The Darlings

by Cristina Alger

  She put her hand in his, and held on tight as he opened the door for his guests.

  THURSDAY, 11:16 A.M.

  Quiet was Marion’s gift to Sol. She had been asleep when he crawled into bed beside her the night before—it must have been 2 or 3 a.m.—and she was asleep when he went back to work a few hours later.

  Sol was sure she had been up for at least a few hours. But she was lingering upstairs, reading maybe or taking a long bath. Staying out of his hair, basically, so he could work. It was this sort of gesture, so subtle that any other person would have missed it entirely, that made him love her after thirty-six years. Not just a warm, familial love, but a deep, rare sort of love. Her body was a mass of lumps and veins, and her hair was like an overgrown shrub most of the time, no longer really worth tending. But still, Sol thought Marion was beautiful.

  When he heard her softly padding around in the kitchen, he couldn’t wait to see her. Though they had been together since the previous evening, he hadn’t really been with her. The Morty situation had swallowed him whole.

  He hoped she was making coffee. It was less acidic somehow when she made it. Sol made a mental note to thank her for driving last night and for the coffee, if there was any. He never remembered to thank her for coffee.

  He found Marion in front of the open refrigerator, her spandexed body sticking out from behind the door.

  He patted her on the rear. “Sol!” she exclaimed. “You scared me half to death. I thought you were working.”

  “I am,” he said, feeling unusually affectionate. “But I wanted to say good morning.”

  Marion’s chocolate-brown eyes softened as she smiled. The little crow’s feet that sprouted from their corners were so kindly, he thought. He couldn’t imagine why she kept threatening to erase them.

  “Well, that’s nice of you,” she said, leaning in for a kiss. “I hope you got some sleep last night. What time did you get to bed?”

  He smiled and wrapped her in a hug so that she couldn’t see his face. Marion could always tell when he was lying to her. “I’m fine,” he said. “I got a few hours. You know me. I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

  “That’s what worries me!” she said and laughed a little. “You need to take care of yourself. You work too hard.”

  “No such thing.”

  She shot him an admonishing look. “I know,” he conceded. “I know.”

  “I’m meeting Judith for spin class this morning,” Marion said, changing the subject. She closed the fridge. “We might go for a bite after, but everything’s probably closed.”

  Usually, when Marion went “for a bite” she returned home with a shopping bag or two dangling from one arm. She was unable to walk through East Hampton’s main drag without buying something. She shopped with heightened abandon in East Hampton. Sol assumed this had something to do with feeling relaxed. She would come to her senses later in the day but by then, it was too late. On principle, Marion almost never returned anything. She didn’t like to upset anyone, even salesclerks. Every time Sol went into the closet, he found something else with the tags still on.

  Sol usually kept his mouth shut. If he saw it as part of the cost of doing business, he would accept the thirty-dollar spin class, and even the postclass shopping spree.

  “There are spin classes on Thanksgiving?”

  “There are always spin classes in East Hampton,” Marion said drily. “We’re supposed to be at the Darlings’ at 6 p.m.?”

  “Yes, 6 p.m.”

  “Okay, I’ll be back by then. I hope everything goes okay today. I set a fresh pot to brew.” She kissed him on the cheek. “How’s Julianne?”

  “She’s holding up. Considering.”

  “Have they . . . any word?”

  “No,” Sol said. He shook his head sadly. “They’re still dredging the river. The storm’s making things very difficult, they say.”

  “And the memorial service?”

  Sol sighed. “It’s complicated. Julianne doesn’t want to move forward until they’ve found the body. We’re preparing her for the possibility that they may not.”

  “Oh,” Marion said. “That’s just awful.” Her eyes shone with tears. “When you speak to Carter, tell him they’re all in my thoughts.”

  “I will.” Sol said. Marion ducked her head respectfully. She offered him a sad smile then turned. Through the open door, he watched her descend the porch stairs to the gravel drive.

  “Thank you for the coffee,” he called after her.

  “Anything for you, my love,” she called back, and was gone.

  Sol never spoke to Marion about his clients. He was naturally circumspect, but his job—and client list—demanded the utmost discretion. Marion knew some of them; some she even considered friends. They had family dinners together and weekends in the Hamptons. She sent gifts for birthdays and children’s graduations. But she never pried about their business.

  Marion was the listening type. She had been a family therapist for fifteen years. She was retired now, but she still continued to volunteer as a grief counselor at Beth Israel Medical Center. Though Sol never spoke of his own work, he was quick to praise Marion’s at parties, or to clients. He was happy whenever she she came up in conversation.

  Her practice had put him through law school. Their first years of marriage had been a struggle, a constant flow of work and bills. She never complained. Sol often marveled that she had stayed with him all that time. Part of the joy of making as much money as he did now was watching Marion thrive in her volunteer work. By the end of the year, construction would be completed on the Marion and Sol Penzell Wing of Beth Israel Medical Center. They had been working on it for five years, and talking about it for nearly fifteen. It was their baby, she said. The baby they couldn’t have themselves. He liked it when she bought herself nice things; certainly she deserved them. She had given him so much, and he wanted to give her back everything he could.

  It had been many years since he’d left life at a large law firm to form Penzell & Rubicam LLP, a small boutique firm that specialized in securities enforcement and litigation, white-collar defense, and government relations. His partner, Neil Rubicam, ran the firm’s Washington, D.C., office, which, if you asked Neil, was the firm’s headquarters. Neil was more of a showman than Sol. He took pleasure in being interviewed on the courthouse steps, and he favored custom-made suits and bold ties that photographed well. On the wall behind his desk, Neil had framed clippings that mentioned the firm, or more specifically, mentioned him. Sol thought this was an amusing and somewhat juvenile practice. The only things on Sol’s wall were a photograph of Marion and his certificate of admission to the New York State Bar. Most of Penzell & Rubicam’s real successes were by their very nature unknown to the public. The high stakes court battles were important, of course, and served to garner the firm’s sterling reputation. But keeping their clients out of court—and out of the limelight—was the firm’s forté.

  The most lucrative of Penzell & Rubicam’s victories were the ones about which no one, except the client and a small handful of attorneys under Sol and Neil’s management, would ever know. These were settlements negotiated in the shadows, the kind where money simply disappeared into numbered offshore bank accounts. Sometimes no money exchanged hands at all, except of course to Sol, who was compensated handsomely for the representation. Instead, billion-dollar relationships were forged, debts of gratitude incurred, favors curried. The fact that he received no recognition for this work, not even from his wife, was, to Sol, a small price to pay for the privilege of doing the work he did. While he loved the practice of law, his work now was far more sophisticated than a traditional legal practice. It was negotiation at the highest level, a form of extralegal deal brokering that made him a very powerful man.

  They ran the two offices like two discrete firms. Neil was in charge of the high-visibility litigation practice in Washington, and Sol spearheaded a hybrid advisory business that served the biggest names on Wall Street. While functionally inde
pendent, the arms were complementary; Sol and Neil often worked in tandem on different aspects of a client’s business. Sol looped in Neil when a client looked as though he might be headed for litigation, and Neil called Sol for behind-the-scenes negotiations, M & A advice, and crisis management. Publicly, Sol was happy to let Neil be the firm’s front man. To the firm’s most valued clients, discretion was mandatory, and Sol was their guy.

  Carter kept Sol on retainer, consulting him on everything from dealings with FINRA and the SEC to dealings with Ines. Admittedly, Sol often found the latter to be stickier. Over the course of their thirteen-year business relationship, Sol had seen Carter through marital peaks and valleys. There were times when Sol had braced himself for Ines to leave, but she never did. This was different. Ines was tough as hell, but this would be a test for the strongest of wills. Sol wasn’t sure that Ines could withstand the coming storm. He wasn’t sure any wife could.

  “Let’s hope she’s got some Silda Spitzer in her,” Neil had said the night before. He had been shooting hoops in his office with his mini basketball; Sol could hear it as it bounced off the rim.

  “Take me off speaker. Did you get PR lined up?”

  “Relax.” Neil’s voice came in clearer now. “I have Jim working on it. I think his firm does the best work in corporate damage control. I’ve been using them a lot lately.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “He’s the best.”

  “We’ll need it.”

  There would be more than rumors about Carter this time. In a matter of weeks, maybe days, the Darlings would be exposed to immeasurable intrusion from the press, the authorities, friends, and strangers. Their personal lives would be on display. Many would relish the fall of such a privileged family. The baseline assumption, Sol knew, would be that Carter was guilty.

  He was trying to cut a deal as fast as he could so that wouldn’t happen. He had made some headway with Eli Sohn, his contact at the attorney general’s office, but they weren’t there yet. A deal couldn’t be cut until tomorrow, at the earliest. Carter would have to show up in person, hat in hand. Unfortunately, Carter wasn’t great at hat in hand.

  THURSDAY, 12:56 P.M.

  There were already four cars in the driveway. Paul wondered if they were the last ones to arrive. Adrian and Lily’s black Porsche Cayenne was parked at the apex of the curved drive, blocking everyone else. The front door of the house was ajar. When Bacall heard the rumbling of the gravel beneath the tires, he burst out through it, barking happily and wagging his tail like a windshield wiper. It felt like a standard-issue late fall day. Paul pulled to a stop just behind Adrian and Lily’s car, trying to keep his eye on Bacall, who was skirting the edges of the drive. King sat up and pressed his dappled paws against the window, panting in anticipation.

  “We’re here, honey,” Merrill said. She spoke in the singsong voice she used when addressing the dog, but it was halfhearted. “Are you excited?”

  King let out a yelp as Merrill opened the door and set him down on the drive. Steam rose from his nostrils and his feet crunched on the ice-crusted grass. He and Bacall went about sniffing each other while Paul and Merrill got out and stretched. The air was colder out here than it was in Manhattan; clean and bracing. Paul shivered through his wool sweater. It wouldn’t be a pleasant weekend, but it still felt momentarily nice to be out of the city.

  The house had taken on that stark New England quality that shingled houses do in the fall. Ines’s prized window boxes stood empty; in the summer they overflowed with pink geraniums. The house’s façade was an aged nut-brown. Though the Darlings had built the house in 2001, it was traditionally designed, fading seamlessly into the Island’s patchwork of farmhouses and saltboxes. At the back of the house was a small formal English garden, the hedges of which were clipped neatly into a rectangular maze. They were covered now to protect them during the winter.

  The house was, as ever, eerily perfect. The outside had white-trimmed gambrels and a porch that caught the breeze just so. The footpaths were constructed out of brick, eaten away at the corners, the colors as varied as the back of a tabby cat and faded by the sun. Inside, the house had all the trappings of a family estate. Ines favored old silver for meals, the kind that was supposed to be passed down, never purchased, and was slightly worn around the handles. A painting of Carter’s grandfather hung on the library wall; across from it was a framed car company’s stock certificate that supposedly bore his signature. Everything that could be personalized or monogrammed or customized was: the crisp white sheets, the soft blue towels, the L.L.Bean canvas bags that were lugged everywhere, from the beach to the golf course to the farmer’s market. Yet there was something manufactured about it, as though Ines had opened the pages of Architectural Digest and said, “Give me this.”

  All of the heirlooms and old photos were from Carter’s side of the family; his stories were the family’s communal history. Paul never once heard Ines speak about her childhood in Brazil. Paul knew all about the summers in Quogue, the cousins back in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, the winter recesses from boarding school. He knew that Charlie Darling had been an equestrian and an expert marksman, that Eleanor had had a tent for her debutante ball that had been made entirely of white roses. Once, when she was drunk, Merrill told Paul that a lot of her father’s stories were embellished. “They were never really all that well off,” she whispered, after her father finished a story about childhood Christmases in Palm Beach. “My grandfather was just a showman. Dad is, too, I guess.”

  You were with them or you weren’t. Paul and Merrill spent every weekend at the Darlings’ house in the summer, and every holiday. After they were married, it was often said to Paul that “he was a Darling now.” He was glad about it; he wanted nothing more than for his wife’s family to accept him. Still, it felt a little strange, as though he had joined a preexisting family instead of beginning one of his own. Sometimes, less now than in the beginning, Paul wondered how Patricia and Katie felt about his relationship with the Darlings. He tried not to have an ego about it—his family was in North Carolina after all, and the Darlings were here—but there were moments when he was troubled by it.

  And then there was the issue of the name. At their engagement party, Adrian had jokingly asked Paul if he was going to take her name after they were married.

  “No, but I’m keeping my own,” Merrill had replied before he could answer. She turned to Paul. “Lily goes by Lily Darling Patterson, but only socially,” she added, as though that bolstered her cause.

  “Socially? As opposed to what?” Paul said, sounding snarkier than he intended. Merrill raised a quick eyebrow in Adrian’s direction, a reprimand and a warning.

  “Professionally,” she said coolly. Conversation over.

  “How do you feel about that?” Adrian asked, winking at Paul.

  “Just fine,” he said, but felt his face flush with embarrassment. “I’m going to get a refill,” he said and nodded toward the bar.

  As Paul walked away, he heard Adrian say to Merrill, “You girls have to maintain your brand equity, huh?” They both laughed. It felt like a slight, though Paul knew it wasn’t meant as one. It was a joke, nothing more.

  It had never occurred to Paul that his wife wouldn’t want to be Mrs. Ross. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked her later, clumsily, after too much scotch.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just thought you’d understand.”

  They unpacked the car in silence, the wind stirring up the leaves along the edges of the drive. Eventually, Adrian appeared at the door, Sam Adams in hand. He whistled at Bacall and both dogs bounded into the house. Paul was momentarily irked by the fact that his dog responded so willingly to Adrian’s whistle, and then felt childish for caring.

  “Welcome, kids,” Adrian said. He meandered down to the car to give Merrill a hug. “Need a hand?”

  “Looks like you guys just got here,” Paul nodded his head toward the open trunk of Adrian’s car.

  “Yeah, we got a l
ate start. Because of the Morty thing. Lily’s a little shaken up.” Adrian’s throat sounded dry, as if he had been up talking late into the night. On first glance Adrian was his usual, relaxed self: hands stuffed in his pockets, errant shirttail emerging from the waistband of his corduroys, a page from the J. Crew catalog. But Paul knew Adrian well enough to sense a heavy chord in his voice. The men locked eyes. For a moment, Adrian looked older than Paul had ever seen him.

  “I’ll go find her,” Merrill said.

  “Everybody’s in the kitchen, except Carter. He’s at the Penzells’, I think.”

  Merrill nodded and disappeared into the house without acknowledging Paul. Not wanting to follow her, he took their suitcases to their bedroom.

  Upstairs, Paul began to unpack his suitcase and then closed his eyes for a moment, succumbing to a bone-deep fatigue. He knew he needed to go say hello to the family; he was simply delaying the inevitable. But once he left the bedroom, the weekend would begin in earnest. That overwhelming thought kept him pinned down to the bed.

  There was no real need to unpack, anyway. Closed suitcases left on luggage racks at Beech House were silently and miraculously unpacked by Veronica, the housekeeper, the clothes withdrawn, steamed, and hung neatly in rows. Like many details about the Darlings, Paul found this practice unsettling. It created a strangely intimate association with Veronica. She folded his undershirts; she placed his spy novel by the bedside and his Dopp kit on the bathroom counter; she left his work files untouched in his duffel, as if to say that some things, work things, are still private here. But they weren’t, really. She touched his toothbrush and saw his condoms under the sink. It seemed inequitable, a streaming one-way channel of information. He didn’t even know her last name. Some days, it felt to Paul as though the staff knew the Darlings better than the family knew themselves.

  He was hanging a button-down in the closet when a voice behind him said, “You don’t need to do that. Veronica’s here today.”