her childhood and life at Wyndemere, it was easy to conclude she was someone who never had spent time looking at the downside of things. There would always be someone holding that net if you fell. Money, which could buy you the best education, could also buy you obliviousness.
Fontaine’s reeked of wealth, yet it wasn’t overstated and gaudy like some restaurants with expensive menu items. Nevertheless, I sensed that the combined wealth of the patrons having lunch might easily be twice that of most Third World countries. Naturally, I felt underdressed, but Samantha refused to permit me to think that way.
“We don’t care what anyone else thinks, anyway,” she said when I suggested it. “We don’t live to please them. We live to please ourselves.” She said it as if she were the queen of selfishness, but she was so innocent and harmless about it I had to smile. It was all in fun. She wasn’t being condescending or arrogant.
However, despite how many ways she was listing to conclude that we were so similar, I knew we were as different as two young women might be. We were, after all, brought up in different worlds and not just different countries. Even if my father was as wealthy as hers obviously was and as wealthy as her husband was, he wouldn’t have permitted me to demonstrate an iota of blissful indifference when it came to what something cost.
She ordered a bottle of very expensive champagne and then a platter of hors d’oeuvres that included beluga caviar, something I had never had. The most expensive item my father would permit my mother to buy either to prepare at home or have in a restaurant was a prime cut of beef. From the way the waiter at Fontaine’s treated us, I had the sense that Samantha had been here many times. I felt like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. There were so many forks and knives, the correct way to drink champagne, and French descriptions of foods and wines. Some I could translate, but many I could not.
Samantha was eager to teach me anything and everything. I had the strange, almost eerie feeling that she was out to mold me into a mirror image of her as quickly as possible. It was important for me to like the things she liked. If I indicated in the slightest way that something wasn’t my cup of tea, she suggested substitutes. It was as if she believed the fetus that would live within me could be fooled into thinking it was indeed she who had carried it to its birth.
“You don’t have to bring a single thing with you tonight,” she said. “We’re the same size. You will see that you will have miles of clothing from which to choose. And everything is fashionable. I’m pretty sure we’re the same shoe size.”
“Seven?”
“Yes,” she said, clapping her hands. “Seven. Serendipity. Our guest rooms—there are seventeen bedrooms—are fully stocked with everything any guest would need. My mother-in-law keeps Wyndemere as if it were a first-class hotel, a five-, even six-star. It’s been in the Davenport family for decades and decades. It was originally built and owned by the Jameson family, a family with a history full of intrigue, most of it embellished to give the house more character, as my mother-in-law likes to remind us all.”
She leaned toward me to whisper.
“Sometimes, just out of spite, I attempt to change things. I’ve been after Dr. Davenport to remodel the outside, but my mother-in-law considers it a historical site. I’m lucky to change the color of my own bedroom curtains.”
I think she saw me immediately pick up on the word my.
“The doctor and I sleep in separate bedrooms because he keeps terrible hours. I’d have my sleep interrupted every time he had an emergency. I’d be wakened in the middle of the night and rise with bags so big under my eyes they could be used for luggage.”
I had to laugh at that.
“But that doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy the pleasure of marriage,” she added. “In fact,” she said, her eyes twinkling, “it adds romance. I can pretend a strange, handsome, debonair new lover has found his way to my boudoir.” She scrunched her nose. “Sometimes, I think he’s doing the same thing… pretending I’m someone new.
“It’s so important to keep romance alive, even after years and years of marriage, don’t you think?”
I never thought that about my parents. Could it be true?