Paradise

  “You’re going to be a brilliant lawyer, just like your father.”

  “Would you like to go out next Saturday night?”

  “What?” Meredith gasped, her gaze snapping to his face. “I mean,” she hastily said, “it’s nice of you to ask, but my father won’t let me date until I’m sixteen.”

  “Thanks for letting me down easily.”

  “I wasn’t!” Meredith replied, but then she forgot everything because one of Rosemary Reynolds’s boyfriends had just cut in on Parker, and he was turning toward the ballroom doors to leave. “Excuse me, Stuart,” she said a little desperately, “but I have something to give to Parker!” Unaware that she was attracting the amused notice of a great many pairs of eyes, Meredith rushed across the deserted dance floor and caught up with Parker just as he was about to leave with his friends. They gave her a curious look, as if she were a clumsy bug that had skittered into their midst, but Parker’s smile was warm and real. “Hello, Meredith. Enjoying your evening?”

  Meredith nodded, hoping he would remember his promise to dance with her, her spirits sinking to a new, unparalleled low when he continued to wait for her to say whatever she’d rushed over there to say. A hot flush of embarrassment stained her cheeks bright pink when she belatedly realized she was gazing at him in worshipful silence. “I—I have something to give you,” she said in a shaky, horrified voice, rummaging in her purse. “I mean, my father wanted me to give you this.” She pulled out the envelope with the opera tickets and birthday card, but the pearl necklace came out too and spilled on the floor. Hastily, she bent down to pick it up at the same instant Parker did and her forehead banged hard against his. “Sorry!” she burst out as he said, “Ouch!” When she lurched upright, Lisa’s lipstick fell out of her open purse and Jonathan Sommers, one of Parker’s friends, bent down to pick that up. “Why don’t you just turn your purse upside down so we can pick everything up at once,” Jonathan joked, his breath reeking of liquor.

  Horribly aware of the titters of laughter from the Eppingham students who were watching, Meredith thrust the envelope at Parker, shoved the pearls and lipstick into her purse, and turned, blinking back tears, intending to beat an ignominious retreat. Behind her, Parker finally remembered their dance. “What about the dance you promised me?” he said good-naturedly.

  Meredith whirled around, her face lighting up, “Oh, that. I’d—forgotten. Do you want to? Dance, I mean?”

  “It’s the best offer I’ve had all evening,” he gallantly replied, and as the musicians began to play “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” Meredith walked into Parker’s arms and felt her dream become reality. Beneath her fingertips she could feel the smooth fabric of his black tuxedo jacket and the solid hardness of his back. His cologne smelled spicy and wonderful, and he was a superb dancer. Meredith was so hopelessly overwhelmed that she spoke her thoughts aloud. “You’re a wonderful dancer,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “And you look very nice tonight in your tuxedo.”

  He chuckled softly and Meredith tipped her head way back, basking in the warmth of his smile as he said, “You look very nice too.”

  Feeling a fierce blush heat her cheeks, she hastily looked at his shoulder. Unfortunately all the standing up and down and tipping her head back and forth had loosened the pin holding the flower in her hair, and it slid unnoticed to hang drunkenly from its wired stem. Thinking madly for something sophisticated and witty to say, she tipped her head back and said brightly, “Are you enjoying your Christmas break?”

  “Very much,” he said, his gaze dipping to the vicinity of her shoulder and the fallen blossom. “And you?”

  “Yes, very much,” she answered, feeling incredibly gauche.

  Parker’s arms dropped away the instant the music ended, and with a smile, he said good-bye. Knowing she couldn’t stand and stare at him while he walked away, Meredith hastily turned around and caught her reflection in a mirrored wall. She saw the silk flower hanging crazily from her hair and snatched it out, hoping that it had just that very second fallen.

  Waiting in line at the coat check, she stared morosely at the flower in her fingers, horribly afraid it had been dangling on her shoulder the entire time she danced with Parker. She glanced at the girl standing beside her, and as if the other girl read her thoughts, she nodded. “Yep. It was hanging down while you danced with him.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  The other girl grinned sympathetically, and Meredith remembered her name—Brooke. Brooke Morrison. Meredith had always thought she seemed nice. “Where are you going to school next year?” Brooke asked.

  “Bensonhurst, in Vermont,” Meredith told her.

  “Bensonhurst?” Brooke repeated, wrinkling her nose. “It’s in the middle of nowhere and it’s as regimented as a prison. My grandmother went to Bensonhurst.”

  “So did mine,” Meredith replied with a depressed sigh, wishing her father weren’t so insistent on sending her there.

  Lisa and Mrs. Ellis were slumped in chairs in Meredith’s room when Meredith opened the door. “Well?” Lisa asked, jumping up. “How was it?”

  “Wonderful,” Meredith said with a grimace, “if you don’t count the fact that everything fell out of my purse when I gave Parker the birthday card. Or that I babbled to him about how terrific he looked and danced.” She flopped down in the chair Lisa had just vacated and it belatedly struck her that the chair she was sitting in had been moved. In fact, her entire bedroom had been rearranged.

  “Well, what do you think?” Lisa asked with a sassy grin as Meredith slowly looked around, her face reflecting surprise and pleasure. Besides rearranging the furniture, Lisa had dismantled the vase of silk flowers and now bunches of those flowers were pinned to the tie-backs on Meredith’s canopied bed. Green plants had been purloined from other parts of the house and the austere room had acquired a feminine, garden atmosphere. “Lisa, you’re amazing!”

  “True.” She grinned. “Mrs. Ellis helped.”

  “I,” Mrs. Ellis disagreed, “only provided the plants. Lisa did everything else. I hope your father doesn’t object,” she added uneasily, standing up to leave.

  When she was gone, Lisa said, “I was sort of hoping your father would look in here. I mean, I had this great little speech all prepared. Want to hear it?”

  Meredith returned her grin and nodded.

  Positively oozing good breeding and impeccable diction, Lisa made her speech: “Good evening, Mr. Bancroft. I’m Meredith’s friend, Lisa Pontini. I plan to become an interior designer, and I was practicing up here. I do hope you don’t object, sir?”

  She did it so perfectly that Meredith laughed, then she said, “I didn’t know you plan to be an interior designer.”

  Lisa sent her a derisive look. “I’ll be lucky if I get to finish high school, let alone go to college and study interior design. We don’t have the money for college.” In an awed voice she added, “Mrs. Ellis told me your father is the Bancroft of Bancroft & Company. Is he away on a trip or something?”

  “No, he’s at a dinner meeting with the board of directors,” Meredith answered, and because she assumed Lisa would be as fascinated with the corporate functioning of Bancroft & Company as she was, she continued, “The agenda is really exciting. Two of the directors think Bancroft’s ought to expand into other cities. The controller says it’s fiscally irresponsible, but the merchandising executives all insist that the added buying power we’d have would increase our overall profits.”

  “That’s all mumbo-jumbo to me,” Lisa said, her attention on a big schefflera in the corner of the room. She moved it a few feet forward, and the effect of the simple change was quite startling.

  “Where are you going to high school?” Meredith asked, admiring her transformed bedroom and thinking how unjust it was that Lisa couldn’t go to college and make the most of her talents.

  “Kemmerling,” Lisa answered.

  Meredith winced. She passed Kemmerling on her way to St. Ste
phen’s. St. Stephen’s was old, but immaculately well-kept, Kemmerling was a big, ugly, sprawling public school and the students looked very shabby and tough. Her father had repeatedly stressed the idea that excellent educations were obtained at excellent schools. Long after Lisa had fallen asleep, an idea was taking shape in Meredith’s mind, and she planned her strategy more carefully than she’d ever planned anything, with the exception of her imaginary dates with Parker.

  5

  Early the next morning, Fenwick drove Lisa home, and Meredith went down to the dining room, where her father was reading the newspaper, waiting to have breakfast with her. Normally she’d have been curious about the outcome of his meeting last night, but now she had something more pressing on her mind. Sliding into her chair, she said good morning, then she launched her campaign while his attention was still on the article he was reading. “Haven’t you always said that a good education is vital?” she began. When he nodded absently, she continued. “And haven’t you also said that some of the public high schools are very understaffed and inadequate?”

  “Yes,” he replied, nodding again.

  “And didn’t you tell me the Bancroft family trust has endowed Bensonhurst for decades?”

  “Mmmm,” he murmured, turning to the next page.

  “Well,” Meredith said, trying to control her mounting excitement, “there’s a student at St. Stephen’s—a wonderful girl, from a very devout family. She’s very smart, and she’s talented too. She wants to be an interior designer, but she’ll have to go to Kemmerling High because her parents can’t afford to send her to a better school. Isn’t that sad?”

  “Mmmm,” he said again, frowning at an article about Richard Daley. Democrats were not among his favorite people.

  “Wouldn’t you say it’s tragic that so much talent and intelligence and, and ambition will go to waste?”

  Her father raised his gaze from the newspaper and regarded her with sudden intensity. At forty-two he was an attractive, elegant man with a brusque manner, piercing blue eyes, and brown hair turning silver at the temples. “Just what are you suggesting, Meredith?”

  “A scholarship. If Bensonhurst doesn’t offer one, then you could ask them to use some of the money the trust has donated for one.”

  “And I could also specify that this scholarship is to be awarded to the girl you’ve been talking about, is that it?” He made it sound as if what Meredith was asking was unethical, but she already knew that her father believed in using his power and connections whenever, and wherever, they would benefit his purpose. That’s what power was for, he’d told her hundreds of time.

  She nodded slowly, her eyes smiling. “Yes.”

  “I see.”

  “You’d never find anyone more deserving,” she prodded eagerly. “And,” she added, seized by inspiration, “if we don’t do something for Lisa, she’ll probably end up on welfare someday!” Welfare was a subject guaranteed to evoke a strong negative response in her father. Meredith wanted desperately to tell her father more about Lisa, and about how much their friendship mattered to her, but some sixth sense warned her not to do it. In the past, her father had been so overprotective of her that no child had ever met his standards for a suitable companion for her. He’d be much more likely to think Lisa deserved a scholarship than that she deserved to be Meredith’s friend.

  “You remind me of your grandmother Bancroft,” he said after a thoughtful pause. “She often took a personal interest in some deserving but less fortunate soul.”

  Guilt stabbed at her, for her interest in having Lisa at Bensonhurst was every bit as selfish as it was noble, but his next words made her forget all that: “Call my secretary tomorrow. Give her whatever information you have about this girl, and ask her to remind me to call Bensonhurst.”

  For the next three weeks Meredith waited in an agony of suspense, afraid to tell Lisa what she was trying to accomplish because she didn’t want her to be disappointed, yet unable to believe Bensonhurst would refuse her father’s request. American girls were being sent to school in Switzerland and France now, not to Vermont, and not to Bensonhurst with its drafty stone dormitories and rigid curriculum and rules. Surely, the school wasn’t filled to capacity as it once had been; therefore they wouldn’t want to risk offending her father.

  The following week a letter from Bensonhurst arrived and Meredith hovered anxiously by her father’s chair while he read it. “It says,” he finally told her, “they’re awarding Miss Pontini the school’s one scholarship based on her outstanding scholastic achievements and the Bancroft family’s recommendation as to her desirability as a student.” Meredith let out an unladylike whoop of glee that earned her a chilly look from her father before he continued: “The scholarship will cover her tuition and room and board. She’ll have to get herself to Vermont and provide her own spending money while she’s in school.”

  Meredith bit her lip; she hadn’t considered the cost of a flight to Vermont or spending money, but having succeeded this far, she was almost certain she could think of something else. Perhaps she could convince her father that they should drive; then Lisa could ride to Vermont with them.

  The next day Meredith took all the brochures about Bensonhurst, along with the letter about the scholarship, to school. The day seemed to last a week, but finally she was sitting at the Pontinis’ kitchen table while Lisa’s mother bustled about, laying out Italian cookies as light as air, and offering her homemade cannoli. “You’re getting too skinny, like Lisa,” Mrs. Pontini said, and Meredith obediently nibbled on a cookie while she opened her schoolbag and laid out the Bensonhurst brochures.

  A little awkward in her role of philanthropist, she talked excitedly about Bensonhurst and Vermont and the excitement of traveling, then she announced that Lisa had been granted a scholarship to go there. For a moment there was dead silence while Mrs. Pontini and Lisa both seemed unable to absorb the last part of that, then Lisa slowly stood up. “What am I,” she burst out furiously, “your newest charity! Who the hell do you think you are!”

  She stormed out the back door and Meredith followed her. “Lisa, I was only trying to help!”

  “Help?” Lisa snapped, rounding on her. “What makes you think I’d want to go to school with a bunch of rich snobs like you who’d look at me like a charity case? I can just see it, a school full of spoiled bitches who complain about having to get by on the thousand dollars a month allowance their daddies send them—”

  “No one would know you’re there on a scholarship unless you tell them—” Meredith began, then she paled with angry hurt. “I didn’t know you think of me as a ‘rich snob’ or a ‘spoiled . . . spoiled bitch.’ ”

  “Listen to you—you can’t even say the word bitch without choking on it. You’re so damned prissy and superior!”

  “You’re the snob, Lisa, not me,” Meredith interrupted in a quiet, defeated voice. “You see everything in terms of money. And you didn’t need to worry about fitting in at Bensonhurst. I’m the one who doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere, not you.” She said that with a calm dignity that would have pleased her father immensely, then she turned and left.

  Fenwick was waiting in front of the Pontini house. Meredith slid into the backseat of the car. There was something wrong with her, she realized—something about her that prevented people from feeling comfortable with her, no matter their social class. It did not occur to her that perhaps there was something special—a fineness and sensitivity—about her that made other kids want to put her down or stay away from her. It occurred to Lisa, who was watching the car pull away, hating Meredith Bancroft for being able to play teenage fairy godmother, and despising herself for the ugliness, the unfairness of her feelings.

  At lunch the next day Meredith was sitting in her usual place, outside, huddled in her coat, eating an apple and reading a book. From the corner of her eye she saw Lisa walking toward her, and she concentrated harder on her book.

  “Meredith,” Lisa said, “I’m sorry about yesterday.”
br />   “That’s okay,” Meredith replied without looking up. “Forget it.”

  “It’s pretty hard to forget that I was lousy to the nicest, kindest person I’ve ever met.”

  Meredith glanced at her and then back at her book, but her voice was softer, though final. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  Sitting down beside her on the stone ledge, Lisa continued doggedly, “I was a witch yesterday for a lot of selfish, stupid reasons. I felt sorry for myself because you were offering me this fantastic chance to go away to a special school, to feel like someone special, and I knew I’d never be able to go. I mean, my ma needs help with the kids and the house, and even if she didn’t, I’d need money for the trip to Vermont and other stuff once I got there.”

  Meredith had never considered that Lisa’s mother couldn’t or wouldn’t spare her, and she thought it seemed horribly unfair that Mrs. Pontini’s having had eight children meant Lisa had to be a part-time mother too. “I didn’t think about your mother and father not letting you go,” she admitted, looking at Lisa for the first time. “I sort of thought, well, that parents always wanted their children to get a good education if they possibly could.”

  “You were half right,” Lisa said, and Meredith noticed for the first time that Lisa looked as if she were bursting with news. “My ma does. She had a big fight with Pa over it after you left. He said a girl doesn’t need to go to fancy schools, just to get married and have babies. Ma started waving this big spoon at him and yelling that I could do better than that, and then everything started happening. Ma called my gramma and she called my aunts and uncles, and they all came over to the house, and pretty soon everybody was chipping in money for me. It’s only a loan. I figure if I work hard at Bensonhurst, I ought to be able to get a scholarship to some college after that. Later, I’ll get a great job and repay everybody.”

  Her eyes were shining as she reached out impulsively and squeezed Meredith’s hand. “How does it feel,” she asked softly, “to know you’re responsible for changing someone’s entire life? To know that you’ve made dreams come true for me and Ma and my aunts—”