Danielle Steel - Remembrance

“Brad …” There was that strange tone in his voice again. “I think she knows.” It was as though he were warning his older brother of something.

“Anything wrong?” Brad was suddenly tense.

“No.” He'd find out soon enough. “I'll go get Mom.”

As it so happened, she was in the dining room having breakfast with Greg and Pattie Atherton, who had come for a special pre-Christmas breakfast “with them all. When Ted went to the doorway and beckoned his mother urgently, she came quickly, with a worried frown.”

“Is something wrong, Ted?”

“No, Mom, it's Brad on the phone. He called us to wish us a Merry Christmas.” And as he said it he hoped that his mother would allow it to remain merry. She took the phone from her youngest son, smoothing a hand over her snowy white hair, and sat down quickly in her desk chair. She was dressed elegantly in a black Dior suit that did extremely well by her still-streamlined youthful figure. She was a woman of fifty-eight, but she could easily have concealed ten or twelve of those years, had she chosen to, which she never did. She had B.J.'s same slate-gray eyes, and the features were much the same too, but whereas on B.J. everything looked easygoing and gentle, on his mother everything looked eternally tense. One always had the feeling that she was listening for something, some superhuman, extraterrestrial whine that was audible only to her. There was always about her a kind of electric tension, and she seemed ever about to pounce, which she did frequently, mostly on her husband, and often on her sons. She was a woman one spoke to carefully and handled with the utmost caution, so as not to set her off, or “get her started,” as her family called it. “Don't get your mother started, boys,” her husband had always implored his sons. And in order not to himself, he hardly ever spoke, but he nodded constant agreement. When they were younger, the boys used to imitate him a lot, B.J. having perfected his father's constant noncommittal, almost mechanical “Ummmmmm.…”

“Hi, Mom. How's everything in New York?”

“Interesting. Very interesting. Eleanor was here for lunch yesterday.” He knew she referred to Mrs. Roosevelt. “The political news these days is certainly ever changing. It's a hard time for her, for all of us really. There are a lot of readjustments going on after the war. But never mind all that, Brad darling. More to the point, how are you?” She said it with an emphasis that ten years before would have made him extremely nervous. But he had got over being intimidated by his mother when he gave up his job in Washington and moved to Pittsburgh to suit himself. It had been a move of which she had violently disapproved, and for the first time in his life he had decided that that wasn't going to change anything for him. “Are you all right, darling? Healthy? Happy? Coming home?”

“Yes to the first three, no to the fourth question, I'm afraid. At least they don't appear to be shipping me Stateside for the moment. But I'm fine, everything's just fine.” He saw Serena's expectant eyes upon him, and for the first time in a long time he realized that he was afraid of his mother. But this time he had to stand up to her, not only for himself, but for Serena. It gave him added courage as he plunged in. “I've got some good news for you.”

“Another promotion, Brad?” She sounded pleased. As much as she disliked having him in the army, as long as he insisted on being in it, his frequent promotions pacified her and pleased her with their prestige.

“Not exactly, Mom. Better than that in fact.” He swallowed hard, realizing suddenly what he had done. Serena was right. He should have called her first. Christ, imagine telling her like this when it was all over. He could feel a thin veil of sweat break out along his hairline and prayed that Serena wouldn't see. “I just got married.” He wanted to close his eyes and gulp air, but he couldn't, not with those expectant, trusting green eyes on him. Instead he smiled at Serena and gestured that everything was going fine.

“You what! You're joking of course.” There was a silence, but before that there had been a tight edge in her voice. He could imagine the tenseness in her face by listening to the tone of her voice. He could picture the elegant almost bony hand with the heavy diamond rings clutching the phone. “What's this all about?”

“It's about a wonderful young lady whom I met in Rome. We were married this morning, Mother, in the English church here.”

There was an endless pause while he waited. At her end her face was suddenly grim, her eyes the color of the Atlantic before a hurricane. “Is there some adequate reason why you've kept this a secret, Brad?”

“No. I just wanted it to be a surprise.”

His mother's voice was glacial. “I assume she's pregnant.”

Slowly Brad was beginning to burn. Nothing ever changed. No matter how old they got, she still treated them the same way. Like naughty, demented little puppets. It was what had driven him away years before. He always kind of forgot that part of it and he was realizing that things were no different now.

“No, you're mistaken.” For Serena's sake he went on as though all were well. “Her name is Serena, and she's blond and very beautiful.” He felt faintly crazy as he said it all, and all he wanted was to get off the phone. “And we're very happy.”

“How enchanting.” His mother's words shot into the phone like bullets. “Do you expect me to applaud? Is it possible that this is the girl Pattie told me about in November?” His mother's tone would have cracked marble. “I believe she mentioned that the girl was a maid in the place where you lived. Or is this someone else?” By what right do you ask, damn you, he wanted to shout at her, but he controlled himself as best he could and attempted not to fly into a rage.

“I don't think that's something I want to discuss with you now. I think when Pattie was in Rome she saw things with jaundiced eyes—”

“Why?” His mother cut him off. “Because she broke off the engagement?”

“Is that what she told you?”

“Isn't that what happened?”

“Not exactly. I told her that things had changed and I wanted to call off the engagement.”

“Not by the account I heard.” Margaret Fullerton did not sound as though she believed her son. “Pattie said that you were having an affair with your scrub girl, and when she caught you at it, she gave back the ring and came home.”

“It's a nice tight little story, Mother. The only trouble is that it's not true. The only thing true about it”—he realized that it made sense to admit at least that much to his mother, in case she heard something later on—”is that Serena was working at the palazzo. Her parents owned it before the war. But her father was among the aristocracy against Mussolini, and both of her parents were killed early on in the war. It's a long story and I won't give you all the details now. She's a principessa by birth and spent the war at a convent in the States, and when she returned to Italy last summer, she found that the rest of her family had died, she had no one and nothing left, so she went back to the palazzo to see it, and was taken in by one of the maids. She's had a grim time of it, Mother.” He smiled at Serena. “But that's all over now.”

“How charming. A little match girl. A war bride.” Her tone was venomous. “My dear boy, do you have any idea how many nobodies are wandering around Europe now pretending that they were once princes and counts and dukes? My God, they're even doing it over here. There's a waiter in your father's club who claims that he's a Russian prince. Perhaps,” his mother suggested sweetly, “you'd like to introduce your bride to him. I'm sure he'd be a much more suitable companion for her than you are.”