Twenty-one
Vivian pushed through the warm water, then turned over onto her back to see the stars. Make a wish, she thought, the magical thinking of her girlhood.
She had always loved night swimming and wondered now why she didn’t do it more often. Probably because her husband didn’t like swimming after dinner, and she had always adapted her habits to accommodate him.
But tonight, with their entire world turned upside down, a shift in their routine was a luxury she allowed herself. Even if that also meant risking nostalgia, something she found herself indulging in more and more lately.
Although there was no sense in looking back too much. What had her old book club notebook been doing mixed in with the photo albums? Had she mistakenly forgotten to put it away at some point? She couldn’t remember the last time she’d looked at it. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d thought about the club, though she did think about the young woman who’d encouraged her to start the group in the first place.
Enough. She didn’t want to think about that time. Not now. There was too much to worry about in the present.
Vivian moved her arms with disciplined strokes, pushing the water away from her body to propel her back and forth. She blinked, the view of the stars blurring from water splashed into her eyes. Oh, how she’d hated getting water in her eyes when she was little. She’d create a huge fuss and her mother got very frustrated.
As a girl, Vivian spent her summers at her family’s cottage in East Hampton. Aside from horseback riding, the biggest treat was an evening swim, when her parents entertained guests in the dining room or on the lawn and Vivian and her brother had the pool all to themselves with only their nanny watching over them.
The Freudenbergs were Jews, and as such were not welcome at the Maidstone Club or any of the other social institutions in town. Her mother, Lillian, determined to give her husband the social life a man of his stature deserved, made certain that their oceanfront mansion functioned like a club. The house, called Woodlawn, offered three formal meals a day, evening cocktails, tennis matches, swimming, and parties all season long. On the Fourth of July, Woodlawn even had its own fireworks show.
When Vivian and Leonard started the winery, she anticipated that her life would be very different from that of her parents. It was hard to imagine during those early years of fieldwork that she would ever have a moment of luxury again. She didn’t mind; the financial end of things and decision-making was her husband’s business, her husband’s family money. But out in the field, they were equals. Then even that changed. They were able to hire people to do the labor-intensive, day-to-day work. Leonard could focus on the big picture and management, business instead of farming. And, of course, they wanted to start a family.
When Asher was a few years old, she researched schools in the area and found her favorite was in Bridgehampton.
“You’re going to drive him back and forth an hour each way?” Leonard had said. She knew he thought it was crazy, but he also wasn’t going to give her a hard time about it any more than she gave him a hard time about his decisions in the vineyard. Their division of labor had been set.
She became a full-time mother, carpooling her two children, managing their field trips and doctor’s appointments and playdates, leaving the business to her husband. But by the early 1980s, Leonard needed her help. It seemed that a great winery was made not just in the field, but in the marketplace. They had proven they could produce great wines. They attracted customers to the tasting room and sold their wine by the caseload. But if they were going to truly succeed, they needed their wine in restaurants. The most celebrated wines in the country were produced on the West Coast, but it was the New York City restaurant market that could make or break a brand. And New York City restaurants wanted nothing to do with Long Island wines.
“You know what our greatest asset is, Vivian?” Leonard had said one night. “It’s not out in that field. It’s right here, in front of me. It’s you.”
Suddenly, the decision to send their children to school in the Hamptons wasn’t so crazy. The Hamptons were filled with influential Manhattanites.
“I need you to network,” he told her.
It sounded simple enough, but she soon found that the Hamptons social scene was, in the 1980s, as closed to her as it had been to her parents in the 1950s—not because she was Jewish but because she was an outsider. The Freudenbergs were long gone from the Hamptons; they had sold Woodlawn and their townhouse on Fifth Avenue and moved to Palm Beach. Any remaining connections from her parents’ generation were too old to help her. The parents of her children’s friends were cordial but clannish. If Leonard and Vivian were going to make inroads socially, she’d need to follow her parents’ model with Woodlawn.
“Okay,” she said. “I can do that. But we need to start entertaining. And that means renovating this house.”
The pool had been built during that remodeling. As Vivian oversaw the house renovation, making countless decisions large and small, she remembered her love of night swimming as a child. And so one of the design elements of the pool was dozens of fiber-optic lights that looked like the reflection of the stars at night. Looking at them now, she wished she could transport herself back to the optimism of the 1980s. She hadn’t appreciated it at the time, but they were the happiest years of her life. She had her children, the winery was flourishing, she was young and beautiful and in love. She believed their family and business would continue to flourish. She had no idea what was just around the corner.
Vivian heeded Leonard’s request that she make inroads in the Hamptons social scene. Invitations came their way sporadically, but none had brought them any closer to connections that might help them crack the Manhattan restaurant market.
And then one night, the mother of one of Asher’s classmates invited them to a dinner party she was hosting in East Hampton along with her husband, an investment banker. Vivian’s expectations for the evening were low; by that time, they’d been to a few such parties, driving down dark streets lined with hedgerows so tall you could only imagine what was hidden behind them. The evenings were pleasant, full of fine food and small talk. But nothing had ever come out of them.
Vivian felt out of place at the parties. A decade of working in the field pulling leaves and setting out bird netting and pruning vines had left her more comfortable running around with her kids barefoot in the backyard than slipping on heels and a Norma Kamali dress for cocktails at a waterfront mansion. Ironically, if she had followed the path her parents had wanted for her, she would be living in a house just like the ones she visited as a guest, hosting parties all summer long instead of worrying about sour rot.
Security greeted them at the foot of the drive and directed them to another gate at the side of the sprawling front lawn. They followed a stone path to the poolside terrace. A bar was set up on the terrace, and another on the lawn. The entire area was strung with small, decorative lights. Beyond the pool, a long table set for forty with arrangements of roses and lilies and twinkling with countless votive candles. Music played from outdoor speakers, Elton John’s hit “Little Jeannie.”
Their hostess wore a cream-colored, flowy knee-length dress, a silk flower in her upswept hair. She smelled faintly of marijuana, and it was hard to reconcile her with the plain mom Vivian mostly knew from drop-offs and pickups and bake sales. She took Vivian by the arm and said, “I’m glad you’re here. Someone wants to meet you.”
“Meet me?” Vivian echoed, turning to look at Leonard. But he’d already made his way to the crowd of men smoking cigars poolside. Vivian followed her hostess to the terrace, where she immediately noticed a pretty blonde, a Cheryl Ladd look-alike who stood out from the crowd in a ruby-red tunic dress that reached the ground.
“Vivian Hollander, meet Baroness de Villard. Baroness, this is the friend I was telling you about—with the winery.”
The woman stood from her seat and extended her hand. The name de Villard sounded familiar, but Vivian was certain she’d never met the woman before.
“Alors,” the woman said. “Please—call me Natasha.”
“A pleasure to meet you,” Vivian said.
“The pleasure is all mine, Mrs. Hollander. I’ve heard so much about you.” The woman was clearly not French, but American. And not just American, but—judging from her accent—from Brooklyn or Queens.
“Natasha’s husband, the Baron de Villard, owns a winery in France,” their hostess said.
“Oh, lovely,” Vivian said, trying to get her bearings in the conversation as she realized why she recognized the name. The de Villard family was a famous name in wine. Their vineyard in Bordeaux was grand cru classé—the highest classification in France.
“I’m from New York,” Natasha said. “But I can’t imagine growing grapes here. I understand that you and your husband were the first.”
“That’s right,” Vivian said. “We came out here over a decade ago. It was just potato farms.”
“How impressive,” Natasha said. “I’d love to see your vineyard sometime. And of course, you must come to France and meet my husband. He doesn’t like visiting the States. The only thing he likes about America is that it produced me,” she added with a wink.
And then she drifted away. Vivian couldn’t recall if she’d spoken another word to her the entire evening. Certainly, by the end of the summer, the particulars of that party had faded to a dim memory. So she was surprised when, in September, she received an invitation to Château de Villard in the mail—along with two first-class plane tickets to France.
There had been no question that they would go. It was a decision they would both come to regret.
Vivian’s limbs became heavy with the last few strokes, and she swam to the side of the pool and grabbed hold of the ledge. How long had she been out there? She wasn’t ready to go inside, but then Leonard appeared. He was dressed in his robe and looked tired.
“I’ve been looking all over for you,” he said. “What are you doing out here at this hour?”
“I’m trying to tire myself out so I can sleep.”
Leonard walked to the pool’s edge.
“Things went well with the buyers today,” he said. “They increased their offer.”
“Is that my cue to be happy?”
“We’re going to walk away with something. Not a lot, but something.”
Vivian had been sad when her parents sold Woodlawn and the Manhattan apartment she’d grown up in. But she had her own life by that time, and she knew that if she wanted a forever home, she’d have to create one with her husband.
“I know we built the house to advance socially—for the business. But deep down, I was doing it for our children. I imagined them bringing their children here, and their children’s children here. You know, Jews are a wandering people. To me, success meant not wandering anymore. I wanted to put down roots, literally and figuratively.”
“Vivian,” Leonard said, “we can’t indulge in sentimentality. This deal is going to save us. In the morning, I’m telling Asher I’ve accepted the offer.”
“How long will it take to close?”
“A few months.”
“So we’ll have the summer here. And then what? What about Peternelle? The Arguetas?”
Leonard walked toward the house, calling back to her, “It’s late, Vivian. Come to bed.”
She submerged herself underwater, swimming toward the fake stars.
The library felt different at night. It was as if the spirits of all the authors whose works were collected there were speaking to one another. Or maybe it was just the silence of the grand house at midnight. Or maybe, Leah thought, it was all the wine she’d had at dinner.
Her buzz had worn off, leaving her anxious. And the phone call with Steven after dinner hadn’t helped. He’d seemed eager to get off the call. Or maybe they just didn’t have that much to talk about aside from the cheese shop, and every mention of that included the unpleasant subtext that she was shirking her responsibilities.
She turned on one panel of lights, illuminating the middle section of the vast room while keeping the perimeter of shelves in shadow. She walked up to the second level, where she and Sadie had gathered up the photo albums, now packed away. Where Sadie had discovered her mother’s old book club journal.
She remembered those racy books with the glamorous women on the covers, with their big eighties hair and bright makeup. But more, she remembered Vivian in her prime, holding court on the veranda, surrounded by her friends, delighting in the fictional misadventures in the pages of the novels.
“Mom?”
Leah looked over the ledge of the landing to see Sadie.
“What are you doing here so late?” Leah said.
“What are you doing here so late?” Sadie closed the door behind her.
“I can’t sleep,” Leah said. “I need something to read.”
Sadie climbed the stairs, holding a copy of Lace. She slipped it back onto the “C” shelf.
“You finished it?” Leah said.
Sadie smiled sheepishly. “Yeah. All six hundred pages. I wish I could read what Gran wrote about it. Did she ever mention the book club journal to you? She must have it. It couldn’t have just disappeared.”
“She didn’t mention it to me,” Leah said. “It’s possible Peternelle just packed it up along with your book. You could just ask her what she thought about it.”
“Um, no. The last thing I want is to talk about Gran’s hot take on all the sex. I just thought reading the discussion notes might be interesting. From a sociological perspective, of course.”
“Of course,” Leah said, smiling. “You should get some sleep, sweetheart.”
“Yeah. I’m going to try.” She kissed Leah on the cheek. “‘Night, Mom.”
Leah waited until her daughter left, then turned back to the shelf where she’d placed Lace. She thought she’d spotted something.
She pulled out another thick novel, the cover featuring a beautiful brunette, dressed in a black evening gown, her dark eyes staring directly into the camera lens. Above her head, in big gold embossed letters, the title: Chances.
With a thrilling sense of anticipation, Leah tucked the Jackie Collins novel under her arm and headed back to her bedroom.