THE HEIRS is the dramatic conclusion to the four-book series BY THE
SEA. Economic hard times are a distant memory in high-flying,
recent-day Newport, home of the oldest and most prestigious trophy
in the world, the Holy Grail of sport—the America's Cup. Here, the
descendants of Tess, Amanda and Laura play out their destinies,
their paths crossing in unforeseen ways: Mavis Moran, Neil
Powers, his daughter Quinta, and America's Cup skipper Alan Seton
all find themselves caught in a web of mystery, sabotage, and
conflicting desires.
Summer 1986
Men have no idea about ball gowns. They think of them as dressy dresses, when every woman knows that a proper ball gown is not clothing at all, but an extension of her soul. Why else does a wealthy woman have her own couturier? The designer is a high priest at her altar, striving to interpret the ineffable. If her soul is blond, he will wrap her in blue. If her soul is old-money, he will set off her pearls with simple satin. One way or another, the couturier will make a wealthy woman's special beauty shine forth.
Of course, other souls have to be happy with ready-to-wear, and Neil Powers' daughter Quinta was one of them. For one thing, there was not enough time to have a gown designed and made for the Pegasus ball, even if her father did take out a second mortgage. For another, she did not wish to rely on someone to tell her what her best feature was, or what color suited her, or which fabric was in vogue. So she set out, innocently enough, with a hundred dollars in cash and at least one caveat in mind: the gown must be long, even if it were made of bed-sheeting.
Which, for one hundred dollars, she soon found, was about all she could hope for. Anything she saw under that price looked frilly and silly—a prom gown, not a ball gown. She had a vague idea that a ball gown was different, that a ball gown was grown-up. After hovering timidly in front of a Bellevue Avenue shop window filled with dazzling, jeweled ensembles, Quinta found the courage to step inside.
"Yes, ma'am. May I help you?"
"Ah, no. I'm just browsing," replied Quinta. How dumb. You browsed at Sears and J. C. Penny, when there was nothing to watch on TV. Here you tried on, and then you bought.
Still, Quinta went gamely through the motions, sliding each beaded and bejeweled dress carefully along the recessed rack, afraid almost to touch them, let alone ask to try them on. Her worst fears were realized when a bright-blue sequin came off one dress and stuck to the palm of her hand. Horrified and feeling like a shoplifter, she dropped it inside the neckline and kept looking. She thought it might be boorish to check a price tag, but she did it anyway, unable to bear not knowing. Her eyes widened. Eight hundred dollars. Well, she could see it. It was a stunning dress, silver and black, wildly dramatic. When you thought about the labor involved ... each little bead … even in India, that had to add up.
A dizzying thought occurred to her. If she tried it on? If she liked it? If she charged it? She lifted the hanger carefully off the rack. It took three seconds, the exact same length of time it took for her brain to begin functioning normally again. Not for you, Cinderella. Put it back.
She did, with a sigh, and was about to leave when the salesgirl—so slim, so chic, so pitying—said, "There are a few things on sale in that armoire, if you'd like to look at them."
More to oblige the salesgirl than any uncontrollable urge of her own, Quinta went through the rack of ensembles, almost not looking at the items, just checking shamelessly through the price tags: $400, $360, $500, $400, $200—wait, two hundred! Was it possible? Sure it was: the bottom half of the ensemble was missing. The part that remained was a lovely white top with a neckline of bugle beads fanning into a flower-motif over the bodice. Not very many beads, but some. Enough to gain entry to an upper-crust ball. As for the fact that she would be naked from the waist down—well, she could sew a silky polyester floor-length skirt in a couple of hours.
She tried on the top, liked it, put it on her Visa card and flew out of the shop: she had material to buy, and a pattern.
****
Quinta sat nervously inside the Cozy Cab as it approached Ocean Court. Would she have to get the door herself? No. That was what valets were for. Did she have her invitation with her? Yes. In her purse. Was her lipstick on straight? She thought so, but there was no time to look. So far so good, but ahead of her, lined up like indoor palms on the yellow Siena marble floor of the entrance hall, stood the receiving line: half a dozen people, only two of whom she recognized.
She took her place in the slow-moving queue of guests and introduced herself to each member of the receiving line: a short fat man from Dexter Paint Company, and a tall thin one from North Sea Weathergear. A friendly young woman from the something-Industrial Corporation, and a grouchy old man from the Sleptell Hotel Chain. It was a Dow-Jones receiving line of America's Cup Race sponsors, no doubt about it.
Except for the handsome couple at the end.
"Hello... Alan," Quinta said, shaking his hand.
"You were able to come."
"Yes."
Alan Seton turned to the incredibly beautiful redhead, nearly as tall as he was, who stood next to him. "Mavis Moran, this is Quinta Powers, a writer for Cup Quotes."
Mavis smiled. "Quinta Powers? Aren't you the one who wrote that pretty little tribute to Alan?" She shook Quinta's hand lightly.
"I think I might have," replied Quinta, as if she really couldn't keep track of the thousands of pretty little tributes she'd written that summer.
Mavis smiled a second time, a knowing, perfect, green-eyed smile. "It was so sweet."
With that, Quinta was bumped by the next arriving guest into a French-style ballroom floored in parquet and paneled in a subdued gray that was edged in gilt and silver. Unlike the great Gilded Age monsters that were built after it, Ocean Court was not quite palatial, but by the electrified light of the gilded bronze sconces, it all looked pretty spectacular.
Especially to Quinta Powers. She was aware that she was a fraud, a neighborhood urchin who'd scrambled over a high brick wall to see how the other half partied, but that didn't diminish the pleasure she got from watching all the glitter, all the gold. In a way she was grateful to them for putting on such a show. To her the guests were actors and actresses hired by some mysterious Newport public relations manager to keep up Newport's image. If she squinted, which she did, she could see a hundred years in the past.
She meandered through a quick tour of the disco tent on the grounds, as well as the few rooms in Ocean Court that were actually open to guests: the somber wainscoted library, the exquisite music room, the east-facing breakfast room, the his-and-hers reception rooms. All in all, she preferred the simplicity and logic of twentieth-century living, not to mention her Mac computer. It was fun to imagine a life of extravagance, but living it seemed like an awful lot of work. Besides, look at what a fascination with the good life had done for her poor father. No: it was better not to pine.
Nonetheless, steeped in extravagance and Strauss waltzes as she was tonight, Quinta discovered that she was pining like crazy. When Alan Seton took Mavis Moran in his arms and whirled her around the dance floor, Quinta felt decidedly crummy. When someone cut in for Mavis and Alan retired to the sidelines, Quinta still felt bad: Alan was staring at the auburn-haired woman far too intently. Then he and Mavis danced together again, and Quinta felt her spirits sink still more.
After that, a young man who wrote for Yachting Magazine recognized fellow-journalist Quinta and asked her to dance. That made her feel even worse, because she didn't know how to dance very well. It never occurred to her, as she disentangled her feet from her partner's, that maybe it was the young man who was making a botch of it.
After the waltz was over, Quinta excused herself to go to the powder room. She took up her place in a line of gowned and jeweled beauties and thought, At last, the great equalizer—the line to the john. It made her feel better. Looking back over the evening so far, Quinta decided that her discomfort had begun when she stopped being a nicely dressed member of the audience and tried to join the troupe on stage. She never should've stepped out on that parquet floor. This was not the Regency period, and she was not a character in Jane Austen. Absolutely, positively, she had danced her last dance. There was only one thing to do: find the host, thank him for having invited her, and get the heck out. Enough was enough.
After Quinta emerged from the powder room, she straightened her shoulders, lifted her chin, and steamed full speed ahead for Alan Seton, who was standing off to one side of the dance floor, talking with someone commodore-ish. He saw her coming.
"I was looking for you," Alan said with a smile she hadn't seen for three years. "Are you free for the next dance?"
Free? To make a fool of herself? To set her heart on its ear for nothing? To tear out another strap of a brand-new pair of shoes?
"Free as a butterfly," she answered instantly.
As it happened, the gods conspired to prevent Quinta from having anything so rational as a second thought. The orchestra struck up a waltz, and she found herself being led gently but very firmly toward her personal Armageddon. She knew without looking that every eye was naturally focused on the star of the show, Alan Seton. And tomorrow over brunch they'd all rehash the ball and speculate about the bimbo in the polyester skirt.
But that was tomorrow. Right now she was dancing! Dancing well! Never mind Alan's knock-down nearness; never mind the society photographer who stuck a large camera in their faces and flashed. Suddenly she was dancing, getting neither underfoot nor overfoot, gliding in three-quarter time to heavenly strains with the handsomest man in the ballroom. Suddenly it was all coming together for her: the rainbow swirls of long gowns, the flowers, the music, the lighting, the laughter. Suddenly she understood; and—polyester or no polyester—she belonged.
The waltz was nearly over and they hadn't exchanged a word. Quinta wondered whether Alan was always this way—so concentrated, so intense. Maybe that was how America's Cup skippers were. But no: she'd seen him murmuring pleasantly with Mavis Moran as he danced with her, and with the young woman in the receiving line from the something-Industrial Corporation. So it must be Quinta's fault: he was assuming she couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time.
Well, she thought happily, he's right. She wanted the moment to stay perfect, and who knew where chit-chat might lead them.
When the dance was over he gave her a light and courtly bow, a replica of the one he'd bestowed on her three years earlier. Was he making fun of the article she'd written about him? She muttered, in some confusion, "What's new with you, Alan? Has the pizza man struck again?"
He looked surprised. "Yesterday, as a matter of fact. If you don't mind my saying so, you sound like an obvious suspect." He was smiling as he said it, but his blue eyes looked puzzled.
"I'm innocent, honest," she said quickly. "I must have practical jokers on the brain; we've had one hard on our trail lately." She added, "I didn't mean to pry."
The orchestra struck up another dance, a tango this time. The ballroom floor began immediately to empty. Alan said, "This isn't my cup of tea. Do you mind if we sit this one out?"
She was about to ask, Together? but stopped herself in time.
He led her through French doors which opened out onto a modest terrace, not so small that it would be considered intimate, not so large that it invited curious onlookers. The night was deeply starry; a breeze lifted the folds of her long skirt and ruffled the jeweled sleeves of her top, sending pinpoints of starlight shimmering from her neckline. The setting was impossibly romantic. Quinta took it all in, the mathematician in her calculating the odds of something like this ever happening to her again.
Alan Seton, like the rest of the Pegasus sailing crew, wore cream-colored flannels and a blue blazer, the more easily to stand out from the black-tie guests. The night was warm. He took off his jacket and threw it on the stone balustrade, then loosened his tie.
"I suppose I should be grateful that I don't have to wear a monkey suit," he said with a sigh. "You look extremely fetching, by the way. I found myself staring at you before I knew who you were."
"And after you found out?" she asked, not at all coyly.
"I did a double-take."
"Because?"
"Because you're a kid, or supposed to be, and you're not anymore, that's all." He laughed softly, more to himself than to her. "I don't think you understand how deeply ingrained a certain picture of you is in my mind. In my mind you'll always be wearing ratty jeans and have your hair in ... in bangs, I think," he said, struggling to translate his vision of her into words. "You symbolized something to me that night of the accident, something very special—a kind of life-must-go-on-attitude that carried me through some hard decisions. I think you still have whatever it was I saw in you, except that the wrapping is fancier now."
He reached up and with the lightest possible touch lifted a strand of her hair and let it fall over her forehead, the way she let it do years ago. "There. You wore it something like that, he said softly. "Not so pulled back."
"I was a child," she whispered, faint with pleasure.
"And now you're not. I know." He swept her face with a searching look, as if he were making sure of it; and then he lowered his mouth to hers and kissed her on her lips, in a gentle, almost melancholy acknowledgment of her womanliness.
To be kissed on a starry balcony at a ball is not the same as being kissed on the steps of your front porch. She held her breath, afraid to move, afraid to think. If God were in His heaven, Alan Seton would never let go.
Instead, he drew from her and said murmured, "Why did I do that?" He was as much amazed as she was. "What a dumb thing to do."
"It wasn't that bad," she whispered, suddenly crestfallen.
"Ah, Quinta ... this isn't the time; certainly not the place." He looked around quickly. "I have no right to take your life out of your hands and pass it on to the media. Forgive me."
"I passed a piece of your life on to the media," she reminded him promptly. "And I'm not sorry."
"My life's fair game," he said with a crooked smile. "But yours—yours is precious to me."
"If it's so precious, why didn't you ever call or write?" she blurted out.
"I did write."
"To my father."
He laughed a short, bemused, frustrated laugh. "What was my relationship to you then? Friendly Dutch uncle?"
"Friend. Period," she shot back.
He repeated the word after her: "'Friend.' I don't think I have any of those."
"You mean you don't have time for any of those."
He grinned. "What a little scold you are."
She colored, then replied, "It comes from living with my father." It was her greatest fear: that she'd live out her years as an unmarried nag.
"I think you're the best thing that could happen to your father. He'd be crazy to ease you out," Alan added, lifting his hand and tracing her lips with a feather-light touch of his forefinger.
"Who says he's—?"
"Darling," came a voice behind Quinta. "People are beginning to grumble. I hate to tear you away, but the dog-and-pony show really must go on."
Quinta turned guiltily away from Alan and to see Mavis Moran, an iceberg on fire, smiling at them. There was no question in Quinta's mind that her father's gossipy speculations about the two were right on the money. So: she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Feeling very much like Cinderella at 11:59 P.M., she mumbled a flustered good night and left them on the terrace.