Home > Silent Night(2)

Silent Night(2)
Author: Danielle Steel

Emma’s career had been a bone of contention between Paige and her older sister, Whitney, ever since Paige had started Emma modeling when she was six months old. Whitney considered it exploitation, and the older Emma got, the more Whitney objected to it. She accused Paige of living vicariously through her child to the point of being abusive. She told Paige she was robbing Emma of her childhood and depriving her of a normal life.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Paige argued with her. “Look at her, she’s a star at nine, the whole world loves her, and she loves being on the show. Do you think Dad abused Mom by running her career?” They fought about it often, and had diametrically opposite points of view. Whitney had hated their childhood as the children of a major star. Paige had loved every minute of it, or said so now. And she idolized their father. Whitney saw all his flaws.

“Does it ever occur to you that maybe Mom got early onset Alzheimer’s at fifty-two, and died at fifty-four, because of the pressure she was under, which he orchestrated for thirty years? She had no life, all she did was work on one film after another, and win two Oscars. She had no time for friends except the people she worked with, and she almost never saw us. She was always working somewhere. Mom did everything he told her to, just like you’re doing with Emma now. Doesn’t that ever scare you? Aren’t you afraid she’ll accuse you of stealing her childhood one day?”

“She’ll thank me for it when she’s as big a star as our mother was, or bigger. With social media today, stardom is an even bigger deal than it was then. It’s global now, and everything moves faster.”

“It was global then too,” Whitney reminded her. Their mother had been an icon like Elizabeth Taylor and Rita Hayworth in their day. But Whitney had never had the impression that their mother was happy. She seemed frightened a lot of the time, except when her husband was making her decisions for her, and she had died so young. She had died two weeks after Whitney graduated from medical school, which had been Whitney’s way of escaping her family’s Hollywood destiny. She had chosen a career as radically different from her parents’ as she could, and she was now a psychiatrist with a solid practice at thirty-nine.

Paige was thirty-seven, and her greatest and only achievement was being the ultimate stage mother and running Emma’s life. The two sisters couldn’t have been more different, and Whitney always felt sorry for Emma and wished she had a better life with more time to be a child, not just a small adult. But Paige never saw it that way. All she could see was how huge a success Emma would be one day, and she never missed a chance to remind reporters and publicists that Emma was Liz Winston’s granddaughter, and even pointed out how much they looked alike. Just reading it in the press made Whitney sad.

Neither she nor Paige had ever married, and Whitney had never wanted to. After watching her father control every instant of her mother’s life, marriage looked like a bad deal to her, and she had an aversion to it. She readily admitted she was phobic about marriage. She had no desire to have anyone control any aspect of her life. She’d never wanted children, and didn’t consider her childhood a happy one, although her sister disagreed. In Whitney’s opinion, she and Paige had had a lonely childhood, brought up by nannies, while their mother was on location somewhere and their father was her constant shadow, so he was gone as well, and too busy to spend time with them when they came back to L.A. He was always setting up his wife’s next movie with producers and studio heads.

Whitney loved her career as a psychiatrist, and didn’t want to ruin someone else’s life, or burden herself with a child. She enjoyed her life among adults, the freedom to do what she wanted, and lead a selfish life if she chose. She liked living alone.

Her determination not to have children had complicated her life for a while. It made her shy away from men who wanted marriage and children, which led her into a series of affairs with irresponsible men who were players and took advantage of the fact that she didn’t want to get married. Or she wound up with emotional cripples, incapable of attaching to anyone. As time went on, and the men she met were divorced, she found herself on dates with men and their children on weekends, while they told her their tales of woe about their greedy, vicious ex-wives, and she spent time with their angry children damaged by the divorce. She did everything she could to avoid getting involved with their dramas. She just wanted to enjoy a peaceful, adult relationship with no complications. Her last divorced boyfriend had been the father of thirteen-year-old IVF triplets. It had been a nightmare, with middle-of-the-night threats from his neurotic ex-wife, who he went back to anyway, and Whitney fled as fast as she could when his ex-wife started threatening her. She hadn’t dated a divorced man with children since.

For the past five years, she’d been dating someone she considered the perfect man for her. Chad Phillips was a brilliantly successful high-tech venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. He was twenty years older than she, had four grown children she had met but spent no time with, and he didn’t expect her to. And he had no interest in remarrying or having more children. He had a yacht that he kept in the Mediterranean in summer and the Caribbean in winter. They loved taking trips together, and managed to meet once a month for a quiet weekend, or a fun adventure somewhere, which was all either of them wanted. They cared about each other, but Whitney had strong boundaries, and she never let men get too close to her. She didn’t need or want a man running her life, and Chad didn’t want to have a woman dependent on him again. His ex-wife was still bitter about their divorce fifteen years later, and Whitney wanted no part of jealous stepchildren or angry ex-wives. She and Chad thoroughly enjoyed each other and their adult relationship, and he was fascinated by her work, her beauty, and her history. Whitney was a striking-looking woman, tall like her father, graceful and slim with an exquisite face, porcelain white skin, and long dark hair. The only trait she shared with her sister was their mother’s huge blue eyes.

Whitney’s relationship with Chad suited them both perfectly, and he was always slightly intrigued by who her parents had been, and how removed Whitney kept herself from the whole Hollywood scene. He thought it was admirable of her. She never traded on it. In fact she never mentioned it, and he had only discovered it a year after they’d started dating, when he read an article about her. Whitney hadn’t said a word about it to him before.

He had never met Whitney’s sister, whom Whitney described as a flake for most of her life, and the consummate stage mother living vicariously through her child, which sounded unhealthy to him. He loved how balanced and sane Whitney was, despite what must have been an unusual upbringing. Enough so to make her gun-shy about marriage and children of her own, which worked for him. Women had been trying to lure and ensnare him into marriage for all the years he’d been divorced, and it was a breath of fresh air that Whitney never did.

Chad was fifty-nine years old, vital, active, healthy, brilliantly successful, and he and Whitney got along perfectly. They were about to leave on their annual summer trip together, on his boat in Italy. They hadn’t seen each other in a month, since a lovely Fourth of July weekend in Lake Tahoe. They shared the fun in their lives, not the headaches. He was already on his boat in Monte Carlo, waiting for her, and she was flying over to meet him in a few days. They spent three weeks on his boat every summer, and she spent another week at home afterward, getting organized to go back to work. There was purpose and planning to everything Whitney did. Spontaneity was not her style. To her, spontaneity always felt like chaos.

* * *

Paige’s love life had been even more checkered than her sister’s while she floundered through the early years of her unsuccessful acting career. She’d had a series of notoriously badly behaved Hollywood boyfriends, the usual bad boys to her lost ingénue. She’d had public breakups, embarrassing cheaters, actors who wanted to get to her father by sleeping with her, hoping Bill Watts would take them on as clients and further their careers, since he was still working in his eighties. Paige had been a mess in the early days, and Whitney considered her embarrassing and irresponsible. Paige was almost as beautiful as their legendary mother, but she had never had her act together where men were concerned.

Their mother’s death had rocked Paige’s world. She was twenty-four when it happened. And losing her mother had led to a year or two of drugs, and a celebrity rehab, while Whitney was doing her residency.

The worst blow had come when their father died two years after their mother. He was ninety-one years old by then. He had gone downhill rapidly after Liz died. He retired very shortly after her death, and his health began to deteriorate. Whitney felt that losing her had disheartened him so severely, he didn’t want to survive. They had had a totally codependent relationship. Paige was twenty-six when their father died, and Whitney twenty-eight. It had been a crushing loss for both of them, but Whitney had weathered it as she did all things, with resilience, strength, and quiet fortitude. Paige had been a lost soul for almost two years, squandering her share of the inheritance, in a free fall of confusion and despair without her parents, and had finally stopped it by deciding that what she needed to ground her and give stability and purpose to her life was a baby. With no meaningful man of the hour to accomplish that with, she’d used an old friend from high school as a sperm donor. He was gay and had been touched by the request. He’d made it clear that he didn’t want an active role in the child’s life, which appealed to Paige. She embraced the idea of being a single mother, and he did it as a favor for an old friend. Paige was already pregnant when she informed Whitney of what she’d done. Whitney was horrified, and shortly after Emma was born, the baby’s biological father got sick and died of AIDS, and Whitney attended her niece’s birth with a feeling of overwhelming dismay and sorrow for the child, with a mother who would be incapable of caring for her responsibly, and no father at all. Whitney was glad her parents weren’t there to see it, but things had turned out better than she’d feared. Much to Whitney’s surprise, Paige was fiercely devoted to the baby, and made her the center of her universe. Whitney didn’t agree with her theories about child rearing, but at least Paige was no longer on drugs or endangering Emma in any overt way, even if she was obsessed with making her a star one day. But it could have been a lot worse. Paige cleaned up her act and settled down to mother the baby, and Whitney was pleasantly surprised.

   
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