8. Imogen
— ? —
Imogen
The text from my mother arrives in the late afternoon, worded as an invitation and structured as a summons.
Mother: Dinner tonight. Your father and I would love to see you. Mother: Seven o’clock. Don’t be late.
No question mark. No how are you, no I’ve been worried, no acknowledgment of the fact that her only daughter just left her husband and is currently living in a sublet the size of a walk-in closet, eating cereal over the sink because she hasn’t bought real dishes yet.
Just the time, the expectation, and the unspoken understanding that declining is not on the menu.
I haven’t been back to the house since before the leak.
I haven’t called her. I haven’t returned the two voicemails Trisha warned me about, the ones I’ve been pretending don’t exist, because engaging with Susannah Hearst while you’re already emotionally compromised is a tactical error I learned to stop making a long time ago.
But avoiding doesn’t work forever, not with my mother. Avoidance just buys her time to build a more elegant argument, and my mother’s arguments are already the most elegant weapons I’ve ever been on the wrong end of.
So I put on real clothes. I do my makeup with hands that only shake a little.
Then I drive across the city and up into the hills, past the gates and the hedges and the long private drives of the old-money enclave where people like my parents have been quietly running this town from behind since before there were cameras to run it in front of, to the stone and ivy monument where I grew up.
I park in the circular drive I used to ride my bike around, and I walk through the front doors of a house that has never once felt like it belonged to me, despite the fact that my name is on the deed.
Our house doesn’t welcome you. It assesses you.
Every room is a museum of correct taste, the right art on the right walls, the right furniture arranged at the right angles, the right flowers cut and set in the right vases.
There are roses on the hall table, pale pink ones, perfect and scentless and arranged with a ruler’s precision, and I have to look away from them, because pink roses mean a thing to me now that they will never mean in this house, and seeing them here, sterilized and staged and stripped of everything soft, is its own small cruelty I don’t have the strength for tonight.
My mother is in the dining room when I come in.
Of course she is.
Susannah Hearst does not receive you in the living room, where the furniture is soft and the conversation might accidentally become casual. She receives you at a table, where the seating is assigned and the power is built into the architecture.
“Imogen.”
She stands, kisses the air beside my cheek.
She’s in slate gray, understated to the point of severity, every hair in place, the pearl earrings I’ve seen a thousand times catching the candlelight.
She says my name the way she says it when she’s displeased, which is cool and complete and somehow makes three syllables feel like a closed door.
“You look thin.”
“Hello, Mother.”
“Sit. Your father’s running a few minutes behind.”
“Of course he is.”
She either misses the edge in my voice or elects to ignore it, which with my mother amounts to the same act.
I sit in my assigned chair, the one to her left, the one I’ve occupied since I was old enough to reach the table, and I fold my napkin into my lap with the mechanical precision of a woman who was taught table manners before she was taught to read.
My father arrives a few minutes later.
Bernard Hearst moves through his own house the way he moves through every room, quietly, carefully, taking up as little space as he can manage so that his wife has room to fill the rest. He kisses my forehead, squeezes my shoulder, murmurs.
“Good to see you, sweetheart,” and folds himself into the chair at the head of the table without once meeting my eyes.
He knows why I’m here.
They both do. The pleasantries are the opening act, and everyone at this table understands it, and the food arrives and is set down and the woman who cooked it disappears back toward the kitchen before the first real word is spoken, the way you’d clear the room before a controlled demolition.
We eat in silence for exactly two minutes. I count them.
Then my mother sets down her fork, and the small precise click of it against the china is the sound of a starting gun.
“Well,” she says. “I suppose we should address it.”
“Address what?”
“Don’t be coy, Imogen, it doesn’t suit you.
” She folds her hands on the edge of the table, rings catching the light.
“The divorce, already rumored as a scandal. The spectacle of it. The fact that your private life is currently a public conversation being conducted by people who have no business conducting it.”
“I didn’t make it public.”
“And yet here we are. The Hearst name and the Carver name in comment sections and gossip columns and whatever those dreadful little video clips are called. Your father has fielded three calls this week from associates asking, so delicately, about the situation. Three.”
Father shifts in his chair, says nothing.
“I’m devastated for Dad’s associates,” I say. “That sounds like a very hard week for them.”
“This is not funny.”
“I’m not laughing, Mother. Look at my face. This is the opposite of laughing.”
She breathes in through her nose, the controlled inhale of a woman who has never once raised her voice and regards volume as a failure of breeding.
“I understand that you’re hurt. I understand that this business with Hendrix and the so-called manuscript has been unpleasant.
But filing for divorce over a book he wrote years ago, and then permitting the papers to be served on camera, in public, that is simply not how this family manages its difficulties. ”
Here she goes as always. The word she loves most in the language.
Manage. She uses it the way other people use the word breathe, as though it were involuntary, as though the entire purpose of a woman’s life were to manage the messes the people around her make and never, not once, let anyone catch her doing it.
“How does this family manage its difficulties, exactly?” I set my own fork down, carefully, the way I’ve learned to set things down when my hands would rather be doing a thing less civilized.
“Because from where I’ve always sat, this family manages its difficulties by pretending they don’t exist until the person having them gets too tired to keep bringing them up. ”
“We manage them with discretion. With maturity. We do not drag the family name through a public proceeding because our feelings were bruised.”
“My feelings weren’t bruised. My marriage ended. Those are not the same thing.”
“Aren’t they?” One perfectly shaped eyebrow lifts.
“Because from the outside, and I say this with love, it looks very much as though you had a difficult few weeks and, rather than working through them the way a Hearst woman works through a thing, you detonated your entire life in the most theatrical fashion available to you.”
“Marriages have rough patches.” She’s warming to it now, the smooth authority of a speech she’s clearly been rehearsing since the first voicemail went unanswered.
“Every marriage does. Your father and I had ours. The Carvers had theirs, God rest Mabel. The point is that you weather them. You do not quit at the first sign of discomfort, and you most certainly do not make a performance of the quitting.”
“The first sign of discomfort.” I hear my own voice go very even, which is what it does right before it stops being safe. “Is that what you think three years was. A sign of discomfort.”
“I think you’re young, and you’re angry, and you are not seeing the full picture.”
“Then show me the full picture, Mother. Please. I’m dying to see the version where I’m the one who got this wrong.”
She opens her mouth to give it to me, the full picture, the elegant airtight case she’s been assembling my whole life, and across the beautiful table with the beautiful flowers and the food none of us are eating, I hold her gaze and wait. I don’t look away first.
Then I see it. Sitting there holding my mother’s gaze across the beautiful table, I finally see the whole architecture of it.
Not just tonight, not just the lecture and the elegant manipulation happening in real time.
The blueprint underneath it. The one that has been running since I was young enough to be shaped and too young to feel the shaping.
Because I was a ballerina.
I was a principal-track ballerina with a body built for the stage and a discipline that scared my teachers, and I had an offer.
A real one, from a real company, the kind of call a dancer trains her whole life for and most of them never get.
I got it. I earned it, in a studio, in the dark, on feet that bled, entirely on my own, with no help from anyone’s name.
It was the one thing in my life that had nothing to do with being a Hearst.
But my parents said no.
Not in those words. Susannah Hearst would never say the word no to her daughter’s face, that would be crude, that would leave fingerprints.
She said it in gentler words, more elegant ones.
She said I think it’s time we talked about your future.
She said the Carvers have been so patient.
She said ballet is a beautiful hobby, Imogen, but it isn’t a life.
And my father sat at a table exactly like this one, in a chair exactly like that one, and said nothing at all.
They took it from me.
Not with force. With expectation, which is so much harder to fight, because there’s nothing to push against, just the slow steady pressure of two people who had already decided the shape of your life and needed you to stop resisting it.
They took the one thing that was purely mine and they replaced it with a wedding, and they called the taking love, and I was young enough to believe them.