The Echo of Old Books(33)

“And yet, something tells me you do.”

“Of course I don’t.”

“It’s just us,” I say gently. “You don’t have to defend her. Or your father. Not to me.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I just mean you seem a little protective. You button up the minute I ask about either one of them. And if you do happen to slip and say what you think, you immediately backpedal.”

“Privacy means a great deal to my father. And loyalty. In fact, they’re everything. Family first. Family last. But he has good reason.”

“Does he?”

“My father’s a very wealthy man, and there are people who don’t think that’s okay. They’d love nothing more than to see him taken down a few pegs.”

“Who are . . . they?”

“Business rivals, mostly. And the papers.”

“Like the one I work for,” I remind you. We’re getting into tricky territory now. “Why should the newspapers want to take down a private citizen? Has your father done something to warrant being taken down?”

“Over the years, there have been . . . stories. Rumors.” You drop your eyes then and look away. “Not nice ones.”

“What kinds of rumors?”

You pull your hand free and look at me with your mouth clamped tight. “You sound like a newspaperman.”

“Or a man who wants to know all about you.”

“And which are you?”

Your frosty mantle is back in place as you study me. Still, I’m dazzled as I look at you, the way the sun creates shadows beneath your cheekbones, the play of the breeze as it lifts your hair off your face. “The latter,” I say quietly. “Very much the latter.”

I reclaim your hand, winding my fingers through yours, then lean in to kiss you. I feel your distrust as our lips touch, your rekindled wariness, then feel it melt away as your mouth gradually opens to mine. I lay you back on the scratchy blanket and kiss you until I’m dizzy, and some part of me realizes we’re careening toward a point from which there will be no going back. It’s all I can do to pull away, to remember that you’re not mine, that you belong to another world—and another man.



How I wish I could say that’s what stopped me that day, that my restraint had to do with some noble twinge of conscience, but it was nothing of the sort. I stopped because I knew you would regret it—regret me—and the thought of being a regret, a reckless lapse in judgment for which you would one day feel remorse, was enough to bring me to my senses. That and the absolute certainty that I wouldn’t survive it when you did. Would that I had remembered it later on. Because you did come to regret me, didn’t you? Though not nearly as much as I came to regret you, dear Belle. Not nearly as much.





Forever, and Other Lies

(pgs. 29–36)

September 22, 1941

Water Mill, New York

You speak of regret. You of all people. As if you’re the only one with cause for such a thing. I assure you, I have causes enough of my own, all of them beginning and ending with you. That you could bring up that day—of all days—astonishes me.

When I think of how you wheedled things out of me. Coaxing me with that smile you have—that very practiced smile—that says you want to know, need to know, all about me, and in every tiny detail. The way you pretended to care. The way you lied. That mouth, so skilled. Words. Kisses. All false. You ask if I remember. Of course I remember. How could I not?

It’s just us. That’s what you said.

But it wasn’t true, was it? She was there with us. Your lady bountiful with her string of newspapers. That day and from the very beginning. Whispering in your ear. Pulling your strings.

Did she teach you, I wonder? How to soften the ground with your charm and your family stories? Or did the lies come naturally? Perhaps you should have gone on the stage. You certainly had me convinced. Why else would I have poured out my heart to you? Given you the ammunition to wound me? To wound us all?

It was only the beginning, that day on the blanket, but yes, I remember. And wonder, even as I write this, how it was possible to not see where it was all headed—where you were headed.

You asked about my mother and I told you some of her story. All my life, she’s been a kind of shadow figure, a flicker of softly shifting images, there, then gone, then back again, so that it feels at times as if I’ve invented her. I haven’t, though, however much my father may have wished it were true. She was quite real. And for a time, she was my whole world.

Here are the things I didn’t tell you, the lovely things about her that you might have known but never bothered to ask—because you were interested in only the ugly parts. And you made quick work of those bits when you got a hold of them, didn’t you? What a banner day it must have been for you. What a laugh you must have had at my expense, fool that I was. But I’ll tell you the rest now—not because I imagine you capable of remorse; I know you too well for that—but because I want you to know the woman I knew.

I told you my mother was a beauty. The most beautiful woman in New York, some said. But I didn’t tell you that people used to say I looked like her. I have her dark hair and amber eyes, her bone structure, too, I suppose. Perhaps that’s why my father never quite looked at me in those days, because I reminded him of the young woman he married, though I could never have held a candle to that girl.