A Palm Beach Scandal--A Novel

by Susannah Marren

“And not travel when they perform?” he asked. “It’s your family, isn’t it? It’s the baby, right? Why else would you have that idea?”

  The old me, the me from before I promised my sister and James this baby, would have been about going with our singers. Instead, I’m looking for excuses to be nearby. Yesterday I found myself walking through the Tot Lot playground, the one for toddlers and babies, at Lummus Park in Miami. The cutest little girl, maybe two years old, walked alongside her stroller while the mother, on her cell phone, pushed and texted. I know I wouldn’t do that; I’d be too vigilant. I’d watch Baby Grace’s every move. I’d take her on the swings; we’d do the baby slide together.

  “Maybe for a few months, like maternity leave,” I said.

  “Isn’t Elodie taking maternity leave?” he asked.

  “Yes, of course she is. I want to be available to her, in the beginning. I thought maybe if we didn’t start traveling again at once, I could help out a little.”

  A rain had begun, falling in pockets along the highway. Tyler put on the windshield wipers. They swiped against the glass; the swish of it was hypnotic.

  “It might be a good idea to hammer it out with your sister sooner than later,” he said.

  “Mimi keeps asking. Doesn’t the baby nurse need to be chosen before a nanny is hired? Will I express my milk for Elodie to have in bottles?”

  “Good for Mimi.” Tyler kept heading south. “I mean, your sister is sort of missing in action.”

  “Please, she’s my sister.”

  After a while, Tyler switched on his playlist, turning to Bob Dylan singing “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” He reached for my hand, his palm calloused like a guitar player’s, though he hasn’t played in months.

  * * *

  Mom tugs her left eyebrow up toward her forehead. She’s in a Lilly Pulitzer shift, a light blue print with a panel of white lace.

  “I wish that Elodie could meet us. Take a half hour from her schedule. I’d like to buy you both a little something.” Veronica uses her social “maybe she means it” tone.

  She lets the mirror flip back up.

  “I am a firm believer in punctuating good news.” She has morphed into her public voice. “A baby gift for my girls.”

  “I don’t know, Mom, I’d rather wait until we have the baby.”

  “Not necessarily. We’ll look around, feel it out. See what Faith is consigning at the moment. Shall we?” She turns to me, perfected.

  * * *

  Through the window, I see the women buying, chatting, longing for things. The Estrela sofa, the Egg chair, themed items, jewelry in cases with miniature placards that read CARTIER, IPPOLITA, DAVID WEBB, TIFFANY—they’re all there. The bags arranged by color, Hermès, Chanel, Fendi, Prada. A case of costume jewelry, Oscar, Miriam Haskell, Saint Laurent. Buying and selling as a contact sport.

  Chimes. Mom pushes open the door. She smiles, at ease with status items, addictive shopping as a solution. “Hello, everyone.”

  The age-defying, yoga-loving crowd, some wearing sapphire or ruby earrings, wide diamond bracelets, diamond solitaires, pause. Hello, Veronica. Veronica, how have you been? Their welcomes float up toward the coffered ceiling; their gaze is on me.

  Two unnamed women nod, then the usuals: Patsy Deller, Cecelia Norric, Lara Mercer. Jesus, even Jessica’s and Tiffany’s mothers are in the shop, together. Eve Crane, the majordomo, approaches, her stilettos clicking on the white marble tile. She carries a velvet tray of women’s watches and focuses on my mother. “After your call about an everyday watch, a woman’s watch, Veronica, I gathered what we have … including from the safe.”

  “My girls don’t wear watches anymore, they read their cell phones,” Sylvan Harley, Jessica’s mother, says. “Do you, Aubrey?” She turns to me, a chance for her to stare directly at my body.

  “It depends, Mrs. Harley. I like watches; they’re decorative, historical,” I say.

  “I suppose that is a slant,” Patsy Deller says. “Show us what you’ve got!”

  “Why, some of these are charming!” Mom says. “They are decorative, if not useful.” She lifts a Cartier tank on a black alligator band. “This is classic.”

  Doesn’t she know that she’s brought along the wrong daughter for the shop, for the crowd? I have not worn a watch since I graduated from college and only costume myself in designer clothes and jewelry when I come to Palm Beach. Borrowed from my mother and sister.

  “Aubrey, try this on. It can be casual or dressy.”

  “Sure.” I half smile at the others. I’m about to offer my left wrist, when texts start coming in. I should have turned off my iPhone.

  “Is that mine?” Lara Mercer puts down the Valentino rockstud bag that she’s been looking at and takes her cell phone out of her pocket.

  “No, no, it’s mine.” I back off a few steps, start texting back quickly. First from Celeste: Nervous about the stage. I text back, You are fine. How relieved I am not to be at her performance. The decibels of songs, the chords too loud for Baby Grace.

  I place my hand over my womb, as I’m always doing lately. Another text, this one from Elodie. Uber to me now. I text back, All ok?

  Pls come. Please. Using only my thumbs, I hit my Uber app. Mom tries the watch on, holding her wrist up and examining the effect. Sylvan comes close to inspect it.

  “Look at something younger if it’s for your girls. Too old-school, too traditional. Look at the bags. Jessica would want—”

  “Mom? Maybe we can do this another time. I unexpectedly have to go. I’m sorry.”

  “Dear, where are you going? How will you get there?” Mom asks, code for You cannot leave at this moment.

  “We want to hear about your baby,” one of the unnamed women says. I stare at her. She’s about fifty, pretty, Palm Beachy.

  “Well, surely you will tell everyone,” Mom says. “Quickly, before you have to leave.”

  “I have an emergency meeting for work.”

  “Of course, Aubrey. I’ll keep shopping,” Mom says. “I’ll peruse the latest evening bags.”

  I lift my backpack and turn to the seven shoppers and Eve. “I’d say my mother will be best at filling you in.”

  * * *

  The oxygen is sparse where Laurie trots me down a back hall of the Literary Society. Unlike the front offices, unlike the check-in desk made of ash wood, where staff is welcoming and professional, this is hidden away and dark.

  “Elodie’s in her office.” Laurie is about to leave me outside a half-closed door that has no name on it. Where my sister must sequester herself when she isn’t presenting an author, greeting the members, feigning a faultless life.

  “I’ll go in?”

  “Oh, sure, she’s waiting for you.” Laurie pushes her hair off her forehead and tugs the sides of her light blue dress. She holds her head a bit higher. Breezy and self-assured, she reminds me of my sister. Especially how she begins to walk away.

  Elodie is at a wide wooden desk, staring at her desktop. “Hey,” she says. “I’m glad you came.”

  The office is shabby, in the style of early librarian. I look at the bookcases, where my sister has set aside titles. As I Lay Dying, So Big, Ragtime, To the Lighthouse, Case Histories, Celestial Railroad. Poetry is on another shelf, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Walt Whitman, Sharon Olds, D. H. Lawrence. To the right, on the floor, is a low pile of shoes, Manolo slingbacks in nude, two worn pair of Tory Burch patents circa 20l6, a pair of New Balance running shoes.

  I sit in a straight-backed wooden chair. My sister looks jaundiced.

  “Are you okay?” I ask. For the past three or four years, she has had this affect at times. I thought it was from taking hormones, trying to be pregnant. Then it started to disappear, until today.

  “I don’t know. I’ve felt ill ever since…” she says.

  “I feel sick, too.” I start fanning myself with my hands. “Plus, I’m pregnant.”

  The fluorescent lighting doesn’t help. Wouldn’t my sister ask the Society to tak
e it down? Why would she want noxious lights over her every day, casting a dank fake brightness over the room? I decide not to bring it up.

  “Being pregnant isn’t easy. I’m not someone who loves it.” Yet Baby Grace is tumbling around, there is that.

  “I know. I have thanked you, haven’t I? I am incredibly grateful, Aubrey.” Elodie jumps up and comes over to where I am and puts her head against my womb. “I can hear her! I hear swishing!”

  The air-conditioning unit makes a startling sound; then the air begins to circulate. Elodie jumps up, then back into her worn office chair, which squeaks. “I wanted to see you about James and Tyler—what we say to them next. Let’s not get into the half sibs yet.”

  “Half sibs?” I ask.

  She states this; my sister fucking states this. Like it’s ordinary stuff, nothing about how it is loaded or life-changing. I can’t stand much more.

  “Why am I here, Elodie? Leaving Mom at Vintage Tales, where shoppers were practically pouncing on her. Gossiping over our baby.”

  “I told you. Because of the half-sib situation.” Elodie takes a tortoiseshell hair clip and gathers her hair together.

  “What are you talking about?” I take the same tortoiseshell hair clip from my backpack and clip my hair up. I feel myself becoming the same jaundiced hue. Half sib. I know what she means and I don’t. I don’t have it in me.

  “According to a New York Times piece that ran months ago, there was one group of thirty or more half sibs. You know, people who connected through 23andMe or Ancestry. In that article, they were young; they knew from the start that they were sperm-bank babies. This family of half sibs are in their early twenties.”

  “That’s not the same. I read it, too. Everyone was okay because they were aware in that story of the bio father. With Mom and Dad’s case, we’re older. It wasn’t out in the open. There’s the loony shit cover-up,” I say. “It would destroy Dad if we pushed anything.”

  “Aubrey, I have another half sister, so far. She’s my age; we look the same from pictures. We’ve emailed, first through the 23andMe site, then emails, then texts. We both have a widow’s peak; we love the same writers. She was born in New York, too,” Elodie says.

  “Pictures—you’ve been swapping pictures like she’s your pen pal? No, please, Elodie. Please let’s not add anything more. Besides, I don’t have one, I don’t have another half sib.”

  “Yet, you don’t have one yet,” she says.

  “Well, you have me.” I start walking around the small space beside my chair.

  “Ah, that’s true. We’re sisters, half sisters,” Elodie says. “I want to meet the others. I want to know about the donor, my bio father.”

  “No, no! Please don’t. I want nothing to do with it. You’re my sister, Dad’s our dad. Please, Elodie.”

  “You don’t understand. Maybe it was always fine for you, but as I keep explaining, not exactly for me. I’m beholden to the answer. I want to meet Alice.”

  Alice. I feel punched. Punched while carrying my sister’s child. A twinge radiates inside me, Baby Grace flipping, diving. Elodie’s hands dart along her keyboard. Is she looking up more siblings, more links to a truth that divides us?

  “Elodie, I am in Palm Beach for you, for our family. That’s what we do for each other. The baby, for you. Can’t we talk about our baby? That’s the future.”

  She half hears me, turns to agree, and then rotates to the screen. She’s squinting, captivated. I’m mystified as to what might bring her back to the ambitious pleaser, the loyal Cutler, the sister I know.

  “I’ve almost met her once, Aubrey.” Elodie’s voice is high-pitched, excited. “I only put it off so that we could speak first.”

  “Is that loyalty?” I ask.

  My sister gets up from her desk chair again, and I expect her to make a promise. A decision to let the others, the half sibs, go. Together we’ll scatter them far from us, from the existence we’ve shared our entire lives. Except she’s infatuated with the idea of them; she’s glassy and feverish at once.

  “Well, yes, it is loyalty. I mean, this is happening very quickly, the half sibs. I can’t help but want to know.”

  I’d like her to come to where I stand. We’ll hug. We’ll agree on a shared strategy about our father. We’ll protect each other, celebrate the ultrasound. A girl. Except she doesn’t come over and embrace me. Rather, a text comes in; she frowns as she reads it.

  “I’m going,” I say. “You asked me to rush over and you’re being rude.”

  Elodie starts intense texting. She waves her free hand toward me. “Just a sec, Aubrey. One sec.”

  I imagine the words she is choosing carefully for outsiders she calls “family.”

  “Hey, Elodie?” I say. “Who do any of us belong to, anyway? Who does this baby belong to?”

  My sister doesn’t hear me. She shifts her attention back to her desktop, where she is bewitched by a screen. A screen that leads to the DNA of others.

  CHAPTER 28

  ELODIE

  Again we saunter to Justine’s for our “family dinner,” as Veronica insists on calling it. Repeat conversations, talk of tennis, boating, member guest golf outings, acknowledging every acquaintance to the left and to the right.

  My mother and I are the first to arrive. We follow Smyth, the maître’d since I was fourteen, to our table, the one the Veronica and Simon Show must have and rarely do not have.

  “Well, this has been the slowest/fastest season that I’ve ever known,” Veronica says as we are seated.

  “I know,” I agree.

  We might allude to the passage of time in terms of Aubrey’s pregnancy, how keenly we’ve tracked her progress, but we do not. Rather we feel it and it is unmentioned. Just as we feel the air steeped in Florida humidity and few mention it. Discussing the weather would be disloyal. Whatever day one decides to leave Palm Beach to go north or west for the summer is the day it becomes intolerable. Until then there is nothing about South Florida that is unpleasant. The Cutler/Evans clan has never before been seasonless, staying in Palm Beach during the summer. This year we remain, waiting for our baby. Veronica has labeled it a year of missed “punctuations,” as she calls anything important and upbeat—Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, Valentine’s Day.

  I turn to Veronica while she discreetly powders her nose.

  “Don’t you ever feel, Mom, as if everything seems to be beyond you?”

  “How would that be, darling?”

  “Like I’m not the one decorating my home, carrying my child or—” I stop myself. It hangs in the air. Or have the real father who I thought was mine.

  “The baby, the house, they belong to you, Elodie. You might try to own these things—mold them as you want them to be. I promise it’s best.” She runs her hands through her hair for a millisecond, sneaking the gesture since we’re at a dining table and it’s bad manners. Then she closes her compact.

  Guests are coming in; Veronica is distracted.

  “I am surprised to see familiar faces. I thought the Van der Bergs and older Sinclairs had gone to Aspen. And the Morris family to Greenwich,” she remarks.

  “At the Literary Society we have a full calendar of events through Labor Day,” I say.

  Simon and James are walking in together, a father-and-son dyad worthy of a Netflix series. They toss their shoulders and keep their chins tipped away from their collarbones. Ever since James learned about my father, he’s been too engaged with both my parents. He is on the phone nonstop with Veronica about the new house; he and Simon have planned two golf games together. James is asking about bridge—if he sharpens his game, can he play with my father? It’s deranged.

  A family text comes in from Aubrey. All, cannot make it. Turned back on the 95, accident. Band at 9 tonight.xo

  Veronica holds her iPhone as if she’s angry with it.

  “We are having an early dinner for Aubrey. The idea was that she and Tyler could get on the road in time,” she says.

  “We shoul
d have driven to South Beach and had dinner there. It makes little sense in Palm Beach if she’s got something tonight in Miami,” Simon says. “She is very far along.”

  Veronica doesn’t bother with such a thread of thought. “I’m sorry, I was hoping that Aubrey would be with us tonight.”

  I’m disappointed, too, but I don’t want it to be worse for my sister. “She’s busy,” I say. Meanwhile, my father must be unhappy, too. He wanted Aubrey to sit beside him. I was to move over when she arrived. He and I were both planning for it.

  James dares to whisper—since my mother forbids whispering at a dinner table. “Let’s manage to say nothing out of the ordinary for the entire meal.”

  “That’s not a challenge.” I speak up. What do I have to lose?

  Mimi rushes to our table and sits down. “Hello, ladies.”

  “Mimi, perfect timing.” Veronica leans in. “You know, Elodie, Mimi and I have an idea. Dad, too. We were thinking that perhaps Nadia Sherman from Palm Beach Confidential could come along to your office to interview you.”

  “Interview me? Mom, she already did that two years ago.”

  “About your work at the Literary Society and how the house and the baby are synchronized. About you and your sister, a story that will satisfy everyone.”

  “Why would I do that? What about Aubrey?” Nothing would offend my sister more; I cringe at the idea. And that Veronica and Mimi seem at the beck and call of what other people might think.

  Mom sighs. “Well, it would alleviate talk and show the life that you have. The life that Aubrey has. What she’s given up for you, what you and she are doing together.”

  “Dad, you’re okay with that? James, does this make sense?”

  “Elodie, this is an idea. A sort of proof of what’s going on,” Mimi says. I want to scream. Proof? Are you kidding, after my parents’ secret?

  Aubrey’s right at the center of my thoughts, probably where my husband should be. Smiling and laughing with Tyler, dancing, despite how pregnant she is, to “The Rain Song,” by Led Zeppelin.