Diana was so intent on making them understand what led up to her decision to marry Cole that she didn’t notice the growing sorrow and regret in her family’s expressions. Gentling her voice, she held out her hands as if asking for understanding. “I know you’ve always assumed that because Daddy and his friends were all wealthy and successful, and because I grew up among them, that I had inherited some sort of instinctive ability to start up a successful business, but I didn’t.”
When she paused for a moment, her grandmother reminded her in a quiet, gentle voice, “And yet, that’s exactly what you did.”
Diana’s overwrought emotions veered from near-tears to near-laughter. “It was a fluke!” she said. “What I ‘inherited’ from my upbringing was a healthy fear of poverty. That, and a firsthand knowledge of how callous and cold wealthy people can become when one of their own goes broke. There’s a stigma associated with it, and I didn’t want Corey to discover it the hard way. I didn’t want any of you to experience it. I wasn’t some sort of daring entrepreneur, I was scared of the alternative, and so I took a risk, an enormous risk. All we had was this house, and I was so scared when I mortgaged it to start up the business that I threw up when I got home. I just couldn’t think of any other way to keep us together and go on living as we had.”
She paused and took a deep breath before she confessed the true extent of her youthful incompetence. “I made some costly mistakes, particularly in the beginning, that I will always regret. In order to raise money from private investors, I sold them stock in the company, stock that’s now worth a fortune in comparison to the money I got for us. I’ve made other mistakes, too, like holding us back out of fear several times when I should have pushed forward.”
Finished with the worst of her admissions, she said ruefully, “Everything I’ve achieved with Foster Enterprises hasn’t been the result of genius; it’s been the result of endless worry and work, combined with a whole lot of luck!”
The only person who didn’t look completely taken aback by Diana’s revelations was Cole, yet he was the most stunned of all. He’d assumed that Foster’s Beautiful Living magazine had started out as a hobby, a whim when Robert Foster was still alive—a self-published vanity magazine that the Foster family had originally used to show off the family’s unusual living style, showcase Corey’s exceptional photographic ability, and give Diana a chance to dabble at being a publisher when she graduated from college. Never, ever, would he have imagined that the magazine had been created out of financial necessity and daring, not boredom and unlimited wealth. Until that moment, he’d also assumed that Diana was probably Foster Enterprises’ figurehead, not its founder.
What astonished him most of all was that she’d undertaken the enormous risk and responsibility when she was only twenty-two. Twenty-two. He’d been the same age when he struck out on his own, but he’d already led a hard life by then; he was used to scandal and hardship and opposition. Diana, on the other hand, had always struck him as being delicate and sheltered and endearingly prim.
In the uneasy silence that occurred while the family came to terms with the second major shock of a decade, they seemed to have forgotten that Cole was there, and normally he would have preferred not to be. He knew he could put an end to the discussion by either excusing himself or politely reminding them that such personal family matters were better discussed with family and not outsiders. He had, in fact, perfected that tactic and used it often, whenever a woman he was seeing attempted to draw him into a discussion about her children, her parents, or her ex-husband and his family. Discussions among family members or about family members invariably made him feel like an alien being who had sprung from a rock in a cave and had spent his first two decades on some uninhabited planet.
His own youth hadn’t given him the slightest insight into normal family dynamics nor even a glimpse of how members of a loving family interacted.
Henry Britton finally spoke, his words springing from guilt and hurt. “Diana, you didn’t need to put yourself through all that for our sakes. We weren’t your dependents, after all. Your grandmother and mother and I could have gone back to Long Valley and lived as we used to live. Corey could have gone to college nights and worked for a photographer during the day.”
Cole expected Diana to indulge in some sort of righteous outburst at having her efforts and sacrifices treated as unnecessary, but although her voice was teary, she smiled softly and shook her head. “You don’t understand, Grandpa. I couldn’t let that happen without at least putting up a fight. Corey has a rare gift, but she had to have a chance to show it off, and she might never have gotten that chance if she’d had to support herself by taking candid wedding shots for some local photographer who’d take all the credit and pay her peanuts in return.”
Diana transferred her gaze to her mother and grandparents, and her voice grew heavy with emotion. “None of you realize how remarkably talented you are. You all have such amazing gifts that millions of people have fallen in love with you and everything you represent. The three of you still think of what you do as sort of a hobby, as ‘puttering’ in the gardens or in the workshop or in the kitchen, but it’s much more than that. You see beauty in simple things and show other people how to see it, too. You prove to people that there’s pleasure and harmony to be found in the creative act. You’ve reminded people that the job of a true hostess isn’t to show off her home or her possessions, but rather to make each and every one of her guests feel special and important. People watch you on television, working together and laughing together, and they believe in you.”
Diana’s voice shook with feeling as she added, “The four of you have made a real difference in the attitudes and priorities of a huge number of people—men and women, young and old. The politicians all talk about a return to traditional values and getting back to basics, but you have shown people a lovely, simple route that will take them there.”
Finished with every explanation and argument she could think of, she returned to the original reason for the meeting: “Whether or not you believe all that, you have to believe me when I tell you that Cole did not coerce me into marrying him. In my opinion, marrying him was the best of all possible alternatives, and I’m glad he trusted me enough to ask me. I know he’ll live up to his part of the bargain, and I intend to live up to mine.”
Diana sensed instinctively that the best thing to do for now was to let her family discuss the matter among themselves and come to terms with it. She looked at Cole and said, “We’d better go now.”
Still grappling with his surprise over Diana’s gentle but emphatic support of him in opposition to her family, Cole followed right behind her, but when they neared the doorway, Diana’s grandmother issued an invitation in the form of a gruff challenge: “Do you intend to at least stay for Sunday dinner, young man?”
Diana refused in an attempt to spare Cole any more of an ordeal. “Not today,” she said. “Another time, maybe,” but to her surprise, Cole turned to Gram with an equally challenging smile and said, “I wasn’t aware that I’d been invited.”
“You are now,” she announced.
Mary Foster seconded the invitation with quiet firmness. “Please have dinner with us.”
Henry made it unanimous, though his voice was gruff. “You haven’t had any of Rose’s cooking in a long time.”
“Thank you,” Cole said to all of them. He glanced at Corey, and he thought he saw in her eyes a tentative offer of friendship. “In that case, I’ll be happy to stay.”
Diana decided it was still best to take Cole outside so that her family could talk freely among themselves and come to terms with her unorthodox marriage. They had already begun to change their attitude in the living room and the proof was their invitation to Cole to stay for dinner. She had every reason to think that the meal would be a pleasant one for Cole, but since he had had no way of knowing that, she’d been both surprised and pleased when he accepted their invitation.
Chapter 34
OUT
SIDE, THE WORKTABLES AND EQUIPMENT had all been put away, and without their presence to distract the eye, the back lawn had been restored to its normal state of manicured, semitropical splendor.
Palm trees surrounded by fragrant gardenias leaned gracefully over chaise longues at poolside, their giant fronds rustling softly in the breeze. Stately clumps of crepe myrtle dripping with blossoms added dignified splashes of light pink and white, while the pink and red asters covered themselves in exuberant glory and the hibiscus bushes flaunted exotic flowers the size of salad plates in colors ranging from tangerine to yellow to red.
Since Diana knew that men were usually enthralled by her grandfather’s workshop, with its array of tools, equipment, millwork, and fine woods, she took Cole there first. He pretended to be interested in everything she showed him, but she could tell that he wasn’t, so she invited him to stroll through the greenhouse and then the cutting gardens tucked into the back corners of the lawn.
When he still seemed distracted, she decided that the scene in the living room had darkened his mood far more than he’d let show. In view of some of the things that had been said, she couldn’t blame him. Deciding to bring it out in the open, Diana stopped on the lawn near the pool. Leaning her shoulders against a palm’s smooth, thick trunk she said simply, “I’m sorry about what was said inside. Please try to make allowances for my grandfather’s age.”
“I did,” he said dryly.
“But you’re still embarrassed,” Diana surmised.
He shook his head. “I’m not embarrassed, Diana.”
“Are you angry?” she asked, studying his features for a clue.
“No.”
“Then what are you?”
“I’m impressed.”
“By what?” Diana asked, taken aback.
“By you,” he said solemnly.
She rolled her eyes in laughing disbelief. “For a man who’s impressed, you’ve been looking awfully grim.”
“Probably because it doesn’t happen very often, and I’m not used to the feeling.”
He was serious, Diana realized, and she was momentarily speechless with pleasure and surprise.
“By the way,” he added, “that isn’t my ‘grim’ look.”
“It isn’t?” she said, still glowing from the compliment. “What’s your ‘grim look’ like?”
“I don’t think you want to know.”
“Oh, go ahead. Let me see it—”
Cole was so unaccustomed to being treated with teasing impertinence that it startled a shout of laughter from him, and Diana thought there was a rusty quality to it.
“You haven’t asked me what about you impressed me. . . .”
She pretended to ponder that. “Well, I know it wasn’t Grandpa’s workshop. You called a beautiful piece of mahogany ‘a board.’ And I don’t think you know a hybrid rose from a hibiscus either.”
“You’re right on both counts. But I do know a little bit about business. I realized your magazine was a success, but I had no idea you’d managed to create national personalities out of your stepmother and her parents. At the very least, that’s an amazing feat!”
“I didn’t create personalities for them,” Diana said with a shake of her head and a wry, affectionate smile. “They were unique when I met them, and they haven’t changed a bit. They were forerunners of a coming trend.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“About a month after my father and stepmother were married, they took Corey and me to Long Valley, and I met my grandparents for the first time. Although I wasn’t familiar with the term at the time, they were the consummate ‘do-it-yourselfers.’ During the day, my grandfather was a surveyor for a town with a population of about seven thousand. But he spent his evenings and weekends in his garden, where he experimented with ways to grow the biggest and best flowers and vegetables in west Texas without resorting to chemical fertilizers or insecticides.
“When he wasn’t poring over seed catalogs or searching through books for new or ancient methods of controlling garden insects and diseases, he spent his time in the little workshop behind their house, where he built everything from dollhouses and scaled-down furniture for Corey, to wooden jewelry boxes and rocking chairs for my grandmother. I loved everything about my grandfather’s workshop, from the wood shavings on the floor to the smell of the wood stains he used. I remember on that first visit, I stepped on a little piece of wood about an inch square lying beside his workbench. I picked it up and started to toss it into a trash can beside his workbench. He laughed and stopped me and asked me why I wanted to throw away a kiss. I was fourteen at the time and although he was only in his late fifties, he seemed very old to me. So when he described a little chunk of soft wood as a kiss, I was horribly afraid that he was old and—” With her forefinger Diana made a circular motion near her ear, a child’s pantomime for crazy.
“But he wasn’t,” Cole ventured with a smile, enjoying her tale and the way the sun glistened in her hair and the way her eyes glowed when she spoke of the people she loved. She was part of America’s aristocracy, but there was a wholesomeness and gentleness about her that had always appealed to him—now more than ever, because he realized how rare that combination really was.
“No, he wasn’t crazy. He picked up a little carving knife and whittled it into a rounded triangle; then he reached on the shelf and tore off a piece of old silver foil. He wrapped it in the foil and dropped it into my palm. And there it was—a Hershey’s ‘kiss.’ One with no calories, he told me, laughing. There was a bowl of them, I later realized, on a coffee table in the living room.”
“How did your grandmother and mother fit into the picture?” Cole asked when Diana turned aside to study a large gardenia bush beside them.
She glanced at him, then returned her attention to the fragrant bush. “My mother worked as a secretary for a manufacturing company when my father met her, but she spent her free time as my grandmother did—cooking and canning and baking to her heart’s content.”
She snapped off a stem from the bush and turned back to him, her hands cupped around a mound of glossy, dark green leaves with one perfect blossom in the center that looked as soft and white as whipped cream.
“Go on,” Cole urged, watching her lift the blossom to her nose.
“My grandmother used the fruits and vegetables that my grandfather grew, and she experimented with recipes that had been handed down in her family from mother to daughter for generations. Every recipe had a name that conjured up friendly ancestors and bygone events along with wonderful tastes and delicious smells. There was Grandma Sarah’s three-bean salad and Great-grandmother Cornelia’s cherry cinnamon pie. There was harvest-moon cake and wheat-threshers ham biscuits.”
Ruefully, she admitted, “Until my first trip to Long Valley, I actually thought strawberries grew on trees and that ‘canned goods’ meant tin cans with labels on them that said Libby and Green Giant, and that the cans belonged out of sight in a pantry. You can imagine, then, how I reacted to the sight of bright yellow peaches in a glass jar with a label on it depicting a peach tree with a baby sitting beneath it on a blanket, framed in a border of peach blossoms and leaves. To me, it was more than wonderful, it was positively exotic.”
He eyed her with amused fascination. “Did you really believe strawberries grew on trees?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” she replied, batting her lashes in a comic imitation of a dopey femme fatale. “I thought chicken was created in a carton with plastic wrap. Actually,” she admitted sheepishly, “I still prefer to think of it that way”; then she finished her tale: “I thought my grandparents’ house was magical. When they came to live with us in Houston, our house began to change in the same wonderful ways, from the back lawn, which had only had a swimming pool and some palm trees when they got there, to the rooms in the house.”
Finished, she lifted her hands and offered the flower to him, cradling it in her palms as if it were a priceless treasure. “It’s exquisite, isn’t it?” s
he said softly.
You’re exquisite, Cole thought, and he shoved his hands into his pockets to avoid the temptation to cradle her hands in his and lift the flower to his face, and then see how her fingers would taste against his lips. Lack of control over his sexual urges had never been a problem for him. Neither had sentimentality, lack of concentration, or the urge to protect a member of the opposite sex beneath the age of sixty. Annoyed with himself for his unprecedented failings in all three of those areas in the last twenty-four hours, he said curtly, “And so you managed to create a market for their talent and philosophy. You were very clever.”
She looked a little taken aback by his brusque tone, but she shook her head and her voice remained soft yet firm. Like her body, Cole decided, and glowered at the tree trunk in self-disgust for the direction of his thoughts. “I didn’t need to create a market; it was already there and growing bigger each year, though no one seemed to recognize it at the time.”
“What do you mean the market was there and growing?”
“We live in a time when Americans are feeling more and more rootless and more separated from each other and their natural surroundings. We live in an impersonal world; we come home to huge subdivisions filled with near-identical houses that are filled with mass-produced everything, from furniture to accessories. Nothing seems to give us a sense of timelessness, of stability, of roots, of real self-expression. People feel a desire to personalize their immediate surroundings, even though they can’t personalize the world beyond. The Foster Ideal is about rediscovering the pleasure of, and depth of, one’s own creativity.”