Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Summer 1977
T he day Esme married Victor Sutton was three weeks after Fran left Thomas and moved to Wisconsin with a man she called “the love of my life.” It was funny timing for Esme, who was trying desperately to believe in the concept of “true love.”
It wasn’t that Fran’s abandonment came out of nowhere. For quite some time, Esme had seen the cracks in the foundation of Fran and Thomas’s marriage. The strain of LeeAnne’s illness had cratered the relationship and demanded far more of them than they could give.
On the morning of Esme’s wedding, she woke up to find Thomas alone in the kitchen with a mug of coffee and the enormous James Joyce novel Ulysses. Esme kissed her father’s forehead and silently sat with him until he looked up. When he did, she asked him about the novel.
“You haven’t read it, have you?” Thomas asked.
“I did,” Esme said. “A few months ago.”
Thomas shifted back and crossed his arms over his chest. “It’s a monster of a book, isn’t it?”
Esme hadn’t struggled through it at all, but she knew many people who had. So she agreed, “A monster.”
Thomas had lost about ten pounds since Fran left him. He looked haggard and sorry and old. Esme got up to pour him a cup of coffee and asked him a few more questions about the novel, hoping the conversation would distract him from his broken heart.
But it wasn’t long after that that Esme’s girlfriends arrived to get ready for the wedding. The day was going to have its way with them. And at the end of it all, Esme would be married to a Harvard grad student. She would be “one of the wives.”
Margaret was pregnant again. She was one of the bridesmaids and tried her darnedest to hide her pregnant belly, but it was no use. She puffed out her cheeks and said, “This will be you soon!”
Esme’s stomach flipped over. She was pretty sure she wanted that. She was pretty sure she could still read as much as she wanted as a baby grew in her belly. She remembered her list of “must reads” that she’d compiled when she’d decided not to go to Rutgers University after all. The list got longer and longer as she learned of more books.
But once the baby came, there wouldn’t be time.
And then another would come. And another.
“Did I tell you what I heard about Hank?” Margaret was saying now.
It took Esme a few seconds to fully remember who Hank was. “No?”
“He learned about your engagement and lost his head,” Margaret said. “This was at a party on the beach a couple of weeks back. He kept telling everyone that you were the real love of his life. Never mind that he’s engaged to somebody he met in Michigan.”
Esme giggled. She felt nothing. Hank was like an actor from a different era in her life story.
Like most wedding days, Esme’s went by in the blink of an eye. There she was, walking down the aisle, saying her vows, kissing Victor in front of his family and her family of one (just her father, now), eating dinner, eating cake, drinking champagne. Victor’s father, Jeremy, asked for a dance, and then her father asked for one. Thomas wept openly during their dance and told her she looked like her mother. Esme wanted to melt on the spot.
A girl was supposed to have her mother at her wedding. Esme, who’d been born to one mother and raised by another, had no mother. Fran was miles away. Fran had never cared for her at all.
Victor already said this was the kind of damage better dealt with in therapy. But although Esme was now married to a soon-to-be psychiatrist, she didn’t fully believe in therapy. It was 1977. People dealt with their problems themselves behind closed doors.
The first night they were married, Esme and Victor stayed in a swanky hotel on a mostly empty southern Nantucket beach. There was champagne and chocolate on the bed and a balcony with a staircase that led out to the water. Late at night, Esme and her new husband ran through the sharp Nantucket winds and dipped their toes in the surf. They called each other’s name to the wind. “Mr. and Mrs. Sutton!” It thrilled Esme to hear that. It didn’t occur to her till much later that now, nobody would know she was related to her father, not by name. She totally belonged to Victor. She totally belonged to the story they were building together.
She prayed she hadn’t given too much of herself up in the process. She prayed it was worth it.
And when Rebecca was born two years later, Esme fully believed it had all been worth it. How could she not? Little Rebecca was the sweetest thing she’d ever seen. She cried sweetly; she smiled sweetly; she even nursed sweetly. Sure, Esme had to do her very best to ensure Rebecca didn’t cry when Victor was studying—but all of the “Harvard wives” were dealing with that. She hardly thought about it at all.