“Well, good. You don’t have to go in there alone.” And so we went through the doors of the Century Club, arms linked, into the sea of older men in tuxedos and women in silk pantsuits andgood jewelry. Always get married in May—it ensured anniversaries full of peonies and ranunculus and anemones. The room might as well have been a cutting garden. “The Hotallings like flowers,” Eddie said as my gaze went from one massive arrangement to the next. We filed into the receiving line with everyone else, fifty couples to mark fifty years, everyone moving forward. All of them knew Eddie. His name was a bass note called again and again. I could see how truly rotten it would have been to show up to this thing alone.
“Ed!” the woman at the front of the line said, holding out her arms to him. He let go of me long enough to kiss her. Polly Hotalling wore a white silk duster over white silk pants, an outfit appropriate for a second marriage or a fiftieth anniversary. She was still the size of a teaspoon.
“Ed,” her husband said, and shook his hand. Skip Hotalling was trim and tall, a full head of silver hair and a cleft in his chin, for heaven’s sake. A leading man from bygone days. “Who do we have here?”
Eddie put his arm around my waist. “Here we have my daughter, Daphne Fuller. Daphne, these are the famous Hotallings, Polly and Skip.”
Skip, Polly, and I were each taken aback by the introduction but for different reasons. For me, it was a huge promotion. I held out my hand and said how glad I was to meet them.
Skip, lost, kept on smiling, but it only took Polly two beats to catch up. “Daphne Zabriskie?”
I smiled. “It’s been a long time since anyone called me that, but yes, Daphne Zabriskie.”
Skip laughed. “No one ever put one over on Polly.”
“No one was trying to,” I said, still beaming. I knew how tobeam.
“You look beautiful,” Eddie said, and pressed Polly’s hand to his heart. “Let everyone else see how beautiful you are.”
“You’re at our table,” Polly said to me, spider to fly.
I felt the doom ahead as Eddie steered me towards the bar. A young woman in a sequined dress leaned her hip into the curve of the piano, singing, “I wandered around and finally found the somebody who ...”
“Well, we’re here,” he said. “Let’s make a night of it.”
“DaphneZabriskie,” I said, a glass of Sancerre in hand. What open bar featured a good Sancerre? None that I’d ever seen. “Have I met them before?”
Eddie nodded. “Probably, when your mother and I were first dating, or it may have even been when we were palling around. Your mother was once a great pal of mine.”
“Good to know.”
“Polly and Skip came to see me a couple of times in Boston before they had children. Polly was besotted with children so we brought you and Leda along.”
“She’d remember me from that?”
“Polly has what we used to call an acute memory. She would remember that Abigail’s daughters were Daphne and Leda. I’m a little surprised she was able to pull up Zabriskie.”
“Wait, were they at your wedding?” The one in which he married my mother, the one in which Leda and I got matching dresses made of yellow silk with a sewn-in slip. Eddie called us daffodils.
He shook his head. “They were not.”
“You were the best man at their wedding and they didn’t come to yours?”
“Your mother did not care for the Hotallings.”
“Ed!” a woman cried, short gray hair, large black glasses,making her way towards the bar. “Tell me what to read!”
“Daphne, this is Maxine.”
Maxine and I shook hands.
“Maxine likes to play Stump the Band but with books. Maxine has read everything. Don’t engage with her. She was the associate publisher at Farrar, Straus.”
“Retired,” Maxine said, hitting the word hard. “Out of the loop. Yesterday’s news. Tell me what to read.”
I longed for my husband, who was probably cleaning out a linen closet now, eighteen sets of sheets for double mattresses. He could have played the retirement game no matter where he turned.
Eddie took a sip of his drink. “Je refuse.”
