"You will have noticed," Garrison's garish and acidic wife Margie-whose tongue was notoriously acidic-remarked, "that you keep seeing the same sour old faces wherever you go. You know why? There's only twenty important people left in New York, twenty-one now you're here, and we all go to the same parties and we all serve on the same committees. And we're all very, veryv bored with one another." She happened to make the remark while she and Rachel stood on a balcony looking down at a glittering throng of perhaps a thousand people. "Before you say anything," Margie went on, "it's all done with mirrors."
Inevitably on occasion a remark somebody would make would leave her feeling uncomfortable. Usually such remarks weren't directed at her, but at Mitchell, in her presence.
"Wherever did you find her?" somebody would say, meaning no conscious offense by the question but making Rachel feel like a purchase, and the questioner fully expected to go back to the same store and pick up one for themselves.
"They're just amazed at how lucky I am," Mitchell said, when she pointed out how objectionable she found that kind of observation. "They don't mean to be rude."
"I know."
"We can stop going to so many parties, if you like."
"No. I want to know all the people you know."
"Most of them are pretty boring."
"That's what Margie said."
"Are you two getting on well?"
"Oh yes. I love her. She's so outrageous."
"She's a terrible drunk," Mitchell said curtly. "She's been okay for the last couple of months, but she's still unpredictable."
"Was she always…?"
"An alcoholic?"
"Yes."
"Maybe I can help her," Rachel said.
He kissed her. "My Good Samaritan." He kissed her again. "You can try but I don't hold out much hope. She's got so many axes to grind. She doesn't like Loretta at all. And I don't think she likes me much."
Now it was Rachel who offered the kiss. "What's not to like?" she said.
Mitchell grinned: "Damned if I know," he said.
"You egotist."
"Me? No. You must be thinking of somebody else. I'm the humble one in the family."
"I don't think there's such a thing-"
"-as a humble Geary?"
"Right."
"Hm." Mitchell considered this for a moment. "Grandma Kitty was the nearest, I guess."
"And you liked her?"
"Yeah," Mitchell said, the warmth of his affection there in his voice. "She was sweet. A little crazy toward the end, but sweet."
"And Loretta?"
"She's not crazy. She's the sanest one in the family."
"No, I meant, do you like her?"
Mitchell shrugged. "Loretta's Loretta. She's like a force of nature."
Rachel had met Loretta only two or three times so far: this was not the way the woman seemed at all. Quite the contrary. She'd seemed rather reserved, even demure, an impression supported by the fact that she always dressed in white or silvery gray. The only theatrical touch was the turbanish headgear she favored, and the immaculate precision of her makeup, which emphasized the startling violet of her eyes. She'd been pleasant to Rachel, in a gentle, noncommittal sort of way.
"I know what you're thinking," Mitchell said. "You're thinking: Loretta's just an old-fashioned lady. And she is. But you try crossing her-"
"What happens?"
"It's like I said: she's a force of nature. Especially anything to do with Cadmus. I mean, if anyone in the family says anything against him and she hears about it she tears out their throats. 'You wouldn't have two cents to rub together without him,' she says. And she's right. We wouldn't. This family would have gone down without him."
"So what happens when he dies?"
"He isn't going to die," Mitchell said, without a trace of irony in his voice. "He's going to go on and on and on till one of us drives him out to Long Island. Sorry. That was in bad taste."
"Do you think about that a lot?"
"What happened to Dad? No. I don't think about it at all. Except when some book comes out, you know, saying it was the Mafia or the CIA. I get in a funk about that stuff. But we're never going to really know what happened, so what's the use of thinking about it?" He stroked a stray hair back from Rachel's brow. "You don't need to worry about any of this," he said. "If the old man dies tomorrow we'll divide up the pie-some for Garrison, some for Lor-etta, some for us. Then you and me… we'll just disappear. We'll get on a plane and we'll fly away."
"We could do that now if you want to," Rachel said. "I don't need the family, and I certainly don't need to live the high life. I just need you."
He sighed; a deep, troubled sigh. "Ah. But where does the family end and Mitchell begin? That's the question."
"I know who you are," Rachel said, drawing close to him. "You're the man I love. Plain and simple."
Of course it wasn't that plain and it wasn't that simple.
Rachel had entered a small and unenviable coterie: that group of people whose private lives were deemed publicly owned. America wanted to know about the woman who had stolen Mitchell Geary's heart, especially as she'd been an ordinary creature so very recently. Now she was transformed. The evidence was there in the pages of the glossies and the weekly gossip rags: Rachel Pallenberg dressed in gowns a year's salary would not have bought her six months before, her smile that of a woman happy beyond her wildest dreams. Happiness like that couldn't be celebrated for very long; it soon lost its appeal. The same readers who were entranced by the rags-to-riches story in February and March, and astonished by the way the shop girl had been made into a princess in April and May, and a little tearful about the announcement of an autumn wedding when it was made in June, wanted the dirt by July.
What was she really like, this thief who'd run off with Prince Mitchell's eligibility? She wouldn't be as picture-perfect as she seemed; nobody was that pleasant. She had secrets; no doubt. Once the wedding was announced, the investigators went to work. Before Rachel Pallenberg got into her white dress and became Rachel Geary, they were going to find something scandalous to tell, even if they had to turn over every rock in Ohio to do it.
Mitchell wasn't immune from the same zealous muckraking. Old stories about his various liaisons resurfaced in tarted-up forms. His short affair with the drug-addicted daughter of a congressman; his various trips around the Aegean with a small harem of Parisian models; his apparently passionate attachment to Natasha Morley, who'd lately married minor European royalty, and (according to some sources) broken his heart by so doing. One of the sleazier rags even managed to find a classmate from Harvard who claimed that Mitchell's taste for girls ran to the barely pubescent. "If there's grass on the field, play ball, that's what he used to say," the "classmate" remembered.
Just in case Rachel was tempted to take any of this to heart, Margie brought over a stack of magazines that her housekeeper, Magdalene, had hoarded from the early years of Margie's life with Garrison, all of which contained stories filled with similar vitriol. The two women were in almost every way dissimilar: Rachel petite and stylish, reserved in her manner; Margie big-boned, overdressed, and voluble. Yet they were like sisters in this storm.
"I was really upset at the time," Margie said. "But I've begun to wish ten percent of what they were saying about Garrison was true. He'd be a damn sight more interesting."
"If it's all lies, why doesn't somebody sue them?" Rachel said.
Margie offered a fatalistic shrug. "If it wasn't us it'd be some other poor sonofabitch. Anyway, if they stopped writing this shit I might have to go back to reading books." She gave a theatrical shudder.