“Just get her dressed in something else and bring her downstairs,” he snapped. “My wife is late as it is.” And with that, he turned on his heel and headed for the stairs and the relative calm and safety of the adult world below.
Suzanna looked at her friend in horror and ran an exasperated hand through her hair. “Can you believe that? What an asshole! Fat lot of good he was.”
“I know,” said Leila. “If they never stand up to her, she’s only going to get worse.”
Siena gave them both the benefit of her most butter-wouldn’t-melt smile.
“What an asshole!” she said.
Nothing, it seemed, could stand in the way of the entire household’s love affair with Siena. Never had so much unceasing affection and attention been heaped on one little girl. Especially not in the McMahon family, who were not renowned for their sentimentality and whose previous generation of children had long been used to playing second fiddle to their larger than life parents.
Claire had waited so long for a child, she couldn’t help but spoil her. One particular expression of her love—her desire to dress her little daughter like a doll—was a constant source of friction between the two of them. Claire would spend a small fortune on clothes, from tiny, exquisitely embroidered linen dresses to cashmere cardigans and shiny red patent-leather shoes. Siena, who hated to wear anything but her favorite blue corduroy pants, fought tooth and nail against her mother over these outfits, and never wore them without a stubborn scowl fixed on her face.
But as long as she wasn’t being straitjacketed with ribbons and bows, Siena loved being with her mother, baking biscuits in the kitchen or reading her favorite story about the magic porridge pot.
“Stop, little pot, stop!” she would squeal delightedly on cue, while Claire turned the page to reveal the overflowing pot sending magic rivers of porridge down the village street.
“Look, Siena. It
doesn’t
stop, does it? The magic pot makes
more
and
more
porridge!”
Siena soon knew the story picture for picture and word for word, but she never tired of listening to her mother tell it.
Not that Claire had an exclusive on her daughter’s affections. Laurie, who was still unmarried, also loved her niece every bit as passionately as she had hated and resented Hunter. She was nervous around children, not a natural like Claire, but despite her awkwardness she made a huge effort to bond with Siena.
One morning, Laurie had waddled into the nursery with a large lollipop—cherry, Siena’s favorite—clenched in her clammy palm. Siena sat contentedly like a little dark-haired Buddha amid a sea of Fisher-Price toys. Although it was officially a playroom for both the children, most of Hunter’s action men and Lego sets had been relegated to the far corner, while the rest of the room had gradually been overwhelmed by a sea of pink plastic, headless Barbies, and other Siena paraphernalia.
“Hey there, sweetie,” Laurie said, in that unfortunate patronizing tone that nervous adults use to speak to children, old people, and the mentally ill. She squatted down so she was at the child’s eye level, and thrust the lollipop out in front of her rather like one might brandish garlic at a vampire. “Look what your aunt Laurie brought you!”
With one swift movement, Siena whipped the lollipop from her aunt’s hand and thrust it greedily into her mouth, giving Laurie a sticky kiss before toddling back over to her bricks and hammer. Her number one game of the moment was building teetering tower blocks and then demolishing them with a little wooden hammer on a string that Hunter had made for her.
“What do you say?” said Laurie, hopefully waiting for a thank-you, but she was met with a blank stare. Now that Siena was in full possession of the coveted lollipop, her thoughts had strayed to other things.
Laurie looked around for a chair, but the entire nursery seemed to have been furnished by midgets, and nothing in the room was going to take her weight. She eventually eased herself down onto the carpet beside her niece.
“What are you playing, honey? Do you want me to play with you?” She picked up a brick and placed it awkwardly on top of the wobbly tower. It collapsed.
“Oh dear,” said Siena, but she flashed her aunt a big grin and seemed unperturbed by her tower-building ineptitude. That child was the one member of the family, thought Laurie sadly, who seemed to accept her for who she was, faults and all.
“Star-t-again.” Siena sighed heavily, doing a good impression of her father after a long day at the office, and began piling up the bricks from scratch, the hammer swinging dangerously close to Laurie’s face as she worked.
“Oh, look,” said Laurie brightly, seeing Duke appear at the nursery door. “Here comes your grandpa. What do you say he builds your tower with you?”
At the mention of Duke, Siena’s eyes lit up. Pushing aside her bricks, she leaped to her feet and raced across the room toward him.
Ignoring Laurie completely, Duke knelt down and opened his arms to his granddaughter. Mirroring him, Siena flung her own chubby little arms wide and hurled herself into his embrace. She was smiling so broadly, her lollipop fell to the floor.
“Whoa there, princess!” Duke grinned. “Hold your horses! What are you up to in here?” He pulled her onto his raised knee and breathed in her sticky, infant smell as she wrapped her arms around him. God, he loved her.
“Bricks!” She beamed at him. “I doin’ my tower, I dot my hammer. Grandpa comin’ to play with me?”
“Absolutely,” said Duke, hoisting her up into his arms.
Laurie, who had been watching this loving exchange between grandfather and granddaughter, had decided to slip away and leave them to it. She knew Siena loved her, too, and tried not to feel jealous of the girl’s special relationship with Duke. But sometimes she wished her father wouldn’t show up every time she and Siena were having some fun together. He sure hadn’t been so peachy-keen on hanging around the nursery when she and Petey were kids.
“Hey, Laurie.” Duke turned briefly to his daughter, and despite herself, she felt her hopes lifting that he might ask her to stay and join them. “D’you wanna get rid of that lollipop? It’s gonna stain the carpet if we leave it there.”
Meekly, Laurie picked up her sticky peace offering, now covered with carpet hair. Fighting her sense of dejection and disappointment, she left the two lovebirds to it.
Laurie was as baffled as the rest of the family by Duke’s unexpected bond with his granddaughter. The man who had never shown anything other than irritation with children, and especially with babies and toddlers, had become a tamed tiger in Siena’s presence.
The truth was that from the first moment he laid eyes on her grumpy little face, fists flailing in fury, Duke had fallen head over heels in love with his granddaughter.
“That kid is the only one of the lot of you who takes after me,” he would announce proudly.
Siena, in turn, responded to him like no one else, turning off her tears in an instant whenever he picked her up and settling obediently to sleep when he sang her the old Irish folk ballads of his childhood, in the wonderfully deep voice that had hypnotized women around the world.
“It’s the old McMahon magic!” he liked to tell Claire, who often felt powerless to placate her difficult daughter without him. “She’s not the first girl to give up the fight once I start singing to her.”
As the years went by, it was a close-run thing as to who, between Caroline and Pete, was the more enraged by Duke’s blatant adoration of Siena.
“He never gave a damn about any of his own children, and now he wants to monopolize mine. Why can’t he just do us all a favor and die?” Pete complained to Claire for the umpteenth time one night as they lay under the peach duvet in their south-wing suite.
These momentary flashes of Pete’s old rage rattled Claire greatly. She felt she could bear almost anything rather than lose her husband a second time. “I know it bothers you, honey,” she tried to soothe him. “But he is her grandfather. And you know, despite all the awful things he’s done, I think he really does love her.”
Caroline was less accepting.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she screamed one Sunday afternoon, when Duke had returned from Griffith Park with the three-year-old Siena, who was tightly clutching her grandfather’s hand and fluttering her eyelashes innocently at Caroline. “Hunter was waiting all morning for you to come and take him to softball. How could you just disappear like that?”
Duke was unrepentant. “You’re his mother. Why didn’t you take him?”
Nothing infuriated Caroline more than being reminded of her own failings as a parent, particularly by Duke.
“I’m taking Siena up for a bath,” he said firmly and, hoisting the child onto his shoulders, started climbing the stairs. “Up we go, sweetheart! You stick with your grandpa Duke.”
“I’m well aware that I’m his mother,” Caroline shouted at his disappearing back. “But you’re his father, Duke, and that’s very important to a boy.” Duke continued climbing the stairs. Caroline’s histrionics bored him, and he hadn’t the slightest interest in talking about Hunter or his ball game. “You have a son, and he needs you,” she continued, exasperated. “I can’t be expected to do everything with him, for Christ’s sake.”
In fact, Caroline would rather have eaten snakes than take Hunter to softball herself and miss her Sunday pedicure with Chantal. Suzanna had taken him, as usual. But that was beside the point, she thought furiously. It wasn’t just that Duke ignored the boy. Like her, he had never been interested in children, and until that bloody little girl had arrived in their lives she had never considered his detachment from their son to be an issue. But recently Duke’s obsession with Siena was becoming not just unreasonable but downright dangerous.
Caroline even suspected that Duke got more pleasure from playing farm animals with his granddaughter than from sex with her, a possibility that made her profoundly uneasy. They still made love with surprising frequency—for a man in his early seventies, Duke had phenomenal energy—and his desire for her remained strong. She knew it was a tactical mistake to go head to head with him, and that her attacks on him were almost certainly counterproductive. But she was becoming genuinely fearful for her son’s future. After all, she and Duke were not married, and she now accepted that they were never likely to be. She had seen the will, and knew that both she and Hunter were handsomely provided for. Even so, she couldn’t shake the lingering doubt over the security of her position. Siena’s arrival in their lives had changed everything and had shattered any hopes she may have harbored of a conclusive rift between Duke and the rest of his “first” family.
For the first time in her life, Caroline felt at a loss. Duke’s love for Siena was getting stronger by the day. It was the one element in his life that was completely out of her control.
Later that evening, eight-year-old Hunter was sitting in the playroom watching
The Muppet Show
with Siena snuggled happily in his lap, smelling of talcum powder and wearing her favorite Snow White pajamas.
She was kind of subdued this evening, he noticed, probably because his dad had fed her so much ice cream at the park that she’d puked all over Claire, and now it seemed like everybody was mad at everybody else. Sometimes he just couldn’t figure out his family. Someone always seemed to be mad, and nine times out of ten, it was his fault.
He loved it when they all left him alone, when it was just him and Siena having fun by themselves. It was a testament to Hunter’s loving nature and generosity of spirit that he never resented Siena for so effortlessly winning the love that he had consistently been denied. On the contrary, he worshipped his little niece and never tired of reading to her or crawling down the endless corridors of the estate with her on his back, playing “horsey.” Most boys in the second grade considered it totally uncool to hang out with a toddler, especially a girl. But those kids all had normal families with brothers and sisters of their own. To Hunter, the experience of having a permanent playmate, another human being who loved him unconditionally, was infinitely more wonderful and more fun than playing the Incredible Hulk with boys his own age. Siena was a little minx, of course, everybody knew that, but he forgave her for it just like everybody else.
“Animal!” Siena squealed in delight as the fuzzy orange Muppet wielding drumsticks came bounding onto the screen, headbanging. “I wuv dat one! I wuv dat one, Animal!”
“Sure you do!” said Hunter, tickling her. “You love Animal because he’s just like YOU! Noisy and rude and a little MONSTER!” She was terribly ticklish and, after only a few seconds, had collapsed into an exhausted, happy heap on the floor. “Do you surrender?”
She smiled up at him adoringly, her huge eyes alight with mischief, and shook her head no, screaming for all she was worth as he wiggled his fingers mock-menacingly in her direction. “God, for a baby, you sure are stubborn. I hope you’re ready for some more tickling?”
At that moment Suzanna came into the nursery and announced that it was time for Siena’s bed. The wails of protest were instantaneous.
“Can’t she stay up with me just a little bit longer?” pleaded Hunter. “At least till the end of the Muppets? It’s only ten minutes?”
Suzanna was very fond of Hunter and constantly amazed by the way he stuck up for Siena. She had lost count of the times she had seen him meekly take the blame in front of Pete or Minnie when Siena had spilled her juice or carelessly broken one of her grandmother’s priceless ornaments, suffering frequent, unjust punishments on Siena’s behalf. No matter how vociferously Siena insisted it had been her own fault, none of the adults felt inclined to punish their little cherub when Hunter provided so much more satisfying a whipping boy.
“I’m sorry, Hunter, but not tonight,” she said. His face was so pitiful she almost relented, but the only thing worse than Siena’s usual behavior was her behavior when she was overtired. Looking at her droopy eyes and enormous dark shadows, Suzanna decided it was definitely bedtime. “Little madam here has already been thoroughly overexcited today, and her mother wanted her in bed half an hour ago. Come on, you.”
She picked up an irate, struggling Siena and carried her off down the hallway to her bedroom. It made Hunter laugh, the way Siena fought everything all the time. Part of him wished that he could fight the world like that. But another part of him knew it would make no difference how loudly he screamed.
Nobody was going to pay a blind bit of attention.