Mistress of the Game Read online

  Worth the rare moments of tragedy.

  The father gently caressed his baby’s cheek. He was a beautiful man, Nurse Matthews decided. Tall, dark, broad-shouldered, a classic jock. Just the way she liked them.

  She blushed. What on earth was she doing? She had no right to think such things. Not at a time like this.

  The father thought: Jesus Christ. She’s so like her mother.

  It was true. The little girl’s skin was the same delicate, translucent peach as the girl he’d fallen in love with all those years ago. Her big, inquisitive eyes were the same pale gray, like dawn mist rolling off the ocean. Even her dimpled chin was her mother in miniature. For a split second, the father’s heart leaped at the sight of her, an involuntary smile playing around his lips.

  His daughter. Their daughter. So tiny. So perfect.

  Then he looked down at the blood on his hands.

  And screamed.

  Alex had been so excited that morning when Peter drove her to the hospital.

  “Can you believe that in a few short hours she’ll be here?”

  She was still in her pajamas, her long blond hair tangled after a fitful night’s sleep, but he didn’t think she’d ever looked more luminous. She wore a grin wider than the Lincoln Tunnel, and if she was nervous, she didn’t show it.

  “We’re finally going to meet her!”

  “Or him.” He reached over to the passenger seat and squeezed his wife’s hand.

  “Uh-uh. No way. It’s a girl. I know it.”

  She’d woken up around six with fairly mild contractions and insisted on waiting another two hours before she would let him drive her to Mount Sinai. Two hours in which Peter Templeton had walked up and down the stairs of their West Village brownstone sixteen times, made four unwanted cups of coffee, burned three slices of toast and yelled at his son, Robert, for not being ready for school on time, before being reminded by the housekeeper that it was in fact mid-July, and school had been out for the last five weeks.

  Even at the hospital Peter flapped around uselessly like a mother hen.

  “Can I get you anything? A hot towel?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Water?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Crushed ice cubes?”

  “Peter…”

  “What about that meditation music you’re always playing? That’s calming, right? I could run to the car and get the tape?”

  Alex laughed. She was astonishingly calm.

  “I think you need it more than I do. Honestly, darling, you must try to relax. I’m having a baby. Women do this every day. I’ll be fine.”

  I’ll be fine.

  The first problems began about an hour later. The midwife frowned at one of the monitors. Its green line had begun rising in sudden, jagged leaps.

  “Stand back please, Dr. Templeton.”

  Peter searched the woman’s face for clues, like a nervous airline passenger watching the flight attendant during turbulence…if she was still smiling and handing out gin-and-tonics, no one was gonna die, right? But Nurse Matthews would have made a first-class poker player. As she moved surely and confidently around the room, a professional smile of reassurance for Alex, a brusque nod of command to an orderly-fetch Dr. Farrar immediately-her doughlike features gave nothing away.

  “What is it? What’s the problem?”

  Peter struggled to keep the panic out of his voice, for Alex’s sake. Her own mother had died giving birth to her and Eve, a snippet of Blackwell family history that had always terrified Peter. He loved Alexandra so much. If anything should happen to her…

  “Your wife’s blood pressure is somewhat elevated, Dr. Templeton. There’s no need for alarm at this stage. I’ve asked Dr. Farrar to come and assess the situation.”

  For the first time, Alexandra’s face clouded with anxiety.

  “What about the baby? Is she all right? Is she in distress?”

  It was typical Alex. Never a thought for herself, only for the child. She’d been exactly the same with Robert. Since the day their son was born, ten years ago now, he’d been the center of his mother’s universe. Had Peter Templeton been a different sort of man, a lesser man, he might have felt jealous. As it was, the bond between mother and son filled him with joy, a delight so intense that at times he could barely contain it.

  It was impossible to imagine a more devoted, selfless, adoring mother than Alexandra. Peter would never forget the time Robert came down with chicken pox, a particularly nasty case. He was five years old, and Alex had sat by his bedside for forty-eight hours straight, so engrossed in her son’s needs that she had forgotten to take so much as a sip of water for herself. When Peter came home from work, he’d found her passed out cold on the floor. She was so dehydrated she’d had to be hospitalized and placed on a drip.

  The midwife’s voice brought him back to the present with a jolt.

  “The baby’s fine, Mrs. Templeton. Worst-case scenario, we’ll speed things up and do a cesarean.”

  Alex went white.

  “A cesarean?”

  “Try not to worry. It probably won’t come to that. Right now the heartbeat looks terrific. Your baby’s as strong as an ox.”

  Nurse Matthews had even risked a smile.

  Peter would remember that smile as long as he lived. It was to be the last image of his old, happy life.

  After the smile, reality and nightmare began to blur. Time lost all meaning. The obstetrician was there, Dr. Farrar, a tall, forbidding man in his sixties with a pinched face and glasses that seemed in permanent, imminent danger of toppling off the end of his long, shrewlike nose. The green line on the monitor took on a life of its own, some unseen hand pulling it higher, higher until it looked like a fluorescent etching of the north face of the Eiger. Peter had never seen anything quite so ugly. Then came the beeping. First one machine, then two, then three, louder, louder, screeching and screaming at him, and the screams turned into Alex’s voice, Peter! Peter! and he reached out his hand for hers, and it was their wedding day, and his hands were trembling.

  Do you take this woman?

  I do.

  I do! I’m here, Alex! I’m here, my darling.

  The doctor’s voice: “For Christ’s sake, someone get him out of here.”

  Peter was being pushed, and he pushed back, and something fell to the floor with a crash. Then suddenly the sounds were gone, and everything was color. First white: white coats, white lights, so strong Peter was almost blinded. Then red, the red of Alex’s blood, blood everywhere, rivers and rivers of blood so livid and ketchup-bright it looked fake, like a prop from a movie set. And finally black, as the movie screen faded, and Peter was falling into a well, down, down, deep into the darkness, pictures of his darling Alex flickering briefly in front of him like ghosts as he fell:

  Flash!

  The day they first met, in Peter’s psychiatrist’s office, back when Alexandra was still married to that psychopath George Mellis.

  Flash!

  Her smile, lit from within as she walked up the aisle to marry him, an angel in white.

  Flash!

  Robert’s first birthday. Alex beaming, with chocolate cake smeared all over her face.

  Flash!

  This morning in the car.

  We’re finally going to meet her!

  Dr. Templeton? Dr. Templeton, can you hear me?

  We’re losing him. He’s blacking out.

  Quick! Someone catch him!

  No more flashes. Only silence and darkness.

  The ghosts had gone.

  Reality did not return until he heard his baby cry.

  He’d been awake for almost half an hour, listening to the doctor and the hospital staff, even signing forms. But none of that was real.

  “You must understand, the level of hemorrhaging, Dr. Templeton…”

  “The speed of the blood loss…”

  “Highly unusual…perhaps her family history?”

  “After a certain point, heart failu
re cannot be prevented.”

  “Deeply sorry for your loss.”

  And Peter had nodded, yes, yes, he understood, of course, they’d done all they could. He’d watched them wheel Alex away, her ashen face covered with a bloodstained hospital sheet. He stood there, breathing in and out. But of course it wasn’t real. How could it be? His Alex wasn’t dead. The whole thing was preposterous. Women didn’t die in childbirth, for God’s sake, not in this day and age. This was 1984. This was New York City.

  The shrill, plaintive cry seemed to come out of nowhere. Even in his profound state of shock, some primal instinct would not allow Peter to ignore it. Suddenly someone was handing him a tiny swaddled bundle, and the next thing Peter knew, he was gazing into his daughter’s eyes. In an instant, every last brick of the protective wall he’d been building around his heart crumbled to dust. For one blissful moment, his heart swelled with pure love.

  Then it shattered.

  Wrenching the baby out of his arms, Nurse Matthews thrust her at an orderly.

  “Take her to the nursery. And get a psych up here, right now. He’s losing it.”

  Nurse Matthews was good in a crisis. But inside she was riddled with guilt. She should never have let him hold the child. What was she thinking? After what that poor man had just been through? He might have killed her.

  In her defense, though, Peter had seemed so stable. Fifteen minutes ago he was signing forms and talking to Dr. Farrar and…

  Peter’s screams grew louder. Outside in the corridor, visitors exchanged worried glances and craned their necks to get a better view through the glass window of the delivery room.

  Hands were on him again. Peter felt the sharp prick of a needle in his arm. As he lost consciousness, he knew that the peaceful blackness of the well would never return to him.

  This wasn’t a nightmare. It was real.

  His beloved Alex was gone.

  The press had a field day.

  ALEXANDRA BLACKWELL DIES IN CHILDBIRTH!

  To the public she would always be Alexandra Blackwell, just as Eve was forever known by her maiden name. “Templeton” and “Webster” simply didn’t have the same cachet.

  KRUGER-BRENT HEIRESS DEAD AT 34

  AMERICA’S FIRST FAMILY STRUGGLES TO COPE WITH LOSS

  The national fascination with the Blackwells was well into its fifth decade, but not since Eve Blackwell’s surgical “mishap” had the papers been thrown such a juicy bone. Rumors were rife.

  There was no baby: Alexandra had died of AIDS.

  Her handsome husband, Peter Templeton, was having an affair and had somehow contrived to end his wife’s life.

  It was a government plot, designed to bring down Kruger-Brent’s share price and limit the company’s enormous power on the world stage.

  Like Peter Templeton, no one could quite believe that a healthy, wealthy young woman could be admitted into New York’s finest maternity hospital in the summer of 1984 and wind up twenty-four hours later on a slab in the morgue.

  The rumors were fueled by a stony silence from both the family and the Kruger-Brent public-relations office. Brad Rogers, acting chairman since Kate Blackwell’s death, had appeared just once in front of the cameras. Looking even older than his eighty-eight years, a white-haired apparition, his papery hands trembled as he read a terse statement:

  “Alexandra Templeton’s tragic and untimely death is entirely a private matter. Mrs. Templeton held no official role within Kruger-Brent, Ltd., and her passing is not pertinent to the management or future of this great company in any way. We ask that her family’s request for privacy be respected at this difficult time. Thank you.”

  Refusing to take questions, he scurried back into the maze of the Kruger-Brent headquarters like a distressed beetle searching for the safety of its nest. Nothing had been heard from him since.

  Undeterred by the lack of official information, perhaps even encouraged by it, the tabloids felt free to start making the story up themselves. Soon the rumor mill had taken on a life of its own. But by then it was too late for the family or anyone else to stop it.

  “We must do something about these press reports.”

  Peter Templeton was in his study at home. With its tatty Persian rugs, antique Victorian upright piano, walnut paneling, and bookcases crammed to bursting with first editions, it had been one of Alex’s favorite rooms, a place to retreat to after the stresses of the day. Now Peter paced it furiously like a caged tiger, shaking the newspaper in his hands.

  “I mean this is the New York Times, for God’s sake, not some supermarket rag.” The disdain in his voice was palpable as he read aloud: “‘Alexandra Alexandra Blackwell is believed to have been suffering from complications of the immune system for some time.’ Believed by whom? Where do they get this nonsense?”

  Dr. Barnabus Hunt, a fat Santa Claus of a man with a crown of white hair around his bald spot and permanently ruddy cheeks, took a contemplative draw on his pipe. A fellow psychiatrist, and Peter Templeton’s lifelong friend, he had been a frequent visitor to the house since Alex’s death.

  “Does it matter where they get it? You know my advice, Peter. Don’t read this rubbish. Rise above it.”

  “That’s easy for you to say, Barney. But what about Robbie? He’s hearing this kind of poison day and night, poor kid.”

  It was the first time in weeks that Peter had expressed concern for his son’s feelings. Barney Hunt thought: That’s a good sign.

  “As if his mother were some kind of prostitute,” Peter raged on, “or a homosexual or a…a drug addict! I mean, anyone less likely to have AIDS than Alexandra…”

  Under other circumstances, Barney Hunt would have gently challenged his friend’s assumptions. As a medical man, Peter should know better than to give any credence to the pernicious idea that AIDS was some sort of righteous punishment for sinners. That was another thing the press should be blamed for: whipping the entire country into such a frenzy of HIV terror that gay men were being attacked in the streets, refused employment and even housing. As if the dreaded disease could be spread by association. It was a bad year to be gay in New York City-something Barney Hunt knew a lot more about than his friend Peter Templeton would ever have suspected.

  But now was not the time to raise these issues. Six weeks after Alex’s death and Peter’s grief was still as raw as an open wound. His office at Kruger-Brent headquarters remained empty. Not that he’d ever done much there anyway. When Peter first married Alexandra, he’d insisted to Kate Blackwell that he would never go into the family business.

  “I’ll stick with my psychiatry practice, Mrs. Blackwell, if that’s okay with you. I’m a doctor, not a businessman.”

  But in the years that followed, the old woman had ground him down. Kate Blackwell expected the men in her family to contribute to “the firm,” as she called it. And what Kate Blackwell wanted, Kate Blackwell always got in the end.

  But now Kate, like Alexandra, was gone. There was no one to stop Peter from spending entire days holed up in his study with the phone unplugged, staring mindlessly out of the window.

  The true tragedy of Alexandra’s death, however, was not Peter’s retreat from life. It was the wedge that it had driven between Peter and his son, Robert.

  Robbie Templeton was Barney Hunt’s godson. Having known him since birth, Barney had seen firsthand the unusually close bond between Robbie and Alexandra. As a psychiatrist, he knew better than most how devastating it could be for a boy of ten to lose his mother. If not handled correctly, it was the sort of event that could fatally alter someone’s personality. Dead mothers and estranged fathers: two of the key ingredients for psychopathic behavior. This was the stuff that serial killers, rapists and suicide bombers were made of. The danger for Robbie was very real. But Peter point-blank refused to see it. “He’s fine, Barney. Leave it alone.”

  Barney’s theory was that because the child had internalized his grief (Robbie hadn’t cried once since Alex’s death, an immensely worrying sign), Pe
ter had convinced himself that his son was okay. Of course, the psychiatrist in him knew better. But Peter Templeton the Psychiatrist seemed to have shut down for the moment, overwhelmed by the pain of Peter Templeton the Man.

  Barney Hunt, on the other hand, was still very much a psychiatrist and he could see the truth all too clearly. Robbie was screaming out for his father. Screaming for help, for love, for comfort.

  Unfortunately his screams were silent.

  While Peter and Robbie drifted past each other like two ruined ghosts, one member of the Templeton household provided a tiny, flickering light of hope. Named Alexandra, after her mother, but referred to from the start as Lexi, the baby that Alex had lost her life delivering was already an utter delight.

  No one had told Lexi she was supposed to be in mourning for her mother. As a result, she yelled, gurgled, smiled and shook her little fists with happy abandon, blissfully ignorant of the tragic events surrounding her arrival into the world. Barney Hunt had never been big on babies-a confirmed bachelor, and closet homosexual, psychiatry was his life-but he made an exception for Lexi. She was quite the sunniest creature he had ever encountered. Blond-haired and fine-featured even at six weeks, with her mother’s searching gray eyes, she “smiled whene’er you passed her,” like Robert Browning’s “Last Duchess,” as content to be held by strangers as by her doting nurse.

  She reserved her broadest grins for her brother, however. Robbie was entranced by his baby sister from the moment she arrived home from the hospital, rushing to greet her as soon as he got back from school, irritating the maternity nurse by dashing straight to her crib whenever she cried, even in the middle of the night.

  “You mustn’t panic so, Master Robert.”

  The nurse tried to be patient. The boy had just lost his mother, after all.