Mistral's Daughter (71 page)

Fauve's
stomach growled and she considered reading the newspapers after all...
 
anything to pass the time without thinking
about doughnuts, jelly doughnuts with powdered sugar on them, gingerbread
doughnuts, whole-wheat doughnuts, chocolate-covered doughnuts
—
she
didn't even
like
doughnuts, for the love of God.
 
When on earth had Ben had time to go through
the
Times
and the
News
? she wondered.
 
Dimly she remembered half waking up in the
middle of the night and seeing the light on in the bathroom and hearing the
crackle of newsprint.
 
Had he had an
attack of insomnia and tried to read himself to sleep?

Ben
Litchfield's key scraped in the door and he came in with his arms so laden that
Fauve jumped up to relieve him of some of his burden.

"Two
Kellogg's Snack-Paks, milk, eggs...
 
that's
it?
"
 
She wanted to whimper but
pride prevented her.

"I
didn't know if you preferred Corn Flakes or Rice Krispies," he said,
"so I got plenty of both.
 
There's
butter in the kitchen, and some Wonder Bread."
 
He kissed her on her nose, over a three-foot
high pile of newspapers.

"You've
been gone for hours!"

"I
thought you'd still be asleep...
 
I had
to go down to Hotaling's in Times Square and, wouldn't you just know it, the
Philadelphia
Inquirer
was late this morning so naturally I had to wait," he said as
he carefully put down the Sunday editions of the
Boston Globe
, the
Pittsburgh
Press
, the
Washington Post
, the
Cleveland Plain Dealer,
the
Los
Angeles Times, Newsday,
the
Houston Chronicle,
the
Atlanta
Journal-Constitution,
and the
San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle.
"But
on the other hand, I got lucky
—
look, a
Miami Herald!
 
You
usually can't get one on
Sunday...
 
it almost makes up for not
being able to get the
Chicago Trib
—
that's never available till
tomorrow.
 
Give me another kiss."

"Isn't
there any bacon?" Fauve asked carefully.
 
"To go with the eggs?"

"Bacon
crossed my mind, but I only have one frying pan so there's no way to cook bacon
and
eggs."

"Did
you ever think of cooking the bacon first and then frying eggs in the bacon
fat?" she asked in a hunger-inspired leap of her imagination.

"My
clever darling
—
women know so many things.
 
Let's try that some other time," he said
absently as he started quickly going through the papers and putting certain
sections to one side and flinging the rest on the floor.

"What
are you looking for?" Fauve sputtered.
 
"Has something terribly important happened?"

"Hmmm...
 
no...
 
nothing special...
 
I have to read
the Sunday magazine sections and the women's sections
—
Style, or View
or Home or Leisure or whatever they call it...

"You
have
to read them?"

"You'd
be amazed at what fresh new ideas the out-of-town papers come up with on
Sunday
—
they're very useful..." he muttered, searching feverishly
through the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
. "Damn,
damn
, that
bastard, he sold me a bummer!
 
The
magazine section isn't here!
 
You can't
trust those guys...
 
it's a crime...
 
well, what the hell, it's not the newsstand's
fault...
 
it's the people who bundle them
up to get them on the plane on Saturday...
 
oh, shit!"

"
Ben
!"

"Yes,
darling?" He looked up. "Let's go back to bed."

"
Now
?"

"Right
now," she said, putting her arms around him and taking off his glasses.

"Before
breakfast?"

"It's
better on an empty stomach.
 
Dangerous on
a full one."

"Well..."
he said, looking with an infinitude of
regret and reluctance at his
newspapers. "Well..."

"Or,"
Fauve suggested softly, "would you rather read your papers while I make
breakfast
—
and then go back to bed?"

"What
a marvelous idea!
 
Oh, darling, I do love
you."

"Ben,
what's happened to my clothes?"

"Aren't
you comfortable?"

"The
bathrobe's too big and I don't have anything for my feet."

"I
hung up everything in my closet while you were asleep...
 
I hate to wake up in a messy room."

"Thank
you," she said to him as he pounced on the View section of the
Los
Angeles Times
with a junkie's avidity.

Five
minutes later she let herself out of the apartment so quietly that Ben
Litchfield didn't notice she was gone until it was too late.
 
"Out to Lunch" read the message she
had scribbled in lipstick on his bathroom mirror.

Maggy
was sprawled on the floor of the big living room of the converted farmhouse,
wearing brown tweed slacks and a toast-colored cashmere sweater.
 
On the plaid rug was a long roll of graph
paper, an array of colored crayons and the White Flower Farm catalog.
 
Darcy, a book in his lap, sat looking into
the flames of the fine fire he had built from the stack of wood next to the
fireplace.

He
sipped his martini and considered his happiness.
 
Was there anything better than knowing that
it was Sunday night and you didn't have to drive back into the city until late
tomorrow?
 
He and Maggy had gone for a
long walk in the barely budding woods this afternoon, proving once again his
theory that a martini never tasted better than after prolonged exposure to a
large dose of oxygen and the brisk development of all the muscles.
 
There was really no point in exercise if you
didn't follow it with a drink.

"What
are you doing, sweetheart?" he asked Maggy.

"I'm
ordering some new plants for the day lily garden."

"But
why the graph paper?"

"I
don't just shove plants into the ground any old way, baby face.
 
I measure my garden space and I work it out
on paper, six squares to a foot, and I color in the outlines of the shapes of
the patches of lilies so that they'll drift into each other naturally.
 
Then I look in the catalog and pick out
colors that harmonize with what I planted last year
—
and then I order
them by mail. Actually I should have done this last month but I was too busy
thinking out the new herbaceous English border."

"Oh,
God, why did I
ever
say it?" he asked the white-washed ceiling
beams.
 
"Why didn't I know better,
why didn't anyone warn me?"

"What
are you talking about?"

"The
day I said you didn't know anything about gardening.
 
I could curse myself.
 
That was the day you fired the gardener,
remember?"

"It
was a turning point in my life, darling.
 
You made me so angry that I decided to prove to you that anyone, even a
city girl like me, could learn how to garden from books.
 
It's no harder than cooking."

"But,
Maggy, you're obsessed!
 
I understand
that theory about the wisdom of planting a three-dollar rosebush in a
six-dollar hole, but, my God, you made sixty-dollar holes all last summer!
 
You ate up half the lawn with those
holes.
 
Each one took you a full day to
dig and prepare."

"I
only wanted to be sure that my bushes had all the room they needed in which to
spread their roots, and all the nutriments at the bottom of the holes to help
them grow for the next hundred years."

"But
what about those nights you used to go out weeding and I had to hold the
flashlight so you could see what you were doing?
 
Do you call that normal?"

"When
you only have weekends you have to take advantage of every minute," Maggy
said serenely.

"And
last fall when you spent six days mulching everything three inches deep with
dried cow manure?
 
You were in it up to
your elbows!"

"When
you put your garden to bed in the fall, cutie pie," Maggy said with a
learned look, "you don't just wave goodbye...
 
you mulch!
 
I'll get my reward next month when things start to bloom.
 
Gardening has taught me patience.
 
You should be pleased."

"I'm
enchanted.
 
It's a whole new Maggy, the
queen of the potting bench.
 
I think you
could carry double your own weight as long as it's wet dirt in a clay pot, but
what I don't understand is why you're determined to go into the office
tomorrow.
 
So what if Fauve won't be
there?
 
It breaks up our weekend,"
he grumbled, suddenly remembering the flaw in the next day that he had
forgotten.

"Darling,
you don't have to drive back till evening and I'll be waiting for you then, but
I don't like to leave the agency without anyone in charge."

"Casey
can be in charge for one day, can't she?
 
You're always telling me how reliable she is, and what good judgment she
has."

"It's
not the same thing.
 
Fauve has the
business in her blood.
 
When she's not
there, I should be," Maggy said.

"Always
a Lunel at the helm?
 
O Captain my
Captain'?
 
That sort of thing?"

"Lunel
stands for something and I just can't let them all run around without some sort
of final authority who's instantly available." Maggy was firm.

"You
know best.
 
Actually I never believed
you'd be able to stick to your plan to spend these long weekends here...
 
I shouldn't complain."

"No,
you certainly shouldn't," Maggy said, thinking, as she turned back to her
graph paper, of how quickly she had grown to hate these four-day weekends, one
after another, all year long.

When
Darcy had bought this house his plan for their life had seemed to promise the
ideal combination of work and leisure.
 
But after a few months she had realized that she wasn't built for four
days of relaxed country living every week.
 
Maggy took golf and tennis lessons and loathed every minute of
them.
 
She prepared far too elaborate
meals for lunch and dinner, and she had begun to look hopefully under the beds
for nonexistent dust when the challenge of gardening had come along and given
her something that absorbed her energy.

If
it hadn't been for gardening...
 
she
could almost understand how the Duke of Windsor, without his role of monarch to
play, had been able to fill his years in creating a marvelous garden.
 
But it was only a substitute for real work as
far as she was concerned.
 
It wasn't
enough, even during growing weather and from late October till late March,
while the garden slept, she was reduced to planning for the following
spring.
 
Maggy would have had to tell
Darcy that the plan wasn't working, that it made her too unhappy to be idle,
that she simply wasn't ready for this form of semi-retirement, if it hadn't
been for Fauve, and the need to prepare her to take complete charge whenever
the business became hers.

The
Lunel Agency had never stopped growing since its inconspicuous beginning in
1931. John Robert Powers had closed up shop in 1948 and even with the emergence
of Eileen and Jerry Ford, now, in 1975, Lunel remained, the biggest and most
established agency in the world.
 
But
model agencies depend on the people who run them for their success, so Maggy
forced herself to stay in the country on Fridays and Mondays as firmly as she
forced herself to accept the decisions Fauve made on those days.
 
She made herself give Fauve the freedom to run
the business on her own, to make mistakes, to learn the hard way.

And
the plan had worked.
 
All too well, Maggy
admitted to herself ruefully.
 
You can't
half
abdicate, Maggy thought, realizing that this knowledge came too late.
 
Fauve had earned the right to exercise power
and if Maggy tried to nibble away at that power, tried to gather it back to
herself, she would undermine the capable, self-reliant businesswoman Fauve had
become.