The White Rose (16 page)

God, he thinks. Is this all it comes down to, in the end? A thing for older women?

“Sweetie, you're not eating,” his mother observes.

Oliver takes a bite. The meal is a success.

Oliver can even remember the first time he thought his mother beautiful, on visiting day at Keewaydin Camp, circa 1982, when the cars had filled the parking lot, disgorging mother after mother: the gray and thick, the puffed and colorless. When his family's station wagon arrived—Oliver remembers now—and Caroline stepped out from behind the wheel, she was thin like a willow with pale yellow hair, and glittering in the Vermont sunlight. Oliver had run to her feeling select: he had no father, it was true, but he had this magical person with her arms open and her face alight, who drew every boy's attention away from his own parent.

The leers of a camp full of boys could not compensate for his mother's loneliness. Oliver understood that, even then, though she had not yet introduced him to Henry Rosenthal or to anyone else. Caroline had loved her marriage and family life, and her son already understood that what one loved, and lost, one sought to reclaim. He might have had her to himself, those years, but that passed.

Now, fifteen years later, Caroline had resumed the role of Greenwich wife, though with a husband whose higher profile brought her frequently to the city. Henry, who had a penchant for difficulty and loved to fight, preferably in public, handled a string of ugly divorce cases, most of which featured celebrity participants and vitriol all around. He loved to grapple and rant, and he would play the press without mercy for anyone. Oliver's teenage years had been dominated by the DiSanto case, with its sullen offspring and obscene assets. This was followed by the fighting Coneys and their labyrinthine real estate trusts (a marital dissolution that reverberated in aftershock lawsuits for years). The early nineties were consumed by the famous film director who ran off with his nearly ex-wife's sister, all three of whom were ultimately accused of the sexual abuse of the children, and after that Henry took on the Susskind divorce, a pitiable exercise in devastation culminating in the suicide of the thirteen-year-old whose custody was in dispute. (The day after the funeral, Henry filed a civil suit against the mother, on behalf of the father.)

Did Oliver love him? Of course not, but he saw his mother's contentment. Caroline warmed to her new marriage, and seemed to relish her emergence from suburbia. The Manhattan charity circuit was a homecoming for her, and not a few of the more prominent hostesses she now regularly encountered had been her classmates at Brearley or had taken riding lessons with her at the Claremont Stables. Henry took pleasure in the squeals that would sometimes follow his introduction of his new wife—“But of course I know Caroline! We were in the same bunk at Tripp Lake!”—and always in her beauty, hidden away for long years in widowhood and Greenwich. And yet, although she was meeting (and re-meeting) so many people in Henry's frenetic world, Caroline's circle of friends continued to diminish; Marian was only one of many who fell away as Caroline made her new life with a new marriage and a growing son. Her energy was divided between mothering Oliver and mothering Henry, endeavors requiring intense if different effort. She gleaned early on, for example, that the only way Henry could detach himself from work was to have an ocean inserted between himself and his clients, so Caroline plotted with his secretary to create firewalls of vacation time, during which she took him to Europe, Asia, South America. Once home again, she would lose him to the great world and have to content herself with glimpses at breakfast and late dinners, distracted embraces and rushed compliments as he passed through the house. She might have had another child, but didn't. She might have had a busy life of her own, but for some reason she didn't, at least until she joined the board of the New York City Ballet Guild. While Oliver lived at home, she perfected a presence that was attentive but unintrusive and took pains to construct a home life in which the three of them operated independently, but with generally benevolent overlap. When Oliver left for Providence, they mysteriously reverted to mother and son without reference to Henry. Oliver hardly saw his stepfather at all now, except on holidays and in the
New York Times.
In any case, Oliver had long since decided to think of his mother as happily married, mostly because he could not bear to do otherwise.

“How's Henry?” Oliver asks.

Caroline looks up. “Consumed. Of course.”

“With what's her name?”

His mother nods. “It just goes on and on.”

“But the trial's in two weeks, you said.”

“Well,” Caroline says and sighs, “unless the husband's lawyer asks for another continuance. Or Henry does.” She shrugs. “One of them almost certainly will.”

Oliver takes a sip of wine. “I don't understand that. I mean, it's been an age already. What's the point of dragging it out even more?”

Caroline rubs her forehead absently. “Well, right now she's got primary custody. And the longer she can hold the line, the better off she's going to be. Judges don't like to uproot kids.”

“Possession being nine-tenths of the law,” Oliver says grimly.

She shakes her head. “It's astonishing how some people behave. You have to remind yourself: these are people who stood up in front of their friends and said they loved each other!”

Oliver, despite himself, laughs. “It's a nasty business.”

“Yes. Is there more orzo? I love the sauce.”

He serves her another helping, then pours more wine. “Mom? Doesn't it make you cynical about marriage? I mean, it's none of my business.”

It's when he says this that Oliver understands he is asking about her marriage, not marriage in general. Immediately, he wishes he could take it back, but Caroline is already looking contemplative.

“No, it's all right,” she says, her voice quiet. “I think, to be honest, I have to say yes, but not because of what Henry does for a living, necessarily. I have my own experiences to draw from. Though both of my marriages have been good, they've been very different. So I have a sense of marriage as something that isn't necessarily sacred. It's just a box you put things in. How good it turns out to be is a matter of what you put in the box.” She looks up at Oliver and smiles, suddenly embarrassed. “How profound.”

“Yes,” he says, relieved. “Profoundly profound.”

“I should be hanging around with Bell,” Caroline says. “He could translate my pearls of wisdom into poetry.”

“Bell thinks you're beautiful,” Oliver hears himself say.

Caroline smiles, shaking her head. “I knew there was a reason I liked that guy. At my age, you don't get that kind of compliment very often.”

“At your age,”
he says, disapprovingly. “What's the matter with—”

He stops himself. He had been about to say,
with the two of you.

There is a silence, more awkward than it should be.

“I mean—” he begins.

“Yes, yes,” Caroline puts up an elegant hand, which bears an Elsa Peretti cuff of silver, “it's hard for you to get your head around. You're the kid, so I've always been older. But in my own mind I'm always younger. It's disconcerting to see myself in the mirror.”

“But you're beautiful!” Oliver insists.

“Thanks, but it's a question of age. You know, last summer up in the Berkshires, at one of Farley's big weekends, we started talking about this.”

Farley was Henry's partner, the Prenup Pasha. Between them, they had the state of matrimony covered, before and after.

“Not just people our age, either. There were a few kids in their twenties, and some couples in their thirties and forties. And an older couple, too—I think the man was sixty and the woman fifty-something. Anyway, we were talking about the feeling of age, you know? And we went around the table: how old do you think you are? Not that we didn't know how old we were, but the age that feels correct, you know, in your head. Do you understand?”

Oliver, who doesn't exactly, nods.

“The twenty-year-olds thought of themselves as adolescents. The thirty-year-olds thought of themselves as just out of college. The ones in their forties and fifties thought of themselves as a generation younger. Without fail. It's like a rule: your sense of self lags behind your actual age by a certain factor.”

“And you think of yourself…,” Oliver said, leading her, setting down his knife and fork.

“Oh, about the age I was when you were little, I suppose. Mid twenties. I'm always a little bit surprised to discover that I'm in my late forties, with a grown child.”

“A grown child who's very fond of his mother,” Oliver says, trying to be reassuring.

“Yes,” she says and smiles at him. “That's some compensation.”

“Some!”

Caroline does not bother to answer. “Though I wouldn't mind a daughter-in-law. A daughter-in-law would be nice.”

“Mom,” Oliver says.

“And you're not even dating. Maybe I can help.”

You can't,
he wants to say, but his goal is to block further conversation. He gets up and takes her plate and his own, then sets them down in the sink. “Want some coffee?”

“What are you afraid of?” Caroline asks. “Is it rejection? Because I can tell you, Oliver, this city is crawling with women who are not about to reject you. I say this in all modesty, given that you're my son.”

“Thanks for the endorsement,” he says. “I didn't really make dessert, but I have chocolates.”

She sighs. “Well, I'd love a chocolate, but I'd also like to stay with this.”

“I'm sorry,” he says. This is both an observation and a dismissal.

He holds out the Burdick chocolates, snug in their wooden cigar box. Caroline picks out a white chocolate mousse. “I love these. Marian Kahn once gave me these.”

Me too, he almost says.

“Do you remember her? We had dinner with her one evening last spring. She was with her husband.”

“I remember,” Oliver says. He purposely turns away, filling the coffee pot from the tap.

“Strange man. Very rich and very fierce. I wonder if small men are predisposed to be very fierce.”

Oliver looks at her, puzzled.

“His family had nothing, you know. They came over after the war, I don't know where from.
Kahn,
” she says and frowns. “That's German, right? It's hard to believe there were any Jews left in Germany after the war. Maybe they were from somewhere else. Anyway, Marshall got himself a scholarship to Brandeis, then Yale Law. Afterward, when he got to New York, he had no loyalties.”

Oliver, despite himself, wants to hear more. Marian is not often forthcoming about Marshall. Oliver finishes preparing the coffee and takes his seat.

“What do you mean, no loyalties?”

“I mean, there were no family connections. There was no place ready for him—he made his own place. He didn't have to be careful of anyone's history or anyone's feelings.” She smiles and shakes her head. “And he wasn't.”

“You knew Marian first, right?” Oliver says. “Didn't you know her when you were a child?”

“Marian?” says Caroline. “God, yes! She's the oldest friend that I'm still in touch with. Well, not in very good touch, to be honest. We've been talking about a lunch date since that day in April, and it hasn't happened yet. But she's terribly busy. I think she's writing another Lady Charlotte book.”

Oliver contemplates his wineglass.

“I remember her in ballet class—that's how far back we go. We met at Fokine, and our mothers knew each other.”

Oliver can't help himself. “What was she like? I mean, was she a nice little girl?”

“Oh, I loved Marian. Her mother was so glamorous. We used to go and play with all her puffs and jewelry and perfume after she'd gone out. I always think of Mrs. Warburg when I hear the phrase ‘society hostess.' She was the real thing—you get a copy of Emily Post from the 1950s, that was the Warburg apartment. Park and…” She pauses, considering, “Eighty-first. And it had the most elegant dining room, with glorious Zuber paper and little crystal bowls full of nuts everywhere. Oh! And silver boxes of cigarettes on every table,” Caroline says and laughs. “God forbid someone should have to walk across the room for a cigarette! She was on the board of the Jewish Museum and the Henry Street Settlement but, you know, her heart wasn't really in that. She tried for years to get herself on the board of the Whitney, but they wouldn't have her. It was a hard blow for someone like her,” Caroline says and shakes her head. “There were some lines you just couldn't cross, even if you were a Warburg. Of course, she hated that Marian always had her face in a book. Mrs. Warburg believed that intelligence in a girl was wholly unnecessary, and ultimately detrimental. Later on, Marian and I ended up at Brearley together. Of course, Marian flew through Brearley.”

Oliver, smiling, gets up to pour the coffee. “Are we taking sugar tonight? Or some chemical du jour?”

“Don't be fresh,” says his mother. “Sugar is fine, if that's all you have. What's the time, by the way?”

“Quarter past seven. Plenty of time.”

“We might have trouble finding a cab.”

“We might take the subway, which goes right there.”

“I'm not taking the subway, Oliver.” This is a concession to city life that Caroline has never made, as Oliver knows perfectly well. He smiles.

“We'll go soon. Have another chocolate.”

She does, then makes a face. “Oh! It's…I think there was pepper in that one.”

“No doubt,” he says. “They have some unusual flavors.”

Marian, by way of example, favors the ones with clove.

“Anyway, Daddy and I were already in Greenwich when Marian brought Marshall out. It must have been…oh, I guess around seventy-three. They came down for dinner, from New Haven. Of course, she'd been at our wedding, but Daddy hadn't really talked with her until that dinner. Afterward, I remember he told me she was my only sensible friend.” Caroline sighs. “Though, to be honest, that had more to do with the girls he didn't like than with Marian.”