Ralph wasn’t slick like a lot of the investment bankers I’d met around town. There was nothing slippery about him. He was mellow and grounded and handsome and so polite. Next to Ralph, I felt like a lady. I remember standing there under this very tall man thinking, This is someone I can really sink my teeth into. By the way, I was still wearing my braces when we met.
I knew from the very beginning that Ralph would make a good father, but I wouldn’t tell him that for a while. That night, we talked and danced and had a fantastic time and at the end he asked me out on a date.
Life isn’t about finding yourself.
It’s about creating yourself.
Chapter Four DORINDA LYNCH
On our first date, Ralph picked me up in a town car. Can you imagine? For a woman who couldn’t afford cab fare, this was miraculous. Then it got even crazier. Between us in the backseat was a box. Well, Ralph opened this box and inside the box was a phone. A car phone! Ralph made a call and then he was casually talking into the receiver as we drove through Manhattan. I just could not believe that it was a real phone. In a car.
Ralph took me to a beautiful dinner that night, and afterwards I took him to an Irish bar that I liked. The band started playing “The Unicorn” by the Irish Rovers, which goes: “Green alligators and long necked geese / Some humpty-back camels and some chimpanzees…” If you don’t know this song, there’s a famous dance that goes along with it. Well, I got up on the bar and started dancing and he thought, This is the type of person I need in my life.
The more I got to know Ralph, the more I liked him. He was a solid human being with a dry sense of humor that I found hilarious. Ralph was clever, and he spoke in a deadpan monotone that just cracked me up. Ralph wasn’t fast and loose like a lot of the guys I knew. He wasn’t the type to sleep around. He didn’t have an agenda. He was a loyal, hardworking man who always tried to do the right thing when it came to the people he loved. And, on top of being a great human, he happened to have all the outside things that made me swoon, like a big job at a bank and a car phone.
In the late eighties, investment bankers had the world at their feet. They had drivers. They had beautiful apartments. They had expense accounts. They were making tremendous amounts of money. Dating Ralph opened up a new world to me, and it was a world of elegance and opulence. Gone were the happy hours and Chinese restaurants that served free wine with their meals. We now went to grown-up restaurants. I got used to driving around in the town car. I no longer wanted to get my toenails done on Second Avenue and walk around in disposable flip-flops. I wanted to dress more nicely and be more refined.
Hanging around with his friends was a revelation to me in so many ways. It was kind of the same revelation I’d had at Berkshire School, but bigger. The host of a Christmas party we went to had a tree ferried up to his rooftop apartment with a crane! It was just decadent beyond belief. I was struck by how at ease Ralph’s friends seemed and how nobody looked tired. When you had money, you weren’t anxious all the time. You weren’t scared. You slept more soundly and had fewer wrinkles.
Unlike Richard, whom I’d meet many years later, Ralph wasn’t showy. He was quiet, conservative, and responsible. He was the guy you wanted to be with if something went wrong. If Ralph Lynch had been on the Titanic, he’d be the person who’d get you to safety, and he wouldn’t make a big deal about it either.
On the outside, we were very different. I was silly and loud and Ralph was reserved. But ultimately, we were two people from a similar background who wanted the same things out of life. His mother had opened a hair salon and worked hard to raise and support three boys. Ralph and I were both quite traditional in certain ways. We were committed to each other. With Ralph, it wasn’t a passionate love affair; it was a true partnership.
After we’d been dating for about a year, Ralph got a job offer at Lehman Brothers. Back then, it was all about merging domestic companies with overseas ones, and they would often send investment bankers abroad to make deals. Well, Ralph was thinking about transferring to the Hong Kong office, and he asked me to come with him.
“Yes!”
I didn’t think twice. I had moved to New York City, I had a wonderful and successful boyfriend, and now we were going to live abroad. I’d only left the United States once, to backpack through Europe, and now I was going to live abroad? I thought it was the best thing that had ever happened to me. This was exactly what I had wanted. No, it was more than I had wanted; it was more than I had even thought to dream of. “Abroad,” to me, was just so decadent and, quite frankly, still is. But I was naïve about it, too. It’s not like I was a worldly woman. Consciously or subconsciously, I thought “abroad” meant diving into a cartoon poster of the Eiffel Tower—even though we were going to Asia. And I felt special—maybe too special. During that time, if a friend said to me, “I’m moving to Chicago,” I would say, “That’s nice. I am moving abroad.”
My mother bawled her eyes out when I told her. In her mind, it was like I had died. Remember, back then there were no cell phones and no FaceTime. And you couldn’t just pick up the phone in China, punch in your phone number, and talk to someone in the United States. Operators were involved. It was complicated. After my mother finally stopped crying, she had questions. “You’re moving to Hong Kong with a man who hasn’t proposed to you?”
I’d prepared for this, because I knew my mother. Before calling her with the news, I’d told Ralph that my parents were going to freak out if we weren’t engaged. Ralph and I knew we were in it for the long haul anyway, so him getting me a placeholder ring (which I still have and love) a bit earlier than expected wasn’t that crazy. He bought me a band so I would have something to show my parents, and for the next few months we pretended to be engaged, with the understanding that one day there would be a real proposal. It was unconventional but in its own way incredibly romantic.
With a placeholder ring on my finger and Ralph by my side, I quit my job, packed up my life, and hopped on a plane to China. I just knew that this was it. This was the next big jump. This was going to be so exciting.
Well, it turned out that my dreams of living abroad and the reality of it were not aligned at all. I am not saying that Hong Kong is a bad city, but it wasn’t a place where I felt at home. First of all, it was like Mars. I couldn’t speak the language, I didn’t understand the customs, I was unfamiliar with the culture, and the city was enormous. You have to understand that I was still in my twenties and was totally naïve. To me, when I first moved to New York, it felt like I had moved to a different country. So you can imagine how Hong Kong felt: beyond foreign.
Ralph’s brother had moved to Hong Kong first, so we stayed with him. Then we started the process of looking at beautiful apartments to rent. They were apartments with sweeping views of the Hong Kong harbor—the kinds of apartments that had a magical view of Hong Kong, a place I had only seen in films and pictures. I am like a real-life princess, I thought to myself. After brushing a manager’s hair at Liz Claiborne, I now had a housekeeper who wanted to brush my hair. I didn’t want her to, but I thought the offer was both bizarre and exciting.
Ralph worked for fifteen hours a day, so I soon found myself alone all the time, and with no friends. Exxon had a big presence in Hong Kong at that time, so there were a lot of Exxon wives, but they were older than me and had set lives with their husbands. I considered them to be Junior League–y country club women and I couldn’t really relate to them. I missed home. I became terribly depressed. I was learning that living in the lap of luxury was nice, but it didn’t necessarily solve all your problems.
One day, I got myself together and decided to take a fun day trip to Kowloon, a historical city that’s a few miles away from Hong Kong Island by boat. Sightseeing! Somebody had told me that it was a fabulous place to go. I got on the boat, I wandered around Kowloon for a little while, and then I decided it was time to go back to Hong Kong, but there was one big problem. Nobody spoke English in Kowloon. Unlike in Hong Kong, people in Kowl
oon were only speaking Mandarin. The harbor was full of what seemed like hundreds of boats. Which was the right one? I tried to ask people where to go, but nobody understood what I was saying. I wanted to cry. Intellectually I knew I would get home, but in the moment it was as though I were stranded on a desert island. Then, just as I was about to lose my mind, I was saved by a local woman who pointed at one of the boats and said, “Hong Kong.”
After that trip to Kowloon, I mostly stayed in the apartment and I felt even more trapped and lonely than I had before. I lived in beautiful surroundings, but I found it very isolating. When Ralph would come home, I would just cry and cry. I felt so detached. I was lucky to have a partner like Ralph. Knowing how unhappy I was, Ralph asked to be transferred to London.
We did short stints in Australia, Paris, and Munich first, staying in each city for about a month while Ralph closed deals. Life in those cities felt like a vacation for me. When Ralph left for the office, I would set out as a tourist, swimming around the Great Barrier Reef at Hayman Island in Australia. I would watch old men play boules on the Place Dauphine. I had been to many of the European cities before, when I went backpacking in the summer before college, and yet I couldn’t help but feel like I had never really seen them. Now I was behind the curtain and living in a dazzling universe of five-star hotels. What I found, however, was that while these experiences were exciting and uplifting, they also came with a hint of melancholy. It was like a nostalgic sense of regret that drew me to the past and isolated me in the present at the same time. I often wished that I had loved ones with me to see what I was seeing. Every time I saw something that took my breath away, it was immediately followed by the thought, I wish my family were here.
My social circle at that time consisted of the wives of other bankers, whose roles were as much about love as they were about duty. And me, I was now stepping into my role as a Lehman wife. At the time, there were terms of engagement that came with being a “Lehman wife,” which were that our husbands (or partners, as Ralph was then) worked for an astronomical number of hours each day making incredible salaries, and our job was to be supportive and keep the house in order. It wasn’t anyone’s fault; that’s just the way it was. You didn’t own your husband. The bank owned your husband. While it was tough not seeing Ralph as often as I might have liked, I adapted, because he did everything he could to make me happy, and even when we were apart we truly did love each other.
And then Ralph proposed, in the Ralphest way imaginable. I honestly can’t remember if this was before Hong Kong or after, but I know it was before London and that it involved a trip to my parents’. One day, Ralph took a walk to the barn in our backyard with my father and asked him for my hand in marriage. After receiving the okay from Dad, Ralph took the car and journeyed to Philadelphia because a friend had told him about an exceptional treasure of a jewelry shop—the type of family-owned place where everything is done by hand. He picked out a stone, set it in a simple silver setting, and, in Great Barrington, he got on one knee and asked me to marry him. I of course said yes, and with that we started planning our wedding.
The first step was picking the venue, and that was easy. I wanted to get married at the Blantyre Castle in Lenox, Massachusetts. It was owned by Senator John and Jane Fitzpatrick, who also owned the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, where I had waitressed for all those years. Back then, if you got lucky you’d get chosen to serve at special events at the castle. I had been chosen, and it was during my time waitressing there, walking around with a tray, that my dream of getting married at Blantyre had formed.
This dream had always seemed completely inaccessible, especially since in order to have a wedding there, you had to rent the entire castle. At the time, it was very expensive, and though my parents had become financially secure by then, I was not about to ask them to pay for a very expensive wedding. But of course they wanted to pay for the wedding. That’s tradition! To them, though, the idea of getting married at the Blantyre Castle was just unimaginable. And so, I had to figure out a way to get married at the castle while allowing my parents to be involved financially.
Well (surprise surprise), I figured out a way. Thankfully, the Fitzpatricks had always valued my work ethic and been kind to me. The senator had even written me a beautiful recommendation for college. When it came time to get married, I asked them for a favor. If I could get all the rooms filled with our friends and if my parents paid for the reception, could I possibly have the keys to the castle for a day? The senator and Jane graciously agreed, and I was over the moon.
It was a huge full-circle moment in my life to have my wedding reception at the Blantyre Castle, and beyond my wildest dreams. The wedding was in the fall of 1991. Ralph and I were twenty-seven years old. His Scottish friends wore kilts and sporrans and my bridesmaids wore Laura Ashley. Ralph and I got married at St. Peter’s Church in Great Barrington, the same church where my grandparents and my parents had been married. The only difference was that this time, there was a bagpiper outside the doors of the chuch, announcing the big day to our small town. It was truly a magical wedding, and it marked the start of my new life.
After Ralph and I got married in October, we took an amazing three-week honeymoon through Thailand and Bali before returning to London. It was now official; I was married to a Scotsman and Britain was my home. Ralph could continue opening offices and making deals, and I could make us a home. London exceeded my expectations and I instantly fell in love with the city. People dressed up. People valued tradition. Everyone was just so glamorous, they dazzled effortlessly. They made the ordinary feel luxurious. London was like a white cashmere blanket that is used every day but never gets stained or pills.
I can remember one night in particular, when we went to a party hosted by one of Ralph’s friends and his leggy, gorgeous Italian wife. Upon our arrival, the door was opened not by the wife, but by a door person. When it happened, I remember literally jumping a bit. “Oh.” I was overwhelmed by the extravagance of it. And the Italian wife wasn’t dressed in a basic A-line dress, but rather in a long satin number that made her look so elegant—but not pretentious. At one point she put on music and everyone started dancing, and the dress moved with her like water. All I could think about was, Okay, Dorinda, you need to go home and burn all your A-line dresses.
The real kicker was that in the center of their beautiful serving table was a gigantic sterling silver bowl filled with shrimp cocktail. When I was growing up, shrimp cocktail was the alpha and omega of foods. It was the thing on the menu you always looked at but were never allowed to order. To me, it was reserved for very special occasions and even then you’d be lucky if you got more than one or two. And there it was right before my eyes, a castle of shrimp cocktail. I couldn’t believe it.
I whispered to Ralph, “I’ve never seen so much shrimp in my life.”
Ralph hadn’t seen that much shrimp in his life either. Since we’d both grown up in middle-class families, we were awed by this opulence together. The truth is that we were both kind of awkward in our life at first. We wore it like we were playing dress-up.
Our first real home was a gorgeous two-bedroom apartment in Eaton Place in Belgravia, right between Buckingham Palace and Sloane Square. The apartment was beautiful, with two bedrooms decorated in a traditional British style. The living room had Osborne & Little English-style floral curtains with tiebacks that draped over the French doors, which opened up to a view of Belgravia. We had velvet couches and a formal dining room. It was everything I had dreamed of, and now it was my home. It came with a key to Eaton Square, which was just across the street from our place, and I remember being unable to wrap my head around it. I thought, What do you mean we have a key to a square? Also, what is a square?
This square turned out to be a beautifully maintained common garden across the street from our apartment, surrounded by a black gate that served more as a symbol than a guarded perimeter. There was a lot of subtle pageantry in London and the square was sacred ground for it. Most o
f my friends in New York were still living post-college lifestyles, and I now had a key to Eaton Square? It was beyond what I could have imagined. The apartment came with a full kitchen and a proper dining room. And I got my first real set of china and glassware.
I was now officially a serious adult—a very serious adult. The funny thing was that I didn’t really know how to be an adult at all, or at least not a posh kind of adult. Yes, I’d been exposed to wives who were the Olympians of glamour, but when it was my turn to run our home in London I did it like my mother. I tried to replicate the warm and cozy feeling of my childhood. Every morning, I would get up early with Ralph and make us breakfast and iron his shirts. It was like a love language that bonded us. We hired a housekeeper, but it didn’t feel natural to me to let somebody else do all the household tasks, so we did them together. I felt like cooking and cleaning were essential parts of making a home and I wanted to take part.
I also wanted to fit in, and so I started shopping and dressing like a Londoner. Even though I wasn’t a full adult at this time, I felt like I was “adulting” in my new clothes. I shopped at Harrods, Harvey Nichols, Joseph, and other upscale stores on Sloane Avenue, and over time I amassed a wardrobe that was sophisticated and chic. I came to look like an investment banker’s wife. I learned from the women around me. The Chanel jackets they bought—I bought those, too. The handbags they carried—I carried those, too. For the first time ever I felt like a glamorous person. I would try on a pair of the most basic black pants you’ve ever seen, but when I looked at myself wearing them in the mirror at Selfridges it was like I was wearing an evening gown.
I couldn’t work in London because I didn’t have a visa, so along with shopping I would spend the day busying myself with errands. There was a separate shop for every item. I went to the fishmonger in Chelsea Square for fish and to the specialty cheese shop for cheese. Going to the bank back then was a full affair. You had to make an appointment to take money out of your account, and then you would go and sit at the bank, Coutts & Co, and explain to your banker that you needed to withdraw 200 pounds, and by the time you were done half the day was gone.
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