It’s a funny story, really. How you’ll laugh. I know I did, when my mother explained it to me over vodka gimlets one night, when I was thirteen. You see, she went into labor with me ten whole days before the due date, which was terribly inconvenient because she had this party to go to. Well, it was an important party! The van der Wahls were throwing it, you see, and everybody would be there, and Mums even had the perfect dress to minimize the disgusting bump of me, not that she ever had much bump to speak of, being five-foot-eleven in her stocking feet and always careful not to gain more than fifteen pounds during pregnancy.
Well. Anyway. There I inconveniently arrived, five days before the van der Wahls’ party, six pounds, ten ounces, and twenty-two gazelle inches long, and poor Mums had no more girl names because of my two older sisters, so she left unchanged the little card on my bassinet reading Baby Girl Schuyler, put on her party dress and her party shoes, and checked herself out of the hospital. Voilà! Disaster averted.
Except that when the nanny arrived the next day to check me out of the hospital, they needed a name in order to report the birth. I don’t know why, they just did. So the nanny said, hmm, Vivian seems like a safe choice. And the nurses said, Alrighty, Vivian it is.
Oh, but you’d never guess all this to see us now. Just look at the ardent way I swept into the Schuyler aerie on Fifth Avenue and Sixty-ninth Street, tossed an affectionate kiss on Mums’s powdered cheek, and snatched the outstretched glass from her hand.
“You slept with him, didn’t you?” she said.
“Of course I did.” I sipped delicately. “But don’t worry. He practically asked me to marry him on the spot.”
“Practically is not actually, Vivian.”
I popped the olive down the hatch. “Trust me, Mums. Is Aunt Julie here today?”
“No, she’s having lunch with the Greenwalds.” Out came the moue, just like that.
“Ooh, and how are our darling Jewish cousins doing these days? Has Kiki had her baby yet?” I watched her consternation with delight. Poor old Mums never could quite accustom herself to what she was pleased to call the Hebrew stain in the Schuyler blood. Of which, more later.
Mums made a triumphant little cluck of her tongue. “Not yet. I hear she’s as big as a house.”
“Oh, maybe it’s twins! Wouldn’t that be lovely!” I pitched that one over my shoulder on the way to the living room, where my father wallowed on a sofa with my sister to his left and a fresh pair of trickling gimlets lined up to his right. (The vodka gimlet was one of the few points of agreement between my parents.) He staggered to his feet at the sight of me.
“Dadums! Handsome as ever, I see.” I kissed his cheek, right between two converging red capillaries.
“You look like a tramp in that dress.” He returned the kiss and crashed back down.
“That’s the point, Dad. Two guesses whether it did the trick.”
“Don’t listen to him, Vivs. You look gorgeous.” Pepper pulled me down next to her for a cuddle. “A little creased, though,” she added in a whisper.
“Imagine that,” I whispered back. We linked arms. Pepper was my favorite sister by a ladies’ mile. Neither of us could politely stand Tiny, who had by the grace of God married her Harvard mark last June and now lived in a respectably shabby house in the Back Bay with a little Boston bean in her righteous oven. God only knew how it got there.
“I want details,” said Pepper.
“Take a number, sister.”
Mums appeared in the doorway with her cigarette poised in its holder. She marched straight to the drinks tray. “Charles, tell your daughter what a man thinks of a girl who jumps into bed with him right away.”
He watched her clink away with ice and glass. “Obviously, I have no idea,” he drawled.
Pepper jumped to her feet and slapped her hands over her ears. “Not another word. Really. Stop.”
Mums turned. The stopper dangled from one hand, the cigarette holder from the other. So very Mumsy. “What are you suggesting, Charles?”
“Dad was only celebrating your renowned virtue, Mums. As do we all.”
She turned back to her mixology. “Fine. Do as you like. I’d just like to point out that among the three of you, only Tiny’s found a husband.”
“Mums, I’d rather die a virgin than marry Franklin Hardcastle,” said I.
“No chance of that,” muttered Pepper.
“Pot, meet kettle,” I muttered back.
Mums was crying. “I miss her.”
“Now, now,” I said. “No use weeping over spilled milk. Especially when the milk took so excruciatingly long to get spilled.”
“At least one of my daughters has a sense of female decorum.” Sniff, sip, cigarette.
“I can’t imagine where she got it from,” said Pepper. God, I loved Pepper. We were simpatico, Pepper and me, perhaps because we’d arrived an unseemly twelve months apart. As a teenager, I’d once spent an entire morning smuggling through Mums’s old letters to discover whether we were half sisters or full. I’d have to concede full, given the genetic evidence. Tiny, I’m not so sure.
“Apparently not from our great-aunt Violet.” I piped the words cheerfully.
Next to me, Dad exploded into a fit of coughing.
Mums’s red eyes peeped over her poisons. “Are you all right, Charles?”
“Who’s Aunt Violet?” asked Pepper.
“Oh, this isn’t about that package, is it?” said Mums.
I pounded Dad’s broad back. The hacking was beginning to break up, thank goodness, just as his face shifted from red to purple. “Deep breaths,” I said.