"Phyllis A. Whitney - Spindrift" - читать интересную книгу автора (Whitney Phyllis A)

I didn't believe in a scandal concerning my father, didn't believe that Adam Keene had been involved with a crime syndicate, or stooped to deal with those miserable little men who brought the accusations against him. While Hal Moreland had been known more than once to color the news to fit his own beliefs and influence the thinking of millions, my father, though he had always responded to the excitement of a good story, had also loved the truth. He thought a good story was the real story. In the beginning of what had been a partnership, his had been the imagination, the gifted creation of ideas, Hal Moreland's, the business head and the money. After their first paper, The Leader, took hold and jumped its circulation into the millions, rivaling the World and Journal-American, Hal had assumed command, though my father remained managing editor. The trouble with Adam Keene was that he cared about an honest paper, he cared about doing the job well. Power for itself meant nothing to him. He had his weaknesses, but greed for power was not among them. On the other hand, power meant everything to Hal Moreland, as it did now to his widow, Theodora. Even in her early seventies she had the will and dynamic drive of a much younger woman.
She stood by my bed and I knew she wanted me to die. She had always disliked me because I was Adam Keene's daughter. Once, when they were all young, rumor had it that Adam had been the man Theo wanted to marry. But, already in love with my gentle mother, he had not returned her demanding affection. He had never told me much about this, but I had gathered that Theo would never forgive the rejection, even though Hal Moreland was far more suited to her as a husband and they'd had an obviously successful marriage. On the other hand, Hal had been a big man in his way and he had the self-confidence to shrug off Theo's early infatuation with his partner.
With my father gone, I was all that was left to stand between Theo and the grandson she coveted so possessively. She had once lost her son to me, but now she was getting him back, and she intended to keep her grandson, whom she spoiled on every occasion, and whom she encouraged in unruly ways. She claimed that Peter looked like his grandfather Hal, and that he must grow op to be like him. A resemblance to that old pirate was the last thing I wanted. I wouldn't have him damaged like that. So I steeled
myself against her-and against Joel, if he was on her side. I wasn't going to die. I had been ill with grief and shock, I had collapsed, but I didn't believe hi this sickness of the mind they were insisting upon in lieu of my death. There were tunes when I knew with all clarity and certainty that it was the drugs they fed me, the tranquilizers and sleeping pills, that clouded my mind and brought this confusion between the real and the unreal. Somehow I had to escape from this smothering haze and recover what was left of me. For two reasons-to wrest Peter from his grandmother's influence and to uncover the truth about my father's death.
During all these months of illness they would not bring Peter to see me. Let him remember me the way I was, they told me. It would frighten him to see me now: As soon as you are yourself again . . . But the clear inference was that the Christy I had been -Christy Keene, Christy Moreland-was gone for good.
Oddly enough, it was Joel who saved me, which was not an action typical of him. He was not given to taking hold in a crisis, but this time he did. It had been a particularly bad day for me. I had been ranting furiously about something unreal-completely out of my head, yet at tunes pleading piteously to be released from a torment that was not entirely imaginary.
"All right," Joel said, "you're coming home." For once he stood up to his mother, to Dr. Dorfman, to the lot of them. Waiting fearfully for my collapse, the nurses ceased the injections, the feeding of pills. My nerves were rocky, it was true, my sleep interrupted by wakeful periods at night, but in a week or so the fantasies left me and my head was clear. Joel took his shaky wife home.
Unfortunately, after all these months of Theo's torment and Joel's support of her, our marriage had gone flat. All feeling for Joel had died in me. I could no longer believe that he had done what he thought was good for me. He was too much his mother's son and I seemed to be seeing him clearly for the first time. I looked at his slender, good-looking face that I had always thought so sensitive, at his gentle mouth and the gray, thoughtful eyes, and I could not remember loving him. Those days nine years ago when I had married Mm belonged to someone else's life. Another girl. Another world. And love-making was something I could hardly endure. After my first week at home in the New York apartment, he did not come near me again. It was not only I who had changed-there was a difference in Joel. Theo was in control
again and I began to wonder if the man I had loved had ever really existed. Perhaps I had only loved a dream.
I could no longer care. For all that I tried, I simply could not respond. The only things that mattered were the truth about my fattier and the recovery of my son.
By Theo's edict I still had not seen Peter. Once I had been allowed to talk to him on the phone, but the call had interrupted a game he was playing, and he sounded petulant. By this time he was used to being without me, so that nothing at all of the little boy I loved came through. For an hour or two afterward I wavered on the verge of a relapse, but I fought down the all-enveloping sense of futility and I did not call Peter again in his grandmother's brownstone mansion. Desperate and frightened, I faced the unhappy reality. Theo had already made me a stranger to my son and it would take all the ingenuity and guile I could muster to win Mm back. I didn't even know how to start.
And then Theo Moreland herself opened the way. The letter from her came one morning when Joel had stayed home from the office to work on a batch of manuscripts. There was a strange look on Ms face when he came out to the kitchen where I was sitting over a late cup of coffee. Almost a look of wariness.
"Theo is reopening Spindrift," he said and tapped the letter with slender fingers. "She wants us to come up there."
The door that opened was at once ajar upon a vista of brimstone and terror. Spindrift was a place I would never return to. It was the scene of my father's death and the beginning of my collapse.
"Don't look like that, Christy," Joel said. "It's not the end of the world to do what she wants," and I knew that he had already given in to Ms mother as he always did.
I stared without seeing him. "Is she taking Peter with her?"
"Yes," Joel said. "She's planning some sort of party to open the house again. She wants to take"-he glanced as the hasty scrawl that was so unmistakably Theo's writing-"to take the curse off the place so it can be put into use again. She thinks it will be good for you and Peter to go back and exorcise-that's the word she's used-all that happened there. She suggests that this would be a good time for me to take a vacation. It had to come," he added. "You know Theo would never give up Spindrift for good."
My mouth was dry and I could feel the quivering in the pit of my stomach. My hands had clenched about my coffee cup and I tried deliberately to relax them. Joel put Theo's note on the table
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beside me and went quietly away. He had always hated to stay with me through any disturbed mood I might experience. I suspect he felt helpless and that pained him. What he didn't have to watch needn't exist. I sat on at the table and thought about Spindrift.
In Rhode Island's famed Newport there is an avenue called Bellevue. It is not a particularly long street-only three miles. It is continued by Ocean Drive running above the sea, and though the entire area is not large, it is an American phenomenon. It was here that the socially elite, the very rich and powerful, built their summer "cottages" in a wild extravaganza of splendor in the years just before and after the turn of the century. The houses were, hi fact, castles, of a peculiarly mixed breed of architecture. Whatever whim governed the owner was indulged, and if the results were sometimes monstrous in their pretension and display, the grand mansions had the proud self-assurance of their masters-and particularly their mistresses, and were, for that period of magnificence, above reproach.
Theodora Colby (later Moreland) had been born to Boston, but not to Newport. Her father had been an ambassador who lived much abroad and the family had no Newport house. But as a child she had several times visited the "summer cottage" called Spindrift. Those were still the days of huge straw hats and veils, of white flannels, Irish lace collars and croquet on the lawn, and she loved every minute of it. Visiting it later in her teens, she vowed to herself that she would someday live in a house like that. The dream was never forgotten and when she had married Hal Moreland and his fortunes had increased to the point of real wealth, Theo went back to have a look at those cottages of her childhood. Many of the great houses had become white elephants that no one wanted any longer and that taxes could eat up. The Newport Preservation Society was not yet engaged in their rescue work as far as the mansions were concerned. Spindrift was on the market and Theo bought it with Hal's money and his amused consent.
But Theodora Moreland was not in society. She was a businesswoman, involved in her husband's work, and completely independent of what was proper and expected-a born nonconformist. So she put Spindrift to work in rather a grand way. Hal's position and driving ambitions led him to consort with the world's noted and even the deservedly-great. There were times when he entertained royalty and heads of governments, and what could prove a better background for lavish entertainment than Spin-
drift? Theo paid no attention to "the season." She was as likely as not to throw a Christmas party when the coast of the island was bleak and gray, there was snow at the windows, and the fashionable were hi Palm Beach. But the chandeliers of Spindrift would be draped with holly and mistletoe, and never had its ballroom shone with more crystal splendor.
Of course she had the house done over from room to room, using what was there, but also buying the furnishings of other Newport castles outright, acquiring antiques and oriental rugs and marble statuary. Fiona helped her. Fiona Keene was my stepmother, but long before she married my father, Adam Keene, she had been the wife of Theo's elder son, Cabot Moreland. Many years ago Cabot and his sister, Iris, had been lost in a tragic boating accident. Theo had liked Fiona and perhaps she wouldn't have been able to bear her marriage to the widowed Adam Keene if it hadn't been that she simply ignored it. To Theo, Fiona was still Cabot's wife. She had worked In interior decorators' shops and made something of a specialty of the Victorian, the turn-of-the-century, and antiques hi general. So hers was the knowledge behind Theo's rather gaudy enterprise.
The house was a great success. Old Newport had raised its eyebrows to see it was used not only to welcome the truly famous, but for office gatherings at high level, for the use of those who might lack either blue blood or wealth, and of course to attract the notorious whenever they were useful to the Morelands. It was mainly for extravaganzas, for sumptuously planned house parties, though sometimes simply used as an escape when Hal and Theo wanted to get away from New York to what they regarded as a simpler, less hectic life. The entourage that went with them often belied this. I had been to Spindrift many tunes as a child with Adam and Fiona, and later as Joel's wife. Our son, Peter, adored it. All those marble columns and balustrades, all of those spooky old rooms with the vast high ceilings and miles of rich red draperies and swags of gold trim! I had enjoyed it myself, become quite fond of it as an anachronism from the past, until the night of that last New Year's Eve party.
After the shock of Adam's death, Theo herself couldn't bear the place. She closed it up, turned her back on it. Until now, when it was October, and she was making this dramatic gesture of reopening the house that had seen so much bitter grief.
Spindrift to be reopened . . . ! And she wanted me there.
Everything within me shuddered in resistance. I didn't trust her.
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Why did she want me to come? But still-if I was once more allowed to be with Peter . . . ? I wished that Joel had stayed at the table with me. There was no one else I could talk to. But I had hurt him, and I could hardly blame him for not seeking my company. I had to weigh carefully this matter of stepping once more into the world of Spindrift and facing the remembered terror that waited for me there.
Yet wasn't this what I must attempt? During my convalescence at home I had been unable to do anything about recovering Peter. Theo had blocked my smallest effort. Nor had I learned anything new about my father's death. If both these things could be accomplished by proving that I was well and confronting Spindrift itself, must I not go? Yet somehow I was afraid. Terribly afraid. Though I didn't know exactly what frightened me. Perhaps I was only afraid of failure-of my own weakness since being ill. If that was what I feared I must face it down as Adam would counsel me to do. Courage had been Adam's guiding spirit, and it was courage I must find.
I pushed my coffee cup aside and went into the bedroom I had occupied alone since that first week when Joel had brought me back to the apartment. He had used the convertible couch in his study for sleeping from then on. I couldn't even feel guilty. It was as if a whole facet of my character had gone numb. He had become a stranger to me.
The framed color enlargement of the last snapshot I'd taken of my father stood on my dressing table. I picked it up and studied his strong, life-marked face. Lines ran deep from cheeks to chin and his dark blue eyes seemed to burn with that excitement for life that I remembered so well. The picture was so good, so true that it seemed as though he ought to speak to me, as though his mouth ought to widen in the remembered grin that could be amused and wry, but never contemptuous.
I set the picture down and moved restlessly about the room. I knew I was much better, nearly recovered. Surely I was strong enough now to meet whatever had to be met. It was only natural to be a little afraid. One was always afraid before going into battle. In a moment I would go to Joel in his study and tell him we would leave for Newport whenever he wished.
But before I could cross the hall the door chimes sounded. I hurried to answer and let Fiona into the apartment, not exactly glad to see her. We had never been close, though I think she had
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done her best in the beginning to make friends with a rebellious child of twelve who resented sharing her father with anyone, much less a stepmother. I could realize now what a burden I had been, what trouble I must have caused her, and after I had grown up we'd moved nearer to an affectionate relationship. My father's death had changed all that. Fiona had very nearly dropped me. She had visited me in the hospital only once or twice and had been strangely guarded on each occasion. In Theodora's eyes the interlude between Adam Keene and Fiona Moreland had been wiped out as though it had never existed. Fiona was once more her son Cabot's widow, and Theo employed her in all sorts of unofficial capacities.
After a startled greeting, I stood aside to let her pass me into the riving room. At thirty-eight she was only ten years older than I -which had partly caused my resentment as a child. She wasn't old enough to respect as a mother. But Fiona's predominant quality had always been a wonderful serenity, against which my angry resentment had battered itself in vain. When my father went on a gambling binge and then drank too much out of a guilty conscience, Fiona stayed calm and self-contained.
As I grew older, I sometimes thought her devotion to my father was almost like that of another older daughter. And once, more recently, I'd had reason to believe that she had strayed into some outside affair. Whether my father knew or not, I could never tell. He continued to turn to her still pool of quiet from his own wild whirlpools, knowing he would meet with no reproaches, no angry emotions. I was the one more likely to be angry, to weep because I idolized my father and I could not bear to see him let himself down.
But today there was a lack of serenity in Fiona. As she strode nervously past me and went to look out at the view of Central Park, there was a disquiet in her every move. Her build was angular in rather a good way-as certain models are angularand she was wide through the cheekbones, with blue-gray eyes that could often be clearly appraising. She might not criticize, but I sometimes caught her thinking. She used to make me uneasy when she came as a visitor because she could bring order even out of an existence like Adam's, and his apartment with her in it had taken on a composure it had never known before, to say nothing of a tidiness foreign to Adam or me. I wasn't quite as heedless to order as I'd been at twelve, but Joel and I liked rooms that
were alive rather than carefully ordered, and I could imagine the distaste our comfortable jumble must sometimes have caused Fiona to feel.
She paid no attention now to books and newspapers on the floor, or to the scatter rug that had been tripped over and not straightened. At the window her fixed look was upon a Central Park that I felt sure she didn't even see. There had been tension in her stride across the floor, and her hands held onto each other hi a loss of quiet that was disturbing to me, who remembered her calm so well. Had my father's death done this to her? I had been too busy with my own central problems to be observant of others.
"Fiona," I said, "what's the matter?"
She did not look around at me. "You mustn't go to Spindrift. Don't accept Theo's invitation."
"I haven't decided yet whether I'll go or not," I told her. "But why shouldn't I?"
She twisted my father's rings on her left hand. "Theo's plotting against you. Don't give her an opening."
"How can she plot? What can she do?"
"I don't know." She turned around, her light brown pageboy swinging above her shoulders. "But I've got a sort of sixth sense when it comes to Theo Moreland and 1 think she'll do you in if she can."
"I already know that." I plucked at the sleeves of my blue cashmere. "Anyway, why should you care? You're back in Theo's pocket now, aren't you?"