her palms on her apron or a nearby dishtowel and give Lily an artful look of good-humored exasperation and camaraderie, a look that said, Men. Then she’d pop off to the basement to help Ben.
These moments terrified me more than almost any other. Time slowed down; my stomach burned and my pulse rang in my ears as if I were the one about to get caught. I knew my role at these times. I was there to distract and amuse; I’d talk too much, tell jokes, do a jig in the kitchen if that’s what it took conceal Ben and my mother’s absence. As if any amount of jazz hands and blathering could divert attention from the ticktock of the grandfather clock and how absurdly long it was taking two adults to locate a ten-pound bag of charcoal.
Footsteps would finally thump back up, five or six or seven minutes later. An eternity.
“Exactly where I told him it would be,” my mother would announce.
I’d vigilantly check her for mussed hair, smeared lipstick, disheveled clothing, but if I brushed a strand of hair back into place or straightened her collar, my mother was just as likely to slap my hand in annoyance as to be grateful. She did not sheepishly avoid eye contact or busy herself in the kitchen at these times. If anything, there was defiance in her eyes, a raised chin. She felt the right to what small piece of Ben she had, to what dim glow of the bright light of her future she could bask in now—and, goddamn it, no one was going to take that from her.
Could it be that Lily, then married to Ben for close to forty years, believed her husband to be a harmless flirt and didn’t let it bother her? I imagine it would have been inconceivable to Charles that Ben, his oldest friend and godfather to his son, could be in love with his wife, let alone be having an affair with her. I would later learn that before my mother and Charles married, Ben Souther had been one of several people who were suspicious of her intentions. He’d cautioned Charles, one of Boston’s most eligible bachelors at the time, not to rush into marriage with her.
So even as evidence stacked up and my mother and Ben’s chemistry charged the air, Charles and Lily didn’t waver in their support of this friendship or of the wild-game cookbook in the making. Perhaps somewhere deep down, they understood, as I did—for my mother was very clear on this point—that this affair was being conducted with everyone’s best interest at heart.
But Malabar was growing impatient. How was she to manage unfulfillment lurking on one side and Charles’s death calling from the other? Simple. She filled a shaker with ice, poured in the bourbon, and wrapped herself in a blanket of alcohol to dull the hurt and deaden the guilt as she rode around and around, endlessly circling the life she wanted, that gold ring just out of reach. When Malabar made a power pack, that dry Manhattan with a twist, she would pause for a moment, consider the shaker, then add another shot of booze.
For years when I made Manhattans, I did the same.
Eight
At age seventeen, three years into my life as Malabar’s confidante and accomplice, I became overwhelmed by the desire to get away. The gnawing guilt I felt but didn’t recognize as such continued to worsen, as did my stomach problems. At the time, I didn’t trace the roots of my wanderlust to my mother or anything beyond a typical teenage drive for independence. As my high-school graduation loomed in the spring of 1983, I impulsively decided to take a gap year before attending college. I’d worked hard at Milton Academy and deserved a break, I told myself. I’d earned a year off to follow my dreams. Who could fault me for wanting to travel?
With an acceptance letter from Columbia safely tucked in my desk drawer, I deferred for a year, wondering if my parents might object. Perhaps they’d suggest that I should spend the time doing something meaningful, like volunteering for Habitat for Humanity or teaching English abroad, something that might count as vaguely productive, educational, or altruistic. But I needn’t have worried. My family wasn’t particularly big on the idea of giving back or community service. I was taught to take full credit for my accomplishments and consider them the result of grit and hard work. Privilege was not a concept