“That woman looks like she eats hardware for breakfast.”
“Only the screws.”
Holly Grace laughed, and Francesca felt a surprising sense of camaraderie with her. They walked toward the tent together, chatting awkwardly about the weather. A gust of hot air plastered her loose cotton dress to the mound of her stomach. A fire siren went off, and the baby gave her three hard kicks.
Suddenly a wave of pain ripped across her back, the sensation so fierce that her knees began to buckle. She instinctively reached out for Holly Grace. “Oh, dear—”
Holly Grace dropped her Popsicle and grabbed her waist. “Hang on.”
Francesca moaned and leaned forward trying to catch her breath. A trickle of amniotic fluid began leaking along the insides of her legs. She leaned into Holly Grace and took a half-step, the sudden wetness squishing into her sandals. Clutching her abdomen, she gasped, “Oh, Natalie... you're not acting... much like a... lady.”
Over by the calf pens, cymbals clashed and the boy with the trumpet once again turned the bell of his instrument into the blazing Texas sun and played for all he was worth:
I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy,
Yankee Doodle do or die,
A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam,
Born on the Fourth of July....
Lighting the
Lamp
Chapter
22
He pressed himself flat against the wall, the switchblade clenched in his fist, his thumb next to the button. He didn't want to kill. He found no pleasure in drawing human blood, especially female blood, but the time always came when such a thing was necessary. Tilting his head to the side, he heard the sound he'd been waiting for, the soft ding of the elevator doors opening. Once the woman stepped out, her footsteps would be absorbed by the thick melon-colored carpet that covered the hallway in the expensive Manhattan co-op building, so he began to count softly to himself, every muscle in his body tense, ready to spring into action.
He brushed the pad of his thumb over the button of his switchblade, not hard enough to trigger it, but merely to reassure himself. The city was a jungle to him, and he was a jungle cat—a strong, silent predator who did what he had to.
No one remembered the name he had been born with— time and brutality had erased it. Now the world knew him only as Lasher.
Lasher the Great.
He kept counting, having already calculated the time it would take her to reach the turn in the hallway where he had flattened himself against the subdued paisley wallpaper. And then he caught the faint scent of her perfume. He poised himself to spring. She was beautiful, famous... and soon she would be dead!
He sprang forward with a mighty roar as the call for blood raged in his head.
She screamed and stumbled backwards, dropping her purse. He flicked the button on his switchblade with one hand and, looking up at her, pushed his glasses back up on the bridge of his nose with the other. “You're dead meat, China Colt!” Lasher the Great sneered.
“And you're dead ass, Theodore Day!” Holly Grace Beaudine leaned over to swat the seat of his camouflage pants with the palm of her hand, then clutched her chest through her down jacket. “Honest to God, Teddy, the next time you do that to me I'm going to take a switch to you.”
Teddy, whose I.Q. had been measured in the vicinity of one hundred and seventy by the child study team at his former school in a fashionable suburb of Los Angeles, didn't believe her for a minute. But just to be on the safe side, he gave her a hug, not actually something he minded, since he loved Holly Grace almost as much as he loved his mother.
“Your show was great last night, Holly Grace. I loved the way you used those numbchucks. Will you teach me?” Every Tuesday night he was allowed to stay up and watch “China Colt,” even though his mother thought it was too violent for an impressionable nine-year-old kid like himself. “Look at my new switchblade, Holly Grace. Mom bought it for me in Chinatown last week.”
Holly Grace took it from his hand, inspected it, and then ran the end through the auburn hair that hung straight and fine over his pale forehead. “Looks more like a switchcomb to me, buddy boy.”
Teddy gave her a disgusted look and reclaimed his weapon. He pushed the black plastic frames of his glasses back up on his nose and messed up the bangs she had just straightened. “Come see my room. My new spaceship wallpaper is up.” Without looking back, he took off down the hallway, sneakers flying, canteen banging against his side, Rambo T-shirt tucked into his camouflage pants, which were tightly belted high above his waist, just the way he liked them.
Holly Grace looked after him and smiled. God, she loved that little boy. He had helped fill that awful Danny-ache she had thought she would never lose. But now as she watched him disappear, another ache nagged at her. It was December of 1986. Two months before, she had turned thirty-eight. How had she ever let herself get to be thirty-eight without having another child?
As she bent to pick up the purse she'd dropped, she found herself remembering the hellish Fourth of July when Teddy had been born. The air conditioning hadn't been working at the county hospital and the labor room where they put Francesca already contained five screaming, sweating women. Francesca lay on the narrow bed, her face as pale as death, her skin damp with sweat, and silently endured the contractions that racked her small body. It was her silent suffering that eventually got to Holly Grace—the quiet dignity of her endurance. Right then Holly Grace made up her mind to stand by Francesca. No woman should have a baby by herself, especially one who was so determined not to ask for help.
For the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, Holly Grace wiped Francesca's skin with damp, cool cloths. She held her hand and refused to leave her when they wheeled her into the delivery room. Finally, on that endless Fourth of July just before midnight, Theodore Day was born. The two women had gazed at his small, wrinkled form and then smiled at each other. At that moment, a bond of love and friendship had been formed that had lasted for nearly ten years.
Holly Grace's respect for Francesca had slowly grown over those years until she couldn't think of a person she admired more. For a woman who had started life with more than her fair share of character defects, Francesca had accomplished everything she'd set out to do. She had worked her way from AM radio to local television, gradually moving from smaller markets into bigger ones until she made it to Los Angeles, where her morning television program had eventually caught the attention of the network. Now she was the star of the New York-based “Francesca Today,” a Wednesday night talk and interview show that had been chomping up the Nielsens for the past two years.
It hadn't taken viewers long to fall in love with Francesca's offbeat interviewing style, which, as far as Holly Grace could figure out, was based almost entirely on her complete lack of interest in anything resembling journalistic detachment. Despite her startling beauty and the remnants of her British accent, she somehow managed to remind viewers of themselves. The others—Barbara Walters, Phil Donahue, even Oprah Winfrey—were always in control. Francesca, like millions of her fellow Americans, hardly ever was. She just leaped into the fray and tried her best to hang on, resulting in the most spontaneous television interview show Americans had seen in years.
Teddy's voice rang out from the apartment. “Hurry, Holly Grace!”
“I'm coming, I'm coming.” As Holly Grace began walking toward Francesca's co-op apartment, her thoughts drifted back through the years to Teddy's six-month birthday, when she had flown to Dallas where Francesca had just taken a job at one of the city's radio stations. Although they had talked on the phone, it was the first time the two women had seen each other since Teddy's birth. Francesca greeted Holly Grace at her new apartment with a squeal of welcome accompanied by a loud smacking kiss on the cheek. Then she had proudly placed a wiggling bundle in Holly Grace's arms. When Holly Grace had looked down at the baby's solemn little face, any doubts that might have been lurking in her subconscious about Teddy's parentage evaporated. Not ev
en in her wildest imagination could she believe her gorgeous husband had anything to do with the child in her arms. Teddy was adorable, and Holly Grace had instantly loved him with all her heart, but he was just about the ugliest baby she'd ever seen. He was certainly nothing at all like Danny. Whoever had fathered this homely little critter, it couldn't have been Dallie Beaudine.
As the years passed, age had improved Teddy's looks somewhat. His head was well shaped, but a fraction too large for his body. He had auburn hair, wispy-fine and straight as a board, eyebrows and eyelashes so pale they were almost invisible, and cheekbones that he couldn't seem to grow into. Sometimes when he turned his head a certain way, Holly Grace thought she caught a glimpse of how his face would look as a man—strong, distinctive, not unattractive. But until he grew into that face, not even his own mother ever made the mistake of bragging about Teddy's good looks.
“Come on, Holly Grace!” Teddy's head popped back out the paneled white doorway. “Get the lead out!”
“I'll get your lead out,” she growled, but she walked the rest of the way more quickly. As she entered the foyer, she shrugged out of her down jacket and adjusted the sleeves of a snowy white sweat suit, the legs of which were stuffed into a pair of Italian boots hand tooled with bronze leather flowers. Her trademark blond hair fell well past her shoulders, its color now highlighted with pale silvery streaks. She was wearing a trace of sable brown mascara and a dab of blusher, but little other makeup. She regarded the fine lines that had begun to form at the corners of her eyes as character-building. Besides, it was her day off and she didn't have the patience.
The living room of Francesca's apartment had pale yellow walls, peach moldings, and an exquisite Heriz rug accented in navy. With its English country garden touches of cotton chintz and silk damask, the room was exactly the kind of tastefully elegant and outrageously expensive showplace House and Garden loved to feature on its glossy pages, except that Francesca refused to raise a child in a showcase and had, quite casually, sabotaged some of her decorator's best work. The Hubert Robert landscape over the Italian marble fireplace had given way to an elaborately framed crayon rendering of a bright red dinosaur (Theodore Day, circa 1981). A seventeenth-century Italian chest had been moved several feet off center to make room for Teddy's favorite orange vinyl beanbag chair, while the chest itself bore the Mickey Mouse telephone Teddy and Holly Grace had bought as a present for Francesca on her thirty-first birthday.
Holly Grace stepped inside, dropped her purse on a copy of The New York Times, and waved to Consuelo, the Spanish woman who took wonderful care of Teddy but left all the dishes for Francesca to wash up when she came home. As she turned away from Consuelo, Holly Grace noticed a girl curled up on the sofa engrossed in a magazine. The girl was sixteen or seventeen with badly bleached hair and a faded bruise on her cheek. Holly Grace stopped in her tracks and then rounded on Teddy with a vehement whisper, “Your mother did it again, didn't she?”
“Mom said to tell you not to scare her.”
“This is what I get for going to California for three weeks.” Holly Grace grabbed Teddy by the arm and pulled him back to his bedroom out of earshot. As soon as she had shut the door, she exclaimed in frustration, “Dammit, I thought you were going to talk to her? I can't believe she did this again.”
Teddy walked over to the shoe box that held his stamp collection and fiddled with the lid. “Her name's Debbie, and she's pretty nice. But the welfare department finally found a foster home for her, so she's leaving in a few days.”
“Teddy, that girl's a hooker. She probably has needle tracks in her arm.” He began puffing his cheeks in and out, a habit he had when he didn't want to talk about something. Holly Grace groaned in frustration. “Look, honey, why didn't you call me in L.A. right away? I know you're only nine years old, but that genius I.Q. of yours has some responsibilities attached to it, and one of them is to try to keep your mother at least partially in touch with the world of reality. You know she doesn't have an ounce of common sense where this sort of thing is concerned—bedding down runaways, tangling with pimps. She leads with her heart instead of her head.”
“I like Debbie,” Teddy said stubbornly.
“You liked that Jennifer character, too, and she stole fifty bucks from your Pinocchio bank before she split.”
“She left me a note telling me she'd pay it back, and she was the only one who ever took anything.”
Holly Grace saw that she was fighting a losing battle. “You should at least have called me.”
Teddy picked up the lid of his stamp collection box and put it over his head, decisively ending the conversation. Holly Grace sighed. Sometimes Teddy was sensible, and sometimes he acted just like Francesca.
Half an hour later, she and Teddy were inching their way through the traffic-snarled streets toward Greenwich Village. As Holly Grace stopped for a light, she thought about the beefy forward on the New York Rangers she was meeting for dinner that night. She was certain he would be terrific in bed, but the fact that she couldn't take advantage of it depressed her. AIDS really pissed her off. Just when women had finally gotten themselves as sexually liberated as men, this awful disease had to come along and stop all the fun. She used to enjoy her one-night stands. She would put her lover through all his best tricks and then kick him out before he had a chance to expect her to make breakfast for him. Whoever said sex with a stranger was demeaning had to be somebody who liked to cook breakfast. Resolutely, she pushed aside the stubborn image of a dark-haired man whose breakfast she had very much liked cooking. That affair had been temporary insanity on her part—a disastrous case of rampaging hormones blinding her judgment.
Holly Grace leaned on the horn as the light changed and a moron in a Dodge Daytona cut in front of her, barely missing the fender of her newest Mercedes. It seemed to her that AIDS had affected everybody with any sense. Even her ex-husband had been sexually monogamous for the past year. She frowned, still upset with him. She certainly didn't have anything against monogamy these days, but unfortunately Dallie was practicing it with someone named Bambi.
“Holly Grace?” Teddy said, looking over at her from the soft depths of the passenger seat. “Do you think it's right for a teacher to flunk a kid just because maybe that kid doesn't do a dumb science project for his gifted class like he's supposed to?”
“This doesn't exactly sound like a theoretical question,” Holly Grace replied dryly.
“What's that mean?”
“It means you should have done your science project.”
“This one was dumb.” Teddy scowled. “Why would anybody want to go around killing a bunch of bugs and sticking them to a board with pins? Don't you think that's dumb?”
Holly Grace was beginning to get the drift. Despite Teddy's penchant for war games and filling every sheet of drawing paper he put his hands on with pictures of guns and knives, most of them dripping blood, the child was a pacifist at heart. She had once seen him carry a spider down seventeen floors in the elevator so he could release it on the street. “Did you talk to your mother about this?”
“Yeah. She called my gifted teacher to ask if I could draw the bugs instead of killing them, but when Miss Pearson said no, they ended up getting in an argument and Miss Pearson hung up. Mom doesn't like Miss Pearson. She thinks she puts too much pressure on us kids. Finally Mom said she'd kill the bugs for me.”
Holly Grace rolled her eyes at the idea of Francesca killing anything. If any bugs had to be killed, she had a pretty strong notion who would end up doing the job. “That seems to solve your problem, then, doesn't it?”
Teddy looked over at her, a picture of offended dignity.
“What kind of jerk do you think I am? What difference would it make to the bugs whether I killed them or she did? They'd still be dead because of me.”
Holly Grace looked over at him and smiled. She loved this kid—she really did.
Naomi Jaffe Tanaka Perlman's quaint little mews house was set on a small cobbled Greenwich V
illage street that held one of New York's few surviving bishop's-crook lampposts. A tangle of winter-bare wisteria vines clung to the green shutters and white-painted brick of the house, which Naomi had purchased with some of the profits from the ad agency she'd started four years ago. She lived there with her second husband, Benjamin R. Perlman, a professor of political science at Columbia. As far as Holly Grace could see, the two of them had a marital match made in left-wing heaven. They gave money to every goosey cause that came their way, held cocktail parties for people who wanted to bust up the CIA, and worked in a soup kitchen once a week for relaxation. Still, Holly Grace had to admit that Naomi had never seemed more content. Naomi had told her that, for the first time in her life, she felt as if all the parts of herself had come together.
Naomi led them into her cozy living room, waddling more than Holly Grace thought necessary, since she was only five months pregnant. Holly Grace hated the gnawing envy that ate away at her every time she looked at Naomi's waddle, but she couldn't seem to help it, even though Naomi had been her good friend ever since their Sassy days. But every time she looked at Naomi, she couldn't help thinking that if she didn't have a baby soon, she would lose her chance forever.
“... so she's going to fail me in science,” Teddy concluded from the kitchen, where he and Naomi had gone for refreshments.
“But that's barbaric,” Naomi replied. The blender whirred for a few moments and then shut off. “... think you should petition. This has to be a violation of your civil rights. I'm going to talk to Ben.”
“That's all right,” Teddy said. “I think Mom got me into enough trouble with my teacher as it is.”
Moments later, they emerged from the kitchen, Teddy with a bottle of natural fruit soda in his hand and Naomi holding out a strawberry daiquiri to Holly Grace. “Did you hear about that bizarre insect assassination project at Teddy's school?” she asked. “If I were Francesca, I'd sue. I really would.”