The letter had clearly been sent out of pure spite and rage, the howling anger of an animal with its leg caught in a trap. But what trap is she caught in? Isabel thought. I’m the one trapped. She sent these and that’s it, she can move on. I’m the one trapped. It wasn’t even two years at that point since their wedding, since Bob had insisted on a much bigger party than she’d wanted. Since he had suggested she buy a new dress rather than wear her mother’s, that she permit a Times reporter to follow her around on the day of, asking niggling questions about every last aesthetic touch. Since he had told her he wanted her to be good and pregnant by the end of the honeymoon, when she’d already said many times that she wanted to wait until thirty for kids. She’d been pregnant four months after the wedding.
She would have wanted to get married on Shelter, right out behind the house. With the Petonic behind them. But they couldn’t get the attention they deserved if they did it at her parents’ place, he’d said.
Is this it, now? The attention we deserve? She almost said it out loud, to Lily, but she didn’t want to have to explain herself.
She should have known, back then. That whatever he said, what he actually wanted was a wife like Kiki McGinniss or Suzanne Welsh. She should have known he wouldn’t want the reminders of everything that had, at one time at least, mattered to him.
“But I can’t just give up now,” she’d said to her mother, who held Madison on her lap, the baby’s feet pedaling away in the air.
“No,” her mother agreed. “We aren’t those kind of people.”
“What would you do?” Isabel asked. And her mother looked up at her, quizzical, genuinely confused by the question.
“Isabel,” her mother said. “As I would think you’d know, I would never have opened the envelope.”
That was it. They strolled to town, avoided speaking of Buck, who was abroad that spring. They walked along the windy beach just below the house. Her mother held the baby, played with her endlessly, touched her cheeks and cupped her little chin.
But she heard what her mother really meant. She’d chosen to marry someone who was not their kind of person, and now she had to devise a way to work within the new system.
But I did, she thought that night, sitting in the kitchen with Lily. I did, I did. She had explained to him very clearly, that weekend of the photographs, after the drive back from Shelter Island. And he understood, or he told her that he did. He promised her it would never happen again.
He made her all these promises, but the truth was that he could break any promise he wanted, there had never been any sword hanging over his head. She’d been as helpless as her mother before her, as helpless as Madison was now.
Even as helpless as all these other women who told themselves they hardly needed to understand what their husbands did. That it couldn’t matter less whether they knew the difference between a hedge fund and a bond shop, if they understood why insider trading was illegal. The difference between a margin call and a collateral call.
Isabel knew that most of these women would ride it out, the rest of this shimmering, soap bubble year, without ever fully understanding the underlying structure of a credit-default swap, what role the naked shorts had played, what mortgage-backed securities even were. They’d tell themselves that an idiot in Ohio, who should have known he couldn’t afford to own a home, had no bearing on their husbands or their work, their families. They’d wait for the rest of the world to lose interest, which would happen. Bob would go down, like a ship sinking beneath black waves far from land, and the rest of them would wait for the whirlpool to consume itself, and resume swimming.
“I’m going to make some coffee,” Lily said, breaking the reverie. Isabel nodded. She wanted to tell Lily to go to sleep, but she knew Madison might come home and choose to speak only to one of them. And she had no reason to believe it would be her, and not Lily.
“Yes,” she said, “please do.”
She couldn’t fault these other women, could she? They were just hewing to the deals they’d struck. If her husband had done the same, she wouldn’t be here now. And besides, Isabel Berkeley had always prided herself on understanding his career. On knowing the lingo, dropping the terms. But what good had that done? Where’s the solace in understanding every single phrase of what’s being said when your husband is on a television screen, seated before Congress, looking like it’s all he can do to keep from upturning the table itself and strangling the men looking down on him?
All these years I’ve told myself that he’s fierce, that he doesn’t just love the nickname because it makes him feel big. But tonight, he left his daughter standing there, alone. She had to spit at him to get him even to look her in the eye.
That was when the phone rang, and Teddy told her that he had a “squirrely looking” boy down at the gate, a boy who had driven her daughter home.
WHEN MADISON CAME IN through the mud room, she was a woman on fire. Her hair was wild, her makeup trailing away from the corners of her eyes in rivulets. She still had everything, Isabel noted: her shoes, her purse, every piece of clothing. But she looked, somehow, destroyed.
She stared at Isabel.
“You had the security guy question him?” she said.
“I didn’t have anyone do anything,” Isabel said. “You showed up with a stranger, of course they questioned him.”
“Well, that’s great,” Madison said. “Fantastic. He already can barely even pretend he’s interested in me for more than one reason, but this is great. This is just my final humiliation.”
“Okay, let’s—” Lily said, rising from the table, but Madison moved back suddenly, as if the two women in the kitchen were predators.
“Why are you both up,” she said.
“Because we were worried,” Isabel said.
Isabel knew that she was a bad mother in one way: she rarely hugged her daughter. For some reason, it always felt so much thornier than it did with the twins. The twins, she would kiss and cuddle and lovingly maul with abandon. Their embraces were so unquestioned, so simple. But with Madison, it always felt insincere. Like she was hugging her daughter to prove that she loved her, when so many other things she did every day were much more straightforward displays of her obvious love for Madison.
As far as Isabel could remember, Madison’s grandmother had been much the same. They had not been a demonstrative pair when Isabel was growing up, and so it had been all the more surprising when her mother had taken to Madison, the first grandchild, with such gleeful, explosive affection. She’d still been herself. She hadn’t become a more casual woman, not in the slightest. But it no longer seemed to stiffen her shoulders, the idea of embracing another person.