The Summer Hideaway (29 page)

“You came running to me,” he said. “You spent the night in my room. You call that nothing?”

“I call it a mistake, made out of impulse and panic. I honestly thought I’d lost Charles forever. I had nowhere to turn, so I turned to you. All I wanted was someone to talk to.”

“We did a whole lot more than talk.”
Please. Don’t. Stop
. He could hear her, plain as a radio broadcast.

“That was a…an accident. A mistake. I’d had too much to drink and I was confused. I didn’t know…didn’t expect—”

“Baloney,” he burst out. “You came to me knowing how I felt about you, how I still—”

“No. I didn’t know you felt anything but contempt. That’s certainly all you ever showed me.”

“Then why did you come to my room?”

“Because Charles respects you. I thought you might talk sense into him, convince him to change his mind.”

“You knew better than that,” he said. “Drunk or sober, you knew you had my heart, Jane. Don’t deny it.”

“Oh, George.” Tears coursed down her cheeks.

“You felt it, too,” he accused. “I know you did.”

“But—”

“Hush, just listen. It’s not too late for us. I have a job in Paris. I start next month, right after graduation. We can go to Paris together, live like natives there, in an old-fashioned apartment on the Rive Gauche. It’ll be like a dream come true.”

She smoothed her skirt over her knees and looked out at the beaten-down neighborhood. “Whose dream, George?”

“Ours, silly. It’s Paris, for Pete’s sake. Who doesn’t dream of Paris?”

“You don’t know anything about my dreams,” she said brokenly. “I’m not going to Paris with you. I’m not going anywhere with you.” She gestured at the weedy neighborhood. “This is my world. My life. I look after my mother. I help my father with the camp in the summer. How am I going to do that if I live in Paris?”

“We’ll figure something out, find an arrangement—”

“We won’t do anything of the kind,” she said, swiping at her cheeks. “Don’t you understand? I’m all my mother and father have. You can’t ‘arrange’ for my parents to have another daughter, no matter how much money you have.”

“Then I’ll cancel my plans for Paris. I’ll move right here to this house if you want,” he blurted out. “I love
you, Jane. I’ll do anything to be with you.” He plunged his hand into the pocket of his trousers, closing his fist around the small ring box.

“Stop it,” she snapped. “You don’t love me any more than I love you.”

He let go of the box and touched his empty hand to her cheek, feeling the damp heat of her tears. “Then why are you crying? Answer me that.”

“Because I’m frustrated. You won’t listen. You need to understand, I’m with Charles now. We’ve reconciled.”

“Three days ago you were with me,” George reminded her, surprising even himself with the unblunted cruel edge to his voice. “You declared it was over with Charles and you came running straight into my arms. Into my
bed
, Jane.”

“I should not have done that. I told you, I was upset, because all of a sudden, the future I thought I had was gone. It frightened me.”

“I’ll just bet it did. So you were scared of losing your rich boyfriend? Did you think to replace him with somebody equally wealthy, so—”

Her slap shut him up, a sting of heat he almost welcomed because it kept him from saying even more regrettable things. At the same time, the feeling was akin to the horror of being encased in the iron lung all those years ago. He felt trapped. He wasn’t sure where his next breath was coming from.

The suddenness and violence of the blow seemed to startle her as much as him. “I shouldn’t have done that,” she said, wrapping her arms around her middle and leaning forward, as though her stomach ached.

“Does he know about us?” George demanded, determined to feel nothing.

“He can’t ever know. It would hurt him too much. It would destroy him.”

“What about us? We’re destroying each other right now.” That was how it felt to him. He was crushed. Devastated.

“For Charles’s sake, we must put this behind us. As if it never happened.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Anything is possible.” She stood up, wiping her hands on her apron in a decisive fashion. “Don’t contact me again, George. Go to Paris. Find your dreams there.”

“I already found my dream,” he said. “That night, in my room—”

Fresh tears gleamed on her face. “That wasn’t a dream. It was an accident. A mistake.”

“Don’t do this.”

“It’s already done.” She put her hand on the door latch. For the first time, he noticed the diamond ring, winking on her left ring finger.

The entire exchange had taken exactly ten minutes. George was glad he’d asked the cabbie to wait.

“Be happy for me, George.” Charles sounded a little desperate as he dogged his brother’s footsteps through the terminal of LaGuardia Airport. George was on his way to Paris, and Charles had come to see him off.

“I’m not going to pretend to be happy,” said George, trying to stay focused on the bustling redcaps and liveried pilots hurrying to their flights.

“It’s bad enough Mother and Father won’t give us their blessing.” Their parents had begged Charles not to marry Jane Gordon. They threatened to disinherit him, yet he
refused to veer from his path. “I suppose I can understand Mother and Father disapproving. They’re so old-fashioned. But you. Why can’t you be happy for us?”

“Because I don’t need a crystal ball to see what’s going to happen. You’re too different,” George insisted. He kept up the argument about class differences because it was easier than telling the truth.

“Hey, variety’s the spice of life,” Charles reminded him.

“When it comes to
building
a life, you don’t want it so spicy.” George couldn’t stand the thought of Charles and Jane together, having to smile through their wedding, through family holidays and gatherings, having to pretend he wasn’t dying inside.

“I just don’t get it,” Charles said. “We’ve known Jane since we were kids.”

“She’ll break your heart,” George blurted out. “She’s trash.”

Charles’s chin snapped up as though he’d been punched. “Apologize.”

“What, for wanting to spare you a lifetime of pain?” George asked. “Because that’s what you’re in for. I know you don’t want to see that right now, but it’s true.”

“And
I
know you can get the hell out of my sight. Come back when you’re ready to apologize.”

“In that case, let’s make it never.”

D
espite their bitter quarrel, George fully intended to man up and go to his brother’s wedding that August. By then he was living in Paris, a Yale grad with a job doing exactly what he loved—writing. He covered stories and events that mattered to the world—armed conflicts in Egypt and the Suez, earthquakes and the Olympics.

He lived in a flat with a balcony overlooking the Place de la Concorde and kept company with literary friends. He visited the haunts of Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and J.P. Donleavy. He read banned books, drank absinthe and even seduced two women.

One of the women he seduced claimed she was falling in love with him, and he let her, because she was exciting. She was Jacqueline duPont, heiress to a champagne-exportation fortune. She was fiercely beautiful, sexually sophisticated and fashionable enough to have her photograph in
Women’s Wear Daily.

For about two seconds he considered inviting Jackie to attend his brother’s wedding as his date. But George rejected the notion. It was out of the question. He could
not imagine Jackie, in her Chanel suit with her heirloom pearls, witnessing Charles marry a chambermaid.

George buried himself in work and in a matter of weeks won the attention of a key editor at the paper—the
Trib
as it was called by insiders. He worked in a cramped and cluttered office alongside journalistic giants—the ascerbic Art Buchwald, the relentless Desmond Burke, and other revered veterans of journalism. From early on, George’s career was guided by the same demanding editor who had overseen the Pulitzer prizewinning coverage of the Blitzkrieg.

Two days before George was due to fly to New York for the wedding, he was presented with a career-making opportunity. He would be given exclusive access to a high-level meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. General de Gaulle would be there.

George accepted without hesitation. This event was important to the world. He told himself he would do the job and catch a transatlantic flight in time to get there for the wedding. Sure, he was cutting it close, but that was the nature of modern journalism. You followed a story moment by moment, provided up-to-the-minute reportage. There was even a new term for it—breaking news.

He filed his story at the eleventh hour, sending it clacking over the Telex machine to be published not just in the
Trib
, but in the
New York Times
. Once this was accomplished, he discovered there was only one flight that would get him to the wedding on time.

Events conspired to delay him. That was what he knew he would tell himself later. The train out to Orly Airport ran behind. At the airport, he found himself crushed in a busy, jostling crowd. There was a line at the
ticket counter. When he got to the desk, he discovered his pocket had been picked. He had no ticket, no passport, no cash. He talked the clerk into selling him a ticket with a promissory note, and hoped the border authorities would accept his story of the theft. The clerk told him he would have to run in order to catch the New York flight before it closed its hatch and taxied down the runway.

Running was not George’s strong suit. He was in a leg brace, which he still had to wear on occasion, and the hinges and mechanisms simply did not allow him to move at a speed faster than a brisk walk.

He was a hundred meters or so from the departure doors when he saw the Pan American airplane pulling up its boarding stairs.

Did he shout loudly enough to be heard, or just loudly enough to say he tried?

In the end it didn’t matter. A missed flight was a missed flight. He’d left himself one chance to make his brother’s wedding and he’d missed it.

Thank God.

George plunged into work with a passion. He lived and breathed the news of the day. He produced story after story, covering topics as diverse as the opening of a new museum to state visits to violent uprisings.

He lobbied hard for the chance to interview Jonas Salk. He sat in the Prince de Galles hotel with the scientist and spoke with him about developing the live-virus polio vaccine.

He didn’t tell Dr. Salk he’d had polio, for he wanted to keep the interview professional, not personal. But at
the end of the conversation, as they shook hands and the staff photographer moved in to take a photo, Dr. Salk kept hold of George’s hand, turning it palm up.

There was a telltale sign, so subtle no one ever noticed it—no one but experts. In an unaffected hand, the muscle at the base of the thumb was thick and healthy. In George’s hand, the muscle was almost nonexistent.

Dr. Salk asked simply, “When?”

“The summer of ’44,” George said. He was surprised to feel a jolt of leftover emotion from that time—terror, rage and grief, knowing he’d contracted a disease from which he would never fully recover.

“I’m very sorry,” said Dr. Salk.

George’s mind flashed on Ward 8 at the polio clinic where he’d been sent in an attempt to save his life. Clear as yesterday he could hear the screams of other boys brought back from surgery, the wrenching sobs of parents being told their babies had died in the night. And always, like a nightmare, he couldn’t escape, he heard the rhythmic suck and shush of the iron lung.

“I was one of the lucky ones,” he said.

In December, George received a letter on his mother’s personal letter-pressed stationery. Calls home via telephone were rare because the connection was usually quite poor, so he looked forward to his parents’ letters. From Charles, he’d heard not a word; clearly his brother was sticking to his vow not to forgive George until he apologized.

For all that he was a prolific and tireless journalist, George was not much for writing letters. He didn’t enjoy writing about himself. He’d sent Charles a telegraph the
day of the wedding: “Missed flight. Nuptials must go on without me. Best wishes.”

That had been their last communication.

George found it remarkably easy to avoid dealing with his brother and apparently it was the same for Charles. All George knew about Charles came via his mother’s weekly letter. And Theodosia Bellamy had little enough to say about her younger son, only that he seemed to be doing well and intended to get his law degree.

Charles. A lawyer.

George wondered what kind of litigator he would be. He might sue his brother for breach of…what? Of brotherhood?

Then in December came unexpected news. Charles and his wife had a baby boy. His name was Philip Angus Bellamy, in honor of both his grandfathers.

At first George felt nothing but a small twinge of curiosity. No envy, of course; he was no fan of babies. They seemed to be noisy, puking, snotty things that disrupted people’s sleep. No, thank you.

Later, sitting at an outdoor table at his favorite zinc bar in Montmartre, sipping cold, acrid pastis and reading
Le Monde
, a belated notion struck him. He drummed his four fingers on the enameled surface of the table.

Charles and Jane had been married in August.

They’d had a son in December.

His fingers tapped on the table:
tap tap tap tap…tap.

August, September, October, November…December.

Five months was not the correct gestation time, was it?

Not unless you were a Nubian goat.

AugustSeptemberOctoberNovemberDecember—

It was not uncommon for babies to be born prema
turely. But not by four months. That was simply impossible. Especially since George’s mother reported that Philip was a healthy eight-pound baby boy.

It was of course considered impolite to count, but George counted. He checked the date mentioned in his mother’s letter. He opened his small leather-bound pocket calendar, the one he’d been given as a graduation gift. He took out a pencil.

Counted back nine months from the date the baby was born.

The point of his pencil broke as it landed on the day in late March. George tried every way he could think of to avoid seeing the truth. But there it was, staring him in the face.

That was the day—the night—he’d been with Jane. And nine months from that night, an ocean away, Jane had given birth to a baby.

George went a little crazy after that. He got roaring drunk and stormed the citadel that was Jacqueline duPont’s flat on Avenue Marechal Foch, the one she shared with three other young women of privilege. He made love to her with a harsh insistence that surprised and delighted her, and she told him so.

“I’m glad you liked it,” he said. “Let’s get married.”

She laughed and touched him in a way that was probably illegal in some parts of the world. “I thought you’d never ask,” she said to him.

They eloped on New Year’s Eve, taking a private jet to Monte Carlo, courtesy of the duPont family. Jackie was more adventurous than sentimental, and she regarded elopement as the ultimate adventure.

Amid the glittering lights of the French Riviera, they found a civil judge who was happy to take their money and officiate the union. There was no fanfare, just a hasty signing of documents and, at the Hotel Villa Mondial, a room service order that cost a fortune—champagne, oysters, caviar, chocolates decorated with gold leaf.

Although George’s family was well off, Jackie’s money made their lives worry free. It made them fun and exciting. George could have retired from the paper, but he insisted on staying and working harder than ever.

Jackie was prolific in her own way, giving him four sons in the first ten years of their marriage. He discovered that he loved babies after all, and lavished his adoration upon Pierce, Louis, Gerard and Trevor.

Their lives were a busy whirlwind. George rarely thought about home—the States, as the ex-pats in Paris referred to the U.S. It took no effort at all to maintain the silence with his brother.

It was through their parents that George learned Charles had volunteered to serve in Vietnam, and was now a JAG officer in some jungle outpost.

When their parents were killed in a cable car mishap in Switzerland, Charles was incommunicado, still serving overseas, and George took care of the arrangements. The estate was divided evenly down the middle. Within a matter of years, the brothers were living lives so separate they might as well have been strangers.