Chapter 2
It only took Eugenia an hour to finish packing when she got back to the apartment from her office.
She had three bags full of clothes for every eventuality, evenings at home, days at the pool, a few fancier things to wear out to a restaurant, or a party, if they were invited anywhere dressy.
Daphne and Phillip were giving a small outdoor party for them in two days, and Eugenia had hired a cook to make lunch and dinner at her house so they could enjoy their time together and relax at meals.
It would be a real vacation for everyone, even for Eugenia, not having to wash dishes or prepare meals to everyone’s liking.
The house came with two maids to make their beds and keep everything clean and orderly.
It was going to be a week of luxury, maybe for the last time.
She usually met all her children in Europe for the week’s holiday, at her invitation and expense, at some of the best hotels, in rented villas, or on chartered boats.
The six cabins on a standard charter were perfect for them.
But with the pandemic not quite over yet, it seemed easier to stay in the States.
Daphne was heavily pregnant and couldn’t travel, and Eugenia wanted her to be with them too.
So the property she had rented in East Hampton, near the Southampton home where Daphne and her family had spent the pandemic, seemed the right choice.
Eugenia was looking forward to it, and hoped that everything would go smoothly, and was as nice as she remembered when she visited the house.
She’d rented it because it had a main house and three smaller guesthouses and would accommodate them all.
She had a salad after she closed her bags, and was on the road by eight o’clock.
The doorman loaded the suitcases into her car, along with a few shopping bags filled with loose ends.
The Friday night traffic was light by then.
At the height of the summer, as it was now at the end of July, it could take four hours to get to the Hamptons in heavy traffic.
She made it in two and a half, and found the keys to the main house easily, where the realtor said she’d left them in a box on the porch.
There were handsome gates to the property, and a long driveway.
The main house had three bedrooms on the upper floor, in addition to the master suite, which Eugenia remembered as spacious, airy, and lovely.
Every bedroom had its own bathroom. Downstairs on the ground floor there were two living rooms, a den, a dining room, and an enormous kitchen with a big table where they could all eat together informally.
It suited all their needs to perfection, with the three smaller guesthouses, the pool, and a dressing room.
There was a downstairs playroom in the main house with a pool table, a movie room, and a huge library of films.
Her children with partners would each have a guesthouse of their own, each with two bedrooms. Gloria with her fiancé, Geoff, and Sofia with Bradley Jackson, a man they were meeting for the first time.
He was a young doctor at the hospital where she worked as a nurse practitioner and midwife.
The third guesthouse would be occupied by Stefano and his wife, Liz.
Eloise was staying in the main house with her mother, since she was on her own.
Eugenia was curious about the man Sofia was bringing.
She was extremely private about her life, and she had said little about him, except that he was a very talented doctor.
But if she was bringing him on their family vacation, Eugenia knew he was important to her, so all eyes would be on him.
And Sofia never brought men home. Being together on vacation was more challenging now that most of her children had partners.
There was more opportunity for dissent and conflicting opinions, provoked by their partners.
It was a lot easier when they were younger and came alone, but this was the way it was now, and Eugenia had adjusted to it.
Daphne was the peacemaker, and Phillip seemed to make every situation easier in a fatherly way with unlimited patience, and knew when to withdraw when family discussions became heated.
He was an asset, not only for Daphne, but for all of them.
He was older and knew better than to enter the fray when things went off the rails.
They were a lively group with different personalities and strong opinions, and expressed them freely.
Stefano’s wife, Liz, was exactly the opposite of Phillip.
She was famous for making some caustic, controversial remark or harsh criticism her in-laws took exception to, and Stefano then had to defend his wife, when his sisters challenged her and complained about her later.
She came from a very simple background, having grown up in Queens, and had some rough edges, and was occasionally aggressive when she felt threatened by Stef’s sisters.
She was extremely bright, had paid her own way through business school, and was politically very liberal, which some of the others weren’t.
She didn’t like snobs and she thought it was ridiculous that Stefano had an inherited title and was a prince.
She made fun of him for it, although none of them used the title, and Eugenia never had either except when she was out with Umberto socially, when they were married.
He expected it and took the title very seriously, although he was the prince of nothing now, with no throne for a royal to be on in Italy.
Princes in Italy were a dime a dozen, although Eugenia would never have said that to her husband.
She used the title for her haute couture line, but not personally.
It was just part of Umberto’s mystique and meant more in Europe than in the States, which she always thought was part of why he moved back to Europe.
There he could be Prince Umberto of Florence, and not just Eugenia Ward’s husband, which sounded common to him, and demeaning.
He never felt denigrated by spending her money, however, by any name.
The family jury’s verdict was not yet fully in on Geoff, Gloria’s fiancé.
He was from an aristocratic family and Eugenia had found him snobbish when she met him.
He was also very attached to his title. His father was an earl, although penniless, with a threadbare, crumbling estate in Sussex, a drafty, dreary manor house Geoff made sound like Buckingham Palace.
Geoff was always aware of who had money and who didn’t.
It mattered to him. He could be fun when he’d had a lot to drink and took himself less seriously.
Eugenia found him pompous and irritating, with enormous literary pretensions about the novel he’d been writing for as long as Gloria had known him, two years now, nearly three.
He never seemed to finish the book. Eugenia knew that Gloria was impressed by him, though her mother was not entirely sure why.
Gloria was a very serious writer, and Eugenia thought she would become successful at it in time.
She wasn’t as sure about Geoff. He was all talk, bragged about graduating from Oxford, and as an only child was not used to fitting into a big family.
He and Gloria were treating their wedding as the event of the century, which worried Eugenia.
The expenses kept growing, and while she had set a large amount aside to pay for it, a huge stretch for her at the moment, they were already at twice the original budget, which Gloria was completely oblivious to, as was Geoff.
They never mentioned the expense and expected Eugenia to put on a grand event and foot the bill for everything.
It never occurred to them that business might be bad and it might be hard for Eugenia, and she never said it.
The dress she had designed, according to Gloria’s wishes, was fit for a queen, or a Saudi princess with a very rich father.
The dress was entirely made of antique lace, with a matching coat, a ten-foot train, and an exquisite veil.
It was encrusted with tiny pearls and had taken a year to make, and Gloria was going to look gorgeous in it, in exactly four weeks.
Umberto hadn’t contributed a penny to the event, of course.
Eugenia didn’t expect him to, but some fatherly gesture might have been nice, and would have been appreciated.
It never occurred to Umberto or to Gloria that he should contribute.
She was used to her mother shouldering the full load for everything, alone.
They all were. It was what she had always done, since Umberto wasn’t going to, and until recently she could afford it.
Now it was another story, and from the look of her accounts, the vacation in the Hamptons and Gloria’s wedding seemed like they might be the family’s last moments of ease and luxury, but they didn’t know it yet since Eugenia hadn’t told them, and didn’t intend to for a while.
She was still hoping for a miracle to help turn things around.
She took a quick tour of all the houses when she arrived to make sure that everything was in place for their arrivals the next day, and it was.
The houses were spotless, the beds perfectly made with beautiful Porthault sheets from Paris.
The furnishings were modern and well chosen from Italian designers by a well-known decorator.
It was just as Eugenia remembered it, only better.
There were even flowers placed in every room, and Eugenia settled into her own suite at midnight, turning on the large screen TV in her bedroom when she got into her bed in the perfectly pressed sheets, and minutes later, she was asleep. The vacation had begun.
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