Mixed Blessings: A Novel - Couverture souple

Chapter One

The sky was a brilliant blue, and the day was  hot and still as Diana Goode stepped out of the limousine with her father.  The  angles of her face were softer than usual beneath a haze of creamy ivory veil,  and the heavy satin dress whooshed softly as the driver helped her out and  settled it around her. She beamed at her father, standing outside the church, and then she closed her eyes, trying to remember absolutely every detail of  the moment.  She had never been this happy in her life.  Everything was  perfect.

"You look beautiful," her father said softly, with All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena rising behind her.  Her mother had gone ahead in the other car with her sisters and their husbands and children.  Diana was the middle child, classically striving to be better, smarter, more successful.  She loved her sisters with a deep, solid affection, and yet she always felt she had to  do something  more than they did.  Not that they had set such impossible standards.  Her oldest sister, Gayle, had been set on going to medical school, until she met her husband in her first year of premed, married him that June, and instantly got pregnant.  At twenty-nine, she had three adorable little girls of her own now.  Gayle was two years older than Diana, and although they were close, there had always been a sense of rivalry between them, and the two women were astoundingly different.  Gayle never looked back at a career in medicine once.  She was happily married, and satisfied to stay home with her girls, and keep busy with them and her husband.  She was the perfect doctor's wife, intelligent, informed, and completely understanding about his hours as an obstetrician.  They were planning to have at least one more child, Gayle had confided to her a few weeks before.  Jack was desperate for a boy now.  Gayle's whole life revolved around her husband, and her children, and their home.  For her, the world of  careers held absolutely no appeal, unlike her two younger sisters.

  In some ways, Diana had more in common with her younger sister, Sam.  Samantha was ambitious, competitive, excited about being out in the world, and for the first couple of years she was married, she had desperately tried to juggle both home life and career.  But when her second child was born thirteen months after the first, a mere two years after she'd gotten married, she admitted that she just couldn't do  it.  She quit her job at an art gallery in L.A.  and decided to stay home, which was welcome news to her husband.  Although for months after she'd quit, Sam felt disappointed not to be working.  In the two years they'd been married, Seamus's work had begun to be recognized and admired, and he was slowly becoming one of L.A.'s most successful young contemporary artists.

  Sam did free-lance design work from home, but even that was almost impossible to do, with no help and two very young children.  She adored being home with Seamus and her babies, and they had a great marriage, and their son and daughter were two little fat cherubs.  Everyone who saw them instantly loved them.  But still, there were times when she envied Diana's place in the working world, among "grown-ups," as she put it.

But in Diana's eyes, her sisters' lives seemed so settled.  As far as she could see, at twenty-five and twenty-nine, her sisters seemed to have everything they wanted.  Sam was happy and at ease in the world of modern art, Gayle was equally so as the wife of a doctor.  But Diana had always wanted so much more than they had.  She had gone to Stanford, and then did her junior year abroad, in Paris, at the Sorbonne.  And she had returned to Paris for yet another year there after graduation.  She had found a fabulous little apartment on the rue de Grenelle, on the Left Bank, and for a while she had decided that she really was going to  stay there.  But after a year and a half working for Paris-Match, she  got homesick for the States, and her family .  .  . and most of  all, much to her own surprise, for her sisters.  Gayle had been having her  third baby then, and Sam had been expecting her first, and somehow Diana just  felt that she wanted to be with them.

But she felt torn when she got back, and tortured herself for the first  few months about whether or not coming back had been the right thing.  Maybe  she hadn't tried hard enough to stay there.

Paris had been great, but L.A.  was interesting, too, and she had landed a great job almost instantly when she returned, as a senior editor at  Today's Home. The magazine was still new then and the opportunities  were exciting. The salary was good, the people were nice, the working  conditions were great, and they gave her a fabulous office.  Within months she  was running shoots, hiring photographers, rewriting some of the stories  herself, and flying off to look at extraordinary homes in exotic locations.   She even got back to Paris now and then, and London.  She shot one issue in the  south of France, another in Gstaad.  And of course New York, Palm Beach,  Houston, Dallas, San Francisco, and other American cities.  It was the perfect  job for her, and it made her the envy of her friends, and even her sisters.  To  anyone who didn't realize what hard work it was, it looked extremely  glamorous, and so did Diana.

Shortly after she took the job, Diana met Andy at a media party.  They  talked six hours straight in a little Italian restaurant the night they met,  and after that she hardly had time to catch her breath before he asked her to  move into his apartment.  She waited six months before she did, cautious about giving up her independence.  But she was crazy about him, and he knew it.  He was wild about her, too, and everything about them was a perfect mesh.  They seemed to be ideally suited to each other.  He was tall and handsome and blond, had been a tennis star at Yale, was from an old, respected family in New York, and had come to UCLA to go to law school.  And as soon as he graduated, he had gone to work in the legal department of a major network.  He loved his work, and Diana was fascinated by what he did, and the people he knew there.  He was the legal counsel for several important shows and the network was extremely pleased with the way he handled their more complicated contracts.

Diana loved going to business parties with him, meeting some of the stars  and talking to other lawyers, big producers, and important agents.  It was heady stuff, but Andy took it all in stride.  He had a good head on his shoulders, a bright mind, and he was seldom impressed by the glamour of the world he worked in.  He liked what he did, and eventually he planned to open his own practice, specializing in entertainment law.  But he knew it was still too soon, and appreciated the valuable experience he was getting at the network.  He knew exactly where he was going and what he wanted out of life.  He had carefully mapped out his career long before, and when Diana walked into his life, he knew within a matter of days that this was the woman he wanted as his wife, and the mother of his children.  And they had laughed when they discovered that they both wanted four children.  He had been one of four boys, which included a set of identical twins, and Diana wondered if they would have a set of their own. They talked a lot about having kids, and Diana realized that once in a while their sexual carelessness was born of their desire to tempt the fates and get pregnant.  Neither of them would have been distraught if Diana had gotten pregnant and forced them into an early marriage.  Within months of the day they met, they both talked openly about wedding plans and their long-term intentions.

  They lived together in a small but handsome apartment in Beverly Hills.  They shared much the same taste, and they had even bought two paintings from Seamus. With their combined incomes, they could afford something really nice.  They decorated in stark modern style, and spent all their extra money on art.  One day they wanted to start an important collection, but they couldn't afford it now, so they bought what they could and enjoyed it immensely.

But what really pleased Diana about Andy was how well he got on with her parents, and with her sisters and their husbands.  As different as Jack and Seamus were, Andy seemed to like both of them, and frequently had lunch with them when he didn't have a business lunch scheduled at the network.  And he seemed to be just as much at ease in Seamus's world of art as he was in Jack's world, either discussing medical research or financial investments.  Andrew Douglas was an easy, likable guy, and everything about their life together thrilled Diana.  They went to Europe together after the first year, and she showed him all her favorite haunts in Paris, and afterward they drove through the valley of the Loire.  And then they went to Scotland to visit Nick, Andy's younger brother, who was spending a year there.  It was the perfect life, and after they got home, they started making leisurely plans to get married the following summer.  They got engaged eighteen months after they met, and set the wedding date eight months later, in June, and decided to go back to Europe for their honeymoon, to the south of France this time, Italy, and Spain.  Diana had managed to get three weeks off from the magazine, and Andy had wangled the same amount of time from the network.

  They looked for a house in Brentwood, Westwood, and Santa Monica, and even thought about commuting from Malibu when they saw something they really loved there.  But in  March they found the perfect house, in Pacific Palisades.  It had been well loved and well tended by a large family for years, and now the children had grown and gone and the couple who owned it were reluctantly selling.  Andy and Diana fell in love with it at first sight.  It was big and rambling and warm, there was wood panelling, and there were wonderful trees just outside and a huge garden for the children to play in.  There was a lovely master suite on the second floor, and an office for each of them, as well as a handsome guest room.  And on the floor above were four huge children's bedrooms.

  The closing on the house was in May, and Andy had moved into it just three weeks before the wedding.  The night of the rehearsal dinner, which Diana's parents gave at the Bistro in Beverly Hills, there were still boxes everywhere, and Diana had left her bags for their honeymoon in the front hall. She didn't want to spend the night before the wedding with him, and she was spending the night at her parents'.  She spent it in her childhood bedroom, and lay for a long time after she woke up, looking at the faded pink-and-blue flowered wallpaper she knew so well.  It was funny to think that in a few hours she would be someone else, someone's  wife .  .  .  what did that mean? Who would she be then? Would it be different than it had been living with him? Would he change? Would she? Suddenly it all seemed more than a little scary. She thought of her sisters then, the men they had married, the  children they'd had, and how it had all changed them, subtly at first, and then over the years, they seemed to become sort of a unit with their children and husbands.  She was still close to them, but in subtle ways it was just a little different.  It was odd to think, too, that a year from now she might have her own child.  The idea gave her a small thrill in the pit of her stomach.  Making love to Andy was always so extraordinary, but it was even more exciting to think that one of these days it might bear fruit, and they would have a baby.  She loved Andy so much, and loved thinking about having his children.

  She was still smiling to herself when she got up on her wedding day, thinking about Andy and the life they would share.  She went downstairs for a quiet cup of coffee before everyone got up, and her mother came down after that, and half an hour later her sisters and their children arrived to dress there, and help Diana get ready for the wedding.  Their husbands had stayed home, both were going to be ushers in the wedding.  Gayle's three girls and Sam's one little girl were going to be flower girls, and Sam's little boy was going to be the ring bearer.  He was just two, and he looked so cute in the little white silk suit Diana had picked out for him, she and her sisters had tears in their eyes when they saw him.

  Diana's mother rounded the children up shortly after they arrived, and she'd hired a girl to help keep them in  order while their mothers dressed. "Typical," Gayle had cracked with a grin and a raised eyebrow.  Their mother usually thought of everything, planned for all contingencies, and was so organized as to make everyone groan when she started calling them in June to find out what their plans were for Thanksgiving.  But her mother had been a godsend for Diana in putting together the wedding.  She had been so busy herself at the magazine, she'd scarcely had time to go to her own fittings, but her mother had handled everything, and Diana knew that, as a result, everything would go smoothly.  And so far, it had.  Her sisters looked beautiful in their pale-peach silk gowns, and they were carrying the palest peach-color roses. And the little girls looked exquisite, too, in their white dresses with peach-colored sashes, carrying baskets of rose petals in their little gloved hands, as they left for church with their grandmother and mothers.  Diana stayed and chatted with her father for the last few, nerve-wracking moments.

  "You look just beautiful, sweetheart," he beamed at her.  He had always been so proud of her, so decent and kind and supportive.  She had no complaints about her parents, there had been no hidden agendas here, no unreasonable demands, no animosities, not even as she was growing up, from what she re...

After the wedding of Diana Goode and Andrew Douglas, Diana teases that they will make a baby on their honeymoon.  But long afterward, she is still not pregnant.  As Diana and Andrew wait out each month only to be bitterly disappointed, they are forced to question just how much they are willing to go through to have a baby.  

Charlie Winwood dreams of a house filled with children.  His bride, party-girl actress Barbie Mason, has other ideas.  When he discovers he is sterile, Charlie has to rethink his deepest values -- and his marriage to a woman who shares none of his dreams.

After ten years of living together, Pilar Graham, a prominent Santa Barbara attorney, marries Judge Brad Coleman, who is nineteen years her senior and father of two grown children.  They are happy with their comfortable life together, à deux, until Pilar begins to wonder if she will someday regret not having a baby with Brad.  Are they crazy to begin now -- with Brad about to become a grandfather and Pilar with a busy career, and in her early forties, possibly putting herself at risk?

Through the lives of these couples, Danielle Steel shows us the mixed blessingswe face as we build our families and live our modern lives.  She touches us with the triumphant people who prevail, their victories, their defeats, their tragedies and joys, their compromises, their lives.