by Cathy Kelly
Kyle loved to see her spending money on her appearance.
“You need to look the part, honey,” he’d say. “Daddy always says, ‘Look the part, son, and they’ll think you are the part.’”
For the first year of their marriage, Suki didn’t care what “the part” was, she was simply pleased to be able to indulge in an orgy of spending. After a childhood of scraping by in drafty old Avalon House, it was like being released from prison and relishing the freedom. She bought art for the walls of the house on D Street, perused antique auctions with a gimlet eye and repainted the hall four times before she’d achieved the right shade of subtle gray. She bought flowers—too many for the house, sometimes. But she didn’t care about the excess: the Richardsons had serious money; nothing she could do could put even the slightest dent in it.
She and Kyle went to charity balls, dinner parties, and Republican party fund-raisers where the wives of party bigwigs wore Chanel suits and worked the room. Even Antoinette seemed to be thawing toward her. Suki had been brought up in an important Irish mansion, she was clearly from upper-class stock and she knew how to behave.
But as Tess might have told them all, Suki got bored easily. She became fed up with statements referencing Kyle Senior. Daddy had an opinion on everything: he said it was a ludicrous idea to buy a house in Taos as Suki was suggesting instead of a cottage in Newport where Daddy wanted them to buy.
“It’s none of his business where we buy,” Suki shouted at Kyle as they stood at their matching his-and-hers sinks in the cream marble bathroom en suite.
“Oh, come on,” said Kyle angrily. “You’re not that naïve are you? I thought you prided yourself on your intellectual abilities, Suki. It’s like listening to a Renaissance painter saying he doesn’t want to paint what his patron wants him to paint. My father pays for it all!”
This last statement, and the way Kyle had hissed it at her, stuck in Suki’s mind: did his father’s absolute control over the whole family rankle with Kyle, or was he merely angry that she’d threatened to upset the applecart?
She flew to Taos to look at properties in spite of them all and then received an irate phone call from Antoinette.
“If you continue with this nonsense, Suzanne”—only Antoinette refused to use the nickname Suki had had since she was three—“you will upset my husband. And we don’t want that now, do we?”
“Don’t we?” said Suki truculently. “What do I care if he gets upset?”
There was silence on the other end of the phone.
Finally, Antoinette spoke. “Kyle said you’d say that. Personally, I thought you were too clever, but I can see I overestimated you. Kyle Senior and I control you, whether you want to admit it or not. That goes for everything: from where your children go to school to whether you holiday in Europe or on the Cape with the rest of the family.”
Suki felt rage overwhelm her. She wasn’t sure which part of the conversation infuriated her most: the fact that her husband clearly told his mother everything, or the veiled threat that Antoinette and Kyle Senior could stop her going home to Ireland for the summer, because she wanted to be in Avalon again and was fed up with Massachusetts and its social set.
“Oh, and the house in New Mexico—don’t even bother. You won’t get a red cent for that. You’ll summer with us. Perhaps, in time, you might get a cottage of your own on Martha’s Vineyard. That’s it. You’re a Richardson now, Suzanne, and you play by our rules.”
Boredom wasn’t something Suki was used to, but in the gilded cage the Richardsons had constructed around her, boredom dominated her daily life. She wasn’t expected to do anything other than look beautiful at functions, know all the right people, do a little charity work, have her hair done expensively, learn how to make small talk at elegant dinner parties and never, as Antoinette explained to her, say anything controversial, even as a joke: “There are no jokes in Washington.”
At this, Suki had thrown her head back and let rip with a great, throaty laugh, but Antoinette had stared at her, stony-faced.
“I am not joking,” she said. “Junior has a very good chance of a Senate seat and he needs a wife by his side, not a loose cannon. I can see that in you, Suzanne—a certain wildness. It must be the Irish blood.”
Suki could take Antoinette’s insults because she always managed to get her own little barbs in. However, saying anything about her Irishness inflamed her.
“My ancestors were living in a castle when yours were still . . .” Suki searched her mind for some suitable retort, “digging for vegetables in a field somewhere, and on your knees at night praying for redemption.”
Antoinette glared at her. “I will not lower myself to your insults,” she said.
“Oh, but you can insult me and that’s fine, is it?” said Suki. “We all know the truth, don’t we, Antoinette: I’m the one with the blue blood in this family.”
In truth, Suki didn’t really care about the Power name or what it meant. Her father had been proud of his De Paor ancestry, but proud in a gentle way. Proud to be able to trace back his family, and yet deeply sad that a succession of feckless Powers in the past had frittered away the family fortune. As a result, the Powers had lost the ability to keep their lovely home, had lost the ability to take care of the people of the village. Her father would have been a philanthropist, if only he’d had the cash. So Suki hadn’t been brought up to think that being a Power meant that she was better than anyone else. But if it riled Antoinette, then she would remind her at every opportunity.
Angry, she went off and signed up for a course in Women’s Studies and ostentatiously left the books lying around. The Feminine Mystique, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Incredibly, she found herself fascinated by the writers, by the work. She had always thought she was living a very different life from other women because she’d left her home and had to make a living for herself in America, yet it turned out she was only doing what countless other women had done before her. And like countless other women, she’d succeeded in marrying well, but not wisely.
Kyle didn’t like her studies.
“For God’s sake, what are you doing with all those damn books?” he said. “You’ve finished with school, you don’t have to go back to it.”
Kyle was not bookish in the least, despite his father’s attempts to get him to keep up to date with happenings around the world. Kyle Senior was a voracious reader of nonfiction, particularly biographies and accounts of war. He’d never served in the military and yet he thought like a military commander, Suki realized. If he hadn’t been such a cut-and-dry bastard, she might have admired him.
It didn’t help that the slow push to get Kyle Junior’s feet wet in the world of politics was beginning to gain momentum.
“Children,” said Kyle Senior, “you need children. The wife isn’t enough.”
Suki was in the room while this conversation was going on and she sat, quite astonished. “Talk about me as if I’m not here, Senior,” she said. “Absolutely fine. I’m a brood mare, am I?”
Kyle Senior laughed. “Yes, honey, I guess you are. And we’re looking for sons.”
That night Suki went out on her own to a bar across town and proceeded to get very, very drunk. She arrived home at two in the morning, having danced the night away in a jazz club and extricated herself with some difficulty from the very good dancer who’d wanted to take her back to his place. “I can’t, my husband wouldn’t like it,” she’d managed, which was strange because the old Suki would have leaped at the chance.
“You’re drunk,” Kyle had said as she’d thrown herself into bed, clothes on, her mascara sliding down her face.
“Yeah, I am,” she said. “So what?”
The next day she’d felt sorry. She loved Kyle. It wasn’t his fault that his family were pigs and treated her as if she was nothing but an accessory in a political campaign.
“Maybe we should have a baby,” she said.
The baby-making plan brought them closer toge
ther—at first. Six months down the line, and still no baby, it was a different matter.
“Maybe we should go see Dr. Kennedy?” Suki had suggested. “There’s lots of tests you can have these days and stuff you—”
“We will not go to the doctor to discuss this,” said Kyle, his nostrils flaring. For a second, he looked exactly like his father. Oddly, Suki found this a turn-on.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s give it another few months.”
But nothing happened. Kyle started to spend nights in a different bedroom, said he couldn’t get to sleep at night, he didn’t want to wake her, but Suki knew the real reason. He couldn’t bear to make love to her any more. He could barely get an erection when he came near her. In their desire for a baby, somehow Kyle Junior had been emasculated.
She began going out on her own more, hanging out with women from her college course. Nobody on the course had any money, but Suki would buy them all drinks, cocktails. “You’re gonna love this one,” she’d say. “It’s a Long Island Iced Tea and it is fantastic.”
Carlotta, a fiery Latina on the course, wanted to write a thesis on racism and stereotyping of Hispanics in American culture. Her father had threatened to disown her. “He wants us to fit in,” she said, dark eyes flashing. “I do not want to fit in, I want to be myself. I do not want to be put into a box I need to fit.”
“Me neither,” said Suki.
“And you drink too much, Suki,” said Carlotta, “if we are being straight with the truth.”
“Yeah, thanks for telling me, honey,” Suki said. “You might drink too, if you had my life.”
“You might drink if you had my life,” countered Carlotta. “I pay for this course by cleaning houses at night. Maybe I clean yours too?”
“Oh, gimme a break, Carlotta! We’re supposed to be in this together.”
“Money separates us,” said Carlotta. “Don’t forget that, chica.”
Kyle Senior rang her up. “I want you to stop this ludicrous college course immediately,” he said. “From what I hear, it’s all rubbish about women’s rights, that tired old turkey. You’ve got plenty of rights, you don’t have to work, you’ve got money to buy clothes. What else do you want?”
“A life,” said Suki sarcastically. “A life where I’m not the Richardson family brood mare.”
“If you can’t have a baby, you’re not much of a brood mare, are you?” said Kyle Senior.
“What do you mean, if I can’t have a baby?” said Suki. “Who says it’s me? Your bloody son can’t even get it up when he sees me.”
She wondered if she’d gone too far, but Kyle Senior never shied away from plain talking.
“We’ll have to make sure he does then,” he said. “But I don’t want you going out at night with your girlfriends, going to bars. There are rumors starting, rumors about you having fun in bars. Inevitably, sooner or later somebody will pick up on the rumors and start to wonder whether you’re playing around. No Richardson wife plays around. So you be very careful, because I’ll be watching you.”
“There’s nothing to watch,” snapped Suki, and slammed the phone down, but she felt frightened. Kyle Senior was not a man to cross.
15
The days following Kevin’s revelation, outwardly Tess continued to drive Zach to the bus, take Kitty to school, and carry on with her daily business. Inside, Tess wondered was the whole separation disaster all her fault and thought that if only she could have kept her mouth shut, if only she’d been happy with I love him most of the time love, then she, Kitty, Kevin and Zach would still be a family. Then Zach wouldn’t have to put out the bins in an attempt to be the man of the family, Kevin wouldn’t have fallen for Claire, and she wouldn’t be consumed by the most unbelievable rage she’d ever experienced.
Despite her best intentions, a great vat of anger was boiling inside her over Kevin and Claire.
“I’m so furious with him for doing this to the kids and to me,” she said to Vivienne. “How could he?” Tess paused because the last bit was the hardest: “And I’m angry with myself for almost pushing them together! I made this happen. Me!”
Zach wasn’t talking to her at all, as if it was all her fault.
I DIDN’T TELL KITTY THAT CLAIRE IS PREGNANT. WE NEED HER TO GET USED TO THE IDEA OF CLAIRE FIRST, Kevin texted.
Wonderful, thought Tess. Now he turns into the concerned parent.
Then she felt guilty—Kevin had always been a good parent. And he loved Zach and Kitty. He probably was doing his best under difficult circumstances. She needed to meet him to discuss what they did next.
The problem was that Kitty was desperately keen to meet Claire and Zach seemed incredibly angry with his mother.
“She had to go away,” fibbed Tess, which earned her a furious glare from Zach.
“It’s not my fault, Zach,” Tess said to her son.
Only to have him hiss: “Isn’t it?”
“If Gerard did that to me,” Vivienne said, “I’d take him to the cleaners in the divorce courts. I’d be more than bitter, I’d be furious.”
Under the circumstances, Tess felt that bitterness was allowed, except that, having met a few bitter divorced women, she wasn’t in any hurry to join their ranks.
They were the women who divided life into two chunks: Before the divorce and After the divorce. Everything in the After category, be it global warming or a stock exchange crash, could be blamed on the departed husband.
We had no holes in the ozone layer until he left me!
Much of the stock in her shop had come from these perpetually enraged women. It was astonishing how many of the husbands had failed to collect their belongings after they left.
“This was his mother’s,” one ex-wife said furiously, holding up a particularly fine piece of Chinese pottery.
In the interests of legality, Tess inquired whether the woman was entitled to sell the pottery. It was a valuable piece. Perhaps her ex-husband’s lawyers would need to be contracted . . .
“I got the house and everything in it!” hissed the woman, making Tess think, not for the first time, that the antique business was not your average job.
It was almost easier dealing with bankruptcy sales, much as Tess hated those. Having been through it herself, she found it unbearable trying to make a profit from people who were forced to sell everything they owned.
“No, Vivienne, I’m going to concentrate on the business,” Tess said. “I need it now that we’re not getting back together. I’ll have to hire someone to work here occasionally so I can attend more auctions and go off around the country to executors’ sales.”
“You should find a new man. That would show bloody Kevin what a mistake he’s making,” Vivienne said. “There’s that lovely Cashel Reilly, he’s not married. A nice millionaire—or is it billionaire? Either way, you could do worse.”
“I told you, we dated years ago and it ended horribly,” said Tess miserably.
“Oh, that was years ago. People move on. He’s been married since, he’s got over you. And besides,” Vivienne said, returning to a well-worn theme, “if you made even the slightest effort, Tess, you’d look fabulous. I’ve never seen a woman less interested in her appearance.”
Tess wasn’t even mildly insulted by these words because Vivienne had been saying them for years. Ever since they’d been shop neighbors, she’d been pushing Tess to have her hair cut properly, wear makeup and, obviously—befitting advice from a woman who owned a clothes shop—to dress beautifully.
“I could do so much with you, Tess,” Vivienne would say regretfully. “Look at you, you’re slim and tall. Most women would kill for long legs like yours, and such a narrow waist. And heavens, Tess, your hair! You’ve got to stop going to Eileen’s to get your hair cut. Eileen can only do blue-rinse shampoos and sets. Her version of the pixie cut makes you look like someone went at your hair with sheep shears.”
“Stop with the compliments,” said Tess drily. “I don’t think I can take any more of it.”
“I’ve only got your best interests at heart,” said Vivienne. “Now that you’re a single woman, you have to make more of an effort. At least go to the beauty salon and get your eyelashes tinted, seeing as you won’t wear any eyeliner or mascara or anything. You’re like my sister-in-law, Gladys, determined to live her life without a bit of lipstick passing her lips.”
“You hate her! You always say she’s a complete cow,” said Tess, finally insulted.
“Oh, you know what I mean,” sighed Vivienne. “You’re anything but a cow. You’re one of my best friends and I love you dearly, but I don’t know why you persist with this sheep-farmer-from-the-back-of-beyond look. You’re beautiful; you could be so stunning if you made even the slightest effort. It’s as if you want to look like some old boot so that no man will ever look at you again.”
And there it was finally, the thing that really hurt Tess.
She quickly moved the conversation on to something else because Vivienne had touched a nerve. Kevin had never said anything to her in all the years of their marriage about dressing up or wearing eye makeup, and that had suited Tess. Suited her too much, she realized now.
“Of course, hunky Cashel is going to be around much more now that he’s bought the house.”
“What house?”
Vivienne paused. “Avalon House,” she said reluctantly.
Tess nearly dropped her cup of tea.
“You hadn’t heard? Oh hell, I’m sorry, Tess . . .” Vivienne flailed around, trying to find the right words. “I honestly thought you’d know, that someone would tell you . . .”
“Why would anyone tell me?” Tess said. “It hasn’t been my home for years. It’s nothing to me now.” She put down her cup and gave Vivienne a brief hug. “Sorry, love, I’m going next door to shut up shop. It’s been a tough few days.”
She almost ran out of the shop and into her own. Silkie, who’d followed her into Vivienne’s, ran after her and looked up in alarm.
