Free Seidel, Kathleen Gilles by More Than You Dreamed Page A

mother had given up custody of her. The accurate statement was larger: Melody had given up.
    Cass had been determined to keep Jill, this delicious golden-haired child who lived in clouds of baby powder, white ribbon-threaded dresses, and stuffed bears. With her silver-handled mother-of-pearl teething ring and her bright pink plastic Brady Bunch lunch box had come the sweet pleasures of late-life fatherhood. Cass had let his two sons go back to their native land; this daughter he was keeping.
    There had never been any question of attacking Melody, of threatening to prove her an unfit mother. Cass was too gentlemanly for that, and his lawyers too clever. An attack might have roused the defensive lioness in even the frail and shaken Melody.
    Cass's silver-haired attorneys, in their white shirts and dark pinstriped suits, had sat across a long table and done something much more devastating. They asked Melody to speak for herself.
    "By what criteria would you select her schools, Mrs. Casler? What type of curriculum do you prefer? Who do you envision being her peer group? How do you propose to cope with the psychological ramifications of divorce?"
    And poor Melody, who believed the only thing valuable about her were her legs, had given up. Those legs might have gotten her out of the trailer park she had grown up in, but they weren't going to analyze curriculum for her.
    Melody had not given herself enough credit. Of course she could have chosen a school. She had taught herself to dress, she had furnished a Bel Air home, she had learned to converse with writers and producers, she had developed taste and acquired interests, all from reading fashion magazines and watching other people. She had, Jill now knew, an enormously retentive mind with an unerring capacity to distinguish between essence and effect.
    As much as Jill understood this, she also knew that she had been better off in her father's care. Her mother would have been a fine parent during her good periods, but Melody had an addictive personality. During Melody's bad times Jill would have suffered terribly.
    Melody was currently in one of the good periods. Having married two father-figures—the husband after Cass had been George Norfolk, a federal judge—she was, at age 47, married to a son—Dodger third baseman David Ahearn, who was only six years older than Jill.
    The previous summer David had embarked on a hitting streak that hadn't ended until he had tied Pete Rose. For all of David's twelve years in the majors, the pressure and the media were almost too much for him. This brought out the best in Melody. She had been wonderful, traveling with David, making his world private and comfortable. Anything she asked for during those long road trips the Dodger organization gave her. They knew she was essential to keeping the streak alive.
    This, much more than her stunning legs, was the basis of Melody's appeal to men. She made them comfortable. A gifted director, a well-respected judge, and an intelligent, articulate athlete had found her irresistible.
    But she set too high standards for herself. It wasn't possible to make everything in someone else's life perfect. When she couldn't, she believed herself to be failing. She couldn't forgive herself, she couldn't make a few corrections and go on. She would instead turn herself into what she, at heart, believed herself to be: a woman valuable only for her legs.
    Jill knew the pattern well. It would start with shopping. Melody would be drawn to a dress, but couldn't decide whether to buy it in amber, periwinkle, or ivory-on-ivory. She would buy them all and then never take them out of the trunk of her car. She, whose body was so easy to fit, would buy suede suits that needed to be altered, even completely recut. Then she would forget to pick them up from the store. She would buy new linens for all her beds and store them, forever unopened, in her linen closets. Her garage would be lined with boxes of dishes and cookware, still in