Because She Can Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007 by Bridie Clark

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Warner Books

  Hachette Book Group

  1271 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First eBook Edition: February 2007

  Warner Books and the “W” logo are trademarks of Time Warner Inc. or an affiliated company. Used under license by Hachette Book Group, which is not affiliated with Time Warner Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-446-51194-0

  Contents

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE: POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE

  ONE YEAR EARLIER

  CHAPTER ONE: A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND

  CHAPTER TWO: GREAT EXPECTATIONS

  CHAPTER THREE: THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

  CHAPTER FOUR: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

  CHAPTER FIVE: WOMEN WHO RUN WITH THE WOLVES

  CHAPTER SIX: THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

  CHAPTER SEVEN: LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

  CHAPTER EIGHT: SHE’S COME UNDONE

  CHAPTER NINE: EAT THE RICH

  CHAPTER TEN: THE SOUND AND THE FURY

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: BLEAK HOUSE

  CHAPTER TWELVE: THE BELL JAR

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE TURN OF THE SCREW

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THE HOUSE OF MIRTH

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: HEART OF DARKNESS

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: A TALE OF TWO CITIES

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: THIS SIDE OF PARADISE

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: THE CONSCIOUS BRIDE

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: ENORMOUS CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE

  CHAPTER TWENTY: THE AWAKENING

  EPILOGUE: TO HAVE AND TO HOLD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Dedicated to my family

  PROLOGUE

  POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE

  It’s my wedding day. T minus two hours until I’m supposed to be walking down the aisle.

  My best friend, Beatrice, helps me pull my dress over my head, smiling as it rustles down around me, fastening the small row of delicate buttons in the back. Thank God for Bea, I think for the millionth time that day. We both look at the bride in the mirror. She looks just the way brides are supposed to look: dark mahogany hair pulled back into an elegant twist at the nape of her neck, flawless makeup, porcelain skin, diamonds dripping off each earlobe.

  I spin a little to see if the Perfect Bride in the mirror will follow my lead—and she does, of course. Then she examines her spectacular train, custom-designed by Vera herself, onto which a dozen seamstresses at the House of Lesage have sewn the finest little diamonds to look like fairy dust.

  “You’re stunning, Claire,” says Bea, because what else can you really say to a woman wearing this kind of masterpiece. We stare at me in the gilded mirror. Neither of us bothers to smile.

  A bony knock on the door of my bridal suite snaps us out of the fog.

  “It’s open,” Bea calls out, and in charges Lucille Cox, my mother-in-law-to-be—face taut as a Doberman pinscher’s, body the size of a scrawny eight-year-old boy.

  “I come bearing a gift from the groom!” Lucille booms exuberantly to neither of us in particular—what Lucille lacks in stature, she tends to make up for in decibels. Today she is smaller and louder than usual, drowning in a crimson Oscar de la Renta gown that cost three times more than my mother’s car. Prewedding jitters have reduced Lucille’s diet from Spartan to Ethiopian. The pigeons in Central Park are better fed.

  “Oh, Claire, darling, you look …” Lucille ends her sentence by pressing a jewel-encrusted hand to her freckled, skeletal décolletage—a gesture in lieu, I have to assume, of kind adjectives. Then she finishes her thought: “You look just like your mother.”

  Stop the presses—has Lucille actually said the right thing? Shockingly, Lucille—a woman whose most frequent meal is her own foot—has paid me my all-time favorite compliment, and one that I know is highest praise coming from her. Lucille has always idolized my mother, ever since their roommate days at Vassar.

  I feel a rush of gratitude toward her. Lucille, as if sensing softer emotions in the air, awkwardly thrusts a velvet box into my hands to dispel them.

  “Open it!” she commands.

  I do as I’m told, as has become my bad habit. I undo the little clasp and crack open the box’s stiff hinge. On a pillow of plush black velvet rests a spectacular necklace, loaded with diamonds—the most expensive piece of jewelry I’ve ever seen, let alone held.

  “Oh, my dear,” purrs Lucille, gazing with adoration at the necklace as if it were her first grandchild. “Vintage Bulgari. Stunning.” I fasten it around my neck, and the three of us turn to the mirror once more. It’s perfect. Absolutely spectacular. My fiancé’s secretary has exquisite taste.

  “And I got my hands on an advance copy of the Sunday edition,” Lucille trills, unclasping her Judith Leiber and pulling out a newspaper clip, which she hands to me.

  Claire Truman,

  Randall Pearson Cox III

  Claire Truman, the daughter of Patricia and the late Charles Truman of Iowa City, Iowa, and Randall Pearson Cox III, the son of Lucille and Randall Cox II of Palm Beach, Florida, are to be married today at St. James’ Episcopal Church in New York City.

  Miss Truman, 27, is an editor at Grant Books. She graduated summa cum laude from Princeton with a degree in English literature and language. Her mother is a painter, and her late father was a poet-in-residence and professor at the University of Iowa.

  Mr. Cox, 31, is a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs, an investment bank in New York. He also received his bachelor’s degree from Princeton, as well as an M.B.A from Harvard. His mother is on the board of the Flagler Museum and the Palm Beach Historical Society. His grandfather was the former CEO and Chairman of McCowan Trust, where his father retired as Senior Vice President last year.

  “Are you all right, Claire?” asks Lucille, looking down. I follow her gaze. My hands are shaking violently, as if they’re gripping an invisible sledgehammer. Thankfully, Lucille has the attention span of a baby gnat and is diverted by the entrance of our makeup artist, Jacques, who pulls her into a chair for a touch-up.

  “Where is that mother of yours, anyway?” she calls out to me over her shoulder, scanning Jacques’s tool kit for the right shade of burgundy lipstick.

  “She’ll be here any moment.” I check my watch, silently willing time to stop for just a second to let me catch my breath. Doesn’t work. Hasn’t worked all month.

  “I need her advice on earrings,” Lucille whines.

  Bea looks up, incredulous. Well, it is pretty laughable, the thought of Lucille—society matron, with several walk-in closets full of unworn couture—asking my aging hippie of a mother for her advice on which arrangement of Harry Winston diamonds works better with a straight-off-the-Paris-runway gown. Mom, whose only adornment since I’ve known her has been her plain gold wedding band. Mom, whose idea of decadent pampering is a hot bath and some organic aromatherapy given to her by her best friend in Iowa—a lesbian farmer/fellow artist who makes her own soap. Mom, whose wardrobe consists of flannel, denim, tie-dye.

  It’s hard to imagine, but apparently Mom and Lucille had been as close as sisters at Vassar. Lucille (who grew up in a on
e-horse Kansas town that drifts closer to Chicago every time she’s asked) spent four years peppering Mom (who hails from Boston Brahmin) with pointed questions about etiquette, style, refinement. I suppose Mom found Lucille’s aggressive social climbing benign and even somewhat amusing—she didn’t care enough about the world into which she’d been born to feel possessive of it or object to anyone’s desperate desire for access. And Lucille’s secondary education paid off richly when she landed Randall Cox II, a debonair, blue-blooded polo player. He’d been dating five Vassar girls at once, but he’d chosen Lucille to be his wife. Quite the campus coup, or so she’s informed me.

  Lucille’s snared husband, aka my future father-in-law, turned out to be as unfaithful as he was successful (wildly, both counts). But as far as I know, Lucille’s never minded her husband’s flagrant transgressions—so content has she been with the mansion in Palm Beach, the private jets, the jewelry, the seven-bedroom “cottage” in Southampton, the fashion shows in Paris and Milan, the peripatetic cook and masseuse and secretary, the town house in Manhattan. The lifestyle of Mrs. Randall Cox II.

  Mom, on the other hand, traded her family’s life of privilege for my incomparably wonderful father—the love of her life, a close to penniless poet who nonetheless provided us with the richest life imaginable. Money was always a bit tight—Dad taught classes at the university, Mom sold her watercolors in local boutiques to subsidize his income, and I worked hard to gain my scholarship to Princeton—but looking back on my childhood, I wouldn’t have changed a thing.

  I grew up in a small, picture-perfect white farmhouse in the emerald cornfields of Iowa, an only child surrounded by a brilliant coterie of poets, students, playwrights, novelists—all of whom had gravitated to the university’s famous Writers’ Workshop. Starting at around age ten, I was often asked to read and give my input on the work of this extended family circle. Having my opinion valued was a thrill for a burgeoning bookworm (okay, burgeoning nerd) like me, and I would spend afternoons holed up in my bedroom writing detailed letters with my thoughts and suggestions. Maybe our friends were just humoring me, but working with such brilliant writers, penning my first “editorial letters,” getting my first taste of creative collaboration—these were the unusual childhood delights that led me to major in English in college and then into a career in book publishing.

  Maybe that’s my problem: My life has been a series of easy, clear choices. I’ve never appreciated it until today. Unlike almost everyone else I know, I’ve never had to grapple with which path to take.

  I look down at the Times announcement again, my eyes suddenly stinging with tears.

  “You okay?” Bea rests her hand on my shoulder. Then she grips my hand, which is still shaking.

  “Cigarette,” I whisper urgently. She nods like a dutiful soldier. Thank God for Bea.

  Ten minutes later, Bea and I crouch in the stairwell, sharing our second contraband Marlboro Light and swilling Veuve Clicquot straight from the bottle, a blanket underneath us so my dress won’t get soiled. I feel like a fugitive and know I’m on borrowed time.

  “Mandy’ll have a search party out in about two minutes,” Bea snorts. Mandy is the de rigueur neurotic wedding planner whom Lucille forced upon me the day after Randall and I got engaged. (Here’s some advice: Never trust an unmarried wedding planner over the age of thirty-five. Mandy’s single and forty-two.)

  Combined, Mandy and Lucille have the diplomatic skills of a bulldozer. At first, I put up a halfhearted fight about the wedding plans, but they quickly broke me—and the intimate gathering on my parents’ farm exploded into a white-tie soiree at the St. Regis Hotel with 600 of our “closest friends.” Otherwise known as 300 of Lucille’s crusty Palm Beach set, 250 of Randall’s business associates, and a handful of my friends and family.

  I shouldn’t complain—the Coxes are picking up every tab. There was no way Mom could afford the kind of wedding Lucille had her heart set on.

  “Here,” says Bea, handing me the champagne. I chug, and the fizz goes straight to my head. She refills. I chug again.

  The past two months have been grueling. My boss—the notorious sociopath Vivian Grant—has been on a particularly ruthless rampage. I’ve been working around the clock … barely an exaggeration. If Mandy and Lucille hadn’t stepped in, I wouldn’t have had a free minute to deal with the wedding details. I’ve barely had time to see Randall since we got engaged three months ago.

  Lucille even set the date for us, a shockingly early date at that—she hadn’t wanted our wedding to get “lost” in the lineup of society weddings planned for the following fall.

  A door crashes open down the hall, some distant floorboards creak, and Bea and I exchange furtive glances.

  “Claire,” starts Bea, biting her pinkie nail as she always does when she’s not sure how to phrase something gently. (After a decade of best friendship, we’ve developed an awareness of each other’s body language that sometimes borders on telepathy.)

  “Okay, don’t,” I interrupt. “All brides get cold feet.” I can’t back out now. Maybe Julia Roberts can dodge the altar a few times and still seem adorable, but this isn’t some Hollywood movie. This is my life. Deposits have been paid … What am I thinking? I can’t back out now because Randall is a good man—no, he’s a great man—and I’d be pretty much insane not to marry him.

  As I take the last drag of our cigarette, a memory involuntarily pops into my head—an increasingly frequent problem—of the night before Beatrice’s wedding to Harry, now three years ago. She’d been one of the first of our circle to get married, and they’d opted for a simple ceremony in the garden of Bea’s family’s home. We’d stayed up the night before trying to bake something remotely akin to a wedding cake, sitting around the big table in their kitchen and dipping our fingers into the spilled batter.

  “Getting nervous, Bea?” one of the bridesmaids had asked.

  I remember how Bea had just shrugged, taking another swipe of the batter. “Excited, yes. Nervous, no,” she’d answered honestly.

  I think of my own wedding cake. How could any bride not get excited about a statuesque twelve-tiered cake with sugar-spun, botanically correct rosebuds and irises (a dusting of colored sugar on each one to look like pollen), not to mention a background pattern in the frosting that’s consistent with the beading on my dress and the china? So what if this skyscraper of a cake costs roughly the same as a year of tuition at a private college? It is literally perfect. A Sylvia Weinstock masterpiece. What more could I ask for? What more could I possibly want?

  The heavy door to the stairwell slams open, and Bea and I both jump two inches. The bloodhounds have found us.

  “Claire, darling! Sweet pea! I’ve been looking high and low for you! Just an hour until we have to leave for the church!” Mandy, flushed and badly in need of a Xanax, rushes over to pull me to my feet and smooth out my dress. “I’ll get hair and makeup to come do a touch-up.”

  “Unbelievable,” I distinctly hear her whisper as she herds us back to the bridal HQ. I shuffle wordlessly behind her like a prisoner called in from the yard.

  “Claire!” Mom sprints toward me as we turn the corner to the suite, pulling me away from Mandy and into just the kind of hug I desperately need. I feel my shoulders drop, my neck relax. It feels so good to be held—really held. I take a deep breath, inhaling the faint eucalyptus scent of her shampoo. Mom squeezes me tighter.

  “I have something for you, sweetie,” she says, pulling a small velvet pouch out of her handbag. “Your grandmother’s pearl necklace. I know you’ve always loved it, so I thought it could be your ‘something old.’ ”

  “Oh, Mom,” I gasp, running my fingers over the cool, lustrous pearls. As a girl, it had been such a special treat to try on my grandmother’s necklace during our summer visits. “It’s beautiful, Mom. Thank you so—”

  “The pearls are lovely, Tish-Tish,” interrupts Lucille, “but Randall just surprised Claire with this necklace. Fabulous, isn’t it?”


  Mom steps back, taking in the sparkling rope of diamonds around my neck. “Well, my goodness!” she says, “It’s … it’s gorgeous. How generous of Randall. Well, Claire, you can wear Grandma’s pearls another time. They’re yours now.” Mom slides the pearls into the velvet bag. It hurts to see the effort in her smile.

  “Or, um, maybe I could wear Randall’s necklace some other time?” I ask tentatively, knowing it’s a long shot.

  And sure enough, Lucille explodes immediately. “What’s this? Not wear Randall’s necklace? Why, Claire, he’d be crushed! It was his special wedding-day gift to you! You must wear it, you just must!

  Mom nods in agreement. Then she stretches out her arms to give me another hug.

  Please don’t let me go, I think, burying myself in her arms, twenty years melting off me. With Mom’s arms around me, I feel the pit in my stomach dissolve just a little.

  “Tish-Tish, please, I’m desperate for your help with earrings,” whimpers Lucille, wresting Mom away from me. The feeling of Mom’s arms pulling away is worse than the sound of a blaring alarm clock after a night of insomnia. I watch helplessly. I’m too old to dive for my mother’s knees and hold on tight, but it takes every ounce of restraint not to do that.

  And then, just when I couldn’t feel any worse, I do.

  Because I hear her. The unmistakable voice: deep, throaty, powerful, cruel. The voice that’s ricocheted off the walls of my nightmares for the past eleven months.

  And the dreaded voice seems to be walking very briskly down the hallway toward me.

  “Claire! … Claire! There you are!”

  If I were a deer, that voice would be the headlights. Freezes me in my tracks every time.

  Is it actually possible?! It seems too horrible to imagine—

  “Jesus, Claire, I’ve left you a dozen fucking messages on your cell and home phones! Finally I got through to some pea-brained, inbred relative of yours—and after much hemming and hawing, she finally managed to tell me where you were. Unacceptable, Claire. I need to be able to reach you 25/8, we’ve been over this—”