Tampa, Florida
Friday 3:00 p.m.
January 8, 1999
I intended to go back to the office, but couldn’t muster the enthusiasm. Nothing on my calendar until Monday morning. A good time to play hooky. I pulled over to the side of the road and put Greta’s top down.
Driving over the bridges, the water on either side, the wind blowing through the car and the top down rejuvenated my spirit, if not my hairstyle.
On the way home, I couldn’t help thinking about Carly and what kind of child she had been before she learned the big secret. Kate had two sons when Mom and I came to live with her. Later, Carly was born. Since I was ten years older, I learned about the birds and the bees a lot sooner, and I knew Kate had been widowed far too long to have another baby. The boys must have at least suspected, too, but Kate was so happy about the pregnancy and kept referring to the baby as “your brother or sister,” that none of us was willing to challenge her on it.
When Carly was born, and as she grew up, it just ceased to be important to all of us who Carly’s father was. To us, she was our sister, so it didn’t matter. And Carly never questioned it. Until the year she was ten. That year, her science class studied the gestation time for dogs, cats and human babies. She began to ask questions about why her appearance was so different from the dark hair and eyes her brothers had, and finally, the exact date of their father’s death.
From that point on, Carly began hounding Kate about the identity of her father. And the boys, being boys, wanted to know with whom their mother had had an affair. Kate refused to say, at least to her children. I don’t know what she told my mother at the time. Kate would only say that all her children were hers and they were brothers and sister.
For Carly, it was as if she had lost all perspective. I’m not sure ten year olds are supposed to have perspective, but Carly did. At least, until she decided finding out her father’s identity was to be her sole mission in life. She pestered all of us endlessly about it. She made a list of all the men she knew, and relentlessly questioned my mother, Kate and the rest of us about them. When did Kate meet each one? How? How well did they know each other? She kept completed questionnaires on all of them, and meticulously correlated their relationships with Kate to her birth date and what she calculated as her date of conception. She’d interview them in circumspect ways, always trying to find out if he’d been around at the right time, if he was the right age. Each time she ruled out someone she considered desirable, she’d go into a deep depression and refuse to talk to any of us for days. By the time I was in college, Carly had filled several loose-leaf notebooks of father contenders, viable and rejected.
It was hard to tell whether the serious rift between Kate and Carly resulted from a secret kept too long, or the natural animosity of a teenage girl toward her mother. In either case, Carly was never the same toward any of us. She went away to college at the University of Colorado and rarely came home after that. None of us knew her, really, since we hadn’t talked to her seriously since she was a child. Mark was the closest to her, and she was the most jealous and distant from me. Carly has always seen me as some kind of competition for her place in her family. She knew I wasn’t really a blood relative, and she felt she wasn’t a full blood relative either. The self-imposed competition made her brittle, even a little flaky.
When Carly secretly moved to Tampa, after her mother and I moved here, we didn’t even know it for a long time. I think she did it partly because she was jealous of my relationship with Kate, and partly because she was beginning to grow up. She entered Stetson Law School and became a lawyer like her two brothers and, not coincidentally, me. It’s hard to beat the competition if you’re not in the same game. Carly wanted a real contest.
Once she moved here, she still saw her mother rarely, but in a typical Carly move, signed up for my class. Even now, she’s a bundle of contradictions; independent and rebellious, brilliant but immature. I couldn’t really fathom how it must feel not to know who your father was, to feel that rejection and deception. Carly certainly seemed to be struggling with it still, and I wasn’t sure she’d ever get over it.
Comparing my childhood to Carly’s wasn’t really possible.
Kate says that I was a dreamer as a child. I spent all of my time either reading or daydreaming, making up a world far different from the one I lived in. In school, I was always planning the next event, looking forward to activities next month or next year.
After Mom died when I was 16 and Dad left me with Kate and her family, I became even more out of touch with what was going on around me, but I held onto Kate and her family as if I was drowning in abandonment and only familial affection would save me. For her part, Kate took the role of my mother in the same way she mothered her own children. She went to parent-teacher conferences, threw birthday parties, and had her picture taken at my graduations, just as she did with her other kids. She even played the part of mother-of-the-bride when George and I married. Kate is my mother, for all practical purposes, and has been for longer than I knew my real mom. If it wasn’t that I’d feel so disloyal, I’d call her “mother.” She’s suggested it. It’s a step I’m not ready to take.
So maybe Carly is right to be jealous of me. Maybe I said or did something those last few years when I lived with Kate’s family to justify it. But even if I did, I can’t relate to how she treats her mother. Because if my mother was still alive, no matter what she did, I’d never treat her the way Carly treats Kate.
Mom died of cancer. While she was ill, we spent so much time together and I wanted to savor every moment of it. She wanted me to go to school and the truant officers insisted that I go at least half a day. But the last few months of her life, they let me stay home when I promised to test out of the tenth grade after she died.
That was such a glorious time. She taught me how to make bread, arrange flowers, put on a dinner party. She told me all of the secrets a mother imparts to a daughter about dating and dealing with men. Some of what she said scared me. “Never let a boy put his hand on your knee. If you do, he’ll want to put it under your skirt.” I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant by that, but it was advice I followed until I met George years later.
Mom and I had our own little world then. Dad was traveling, as he always had, even at what was clearly the end of his wife’s life. On some level, I never forgave him for that. But on another level I was glad for the time it gave mother and me to be together. Maybe that was his present to both of us.
It was while Mom was sick that she told me she’d wanted to be a lawyer instead of a nurse. And I promised her that I would do what she had not done. Eventually, Mom died and her husband, the man I’d called my dad since she married him when I was five, never came home. I went to live with Kate and, as I promised, I tested out of the tenth grade. I graduated from high school at seventeen and then went directly to the University of Michigan.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I know now that I was lucky to have loved my mother for 16 years, and to have had her unconditional love while she lived. She sent me off into the world with that, the love, desire and support necessary to make something of my life. Every time I think of her, I think, “I could be better,” not just as a lawyer, or a woman, but as a person. She believed that what’s important is how you live your life, how you treat others. She taught me always to do my best and to help those who need it. It was a hard lesson to learn at sixteen, but I learned it, and it sustains me. It also gets me into trouble. Mighty Mouse does save the day, but it’s not easy.
Carly was still dealing with Kate from anger and abandonment. I doubt Kate had ever sat her down and asked her to consider the alternative--being born to Kate’s family or not at all. But Carly is the closest thing to a sister I’ll ever have. She may be flaky and irresponsible and irritatingly self centered, but there’s no way I could let her get seriously hurt. Kate would never get over it and I’m not sure I would either. I didn’t want to lose anyone else in my life.
About twenty minutes after I left Carly, I was turning onto Plant Key Bridge. I forced my mind back to the present and filled my senses with the approach. Florida is so flat, and Plant Key so far below sea level, that from the bridge, I could only see the top of Minaret. And a spectacular top it is, too.
The house is named after its most prominent architectural feature, a large minaret on the top of the third floor roof. The story goes that Henry Plant had visited Turkey and became enamored of the bulbous onion domes he saw there. He put several on the top of his hotel and one on the top of his home. Ours is shiny steel and the sun glints off of it most of the day, making it shine bright blue with reflected skylight, orange with the sunrise or grey with the clouds. The rest of the house isn’t in any way reflective of Middle Eastern architecture, so the minaret itself is somewhat out of place on top of the southern style home. It’s sort of like Jimmy Durante’s big nose, something you come to appreciate over time.
As I left the bridge, I drove down Plant Key’s version of the Avenue of Palms. Ours are not so old or so tall as the ones at the entrance to Palm Beach, but they stretch for about a half a mile and give one the impression of grandeur an entrance onto Plant Key should have. To show the proper respect to the original, our avenue is unnamed. It opens out to the front lot entrance to Minaret, which is red brick, paved and circular.
Plant copied the entrance from the Breakers Hotel, built about the same time by Plant’s great friend Henry Flagler. If you’ve been to the Breakers, the Ritz in Naples, or seen pictures, you’ve seen our front entrance, except ours is red brick and not yellow. We have a round fountain in front of the porte cochere, and a drive that runs through. In those days, Florida storms were as fierce as they are now, and the ladies and gentlemen needed a shelter from which to leave their carriages. Now, it makes a great valet parking entrance to Minaret, particularly if you’re arriving in the summer between four and seven o’clock in the afternoon when we get our afternoon storms.
Puttered across the bridge, onto the island, and toward the house. I asked the valet to put the top up on the car and went inside, intending to change into running shorts and a T-shirt and take the dogs out.
But when I walked into the lobby, I saw Kate sitting in the dining room with Victoria Warwick and Cilla Worthington.
Tried to sneak around to the winding staircase that goes from the main entrance to the house up to the second floor, but Kate saw me and waved me over. Shook my head furiously, signaling her that I didn’t want to come in, but Victoria spied me, too.
Trapped.
Failed to appear gracious as I walked into the dining room and approached their table.