“Cliff,” Eleanor had asked him one summer, “don’t you have a special someone in your life?”
“Yeah, Mom,” Cliff had answered. “You.” He hugged her as they both laughed.
“Cliff,” Eleanor had asked him this Christmas, “are you dating anyone special?”
Cliff grinned and shook his head. “So many women, so little time.”
When Cliff was younger, she’d taken him and his sister to all the best plays, musicals, and ballets in Boston and often in New York. After Mortimer died, Cliff invited Eleanor up to Boston, put her up at the Chilton Club, and took her to plays and operas and out to dinner at posh restaurants where he ordered expensive wines. When he began selling real estate, Cliff often emailed Eleanor photos and information about the gorgeous houses he was selling, and Eleanor responded, glad to have this connection with her son. It was fun to see the interiors of houses, even though she wouldn’t change a board in her own. Because of the weekends and emails, Eleanor felt much more attached to her son than she did to her daughter, who was, even in her forties, worried about her figure and whether or not to have her forehead Botoxed. It took Eleanor months to realize that the closeness she felt with Cliff was about his professional life, not his personal life. But she had tried to stay close. Weren’t men supposed to adore their mothers?
In her most bitter moods, Eleanor blamed her husband for their son’s and daughter’s obsession with money. But even then, she admitted to herself that she’d influenced them, too. In the early days, she’d left them with a nanny while she tried to be the perfect wife for Mortimer. She’d furnished their Ipswich house luxuriously and elegantly. She went to a gym to keep herself trim, had her nails and hair done weekly, held the requisite cocktail parties for his colleagues, attended other requisite parties. Because Mortimer expected it, she’d forced her children to attend the appropriate after-school activities: tennis, swimming, archery for Cliff. Tennis, swimming, and ballet for Alicia. She’d taught them manners, yes, and sent them off to boarding schools when they were fourteen, because they’d asked to go.
Still, when they were small, she had curled up with them at bedtime, reading to them from the classics. She had cuddled them, praised them, tended to their occasional cuts or bruises. And every summer she’d brought them here, to her family’s summer home on the east coast of Nantucket Island.
Here, on the island, Eleanor had let the kids run free. Mortimer disapproved of skateboards and especially of any sign of sexual awareness. So Eleanor hadn’t told him when she’d sat her embarrassed teenagers down and talked to them about sex. She allowed them to go to beach parties in trucks driven by older teenagers. She didn’t mention it when they came home smelling of weed, and she held Alicia’s hair the night she came home so drunk she was sick. She put Alka-Seltzer in the medicine cabinet. She didn’t mind when they blasted Guns N’ Roses or Aerosmith.
Her children had turned out just fine.
Regardless of her parenting, Alicia and Cliff were who they were; they were done, like baked gingerbread cookies. The only family member Eleanor had any chance of being close to was her granddaughter, Arianna. Arianna, who asked people to call her Ari, was graduating from Bucknell University in a week, and she planned to continue her education, starting a master’s in early childhood education at Boston University.
Where would Ari be for the summer? Eleanor wondered. She knew Alicia complained constantly about the sky-high tuition for boarding school and college, plus all the extras, clothing, textbooks, trips with friends. In fact, now that Eleanor thought about it, she remembered the atmosphere of tension and anger lying just below the surface of her family when they were on the island for Christmas.
Alicia had wakened Eleanor the morning after Christmas Day. She’d tapped on Eleanor’s door, which made Shadow swiftly disappear under the bed, and slid into the room carrying a tray with two cups of coffee. Alicia had bumped the door shut with her hip.
“Good morning, Mommy,” Alicia had said sweetly.
Dear God in Heaven, Eleanor had thought, was her daughter not aware that calling her “Mommy” was a dead giveaway that Alicia was going to ask her for money?
Eleanor had been awake, reading, trying to put off the moment of rising and facing her family. She slipped her book beneath her covers and sat up, shoving pillows behind her back. “Good morning, darling.” She did love her daughter, and wished she knew what in the world would ever make her happy.
“It’s a cold day,” Alicia said. She set the tray on Eleanor’s bedside table. “Phillip is building a fire in the living room. I brought you coffee to warm you up before you come down.”
“Thanks.” Eleanor took a sip. “Mmm. Nice and hot.”
Alicia settled on the bed near Eleanor. “This has been such a wonderful Christmas, Mommy. Phillip loves his Fitbit. And your check was so generous.”
“Well, I know it wasn’t as generous as you’d hoped for,” Eleanor said bluntly.
A stab of guilt pierced her heart as she spoke. Why could she never be tender with her grown daughter?
“I’m sorry if I offended you,” Alicia said, pouting, shrugging into herself. “It’s just that these past four years, Phillip and I have been stretched financially. Ari’s tuition is around sixty thousand dollars a year. Imagine! And now—I don’t know if she spoke with you about it—now she wants to get a master’s in early childhood education.”
“Phillip’s a surgeon,” Eleanor reminded her daughter. “He must make a substantial salary.”
“Oh, you would think so, wouldn’t you, but
