A day in our life at the time went something like this: Charles shuffled off each morning to work at the investment banking and brokerage firm that his grandfather had founded and that bore his family’s name. He disliked this job, but luckily for him, his passion for archaeology offered solace from this stultifying fate. Starting in the tenth grade, my brother attended a different New England prep school than I did. Peter went to Roxbury Latin, an independent, all-boys school, and I went to Milton Academy, an institution with a stately campus featuring sprawling green lawns, well-kept grounds, and imposing red-brick buildings and whose motto was “Dare to be true.” And our mother filled her days with . . . well, I was never quite sure with what. She might have been puttering around that enormous residence trying to figure out how to fit in with the country-club set or how to jump-start a new career after having jettisoned the old. Or perhaps she was simply wondering if it had all been a huge mistake.
During the school year, Peter and I ate dinner together at the kitchen table every evening at around six o’clock, right as Malabar and Charles commenced their leisurely cocktail hour. The ritual began with a lively discussion of what they wanted to drink, bourbon or scotch. This was not a decision to be made lightly because it was an evening-long commitment. If they chose bourbon, bourbon it would be, not just for that first drink or two—on the rocks with a splash—but also for their Manhattans, their power pack and its dividend. Very occasionally, rum or rye might make an appearance. But never vodka, or at least never at night (the clear spirit did sometimes find its way into a bloody mary at brunch). And absolutely never gin, which Malabar detested with a passion because her mother, Vivian, had administered it to her starting when she was twelve as a tonic to relieve menstrual cramps. And although Malabar never forgave her mother for eliminating a perfectly good spirit from her cocktail repertoire, she administered the same home remedy to me, creating an association between gin and menstruation that I have not been able to shake to this day.
Once they’d landed on what to drink, Malabar would retrieve the appropriate glassware—tumblers or highballs—and Charles would pour. Then, their moods brightening with anticipation, they’d retreat to the library, where they’d sit on plush sofas, an antique end table dotted with coasters between them. The accumulation of all these cocktail conversations added up to their life together.
* * *
Starting in 1980, my mother’s affair eclipsed nearly everything else in her life. She was radiant and hot with it, blinded for a time. She still did what she could for Charles—hosted dinner parties, accompanied him to events, orchestrated family gatherings—but she could not get enough of Ben Souther.
“Rennie, I’ve never felt so alive in my life,” she confided giddily one day. We were in her bathroom, she sitting on a stool, me standing behind her, my gloved hands applying henna conditioner to her hair. The concoction, just brewed, was the consistency of mud and smelled like wet hay.
“Tell me what it’s like,” I said, even though we’d had this conversation before and I’d witnessed firsthand how the volatile forces of passion and infidelity had given my mother exuberance. I just loved to hear her talk about it.
“It’s like that moment in the Wizard of Oz when everything goes from black-and-white to color,” she said, twirling her stool to face me, a strand of henna-covered hair slapping across her upper lip and sending beads of conditioner flying, making us both laugh.
“I’m not sure Ben is going to love you with a mustache,” I said, returning the stray tress atop its swampy pile and tucking the whole green mess into a clear shower cap. It had left a dark line below my mother’s nose, which I wiped clean with a warm washcloth. We did these treatments about once a month, usually on the Sunday before Malabar was to see Ben, when she was at her most jittery.
“Or maybe it’s more like diving into a wave,” she said. “You brace yourself for what you know is going to happen, but still, it’s a shock, right?”
There was so much tightly coiled inside my mother’s affair—love, sin, lust—that the situation seemed destined to explode sooner or later. I saw my job as protecting her, and all of us, really, from this eventuality.
I swiveled her around to face the mirror on the back of the door, my head above hers in our reflection. “Mom, what will you do if someone finds out?” I asked.
“No one will ever find out,” she assured me. “We’re being very careful, Rennie. Plus, we have you, our secret weapon,” she added, patting my hands as they rested on her shoulders.
I started the timer. The henna had to stay in for an hour. “But what if someone does?” I persisted. I worried constantly about this. What would happen to her, to us, if the truth came to light?
She leaned in close to the mirror, examining some flaw I couldn’t see or perhaps just buying time. “Well, that would be terrible, and I don’t even like to think about it, as it would kill Charles and Lily too,” she said. “They’re both fragile enough as it is. But if it were to happen, Ben and I would stay together. We’ve made that promise to each other.”
In the beginning, Malabar had been as nervous as I was about getting caught, so we were meticulous in covering her tracks. We developed complex alibis for her trysts in New York; she was either visiting her best friend, Brenda, who was single and had a busy career, or, more often, attending to her ailing stepmother, Julia, my grandfather’s much younger second wife. Julia, just a couple of years older than my mother, was a binge drinker with a long history of alcoholic episodes; “benders,” our family called them. It was a perfect ruse. My grandfather had died a year earlier, so my mother’s cover would not require his corroboration. Also, she had intervened to help Julia in the past, so the lie felt close enough to the truth that it passed effortlessly from our lips.
When I felt bad that we were hiding my mother’s secret by exposing my step-grandmother’s, Malabar assured me that Julia’s alcoholism was not remotely under wraps.
“When you’re a falling-down drunk, it’s not a well-kept secret, even if you live on Fifth Avenue. Trust me, Rennie, despite what Julia wishes to believe, everyone knows she has a serious problem.”
This was likely true. Julia did fantastically outlandish things when drunk, from stripping down to her underwear at dinner parties to passing out in a hallway where unsuspecting guests might stumble upon her in a pool of urine. With stories like Julia’s at my disposal, it would be easy to throw people off Malabar’s scent if it came to that.
When the timer went off, Malabar showered and washed the henna out of her hair and we moved from the master bathroom to her dressing room, possibly the only room in 100 Essex that could be described as cozy. It was our favorite place to talk. Furnished with a twin bed, a floral-skirted dressing table, a matching upholstered stool, and complementary drapes, the room was heavy with fabric and felt feminine in an old-fashioned way. My mother, who’d suffered from insomnia since Christopher’s death, usually slept in this room, ostensibly because Charles snored. When I roused her in the mornings, never easy, her head was sandwiched between two pillows with only her nose peeking out.
I took my usual perch on her bed, my back against the wall and my feet tucked under me to make room for her suitcase, which lay open at the foot. We were deciding what she should bring for an overnight stay in New York with Ben. My mother tried on outfit after outfit, appraising her reflection in the full-length mirror, her lips pursed critically.
When she put on a dark green wrap dress that flattered her narrow waist, I said, “Oh, Mom. That’s the one. You look gorgeous.” And she did.
Malabar positioned herself on the padded stool and leaned into an unforgiving, three-paneled magnified mirror to study her face. Her large brown eyes, shaded by heavy lids, gave her a sultry look. As a child, I’d heard her friend Brenda refer to them as “bedroom eyes.” At the time, I took this to mean she looked sleepy.
Despite my assurances that she was beautiful, so very beautiful, Malabar was in no mood for compliments. She pinched th
e excess skin from her upper lid and frowned at her reflection. “There is nothing worse for a woman than getting old, Rennie,” she told me. “My mother warned me and I didn’t believe her. But mark my words: Nothing worse on earth.”
A photograph of my glamorous grandmother Vivian sat on the dressing table. Hers was the beauty standard against which my mother compared herself and believed she came up short. I didn’t agree. To me, Malabar was far lovelier. My mother’s face had warmth, and her eyes sparkled with mischief, whereas my grandmother’s black hair, dark eyes, and flawless ivory skin struck me as austere. She had a steely gaze even when she smiled. When I looked at my grandmother’s photo, it occurred to me how all-consuming it must have been for my mother to be her only child.
But I was alone in the impression that my mother was the more attractive of the two. I needed only to utter my grandmother’s name, and the universal response—from men, women, close friends, and rivals—was that Vivian was the most stunning woman who had ever walked the earth.
“Your grandmother was a seductress extraordinaire for much of her life, but she did not age gracefully,” my mother said. I’d heard stories about my grandmother’s temper, competitiveness, and alcoholism for years, including one about a terrible fight she’d had with my mother when I was a toddler. They’d brawled over a man they’d both been flirting with at a party. Drunk and furious, they slung accusations until the argument turned physical and my mother ended up falling backwards and landing in the fireplace. My grandmother came out of it bruised, my mother in a hip-to-toe cast.
I hated to imagine them fighting; the thought of a mother hurting her daughter scared me.
My grandmother was bedridden now, no longer capable of tussling with her only child or seducing a man. After she and my grandfather divorced for the second time, she spent some thirty years single and then remarried in 1976. Her new husband, Gregory, hailed from Plymouth and was a direct descendant of the Pilgrims, just like Ben Souther. But happiness and misfortune ran hand in hand for Vivian, and Gregory died just five months after their wedding, when I was eleven. My grandmother, wanting to be clearheaded at his funeral, skipped her blood-thinning medication and had a major stroke the next day. We visited her regularly, but she was no longer capable of communicating in a meaningful way. Years later, my mother confessed that my grandmother had had a decade-long affair with Gregory while she waited for his wife to die. It was as if Vivian had left a map for her daughter to follow.
Initially, my mother and Ben conducted their romance cautiously, meeting discreetly on Ben’s business trips, usually in New York City, where he served on the board of several organizations. They would book hotel rooms on different floors from each other, order room service instead of going out for meals, and pay for everything with cash. But it wasn’t long before they became emboldened, having determined that it was unlikely they’d run into anyone they knew. They started dining out in style at restaurants like Le Cirque, Hatsuhana, Lutèce, and La Tulipe, which was owned by one of my mother’s good friends.
My mother loved nothing more than going to fine restaurants, insisting it was the only way for her to get out of her own kitchen. “Think about it, Rennie,” she told me more than once. “When you are known to be a fabulous cook, everyone’s too intimidated to invite you over for dinner.”
This might have sounded arrogant, but it was true. My mother had studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, had worked as a chef in Time-Life’s test kitchens for its Food of the World series, had published four cookbooks, and currently wrote a popular food column, Do-Ahead Dining, for the Boston Globe. What rational person would risk judgment by inviting Malabar over for a tuna casserole?
Restaurants were like mini-vacations for Malabar; someone else was doing her job. She adored getting dressed up, curling her shiny, auburn hair, and applying a slash of bright lipstick, keenly aware that when she entered a room, people took notice. She was daring when it came to ordering food and rarely went for old favorites like lamb chops or filet mignon, opting instead to see just what the chefs had in them, exactly what they could do with something challenging like sweetbreads or razor clams. She had the uncanny ability to know how a dish was prepared from a single bite—whether, say, the meat had been seared or poached first—and could tick off every ingredient in a sauce, store that information, and not only replicate it later but make it a bit better. “When it comes to cooking, I’m a thief,” she’d whisper to me, her exhale fragrant with spices.
Soon, she and Ben started traveling together on the same flights to New York City, even booking seats beside each other. Once, she reported they’d run into someone they knew on the Boston–to–New York shuttle, an acquaintance from Plymouth who knew both Charles and Ben. My heart raced. What if that got back to Charles? But my mother said that she simply placed one hand on Ben’s sleeve, another on her breastbone, and exclaimed with surprise: “What a small world. First I bump into Ben Souther, and now you!” Then she’d invited the person to join them.
I hung on every word of my mother’s stories, eager for details of her clandestine and illicit encounters with Ben, which occurred every four to six weeks. Sometimes I would leave a note on her pillow instructing her to wake me up as soon as she returned from New York. She would, and we’d talk on my bed into the middle of the night about how in love with Ben she was. There were never any reports of Broadway shows, trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, strolls along Park Avenue; there was no evidence of shopping binges. As far as I could tell, my mother and Ben spent their time together engaged exclusively in life’s most sacred sensual duet: eating and making love. Luckily for me, my mother preferred to talk about the food and not the sex, although every so often her coy smile revealed less chaste memories.
Whole Sundays could be lost in my mother’s dressing room, me on her soft bed, propped up by pillows, Malabar sitting on her dressing-table stool. I never tired of hearing her talk about Ben or of dissecting his every sweet promise. My mother loved nothing more than imagining the future they would one day have together, especially when it came to travel.
“Let’s talk honeymoon, Rennie,” she’d say and we would review the top contenders: a lavish Italian extravaganza, an African safari, a sailing adventure along the Turkish coastline. I was always drawn to the idea of the safari—all those magnificent animals—but my mother, more attuned to thread count and truffle oil, wanted the decadence of Italy. “Is there a more romantic spot on earth?” she asked.
Much to my mother’s frustration, Ben was reluctant to participate in these fantasies. He had established strict rules for this affair, best policies to navigate its moral ambiguities and avoid getting caught. These included planning only one visit ahead, not calling my mother from his home unless it was for official couple-friendship business, and never committing his feelings to paper.
Ben seemed to have it all: a satisfying domestic situation with Lily, of whom he was very fond, a fabulous romantic life with Malabar, with whom he was in love, and the ability to compartmentalize the two, which exasperated my mother no end. My mother wanted their affair to be as all-consuming for him as it was for her. She had to settle for it being as all-consuming for me. I lapped up every detail, utterly engrossed.
“You know what I’d like to do with Ben’s rules?” she’d ask me. I knew the answer but was never given the chance to respond. “Break every single one of them.”
The power of transgression, seductive in and of itself.
“I just have to be patient, Rennie,” my mother would say over and over again, as much to herself as to me, both of us knowing patience was not her strong suit. “I need to play the long game here.”
And where was Charles when we had these Sunday talks? Usually in an armchair tucked into a corner of the den, a standing lamp behind him illuminating whatever large book was on his lap, his index finger tracking his place on the page. My stepfather, a reserved man whose destiny—set by his father and grandfather—was the unromantic work of making money, was also
an unlikely dreamer, a man inspired by early American history and stories of ships lost at sea.
It’s worth pointing out that there was a time when my mother was as crazy about Charles as she now was about Ben. She’d been charmed by Charles’s intellect, in particular his longtime interest in the Pilgrims and the culture they’d created in Plymouth. And though she loved that Charles came from family money, she admired that he was driven by passion and not the desire to acquire more wealth. He would read and ponder until right around six o’clock, at which point his internal alarm clock would go off and he would emerge from his peaceful sanctuary, suddenly animated, and promise my mother a cocktail if she would only listen to his latest obsession. Before Ben, my mother would happily comply.
But falling in love with Ben had upended Malabar’s priorities. She was no longer as aroused as she had once been by Charles’s brilliant mind, his archaeological and historical obsessions, his genteel manners. She still took her evening libation with her husband, but I’m quite sure she daydreamed of Ben as Charles spoke, now craving stimulation of a different sort. Ben was outgoing, physical, confident to a fault. She wanted him.
Whenever my mother was away—purportedly rescuing Julia but in reality staying in a hotel room with her husband’s best friend—it was my job to look after Charles. This task was not difficult. The most I had to do was reheat a meal my mother had prepared in advance, open a bottle of wine, or help him undo the buttons on his shirtsleeves, as the fine-motor skills involved in that process were no longer possible for him. Really, the man just wanted peace, a stiff cocktail, and a quiet place to read and think. What made Charles a great stepfather was probably what had made him a less-than-stellar father to his own children—his parenting style was one of benign neglect. He was uninterested in parenting Peter and me, in the messy feuds, the inherent competition, the demands on his time and energy.
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