Now, here I was again and this dream felt the same: if I didn’t act on it, Mother would die. She’d pushed me away, but she was my mother, and no matter how angry I was with her, I couldn’t lose another parent. If I saved her, maybe then I would have done something right, and if I’d done something right, maybe she would be the mother I wanted.
I rolled over and looked at the clock: six a.m. Sliding out from the covers, I shivered for a moment. On the floor lay three packed suitcases. I picked up the phone and dialed United’s international desk. “I need to change a flight,” I said.
Chapter 2
Hugh Woodward was my date at Mother’s annual Christmas fête. Twenty-four hours later he was dead. I’d arrived home two days earlier from Girona, Spain, where my ex-stockbroker and soon-to-be ex-husband was in an early mid-life crisis. He was an annoyance of a man with rimless glasses and too much chest hair who, at forty, believed he still had a shot as a professional bike racer. Mother was startled to see me, and that was the only emotion she expressed—the only thing she expressed—in the entire two days. In fact, other than greeting me at breakfast and asking after my day when she arrived home around ten p.m. from some function, she said little to me. She absolutely refused to be available for the conversation I needed to have with her.
On the day of the fête, Mother ended up with an odd number for dinner because Mary Ellen Winters canceled at the last minute with some excuse about a crisis in her brother’s special election campaign. The incumbent had dropped dead of a heart attack on the Senate floor a week after Labor Day, providing Andrew Winters with an early opportunity to declare his bid for the seat. The special election would be held in early February, so none of the Winters made it that evening.
That left Hugh Woodward, an old family friend, without a dinner partner. Mother always invited the whole town to the party, friends and foes alike, and insisted on having an even number of guests at the table: an etiquette rule she refused to break. I was conveniently available. “Clara, darling, you will help me out, won’t you?” Just a touch of guilt, just a touch of intimacy—my mother’s trademark.
I hated these parties. Most of the people were perfectly nice, but the ones who weren’t—the ones who played political games, did frenetic charity work, pretended to like people because they had more social status or money, or used Botox while making sly little digs at someone else’s skirt size or cellulite—those were the ones I couldn’t wait to ditch when I left town, even though they existed everywhere, even inside me.
“Of course, Mother.”
She lifted her cheek toward me, and I kissed her. That’s what one did.
Mother held her fête in early December, after the first snow had fallen, but before the roads had clogged with angry shoppers. Connecticut was particularly beautiful, her green hills and pearl lakes just crisp, not frozen, the dust of winter newly laid, glittering with red decorations of holly berry and window poinsettias.
Mother’s house—she’d inherited it along with a pile of money from her family—was a long, low Frank Lloyd Wright-ish affair crowded round by woods and overhung with pines. Father had landscaped thirty years ago with privet and holly, rhododendrons and grass; only the holly and privet were left, the rhododendrons and grass having given up the ghost when the sun disappeared into the clouds of green leaves, and my mother’s disapproval became so strong it floated from the house like the scent of burnt toast.
All that green stood out spectacularly against the weathered gray stone of the house. One summer, Fine Gardening had even done a spread. They’d planted flowers in father’s garden; he’d had them dug up again at the end of the day.
Promptly at seven o’clock on the evening of the fête, I presented myself in a short red cocktail dress and silver sandals. One didn’t show up late to Mother’s parties expecting a flexible cocktail hour. Show up at seven forty-five and one had only fifteen minutes to gulp down the first martini before being called to dinner. Besides, being on time let me scope out the room for candidates likely to give up Mother’s secrets. My dreams of a civil conversation with her hadn’t lessened any, now that I was home, but her reticence required new tactics.
The downstairs rooms twinkled with gold, red and green trim, and tiny white lights. The window drapes and throw pillows had been changed to red, green and gold velvet, two large coffee tables held elaborate crèches, and a pine bough garland festooned with crimson bows and real-looking fake cranberries draped the fireplaces.
Mother’s Christmas fête was strictly black tie. Women in body-draping dresses, thinner than they were at seventeen, their skin professionally smoothed, decorated men distinguished with early gray hair and tuxedos, whose eyes roamed the room for women more good-looking than their wives and men richer than they were. Their superficially delighted expressions registered underlying anxiety, perhaps at their own sense that they weren’t having as much fun as they should be. Perhaps because that anxiety was roughly akin to the seventh-grade schoolyard, they wielded an exacting social power, determining in a glance wielded like a Michelin four-star chef’s paring knife whether or not a newcomer was worthy. It was exhausting to be part of their world and devastating to be rejected.
Martini in hand, I’d gotten trapped by Hetty Gardner, stepdaughter to my father’s business partner, Ernie Brown. She was an organic lamb farmer and claimed she was selling to
