

Tisdale made a pass at Nicole, offering to show her the design for one of his new buildings. The politician asked her to dance and ground his crotch up against her belly while blowing into her ear. Ben came to the rescue by suggesting that they spend some time with the younger set that was a better fit for their ages.

Nicole sat for several minutes with Pam, whose date seemed to have vanished on his way to the men’s room. She was impressed to learn that Pam had graduated from Columbia and ranked high in her class. “I’ll be starting as assistant manager of the New York Philharmonic,” she said. “It sounds important, but really I’ll be just another bookkeeper.” She didn’t seem enthused.

“Any romantic interest?” Nicole asked, nodding her head to a gathering of young studs.

“Sure,” the new graduate answered. “They’d all like to get laid in the boathouse. But if I were trapped in a burning building there isn’t
one of them who would risk scorching his jacket, if you know what I mean.”

Nicole nodded.

“Alexandra sees through them all,” Pam continued. “None of them measures up.”

Nicole felt a brief stitch of anxiety. No one seemed to measure up to any of Mrs. Donner’s children. Did Alexandra see through her the same way she saw through Pam’s suitors? Had the warm reception been nothing more than polite society babble?

“I really admire the way you’ve gone out on your own and taken your chances,” Pam said with overtones of envy. “Jonathan said you were a struggling actress, sort of living in a garret.”

“It was a tenement walk-up with old plumbing,” Nicole laughed. “Like
La Bohème
without the music. I got out as fast as I could.”

“I’m going to try something on my own,” Pam said with conviction. “I was thinking that I’d like to run an art gallery, maybe a place for undiscovered artists.”

Nicole and Jonathan got up for the next rock number and danced energetically. Ben used his date’s trip to the ladies’ room as an excuse to dance with Pam, and kept her on the floor through three numbers. The Asian lady kept her smile, even though her eyes were angry. At one point Nicole noticed Jack, standing off with another man, leering at her, a cigar grinding in the corner of his mouth. She stole a glance to his table where Alexandra had turned her chair to watch the dancing. Alexandra was looking right at them with a pleasantly blank expression, giving no hint of her reaction. It was hard to tell whether she was more concerned with her son or with her daughter.

By midnight, the entire party was tipsy, sleepily on the adult side of the pool and raucously on the other. Then the inevitable: one of the younger crowd missed a step and toppled into the pool. As his friends gathered at the edge, another was pushed in. Like a salvo of battleship fire, another dozen plunged in together and then screaming women were pushed in on top of them. In a matter of seconds, half of Pam’s friends were in the water, standing chest deep and gyrating to the music. Ben was wringing out his jacket over Pam’s head.

Word passed quickly that Jack was serving brandy back at the
main house, which gave the elders a chance to pick up and leave before Pam’s friends turned on them. Nicole and Jonathan joined the exodus, and drove back to the manor.

The entrance foyer of Rockbottom looked like a museum, with armor displayed in the corners, and heraldry banners hanging from the surrounding balcony. A left turn brought them to the reception room that could have been the lobby of a Ritz-Carlton. There were a half dozen casual furniture groupings, any one of which would have sufficed for a typical family home. A portable bar had been rolled in with a dozen bottles on display. At the other end of the room was a coffee service with a three-foot-high silver urn.

Jonathan got Nicole a coffee and left her with Ben’s abandoned date while he went to find the housekeeper. He returned with keys to the gatehouse where the two women were supposed to spend the night. Minutes later, a soaked-through Ben and his icy lady left for the city, which told Nicole that she and Jonathan would have the gatehouse to themselves.

NINE

I
T WAS
a delicate situation. Obviously, she wasn’t going to lock him out, but just as obviously there were proprieties to be observed in his parents’ house.

“Is this a good idea?” she asked an hour later when he closed the gatehouse door behind them, and turned on the light in the well-furnished parlor.

“You mean I’m not up to it?”

“I mean right in front of your family.”

“They know we were together in Newport. Alexandra gets daily reports from the maintenance guy.”

“They weren’t with us in Newport.”

He had already kicked off his shoes and was lifting wineglasses and a bottle of sauterne from his suitcase. He had told the frontdoor porter exactly where to put them when he had stolen them from the cart.

“Nicole, we’re not fooling anyone. Alexandra knew damn well that Ben wasn’t staying when she set this place up for you and his girlfriend. Ben and Pam are sort of a thing but neither of them want to announce it. The girl wasn’t staying, and if Ben were staying anywhere it would be out on one of the boats with Pam. All Alexandra wants is a bit of deniability and a way to get you out of the house while Jack is around.”

“Your father?” She was startled at how casually the implication was presented.

“Jack can be a bit of a lecher when temptation is thrown in his path. So Alexandra always hides the cookie jar.”

He led her up the stairs to a huge bedroom that took up most of the second floor. “You’ll like this better than the cabana,” he said.

“The cabana?”

“That’s where you’d be sleeping if you were just one of the single ladies. But Pam did the room arrangements.”

“Does everyone in your family know that I’m sleeping with you?”

He slid the zipper down the back of her dress. “They will in the morning when they see the smile on my face.”

She awoke to the sound of Jonathan’s voice as he whispered into the telephone. “Just getting us some coffee,” he said when he hung up. “I also asked for toast. They don’t stock doughnuts in the kitchen.” They showered separately, dressed quickly, and were downstairs when the porter, Raymond, arrived bearing the coffee on a covered silver tray.

“What time did things finish up?” Jonathan asked. It was apparent that he and Raymond had long been coconspirators within the household.

“The people inside were gone by two. Pam’s friends went on all night. There are two young men in wet clothes asleep on the lawn. There are also two evening dresses floating in the pool. God knows where the young ladies are or what they’re wearing.”

“Is Pam okay?”

“Asleep in her room,” Raymond answered, “although no one saw her come in.”

“Sounds like her party was a great success.”

“I think it will be talked about for some time.”

Over coffee, Jonathan filled her in on the day’s schedule. Brunch at the cabana, which would start at ten and run until there were no more guests to feed. Boat rides for any that wanted to cruise the Sound. The pool was open, of course. For serious, adult conversation, Jack would be holding court in the library. And Pam would be opening gifts in the reception room.

“I didn’t bring a gift,” Nicole confessed.

“I signed your name on mine.”

“What did we give her?”

“Well, she’s becoming business manager at the Philharmonic ...”

She reacted with horror. “Oh God, not a fountain pen, or a briefcase?”

“I stressed the art over the business,” he answered. “I got her a CD set of all last year’s concerts.”

It seemed like a relaxing, pleasant schedule. Nicole hadn’t brought a swimsuit so she was leaning toward a sail out on the Sound.

“Oh, I told Alexandra that you liked flowers. She wants to show you her garden.”

Nicole felt her heart miss a few beats.

TEN

T
HE GARDENS
could have been the botanical center for a city. In terraces that fell down the hill to the south, away from the water views, there were fields of perennials and fresh rows of brightly colored annuals. Interspersed were collections of grasses, tall and green now, and destined to ripen to golds and ambers as the summer progressed. There was a miniature bamboo forest that Alexandra feared might not survive a full year. And there was a huge greenhouse hidden behind a decorative wall that was devoted to epiphytes. The orchards were sensational. Below the gardens there were potting sheds filled with tools, plant feed, and sacks of aromatic soil. The way Alexandra handled the plants on the workbench showed that she wasn’t just a spectator. She liked to get her hands dirty.

Nicole strolled up and down the pathways at Alexandra’s side, oohing and aahing, asking questions and, in general, trying to sound impressed. It was quickly obvious that Nicole’s knowledge of flowers was limited to a florist’s window, but her love of plants seemed sincere. They were passing in front of a row of rose bushes when Alexandra got down to business.

“Jonathan is quite taken with you. He talks about nothing else.”

“That’s flattering. He’s a wonderful person.”

Alexandra stopped walking. “Do you really think so?”

The question was a shocker. “Of course,” Nicole answered. “You know he saved my life.”

Alexandra’s expression said she didn’t know, so Nicole told her the story of their first meeting. “I hated him for chewing me out like that,” she explained with a laugh. “But then I realized that it was for my own good. I could easily have been killed. So, when he called me a week later—”

“He called you?” Mrs. Donner seemed surprised.

“Yes, and asked me to dinner.”

“When did you find out he was a Donner?”

A key question, Nicole realized. Did she find she liked Jonathan before or after she learned of his millions? “When he left me his phone number. I’m in brokerage, so I know about Sound Holdings. Jonathan Donner rang a bell.”

“When did you know that you loved him?”

Another mine in the minefield. “That’s hard to say. I liked him right away, when we were in the airplane. He could see I was nervous and tried to be encouraging. And he took responsibility for me during the jump.”

“And now your feeling for him is more than just ‘liking’?”

“Yes,” she said softly. “Much more.”

Alexandra nodded and resumed her walking tour. “That’s very important to me. There have been several women who wanted to marry my son. But none of them loved him. They were all very enthusiastic about learning skydiving, and helicopter skiing, and some of his other hobbies. But when it came right down to it, none of them ever jumped out of an airplane just to be with him.”

A few more steps and then Alexandra stopped again. “What do you see in Jonathan’s future?”

Nicole shrugged. “I haven’t looked that far ahead. We’ve only been together for a few weeks.”

“Long enough for you to have discovered that he’s flawed.”

“Flawed? I don’t understand, unless you mean that he’s very nonchalant. But I like that better than someone who is grimly serious.”

“I mean he’s a frightened child with a death wish. That isn’t a description of the ideal husband.”

Nicole was speechless. Her eyes blinked and her lips moved, but there was no sound.

“Jack Donner is a dreadnought,” Alexandra said in a tone that was flatly factual. “He leaves a wake that swamps all the other boats in the harbor. Jonathan has been sunk so many times he’s waterlogged.”

“At times he seems a bit. . . resentful,” Nicole agreed.

“He’s been castrated! He doesn’t have the balls to stand up and fight. Not even with me. I’ve been propping him up against his father for so long that now he waits for instructions from me.”

“How can you talk about him like that? Your own son—”

“Because I love him. And I don’t want to see him marry a woman who will caress him and console him, and make his decisions for
him. He has me to do that. What he needs is a woman who will pour some steel into his spine.”

“He seems strong to me ...”

“If he was strong he would have told his father off years ago. And he would have put me in my place as well. He would be out on his own, not sniffing around the table for the scraps that Jack throws him to keep him from barking.”

“Mrs. Donner, I’ve seen none of this in Jonathan. He thinks for himself.”

“Thinks, maybe, but does nothing about it. Because he’s afraid that if he stands up Jack will kick him out. He’s too content on the family dole to risk a confrontation. So he stays in a job he hates and puts up with the ridicule. And he jumps out of airplanes because in his case dying can’t be much worse than living.”

They were walking up the steps from the garden to the house when Alexandra said, “I guess that’s what I’m asking you. Are you the woman who will get him up on his feet even though it will cost him—and you—the family fortune? Do you love him? Or do you love his lifestyle? Some young women have thought they went together. But they don’t. His lifestyle is what his father pays to keep him on a leash.”