Chapter 2 Holly
I wind through this posh playground for Atlanta’s multigenerational families of wealth and status.
The bridge ladies convene on the flower-strewn veranda that overlooks the pool deck, shuffling cards amid the clinking of tea glasses.
A lifeguard blows his whistle, signaling the start of toddler swim lessons.
Society moms in tennis dresses chat amiably and head toward the courts, passing by the distinguished gentlemen who gather in carts near our world-renowned golf course, puffing on cigars while they prepare to tee off.
But it’s not just another Friday morning. It’s the morning of Anna-Byrd Johnson’s annual Baubles Brunch, where her go-to jewelry designer shares the latest shimmering trends with a select group of “girls in the know.” And so here I am—on my precious day off.
During my eighteen years working at this club, including five years managing events, I’ve successfully served countless cocktails to Coca-Cola’s founding families and organized elaborate weddings for hundreds of discerning guests.
I’ve planned and executed dinners to honor governors and mayors, the sort of people who will, in fact, be here tonight, for the city’s annual Philanthropy Banquet.
But still: Anna-Byrd Johnson’s Baubles Brunch for twelve sends my heart into palpitations.
She is the absolute worst of this place’s prim and judgy society ladies, all bright smiles and effervescent how aaaaahhhhre yous with the other ladies at the club—until they turn their backs.
Then it’s a litany of razor-sharp judgments, covering everything from their tennis skirts to where their toddlers go to preschool.
No one is safe, not even her (purported) best friends.
She and her lecher husband, Griggs Caldecott Johnson III, are a perfect match—made in hell.
They are Atlanta’s Golden Couple, the city’s country club royalty, and crossing either one of them has extreme consequences that I’m not willing or able to endure. I have a kid to feed.
Every single detail of this brunch must go precisely as Anna-Byrd planned, or that woman will have my head. Which is why I’m storming through the double doors into the kitchen.
“Ohmygod how could I not remember this?” I desperately call out to whoever might be within earshot. “And where the hell are my notes? Do the Davis sisters drink Bollinger or Taittinger?”
“Not your fault,” Irma replies, slipping on red oven mitts. “Neptune’s swimming through your tenth house of career, making details a little murky. You’ll come through it.” For Irma, the club’s sous chef and amateur astrologer, everything’s written in our stars.
“Before or after Anna-Byrd Johnson chops her head off?” Justine replies from the walk-in. She’s not wrong. The Davis sisters are Anna-Byrd’s closest friends and partners in crime, and perennial guests at the Baubles Brunch. Their every wish must be my command.
“I’m just sayin’.” Justine shrugs, coming out of the fridge with four gallons of sweet tea balanced in her arms. “You’d better fucking get it right.
” Justine—the Dogwood Hills Country Club’s head waitress and chief surliness officer—acts as sweet as tupelo honey when she’s out serving club members, but back here, she’s a drill sergeant. And I adore her.
“Taittinger,” Byron announces from the other side of the room as he casually slides on his white bartender jacket. “Loula Davis Babb hates Bollinger. She thinks it’s too bubbly.”
“Too bubbly?” Irma replies with mock horror, pulling a tray of the club’s signature crackers from the oven.
Can champagne be too bubbly? I shove the question from my mind, focusing on the task at hand. If the Davis sisters want mildly bubbly champagne, that’s exactly what they’ll get.
“And, by the way,” Byron adds, gesturing toward the prep table, “I believe your beloved tablet is hiding under that tray of canapés.”
“Bless you,” I exclaim, rushing over to retrieve it. It’s absolutely fitting that Byron has swooped in to rescue me. He is, without a doubt, the most consistent and reliable man in my life.
I tug my tablet out from under the canapés, open it, and scroll through my event notes.
Lavender hyacinths? Check.
Champagne flutes smooth, NOT cut glass? Check.
Taittinger, NOT Bollinger? Check.
“Now wish me luck,” I say, grabbing two bottles from the fridge. “I’m heading into the fray to check on the boozy ladies.”
Perfectly chilled Taittinger in hand, I make my way toward the Ivy Room, one of several small formal dining rooms that fan around the grand rotunda.
These spaces, intended for such intimate gatherings as small birthday fetes, sweet sixteen luncheons, or special family dinners, have been decorated with the feminine feel of a ladies’ parlor in a well-appointed Southern home, circa 1936.
I push open the door and step inside, noticing immediately how gorgeous the hyacinths are looking in that silver vase at the center of the table.
I make a mental note to call my go-to florist and shower her with praise.
And the white linens, crisp and perfectly draped, are a real testament to the entire team over in housekeeping.
The women are huddled, discussing in hushed tones the latest Posted Notice: Dogwood Hills’s most arcane form of public humiliation.
The husband of one of their—now spurned—friends just had his name taped to bulletin boards around the club.
An announcement carefully printed on expensive ecru card stock reports the precise balance on his delinquent account.
“Holly!” Loula, the younger of the Davis sisters, says, her voice slurring just the slightest bit. “Come join us!”
I set Loula’s not-too-bubbly champagne on ice and watch from an appropriate distance. Chatter about the Posted Notice abruptly stops, and Anna-Byrd extends her dainty hand, showing off the enormous emerald tennis bracelet dangling from her slim wrist.
Seeing that bracelet reminds me of the almost identical one currently residing in a safe under my desk.
The only difference? That one is sapphire, presumably to match the piercing blue eyes of Kasey Ketchum, the young third wife of banking magnate Miles Ketchum, and Griggs’s erstwhile lover.
According to Janey, the club’s receptionist and resident gossip, Kasey lost the bracelet during a passionate after-hours encounter with Griggs on the squash court (gross) after which he unceremoniously dumped her.
She’ll probably never retrieve the bracelet since it was a gift from Griggs, and Mr. Ketchum appears to provide her with a shiny new object every week.
In the meantime, a bauble worth several thousand dollars is gathering dust in my office.
“Come sit,” Loula calls out to me, patting an empty seat beside her. “You must see this absolutely to-die-for ring.”
Loula knows, of course, that there can be no “joining them,” and I won’t be cozying up beside her, since I am staff and they’re club members. Nevertheless, she persistently invites me.
“That’s a lovely piece, Mrs. Babb,” I say, lying. I’m not really a fancy jewelry person.
“For the hundredth time,” Loula says, gesturing for me to come closer, “please call me Loula! Mrs. Babb is my mother-in-law.”
“And for the hundredth time,” I reply, my voice gently teasing, “please don’t make me call you by your first name. I could lose my job for it. And I happen to really like my job.”
All the women around the table laugh uncomfortably. All but one, that is.
“Well, well, well. Isn’t someone feeling cheeky this morning,” Anna-Byrd Johnson says, through an utterly disingenuous smile.
She shakes her head slowly, sending the bright blue tassels on her earrings bobbing about.
The woman is obsessed with fringe earrings.
Every time I see her she’s wearing a different pair, to match whatever brightly patterned dress she’s got on.
An uncomfortable silence ensues, during which I attempt to stare thoughtfully into the distance, or, in this case, at the strange array of eighteenth-century pastoral scenes gracing the walls of the Ivy Room.
Over many years, I’ve come to realize that the design of this antiquated, slightly shabby club is meant to convey something important about the people that fill it: They are old money, not new.
Theirs is multigenerational wealth. Any unseemly displays of their status are, at best, tacky and, at worst, meriting quiet expulsion from their tightly monitored social world.
I happen to know a good deal about their world.
Growing up, I lived on the other side of the member-staff divide.
Not here, but at a club a whole lot like this one, in Mississippi.
My father basically ignored me, electing instead to play endless rounds of golf and drink bottomless scotch.
My mom spent most of her time preening and gossiping with the ladies.
She only cared about what I did to the extent that it reflected on her.
For my mother, discretion and propriety were the most important virtues, and so discreetly raising proper children was the ultimate goal of parenting.
By the time I hit puberty, I was through pretending to have a real family.
Instead, I worked my little ass off to ensure that every single action I took made my mother look like an utter and complete failure.
Desperate to escape my gilded cage, I threw myself repeatedly against the bars.
My teen pregnancy was, for her, both the pinnacle of my indiscretion and the final proof of my reckless irresponsibility.
There was one fleeting moment, though, after I got pregnant with my son, Aidan, when I thought I might stay a part of that world—maybe even build a little family with his father, play by the rules, and make a place for us there.
Aidan’s father wasn’t like me. I rebelled; he simply belonged. He lived comfortably with his good name, his lovely family, his sterling reputation.
As it turns out, in my Mississippi town, teenage boys who want to maintain sterling reputations don’t become dads. They properly and discreetly pay to take care of the “problem.”
So I left. I escaped the gilded cage, secretly carrying away the shame both our families said the pregnancy would bring, and I boarded a bus for the big city.
Here’s the great irony: When I was utterly adrift, desperately seeking a job in Atlanta, this country club was the only place that would take me in.
I landed a job here, with no family or community, and the staff made a home for us.
Almost immediately, they became, for Aidan and me, the family I never had.
Marg, the older Davis sister, breaks into my memories. “Holly, be a dear and run down to the driving range. Let Chase know we’ll be a tad late to pick the boys up from their golf lesson.”
“Of course,” I say, then leave the ladies to their jewelry chatter, to deliver the news that Chase will be babysitting the Davis sisters’ little hellions for a while longer.
The heavy oak door hasn’t even had a chance to thud shut behind me when Janey enthusiastically scurries toward me, sensible black pumps shuffling across the maroon carpet. Janey’s face brightens as she calls out to me. “Holly! I didn’t expect to see you here.”
At least one of us is thrilled I’m at the club on my day off.
“You won’t believe it,” she says, somehow managing to simultaneously express deep distress and utter glee at having procured new information. “It’s Reginald.”
“Reginald, the new head of security?” He’s been at the club for almost two years, but that makes him a real spring chicken, relative to old-timers like us.
“Fired!” she cries out.
“No!” My jaw goes slack with disbelief. Reginald is a great guy—honest to a fault, but also compassionate.
Last summer, he did me a huge favor, and I’ll forever be grateful to him.
If it weren’t for him, I’d probably be unemployed, and my son definitely wouldn’t be out there living his best life in college.
“I overheard Lynn talking to Dennis, who’d just gotten off the phone with Buck Dorsey…”
I’m waiting patiently for Janey’s story to unspool, wondering what the club’s board chair has to do with any of this.
“Mr. Marshall said Mr. Johnson accused Reginald of some funny business. He insisted Reginald be fired—wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
“Griggs Johnson?” I ask, knowing the answer but still needing to hear it.
“Yes. You know, he just got elected to the board—youngest member ever,” she says, apropos of nothing. “He must have dug up some terrible scandal involving Reginald, because—poof!—Reginald’s gone. Just like that.”
Just like that, Reginald is gone. I sure hope he’s taken my secret with him. But the sick feeling in my gut suggests otherwise.