"Yes, I do blame you," Eugene argued. "When I say that I'm here because I have to be, that should be enough. There was no need for you to race on up just to make sure I was working."

"I raced on up because I missed you. It's been three weeks."

"It's often been three weeks."

"But it shouldn't be. It doesn't have to be. I need you there."

"You nag me there. You've got me dressed up and going out every night to some party or ball or art show."

"They're important."

"They're boring."

"Those parties and b.a.l.l.s and exhibits are where you can make contacts to broaden your base. That's what you should be doing."

Pam heard the tension in her father's voice as he said, "My business is taking tourmaline from the earth and selling it, and I'm doin' pretty d.a.m.n well."

"But you could be doing better. Don't you see? You're not making the most of your a.s.sets. You sell the stones, pay your crew, buy new equipment now and then, and put the rest of the money into the bank. It's piling up there, Gene, when it should be earning twice as much in another venture."

"This sounds familiar. Have you been talking to John?"

Pam flattened her back against the wall. She knew the answer to that one. She saw the way Patricia had begun to wait for John to come home from work. She heard the discussions they often had over drinks before dinner.

"Who else do I have to talk with?" Patricia shot back. "You're never around."

"Why do you have to talk with anyone? Why can't you just trust me?"

"I do trust you, but I get nervous. We have all our eggs in one basket. What if something should happen up here? What if the mine caves in or there's a flood, or you take the last piece of tourmaline out of the ground and can't find any more? What will you do then?"

"If that happens," Eugene said with renewed patience, "which it won't, but if it does, I'll know that I've got all this wonderful money in the bank that I can use to keep from starving."

Pam pictured him grinning that broad, self-confident grin of his. Leaning against the wall, she smiled. But her smile soon faded, because Patricia wasn't as easily rea.s.sured.

"But why not invest it and make even more money? Why not diversify? If you branch into another field, you can be in Boston more. I need you there, Gene. When I'm alone, I start imagining things. I get very nervous." She was speaking more quickly. Even from the distance, Pam could hear the tremor in her voice.

Eugene must have heard it too and been touched. "Now, now, Patsy . . ." He went on, but his voice faded to a gentle murmur, too low for Pam to hear at the top of the stairs.

Telling herself that things were in hand now that her father knew her mother's fears, Pam went to bed. She heard no more voices, and if her parents slept together in the large master suite, she was asleep before they climbed the stairs.

She and Patricia stayed the weekend, and by the time they headed back to Boston on Sunday afternoon, Pam felt optimistic that her parents' differences had been ironed out. "You'll be down to see us soon?" she asked after giving Eugene a last hug and kiss.

"Soon, Pammy girl. Real soon."

He kept his word. He was back in Boston the following week, but it was for a single night. Then he was gone. Patricia was more disappointed than usual and therefore more nervous. That added to Pam's disappointment, because when Patricia was nervous, she turned to John.

He was, without doubt, Pam decided, one of the coolest people she'd ever known. His hair was always combed, his tie always straight, his posture just so, with one hand in a pocket so that he'd look casual even if he felt tense.

She could forgive him that, she supposed. What she couldn't forgive was that he always seemed to know how to put Patricia's mind at ease, which wasn't right at all. That was Eugene's job.

But Eugene wasn't there, and the more John filled the gap, the more Patricia sought him out.

Pam didn't know what to do. Each time she talked with her father, she begged him to come home, but he always had an excuse. Then vacation came, and she went to Timiny Cove. Patricia joined them for several days, driving up with John when Eugene demanded he come. But when John returned to Boston, so did Patricia.

Watching her leave, Pam felt a sense of loss. She wasn't as close to her mother as she used to be. They didn't talk much. They didn't laugh together or daydream together or spend days together, just the two of them, the way they once did. Patricia seemed distanced from her, even when they were in the same room. She watched her mother drive away from her and she knew their relationship had changed.

Unable to blame Eugene, whom she adored, or Patricia, who seemed too distracted, Pam put the responsibility on John.

Chapter 4.

JOHN WASN'T SURE JUST WHEN his fear of his father hardened into contempt. It was a gradual process, starting in his early teen years when he formed an elite group of friends, continuing when p.u.b.erty gave him the confidence of height and a physical par with Eugene, and culminating with his parents' divorce and his mother's subsequent death.

He wasn't sorry to see the fear go. Long after childhood, he could vividly remember the quaking he'd felt when Eugene's loud bellow told him that he'd disappointed his father again. Sometimes, it had been the way he looked: "Too new, for pity's sake." Sometimes it had been the way he acted: "Starchy, boy, where's your sense of adventure?" Sometimes it had to do with the business: "What do you mean you don't want to work in the mine?" It wasn't only the voice that made him tremble but the flashing eyes and the cheeks that grew red with temper. "You've got the whole summer lying out there ahead of you, with nothing better to do. h.e.l.l, by the time I was your age I'd been workin' for three years shovelin' manure at Grady's farm!"

John shrank back against the paneled wall of his bedroom, but the painted pine offered no protection from this man who didn't like him. "Why do I have to work?" his small, eight-year-old voice asked.

"To learn. And you won't be doing anything killing. You'll be helping out with little things like carrying water and running errands. I'm no slave driver, for pity's sake."

There was no solace in that, since John had no idea what a slave driver was. The word work was enough. But the words Timiny Cove were even worse. His very first memory of the place was of being lost in the woods, and lost was what he'd felt every time he'd been there since. Timiny Cove was filled with people who didn't dress like he did, didn't live like he did, didn't like what he did.

"I want to stay here," he protested, but his voice sounded feeble next to his father's full boom.

"And do what?"

"Play with Timmy and Doug."

"Timmy and Doug? What for?"

"I like Timmy and Doug."

"Well, that's just fine, since they're your cousins. But what they can teach you about business ain't worth a tinker's d.a.m.n. With due respect for your mama's family, the Wrights have had their money since the Pilgrims landed. They don't work. We St. Georges do." Under his breath he mumbled, "You wanna play with Timmy and Doug." Then he thundered so loud that John jumped, "For pity's sake, you do enough of that here. Your mother's got you runnin' around with your cousins and a whole bunch of other little boys with fancy names. Well, enough! There are some fancy names up in Timiny Cove, too, and the boys there can teach you a whole lot more about living than any Saltonstall ever could. So this summer you can do your playin' with the Duffys and the Greenleafs and the Pelletiers, and you'll learn a thing or two along the way."

Given no choice in the matter, John tried. He worked for his father that summer and hated every minute of it. He didn't like the dirt, didn't like the smell, didn't like the men. Mostly he didn't like the way Eugene kept yelling at him. In his father's eyes, he could do no right. If he was sent for a tool, he brought the wrong one. If he was sent for the medical box, he brought it too slowly. If he was sent for water, he spilled too much along the way. John knew that Eugene yelled at other people, but never as loudly as at him.

He did learn, though. During that summer and the ones that followed, he learned what went into the mining operation, when to use a hammer versus a chisel, how to blast open a new pocket, how to care for each crystal unearthed. He also learned that he didn't want to spend the rest of his life in the family business if it meant hanging around with the men at the mine, and he certainly didn't want it if it meant working with his father.

His father and the miners were alike. Eugene was one of them, a local. It didn't matter that he was the boss, that he lived in the biggest house in town, and that he had an even finer one in Boston. He could drink with the others, tell jokes with the others, spend his Sat.u.r.day mornings on the bruised brown bench on the town green pa.s.sing the time of day with the others. He fit into the Timiny Cove life as only a native could.

John never would. He'd been born in Boston and had spent his earliest years in a neat little house in Brookline before his father bought the Beacon Hill home. He loved the city. He found it stately and genteel, civilized in ways that Timiny Cove would never be. Of course, he viewed it through the eyes of a Wright, and a Wright was a person of status.

Eugene St. George had none of that status. He may have risen a little when he married John's mother, but when they went places as a family, even John could see that Sybil was the one who drew the respect. Not that Eugene didn't hold his own. He looked right and talked right. John had often wondered how he did it, coming from the backwoods and all, until he found a book of etiquette lying open in the library one day. So Eugene never embarra.s.sed them. Neither, though, did he impress the Brahmans of Boston.

Early on, John felt the sting of being a St. George. More than once when he went to a friend's house, the shout from the door was, "It's that St. George boy," in a tone of voice that made him swallow hard and hold his chin high. The name should have been regal, he thought. On a blue-blood's tongue, it wasn't. Even then, he knew he had an uphill battle to wage.

What mystified him, given his mother's family, was why they had allowed the wedding. Sybil and Eugene were from different worlds. Sybil was a lady, and while Eugene did his best to be a gentleman to match, he never quite seemed polished.

"Earthiness," his mother had once said, grinning at Eugene at the time. "Earthiness is very exciting in a man."

But John couldn't see it. He found nothing exciting in dirt or sweat. The Wright side of the family had nothing to do with either and lived an exciting enough life shuttling between Boston and Cape Cod. In time, his mother seemed to see that too, because she had terrible arguments with Eugene about buying a summer house and joining the club. Eugene didn't want either. He said that they had enough going for them between Boston and Timiny Cove, and that if Sybil wanted to summer on the Cape, she could just move in with her family.

She did that for a summer or two, while John suffered in Maine with Eugene. By the time he was old enough to understand what his mother meant by the appeal of earthiness in a man, his parents had split up.

It was inevitable. The way it happened, though, was wrong. Even at fifteen John knew that. Eugene announced one day that he wanted the divorce, that he would pay Sybil to file for it, pay for her to travel to a place where the divorce could be granted without delay. If she protested, he said, he would simply move to Maine and let her come along like a good wife or be branded the offending party. In either case, he would get his divorce. Whether it was sooner or later, more or less painful, depended on her.

She was devastated. She didn't want a divorce. It just wasn't done. It represented failure.

The Wrights, who had never cared for Eugene, argued otherwise. In their opinion, Sybil had married beneath her cla.s.s and was now simply freeing herself from a man who would be nothing but a burden in the years to come.

Such was the story they pa.s.sed among their friends. John heard it more than once. Living with his mother for all but the summers, he had even greater exposure to the Wright circle than before. He wasn't offended when people criticized Eugene. Eugene was of a lower cla.s.s. The fact that John had chosen to remain in Boston with his mother was proof that he was his mother's son, a Wright in all but name.

That was what he kept telling himself, though the mirror told him different. At sixteen, he was becoming quite a man, tall and broad, with eyes that flashed vividly when he was angry and a voice that sounded self-a.s.sured even when he wasn't. A handsome devil he was, and he knew it, but at sixteen he looked just like his father had at that age, if the observations of old-timers lounging on the porch of the post office in Timiny Cove were correct. John's saving grace, as far as he was concerned, was his skin, which was less ruddy, smoother than his father's, and his hair, which was darker, finer, and more easily groomed.

And, of course, he had cla.s.s. Physical attributes alone meant nothing. Far more important in life, he told himself, was what he did with those attributes, which was where his Wright genes took over. He believed that he had more cla.s.s at sixteen than Eugene St. George would ever have. He could go anywhere, do anything, and be sure of himself, because of the exposure he'd had. He knew the right people. If some of those right people still seemed wary of him, he a.s.sured himself, it would pa.s.s with time.

His life in Boston was rewarding. He attended the most prestigious prep school, wore the nattiest clothes, played a solid game of tennis on the clay courts at his grandparents' club, and partied to his heart's content. Eugene bought him a car to drive to Maine and back, but John took perverse delight in using it for all else but that. The car was shiny and new, everything Timiny Cove wasn't, and the girls loved it. Not for a minute did John feel guilty about showing it off. After all, he was one of the privileged.

The carefree carousing he did was some solace for the fact that, a week after Sybil obtained her divorce, Eugene remarried. It came as a surprise to John, whose mind was on his own s.e.xuality, not on his father's. It hadn't occurred to him to a.s.sociate Eugene with another woman.

Before he could respond one way or another to the marriage, he had to cope with his mother's reaction to it. She was stunned, then appalled, then furious that she hadn't seen what was happening. Piecing things together, she realized that Eugene had been having an affair with Patricia for more than a year. The pain of that seemed her undoing more than the divorce itself. She lost something, became less enthusiastic about everything, including John.

He was furious. He had already decided that his father wasn't worth much, but with his remarriage, that a.s.sessment fell even lower. John was personally affronted by what his father had done. The pain his mother felt was nothing compared to his own humiliation, because word spread quickly. Within weeks, all of Boston knew that Eugene had taken a second wife, that that wife was a good deal younger than he was, and that she was noticeably pregnant. John took his share of ribbing from his friends at school, even some from their parents, and although he swallowed it all with the good humor of the aristocrat he was determined to be, inside he seethed.

Eugene must have seen it, because before he introduced John to Patricia he took him aside with a warning. "Don't say it, John. Don't say it if you know what's good for you. I don't mind if you feel loyalty to your mother. It'd be strange if you didn't. But I won't have you upsetting my wife. You'll show her respect, even if you choke on it."

"I well might," John mumbled.

"Come again, sonny?"

He should have known better, should have known that in the long run he couldn't win, but he'd bottled the anger inside for too long. "You knocked her up. You got her pregnant while you were still with my mother. Is that why you married her, because she's having your kid?"

Eugene glared at him, red-faced and rigid. "I married her because I love her."

"What about my mother? What happened to the love you were supposed to be feeling for her?"

"Things happen sometimes. Love fades."

"If it fades, what's it worth? Will you love this one till it fades, then dump her, too? Will she be feeling the same kind of pain that my mother is now? This one-"

"Her name," Eugene stated through clenched teeth, "is Patricia."

"-must be really dumb-"

"Watch it, boy!"

"You want me to respect her, when she takes a married man away from his wife? What kind of woman does that? My mother was there. She was your wife. Were you respecting her, while you were shacking up with Patricia?"

Man of pa.s.sion and impulse though he was, Eugene had never resorted to violence as an outlet for anger. Somewhere in the back of his mind, John knew that, and it was confirmed by the fact that Eugene kept his fists locked tightly to his sides.

"You're treading on shaky ground, boy."

"What can you do to me that you haven't already done? Yell. Go ahead. Yell all you want. I'm used to that. Face it," he dared say, at his most rebellious, "what you are and what you've done don't concern me anymore. Two more years and I'll be eighteen. Then I won't even have to come when you call."

But John had underestimated his father, who said in that same dangerously slow, tight-jawed way, "Don't be so sure. I'm your future, John. St. George Mining is your future."

"Not if I don't want. it."

"You will," Eugene bellowed, "because the day you turn your back on it will be the day I write you off. That'll be the end of the money, sonny. And don't"-he raised a cautioning finger-"think you'll be supported by the Wrights in the style you like, because there's somethin' you don't know about people like that. You think they live high off the hog? Well, look close. The house on the Cape has been in the family for three generations and is shabby as h.e.l.l. The membership in the country club was bought for perpetuity by the Wright who was a founding member. Do you see your aunt an' uncle buying fancy clothes? Or flyin' to New York for the weekend? Your cousins didn't get new cars when they turned sixteen. The fact is, sonny, that people like that have the pedigree and the history and the money, but they don't sh.e.l.l out. So if you think you're gonna turn to them to support you while you p.i.s.s away your time with your nose up in the air, you're wrong."

Seeing that he'd regained the upper hand, he took a breath. "You need my money, John. Think about it, and you'll know it's true."

John wanted to argue, but his rebelliousness wouldn't take him that far. He wasn't sure if he believed that the Wright side of the family was a dry well, but he did know that there was money in St. George Mining. He liked nice things, and nice things cost money. Until he knew his options, he couldn't risk disinheritance.

So he met Patricia, and it took every bit of the social skill he'd developed in his sixteen years to be civil. The gossip hadn't quite prepared him. Married, she was; the shining gold band on her finger confirmed that. Pregnant, she was; her protruding belly confirmed that. But John had imagined a husband stealer to be more sharp-edged. Patricia was pretty and soft, hatefully so.

She was also very, very young. Gossip had hinted at that, but John wasn't prepared for someone far closer to his own age than to Eugene's. She was, it turned out, twenty, to Eugene's forty-eight, which was the most bizarre, the most hateful turn of all.

John couldn't return to Boston fast enough, not so much to report on what he'd learned, since he was too disgusted to confess it, but because he needed to return to his own life and blot out his father and his father's very young, very pregnant wife.

He might have succeeded had Sybil not taken suddenly ill. The diagnosis was cancer. The prognosis was guarded. She had one operation, then another, and though the Wrights came often to visit, John was the one who stayed by her side. "You look so much like your father," she would say with a smile in fuzzy moments, just before she drifted into a drugged sleep, and although he hated the comparison, he knew he would bear it if it brought her some comfort. Nothing else seemed to. The lethargy that had set in after Eugene's marriage was magnified tenfold. The doctors told her to fight. The Wrights told her to fight. John told her to fight. But she wouldn't.

Seven months after the cancer was found, she died. John, at seventeen, was. .h.i.t in the face with the facts of life and death. His grief was intense and complex. He felt fear, confusion, anger, and a pride that kept him from sharing his feelings with others lest they think him weak. So he guarded his emotions well, pressing them into a deep, dark portion of his mind, covering them over with the practical concerns relevant to survival. Because that was the name of the game. Not only was Sybil gone, but no invitation had come from the Wrights for John to move in with any of them. They didn't have to respect Eugene St. George to fear him, John was dismayed to discover. They gave Eugene wide berth, which meant keeping well to themselves where the matter of John's well-being was concerned.

John was totally disillusioned. Wasn't blood thicker than water? he wondered. Wasn't the fact that he was his mother's son enough to keep him in the Wright fold? But they let him go. He had to accept that what his father had told him that night in Maine was true. When the chips were down, help wouldn't come from the Wrights, particularly now that Sybil was gone.

Within weeks of her death, Eugene moved Patricia and their newborn daughter into the Beacon Hill townhouse to which he had never relinquished the t.i.tle. If he'd been able to think charitably, John might have thanked his father for maintaining the continuity of his senior year in high school, rather than forcing him to move up to Maine. But he was beyond grat.i.tude. He saw the move as an insult to the memory of his mother. More than that, he saw it as an enemy occupation. They were the enemy, Eugene and Patricia. Sybil had given up on life, and they were to blame. Not even the baby was without guilt. Despite Eugene's denials, John was convinced that she was the one thing most instrumental in bringing about the marriage.

But he was over a barrel. He wanted to pack up and move out, but his father had the money. John's weekly allowance wasn't enough to carry him long. Turning eighteen wouldn't matter. Twenty-five was the magic number, and "modest sum" was the term Eugene used when describing what John would receive then if he didn't join St. George Mining. Otherwise, John's weekly allowance would continue until he graduated from college, when he would go on salary with the company. That salary would be generous. John wouldn't have cause for complaint as long as he stayed with the business.

John would have screamed in frustration if it wouldn't have been uncouth. In the privacy of his thoughts, though, the curses went on. He had wealthy friends, friends with potential, friends to impress. Living with his father didn't help his image; Eugene was and always would be the miner from Maine, in the minds of those who mattered. John knew he'd have to work twice as hard to avoid that stigma and prove himself worthy of his city friends. He'd have to build on the image of self-confidence, wealth, and sophistication that he'd already established.

So he needed money. He was the proverbial beggar who couldn't be choosy, and he despised the role with a pa.s.sion. His daily life was tormented. Although he spent as much time as possible out of the house, inevitably he encountered Patricia. More than Eugene and the baby, who did little more than sleep and eat, Patricia bothered him. He despised her-despised her for snaring Eugene, for having been poor and desperate and pregnant at the time of her marriage, and for clinging to Eugene ever since. He despised her for being surprisingly nice to him. Mostly, he despised her for being so young and so pretty.

With a deliberate effort at first, he was civil to her. In time, that civility became a way of life. It was easier, he decided, to shut off his emotions and do what had to be done than to challenge his father's power. Someday he would. He wasn't about to stand in Eugene's shadow for the rest of his life, any more than he was about to break off from the company with nothing more than a "modest sum." He figured he had more due him, and he intended to collect.

First he had to graduate from high school, which he did with his share of academic honors. Eugene couldn't appreciate that, he knew, any more than Eugene could appreciate the fact that he had been accepted at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. As far as Eugene was concerned, any school that could give John the basics in business would be fine, since he had a job waiting for him.

But John had worked his tail off-with panache, of course, and ease, in the eyes of his friends-to get into a top college for a purpose. The academic honors and acceptance at Penn were credentials to add to his name. They complemented the image of the aristocrat, the man who aimed for greatness and achieved it without noticeable effort. The Wharton School was prestigious. It was rich with contacts. It was also far from Boston.

Other than summers, when he commuted between Boston and Timiny Cove, he was rarely at home during his four years at Penn. He liked it that way. He didn't particularly care to see Eugene or Patricia, and he certainly didn't care to see the baby. The way they fawned over her disgusted him-though there were, he had to admit, some amusing moments. When Eugene tossed her high into the air, Patricia was furious, but no more so than Eugene was when Patricia dressed the little girl up like a doll. They were forever arguing about what was and wasn't right for her to do. John might have felt sorry for the kid had she not been such a charmer. From the earliest, she played up to both of her parents, sensing what each wanted from her and delivering. She could make them smile, which was something that, at least when it came to Eugene, John had never been able to do.

He wasn't jealous. One couldn't be jealous of a child, he reasoned. He had his own life, his own future. He could afford to let them all smile. His turn would come.

So he waited. When he graduated from college, he took over the office that Eugene had designated his at the St. George Mining headquarters in Boston. Given his druthers, he'd have been working for another company in another city, but other opportunities had been scarce. Neither the contacts he'd made at Wharton nor his own Boston connections-most of them were busy finding prestigious spots of their own-produced a better offer than Eugene's. Certain circles were tight, and he was, after all, a St. George. He might have taken an entry-level post somewhere, even managed to w.a.n.gle something a little higher up the ladder, but nothing could compare with the t.i.tle of vice president that awaited him in Boston.