“Don’t you worry, darling. There will always be somethingfor you.”
“I’m his goddaughter,” she told me. “Which means I’m his daughter but with god attached.”
“Come along, come along, more people to meet,” Eddie said, smiling. He guided me away.
“Is she for real?” I asked.
“For real insofar as she is what she seems, but she’s joking about the money. Mae-Mae is an intellectual properties lawyer, and her husband is a hedge funder of the mega-yacht variety. Her inheritance is a long-standing joke between us. I suppose she’ll need my money after I’m dead to tip the crew.”
“What a sparkling wit.”
“It’s a Hotalling family trait. They tease. The whole lot of them. They practice when they’re together.”
We went to table one to find our seats. “You’re Esther Newberg,” Eddie said to me.
“My third name of the night,” I said.
“No, Esther is my friend with the cold. She couldn’t come.” Esther Newberg had been seated directly across the table from Eddie.
“We have to switch this,” I said, picking up the place card. I was seated next to Skip Hotalling.
“I have no doubt that Polly worked on the seating chart for a month. If you switched the cards, she would switch them back. She would tell you the reason she and Skip have made it fifty years is that they never sat next to one another at a dinner party.”
“But I’m not your wife. I’m yourdaughter.”
Then someone else who Eddie knew swept him away, and I was left alone to sit in Esther Newberg’s chair.
The evening had been fun up until this point. The camaraderie between Eddie and myself kept things jolly. Women incocktail pajamas admired my dress and the men who were with them admired me. A part of me, a person small and far away, was thrilled to have Eddie call me his daughter. He never would have done that if Buddy were alive, but here at the Century Club, there was no one to be hurt by so small a misrepresentation. All he meant was that he had chosen me, and I appreciated that. Still, around now I was wishing I was in my own backyard. The role for which I was the stand-in belonged not to Esther Newberg but to my mother, who had yet to be apprised of her ex-husband’s reappearance. Wasn’t it her responsibility to be seated across the table from Eddie? To be seated next to Skip Hotalling, who even now was working his way towards the chair at my left?
But my mother was decades out of the picture, and she hadn’t liked the Hotallings anyway. If she hadn’t invited them to her wedding, then chances were good they wouldn’t have invited her to their golden anniversary dinner.
“Daphne Zabriskie,” Skip said once he was seated. “I could have spent fifty years guessing who I might be seated next to this evening and I don’t think I would have come up with you.”
“Would you have come up with Esther Newberg?”
Skip nodded. “Oh, sure. Esther’s a friend from Sag Harbor. Her place is four blocks over from ours. We see Esther all the time.”
“I guess that doubles the disappointment.”
My host laughed heartily, and the other members of our table smiled to think that Skip had been seated next to a woman both witty and young.
“So you and Polly live in Sag Harbor?”
“We live in Darien, but we get out to Sag Harbor when there’s time. A lot more time now that I’m retired.”
Again, I longed for Jonathan, but then remembered that evenif he were here, he would not be able to take this burden from me. Jonathan would have been seated on the other side of the table next to Polly.
“How long have you been retired?”
“Five years. Five long, dark years,” he said. “What about you and Ed? Have the two of you been in touch for a while now?”
“A while,” I said, because what did “a while” even mean? “I’ve enjoyed being with him.”
“No one’s better company than Ed. I would bet you he’s the favorite person of everyone in this room.”
“He has my vote,” I said.
From across the table Polly sent a telepathic communiqué to her husband, who then picked up his salad fork at the moment she picked up her salad fork. The first course had begun. “How’s your mother these days?”
