Everlasting. Part 1

Everlasting.

by Nancy Thayer.

An Introduction from the Author.

Flowers, English country gardens, and opulent family estates are the background for this novel about Catherine Eliot, a rebellious young woman who chooses the work she adores instead of her family's life, a woman caught between love for a rich Yankee lawyer and a dangerously sensual European. Everlasting is my most romantic novel.

Can I tell you how much I loved writing this book? I rented an apartment in New York and rose at 4 a.m. to go down to the flower district to see heavy boxes of delicate blooms packed in ice, just flown in from Amsterdam. I interviewed the florist at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston and a Dutch-born florist who ran a posh Nantucket flower shop. And I worked revenge into an arrangement for a dinner table!

I'm delighted that my early novels are being made available to my readers as ebooks. My style has changed slightly, as the world has grown faster, but my subject, family life, remains as mysterious and fascinating to me now as it was in these early books: falling in love, raising children, friends.h.i.+ps and betrayals and forgiveness.

I hope you enjoy these early novels and discover some new friends there.

Nancy Thayer.

Chapter 1.

Everly.

Christmas Night 1960.

Home is where you go for Christmas, Catherine thought, but she wondered what "home" meant. If home was a building, then this expansive old Victorian folly of her grandmother's stuck out in East Hampton was her home. It certainly wasn't her parents' gloomy apartment on Park Avenue. Her brother thought Everly was boring; her sister thought it was creepy; but Catherine had loved this labyrinthine house with its tangled gardens all of her life.

At Miss Brill's, where she'd been at boarding school for the past five years, there was a girl whose parents were diplomats; they lived in a different country every year. For her, home was her parents; she was at home when she was with them. It wasn't that way for Catherine. She was her parents' oldest child, but not their favorite, and in fact the amazing thing was that she seemed to have nothing in common with them at all. The older she grew, the more different she felt. She did love her brother and sister, though; they were younger than she was, still children, and they had no idea of the secrets in her heart. Yet it was when she was with them that she felt truly at home.

Downstairs, they were preparing for the party. Christmas Eve the family exchanged presents, and Christmas morning Santa came, but Christmas night was for the adults. It was 1960, and the routine had remained unchanged since just after the war, when her grandmother first began her now famous Christmas parties. A formal c.o.c.ktail hour began the evening, followed by a lavish buffet dinner, to which the children were allowed to come if they behaved with impeccable manners.

The third floor of Everly was the nursery floor, with bedrooms for each of the three children, a large playroom, and extra bedrooms for visiting friends. Sh.e.l.ly and his friend George Collier were in Sh.e.l.ly's room building a complicated structure from electric Tinkertoys. Ann was being dressed by Miss Smith.

Catherine was sewing.

She'd been sewing since this morning, when Miss Smith presented the three Eliot children with their Christmas clothes. Catherine and Ann were given dresses made out of rustling taffeta in a bright red, green, black, and gold Christmas plaid, and Sh.e.l.ly was given a matching vest to wear under his camel hair blazer. Catherine and Ann had gone to Catherine's room together to try on their dresses, which had been cut exactly the same way: a s.e.xless little-girl style, full, long-sleeved, the material falling straight from the shoulders to the floor in a wide A. The collars and cuffs were of intricate white lace. The dresses were beautiful, and ten-year-old Ann, with her blond hair and blue eyes, looked like a Christmas angel, but Catherine felt like Alice in Wonderland once she had eaten too much cake and grown up so fast that she hadn't had time to change her clothes.

Catherine had stared at herself in the mirror, her mouth tightening in resolve. She'd slipped out of her dress and into a robe.

"Don't you like it?" Ann had asked nervously.

Catherine had knelt, put her hands on her sister's arms, and smiled.

"Ann. How old are you? You've just turned ten. Sh.e.l.ly's almost twelve. But I'm almost eighteen. Your dress looks perfect on you. But my dress makes me look like a giant circus baby! You know it does."

"I think Mother wants us to look like children."

"Yes. That's what she wants. But that's not what she's going to get. I'm not a child anymore."

"Oh, Catherine. What are you going to do now?"

Catherine had hugged Ann against her. "Don't you worry about that. I've got a plan. Go on now, find Miss Smith."

As soon as Ann had headed reluctantly to her own room, Catherine swooped down on the horrid Christmas dress. She turned it inside out, studied it, then with great care began to rip it apart at the seams. All Christmas Day, while the adults slept off their Christmas Eve indulgences and Sh.e.l.ly and his friend George ran screaming through the gardens, falling into the shrubbery with hair-raising shrieks, while Ann played dress-up with her porcelain doll, Catherine had cut and fitted and sewed. She used an old swimming suit top as a pattern. When she was through, she had constructed a dress from the Christmas material that had a full skirt but a tight and strapless bodice. She would wear no jewelry. At seventeen Catherine had the slender, wraithlike waist and hips her mother torturously dieted for and the swelling full bosom that her mother lost whenever she succeeded in her dieting.

Now she clipped the thread that closed the last seam, shook out the dress, and laid it across her bed. Looking down at it, she smiled. "There," she said, satisfied.

She stretched to relieve the ache in her neck and shoulders, then rose and stretched again. The room was stuffy. She went over to kneel on the cus.h.i.+oned window seat and cranked open the cas.e.m.e.nt window. Cold December air blew in. It was not snowing, but the shrubbery and trees were iced with a frost that glittered like the laughter drifting up the stairs from the party below.

Catherine took a deep breath of the bracing air, then closed the window. It was time to get dressed.

She bathed, then carefully daubed herself with her grandmother's light perfume. There had been enough taffeta left over to make a wide headband, and now she twisted and tied it around her head so that it held back her abundant curly dark hair. Catherine's mother despaired of Catherine's hair. She thought it made her daughter look "ethnic." Marjorie also thought her daughter's hazel eyes were "boring." Only now was Catherine beginning to find another vision of herself, like a person turning from a clouded mirror to a clear one, yet caught between, unsure which reflection was the truth.

How many times had Catherine been summoned to her mother's room dressed for some occasion, how many times had she stood, head bent obediently as her mother labored over her hair-how many times had her mother, attempting to pull that dark, willful, untamable hair into pigtails or a braid, collapsed, sobbing, head on crossed arms, at her vanity table, knocking perfume bottles sideways, the Wedgwood dish of hairpins upended, scattering its contents across the carpet, as Marjorie cried in frustration?

Catherine was a disappointment to Marjorie, who wore her thick bronze hair in an elegant French twist, who spent every day of her life making herself beautiful. In the early years, this had been the supreme fact of Catherine's life. When, at twelve, she was sent to Miss Brill's School for Girls in Fairington, Connecticut, she was shy and frightened. Now she was about to graduate, and it had taken all these years for her to learn that her mother's criticisms of her had more to do with what her mother thought than with the way Catherine looked. Catherine's best friend and roommate, Leslie Dunham, one of those easily self-confident bossy girls, was mostly responsible for changing Catherine's opinion of herself. One spring Leslie had come down to New York with Catherine to stay with her at the Eliots' Park Avenue apartment. They were attending a graduation party for Kimberly Weyland's older brother. It was a big, elegant event, and they were almost hyperventilating with nervousness. Marjorie had come into Catherine's room while the girls were dressing. She was wearing her hair up in its usual French twist, and because this was one of her overweight phases, she was wearing black, which was slimming, and lots of jewelry to distract.

"Lovely dress, Leslie," Marjorie had said, leaning against the door, a cigarette in one hand, a whisky sour in the other. "Pretty color on you. But Catherine, darling, should you be wearing that shade of green? Don't you think it's a bit too Carmen Miranda? I mean, it makes me want to put bananas in your hair."

Catherine had shrugged. She only wanted her mother to go away and let her dress in peace. Marjorie had sighed and left to freshen her drink.

The moment Marjorie had gone, Leslie said, "What a b.i.t.c.h your mother is! Who talks that way to her daughter? Your mother's crazy! You never told me. Listen to me, Catherine, you look great in that dress."

"No, I don't. I don't look good in any formals. My bones are too big and my b.o.o.bs are too big and my coloring is too flagrant." Catherine was perfectly matter-of-fact. This was the truth as she knew it, as she had heard it stated over and over to dressmakers and saleswomen in department stores when her mother asked for help in making her daughter look presentable.

"Your coloring is too 'flagrant'? What does that mean? Catherine, you're s.e.xy. I think your mother's nuts. I really do."

"Oh, well, you know how mothers are," Catherine said tactlessly, because Leslie's mother was dead, but quickly caught herself: "Sorry."

"But I do know how mothers are!" Leslie protested. "I've stayed with my aunt, I've summered with the Weylands, I know how mothers are-they love their children."

Catherine had shrugged again. She was amazed and grateful for this news flash from Leslie, but she was also on guard, protective of her mother, in spite of everything. It was one thing for her to think her mother was horrible, but for anyone else to say so ... well, it was confusing, to say the least.

That night she had received so much attention from the boys at the dance that Leslie had forced giddy Catherine to admit that perhaps, even probably, her own mother might be wrong about her daughter. So like sunlight flas.h.i.+ng over a dark horizon, the bright light of Leslie vision beckoned at Catherine, urging her toward a new consideration of herself.

What Catherine could not articulate to Leslie or even to herself was the sense that although she wanted her mother to be wrong, she also, just as strongly, wanted her mother to be right. If her mother's judgment about her looks was wrong, then what else in life could Marjorie be wrong about? If Marjorie's standards were not the right ones, then whose were? For Marjorie was famous for her beauty, or as famous as any New York socialite could be. With her husband, Drew Eliot, by her side, she was caught in camera flash at the openings of everything her world considered important: operas, ballets, theater, museums, exhibitions, charity galas. Catherine read about her mother in the society section of newspapers and in WWD and the women's magazines, and everything she read confirmed Marjorie's sense of beauty and style.

But there was something deeper, too, a private sense of indignation Catherine felt at having her mother criticized. She didn't exactly know why, but Leslie's criticism of Marjorie wounded not Marjorie, but Catherine.

Yet Catherine knew she couldn't explain all this to Leslie, who had the least complicated life of anyone they knew. Leslie's mother was dead, and her father, a charming and brilliant man who dealt in antiques from the Orient, adored Leslie unequivocably. She was his only child, and they were a happy couple in their own way. Leslie's father let her have everything she needed, and when he was away-and he almost always was-there were friends who welcomed Leslie into their homes for Christmas or summer vacation. For Leslie, family life was simple, two people holding each end of one rope, but for Catherine there were so many people with so many complications that the lines of her family life were in a tangle, like a ball of yarn, and she felt caught in the middle.

Catherine had always longed for her mother's approval, but she had always been afraid to ask for it.

Yet on this Christmas night, she was asking-demanding. Scrutinizing herself carefully in the full-length mirror, Catherine found herself smiling. She felt something very like triumph. Her mother was right. She did not look like the rest of the family, with their healthy cool Anglo-Saxon faces. Catherine's skin was pale, but it was tinged with olive. When she was younger, after studying their bodies in detail, she and Sh.e.l.ly had decided that his blood must be blue and hers green. Sh.e.l.ly's eyes were her father's green; Ann's were her mother's clear blue. But Catherine's eyes were a changeable hazel. Odd eyes. All this, topped with that dark curly hair, made Catherine look like no one else in the Eliot clan. She looked like a gypsy, or a witch, or some medieval European peasant/queen. Nothing looked more inappropriate on her than the navy plaid pleated skirt, navy V-neck sweater, and white blouse that was the school uniform.

The bold red plaid of the Christmas formal, however, looked good on Catherine. It gave her a Scottish look, and there was Scottish blood in the family. The headband, holding back her hair, tamed that hair a bit, and now she pulled on three-quarter-length white gloves for formality's sake. Her bosom was more exposed than she had intended, but she didn't think she looked immodest, only very feminine.

She went to find her brother and sister, in the nursery. "Wow! You look great!" Sh.e.l.ly yelled, surprised, while his friend George grinned and goggled and stared at her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"Oh, Cathy, you look like a princess, you look amazing," Ann said rapturously.

Even Miss Smith, their reserved governess, expressed her admiration. "You're turning into quite a beautiful young lady, Catherine," she said, and Catherine's face went warm. Someone had called her beautiful-even if it was only unbeautiful Miss Smith.

So perhaps this dress would work a charm.

Catherine descended the stairs with high hopes, Ann and the boisterous boys behind her like an attending court, holding her gown in one hand, the other hand on the banister so she wouldn't trip, ready to make the entrance of her life.

A majestic Christmas tree, glorious with colored lights and brilliant gla.s.s ornaments, towered in the grand entrance hall. Catherine could have leaned over the banister to touch the golden star that topped the tree. For a moment she lost her self-consciousness and let herself be carried away in the beauty of it all. It was Christmas, and Grandmother Kathryn, usually so preoccupied and solitary, had once again transformed her home into a magic palace and thrown it open to her family and friends.

Catherine's grandfather, Drew Eliot, had built this house in the early 1920s, when he was famous and when his new British bride was homesick for her country estate. Back then, houses like this-replicas of English "country houses"-were still being built. Drew and Kathryn had named their home Everly, after Kathryn's British home, and they had spent a few good years in it before their divorce. Since then, Kathryn had lived in the enormous place alone, except for the occasional visit from her son when he was on school holiday. In those early years she had been thought eccentric, a single woman living in that vast house in East Hampton all year round, but in fact Kathryn was eccentric and didn't care what others thought. She was a devoted gardener, happy working in her garden when the weather was right, happy reading and planning her garden during the winter months. Now she was a grandmother, and her son and his wife and their children spent every Christmas at Everly, and each year they held a gala dinner and dance on Christmas night.

Kathryn didn't mind all this fuss and bother. After all, it happened only once a year. In her best moods she said it was good for the old house to get opened up and really used now and then; it reminded her of her British childhood. In her worst moods she said-to anyone in the family who'd listen-that perhaps all this folderol would satisfy her son and his family enough to make them leave her alone for a year. It wasn't such a bad trade. Her son, Andrew, and his wife, Marjorie, came out from Manhattan, and the three children came to Everly from their boarding schools, often bringing friends, and the adult Eliots invited their guests to stay the night, because the party always lasted until morning. Every room in the house was full of guests. Kathryn brought in extra help from the town to cook and serve. Children raced through the house, adults danced and quarreled and met for secret love affairs, everyone feasted and celebrated. Kathryn was satisfied that a year's worth of life went on in her house during those twenty-four hours.

And tonight even Kathryn, who tended to be absentminded and uninterested in people, actually had guests of her own, P. J. and Evienne Willington. It had just been announced that the Willingtons were bequeathing their staggeringly expansive East Hampton residence, a Gothic mansion and one hundred acres of gardens, to the state of New York, to become a museum and public garden upon their death. Their children didn't mind, the Willingtons confessed, for they would be receiving all the money and wouldn't have to be burdened with the upkeep of the estate. And the Willingtons were young, only sixty, so they had many years ahead in which to luxuriate in the grat.i.tude of the state.

Catherine, Ann, Sh.e.l.ly, George, and Miss Smith stood at the door to the library, gazing at the beautiful room, the s.h.i.+ning people. Grandmother Kathryn had had this room and the dining room splendidly decorated, with laurel roping looped over all the oil paintings and mistletoe tied with red ribbon to the chandeliers. Crystal bowls of hard red and green candies were set on every surface. The room was fragrant with evergreen and expensive perfume. The guests were gathering here for predinner c.o.c.ktails.

The Willingtons were seated with Kathryn, sipping sherry, discussing the newest breeds of Dutch tulips. Marjorie and Drew Eliot were laughing in the center of a group of friends, the men elegant in tuxes, the women's gowns swaying, as colorful as a field of flowers.

Tonight, as on other Christmas nights, Marjorie had adorned her gown with a bit of the same material used for her children's clothing. Her dress was full-skirted and full-sleeved, made of a vibrant rich gold satin that made the accompanying gold lights in her high-swept hair glisten. Around her waist was the matching red plaid material, tied in an enormous plump bow in the back. Her earrings were dangling, heavy and ornate, unusual for Marjorie, who usually preferred more sedate jewelry.

Catherine knew her mother looked magnificent. She could tell by the lift of her mother's head that Marjorie knew it and was glowing from the compliments of others. But she knew she looked beautiful, too.

It seemed to Catherine that all eyes in the room turned on the four of them as they entered. She saw her father's eyes widen as he looked at her. He excused himself from his group and approached Catherine and the others, his face beaming with happiness.

"Merry Christmas, darlings," Drew said to his children, approaching them and kissing the girls formally on each cheek, then shaking hands with his son and his son's friend. "You all look wonderful. Come in and join us. Tonight, a special occasion, you can all have champagne. George, I don't think your parents will object, do you? Catherine, how grown-up you look. It's too bad there aren't some young men here for you to dazzle."

Their father was leading them into the room when Marjorie came sweeping toward them, glittering but, Catherine realized with a cold shock of dismay, smiling her public smile. Marjorie's blue eyes were cold. Fear caught in Catherine's throat like a hard thing she could not swallow.

"h.e.l.lo, everyone," Marjorie said smoothly. "Sh.e.l.ly, dear, take George over and get him something to drink. Drew"-this was to her husband, and as she spoke she touched each person lightly on the shoulder, directing-"take Ann in and show her to your mother and the Willingtons. They'll be pleased to see such a pretty, innocent girl." Marjorie took her younger daughter's chin in her hand a moment and tilted Ann's face so that Ann could see the affectionate approval in her mother's eyes.

Now Catherine hoped for one dreamy instant that Marjorie, having dismissed the others, would link arms with her in the smug, snug way Marjorie had of making one feel chosen, and the two of them would walk into the room, two beautiful Eliot women together.

Marjorie bent close to Catherine and spoke directly into her face so that Catherine had to read her mother's lips as much as hear her words.

"Catherine," Marjorie said, "what have you done to that dress? You look like a fool. Go to your room and stay there. I don't want to see you again tonight."

Marjorie turned her back on Catherine then and swept regally back into the crowded room.

Catherine stood for a moment, stupefied with shame. But no one else was looking at her. She turned and, with what dignity she had left, slowly walked back through the entrance hall, past the towering, glittering Christmas tree, and up the wide curving stairway, away from the party, to the solitary third floor.

She shut herself in her room. Stunned, she sat on her bed, looking at her hands, waiting for her heart to stop thudding. It was lonely on the third floor, for even Miss Smith was down in the library. It was quiet, for the huge old house was well insulated by the thickness of its walls and floors; the party might have been a thousand miles away.

She hugged herself; she tried to keep from crying, but the painful sobs broke forth, hurting her chest. It had happened again. It always happened. She should not have pretended she could change it. She did not belong here, she was wrong here, always wrong. Catherine wept, hating herself and her family and her life.

She knew she had to escape, change, leave-but she didn't know where to go, or how.

If she didn't belong with the family she had been born to, then where did she belong?

The next day her father summoned her to the library. It was a little after noon, and the adults were just rising. Even Sh.e.l.ly, George, and Ann were still asleep. The Christmas night revelry had lasted late into the night, as had Catherine's tears.

This morning Catherine thought her father looked old and tired, but handsome as always. He had a b.l.o.o.d.y Mary, his typical morning drink, in his hand. He sat on a leather chair near the fireplace, but there was no fire lit this morning, only dead ashes as deep as the grate. Perhaps the worst and most British quality about Everly was that some rooms were impossible to heat. Catherine, in wool slacks and sweater, s.h.i.+vered.

"So, Pudding, sorry you couldn't be with us last night," her father said casually.

Catherine shrugged. She and her brother and sister knew that their father loved their mother with a slavish devotion that would prevent him from ever crossing her in the smallest thing. He would not protect his children, if it meant defying his wife.

"Your mother's been a bit miffed with you lately, Cathy," he went on. "This college thing, you know. You're really going to have to do something."

Catherine stared at her father. Many times she had heard her mother say to her father that he had inherited all of his famous father's charm and good looks but none of his intelligence or common sense, and Catherine knew her mother was right about this, as she was about so many other things. Now she knew that her father would have nothing helpful or surprising to say about the matter of her college applications-or rather, her lack of them. She was not planning to apply to college. In fact, she was not planning to go to college. If she didn't go, she'd be the only Miss Brill's girl in the history of that school not to attend college. The school guidance counselor and the headmistress were furious with Catherine.

It was not from rebelliousness that Catherine was not looking at colleges, but rather from apathy. As each year of her life progressed, she had less enthusiasm for it and its routines. Studying and taking tests bored her. She wanted action.

"It's simple," her father went on, "you have to go to college. People like us just don't not go to college."

"Maybe I don't want to be like you," Catherine said. She was speaking truthfully, for she knew she didn't want to be like her mother and father and their friends. The problem was that she had no idea in the world what she wanted to be instead.

"Oh, I don't think we have such bad lives," Drew Eliot, Jr., said complacently, looking around him at the luxurious room.

Catherine thought of pointing out to him that this house was his mother's house, built by his father, that he had never built a house himself, and that as far as she knew he didn't work at all, at anything. But she had been taught that it was vulgar to discuss money, and she had no idea what kind of money her parents had. Still, it seemed to her that the inherited prerogative to sit in a room of beautiful furniture was not sufficient justification for a well-lived life.

But Catherine remained silent. Sh.e.l.ly argued like a bull ox when confronted by his parents, and Ann either went into pathetic orphaned child tears or into full-blown floor-kicking tantrums, but Catherine tried to hold her tongue. She knew this irritated her parents, but she found it too difficult to break into speech. Her most eloquent pleas had never helped her before.

"Your mother has asked me to pa.s.s on an ultimatum to you, Catherine," her father said now, drawing himself up in his chair and trying not to look hung over. "If you apply and get into a college, any college, we will continue to support you in every way. If, however, you choose to continue this bizarre path of rebellion, we have no choice but to tell you that we will not support you. Not in any way. Once you turn eighteen, you'll be on your own. We won't allow you to live in the Park Avenue apartment or to summer with us on the Vineyard. You'll have to find your own living accommodations-everything."

"What about money?" Catherine said. Terror made her bold. She certainly couldn't stay at school after this May when she graduated. If she couldn't live at her home in New York, where would she live?

"What do you mean?"

"I mean-don't I-isn't there some kind of trust set up for me? Don't I have some money of my own?"

"What money there was left for you went to pay your tuition all these years, and to buy your clothes, and pay for your traveling expenses, and so on. You've had an expensive childhood, Catherine."

"But Grandfather-"

"All of my father's money is in this house. And that belongs to my mother, to do with as she wishes."

"But if I don't go to college, couldn't I have the tuition money?"

"No."