bring up Benny’s alarming letters. What would my parents do, put him on yet more drugs, or—worse—send him off to some reform school? Maybe he did need help, but it also struck me that Benny had been through enough already—isolated in Stonehaven, shipped off to Italy, his friends monitored by Maman. Maybe he just needed to be left alone, to feel loved for once. I stood there before my father, undecided; but before I could say anything my father rose from his chair. He reached across the space between us and wrapped me in a rare hug, folding me into his chest. He smelled like starch and lemons, a whisper of whiskey on his breath.
“You’re a good daughter,” he said. “Always looking out for our family. You make us proud. And it’s a relief to know that we don’t have to worry about you.” He laughed. “God knows we have enough to worry about with your brother.”
I could have said something about the letters then. I didn’t. Because in that moment it felt like the biggest betrayal to my brother would be to set myself up in opposition to him. The easy child and the difficult child. I couldn’t do that to him again.
So back to Princeton I went, and that was the last I ever saw of my mother. Eight weeks later, she would be dead.
* * *
—
My mother died on the last Tuesday of October. I still hate myself for letting the weeks before her death slide by; for failing to note the fact that she wasn’t calling me to check in. But I had a new, all-consuming boyfriend; and then I dumped him; and then there was another; and then my grades were tanking (again) because of the boys; and then I needed a distraction from all that so I organized a weekend trip to the Bahamas. When I returned, tanned and just a little spun out, it finally occurred to me that my mother was MIA. Even then, it still took me a few days to rally myself to pick up the phone, as if I was afraid what might be waiting for me on the other end of the line.
Her voice, when she finally answered the phone, sounded like a cloudy day, flat and affectless and gray. “Your father has been having an affair.” She was as matter-of-fact as if she was informing me of the outcome of an opera board meeting.
Downstairs in my dorm, a party was going on, Eminem blasting so loud that the floor under my feet was vibrating. I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly. “Daddy? Are you sure? How do you know?”
“There was a letter….” She swallowed the end of the sentence, mumbled something I couldn’t hear.
Girls were shrieking with laughter down the hall. I covered the phone with my palm and screamed out the door, “Shut up shut up SHUT UP!” There was a sudden, resounding silence, and then I could hear them giggle. Vanessa Liebling has lost her shit. I didn’t care.
An affair. But of course: That’s why he’d been spending his weekdays in San Francisco, instead of at Stonehaven with his family. Maybe that’s even why he’d moved them to Stonehaven in the first place—to keep them separate from his mistress. Poor Maman. No wonder she’d been such a wreck for so long.
I wasn’t shocked, though; of course I wasn’t. My father was hideously ugly, objectively speaking; but that wasn’t what mattered to some women. Power is its own aphrodisiac. And the lure of taking what already belongs to someone else—even more powerful. Most of my mother’s friends had already gone through a society divorce, their husbands now married to much younger women (gold-diggers/trophy wives/tacky whores) while they resettled themselves in Four Seasons penthouses with generous divorce settlements.
So of course Daddy had affairs; it was an inevitability.
“Is Daddy there right now?” I asked.
She laughed, and it was a terrible sound, like stones rattling inside an empty box. “Your father is never here, darling. He sent us up here to rot, your brother and me, up in this awful house where we can’t embarrass him anymore. Like, what’s that novel? Jane Eyre. We’re the mad relatives he’s shut