After the third meeting, Lillian had stood up from the table and said, “I’ve heard all your arguments, seen all your evidence that shows that I could win, and I still won’t do it. I’m going to abide by my husband’s will.” She then turned around and walked away from them.
One of the lawyers, a man who hadn’t known James, and certainly didn’t know his wife, snickered and said softly, “Obviously, she’s too simple to know what money means.”
Lillian heard him. Slowly, she turned around and looked at the man in a way that was so like James Manville, Phillip drew in his breath. “What you don’t understand,” she said quietly, “is that there is more to life than money. Tell me, if you were a billionaire and you died and left your wife nothing, would she fight for it? Or would she love the memory of you more than the money?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but turned and walked out of the room.
The other lawyers hid their faces from the man Lillian had just told off because they couldn’t contain their laughter. He had, in fact, just been through his third very nasty divorce and his ex-wife had fought him down to who got the antique doorknobs.
In the end, Phillip had given up trying to persuade Lillian to fight. The night of the last meeting, he’d fallen into bed beside Carol and said, “I don’t know what else to do.”
“Help her,” Carol said.
“What do you think this has all been about?” he’d snapped at his wife.
Carol was unfazed; she didn’t even glance up from the magazine she was looking at. “You’ve been trying to make her into what she isn’t. You’re a worse tyrant than James was.”
“Yes, and I can see that you’re terribly intimidated by me,” he said sarcastically. “So what’s in that pretty little brain of yours?” After twelve years of marriage, he could almost read her mind, and he knew when she wanted to tell him something. As always, she’d waited for him to fail, and only then would she offer her help.
“You’ve got to help her do whatever it is that she wants to do,” Carol said.
“Any ideas what that is?” he asked, looking at her with skepticism. “She stays alone in the guest room, and doesn’t talk to anyone. All those so-called friends that James used to fill the house with haven’t so much as called her to say they’re sorry about his death.” His voice was filled with disgust.
“I don’t know her very well, but it seems to me that when she was with James, she tried very hard to have a normal life.”
Phillip snorted. “Normal? With James Manville? Carol, did you have blinders on? They lived in vast houses all over the world; they were surrounded by servants. I took her into a department store right after James died, and I swear she’d never seen one before. Or at least not since she ran away from home
and married him.”
“That’s all true, but what did Lillian do when she was in those houses? Give parties?”
Phillip put his hands behind his head and looked up at the ceiling. “No,” he said thoughtfully. “James gave the parties and Lillian put in an appearance. I don’t think I ever saw anyone more miserable than she was at those functions. She used to sit in a corner all by herself and eat. Poor kid.”
“Did you ever see her happy?”
“No, not—” Phillip began, then stopped. “That’s not true. One day I took some papers to James to sign, but after I left his house, I saw that he’d missed one, so I went back. When I got there, I could hear voices, so I went through the house toward the back and I saw them. They were alone, just the two of them, no guests, no servants and . . .”
He closed his eyes for a moment in memory. It had been one of James’s multimillion-dollar houses, “all glass and steel,” as Lillian had said, and the voices had come from a room Phillip had never seen before. It was off the kitchen, and since the door was open, he looked inside. As he was standing near some flowing drapery that some designer had put up, he knew they weren’t likely to see him. He knew he was playing the voyeur, but he couldn’t move as he looked in on the scene.
Lillian, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, not the designer clothes that he’d always seen her in, was serving James dinner. They were in a small sitting room with a tiny, round table at one end. From the look of the room, no designer had touched it. The sofa was covered in a rose chintz; near it was a plaid chair. The table was pine and scratched; the two chairs with it looked like something from a country auction.
None of the furnishings had that fake look that designers managed to achieve. There was nothing “arranged” in this room. Instead, it looked like half the living rooms in America, and the couple in the room looked like what other American couples hoped to be. As Lillian filled James’s plate from the food set out on a buffet, James was talking nonstop. And Lillian was listening closely. When she turned and put the plate in front of him, she laughed at what he was saying, and in that moment, Phillip thought she was beautiful. She wasn’t just the billionaire’s plump wife who never had a word to say, but a real beauty. As she began to fill her own plate, she started talking and Phillip was astonished to see James listening to her with an intensity he’d never seen in him before. James nodded as she talked and Phillip could see that he’d asked her opinion about something and she was giving it. “Partnership,” was the word that came to his mind.
Silently, his paper unsigned, Phillip tiptoed away. How many times over the years had he heard people say, “Why doesn’t Manville ditch the dumpling and get a woman who isn’t afraid of her own shadow?” But, obviously, as in everything else, James Manville had known what he was doing.
On that day, as Phillip walked back to the car, he thought that in all the years he’d known James, he’d never been jealous of him. Thanks to James, Phillip had all the money he wanted, so he didn’t envy James his billions. But Phillip realized that when he’d looked in on that scene, he’d felt a hot wave of jealousy. Carol hadn’t looked at him like that or listened to him in that way since the first year they were married.
Phillip had looked at the unsigned paper and was glad he hadn’t made his presence known. It would be better if James didn’t know that his private moments with Lillian had been observed.
“Yes,” Phillip said to Carol. “I’ve seen her happy.”
“Oh?” Carol asked, her voice full of curiosity. “When was that?”
James might be dead, but Phillip still couldn’t bring himself to betray his friend by telling what he’d seen. The memory of it, though, just made him more confused. If James loved his wife so much, why hadn’t he at least left her enough money to protect herself from the press? “You have something you want to tell me,” he said to his wife, “so why don’t you spit it out?”
“On the way to James’s funeral, Lillian asked me if I’d seen the farmhouse that James left her.”
“So?” Phillip asked. “What does that mean? The place is a pig sty. It’s horrible. The countryside around it is beautiful, but the house ought to be torn down, and only a bulldozer would help the landscaping.”
“Hmmm,” Carol said, closing her magazine. “Nobody made as much money as James did without being able to plan. What do you think his plan was for that farmhouse?”