“Actually, I can’t imagine having a daughter,” Madison said softly.
Ellie started to say something, but Leslie cut her off. “So you got to see a ‘normal’ relationship. Why don’t you tell Ellie and me what that’s like? I’m sure I’ve never seen one.”
“I’ve not only not seen one,” Ellie said, “I’ve not even written about one.”
Smiling, Madison lit another cigarette. “Thomas’s friends assumed that Thomas and I were a couple and they treated us as though we were. It was . . . a . . . revelation to me. You see, Roger was the only man I’d ever even been out on a date with, and his parents thought I was trash. They were rich and I was . . .”
“A bastard,” Ellie said angrily.
“Exactly. I think that Roger’s mother knew who my father was—is, for all I know. I overheard her once on the telephone saying, ‘Imagine the gall of the woman naming her child after him! What must his lovely wife feel?’”
“You never tried to find out more about your father?” Ellie asked. “At least who he was?”
“He always knew where I was, but he didn’t make any effort to contact me, so why should I bother him?” Madison said.
Ellie frowned. She didn’t like the way Madison said, “bother him,” as though Madison weren’t worthy to contact her own father, a man who had abandoned a woman he’d impregnated.
“I want to hear the rest of this story,” Leslie said impatiently.
Ellie grinned. “I love people who love stories.”
“And I love people who listen to stories,” Leslie said sharply.
“Okay, no fights,” Madison said. “Thomas and I spent the night at his friends’ ‘cabin,’ if you can call it that. It wasn’t as big as Thomas’s place, but it wasn’t what I think of when I imagine a cabin. Thomas’s friend’s name was Alex and he was there with his fiancée, Carol. They were getting married in about six weeks, and all Carol could talk about was the coming wedding. Alex’s parents were there and his young sister, Paulette, who everyone called Pauli.”
Twelve
“You’re not like Thomas’s usual girlfriends,” Pauli said as she flopped down on the grass beside Madison. She was thirteen and still trying to decide if she wanted to remain a child or grow up.
“Pauli!” her mother, Mrs. Barnett, said sternly. “That’s not a polite thing to say.”
They were sitting outside the big log house under an oak tree that George Washington had probably sat under and drinking lemonade.
“It’s all right,” Madison said in what she hoped was a demure way. At least she hoped that none of the eagerness she felt was in her voice. “And what were his other girlfriends like?”
“Boring,” Carol said without looking up from an issue of Bride’s magazine that was three years old. She’d been collecting issues ever since she’d met Alex, and according to Pauli, she carried them with her wherever she went. “If my brother hadn’t asked her to marry him, Carol would have committed suicide,” Pauli had confided to Madison on the first evening she and Thomas had arrived. Truthfully, Madison doubted that, as Carol was pretty and smart and educated.
“Really, Carol,” Pauli’s mother said, “we’re going to give Madison the wrong idea. Thomas’s other girlfriends weren’t exactly boring; they were—” She broke off as she looked at the three pairs of eyes looking at her in question. Mrs. Barnett looked down at her lemonade. “All right, so maybe they were a tad . . . well, uninteresting.”
“Hmph!” Carol said, then looked back at her magazine.
“You know all those girls with the thick glasses and the big noses who can’t get a date to the prom? They are the girls Thomas dates,” Pauli said.
“Why?” Madison blurted out before she thought, then tried to retreat. “I mean, why would someone like Thomas want . . . ?” She trailed off. She was trying hard to remind herself that she didn’t belong with these people, but she wasn’t having much success. Both Thomas’s family and this one had been born to wealth and privilege such as Madison had seen only in the movies. And, like most people who had to struggle to pay the utility bills, she’d assumed that these rich people were snobs, that they were only interested in “their own kind.”
But, inadvertently, on the first night, Madison had said something to that effect to Mrs. Barnett. For all the deception about her “involvement” with Thomas and about her marital status, Madison had been brutally truthful about her origins. At the time, Mrs. Barnett and she had been alone in the kitchen, breaking green beans that Mrs. Barnett had grown in a little plot at the back of the cabin. Unlike Mrs. Randall, she had no full-time cook.
Mrs. Barnett had listened to Madison’s words, but she’d listened harder to her tone. “We’re not the British royal family, dear,” Mrs. Barnett had said calmly. “Our children don’t have to find virgins to marry, or even someone ‘suitable.’ And our children have trust funds, so they don’t need to marry for money. If you think about it, it gives them great freedom of choice.”
Madison had stood there gaping at the woman, both for what she’d said and for her insight.
“So you nursed your mother?” Mrs. Barnett had continued when Madison said nothing. “I’ve always had a great sympathy for single mothers, especially since, when my children were young, my husband was gone so often that I was too often alone. So tell me how you met Thomas.”
Madison picked up another handful of beans. Mrs. Barnett’s words had relaxed her so much that she told the truth about her first meeting with Thomas. However, she left out any mention of her husband, Roger. Madison told of her friendship with Thomas’s aunt, Dr. Dorothy Oliver, being vague about how she’d met the prominent physician. Then, with her breath held, Madison told how Thomas had caught her hiding in the kitchen
and later how he’d accused her of blackmail.
Mrs. Barnett smiled. “That sounds just like Thomas. He’s a throwback to his great-grandfather. It was said that the man never laughed, except when he made some brilliant business deal and had earned a fortune, that is. I sometimes think that Thomas went into medicine because he wanted to be the opposite of what his grandfather was. There now, that should be enough for dinner. Do you cook, dear?”