Lovers and Liars Trilogy (12 page)

She averted her gaze. It made no difference: No matter how she put it, the fact remained that she had misled him, and if he discovered the truth, she knew how he would react. He would be angry, guilty—perhaps contrite. However he reacted, it would be over, she was certain of that. So she had said nothing, not one word. The heat in the shadowy room intensified. She sat there, flushed and miserable, in an agony of deceit. Later, back in his bare white room, Pascal clipped the little gold earring into place. He kissed her earlobe, then looked at her anxiously. “You like it? You’re sure you like it? It looks so tiny….”

“I like it. I love it. I love you.” She flung her arms around him and hid her hot face against his neck. Age did not really matter, the lie was not an important one, she told herself: One day she would explain to him, but not yet, not yet. Midday heat shimmered; reflections of waves moved on the white walls. Closing the shutters, she took his hand and drew him toward the bed. They lay down, and the lie no longer mattered. Time passed: hours, days, a week more together—until the break finally came, that one little truth was never expressed.

Let the past rest. She took the little earring and hooked it into place. An indulgence, perhaps, bringing with it the ghost of an old happiness. Then the ordinary present reasserted itself. The pizza arrived. She removed the earring, packed it carefully away with the other relics, pushed all of them into the box, and back into the desk drawer. She was stern with herself. No more relics, no more nostalgia, she told herself. She unpacked the newspaper clippings she had photocopied and spread them out on her desk.

John Hawthorne’s and Lise Hawthorne’s features stared back at her. She forced herself to concentrate. The Hawthornes, that perfect couple, looked famous, familiar, and unreadable. She sighed, and sank her head in her hands: Behind this public façade, was there a secret life?

When she had been working for over an hour, she took a break, made coffee, returned to her desk. She felt a sense of frustration. Here were all the staging-posts of a glittering career, here were the same anecdotes, the same quotes, endlessly repeated. Here was Hawthorne at twenty, at thirty, at forty—yet what had she actually learned? It was as if what she was reading was an authorized version, formulated years before, perhaps by an astute PR adviser, perhaps by Hawthorne’s father, or by Hawthorne himself. It was all too perfect, all too pat. Most of the interviews recycled material first given by Hawthorne long before, a phenomenon she was familiar with. It meant either that the journalists concerned had been lazy, content to write from clippings, or that Hawthorne himself refused to depart from a set script. No one here seemed to have reached below his guard: Even those journalists obviously hostile to him wrote articles that lacked sting. Unlike his notoriously right-wing father, Hawthorne had an impeccable civil rights record. Sure, he had fought in Vietnam in the late sixties and had been decorated three times for valor; but before he was drafted he had marched in Selma and Birmingham and been befriended by Martin Luther King. His political stance now was equally hard to define: pro-Israel, markedly so. In favor of massive aid to the Russians but an early advocate of intervention in Bosnia. Strong on law enforcement, a hard-liner on capital punishment, a supporter of the NRA and anti-gun-law reform, yet a liberal when it came to abortion and women’s rights.

Not a unique balancing act in American politics, perhaps, but one Hawthorne performed with exceptional skill nonetheless. Was this the result of conviction, or opportunism? It was impossible to judge. She had only her instincts to guide her, and her initial reaction was suspicion: Hawthorne looked too good and smelled too clean. He was too adroit, too careful, too perfect—a verdict that applied equally to his political and to his personal life.

The coverage of that personal life was extensive, the price Hawthorne paid for a famous name, a privileged background, and exceptional good looks. Here, before her, was Hawthorne the devoted husband, Hawthorne the proud father, and—old clippings these—Hawthorne the golden youth.

Here he was as an eighteen-year-old, flanked by his younger brother, Prescott, by all three sisters, and by the patriarch, S. S. Hawthorne himself. They stood outside the Hawthornes’ country house overlooking the Hudson. John Hawthorne smiled fixedly at the camera, his father’s arm around his shoulders; two spaniels lay panting at their feet.

The resemblance between father and son was strong. Both were tall, strong-featured, strikingly blond. Both conveyed a certain arrogance in their stance, Gini thought—or was that something she read into the photograph, a prejudice of her own, a reaction to the wide lawns, the expensive sports cars parked in the drive, and the towering façade of the house itself? She looked at the picture more closely. Thirty years old, a blurred photocopy of blurred newsprint. On closer examination, she decided John Hawthorne looked ill at ease and constrained, as if he endured with reluctance that fatherly embrace.

She pushed that picture aside and turned to others. A young Hawthorne with numerous well-connected girlfriends, but then the young Hawthorne had a reputation as a Lothario. There seemed to be a new girlfriend each month. Hawthorne at Yale with a group of friends—John sprawled in a chair while two unidentified women knelt in worshipful attitudes at his feet. Pictures of him in uniform; pictures of him as a young congressman, then as a senator. The first photograph of Hawthorne with Lise, snatched for a gossip column as they left a Washington restaurant together. They were indeed, as Pascal had suggested, related. Third cousins, Gini saw, friendly since early childhood, part of the immense tribe of interlinked Hawthornes and Courtneys who seemed to spend the endless summers of their youth in a round of parties at one another’s estates. Long Island, Nantucket, Tuscany; a stud farm on the west coast of Ireland; an English manor house in Wiltshire; a castle belonging to the Scottish branch of the family, in Perthshire—they moved around the globe, the golden members of this tribe, always to an aunt, an uncle, a cousin’s place, always to a house where there were servants, tennis courts, swimming pools, horses, abundant acres. They journeyed, Gini thought, and yet they remained cocooned in that citadel peculiar to the rich.

John Hawthorne and his distant cousin Lise had reencountered each other, she saw, some eleven years before. Lise, who had had some training in art history, had been away working for old family friends in Italy, cataloguing their art collection. It was some five or six years since she and her senator cousin had met. Their remeeting was staged by Hawthorne’s father—or so the gossip columns claimed—and it took place at the Southampton estate of another distant cousin, Lord Kilmartin, a diplomat then assigned to the U.N.

Hawthorne was then thirty-six, and known as one of Washington’s most eligible bachelors; Lise was twenty-eight, though she looked much younger; she was then in mourning for her parents, killed in an air crash some six months before. According to the newspapers, the attraction had been immediate, the courtship swift. Certainly the engagement was brief.

Within a year, the celebrated wedding. Gini scanned the photocopies in front of her. Again, she saw, Pascal had been correct. There was Lise, radiant, legendarily lovely, encased from neck to ankles in a nunlike, virginal, Yves Saint Laurent dress. Her black hair was worn loose; a white lace veil framed her beautiful face. The train, of heavy silk, was fifteen yards long, requiring four diminutive pages and six tiny bridesmaids in processional behind the bride to keep the train in place.

The wedding of the decade, the headlines screamed. And a decade later, here were all the details: the name of the Catholic bishop who officiated at the nuptial mass; the special flights and trains laid on for the thousand-plus guests. S. S. Hawthorne had piloted his own helicopter to the ceremony. In the photographs, formal and informal, he was ubiquitous, resplendent in morning dress.

Fireworks had lit the sky—a Hawthorne family tradition. The dancing began at midnight and continued to dawn. The roster of guests’ names was an illustrious one—statesmen, politicians, a clutch of Euro-titles; the Hollywood contingent, the authors, the diplomats, the opera diva, the English duchess.

There were many famous names here, and some infamous ones, since S. S. Hawthorne, less circumspect than his son, had contacts going back decades that might have surprised, even alarmed, some of the other wedding guests. A Middle Eastern arms dealer, for instance; a Sicilian-American rumored to own a tranche of Las Vegas clubs…. If such guests were cold-shouldered by his son, S. S. Hawthorne, Gini saw, had made up for any neglect. There he was with the arms dealer, here with the Sicilian. Robust, huge, unquenchable, indestructible, radiating purpose and energy even from faded newsprint: S. S. Hawthorne, networking, pressing the flesh.

And here, finally, were the formal photographs, the posed wedding-group pictures, taken by Lord Lichfield. They had an idyllic and yet a mysterious quality. Perfectly posed, perfectly lit, they were designed to convey perfection—and yet Gini felt they suggested something beneath and beyond: There was an inner story here, she sensed, of which Lichfield conveyed hints.

In all the official wedding pictures, John Hawthorne seemed at ease with himself. Tall, debonair, astonishingly blond, his cool blue gaze rested unerringly on the heart of the photographer’s lens. He appeared, throughout, to be slightly amused by this circus; in every photograph there was a curious, almost disdainful, half-smile on his lips.

His bride, then little used to such publicity, looked as lovely as legend claimed, but also a little nervous, a little stiff. Later, as Gini knew, Lise Hawthorne would master the art of the photo opportunity, but here, at the very beginning of her public career, her inexperience showed. She clung to her new husband’s arm as if in need of support; her eyes were either modestly lowered or fixed in anxious devotion on her new husband’s face. There was a startled, almost sacrificial quality about her, Gini decided. Her wide, dark eyes stared out of newsprint a decade old, and they seemed to carry a plea—as if Lise, encountering fame in its raw form for the first time, were silently praying to escape.

Interesting, Gini thought—and interesting too how quickly Lise adapted, how adept she soon became at dealing with photographers, with public appearances, with the campaign trail, with the press. Now, only a decade after that wedding, Lise had carefully forged a very public identity for herself. She was celebrated for her charity work, for her skills as a hostess, and—on a thousand magazine covers—for her continuing, unrelenting chic. No sign, in recent photographs, of any strain or unease. Lise now greeted photographers with a radiant calm. Gini might find Lise’s present image a somewhat cloying one, but this, she knew, was a minority view. The popular conception of Lise Hawthorne was that she was beautiful, good-hearted, and devout. She was an exemplary wife, an exemplary mother. Her friends, constantly quoted in profiles, spoke with one voice: Lise might not be her husband’s intellectual equal, indeed intellect was not Lise’s strongest point, but what did that matter? Lise was that great rarity—a beautiful woman with a good heart. “The thing you have to understand about Lise,” said the friends, “is that she’s just terribly,
terribly
nice….”

Was she? Gini frowned. Personally, she found niceness hard to equate with a taste for thirty-thousand-dollar Yves Saint Laurent dresses. But perhaps that was unfair, churlish, puritan even—another example of her own prejudice. Vanity was a pardonable weakness, perhaps, in a woman as lovely as Lise. All the evidence here told the same story. Lise worked hard for her pet charities; she adored her husband and children; she lived an upright, blameless life.

Gini sighed, and pushed the bundle of newsprint to one side. She turned to the last item, not culled from the press archive, but bought at a newsstand that evening. It was the latest issue of the magazine
Hello!,
that bland periodical chronicling the home lives of the famous and rich. There on the cover, and inside across six pages, the pictures in brilliant color, were the Hawthornes
en famille.
They had been photographed in Winfield House, the newly decorated ambassadorial residence in Regent’s Park.

Lise was famous for her taste; the revamped house looked as perfect as a stage set: Not so much as a newspaper marred its serenity; every chair, vase, cushion, was in exact alignment; every color used was harmonious. Lise, readers of the magazine were informed, had selected the chintz used to curtain the room because it blended so well with the Picasso that hung above the fireplace. Gini suppressed a smile. The rose-period Picasso, she noted, was flanked by an equally pinkish Matisse.

All the photographs had this roseate glow. They must have been taken the previous summer, for here were the Hawthornes in the large garden behind the house; here they walked along a path framed with pink roses; here they sat in a huge bower of pink roses, flanked by their two angelic-faced sons. The two boys, Gini saw, were aged six and eight. Both the elder, Robert, and the younger, Adam, bore a marked resemblance to their father. Both, like him, had startlingly blond hair and blue eyes. The eight-year-old seemed the more outgoing of the two. He met the camera lens with a mischievous grin, and in several of the garden pictures swung from his proud father’s arms like an agile little monkey. Adam was the child who had been so seriously ill some four years back. According to his mother, he had made a near-miraculous recovery from the meningitis that had threatened his life. In contrast to his brother, Adam seemed nervous and subdued, ill at ease with the cameras. In several pictures he averted his eyes and clung closely to his mother. “Adam’s just fine now,” his father was quoted as saying. “All he needs now is some toughening-up.”

An interesting remark, Gini thought, given John Hawthorne’s own rigorous upbringing. She closed the magazine, but its images of roseate domesticity remained. She rubbed her eyes tiredly, and thought of the story Nicholas Jenkins had recounted earlier with such malicious delight. Either he had been misinformed, or these photographs lied. Which was the true version—her editor’s or this?