Miss Wyoming

afterward Doris was unable to tolerate heat or anything that smacked of the tropics, living her life from one air- conditioned space to the next. John was born on the mahogany floor surrounded by tropical flowers and perplexed executive wives. At the time of the birth, Piers was checking out horses in the Canary Islands. His twin-prop plane was lost in a squall, and he vanished.

Her family tsk-tsked and I-told-you-so'd. Her father assigned her to a small family-owned apartment on the Upper East Side, doled out a child-support allowance for young John, plus limited expense accounts at a few grocers and clothiers. Her days of waxy Chianti bottles, Japanese paper lanterns and peacoats were over before they'd even fully begun. She was to become a New York matron. She was to play the part of rich — she was bred to be rich — but she wasn't rich, and this powerless position defined her life. Yet she cherished her lovely memory of Piers in this red roast beef of a baby who wailed like the thrashed clutch of a Chevrolet.

Thirty-seven years later, when John met former child star Susan Colgate, he skipped many pages of the family's story. John was a member of Delaware's Lodge clan — pesticides originally, and then all forms of agrochemicals, plastics and pharmaceuticals, eventually forming a monster that spat out everything from mousetraps to orange juice to nuclear weapons components. The firm was largely privately owned, and headed by Doris's uncle Raitt, who reigned from the family Tara in rural Delaware.

The family had decided, though not in these exact words, that Doris was a flaky financial drain who had willfully strayed outside the clan's unspoken bounds. She was grudgingly tolerated at annual family events, and she often arrived alone, because young John was a sick child. John was home more than he was at school, frequently in the hospital with infected ears or sinuses or other microbial lapses, which Doris handled with a genial calmness.

«Come along, John, I need to ferry you off to your quack for a checkup.»

«Let me finish my breakfast first.»

«What is that orangey glop you're drinking there?» She picked up the bottle of drink powder John had begged her to buy the previous week and read the label. « “Tang” — brilliant. I'll try some with Bombay gin tonight.»

«It's for astronauts.»

«Really? Then I must have a sip immediately because this afternoon I'll be off to see Raitt at the St. Moritz, and it'll take an extraterrestrial amount of energy to go and pry him away from the charms of Sixth Avenue long enough to discuss raising my allowance just slightly.» She sipped it. «Bravo! Now off we go.»

John was an imaginative child, but his curiosity was often limited by illness to the confines of the apartment. When Doris was out, John would sneak into her room and go through her treasure box. It contained the shell of a baby turtle she'd eaten for breakfast with Piers in Kyoto in 1961 («I felt it wriggling down by my voice box, the little dickens»); before-and-after cosmetic surgery photos of saddlebag removal («Saddlebags are the Lodge family curse, Johnsy. Oh, to be a boy !»); the handwritten menu from her wedding dinner catered by an Andalusian chef recommended to her by Gala Dalн — unborn lamb in a mint coulis («Lambryos, darling, and don't go knocking it until you've tried it, and don't go giving me that Mutual-of-Omaha's-Wild-Kingdom face»). There was one of John's baby shoes (gilded, not bronzed), some seashells and a stack of girlhood horse- jumping ribbons. There was also a photo of Doris water-skiing with Christina Ford, one of Piers on his prized Chesapeake mare, Honeymoon, as well as a faded black-and-white shot, reverently framed and somehow out of synch with the other photos. It was seemingly taken near a stable — Piers was talking with somebody in the background — and showed Doris standing with Marie-Hйlиne de Rothschild, with Marie-Hйlиne lighting Doris's cigarette, a wicked grin on Doris's face.

John didn't think it abnormal that his mother spent her days neither learning skills to make her employable nor making thrusts at wisdom. Rather, Doris preferred spending her time pursuing rich men, which she had been raised to do, with the uncritical instinct of terns who migrate from continent to continent each year. John found this fascinating.

«Mom, why do you always go everywhere in a plane?»

«What do you mean, darling?»

«Like today. You went up the Hudson Valley and you could easily have taken a car, but you flew.»

Doris preferred flying — even to nearby locales like the Hudson Valley or the Hamptons. «Darling, if there's one thing a man will never admit to a woman, it's that he is unwilling to pay for a plane ticket or charter a craft for the day. A man would sooner eat ketchup soup for a month than to not hire a helicopter to hop to Connecticut with a lady. Easiest just to order the plane and then tell him to pay once you're at the other end.» This was not a cynical statement from Doris. She had been taught this on her mother's knee.

Relatives were somewhat kinder to John than they were to Doris, as families often prefer to skip generations when it comes to conferring affections, and John was a handsome, affable, if quiet, young boy. Spending so much time in bed, he soaked in abnormally large amounts of daytime TV programming — far more than the occasional episode of Love of Life or The Young and the Restless watched by the typical American teenager. John absorbed everything. TV loaned him a vocabulary and a tinge of sophistication lacking in others his own age. Relatives brought him presents and slipped him envelopes of money. John appeared grateful for these gifts in their presence, and, once they left, promptly gave the cash to Doris. She stashed it away in her mad-money Vuitton valise, up above her collection of Op and Pop outfits that began to infiltrate her sensibility across the decades.

Doris liked arty men. She liked men who lived inside paintings. And these men tended to like Doris at first, when they thought she could buy their way out of paintings, but it usually took about one season before they discerned she wasn't in the Maria Agnelli league and elegantly dumped her. Doris was aware of this cycle, but it failed to harden her in the same way that the serial tribulations of soap opera characters left them similarly undented.

With John, Doris was quite talkative about her family, its source of wealth and its role in the overall scheme of the world. John would squint and try to envision the Lodge Corporation, and he would briefly gather the impression of a massive diseased creature — a sperm whale in which all cells were infected and doomed.

«Darling,all aspects of the Lodge corporation are malignant. Lodge food products are unnutritious and rot quickly. Children raised on Lodge baby formula quickly sicken and die. Lodge electronics fizzle, pop and quickly expire like thrushes hitting the front picture window. Untold thousands of Lodge factory workers routinely become emphysemic by breathing the solvents used in the making of Lodge footwear which, I might add, invariably render their wearers unstylish, lame and beset by fungus infections. Lodge service divisions give sloppy parodies of service at hyperinflated prices needed to pay for Lodge's vast overhead of union bribes, drugs, lynx fur coats and Bahamian holidays for executive wives. Lodge is a goiter on society, draining and taking, pustulant and mute.»

John would egg her on: «What kinds of things does Lodge make, Ma?»

«What doesn't Lodge make is the better question, darling. Lodge will make anything. Nothing is sacred: children's cigarettes, Holocaust boxcars, dairy products that are born timeexpired, Vatican City parking spots — just call Lodge. Each time somebody in America cries or dies, Lodge nabs its shaved penny from somewhere in the proceedings. Well, darling,that's Lodge. »

When he was fourteen, John developed breathing problems, and spent, with minor exceptions, a year in bed while his lungs and bronchial tubes healed. He watched TV, read, chatted with Doris — he had no friends and his numerous cousins were conspicuously kept away from him. Tutors came in and kept him primed with the basics. He wasn't dumb and he wasn't a genius. He liked his world, and he didn't mind its limitations.

John did wonder, though, how he could make up for the lost time in his life. Assuming he recovered, how might he catch up with all the other children who had been out in the everyday world — chasing balls? throwing sticks? shoplifting? John's notions of normal childhood behavior were sketchy. And he worried about Doris, who came close, but didn't «snag herself a may-un. » Would she ever be happy? What could he do to bring love into her life? TV had taught him that love was pretty much a cure for all ills.

Doris put a good face on it all. John was the constant in her life, the one thing family could neither take away nor reduce. From her perspective, the more time John spent watching TV in the apartment away from