Chapter 7 - The Meeting at the Carlyle
My mother had chosen the corner table in the Gallery at the Carlyle because she believed that the velvet banquettes and the thirty-dollar pots of Earl Grey provided an invisible shield against vulgarity.
She was wearing her best St. John knit suit—the navy one with the gold buttons that she only wore to committee meetings of the Westchester Historical Society—and her pearl earrings. But her hands were shaking so severely that the silver spoon clinked against the porcelain rim of her cup every four seconds.
I sat across from her wearing a simple gray cashmere sweater and a pair of dark jeans.
I hadn't brought Lily. She was at the Central Park Zoo with Adrian and two men who looked like investment bankers but moved like middleweights.
“Nora,” my mother said, her voice dropping into that hushed, conspiratorial register she used when she was about to tell an untruth about a neighbor’s daughter. “Look at us. Sitting here like strangers. It’s... it’s simply absurd.”
I didn't touch my tea. I looked at the small silver pot between us.
“You have three minutes, Mom,” I said.
Her mouth tightened, that old, familiar flash of irritation showing behind her eyes before she smoothed it over with a practiced, social smile.
“Your father spent the night in a cell with three men who had been picked up for narcotics, Nora. In White Plains. Do you have any idea what that does to his standing at the club? The president called him this morning to suggest he take a leave of absence from the greens committee.”
“He shoved a four-year-old child into three feet of water, Diane,” I said, my voice perfectly level.
She flinched at her first name. It was the first time in thirty-one years I had ever used it.
“He was upset!” she insisted, leaning across the table, her perfume—the heavy, suffocating jasmine she had worn since 1994—filling the space between our faces. “You know how he gets about the family reputation. And Chloe... Nora, your sister is staying in a motel near the airport. An actual motel with exterior corridors! Mark’s apartment was leased through his company, and they changed the locks at noon yesterday! She had to leave three suitcases of her trousseau in the hallway!”
“Chloe called my daughter a brat,” I said. “And then she laughed when my head hit the stone.”
“She was stressed about her dress!” Diane cried, her voice rising enough that a couple at the next table glanced over their scones. She caught herself, took a sharp breath, and lowered her tone again. “Nora, be reasonable. You’ve won. You have this... this incredible life. You’re married to an Adrian Vance. Do you know who his mother was? She was an Eleanor Cabot! They own half the shipping berths in Massachusetts!”
She reached out, her fingers—sharp, cold, and manicured—trying to cover my hand.
I pulled my hand back and rested it in my lap.
Her fingers closed on empty linen.
“You could fix this with one phone call,” my mother whispered, her eyes wide, desperate, and completely empty of anything resembling shame. “Adrian has the governor on speed dial. He could have the charges dropped before the grand jury convenes on Thursday. He could give Mark a bridge loan through one of his smaller entities—just five million, Nora. Just enough to keep the drivers from walking out until the press dies down.”
“Why would he do that?” I asked.
“Because we’re your family!” she said, as if stating a mathematical law that superseded the state penal code. “Because blood is blood, Nora! Whatever happened in the past—whatever mistakes we made about your schooling—we’re the only family you have!”
I looked at her face.
I looked at the small, surgical tucks behind her ears, the careful line of her eyebrows, the diamond ring that my father had bought her after he closed the warehouse deal in Hackensack in 2004.
I remembered sitting on the floor of my studio apartment on Eighty-Fourth Street five years ago, with eight dollars in my checking account and a four-month-old baby who had an ear infection, listening to my mother tell me over the phone that if I couldn't afford infant Tylenol, I should have thought about that before I decided to be a fallen woman.
“When Lily was three weeks old,” I said, my voice so quiet the waiter three feet away didn't even turn his head, “she had a fever of one hundred and three. I called you from the emergency room at Mount Sinai because my debit card was declined at the pharmacy counter. I needed forty-two dollars for the antibiotic drops.”
Diane’s eyes blinked rapidly. “Nora... that was years ago. I don't remember—”
“You told me that your bridge club was starting in twenty minutes,” I said. “And that if you started paying for my mistakes, I’d never learn how to balance a household budget.”
She swallowed hard. Her lips were dry.
“Nora, that was... that was tough love. Every mother—”
“Adrian was the one who paid for the drops,” I said. “He was thirty-one years old. He had known me for three months. He sat in that plastic chair in the pediatric ER for six hours while she had her blood cultures run, and then he walked three blocks through a sleet storm to find an all-night pharmacy that had the oral suspension in stock.”
I stood up from the banquette.
The three minutes were over.
I reached into my bag, pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, and laid it flat on the linen tablecloth beside the silver teapot.
“That’s for my half of the water,” I said.
“Nora!” she whispered, rising halfway from her seat, her pearls swinging against her knit jacket. “You can’t just walk away! What are we supposed to do? The legal bills alone—your father says they want fifty thousand dollars just for the retainer!”
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“I suggest you sell the Vera Wang, Diane,” I said. “I hear it cost twenty thousand dollars. That should cover the first two weeks of his trial.”
I turned and walked through the Gallery, past the gilded mirrors and the black-and-white photographs of the thirties, out through the revolving doors onto the cold, clean granite of Madison Avenue.
