Changes of Heart Read online

  Changes of Heart

  Liza Gyllenhaal

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1004

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1992 by Liza Gyllenhaal

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition February 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-252-9

  To W.E.B.,

  as always.

  Chapter 1

  “Oh, God, not another one,” Zachary Dorn muttered under his breath as Janie explained that she had majored in fine arts, minored in French, and graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with some of the highest honors in the history of the school.

  “Pardon?” Janie demanded, infuriated by this cocky, obviously disinterested advertising executive. She had finished her interview with his partner, Michael Delaney, feeling buoyantly confident that Dorn and Delaney Advertising, Inc., was a dream come true of a first job. She’d done enough research to know that it was considered one of the most creative “boutique” agencies on Madison Avenue. The headhunter who had guided Janie through initial interviews at a number of agencies ranked D&D at the top of the list.

  “It’s considered quite hot, honey,” the woman had told her. “And Lord knows it’s growing. They just landed Chanson Wine International. That’s why they’re staffing up, I think.”

  “But I know nothing about wine,” Janie had replied uncertainly.

  “Doesn’t matter,” the headhunter assured her, sorting once more through Janie’s portfolio and rearranging some of her comps. “You know about design. Obviously.”

  “Excuse me?” Janie said again when Zachary Dorn didn’t respond to her question. He was flipping through her work as though it were a back issue of an old National Geographic at some dentist’s office. Where Michael had been cordial and polite, getting up to shake her hand, asking if she wanted a cup of coffee, Zachary had barked “Come in, dammit” when Janie knocked on his door. Where Michael had skillfully led Janie through a series of questions about her past and education, Zachary had gruffly demanded, “So, tell me about yourself, why don’t you?”

  Perhaps she had gone into rather more detail than was necessary about her achievements at RISD, but she was proud of her accomplishments. A part of her was still glowing from the letter the head of the art department had written on her behalf for prospective employers. “Talent, hard work, and adaptability have rarely merged so beautifully in one individual,” the letter had concluded, “as they have in Jane Penrod. If you’re lucky enough to have Janie come your way, grab her!”

  “Uh, I’m sorry, Jeannie,” Zachary finally replied, closing the portfolio and pushing it across the tabletop as if it were some tray to be cleared.

  “Janie,” she answered tightly, staring coldly across the table at Zachary Dorn and comparing him unfavorably to his partner. Michael Delaney had worn an impeccably tailored gray suit and tastefully coordinated pale pink shirt and dark tie of a rich but muted design. His hair was thinning, brushed back off his forehead, neatly trimmed. He wore horn-rimmed glasses, which he took off and gestured with frequently enough for Janie to assume they were as much a prop as a necessity. Janie had liked everything about Michael instinctively: his charm, his friendliness, his obvious good impression of her. Michael had made her feel that D&D would nurture her talent, give her a home, offer her a brilliant start to what was sure to be a smashing career. Zachary made her feel as though she’d never left Baldwin, her hometown in Massachusetts. He made her feel like dumb, fat Jane Millicent Penrod again. She decided that she loathed him.

  “Sorry. Janie,” he said, rubbing his forehead, and then smoothing back his dark, wavy hair. He had far too much hair, Janie decided, for someone in his position. It would be different if Zachary were the creative director of D&D, but that was Michael’s job. Zachary was supposed to be the business partner, the money man, the cool, calculating head of the firm. He looked more like some assistant professor of anthropology, Janie decided, someone who had just come back from the field after living among pygmies for too long. He had on a blue work shirt. A piece of brightly patterned fabric that Janie assumed was a tie hung at half-mast down his chest. Dark patches of sweat showed beneath his arms when he leaned back. He needed a shave. His gaze was trained somewhere beyond Jane’s right shoulder, lost in a world that she knew had nothing to do with her. She decided it never would.

  “Well, I guess I’ll go then,” she announced, reaching for her case. “I assume you’ll let Michael know that you weren’t that impressed.”

  “What?” he said, sitting forward. “Where the hell are you going?” he demanded, when she rose from her chair.

  “Home. Away,” she responded coldly. “I obviously won’t do.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Zachary cried, standing up and coming around the front of his desk. “Did I offend you? Please … please sit back down.” She sat. He perched himself on the edge of his desk.

  “I have an idea,” he said, looking down at her. His eyes, at last trained on her, were far warmer than Janie had anticipated. Intelligent and amused, his gaze roved over Janie’s face, stopping at her lips. She could feel her face start to redden.

  “Smile,” he instructed her. “Just give me your best smile.”

  Deciding he was crazy and that she didn’t really care, she smiled up at him. And then she laughed. “What’s your idea, for heaven’s sake?” she asked, pleased when he started to laugh in return.

  “Oh, it’s just this psychological test I like to run on recent, brilliant graduates,” he explained, standing again and starting to pace the office. “You all come out of school so damned serious. So ready to take on the world. So … eager to succeed.”

  “And what’s wrong with that?” Janie demanded, her smile fading. He had sketched her current state of mind a little too accurately.

  “Tell me something, Jean—Janie,” he demanded, not answering her question. “Just what the hell is it that you want to be? I mean, who is the secret you?” He was standing with his back to her, staring down at the snarl of midtown traffic twelve stories below. Janie could hear the muffled cry of car horns, like the bleating of sheep on a distant hillside. She’d been in Manhattan only a week now, but already she loved the noise and the smells. She loved the pushiness, the intensity. But mostly she loved the feeling that she could lose herself here, as she had never really been able to do at school, immerse herself in this rough sea of humanity and someday reemerge—changed, different, new. It was a city that invited you to dream, that whispered craftily in your ear that you could be anything you wanted … if you had the nerve. Something about the last few days—the excitement, the new frenetic pace—made her feel that she already was changing.

  She must have been tired, or a little light-headed from the tension of the afternoon—why else would she suddenly announce to this virtual stranger, “I want to be beautiful.”

  “You what?” he demanded, turning from the window to look at Janie. He stared at her as if he’d just noticed her there: a fat, redheaded girl dressed in a navy blue linen suit designed to conceal unflattering lines. She hated the suit and the matching Chanel pumps the personal dresser at Bergdorf’s had insisted she buy with it. She m
issed the striped overalls and brightly flowered shirts that had been her signature wardrobe at college. And she knew she looked uncomfortable, tense, as if she were secretly sucking in her stomach. Which she was.

  “I mean,” she immediately started to correct herself, “I want to design beautiful things. Ads. I want to be a great art director.”

  “No, no, no,” Zachary said, walking slowly back toward her as he continued to study the way she was sitting, her face, and her body as very few men ever had. “That’s not what you said. You said … you”—he was behind his desk again now and peering down at her résumé—“Jane Millicent Penrod, wanted to be beautiful. I think you were being honest. Being human. I think you’ve just opened up a little chink in that well-polished armor of the newly graduated brilliant art student—and allowed me to see into your sacred soul.”

  “What is this?” Janie demanded, now both embarrassed and mad. She grabbed for her purse again and stood up. “An advertising agency or a psychological testing site? I came here for a job, not a personality analysis.” She faced him across the desk, her face flushed, her green-gray eyes electric with anger.

  “Ah…” he said, smiling at her. He had a smile that turned down on one side, as if one half of him were trying to deny that he found anything amusing. “Got a little fire in there, have we? Not the cool, levelheaded New England iron maiden we pretend to be, after all.”

  “What’s with you, Mr. Dorn?” Janie snapped, throwing her purse over her shoulder. “You get a kick out of insulting potential candidates or something? This makes you happy—seeing me upset?”

  “No, it doesn’t make me happy, Jane,” Zachary replied, “but it gives me a hell of a lot better sense of what kind of person you are than if I sat here and listened to you natter on about your GRE scores.”

  “Is that so?” Janie demanded angrily. “Well then, how about a little tit for tat? With Mr. Delaney I had a pleasant, if perhaps—you’re right—slightly superficial introduction to Dorn & Delaney. You want to probe my psyche—okay, I don’t mind. But I get to ask you what I really want to know, too.”

  “Deal,” Zachary said. “Now sit down, dammit. And here”—he pushed her résumé toward her—“put this damn thing away. It’s about as revealing as that pup tent you’ve got on.”

  “For what this cost, Mr. Dorn, I could have gone to Europe for the summer,” Janie replied evenly. “Besides which, believe me, what’s under here is best left hidden.”

  “Okay,” Zachary said, leaning back and folding his arms behind his head, “let’s start with that. Why are you fat, Janie? Is it genetic? Or is it your own special way of hiding who you are?”

  It was, Janie had to admit to herself later, one of the most interesting hours she’d spent in her adult life. Maybe that was the operative word—adult. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been through some no-holds-barred, drag-out, gut-spilling sessions at Rhode Island. That’s what you did at college, after all, take stock of the person you really were for the first time in your life. The only thing about those sessions, though, was that Janie tended to be the prober, the listener, the shoulder that everyone took turns crying on. Because that was Janie’s specialty at college—she was a world-class confidante. After the long, lonely nights of her girlhood, Janie discovered at RISD the key to being popular: be a good friend. Be there when the big date doesn’t show. Lend a hand when the term paper needs to be retyped the same weekend the parents decide to visit. Jolly Janie. Always happy Janie. Everybody’s best buddy.

  “Boyfriends?” Zachary demanded, interrupting Janie’s personal interpretation of the how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people theory.

  “What? Me? Please, Mr. Dorn,” Janie replied with a self-deprecating laugh, “take a good look at the current model, okay? Only a weirdo would want to take this out for a test drive.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Zachary replied thoughtfully. “You have a very attractive mind—anybody tell you that? And, I believe from what I saw of your portfolio, a lot of talent.”

  “Ever ask a lot of talent out for dinner, Mr. Dorn?” Janie retorted.

  “My name’s Zach,” he answered. “To my friends.”

  “And you didn’t answer my question.” Janie sighed. “But that’s okay. I’ve got another question for you. I believe it’s time I asked you a few, okay?” Zach nodded and half-smiled his assent. “Are you becoming like your father as you get older?”

  “What?” Zach sat up, stung. “What the hell do you know about my father?”

  “Why … nothing,” Janie answered slowly. She’d hit some kind of raw nerve, all right. Up until that moment he’d struck her as one of the more laid-back businessmen she’d ever encountered. Suddenly he was coming on as wired and suspicious as a corporate lawyer in a takeover battle. “I was just curious … someone like you—obviously successful, but clearly a little, well, renegade. Are you continuing the pattern your parents started—or breaking the mold?”

  “I’ve broken the mold,” Zach retorted. “My question: how about you?”

  “I thought I already explained this,” Janie told him. “I was born a hybrid or something. I was missing a chromosome or, more likely, I had one too many. There’s not much chance of me repeating my parents’ patterns. I’ve about as much in common with the rest of the Penrod clan as a hippo has with a family of giraffes.”

  “I’ve always thought giraffes a bit snooty,” Zach answered, his eyes smiling though his expression was neutral, “with their noses in the air all the time. Don’t mind hippos. Definite sense of humor there. And I think we all need a laugh or two to get us through the day.”

  “So what are you trying to say?” Jane replied. “You want to bag this hippo?”

  “Depends on how you feel,” Zach answered. “As I think you’ve no doubt gathered by now, Michael’s straight as an arrow, noble and true. He’s even-tempered, great to work for. He’ll teach you a lot about the business, no doubt help you develop your talent, etcetera.”

  “I detect a ‘but’ in your voice, Zach.”

  “Well, you see, unfortunately, it’s a package deal,” he replied. “You have to report to me, too. And I’m a crazy son of a bitch. I’m unpredictable and moody as hell. I expect miracles from everybody and scream bloody murder when we don’t produce them overnight. Plus, I have this thing about interfering with my employees’ lives. I have this stupid notion about the agency being like one big happy family. You know, everybody sharing and caring. We’ve got no secrets. Air dirty laundry on a regular basis. It’s not like working in a normal office.”

  “Good,” Janie replied. “So when do I start?”

  Chapter 2

  Jane Millicent Penrod did not like to discuss the fact that her mother’s ancestors were among the first Pilgrims to step off the ship at Plymouth Rock. Or that her father’s side of the family had comprised a good portion of the Green Mountain Boys and had dug their roots so deeply into New England’s economy—digging quarries, laying down railroads, establishing mills—that no one in the huge, extended Penrod clan had actually had to work for a living for over two generations. Though the Penrods were far from unindustrious.

  After his return from the Pacific in 1946, Jane’s father Henry, third son of the Boston-based Penrods, moved his young, growing family north to take over as headmaster at Baldwin, a prestigious boy’s prep school near Gloucester. He didn’t need the job, any more than Jane’s mother Faith needed to sew her daughters’ dresses or bake the ever-growing family’s supply of bread and muffins. Though not by any means Puritan, Henry and Faith nonetheless believed in a mutually developed ethic of hard work, hard play. They were a big, strong couple—tall, fair-haired, long-limbed.

  Henry loved intellectual stimulation and, within a few short years as headmaster, he had helped transform Baldwin from a provincial backwater to one of the cultural hot spots of northern Massachusetts. He established a winter medieval music festival that drew scholars and devotees from around the gl
obe. In the summer, he endowed a local theater group with enough money to mount a performance program that would eventually rival Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare-in-the-Park series.

  “The area was ripe for rediscovery anyway,” Henry used to demur when people told him he had single-handedly put Baldwin back on the map.

  “Oh, Henry and I were just so lucky to find this place,” Faith would modestly respond when visitors marveled at the sprawling, handsome Penrod mansion overlooking Massachusetts Bay. Situated a mile or so from Baldwin, it had been in a ruinous state of decay before Faith started in on it, stripping it down to its frame, then refurbishing the structure to its former gabled Victorian glory. With the help of local artisans and the original plans she had discovered in the Baldwin town archives, it took Faith three long back-breaking years to make the house habitable, but from the way she talked it was “just one of my little projects.” Other accomplishments included being the first woman to head up a boy’s prep school athletic program (and lead its wrestling team three years running to a division championship); establishing one of the most active Republican Women caucuses in New England; heading up the local Daughters of the American Revolution; and bearing five handsome, brilliant, competitive children by the time she was forty. At that point Henry and Faith quietly agreed that enough was enough and retired to separate bedrooms.

  The Penrod children—Henry II, Willard, Victoria, Cynthia, and Matthew—took after their parents. They inherited their father’s forceful personality and intellectual speed and their mother’s physical stamina and stick-to-itiveness. Encouraged, challenged, and roundly rewarded for their achievements, they grew up with lusty appetites and dominating ways. Children of a different, freer era, they had none of Henry’s quiet charm or Faith’s modesty. They knew their own worth. They were tall, fair-haired, full of energies. And though they fought and competed with each other endlessly, they secretly respected each other far above any other children they knew.