be there early tomorrow, and we can talk to Carrie before school. I was planning on coming down for Pooh's birthday, anyway.” Just not before the day's filming was over, he thought. “Allen will schedule this thing for eleven. Okay?”
What could she say? No, I won't. No, I want to remain completely anonymous. I want our daughter to continue to exist in an insulated world. Stop the
He was there by seven, driven over from the airport after an all-night session of editing. He was losing two more days, and Allen kept reminding him of the costs. But if he seemed remarkably composed for a bone-weary man it was because he was pleased to announce to the world he had a daughter he loved, and was eager to tell the media of his marriage plans.
Carrie was calmer than either of her parents over breakfast when Molly nervously said, “We have something rather unusual to tell you, darling.”
“I figured Carey was here this early for something, Mom,” she said, leaning her chin into her cupped palm and watching Carey spoon the seventh measure of sugar into his coffee cup. “That's seven,” she noted with a cheerful grin.
He looked up like a man waking from a dream, gazed into his cup, and pushed it away.
“Would you like a fresh cup?” Molly asked.
He shook his head, but noticed how her hands were clenched, white-fingered, in her lap. They were both scared by this placid little girl with her perfect chin cupped in her hands and her large, dark eyes moving slowly from one to the other.
“Would you mind missing school today?” Molly said after a fortifying breath to still the pounding of her heart.
“Are we going somewhere?”
“Well… no… but, well-” At a loss for words, she turned to Carey in appeal.
“Is it all right if I tell her?” he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he began, “I knew your mother years ago before you were born… and I loved her very much.” He stopped for a moment, his dark eyes tender as he glanced at Molly, and his voice took on a note of poignancy. “But sometimes things don't always work out.”
“So Mom married Dad.”
“Yes, she did.”
“I shouldn't have,” Molly said softly.
“And that's why you got a divorce. Mom and Dad always argued,” Carrie explained to the pale-haired man, dressed for a boardroom meeting, sleek and sophisticated at seven in the morning. “Did you get married, too?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Carey said. “For a while.”
“And you divorced, too.”
He nodded his head.
“Just like
Molly smiled ruefully. “We're not shocking her sensibilities.”
“Mom, you're more easily shocked than I am.” It was said with the authority of eight years experience in the world, and her own special brand of assurance.
“Well, sweetheart,” Carey went on, a small smile responding to her artless competence, “what we have to tell you
“Can I tell Lucy about it?”
Molly instinctively began to say no, until she recalled the reason for this conversation. After tomorrow the entire world would know-Lucy included. “If you want to, it's fine,” she said.
There was a lengthening silence, until Carey finally said very quietly, “Bart isn't your father. I am.”
She sat upright, her placid pose abruptly altered as she looked at her mother for confirmation. When Molly nodded, her gaze traveled to Carey. “Bart isn't my father?”
Molly expected confused questions like: Why didn't you tell me? What does Bart have to say about that? How will it change things? Why did you wait so long?
“Carey's my father?”
She nodded again.
“You're my father?”
“Yes,” Carey said, his heart thudding against his ribs, never in his experience so unsure and afraid. She was his only child, the child he thought he would never have.
Carrie leaned back against the painted kitchen chair, her hair like molten gold next to the swedish blue. Her small face was expressionless, and Molly thought for a moment how like her father she was, her feelings controlled and concealed behind the perfect symmetry of her features. And then her young face lit with the dazzling smile she'd inherited from her father, and she said, “Wow!”
“You don't mind?” Carey asked with a hesitancy which would have shocked his entire entourage of friends and acquaintances. He was not a man of insecurities.
“It's great,” his daughter said with feeling.
Then she glanced at her mother, a small frown furrowing her brow. “It's great for you too, right?”
Molly nodded. “Yes, the greatest.”
Carrie's gaze flicked toward her father, her smile re-appearing. “So when are you moving in?”
And the dire crisis both parents had dreaded with misgivings and doubts, with faint hearts and trepidation, was over.
They explained to her about the photos, the
Looking at Carey, her mouth quirked with amusement, Molly said, “It must be in the genes. She's as immune to public opinion as you are.”
Carey smiled. “Indifference to society's judgment runs undiluted through fifty generations of Ferstens. Not to mention my mother's family, who consider themselves obliged to be outrageous.”
“I'm the only one who prefers anonymity.”
“You and Greta Garbo. That's it.”
“I don't like people prying into my private life.”
“They will, anyway, sweetheart, so why fight it?”
“It's embarrassing.”
“Embarrassing that you and I love each other?”
“Yes, no, oh hell-it's not the whole world's business.”
“The entertainment industry attracts that kind of fascinated interest, darling. You'll get used to it.”
“I don't want to.”
“On the other hand,” he immediately said with a boyish grin, “they could live without knowing what you ate for dinner.”
“Damn right they could.”
“All right, we're agreed. No publicity.”
“We can avoid the press conference?”
“
“When do you have to leave for Australia?”
