Adam's Daughter Part 17

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE.

It had been an aberration. That one moment of lucidity was gone as quickly as it had come, and Elizabeth slipped back into her twilight world.

During the next three days, she awoke only once and began to call out unintelligible words and nonsensical sentences. Adam stood outside her closed door with his eyes closed, listening to her rantings and the gentle ministrations of the nurse.

Late one night when Adam went downstairs, he saw Kellen sitting on the sofa in her white bathrobe, staring at nothing. He was exhausted and his first instinct was to call Hildie to take her up to bed, but he knew he had waited far too long to face Kellen. He went over and sat down next to her. Her face was tear-streaked but her eyes were dry.

"Are you all right, Lil'bit?" he asked.

She just sat there without looking at him.

"I think we should have a talk."

"About Mommy," Kellen said flatly.

"Yes."

Finally, Kellen turned to meet his eyes. "She's going to die, isn't she."

Adam felt the last breath of energy leave his body. He nodded numbly.

Kellen stared at him, unblinking. "Why can't I see her?" she asked.

"Kellen, she --"

There was a sound in the foyer, and they both turned. Elizabeth was standing on the bottom step, holding onto the bal.u.s.trade to steady herself, her bare feet visible beneath her white nightgown. Her hair was a tangle around her white face, and her eyes were wide with fright as they darted around the foyer. She seemed to be desperately looking for something, and finally her gaze fell beseechingly on Adam and Kellen, who both sat in frozen shock.

"Elizabeth," Adam whispered, rising.

She stared at him. Her mouth moved, as if she wanted to say something but she couldn't. Tears began to fall down her cheeks.

"I'm scared," she whispered.

Before Adam could move, Kellen swept by him and went to Elizabeth's side. Elizabeth stared at her blankly but Kellen didn't seem to notice that her mother didn't recognize her.

"I'll help you back upstairs, Mommy," she said.

Elizabeth pulled back slightly but Kellen took her hand. "Once there was a little girl who was afraid to go to bed," Kellen said softly, pointing to the carved frowning face in the bal.u.s.trade. "And her face looked like this. An evil fairy came along one day and turned her into wood."

Elizabeth's eyes were still wide with fear, but she was listening to Kellen's small voice. Adam hung back, waiting.

"But then the good fairy came along and told the girl she could break the spell if she'd smile and be brave..."

Somehow, Kellen had turned Elizabeth around and was very slowly leading her by the hand back up the stairs. "So the girl smiled, and she started floating up the stairs."

They had reached the first landing, and Adam stood below, unable to move. Finally, the nurse appeared and helped Kellen take Elizabeth up the rest of the way. Adam watched them until the three of them were nothing but slowly retreating white blurs, misshapen by his tears.

It was late the same night when Josh rang the bell of the mansion. No one answered but the door was unlocked, so he let himself in. The foyer was dark, as was the rest of the house, and it was eerily quiet.

The study door was ajar and Josh went to it, pus.h.i.+ng it open. The room was dark, except for the moonlight streaming through one window near the desk. He saw someone sitting behind it.

"Adam?"

"Come in, Josh."

Josh went slowly to the desk. He paused, staring at Adam's motionless form slumped in the chair. He reached over to switch on the lamp.

"No, leave it off, please."

"I got here as soon as I could," Josh said, sitting down. "Where is everyone?"

"I dismissed the nurse and the rest of staff for the night. Kellen's spending the night at a friend's."

Josh waited, but Adam did not move. "What is it, Adam? Is it Elizabeth? What's wrong?"

Adam looked up, his eyes glistening in the moonlight. "I need your help," he said.

Elizabeth died the next morning, two days before her forty-second birthday. Adam made quick arrangements for a simple funeral. Kellen sat by Adam's side during the service, clinging to Hildie's hand. Ian came home for two days then returned to college. In the Times, there was a small sedate obituary that Adam had ordered be underplayed. In contrast, the Journal ran a long prominent story, playing to the gossip that had surrounded Elizabeth's illness for the past six months. The life and death of Elizabeth Ingram Bryant was a story tailor-made to inflame the imaginations of readers, rich and poor. It had all the elements -- money, glamour, madness, and mystery. Adam read the Journal story with a strange dispa.s.sion that concerned Josh.

"That ought to sell a few papers for that b.a.s.t.a.r.d Capen," Adam said.

Josh watched Adam carefully, looking for signs of a breakdown but there were none. Adam had remained calm and dry-eyed throughout the funeral and its aftermath. It worried Josh at first but then he realized that Adam was handling his grief as he did most things, in a private and orderly manner. But Adam had changed, as if a light had been extinguished inside him.

It was reflected in his appearance. His face had grown sharp from his weight loss, and a new short beard intensified the look of severity. His entire manner seemed stiffly precarious, like an oak tree after a storm, still upright but with its roots unloosed and exposed.

Adam spoke to Josh about Elizabeth only once. A week after the funeral, he called Josh to the study and handed him a cigar box. "I bought this two months ago," Adam said, "for her birthday. Just put it away somewhere. Josh."

Josh opened the box and saw a large unset sapphire lying atop some old photographs. The three-jeweled necklace that Elizabeth had so loved was also in the box, and Josh understood that the sapphire was meant to represent Adam's fourth newspaper. Josh put the box in a bank vault.

A week later, Adam hired a housekeeper to oversee the staff. She was a cool efficient woman who immediately set out to restore the order that had been lost during Elizabeth's illness. Dinners were again served at seven, with candles and silver service. Flowers reappeared throughout the house. The staff was snapped out of its lethargy. A forced sense of normalcy returned to the house on Divisadero.

To impose order on his own life, Adam turned to the newspapers. He didn't want to go back to the office yet so Josh brought his work to him, encouraged by the fact that he was showing interest again in the neglected newspapers.

But he wished Adam would do the same for Kellen. Elizabeth's death had left the child floundering. She had been brave during the funeral but now she felt abandoned, and no amount of comfort from Hildie could fill the gap. Josh asked Stephen to keep an eye on Kellen.

Stephen took his new responsibility seriously, listening to her when she needed to talk, holding her hand when she cried. They talked often about death, about why people had to die, where they went afterward. Stephen had always put his trust in books so he looked there for his answers as to how to comfort Kellen.

He had recently been reading about the mystic cabalistic Jews, whose writings taught about reincarnation, and he suggested to Kellen, in the simplest terms, that Elizabeth's spirit could live again someday.

Kellen, too young to recognize this was at odds with her Catholic instruction, was comforted. She still mourned for her mother but slowly she began to come to grips with her death.

But she had become angry at her father.

"I hate him," Kellen told Stephen one day, about two months after the funeral.

Stephen knew she was just hurt because Adam was ignoring her. "You don't really hate him," he said gently. "He's your father."

Kellen's eyes filled with tears. "Why is he acting like this, Stephen? Why can't he be like he used to? Why can't everything be like it used to?"

But for all he had read in books, Stephen had no answers for that.

CHAPTER THIRTY.

Three months after Elizabeth's death, another story about her appeared in the Journal. It began: "Socialite Elizabeth Ingram Bryant died under mysterious circ.u.mstances involving her husband, Adam Bryant, publisher of the San Francisco Times, the Journal has learned exclusively."

The story quoted some of Elizabeth's friends who said they had noticed changes in Elizabeth's behavior and that she had been taking drugs. One unnamed source suggested that the Bryants were having marital problems.

Most d.a.m.ning, however, was the quote by an unnamed doctor who said he believed Mrs. Bryant's severe depression resulted from an untreated infection and speculated that Adam's refusal to keep his wife in the hospital had jeopardized her health and chance for recovery.

The story also pointed out that most of the Bryant newspapers and properties were owned solely by Elizabeth, and even quoted Charles Ingram's lawyer, explaining how the trusts of Elizabeth's two inheritances had been set up to prevent Adam from accessing her fortune.

Enraged, Adam called Josh. "I want that f.u.c.king b.a.s.t.a.r.d Capen sued. This is nothing but conjecture and gossip. Not one source in this story is named. No one had the guts to go on record."

"It sounds like they've stayed just this side of libel," Josh said. "You might be best to ignore it. People forget easily. You won't have to worry about it in the long run."

"I don't care about me!" Adam said. "I don't want her dragged down like this."

"I'll file the suit," Josh said.

Two days later, another story appeared in the Journal. This time, a source did go on record: Elizabeth's attending nurse said that on the night before Elizabeth died, Adam had acted strangely and had ordered her to leave the house just before midnight. The police launched an investigation and the body was exhumed, despite Josh's legal attempts to stop it. The results of the autopsy were dutifully reported in the Journal. Elizabeth Bryant had died of heart failure, probably brought on by a potent mixture of several narcotics.

Adam endured a police investigation. He would face a manslaughter charge if he could be implicated for negligence, for allowing Elizabeth's death. But the conclusion was that the drug overdose was probably accidental, given the great number of conflicting diagnoses and treatments Elizabeth had received.

Adam was not charged, but the episode left him devastated. To escape the publicity, he went to the house in Carmel alone. While there, he received a call from Josh.

"It's not over," Josh told him. "The Journal's got a copy of the codicil."

"But how?"

"I don't know, someone in my office, maybe. All I know is their reporter just called me and asked if I'd comment on Elizabeth's will."

"I'll be back as soon as I can." Adam hung up the phone. He stared out at the beach. He knew that tomorrow morning there would be another story in the Journal that would refuel the fire of gossip. It would say that three weeks before her death, Elizabeth Bryant had signed a codicil to her original will, which had been drawn up by her father before his own death. The codicil, prepared by Josh Hillman, named Adam Bryant sole beneficiary of her fortune and her newspaper holdings, to the exclusion of Elizabeth's sister. Through a legal loophole, it also circ.u.mvented the wishes of the trustees who had overseen the holdings Elizabeth had inherited from Willis Foster Reed. The codicil left Adam the sole heir of a fortune estimated at two hundred million dollars.

The next day, the story appeared as expected. It traced Adam's life from his penniless childhood to his rise through the Times via marriage to Lilith Bickford. It described his hasty divorce and remarriage to an heiress and her purchase on his behalf of four newspapers and other holdings. It recounted her illness and death, noting that she had changed her will only weeks before her death.

The story, Josh told Adam, was not actually libelous. But it cleverly implied that Adam Bryant had somehow, by design or negligence, engineered his own wife's death.

The publicity began anew, but this time it grew beyond the front page of the Journal and the tasteful obits that had run in Atlanta and New York. Phone calls from newspapers all over the world flooded the house. Reporters and photographers camped outside the door. Adam refused to comment and ordered his own newspapers to ignore the story.

Ian returned home unexpectedly, saying the publicity in the East made his life impossible. At school, Kellen was taunted by cla.s.smates who called her father a murderer. Adam pulled her out of school and sent her to stay with Josh and Anna.

Two months dragged by, and very slowly the furor began to die down. The phone calls trickled to a few and then finally stopped as other stories grabbed the headlines: Eisenhower was nominated for president. The Americans outscored the Soviets at the Helsinki Olympics. And in southern California, the second strongest earthquake in the state's history killed eleven people. The story of Elizabeth and Adam Bryant had finally ceased to be news.

In October, Adam returned to the office for the first time since Elizabeth's death. He walked through the newsroom, head high, and paused by the city desk to make a brief announcement.

Everyone eyed him curiously. The publisher they remembered was a gregarious man who would come down to the newsroom with his s.h.i.+rt sleeves rolled up when a good story was breaking, or swoop in late at night in a tuxedo with Elizabeth at his side to check on a story.

This was not the same man. This thin man in a gray suit, a salt-and-pepper beard blunting his unsmiling face, was a stranger.

"I wanted to tell you all how good it is to be back," Adam said. "I know my absence had created some difficulties for you." He paused. "It's been a difficult time all around. But the Times is a great newspaper. It will always be, thanks to the hard work and devotion of people like you." He surveyed the room, thanked his employees, and went upstairs to his office.

Adam resumed his role as head of the Times Corporation with fierce energy. But his manner had turned brusque. He was impatient, even intolerant if business did not progress on schedule. At home, it was the same. Adam stayed in his study working, and treated the servants with indifference.

When Ian announced he was returning to school, Adam managed only a cool good-bye. And he continued to ignore Kellen. Hildie confided to Josh that Kellen was having problems in school and that Adam refused to listen.

But when Josh broached the subject with Adam, he was rebuffed. Josh persisted, and finally Adam exploded.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n it, Jos.h.!.+" Adam said. "I can't run this corporation and play nursemaid to a willful preteen girl!"

"Adam, listen --"

"I've been working my a.s.s off to get things running smoothly again at the paper. And I've almost got this guy up in Oregon where I want him on the price of his newspaper. Not now, Josh, please. I've got too much on my mind."

"Kellen's having problems at school, Adam," Josh said. "Her grades have slipped. She's getting into fights."

"It's that school," Adam answered. "All she needs is a structured atmosphere, away from here."

"Away?"

"She's had her head filled with all those stories. It's no wonder she's having problems." Adam paused. "She'd do better in a boarding school."

"Adam, for G.o.d's sake, don't send her away," Josh said.

"It's my decision, and I've made it. It's for the best, Josh," Adam said.

A week later, Kellen stood in the foyer, dressed in a new coat and hat, staring at the car that would take her to Monterey, where Adam had enrolled her in the Santa Catalina School for Girls. Stephen and Josh stood at her side and they all watched in silence as the chauffeur loaded the suitcases into the trunk.

Kellen stood there stoically. She had done all her crying three days ago when Hildie had first told her she was being sent away. Those were not the words Hildie had used; she told Kellen she was going off to a fine school to get the best education, just like Ian did at Princeton.

But Kellen knew the truth. Her father didn't want any part of her. He had not even bothered to tell her himself, he had just gone off to Oregon and had come back just last night. He was sending her away, punis.h.i.+ng her, and she didn't know why.

Josh stepped forward to give her a hug. "Thanksgiving's only a month away. We'll see you then," he said. He moved away so she could be alone with Stephen.

"You better write to me, Squirt," Stephen said.

Kellen stared at the car, her chin trembling.

"Listen," Stephen said. "Pretty soon I'll have my driver's permit. I can drive down to visit, with my dad, of course."