Her weak attempt at humor fell flat. Dallie looked as if she'd just punched him in the stomach. “That does it!” He reached down and snatched up a towel that was lying on the carpet next to the bed.
Holly Grace looked pleadingly at him. “I know you have something to say about all this, but just for a few minutes, do you think you could let Francie and me talk?”
“No, I do not,” he replied coldly. “I can't believe the two of you. This is a perfect example of how entirely out of hand the women in this country have gotten. You act like men aren't anything more than extraneous amusements, little toys to keep you entertained.” Under the covers, he wrapped the towel around himself. “And no matter what anybody says, I don't believe all this trouble started when women got the vote. As far as I'm concerned, it goddamn well got started when you taught each other how to read. “ He rose up out of bed, pulling the towel tighter at his waist. “And another thing—I'm getting a little tired of the two of you treating me like a walking sperm bank!” With that, he stalked into the bathroom and slammed the door.
Unimpressed with Dallie's anger, Holly Grace looked back at Francesca. “Assuming I could bring Dallie around to my way of thinking, what would you have to say about that?”
The idea gave Francesca a lot more discomfort than she liked to admit. “Holly Grace, just because Dallie and I succumbed to a night of temporary insanity doesn't mean I have any decision to make in this. Whatever happens is between the two of you.”
Holly Grace looked at Francesca's underwear scattered over the floor. “Hypothetically speaking, if you really were in love with Dallie, how would you feel about it?”
There was such naked need in Holly Grace's face that Francesca decided she had to answer honestly. She thought for a few moments. “As much as I love you, Holly Grace—as much as I sympathize with your desire to have a child—if I really loved Dallie, I wouldn't let you touch him.”
Holly Grace didn't reply for a moment, and then she gave a sad sort of smile. “That's exactly what I'd say, too. For all your flightiness, Francie, it's moments like this that make me remember why we're best friends.”
Holly Grace squeezed her hand, and Francesca was glad to see that she had finally been forgiven for lying about Teddy. But as she looked at her friend's face, she frowned. “Holly Grace, there's something about this that doesn't ring true to me. You know very well that Dallie won't agree. I'm not convinced you even want him to.”
“He might,” Holly Grace said defensively. “Dallie's full of surprises.”
But not this kind of surprise. Francesca didn't believe for a minute that he would go along with Holly Grace's idea, and she doubted if Holly Grace believed it either. “Do you know what you remind me of?” Francesca said thoughtfully. “You remind me of someone with a bad toothache who's hitting herself in the head with a hammer to distract herself from the pain in her mouth.”
“That's ridiculous,” Holly Grace snapped, her reply coming so quickly that Francesca knew she had struck a nerve. It occurred to her that Holly Grace was frightened. She had begun to grab at straws, hoping to find some distraction to ease the ache in her heart from losing Gerry. There wasn't anything Francesca could do to help her friend except lean forward and give her a sympathetic hug.
“Now, isn't this a sight to warm a man's heart?” Dallie drawled as he came out of the bathroom buttoning his shirt. He looked like a man who'd been doing a slow burn for the past few minutes, and it was immediately apparent that his anger had shifted from righteous indignation into a serious, full-fledged forest fire. “Did the two of you decide what you're going to do with me, yet?”
“Francie says I can't have you,” Holly Grace replied.
Alarmed, Francesca cried out, “Holly Grace, that's not what I—”
“Oh, does she?” Dallie shoved his shirttail inside his jeans. “Goddamn, I hate women.” He pointed his finger toward Francesca angrily. “Just because we set off a few million fireworks last night doesn't mean you have any right to make personal decisions for me.”
Francesca was outraged. “I didn't make any personal—”
He turned on Holly Grace. “And if you want to have yourself a baby, you go look in somebody else's pants, because, by damn, I am not providing you with stud service.”
Francesca felt an anger toward him that she understood wasn't totally reasonable. But couldn't he see that Holly Grace was in real pain and that she wasn't thinking very clearly? “Aren't you being just a little insensitive?” she inquired quietly.
“Insensitive?” His face grew pale with anger. His hands balled into fists, and he looked very much like a man who wanted to destroy one of the higher life-forms.
As he came toward them, Francesca instinctively shrank down into the sheet, and even Holly Grace seemed to move back. His hand slashed out toward the bottom of the bed. Francesca let out a small hiss of alarm only to see that he had grabbed Holly Grace's purse from the place where she'd tossed it. Pulling it open, he dumped out the contents and snatched up her car keys.
When he spoke, his voice was bleak. “As far as I'm concerned, the two of you can go straight to hell.” With that, he stalked from the room.
As Francesca heard the distant sound of a car driving away a few moments later, she felt a stab of regret for the loss of a house where no angry words had ever been spoken.
Chapter
30
Six weeks later, Teddy got off the elevator and walked down the hallway to his apartment, dragging his backpack the whole way. He hated school. All his life he'd loved it, but now he hated it. Today Miss Pearson had told the class that they would have to do a social studies project at the end of the year, and Teddy already knew he would probably flunk it. Miss Pearson didn't like him. She said she was going to kick him out of gifted class if his attitude didn't improve.
It was just— Ever since he'd gone to Wynette, nothing seemed to be fun anymore. He felt confused all the time, like there was a monster hiding in his closet ready to jump out at him. And now he might get kicked out of gifted class.
Teddy knew he somehow had to think up a really great social studies project, especially since he'd messed up so bad on his science bug project. This project had to be better than everybody else's—even dorky old Milton Grossman who was going to write Mayor Ed Koch and ask if he could spend part of the day with him. Miss Pearson had loved that idea. She said Milton's initiative should be an inspiration to the entire class. Teddy didn't see how anybody who picked his nose and smelled like mothballs could be an inspiration.
As he walked in the door, Consuelo came out from the kitchen and told him, “A package came for you today. It's in your bedroom.”
“A package?” Teddy peeled off his jacket as he walked down the hallway. Christmas had come and gone, his birthday wasn't until July, and Valentine's Day was still two weeks away. Why was he getting a package?
As he entered his bedroom, he spotted an enormous cardboard carton with the return address of Wynette, Texas, sitting in the middle of the floor. He dropped his jacket, pushed his glasses back up on the bridge of his nose, and chewed on his thumbnail. Part of him wanted the box to be from Dallie, but the other part of him didn't even like to think about Dallie. Whenever he did, he felt like the monster in the closet was standing right behind him.
Slitting open the packing tape with his sharpest scissors, he pulled apart the box flaps and looked around for a note. All he saw was a pile of smaller boxes, and one by one, he began to open them. When he was done, he sat dazed, looking at the bounty that surrounded him, an array of presents so admirably suited to a nine-year-old boy that it was as if someone had read his mind.
On one side of him rested a small stack of wonderfully gross stuff, like a whoopee cushion, hot pepper gum, and a phony plastic ice cube with a dead fly in the middle. Some of the presents appealed to his intellect—a programmable calculator and the complete set of The Chronicles of Narnia. Another box held objects representing a whole world of masculinity: a real Swis
s Army knife, a flashlight with a black rubber handle, a set of grown-up Black & Decker screwdrivers. But his favorite present was at the bottom of the box. Unwrapping the tissue paper, he let out a cry of pleasure as he took in the best, the neatest, the most awesome sweat shirt he had ever seen.
Gracing the navy blue front was a cartoon of a bearded, leering motorcycle rider with popping eyeballs and drool coming from his mouth. Beneath the biker was Teddy's name in Day-Glo orange letters and the inscription “Born to Raise Hell.” Teddy hugged the sweat shirt to his chest. For a fraction of a moment he let himself believe that Dallie had sent him all this, but then he understood that these weren't the kinds of things you sent to a kid you thought was a wimp, and since he knew how Dallie felt about him, he also knew the gifts had to have come from Skeet. He squeezed the sweat shirt tighter and told himself he was lucky to have a friend like Skeet Cooper, somebody who could see past his glasses and stuff all the way to the real kid.
Theodore Day—Bora to Raise Hell! He loved the sound of those words, the feel of them, the grit and spit of them, the whole idea that an undersize kid like himself, who was a jerk at sports and might even get kicked out of gifted class, was Born to Raise Hell!
While Teddy was admiring his sweat shirt, Francesca was winding up the taping of her show. As the red light went off on the camera, Nathan Hurd came over to congratulate her. Her producer was balding and chubby, physically unimpressive but mentally a dynamo. In some ways he reminded her of Clare Padgett, who was currently driving the news department at a Houston television station to contemplate suicide. Both were maddening perfectionists, and both of them knew exactly what worked for her.
“I love it when they walk off the show like that,” Nathan said, his double chin quivering with pleasure. “We'll run the program as is—the ratings will go right through the ceiling.”
She had just finished doing a program on electronic evangelism in which the guest of honor, the Reverend Johnny T. Platt, had walked off in a huff after she'd charmed him into revealing more than he wished to about several failed marriages and his Neanderthal attitude toward women.
“Thank goodness I only had a few minutes left to fill or we would have had to retape,” she said as she unclipped her microphone from the paisley scarf draped around the neck of her dress.
Nathan fell into step beside her and they walked from the studio together. Now that the taping was finished and Francesca didn't have to focus all of her concentration on what she was doing; the familiar heaviness settled over her. Six weeks had passed since she'd returned from Wynette. She hadn't seen Dallie since he stormed out of his house. So much for all her worries about how she was going to accommodate having him back in Teddy's life. She felt as confused as one of her teenage runaways. Why had something that was so wrong for her felt so very right? And then she realized that Nathan was talking to her.
“... so the press release went out today about the Statue of Liberty ceremony. We'll schedule a show on immigration for May—the rich and the poor, that sort of thing. What do you think?”
She nodded her agreement. She had passed her citizenship exam early in January, and not long afterward, she had received a letter from the White House inviting her to participate in a special ceremony to be held that May at the Statue of Liberty. A number of well-known public figures, all of whom had recently applied for American citizenship, would be sworn in together. In addition to Francesca, the group included several Hispanic athletes, a Korean fashion designer, a Russian ballet dancer, and two widely respected scientists. Inspired by the success of the 1986 rededication of the Statue of Liberty, the White House planned for the President to make a welcoming speech, generating a little patriotic fervor as well as strengthening his position with ethnic voters.
Nathan stopped walking as they reached his office. “I've got some great plans for next season, Francesca. More political stuff. You have the damnedest way of cutting through—”
“Nathan.” She hesitated for a moment and then, knowing she'd already put it off too long, made up her mind. “We need to talk.”
He gave her a wary look before he gestured her inside. She greeted his secretary and then walked into his private office. He closed the door and perched one chubby hip on the corner of his desk, straining the already overtaxed seams of his chinos.
Francesca took a deep breath and told him of the decision she'd reached after months of deliberation. “I know you're going to be less than delighted about this, Nathan, but when my contract with the network comes up for renewal in the spring, I've told my agent to renegotiate.”
“Of course you'll renegotiate,” Nathan said cautiously. “I'm sure the network will come up with a few extra dollars to sweeten the pot. Not too many, mind you.”
Money wasn't the problem and she shook her head. “I'm not going to do a weekly show any longer, Nathan. I want to cut back to twelve specials a year—one show a month.” A feeling of relief came over her as she finally spoke the words aloud.
Nathan shot up from the corner of the desk. “I don't believe you. The network will never go along with it. You'll be committing professional suicide.”
“I'm going to take that chance. I won't live like this anymore, Nathan. I'm tired of being tired all the time. I'm tired of watching other people raise my child.”
Nathan, who saw his own daughters only on weekends and left the business of child rearing to his wife, didn't seem to have the vaguest idea what she was talking about. “Women look at you as a role model,” he said, apparently deciding to attack her political conscience. “Some of them will say you sold out.”
“Maybe... I'm not sure.” She pushed aside a stack of magazines and sat down on his couch. “I think women are realizing that they want to be more than burned-out carbon copies of men. For nine years I've done everything the male way. I've turned the raising of my child over to other people, I've scheduled myself so tightly that when I wake up in a hotel room I have to pull a piece of stationery out of the drawer to remember what city I'm in, I go to bed with a knot in my stomach thinking about everything I have to do the next day. I'm tired of it, Nathan. I love my job, but I'm tired of loving it twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I love Teddy, and I've only got nine years left before he'll be off to college. I want to be with him more. This is the only life I've been given, and to tell you the truth, I haven't been all that happy with the way I'm living it.”
He frowned. “Assuming the network goes along with this, which I seriously doubt, you'll lose a lot of money.”
“Right,” Francesca scoffed. “I'll have to cut my yearly clothing budget down from twenty thousand dollars to ten thousand. I can just see a million burned-out working mothers losing sleep over that while they try to figure out how to buy their kids new shoes for school.” How much money did a woman need? she wondered. How much power? Was she the only woman in the world who was tired of buying into all those male yardsticks of success?
“What do you really want, Francesca?” Nathan asked, switching his tactics from confrontation to pacification. “Maybe we can work out some sort of compromise.”
“I want time,” Francesca replied wearily. “I want to be able to read a book just because I want to read it, not because the author is going to be on my show the next day. I want to be able to go through an entire week without anyone sticking a single hot roller in my hair. I want to chaperon one of Teddy's class trips, for God's sake.” And then she gave voice to an idea that had been gradually growing inside her. “I want to take some of the energy that's gone into my job and give serious thought to doing something significant for all those fourteen-year-old girls who are selling their bodies on the streets of this country because they don't have anyplace to go.”
“We'll do more shows on runaways,” he said quickly. “I'll work something out so you can take a little more vacation time. I know we've been working you hard, but—”
“No sale, Nathan,” she said, getting up from the couch. “This merry-go-round is slowin
g down for a while.”
“But, Francesca—”
She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and then left his office before he could say any more. She knew her popularity wasn't any guarantee that the network wouldn't fire her if they felt she was being unreasonable, but she had to take that chance. The events of the past six weeks had shown her where her priorities lay, and they had also taught her something important about herself—she no longer had anything to prove.
Once she arrived at her own office, Francesca found a pile of telephone messages waiting for her. She picked up the first one, then set it aside without looking at it. Her gaze drifted to the file on her desk, which held a detailed summary of the professional golfing career of Dallas Beaudine. At the same time she had been trying to put Dallie out of her mind, she had been gathering the material. Although she toyed thoughtfully with the pages, she didn't bother to reread what she'd already studied so thoroughly. Every article, every phone call she'd made, every piece of information she had been able to gather pointed in the same direction. Dallas Beaudine had all the talent it took to be a champion; he just didn't seem to want it badly enough. She thought about what Skeet had said and wondered what all this had to do with Teddy, but the answer continued to elude her.
Stefan was in town and she had promised to go with him to a private party at La Côte Basque that night. For the rest of the afternoon, she considered canceling, but she knew that would be the coward's way out. Stefan wanted something from her that she now understood she couldn't give, and it wasn't fair to postpone talking to him about it any longer.
Stefan had been in New York twice since she'd gotten back from Wynette, and she had seen him both times. He had known about Teddy's kidnapping, of course, so she had been forced to tell him something about what had happened in Wynette, although she had omitted giving him any details about Dallie.