37. Sinclair
Sinclair
Ihave not stopped thinking about Gen’s advice since that dinner the other day, and I’m still ruminating on it as I drive myself out to Glen Cove for Thanksgiving drinks and dinner, Andrew having taken a well-deserved few days off to celebrate the holiday with his family.
I’m grateful for the privacy, to be honest. Driving is a useful activity for processing, and it strikes me that Felix’s stepmom is some kind of sage.
Because of course her solution is the only one that works.
Nothing I do will persuade Elyse to trust me again, except trusting her.
I abused my power, so the only way to restore balance and equality in our relationship is to hand every last bit of that power over to her.
There’s something circular about it that pleases my logic-loving brain, but it’s more than that.
As I drive through the quiet streets, I feel almost fatalistic.
Everything I do, everything my family does, is driven by this deep-rooted obsession with optics and control.
With editing and erasing experiences. Messy is bad.
Vulnerability is bad. And risk of exposure, no matter how faint, is worse.
All of which raises the question:
How would it feel to blow the whole fucking thing up for the woman I love?
Fairwater at Thanksgiving is a study in the same kind of restraint that causes my mother to eschew makeup and jewelry. There isn’t a pumpkin to be seen. Rather, Mom has her staff decorate the house with bounty from the estate in a way that intentionally looks like an hour’s work and not a week’s.
I park in front of The Lindens and open the door just long enough to drop off my overnight bag.
Any longer, and I’ll be tempted to crawl into an armchair in bleak solitude and blow my family off altogether.
But my God, it’s an alluring option compared to the obligatory networking.
When I crunch across the gravel to the main house, the light from the drawing room spills out onto the dim driveway, illuminating a scene as old as time and as tiresome as hell.
The Vosses have a longstanding and wholly inflexible arrangement of “neighborhood drinks” on Thanksgiving afternoon.
It’s been in place since we were kids and is strictly limited to the dozen or so families at the top of the Glen Cove social hierarchy.
It takes place strictly from four o’clock until five thirty, at which point everyone heads home for their family dinner, and the only foods served are chips and olives, to ensure no one spoils their appetite.
Given the strength of my parents’ gimlets, this combination usually feels ill-judged, but whatever.
It’s certainly loosened a few tongues over the years.
As always, the only nod to the holiday from the outside is the urns bearing copper beech branches and a foraged-looking wreath, spruced up with a few pheasant feathers.
Inside the entry hall, Mom’s gone with a single, oversized arrangement on the central table: more branches from the grounds, mixed in with papery dried hydrangeas.
The cocktail party is in full swing. I’ve taken advantage of the fact that, oddly, Mom never seems to mind if I turn up to these things a little late.
My take is that she thinks it gives the impression that I am Very Busy and Important.
I suspect she gets a kick out of seeing me make an entrance—except that, this year, I shuffle into the drawing room as unobtrusively as possible, surveying the scene as I take a gimlet from a silver tray.
Ugh. It’s the same old crowd, year after year: senators, and scions of industry, and a few illustrious doctors.
My parents’ friends, and their kids, and their kids.
The generations grow up, but the names don’t change: Pratt, and Van Duyn, and Prescott.
It’s my normal, a bubble I’ve existed in my entire life without really questioning it, but as I look around now, I can’t help but consider what on earth Elyse would make of it.
Would she see my patrician bubble as the very opposite of normal? Most probably.
And that has my mind wandering, as I take a sip of my delicious and absolutely lethal gimlet from a crystal coupe, to how the Ward family’s Thanksgiving looks.
Do they invite friends over, or do they go it alone in that little house?
Does the ghost of Elyse’s mother hang over them?
Are they celebrating more than usual this year, and has the joy of having her family’s debt forgiven supplanted any memories in her mind that she may have had of me—good or bad?
Either way, I’d bet there’s less Waterford crystal and a whole lot more giving of actual thanks over in Jersey than there is here in Glen Cove.
Eventually, the party grinds crashingly to a close, our guests are herded out to their awaiting drivers, and we adjourn to the dining room.
We are six this evening—Mom, Dad, me, and my siblings: the OG Vosses.
Seb’s wife, Charlotte, is notably absent, as are his kids, Eleanor and William.
Honestly, I feel their absence. I was counting on the kids to lighten up the atmosphere. Will in particular is a hoot.
Once we’ve held hands and said grace—because apparently you should come over as even more Episcopalian on Thanksgiving, even when it’s just you and the staff—Mom gets right down to her regular business of controlling the narrative.
“I assume Charlotte’s poor mother must still be feeling unwell?” she inquires of Seb as Dad pours an inch of red Burgundy into her glass.
My brother and I exchange a Not this bullshit again look. Charlotte’s mom is one hundred percent recovered from the shingles she developed a couple of months ago. But he knows how this goes. We all do.
“Exactly,” he tells Mom. “She felt it was the right thing to do.”
“That poor woman,” Dad says. “Shingles is a nasty business.”
“Well, I think it shows a commendable sense of loyalty on Charlotte’s part, taking the children up to Maine for Thanksgiving,” Mom says. “I told Senator Thorne as much when he asked after them earlier. I know how much they love spending the holiday at Fairwater.”
“We’ll have to spoil them even more at Christmas,” my sister, Melissa, pipes up, tucking her long hair behind her ear.
“I’ll come back early to make cookies with them.
” It’s exactly the kind of beige, pointless platitude she can be relied upon to provide at family meals, and, while I know it comes from her deep-seated horror of rocking the boat, it irks me even more than usual this evening.
I’m not sure if that’s because I’m watching the scene unfold through Elyse’s eyes or because this year it’s even more obvious to everybody, my parents included, that Seb and Charlotte’s marriage is now urgently in need of a priest to read it its last rites.
No one knows that better than my older brother and I—except, of course, for Charlotte.
But who gives a flying fuck about the real state of affairs when we can rely on gossips like Senator Thorne to push a far more palatable narrative instead, with little more than a verbal nudge from Mom?
Who indeed.
It’s only my youngest brother, Xander, who has the gall to look down at his plate of beautifully carved turkey and snicker quietly to himself. I glance over at him until he catches my eye. Hopefully, he can see from my expression that he’s not alone in his lack of tolerance for this horseshit.
Incidentally, Xander isn’t alone in his choice of underwear, either.
Because, unbeknown to my parents or to Melissa, he pulled me and Seb into the downstairs restroom as my folks bade their guests farewell and forced us to don his Thanksgiving gifts under our dress pants: matching pumpkin-orange boxer briefs that he’d commissioned from Etsy, bearing the following in jaunty black print across the butt:
THANKFUL FOR GENERATIONAL WEALTH.
Later, feeling low-key nauseated from a surplus of excellent food and terrible conversation, I swipe an unfinished bottle of claret from the walnut sideboard and take myself off in search of an empty room.
If I can’t bleach my brain, then I need a half-hour of solitude and silence before we embark on the parlor games portion of the evening.
I settle on the study and close the heavy oak door behind me, blowing out a sigh of relief before I wander over to the desk, swinging my bottle.
Boy, is this room thick with memories: recent ones, bittersweet ones. I run a hand over the wooden rim, allowing myself to recall how I fucked Elyse right here just a few weeks ago, urging her not to look away as she fell apart around me.
But as I sit heavily down in the leather chair, those memories begin to blister and burn as the poison of this room’s legacy takes hold. Whatever the year, whatever the crisis, whatever the context, the answer has always been: it was Marion Voss, in the Fairwater study, with the wax seal.
Maybe I should commission a bespoke version of Clue for her Christmas gift. I’m sure Xander can point me to someone on Etsy.
I take a slug of the excellent Pauillac straight from the bottle and pick up the heavy brass seal, turning it this way and that, examining the edges of the “V”—innocuous here; less so when its imprint lands in your mailbox.
I recall the sober look on Elyse’s face when I told her my mom ruins lives with this very seal.
I can’t tell if you’re joking.
No, sweetheart. I wasn’t joking. I wish I was.
But as the intricate brass design glints in the firelight, just as it did that afternoon with Elyse, an idea begins to take form in that gradual way an image appears on film in a dark room.
I know I want to transfer power to her, control to her—that much I’m decided on. In the Vosses’ world, power isn’t just money and influence and generation upon generation of entitlement.
It’s information.
Rather, it’s the flow and the suppression of information that forms the cornerstone of our power. We decide who knows what version of what, and when.
And wouldn’t it be positively poetic if Marion Voss’s prized wax seal became not an executioner’s stamp but a symbol of transparency? Of trust?
Elyse won’t take my calls.
She won’t see me.
She doesn’t trust me.
The only way I can reach her, in truth, is the old-fashioned way: by letter.
And if I want my letters to be a true abdication of control, a true transfer of power, then I’d sure as hell better make certain that they bear the ultimate guarantee of authenticity.
The Voss seal.
I open the top drawer, pull out a sheaf of Fairwater-headed notepaper, slide my trusty Montblanc out of my inner blazer pocket, and begin to write.
And write.
And write.
At some point, the study door opens, and I look up dazedly. It’s only Seb.
“You’re wanted for Monopoly,” he says.
“Yeah. Tell them I’ll be through in ten.”
“Whatcha doin’? Looks serious.”
“I’m writing to Elyse,” I say. “I’m telling her everything.”
His eyebrows wing up. “Everything?”
“Not everything. Not stories that aren’t mine to tell. But everything I’ve been complicit in, sure.”
“Fair enough.” He shrugs like he, too, has no more fucks to give. “Spill it all.”
“Even Charlotte?”
He pauses, looking somber. “Even Charlotte. I have to do something about that sooner rather than later, anyway. Just wait until I’ve gotten her blessing.”
I give him a nod and go back to my writing.