“We’ll be there, whenever it is.”
“Of course.”
“Paul?” Merrill lifted her head off his chest. “What’s going to happen at work?”
Paul stared at the blank whiteness of the ceiling. It was a relief from the walls, which were painted dark green, like a British racing car, and cluttered with paintings and photographs. The richness of the room, the overlay of so many hanging things felt grand to him; at times, mildly claustrophobic. The far wall was dominated by two antique maps, given to them by Carter and Ines as an engagement present. One was an early map of New York, back when the Upper East Side was nothing but open farmland. The other was a nautical map of Cape Lookout in North Carolina, from 1866. Cape Lookout wasn’t anywhere near where he was from, but—according to Ines—it was the only antique map of North Carolina available.
Beneath the maps was a slim mahogany table, selected by Elena and Ramon, the Darlings’ decorators, to “complement” the maps. Merrill hadn’t told Paul how much it cost, and though he wondered about it every time he walked into the apartment, he really didn’t want to know. Some days, the apartment felt disorientingly ornate, like something out of Architectural Digest. This was one of those days.
Paul looked down at his wife. Her hair was pulled into a messy bun, her face stripped bare and slightly ashen. Still, she was beautiful, her eyes a luminous blue flecked with gold. Her hair smelled as it always did, and her body felt familiar next to his. It was only because of her that he lived here. Sometimes, he wondered if he would have stayed in New York at all, if it wasn’t for her.
“Is Dad going to lose the business?”
She looked at him in that way of hers, loving him and needing him all at once. He felt a rush of sadness fill his chest; he wanted so much to make everything okay.
“Come here,” he said, and wrapped her up tight in his arms. His body was just beginning to feel warm again. “Your dad’s going to be fine. We’re going to figure everything out.”
“I love you,” she said simply. “Things like this just make me realize how much I love you.”
Paul decided not to bring up his conversation with Alexa until later. Maybe when they were in the car, on the way to East Hampton. This was mostly out of cowardice, but then it would be quiet in the car, with no distractions. And, for a couple hours, she wouldn’t be able to get up and walk away from the conversation, which Merrill sometimes did when she was angry or upset or frustrated. Paul had a sense that it was very likely she would be all three. Not necessarily with him, though that was a possibility.
For the moment, Paul held her on the couch and let her talk. She needed that, to talk and have someone just listen. What she said didn’t really matter, and she was so tired that it didn’t make much sense anyway, but Paul sensed that it was a relief for her to let it out. She rambled on about how Morty had been like an uncle to her and Lily, how after a few drinks he would tell them stories about her father as a young man that they weren’t supposed to hear and how he took them both to get their ears pierced after school, when Ines didn’t want them to. How he never bought himself new clothes but would lavish the Darling girls with presents around the holidays. How it felt, to her, like the world was coming slowly apart at the seams.
Merrill started to cry as she talked, the hard kind of crying, with snot slipping down her face. Paul held her as her body shook. When she was done, they ordered from the Chinese place down the street.
“I haven’t eaten since breakfast,” she said to the delivery boy as he wordlessly peeled off singles, making change. As though she owed everyone an apology.
She ate ravenously, straight from the cartons. Usually he would have enjoyed being with her like this, informal and cozy. But she looked so pale and thin in his oversized UNC T-shirt . . . She worked so hard, always putting everyone—her colleagues, her family—ahead of herself. Lately, it seemed to be taking its toll on her physically. She had lost weight. She was sleeping badly. She had developed a cough that she couldn’t seem to shake.
“Do you want to play Scrabble?” she asked when she was done eating. They always played Scrabble after Chinese food.
“I think you should get some sleep,” he said.
“You always win, anyway,” she said, and smiled.
“You let me. Go brush your teeth.”
Paul tucked her in. Her body disappeared beneath the duvet and her eyes shut as soon as her head hit the pillow. After he turned off the light, he stayed for a while, watching her in the amber twilight of the unlit room until her breathing became shallow and rhythmic. When he kissed her, she stirred lightly beneath his touch. Her brow rippled as though she was consumed in a dream.
After the leftovers were packed away in the fridge and the trash had been taken out and his face had been scrubbed clean in the bathroom sink, Paul padded into his home office to look through old e-mails. There was one in particular that he wanted to read. He did so again and again, until its words blurred across the page and he was no longer reading it but simply reciting its memorized contents in his head. Finally, he printed it out and put it in a file. Though he was tired, the pieces of the last shattered day were coming together like a Rubik’s Cube.
Eventually the world behind the semitranslucent window shade brightened, and the room came alive again with the pink light of morning. It was Thanksgiving. He had been waiting for it for weeks, though now that it was here it certainly didn’t feel like a holiday. He heard Merrill stirring in the bedroom. He went to put on coffee.
The coffee brewed gently on the counter, filling the kitchen with a familiar, rich scent. Paul reached up into the cabinet to pull down a mug. He had to dig behind the china coffee cups they had gotten off their registry in order to find the big, chipped Harvard Law School mug that was his favorite. If Merrill were awake, she would try to steal it from him. It was the biggest of the mugs, and she was even more of a caffeine fiend than he was. He smiled. He put it out on the counter for her, and pulled the slightly smaller Dean & Deluca mug down for himself.
Sometimes he wondered how much stuff from their apartment they would take if they ever moved. Did they need sixteen eggshell-thin coffee cups with matching saucers? What about the perfect window treatments with the matching pillows that Ines had so painstakingly picked out and Merrill secretly loathed? The porcelain vase and the cut crystal ice bucket and the set of good silver, all of which lived in the storage unit in the basement of their building? They never used any of it. Would Merrill even notice if one day it was all gone?
What they needed was a plan. By the time they arrived in East Hampton they would have one, he told himself. It wouldn’t be over—in fact—it was all just beginning. But at least, he hoped, they’d be in it together.
THURSDAY, 5:06 A.M.
Carter was up early. He dressed quietly in running pants and a Harvard sweatshirt and carried his sneakers into the bathroom so as not to wake Ines. As he brushed his teeth, he stroked his day-old beard. It was more silver now than black. Beneath his fingers was the wobbly neck skin of an old man. He couldn’t remember when they had lost their battle with gravity, but his jowls had surrendered. He decided to shave later. It was a holiday, after all.
He padded down to the kitchen where Bacall thumped his tail against the tiles, happy that someone was awake. Carter felt the cold stone floor through his socks; the temperature had dipped into the twenties overnight. After a cup of coffee, Carter poured Bacall a bowl of kibble and went outside for a run. Snow hadn’t yet fallen, but the air felt primed for it, chilled and wet. No one had been out to the house in East Hampton in more than a month, but the caretakers had wrapped the hedges in sackcloth to protect them from frost.
Running was one of Carter’s greatest pleasures. He liked to follow Apaquogue Road to Georgica Beach before circling home on Lily Pond Lane. Though he had run the route countless times, the beauty of the area always improved his mood. Apaquogue was a charming street with well-kept hedges and traditional, shingled houses. An open expanse
of land had been preserved just before the beach and residents enjoyed an open skyline. The colors in East Hampton were muted—olives and browns and blues—but richer somehow than the colors of Manhattan. In the autumn, the trees exploded in a symphony of crimson and burnt orange. The air felt crisper, too; a welcome change from city smog.
The turn onto Lily Pond Lane was the run’s crescendo. Some of East Hampton’s most moneyed residents lived on Lily Pond Lane; the homes were among the most expensive in what was already an expensive town. For the most part, they were tucked discreetly behind high hedgerows. An occasional iron gate afforded passersby a glimpse of the rolling lawns and estate homes. Carter always slowed his jog to take in the view. There were few times in life when he allowed himself to feel as though he had made it, but a jog down Lily Pond was awfully close. Even more than the Sixty-fourth Street apartment, Carter’s home in East Hampton brought him endless pleasure, a sense that he had been rewarded for years of hard work.
The Darlings’ home sat on the north side of Lily Pond Lane. The less prestigious side; it didn’t enjoy the oceanfront views and beach access to the south. Despite the once-removedness of the shoreline, Ines had still insisted on naming the house “Beech House.” She thought this was a particularly clever play on words, referring to the indigenous beech trees that graced the edges of Lily Pond Lane.
As a young man, Carter had accepted that there would always be a bigger house, a richer neighbor. Though the Darlings were a venerable New England family, several generations of irresponsibility had reduced the family fortune to nothing. Regardless, Carter’s father had maintained a lavish lifestyle for them, one that had far exceeded their means. Carter had been raised as an only child in a classic six on Park Avenue. They had a nanny (Gloria), a cook (Mary), and a revolving stable of housekeepers and other help. Carter’s earliest memories were from summers spent in a gabled house in Quogue, an old-guard community just down the shore from East Hampton.
“As a boy,” Carter once told Paul, “I assumed that everyone spent the summer on the southern shore of Long Island. I actually thought that Christmas only happened in Palm Beach. Not that we celebrated Christmas there, but that it actually happened there. The year Father died, they told me he was too sick to travel to Florida. And that was what I was upset about. I thought that meant there wouldn’t be any Christmas that year.”
Carter was right. After his father died, everything changed.
Eleanor hung on to the Park Avenue apartment as long as she could, but eventually was forced to move to a charmless condominium on Second Avenue. The Quogue house was sold without comment. During the summers, Eleanor and Carter found themselves at the mercy of wealthier friends. July and August were a patchwork of invitations: visiting cousins in Nantucket, staying in a guest cottage in Sag Harbor, sailing in Newport with Eleanor’s latest gentleman friend. Carter rarely enjoyed these seasonal jaunts. He usually slept in a back guest room, the kind with a rickety twin bed, a decoupage wastebasket, and faded floral drapes. Worse yet was when he had to share a room with the child of the house, who always resented the intrusion.
At least one weekend every summer was spent with the Salms in Southampton. Eleanor and Lydia Salm had been roommates at Vassar. Lydia had dropped out during their junior year to marry her father’s business partner, who at the time was thirty-seven and according to Eleanor, “very dashing.” Carter assumed something unfortunate had happened in the intervening years, because Russell Salm was extremely fat and coughed chronically as though his throat were made of phlegm. He smoked cigars by the pool and wore a ring on his pinky finger that bore the Salm family crest. The Salms had only had one child, which Carter thought was just as well.
Russell Salm Jr. was three years older than Carter and preternaturally large for his age. In the afternoons, he would invite his friends over to eat potato chips and sneak cigarettes behind the pool house. They fashioned wet towels into weapons, which, when appropriately snapped, raised flesh into red welts in an instant. At night, Carter was forced to sleep in a trundle bed that pulled out like a drawer from beneath Russell’s bed.
At the end of the weekend, Mrs. Salm would pack a paper bag filled with Russell’s hand-me-downs and force Carter to look through it in front of her. It was, Carter later realized, the greatest humiliation of his young life. Russell would sulk behind his mother during this ceremony, his silence occasionally pierced by a protestation that something “still fit.” Once back at home, Carter would write Mrs. Salm a thank-you note on his sailboat stationery. He was careful to address it only to her and not to Russell, who he felt deserved no acknowledgment of any sort.
As much as he hated boys like Russell, Carter reserved a special type of vitriol for their mothers. More than cruelty or disdain, he hated pity. It would dog him throughout his young life. He was often cast in the role of the earnest boy from modest circumstances. While the Darlings were not poor by conventional standards, they were in the company they kept. Carter suspected that Eleanor never doubted that she belonged anywhere but among the very rich. The Darlings were people of privilege, and people of privilege was what they would remain, no matter what the cost.
Hence the cobbled-together summers, the endless rotation of weekend visits to the right places. And, of course, the schools. Carter was never once reduced to applying for scholarships. He never knew how his mother managed his tuition, but instead was left to imagine what she had cut back on to provide it. Though it was never far from his mind, he inquired about it only once, when he had been accepted by Harvard College.
Carter was admitted to Harvard’s class of 1966, but without financial aid or a scholarship. About this, Eleanor said simply: “All Darling men go to Eaglebrook, and all Darling men go to Groton. But not all Darling men have the smarts to go to Harvard. I’m so very proud of you.”
“Mother, can we afford this?” Carter said. He had just turned eighteen and was feeling assertive. He was, after all, now the man of the house. “If we can’t, I can take a scholarship to Williams or Bowdoin. Both of them have offered, and I would be happy enough rowing crew for either.”
Eleanor’s face went cool and blank. “Carter,” she said, her voice as smooth as a gimlet, “Harvard is something you don’t turn down. You’ll find your way after that, but leave the next four years to me. I won’t have it any other way.” Carter felt momentarily bested, but also deeply relieved.
Eleanor was right, of course. Harvard College was where Carter ought to have been, where he deserved to be all along. He was a Darling, and a hardworking one at that. Unlike his father, who had whiled away his years at Cambridge studying literature and attending parties, Carter concentrated on economics. He spent most of his time in the stacks of Widener Library, determined to graduate at the top of his class. When he socialized, he considered it a form of networking. Unlike his father, Carter chose not to join the Porcellian Club, where most of his classmates from Groton became members. Instead, he joined the Delphic Club, a gentlemanly, if slightly less selective, final club.
Even at eighteen, Carter knew the Groton boys would never be his friends. They had always kept him at an arm’s length while in prep school. They accepted him out of respect for his family, but recognized, some more politely than others, that he didn’t have the resources to be part of their inner circle. He didn’t have the house in Palm Beach and so he wasn’t invited to their New Year’s parties. He couldn’t fly to Gstaad for spring skiing. “To be jealous of money is uninspired,” Eleanor would say with a dismissive wave of the hand. “You can only be jealous of someone who has something that you can never have. More style, for example, or wit. Money is easily earned.”
One of those Groton boys was now Carter’s neighbor on Lily Pond Lane. Nikos Kasper (Kas to his friends) lived directly across from the Darlings in an eleven-thousand square-foot compound, discretely, if somewhat misleadingly, named “Endicott Farms.” Carter found Nikos’s touted genealogical connection to the Reverend Endicott Peabody, the founder of the Groton Sc
hool, dubious at best. It had long been whispered that Nikos’s grand-father, to whom the family fortune was owed, was in fact a self-invented entrepreneur of Greek Orthodox descent who had grown up in a working-class community somewhere deep in the Bronx. Nikos, along with his fear-inspiring twin sister, Althea, now ran the family’s multibillion-dollar real estate company. Nikos was especially proud of the group’s investments in luxury properties in California and Florida, though their main business was developing low-income residential properties in Mexico. In private, Ines had christened Nikos and Althea “those glorified slumlords.”
Like many real estate companies, the Kasper Group had recently taken a few public blows. Over Labor Day, the Wall Street Journal had run a front-page article titled “Strapped for Kas?: Kasper Group’s Desperate Search for Financing.” The article had precipitated a wave of negative press that had, in turn, sent the stock price into a tailspin. Privately, Nikos was hurting. Most of his net worth was tied up in the family company, and in 2007, he had made the poor decision to guarantee a highly risky development project in Mexico City personally. Rumors of bankruptcy had dogged him for years, but this time Carter knew the threat was real. Adding to the ignominy, Nikos’s wife, Medora, had recently filed for separation.
Endicott Farms showed no external signs of turmoil. The window boxes brimmed with white geraniums. Carter slowed to a fast walk when he reached the edge of Nikos’s property and came to a stop in front of its gates. After only five miles, his breathing was sharp and labored.
I’m getting old, he thought, checking the timer on his sports watch. This is ridiculous.
He walked up to the Kaspers’ gatepost and held on to it as he stretched his quadriceps. Beyond the gate was a sweeping expanse of lawn. Even in November, the grass was as manicured as a golf-course green. The only farmlike thing about the property was a small, meticulously maintained apple orchard.
The Darlings Page 13
