Legacy of Secrets (65 page)

At the hospital she sat numbly in the stuffy little waiting room while they did what they could for her husband, thinking about Finn and wondering what was going to happen to her now.

W
HEN
D
AN REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS
he found he had multiple fractures of his left leg and a suspected fracture of the spine, and even though he was very ill he remembered clearly what had happened and he burned with anger against Lily.

“That woman does not enter my door,” he told the terrified nurses.

A week later, encased from neck to toes in a plaster cast, he had a long conversation with Father O’Byrne from St. Stephen’s and he thanked heaven he had not married Lily in the Catholic Church. He employed a man to make some enquiries about his wife’s past, and what he discovered surprised him because he was not a reader of the gossip columns. A few weeks later civil divorce proceedings were entered against his wife, citing her adultery.

Lily received the papers from the hands of a smirking sallow-faced young process-server who had pushed his way past her parlormaid into the hall. Telling him coldly to get out or she would send for the police, she took the papers to her room and stared aghast at the name of the corespondent.
She knew why Dan had done it; as a politician he was avoiding even more scandal and he was keeping his own family name clean by not naming his brother. Wondering what her mother would think if she could see her now, she burst into tears asking herself what she had done wrong.

The next day her maid packed her things and, with the nanny and Liam, she returned to her own house on Mount Vernon Street. “After all, it’s better that Liam should grow up in his father’s own home,” she told herself comfortingly, eliminating his true father from her mind with a single master stroke, just the way she had managed to eliminate Dermot Hathaway and his son all those years ago. Liam was hers. He belonged to her now and no one else. She would put her wicked past behind her and devote her life to him. She would be an exemplary mother, just like her own darling mammie. She would put his name down for the right schools and he would follow in his father’s brilliant academic footsteps to Harvard.

Lily pictured herself as the mother of the brilliant young professor, entertaining his colleagues at dinner the way John used to, and she told herself fiercely that now she had picked up the pieces, maybe life wasn’t so bad after all. She had this beautiful house, she had money and her freedom, and she had her son to plan for. And nobody was going to take him away from her.

She paid a visit to her attorney to make sure that Liam’s birth was properly registered and she said that she wished to make her will. She was leaving everything in trust for her son, and eventually his children, and so on in perpetu-ity.

She had lost everyone she loved, except her son, and now she was making sure that Finn could never claim Liam was his and take him from her.

Ned was the only friend she had left. She hadn’t seen him in ages, and she didn’t know where he was, but she knew his manager, Harrison Robbins’s habit of breakfasting
at Delmonico’s when he was in New York, so she telephoned him there.

Harrison groaned when he heard her imperious voice; he had thought he had gotten rid of her when she got married. “Ned’s a family man now,” he told Lily coldly. “He has a wife and a child to look after and another on the way, as well as a new tour coming up that’s going to be pretty damned grueling, even for a man of Ned’s stamina. He’s taking a well-earned rest and no one knows where he is.”

“I must see him. Something’s happened … I must talk to him, Harrison. It’s urgent.”

He groaned. When Lily wanted something, she always got it. He promised to give Ned the message.

“What’s wrong?” Ned asked worriedly when Harrison called him in Nantucket.

Harrison shrugged indifferently. “I don’t know, and if you want my opinion you’re a damned fool if you intend to go and find out.”

He should have saved his breath: Ned went anyway.

She was alone in her big house, looking calm and serene and not at all at her wits’ end, as she had told Harrison. Ned was tensed up with anxiety about her; all the time on the train he had been thinking maybe she was ill or maybe something had happened to her son. He was sure it was going to be something terrible and he felt weak with relief that she seemed all right.

Lily poured tea into pretty flowered china cups. “I needed someone to talk to, and you are my only friend,” she said. “Besides, there’s something I have to tell you.” She was going to say “before the process-server finds you.” But her nerve failed, and instead she said, “How is your wife?”

“Fine. The baby is due in a couple of months. She swears it’ll be another girl.” He helped himself to a sandwich.

“Lucky Juliet,” she said sadly. She knew she couldn’t put it off any longer. She said, “Dan is suing me for divorce.
He’s accusing me of adultery and I’m afraid he’s named you as corespondent.”

Astonished, he looked at her. “But it’s not true. You and I were together before you married him. Never after.”

“Are you prepared to go into court and testify to that?” she cried. “Because I can tell you, Ned, I am not. Dan intends to divorce me and he will use any means he has to achieve it. He’s the injured party, and if he blames me the scandal will roll right off his back. If you and I defend ourselves we shall have to testify in an open court. You know what the tabloids are like, every salacious detail of your life and mine will be splattered across the headlines.”

She turned pleadingly to him. “Think of our children. How can we do this to them? Why not just let Dan have his divorce quietly? It will be a one-day wonder. I shall take Liam away on holiday for a while and by the time we get back it will all have blown over.

“Please, Ned.” She took his hand and held it to her cool cheek. “Please. If you still love me.”

Ned thought of the scandal he would have to face because he was who he was, a star in the public eye. He thought of his wife and children and what it would cost them. And then he looked at Lily, alone and helpless, with no one to turn to. His heart was filled with love for her and, as he always had, he knew he would do as she asked.

Lily breathed a huge sigh of relief. Now people would think it was Ned who was her lover. They would never link her name with Finn, and Liam would be safe.

Ned returned to New York and told Harrison what was happening. “The case will be uncontested,” he added, not looking him in the eye.

“Uncontested? But goddamm it, Ned, you haven’t been near the woman….”

Ned shrugged. “That’s the way it’s going to be,” he said, tight-lipped. “The case will probably come up when I am out of town with the show, so I want you to take care of Juliet for me.”

“Tell her,
you mean? You must be out of your mind. She’ll kill me instead of you.” Ned grinned at him. “Isn’t that what managers are for?”

D
AN SPENT FOUR MONTHS IN THE HOSPITAL
and when he came out he was in a wheelchair. It took another four or five months of teeth-gritting determination and pain and hard work before he walked again, and even then it was with a stick. His cronies and colleagues and the people of the North End who had given him their votes shook their heads pityingly as he limped by. “ ’Tis a sad thing, and himself such a fine strappin’ fella,” they said sympathetically, “and handsome and successful with it. And now he has himself a trollop of a wife to deal with also.”

Finn read about the divorce in the newspapers. He couldn’t miss it—it was splashed all over the front pages of every scandal sheet in the city, with Ned Sheridan’s handsome face staring at the world, branded as the scoundrel who had stolen another man’s wife. There was no picture of Lily, though they did mention that she had been Mrs. Adams, a wealthy Boston widow, when she married Dan.

He thrust the newspapers into his wastebasket and put his head in his hands, thinking about Lily, and about his brother, crippled by that stupid drunken accident. Dan had refused to see him. He had not spoken to his brother since that night, and he doubted he ever would again.

W
E HAD TAKEN AN OLD BOAT
out into the bay, just a little outboard motor vessel, held together with spit and string, but it had lasted me half a century and I saw no reason it shouldn’t last another. “Safe as houses,” I said cheerfully to Shannon when I saw the doubt on her face. “Besides, we’re only going a little way out and you could always swim back.”

“What about you?” she asked worriedly.

“I look at it this way,” I told her. “If God is going to send for me, then he’ll do it when
he
chooses, and not me. Besides, I know this boat and these waters as well as I know my own face, and there’s the same amount of choppy little waves and crinkles on both of ’em.”

“You’re a fatalist,” Eddie said with a smile. “But there’s no need to worry, God’s not going to get you in his clutches today. I’m a Californian and I’ve been swimming since I was one year old. I’ll save you.”

He tinkered with the motor and it grumbled once or twice, then it sputtered into life and we were off to fish for our suppers in a sheltered spot I knew to the east of the bay, leaving the dogs sitting disconsolately on the rocks, howling into the breeze like a couple of spotted sirens attempting to lure sailors to their doom.

The morning was pleasantly warm with the sun half in
and out and the water a lovely deep blue, pretending it was the Mediterranean with baby wavelets all a-sparkle.

Shannon propped her long legs on the edge and tilted Mammie’s old straw gardening hat over her face to protect it from the bad rays. My own hat is solely for vanity because it’s too late for preservation. It’s blue, that sort of darkish aquamarine color that I thought toned well with the color of the sea that day, and it has a broad brim, upturned at one side and pinned back with a big floppy pink silk flower. I bought it years ago for one of Molly’s weddings, must have been about 1950, I suppose, though you’ll be pleased to know I wasn’t wearing the rest of my wedding outfit on the boat. I was suitably dressed in white sailor pants bought in Saint-Tropez in 1966. I forget how old I was then, and don’t you dare to even try to calculate, but it was during the time of the “youthquake,” and believe me I did not intend to be left behind.

I told Shannon and Eddie the story of how I was staying on a famous person’s yacht: he was a great racing man and I often met him in Ireland, at Punchestown and Leopards-town, and at his wonderful stud farm. He once sold me a mare and that’s always a great bond between horse people, and I daresay I was invited onto his yacht for a cruise around the Med as much for my entertainment value as for my fashionable appearance. Because, as I told you before, we Irish are never short of a story. In fact we often have to be held back in civilized company lest we monopolize the conversation.

Anyhow, in 1966 I was older than I would have liked to be, which seems to be the story of my life, and of the firm belief that no woman over the age of thirty-nine should show more than two inches of leg above the knees, even though I still had pretty legs.

Of course, all the saucy little girls were in skirts the width of curtain rods, which showed their thighs and sometimes more, and I decided I couldn’t possibly compete so I went shopping in those smart little boutiques in the back streets and bought myself these wonderful sailor pants.
They fit like a second skin and I wore them with a thin-as-air white voile shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and the tails tied in a big knot at my bare midriff. I had a big straw hat and the biggest darkest sunglasses and the local cheap espadrilles, and believe me I started a fashion. Soon everyone in that little town was into voile shirts and white sailor pants, all except the saucy little girls who weren’t about to abandon thighs for fashion.

I was with a man, an Italian industrialist and a great charmer. He was, to put it delicately, “a special friend,” and he was handsome in the macho way power and money has of endowing looks on an older man, but he also possessed an unbeatable charm and a terrific sense of humor. I had known him, on and off, for ten years and we always enjoyed each other’s company. I spoke his language and he spoke some of mine, and we got along just fine. Until this little miss arrived. I think someone on a neighboring boat met her sitting at a cafe on the port, sipping Pernod and greedily eyeing life and men on the grand yachts moored opposite.

Anyhow, before she knew it she had been picked up and was on board one of the grandest of them all, and she was brought along to have cocktails on our boat. She recognized my friend from his frequent appearances in the world’s gossip columns and she made a beeline for him. She was eighteen, blond and, goddamm it, gorgeous and the Italian was no match for her wide-eyed breathless admiring wiles.

Now, I had never had an “exclusive” on him, nor he on me, we just had an ongoing “friendship,” but she and her escort stayed on board for dinner and she elbowed me ruthlessly aside and took a seat next to my Italian, while I was fobbed off on her escort, a perfectly nice man with whom I had nothing at all in common. The little minx snuggled up to my Italian, with her hand resting lightly on his thigh, gazing adoringly at him and all the while casting triumphant glances at me, while I tried to keep a civilized conversation going.