Authors: Dazzle
William Malvern Sr. had been the first and only member of the Malvern family to emerge from the middle class, and he had taken pride in giving his son every advantage; he had shipped Billy off to as good a prep school as was willing to admit him; he had insisted on riding lessons and tennis lessons; he had sent him to the University of Virginia with a large allowance and overlooked Billy’s indifferent marks when his son made the tennis team. After Billy’s graduation his father had bought him a seat on the Stock Exchange. When William Malvern Sr. died in 1967, his son found that after the probate of his father’s will he had inherited a tax-free income from five million dollars in municipal bonds.
William Malvern Sr. had achieved his goal of producing a son who was undeniably a gentleman and an amiable fellow. If he was aware that his son made up in good nature what he lacked in intelligence, he never revealed it to anyone but himself.
Billy Malvern had been a catch for clever, dominating Valerie Kilkullen in spite of his lack of background. She was never pretty unless she smiled, but easygoing, rudderless Billy, unlike other young men, had been captivated by her air of authority and her look of knowing exactly who she was. The Malverns
had married only three months after they met, and Valerie, who had never dared hope for a handsome husband, much less one with money, paid no attention to his basic absence of intelligence until long after the honeymoon was over.
Valerie had been as much in love as it was in her nature to be, and during the years when Billy’s income had been riches, more than enough to buy everything they wanted, his faults had not mattered. But now, in the New York of 1990, there was little room for a man without cunning or aggression.
Billy, for all his geniality, lacked the gut sense of timing essential in the stock market, and he had actually managed to lose money for his own account during years in which other men were becoming wealthy.
He still kept a few clients, old pals who were as conservative as he was, but his commissions were negligible. Little by little he had sold some of his bonds, and now the Malverns’ unearned income was no more than two hundred thousand dollars a year. Inflation had made that a small sum indeed in Valerie’s Manhattan circle, which had been infiltrated, and quickly taken over, during the last decade, by a class of new people of impossible wealth, wealth on a breathtaking scale that had not been known since the heyday of the Robber Barons.
Incredibly, she and Billy had become
nouveaux pauvres
, Valerie thought, with a familiar pang. Their large Fifth Avenue apartment had been paid for in the 1960s, and their house in Southport, Connecticut, in the early 1970s, but there was no possibility today that they could afford to buy a vacation house in ski country or the Hamptons. The Malverns were invited everywhere, of course, but it wasn’t the same as having their own place. Valerie had employed all her ability in redoing their no-longer-highly-fashionable Southport clapboard house so that it was occasionally photographed for magazines. In addition they gave two large, well-publicized annual parties, one in Southport and one in New York, without which they
would have no visibility as multiple home owners, the new coinage that signaled wealth.
Billy Malvern Jr. deeply cherished his position in the rapidly changing cosmos of New York, still seeing himself as the glamorous young man he had been in the 1960s. However, it was the money Valerie earned that now permitted them to stay in New York.
She had graduated from the New York School of Interior Design and apprenticed to an older decorator before she opened her own small business. Although Valerie would never have an innovative talent, she was able to create and supervise a workmanlike, professional job for women who craved the cachet of employing a “society decorator” from an old family.
Valerie charged her clients a straight thirty-three-and-a-third markup above wholesale on what they spent, plus a design fee. She did several jobs a year, as much as she could handle with one assistant and a secretary-bookkeeper. As long as nobody guessed that the Malverns needed the money, those jobs would continue to come her way.
Of course, Valerie mused, as the limousine proceeded north, she and Billy and their children could move to Philadelphia, her maternal ancestors’ Philadelphia, where she could abandon the struggle to maintain a façade, where she never need set her feet in the abominable Decorating and Design Building again, where they could comfortably coast along on income and still take their place among the old families of the city. There, where New York values didn’t prevail, where Valerie was related to half the town and friendly with the other half, they would be perceived correctly as having as much money as anyone really needed.
But Billy was the first generation of his family to attain a place in society. He had none of the attitudes of an old-money, bred-in-the-bone aristocrat, who would have scorned to maintain a position in the social-climbing Bedlam of New York in 1990. On the contrary, Billy Malvern was infatuated with his niche in society and he refused resolutely to move to Philadelphia,
a city he considered stuffy, dowdy and unthinkably provincial.
There could be no question of divorce. Marriage to a presentable man, however ineffectual, however puffed-up, was far better, Valerie knew, than living on her own, earning her own keep as just another divorcee, while Billy was snatched up by some Fort Worth billionairess as any available man as attractive as he would inevitably be.
Whenever she thought of divorce, Valerie shivered in fastidious distaste, wondering how her younger sister, Fernanda, had endured, in her careening career, the disruptions of being once widowed, thrice divorced and now married to a fifth husband who obviously wasn’t going to last any longer than the others. Yet Fernanda seemed to thrive on the hurly-burly of marital adventure, buoyed up by the money her first husband had left her, and a knowledge that she possessed an indefinable quality, beyond charm, beyond beauty, beyond cleverness, that guaranteed that she would never be without men vying for her attention …
It was a lucky thing that magazines and newspapers invariably referred to the two of them as the “Spanish Land Grant heiresses,” Valerie thought with a quickly repressed, acrid twist of her mouth. Most people assumed that she and Fernanda had already inherited large, romantic funds. All that was very well, except that in both their cases “heiress” merely meant expectations. Neither she nor her sister nor their children had had anything from their father, except for the normal birthday and Christmas presents.
Mike Kilkullen’s money was all tied up in unsold land. If you kept an eye on Orange County land values, and she did, oh, she did indeed, then the Kilkullen Ranch was worth billions to investors who would stand in a long line to buy and develop virgin acres on that Platinum Coast.
But their father would never sell as long as he was alive. He had made up his mind to it from the day on
which he was first old enough to think, and Valerie knew that stubborn, unreasonable, unreachable man would never change. His land was himself, and he’d far sooner cut off an arm than part with as little as five thousand acres.
Valerie glanced briefly at Billy, charming as ever, she acknowledged, and still lovable, but in the final analysis a rather disappointing husband who worked in a business in which he was not bright enough to compete, but not quite stupid enough to be found out. Billy Malvern, whose genes had managed to produce three daughters! Not even the grandson who might have somehow caught her father’s fancy.
The last stretch of highway to the ranch turnoff seemed endless. This weekend, thank heaven, would be particularly short, involving them only until the Monday morning after the Fiesta, since both she and Billy could plead their work as a reason for their return, and the children had to be back in school. She’d hoped to be able to avoid the annual Fiesta this year since there was a particularly good dinner party in New York on Saturday, until her mother had phoned from Marbella and told her that it was out of the question.
“You and Fernanda haven’t visited the ranch for almost eight months,” she had said sharply to her eldest daughter. “I don’t understand how either of you girls can be so foolishly neglectful, Valerie. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that just shipping your children out to California from time to time is enough.”
“Father’s very fond of my girls,” Valerie had objected.
“Nonsense. You and Fernanda are his flesh and blood, not the girls. Why do you think Jazz is down there almost every weekend? She’s no fool, she understands that man, and if we don’t take care she’ll turn herself into the son he never had. How would you two like to be supplanted in his will by Jazz, Valerie?”
“Father would never do that,” she’d answered, attempting to don the confidence of the oldest child, while she wondered, with a familiar rage, how her
domineering mother, stuck away in Spain, always managed to know exactly what was going on in her life.
“I’m far better aware than you ever will be of what your father is capable of doing,” Lydia Stack Kilkullen had responded. “He’ll do whatever suits him and just when you least expect it. How often do I have to tell you that he’s a monster of selfishness and a slave to any impulse that may strike him? I don’t doubt that as he gets older he gets more selfish and more impressionable. He’s sixty-five, Valerie, he can’t live forever.”
“He hasn’t aged a day in ten years. He’ll live to be a hundred, Mother.”
“All the more reason to remind him of how devoted you both are. Consider, Valerie, what if he should marry again? There will always be plenty of women quite willing to become the third Mrs. Michael Kilkullen. How can you forget for a single minute what he did to me?”
“No one’s managed to catch him in twenty-one years,” Valerie had reminded her mother, but an irritated hiss had told her, without words, how lacking in foresight she was.
Her mother was probably right too, Valerie admitted as they passed the Carlsbad city limits. How many sixty-five-year-old men in New York, widowed or divorced, took young brides? It was standard procedure, so expected, so natural that it caused next to no notice. If a man of sixty-five had married a woman of his own age it would have been the talk of Manhattan, a nine-and-a-half-day wonder. Why had she not thought of the possibility herself? And Fernanda, that self-educated expert on divorce, why had she too ignored it?
Valerie bit the inside of her lip, thinking that she’d allowed herself to slip where her father was concerned.
It hadn’t always been that way. After her parents’ divorce, her mother had insisted that she and Fernanda spend weeks out of every year at the ranch. It
had been banishment for the teenagers to be sent out to Southern California when they had been invited to stay with their relatives from Philadelphia during school vacations. In the summers, when they longed to be with their peers on the East Coast, sailing and going to parties in Long Island or Maine, where so many of them spent the summers, they’d been forced to sweat it out for weeks at a time in that old-fashioned, gloomy adobe her autocratic father was so ridiculously proud of. They’d had to put up with Jazz, that humiliating new baby, and, worst of all, Sylvie, her father’s second wife.
Valerie couldn’t remember a time when she’d believed that her parents were happy together. Her mother’s sense of alienation in California had been passed on in hundreds of subtle ways to her daughters. Valerie had been twelve at the time of the divorce, thirteen when Jazz was born, and she had seen it all through her mother’s demonically bitter eyes. Nevertheless, Liddy Kilkullen had insisted that her daughters “preserve their place in the family.” The Kilkullen family! As if she’d ever cared about them.
She, Valerie Malvern, whose mother had been a Stack of Philadelphia, whose maternal grandmothers had been a Greene of Philadelphia and a James of Philadelphia, who could count among her ancestors five Philadelphia gentlemen—a Dickinson, a Morris, an Ingersoll, a Pemberton and a Drinker—five Tory loyalists who had had the class and convictions to
refuse
to bow to pressure to sign the Declaration of Independence, why should she think of herself as a Kilkullen? What was there to admire in that half of her background? How could a single poor Irish immigrant of 1852, a shopkeeper before he bought land, compare to the founding fathers of the most proper city of the United States, men with such close ties to the great families of England that they refused to revolt against her?
And what were succeeding generations of Kilkullens but cattlemen who had known their share of bad times? She knew little about the Valencias, the far-away
source of the Spanish land grant. The family seemed to have melted away after one of their daughters had married the first American Kilkullen. They were lost in the rough stream of California history, complicated history that had always seemed too foreign to stir her interest. And as for their taste in furniture!
“Mother! We’re almost there,” exclaimed Holly, her oldest daughter, who at seventeen showed no signs yet of becoming either a beauty or a brain. Valerie, jolted out of her brooding, passed her hands quickly over her hair in an involuntary grooming gesture, checked her dark red lipstick and made herself ready to face a father she had been taught to blame for her mother’s unhappiness. Nevertheless, in her unemotional way she had always longed to love him. She had never been able to admit this to herself, for Valerie had also been taught to believe that he had never loved her.
Fernanda Kilkullen Donaldson Flynn St. Martin Smith Nicolini, so often married that she was known to the readers of society pages from Bar Harbor to La Jolla simply as Fern Kilkullen, was accompanied by her two sons, Jeremiah Donaldson and Matthew Donaldson, offspring of her first marriage, a marriage that had left her, at twenty-five years, a widow with a sizable fortune. The boys were nineteen and seventeen, more than grown up enough to handle any transportation while she sat in the backseat of the Chrysler Imperial and mentally prepared for the weekend.
Her father, of course, would want to know why Heidi Flynn, Fernanda’s fifteen-year-old daughter, had not come to the Fiesta with her. He expected Heidi, as usual, and he probably even expected Nick Nicolini, much as he disapproved of his daughter’s latest husband, who was only twenty-nine and hadn’t had a serious job in his life. Mike Kilkullen would be satisfied by nothing less than the attendance of his entire family at the Fiesta, but Fernanda and Nick had reached the point of divorce after the battlefield of
their two-year-long marriage and she didn’t want her father to know about this latest mess until it was necessary. As for Heidi, she had simply grown too pretty in the past six months for her to be included.