Rubout (12 page)

I wondered if everyone in Ladue believed that you died if you went to St. Louis. I wondered if anyone really cared about Sydney. Was Sydney worth caring about? So far, all I knew was that the woman was one hell of a shopper. There had to be more. Maybe I was asking frivolous questions. I tried a serious one. “What did you admire most about Sydney?”

Caroline smiled. She was on safe ground again. “Sydney
always
dipped her fork in her salad dressing,” she said.

Hey, it’s something I’d want on my tombstone.

“I
never did like that woman,” said Sydney’s best friend, Jane.

I agreed. I always agree with people who have sharp knives in their hands. Besides, Jane was right. Caroline was a heartless ditz.

“Caroline doesn’t have the brains of a zucchini,” said Jane, beheading a zucchini on her cutting board, then gutting it, or whatever you do with a dead zucchini. Jane kept telling me this was a simple recipe, but she couldn’t fool me. I was in her kitchen. The woman had an asparagus steamer, pudding molds, and a pasta machine. People with hardware like that did not have simple recipes.

“I never did see what Sydney saw in Caroline,” Jane said. “But Sydney had the ability to get along with people, even that awful mother-in-law of hers.”

Jane gave the zucchini another whack, then began rummaging in the refrigerator like a bear in a park trash can. Her refrigerator was crammed with fruits,
vegetables, meats, cheeses, bottles, and jars. I didn’t have that much food in my fridge if you totaled its lifetime contents. This could be a long search.

I wandered into the living room and looked at the view of Lake Michigan. The lake stretched out, an endless smoky blue-gray, trimmed with darker gray clouds. Jane’s living room seemed a continuation of the view, only warmer. St. Louis still had warm fall days in November, but Chicago was bitter cold. The wind clawed at the windows but didn’t get in. I was only an hour by plane from St. Louis—even the ultra-cheap
Gazette
would spring for a one-day trip to Chicago—and Jane was my last chance to get a fix on Sydney for my story. I went back into Jane’s kitchen, lured by the good smells. I could see why she was a popular Gold Coast caterer. She was out of the refrigerator now and eviscerating a fat purple eggplant.

“When did you move to Chicago?” I asked.

“Ten years ago,” she said. “I refused to be one of the Ladue divorcees who live in genteel poverty in Chevy Chase.”

“I heard about that place,” I said. “I got so curious I went to see it. In my neighborhood, people could work all their lives and not achieve that kind of poverty.”

“Touché,” Jane said. “The rich have refined ways of making themselves miserable. There is nothing wrong with Chevy Chase, except I’d have to live there with my friends’ pity. But I didn’t want to cling to a scaled-down version of my old Ladue existence. I wanted a new life. I’d always liked the energy of Chicago, and my kids were in college. So I moved here.
The nice thing about this city is that anyone, rich or poor, can have an apartment by the lake.,”

“This section of Lake Shore Drive doesn’t look too shabby,” I said.

“Oh, it’s not,” Jane said. “But I didn’t live here when I first moved to Chicago. After Rob dumped me, all I had was a small settlement and an outdated degree in English. After years of hosting dinners for Rob, I decided I could make dinner for other people. I went to cooking school and then worked at a caterer’s to learn the business. Now I have my own company. I’m still serving dinner, but now I’m paid for it.”

Jane looked successful, happy, and twenty pounds heavier than Sydney and Caroline. She was no longer a Ladue lady.

“Do you miss your old life?” I asked her.

“I miss some of my old friends, especially Sydney.” Her face started to crumple, but she did not cry. “But she’s dead, so it doesn’t matter whether I live in St. Louis or not. There were things that I liked about my life there. But I don’t miss it.”

“What can you tell me about Sydney?” I said. “I don’t have a clear picture of her.” What I did know made her death seem no great loss.

“Sydney was closer than a sister,” Jane said. “We did everything together. We met in college. We were bridesmaids in each other’s weddings. We both married St. Louis boys. We both got pregnant the same year and had our boys a month apart. We both did the suburban mom routine together. Because of Rob’s law firm, I think I entertained even more than she did. I still remember my first dinner. Rob was up
for partner, and he wanted to impress everyone. I tried something exotic—lobster and shiitake mushrooms in puff pastry, and a lovely field greens salad before you could buy field greens at the supermarket. You’d have thought I was trying to poison my dinner guests. The women were all on diets and wouldn’t touch the lobster because of the pastry and cream sauce. One of the senior partners picked a baby oak leaf out of the salad. He’d never seen edible oak leaves before. He said, ‘So, Rob, did you rake the yard before dinner?’ Rob was furious at me. I learned my lesson. Next time I served beef tenderloin and Caesar salad. Rob had the partnership and I had a reputation as a good cook.”

Jane set aside the eggplant and began dismembering a chicken. Now I knew why I didn’t cook. It was too violent.

“Sydney’s dinners were exquisite. She could serve a salad and it looked like a sculpture. Of course, her degree was in interior design. She never had a career, but she would have been good. She paid attention to the details, always. She kept her guest room ready for a constant flow of out-of-town visitors for Hudson’s company, and it was lovely—fresh flowers, heated towel bars, Porthault sheets. All her creativity went into these things. You’d say it was wasted, I guess. But we didn’t think so back when we got married. The unspoken agreement—and perhaps the problem for women our age was that it was unspoken—was that Sydney would give up her career to help Hudson’s career. She made sure their son, Hud, went to the proper schools. She took him to all the games and activities, and attended all the parent
teacher conferences, because Hudson was too busy. She was a very good mother. When she found out their son was using coke at parties, she insisted he go to a drug rehab clinic. Hud Junior was furious. He saw coke as a recreational drug. All his friends used it. She took his drug use seriously. She and the boy were estranged over the rehab issue. Hud dropped out of college, but I always thought it was just for a semester, to scare her. His father promptly cut his allowance until he went back to school. Hud calls me from time to time. I’m still Aunt Jane, and with his mother gone, he needs a shoulder to cry on.”

“I tracked him down at Has Beans, the coffeehouse where he works,” I said. “He seems pretty upset by his mother’s death.”

“He is, and his family is no comfort. Hudson is like hugging an iceberg, and Elizabeth is no warmer. That poor boy is alone.”

“Do you think he’s off drugs?”

“Hud’s problems are not for publication,” she said, pointing the knife at me. I felt . . . chicken.

“I’m not interested in nailing a kid in the newspaper. But it might help if I knew.” Help what, I couldn’t say.

“He says he is,” Jane said. “I don’t know. I hope so. Sydney was miserable when he dropped out of school.”

“You said Hud’s friends used coke. Is that true?”

“There’s a big drug problem in Ladue. You have too many bored kids with too much money.”

Jane washed her hands in the sink, as if she were finished not only with the chicken but the whole subject. She arranged a vegetable still-life on the wooden
cutting board: four floppy pale-green heads of lettuce, purple onions, weird mushrooms that reminded me of my college days, red tomatoes on a green vine, and a pottery jar of garlic cloves. She peeled the cloves, halved them, and rubbed them on the inside of a wooden salad bowl the size of a small tree trunk. I watched in silence and considered what Jane had told me.

The Sydney she knew was nothing like the tipsy troublemaker I saw at the Leather and Lace Ball. I didn’t recognize Caroline’s silly spendthrift, either. I couldn’t make all these Sydneys match up.

“Is your Sydney the same woman who dipped her fork in her salad dressing and bought cute things that cost a fortune?”

“Oh, she did that, too,” Jane said, tearing apart a lettuce head with her bare hands. “A good Ladue wife is obsessed with dieting and shopping. Sydney never gained an ounce, and she could find cute things we couldn’t. But she had a serious side. She was a loving mother and a good wife. Not that Hudson noticed. The real woman in his life, at least until he met Brenda, was his mother, Elizabeth, and she ruled the roost.”

“Was Sydney in love with Hudson?” I asked. I didn’t know how anyone could be.

“I’m not sure,” Jane said. “They’d been married a long time. I thought Hudson was short-tempered and demanding, and probably drank too much. Sydney made excuses for him. She said he wasn’t like that when they were first married. She said his mother spoiled him and his secretary kowtowed to him. She said his bad behavior wasn’t his fault, because Hudson
was under pressure at work. I thought she was too tolerant, as usual.

“I know Sydney would have stayed with Hudson. She liked their life and she liked their money, and she lived with the hope that he’d change back into the man she imagined she married. But one day Hudson came home and announced he wanted a divorce.”

“To marry Brenda the lawyer, right?”

Jane rolled her eyes and ripped into more lettuce. “I saw her only once, but I heard all about her. Brenda was ten years younger, ten pounds heavier, and six inches taller than Sydney. Brenda didn’t diet. She drank beer—an exotic act for a woman in Ladue. To me she looked like a man-stealing yuppie, but Hudson found her wildly exciting.

“Sydney was stunned when Hudson said he wanted a divorce. She was paralyzed. She pretended nothing had happened for the longest time. Sydney believed Hudson would come to his senses and drop Brenda. Meanwhile, Hudson hired a divorce shark to make sure that Sydney got nothing. He was cruel. He declared war on his own wife.”

Jane declared war on a tomato, savagely slicing until the cutting board ran red.

“Sydney was helpless,” she said. “She didn’t know how to fight. She was a woman who believed in the system, and it betrayed her. Her husband and his bloodsucking lawyer wanted to strip her of everything. Until it happens to you, you can’t understand what it’s like. There are rich wives who wind up homeless, literally living under a bridge after their divorce.”

“Don’t they have lawyers?”

“Hah!” Jane said, slashing another tomato. “Lawyers are part of the problem. A divorce for someone in Sydney’s circumstances can cost thirty thousand dollars or more. A woman can go bankrupt trying to pay off her own lawyer.

“The first thing Hudson did was cripple her financially. He made sure she couldn’t get her hands on their joint assets. Before he announced the divorce, the sneak cleaned out their safety deposit box, although she didn’t know this until later. She couldn’t find any of their salable stocks and bonds, the deed to their place in the country, anything. Sydney was sure he was hiding their assets, but she didn’t hire an equally aggressive lawyer to fight him. She didn’t know how to find one. At first, she treated her husband’s betrayal as if it were some terrible failure on her part. She was too ashamed to talk to other women who’d been divorced. We could have steered her to someone good. Instead, she got Elliott Tedley. She knew him from their dinner parties. Elliott talked a good game, but he was not a fighter. He knew Hudson had the money, so Hudson would have the power. Elliott could have asked the judge to have Hudson pay Sydney’s legal fees. But Elliott didn’t want to upset Hudson. Then he wouldn’t be invited to the Vander Venter parties.

“The final blow came at a meeting in Hudson’s lawyer’s office. Sydney called me in tears and told me all about it. If she’d called me earlier, I could have helped her. At the meeting, Hudson’s attorney announced he had canceled all Sydney’s charge accounts and put their joint checking account in
Hudson’s name. This left her with no money to fight back. He said Sydney would be given a small cash settlement and a little alimony for two years, until she was ‘rehabilitated.’ Then, when she was self-supporting, Sydney would get no other money. After all, Hudson’s business was not doing well.

“Sydney sat there in the lawyer’s office, speechless. Then she said, ‘Rehabilitated? Like I’m some kind of . . . of convict? And then I’ll be turned loose to go to work when other women my age have had a twenty-five-year start on their careers, and I’ve been at home? You owe me more than that, Hudson. I never asked for this divorce. I gave up my career to advance yours. You owe me.’

“Hudson said, ‘I owe you nothing. And that’s what I have to give you. I am simply an employee of the firm with a few shares of stock. Mother is the main stockholder, and my partners are the other major shareholders. Mother is the real investment genius in the family. You don’t even deserve what you’re getting. You sat on your ass for twenty-five years while I supported you in style.’

“Sydney said, ‘You couldn’t have had a career if I didn’t take care of our son. You wouldn’t have been able to travel if I didn’t stay home with him when he was sick, and car-pool him to school, and . . .’