Cheyney Fox (39 page)

Cheyney began to think that school sounded pretty much like the world in general. The same bitching, the same ground rules. Her son’s advice was in turn with her own instinct.

“Agreed then?” he insisted.

“Agreed.”

“Now listen, Mom, I’m going to be over here, wallowing in the old Etonian traditions, while you’re out there having fun battling the real world. You’ve got to promise you will call and tell me all about it, if there is anything I can help with, anything I should know even if things get rough. You’ve got to have trust in me, Mom, to know that whatever does get through to me here, no matter how good or bad it is, we have made our resolve and I can handle it. Mom, do you think it would be too piggish of us to open a mango?”

Cheyney began to laugh, mostly from relief, and answered, “Why not?” Then as she cut into the mango, “You’re quite a boy, Taggart. I’m always throwing things to you from left field, and you’re always catching them and turning them into victories.”

She recognized a sheepish look that on rare occasions came into Taggart’s eyes. He said, “Mom, you’re going to have to learn to play cricket. It’s full of surprises. You ought to find out about it. Just in case you think baseball is the name of the game and wake up one day and find I’ve been playing cricket all along.”

Now what was he getting at? Not for the first time that day he seemed to have abruptly shifted the ground of their conversation, as if he had something on his mind. “Is there something I need to know right now about … cricket?” she asked.

He almost told her about Grant Madigan, right then and there. But the moment passed. He sensed “bad timing,” so he answered, “No, not at the moment. Everything seems to me to be just fine. How much do you want this job, Mom? I’m thinking you really want it a lot.”

“You would be thinking correctly. I really do want it. But, I repeat, it isn’t going to be easy. Appointments like this never are. Now you have one last chance for us to change our decision to ‘go for it.’ One word from you …”

“Just slice the mango, Mom.”

For the next twenty minutes they talked and laughed, and suddenly he had reverted from the half boy, half man, back
to the young boy, who could at times be even a little childish. When they were packing up to go back to Eton, he playfully tied several of the wildflowers in her hair. He began to recite:

“And I think,” said Cheyney firmly, “that Shakespeare wrote ‘given to
men
of middle age.’ So keep your middle-aged flowers for whoever’s teaching you English literature, if you don’t mind. Spare your mother, who is trying to look young and sassy.”

Then Taggart looked at his watch. “I’m due back at school, Mom. Cricket practice, you know. I shouldn’t let the team down.”

“And I have to call Washington, get the car back to the gallery in Mayfair. James has to drive me to the airport so I can make my flight, and the car to the air-freight office. I actually bought it to have in the States.”

Once the car was packed, they took their seats. After clicking his seat belt on, Taggart looked at his mother mischievously. She kept her eyes on him. Their eyebrows did the talking. She shot the car into reverse. The wildflowers and grasses became a blur, sand and dust clouded up around the revving sports car. Taggart nodded silent congratulation — his mother could reverse an Aston Martin after all. At the fork in the road she spun the car around and pressed the accelerator to the floor. Until the traffic closed in on them, she drove like a racing driver. Between excited laughs, Taggart shouted navigational instructions: “Police trap on the left. Truck on our tail. Christ in heaven, Cheyney! You almost hit that woman. What a way to take a corner! Gear down, gear down. Oh
no
, Mom, Mom, you’ll never make it! Power, it needs more power!”

“Don’t give me that, Taggart. How’s this for power?” She
pulled out as soon as she saw a gap. With a transcontinental truck bearing down on them, she passed three cars and slid safely into an opening between two more.

Taggart watched her every move, the way she revved the motors, managed the gears and the braking. They were in Windsor. She was forced to slow down and flow with the traffic. Taggart favored her with a schoolboy’s backhanded compliment: “Mom, you’re the best nonprofessional,
almost
-reckless driver I know.”

Taggart gave in and allowed himself the luxury of adoring his mother. This was the way he loved her best, just the way she was being right now. Young, carefree, and naughty, with childlike qualities. He wondered, If Grant Madigan saw Cheyney again, just like she was now, would he fall in love with her? How could he not? “Mom, stop the car.”

She pulled the Aston Martin over to the curb, cut the motor, and turned to look at her son. They both laughed and she said, “Got you, didn’t I? Admit it, you were chicken when I passed those cars on the slope!”

“Never.”

“Really, never,” she teased.

“Yes, Mom, really never.”

The pair of them sat there allowing their laughter to die away and putting on their more serious faces. Cheyney brushed her hair while Taggart held a mirror for her. Almost unconsciously the boy stroked the length of it down to the middle of her back. He loved his mother’s waist-length hair, always had, since he was a child. Cheyney took the mirror and returned it with her brush to her handbag, and said, “Well, I guess this is it, TG. Back to Eton.”

“Mom, you know what would be a gas?”

“No, TG, what would be a gas?”

“If you called the president of the United States from a public phone booth.” They both burst out laughing.

“You’ve got a great sense of style. You’re right, that would be a gas. I’ve got a credit card. I could do it.”

“Let’s do it, Mom. From a telephone near Windsor Castle. I know where there is one. It’s only about three blocks away.”

“You know, Taggart, I may not get to speak to the president.
He may be busy with other things like Russia, Central America, the national deficit. You may have to settle for me speaking to the White House and his secretary.”

“That’ll do.”

A few minutes later, Cheyney was squeezed into a telephone booth looking up a curve of busy street at the looming stoniness of Windsor Castle. She was supplying her credit card number to the operator, then the telephone number given to her specifically for the call she was making. Taggart was leaning against the open booth listening. He quickly drew away when he saw several Etonians, not in their unmistakable garb, walking toward them. Why now? Here? Weren’t they off-limits, anyway? When they saw Taggart, they called out and joined him.

Cheyney was waiting to be put through to the president, when she heard one of them say, “Your mater sending for the breakdown service?” All the boys laughed.

“No, Westerly. Just calling to say hello to … someone.”

Cheyney made her second long-distance call to Judd Whyatt to tell him her news and how pleased the president was. The thought of making a third call to David Rosewarne never crossed her mind. Several minutes later she watched the boys, Taggart one of them now, walk away, swinging the Fortnum’s picnic basket between them. All of them chattering at once. There had been no chance for a sentimental good-bye after Taggart agreed to join them on some mysterious errand. Just a quick look of mutual approval between mother and son, while the boys tried out their charm on Cheyney.

Chapter 34

“S
he never loved him.”

The whisper was more like a hiss in Cheyney Fox’s ear. She tried to ignore what she heard, but how can you ignore the truth? Especially a truth that you thought had been your own well-kept secret, rarely admitted even to yourself, suddenly revealed in a stage whisper to a gathering of strangers.

“He knew it and didn’t care. Kurt was a man never much interested in love. His appetites lay elsewhere, and she satisfied them all … the bitch, the whore.”

The woman’s venomous words pierced Cheyney’s consciousness like a viper’s darting tongue. The voice stung again.

“Kurt Walbrook’s widow — Cheyney Fox — who thinks she has buried their secrets. All those mysteries and memories, the lies they lived, prospered and became famous on, shoveled into a grave under this monument to his memory. And now, this baronial home of his opening to the public, a museum of contemporary art. Does she think that’ll silence the ghosts that stalked their lives? One day those ghosts will speak the truth. Then all her illusions about herself will explode in her face and shatter her smug little life. She will be made to understand that she is what Kurt Walbrook molded her into. Nothing more. Just another whore with ambition and a bit more knowledge than most, who chose the art world to hustle.

“All that lust, ambition, greed, those failures and weaknesses — they never deceived Kurt. He used them, made capital of them. Played with them, and her, to satisfy his own hungers. He was always protecting her from the outside world right from
the time he scooped her out of the gutter. He possessed her, enslaved her by the one real truth of their life together, his love for her son. So long as he was alive that was what ruled her. The family relationship between the three of them — mother, son, stepfather — was the only perfect and honest thing Kurt Walbrook and Cheyney Fox ever shared.”

Cheyney, riveted by the intensity of the hushed voice behind her, forced herself to remain calm. Distractedly she heard the Austrian minister intone his country’s gratitude to her for endowing the private museum they were about to open to the public. Yes, there would be two exhibitions a year of contemporary painting and sculpture. Her generosity would ensure that this was the pattern for the next seven years.

But to listen was not easy. The woman behind her simply would not let up. Several people sitting close to Cheyney began to fidget with embarrassment for her. One man tried to silence the woman with a loud “Shush!” This merely released a buzz of whispers from those around Cheyney. They were hearing the woman’s slurs. Suddenly Cheyney had had enough. She sprang out of her chair to confront the voice. But a hand restrained her, gripping her slender wrist.

“Not a good idea, making a scene.”

Cheyney looked down at the man sitting next to her. She glared at him, determinedly peeled his fingers from around her wrist.
Sotto voce
she said, “You should know by now, Senator, I never make scenes.” Instead, she approached the lectern, took the minister by the hand, announcing with an exertion of charm, “Please, sir, you are more kind than I deserve. I cannot allow you to go on.”

He was cut off from his prepared text. Cheyney Fox, the American art dealer, remembered that she was, in the eyes of some, the most influential woman in American art. She could upstage an Austrian minister. She deftly snipped the white satin ribbon. It fluttered up, rippled on the gust of an early spring breeze, and then lazily trembled on its way to the ground, declaring the museum open.

The hundred-odd guests rose from their gilded, red silk-velvet music-room chairs to give a standing ovation in recognition of the occasion. Cheyney had not made a scene, but she had made something happen. She now zeroed in on her
quarry, the malicious woman seated behind her. How could someone be so deranged, so full of hatred for her?

The ceremony was taking place outside, under a marquee of white canvas, open on all sides to the beauty of the Austrian wood rising dramatically over steep ridges above the Schloss. It billowed over a section of the cobbled road that formed a mile-long avenue between aged chestnut trees in fullest bud. Here the trees yielded to an impressive stone bridge spanning the wide, deep moat that circled a many-roomed hunting lodge of white stone, with dark blue shutters and a crown of turrets.

The sound of applause drifted away as the crowd milled across Persian carpets laid over the cobblestones. Programs in hand, the chattering mass crossed the bridge to the sound of racing water, each person anxious to be the first to see Kurt Walbrook’s collection of Old Masters and Impressionist paintings in their setting, the deceased baron’s fifteenth-century home, and the Fox collection of contemporary art.

Cheyney smiled and shook hands and fought her way against the stream of people. She reached the place where she had been seated. The chair behind hers was empty. An exhibition brochure lay across the seat. Each page had been deliberately torn out, and then torn again once, from top to bottom, corner to corner. A ragged, diagonal mutilation of hatred. A breeze blew under the empty marquee. It swept several of the torn colored photographs up into the air. Cheyney watched. Somehow this dismembering of the museum’s commemorative catalog was far more disconcerting than the hissing sound of the woman’s venomous words.

Yet how she had detested that woman’s German. The language too coarse and guttural for her ear. Although fluent, Cheyney only spoke German herself when absolutely necessary. It was at Kurt’s insistence that she had mastered the language. She had made English or French the first language spoken in their home. German was for when they were in residence here at the Schloss Garmisch-Konigsberg.

Scraps of a Miró, a Motherwell, a Rothko, and a rampant Campbell’s soup can fluttered, almost tauntingly, in front of her on a current of air. She reached out to grab them, but they eluded her and danced away like snowflakes under the elegant emptiness of the marquee. Cheyney reached down to gather
up the remaining pages from the red velvet seat of the woman’s chair. Before her associate Takashi Ishiguro could say a word, she plunked them in his hands, saying, “Takashi, please get rid of this mess,” and walked away.

She had taken only a few steps when she turned around and said, “I’m so sorry, Takashi, I was distracted. Did you want me for something?” At that moment a torn page reproducing an Andy Warhol painting of a Campbell’s soup can with a torn open lid went into a gentle tail spin and alighted on her bosom.

Cheyney Fox was taken by surprise. She recoiled for a split second, and then, picking it off her chest and looking at it, she burst into laughter.

“Andy would have loved today. All the glamour and elegance of the occasion, the galaxy of art-world celebrities, famous collectors, Austrian dignitaries. And he would have been in awe of the museum and the collection. Without letting on, though. Do you think this is his way of telling me? Andy reaching back from the grave and saying, ‘Gee, oh gosh, well, ugh.
Terrific
, you’re fabulous’ the way he might have, half a lifetime ago?”

She began to laugh again and handed the colored scrap of Warhol to Takashi. The breeze that had sprung up had now died down. The sparkle of beautiful people was nearly gone from under the marquee. She and Takashi walked together slowly, joining the tail end of the procession of invited guests crossing the bridge and flowing into the museum. Cheyney felt really good about it. She tossed her head back and laughed again. Slipping her arm through Takashi’s, she announced:

“Oh, God, is it ever good to be back in the art world, and at the top! I feel born again, alive again, as I have not been since I slunk away from it. I had no idea how dead my life was without the thrill of working and dealing out there in the open, in front of the world. Granted, not all the time, but most of the time. But for Kurt, I wonder if I would be where I am today. And my boy, Taggart. How could I have survived at all, had I not had my love child?”

“Where do you go from here, Cheyney?”

“Higher, just a little higher. To the top, maybe, and then … over the rainbow,” she laughed.

“Where does it come from, this scent you have for discovery,
your eye for abstract beauty, your constant passion for great painters and paintings?” asked Takashi.

“Who knows? Eye? Scent? It feels more like a heavy cross that I have carried for as long as I can remember. It has never been easy. I have loved and I have hated, and I have given up my passion for art and the art world. Now that I’ve reclaimed it, you can be sure I don’t take it for granted. But, anyway, there is something else. Who wouldn’t like being a powerful force in the art world? It gives me a chance to balance out my past failures.” To herself she added, Would that I could balance out my past loves, most especially the great love, the grand passion shared with another soul I yearn for, even now. Then chastised herself for still loving, still wanting the impossible. Grant Madigan. The very idea embarrassed her. She put him, as she had so many times in her life, out of her mind.

Cheyney and Takashi stopped for a minute and listened to the sound of the water rushing far below under their feet. They remained silent, letting her words dissolve on the light, warm spring breeze and race away with the water below. They looked into each other’s eyes. There was emotion there for the monumental accomplishments of the day. For seeing the fruits of years of work together. Far from jaded, they could still react in anticipation of the thrill awaiting them. The power of beauty, peace; the hush of tranquillity a museum of art can cast upon the soul. The inspiration that great works of art can stir in the mind and heart. And for the couple standing on the bridge, especially this museum, created by Cheyney Fox. Their hearts were singing in their eyes. But there was something else there, too. Another kind of emotion, more sensual, that flared up and smoldered.

The tall, slender Japanese smiled, bowed respectfully, and, taking her hand in his, kissed it. The touch of his lips upon her fingers ignited a passion in her she had not expected to feel on this momentous day. But it was there, warm and rich, like an early-morning sunshine that dissolves the dew. She smiled back at him, grateful for their multileveled, ten-year-old association, and placed an arm around his shoulder. They were still looking into each other’s eyes. The warmth of their feelings expressed itself in a slow smile that spread from their lips across
their faces. Arm in arm, they continued across the bridge to the entrance of the museum.

They walked in silence, in bright sunlight, enveloped by the sound of roaring water in the moat below and the hum of conversation from the crowd surging with them toward the huge open wooden doors decorated with ancient Persian bronze studs in animal forms. Occasionally someone tapped Cheyney on the shoulder to congratulate her on the occasion of the museum’s debut, others on her nomination, already in the news. She found ways to respond. She asked Takashi, “Did you come to find me for anything special, Takashi? I was distracted by that sick woman who was saying such vile things about me. To think it has already begun, the scandals and gossip. I was upset at the thought of having to call David Rosewarne and having to tell all. Who in their right mind wants to review their past, relive what is already behind you, and worse, make it public. It does rankle. But none of that seems to matter one bit now.”

She stopped and, moving her arm from around his shoulder to his waist, she looked deeply into his eyes once more. She lowered her voice, so that her words were only for him. “It was the feel of your lips upon my skin. It woke me, swept me away from the ugliness. Your lips, as always, put me in touch with the core of myself, reminded me that only I know the truth and falsehoods of my life.”

Such directness could have made Takashi Ishiguro feel embarrassed, but only until he felt her press a key into his hand. No words were needed. They wanted each other, could actually feel sensual excitement stirring within, in anticipation of the erotic interlude that was to come. The sharing of invisible lust that was vibrating now between them.

“I had come to ask you if you were returning to Washington on the State Department jet with the senator and Judd, or if you wanted me to make alternative arrangements. But now that question is redundant.”

They entered the museum together and were immediately swept along on a current of something quite ethereal. There was an immediate sense of light and airiness. An unearthly delicacy of substance or character appeared instantly and dropped like some invisible net enveloping in a special world all who entered.

There was something quite spooky in the way the chatter of the people stepping into the central gallery abruptly turned to silence. Even the expression on their faces altered. It was as if all that was superficial and trite had been left outside the museum, like unnecessary baggage.

The crisp whiteness and polished satin look of the Carrara marble floor, the ramp as wide as a room, and the broad handrail sweeping four stories up in an elegant snail’s spiral, were pure architectural perfection. The natural sunlight pouring through the glass roof at the top filtered down through the open center of the spiral, changing architectural perfection to sculpture. The infinitely gradual incline of the cantilevered ramp functioned as the floor from where one viewed the works of art. The curving wall from the ground to the top floor, twelve feet back from the balustrade of clear glass below the marble handrail, was where the Fox collection of contemporary paintings hung. Each canvas was lit within its frame, so that every painting, though hung in an open gallery, shone singularly to every pair of eyes viewing it.

Dozens of waiters in white jackets offered Czechoslovakian crystal flutes of a certain age, hand decorated with gold arabesques and rims, filled with fresh strawberries and champagne. People trailing up the spiraling ramp, glasses in hand, faces glowing with excitement for the occasion, and absorbed by great paintings, charged the atmosphere, making it electric.

To have transformed what had once been the open courtyard of the Schloss into the main gallery was absolutely the correct thing to have done. Cheyney had then been able to keep the remainder of the miniature Austrian palace, really a hunting lodge, relatively intact, and, as such, many of the rooms were used for exhibition. A museum stunningly conceived as individual galleries, exhibiting works of art from ancient times to the present, all linked together under one roof. The overall design flashed through her mind and was quickly dispelled, as was all else about the day, in the wake of viewing the exquisite paintings and sculptures in the main gallery. They sang to her. No, they were an orchestra. For they hung together, each attuned to the other, a visual symphony of art. They set her heart to a faster beat by the sheer power and beauty they exuded. Combined with her inner sensual feelings, triggered by an exquisite
kiss from Takashi, she felt her very soul about to flower.