4

THEY DIDN’T SEE BABE watching.

She stood outside the open door, in darkness, staring in.

They moved in slow motion through a soft sea of candlelight, holding champagne glasses. They wore tuxedos and gowns and rubber headpieces like children’s Halloween masks. Babe recognized Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse, Richard Nixon, the Mad Hatter.

A butler in a John Wayne mask glided through the crowd, refilling glasses from a green jeroboam with a Moët label.

Babe could see the masks bobbing up and down, chitchatting animatedly with one another.

“Bonjour,” Porky Pig said. “Ça va?”

That didn’t seem right. Porky Pig couldn’t have said bonjour.

For an instant Babe was lost, hovering between two worlds. Then her eyes blinked open. The dream figures faded and the hospital room came slowly into focus.

“Bonjour, ma petite.” That voice again, familiar now.

Babe’s gaze went to the doorway. She saw a rangy, wide-shouldered, fit-looking man in his late fifties. He came forward into the light, wearing a beautifully cut blazer and slacks and a silk tie with the insignia of the New York Racquet and Tennis Club. He bent down at her bedside to kiss her. He had gray hair and strong, handsome features, and he smelled of vetiver cologne. At that instant she recognized her old friend Baron Billi von Kleist.

“It’s been quite a while.” He spoke with the comfortable Oxford accent of a European aristocrat. “You look splendid. As usual.”

He took a chair and sat gazing at her. He had a deep tan, and she sensed something very like compassion in his eyes.

“Stop being charming,” she said, smiling as she always did when he played with her. “You look splendid. I look like an exhumed corpse.”

He lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. He crossed one knee over the other. The press in his gray trousers was razor sharp.

“Chacun à son goût,” he said. “Actually, I’m here on a mission, not a visit. I’ve brought you an old friend—she’s been seeing you faithfully twice a week while you were in the land of Winken and Blinken and Nod but now that you’re awake, she’s turned a little shy about picking up with you again. She asked me to bring her. Or rather, your mother told me you were back and when I said I was coming to see you, she delegated me to bring Cordelia.”

“Cordelia!” Babe cried.

“Hello, Mother.”

It was a woman’s voice, not a girl’s, and when Babe looked toward the doorway of the hospital room it was a woman, not a girl, who stood there.

Babe squinted. “Cordelia?”

Instead of an answer, her daughter shot Babe a questioning look, swaying with a moment’s unsteadiness as though she had the legs of a newborn deer. Then she gathered up her poise and glided into the room.

Babe had to catch her breath. When she’d last seen Cordelia the child had been a gangly, unhappy twelve-year-old, but the young woman who walked into the hospital room was a stunning young blonde: startlingly made up and colorfully dressed in jeans and a yellow silk blouse, with jangling chains and baubles and a wide gold cuff bracelet on her left wrist.

The young beauty bent over the bed and kissed Babe. It was not a daughter’s kiss, warm and giving, but reserved, precise—a kiss between countesses.

“Welcome back,” Cordelia said. Her eyes were the deep, almost cobalt blue that Babe remembered.

“It’s good to be back,” Babe said. “Let me look at you.”

Cordelia’s hand slipped free of her mother’s. She backed away from the bed and turned 360 degrees, like a mannequin in a fashion salon showing off a new dress.

“Don’t say it. I’ve grown. I’m two inches too tall to be a dancer and it just killed me when I had to drop out of ballet school.”

“But you’re a perfect height.”

“I owe that to your genes, mother. And to Billi’s nagging me about posture. Just like a parent.”

“Wasn’t I supposed to act like a parent?” Billi said. “After all, Cordelia’s my ward—and a very well behaved ward too.”

“Yes.” Babe remembered sitting in the lawyer’s office, signing a paper making Billi Cordelia’s guardian in the event of any mishap to herself. She and Scottie had almost killed themselves driving on the wrong side of the road in Gstaad and it seemed a good idea—one of those just-in-case legalities that she had never thought would actually come to pass. “Were you a good guardian?” she asked.

“You’ll have to ask my ward,” Billi said.

“Billi was magnificent,” Cordelia said. “He kept Grandmère from nagging too hard and he took me out at least twice a month for wonderful evenings—and he hired me.”

“Hired you? What did you hire her to do, Billi?”

“Cordelia will tell you all about that. She’s an excellent employee.” Billi rose. “I’m going to leave you two alone. I’ll be back, Babe. We’ll have a chat of our own.”

He kissed her good-bye, and she had a sense he wanted to say something more. But he turned and left.

Mother and daughter sat gazing at one another. Cordelia’s eyes were smiling, but uneasiness peeped through them.

“You’re beautiful,” Babe said.

“You mean I’m glossy. I have to be. I’m a professional model.”

This is my child, Babe thought. This stranger. “Tell me everything.”

“That would take days.”

“Good. They say I’ve got weeks to kill in this place.”

Cordelia shifted in her chair. Babe noticed the faint pulse under a milk white patch on the inside of Cordelia’s arm, barely hollowed by shadow.

“You’re staring,” Cordelia said.

“I don’t mean to. It’s just that you were so little and lost and now you’re so grown-up and you don’t look lost at all.”

“Do you mind if I smoke?” Cordelia said.

For an instant Babe was startled: a child of twelve smoking? Babe had to remind herself that this particular child was nineteen. She watched her daughter light a Tareyton filter king. Cordelia did it very well, like an actress in an old Warner Bros, movie—the rich bad girl—tilting her head back, propelling twin dragontails of white smoke through her arched nostrils.

Cordelia studied her mother. “You’re looking well, Mother.”

Babe felt jewelless, dressless, seven years behind the times. “Bring me up to date. You were twelve when we last talked. You wore braids and you were always bumping into things.”

A frown flickered on Cordelia’s face. “And I was going to Spence, and you were making me wear those horrid braces.”

“They weren’t all that horrid, and look what lovely teeth you have as a result.”

“I hated them. But they came off when I was thirteen, so at least I didn’t look like a freak when I went to Madeira.”

“How did you like Madeira?”

“A little stuffy. I roomed with a girl from Richmond. We almost got thrown out for smoking pot.” Cordelia’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully, and then she dropped her gaze. “I was on probation for a term.”

Babe felt an instant’s anxiousness in the pit of her stomach. She hid it with an interested smile. “That probably helped your schoolwork.”

“Yes, I did well in music.”

“You get that from your father.”

“And I did well in French and history and art too.”

“You get the art from me.”

“I graduated with honors.”

“I wish I could have been at your graduation.”

“Be glad you weren’t. It rained. And guess what. The headmistress turned out to be a murderess. She’s serving a twenty-five-year sentence for shooting three bullets into her Jewish lover.”

Babe studied Cordelia, wondering if she was playing some kind of joke.

Cordelia smiled. The smile got as far as her eyes and then her jaw and chin tightened. Suddenly she placed her head across Babe’s lap. Babe began stroking the pale golden spill of hair.

After a moment Cordelia sat up again, choking back a sniffle. “I had my coming-out that spring at the cottage in Newport. Grandpère was my escort. He looked smashing in his old World War One ribbons.”