DEDICATION
C.M.M.
EPIGRAPH
The Dust Bowl was the darkest moment in the twentieth-century life of the southern plains. The name suggests a place—a region whose borders are as inexact and shifting as a sand dune. But it was also an event of national, even planetary, significance . . . the Dust Bowl took only 50 years to accomplish. It cannot be blamed on illiteracy or overpopulation or social disorder. It came about because the culture was operating in precisely the way it was supposed to.
—Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
I One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
II Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
III Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
There was a night, in the year before everything happened, when Madison’s mother came to see her.
Isabel just appeared at the bedroom door one night, a few hours after dinner, and at first she said nothing. She hadn’t done this since Madison was small. Madison could feel her standing in the doorway, watching.
“I wanted to see if you need anything before you turn in,” her mother said when Madison finally looked up. And then Isabel smiled, her large blue eyes watchful above the crinkled mouth. There was something undefined about the smile, like an image reflected in rippling water.
It had been only a few months since Isabel’s parents had died; first Grandpop and then Gran Berkeley, succumbing one after the other that winter. Madison knew her mother was still moving through the cluttered daily air of new grief.
“I was just going to do my hair,” Madison said. “Before I go to sleep.”
Normal touching, affection: For Isabel, that was contact without purpose. Grooming, on the other hand, had function. It was far from superficial; it was the only real bulwark against the world outside. Not only outside the house, beyond Greenwich, but even beyond this very bedroom, the whole world beyond their own two bodies.
“Sit,” Isabel said. “Let me do it.”
Her fingers began to work absently through Madison’s hair, the way another sort of mother might sift flour before baking.
“People were talking at lunch today about how their parents met,” Madison began.
“Which people?”
“I don’t know. Me, Amanda, a few other people. Wyatt Welsh was there, but none of the boys seem to know their family’s stories.”
“Well,” Isabel said, snorting. “Of course they don’t.”
“Would you tell it again?”
“Don’t you prefer it when your father tells it? He tells a better story than I do. He always has.”
“But he’s at work,” Madison said.
And her mother’s fingers began to work more quickly.
EVERY DETAIL OF THE STORY was familiar, something Madison had rubbed smooth in her mind. The parts that were left vague, known only to her parents, were surely inconsequential; she imagined and reimagined the parts she already knew, so that the mysteries seemed less important.
Her mother had been working nights as the hostess at a club, right after she moved to New York. She was twenty-two.
“Your grandfather thought it was hilarious, me taking a second job,” Isabel said. The bristles of the hairbrush grazed Madison’s scalp. “He thought I was bluffing. He would show up to take me to lunch twice a month, fly the shuttle up from D.C. and take me to midtown, 21 or one of the steakhouses. He’d wait until the very end of the meal, as though I didn’t know what was coming, and then he’d draw a check from his breast pocket and hold it out to me. And we never said anything, he just held it there for a few seconds and then laughed and put it away.”
“And you didn’t even have enough money every month to buy groceries.”
“It’s so funny to think this was only, what? Two years before I had you? And I was still such a child.”
Madison could hear, though, the wistful pride in her mother’s voice. Misery in the absence of danger, misery you’d signed yourself up for, carried with it an ersatz thrill, a shiver along your spine that couldn’t be found anywhere else. It was like a soreness on your skin rather than in your bones. Madison had realized, by the time she hit middle school, that this feeling was something open to her that was open to almost no one else in the world. She’d kept this to herself.
“But one night, Daddy came in.”
Isabel parted Madison’s hair down the center of her scalp, as though preparing to split her daughter into two equal, tidy halves.
“And one night, your father came into the club, yes.”
THOUGH SHE’D BEEN FOURTEEN when he died, Madison did not think of herself as someone who’d known her grandfather very well. Her memories of him could be sorted into several specific categories: his visits; Gran’s cocktail parties at the town house in D.C.; his annual birthday dinner at the Yale Club, near Grand Central.
Madison’s father liked her to mix his drinks, especially when other men from the bank were over at the house. By the time she was ten years old, she already knew every possible way Bob D’Amico might take his bourbon, or when he’d prefer scotch, which he only ever took one way. But Grandpop always sent his drinks back, usually for unforeseeable reasons. She learned quickly that she would not be able to anticipate anything other than his dissatisfaction, that he would reject the first drink she made. He never told her in advance whether he wanted an olive or an onion, for starters, and he always wanted what she didn’t have. He’d tell her that anything worth enjoying should be sent back once or twice, because a good drink is wasted unless it’s a perfect drink. He’d look askance at her father, taking steady slugs from the very first drink his daughter had proffered, and shake his head.
Sometimes, when they were in D.C., Grandpop would wait until Bob was talking to an important guest, someone he knew would have his son-in-law on edge—from the State Department, or something—and then creep up behind him, manic glee on his face, to tap Bob’s beer with his own brown bottle.
The first time she saw this happen, Madison was seven or eight. It wasn’t just that her grandfather had tapped the beer, that the geyser of foam had spilled all over Bob’s sleeve. Grandpop had been mocking her father all night, usually waiting until a few guests had clustered in a corner before launching into some unflattering analysis of her father’s role at the bank.
Twenty minutes or so after the spill, Madison wande
red into the kitchen to see if she might poach something from a leftover tray, a toast point layered with buttery smoked salmon or maybe a cucumber sandwich, anything her mother’s uninterrupted gaze had prevented her from touching earlier. But when she came into the room, she only saw her mother and father.
Isabel had him backed up against the sink, one hand tucked into the collar of his shirt, her hips canted up toward his. He pressed one hand to the small of her back, rumpling her silk blouse, and balled the other into a tight fist. Isabel leaned into him until his head fell into the space between her neck and her shoulder. Madison waited a few moments, trying to imagine her place were she to enter the room. Where she might tuck herself, whose arm would have to loosen to enfold her in their closed embrace. She couldn’t see any place that made sense, though, and so she returned to the party, found Grandpop, crawled up onto his knee to listen to the thrum of his voice against his chest.
ISABEL TOLD THE WHOLE STORY that night, while she braided Madison’s hair. She always did, once Madison convinced her to start; it was, after all, a favorite in their family. Every family wants to feel inevitable.
He came into the club one night, celebrating with his coworkers. He tried to get her mother to sit down with them, stay for a glass of champagne, and she told him off. Her exact words were never part of the story, but the point was that she spoke to him in a way that no other woman did. She called him a junior analyst, even though he was a good twelve years her senior. She put him in his place.
Then, to apologize, he held out a single, crisp, hundred-dollar bill. And Isabel threw it back in his face.
He found her, later, after she’d stormed off. He begged her to go out with him.
She was perfectly polite in her refusal, of course, she didn’t bare her teeth. But he came back three times a week, for a month, having called management to find out the nights she worked. He told her that he could learn a lot from someone like her. He told her he needed reading recommendations. He kept coming back until she said yes to dinner.
MADISON LOVED THE DETAILS of this story for many reasons, but she especially loved that one tactic of her father’s. Because he never read for pleasure. Anything that might shed light on the markets, sure. Earnings reports, diversity memos, whatever intel on the firm or its competitors that Jim McGinniss, his second in command and best friend coming up through the ranks, saw fit to funnel onto his desk. During the Russian crisis in ’98, anything and everything about post-Wall Russia that he could get his hands on. But nothing irrelevant. Not for him the camouflaged meanings of fiction, the artificial tidiness of biography.
She thought often of her parents’ story during that September after she turned fifteen, during the shell-shocked year that followed. At first, when it all happened, people were expecting a scene. They wanted his howling at the perceived injustice brought out into the open—for on the day that it happened, quite publicly, he’d been vocal enough for them all to know that he considered himself one of the victims, too. They wanted the brash man they’d all tolerated for so long to turn, finally, on himself. They were afraid of, and so eagerly awaited, screaming and yelling, King Lear ranting beneath a white tent on a moonlit Greenwich lawn.
In this, her father never obliged.
NO ONE KNOWS what is lost at the moment it slips away. What you feel, then, is really fear. There is the inkling of what is to come, and the fear of that future pain leaves you paralyzed. Madison would come to understand, that year, that when Isabel had looked down at the crisp bill in the darkened club where she’d taken a job to spite her own father, she couldn’t have seen the paths that closed themselves to her, right then, in that moment. She could have paused to examine the brutish, pleasingly handsome man before her and still known nothing more of the women she would not become, the lives she would not choose. She could only see the details, could not see the fragmented whole that it was all leading her toward. And for this past limitation, this necessary blindness, Madison felt for her mother only tenderness, only shared regret.
MADISON HAD LOOKED, a few times, trying to find pictures of the club online—her father had once mentioned red velvet couches that fit together to form swirling S shapes. But it was as if the place had evaporated once it closed, only a few years after her parents met there. She could find no trace of it, only casual mentions in magazine articles about the excesses of the eighties.
In the year after her father’s implosion, she could think only of what she didn’t know about that story. She could close her eyes and imagine her parents, could watch them find each other. But she could never hear the dialogue, not the crucial parts, and the story came to seem, for the first time, like only the pieces of a failed mosaic. It was incomplete; it belonged to the world she had known before that September, those fortified, moonlit lawns behind Greenwich houses. So full, verdant and cool, their stringed instruments, their tinkling glass. The lights in the trees.
But the pieces told her nothing, gave her no inside information. And she wanted it to be like that moment at Gran’s cocktail party, in the kitchen, when she saw her mother’s hand on her father’s skin, saw his unused fist, knew something—she could not say what—about the invisible strings between them, the web she’d been living in all her life.
Wasn’t she, after all, the only real insider? Didn’t she live in a house, each day, with some versions of the two people in this story?
I
After the leaves have fallen, we return
To the plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.
It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.
—Wallace Stevens, “The Plain Sense of Things”
If you haven’t discovered your role, you’re the villain today. So you have to act like the villain today.
—Representative John Mica to Richard Fuld, former CEO of Lehman Brothers, during congressional hearings
ONE
The summer before, they spent August at the house on Shelter Island.
“Bob,” Isabel said one morning at breakfast, holding her teacup in front of her face. “Could you put that away, please?”
She stared pointedly at the BlackBerry sitting beside his coffee cup. They were all there, Madison and the twins, eating breakfast in the formal dining room. Madison had assumed that this year, the first summer without Gran, they might finally be liberated from her old rules and habits. But that hadn’t happened. On some days, if they swam in the pool, they were allowed to eat lunch at the outside table, beneath the poplars Grandpop had taken such pride in showing to first-time visitors. But that was it, their only real casual indulgence.
Madison poured her own cup of coffee and immediately burned her tongue. She had been training herself this summer to drink it black, like her father. She didn’t love the taste of coffee itself, but somehow she loved to drink it black. It felt like you were toughing it out, sucking it down anyway not for the pleasure but for the other benefits.
“What?” her father replied, still peering down the table at her mother.
“Vacation,” Isabel said.
“I’m aware,” he said, “that we are on vacation. I’m aware we’re at your parents’ house. I was wondering if you’d repeat the first thing you said.”
Frank and Antoinette were continuing to ferry things into the room. There was already a samovar of coffee, a teapot for Isabel. They’d brought in a platter of bagels with lox, capers, onions and tomatoes and cucumbers. The strawberries in Gran’s enormous old ceramic bowl were so red you looked at them and could think only of blood, that accusatory red you see when you’ve accidentally bitten the inner, fleshy part of your lip.
Madison could feel Luke beginning to vibrate beside her. She set down the fruit bowl and put one hand to the bac
k of his neck.
“You heard me, I think,” her mother said.
“But you know that I’m working. You know full well why I’ve got my phone here with me during breakfast. So I’m just fascinated, really, that you think I can just—” And her father snapped his fingers, an uncontrolled smile spreading over his face. He looked like a failing magician. “Make it go away.”
Madison felt the sound of his fingers crackle down along her spine. She began rubbing her hand in smooth, continuous circles on Luke’s back.
“I do think you can make it go away for the remainder of our children’s breakfast,” Isabel said. “I have that much faith in you, sweetheart.” She tilted her head and smiled, that smile she had and used so sparingly. It made you feel she’d considered every detail of your person, your every gesture, and decided that you were truly and gracefully beyond reproach. She had offered the smile to calm him down, to bathe him in her own well-being. On his good days, it worked.
He squinted again. His eyebrows looked especially thick and unruly that morning, as if he’d repeatedly put his thumbs to his brow and rubbed with anxious distraction.
“You’ve got faith in me,” he repeated.
Frank and Antoinette had suddenly vanished. They’d been Gran’s only real staff out here for the last twenty years of her life, and this couldn’t be the first unpleasantness they’d seen unfold over sliced bagels, Madison thought. They knew when to glide into the room slowly, so that by the time you realized you needed something, you’d grown accustomed to their soothing presence in the corner, but they knew just as well when to disappear.
She stared past her father’s face, his jaw working away, to the big bay windows that looked out over the gray strip of sand on the beach below. The slightly longer grasses at the edge of the lawn were being bent wildly in different directions. What was she going to do if today was too windy? If she couldn’t take the boys outside, and keep them there?
She wished that her mother had insisted Lily come along on this trip, that she hadn’t given her the two weeks off to go home to her own parents in Brooklyn. Lily would have known, somehow. She would have seen this coming, before the meal had begun; she would already have figured out where to take the boys.
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