Deadly Beloved(6)
“Well, Evelyn,” he said, sitting down in one of the breakfast nook chairs, “are we going to find any surprises on the scale today?”
Evelyn suddenly thought of Patsy MacLaren Willis, out in her driveway with all those clothes. There had never been a divorce in Fox Run Hill as far as Evelyn knew. It was the kind of place men moved with their second wives. Still, she thought, there was a first time for everything.
3.
MOLLY BRACKEN WOULD HAVE been divorced years ago if her husband Joey had had anything to say about it, except for the fact that Molly was the one who happened to have all the money. It wasn’t serious money, the way money is judged serious in a place like New York—not enough to go into real estate deals with Donald Trump or to try a hostile takeover of IBM. It wasn’t old money the way Philadelphia liked old money either. Neither Molly nor her family knew of any ancestors who had come over to America on the Mayflower. One of Molly’s grandfathers had been a shoemaker and the other had worked in the steel mills in Bethlehem until he’d had an early heart attack at the age of thirty-six. Molly’s money came from her father, who was that horror of horrors to progressive people everywhere, a commercial contractor. He had put up tracts of houses in every town on the Main Line and finally he had put up this tract of houses, Fox Run Hill. The elegant Victorian had been Molly’s wedding present from him, complete with four round turrets and a wraparound porch big enough to hold a high school graduation on. There was even a tower room in one of the turrets, reached by a hidden staircase, with leaded stained glass in the curved windows. Everything about this house was perfect, exactly the way Molly had imagined it would be, back when she was still in grade school and cutting fantasies out of bridal magazines. These days, Molly had heard, girls weren’t allowed to do that kind of thing. They had to be serious about their schoolwork and ambitious for careers. They had to want to be doctors and lawyers and Indian chiefs instead of chatelaines. Molly sometimes wondered what happened to those girls. She was forty-eight years old, and all the women she knew who were doctors and lawyers and Indian chiefs were both drab and divorced, as if the two things went together. They were drab because their clothes always seemed to hang wrong and they never wore enough makeup. They were divorced, Molly thought, because they could never just relax and talk about the weather. They had to discuss stocks and bonds, or the Clinton health care plan, or their feelings.
Molly’s feelings ran mostly to self-satisfaction. In the kitchen of the elegant Victorian, in the circle of light cast by the sunroom windows, she finished reading the women’s page of the Philadelphia Inquirer and put her head up to listen for sounds of Joey getting ready for work. It was ten minutes to nine, but that didn’t matter much. Joey worked in the customer service department of a bank on the edge of Philadelphia. He wasn’t usually expected in until nine-thirty. Molly smoothed the paper out under her fingers and then reached for the coffee pitcher on the trivet in the middle of the table. On the whole, it was shaping up to be a very good day. The weather was going to be bright and hot, Molly’s favorite kind. The newspaper had been full of the kind of news she loved best, what with Princess Di having a new lover and Cher rumored to be hidden away in a plastic surgery clinic somewhere. Even the book section had been a blessing, because the book reviewed there was a novel by Judith Krantz, whom Molly not only read and liked, but understood. Sometimes the book review section caused her trouble because, unlike most of the other women at Fox Run Hill, Molly had never been to college. If the book of the day was something philosophical or historical, Molly would be forced to sit quietly all through lunch at the club, just so she wouldn’t say anything stupid that would make them laugh at her.
Molly heard the door of the master bedroom suite opening and closing. She nodded to herself with unconscious satisfaction and patted at her hair. Her hair was the same bright blond it had been when she was in high school. She used the same home dye product now that she had used then. What she was really proud of was her figure, which was still a size six. Part of that was diet. Part of that was exercise. Part of that was abortions. Molly had had her first abortion at fifteen, illegally, at a terrible place in New York that Joey had known about from the cousin of a friend of his. She’d had her latest at a polished steel and bright-tiled clinic in Philadelphia, just two and a half weeks ago. She had had eight abortions in all, and if she had to, she would have eight more. Children could ruin your life. Her mother had told her so. Besides, she could see it, all around her, the way children ate up their parents and never gave anything back. Fathers made out all right. They escaped to their offices and their poker games. Mothers were devoured whole and spit back dead. Molly didn’t think she had ever hated anyone as much as she hated her mother.