“Because, Mother.” Eleanor exhaled, and I heard her frustration transmitted through the line. “Why did Betty Beale have to break the news tonight?”
“Well…why not?” I asked.
“Have you not heard? Joe just died.”
Joe, dead. And the ink on my happy announcement not yet dry. The gossips and journalists feasted on that for weeks. As I was not invited to partake in any of the gatherings or the memorial in Joe’s honor, I left Hillwood, sick from the attention. Sick from the ghoulish way in which the press fed on my marriages and divorces, making even my moments of happiness into tawdry or macabre morsels.
Herb and I would keep a low profile, and we most certainly would not have a big or celebratory wedding. We wouldn’t invite the Washington social set or provide any further fodder for the newspapers. I remembered how the press had buzzed around at every single one of my previous weddings, so we decamped to Adelaide’s house and had a small service with just the family in her drawing room. We did not need the grandest party—the flowers, the cake, the gown, the glamorous guest list. I’d had that before, and look how it had turned out. This time, I would get it right. This time we would start our union with just those we loved and each other. “Older and wiser,” I joked, as my groom gave me a kiss on the morning of our wedding. Older and wiser, and yet made new by this surprising new love.
Chapter 48
Herb didn’t need my money, any more than I needed his last name, so both of those matters were easily decided. What took us more time was the matter of where to live. I loved Hillwood and I’d spent years, and millions, making it the home perfectly suited for me. But Herb was a Pittsburgh man—his work was in Pittsburgh at Westinghouse and, more important to him, the home in which he had raised his children was in Pittsburgh. So we agreed to split our time. But there was someplace else I also needed to go. Home. We’d used that word so often in our recent discussions. And now home meant a place that I needed to see, and needed to show to my new husband if he really wanted to know me.
I had not visited Battle Creek for more than just a brief in-and-out business trip in more than four decades. Battle Creek had been my formative home, yes, the place of my girlhood and the soil from which everything in my life had sprung. But then it had become Leila’s town. Leila had won it when she’d won my papa, and I’d yielded it to her.
But now Leila was dead. A visit to Battle Creek no longer meant a run-in with that woman, that imposter who’d fancied herself as Mrs. Post and Battle Creek’s unofficial first lady. So I was ready to return to the place that had made me. The place that had made Papa’s fortune when he’d turned an old barn into a place filled with new ideas and new foods that would go on to change the world. And I was ready to make my peace with the people there—both the living and the dead.
Just a few months prior, I had stepped down from my position on the General Foods board. I had served both directly and through my family for fifty years—or closer to seventy, if you counted the years I spent gluing labels and raking hot bran in the barn as a youngster—and I had felt ready to enter a new phase of life. I would continue to focus on my philanthropy and other charitable causes while relishing the time with my family—my new husband, my children, and my grandchildren. Along those same lines, I’d decided to put my Sea Cloud up for sale a few years earlier. Not only did it remind me of times spent with two husbands whom I no longer wished to remember, but with its massive size and crew, and its even more massive price of upkeep, it had become more of a burden than a joy. And besides, my new husband, being a businessman, liked to fly.
“Let’s buy a jet,” I suggested one mild afternoon. We’d just returned to Hillwood from a weeklong trip to Pittsburgh, traveling quickly back to the capital aboard one of my husband’s company planes. It was so much faster than traveling by train or car, and I knew we’d use a jet of our own for trips up to Topridge and down to Mar-a-Lago.
Herb, however, looked at me askance. “My dear,” he said, “do you have any idea how much it would cost to buy a jet of our own?”
“No,” I answered honestly. “But I can look into it.”
“It would cost millions.”
Luckily for Herb, I had millions.
We decided on a Vickers turboprop jet, which would be roomy enough for us to bring a crew and attendants as well as plenty of guests and family on our trips. I gutted the plane’s cabin and filled it with plush couches and throw pillows in an apricot and silver floral pattern. Low lounge tables would be well suited for games of cards, work, or meals. A galley kitchen would allow an on-plane chef to prepare our dishes—with General Foods ingredients, of course—and white-coated attendants would be on hand to serve. And because I had always been the hostess to have lifeboats for my lifeboats, I quite liked the idea of having backup pilots for my backup pilots, so we made sure never to fly with fewer than three ready pilots on board.