Roxy''s Story

  We had been permitted to go out to dinner, and Mrs. Brittany promised her we would be able to go to a movie together very soon. Although it was true that because of my companionship, she took on a new glow and joie de vivre, I was getting almost as much out of it as she was. For the first time in my life, I had a real friend.

  Our shopping sprees with Mrs. Brittany were probably our happiest times together. After the first trip to Manhattan, when I was overwhelmed with the money Mrs. Brittany laid out to start my wardrobe, the planning of another shopping trip always brought great excitement and anticipation. It wasn’t just what she would buy for me and for Sheena, but also the places she would take us to for our shopping.

  We’d be flown in a private jet to Palm Beach to shop on Worth Avenue, or taken to Boston or Chicago because of some designer Mrs. Brittany had heard about. Sometimes she was sent a photograph, even whole portfolios of new fashions. There was always something she wanted to try on me. She took us to runway shows and many private showings in New York. People she admired or trusted brought back pictures of fashions being designed in Europe and the Far East.

  One of her favorite fashion designers, Pierre Beaumont, came from Paris to stay at the mansion for a weekend and arranged for models to come and demonstrate some of his creations. Mrs. Brittany wanted me to listen to him and learn what made clothing exciting. He was very knowledgeable about the history of fashion. I learned a great deal from him at our lunches and dinners together.

  It seemed to me that she had the whole world at her beck and call. Sheena was right to describe her as being like a queen. She could pick up the phone and call so many important people directly or reach any famous person who had anything to do with what was glamorous.

  Sometimes at night, after a full day of training and exposure to something cultural, I would feel as if I had been lifted onto another level on our planet, a level far above the ordinary world, where people like my father and my mother lived. I began to sense what Camelia and Portia were trying to tell me, why they felt so special and were so special.

  “If you think poorly of yourself, you will get others to think the same,” Mrs. Brittany told me. “You don’t want to be so arrogant that you make others feel inferior, even if they are,” she added with a smile. “You want them to admire you for your self-confidence, but also for the respect you give them. They won’t say it, but they’ll feel blessed to have you treat them well, and you won’t even have to look or act superior to have them do it. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  She gave me that look that told me she believed me. I couldn’t help feeling that now she not only had confidence in my becoming one of her girls, but had also developed a genuine and sincere affection for me. Maybe it was just wishful thinking, but it helped me to keep going, study harder, read more, master every task I was given, and win the admiration of every instructor or gentleman to whom I was introduced. It was all going so well that I couldn’t imagine anything that might stop me from becoming as successful as she had promised.

  Perhaps that was because I was a little too arrogant now. That was something she had always warned me about, too. She described it as someone walking a tightrope way above the ground.

  “As long as she keeps her eyes forward, she’s fine, but when she looks down to celebrate how high up she is, she loses her balance. I’d like you to remember that.”

  I could blame only myself for forgetting.

  12

  Mrs. Pratt stepped into the library and interrupted my lesson on current events to tell me Mrs. Brittany had to see me immediately. There was no way to tell from her expression what this crisis was about, but it was clear that whatever it was, it was something serious. I raked through my recent memories to find something I had done wrong, something I might have said to one of the staff, or, worse, something I had told Sheena and Sheena had told her. Perhaps I had been wrong to be so revealing about myself and the things I had done. That first fear I had when Sheena and I started hanging out together reared its ugly head. I had been too R when I should have been PG. Mrs. Brittany had warned me about this. Would she just end my relationship with Sheena, or would it be even more devastating for me?

  Life here over the past months had been so all-consuming that I’d had little time lately to think about my family and from where and what I had come. Sometimes thoughts about Mama and Emmie would sneak into my head just before I fell asleep, but I usually lost them under the dark vision of Papa’s face the day he pointed to our front door and said, “Get out.” The possibility of returning to them and having to explain where I had been and what I had been doing was too much to even consider.

  I excused myself and rose from the table. Professor Marx said nothing, but he looked genuinely afraid for me. I knew that all his initial impressions of me had been wiped away and he was sincerely enjoying our tutorial sessions now. Sheena continued to help me in the evenings, but I had taken more control myself, using my free time wisely to read the books and articles Professor Marx assigned and suggested.

  Recently, I had occasion to discuss current events and some other subjects with some of Mrs. Brittany’s guests, and I could see from the expressions on her face and theirs that I was coming off well. One man, a hedge-fund CEO, blurted out that I had brains and beauty, the unbeatable combination. He was so excited about me, in fact, that he asked Mrs. Brittany what name I was going under.

  “We’re not quite there,” she told him. “Close, but no gold ring just yet.”

  “I think I can be of some help when the time does come,” he told her, looking mostly at me.

  “Of course, you can, Gerard,” she said. “You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

  He laughed at how easily Mrs. Brittany could make someone feel used but not insulted about it. Even I had to smile at her brutal honesty. She gave me an appreciative look, and for the first time, I felt as if we were working as a team. Wasn’t that enough? Didn’t she feel that, too? Couldn’t I have that gold ring now?

  As I left the library to walk with Mrs. Pratt to Mrs. Brittany’s office, I could feel the trembling start in my legs and reverberate up my spine and around my heart. Could it be that I had come all this way and now would be asked to leave, my kill fee in hand? What would I do? Where would I go?

  I called upon that raging, defiant spirit I had brought along with me that first day. If I was thrown out, I wouldn’t return home, and I wouldn’t go to any roach hotel, either. I’d find my way. I’d make them sorry they’d dismissed me.

  Mrs. Pratt opened the office door for me and stepped in with me. Mrs. Brittany had her back to us. She was looking out the window. Her office had a view of the small pond on her property and some of the wooded area that separated her land from the closest neighbor’s. About a half dozen grounds people were cutting the grass and trimming hedges and the bushes around the pond. The dull hum of engines was just barely audible. I saw what looked like a flock of ducks lift off the surface of the pond when something frightened or disturbed them. She waited for them to disappear before turning to us.

  “Sorry to interrupt your work with Professor Marx,” she began. She nodded at the red bullet leather chair in front of her desk. Mrs. Pratt sat on the settee. Whatever this meeting was about, her advice was obviously going to be appreciated. I had been in meetings she had attended before, and I realized that Mrs. Pratt wasn’t just an echo. Her opinions carried weight. I hoped I hadn’t done anything that had offended her.

  I sat and waited. The pause and the silence could be just another test of my nerves, I thought. I was always under glass here.

  Mrs. Brittany opened a folder on her desk.

  “I have a copy of your birth certificate. You didn’t lie about your age. It was one of the first things I checked, of course. Even though you began here underage, we thought we could slip under the wire, so to speak.”

  She glanced at Mrs. Pratt, who nodded.

  “When your parents didn’t follow up on your disa
ppearance, I, like you, thought you had a father who was so headstrong and cold that he was able to write you out of the family without any regret. It’s not that unusual. Blood isn’t always thicker than water. It gets thinned out for various reasons,” she said.

  “We know that for a fact,” Mrs. Pratt said.

  “Yes, we’ve had some interesting examples of it during our journey. For example, there are parents who disown their children because they show homosexual tendencies and those who disinherit children because they marry the wrong people, people from other races, cultures. There is no shortage of reasons or examples of blood losing its adhesive qualities. Ruth—Mrs. Pratt—was disowned when she refused to marry someone her father had chosen.”

  I looked at Mrs. Pratt. During all the time I had been there, my interest in her was so small I never asked any questions about her. In my mind, she was almost a piece of the furniture, something that came with the whole picture. I never thought of her as someone with a past, with pleasures and disappointments separate from Mrs. Brittany’s. I saw now that I had underestimated her importance.

  “Anyway,” Mrs. Brittany continued, “we were cautious about you. Mr. Bob and I anticipated the possibility of starting you out and having to abort because of your age and your family or your father regretting his actions. We didn’t want to get in the middle of that, and we were prepared to send you on your way every day until your eighteenth birthday. When that came and went, we were more confident and willing to invest more in you.”

  “What’s happened to change that?” I asked, unable to balance myself much longer on my roly-poly anxieties and fear.

  Mrs. Brittany’s response was to lift a page from a newspaper out of my folder and pass it to me.

  There was my picture just under the headline on the page describing my disappearance. My mother had apparently finally gotten her way and initiated a search by the authorities. Some ambitious young reporter had tracked down some of my history of bad behavior, Papa’s work and firm, and went on to describe the halfhearted effort to find “a girl neither her school nor her father is that keen on seeing return.” That take on it had obviously initiated a bigger discussion about lost children, especially teenagers. There were references to upcoming radio and television talk shows that would have it as the main topic.

  Mrs. Brittany passed me another article from another city newspaper that had picked up on the story and revisited the Pulitzer Prize–winning narration about “America’s Forgotten Children” living on the fringes, young people who were ripe fruit for drugs, crime, and prostitution. My picture was reprinted there, too. And in another article, there were two different but relatively recent pictures of me.

  “We understand,” Mrs. Brittany continued, “that the New York Crier magazine is going to do a five-page article on all this, highlighting your disappearance. These pictures and a few others will appear. Your mother is turning over whatever she has to build it up. Your picture won’t be on milk cartons, but it could turn up on the sides of city buses and taxis advertising the magazine article.”

  “I never thought . . . I mean, I never expected . . .”

  She reached for the articles, and I handed them back to her. She placed them in the folder and closed it. I glanced at Mrs. Pratt. She mirrored Mrs. Brittany’s look of deep concern. My heart began to thump. What was coming next?

  “We’re not blaming you for anything. Our taking you in is totally our responsibility,” Mrs. Brittany said. “Obviously, however, if anyone managed to connect the dots, it would bring some serious negative attention to us.”

  “No one knows I’m here. I haven’t violated your rule about contacting anyone. I had no one to contact. I’ve never even tried to speak with my mother since I’ve been here, and you know I wouldn’t try to speak with my father.”

  “Yes. And I’m not concerned about anyone who has come here and met you,” she began, sounding more like someone thinking aloud. “The places I’ve taken you, shops and so on, should be fine. However, no one can predict if someone who saw you and read these articles would make the connections. We can only hope not. And we would hope, or assume, that anyone working here who saw you, even if he or she could make any connection, would simply not do so.

  “But,” she continued, “I do not like being dependent on the discretion of too many . . . underlings. We’re risking too much by parading you around on the outside.”

  “I don’t need anything else, and I can wait to see shows or go to more museums.”

  Again, I looked to Mrs. Pratt, hoping to see her nod, but she was stone-faced.

  “That’s not going to solve our problem,” Mrs. Brittany said.

  “So you want me to leave?” I asked, dreading the answer. I held my breath.

  “Yes,” she said.

  I felt a cold chill come over me. It was like being thrown out of my home and driven from my family again. I didn’t know whom to blame more, myself, my father, or Mrs. Brittany. I think what hurt me most was the feeling that my father was going to win after all. All this training, this education I had been enjoying, the hope and the new self-confidence I had developed, would be snatched away. The vision of myself on the streets again actually turned my stomach.

  “I would never say you kidnapped me or anything stupid,” I told her. I looked at Mrs. Pratt, too, so she could see how sincere and determined I was. “And no matter what, I wouldn’t reveal anything about your company or the other girls or . . . anything.”

  “We know that, but more often than not, things happen, good intentions are lost.”

  I could feel the tears come quickly into my eyes. They came more quickly than I could remember happening before. When Mr. Bob first brought me here, I was a much harder, more tightly wrapped person, I thought. Rarely was my father or even my mother able to bring me to tears. I hated the idea of revealing what I really felt inside. Besides making me feel weaker and more vulnerable, something I detested, it gave whoever was criticizing me or chastising me a sense of superiority. It got so I could keep from changing expression when a teacher or the dean at school bawled me out. My expressionless face invariably drove them back and forced them to get me out of their sight. I always left a confrontation feeling victorious even if the results were bad grades, behavior demerits, suspensions, detentions, or being sent to my room.

  Once, my father was so frustrated with my indifference he screamed, “She’s like the devil. You can defeat him in a battle but never destroy him.”

  Then stop battling me, I thought. Leave me alone.

  He couldn’t. I couldn’t be his perfect daughter. Or even his daughter, for that matter, and so I was here, sitting in front of Mrs. Brittany’s desk, feeling as if I were back in school, where I had been called to face the dean so he could discipline me for some rule I had broken, some fight I had been in, or some nasty remark I had made to a teacher.

  “What do you want to do with me?” I asked.

  “I’m sending you out of the country. You’ll be flown to Nice in my private jet today, and you will stay at my home in Beaulieu-sur-Mer. It’s a beautiful villa overlooking the sea. There are servants to care for everything, and since you speak French so well, you won’t be uncomfortable.”

  “For how long?” I asked, now feeling some hope. This wasn’t a dishonorable discharge. She was planning something strategically.

  “I don’t know for sure. We’ll have to wait until this all dies down and see how long your parents, probably your mother, continue to appeal to the media. It might not be a matter of only a few weeks, Roxy. If you don’t want to go through this, we’ll understand. I’ll double your kill fee, and we’ll arrange for you to return home. Maybe things will be different for you now that they’ve shown a desire to get you back. Who knows?”

  “No, they’ll never be any different. He’ll only hate me more for having put them through this,” I said.

  “Well, the choice is yours.”

  “I prefer to keep hoping I can join your organization,” I s
aid. “I’m willing to do what you want.”

  She nodded slowly. “Good. As you see, I’m not exactly giving up on you. I’ll visit you as soon as I can and as often as I can, as will Mrs. Pratt.”

  “What about Sheena?” I asked.

  “What about her?”

  “Can she visit, too?”

  “We’ll see. I think for now, it’s better that you don’t tell her about this and . . .”

  “And give her any false hope,” I muttered.

  “I’ll explain things to her. I’ll tell her I have you overseas for some necessary training and education. And you will have some important and beneficial experiences. I have a trusted associate in Monte Carlo who will look after you, Norbert Davies, a distant relative of Daphne du Maurier.”

  “The author of Rebecca?”

  “Yes. He’s very interesting, but he can exhaust you with stories of the family, the famous actors and writers. He handles some of the Principality of Monaco’s business affairs. He’ll do a good job watching over you. I trust him with you completely for many reasons.

  “I’m going to ask Professor Marx to draw up a list of reading for you and have the books and materials sent over. The villa has a small exercise room and an infinity pool, so you’ll continue to follow your physical regimen. You have enough information to know how to develop your own program. Norbert will arrange for your beauty needs. There’s a limousine and a driver to service you, although you won’t be going around anywhere on your own. When I can’t respond to anything you need quickly enough, Mrs. Pratt will arrange for it,” she added. Mrs. Pratt nodded.

  “So, do I go pack or . . .”

  “Everything’s been packed that you’re taking, Roxy. You’ll have the opportunity to get whatever else you need there.”

  “Been packed?”