Chapter Thirty-eight
GUS CLIMBED THE freestanding staircase that curved its way gracefully to the second floor. He took the stairs slowly to accommodate the discomfort in his joints that had grown more pronounced with each passing year. For the last decade, his quarters had been located on the first floor. Gus seldom visited the second floor-until recently, when the babies came into his life.
Even though Victory Hill had been his primary residence since childhood, he had never loved it the way that he loved the ranch. But when he began his accession to power, it was necessary for him to be a limousine ride away from the nation’s capital. Now he seldom went into the city; if he needed to see someone, that person came to him. Only when he was extremely displeased did he put himself through the drama of strolling unannounced into the White House.
At the top of the stairs, Gus paused and reached down to rub his aching knees, then made his way down the broad corridor with its many-paned, arched windows that looked out onto rolling green acres. Gus tapped gently on the door to Sonny’s old room then opened it and stepped inside. The two sari-clad women smiled, and the younger one, Randi, called out in her precise English, “Good morning, Mister Gus.”
The babies were lying side by side on a pallet wearing identical blue sailor suits. Randi’s baby was brown-skinned with dark hair, and the other was fair-skinned with a bit of light fuzz on the top of his head.
Gus grabbed hold of a nearby chair and gingerly lowered himself to his knees. Then he held out his fingers for the babies to grasp. He found them equally beautiful and equally appealing. Amita and Buck. Both were boys-fine boys who were fat and happy.
Gus had fallen into the habit of stopping by to see the babies morning and evening. Sonny’s old suite was now a nursery. His books were still on the shelves, but most of his possessions had been removed and packed away in the attic. Gus hadn’t even bothered to ask Amanda if that was agreeable with her; he had simply ordered it done. Randi looked after the babies, and her mother, who was called Patty in lieu of her very long and unpronounceable name, came in the morning to help her and often spent the night so that Randi and her baby could be at home with her husband.
Gus produced two musical baby rattles from his pocket and began shaking them in front of the babies’ faces. Then he placed tiny fingers around the rattles and watched the babies’ delight as they waved them around.
“Has Amanda been by to see Buck lately?” Gus asked. He had taken to calling the baby Buck even though Amanda planned to name Sonny’s baby Jason after their father. What would happen to Buck after baby Jason arrived was beginning to weigh heavily on Gus’s mind. To acquire the child, he had given substantial amounts of money to the birth mother and her parents. And to obtain legal custody, he had filed for adoption. Of course, he had no intention of going through with the adoption. No intention at all. He would make sure that the boy went to a good home, however. And perhaps he would maintain some sort of relationship with him in the years to come.
In response to his question, Randi shook her head, her lovely face sad. “No, Mister Gus. Miss Amanda has not seen her baby since the magazine people came last week to photograph them together. I think that Miss Amanda has the sickness in the head that some women get after their babies are born.”
“Postpartum depression?” Gus responded.
“Yes,” Randi said with a nod. “Miss Amanda is not a happy lady. Not happy to have a beautiful son. Not happy with her handsome husband. She is here at Victory Hill so seldom now, and when she does come to this room, Mister Toby is not with her and she does not want to hold her own baby. She just looks at him and leaves. It makes me weep to see her that way, Mister Gus. Miss Amanda, she is our guardian angel. My mother and my husband and I love her so very much. With all of our unworthy hearts, we love her.”
Patty nodded vigorously in support of her daughter’s statement.
“You cannot imagine the kindness that Miss Amanda has shown us,” Randi continued. “And now we are afraid for her and pray for her many times every day to the Christian God and to Uma, who is the Hindu goddess of motherhood.”
Gus grabbed hold of the chair, pulled himself to his feet, and stood watching the babies for a time.
How perfectly beautiful they were.
He bid Randi and her mother good day and headed downstairs to his office, where he tried to reach Amanda on her cell phone for the fifth time in two hours. She still did not answer. Every day that went by she became angrier at him. He had promised that he would deliver Sonny’s baby to her, and he had failed to do so, which shook him to the core. How could a young woman with a small baby and no resources outwit all the muscle that he had thrown against her? Gus had developed a begrudging admiration for Jamie Long and would actually feel sad when she met her eventual fate. And her boyfriend. Gus had been furious when he learned that Joe Brammer had slipped out of Houston on a motorcycle that no one knew about. And when they finally tracked them to that place on the beach, Brammer and the girl weren’t there.
The whole thing seemed like a bad movie in which he was the supreme villain. Which maybe he truly was. Gus knew that eventually he would prevail. He had to. Every day that went by Amanda became more and more difficult, acting out like a petulant child who no longer got her way. It wouldn’t be long before the press got wind of her behavior, and he would have a devil of a time keeping a lid on bad publicity. Fortunately, with the consolidation of the media, it was far easier to pull in chits with various CEOs than it had been in the old days, when he was forced to make good on threats to feisty managing editors who thought they had some God-given right to print “The Truth.” Nevertheless, squelching bad publicity was time consuming and still not a fail-safe process.
Amanda had put him on notice. She would behave herself and come back home to Toby only when she had Sonny’s baby in her arms-a baby who would be genetically tested just to make sure that Gus was not trying to pull a fast one on her. Only Sonny’s actual child would do. She was even threatening to cancel her next national tour. Right now she was holed up in a hotel in Brunswick with some tattooed piece of shit who probably would infect her with a sexually transmitted disease. And her so-called husband was still living down the hall and spending his days tanning, swimming laps, pumping iron, eating nuts and sprouts, and praying to keep himself in shape for when Amanda came home. For the most part, Gus avoided Toby, but he had gone from being appalled that Amanda actually married a brainless bodybuilder to wishing she would honor her marital vows and cleave only unto him.
But Amanda was so much like their mother that it was frightening. Of course, Gus himself had a healthy sexual appetite, but he conducted his activities with great discretion. And he did not preach one thing and do another. His sister-like their mother before her-presented herself to the world as a virtuous woman who not only believed her own sermons but also lived them when nothing could have been further from the truth. But while Mary Millicent and her old reprobate of a father had been hard-core con artists, Amanda actually seemed to believe all the godly rhetoric that flowed from her lovely mouth. Her rationalization seemed to be that God held her to a different standard, that, after all, God had made her beautiful, appealing, clever, and persuasive so that she could bring Him souls, and was therefore perfectly willing to look the other way when those same attributes attracted adoring men. Except that beauty didn’t last forever. In spite of Botox and peels and procedures, Amanda wasn’t going to be able to keep her looks forever. And then, he feared, she would become pathetic like their mother had become. But he would always love her.