Mistral's Daughter (25 page)

Perry Kilkullen felt
marvelously justified. That undeniable, atavistic need for a continuation of
his own existence that he had repressed for so long, burst forth with more
power than any emotion he had ever known, until he had met Maggy.
 
The deep human magic of a baby, his baby,
absorbed him so completely that Maggy,
confined to bed for the two weeks
that were deemed necessary for a new mother, felt almost jealous, and then felt
ashamed of herself as she recognized the source of her irritation.

The moments she most enjoyed
were in the middle of the night when she was left alone to nurse for twenty
minutes at a time.
 
"Little
bastard," she told the child in a low, loving whisper, "little
adorable bastard, how can you look so contemplative?
 
Such dignity, such a look of meditation on
your face, even as you empty my breast, anyone would think you were born an
heiress to a throne.
 
Aah, but you take
yourself seriously, don't you?
 
Not even
thought for your poor old mother.
 
Bastard that you are, and daughter of a bastard
—
little double
bastard
—
you should pay me more attention.
 
Just look at all the trouble that has gone
into putting you in the world.
 
I demand
some respect.
 
But what do you care about
it?
 
I didn't have a mother to nurse me,
yet I survived.
 
You are a luckier baby
in every way, but...
 
nevertheless
—
a bastard."

When Maggy and Perry were
together they never talked of the fact that the baby bore Maggy's name.
 
All that, as Perry repeatedly assured her,
would be changed as soon as they got married.
 
However, it preyed on Maggie's mind to a degree that surprised her.
 
She had not thought often of her own
illegitimacy once she had put Tours
and all those who knew her history
behind her forever, but giving
birth had brought it back as if she was
still in the cruel schoolyard, fighting anyone who taunted her with such ferocity
that even
the strongest of them had learned to leave her alone.
 
It seemed 1o her that if she called Teddy a
bastard, no one else would do so... she was drawing out the poison before it
had a chance to circulate in the baby's veins.

The only person to whom she
revealed her fears and anxieties was Paula.
 
Shortly after they had brought the baby home, Paula, who had often
visited at the hospital, came to call for tea and scolded her roundly.

"For a Frenchwoman you
are a proper fool, my girl, worrying about something that you know will be
regularized.
 
Regularized
, I
tell
you!
 
We have a national genius for
regularization, we French.
 
Why, just
look around you
—
what could be more solidly luxurious, more
perfectly
organized, more
comme il faut
in every way than this magnificent
establishment of yours?
 
I personally
cannot find the slightest fault with it, from the little Théodora's English
Nanny Butterfield to those superb pearls you wear so casually around your neck.
 
Look about you, Maggy.
 
You are surrounded by everything a woman
could possibly want to make her feel secure, by every evidence that Perry
intends you to become his wife.
 
You
should be ashamed to even
think
the word 'bastard' about that glorious
baby.
 
All these legal details will be
put right in a twinkling when the time comes.
 
It's your unfortunate childhood that makes you so nervous, that's
all."
 
She helped herself to another
miniature chocolate eclair.
 
"Why,
you even possess a pastry chef who has no equal, right in your own kitchen, you
ungrateful girl."

"How materialistic you
are, Paula," Maggy protested, laughing.

"Of course I am.
 
And what is wrong with that?
 
Now, where are you hiding that delicious
scrap of an
enfant?
 
I
want
to take just one tiny bite out of her.
 
You owe me that much."

Teddy had been born in a
vintage year, a year in which the Kellogg-Briand Anti-War Pact was signed in
Paris by fifteen nations, the pact that outlawed war forever.
 
The sensation of the salon of 1928 was a
full-length nude of Josephine Baker.
 
The
French public
flocked to the movies to see Mary Pickford, Charlie
Chaplin and Gloria Swanson, the house of Hermès made the first useful handbag
that any woman had ever carried and Coco Chanel had become the mistress of the
Duke of Westminster, the richest man in England.
 
Jean Patou, who had had the idea of importing
pretty young American girls on whom to show his clothes, was enjoying a great
success with the development of a strong bias cut, and a neutral called "greige"
became the color for the most stylish women.

It was such a gentle,
fruitful year that Maggy forgot her apprehensions and relaxed into the absorbed
and playful life of a pampered young mother.
 
The great world seemed to have nothing to do with her.
 
Perry would read out loud to her from the
newspapers as she lay watching Teddy perform the incredible act of sitting up
and she would reply with an abstracted noise to the fact that two American men
had gone around the world in the record time of twenty-three days, fifteen
hours, twenty-one minutes and three seconds by steamer and airplane.
 
She seemed to have abdicated an interest in
the immediacy of his divorce, Perry decided, listening to her sing as she fed
the baby on Nanny's day off. Maggy could wait placidly for it to come about,
certain that wheels were turning mysteriously but surely in the Vatican, but he
was not self-deluded enough to share
the optimism for which he had been
responsible.

Divorce was the first thing
he thought about when he woke each morning and every day he resolved to take
some action, but then, as each day wore on, he remembered the adamantine
rejection with which Mary Jane had responded to the proposal and he allowed
himself to be seduced into immobility because he was living the happiest life
any man could hope for.

Teddy's first birthday passed
and still he did nothing, in a trance of peace.
 
During the summer of 1929 Perry and Maggy took the baby, her nurse and
Maggy's personal maid to spend six weeks in a great beachfront hotel in
Concarneau, where the cool air of Brittany was known to be so good for growing
children. Teddy had become mobile, not a toddler but a swift-running little
creature who remained miraculously upright until she reached the object of her
lovely flight.

As Perry rolled a ball to her
one day at the beach he noticed a group of four people sitting on a blanket not
far away, under a big umbrella.
 
He
glanced at them and, in the instant that he did so, they glanced away.
 
As Teddy ran up to him with the ball and
collapsed in his lap with a laughing cry of "Papa, Papa!" his heart
drained of blood.
 
On the blanket sat
two of his business associates and their wives.
 
He looked at them again and saw that they had rearranged them-selves
adroitly so that none of them was facing in his direction.
 
In spite of their tactful backs Perry knew
that all they could be thinking about was the sight of him and his child, that
all they
would talk about as soon as they left the beach was Perry
Kilkullen and his bastard daughter.

He picked Teddy up and walked
off the beach, holding her in such
a tightly protective grasp that she
squirmed.
 
Bitterly, savagely he damned
himself for a coward.
 
Oh, he had bought
happiness all right, bought it for almost two years at the cost of lying to
Maggy every minute of every day although she didn't know it.
 
Yes, she had been
willing to live with
him before there had been any question of marriage.
 
But reminding himself of that didn't help him
to feel less ignoble.
 
Maggy had
exercised her right to choose.
 
But what
rights did Teddy have?
 
What future was
there for her?
 
What kind of father was
he to his child, his only child, the child of his heart?

Perry went to consult the
lawyer,
Maître
Jacques Hulot, before he returned to do battle with Mary
Jane in New York.
 
If there was the slightest
chance of some legal wrinkle that he could take advantage of by becoming a
French citizen, he was ready to change nationalities.
 
Hulot ponderously announced that he was
unable to help
him, he could not use French law for his
convenience.
 
As Perry rose to go, the
lawyer leaned forward over his immense desk.
 
"One moment, Monsieur Kilkullen," he said, raising his hand
commandingly.

For two years he had
supervised the payments of enormous sums
of money that this rich and
headstrong American spent so easily to maintain what must be a juicy and
accomplished mistress.
 
He had resented
being used to expedite the man's private life, so that no one of his American
world would know how he lived and with whom.
 
How dare Kilkullen, who could afford to dissipate such vast amounts
without thinking twice, presume to discuss French citizenship?
 
Why did he not avail himself of his own Reno,
Nevada?

"We are both men of the
world, are we not?" Hulot said with satisfaction.
 
"This need not, after all, be considered
a tragedy.
 
It must seem to you now that
everything is conspiring against you to deny you your wish to marry
Mademoiselle Lunel.
 
Yet, in ten years,
in even five perhaps, will you not be grateful that the church and the state,
which possess more wisdom than you realize, have prevented you from escaping
into this impetuous liaison?
 
When
the
day comes that you find a new, different...
 
friend...
 
will you not be glad for the restrictions... ?"
 
He stopped, as Perry came around
the
desk and grabbed him by the lapels until he was pulled out
of
his
chair.

"Never,
never
speak
of Mademoiselle Lunel again!"
 
He
released
the lawyer.
 
Until
he could engage another one, he still needed this man's services, damn
him.
 
Hulot had all the financial reins
of the household in his hands.
 
Perry
Kilkullen rushed out of the legal chambers and stalked, enraged, through the
streets of Paris.
 
Perfumed gusts of
insinuating air drifted alluringly around every corner.
 
When, Perry asked himself in angry despair,
did the cynical
French, the mean-minded, hardhearted French,
keep
all
the promises that they made implicit by the fatal fairness of their skies and
the wanton intoxication of their city?
 
When a man and woman
who
should not fall in love, did fall
in love, as everything French invited them to do, then God help them.

As soon as it was possible
after his conversation with Hulot
Perry left once more for New York,
determined to wrest a consent for a divorce from Mary Jane.
 
It was the middle of October before she would
agree to see him.
 
He found her thinner
than ever and looking far older than the passage of two years should
warrant.
 
She was a graying, middle-aged
woman, only dimly pretty now, he thought with surprise, while she gazed at him
with her pale blue
eyes and noted, with a searing flash of
bitterness, that he looked
positively young.
 
She could see in him too much of the
man
she had married.
 
Time had treated him
lightly.
 
Unfair, oh,
unfair.

"Mary Jane, I have a
daughter."

"Surely you don't think
that's news to me, Perry?
 
I don't'
believe I have a friend in the world who hasn't managed to let slip that
information.
 
Do you expect me to
congratulate you?"

"Doesn't her existence
change the picture, for Christ's sake?
 
It’s no longer just a matter of your religious convictions or my
excommunication, it's a matter of my
only child's future.
 
If I'm willing
to
risk
hellfire and eternal damnation and any and all punishments the church promises
me, why won't you let go?"

"I feel no
responsibility for her future.
 
She was
conceived in
sin and born in sin and she is nothing to me.
 
But God's law is clear and I, at least,
intend to obey it."

"Mary Jane, I can't
believe you mean that. You're not a hard woman..."

"How would you
know?
 
How would you know what kind of
woman
I've become?
 
How many years
has it been since you turned away
from me?
 
Go away, Perry.
 
You and your bastard disgust me!"