The Jewels of Tessa Kent (55 page)

“So Sam isn’t perfect?” Maggie asked.

“He is, with that one exception. Does Barney tango?”

“Not unless they taught it in dancing school, along with the box step.”

“Oh, Maggie, I’m so glad it’s over,” Tessa said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “The press conference, the gala—everything a triumph—now all that’s left is the ultrasound and the flight back home. Won’t you go to sleep now? There’s nothing left to worry about, and with this first trip under your belt, speaking loosely, you know the others will simply be more of the same. You can finally relax.”

“But you must be exhausted. You’ve been on your feet for two days.”

“Oh, maybe just a little, but it doesn’t matter … you only live once.” Tessa yawned and stretched, and unzipped her dress, letting it slither to the floor. Maggie lay back with her eyes half-closed until she heard Tessa return from the bathroom in her bathrobe and sit at the dressing table to take off her makeup. Maggie pulled herself up on her pillows with quiet determination, while Tessa, her back turned, concentrated on silently turning the lid of a jar of cleansing cream.

“
Who was my father?
”

“Oh! Good God! You scared me! I thought you were sleeping.”

“Who was he?” Maggie demanded firmly. “I want to know all about him, every last detail. Don’t leave out a thing. I would have asked sooner but I didn’t want to get into it and probably upset you before the big night.”

“Your father’s name was Mark O’Malley and you look very much like him. He was tall and beautiful and as Irish as they come, and he had your curly dark hair and your marvelous big blue eyes, and he was seductive and confident and had a charm no one could resist. Like you. He was a local hero, Maggie, the captain of the high school football team. I was besotted with him for two years. I promise you, I was violently in love and I know how that feels.”

“Two years? You had a two-year romance with him?”

“Hardly that,” Tessa answered soberly, remembering. “He didn’t know I existed … my love was a mad,
completely one-sided passion. I adored him from a distance, I dreamed of him night and day. It was first love, and there’s nothing like it. All-consuming. You ought to know, you and your Barney. Finally, when I had just turned fourteen, a friend and I crashed a party at his house and I met him. I told him I was eighteen and he believed me. I looked much older than I was and I dressed the part. He took me upstairs and he … more or less … seduced me. He never knew my name, he never knew I’d gotten pregnant, he never saw me again.”

“You mean … he could be alive?”

“Well, of course.” Tessa laughed. “He’s probably a perfectly nice forty-one-year-old guy with a wife and four football-playing kids somewhere.”

“That son of a bitch!”

“No, no Maggie, don’t say that! I had on a lot of makeup, he thought I knew what I was doing; I led him on, actually, he certainly didn’t have to force me, so you can’t blame him. Blame me, I’d had too much to drink and I wanted to.”

“Is that what you mean by he ‘more or less’ seduced you?”

“Well … no.”

“Then you mean you seduced him?”

“Not that either.”

“So how in the name of God did you get knocked up?” Maggie asked impatiently.

“Do you absolutely insist on knowing?”

“I do.”

“I warn you, it’s quite improbable.”

“I have a right to know,” Maggie insisted sturdily.

“He was … overly … aroused … and when he … ah, when he … penetrated me, he only managed … about an inch … before he had an orgasm, and that was that.”

“An inch! That’s how you had me? An inch! You were still a virgin, for Christ’s sake!”

“I was, but who would believe me? Your grandparents
didn’t want to know a single detail; they knew I was a sinner and that was enough.”

“So I owe my existence to a horny high school hero with super sperm who suffered from premature ejaculation and a horny high school girl who let
him put it in!
Where were you when they taught sex ed?”

“In deepest Catholic school.”

“Great. Just great.” Maggie shook her head at the ways of yesteryear.

“Well, think of it this way, if it hadn’t happened, you wouldn’t be alive.”

“Oh, God,” said Maggie, “an inch, an inch, one lucky inch …” and she began to giggle so hard that the mattress started shaking. Soon she began to howl with laughter. “An inch, an inch, I owe my life to just one inch …”

“Stop it, you’re getting hysterical,” Tessa begged, beginning to laugh herself. “Please, please stop it, Maggie, honestly it wasn’t funny at the time, but you made me tell you all the details … oh, oh, I admit it’s really … too ridiculous … when it doesn’t happen … to you, oh, an inch, that’s all it was, an inch … not … not that he didn’t have … much more … oh, oh …”

“I assumed … he did … dear old Dad … oh, oh, poor
Mamãe
 … what a rotten break, what lousy luck, I always knew I was special but I never guessed I was the product of a virgin birth. Oh, you’re right, it is improbable … but I believe you, even if nobody else ever did.”

Maggie and Tessa gave full rein to their fill of mirth until they both fell silent with the realization that this discussion wasn’t over.

“When I got that letter from my grandfather,” Maggie said, solemnly, “what just about killed me was not the whole teenage mom story, because anyone would understand that, but the fact that when you could have acknowledged me, you didn’t. I totally get it that when you became famous at sixteen you couldn’t be allowed to have a kid, but what about when you
married Luke and my grandparents died? That’s where the whole thing sucks! Since I was supposed to be your sister
anyway
, not some stranger, why didn’t you and Luke just take me instead of sending me to the Websters?”

“There are a dozen answers to that, none of them any good.”

“Yeah? Well, tell me a few, just for my information.”

“Luke never knew you were my child, that was the beginning of it. ”

“You never told him?”

“I … he wanted to marry a virgin. It was terribly important to him, a real obsession.”

“What right did he have to want a virgin!” Maggie sputtered with rage. “Luke was a hundred years older than you, he’d had a million women, what gave him the goddamned right to
have the fucking nerve
, to want a virgin? Was he some kind of god who demanded a virgin sacrifice?”

“Oh, Maggie, if only I’d dared to ask him that! I was too stupid, too much in love, too young, I wanted him too much, I believed he could keep me safe. Oh, how I needed to feel safe! It was like suddenly being able to breathe fresh air after being underground for years. I was desperate. I’d never felt safe in my life, especially after I got pregnant … I don’t expect you to understand or forgive me, I’m just telling you exactly the way it was. I was afraid to lose Luke, so I
lied
by letting him believe it, and then, afterward, I couldn’t even consider telling him the truth because it was such an enormous and
fundamental lie
, Maggie, I believed our life together was founded on his believing me. Depended on it. Even on our wedding night—I played up to it.”

“But you’d had a child, couldn’t he tell?”

“The doctor who delivered you assured me that he’d done me a favor and stitched me up so that I was ‘as good as new.’ I found out what that meant the first time Luke and I made love.”

“Okay, so you got away with passing as a virgin. But
the man totally, absolutely
adored
you, I know that, so why couldn’t you admit it
sooner or later
, once he couldn’t live without you? All those years, Tessa! Why couldn’t you face up to telling a lie? Tell him to take his belief in you, and stuff it? That’s what I would have done!”

“I was a criminal coward, Maggie. Luke was a very selfish man. I always knew it, even when he was alive. He had a terribly jealous temperament and he hated my career, but he let me have it anyway. I didn’t want to disturb that delicate balance we’d created. Luke was demanding, and controlling, but even though his world revolved completely around him, I had become the most important element in it. He was incredibly generous in so many ways, to so many people.”

“He bought people,” Maggie said in a low voice.

“Yes, he did, one way or another, Maggie, but he didn’t buy me. I allowed him to set the terms of our life because I
liked
it that way. I didn’t have to do it, don’t you understand, I wanted to! Deep down, I wanted to be dominated, to be all the things Luke wanted me to be. I told you, it made me feel
safe
, and I thought I couldn’t live without that. I wasn’t as brave as you would have been. I took the easy way. The lying way. The protected way. The longer I did it, the more it became the
only
way.”

“But after Luke died, why couldn’t you have told me then?”

“That’s the one thing I got right, Maggie, the one action I’m proud of. I was a basket case, nothing would have helped but time and getting through the grieving and loss by myself. I knew I had to just set my teeth, keep busy, and do my mourning alone. If I’d let you sacrifice your last year in school to be with me, it would have been thoroughly wrong and horribly unfair to you.
I’m certain about that
. As soon as I discovered that I was able to make plans again, my first thought was to claim you. But you’d received that letter … and it was too late.”

“More than five years ago … I can’t believe it,” Maggie murmured.

“Maggie,” Tessa said, “you do believe, don’t you, that I never understood how you felt about the Websters? I thought you were happy with them.”

“I never wanted you to know.”

“But I should have guessed!”

“You couldn’t have, not possibly. I’m a pretty good liar myself, and I can keep it up for years, like you. Maybe it’s a talent that runs in the family … your mother, then you … and me.”

“You don’t have to let me off the hook.”

“Maybe I want to,” Maggie said impetuously, “maybe I’d rather have a mother I can love, than a sister I won’t look at and don’t speak to.”

“Maggie, oh, Maggie, do you mean that?”

“Isn’t it time?” Maggie asked, with a sob, opening her arms and pulling Tessa close, so that she could lay her head on Tessa’s shoulder and feel the sweet, necessary, longed-for comfort of her mother’s embrace.

W
hen?” Dr. Helen Lawrence echoed Maggie’s question. “I’d guess in about six months, more or less, but I wish you had some clue as to when you got pregnant. It would take a lot of the guesswork out of this.”

“I always used my diaphragm,” Maggie laughed, pocketing the ultrasound photographs Doctor Roberto had given her to take to her own gynecologist in New York for comparison.

“Always?”

“Well … maybe,” Maggie said thoughtfully, remembering the frenzied, incredulous, magnificent haste of the first night with Barney, “maybe there’s the possibility that I forgot, once, in the spirit of the moment as it were, but what’s once, Doctor Lawrence?”

“Even if you
always
used it, there’s a failure rate, even if you used a diaphragm and a condom, there’s still a failure rate. Almost none, I grant you, Maggie, but never discount the power of a sperm. But since you’re so thrilled to be pregnant, it doesn’t matter.”

“Well,” Maggie defended herself, her eyes rolling with mischief, “at least my diaphragm worked for five
years, with replacements of course. Don’t you remember when I first came to you to be fitted? I didn’t know any doctor’s name but Tessa’s.”

“Of course. You were just eighteen and so upset that you couldn’t get contraception for free from the college you couldn’t afford to go to, that I didn’t charge you. It was the very least I could do. After all, Tessa’d sent me plenty of patients in the course of years. How could I charge her little sister? Whatever happened to that ceramic-porcelain person you were so involved with way back then?”

“Andy? He married a bookish, beautiful, and, so I hear, slightly daffy daughter of an earl—very appropriate, young, rich, noble. Just his style—and in about six months, when Hamilton Scott retires, he’ll be coming back here to help run the business.”

“And the father of this baby of yours? Or is that too personal?”

“Oh, Doctor Lawrence, you’ll be invited to the wedding! His name is Barney Webster and I’ve known him all my life.”

“How refreshingly unconventional.”

“Don’t you mean conventional?”

“These days? When a girl gets married to someone she’s known all her life? It makes a doctor’s hair stand on end with surprise. It’s unique. Congratulations, Maggie, my dear. I’m thrilled!”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

“You’re sure you don’t want to know the sex of the baby? I can tell by now.”

“No, I want to be surprised!”

“You’re wonderfully old-fashioned, Maggie. Now tell me, how’s Tessa doing?”

“She’s simply marvelous. She totally wowed them down in Sao Paulo. She did her job and my job and everything went better than it would have if I’d been on my feet.”

“What about her appetite?”

“Her appetite? I honestly didn’t notice.”