Mistral's Daughter (24 page)

At list Perry left,
defeated.
 
Mary Jane looked at her watch
and frowned.
 
She had missed a meeting of
the Guild of the Infant Saviour
at which she had been supposed to
preside.
 
Still, nothing could be more
important than making Perry understand that there was no circumstance under
which she would weaken and doom him to an eternity
without salvation.

As she picked up the phone to
call
and excuse her absence, she told
herself that she could
almost weep for him, for his pitiful delusion that he could hope to spend a
single day of happiness outside of the church.
 
Poor deluded, corrupted, dishonored Perry, so far gone that he was actually
capable of imagining that Mary Jane McDonnell would ever allow herself to
become the first woman in the long history of her clan to be divorced. That,
she mused, as the phone rang, showed, more than anything else, how far into
error he had fallen.

Perry lingered in New York
for a few weeks, attempting to persuade members of his family who had influence
with his wife to plead his cause for him.
 
He failed utterly.
 
The ranks of
the Kilkullens and the Mackays were closed as far as the question of divorce
was concerned.
 
When he attempted to
speak of Maggy only one of his sisters was even willing to listen, and she had
always been the biggest gossip of the lot who just couldn't restrain her
curiosity.
 
He
turned away from
her, easily able to imagine what she would repeat in a horrified, delighted
whisper, to one and then to another of his relatives.
 
"A twenty-year-old artists' model, my
dear
—
you know what
that
means."

How could he possibly convey
Maggy's pure essence to them?
 
How could
he ever hope to make them understand?
 
A
few of his male
relatives showed themselves not unsympathetic to his
problem so long as he limited it to being nuts about some girl who wasn't his
wife.
 
It had happened to them too.
 
To most of them, for that matter.
 
But it had never led to divorce, not even to
any thought of divorce.
 
Why, several of
them asked, wasn't he willing to just let things go as they had before?
 
Many a Catholic had a girl on the side, why
the hell was he rocking the boat?

Almost eight weeks passed
before Perry was able to extricate himself from the business demands made on
him by his partners, now that he was in New York.
 
He was buying time, he wrote Maggy.
 
It would be at least another year before he
had to return the United States
—
perhaps longer.

He arranged for his Paris
lawyer,
Maître
Jacques Hulot, to take charge of the household, so that
she need never give it a thought.
 
Hulot
paid the servants, checked and settled all the household accounts and took care
of Maggy's personal bills as well.
 
One
of the lawyer's clerks delivered a supply of cash to Maggy every week since
no
Frenchwoman was allowed to have a bank account in her own name.
 
He didn't know what she might want to spend
cash on, Perry wrote, but he wanted her purse always to be so full that any
folly, any caprice could be satisfied. The only matter he neglected to recount
in his daily letters to his love was the result of his meeting with his wife,
and Maggy, in her own letters, didn't press for details.

Her mood was high-hearted,
she assured him, she saw Paula
frequently, she'd ordered a sable coat as
he'd insisted before he left, she'd gone back to her English lessons and was
becoming genuinely fluent; yes, she missed him terribly but since there was no
one she truly wanted to be with but him, it wasn't quite the same feeling as
being
lonely
, it wasn't as if he weren't coming back as soon as could.

As he reread Maggy's letters
in his rooms at the Yale Club, Perry Kilkullen thanked God that he was
rich.
 
So very, very rich that he need
never worry about the approval of the rest of the world.
 
His family could close its doors to them
socially, but they couldn't prevent him from creating his own world with Maggy,
a sweet, wide, adventurous world in which every desire could be fulfilled with
the exception of a legal marriage.
 
It
would be a permanent arrangement of the kind that the French had a knack for
understanding; Maggy would never feel that he was less than a true husband to
her, divorce or no divorce.
 
Of course
she'd be bitterly disappointed when he finally had to tell her, but she was
French, so she'd accept reality.

And as for the life to come
and his immortal soul, about which Mary Jane was so damnably concerned, when he
thought of Maggy, Perry Kilkullen knew that he was indestructible.
 
His immortal soul could shift for itself.

Maggy came to meet him at
Cherbourg.
 
While Perry waited for his
baggage to be cleared he saw her on the other side of the barrier, her face
tense, almost drawn, with excitement.
 
This was the moment he had conjured up, over and over during the long
days of the stormy ocean crossing.
 
Now,
all at once, just seconds away, was the end of the painful weeks of separation,
but even as he longed impatiently
to take her in his arms he found
himself wishing that she had not driven out to Cherbourg but had let him take
the boat train
into Paris.
 
That
train trip, those four dull hours of gentle progression, would surely have
inspired him to find the precise words
in which to present the future to
Maggy in its best light.
 
Mary Jane's refusal
still hadn't formed itself into just the right, optimistic yet final, sequence
of explanation, try as he would to find it.

Suddenly Maggy slipped under
the barrier and ran toward him, throwing herself into his arms, covering his
face with kisses.
 
To the protesting
customs inspector Maggy said something in such rapid slang
that Perry
couldn't understand it, but it left the man chuckling, blushing and
unexpectedly benign.

"Oh, my darling, I have
such news!
 
It can't wait, really it
can't!
 
I was up at four in the morning
to make sure to be here on time... oh, Perry!"
 
She stopped abruptly and fell suddenly
silent.

He scarcely made sense out of
her words as he felt himself enter the circle of enchantment that her charm had
created for him from the moment he had first seen her.
 
Automatically he fell back into their teasing
mode, as if they were continuing a conversation that had just been interrupted,
even while he pressed her head closely between his hands, tenderly caressing
her cheeks.
 
"If it can't wait why
don't you tell me?"

"I'm too shy," she
said, her face rising out of the high collar of her fluffy, silky dark fur like
a bunch of white violets.

"Since when have you
been shy?" he asked. He had forgotten exactly how young her skin felt
under his fingertips, he thought abstractedly.

"I've always been
terribly shy.
 
I just don't act it.
 
People don’t understand that about me because
I don't have a shy look, I'm too tall," Maggy said rapidly, nervously.

"Is that what you got up
so early in the morning to tell me?
 
It’s a fascinating subject, your height, but
to lose half a night's sleep over it..."

"Guess," she
demanded, drawing back a little, and putting
a finger over his lips.

"You fired the
cook?"

"Be serious,'' she
pleaded.

"Darling, I haven't seen
you in almost two months and your letters haven't hinted at the smallest
mystery.
 
Wait
—
I have it!
 
You found a pearl in your oyster at Prunier's
yesterday and you're having it made into a tiepin for me?"

"That's close, very
close," she murmured.

"You've discovered a
brilliant new little milliner no woman in Paris knows about yet, you've been
offered a part in a film with Valentino, and you're leaving me to go to
Hollywood, you've found a little château in the country that we can buy for
weekends, you've learned to ice skate, you won a tango contest...
 
must I go on or can I just kiss you
again?"

Maggy took a deep breath and
switched from French to English.
 
"I
am going to have a baby.
 
No,
we
are going to have a baby."
 

"That's
impossible!"

"I already have sickness
in the morning," she said with timid pride.

"Maggy, you
can't
be pregnant...
 
I've never been able to
father a child..."
 

"When you change your
woman, you change that possibility.
 
Her
mouth smiled but her eyes were tremendously anxious.

"I just can't believe
it," he said numbly.

"Then you aren't
happy?
 
Oh, I've been so afraid you
wouldn’t be happy about it, oh, Perry, I'm so sorry...

"
No!
 
My God, no!
 
Don't be sorry, don't ever say that...
 
it's the most incredible, the most
—
oh, darling, Maggy, you
can't possibly know how much I've always wanted a child.
 
I gave up hope so long ago...
 
this is the most glorious news...
 
sweet Jesus, I can't even begin to tell
you..." Tears of joy sprang into his eyes, and fell down his cheeks and
when she saw them, a touch of color came into her white face.

For weeks, Maggy had been
caught between terror and exultance, between wild excitement and a million
fears.
 
Yet was she not to be his
wife?
 
It hadn't been until Perry had
left for the United States that she began to wonder if she might be
pregnant.
 
Somehow she didn't dare to
write about it.
 
What if she were?
 
What if she weren't?
 
She had waited until a few weeks ago to see a
doctor, as if not knowing for sure would make the whole situation disappear.
 
Yet now Maggy was almost three months into
her pregnancy as far as she and the doctor had been able to determine.

"Just thank heaven that
it didn't happen sooner," Paula had said to her when she heard the
news.
 
"If Mistral, God forbid, had
given you a baby, my girl, I'd advise you to get rid of it and don't think I
don't know a dozen fancy doctors who'd do the job.
 
But Perry is a man you can trust, an honest
man, a good man, if I've ever met one.
 
Granted, this matter of a divorce is inconvenient, but everything will
be arranged, sooner or later, I don't doubt
—
Americans get divorced
right and left, day and night, as far as I can make out.
 
And then think, Maggy, a fine husband and a
baby too, ah ... a baby's the only good thing I've ever missed in my life, the
only regret I have.
 
But you my little
one, you are going to have everything
—
and in such style!
 
I have to admit it, I envy you."

Maggy had held on tightly to
Paula's words, willing them to be true.
 
Now she lay her head on Perry's shoulder.
 
"Hug me, hug me, you don't know how much
I've needed you." It wasn't until the chauffeur was driving the big Voisin
steadily toward Paris that she brought herself to ask with studied lightness,
"What happened, then, with your wife?"

"It's going to be absolutely
all right, darling," he responded instantly. "It's just a question of
time, that's our only problem."

"The Vatican can't be
persuaded to rush, I suppose? just a little tiny nudge?"

"Are you asking if I'll
be divorced by the time the baby is born?"

"I guess ... I
was
hoping for it," she admitted.

He hesitated before he
spoke.
 
"I'm afraid that will be
impossible.
 
But, Maggy, there's
nothing, absolutely nothing to worry about
—
I swear, I
promise
.
 
By the time our baby is grown up enough to
know the difference it'll be ancient history
—
we'll be just another old
married couple.
 
The important thing is
to take care of yourself so that nothing goes wrong."

"Wrong?"

"I want this baby so
much, Maggy."

In May of 1928 Théodora Lunel
was born.
 
The name means "Gift of
God" in Greek and both Maggy and Perry thought it perfect.
 
She was a wise baby from her first day on
earth, a baby who rarely cried, nursed efficiently, slept in the most
satisfactorily thorough way and woke without a moment's crankiness.
 
And she extraordinarily beautiful.
 
People who think all babies are beautiful
have only to walk through a hospital nursery to discover that while all babies
may be endearing in their smallness and helplessness, almost none are
beautiful.
 
Teddy, whose features were
already arranged in a classic pattern of excellence, whose light red hair
curled
entrancingly, whose limbs were straight and perfect in every way,
was the wonder of the nursery.