"Of course," he said. When she left, Albert took the letter down the hall to Mr. Bancroft's study, unlocked an antique secretary, and tossed that letter on top of all the others, half of which were postmarked from Venezuela.
Meredith went upstairs to her bedroom and was halfway to the chair at her desk when the hemorrhaging started.
She spent two days in the Bancroft wing of CedarHillsHospital, a wing named after her family in honor of their huge endowments, praying the bleeding wouldn't start again and that Matt would miraculously decide to come home. She wanted her baby and she wanted her husband, and she had a terrible feeling she was losing both.
When Dr. Arledge released her from the hospital, it was on condition that she remain in bed for the duration of her pregnancy. As soon as she came home, Meredith wrote Matt a letter that not only informed him she was in danger of losing their baby, but that was, moreover, meant to scare him into worrying about her. She was ready to do almost anything to stay on his mind.
Complete bedrest seemed to solve the problem of impending miscarriage, but with nothing to do but read or watch television or worry, Meredith had ample time to reflect on painful reality: Matt had obviously found her a convenient bed partner, and now that they were apart, he had found her completely forgettable. She started thinking about the best ways to raise her baby alone.
That was one problem she had worried about needlessly. At the end of her fifth month, in the middle of the night, Meredith hemorrhaged. This time none of the skills known to medical science were able to save the baby girl who Meredith named Elizabeth in honor of Matt's mother. They nearly failed to save Meredith who remained in critical condition for three days.
For a week after that she lay in bed with tubes running into her veins, listening anxiously for the sound of Matt's long, quick strides in the corridor. Her father had tried to call him, and when he couldn't get through, he'd sent him a telegram.
Matt didn't come. He didn't call.
During her second week in the hospital, however, he answered her telegram with one of his own. It was short, direct and lethal:
a divorce is an excellent idea, get one.
Meredith was so emotionally battered by those eight words that she refused to believe he was capable of sending a telegram like that—not when she was in the hospital. "Lisa," she'd wept hysterically, "he'd have to hate me before he'd do this to me, and I haven't done anything to make Matt hate me! He didn't send that telegram—he didn't! He couldn't!" She talked Lisa into putting on another performance for the benefit of the staff at Western Union in order to find out who sent it. Western Union reluctantly provided the information that the telegram had indeed been sent by Matthew Farrell from Venezuela and charged to his credit card.
On a cold December day Meredith emerged from the hospital with Lisa walking on one side of her and her father on the other. She looked up at the bright blue sky, and it looked different, alien. The whole world seemed alien.
At her father's insistence, she enrolled for the winter semester at Northwestern and arranged to share a room with Lisa. She did it because they seemed to want her to, but in time, she remembered why it had once meant so much to her. She remembered other things too—like how to smile, and then how to laugh. Her doctor warned her that any future pregnancy would carry an even greater risk to her baby and herself. The thought of being childless had hurt terribly, but somehow she coped with that, too.
Life had dealt her several major blows, but she had survived them and, in doing so, she found in herself an inner strength she didn't know she possessed.
Her father hired an attorney who handled the divorce. From Matt she heard nothing, but she finally reached the point where she could think of him without pain or animosity. He had obviously married her because she was pregnant and because he was greedy. When he realized that her father had complete control of her money, he simply had no further use for her. In time, she stopped blaming him. Her reasons for marrying him had not been unselfish either, she had gotten pregnant and been afraid to face the consequences alone. And even though she had thought she loved him, he had never deceived her by claiming to love her—she had deceived herself into believing he did. They had married each other for all the wrong reasons, and the marriage had been doomed from the start.
During her junior year she saw Jonathan Sommers at Glenmoor. He told her his father had liked an idea of Matt's so well that he'd formed a limited partnership with him and put up the additional capital for the venture.
That venture paid off. In the eleven years that followed, a great many more of Matt's ventures also paid off. Articles about him and pictures of him appeared frequently in magazines and newspapers. Meredith saw them, but she was busy with her own career, and it no longer mattered what he did. It mattered to the press though. As year faded into year, the press became increasingly obsessed with his flamboyant corporate successes and his glamorous bedroom playmates, who included several movie stars. To the common man, Matt apparently represented the American Dream of a poor boy making good. To Meredith, he was simply a stranger with whom she had once been intimate. Since she never used his name and only her father and Lisa knew that she had ever been married to him, his widely publicized romances with other women never caused her any personal embarrassment.
Chapter 12
November 1989
Wind whipped up whitecaps and sent them tumbling, frothing onto the sand twenty feet below the rocky ledge where Barbara Walters strolled beside Matthew Farrell. A camera tracked their progress, its dark glass eye observing the pair, framing them against a background of Farrell's palatial Carmel, California, estate on the right, and the turbulent Pacific Ocean on the left.
Fog was rolling in like a thick, undulating blanket, propelled forward by the same wild gusts that were playing havoc with Barbara Walters's hair and spitting sand at the camera's lens. At the prearranged spot, Walters stopped, turned her back to the ocean, and started to address another question to Farrell. The camera swiveled, too, but now it saw only the couple framed against a dismal backdrop of gray fog while wind blew Walters's hair across her face.
"Cut!" she called out, irritably shoving hair out of her eyes, trying to free the strands sticking to her lipstick. Turning to the woman who was in charge of makeup, she said, "Tracy, do you have anything that will hold my hair down in this wind?"
"Elmer's Glue?" Tracy suggested with a lame attempt at humor, and motioned to the van parked beneath the cypress trees on the west lawn of the Farrell estate. After excusing herself to Farrell, Walters and the makeup girl headed toward the van.