He had been cunning. No one in the family had suspected what was going on for six solid months — six months during which Max had taken the bitch out to dinner, given her expensive gifts, handed her the contract for the dismally plain dust jackets C.U.P. wrapped around its works. Val had noticed the signs, but not divined the cause. The dust jackets had brightened up, but in an inoffensive way — their coloring, the lettering, a subtly more modern feel — and Max had been open about the source: Imaginexa, the new design firm on the Boston Post Road not a half mile away. That Max himself had smartened up his appearance and was having the outside of his house painted seemed natural, logical; after all, he was fifty-eight years old, due for a sprucing up.
Emily hadn’t worried about Ivan’s inheritance in many years. Once Martita vanished together with her son, Emily had known it would all come eventually to Ivan, as it should. Who else was left, who deserved to inherit more than Ivan? He had worked very hard to impress Uncle Max, done as he was told, moulded himself in Max’s image. And pleased Max, who may have mourned his lack of a son, but knew Tunbull Printing was in safe hands under Ivan.
Until Davina Savovich, the model from New York City who filled Max with grandiose ideas about his importance to C.U.P. What other printer in Connecticut could cope with the demands of a university press, with its strange publications and limited print runs?
At the end of their secret six months, Max and Davina had married; no one was present to raise objections. Instead, the marriage had broken over Emily, Val and Ivan like a half-frozen Niagara Falls. Silly old goat Max had married a woman nearly one-third his age, and when her belly began to swell, Emily for one knew her life’s purpose was shattered. Yes, naturally the bitch had littered a son! Alexis, yet! Davina was nutty about the Russian czars, insisted on calling her offspring by a Russian name. And old goat Max had consented, as he consented to everything Davina suggested, even insanities like huge, unauthorized print runs. Now it became obvious why Max had painted the exterior of his house: it was waiting for its new mistress to put her touch on its interior — bizarre shapes and colors and patterns, homage to an obscure master named Paul Klee.
Ivan was such a good boy. Never a trouble, never a worry. In high school he had expressed a wish to become a pilot, but when Val explained his position as Max’s heir, he had given up every youthful aspiration, gone to U Conn for a degree in precision engineering, and joined the printery. His choice of bride was perhaps more down-market than Emily for one would have liked, but Lily turned out to be a dear little thing. If her origins showed in her grammar, that was bearable compared to Max’s choice of a wife, thought Emily, still boiling as she trod up the path to the front door. Choice in wives, for that matter. Martita had been too stuck up to fraternise with any of the family, now here was Davina trying to tell the family with whom to fraternise! A loathsome bitch, so sure of herself, so sure of Max … Time to unsettle her …
Emily rang the stupid doorbell with its stupid tune, and was thrown completely off balance when Davina answered the door herself — where was horrible Uda? And dressed, yet! No satin nighties and negligées? Emily was even gladder that she had “dressed” to visit her sister-in-law, who was staring at her.
It was a long time since Waterbury, and Emily Tunbull had learned, as you had to when your men mixed with really important people in the course of their business. The Pollack social climber had learned so well that she hardly ever remembered her maiden name had been Malcuzinski. So she was slim and attractive in a late-forties way, attended the beauty parlor once a week for hair styling and manicure, and shopped for dresses during sales in superior stores. Today she was wearing a well-tailored, darkish blue dress, and the shoes she slipped on her feet once divested of her boots were dark blue Italian kid. A sapphire-and-diamond brooch sat on one lower shoulder. As a young woman she had been ravishingly pretty, but that never lasts; her features had set into a handsome, rather masculine mould, and she wore her crisp dark hair short, expertly cut. Her eyes were dark and very busy: Emily Tunbull missed nothing. As she was about to let Davina know in the sweetest possible way.
“Where’s Uda?” she asked, perching in a chair.
“Doing something for me in the kitchen.”
“How is Alexis?”
“In perfect health.”
“That’s not really what one means when one enquires after a baby,” said Emily, watching Davina light a Sobranie Cocktail cigarette; it was wrapped in green paper.
The thin black brows rose. “La-de-da! What else could you mean, Emily?”