Chapter 2
Felicity always dressed with particular care when she was having dinner at the Whitfields’.
Taylor’s mother, Elizabeth Whitfield, noticed every detail, and always made comments afterward to Taylor, and Felicity wanted to give her as little as possible to complain about.
Taylor claimed his mother’s comments didn’t matter to him, but Felicity knew they did, and he always mentioned them as though he expected her to do something about it.
She tried on a black dress which looked too funereal, a brown suit which didn’t look right either, and settled on a navy dress she had bought with his parents in mind.
It was conservative, but the midnight blue seemed softer than black.
It was a proper length, and she wore the pearl necklace her grandmother had given her when she turned twenty-one, with small, discreet pearl and diamond earrings to match.
She got almost all the paint off her fingers, wore her long blond hair in a sleek ponytail, and put on high heels, but not too high.
Felicity was taller than her mother but looked a great deal like her.
She wore very little makeup, and Taylor smiled when he saw her.
It was hard to find fault with her appearance.
She was beautiful, elegant, and aristocratic.
“You look perfect,” Taylor said approvingly.
The dinner was a command performance, as his parents’ invitations always were.
As an only child, he was expected to dine with them frequently, and he didn’t like to disappoint them.
His father, Phillip, worked for an investment bank, and managed several important estates of well-known families.
He hadn’t had an exciting career, but he enjoyed his work, had a reputation for giving sound advice, and had guided Taylor in the same direction, and Taylor had a good job at a respectable firm, and was on a satisfactory trajectory in wealth management.
He had gone to Princeton, like his father and both his grandfathers.
Taylor and his father went to their reunions together every year, never missing one.
Everything about Phillip Whitfield’s life had been comfortably predictable, including the girl he married.
Elizabeth Brooke, his best friend’s sister, had gone to Vassar, was a year younger than he was, and he had been her escort at her debutante ball.
They had married when she graduated and he was in his first job on Wall Street.
They had waited longer than most of their friends to have children, and then it had taken more time than expected to conceive Taylor.
His parents were now seventy-two and seventy-three years old, and always seemed like an anachronism to Felicity.
They were conservative and old-fashioned, and staunch Republicans no matter who ran for president.
They were almost cookie-cutter archetypes of their kind, and their social life was governed by who was in the Social Register, which was the bible they lived by.
They knew that the Walkers, Felicity’s father’s family, were in it, but her mother’s family was in a far more suspicious listing, the Almanach de Gotha, which listed the noble families of Europe and was a publication they had no faith in whatsoever, but at least the Walkers made Felicity acceptable in their eyes.
They were unaware of her father’s dubious dating habits, his penchant for very young women, and his infidelities, but they wouldn’t have mattered to the Whitfields as long as his bloodline was good.
It was Taylor’s mother who always subjected Felicity to thinly veiled interrogations.
His father had two Scotches before dinner and was mellower, and enjoyed Felicity’s good looks and good manners.
There had been no talk of marriage until then, but the Whitfields didn’t want Taylor, at thirty-seven, wasting his time with unsuitable women he couldn’t marry.
The entire weight of carrying on the Whitfield name rested on him, as the only child of an only son, so it would fall to him to provide an heir to the name one day.
There would be no fortune to go with it, just blue blood and distinguished ancestry, though far less distinguished than Dominique’s family tree, which they were unaware of and would have discounted anyway as Eurotrash.
They were suspicious of all things foreign.
Felicity didn’t look forward to her evenings with them, but she went to make Taylor happy.
He was close to his parents, and Taylor and Felicity usually spent the week between Christmas and New Year with them, at their spartan, drafty, slightly shabby vacation home in Vermont.
It was close to Sugarbush, so they spent most of their time skiing while they were there.
Taylor’s father still skied, but his mother didn’t, after an injured knee several years before.
After dating for two years, Taylor had moved into Felicity’s loft in Tribeca the year before. It saved him money to move in with her. It was a big bright loft apartment on the Hudson River, with a large open space she used as the studio where she painted.
“I got good news today,” Felicity told Taylor in a cab on the way uptown to Park Avenue in the eighties, where his parents lived and he had grown up.
He had gone to Buckley, an exclusive private boys’ school, then Saint Paul’s for prep school, before Princeton.
He had attended all the “right” schools, and had been an ordinary student, and a good athlete in high school and college.
And he had been accepted in Ivy, the same eating club his father belonged to in college.
Everything in Taylor’s life was a blueprint for respectability, which Felicity found she liked.
There was a comforting stability to it, although her sister Violet thought Taylor dull and boring.
Felicity didn’t. But she conceded that he and his parents were snobs.
Felicity was aware of her mother’s more unusual background, growing up with unmarried parents, which seemed a little shocking although Felicity adored her French grandmother.
Her father’s parents had died young so she had no other grandparents, and her father’s nearly total absence from her childhood had made her hungry for solid, respectable men in her life.
She liked Taylor’s father more than his mother, who always seemed to be on the hunt for flaws to object to, and was critical of everyone’s background, and dubious about Felicity’s.
She approved of Felicity’s father, but a French designer mother who made wedding gowns sounded sketchy to her.
And Felicity’s career as an artist categorized her as “bohemian” in Elizabeth Whitfield’s opinion.
They had been momentarily impressed that Felicity had gone to Yale, but discounted it quickly when she told them she had majored in fine arts, which sounded like a second-rate program to them.
She had invited them to her gallery shows as a courtesy in the last two years, and they had never come to see them.
They had unimpressive art in their apartment, and no interest in the art world or Felicity’s work as a painter.
Her good news of the day was that she had been invited to participate in a show at an important gallery in June, which was big news for her, but Taylor didn’t seem excited about it when she told him on the way uptown.
He had changed the subject quickly to remind her of his office party a week before Christmas, which he had invited her to.
They were looking forward to it, but the gallery show was a major coup.
She had told her mother, who was thrilled for her, and knew the gallery well.
Dominique came to all Felicity’s openings, and was a staunch supporter of her work.
Bill often came with her, and had bought several of her paintings.
Taylor was polite about her art, but wasn’t interested in it.
She had done a portrait of him the year before, for him to give his parents for Christmas.
They didn’t think it was a good likeness of him.
His mother thought it looked “unfinished,” and had hung it in a back hallway, which was how they regarded her career, and dismissed it.
Felicity was slowly building a reputation as a serious artist on the New York art scene.
She didn’t take their indifference personally, could easily tell they weren’t art lovers, and Taylor hadn’t grown up with a strong interest in art.
They preferred the symphony, the opera, and the ballet, and had season tickets for all three.
They went because it was the thing to do, not because of any passion for the arts.
Elizabeth looked Felicity over as she always did when they got to the apartment, as though looking for some flaw, and seemed disappointed not to find it.
Taylor’s father was on his second Scotch on the rocks and already mellow, and Taylor followed his mother into another room for a private exchange that Felicity paid no attention to, while she chatted with Phillip about the early snows they were having in Vermont, and how good the snow would be by Christmas.
Dinner went without incident. The conversation was as bland as the food, some politics, some business, some gossip about people Felicity didn’t know or care about.
They ate at seven, as Elizabeth and Phillip did every night.
Felicity and Taylor were back on their way downtown to Tribeca before nine, and Felicity felt the tension leave her body as she relaxed in the cab.
Felicity lit a cigarette when they got home, and Taylor looked at her with disapproval.
She wasn’t a heavy smoker, but smoked occasionally.
“My mother would have a fit if she knew you smoke. She thinks it makes women look cheap,” he reported.