Adored (8 page)

She had received him wordlessly, without surprise or complaint, and afterward he had touched her face with a tenderness she had almost forgotten he had ever possessed. Minnie had never really understood the reasons behind Duke’s cruelty toward her, and she found his rare bursts of affection equally inexplicable. As his wife, she believed it was her duty to accept both unquestioningly. Duke despised her for her passivity, but deep down, he also recognized her as his moral superior. Whatever had passed between them, however horrifically Duke behaved, both of them knew that the other would never leave. The marriage remained their security and their prison.

Minnie had been so sure that things were finally about to change, that he was at last getting over this dangerous infatuation with Caroline. But his behavior tonight at dinner, his tenderness toward her, just didn’t add up. Only a couple of hours earlier, before they sat down to eat, Duke had handed Minnie a tiny blue box, pressing it into her hand almost guiltily while Caroline was out of earshot.

“Happy birthday, Min,” he had whispered, and kissed her, just once, on the cheek. She had put the box up in her bedroom, and even in her current state of confusion over Caroline, its presence there warmed her heart more intensely than the roaring log fire in front of her.

Her reverie was shattered by the tinkling of silver on glass. She gave a perfunctory smile and tried to pull herself together. Someone must be about to propose a birthday toast.

“Now that the whole family is together, I have something I would like to say.” Caroline had risen from the couch where she sat beside Duke. She looked happy and relaxed in a creamy white polo shirt and bell-bottom jeans, not at all her usual spiky, confrontational self.

The moment she started to speak, the cozy family atmosphere shattered like a vase in an oven. The group eyed her warily.

“I am so grateful to all of you,” she began, “for making me feel so welcome here.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” mumbled Pete, only to be shot down by a look from his father.

“I know it hasn’t been easy for you all, adjusting.” She smiled her most infuriatingly smug smile at Minnie, who was frozen to the spot beside her presents. “And, well, I just wanted you all to know that I am really proud to be a part of this family.”

“Excuse me.” Pete had gotten to his feet. “I think I may need to throw up.”

Laurie, terrified of the imminent confrontation, burst into tears.

“Shut the fuck up, Petey, or get out,” said Duke. He had also stood up, a full six inches taller than his son, the power of his booming voice and huge physical presence instantly filling the room and dwarfing Pete into seething, impotent submission. Pete sat down.

Still smiling sweetly, Caroline continued. “Well, I’m sorry you feel that way, Pete, really I am. I can only hope that one day, you might come to accept me, as the person who has made your father happy. Especially now.”

She paused, mischievously savoring the tension in the room.

“Especially now that I’m going to be giving you a little brother or sister.”

The silence was deafening. Nobody looked more horror-stricken than Duke.

“Oh, Duke, darling, isn’t it wonderful?” Caroline squealed, flinging herself melodramatically into his arms. “I’m pregnant! We’re going to have a baby!”

For a moment, nobody said anything. Then, suddenly, Laurie let out a piercing wail and fled, sobbing, from the room.

“Claire,” said Duke quietly, after extricating himself delicately from Caroline’s triumphant embrace and turning to his daughter-in-law as the calmest, most sensible person in the room. “Go after her, please.”

“No!” bellowed Pete as she half started to the door. “You stay where you are.”

Claire froze.

“I’ll go to her.” Minnie heard her own voice sounding oddly detached. For a split second, she caught Duke’s eye. There was something in his expression—was it regret? But he quickly turned away and began arguing loudly with Pete, and she slipped silently out of the room.

She found her daughter upstairs in her bedroom, the same baby-pink room she had slept in since childhood, facedown on the bed, her shoulders shuddering with grief.

“Why?” she wailed. “Why is she doing this to us?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart,” said Minnie, pushing back a strand of limp, matted hair from Laurie’s wet cheek. “I know it’s hard, really I do. But you just have to try and accept it. We all do.”

“No!” Laurie shouted back at her. “I won’t accept it! I’ll never accept it, and neither will Pete. That child, that
bastard
.” Laurie’s fat face was contorted with rage, a hideous contrast to her mother’s composed, aquiline features. “Her kid will
never
be family to me. Or you. I mean, for God’s sake, Mother, how do we even know it’s Daddy’s? She’s such a slut, anybody could have fathered that baby. Edward, or . . . or . . . that awful Negro, whatever his name is.”

All of a sudden Minnie felt terribly tired. “I’m afraid it is your father’s child,” she said. “And don’t ask me how I know, because I just know. Now come along, dry those tears.”

Angrily, Laurie shrugged off her mother’s hand. She didn’t want to be comforted.

Minnie wasn’t sure she knew what to say anyway. Feeling numb and faintly dizzy, she closed the door on her daughter’s sobs and retreated to the sanctuary of her own bedroom. Wild horses couldn’t have gotten her to go back down those stairs, where she could hear Duke and Peter, still screaming at each other.

Sitting down heavily on her bed, she noticed Duke’s birthday gift on her bedside table. She was annoyed to find that her hands were trembling as she opened it. Inside was one of the loveliest diamond rings she had ever laid eyes on. There was also a note, a tiny piece of paper that had been carefully folded and slipped under the velvet of the ring box. Minnie read it:

“To my wife, on her birthday. With affection. Duke.”

For the first time in many long years, Minnie McMahon gave way to tears.

CHAPTER SIX

They named the baby boy Hunter.

It had been a difficult birth. Caroline, unaccustomed to discomfort, let alone real physical pain, suffered terribly for fourteen hours before Dr. Rawley decided the baby was showing signs of distress and performed an emergency cesarean. She had lost a lot of blood, and for weeks after the birth looked so anemically pale and vulnerable that Duke hardly knew how to talk to her. For him, Caroline was a purely sexual being. If his mistress had a deeper side—a troubled past or a more complex range of emotions—he neither knew, nor did he want to know, anything about it.

Bizarrely, his physical desire for her had only increased with her pregnancy. As her belly swelled, he felt an intense happiness at this living, growing symbol of his own virility and potency. He loved the shocked, revolted looks of fans on the street, relished their discomfort at seeing such a young and beautiful woman carrying the child of such an old man. The McMahons’ living arrangements had become the talk and scandal of Hollywood, and Duke was loving every minute of it.

Even better, Caroline’s libido had gone into overdrive. All those fucking pregnancy hormones had made her hornier than ever. When the midwife had suggested that aggressive vaginal sex might not be the best thing for the baby, Duke had happily resorted to sodomizing her, and was delighted by her enthusiastic acquiescence. He knew that she had conceived the child deliberately, hoping to cement her place, if not in his affections, then certainly in his will. But if anything, he rather admired her chutzpah. Hunter’s arrival had been quite a coup for Caroline.

The baby itself was another matter. Duke’s paternal instinct extended no further than a primitive desire to pass on his genes and a dimly defined Irish Catholic belief in the importance of family. He had about as little interest in spending time with some puking, shitting little insomniac as in joining the priesthood.

Caroline was smart enough to realize this and wasted no time in banishing her son to a nursery at the opposite end of the estate, in the care of two full-time nannies. She had also—through gritted teeth—allowed Duke to christen the boy Hunter.

“Honestly, darling,” she had said, when he first suggested it at the hospital. “Hunter McMahon. It sounds like the name of one of Brad’s porn stars. Couldn’t we try something a little more traditional? I was thinking maybe Richard or Hugh. Or what about Sebastian?” Her tired face lit up as she thought about dear old Pa and how thrilled he would have been with his grandson. “That was my father’s name.”

“Oh yeah?” said Duke. “Well guess what, Peter was the name of Minnie’s old man, who was the most miserable, tight-assed son of a bitch to ever walk the planet. I’m not naming another son of mine after anybody’s father, and that’s final.”

“But Duke, my father was nothing like that,” she protested. “He was kind, and honorable, and . . .”

“Caroline.” He put his finger to her lips, not unkindly. “It ain’t happening, okay? And the kid is not getting some fucking English, Lord Rupert the Third goddamn name, either.”

Caroline laughed. She loved Duke’s ideas about the English upper classes, largely fed to him over the years by the sycophantically Anglophile Minnie. As far as he was concerned, everybody was called Lord Rupert of the Manor and went riding around the countryside wearing coronets.

Still, she was shrewd enough to read between the lines, and knew it was important to Duke that she conceded about the naming of the baby. He had never forgiven Minnie, or her family, for the way they patronized him socially. The worst thing Caroline could do would be to appear to be following suit.

“Oh well, all right, darling,” she said. “I suppose he
is
going to be an American. And if he has anything like his father’s charm, I’m sure he’ll be able to carry it off. Hunter McMahon it is.”

“Hunter Duke McMahon,” said Duke.

Oh God. In for a penny, in for a pound.

“Absolutely,” agreed Caroline. “Hunter Duke.”

She made titanic efforts to regain her figure, working out daily with Mikey, and practically starving herself on the new cabbage-soup diet that all the Hollywood wives were raving about. A picture of Caroline in a wisp of white chiffon, looking impossibly svelte at the premiere of
Saturday Night Fever
just six weeks after Hunter’s birth, made the cover of
People
magazine. Now that she had produced a son, the frosty reception she had been used to among Duke’s movie friends was finally beginning to thaw. Caroline Berkeley was here to stay, and anyone who didn’t like it would have to lump it.

From the very beginning, Hunter was an angelic baby. His nannies marveled at his sweet, even temperament, his ability to sleep through the night, and his constant bestowing of smiles on every stranger who so much as looked at him. With his shock of dark hair, tawny brown complexion, and huge midnight-blue eyes, he was the sort of infant whom people stopped to admire in the park and lined up to cuddle at cocktail parties.

Ignored by both his parents, and despised by all the other adult members of the household—with the one exception of Claire—Hunter got used to his own company, and could play for hours at a time, quite happily, alone in his nursery. The only time his peaceful, friendly face would cloud over was when he found himself dragged like a pawn into the adults’ hostilities. The older he grew, it seemed, the more often this happened.

Shortly after Hunter turned four, his mother threw an enormous garden party at the estate, to celebrate her fifth “anniversary” with Duke.
Le Tout
Hollywood was invited and mingled awkwardly with both Minnie and Caroline as each vied for the position of most senior hostess. Minnie, as usual, looked elegant in a beige linen trouser suit, her diamond eternity ring glittering in the California sunshine. Caroline had rather overdone it in a plunging red satin top and matching hot pants—red rags to Minnie’s bull.

“I picked up the outfit last week from Valencia in Brentwood,” she was telling an enraptured entertainment lawyer and his disapproving-looking wife as she leaned seductively against a huge sycamore. “Farrah Fawcett came in about two minutes later,
desperate
to get hold of it, but I’d bought the very last one, can you believe it?”

Despite the lawyer’s drooling appreciation, Caroline was in fact beginning to regret her choice and wish she had gone for something slightly less risqué. It was a fine line, dressing to keep Duke happy while also trying to gain acceptance among his friends as what Americans called a “permanent life partner.” Caroline frequently found herself being outclassed by Minnie, whose conservative, elegant ensembles seemed calculated to paint her as the scarlet woman. It infuriated her.

Oh fuck, what had possessed her to wear red? She’d just have to really play up the whole vamp thing. At least Duke would appreciate it.

While his mother shimmied off into the crowd, gyrating sexily to Neil Diamond as she went, Hunter was discovering the delights of the dessert table, contentedly smearing chocolate gâteau all over his face.

“Hunter! What on earth do you think you’re doing?” All of a sudden a furious Minnie was looming over him. He glanced around quickly in panic, looking for a nifty escape route, but none presented itself.

Minnie was beyond exasperation. Not only had she had to put up with watching that little trollop Caroline trying to insinuate herself with all her old friends but now her hateful little brat had completely destroyed Minnie’s beautiful chocolate gâteau. Why couldn’t his slut of a mother ever control him?

“Young man, you are in big trouble,” she whispered ominously at Hunter. “Just
look
at your face. That’s very, very naughty, isn’t it?”

The little boy slunk back guiltily behind the tablecloth. Maybe if he shut his eyes very tightly, she’d disappear?

“You come with me this instant,” said Minnie briskly, dragging him off in search of Caroline.

She had seized his arm painfully tightly, and this, combined with the harshness of her tone, had frightened him. Wiping the chocolate goo on his sleeve, he began to cry, his fat lower lip trembling pitifully as she dragged him away.

Caroline, as usual, was surrounded by a sycophantic crowd on the other side of the lawn, oblivious to her son’s wails. But Claire, who had always had a strong maternal instinct and felt sorry for the boy, caught sight of Minnie pulling him angrily up the steps to the house and hurried over to intervene.

“Come on, Minnie.” She tried to keep her tone respectful. “You know he didn’t mean any harm. He’s only four for heaven’s sake.” Stooping down, she wiped away Hunter’s tears and the remains of the gâteau with her handkerchief and, prising his arm from her irate mother-in-law, scooped him into her arms.

“How dare you undermine my authority?” said Minnie, glaring at her and further terrifying poor Hunter. She knew it wasn’t really the child’s fault, or Claire’s. It was Caroline she should be angry with. Even so, it was humiliating to be reprimanded by her son’s wife in front of so many people. And Minnie had had more than enough humiliation for one day. “That child is a disgrace!” she fumed. “He needs a little discipline, although Lord only knows how he’s ever going to get it in this madhouse.”

Claire knew better than to argue, but she tightened her grip possessively around Hunter. She hated being in this position but somebody had to look out for the child. If it were possible, her husband resented his little half brother even more vehemently than Minnie did. He flew completely off the handle whenever he caught Claire defending the boy.

Her heart pounded violently now as she stood on the steps with Hunter in her arms, terrified that Pete might see her and make a scene. Sensing her fear, and acutely aware of the tension coiled within her body, Hunter suddenly lost control of his bladder. A warm yellow stain began to spread slowly across Claire’s white muslin blouse.

“I rest my case,” said Minnie contemptuously, before turning on her heel and descending the steps to rejoin the party.

“Don’t you worry, sweetie,” Claire reassured the traumatized child, whose sodden legs remained wrapped tightly around her. “It was just an accident. Come on, let’s go get you cleaned up, shall we?”

She hurried indoors with Hunter, anxious to get both him and herself changed into fresh clothes before Pete found them. Claire had grown to become quite frightened of her husband. More and more these days, Pete seemed to be overwhelmed by some nameless rage that she was powerless to placate. She had thought—well, hoped—that he might mellow once they had a child of their own. But five years of trying had proved painfully fruitless, and Claire felt instinctively that Pete blamed her for their reproductive failure, although there was nothing to suggest that the fault should lie on her side.

It didn’t help that her father-in-law was so gung-ho about his own virility, showing Hunter off like some sort of fertility trophy, rubbing Pete’s nose in it at every opportunity.

She smiled down at Hunter’s chubby body as he sat happily in the bath, squirting himself with bubble bath. How could Duke and Caroline ignore him the way they did? He was such a little angel.

For her part, the longing for a child of her own had become scarcely bearable, a ceaseless drumbeat of yearning pounding away in her head day after day. How ironic, how cruel it was that Caroline, who hadn’t a shred of maternal feeling in her hard, toned little body, should have conceived so easily, while she, Claire, who would make such a natural, loving mother, seemed destined to remain childless.

“There you go, sweetie.” She wrapped Hunter in a huge white towel and began rubbing him dry as he wriggled and squealed in delight. How wonderful to be four—the whole Minnie incident already seemed to be quite forgotten.

“I wuv you,” he said, reaching his hands up around her neck and kissing her.

“Oh, honey. I love you, too,” she said.

After a lightning change, the pair of them reemerged into the sunshine. Claire looked beautiful but flustered in a pale yellow sundress. Hunter, already restored to his natural good humor, was beaming in a crisp white sailor suit, tightly clasping her hand.

Pete pounced on them instantly.

“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded. “I wanted to introduce you to Sheila Peterson, but the moment I turned around, you were gone.”

Sheila Peterson was the wife of Anton Peterson, one of the most reclusive and successful studio bosses in Hollywood history. Pete had been trying for eighteen months to forge an alliance with the famously prickly Anton. The McMahon name still opened a lot of doors in the movie business, and Pete hoped to convince Peterson that he could bring a higher profile and touch of glamour to his thriving but still somewhat low-key business. Today was the first time he’d managed to get Anton and his wife to accept any sort of social invitation. The least Claire could do was to show him a little support.

“Oh, I’m sorry, honey. Hunter had a little accident, so I just ran in to clean him up.”

The second the words were out of her mouth, she could have bitten her tongue off.

“Jesus fucking
Christ,
Claire.” Pete seized her by both shoulders and began to shake her hard. “You are not his mother, okay? When are you going to get that into your stupid head? He isn’t your child.”

Suddenly he released her, giving a yelp of pain. The entire party turned to gawp at the scene. Hunter had sunk his teeth into Pete’s leg and was screaming at the top of his lungs: “Oo, stop it! Oo, stop hurtin’ Claire! Leave Claire ’lone!”

“Excuse me.” Caroline, her face a picture of maternal concern, was pushing her way through the throng toward her son. “What on
earth
is going on?” she demanded in her best clipped, Mary Poppins voice, looking daggers at Pete. “What have you done to upset Hunter?”

“What have
I
done?” Pete was spitting blood. “Your fucking out-of-control son just bit me. Take a look.”

He hitched up the leg of his white linen pants. A deep purple bruise was already beginning to form around the livid red teeth marks that Hunter had left on his calf. Sheila Peterson winced. Pete looked at Caroline as though she were some particularly repulsive beetle that he was having difficulty in stamping on.