The Third Angel (24 page)

“What makes it stupid?” He sounded genuinely interested. Grown-ups were usually bored with a child's opinion, but Michael was different.

“I don't even know the people involved,” Lucy explained. “It's my stepmother's sister, Bryn. I hope for her sake that they're nothing alike.”

Michael grinned. He nodded to the book on the table. “That's the diary Anne Frank wrote?” When Lucy said yes, he asked if he could borrow it. Lucy didn't usually like to lend books; people never returned them and besides, she'd gotten used to reading the diary all through the day.

“Unless you don't trust me,” Michael said.

Lucy looked up at him. It wasn't easy to say no to him.

“You'll give it back?” she asked.

Michael crossed his heart with his hand, making an
X.

“Hope to die,” he promised.

L
UCY WAS A
little lost without her book. She stood at the front desk and asked the day clerk if she could see the rabbit. But the day clerk was a middle-aged man who was studying accounting and disliked children. He was nothing like Dorey Jenkins.

“This is a place of business,” he told Lucy.

She spied the rabbit in a wire hutch in the rear office. For some reason that made her feel like crying. She wandered into the courtyard and sat on the base of the lion. The stone smelled damp and mossy.

“That is a statue, not a bench,” the day clerk called.

Lucy went through the lobby, out onto the street, where she asked a woman who looked like a grandmother how to get to the nearest park. She was directed to Hyde Park, only a few blocks away, and when she arrived she was shocked by how enormous it was. There were probably hundreds of rabbits living in the hedges. Her mother had always told her when in doubt about a city, visit a park.

On the trip over, Lucy had met a woman who practiced fortune-telling. She was the maid who cleaned the staterooms, and she told Lucy that she'd been fortunate enough to be born in the year of the rabbit in the Chinese calendar; so maybe she was lucky, if she could ever make herself believe in anything as stupid as luck. Now it was the year of the dragon, which probably meant anything could happen. As she walked through Hyde Park, Lucy had the same weightless feeling she'd had in Euston Station. She was still in love with London. She walked on until she stumbled upon the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens. Then she sat down in the grass. It was a lovely place to be. For the first time in two years she was without a book, and that was very strange indeed. But her mother had been right; parks revealed the inside of a city, the greenest, sweetest piece.

There were two young women staring at Lucy and clearly talking about her. The grass was perfect and it didn't even smell like a city. Every once in a while it was possible to hear the drone of a bus in the outside world, but that was it. The young women were still talking about her.

“Don't be rude,” Lucy called. They were tall blondes who looked very much alike; they reminded Lucy of swans, with their long necks and their pale hair. She thought perhaps there was a rule about not sitting on the grass, or she had crossed onto private property. Or maybe they just didn't like Americans. “Come and talk to me if you have something to say.”

Lucy would have never been so forthright back in the States, but it was different here. No one knew her. No one knew that after her mother died she locked herself in her bedroom and didn't eat for a week. She drank water, though, and the water had developed a strong taste after her first three days of not eating. It tasted like wine, or what she imagined wine to be. Sweet and dark and rich. At first she'd thought it was the start of a miracle, water turning to wine and all, and that if she left her room she would discover that her mother was still alive, working in the garden or fixing French toast. But it had only been water in her glass and her mother was gone. Her beautiful mother with the long black hair who wasn't afraid to take off her shoes and wade into a pond in Central Park when she saw a heron.

That was when Lucy stopped believing in anything. She came down from her room and fixed a sandwich and started eating, giving up her diet of pure water. Her father thought her reappearance meant everything was fine again, but he'd been wrong.

The English women wandered over; their names were Daisy and Rose. They were sisters, but also best friends, and they held hands. They were wearing blue pleated skirts and white blouses. “We were looking at you because you look like Katharine Hepburn. She's our favorite actress. She's brilliant. We thought you might be related.”

So it wasn't something horrible, something she'd done wrong. Lucy smiled. Daisy and Rose were grown-ups—Daisy had two little daughters at home—but they spoke to her as though she were an equal. They were so excited to meet her that she suddenly felt important.

“My aunt,” she said. It was an outright lie, but a good one. It was so nice talking to people who thought she was a somebody that she didn't want them to go away disappointed. “Katharine and my mother had the same grandmother. We see her all the time.”

Daisy and Rose wanted to know all about Katharine Hepburn and Lucy kept them in thrall throughout the afternoon. At Kate's house, she told them, there was lemonade and ice cream for breakfast. Kate had a chauffeur who was a magician who could call doves out of the sky. Miss Hepburn asked Lucy to read all her scripts before she made a decision about what part to play next; she depended on Lucy, actually. People didn't wear bathing suits in Hollywood; they all had huge swimming pools and they went swimming at night, in the moonlight, naked as fish. They drank champagne as soon as the sun went down and they wore their party dresses only once, then threw them in the trash.

“I'm going to Hollywood,” Rose announced. “I need to start a new life.”

Her sister looked surprised and said, “You can't go that far away!”

Daisy and Rose walked Lucy halfway back to her hotel; when it was time for them to part, they hugged each other as though they were the best of friends, and Lucy said if they were ever in the U.S.A. they should look her up. She'd have Kate's chauffeur pick them up at the airport and drive them all over town.

When Lucy got back to the Lion Park, her father was in the lobby with a policeman. As soon as Ben saw Lucy he ran over and grabbed her.

“Where on earth were you? The clerk said you were in the restaurant talking to a stranger and then you disappeared.” Lucy's father was so upset he looked as though he might smack her, something he'd never done. He didn't believe in things like corporal punishment or the death penalty and he certainly didn't believe in hitting his own child. He just looked that way, as though he could explode.

“I was just in the park,” Lucy said. “I met some English women who wanted to know about America.”

“Good God, Lucy, you're a little old to be behaving so irresponsibly. Don't you understand how worried I was? I thought you had disappeared. We're in a foreign city and I turn around and you're gone.”

“I'm sorry.” Lucy felt idiotic and small. Now Charlotte would have another weapon to use against her. She was irresponsible. One more flaw that could be added to the list. Unsociable. Unsophisticated. Unappreciative.

“W
E SHOULD HAVE
left her home,” Charlotte said later when she and Ben were alone in their room. They'd gone out to dinner with Charlotte's family, and Ben had wanted to bring Lucy along, even though she would have sat there reading the entire time. Charlotte had to beg him to leave her at the hotel, and then she had forced Lucy to sign a contract vowing she would not leave the hotel without informing her father. Now Charlotte was brushing her hair, which was long and honey colored. She had brought three suitcases along on the trip, one for purses and shoes.

“For a month?” Ben said. “Lucy will be fine. Kids can adjust to anything. Look at Anne Frank.”

“Do not mention Anne Frank, Ben. I mean it! I can't stand hearing about her all the time. I don't even want to hear the word
frankfurter.”

Ben laughed. He was in bed watching Charlotte. He had fallen hard for her. She was ten years younger. He'd been so sick of being alone and she had been so beautiful and that was that, a whirlwind of heat, and then marriage.

“Maybe we should have skipped the wedding,” Ben said. “Gone back to Miami. Had some fun.”

“In August? And Bryn is my sister, despite her mistakes. I was not going to miss her wedding.”

Bryn was set to marry an Englishman she'd met in Paris and her family had come to help celebrate. Everyone was overjoyed, and for good reason. Bryn Evans was only twenty-three, but she hadn't had an easy time. Only a very few people knew the truth about her, and all of them were related by blood. Outsiders, including Ben Green, had no idea that Bryn had a secret history. She had been married before, to a wildly inappropriate and dangerous man of whom everyone had disapproved. No one had actually met him, but they had read the police reports. That was more than enough. He was actually some sort of con man who robbed widows of their fortunes or something like that. Anyway, the family had taken care of things and there'd been an annulment. Bryn had been sent to Paris, where she'd met Teddy Healy, a banker who would surely be a good influence on her. Teddy was a good choice, a man the family approved of. At last, a logical decision, unlike most of what Bryn did. Still, despite having Teddy in her life, Bryn seemed shaky and moody. On top of that, she had begun to drink.

Tonight, for instance, their dinner had quickly gone wrong. There were three nights before the wedding and that seemed a good enough excuse to celebrate at every opportunity. Charlotte's whole family—her parents, Carl and Mary; the eldest sister, Hillary; and her husband, Ian; along with Teddy's brother, Matthew; and his wife, Francie—had joined in for the festivities. Teddy and his brother had been orphaned early on, then raised by an aunt who'd passed away; each boy had been the other's rock, two dependable, serious boys who'd grown to be dependable men.

Halfway through the meal, Matthew started to have his doubts about his brother's choice. Bryn had two glasses of wine before the main course was served. Bryn wasn't only the youngest sister, she was the prettiest as well, and she'd been spoiled. She was stubborn about foolish things; she refused to cut her pale blond hair, for instance, which hung to her waist. That night at the restaurant she wore it up, twisted into a French knot; even so, it was her best feature. She wore a cornflower blue silk dress. Teddy had given her a huge square-cut diamond, set in platinum. On her small pale hand it was impossible not to notice the ring.

“This old thing,” she had said when her sisters complimented it. “It weighs a ton.”

Halfway through the entrée, Bryn was sloshed. Charlotte asked if she'd like to come along with her for a breath of air, which in truth meant taking a cigarette break during which time Charlotte would attempt to sober her up. The two went downstairs to the ladies' room. Bryn nearly fell down the steps.

Charlotte got out cigarettes for them both.

“Stop drinking,” she said. “You look like a fool up there.”

“You always think you can tell me what to do. For your information, I'm not drinking. Not seriously.” Bryn took a drag of her cigarette. Her face was flushed and hot. “Not yet.”

“No one's going to be here in London to watch out for you,” Charlotte said. She had always worried about her sister, whose bad decisions Charlotte believed were due to youth and naïveté. “You're going to have to start being responsible for yourself.”

Bryn smoked her cigarette and stared at herself in the mirror. When she narrowed her eyes she looked as though she had disappeared. A blur of blue and blond and smoke. All of it fading into the ether. She actually despised her engagement ring. She felt as though she were wearing handcuffs.

“Did you ever hear of love?” Bryn said. “Or are you totally cold-blooded?”

“Love,” Charlotte said dismissively. “That's the way a child approaches marriage. You're as foolish as my stepdaughter.” Charlotte had had enough of such nonsense. It was not a crime to be a realist, was it? It didn't mean you were any less of a person. “Next thing you'll be telling me you're reading the diary of Anne Frank. Grow up, Bryn.”

“At least Anne Frank died for something important and worthwhile!”

“Listen to me: Anne Frank died because there are horrible, awful people in this world and for no other reason. Everything is a botch and a mess, and you have to set your own life straight if you get the chance. She wasn't able to, but you are not in a war. You're in London with a huge diamond on your hand. So just stop it.”

Bryn put out her cigarette. She had already decided that she wasn't going back to the dinner upstairs. She had a particular look when she was about to be defiant, not unlike the expression Lucy had whenever she opened a book. Bryn's lips were pursed and there was a slight tremor beneath one eye, as though she were a bomb set to explode.

“You're going to fuck it up, aren't you?” Charlotte said. “We all came over for this wedding. Teddy is a great guy who's crazy about you. This is your chance to have a real future with a nice, normal man.”

Bryn laughed. She opened her handbag. Charlotte thought she was getting another cigarette; instead, she pulled out a pair of cuticle scissors. When she'd lived her secret life, Bryn had been settled in an apartment in Manhattan right off Ninth Avenue. It was hardly the best address, but she really didn't care. She'd stopped going to classes at Barnard; she'd stopped all contact with her family. She had never known anyone who lived with a man without being married. Because she was uncomfortable with the situation, the man she was in love with married her, down at city hall, even though he didn't believe in society's rules and regulations. He was a socialist and a freethinker, but he did it for her. He would have done anything for her; he never complained or told her she was spoiled and stupid and worthless. Bryn didn't even have sex with him until their wedding night. It was funny to hear him say he would wait, he who had been with a hundred or more women, but he said she was worth it.