William—suffering the trials of a modern-day Job—was also dealing with the fact that his wife of nearly twenty-five years left him. Out of the blue, she flew to New York, met a bunch of people and ultimately their daughter, came home and confronted him, and then, whoosh, she too moved to New York. His sister and his daughter were gay and Mary, the former, just got married and Suzanne, the latter, was engaged to a woman.
Thus, when people at the party asked, “Where’s Kate?” William punted, “something came up and she couldn’t make it,” and when people asked him about Suzanne he lied and said that she was happy at school and loved working for a New York firm after completing her second year.
Kate’s leaving had only begun to set it. They were simpatico since they met and after giving birth to Suzanne she easily slipped into her role as a stay-at-home mother, working hard on doing local charity work. They were there for one another when Kate had her miscarriages. They both shared a calling, finding security and peace in their faith and in their certainty about things. They were both raised Catholic, and they raised Suzanne and Eric to be true Catholics, although William and Kate spoke often over concerns that their children had drifted away from the true faith and were at best treating their religion, so central to their parents’ lives, as an afterthought, considered only when convenient.
Even after Suzanne quit law school after her first year, Kate and William thought it was caused by the confusion she faced by having left California for the first time, compounded, again, by Mary’s pernicious influence. Surely Suzanne would return to her true family and to her true faith. And she would be greeted, as the prodigal son was, with open hearts and minds. She could probably transfer her first year at Columbia Law and start up her second at Stanford and then follow the trail William and his own father established.
Something, though, happened some weeks before the cocktail party. Out of nowhere, something upset Kate. She told him that there was this woman, the mother of one of Suzanne’s law-school friends, who claimed to care for Suzanne and who taunted Kate about losing her daughter forever. Kate, in desperation, had agreed to go to New York to rescue Suzanne, to break her free of those who had confused her. To get her to come home. They agreed, did Kate and William, that the important thing was to convince Suzanne to return, that Kate had to do what she could to meet alone with Suzanne.
Kate went. And neither she nor Suzanne came back. Sure, Kate showed up and confronted him about it, demanding that he, as she had, turn his back on something fundamental to his existence. He would not do that, and now she was gone. He knew, from what Kate had told him that Eric was likely to go too.
At that moment, at that cocktail party, William was numb. He knew that his task, his crusade, was to bring them back. He was a good lawyer. He would figure it out.
Getting a Job
For her part, after returning to New York, Kate had no idea what would happen. With Mary and Betty married and about to return from their honeymoon, Suzanne and Kerry convinced her to move into what had been Kerry’s old room in Tuckahoe. They, unlike Mary, who worked from home, would be out on weekdays and Kate was, after all, Suzanne’s Mother, and it was not fair that she impose on her sister-in-law and her bride. And there was still some residual bad-blood between Kate and her sister-in-law, though both denied it.
That agreed upon, and the things of Kate’s that were at Mary’s being moved, Kate took Betty to dinner. Kate had credit cards but did not know whether they would be canceled. In any case, she had no ready cash—all of her money was in joint accounts with William—and if she were to be independent she had to find a job. Betty was not only a psychologist but she was the only neutral among the inner circle into which Kate had entered.
The two worked out a strategy. Kate had not done paid work for a while, since she had Suzanne, but she had worked regularly over the past twenty-four years. She was, in fact, the de facto (and unpaid) CEO of her Mill Valley parish’s outreach and charitable programs. She had a degree from Berkeley and worked in the financial industry before quitting to raise her family. She knew many people in the San Francisco area and identified ten women to whom she felt close and with whom she worked. She and Betty agreed that they were the place to start.
On the day after the holiday, July 5, she started dialing. She figured that while her absence from Church on the prior two Sundays—the first when she was in New York, the second when she felt going would be wrong—was noticed, her friends would not have been suspicious, assuming that she was either out of town or ill. She was sending sorry-I’ll-get-back-to-you texts to those who called. She had to be careful. She did not want things to blow out of control with her friends. She felt an obligation to be truthful to them, or at least some of them, eventually. Just not yet.
The pitch was simple and accurate as far as it went. The kids were grown—Eric just graduated high school and was headed to Yale and Suzanne was already in New York—so it was a chance for Kate to have a new adventure with her children, with William well able to care from herself (“I hope” she said with a prepared feigned-laugh). So Kate could do with a job. She and Betty understood that the need for a paying job might raise flags with some but it was unavoidable. Might they have contacts with anyone in New York who might know of something, given how “you”—the friend on the other end of the line—”are familiar with my work”?