Always and Forever Page 22

  The following morning Bella arrived as usual for breakfast with Kathy, Jesse, and Alice in their suite.

  “How’s my precious this morning?” Bella crooned over Jesse.

  “We’re going to fly a kite in the park,” Jesse reported happily. “And then Alice said I can feed the ducks in a pond there.”

  “You’ll have a wonderful time, darling,” Bella promised. “God, at his age I thought the big treat was a day on the beach at Coney Island!”

  “Did you call David?” Kathy asked. He wouldn’t let that encounter between them at the Greenwich house affect their relationship, would he? They’d promised themselves to pretend it never happened. Phil—the family—would never know. “Is he meeting us?”

  “He’ll fly to Paris for the day,” Bella said. “I couldn’t persuade him to take more time off. I gather he and his lab assistant are involved in some important project. He says he just can’t be away for more than a day.”

  “It’ll be great to see him.” Kathy’s heart was singing. In four days she’d see David.

  “He asked about you and Jesse. I told him both of you were here, too. Oh, it’s going to be wonderful to see him.” Bella’s eyes brightened with anticipation. “There were times when he seemed more my son than Phil. You know David. So warm and compassionate. He always remembered my birthday—even when the others forgot.”

  Kathy was glad that today Bella had decreed they would shop. Little would be required of her other than to help make decisions about which blouse to buy, which purse would please “the girls.” Today she was obsessed by the knowledge that she would soon see David.

  On the flight to Paris Phil talked to Julius about the business ahead. Bella dozed. Kathy encouraged Jesse to complete one of the puzzles they’d brought along for diversion while in a secret corner of her mind she recalled the first time she had seen Paris. With Phil. That was when he had asked her to marry him. The second time was when Jesse was two, and she was still able to convince herself that Phil and she had a real marriage.

  It had been frightening to hear Bella say that when her children were grown she was “too lazy” to move out on her own. Too afraid of the outside world, Kathy thought compassionately. Feeling—as she sometimes felt—that she had in some way been lacking because her husband sought out other women.

  Kathy sensed a fresh serenity in Bella as they began their Paris stay. Here—with her liberal spending at the couturiers—she was treated with all the charm and solicitude and pampering accorded rich American women. For a little while Bella felt coddled and important.

  In Paris Bella was concerned mainly with shopping. Remembering Kathy’s success with their designer, Phil arranged for the two women to be included in the dinner party with the designer on their second evening in the capital. The designer insisted that in Paris he would be the host and sent his chauffeured Rolls to bring them to his newly acquired château at the edge of the city.

  Impressed by the grandeur of the eighteenth-century château set on magnificently landscaped grounds, Julius seemed less arrogant than normal, Kathy thought. She sensed that Phil was nervous that his father’s vulgarity—though always masked by Savile Row suits and custom-made shirts—would offend their host. But the evening was a huge success. At intervals her mind escaped from the casual conversation to dwell on the fact that in the morning David would be heading for the airport for his flight to Paris.

  In high spirits over the cordial meeting with the designer, Julius insisted on their return to the hotel that they go into the Ritz Bar for a drink.

  “This is one town I’ve always liked,” he said expansively, the short, thick fingers of one hand wrapped around his Scotch-and-soda glass. “What about you two?” he turned from Kathy to Bella. “Been seeing all the museums?”

  “My favorite museum is the House of Dior,” Bella said with a taunting smile.

  “Hey, Phil, you think maybe your friends here might come up with some more old masterpieces like those two hanging in the Greenwich house?” Julius asked.

  “I doubt it.” Phil smiled self-consciously. “That was a wartime deal.”

  “I thought you bought those from a German refugee.” Bella lifted one eyebrow in surprise.

  “That’s the story I figured sounded safest,” Julius admitted. “Phil bought them from a couple of old Frenchmen here in Paris. That photography assignment was a cover for him to make the deal. You took long enough,” he ribbed Phil. Kathy froze, her mind hurtling back in time. Phil had acquired the paintings when they were in Paris? When? “Then he brought them in—without the frames—disguised as a batch of film. They’re worth close to a million. Phil got them for thirty thousand.”

  Kathy was cold with shock, Julius’s words echoing in her mind. Phil’s story about having been billeted in that house with his wartime buddy had been a lie. The paintings had been hidden somewhere in that house. By Phil.

  “Julius, were you crazy?” Bella stared at him in disbelief and rage. “You allowed Phil to smuggle museum paintings out of Europe? He could have gone to jail!” She could have gone to jail, Kathy told herself. “I think you were both insane to take such a chance!”

  “It was a snap.” Phil smiled as though in amusement, but Kathy saw his furtive glance in her direction. “I’d worked out all the little details, took my time.”

  The whole point of the trip to Paris was to recover the paintings he’d hidden at that little house. Kathy was stunned by the realization. He’d brought them out of France, but she had brought them out of Germany and across the Atlantic and into New York. How could he have exposed her to such chances?

  “Let’s call it a night,” Bella said, her face again its usual inscrutable mask. “I’m tired.”

  Conscious only of the pleasure of being in David’s company, Kathy was relieved that there had been no awkwardness between them. She sat with Bella and David in the Ritz dining room—where the lighting is ingenuously designed to flatter feminine diners—and listened to their reminiscences about his first year in New York. At intervals his eyes met hers in mutual pleasure at this brief reunion.

  “David, do you ever think of coming back to New York?” Bella asked. “I mean, to live?”

  “I feel more American than German,” he confessed after a moment. “I’m an American citizen,” he reminded them with pride. “At times I’ve thought about returning to New York. If ever my research would benefit by the move, then I’d go like a shot. But for now my work is in Berlin.”

  “Is life easier in Berlin now?” Kathy asked softly.

  “It’ll be a long time before West Berliners enjoy the luxuries Americans take for granted,” he conceded with a wry smile. “Central heating and central hot water are not for the average family. And elevators are still only in luxury buildings.”

  “Are East Berliners still defecting to the West?” Bella inquired.

  “Each day there are more—most of them under forty-five and with talents West Berlin welcomes. Many of the defectors are students just graduated from the university in East Berlin.”

  “Who can blame them?” Kathy said earnestly. “They want to be free.” She wanted to be free, but she didn’t have that option.

  “It’s not as simple as it was before that incident in April, when a Soviet jet fighter shot at an Air France passenger plane in the Berlin Air Corridor. Most of the streets leading from East Berlin to West Berlin have since been sealed off. East Berlin seized property and businesses, even bank accounts, owned by West Berliners—a problem that doesn’t affect me.” His voice deepened in amusement.

  “David, where would you like to go this afternoon?” Bella asked when they dallied over coffee. “Montmartre, the Champs-Elysées, the Louvre?”

  “The Louvre.” David’s face all at once exuded anguish. “I was last there eighteen years ago, on a holiday with my father and mother and two sisters.”

  “We’ll spend the afternoon there,” Bella said gently. “Then we’re meeting Julius and Phil for dinner at Maxim’s.”<
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  “That’s Uncle Julius.” David tried to escape painful recall. “Nothing but the best. Wouldn’t he have loved living in Paris in La Belle Epoque?” Suddenly he frowned. “Aunt Bella, I didn’t bring a dinner jacket with me,” he said apologetically.

  “No need for that,” Bella reassured him. “These days it’s only on Friday nights that men must were dinner jackets and women evening dress. And this time of year most Parisians are away—there’ll be more tourists than anyone else there this evening.”

  The three spent a pleasant afternoon roaming about the Louvre, its forty-nine acres of grounds a verdant masterpiece on the right bank of the Seine. It was as though life were standing still for these few hours, Kathy thought, so that she could be with David. They walked along the 900-foot Grand Gallery, lingering long before the Mona Lisa, saying little, enjoying the presence of one another.

  Then a casual remark by an American tourist—“I wonder how many paintings were stolen during the war and smuggled out of the country?”—booted Kathy out of her euphoria. Phil had smuggled paintings out of the country. No doubt paintings that the Nazis had stolen from some museum and left behind in their rush to escape when the Allies arrived. And he had taken thirty thousand dollars from his father for them. But then, she thought cynically, did Julius deserve any better?

  Before joining Julius and Phil at Maxim’s, they returned to Kathy’s suite so that David could spend a little time with Jesse.

  “Jesse, how you’ve grown,” he said with the proper amount of admiration. “You were such a little boy the last time I saw you.” During that awful polio scare, Kathy remembered, and tears of gratitude filled her eyes. Thank God for David’s presence during those awful days.

  Usually shy with strangers, Jesse warmed up instantly to David. He told David about his afternoon at the Tuileries gardens and his passion for flying kites. Kathy was touched by David’s tenderness with Jesse. It was that tenderness as well as his professional skills that had made him so valuable in Hamburg, she thought.

  Now she and Bella excused themselves to change for dinner, leaving David and Jesse to entertain each other. In her exquisite Louis XV bedroom—with the voices of David and Jesse providing a serene background—Kathy changed into her new Dior rosebud-printed chiffon with a strapless, draped bodice, then slipped over it a tiny matching tie-on jacket. She inspected her reflection in the mirror, and was pleased by what she saw. The dress was summery and festive, though not evening length.

  At the appointed time she, Bella, and David joined Julius and Phil in the “back room” at Maxim’s, where Julius had used his designer’s office to secure them a table. Maxim’s was as opulent as she remembered, Kathy thought, her eyes sweeping about the room. Lush red velvet everywhere, the same calla-lily lighting fixtures, the same baroque mirrors, the famous murals she recalled from her first visit.

  She accepted Phil’s ostentatious embrace while Julius extended a demonstrative welcome to David.

  “It’s great to see you, Uncle Julius,” David said with a sincere show of pleasure. “It’s three years since I was in the States.”

  It irritated her that David showed such affection, such deference to Julius. What had his “Uncle Julius” ever done for him? He’d lived with the family in those short periods of time when he wasn’t away at school or camp. Julius had cheated him on the diamonds his father had managed to smuggle to him out of Nazi Germany. Julius had boasted about that to Bella, she remembered with contempt, though to this day Bella didn’t know the diamonds he’d bought “at a fraction of their value” had been David’s inheritance from his family. And David felt so grateful.

  “I’ll bet you didn’t eat back here the last time you were in Paris with Phil,” Julius challenged Kathy.

  “We sat in the smaller front room,” Kathy recalled. She’d been enthralled at dining at the famous Maxim’s.

  “That’s for tourists and ordinary people,” Julius said expansively. This is where the celebrities come, and the super-rich, the very fashionable, and nobility.”

  “I think we could have gotten in without pull tonight,” Phil laughed. “Kathy would have pulled it off for us.” She lifted an eyebrow in bewilderment. “You’re young, beautiful, and you’re wearing a $1,000 Dior. You’re an ornament to the room. That makes you and your party eligible.”

  “I hate to think what I paid for Bella’s dress,” Julius grumbled, but he was in too high spirits tonight to continue on this track. Oddly, Kathy thought, Phil liked her to buy expensive clothes—to him it was an indication of his success to see her in designer dresses.

  “I understand the table over there—Number 16,” Phil said with an air of authority, “is reserved for big celebrities like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Princess Margaret—or maybe Marlene Dietrich or Noel Coward.”

  “And where did you learn all this?” Bella derided.

  “Don’t forget, I’ve been coming over every year for the business,” Phil reminded his mother. Kathy wondered now who had been his companion on those trips when she had remained behind. Roz? That was the kind of information Roz Masters would provide.

  “Isn’t that Ari Onassis over there?” Julius pantomimed a whisper, but the result was more a hiss, eliciting a frown of reproach from Bella. “This is summer. Not many important people are in town.”

  “It’s Onassis,” David confirmed in a low voice.

  Now Julius made a major production of choosing a bottle of champagne to be served with dinner, deciding on the most expensive on the wine list. He meant to impress the sommelier, Kathy thought. At private parties Bella had to make sure he didn’t see to it that the cheapest of champagnes were brought out. At the charity fashion show only the best was served, of course, because he understood there would be those among the guests who would know.

  “So, David,” Julius said with a jovial glint in his eyes, “when are you going to settle down and get married?”

  “I’m—I’m very tied up in my research,” David stammered.

  “Work’s not enough,” Julius chided, his eyes moving about the table. “A man needs a wife and children.” Did David know about Julius’s philandering? Did he remember how little time Julius had for his children? “A man’s real wealth is his family. That’s his immortality.” He was a sanctimonious hypocrite!

  “It’s lonely, yes.” David’s gaze focused on the tablecloth. “I’ve been spending an occasional evening with my lab assistant. She—she’s good company.”

  Kathy felt suddenly cold. She didn’t want to think about David spending evenings with his lab assistant. She didn’t want to think of him as married.

  “Well, that’s good news,” Bella said affectionately. “See more of her. You need somebody to spoil you, David.”

  How awful of her to feel this way, Kathy reproached herself. Bella was right. David should have a wife to look after him. He should have children. Look how wonderful he was with Jesse. Yet she was conscious of an agonizing sense of loss.

  “You’re almost thirty-four,” Phil clucked. “Get married before you’re an old fart and the girls are looking around for somebody younger.”

  “David can have his pick of women,” Bella declared. “Look at him. He’s handsome, intelligent, charming. He’s not letting himself go like you, Phil. Talk to him and Julius, David. Tell them to watch their weight. Even you, Phil,” his mother said resolutely. “I see the pounds creeping up on you. Four years ago you didn’t have that little paunch. You—”

  “Okay, Bella, we’ll start playing golf again,” Julius interrupted. “One martini before dinner, no more. Satisfied?” He exchanged an indulgent smile with Phil. “You get married, David, and we’ll come to Berlin for the wedding. Even Bella, who swore she’d never set foot on German territory.”

  The remainder of the evening was a nightmare for Kathy. She was shocked and shamed by her reaction to David’s admission that he was seeing someone. If David was seeing a girl, he meant to marry her. He wouldn’t have said as much if he had not
already made up his mind. He was slow and cautious, and that girl was patiently waiting. Why hadn’t she waited?

  Now she chastised herself for feeling this awful sense of loss. How could she be so selfish as to wish that David remain unmarried, without a family? No man was more deserving of a happy marriage than David. No man would be a better father.

  There could be nothing for David and her beyond a warm and cherished friendship. They must forever live their separate lives.

  Chapter 19

  ON THEIR RETURN TO the Southampton house Kathy found herself battling restlessness. She was sleeping poorly, blaming her awakening at absurdly early hours on the sunlight that streamed into the bedroom despite the closed drapes. Inwardly she understood her insomnia and restlessness. She couldn’t erase from her mind the knowledge that David—lonely and yearning for a family—might be marrying.

  At times she was consumed by fresh rage that Phil had used her to smuggle two paintings out of Europe, exposing her to a possible prison sentence. And she was ever conscious of his infidelities. Bella had willed herself to accept Julius’s women. She suspected many wives closed their eyes. She felt betrayed, cheapened by Phil’s affairs.

  Gail and Brenda and their husbands were in full-time residence the last two weeks of August. Kathy loathed their constant, self-centered chatter. Milton and Eli were concerned only about the activities on Wall Street and their golf scores. Gail and Brenda—as always—were involved in clothes and the latest acquisition of furniture. The four of them were ever resentful of the not-so-latent anti-Semitism that was part of the Southampton social structure. Kathy, too, found this distasteful but refused to allow it to affect her love for the Southampton sunrises and sunsets and for the magnificent stretch of beach.

  It was a relief to Kathy that most nights “the girls” and their husbands were off to dinner parties or on the restaurant circuit. By the approach of Labor Day she was plotting an escape from the family scene. Alice was going on a two-week vacation on their return to the city. She’d take Jesse and fly out to San Francisco for a visit with Marge, and to see the shop, she decided. They’d be back in time for Jesse to start kindergarten.