The Last Don - Mario Puzo [144]
“Why?” Cross asked. “What were you going to do?”
“There’s a special clinic in France with this great doctor,” Athena explained. “And I was going to go there after the picture. Then Boz showed up and I knew he would kill me and Bethany would be all alone. That’s why I sort of put a contract out on him. She has nobody but me. And well, I’ll bear that sin.” Athena paused now and smiled at Cross. “It’s worse than the soaps, isn’t it?” she said with a small smile.
Cross looked out over the ocean. It was a very bright oily blue in the sunlight. He remembered the little girl and her blank, masklike face that would never open up to this world.
“What was that box she was lying in?” he asked.
Athena laughed. “That’s what gives me hope,” she said. “Sad, isn’t it? It’s a hug box. A lot of autistic children use it when they get depressed. It’s just like a hug from a person but they don’t have to connect or relate to another human being.” Athena took a deep breath and said, “Cross, someday I’m going to take the place of that box. That’s the whole purpose of my life now. My life has no meaning except for that. Isn’t that funny? The Studio tells me that I get thousands of letters from people who love me. In public people want to touch me. Men keep telling me they love me. Everybody but Bethany, and she’s the only one I want.”
Cross said, “I’ll help you in any way I can.”
“Then call me next week,” Athena said. “Let’s be together as much as we can until Messalina is finished.”
“I’ll call,” Cross said. “I can’t prove my innocence, but I love you more than anything in my life.”
“And are you truly innocent?” Athena asked.
“Yes,” Cross said. Now that she had been proven innocent, he could not bear for her to know.
Cross thought about Bethany, her blank face so artistically beautiful with its sharp planes, its mirror eyes; the rare human being totally free of sin.
As for Athena, she had been judging Cross. Of all the people she knew, he was the only one who had ever seen her daughter since the child had been diagnosed as autistic. It had been a test.
One of the greatest shocks of her life came when she found out that though she was so beautiful, though she was so talented (and, she thought with self-mockery, so kind, so gentle, so generous), her closest friends, men who loved her, relatives who adored her, sometimes seemed to relish her misfortunes.
It was when Boz had given her a black eye, and though everyone called Boz a “no-good bastard,” she caught in all of them a fleeting look of satisfaction. At first she thought she had imagined it, was too sensitive. But when Boz had given her the second black eye, she caught those looks again. And she had been terribly hurt. For this time she had understood completely.
Of course they all loved her, she did not doubt that. But it seemed no one could resist a little touch of malice. Greatness in any form arouses envy.
One of the reasons she loved Claudia was because Claudia had never betrayed her with that look.
It was why she kept Bethany so secret from her day-to-day life. She hated the idea that people she loved would have that fleeting look of satisfaction, that she had been punished for her own beauty.
So though she knew the power of her beauty and used that power, she despised it. She longed for the day when lines would cut deep into her perfect face, each showing a path she had taken, a journey survived, when her body would fill out, soften and enlarge her to provide comfort for those she’d hold and care for, and her eyes would grow more liquid with mercy from all the suffering she’d witnessed and all the tears she’d never shed. She’d grow smile lines around her mouth from laughing at herself, and at life itself. How free she would be when she no longer feared the consequences of her physical beauty and instead delighted in its loss as it was replaced by a more enduring serenity.
And so she had kept careful watch on Cross De Lena when he met Bethany, saw his slight recoil at first but then afterward nothing. She knew he was helplessly