“I was a dog. And I’m nice now. And I’ll tell you that even as a dog it bothered me that humans didn’t learn from experience. It’s very frustrating to watch you people. Alarms should have been going off in all directions.”
This is true. I’d married Peter Winthrop in 1950. Neave and I had turned the apartment into something that looked like a home. I was twenty-six and Be Your Best was getting real traction. Twenty-six was an old maid in the world I lived in but I wasn’t worried about that. I’d just woken up one morning thinking that marriage was an interesting idea. Peter Winthrop was a dream on paper: an Ivy-educated doctor, a good looker. And unlike a lot of guys who thought that a working wife was an embarrassment—a clear sign that they didn’t make enough money to support the family—Peter Winthrop was not going to get in my way in that department. He said he thought money was sexy. If I wanted to make it, he said he’d be happy to spend it. So when he pulled out a diamond one night, I said yes. He wore a tux. I wore a white suit. Neave was my maid of honor. Mommy cried. I moved out of the Be Your Best studio and into a suburban house. Annie was born nine months later.
“First husbands aren’t like training wheels that teach you how to steer a husband.”
“They should be. How could you have been married to Peter Winthrop and not come out of it knowing that people lie?”
“Look, Boppit, the man was a dream: the way all the nurses at St. Elizabeth’s treated him like a god, the Harvard diploma, the great teeth. And what person doesn’t lie? Really.”
“Neave does not lie. Jane does not lie.”
“And that’s not always been a very attractive or useful thing for them.”
“Neave would never have looked twice at Peter Winthrop.”
“That poses no problem. He would never have looked twice at her. But I sure caught his eye.”
Boppit sniffed. “You didn’t even know him when you married him.”
“What wife does? Here’s some irony for you—Neave’s responsible for me meeting him. I stepped on a nail and she dragged me off to get a tetanus shot. There he was, running St. Elizabeth’s emergency room that night, cool as a cucumber. I took one look at him and I felt like a man in a desert who’s just spotted a watering hole.”
“Or a mirage.”
“Maybe. But think how pretty those mirages are.”
“A little skepticism when he started working eighty-hour weeks would have come in handy.”
“I wasn’t going to be one of those pathetic, insecure women who go through their husbands’ pockets and call him at work every hour to make sure they’re there. Doctors’ wives expect them to have long hours. How would I know he was at the track?”
“If you’d looked in those pockets you would have eventually found a stray betting ticket or an IOU from the poker games. You wouldn’t have been so surprised when the bank called and told you that you were losing your house because he’d taken out three more mortgages without mentioning them to you.”
“Legally, my signature on that first loan might as well have been made by a chicken. Then he made the mistake of saying what he did with our money was none of my business. I said it was so my business but I was going to make it not my business as soon as I could. I was going to divorce him. Annie wasn’t even three years old but that was not going to change my mind. If I’d been able to dump him on the grounds of being a liar and a thief I wouldn’t have had to invent some proof of infidelity. He cooperated with the girl and the photographer because I threatened to go to his chief of staff to discuss the hours he’d signed in but was really at the track or in the basement at a poker game. He knew I’d do it.”
“Still. He could have given you a lot more trouble.”
“Maybe. But he knew that if he gave me trouble, it could cost him his job. Maybe his medical license. He gave me the divorce. Annie and I moved back in with Neave for a while. The whole Peter Winthrop adventure lasted three years, diamond to divvying up the furniture. I agreed not to ask for alimony. He agreed to leave his mitts off Be Your Best. Besides Annie, the best thing to come out of it was that it made Neave hire a lawyer who knew how to incorporate Be Your Best so that no future husband could get his hands on it. For my little sister, me and Annie living there was like one long pajama party full of Monopoly and popcorn. We came up with some of our best ideas for the company during that time. She was like a dog who’d been handed the biggest ham bone on Earth.”
“She was lonely,” Bop said.
“She was lonely,” I repeated, and suddenly I could see her sitting in front of me with a popcorn bowl on the table and Annie on her lap, both of them so happy. I saw how bereft she was when I told her it was time for me and Annie to get our own place. “I hadn’t been paying her much attention. I wasn’t thinking of her.”
“True,” Boppit said.
Suddenly I felt very small, very selfish. “Neave loved us. I moved us out anyhow so I could do what I wanted without having her looking over my shoulder. I dragged Annie after me. I told myself she was too little to be upset by all the changes.”
“You did.” He nodded. “You were a solid C-plus mother.”
“Take me back in time. Let me be alive again. I’ll do it different.”
“Lilly, if you played it all out again you’d still be you, so you’d still do the same things. Let’s be realistic.”
I looked at this dead dog in navy whites and high heels and I snorted. “Realistic. That’s rich.”
“You can’t do everything, Lilly, and you were doing a lot more than most women ever dream about doing. You created and ran a successful business. Not everybody’s born with this maternal engine driving them around all day, chuffing them off to PTA meetings and coffee klatches and sledding hills. You loved Annie and you did your best.”
“I loved her according to my nature. Which was shallow.” It was the first time I’d seen this as the kind of serious deficiency that can ruin a life, ruin somebody else’s life. I’d generally thought that my nature was simply light and carefree, traits that most people value over sober self-awareness.
“Maybe a little shallow, but very beautiful,” Boppit said.
“I don’t like how things look from here, Boppit. It’s…”
“Broader?”
“Yes.”
“I know, sweetie,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
THE PIRATE LOVER
Capture