The Sins of the Mother

Chapter 3


In recent years Olivia’s invitations to her children for their family vacation had come by e-mail, roughly six weeks before the trip. They always knew it was coming, and that it would be in the last two weeks of July, ending with her birthday on the last night. That much was predictable. What they didn’t know, and what she surprised them with every year, was the location. It was always someplace fabulous, and Olivia worked hard to come up with an unusual venue that everyone would love.

She wanted it to be a place and a trip that her children would remember forever. At one time it had had to be suitable for small children, when her grandchildren were younger. Now they had reached a reasonable age, from late teens to mid-twenties, when they could enjoy the same type of location as the adults, but it had to be lively enough to amuse everyone, and not just a peaceful place to provide rest for the grown-ups. It also had to offer fishing for her sons, who were addicts of the sport, and Phillip was fond of playing golf whenever possible. Both he and John loved sailing, a passion shared by their father when they were boys. They had gone to sailing camp as kids. The vacation had to be in a place that the women in the group would enjoy—her daughters, daughters-in-law, and granddaughters—and she wanted to relax and have fun too, so that ruled out rigorous trips like trekking in Nepal. She always opted for luxury over adventure. Whatever their qualms about vacationing as a family, Olivia tried to come up with a trip that would incorporate everyone’s needs and desires, accommodate their quirks, and still any fears they might have about spending close to two weeks under one roof together. It was an interesting challenge, and she always wanted it to be special, and an unforgettable holiday for them all. It was something she could do for them.

The first year, she had rented a château in France, fully staffed, in Périgord. It had been beautiful beyond belief, with picturesque terrain and vineyards, and excellent horseback riding nearby in Dordogne. Her grandchildren had been little then, and they had loved it too. There had been a spectacular villa in St. Tropez complete with speedboats and a private beach; a fabulous estate in Spain; and a private island in Greece that had been a major hit. There had been a famous house in St. Jean Cap Ferrat that later sold for seventy-five million dollars, a Schloss in Austria, a private island in the Caribbean that had been hot but fabulous, and a Vanderbilt mansion in Newport. Olivia never disappointed them, and she hoped not to this year either. The location she ultimately selected, after nearly a full year of research, was always a secret until they got the invitation on the first of June.

As Amanda Grayson, Phillip’s wife, opened the e-mail early in the morning, she was the first to see this year’s location. It was the three-hundred-foot motor yacht Lady Luck, built two years before, anchored in Monaco, and they would be cruising the Mediterranean in Italy and France. The boat included every imaginable luxury and comfort, including a gym, a spa, a movie theater, and a hair salon, complete with trainers and attendants, and a crew of twenty-four, and all kinds of water toys, from jet skis to sailboats to speedboats to delight the children. Olivia had outdone herself.

Amanda sat expressionlessly, as she read down the list of what was included on the boat. It was a trip she resigned herself to every year. As Olivia was her mother-in-law, and her husband’s employer, Amanda viewed her invitation as a command performance. And however luxurious it was, it was still two weeks on holiday with her extremely powerful, successful mother-in-law. Amanda would have preferred a trip alone with Phillip. But Phillip liked the family vacation, especially spending time with his siblings, and even Amanda had to admit that the Lady Luck looked spectacular.

As she read through the e-mail, with her mother-in-law’s note of invitation, Amanda started thinking about the wardrobe she would need. She knew that her sister-in-law Liz would share a trendy wardrobe with her daughters, who seemed to dress out of one suitcase, even if the clothes looked too young on Liz, but she had a good body and could get away with it. John’s wife looked like the college professor she was, no matter what she wore. Her wardrobe always looked like hand-me-downs from her students. And Olivia would wear linen dresses, colorful silks, and Lilly Pulitzer. She was well dressed and age appropriate but never showy.

Olivia’s interests lay in business and not fashion. She was far more avant-garde in the furniture designs she chose than in her wardrobe. Her hair would be perfectly cut before the trip, in her signature snow-white bob, and she would wear the string of pearls Joe had given her to mark the early success of their business, which she had never stopped wearing since, out of sentiment. She still wore her narrow gold wedding ring fourteen years after his death, and other than that, simple earrings, and a gold bracelet she wore every day. It was all very modest. But if Amanda was going to go on vacation in fabulous locations against her will, she was going to dress for the occasion, not the company at hand.

None of the Graysons felt a need to show off or be pretentious, which Amanda never understood. With the kind of money they had, why not spend it? It was an art she’d been teaching Phillip since they had married nineteen years before. She was forty-four years old, and they had met when Phillip was at Harvard Business School getting his MBA, and she was at Harvard Law. Amanda was unashamedly ambitious about her career. They had married when she graduated, and she immediately joined a prestigious law firm. She rose to the top quickly, and had been a partner for a dozen years. She made an excellent living on her own, but she would never make the kind of money that Phillip would inherit one day and had at his disposal now. His father had invested conservatively and brilliantly and set up trust funds for the children. Phillip’s siblings lived comfortably though modestly, and their mother had a handsome house on an estate in Bedford, but they were not given to random displays of money, unless they had some purpose, like an important charitable donation.

Amanda had been working on Phillip for years to enjoy his money. They had bought a town house in the East Seventies, and she had filled it with beautiful antiques, many of which they had bought in London. And Phillip had a small but elegant sailboat that he kept at a yacht club in Southampton, where they had a small house. Their careers were the main focus of their lives, Amanda was deeply concerned with their social life, and they had no children. She had told him right from the beginning that children would distract them from their goals and sap their funds and energy. She didn’t want them and had convinced Phillip he didn’t either. More important, she said they didn’t need them, they had each other and a wonderful life. What more could they want? Children would only be an interference.

Phillip had no regrets about not having children. His sister Cass had had none either, for the same reasons he hadn’t. Their memories of their childhood were of being deprived of their mother. He had no desire to do that to someone else, and Amanda had no urge to be a mother and never had. It wasn’t in her DNA, nor in his. There was an icy coolness to her that Phillip had always found enticing. Her seeming lack of emotion, on every subject except her own career, was a challenge to him. He wasn’t overtly emotional or demonstrative either, but he had moments of deep affection for Amanda, which she rarely reciprocated. She was the original ice maiden, and when he’d met them, her parents were no different. They were distant, ambitious, self-centered people. Both her parents were attorneys. And they were very impressed with Phillip’s fortune and the business he would one day inherit.

Amanda longed for Phillip to run everything himself, and it irked her that Olivia had no desire to step down and retire, and leave the empire to her oldest son. Olivia was still very much in control, as Amanda saw it, not only of The Factory, but of her children as well. All Amanda wanted was for Phillip to take over, and instead he was content to stand behind his mother quietly, in his role as CFO. Unlike Amanda, he had no hunger for the limelight. Amanda accused him often of being “owned” by his mother, which annoyed him, but he had no need or desire to prove her wrong. He was content in his life as it was, and happy to let Amanda run the show at home. She directed their social life and who they saw, and he knew how determined she was to meet important people and ultimately become a judge. Prestige and appearances were important to her, far more than they were to Phillip. He had lived in his mother’s shadow for years, and in some ways it suited him. He had no desire to take over, and he didn’t want all the headaches that came with being the CEO. He had seen how it had eaten up his mother’s life, and how time consuming it was. Instead, he was happy to sail his boat on weekends, or play golf, and leave the office at six o’clock. He didn’t want to stay in the office until midnight as his mother often did, or spend his life on planes to other cities and foreign countries, and he knew his brother, John, felt exactly the same way. They knew too well the price you paid for the life their mother led. Amanda considered his lack of hunger for power a major character flaw, and she never let him forget it. They fought about it often, and when she went on a tirade about his mother, he ignored her or went out. He liked his life as it was.

Amanda was tall and stately looking, blond with cool blue eyes and an excellent figure. She went to the gym frequently, except on weekends. She dressed well, and he was happy to pay for it. He liked having a beautiful wife on his arm. And he was well aware that as an only child, she wasn’t crazy about his family, and thought both his sisters strange, and his brother negligible as an artist, and his college professor sister-in-law of no interest whatsoever. John’s wife, Sarah, didn’t play the social game, and was only interested in academia and intellectual pursuits. The only one in the family that Amanda truly admired was his mother, although Amanda had never warmed up to her and didn’t really like her, but one had to respect her for turning a hardware store into a worldwide event. Amanda had to give her that. She wished that Phillip were more like her, but neither of Olivia’s sons had her ambition. They were much more like their father, who had been content to stay in the background and be part of Olivia’s support system. Joe Grayson had never wanted more than that, nor had his boys.

Olivia stood alone in her passionate attack on life, taking the world by the horns with her creative and financial genius. Amanda only wished she had had the opportunities Olivia had. But she benefited now from the name and wasn’t shy about using it when it served her. And she was doing all she could to use it to get appointed to the federal bench, which she had been working on for several years. She wanted to be a judge so badly she could taste it, and she used every connection she had to that end. She was always annoyed that Phillip hadn’t done more to help her achieve it, but he always insisted that he didn’t know the right people to help her. Amanda was certain that her mother-in-law did, but she had never dared to ask her for her assistance, and Olivia had never volunteered. The relationship between the two women had always been civil, but there was no great warmth between them. Amanda loved every opportunity to be in the social columns and the papers. Olivia cared about none of that and was interested only in the business section, where she appeared regularly on the front page. Phillip never did, nor did he care. And it meant nothing to him when Amanda got them in the newspapers at some social event.

“What are you reading so intently?” Phillip asked as he walked into the kitchen, and saw Amanda reading an e-mail with a serious expression, as her coffee grew cold beside her. He helped himself to a cup, and sat down across from her at the kitchen table. As always, she was beautifully put together in a cream-colored linen suit. She was perfectly made up, and had her long blond hair pulled back. She looked like a model.

“The summer invitation,” she mumbled, as she continued to read about the boat.

“To what?” Phillip asked as he helped himself to a yogurt from the fridge. Amanda didn’t cook. She had other things to do with her time and she was always on a diet. She had been to the gym that day, as usual, at six A.M., but it paid off. She had a spectacular figure and, like his mother, looked nowhere near her age. Amanda could have passed for thirty, not the forty-four she was.

“Your mother’s birthday trip,” Amanda explained, continuing to read the details about the yacht. She didn’t look excited or pleased. She never was about that trip. And she didn’t think his nieces and nephew should join them—it was tiring for the adults to have them along. She had particularly disliked it when they were younger. But even now she had nothing to say to them. They and Amanda politely ignored each other on the trip every year, although Phillip sometimes enjoyed them, and liked taking his nephew, Alex, fishing with him and John. It was Phillip’s only contact with young people, and Alex was a bright kid. He was a junior in high school, and hoped to go to Stanford, instead of Princeton, where his mother taught literature.

“Where’s she taking us this year?” Phillip asked with interest. He enjoyed the vacations with his siblings, in spite of Amanda’s complaints about them. He had learned not to pay attention to what she said, since she went anyway. His only regret was that they had done nothing like it when their father was alive and the kids were young. There had been family vacations in Maine, but his mother had spent most of the time on the phone to the office, and she and his father had spent the entire time talking business and making plans for new developments she had in mind. It was the only thing that interested her then, or that was how it had felt to Phillip. Olivia just hadn’t had time for them when they were young. The mother figure in his life, and that of his siblings, had been his maternal grandmother, Maribelle—Granibelle as they called her. She lived with them and had been ever-present in their daily lives. She and their father had brought them up, Olivia had appeared between trips and when she came home, usually late, from the office. Their father had always insisted to them how much their mother loved them, and maybe she had, but as far as Phillip was concerned, there had been no evidence of it when he was a child.

Phillip was still fiercely devoted to Granibelle, and visited her whenever he could. She had finally retired to a senior residence on Long Island. It was luxurious, and she was comfortable, and seemed content. She had been a happy person all her life. It was what he remembered most about his childhood, the love and joy she had shared with them, and the affection she lavished on them. She still had a twinkle in her eye at ninety-five, and he always teased her and asked her if she had a new beau, which made her laugh. There had been a ninety-two-year-old a few years before who had been very attentive to her, and then he died. But Maribelle was not a sad person. Whatever the circumstances, she had seen the glass as more than half full, even overflowing with blessings. And her four grandchildren had been one of the great joys in her life. Phillip often tried to get Amanda to visit his grandmother with him, but she rarely had time. She was too busy at the office, not unlike his mother when he was young. And yet Olivia was warmer than Amanda. There was a coolness to Amanda like no other woman Phillip had ever known.

“She’s chartered a boat,” Amanda said with a cool expression as she looked up at him.

Phillip raised an eyebrow in surprise. “That’s going to make my sister Liz nervous. I wonder if she’ll come. She gets seasick. Mom knows that. I wonder why she picked a boat this time.”

“I don’t think she’ll get seasick on this,” Amanda said cryptically. “It’s about the size of the QE2. It has stabilizers and every possible modern device to provide a smooth ride. It’s all in the e-mail,” she said, as Phillip turned the computer so he could see. He glanced at the photographs, and read for a few minutes, and then whistled and looked at Amanda with a grin.

“That’s some boat! A crew of twenty-four, spa, hair salon, movie theater, two sailboats, three speedboats? My mother outdid herself this year. You’re right, Liz will be fine. I guess her seventieth birthday is a bigger deal than I thought. Sounds like fun.” Amanda gave him a quelling look, but it didn’t dampen his spirits. The boat was fabulous, and he was looking forward to it. And Amanda would warm up to it. She did every year, more or less, depending on the location and how much she liked it. He didn’t see how she could resist this. The Lady Luck seemed like paradise to him. And he could fish with his brother, and try out the sailboats they carried on the yacht under the list of “water toys.” Three hundred feet was one hell of a big boat.

“I have nothing to wear,” she said in a chilly tone.

“You never do.” He smiled at her. He heard it every year. Her wardrobe was key to her, and her appearance, and important to her sense of well-being on the trip and in life. “Go shopping, have some fun,” he encouraged her. He never deprived Amanda of what she wanted. He had no one else to spend it on, and he liked spoiling his wife. “You’ll need a whole new boat wardrobe, I imagine,” he said, smiling at her, and this time she smiled back. In some ways it was a perfect marriage, except she wished he was more ambitious, while he was happy with the status quo.

“You know I hate that trip,” Amanda said with a sigh, as she took a sip of her cold coffee. The boat did look fabulous—she just didn’t want to be trapped with his family for two weeks.

“It’s never as bad as you think it will be,” he reminded her. “It sounds like we’ll be going to some fun places, and it really is a gorgeous boat. You always have a good time in the end.” She nodded, loath to admit it to him. “Start shopping. You’ll feel better when you do.”

“Thank you,” she said, and gave him a peck on the cheek, and walked past him to help herself to another cup of coffee. And she knew he was right. A boat as impressive as the Lady Luck would improve the trip immeasurably this year. She glanced at her watch as she heated the coffee. She had to be in court in half an hour. And maybe she’d go shopping that afternoon.

As she sat back down at the kitchen table, Phillip was reading avidly about the boat and stopped to look at her.

“So shall I accept?” he asked.

“Do I have a choice?”

“In reality? No,” he said honestly. He never lied to her, and she knew the vacation with his family was required of her every year. Olivia would have been crushed if they didn’t go, and she made it as nice as possible for them, which her children appreciated. She was making up for the lost years and time.

“Then go ahead and accept,” she said in a dull voice. He pressed the reply button and wrote a quick e-mail accepting his mother’s invitation, and then hit the send button and smiled at Amanda.

“Done,” he said, as she stood and picked up her briefcase and her bag. “Have a nice day. See you tonight,” he said, watching her.

“Thanks,” she said and left the house. She didn’t stop to kiss him goodbye. She never did. He went back to reading the e-mail about the yacht his mother had chartered, and thought about his wife. It was strange, but she always seemed just out of reach to him. It had kept him wanting to win her heart for nineteen years. She was the unattainable ice queen he would always love but never fully have. He knew it was perverse, but there was something about that that he liked. And not being able to have who he loved was painful but familiar to him. He had felt that way all his life, ever since he was a child.



Phillip’s younger sister Liz was hunched over her computer, staring at the blank screen, when the e-mail came in. The sound of the computer voice saying “You’ve got mail!” literally made her wince when she saw who it was from, and she suspected why. It was about that time, and she’d been dreading receiving the e-mail for days. She hated getting it every year, and hated going on her mother’s birthday trip even more. She was always the odd man out, or at least she felt that way. At forty-four, she had felt like the family failure all her life.

She had been concentrating on the screen, with her eyes half closed, trying to write a short story. She had wanted to write since she was a kid. She had published short stories in her early twenties, and then had written a novel. She found an agent through a friend, but no publisher would touch it. They said it wasn’t commercial enough, her characters were flawed, and her plot was weak. Her agent urged her to try again—not everyone published on the first shot. Her second novel was worse. The agent had urged her to rewrite it three times, and when she had, he still couldn’t sell it. She went back to writing short stories and a few poems, and they were published in a literary magazine. And after that she’d been busy getting married, having babies, and trying to keep her head above water. She had been too emotionally spent to write and felt too unstable to even try.

She’d gone back to writing short stories, several years before, but hadn’t written any in three years. She was utterly and completely blocked. She still tried to write in spite of it but never finished anything. And since both of her girls were out of the house, she had told herself that it was now or never. She had been trying to write again seriously for several months, and for the past few weeks she had forced herself to sit down at her computer every day. Nothing came. She just sat there and cried. She was emotionally and mentally constipated, and what was worse, she was the only member of her family who had accomplished absolutely nothing in her entire life. As far as Liz was concerned, publishing a few short stories that no one read didn’t count. It didn’t matter that her agent had said she had talent. That was in her twenties and thirties. Now at forty-four, she had no achievements, no victories, no career, and her years as a stay-at-home mom to her two girls were over.

Her daughter Sophie was getting her master’s at MIT in Boston in computer science, after getting her B.A. at Columbia. She was a math genius and was talking about going on to business school. Like her grandmother, she had a head for business, and at twenty-three, she was far better than her mother at taking care of herself. She was a bright, beautiful, very independent young woman. She had been the product of Liz’s first marriage, to a French Formula 1 race car driver. Liz had fallen madly in love with him and had dropped out of college and run away to marry him at twenty-one. She got pregnant instantly, and he was killed in a race just weeks before Sophie was born. Two years later, with Sophie in tow, Liz had gone to L.A. and dated a well-known actor, Jasper Jones. She had been twenty-three, the same age Sophie was now, with none of her skills or capabilities. Sophie was a practical young woman. Liz had always been more idealistic. Liz had tried to get a job as a screenwriter and had gotten involved with Jasper instead. He was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen. They got married when she was six months pregnant, and the marriage had lasted eleven months.

Carole had been eight months old when they divorced. She was twenty now, and a dreamer like her parents. She had assorted talents and was a bright girl but seemed without direction. She talked about being an artist but wasn’t serious about it. She had taken acting classes but had stage fright. She had done some modeling and talked about moving to L.A. but had no definite plan to do so and no job for when she got there. She went to California to see her father a couple of times a year. He was making movies after a checkered career, and had married a producer who was more successful than he was. He was still married to her, and they had had three more kids, all boys. Carole loved visiting them, and the atmosphere in L.A. She loved the idea of moving out there and living with her father and his family, but she wasn’t ready to leave New York.

Liz was constantly worried about her. She had turned into a mother hen, and both her daughters teased her about it. She called them three times a day to see how they were. She just wanted them to be happy. For the past twenty years, her daughters had been the main focus of Liz’s life. She didn’t want to be like her own mother and miss the boat on motherhood. So she had dropped everything for them, and now that they were gone, she wasn’t even sure she could still write. She had promised herself she would try, but nothing came, and she dreaded being on vacation with her family again, and having to explain to them, again, why she had done nothing for the past year. How did you explain that to people like them?

As far as Liz was concerned, her brother Phillip was second only to their mother in the astounding empire she’d built on her own, with their father’s silent, loving support. Phillip was the pretender to the throne. His wife was a successful attorney, a partner in an important law firm, and looked down her nose at them all. She was beautiful, sleek, well dressed, and had assured all of them she was going to be a judge. Liz’s brother John was an incredible artist and a genius in design. His wife had a doctorate and was a professor of literature at Princeton. And her baby sister, Cass, never came on the summer birthday trips. She had distanced herself from all of them since their father’s death but had become one of the most important music producers in the world, based in London, and for the past five years was living with a world-famous rock star ten years younger than she was, Danny Hell. Liz constantly asked herself how she could compete with people like them. All she had ever done was write a few lame short stories, have two failed marriages, and bring up two wonderful girls. Sophie and Carole were her only accomplishment, and no one in her family was impressed by that. She knew they all thought she was a total failure.

Her mother was always kind about her writing and tried to encourage her, but Liz feared she was just being polite. They felt sorry for her. Liz had been floundering and fighting to keep her head above water all her life. The only thing she’d ever been confident about was mothering her kids. It was the one thing she was sure of, where she never doubted herself, and she loved her daughters more than anyone or anything in the world. But she was also the only one in her family who had never finished college, had been married more than once, and whose marriages had failed. She had no career, lived on her trust, and had been paralyzed by her fear of failure all her life.

Liz lived in a Connecticut farmhouse she’d been meaning to remodel and rebuild since she’d bought it ten years before, and she’d never managed to do that either. She just never got around to it. Although the bones and structure of the place were beautiful, it was a mess, constantly leaking, with things breaking that she never quite knew how to fix. In some ways, her life seemed like her house to her: it had potential but was disintegrating quietly and falling apart. And now she had to go on vacation with all of them again. She didn’t have the guts to do what her younger sister did every year, and turn their mother down and refuse to go. Instead, Liz always did what was expected of her, never wanted to upset anyone, so she and the girls went every year. The girls had a great time, and Sophie and her grandmother were soul mates, just as Liz and her own grandmother were, but each year, after the summer vacation Liz swore she would never go again. It was just too stressful for her, to compare herself to them, and endure their casual comments and put-downs and supposedly helpful criticism about her life. No one could understand what she was doing with herself, and her time, particularly now that the girls were gone. It was impossible to explain to them that some days it took her all day to get out of bed.

The only person who had ever understood the extreme insecurity she felt was Granibelle, whom Liz went to visit on Long Island every week. Just as she had been for Phillip, her grandmother had been the real mother in her life. Olivia was more like a friend. She was always kind to her, and compassionate, but Liz was convinced that they were just too different to ever understand each other. Granibelle always told Liz to give her mother a chance, that she regretted the time she hadn’t spent with them when they were children, but Liz was sure now it was too late. And the birthday trip reinforced that impression every year. She spent two weeks with them in gorgeous locations, feeling like a freak, and in agony in their midst. And now the invitation was sitting on her computer, and Liz didn’t have the guts to open it. She sat and stared at it for a long time, and then finally clicked it open and looked at the photographs of the enormous yacht.

“Shit,” Liz said out loud, sitting in her kitchen. “Now what am I supposed to do?” She felt seasick just looking at the photographs of the gigantic boat. She read the description of everything it had to offer, and even that didn’t help. If her family was going to be on it, she knew she would feel miserable and inadequate, seasick or not. But she knew with equal certainty that both her daughters would love spending those days with the family on a fabulous boat. Hair salon, spa, movie theater, water toys—her mother had gone all out. Liz knew she couldn’t deprive her daughters of a trip like the one her mother had planned. And she didn’t want to miss being with her girls. She got little enough time with them now, and they were busy with their friends most of the time. As she did every year, Liz felt she had no choice. If she wanted to see her children and share a holiday with them, she’d have to put up with everyone else. It was a depressing thought.

She read through the e-mail several times, with the description of the boat, and forwarded it to both her daughters. And then she hit the reply button with a heavy heart.

“Thanks, Mom!” she typed the message to her mother. “This looks incredible! We’ll be there with bells on. The girls are going to be thrilled! Love, Liz.” She read it over several times, and then hit the send button. Her fate was sealed. All she could think was “here we go again.” She had nothing to wear, but she knew she could borrow something from her girls. She still had the same lithe body she had had at their age. Her face looked older, but her body hadn’t changed.

After she responded to her mother’s invitation, she picked up a notepad and walked out into her garden. There were two broken deck chairs with torn cushions on them, and if she sat down on them carefully, she knew they would hold her. She had a silly idea for a children’s book. It wasn’t the kind of writing she usually did, but maybe it would distract her and cheer her up. She had nothing else to do, and she wasn’t going to write the great American novel in the next six weeks, so she might as well write something fun, for herself. No one in her family was going to be impressed by a children’s book, but that didn’t matter now. She was resigned to being the family screw-up who had accomplished nothing, yet again.



Sarah Grayson raced into the house between classes, to pick up some additional books she had left at home. The small cozy house just bordering the Princeton campus was quiet, John was at work, as head of creative and design for his mother, their son, Alex, was in school, finishing his junior year in high school, and their golden Lab was sound asleep, stretched out in the sun. The dog picked up his head when he heard Sarah come in, and then dropped it again. He was too tired to move or do anything more than wag his tail and go back to sleep.

She checked her e-mail, to see if any students had written to her about homework, or help they needed, and she saw the e-mail from her mother-in-law instead. She opened it quickly, and then gasped when she saw the photograph of the Lady Luck.

“Oh my God!” she said, and then sat down heavily at her desk to read quickly through the rest. It was more than a little overwhelming, but she knew Alex would be thrilled, and John probably would too. Their summer trips were fun but always harder for her. Her parents had been serious liberals and activists, her father had been a professor of biology at UC Berkeley, her mother had taught women’s studies when it had become popular as a subject. Her father had been one of the early supporters of the civil rights movement, and they knew that John had money, but they had never fully understood how much, or what it meant. Neither had she. Fortunately, she and John shared the same political views, and the same philosophies about life. They gave away most of John’s income every year, to philanthropic causes, and they wanted their son to have good values that were not based on personal wealth or a fascination with money.

They had chosen to live in a small house and spend their time in the academic community. Alex knew that his grandmother had money, but he had no sense of how wealthy she was, or that his father would inherit a fourth of her vast fortune one day, or that he already had a great deal of money. They were careful to see that none of it showed. John drove a Toyota for his commute into the city every day. Sarah drove an ancient Honda she had bought from a student for a thousand dollars, and when Alex wanted a mountain bike, they had made him get a job after school and pay for it himself. Sarah didn’t want their son corrupted by the more-than-daunting Grayson fortune. Their summer vacations were like trips to Disneyland for them, and for years Alex had been young enough not to make any connection between the rented châteaux and villas and what it cost to rent them. But the yacht Olivia had chartered and that Sarah was reading about in the e-mail was a different story. It would be hard to explain that to Alex. And as far as Sarah was concerned, Olivia should have been giving away the money to people who needed it, not spending it on them for a fancy Mediterranean vacation. The only thing that ever made her more comfortable was John’s assurance that The Factory donated vast sums every year to worthwhile causes. But clearly this year’s summer vacation had cost Olivia a fortune.

Sarah felt guilty just looking at the pictures of the boat and knowing they would be on it. She wished her mother-in-law had decided to do something more modest, but she knew how important these trips were to her, and that she wanted to provide only the best for her children and grandchildren. It was a well-meaning gesture, but Sarah disapproved anyway. She suspected her husband would enjoy it, and love the opportunity to go fishing and sailing with his brother. They were like two kids when they got together away from the office. And at forty-one, John still looked and acted like a boy to her.

Sarah had just turned forty. She had married right out of college. Their initial plan had been to join the Peace Corps together and go to South America, but she had gotten pregnant on their honeymoon, which changed everything. They’d gotten stuck in a small apartment in New York, and John’s mother had convinced him to get a master’s in design and, once he had a family to support, to join her in the business. He hadn’t had the heart to turn her down. And Sarah had eventually gone back to school too, first to get her master’s degree in Russian and European literature, and then her doctorate in American literature. She had been teaching at Princeton for ten years now, and the move to Princeton had been good for them, and they were happily folded back into the academic community. John still dreamed of giving up his job and becoming a full-time artist, but he said he couldn’t do that to his mother. So his dreams of being an artist had been put on a shelf, probably forever, and he had to be content with painting on weekends. He had shown his work several times at a local gallery, and in art shows at the university, where they exhibited work by professors or their spouses. He sold all his paintings every time. It validated him, but was bittersweet. His success at gallery shows always made him wish that he could give up his day job and devote all his time to painting.

Their ease at getting pregnant with Alex, earlier than planned, had led them both to hope that they would have many children. Sarah had wanted four or five, and the blessing of John’s money meant that they could allow that to happen, but an ectopic pregnancy two years after Alex changed all their plans and dashed their dreams. Even with the help of in vitro fertilization, Sarah had never been able to get pregnant again. They tried IVF five times before accepting defeat and conceding. It had been a painful disappointment, but Alex was a wonderful boy and the joy of their life. They had talked about adopting a child from Central or South America, but once they finished their studies, they were both deeply involved in their jobs, and in the end they decided that one child as terrific as Alex was enough for them. And like his cousins, Sophie and Carole, Alex had a wonderful rapport with his grandmother. He looked forward to their summer vacations, and he took the train into the city to have lunch with her from time to time. She had promised him a trip to China with her when he graduated from high school, and Alex talked about it all the time. And Sarah knew as she glanced through the e-mail that he would be ecstatic when he saw the boat his grandmother had chartered for their summer trip.

Sarah sighed as she pressed the reply button to answer. The boat was definitely over the top, and it made her feel guilty to share in such extreme luxury with them, but she also knew that it was going to delight her husband and son. She wrote a hasty note to Olivia, thanking her and assuring her they’d be there; she hit the send button, grabbed the books she’d come home to get for her next class, rushed past the sleeping dog who wagged his tail again, and left the house. And as she walked into her class ten minutes later, the yacht she had just seen and would be traveling on in July was the farthest thing from her mind. All she cared about now was the class she was about to teach, her students, and the academic life she loved. And just as they did every year, they would tell no one about the trip, particularly this year. No one they knew would understand. The world of super yachts, and cruises in the Mediterranean, was no part of their real life. As far as Sarah was concerned, that was Olivia’s life, not theirs.



The e-mail to Olivia’s youngest daughter, Cass, reached her in London at three o’clock in the afternoon. It came through on her BlackBerry as she was sitting in a meeting, planning a concert tour for one of their biggest clients. Cassie Grayson glanced at the e-mail and knew instantly what it was. She saw the first photograph of the boat, and without reading the details, she closed the e-mail again. She wondered why her mother still bothered to send the invitation to her every year, since she had never gone. For fourteen years, she had refused. She was not going to be bought off by a vacation in a château in France, or on a fabulous yacht. She no longer cared. She had left the States at twenty, when her father died, and made her own good life in England. She had gotten into the music world, in production, made her own money, and wanted nothing from any of them, particularly her mother. As far as Cass was concerned, Olivia had missed her chance. She didn’t care what her grandmother said whenever she saw her, Cass always said the relationship with her mother was over for her. Cass had no memories that included her, only her grandmother and her father. Olivia had been too busy building her empire then to spend time with her. With the others, she had still made some meager efforts to come home from the office at a decent hour. When Cass came along, unexpectedly, seven years after John, it was too late. For both of them, mother and child. They had been the busiest years of her mother’s life, and Cass had no need or desire to give her a second chance now.

Cass was happy with her life. She had a business she worked hard at and had built herself; she had friends, and she had lived with a man she loved for the past five years. For Cass, with the exception of her grandmother, her relationship with her family had ended when her father died. She had always blamed her mother for not being there when it happened. After a massive heart attack, he had hung on for two days. Cassie had been convinced he was waiting for his wife to come home. It took them a day to reach her in the Philippines, and two more days for her to get home and he had died just hours before she arrived. Cassie remained convinced that her mother’s coming home in time would have saved him. It was the last straw for her. She never forgave her mother, and three months later she was gone. She had seen her brothers and sister only a few times since. She had nothing in common with them. She thought Phillip was a pretentious stuffed shirt. She couldn’t stand his wife, who seemed like a bitch to her. She had nothing against Sarah and John, but she had nothing in common with them either, and poor Liz was so insecure and frightened to compete with their mother that she could barely breathe. It depressed Cass just thinking about them, and she did so as seldom as she could.

The only one she maintained a close tie to was her grandmother, whom she saw whenever she had business in the States, and occasionally she flew over just to spend an afternoon with her. Granibelle hadn’t changed. She was still the same wonderful, loving woman she always had been, and she always begged Cassie to open her heart to her mother again. Cassie just listened and said nothing, rather than argue with her grandmother about it, or upset her.

Despite her feelings about her, and mostly to please her grandmother, Cass did see her mother once or twice a year. They had lunch sometimes when Cass was in New York, or when Olivia had business in London. The lunches were stressful and brief. Neither of them knew what to say to each other. Olivia had no idea how to make up for the past, and would have liked to. Cass shared nothing with her, and told her nothing about her life. She had never even mentioned Danny Hell. What Olivia knew about him, she heard from Liz, who had read about it in the tabloids. The only thing Olivia did know about Cass was that she had an enormously successful business, and that Cass had mentioned several times that she never wanted children. She said she was too busy to have them, and didn’t want anyone to have a childhood like her own. The point had been made, many times.

And so had her refusals to join them for family vacations. As far as Cass was concerned, the Graysons weren’t her family anymore. Phillip felt the same way about her, and made no effort to see her. He hadn’t seen her in at least ten years. John felt sorry for her, but awkward about the position she had taken and didn’t want to upset their mother by seeing her. Liz missed having a sister, and would have loved to talk to her and have her get to know her girls. But they had all begun to think there was too much water under the bridge. The only one who had never given up on Cass coming back into the fold was Maribelle. She told Olivia never to stop seeing her, and to stay in touch as best she could, and one day Cass would come home. Olivia no longer believed that, but she invited her to their summer vacations every year, and continued to have lunch with her whenever she could.

When she got back to her office, Cass sent the same response she did every year, declining her mother’s invitation. Her answer was always brief and clear: “Thank you, no. Have a nice trip. Cass.”

Olivia saw the message on her own BlackBerry after the New York Times interview. She read it, and closed the e-mail. It came as no surprise, but it hurt anyway. A little piece of her died every time her youngest child rejected her. She knew why she did it. She understood. She didn’t blame her, but it made her heart ache anyway. And then, with a sigh, with the message sent and received, both women, whom Maribelle said were so similar in some ways, went back to work. Better than anyone, Maribelle knew them well.