Chapter 1 #4
Dominique’s oldest child, Tommy, had been the first to break free from her ultraconservative expectations.
Tommy had gone west to college at USC, to study film, instead of the eastern Ivy League schools he qualified for that she wanted for him and that his father and his relatives had attended.
Tommy wanted to be his own person, and resisted his father and mother’s influence.
He went to business school at Stanford after USC, moved to L.A.
when he got his MBA, and at thirty-three was now the number two person at the most important streaming platform in the business, and a favorite to become CEO when the current one retired in the next few years.
He loved his job, and his wife, Marlene, a flashy young starlet he had fallen in love with as soon as he got to L.A.
He had married her four years later, at twenty-nine, and Dominique was still leery of her.
She was an ambitious girl who had set her sights on Tommy relentlessly and won him in the end.
She gave up a minor acting career the moment they married.
They had two babies in two years, and she was dressed in head-to-foot Chanel now, thanks to Tommy.
Everything she wore and did was expensive, and she wore clothes that left her as naked as possible and showed off her flawless body.
Tommy loved it. He had bought a big house in Bel Air at her urging, and indulged her in all the ways she demanded.
It set Dominique’s nerves on edge to see her son taken advantage of, but she said nothing to her son.
He would have leapt to his wife’s defense.
And she didn’t want to jeopardize her relationship with him by criticizing his wife.
She had set up trust funds for all three of her children from her own generous inheritance from her father, but she hated to see her son pumped for money by a greedy wife.
Dominique considered Marlene arm candy, not a woman of substance who contributed anything, which made Dominique angry on her son’s behalf.
Despite his success in business, which she was proud of, he was an innocent with his wife.
Dominique had a discreet, restrained personal style.
Marlene flashed sex and money like a neon sign.
Everything she wore was too short, too low, and too tight.
She had a fabulous figure even after two babies, and Tommy was ecstatic, and seemed to have tossed all sense of propriety to the winds.
Her look shrieked of vulgarity, and the more naked she was, the better he liked it, as he showed off his prize at every Hollywood event they attended.
It made Dominique wince when she saw them in the press.
Dominique visited them in L.A. a couple of times a year, and Tommy always had lunch with his mother when he had business in New York.
He was a devoted son, husband, and father, but totally blind to his wife’s greed, bad manners, and bad taste, which amazed his mother and sisters.
Dominique knew better than to complain about her, and Tommy wouldn’t have tolerated it.
He was loyal to Marlene. It made his mother’s heart ache when she saw them.
There were so many genuinely nice women he could have had, but Marlene had him enthralled.
He loved everything about her, and Dominique accepted it with tolerance and grace.
Their wedding at the Hotel Bel-Air had been a lavish affair that Dominique had paid for, without complaint, at Tommy’s request, since Marlene’s father was in jail for passing bad checks at the time, and her mother was dead broke and still in rehab for severe alcoholism.
She made it out in time for the wedding in a skin-tight white dress as mother of the bride.
Dominique offered to make Marlene’s dress, but she had found her own, which was slit up to her hip bone and showed the cleavage Tommy loved, a backless, nearly topless dress that left nothing to the imagination.
Tommy thought she looked fabulous, which was all that mattered.
Dominique just wanted her son to be happy.
And the wedding was lovely. His grandmother had come from Paris, the last big trip she had taken, and she was glad she had come to support Dominique.
It had been a hard night for her. Once Tommy and Marlene were married, her relationship with them was cautious, distant, and tenuous.
Dominique saw little of her son, living in L.A.
, and he was off to his own life now, under the influence of his wife.
Their two sons were adorable at two and three, but she didn’t see them often either.
It had been her first experience with learning to let her children go and it hadn’t been easy for her.
Bill had been at the wedding too, and was shocked by how bold the bride was, and how totally enraptured Tommy was, although he was otherwise sensible, and smart about his career.
But he was ingenuous and innocent with women, and had had no guidance from his father for his entire life.
Andrew was there with his latest girlfriend, who was younger than the bride.
Neither of Dominique’s daughters was married yet.
Felicity was thirty-two, and had a very conservative boyfriend, Taylor Whitfield, from an old guard New York family.
He worked on Wall Street in investments, and he worried Dominique.
Felicity was an artist and a gentle soul, and Taylor seemed to control her.
They lived together, and Dominique was relieved that they seemed to have no interest in marriage.
There was something about Taylor that made her uneasy, no matter how socially prominent his family was.
She worried about Felicity, who never seemed to stand up for herself or what she believed in.
All she wanted to do was paint and lead a quiet life.
Taylor was much more sociable than Felicity was, and in her mother’s opinion, he didn’t seem the right match for her.
He had a strong need to control and rule by intimidation, and Felicity was easy prey.
Dominique’s third child, Violet, at twenty-eight, was a fireball and an extrovert who had lots of opinions, was politically liberal, and had an interesting store on Madison Avenue, full of high- priced luxury objects she found all over the world.
She had been dating a sports reporter for two years, Jamie Madison, who was casual, fun, from an unruly but wholesome, simple family.
He was a little rough around the edges, and a thoroughly good guy, but not the kind of man Dominique had envisioned Violet marrying one day.
She could imagine her more easily with a European, maybe even someone older, like Dominique’s father, not a boy from Boston who knew every player’s batting average all the way back to Babe Ruth, but had no social graces.
The choices of partners her children had made were unexpected if nothing else, and not the people Dominique hoped they would marry.
But at least neither of her daughters seemed interested in marriage for the time being, which was a relief.
She and Bill talked about the girls sometimes, and he told her that he was sure that neither Taylor Whitfield nor Jamie Madison, at the other extreme, was likely to be the men they would marry one day.
He had said the same about Marlene, and had been wrong.
Dominique had made her peace with Tommy’s choice of wife in the meantime, but not easily, for the sake of harmony.
Dominique’s mother was much more philosophical about it.
“There’s nothing you can do about their choice of life partners,” Marie-Aurélie had said.
“My parents were heartbroken about my life with your father, particularly when he never divorced and we never married. And I was the happiest woman on earth as long as he was alive. It worked for us, which is all that matters really. If Tommy is happy with Marlene, you’ll have to swallow your own ideas about her.
Looking vulgar doesn’t make her a bad person.
They’re crazy about each other, which is something.
My parents never saw me again, which was wrong of them.
They wanted to come to Armand’s funeral, to pay their respects.
I wouldn’t let them, it was too late for me, and I never saw them before they died, and never regretted it.
They were too cruel to both of us when your father was alive.
He never minded about my parents. He was a very forgiving person.
It took me years to forgive them, and they were long dead by then.
Our role as parents is to support our children in their life choices and not impose our own will or dreams on them.
We don’t have the right to do that once they’ve grown up.
” Dominique had tried to follow her mother’s advice, though it hadn’t been easy.
Marlene had become more flamboyant since marrying Tommy, instead of less, and she could do it with his money, but they were happy.
Dominique felt as though she had lost her son to Marlene, which was somewhat true.
His life centered around his wife and children now, and his career and life in L.A.
Dominique had lost him to his new life, and hoped it wouldn’t happen with the girls too.
She was thinking of all of them as she looked out her office window on a bleak November afternoon.
Tommy had just sent her an email to tell her that he and Marlene and the children weren’t coming home for Thanksgiving, and were going to Mexico instead, taking his mother-in-law and Marlene’s sister with them.
He had a new family now, and Dominique had no choice but to accept it and be a good sport.