“Nothing.” She glanced away, her fingers smoothing the picnic blanket. Then, after a moment, she added, “I just wish he were here with you as well.”
* * *
The next morning dawned clear and bright, and I smiled with delight when I looked out my window and saw my new flagpole gracing the lawn—what a wonderful gift that had been. I hadn’t heard from Herb in New York the night before, but I greeted the arrival of my secretary, Margaret, shortly after breakfast. She came into the room with the morning mail in her hands.
“There’s a package here for you,” Margaret said, her glasses perched primly on the bridge of her nose. “It struck me as odd because there’s no return address. Would you like me to open it for you?”
“No, bring it here.” I put my drink down and brandished the letter opener that Margaret handed me, slicing the tape.
“Photos,” I said. I looked at them, still a bit groggy with sleep, but it took only a moment before the blood began to thrash in my veins. And then I gasped aloud, as if the photos had burned me to the touch.
Herb.
Herb at Mar-a-Lago, lounging by the pool, sleek and suntanned and entirely nude.
Herb, his silver head resting in the lap of some young fellow, also sleek and suntanned and entirely nude.
Herb, kissing a golden young man on the lips.
Herb, nude, his hands roving freely over the muscular thighs of another naked man.
There were others; there was a pile. I shook my head, blinking away the images. And yet, they were scorched into my mind, however badly I wished it weren’t so. My vision swam. “Mrs. Post?” Margaret, confused, stood alert beside the bed. I groaned.
“Don’t come any closer,” I ordered, my voice a shudder. Nobody could see this. Nobody could know this. Nobody but me.
Powerless to resist, I looked down and flipped through the remaining photos in that wretched pile. They did not get any better. Herb, laughing with these men. Herb, entwined with these men. Herb, his hands all over these naked men. Their bodies entangled, their skin glistening from pool water and sweat and salty ocean air and God knew what else.
“Mrs. Post, you’ve gone white as a sheet. What is it?” Margaret stepped forward and glanced at the pile. Now I was too dazed to protest, too dizzy with shock and rage, and my secretary gasped aloud as she scanned the photos strewn across my lap. “Mr. May?” Margaret’s face mirrored my own shock.
I nodded. I was aware, vaguely, of a bird trilling outside my window, settled somewhere in my beautiful gardens, but all I could really hear was the frantic pumping of my heart in my ears. “What are you going to do?” Margaret asked.
But I did not know how to answer that question. Not right then. Right then, I was wondering something else. I was wondering: How could I be a woman of such good fortune, and yet have the worst luck of all when it came to the men I loved?
Chapter 50
Winter 1963
Dina lay beside me in my massive bed, neither of us dressed in anything more than our silk wrappers, nibbling halfheartedly from breakfast trays. Heartache made me lazy, and it sapped my appetite. It sapped my will to get up. To get dressed, to face the day with its many prying eyes.
“It’s a blow, to be sure,” Dina said, taking a slow sip from her coffee. “But you can’t tell me that…well, that you didn’t know?”
“Didn’t know?” I angled toward my daughter. “What do you mean?”
“About Herb. The…way he was.” Dina replaced her coffee cup in its saucer, shaking her head. Then her eyes narrowed as she held me in her appraising, blue-eyed stare. “Mother. You really mean to tell me…this is a surprise to you?”
“Of course this is a surprise to me,” I huffed in reply, certain that my confusion was apparent on my face. “You mean…you mean to tell me that you’re not surprised?”
Dina cleared her throat, fiddling with the bedcovers that pooled around her lap. Her voice was low as she answered: “Well, he was a lovely man. So kind to you. And he loved to do all the same things as you. I thought he was a wonderful companion for you.”
I leaned backward, falling into the heap of plush pink pillows, my mind as restless as a feather in a hurricane. Not only had my daughter seen it—the truth—but she’d seen it plain enough that she’d assumed there was no way I had missed it. And yet, somehow, I had.
Was I really so very blind? Or perhaps—and this was a possibility even harder to reckon with—had it been willful on my part? A refusal to acknowledge what I did in fact see? Like that unseemly attention to that young man at the football game on our trip to Battle Creek. The times when Herb had smiled a bit too comfortably at male waitstaff. His love of the ballet that sometimes seemed to go beyond merely appreciating the art of it—trips with the male dancers; weekends away, ostensibly for fundraising; all of those late, scotch-soaked evenings with the troupe in which I did not take part. How could I have been such a fool? How could I, Marjorie the Magnificent, America’s most exacting hostess, shrewd businesswoman with millions in the bank, overseer of everything—a staff of thousands, homes as fine as palaces, parties for presidents and queens that went off without a single false note—have missed the plain truth of the man sleeping right beside me?