Magic Hour by Susan Isaacs

windows—pissed her off. She'd pass by, and there'd be just a sharp expulsion of air through her nose, an irate snort. When I was younger I'd ask, "Hey, Ma, what's wrong?" Her answer would be "nothing" in the form of a high-society chuckle—a throaty heh-heh of denial. Then she'd say, "Steve, sweetheart, please. Anything but 'Ma.' Did I raise a hillbilly?" My mother always made me feel like total shit.
    I know. She didn't have it easy. The farm was gone, and so was my old man. There was no way near enough money to feed me and Easton, and keep us in jeans and sneakers, much less for her to lead the gracious-lady life she aspired to. So she got a job—at
Saks Fifth Avenue
in Southampton, selling expensive dresses to expensive women. And when she wasn't involving herself in rich lives by zipping up their dresses or stroking their embossed names on their charge cards, she was busting her chops doing scutz work for their charity groups. My mother would do anything —set up three hundred bridge chairs in the midday sun, lick one thousand envelope flaps until past midnight—to be allowed into their swan-necked, high-cheekboned society.
    I don't know where my mother got her obsession with the upper crust. Sure, her family was an old one in Sag Harbor, and to hear her you could practically see portraits of bearded Eastons in the brass-buttoned uniforms of whaling boat captains. But there were no portraits; I'd hiked up to the Sag Harbor Library in eighth grade and learned there was absolutely no basis for ancestor worship. Early Eastons might have gone to sea, but they'd obviously been ordinary sailors: guys with bowlegs and black stumps for teeth. Her old man, who died before I was born, had sold tickets for a ferry company that had the Sag Harbor and New London,
Connecticut
, route.
    Still, my mother was convinced, despite all hard evidence to the contrary, that she was a gentlewoman. She didn't give a damn about the local South Fork female elite, the wives of lawyers, doctors, successful farmers, or even the moneyed Yanks—maybe because they all knew who she was, or wasn't. No, she lived for Memorial Day, when her "friends" opened up their summer houses out here. Even when we were kids, she'd sit at the supper table and talk about her
New York
"friends." Quality People.
    Her friends, of course, were not her friends but her customers, summer women who came to the grand old houses, "cottages" in Southampton—like the one Sy bought—for the summer. She'd go on and on about Mrs. Oliver Sackett's hand-embroidered-in-England slips ("Divine, teeny stitches!"), or the thirty-one ("Norell! Mainbocher! Chanel!") dresses Mrs. Quentin Dahlmaier had ordered from the main branch in
New York
, one for every night of the month of July.
    Bottom line? My mother felt fucked every single day of her life because she didn't have a driver (" Never say 'chauffeur'!" she warned Easton; "it's nouveau riche ") and a maid and a sable coat. She didn't even have a roof that didn't leak.
    And I think that's why I got out from under her roof as often as I could. Sitting over a plate of her specialite de la maison , macaroni and undiluted Campbell's Cheddar Cheese Soup (which, of course, she knew was not Quality, but which she announced was Great Fun), listening to her go on to Easton in her throaty voice—she was a heavy smoker and wound up sounding like Queen Elizabeth with laryngitis—Jesus. She'd talk about how Mrs. Gabriel Walker ("one of the Bundy sisters, from Philadelphia") was mad for nubby linen, absolutely mad ... Her conversation was directed to Easton, never to me. But then she knew and I knew that would be a waste of time.
    I did not belong in that house. Like my old man, I was not Quality.
 
    "Had Mr. Spencer to the best of your knowledge received any threatening messages or phone calls?" Robby Kurz was asking Lindsay Keefe.
    You could tell Robby had gotten up extra early to get spiffy. He'd arranged a yellow handkerchief in the breast