Paradise Read online

  Meredith couldn’t go, not now, when the doctor wanted to see her every week, and she wasn’t supposed to walk around more than a little. She couldn’t go and she didn’t want to scare Matt by telling him the doctor thought she might be on the verge of losing the baby. On the other hand, she was so angry with him for not writing, and so frightened for the baby, she decided to scare him anyway. “I can’t come down,” she said. “The doctor wants me to stay home and not move around very much.”

  “How odd,” he shot back. “Sommers was down here last week and he told me you and your friend, Lisa, were at Glenmoor dazzling all the men in the lounge.”

  “That was before the doctor told me to stay home.”

  “I see.”

  “What do you expect me to do,” Meredith shot back with rare sarcasm, “hang around here day after day and wait for your occasional letters?”

  “You might give that a try,” he snapped. “By the way, you’re not much of a correspondent.”

  Meredith took that to be a criticism of her letter-writing style, and she was so furious that she almost hung up.

  “I gather you don’t have anything else to say?”

  “Not much.”

  When they hung up, Matt leaned his hand against the wall beside the phone and closed his eyes, trying to block out the phone call and the agony of what was happening. He’d been gone three months, and Meredith no longer wanted to come to South America. She hadn’t written him in weeks; she was already resuming her old social life and then lying to him about being home in bed. She was only eighteen, he reminded himself bitterly. Why wouldn’t she want a social life? “Shit!” he whispered in helpless futility, but after a few minutes he straightened with resolve. In a few months things at the drilling site would be under better control, and he’d insist that they give him four days off so that he could fly home and see her. Meredith wanted him and she wanted to be married to him; no matter how few letters she wrote or what she did, he knew in his heart that was still true. He’d fly home, and when they were together, he’d be able to talk her into coming back with him.

  Meredith hung up the phone, flung herself across the bed, and cried her eyes out. When he’d told her about the house he’d found, he certainly hadn’t tried to make it sound nice, and he hadn’t acted like he particularly cared whether she came or not. When she finished, she dried her eyes and wrote him a long letter apologizing for being a “bad correspondent.” She apologized for losing her temper and, surrendering all her pride, she told him how much his letters meant to her. She explained in great detail what the doctor had told her.

  When she finished, she carried the letter downstairs and left it for Albert to mail. She’d already given up hovering by the mailbox out at the road, waiting for letters from Matt that never came. Albert, who served as butler-chauffeur and maintenance man, walked in right then with a dustcloth in his hand. Mrs. Ellis had taken three months off for her first vacation in years, and he’d reluctantly assumed some of her tasks too. “Would you please mail this for me, Albert?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he said. When she left, Albert took the letter down the hall to Mr. Bancroft’s study, unlocked an antique secretary, and tossed that letter on top of all the others, half of which were postmarked from Venezuela.

  Meredith went upstairs to her bedroom and was halfway to the chair at her desk when the hemorrhaging started.

  She spent two days in the Bancroft wing of Cedar Hills Hospital, a wing named after her family in honor of their huge endowments, praying the bleeding wouldn’t start again and that Matt would miraculously decide to come home. She wanted her baby and she wanted her husband, and she had a terrible feeling she was losing both.

  When Dr. Arledge released her from the hospital, it was on condition that she remain in bed for the duration of her pregnancy. As soon as she came home, Meredith wrote Matt a letter that not only informed him she was in danger of losing their baby, but that was, moreover, meant to scare him into worrying about her. She was ready to do almost anything to stay on his mind.

  Complete bedrest seemed to solve the problem of impending miscarriage, but with nothing to do but read or watch television or worry, Meredith had ample time to reflect on painful reality: Matt had obviously found her a convenient bed partner, and now that they were apart, he had found her completely forgettable. She started thinking about the best ways to raise her baby alone.

  That was one problem she had worried about needlessly. At the end of her fifth month, in the middle of the night, Meredith hemorrhaged. This time none of the skills known to medical science were able to save the baby girl whom Meredith named Elizabeth in honor of Matt’s mother. They nearly failed to save Meredith, who remained in critical condition for three days.

  For a week after that she lay in bed with tubes running into her veins, listening anxiously for the sound of Matt’s long, quick strides in the corridor. Her father had tried to call him, and when he couldn’t get through, he’d sent him a telegram.

  Matt didn’t come. He didn’t call.

  During her second week in the hospital, however, he answered her telegram with one of his own. It was short, direct and lethal:

  A DIVORCE IS AN EXCELLENT IDEA. GET ONE.

  Meredith was so emotionally battered by those eight words that she refused to believe he was capable of sending a telegram like that—not when she was in the hospital. “Lisa,” she’d wept hysterically, “he’d have to hate me before he’d do this to me, and I haven’t done anything to make Matt hate me! He didn’t send that telegram—he didn’t! He couldn’t!” She talked Lisa into putting on another performance for the benefit of the staff at Western Union in order to find out who sent it. Western Union reluctantly provided the information that the telegram had indeed been sent by Matthew Farrell from Venezuela and charged to his credit card.

  On a cold December day Meredith emerged from the hospital with Lisa walking on one side of her and her father on the other. She looked up at the bright blue sky, and it looked different, alien. The whole world seemed alien.

  At her father’s insistence, she enrolled for the winter semester at Northwestern and arranged to share a room with Lisa. She did it because they seemed to want her to, but in time, she remembered why it had once meant so much to her. She remembered other things too—like how to smile, and then how to laugh. Her doctor warned her that any future pregnancy would carry an even greater risk to her baby and herself. The thought of being childless had hurt terribly, but somehow she coped with that too.

  Life had dealt her several major blows, but she had survived them and, in doing so, she found in herself an inner strength she didn’t know she possessed.

  Her father hired an attorney who handled the divorce. From Matt she heard nothing, but she finally reached the point where she could think of him without pain or animosity. He had obviously married her because she was pregnant and because he was greedy. When he realized that her father had complete control of her money, he simply had no further use for her. In time, she stopped blaming him. Her reasons for marrying him had not been unselfish either; she had gotten pregnant and been afraid to face the consequences alone. And even though she had thought she loved him, he had never deceived her by claiming to love her—she had deceived herself into believing he did. They had married each other for all the wrong reasons, and the marriage had been doomed from the start.

  During her junior year she saw Jonathan Sommers at Glenmoor. He told her his father had liked an idea of Matt’s so well that he’d formed a limited partnership with him and put up the additional capital for the venture.

  That venture paid off. In the eleven years that followed, a great many more of Matt’s ventures also paid off. Articles about him and pictures of him appeared frequently in magazines and newspapers. Meredith saw them, but she was busy with her own career, and it no longer mattered what he did. It mattered to the press though. As year faded into year, the press became increasingly obsessed with his flamboyant corporate successes and