Tom Hyman (21 page)

Once she had severed the cord, Lexy tried to tie it off, but it was so slippery and her left arm was so weak she couldn’t hold it. She pulled off her blouse and used it to get a better grip. Finally she managed to knot the cord tightly against the baby’s stomach.

She wrapped the blouse carefully around the infant and held it close.

Anne was sobbing convulsively from pain and exhaustion.

Lexy bent over her, cradling the child. “You did it, Annie!” she cried, suddenly overcome with tears herself.

In the flashes of the fireworks thundering overhead Lexy raised the tiny, blood-flecked creature up toward the heavens in a gesture of gratitude and celebration, then placed her in Anne’s arms.

Anne Stewart patted the space beside her on the piano bench.

“Come, darling, sit here with me.”

The little girl toddled over to the piano, and Anne reached down and lifted her onto the seat. Genny settled her hands into her lap and gazed up at her mother with an expectant smile.

Genevieve Alexandra Stewart seemed the perfect child. She was bright, attentive, well-behaved, and as beautiful as Anne could possibly have expected. Her curly blond locks, button nose, luminous slate-blue eyes, and dimpled chin instantly beguiled everyone who met her.

For a twelve-month-old, her manner was extraordinary. She moved with the grace, strength, and sense of balance of a much older child. And she had a way of looking at someone that was completely captivating.

Her intense eyes would focus on a person’s face with an inquiring gaze that seemed to penetrate right through to some inner place with which the child could communicate. Some people found this unnerving. Lexy Tate, for one: she had already taken to calling Genny “Little Devil’s Eyes”—a nickname that Anne did not find amusing.

During the first months of her life, Genny had cried a great deal.

Mrs. Callahan, her nanny, thought the reason for the little girl’s irritability was an abnormal sensitivity to touch. Anne sometimes wondered if it had something to do with the traumatic circumstances of her birth.

Now Genny rarely cried at all.

But she did exhibit some odd moods. Anne would sometimes walk in on her to find the child staring with rapt concentration at some object or other. Often she seemed to be looking at nothing but empty space.

Watching Genny during one of these periods of intense, trancelike fixations, noticing how she sometimes tilted her head to one side or crinkled her nose, Anne had the extraordinary impression that Genny was imagining something—seeing, hearing, or even smelling something—that wasn’t there. Anne had reported these peculiar states to Genny’s pediatrician, but the doctor had dismissed them as being of no consequence.

Anne ran a hand over Genny’s curls. “What would you like to hear, darling?”

“Star,” Genny exclaimed in a bright voice.

Anne played through the melody of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” with her right hand. Genny listened with a solemn expresslon.

After a few repetitions Anne stopped. She brushed a vagrant wisp of hair away from Genny’s forehead. “Would you like to hear a song about another star?”

Genny nodded her head emphatically.

Anne quickly searched out the melody for “When You Wish Upon a Star,”

added the appropriate chords, and then played the song, singing the words in a soft voice.

Genny’s eyes followed her mother’s fingers with rapt attention as they moved over the keys. Her face beamed with pleasure.

Anne was especially pleased with Genny’s response to the piano, because there had been a period, only a few months back, when she feared that something might be wrong with Genny’s hearing. The little girl seemed to wince at the slightest sound, and she still did not tolerate loud noises well.

“Do you like that song?”

Genny nodded.

“It’s from a story called Pinocchio. It’s about a little puppet, made out of wood, who wants more than anything in the world to become a real boy.”

“Pin-noke-ee-o,” the girl repeated, pronouncing the word perfectly.

Genny was undeniably precocious. By eight months she had begun to walk, and by ten months she had said her first word.

Anne remembered the moment vividly, because that first word was three syllables long. It happened one afternoon in early November. Anne walked into her room to wake Genny from a nap.

The child was already standing in her crib, waiting, her little hands impatiently clutching the rail. She giggled and then said something.

It sounded like “Toronto.” Anne thought she had imagined it, but Genny repeated the word, uttering the sound with an unmistakable clarity.

Anne lifted her into her arms, shrieking with astonishment and delight.

There was no mistaking it. Her little baby had actually said the word

“Toronto.” It was both funny and miraculous.

Anne remembered that Dalton had come into the nursery the day before.

He had held Genny in his arms and talked to Anne about going to Toronto on a business trip. But of all the words to pick, thought Anne. Genny repeated “Toronto” a few more times that day and then promptly forgot it.

But “Toronto” had opened the gates. In the days that followed, new words poured forth from the little girl at the rate of three or four a day. Now, at twelve months—an age when most children had barely uttered more than a “Mama” or “Dada”—Genny’s active vocabulary was well over a hundred words, and she was beginning to put them together into two-and three-word sentences.

Anne was still surprised—even a little frightened—by the strength of her own feelings for her child. Of course she had expected to love her without reserve, but she had never been able to imagine the depth and the intensity of the emotions this infant would stir within her. She understood now the truth of all those old cliches about mother love.

She knew, without a second’s doubt, that nothing else would ever mean as much to her in her life as this unique and precious, vulnerable creature, so full of needs and wants and demands. Nothing else in the world could possibly ever evoke such an all-consuming protective passion.

Anne embraced the demands of motherhood with enthusiasm and joy. But just as she knew that Genny would enrich her own life immensely, so she also understood that she would never be able to separate herself emotionally from her daughter’s fate.

Whatever happened to Genny would, in effect, happen to Anne as well.

She supposed this was what all parents felt, to a greater or lesser degree; but it came to her as a shock to discover that with the happiness there would forever be an undercurrent of anxiety, because she knew as sure as she drew breath that if anything bad should ever befall this child—if she should ever lose hen-the pain would be more than she could bear.

Genny’s arrival had worked an even more profound transformation on Anne’s husband.

Immediately after Genny’s birth Dalton fell into a severe depression.

The cause was clear: Goth’s death and the loss of the greatest financial opportunity of Dalton’s life. After a couple of months, his gloom began to lift. He turned his attention to his new daughter and soon became an even more anxious parent than Anne. He seemed obsessed with the fear that Genny might not be developing properly. Although the child had been subjected to a heavy battery of tests during the first weeks after her birth, Dalton wanted more tests done—especially after she began exhibiting her trancelike moods. Over Anne’s objections, he took Genny several times to special clinics in New York and Boston for further testing. Although absolutely nothing negative turned up, his anxieties remained. For a long time he clung to the conviction that Genny should be doing better, even though every book and every expert consulted suggested that her development was at the very least superior, if not extraordinary.

Then, for reasons Anne could only guess at, his worries about Genny vanished. He became the epitome of the proud and doting daddy.

One night after they had returned from a dinner party, he came out of Genny’s room with tears in his eyes.

Anne looked at him in alarm. “Is Genny okay?”

He nodded.

“What’s the matter?”

“I just . . . realized something.”

“What?”

“How much I love that child.”

Anne laughed. “Does it really surprise you?”

Dalton seemed to be struggling with his emotions. “Yes. I’ve never had these feelings. I’ve just never loved

anything—anybody—unconditionally.”

“Does that bother you?”

“No. But I guess I’ve always been afraid of the idea. It takes . .

.

I’m just not used to it, I guess.”

They went into their bedroom and began to undress.

Dalton quickly recovered himself and laughed. “Too much to drink,” he said. “Makes me maudlin.”

“Maybe you ought to drink too much more often,” Anne replied.

Suddenly Dalton dropped onto the bed. He looked stricken, as if overcome by some terrible realization. Anne sat beside him and put an arm around him. “Christ, what an ass I’ve been,” he whispered, his voice choking.

“About what?”

He buried his face in his hands. “About you, about Genny.

About everything.”

Anne hugged him.

“I’ve been such a goddamned selfish fool all my life, Anne. And somehow I’ve never even noticed. I’m really sorry….”

They both cried. He put his arms around Anne and they held each other for a long time.

From that night on, Dalton Stewart began making a genuine effort to be a good father and a loving husband. He agreed with Anne that it was essential that their child grow up in a happy and secure home, and he promised to do everything possible to repair the damages in their marriage. Their relationship became stronger than it had ever been.

Dalton neglected his work to spend hours every day playing with Genny, or just watching her. Everything the infant did-every move, sound, or facial expression—got his complete attention. He read all the books on child development and urged Anne to do the same. He was eager to know precisely what to expect at each stage of development. All their discussions centered around the baby and how she was doing. Every cough, burp, sneeze, or cry would send Dalton scurrying to consult a book or to call the pediatrician. The doctor, who had an office nearby in Great Neck, was Dalton’s choice, not Anne’s. She had wanted Paul Elder, the pediatrician she had visited in Manhattan before Genny was born. But since he had rebuffed her so rudely, she had accepted Dalton’s choice without complaint.

They hired a nurse-governess also: Mrs. Denise Callahan. She was a middle-aged woman with impeccable credentials—she had been a nanny for one of the Rockefeller families for fourteen years. She was a stiff, rather formal person, and Anne didn’t relate to her terribly well, but she had many virtues: she was steady, efficient, hardworking, knowledgeable, and completely reliable.

And she was good with Genny. She didn’t especially fuss over her, but neither did she ever show impatience or anger.

Although now Dalton was once more heavily immersed in his business activities, he still checked in on Genny’s progress several times daily. If he was away on a trip, he always called at the end of the day for a full report.

Every time Anne thought of the changes that Genny had wrought on her mother and father in one short year, she felt moved to tears. Not only had the child brought great happiness into their lives; she had actually made them better human beings.

“Would you like to play, too? Here, give me your hand.”

Anne took Genny’s tiny hand in hers and brought it up to the eyboard.

She held the girl’s middle and forefinger together and gently pressed them on the G below middle C. Genny squealed with pleasure as the note sounded. Then up an octave they went, to the next G, then back to F, then E, C-sharp, D, A; D, B, A, G, F-sharp, G, C, and so on, until they had completed the song’s melodic refrain.

Anne guided Genny’s fingers through the melody a second time.

With her free left hand she added some chords. Genny giggled with barely suppressed excitement all through the exercise.

Anne hugged her hard. Yesterday—the first day of the new year, 2001—had been Genny’s first birthday. Anne had arranged a small party for her, attended only by Dalton, Hank Ajemian and his wife, Carol, Lexy Tate, and the house staff. Anne had tried to find a child Genny’s age somewhere nearby, but that part of Long Island’s North Shore was not a neighborhood of young families.

Lexy had stayed overnight, and she and Anne had both gotten a little drunk, reminiscing about that fateful New Year’s Eve on Coronado.

Lexy’s gunshot wound was now a small round scar about the size of a quarter, high on the outside of her left arm, just below the shoulder.

She was very proud of it. She wore short sleeves as much as possible, just to show it off, and would regale anyone willing to listen with an extremely detailed account of how she had received it.

Anne picked Genny up from the piano bench and carried her back into the nursery. Mrs. Callahan was there, putting clean sheets on the crib.

Anne put Genny down. The little girl scampered across to the enormous pile of stuffed animals arranged on the window seat and began pulling them down onto the floor and hugging them.

“Dalton and I are having an early dinner tonight, Mrs. Callahan. He’s leaving for Washington early tomorrow. I’ll be back to nurse her at eight.”

Mrs. Callahan’s expression became stern. “Very well, Mrs.

Stewart.”

Anne smiled to herself. Mrs. Callahan didn’t believe in breast feeding after six months, and she had made her position in the matter quite clear. Anne had listened to her advice politely and then ignored it. But now, with a year gone by, she knew it was time that she come to some sort of decision. Her head told her to begin weaning Genny, but she was still reluctant to give it up.

Well, perhaps another month, and then she’d decide.

Dinner with Dalton was a strained affair. The two of them sat at one end of the enormous table in the mansion’s forbiddingly ornate dining room and talked aimless trivialities. Dalton seemed tense and preoccupied.