The House On Willow Street (32 page)

After twenty-four years of poverty, Suki Power Richardson had loved having money. It wasn’t hers, essentially, it was her husband’s. But she got to use it, to spend it. And spend it she did. She had accounts at all the big stores: Saks, Bloomies, Bergdorf Goodman. She found that she didn’t really like the old rock-chick clothes she’d worn for years, she’d been kidding herself when she said she preferred old jeans and scuffed leather jackets. It turned out that she loved new, elegant clothes made from luxurious fabrics that clung to her hourglass figure in all the right places and cost more than a month’s rent on her old apartment. Her fail-safe tight black polyester pants went in the garbage and she bought beautifully cut pants off the rack at Donna Karan, along with marvelously draped jackets, and rabbit-soft knits. Her shoes were Italian, her fair hair was no longer given added oomph with a store-bought highlighting kit applied in a washbasin in her apartment: she went to a chichi hair salon where ordinary joes couldn’t even
get
an appointment.

Kyle loved to see her spending money on her appearance.

“You need to look the part, honey,” he’d say. “Daddy always says, ‘Look the part, son, and they’ll think you are the part.’”

For the first year of their marriage, Suki didn’t care what “the part” was, she was simply pleased to be able to indulge in an orgy of spending. After a childhood of scraping by in drafty old Avalon House, it was like being released from prison and relishing the freedom. She bought art for the walls of the house on D Street, perused antique auctions with a gimlet eye and repainted the hall four times before she’d achieved the right shade of subtle gray. She bought flowers—too many for the house, sometimes. But she didn’t care about the excess: the Richardsons had serious money; nothing she could do could put even the slightest dent in it.

She and Kyle went to charity balls, dinner parties, and Republican party fund-raisers where the wives of party bigwigs wore Chanel suits and worked the room. Even Antoinette seemed to be thawing toward her. Suki had been brought up in an important Irish mansion, she was clearly from upper-class stock and she knew how to behave.

But as Tess might have told them all, Suki got bored easily. She became fed up with statements referencing Kyle Senior. Daddy had an opinion on everything: he said it was a ludicrous idea to buy a house in Taos as Suki was suggesting instead of a cottage in Newport where Daddy wanted them to buy.

“It’s none of his business where we buy,” Suki shouted at Kyle as they stood at their matching his-and-hers sinks in the cream marble bathroom en suite.

“Oh, come on,” said Kyle angrily. “You’re not that naïve are you? I thought you prided yourself on your intellectual abilities, Suki. It’s like listening to a Renaissance painter saying he doesn’t want to paint what his patron wants him to paint. My father pays for it all!”

This last statement, and the way Kyle had hissed it at her, stuck in Suki’s mind: did his father’s absolute control over
the whole family rankle with Kyle, or was he merely angry that she’d threatened to upset the applecart?

She flew to Taos to look at properties in spite of them all and then received an irate phone call from Antoinette.

“If you continue with this nonsense, Suzanne”—only Antoinette refused to use the nickname Suki had had since she was three—“you will upset my husband. And we don’t want that now, do we?”

“Don’t we?” said Suki truculently. “What do I care if he gets upset?”

There was silence on the other end of the phone.

Finally, Antoinette spoke. “Kyle said you’d say that. Personally, I thought you were too clever, but I can see I overestimated you. Kyle Senior and I control you, whether you want to admit it or not. That goes for everything: from where your children go to school to whether you holiday in Europe or on the Cape with the rest of the family.”

Suki felt rage overwhelm her. She wasn’t sure which part of the conversation infuriated her most: the fact that her husband clearly told his mother everything, or the veiled threat that Antoinette and Kyle Senior could stop her going home to Ireland for the summer, because she wanted to be in Avalon again and was fed up with Massachusetts and its social set.

“Oh, and the house in New Mexico—don’t even bother. You won’t get a red cent for that. You’ll summer with us. Perhaps, in time, you might get a cottage of your own on Martha’s Vineyard. That’s it. You’re a Richardson now, Suzanne, and you play by our rules.”

Boredom wasn’t something Suki was used to, but in the gilded cage the Richardsons had constructed around her, boredom dominated her daily life. She wasn’t expected to do anything
other than look beautiful at functions, know all the right people, do a little charity work, have her hair done expensively, learn how to make small talk at elegant dinner parties and never, as Antoinette explained to her, say anything controversial, even as a joke: “There are no jokes in Washington.”

At this, Suki had thrown her head back and let rip with a great, throaty laugh, but Antoinette had stared at her, stony-faced.

“I am not joking,” she said. “Junior has a very good chance of a Senate seat and he needs a wife by his side, not a loose cannon. I can see that in you, Suzanne—a certain wildness. It must be the Irish blood.”

Suki could take Antoinette’s insults because she always managed to get her own little barbs in. However, saying anything about her Irishness inflamed her.

“My ancestors were living in a castle when yours were still . . .” Suki searched her mind for some suitable retort, “digging for vegetables in a field somewhere, and on your knees at night praying for redemption.”

Antoinette glared at her. “I will not lower myself to your insults,” she said.

“Oh, but you can insult me and that’s fine, is it?” said Suki. “We all know the truth, don’t we, Antoinette: I’m the one with the blue blood in this family.”

In truth, Suki didn’t really care about the Power name or what it meant. Her father had been proud of his De Paor ancestry, but proud in a gentle way. Proud to be able to trace back his family, and yet deeply sad that a succession of feckless Powers in the past had frittered away the family fortune. As a result, the Powers had lost the ability to keep their lovely home, had lost the ability to take care of the people of the village. Her father would have been a philanthropist, if only he’d had the cash. So Suki hadn’t been brought up
to think that being a Power meant that she was better than anyone else. But if it riled Antoinette, then she would remind her at every opportunity.

Angry, she went off and signed up for a course in Women’s Studies and ostentatiously left the books lying around.
The Feminine Mystique
, Mary Wollstonecraft’s
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
Incredibly, she found herself fascinated by the writers, by the work. She had always thought she was living a very different life from other women because she’d left her home and had to make a living for herself in America, yet it turned out she was only doing what countless other women had done before her. And like countless other women, she’d succeeded in marrying well, but not wisely.

Kyle didn’t like her studies.

“For God’s sake, what are you doing with all those damn books?” he said. “You’ve finished with school, you don’t have to go back to it.”

Kyle was not bookish in the least, despite his father’s attempts to get him to keep up to date with happenings around the world. Kyle Senior was a voracious reader of nonfiction, particularly biographies and accounts of war. He’d never served in the military and yet he thought like a military commander, Suki realized. If he hadn’t been such a cut-and-dry bastard, she might have admired him.

It didn’t help that the slow push to get Kyle Junior’s feet wet in the world of politics was beginning to gain momentum.

“Children,” said Kyle Senior, “you need children. The wife isn’t enough.”

Suki was in the room while this conversation was going on and she sat, quite astonished. “Talk about me as if I’m not here, Senior,” she said. “Absolutely fine. I’m a brood mare, am I?”

Kyle Senior laughed. “Yes, honey, I guess you are. And we’re looking for sons.”

That night Suki went out on her own to a bar across town and proceeded to get very, very drunk. She arrived home at two in the morning, having danced the night away in a jazz club and extricated herself with some difficulty from the very good dancer who’d wanted to take her back to his place. “I can’t, my husband wouldn’t like it,” she’d managed, which was strange because the old Suki would have leaped at the chance.

“You’re drunk,” Kyle had said as she’d thrown herself into bed, clothes on, her mascara sliding down her face.

“Yeah, I am,” she said. “So what?”

The next day she’d felt sorry. She loved Kyle. It wasn’t his fault that his family were pigs and treated her as if she was nothing but an accessory in a political campaign.

“Maybe we should have a baby,” she said.

The baby-making plan brought them closer together—at first. Six months down the line, and still no baby, it was a different matter.

“Maybe we should go see Dr. Kennedy?” Suki had suggested. “There’s lots of tests you can have these days and stuff you—”

“We will not go to the doctor to discuss this,” said Kyle, his nostrils flaring. For a second, he looked exactly like his father. Oddly, Suki found this a turn-on.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s give it another few months.”

But nothing happened. Kyle started to spend nights in a different bedroom, said he couldn’t get to sleep at night, he didn’t want to wake her, but Suki knew the real reason. He couldn’t bear to make love to her any more. He could barely
get an erection when he came near her. In their desire for a baby, somehow Kyle Junior had been emasculated.

She began going out on her own more, hanging out with women from her college course. Nobody on the course had any money, but Suki would buy them all drinks, cocktails. “You’re gonna love this one,” she’d say. “It’s a Long Island Iced Tea and it is fantastic.”

Carlotta, a fiery Latina on the course, wanted to write a thesis on racism and stereotyping of Hispanics in American culture. Her father had threatened to disown her. “He wants us to fit in,” she said, dark eyes flashing. “I do not want to fit in, I want to be myself. I do not want to be put into a box I need to fit.”

“Me neither,” said Suki.

“And you drink too much, Suki,” said Carlotta, “if we are being straight with the truth.”

“Yeah, thanks for telling me, honey,” Suki said. “You might drink too, if you had my life.”

“You might drink if you had
my
life,” countered Carlotta. “I pay for this course by cleaning houses at night. Maybe I clean yours too?”

“Oh, gimme a break, Carlotta! We’re supposed to be in this together.”

“Money separates us,” said Carlotta. “Don’t forget that,
chica.
”

Kyle Senior rang her up. “I want you to stop this ludicrous college course immediately,” he said. “From what I hear, it’s all rubbish about women’s rights, that tired old turkey. You’ve got plenty of rights, you don’t have to work, you’ve got money to buy clothes. What else do you want?”

“A life,” said Suki sarcastically. “A life where I’m not the Richardson family brood mare.”

“If you can’t have a baby, you’re not much of a brood mare, are you?” said Kyle Senior.

“What do you mean, if
I
can’t have a baby?” said Suki. “Who says it’s me? Your bloody son can’t even get it up when he sees me.”

She wondered if she’d gone too far, but Kyle Senior never shied away from plain talking.

“We’ll have to make sure he does then,” he said. “But I don’t want you going out at night with your girlfriends, going to bars. There are rumors starting, rumors about you having fun in bars. Inevitably, sooner or later somebody will pick up on the rumors and start to wonder whether you’re playing around. No Richardson wife plays around. So you be
very
careful, because I’ll be watching you.”

“There’s nothing to watch,” snapped Suki, and slammed the phone down, but she felt frightened. Kyle Senior was not a man to cross.