Great Big Beautiful Life(45)
My chest pinches. “That’s beautiful.” I mean it. But it doesn’t answer the question. “Why didn’t you just…tell me about that?”
She studies me, another small smile unfurling over her lips. “And here I thought you’d already figured it out.”
I hadn’t, evidently, but there’s nothing like a challenge to get your brain turning, and as soon as she says it, my mind turns into a prime-time police procedural’s serial killer board, pinning details and suspects together with little bits of red string. Ruth’s mother, Gigi Ives Allen, wasn’t in the room with her father when he died. She wasn’t even in the country, until well after her father died. Only Gerald was there, at their father Lawrence’s bedside, to hear his ranting about Dicky and Thomas and Nicollet. Only Gerald had read their father’s diaries.
Then he’d fled the rest of his family, shortly after Lawrence’s death. He’d met Nina in Los Angeles, and they’d passed nearly a decade together, before her mystery illness took her overseas and she married someone else.
Right around the time Ruth Ives Allen was born.
“She wasn’t Gigi’s daughter,” I blurt, before I’m even sure of it.
Margaret doesn’t look scandalized or even surprised by the theory. If anything, she looks a little satisfied, slightly…smirky. “I knew you’d get there,” she says approvingly.
“Nina’s mystery illness,” I say. “The time spent in the Alps…it was a pregnancy?”
“Nine months would’ve been too suspicious,” Margaret explains. “They had to drag it out. And publicize it, when they were able. Staged hospital visits, complete with photographs, in those first few months of the pregnancy, and then again right after the birth, which happened overseas. When Gigi’s husband died, Gerald and Nina saw an opportunity to bring their daughter home without a scandal.”
“But their affair was an open secret,” I point out. “I mean, even Dove Franklin knew about it.”
“Yes, but back then having an affair was one thing. Maybe everyone wasn’t doing it, but loads of people in Gerald and Nina’s circles were. Not to mention all the showmances of the era. But Gerald was raised Catholic and was never going to subject Rosalind to a divorce. And even if he had been willing, the timeline wouldn’t have borne out, and Ruth would’ve been the one to suffer. Nina didn’t want that for her daughter, and neither did Gerald. So they split up. She married someone else. He raised their daughter as his niece, and they were only ever in the same room again the week Ruth got married. He gave up the woman he loved to be the father he should’ve been the first time around, and Nina…” Margaret’s voice settles into a flat, matter-of-fact tone. “Well, she gave up everything.”
The words seem to echo around us. It takes me close to a minute to muster a reply. “Did…did Ruth know?”
Margaret’s gaze falls. “No. You remember what happened, in the end, to Ruth Allen and her husband.”
My heart clenches. I can picture the headlines and the black-and-white photographs so clearly, their small plane mangled on a jetty south of San Francisco. “It was a tragedy.”
Margaret’s throat bobs. “I always thought the worst part was, she was so much more than that. She was smart and wickedly funny, and so kind she’d stop to help a caterpillar onto a branch before the gardener cut our lawns. More than anyone I know, she lived her short life in raging color, and all she’s remembered for is what she didn’t get to do.”
“Maybe by strangers,” I say. “But not by the people who knew her. And someday, everyone who reads your story will have the chance to know the real Ruth. The truth.”
A sad smile passes over Margaret’s lips. “Maybe.” She takes a long sip of lemonade, then sets it back in its ring of condensation and looks at me, shielding her face against the sun. “A few years after Ruth’s wedding, Nina Gill came to Gerald and begged him to finally tell their daughter the truth. Nina was sick. Actually sick. Lung cancer. In the fifties, the prognosis for that wasn’t so hot. Somehow, she managed to get Gerald to agree. But they never got the chance. The weekend of my sixteenth birthday, LP—Ruth,” she corrects herself, “and James were flying down to the House of Ives, and their plane malfunctioned on takeoff.”
Margaret clears her throat. “Hard not to feel like it was the truth that killed her. Like even the universe had bought Gerald’s lie, but once it figured out that Ruth Allen was well and truly Ruth Ives, her happiness couldn’t be allowed to continue.”
I swallow, emotion tightening my windpipe. “Do you believe that? That your family is cursed?”
“No, honey.” The flash of a smile doesn’t reach her once-sparkling blue eyes. “My family is the curse.”
An alarm goes off on her phone then, cracking the moment in half. “Ah,” she says, eyeing the screen. “Time for my massage.”
I clear my throat, emerging from the dark cloud of her story and reacclimating to this reality: a day full of sunshine, the smell of salt water and grass and pine, a world in which massages and mint lemonade are at your fingertips instead of loss and sorrow.
“I thought you didn’t leave the property,” I say.
“I don’t, usually,” she says.