Magic Hour, Susan Isaacs [life changing books txt] 📗

were too many trees too close: overpowering oaks, dark, drippy maples, grim

124 / SUSAN ISAACS

spruces; their humid shadows spooked the house. And inside…well, it was always dank, especially in the living room, with its never-quite-dry upholstery; sit there long enough and your pubic areas felt about to mildew. No wonder I’d gone off to Vietnam, come home for three days and then never gone back. But my brother had never moved out.

Oh, right, you could say, hearing that: He still lives with Mommy. But it really wasn’t like that. Easton was no mama’s boy. Sure, with his navy-blue blazers and golden color, he might look like some hare-brained heir to a Southampton fortune. But in truth, he was very unindulged. My father had given him almost nothing, except an occasional unbankable belch, and in any case had cleared out soon after Easton’s sixth birthday. My mother, although she clearly preferred him to me, spent every cent she had on upping her own Quality Quotient, not his; she would never pass up buying a hundred-dollar ticket to a benefit for hyperkinetic Maori Anglicans held on some rich socialite’s lawn (with shrimp in sculptedice swan boats) in order to do something nice for her son. Still, Easton had inherited my mother’s grand dreams, although unlike her, he had never lost touch with the truth. He was not the typical Bridgehampton local who falls in with the summer crowd; he did not get dizzy drinking rich people’s champagne. No matter how much time he spent in their perfect houses, he knew he wasn’t one of them, that he was, essentially, poor and, in addition, not blessed with that mysterious personal magnetism that attracts money.

So forget Easton buying his own place, or even renting an apartment. Both assumed a steady income, and my brother understood that long-term job retention—unlike cutting lemon peels into translucent twists—was not one of his fortes.

I’m sure he never

MAGIC HOUR / 125

actually sat down with my mother and said: Listen, I can play golf, tennis and croquet, sail a boat. I know the correct dress shoes to wear from Memorial Day to Labor Day. But for some reason I keep getting canned after six or eight months. So if you don’t mind, I’d going to stay put here.

Why go through the embarrassment of setting up housekeep-ing somewhere and then getting evicted? Right, Mom?

Actually, Easton’s living at home suited them both. No rent for him, just whatever he could contribute, whenever.

And living in the big house set far back from the road, he could pass himself off as a Bridgehampton blueblood. Who among his city slicker acquaintances would get out of their Porsches to inspect the house—and discover we did not own the adjoining farmland? Who, over the course of a lazy summer, would bother to check his credentials, to find out that his father had been not a gentleman farmer but a drunk given to pissing on the floor of the local tavern?

(I call Easton’s friends acquaintances. Just like my mother, he lived for the summer people. From the time he got his driver’s license, he ignored the kids at high school and hung out with a semi-social Southampton crew: the Daddy-is-on-Wall-Street-and-by-gosh-so-am-I fraternity. It didn’t seem to matter who they were individually; they all had boats to invite him on, golf clubs to take him to, wives’ college roommates to fix him up with. They were interchangeable: extremely tan, mildly wealthy and slightly stupid.) Anyway, the domestic arrangement suited Easton. And I guess my mother liked having him around because he could do all the man jobs: mow the lawn, put up the storm windows, check the mousetraps in the cellar. She’d never been much of a farm wife, even when she’d had a farmer.

126 / SUSAN ISAACS

Living with Easton gave my mother an audience for her compulsive monologue no one else would be willing to listen to. She’d sit at the table, push her food around her plate, light up a cigarette and—puff, puff—talk about the French five-thousand-dollar dress Mrs. Preston Cortwright had tried to return the Monday after her big party; the rumor that Mr.

Edward Dudley, husband of size-three Mrs. Edward—puff, puff—had taken up with their Experiment in International Living seventeen-year-old fatso fräulein from Munich. Or—my mother would tap off the ash—how she herself had made all the right diplomatic moves and had finally been named deputy associate chairlady of the Southampton-Peconic Museum of Art’s annual cocktail party.

My mother’s pretentiousness, her coldness—her absolute nothingness—never got to my brother. Unlike me, he could listen to her expound on Quality without wishing she’d choke to death on one of her goddamn Protestant watercress sandwiches.

Not that they spent a lot of time together. My mother used the big back bedroom on the first floor, and Easton took over the second floor. I don’t think either of them longed for more companionship. Okay, compared to me, Easton was my mother’s pride and joy, but compared to what she had expected of him—the presidency of a major brokerage firm, senior partner of a Wall Street law firm—he was a loser.

But a well-dressed one.

Robby Kurz did a major double take after we rang the doorbell. “Easton Brady,” my brother said to Robby, and shook his hand.

Robby stared at Easton. Then he blinked a couple of times, as if expecting his vision to clear. He had probably been imagining me minus two years, and

MAGIC HOUR / 127

that was sort of true. But he was also face-to-face with a gent in gray flannel slacks, a pale-blue oxford shirt and a sapphire-blue V-neck sweater, a rich-looking Waspy guy who was combing back his hair off his forehead with his fingers—hair that was just slightly too long. Not hippy or scruffy hair, but hair that seemed to be saying: Forgive the length, but I just got back from sailing home from Bermuda.

Half an hour later, Robby was still sneaking fast, disbelieving glances from Easton to me. He sat at a folding card table