Social Lives (13 page)

This was the new world according to Ernest Barlow. No rules. No schedules. No parenting of any kind, in fact. Just play. Child's play.

Rosalyn walked silently through the room to the kitchen, where the chef was doing the prep for the dinner. He offered her a cappuccino, which she politely refused; then she unloaded her bag by the computer kiosk on the other side of the room. Logging on to her Mac, she tried to block the sound of her husband's voice as it rang through the house. The high pitch, the inane lyrics about bringing a rainstorm. Did he really think this was what a child needed from a father? It certainly wasn't what she wanted from a husband.

She had thirty-eight messages—social callings and pleas for help from around the world. Friends in Monaco and London. Others in L.A. Wilshire Republicans. They had donated more than ten million dollars to charities last year alone. She sat on four boards. Wellesley College. Miss Porter's School for Girls. Save the Children and the local chapter of the American Red Cross. Her duties included writing checks, writing checks, and writing more checks. Then there was the overseeing of their many properties. The houses in Florida and Telluride. The estate in Nantucket. The Montana horse farm. The villa in Antibes. Some had to be opened, others closed for the winter. There were groundskeepers, chefs, maids, and nannies at all these places, some who rotated with the family's needs, some who worked seasonally.

She answered the queries that couldn't wait, the ones concerning last-minute details for the party.
Yes, the valets had to be in costume. No, they could not have the ice sculpture arrive early. Where would they keep it?
It was aggravating at best, the managing of their lives, and her husband was still singing. She logged out, leaving the rest to be handled later by her personal assistant.

Pushing away from her desk and out of her chair, she stormed back through the kitchen and out to the adjoining family room. It was enough already. Without a word to her husband and ignoring his look of astonishment, she scooped up her daughter and carried her kicking and screaming up the stairs to the nannies' study. It was there that she found Marta.

The young woman froze when she saw Rosalyn and the now very angry Mellie Barlow.

“Mr. Barlow said I should let her play,” she muttered, obviously unnerved having been caught taking personal time during work hours.

But Rosalyn had no hard feelings toward Marta. Those had all been assigned to her husband.

“I know, Marta. But she needs a bath and some quiet time. No nap—it's too late. She'll never go to bed tonight. Maybe some books.”

“Yes, of course.” Marta reached out to take the child, but as she did, Mellie nuzzled her sticky wet face into Rosalyn's neck.

Rosalyn was taken aback. It had been a long time, weeks perhaps, since she'd felt those little arms clutching her back, squeezing with all their might, since she'd smelled the smell of juice and dirty hair that was somehow intoxicating. It had been far too long since she'd felt the warm breath against her cheek.

“You, Mama, you!” Mellie yelled.

“Come on, love. Mommy has things to do.” And she did, didn't she? Endless things.

But Mellie only tightened her grip. Rosalyn shut her eyes against the emotions that had escaped the vault and were now staging a surprise attack.

“Please, Mellie, go with Marta.”

This was her job now, to make the decisions and delegate. It was still mothering, different perhaps from what it had been years before, but still mothering in spite of the guilt she now felt from her four-year-old. She had one boy in prep school, a daughter giving sexual favors, two more boys in grade school, and at the present moment, this little girl draped around her like a rag doll. It was more than anyone could manage alone, and in the decades of Barlow's absence as he built his fortune, she had been forced to choose which roles to take on and which ones to dole out. Giving baths and reading books were things a young nanny could easily handle. Managing teachers, classes, grades, activities, and now Caitlin's problem, required a kind of expertise that she alone possessed within this house.

Life in Wilshire was complicated. The establishments that held the fate of her children needed constant tending. The Wilshire Academy, the country club, the exclusive and very private sports complex. No matter how well her children performed, the ones who rose to the top, who got the best teachers, the shiny medals and trophies and placement on the most coveted teams, depended on her and how deeply she could plug herself in. Through donations and constant face-to-face involvement, she had become the mother to please, and as a result, her children were never overlooked. Not once. This profound understanding was embedded within Rosalyn, at her very core.
She had learned how to manage her world from the greatest puppeteer Wilshire had ever known—the late great Mrs. Eddings.

“Just go,” she said to Marta, dismissing the nanny. “Clean up the family room, please. I don't want the boys to get into Mellie's things.”

She waited for the nanny to leave before squeezing her daughter back.

“Okay. You want Mommy to give you a bath?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Come, then.”

Rosalyn carried her child to the bathroom and filled the tub. Silently, she pulled off Mellie's dirty pajamas and helped her step into the water. Rosalyn sat on the closed toilet seat, still dressed in her silk slacks and heels, and watched as her daughter covered her favorite doll with soap. Inadvertently, Rosalyn drew a long breath and let it out as a sigh. She was tired and sitting still. And the sound of rushing water was beginning to slow her down.

Mellie looked up then, her face covered with a beard of bubbles. “Do I look like Santa?” she asked.

Rosalyn pretended to study her from different angles. Then she nodded. “Yes, I think so.”

“So what do you want for Christmas, Mommy?”

Looking around at the carefully organized toy bins that hung from the wall behind the tub, Rosalyn spotted something on top. Then she closed her eyes. “I would like a Dora the Explorer doll, please.”

“Okay . . . now close your eyes. . . .”

“They're closed.”

There was splashing, then the sound of toys dropping into the water one after another. More splashing, then silence.

“Okay . . . now open your eyes. . . .”

Rosalyn opened her eyes and, with feigned surprise, lifted the wet, soapy doll from the side of the tub and held it in the air. “Just what I wanted! Thank you, Santa!”

Mellie smiled as she wiped the beard from her chin and returned to her own doll, who was floating facedown beside her. Rosalyn held a hand to her mouth as she studied her daughter. Long brown hair sticking up every which way in a parade of curls, those little arms and legs, the potbelly stomach and droopy brown eyes. Her skin was like fine china—pristine and unblemished. If Rosalyn closed her eyes and erased a decade, she could be sitting here
right now, in this same bathroom, with Caitlin playing in the tub. They were so different, her two girls. Mellie had inherited her father's eyes and hair. Caitlin had her mother's. Still, the faces were the same, the little bodies. The innocence. And like a switch being turned, provocative memories of those early, simple years when life had been about two little children and nothing else were pulled from the shadows of her mind.

She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to hold at bay the rush that was taking her over. But they were unstoppable now, the warm memories from those years, running side by side with the burning fear of losing control. She was under assault by the love a mother has for her little girl, the dreams and hopes and worries. Little Mellie playing with her doll . . . Caitlin in that hallway. The images flooded in, immersing her in the reality of their life, the prurient things her daughter had done and the memories they provoked within her. She pulled from her conscience the relief she'd felt when Caitlin made these new friends, friends who had degraded her, and she could find no way to reconcile these thoughts with the little naked girl, covered in bubbles, who was right before her eyes.

She bent down and stroked Mellie's cheek with a washcloth. The child looked up at her, ready to protest, but instead just studied her mother's face.

“Mommy, do you have a boo-boo?”

Rosalyn shook her head and smiled, letting the tears roll off her chin and into the warm water that held her daughter. “No, Mellie. Mommy's just a little sad today.”

Mellie pondered the situation for moment. “Do you want some ice cream?”

Her mother smiled again, but the tears kept falling. “Why don't we both have some after the bath?”

Mellie's eyes lit up then, and she gave a huge grin, even as her mother scrubbed the juice from her face.

This was not something a warm bath and a bowl of ice cream could fix. With all their money, all the status the Barlows had achieved, they had not been able to contain it, this corruption of innocence.

Mellie stood up, and Rosalyn wrapped her in a towel. She pulled her close as she bundled the little body, shaking off the remaining sadness. Then she pressed her lips to her daughter's cheek and kissed her one more time.

 

 

 

 

 

“I
JUST THINK WE
should get it checked out.”

The moment had finally arrived. Nick Livingston was asking questions about their apparent infertility, and pleading with his wife to go to a specialist. Sara thought about the birth control pills in the hidden compartment of her purse, biting her nails as they drove through the dark, winding streets of Wilshire's backcountry.

“How about next month? I'm so crazy with the house.”

A month should do it. One month off the pills would get the hormones out of her system, giving her clean test results. She'd pop one in the second they left the office, and no one would be the wiser.

“Okay. Next month.” Watching the road with its twists and turns, Nick did not sound at all satisfied. “It's just . . . I'd like to have them while I'm still lucid. And Annie's not getting any younger. They say it gets harder the more space there is between them.”

“They say a lot of things. Annie's not going to like a baby no matter how old she is.”

Nick sighed, and Sara heard it loud and clear as she pondered the recent turn of events—her admission onto the now-famous blow job committee, the invitation to this party—and asked herself why, in light of those events,
she couldn't stop herself from taking those pills. Then there was Nick, the way-too-tall Napoleon sitting beside her. He had taken her face in his hands that night four years ago, a face drowning in tears and anguish. The face of a stranger. And he had opened his heart to her without reservation. She would give him anything she had to repay him for that night and every day and night since. Except this one thing. Another baby. She had already traveled farther down this road than she had ever imagined. She was a housewife at twenty-seven who didn't know her own mind. And she needed desperately to stop and catch her breath.

“How far out are they?” Nick's voice was curious, and duly impressed. Having grown up in this town, he knew as well as anyone that the estates grew in size the farther along this path you ventured. Nick had lived only two miles from the downtown. Not an awful address, not great either. Now they lived four miles out, but in an older house. It was a crazy system as far as Sara was concerned. Crazy and inconvenient. But that was the way of the Connecticut suburbs.

“There,” Sara said, pointing into the darkness at a pool of bright light that was unfolding through the tree cover up ahead.

In a moment, the woods disappeared, revealing a brilliant, star-studded sky that was interrupted solely by a stone homestead. Built along the reservoir in 1812 by one of Wilshire's founding families, the mansion had been inhabited only by the wealthiest residents and found its integrity well preserved. Though nearly doubled in square footage, the architecture had been meticulously duplicated, giving the resulting structure a seamless, and timeless, appearance. And even in the darkness, the backdrop of the water against the magnificent stone pillars that flanked the house on either side was breathtaking.

“God,” she said, taking in the view. It was, to Sara, something out of a Jane Austen novel.

“This has gotta be worth thirty million.” Nick's eyes were glued to the house as he pulled into the driveway through the wrought-iron gates.

“Thirty million?”

“Look at the
land
.”

Nick was right. Land was gold in this town, and the Barlow estate looked like it held at least two dozen acres—something unheard of in Wilshire.

Slowly, they wound around toward the front, where white-gloved valets
waited for them. Sara could feel Nick's excitement. Or was it her own? Judging from the number of cars already parked on the lower lawn, there were easily five hundred guests at this party, which implied, of course, that five hundred people could fit inside the Barlow home. How many square feet was this house? Sara couldn't imagine. How many times bigger was it than their house? Ten? Fifteen? And she couldn't even see around the back. There were gazebos and other random structures, perhaps a guest cottage, maid's quarters. The landscaping was glorious, with weeping juniper trees spaced evenly along the front lawn, and what looked like a small apple orchard to the right side.