only of her two children that came directly from my mother’s womb, and although she insisted that this meant nothing to her—that we were both “her babies”—I could always feel that she loved me more. I was her golden girl, the child that could turn her mood from darkness to light. (Your smile is my sunshine, she would say.) Benny couldn’t do that. He was always retreating to his bedroom, his emotional state as heavy and gray as the fog that hung over the Bay. I think Benny reminded my mother too much of the things she hated about herself, as if he somehow reflected and amplified all of her own flaws.
Maman came from an old French family; one that came to the States for the Gold Rush but had lost most of its fortune in the intervening years. It was the Lieblings who had the real money, riding the real estate tide that built California. My mother met my father—the eldest of three brothers, and a man eighteen years her senior—at her own debutante ball in 1978. There’s a photo of them dancing in the ballroom of the St. Francis, my father towering over my mother, his feet swallowed up by the cotton-candy swirl of her skirts. (Pale rose Zandra Rhodes: Maman always did have exquisite taste.)
There’s always an implicit negotiation in marriage, right? I assume, in their case, it was his riches and power in exchange for her beauty and youth—but they also loved each other, I know they did. You can tell by the way they are looking at each other in that photo, the delight on my mother’s face as she looks up to meet my father’s intensely protective gaze. Something changed along the way, though. By the time Benny and I were in high school, they’d started living separate lives: my father in a glassed-in Financial District office, alongside the brothers and cousins that made up the Liebling Group’s board; my mother in the parlor of our mansion, holding court with her socialite friends.
I grew up in San Francisco, a place where everyone knew who the Lieblings were. My family’s name was in Fortune, we had a street named after us in the Marina District and owned one of the oldest houses in Pacific Heights (Italianate, quite stately, though not as big as Danielle Steel’s). When my last name came up in conversation I could see how everything shifted. How people tilted in toward me, suddenly that much more attentive, as if hoping that some of what I had might rub off on them. Smarts mean a lot in the world, and good looks mean even more—my mother, with her closet of couture and her endless low-carb diets, had taught me that much—but money and power are, of course, the most important of all.
That was the lesson I took away from my father.
I remember visiting my father on the top floor of the Liebling Group office tower, on Market Street near the Ferry Building, when I was still small. He perched me on one knee and my brother on the other, and spun in his chair so that we were facing out the wall of windows. It was a clear, windy day, and out on the chop of the Bay the sailboats flew south toward the salty flats of the Peninsula. But my father wasn’t interested in what was happening on the water. “Look at this,” he said, and gently pressed our foreheads against the glass so that we could gaze straight down the side of the building. Fifty-two stories below, I could see people scurrying along the sidewalks, clots of tiny black specks, like iron filings being drawn along by an invisible magnet.
I was dizzy with vertigo. “It’s a long way down,” I said.
“It is.” He sounded pleased to hear this.
“Where is everyone going?”
“The vast majority? Nowhere important. Just hamsters spinning on their wheels, never quite getting ahead. And that is the great tragedy of existence.” I looked up at him, puzzled and concerned. He kissed the top of my head. “Don’t worry. That will never be a problem for you, cupcake.”
Benny squirmed and whined, more interested in my father’s fountain pens than the life lesson that was being conveyed. I felt sorry for all those