CHAPTER 2 #7
“She really does take the air out of the room, doesn’t she?” I said to Eddie.
“This one’s smart,” Maxine said. “New editor?”
“Daphne is my daughter,” Eddie said. It was his story for the night.
Maxine looked at the two of us together. The room was getting louder by the minute. There was a bottleneck of traffic coming into the bar and we were part of the problem. “We should move,” I said, raising my voice.
“This is the story I want to hear,” Maxine said, not moving.
“It’s a long one,” Eddie said, also raising his voice. “You’ll like it.”
“I’ll take you to lunch next week. I want you to tell it to me someplace I can hear you.” Maxine turned to me. “Daphne Triplett, it was a pleasure to meet you.”
I told her the pleasure was mine, and maybe I meant it. I got a kick out of Maxine. I watched the crowd open slightly and then swallow her up. “I wonder if I’ll meet somebody tonight who calls me Daphne Fuller,” I said to Eddie.
“Give it time. There’s bound to be a doctor here somewhere who worked with your husband.”
“Isn’t there something, I don’t know, combative about introducing me to people as your daughter when they all know you don’t have a daughter?”
“Probably,” Eddie said, killing his drink. “‘Combative’ is a good word.”
“You know, if you’re not having fun, we could always call Leda, see if she and Steve want to meet us for dinner?”
“Too much trouble,” Eddie said over the noise.
“It wouldn’t be any trouble.”
He tapped a stud on his tuxedo shirt, the noise reducing us to gesture. “I’d get in too much trouble.”
The room smelled like flowers, like competing perfumes, like white wine.
The louder the party became, the easier it was to be there.
We went through a period of shouted introductions, which in turn gave way to pantomime, Eddie pointing to me, me smiling, hands shaken, then people pointing to the bar, tipping back an imaginary glass. He knew everyone.
Then a waiter came by, tapping a mallet against a three-note xylophone, as if we were at the opera and the second act was about to begin. (The second act was about to begin!) We all filed into the dining room.
The white linen tablecloths were strewn with another garden-load of flowers, arranged low enough that we could see across the table, votive candles dotted around.
The message was that, despite the enormous amount of money spent on this evening, the hostess was fun, still playful, natural.
The five tables of ten were set with place cards: Polly and Skip anchored table one, with each of their four married children and their spouses anchoring tables two through five.
Eddie walked me to each table and introduced me to the Hotallings and the Hotalling partners: two sons married to women, two daughters married to men, eight people who referred to Eddie as uncle.
“Alex,” Eddie said when we stopped at table five, “I want you to meet my daughter, Daphne Fuller.”
Alex (then Sam, then Mae-Mae, then Nanette, and all of their beloveds) shook my hand and commented on the fact that Eddie didn’t have a daughter. “What closet have you been keeping her in?” Alex (Sam, Mae-Mae, Nanette) asked.
“I had an entire life before you were born,” he told them. “Daphne is the best part of that earlier incarnation.”
Mae-Mae, a woman who combined her mother’s power and unfriendliness with her father’s beauty and height, put her arm around Eddie. “Uncle, does this mean she’s getting my inheritance?”
“Don’t you worry, darling. There will always be something for you.”
“I’m his goddaughter,” she told me. “Which means I’m his daughter but with god attached.”
“Come along, come along, more people to meet,” Eddie said, smiling. He guided me away.
“Is she for real?” I asked.
“For real insofar as she is what she seems, but she’s joking about the money.
Mae-Mae is an intellectual properties lawyer, and her husband is a hedge funder of the mega-yacht variety.
Her inheritance is a long-standing joke between us.
I suppose she’ll need my money after I’m dead to tip the crew. ”
“What a sparkling wit.”
“It’s a Hotalling family trait. They tease. The whole lot of them. They practice when they’re together.”
We went to table one to find our seats. “You’re Esther Newberg,” Eddie said to me.
“My third name of the night,” I said.
“No, Esther is my friend with the cold. She couldn’t come.” Esther Newberg had been seated directly across the table from Eddie.
“We have to switch this,” I said, picking up the place card. I was seated next to Skip Hotalling.
“I have no doubt that Polly worked on the seating chart for a month. If you switched the cards, she would switch them back. She would tell you the reason she and Skip have made it fifty years is that they never sat next to one another at a dinner party.”
“But I’m not your wife. I’m your daughter.”
Then someone else who Eddie knew swept him away, and I was left alone to sit in Esther Newberg’s chair.
The evening had been fun up until this point.
The camaraderie between Eddie and myself kept things jolly.
Women in cocktail pajamas admired my dress and the men who were with them admired me.
A part of me, a person small and far away, was thrilled to have Eddie call me his daughter.
He never would have done that if Buddy were alive, but here at the Century Club, there was no one to be hurt by so small a misrepresentation.
All he meant was that he had chosen me, and I appreciated that.
Still, around now I was wishing I was in my own backyard.
The role for which I was the stand-in belonged not to Esther Newberg but to my mother, who had yet to be apprised of her ex-husband’s reappearance.
Wasn’t it her responsibility to be seated across the table from Eddie?
To be seated next to Skip Hotalling, who even now was working his way towards the chair at my left?
But my mother was decades out of the picture, and she hadn’t liked the Hotallings anyway. If she hadn’t invited them to her wedding, then chances were good they wouldn’t have invited her to their golden anniversary dinner.
“Daphne Zabriskie,” Skip said once he was seated. “I could have spent fifty years guessing who I might be seated next to this evening and I don’t think I would have come up with you.”
“Would you have come up with Esther Newberg?”
Skip nodded. “Oh, sure. Esther’s a friend from Sag Harbor. Her place is four blocks over from ours. We see Esther all the time.”
“I guess that doubles the disappointment.”
My host laughed heartily, and the other members of our table smiled to think that Skip had been seated next to a woman both witty and young.
“So you and Polly live in Sag Harbor?”
“We live in Darien, but we get out to Sag Harbor when there’s time. A lot more time now that I’m retired.”
Again, I longed for Jonathan, but then remembered that even if he were here, he would not be able to take this burden from me. Jonathan would have been seated on the other side of the table next to Polly.
“How long have you been retired?”
“Five years. Five long, dark years,” he said. “What about you and Ed? Have the two of you been in touch for a while now?”
“A while,” I said, because what did “a while” even mean? “I’ve enjoyed being with him.”
“No one’s better company than Ed. I would bet you he’s the favorite person of everyone in this room.”
“He has my vote,” I said.
From across the table Polly sent a telepathic communiqué to her husband, who then picked up his salad fork at the moment she picked up her salad fork. The first course had begun. “How’s your mother these days?”
“My mother’s well, thank you.”
“Tell her I said hello, that Polly and I said hello.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Your mother had some funny ideas,” he said to me, still smiling.
Skip Hotalling had his own teeth, a peculiar thing to say, but in this room it set him apart. I looked at him square and told him I knew nothing of my mother’s funny ideas, because it was true.
At this bit of information, Skip Hotalling’s straight shoulders rolled forward slightly, and the smile he had worn for the evening’s duration fell away.
Right in front of me he grew old, and not only that: I could see the energy it cost him to hold up his own bright veneer.
He left me then, turning to the woman on his left while buttering a dinner roll.
From what I could make out, she was the wife of one of Skip’s former partners at the four-name law firm where he had worked.
That partner was seated on Eddie’s side of the table.
The man on my right—I turned to him—had also been a partner at the same firm but retired early to pursue the study of lepidoptera, which, he said, would have been his life’s work had his father not forced him to attend law school.
He and his wife (she was across the table) now spent half the year in Costa Rica, where they owned a condominium not far from the edge of a national park.
The rest of the time he volunteered at the Museum of Natural History.
He had played a significant role in the creation of the museum’s butterfly vivarium.
Eighty species! He told me the first time he went through, he wept, and one of the eighty species alighted on his face to drink from his tear.
He was an enthusiastic student of nature, and I was grateful for his willingness to carry the entire burden of conversation.
I saved up the details of the glasswing butterfly, the blue morpho, and the tropical checkered-skipper to tell Eddie later.
Once the cake had been served, Eddie stood, and someone tapped a knife against their glass. Ten waiters circled the five tables, pouring champagne into the flutes that had been waiting there.