Kate
Sunday, after the call, Kate was sick, retching in the bathroom. All of the earlier happiness drained in an instant. She did not know what she should do. She did not know who she should call. It was still warm, so she just grabbed her purse and headed to Riverside Park, ending up on the greenway overlooking the Hudson and stopping to look across the River. In the few weeks she lived in the city, she learned to enjoy this view and to feel the hundreds of people running and biking and strolling behind her, all oblivious to her turmoil as she was of theirs, and those tending late-summer flowers in the enclosed gardens in the center of the wide path. Like the final scene in “You’ve Got Mail.”
She found no happiness here now. Only despair. Her thoughts did not go to him. There were no open issues there. Her thoughts went to her daughter. Suzanne had told her shortly after William visited her about what happened in Madison Square, and they were both relieved that it was over and that Suzanne had made her terms clear: He must accept her. She did not know now, after the wedding, what to tell Suzanne about what her father had done.
She felt as helpless and as lost as she had been when she came to New York in late June and first confronted Eileen. This thought, though, was a comfort to her. She had climbed out of that hole and she would climb out of this one. The issue was what to tell the others. She realized who she could call, her sister Lizzie, and when the call went to voicemail, she left a brief message, that it was very important.
“Hey, sis. What’s up?” This was twenty minutes after the voicemail. Kate was walking along the Hudson.
“It’s William. He called and confessed to sleeping with someone,” to which Lizzie said it was probably inevitable notwithstanding the whole hypocrisy-thing but she was silent when Kate added, “He did it in Suzanne’s room with someone he admitted looked like Suzanne.”
“Lizzie?”
“I’m sorry, Kate. That is just so fucked up. How did he defend himself?”
“I did not let him. I hung up and never want to see let alone speak to that man again.”
Lizzie knew enough to let her sister alone on this part of things and in the end she was the only person to whom Kate spoke about it. Kate decided she did not want to upset Suzanne and that it was unlikely that William would approach Suzanne given her daughter’s ultimatum and his failure to meet it before the wedding. It would destroy any chance, however unlikely, of a reconciliation with her father. Lizzie agreed.
Lizzie insisted separately on raising the practicalities of Kate and her financial situation and marriage situation. As to the first, she told Kate that at the least she needed money. “It’s all in a joint account, right? So you have to get a lawyer out here to get some of it now, worrying about everything else later. I mean, Kate, he shouldn’t be using your joint money either.”
Kate did not want to get the girls involved, but she called Carol Wright, a guest at the wedding for whom both girls worked, who spoke to her wife, Rachel, who spoke to an English friend who worked in an investment firm who spoke to someone else who worked at that firm and once lived in San Francisco who spoke to a lawyer in San Francisco who handled her house sale who spoke to a colleague who did divorce work and by the end of the day Kate had a name to call in San Francisco. The name was Karen Novack.
Kate called Karen Novack and in three days one million dollars were wired into an account Kate opened for herself in New York, and two thousand dollars were wired into the account each week. This was, Karen told her new client, a preliminary distribution of marital assets. Her husband had similarly been allowed to move one million dollars from the joint accounts into his own and the weekly payments were agreed upon between the lawyers and their clients. The two million removed from the joint accounts was a small portion of what was there, but it was enough to distribute until final distributions were agreed to or ordered by a court.
Kate had not decided whether to start a divorce proceeding. Such a thing was, of course, anathema to her former faith, but she was no longer absolutely opposed to it. Particularly given what happened between William and that woman in Suzanne’s room.
Of course, the money meant a couple of things. Most important, Kate did not have to stay at her job. It paid the bills, but it was well beneath the work she had been doing in Mill Valley.
It also meant that she could give the girls a proper wedding-gift. It had tremendous sentimental value for her daughter, and for Annie, but the Camry, its California plates long traded in for New York ones, was getting a bit long in the tooth. It would still be nice for the city-folk—Kate and Annie—to use every once in a while but Suzanne and Kerry should have something sturdier. So three weeks after the wedding, Kate insisted on going for a drive with her daughters and she got Eileen to pick her up in Bronxville before they picked up the girls. Eileen and Kate sat in the front and the newlyweds in the back as they drove to a car dealership and when the quartet walked in a manager walked up to the newlyweds and asked, “The Neallys I presume” and the Neallys (junior division) looked at each other in shock and were told by Kate that she arranged for them to have any car they wanted, “tax and license included.” Which ended up being a “Cool Gray Khaki” Subaru Crosstrek, to be picked up in a week. When Eileen said (outside the girls’ hearing) she wanted to pay half, Kate ended that discussion by pointing out that (i) she had a boatload of money, (ii) the girls were living in Eileen’s house, and (iii) “I owe them so much.”