As Olivia got older, George was her champion. He helped her with math homework, gave her the gifts she wanted most, and wanted to get her a dog, which her mother wouldn’t allow. He was the bestower of all bounty, and paid for private school for her, although Olivia didn’t know he did. She often thought how lucky she was that they had an attentive, generous friend like him, when she had no father. They never told her the truth. Margaret continued to work for the publisher so she could edit his books at home, and wait for him in their apartment, long after his children were grown. He remained married to his wife, and they continued taking family vacations together. The subject of his marrying Margaret never came up anymore. She never mentioned it and accepted their situation as it was. She lived in suspended animation, waiting for George, and only came alive when he was with her, and faded away again when he left.
When Olivia turned twenty, her mother was forty-seven, and George was seventy-three. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It was their last chance to tell Olivia the truth before he died, so she could have an honest conversation with her father. But they didn’t. They missed their chance. He felt ill and went home early one night. Within a short time, he was tended to by nurses and bed-bound at home. His wife had known about Margaret for years by then, and they had gone on pretending that it wasn’t happening and his love child didn’t exist. Margaret was forty-eight when George died at home, with his wife and children at his side. He hadn’t seen Margaret in two months, or even been able to call her in the final weeks to say goodbye. Margaret had spent half her life with him by then. Olivia was twenty-one, a junior in college at Columbia, when her father died, and her mother explained to her about the trust fund he had left her.
“Why would he leave anything to me?” She was touched by his generosity as a friend, and much later, once she knew, Olivia wondered why she hadn’t suspected before then. Her mother had been a convincing liar.
“He was our friend,” Margaret said primly. Her own parents had died before that and had only seen Olivia a few times in her life, outraged by the fact that she was illegitimate, for which they blamed their only daughter. They remained at a distance from her, as though her immorality was contagious.
It took Olivia almost a year, till after she graduated from Columbia, to again ask her mother why George had left her a trust fund. It continued to puzzle her. Margaret finally told her the truth, that there had been no father who died in a car accident. George, the bestselling author and bestower of all gifts, was her father. Margaret had effectively robbed her daughter of the opportunity to speak to him, with the full knowledge that he was her father. It took Olivia a long time to forgive her mother. Margaret’s life had begun when she met George Lawrence and ended when he died. He left her a modest bequest, which she could live on, though not lavishly. She stopped all editing and retired once she could no longer work on his books. She rarely left the house, and continued to hang around her apartment, as though she thought he still might show up. She slept much of the time, self-medicated with tranquilizers, and began drinking heavily after he died.
Olivia hated visiting her. Liver disease and dementia had taken over in Margaret’s late fifties. She died at seventy, having given up on life twenty-two years before, when George died. She’d never really had a life. She had given up her soul, her dreams, and her youth to George Lawrence. Olivia had provided a nurse for her for the last few years, to make sure she didn’t injure herself when she drank too much, added to her dementia. She often forgot that George was dead and thought that she was waiting for him to come.
Looking around her mother’s apartment, Olivia felt anger rise in her like bile, thinking back to the years when her mother waited for George to show up, and all the holidays she and her mother had spent alone while he went on fabulous vacations with his wife and children. In the end, his wife outlived both George and Margaret, and was in good health. Margaret had wasted her life waiting for him, thinking that one day things would be different. She had let it happen, had signed on willingly for a life where all of his needs were met, and none of hers.
Two editors from the publisher came to Margaret’s funeral at Frank Campbell, her nurses, Olivia, and no one else. She had lived in hiding with no friends, always waiting for George, his willing slave.