The first year, she had rented a château in France, fully staffed, in Périgord. It had been beautiful beyond belief, with picturesque terrain and vineyards, and excellent horseback riding nearby in Dordogne. Her grandchildren had been little then, and they had loved it too. There had been a spectacular villa in St. Tropez complete with speedboats and a private beach; a fabulous estate in Spain; and a private island in Greece that had been a major hit. There had been a famous house in St. Jean Cap Ferrat that later sold for seventy-five million dollars, a Schloss in Austria, a private island in the Caribbean that had been hot but fabulous, and a Vanderbilt mansion in Newport. Olivia never disappointed them, and she hoped not to this year either. The location she ultimately selected, after nearly a full year of research, was always a secret until they got the invitation on the first of June.
As Amanda Grayson, Phillip’s wife, opened the e-mail early in the morning, she was the first to see this year’s location. It was the three-hundred-foot motor yacht Lady Luck, built two years before, anchored in Monaco, and they would be cruising the Mediterranean in Italy and France. The boat included every imaginable luxury and comfort, including a gym, a spa, a movie theater, and a hair salon, complete with trainers and attendants, and a crew of twenty-four, and all kinds of water toys, from jet skis to sailboats to speedboats to delight the children. Olivia had outdone herself.
Amanda sat expressionlessly, as she read down the list of what was included on the boat. It was a trip she resigned herself to every year. As Olivia was her mother-in-law, and her husband’s employer, Amanda viewed her invitation as a command performance. And however luxurious it was, it was still two weeks on holiday with her extremely powerful, successful mother-in-law. Amanda would have preferred a trip alone with Phillip. But Phillip liked the family vacation, especially spending time with his siblings, and even Amanda had to admit that the Lady Luck looked spectacular.
As she read through the e-mail, with her mother-in-law’s note of invitation, Amanda started thinking about the wardrobe she would need. She knew that her sister-in-law Liz would share a trendy wardrobe with her daughters, who seemed to dress out of one suitcase, even if the clothes looked too young on Liz, but she had a good body and could get away with it. John’s wife looked like the college professor she was, no matter what she wore. Her wardrobe always looked like hand-me-downs from her students. And Olivia would wear linen dresses, colorful silks, and Lilly Pulitzer. She was well dressed and age appropriate but never showy.
Olivia’s interests lay in business and not fashion. She was far more avant-garde in the furniture designs she chose than in her wardrobe. Her hair would be perfectly cut before the trip, in her signature snow-white bob, and she would wear the string of pearls Joe had given her to mark the early success of their business, which she had never stopped wearing since, out of sentiment. She still wore her narrow gold wedding ring fourteen years after his death, and other than that, simple earrings, and a gold bracelet she wore every day. It was all very modest. But if Amanda was going to go on vacation in fabulous locations against her will, she was going to dress for the occasion, not the company at hand.
None of the Graysons felt a need to show off or be pretentious, which Amanda never understood. With the kind of money they had, why not spend it? It was an art she’d been teaching Phillip since they had married nineteen years before. She was forty-four years old, and they had met when Phillip was at Harvard Business School getting his MBA, and she was at Harvard Law. Amanda was unashamedly ambitious about her career. They had married when she graduated, and she immediately joined a prestigious law firm. She rose to the top quickly, and had been a partner for a dozen years. She made an excellent living on her own, but she would never make the kind of money that Phillip would inherit one day and had at his disposal now. His father had invested conservatively and brilliantly and set up trust funds for the children. Phillip’s siblings lived comfortably though modestly, and their mother had a handsome house on an estate in Bedford, but they were not given to random displays of money, unless they had some purpose, like an important charitable donation.
Amanda had been working on Phillip for years to enjoy his money. They had bought a town house in the East Seventies, and she had filled it with beautiful antiques, many of which they had bought in London. And Phillip had a small but elegant sailboat that he kept at a yacht club in Southampton, where they had a small house. Their careers were the main focus of their lives, Amanda was deeply concerned with their social life, and they had no children. She had told him right from the beginning that children would distract them from their goals and sap their funds and energy. She didn’t want them and had convinced Phillip he didn’t either. More important, she said they didn’t need them, they had each other and a wonderful life. What more could they want? Children would only be an interference.
Phillip had no regrets about not having children. His sister Cass had had none either, for the same reasons he hadn’t. Their memories of their childhood were of being deprived of their mother. He had no desire to do that to someone else, and Amanda had no urge to be a mother and never had. It wasn’t in her DNA, nor in his. There was an icy coolness to her that Phillip had always found enticing. Her seeming lack of emotion, on every subject except her own career, was a challenge to him. He wasn’t overtly emotional or demonstrative either, but he had moments of deep affection for Amanda, which she rarely reciprocated. She was the original ice maiden, and when he’d met them, her parents were no different. They were distant, ambitious, self-centered people. Both her parents were attorneys. And they were very impressed with Phillip’s fortune and the business he would one day inherit.
Amanda longed for Phillip to run everything himself, and it irked her that Olivia had no desire to step down and retire, and leave the empire to her oldest son. Olivia was still very much in control, as Amanda saw it, not only of The Factory, but of her children as well. All Amanda wanted was for Phillip to take over, and instead he was content to stand behind his mother quietly, in his role as CFO. Unlike Amanda, he had no hunger for the limelight. Amanda accused him often of being “owned” by his mother, which annoyed him, but he had no need or desire to prove her wrong. He was content in his life as it was, and happy to let Amanda run the show at home. She directed their social life and who they saw, and he knew how determined she was to meet important people and ultimately become a judge. Prestige and appearances were important to her, far more than they were to Phillip. He had lived in his mother’s shadow for years, and in some ways it suited him. He had no desire to take over, and he didn’t want all the headaches that came with being the CEO. He had seen how it had eaten up his mother’s life, and how time consuming it was. Instead, he was happy to sail his boat on weekends, or play golf, and leave the office at six o’clock. He didn’t want to stay in the office until midnight as his mother often did, or spend his life on planes to other cities and foreign countries, and he knew his brother, John, felt exactly the same way. They knew too well the price you paid for the life their mother led. Amanda considered his lack of hunger for power a major character flaw, and she never let him forget it. They fought about it often, and when she went on a tirade about his mother, he ignored her or went out. He liked his life as it was.
Amanda was tall and stately looking, blond with cool blue eyes and an excellent figure. She went to the gym frequently, except on weekends. She dressed well, and he was happy to pay for it. He liked having a beautiful wife on his arm. And he was well aware that as an only child, she wasn’t crazy about his family, and thought both his sisters strange, and his brother negligible as an artist, and his college professor sister-in-law of no interest whatsoever. John’s wife, Sarah, didn’t play the social game, and was only interested in academia and intellectual pursuits. The only one in the family that Amanda truly admired was his mother, although Amanda had never warmed up to her and didn’t really like her, but one had to respect her for turning a hardware store into a worldwide event. Amanda had to give her that. Sh
e wished that Phillip were more like her, but neither of Olivia’s sons had her ambition. They were much more like their father, who had been content to stay in the background and be part of Olivia’s support system. Joe Grayson had never wanted more than that, nor had his boys.
Olivia stood alone in her passionate attack on life, taking the world by the horns with her creative and financial genius. Amanda only wished she had had the opportunities Olivia had. But she benefited now from the name and wasn’t shy about using it when it served her. And she was doing all she could to use it to get appointed to the federal bench, which she had been working on for several years. She wanted to be a judge so badly she could taste it, and she used every connection she had to that end. She was always annoyed that Phillip hadn’t done more to help her achieve it, but he always insisted that he didn’t know the right people to help her. Amanda was certain that her mother-in-law did, but she had never dared to ask her for her assistance, and Olivia had never volunteered. The relationship between the two women had always been civil, but there was no great warmth between them. Amanda loved every opportunity to be in the social columns and the papers. Olivia cared about none of that and was interested only in the business section, where she appeared regularly on the front page. Phillip never did, nor did he care. And it meant nothing to him when Amanda got them in the newspapers at some social event.
“What are you reading so intently?” Phillip asked as he walked into the kitchen, and saw Amanda reading an e-mail with a serious expression, as her coffee grew cold beside her. He helped himself to a cup, and sat down across from her at the kitchen table. As always, she was beautifully put together in a cream-colored linen suit. She was perfectly made up, and had her long blond hair pulled back. She looked like a model.
“The summer invitation,” she mumbled, as she continued to read about the boat.
“To what?” Phillip asked as he helped himself to a yogurt from the fridge. Amanda didn’t cook. She had other things to do with her time and she was always on a diet. She had been to the gym that day, as usual, at six A.M., but it paid off. She had a spectacular figure and, like his mother, looked nowhere near her age. Amanda could have passed for thirty, not the forty-four she was.
“Your mother’s birthday trip,” Amanda explained, continuing to read the details about the yacht. She didn’t look excited or pleased. She never was about that trip. And she didn’t think his nieces and nephew should join them—it was tiring for the adults to have them along. She had particularly disliked it when they were younger. But even now she had nothing to say to them. They and Amanda politely ignored each other on the trip every year, although Phillip sometimes enjoyed them, and liked taking his nephew, Alex, fishing with him and John. It was Phillip’s only contact with young people, and Alex was a bright kid. He was a junior in high school, and hoped to go to Stanford, instead of Princeton, where his mother taught literature.
“Where’s she taking us this year?” Phillip asked with interest. He enjoyed the vacations with his siblings, in spite of Amanda’s complaints about them. He had learned not to pay attention to what she said, since she went anyway. His only regret was that they had done nothing like it when their father was alive and the kids were young. There had been family vacations in Maine, but his mother had spent most of the time on the phone to the office, and she and his father had spent the entire time talking business and making plans for new developments she had in mind. It was the only thing that interested her then, or that was how it had felt to Phillip. Olivia just hadn’t had time for them when they were young. The mother figure in his life, and that of his siblings, had been his maternal grandmother, Maribelle—Granibelle as they called her. She lived with them and had been ever-present in their daily lives. She and their father had brought them up, Olivia had appeared between trips and when she came home, usually late, from the office. Their father had always insisted to them how much their mother loved them, and maybe she had, but as far as Phillip was concerned, there had been no evidence of it when he was a child.
Phillip was still fiercely devoted to Granibelle, and visited her whenever he could. She had finally retired to a senior residence on Long Island. It was luxurious, and she was comfortable, and seemed content. She had been a happy person all her life. It was what he remembered most about his childhood, the love and joy she had shared with them, and the affection she lavished on them. She still had a twinkle in her eye at ninety-five, and he always teased her and asked her if she had a new beau, which made her laugh. There had been a ninety-two-year-old a few years before who had been very attentive to her, and then he died. But Maribelle was not a sad person. Whatever the circumstances, she had seen the glass as more than half full, even overflowing with blessings. And her four grandchildren had been one of the great joys in her life. Phillip often tried to get Amanda to visit his grandmother with him, but she rarely had time. She was too busy at the office, not unlike his mother when he was young. And yet Olivia was warmer than Amanda. There was a coolness to Amanda like no other woman Phillip had ever known.
“She’s chartered a boat,” Amanda said with a cool expression as she looked up at him.
Phillip raised an eyebrow in surprise. “That’s going to make my sister Liz nervous. I wonder if she’ll come. She gets seasick. Mom knows that. I wonder why she picked a boat this time.”
“I don’t think she’ll get seasick on this,” Amanda said cryptically. “It’s about the size of the QE2. It has stabilizers and every possible modern device to provide a smooth ride. It’s all in the e-mail,” she said, as Phillip turned the computer so he could see. He glanced at the photographs, and read for a few minutes, and then whistled and looked at Amanda with a grin.
“That’s some boat! A crew of twenty-four, spa, hair salon, movie theater, two sailboats, three speedboats? My mother outdid herself this year. You’re right, Liz will be fine. I guess her seventieth birthday is a bigger deal than I thought. Sounds like fun.” Amanda gave him a quelling look, but it didn’t dampen his spirits. The boat was fabulous, and he was looking forward to it. And Amanda would warm up to it. She did every year, more or less, depending on the location and how much she liked it. He didn’t see how she could resist this. The Lady Luck seemed like paradise to him. And he could fish with his brother, and try out the sailboats they carried on the yacht under the list of “water toys.” Three hundred feet was one hell of a big boat.
“I have nothing to wear,” she said in a chilly tone.
“You never do.” He smiled at her. He heard it every year. Her wardrobe was key to her, and her appearance, and important to her sense of well-being on the trip and in life. “Go shopping, have some fun,” he encouraged her. He never deprived Amanda of what she wanted. He had no one else to spend it on, and he liked spoiling his wife. “You’ll need a whole new boat wardrobe, I imagine,” he said, smiling at her, and this time she smiled back. In some ways it was a perfect marriage, except she wished he was more ambitious, while he was happy with the status quo.
“You know I hate that trip,” Amanda said with a sigh, as she took a sip of her cold coffee. The boat did look fabulous—she just didn’t want to be trapped with his family for two weeks.
“It’s never as bad as you think it will be,” he reminded her. “It sounds like we’ll be going to some fun places, and it really is a gorgeous boat. You always have a good time in the end.” She nodded, loath to admit it to him. “Start shopping. You’ll feel better when you do.”
“Thank you,” she said, and gave him a peck on the cheek, and walked past him to help herself to another cup of coffee. And she knew he was right. A boat as impressive as the Lady Luck would improve the trip immeasurably this year. She glanced at her watch as she heated the coffee. She had to be in court in half an hour. And maybe she’d go shopping that afternoon.
As she sat back down at the kitchen table, Phillip was reading avidly about the boat and stopped to look at her.
“So shall I accept?” he asked.
“Do I h
ave a choice?”
“In reality? No,” he said honestly. He never lied to her, and she knew the vacation with his family was required of her every year. Olivia would have been crushed if they didn’t go, and she made it as nice as possible for them, which her children appreciated. She was making up for the lost years and time.
“Then go ahead and accept,” she said in a dull voice. He pressed the reply button and wrote a quick e-mail accepting his mother’s invitation, and then hit the send button and smiled at Amanda.
“Done,” he said, as she stood and picked up her briefcase and her bag. “Have a nice day. See you tonight,” he said, watching her.
“Thanks,” she said and left the house. She didn’t stop to kiss him goodbye. She never did. He went back to reading the e-mail about the yacht his mother had chartered, and thought about his wife. It was strange, but she always seemed just out of reach to him. It had kept him wanting to win her heart for nineteen years. She was the unattainable ice queen he would always love but never fully have. He knew it was perverse, but there was something about that that he liked. And not being able to have who he loved was painful but familiar to him. He had felt that way all his life, ever since he was a child.
The Sins of the Mother Page 4
