Chapter 1 #4
When Stefano was a year old, they moved to New York.
Her father had just died suddenly and her mother was ill, and Eugenia wanted to be near her in New York.
She was already pregnant with their second child, Eloise.
Eugenia got an amazing job immediately, working for Oscar de la Renta, who recognized her talent.
It was a bittersweet time. Her mother died of cancer and grief after losing her husband, weeks after Eloise was born.
It was a time of sorrow mixed with joy. The baby was beautiful, with her mother’s exquisite, delicate features and her father’s noble bloodline.
Umberto was once again very proud. And Eugenia made enough by then to hire a nanny so she could work.
Eugenia didn’t quit her lucrative job with Oscar de la Renta when Eloise was born.
She couldn’t afford to. Umberto had rapidly made the same profitable connections he’d had in Paris, and used them well.
There were always homes in Palm Beach being loaned to them for vacations, trips to the Bahamas on yachts and to Europe on private planes, free clothes, and free hotels.
And Eugenia’s salary supported them, along with the inheritance her parents and grandparents had left her.
Umberto was very grand, while Eugenia managed it all, two young children, a demanding job, an expensive social life that kept them out every night.
The nanny Eugenia hired helped her deal with the children.
Her life was a juggling act. Eugenia spent as much time with the children as she could and Umberto would allow.
When she insisted on staying home with them, he went out alone, almost every night in black tie.
Eugenia was still desperately in love with him and under his spell.
He was cavalier about their love life, and she got pregnant accidentally when Eloise was three months old.
Daphne was the result nine months later.
Stefano and Eloise looked like blond cherubs, and Daphne was a beautiful baby with dark hair.
Eugenia was back at work in a month. Their constant social life continued, although Eugenia couldn’t keep up anymore with three children and her big job with de la Renta.
She was increasingly being noticed in the fashion milieu and by the press, and Oscar was very good to her, allowing her to shine.
Eugenia had two more babies after Daphne, Gloria a year later and Sofia ten months after that.
She’d had five babies in five years, was Oscar’s chief designer, and was twenty-eight years old, with a highly coveted job.
Eugenia was keeping them afloat. Somehow, they always managed.
By the time Sofia was born, they had lived in New York for four years, and Umberto was homesick for Europe.
He began to travel more and more to balls in Italy, weddings in Paris, shoots and house parties in England with his international friends.
He would come home to Eugenia from time to time, and take off again.
He spent no time with their children, and very little with her.
She spent the weekends with the children, after working all week, all of which bored Umberto.
He loved the idea of the children, but not the reality.
He loved showing them off when they were clean and dressed beautifully in matching outfits Eugenia made for them when she had time, or sketched and had one of the design assistants make.
They looked like the little prince and the four little princesses they were, but she wondered sometimes if Umberto could even tell them apart.
He was proud of them, but barely knew them.
Years slipped by and with what was left of her own money, and her salary, Eugenia put them in the best private schools in New York.
Her life was a relay race of children and work, and it was Oscar, her mentor and friend, who finally encouraged her to find investors and start her own brand.
He became one of the investors, because he had so much faith in her, and he guessed easily the burden she was carrying, with five children and an absentee husband.
He had seen Umberto at enough parties around the world, without Eugenia, to understand what was going on.
Eugenia suspected by then that Umberto wasn’t faithful to her, but she didn’t have the courage to ask, and really didn’t want to know.
The children needed at least the illusion of a father, and she didn’t want a painful and embarrassing divorce, or to be completely on her own.
She realized by then what she hadn’t understood before.
The worldly women he knew had recognized him for the opportunist he was, and never married him.
He had needed an innocent like Eugenia when they married.
She was destined for success, and followed him with stars in her eyes.
She worked hard to provide everything he wanted, and a family, but she wasn’t na?ve anymore.
When she’d left the job with Oscar and opened her own business fourteen years before, she had laid the groundwork so carefully that it was almost an overnight success.
Within a year, she opened the haute couture arm.
Oscar was the first of her investors whom she paid off, out of gratitude for all he had done for her.
She could never have done it without his help.
He had replaced her with a very capable designer, and Eugenia and Oscar remained friends.
Umberto showed up for her opening parties, but very little else.
They hardly saw each other anymore. It wasn’t a marriage.
He was more like a houseguest, an occasional visitor.
She didn’t cheat on him. She didn’t have the interest, the energy, or the time.
Her children and her business took up all of her attention.
She had a marriage in name only, which suited Umberto.
Eugenia had served her purpose, giving him the life he wanted.
And after Sofia was born, the physical attraction between them came to an end.
Eugenia began to hear about his affairs, which ended it for her.
She couldn’t handle or afford more than five children.
Umberto had started traveling more then, and spent more time in Europe than New York.
He said he had never felt at home in New York, although he had many friends there.
And the women he pursued were mainly in Europe.
Four years after Eugenia opened her business, Umberto asked her for a divorce.
It wasn’t a heartbreak, but it was a sadness and a disappointment that he wasn’t better than he was.
They had been married for twenty-two years.
The time had flown. It had been ten years now since the divorce.
She had paid less than the settlement he demanded, but much more than she should have.
He wanted half of her business, which she refused, but he hired a very aggressive lawyer and drove a hard bargain.
He was sixty-eight years old, had no money or profession, and said he was too old to get a job and work, and the judge agreed.
Umberto had no skills or training for anything.
He always came out ahead in his deals, and he did with her as well.
She knew she would never recoup what she had given him in the divorce, but her business was solid at the time, she managed to pay her investors back in spite of it, and she was able to support herself and their children until they grew up.
When the pandemic happened, the bottom dropped out of everyone’s world, and no one wanted to buy evening gowns.
No one could have predicted or even imagined it.
The bulk of her income stream dried up, and she had no way to recoup her losses for the moment.
But she was determined to hang in and work her way back to the top. She was never afraid of hard work.
She had heard that Umberto was still living like a prince in Italy, and she had no idea if he was living on new deals he made, or simply on what was left from her settlement.
He visited their children once or twice a year, took them out for glamorous evenings, and was always charming and fun.
He turned his visits into an adventure of some kind and then floated away, while she lived the day-to-day existence of running a business and being the mother of five young adults who barely knew their father.
She was too gracious to malign him to the children, and she didn’t want to upset them, but she had lost any semblance of respect for him years before.
Her father had been right. Umberto was an operator, brilliant at what he did, and how he achieved it.
She doubted now that he had ever loved her.
She was just a convenient opportunity he could tell would turn into a gold mine for him one day, and she had.
She had provided a stable base for him to operate from and eventually a golden life he felt entitled to, and five wonderful children, all of which gave him an aura of respectability that was undeserved.
It didn’t matter anymore, the past was the past, and she felt nothing for him by the time they divorced.
Everything she had felt for him was dead.
He was seventy-eight years old now. They had a long history together, and five children, and she was grateful for them.
She regretted their settlement, with the effect of the pandemic on her business.
All she could think of was how to stop the ongoing loss of money, how to shore things up and fight her way back to financial stability.
There had to be a way, and she was determined to find it. She refused to give up.
She sat at her desk for a moment, pondering the figures she had just studied again.
She was taking all her children on vacation for a week, as she did every summer.
She had rented a compound of small houses in East Hampton.
She had visited the property in February, and had set the money aside for it, as she always did.
It was a treat for all of them. She was driving to East Hampton that night and her children were due to arrive the next day.
Daphne and her husband, Phillip Brooke, had a beautiful estate in Southampton that he had inherited from his parents.
Daphne had followed in her mother’s footsteps with an older husband, and four years ago had married a man twenty-two years older than she.
Eugenia was twenty-two when she married Umberto, but Phillip was nothing like him.
He was a rock-solid, responsible, kind man, a good husband and father, who had inherited an enormous fortune and had made a career of running his own investments.
He provided Daphne a lifestyle that none of Eugenia’s other children had, and she handled it well.
She was a wonderful wife to Phillip, and mother to their three-year-old son, Tucker.
Eugenia knew she would never have to worry about her.
Daphne was set for life. She was a sensible, intelligent, responsible, loving, good person, and a joy to be around.
It was her other four children that Eugenia worried about, none of whom were as comfortably set as Daphne and never would be.
Fortunes like Phillip’s were inherited, not made.
—
Eugenia got up from her desk, turned off her computer, and left her office.
She still had to finish packing before driving to the Hamptons that night.
She was looking forward to the week with her children.
Her business problems could wait while she took a week off.
And a week before the Labor Day weekend, they would get together again for Gloria’s elaborate, very expensive wedding that they had been planning for a year, waiting for Covid to subside.
The time had finally come, and it seemed safe.
Gloria was marrying a young lord from England, who, like Umberto when Eugenia married him, was rich in blue blood and short on funds.
Geoffrey and Gloria were both writers, and Gloria had a job at a publishing house in London to support her.
Eugenia wasn’t crazy about Geoffrey, but it was Gloria’s life and what she wanted.
Gloria was twenty-seven and Daphne was twenty-eight now.
The two women couldn’t have been more different.
Geoff and Gloria were flying in from London to join them, at her mother’s expense, as they couldn’t have come otherwise.
And Eugenia wanted the week with her children. It was sacred to her.
Eugenia left her office, exiting through the separate doors to the haute couture salon.
She walked past her store and saw the single salesclerk she still employed, in spite of having no clients, but she didn’t want to just close her doors.
Eugenia waved, and the young woman waved back and smiled.
Eugenia walked the two blocks to her apartment on Fifth Avenue in the Seventies.
She had been thinking about selling it if her business didn’t recover.
There were so many changes in store. She tried not to think about it, and to focus on the week ahead with her children.
None of them knew how frightened she was.
She always tried to model strength to them, and calm.
None of them had guessed the waves of panic that seized her at night, or the weight of carrying all the burdens alone.
But they were her children, and she felt she owed it to them to be strong, or at least appear to be.
She couldn’t wait to get to the Hamptons and relax for a week.
She hoped that everything would go smoothly, but the one thing she had learned in the past eighteen months was that nothing was ever sure.
Everything in life, both good and bad, was a surprise and totally unpredictable.