“I wasn’t going to let you steal the show, was I?” She linked arms and dragged me to the edge of the terrace. “You see? This is what I mean by sisterly solidarity. The Schuyler girls, on top of the world. Look at that park, Vivian. Do you ever get tired of a view like that?”
I gazed down at the bumpy dark rectangle of Central Park, the sharp and twinkling edges of the towers around it. No, you could not ever get tired of a view like this. You could never ever get tired of Manhattan.
Pepper squeezed my arm. “How’s Violet these days?”
“Playing violin with Einstein. I can’t figure her out.”
Pepper turned around and propped herself against a planter filled with purpling cabbage. “How so?”
“How she could live with him. Her husband, I mean. She had to have known what he was like. Why did she put up with it?”
Pepper laughed. “Oh, listen to you. Why did she put up with it? Why do any of them put up with it? Mums, Dadums. I think the secret to marriage is just old-fashioned tolerance.”
“Tolerance of lovers?”
“Tolerance of whatever your husband’s sins. Or vice versa. Obviously Mr. Pepper Schuyler would have to put up with a few.”
“You make it sound so tempting.”
She nodded to the glowing terrace doors. “Everyone makes their own bed, Vivian. Everyone makes their own bargain. Anyway, Violet didn’t put up with it in the end, did she?”
“No, something set her off at last. I just wish I could find out what it was.”
Pepper leaned her head back and let the Manhattan moon bathe her face. Her beauty was so sudden and sharp, it stunned me. She crossed her long legs at the glittery ankle straps. “You’ll let me know when you do.”
“Girls! What are you doing, shivering out here like this?”
We turned in tandem.
“Cousin Lily!” I ran up to her as fast as my skittering heels would allow and pressed kisses to both her sweet little cheeks. She beamed back at me, the old darling, just before Pepper grabbed her for equal treatment.
“I don’t know how you can stand it,” she said. “Look at you in your little dresses.”
“Look at you in yours.”
“You like it? Your aunt Julie took me shopping this week.”
“Say no more,” said Pepper.
I took Lily’s right arm and Pepper took her left, and together we jiggled champagne, cigarettes, and cousin back into the living room, where Lily’s husband, Nick Greenwald, was locked in stiff conversation with Dad. He cast her a look as we entered, a look containing an entire quarter century of shared spousal amusement, and my toes ached.
Confession. I’d had an itty-bitty girlhood crush on Nick Greenwald when I was just beginning to have such thoughts. Well, goodness, he was a war hero! And handsome and exceptionally tall, and with that irresistible air of the forbidden about him, being half Jewish and therefore Not Quite One of Us, as Mums put it. Not quite one of us, is he, she would say, making her eyebrow do that thing of hers, that insolent right angle, while she stubbed her cigarette viciously into the tray. I would think, Thank Jehovah and all the prophets for that. He and Lily were like a bulwark, knit together at every stitch against the pick pick pick of implicit Schuyler disapproval. I marveled at them. Lily was my aunt Christina’s daughter. After Christina died, she and Nick had raised her younger sister, Kiki, along with five children of their own, two of them born after the war. Maybe that was where the crush started. I’d been twelve years old, and there was tall Nick cradling Baby Number Five against his shoulder with the delicate reverence he might lavish on a Fabergé egg (I still remembered Mums’s disapproval, her sneering Forty-three years old and she lets herself get pregnant again) and who couldn’t fall a little in love with that?
Nick Greenwald was in his fifties now, so was Lily, and his brown hair was sprinkled with gray, his hazel eyes crinkled deeply at the corners, but he still had it. Especially standing next to old Dadums, who only had it if it were a gut rounded out with too many cocktails and a face sagging downward with too much pick pick pick. Maybe that’s why Mums resented Nick. He stood up so well to scrutiny. He loved his wife. He loved his kids. He was too damned happy.
The living room was trickling full now. Pepper fled to the bar for a refill. I started to follow her, but Lily’s arm tightened around mine. “Hold on. Before you flutter away, you bird of paradise, I have something for you.”
“A present? For little old me?”