Too Much Too Soon (37 page)

“Gideon,” she whispered urgently. “Gideon.”

The right side of his face hung slack in its wrinkles, but the left side contorted with what appeared unendurable effort. Slowly the eyelid raised and he squinted up at her. The earth-colored sclera, dulled iris, lusterless pupil gave the impression that an electric terminal had been doused behind the eye.

He’s not dead, but he’s dying, dying
, Crystal thought, and in the ravagement of the moment her face actually went numb. “Oh, Gideon,” she blurted. “I begged you only to play nine holes.”

The eye blinked. And to her surprise, watered. Gideon weeping? Her spouse’s emotions were formed of hardest rock. Sitting on the chair, she bent close. His fetid breath did not repulse her. “After this, darling, I’m going
to play with you. That way I’ll be sure you get off when you should.”

The left side of his mouth worked and a strange, pinging rumble emerged.

“Shh,” she murmured tenderly. “Plenty of time to argue about it later.”

He made the sound again, and she knew he was trying to say
Alexander.

“He wants to come up, and so does Gid.” One of the remaining strands of his hair fell over his ear, and she smoothed it back. “Tomorrow, when you’re not so tired.”

The wetness oozed onto bruise-colored flesh. Another series of facial spasms brought forth a word. “I . . . vry . . .?”

Hot guilt flooded through her and she could control neither her start nor her blush.
He knows.
In this corrosive moment denials never occurred to her. She could not dishonor this, the solemnest hour of both their lives, with petty prevarication.

Resting her forearms on the pillow so his livid, ugly face filled her vision, she murmured, “Once, darling. It happened once. At that Chinese party in San Rafael. Ever since I’ve hated him even more. There’s never been any other time, Gideon—or anyone else. You’ve made me very, very happy.”

His lips twisted. It flashed through her mind how desperate was her need to be absolved by him—but talk about your hopeless causes. When had Gideon, that soul of Puritanical rectitude, ever forgiven a carnal misstep? Holding her breath, she awaited his
dying castigations.

But he was whispering tortuously. “Lo—ove . . . me?”

Yes
, she thought in bemused wonder.
I do love him.

Her love was composed of threads of numerous other emotions: she respected and admired him, she enjoyed his company, she was grateful for the luxuries he provided, she was proud of him and proud that he had introduced her to royal kings and financial princes, and if their relationship had circumnavigated sexual bliss and romantic love, well, she was sensible enough to know that these existed only in disputed and ephemeral mists.

She gripped his cold hand. “Oh, darling, what a question. Of course I love you.”

“Me . . . you . . . .”

Forgiveness.

The diminished brown eye closed and Crystal rested her head on the pillow so that their cheeks touched, the faraway roar of the Pacific lulling her. Somebody attempted to draw her from the chair.

She braced herself like steel and shrugged off the hands. Bending to kiss Gideon’s dry, foul-smelling mouth, she felt a faint, returning pressure. “I’ve loved you very much, and I always will,” she whispered, and knew she had spoken the truth.

Then she was pulled with forcible gentleness beyond the screen. She could hear two doctors whispering to her, she couldn’t hear their words, yet somehow knew they were telling her
it wouldn’t be much longer. “No,” she cried.
No, no, no.

Her anguish was no longer contained within her but filled the sickroom, like poison gas. Racked with sobs, she ran blindly into their shared dressing room, standing shuddering and gasping with her forehead pressed against Gideon’s door for maybe five minutes, devoid of thought or physical sensation, consumed by her singleminded sense of irrevocable loss.

When her physical upheaval lessened, Crystal peered around as if unsure of where, exactly, she was. Gradually her tear-blurred attention focused on the beige patterned wool scarf that Gideon had draped over his wooden valet. In her grief the scarf seemed significant evidence of her husband’s rock-ribbed loyalty—she had bought it for him in the Haymarket Burberry’s a minimum of a dozen years earlier.

She carried it along with three fresh handkerchiefs into her bedroom. Unable to stop crying, she sprawled on the quilted bedspread and held the scarf to her face for tenuous comfort. The cashmere gave off odors of wet wool and Gideon.

Darkness fell, the temperature dropped. She shivered in her lightweight golf outfit, yet didn’t move to turn up the thermostat.

The door opened. Lights clicked on.

Alexander.

It was only too clear to her what Alexander had been communicating to Gideon on the tenth and eleventh fairways. Rage, near blinding and sudden and swift, savaged her.

Mindless of everything including the nearby sickroom, she shouted, “Get out!” Never had she yelled at her son—or anyone else—in this intimidating roar.

His composed expression dissolved into shock. “Mom, what’s wrong?”

“The sight of you makes me sick!”

He came in, shutting the door behind him, staring at her.

“You viper!” She was on her feet, slashing the scarf ineffectually at his face. “You told him! You told him what you wormed out of me. I hate you! I despise you! You are not my son.” Her voice, low now, was yet more bloodcurdling.

“Jesus . . . .”

“You got me to that party so you could feed me drugs and find out—”

“Mom . . . .”

“
He’s
never been taken in. He’s known all along that behind the brilliance and the charm you’re rotten to the core. Sneaky. Dishonest.
He
warned me about you, but I refused to listen.”

Flinging the scarf onto the floor, she began to slap his cheeks, alternating sides. Had she ever hit him before? Had anyone?

Alexander didn’t duck. He stood with his arms pressed to his sides, the same undefending
yet therefore defiant posture with which he had accepted verbal punishments as a toddler. His cheeks and jaw reddened, his head swiveled from side to side with the force of her small, prettily tapered hands. Faced with punishment he had never shown fear or remorse, never apologized, instead he had retreated within himself as if the outrage of adults were a mysterious storm that would pass if he could ride it out. Gideon, exasperated, had always ended up saying there was no getting through to Alexander.

“I’ve always loved you too much to see you for what you are,” she panted.

“Don’t you care what a trauma this is for me?”

“Trauma, is that all you have to say?” Suddenly her quivering legs went weak, and she sat on the low, king-size bed. “How did you get to be like this? We must have done something very wrong.”

“Wrong?” he asked. The aloof, near smirk was gone from his reddened face, and he rubbed his knuckles across his bewildered eyes. “Mom, I don’t understand what you think is so horrible in wanting to know who my real father is.”

“How about the way you found out?”

“Does that make me a worthless shit? Why do you—why does everybody—get so uptight about me? Are people jealous? Is it because when I want something I plan how to get it better than other people do?”

Cold chills of suspicion traveled down her spine. “Then you really did calculate on this
stroke? You actually intended your father to have a stroke?”

“He’s not my father.” For a second Alexander again was remote, unreachable. Then he shook his head in bemusement. “I don’t know why I told him. Maybe I just wanted to shake him. Maybe I hoped he’d drop dead. Maybe there was no reason. Must there always be a motivation?”

“Oh, Alexander, you have no conscience, none. If you had one you never would have told him.”

“Conscience? What does that mean?”

His face was earnest, and she understood the question was an honest request for information.

“Conscience is an interior voice. It doesn’t always stop you from being cruel or dishonest, but when you are it punishes you afterward.”

He shrugged. “Sounds like a bummer to me.”

“If you had one,” she said tightly, “you’d feel guilty about what’s happened.”

“Yeah, sure. But why are you so shook up about his dying? I mean, he’s old, ugly, and you’re so great-looking. You’re not like everybody else’s mother, you’re young, young like me.”

“I care for him,” she said. She could hear the thudding of her heart. “He means everything to me. I
care.
”

He sat on the bed next to her. After a moment he mumbled, “I’m sorry.”

Had she ever heard him say this before? She sighed, yet couldn’t stop herself from inquiring,
“Sorry? Will sorry heal a stroke?”

He turned to her, the bedside lamp glowing on his face, reddened from the slapping. His expression was intent, his tawny eyes were nakedly unguarded. “That’s not what I meant. I’m not sweating it about him, he’s old, he’d die soon anyway. It’s you. I never wanted to hurt you. Mom, by now you should’ve realized you’re the only person who’s important to me.”

The killing rage had gone, she could feel the sweat on her body and the tingling of her palms. Nothing about the last few minutes was believable. Who charges one’s beloved son of murder? And what boy not yet fifteen tacitly pleads
nolo contendere?

“You’re all I have left,” she whispered, holding out her arms.

Mother and son sat entwined on the edge of her king-size bed, she weeping, he with his puffed face pulled into lines of contrition.

A few minutes before midnight, Gideon Talbott died.

Crystal, who had always cherished the belief that her brain cracked the whip over her emotions, found the incapacitation of her grief unbelievable. Mitchell, red-eyed and shaken, staged a meticulously magnificent funeral. She somnambulated through it, barely recognizing
Governor Brown or Senator Murphy—and this type of large-scale function was her métier. Her esophagus closed up when she tried to eat. She slept heavily for twelve to fourteen hours, awakening in weary grogginess to imagine she heard ponderous footsteps in the adjoining bedroom. Passing Gideon’s small downstairs office, her head would tilt to catch the gravelly voice. Afternoons, she would yearn for one of his companionable, dinner-table briefing sessions on the Talbott projects. The simplest decision—whether to drink coffee or tea, which shade of pantyhose to wear—became impossible. A hundred times a day she would think,
I’m not sure how to do this: better talk it over with Gideon.

The web of fresh widowhood entrapped her, and she could not escape.

Honora phoned four times from Los Angeles. Although Crystal recognized her gentle sister’s loving persistence, she could not pull herself together to take the calls. A condolence letter arrived on stationery embossed
Mrs. Malcolm Peck.
Joscelyn had written a brief yet elegaic paragraph about Gideon during the spring and summer that the three Sylvander sisters had dwelt in his Clay Street house. Crystal’s tears splotched the elegant slants of the engineer’s printing: since she could not decently hand over a note from her own sister to her fussy social secretary for acknowledgment, she dropped it in the wastebasket.

The boys came home each weekend, but even when Alexander was speaking, even when
celebrating his birthday, her attention flickered like a worn-out light bulb.

Most afternoons Mitchell would arrive at the house with a fresh sheaf of documents. Mesmerized by his quiet, self-effacing voice, she never grasped his explanations of the significance of each postmortem paper that she must sign. She saw the executive secretary as a benign ghost sent by her dead husband to guide her.

One afternoon in May they sat in the rear drawing room, he explaining, she staring out the window: the sky was murky and leaden, turning the choppy Bay a brownish, elephant-hide gray. She wrote
Crystal Sylvander Talbott
by his neat exes.

“Mrs. Talbott?”

“Yes, Mitchell?”

Giving a dry, nervous cough, he stacked the signed legalities in his old, carefully polished leather briefcase. “Something’s come to my attention that seems a bit out of the ordinary.”

“Oh, handle it however you think best.” She managed a listless smile. “I have every faith in you.”

Doglike adoration glazed his intelligent eyes. “I don’t like bothering you, not now,” he said gently, “but I think this is important. The board is meeting on Sunday.”

Talbott’s eight-man board of directors, composed of the five division heads plus the presidents of Talbott Construction, Inc., Talbott-Arabian Enterprises and Talbott Engineering, Inc., gathered four times a year around
the long oval table of the directors’ room. In January, while readying her to preside in his place, Gideon had made a rare venture into humor:
No need to be nervous, dear. My bears are quite tame, they’ll dance to whatever tune you play.
Since then she had lumped the board that way. The Bears. Each Bear had made a sympathy call, effusively giving reassurances that Talbott’s was forging ahead, business-as-usual.

“This isn’t the right month,” she said. “And anyway isn’t Sunday a peculiar day for them to meet?”

“Exactly. And no notification’s come for me.” He acted as the recording secretary. “Mrs. Talbott, since Mr. Talbott passed on there’s been an expression of interest in buying Talbott’s.”

She had been leaning back in the pillows. Now her spine, straightened. “I don’t understand. Buy Talbott’s?” She peered at him.

“There’s been feelers.”

“Who is it?” she demanded. “Morrison-Knudsen? Fluor? That damn Ivory?”

“This is all third hand,” he said. “It’s Woodham.”

“Woodham!” Woodham was a large, Illinois-based construction firm with whom Talbott’s had often co-ventured. “Why doesn’t Henry Woodham come to
me?
Don’t people in the business know that what I don’t own outright is in trust for the boys—and that
I
control the trust?”

“I’m certain the disposition of Mr. Talbott’s estate is common knowledge.”

“So why’s Henry Woodham been sniffing around
my
board?”