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Overview
While Melissa and Blake's attraction is immediate and fiery, a dangerous secret lurks beneath their relationship — one that could destroy them ... and their families.
Provocative and beautifully written, and dealing with themes of love, honesty, identity, and the consequences of ambition, The Third Child is a remarkable page-turner.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780060936037 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 11/23/2004 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Sales rank: | 1,006,593 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.02(w) x 10.88(h) x 0.82(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Third Child
A Novel
Chapter One
"Your father is an important man." Rosemary placed her small delicate handsfirmly on the ebony surface of her desk, the desk that had followed her through the governor's mansion to the Washington house the Senator had rented at what Rosemary said was an exorbitant price. She had called Melissa and Billy into her office at the back. "You have to learn to behave accordingly. If this gets into the papers, it could damage your father."
Billy was trying to look remorseful, but Melissa worried he was not succeeding. The windows were open onto the narrow yard, where something exotic was in bloom. It was spring vacation and much warmer in D.C. than at Miss Porter's School in Connecticut where Melissa was in her last year. In her father's family, the Dickinsons, the women always attended Miss Porter's -- even her, no matter how far down the family hierarchy she was rated. The garden was her favorite part of this new house in Georgetown on a street called P in the block off Wisconsin where her parents had moved after the election. She and Billy sat out there last night smoking dope under a magnolia whose big flowers were just browning and falling on them. A tree with pink flowers was opening, a tree as feminine as if it wore a prom dress. In the twilight after Billy went in, she had lain under that tree imagining a lover -- not real sex, with its brutal disappointment, but with a soft dissolve, romantic, like perfect kissing. Her grandmother Susie, whom she never saw anymore, would know the name of that tree. When she was little, she had wanted to be like Grandma Susie -- growing tomatoes and peonies, beans and zinnias in the yard in Youngstown. She had started a garden on the grounds of the governor's mansion in Harrisburg, but when Rosemary discovered it, the gardener pulled her plants up and restored it the way it had been. Melissa was supposed to want to be a lawyer or something better, whatever that might be. Her father wanted to be President, and her mother was determined to get him there. Billy had bought the pot on M Street. M and Wisconsin were a different world from the staid block of old houses mostly flush to the sidewalk and always swarming with workers painting, gardening, tuck-pointing the bricks, primping the houses -- on Wisconsin and on M it was a world of the young, alive and noisy, racially mixed and of all classes. This house was Second Empire, which sounded sinister, and only a hundred twenty-five years old;Rosemary had wanted a federal house of red brick two hundred years old, but those were even more expensive.
"It was just pot, Mother," Billy said. His forelock had fallen over his eyes. She fought the impulse to push it back. His hair in the sun beaming through the window was that light red gold called strawberry blond, different from anybody in the family -- not blond like Father and Merilee. Not ordinary light brown hair like Rich Junior and herself. Mother's hair had been blond for years now; it went with her porcelain skin.
"You're just fifteen. Are you trying to get expelled again?" Rosemary shook her head in annoyance.
He gave Melissa one of those Here-we-go-again looks. Actually Billy did not uch care if he got expelled, as he'd said to her when he was waiting to be called on the carpet -- the two of them sprawled on her bed as always talking in utters and whispers. He had friends at prep school, but he made friends easily and one school was like another to him. This was his third. They always let him get away with a lot before they tossed him because he was the Senator's son, and because he was good at every sport he bothered to try.
"I was just going along with the other guys."
Melissa said, "In high school, most guys smoke pot sometimes, Mother. Be glad he's not on Ecstasy or heroin. Let's have some perspective." She always tried to make peace between her mother and her younger brother -- if only Billy could manage to seem truly sorry, but he couldn't fake it successfully. He had never taken their mother's reprimands as intensely as she had. She had been a puppyish fool, wagging her tail, fetching slippers, trying, always trying to be someone Rosemary wanted for a daughter. Now her aim with her mother was to be cool. She was an undercover agent playing the dutiful daughter, but they would see. They had no idea who she really was, her deadly skills and her hidden brilliance as she played the part of a too tall, too busty, hardworking high school senior. But under that drab exterior, she was something else, something that would astonish them. Oh, sure.
Rosemary ignored her. "Everything you do is visible, Billy. Everything any of us does can come back to haunt your father."
Melissa sighed and slumped into a chair. It was a weird curvy chair, which she supposed went with the house, upholstered in nubby blue silk. Her father 's importance. She could not remember when it did not exist. In retrospect, it gilded even the snapshot of him from his Dartmouth days, holding an oar aloft like a captured trophy -- a shot always accompanied by the caption saying that he had gone to the 1968 Olympics with his sculling team. She had learned only two years ago that he had not actually competed -- her aunt Karen told her. Karen cultivated the unusual habit in the Dickinson family of telling the truth, not a trait valued by the rest of the family -- except Billy and her, the two young misfits. Actually Billy was too handsome to be a real misfit ...
The Third ChildA Novel. Copyright © by Marge Piercy. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.