Bitter Business

lawn, rolling out into a bluff that dropped precipitously at the edge of Lake Michigan.
    We had moved into this house from an apartment downtown when I was five years old. My older brother, Teddy, was nine. Up until then our building on Lake Shore Drive had been my entire world. Gladys, the elevator operator, would take me on rides, and Winston, the doorman, would slip me lemon drops and tell me stories about growing up the eleventh child of an Arkansas sharecropper.
    The move to Lake Forest seemed to me an exile to the end of the earth, and all the years I lived there it never really felt like home. When I was twelve my little sister, Beth, was born—a bonus baby, as Daniel had called Lydia. After that a steady stream of mademoiselles entered our life, sweet French girls who came to nanny in America in order to improve their English, and left once they were fluent enough to give notice to my mother.
    And still the house held memories that would not pass. My brother Teddy killed himself when he was fifteen. He hanged himself in the garage on a Saturday night so that he could be sure, at least once, of commanding my parents’ attention when they rolled in drunk after a party. And it was in this very room that my mother and I had the most vitriolic of all our arguments. It was an hour before my wedding and all the regular furniture had been taken away, save the piano, and replaced with tables for the reception. They were covered in white linen, decorated with white roses, and set with antique silver and Spode. I’d fled there from my mother, trailing twenty feet of satin and tulle, after the stress of the day had led her to pick fights with the caterer, the minister, the photographer, and finally with me. In front of a handful of terrified waiters, Mother accused me of deliberately marrying into a family of overweight Poles who spoke no English for the express purpose of humiliating her in front of her friends. When I ventured to protest, she grabbed a fistful of silverware from a nearby table and threw it, grazing the bodice of my dress with a butter knife, so that a half-dozen pearls were cut loose from their moorings and clattered noisily to the floor.
    But today the music room was free of ghosts and filled with people—more than a dozen, all women. They were all dressed like the businesswomen you see in the movies, their daring little suits much more fashionable than anything I could wear without comment to work. Their hand-sewn Italian pumps showed no signs of having climbed in and out of taxicabs. I was secretly amused.
    My mother made a great show of happiness at my arrival in order to make me feel my tardiness all the more. She saved her look of disappointment at my dowdy work clothes for when none of her friends could see her face. I knew that I had met all of the committee members on countless other occasions but found that except for Sonny Welborn, I could recall none of their names. I always had that problem with my mother’s friends. Their elegant clothes, their expensively understated jewelry, their perfect hair all lent them a homogeneous quality in my mind. Kissing the air next to their powdered cheeks, I made the circuit of the room. Then, taking a seat, I waited expectantly for the meeting to begin.
    It rapidly became clear that the business of the Children’s Hospital Building Committee would be conducted on Lake Forest rather than Chicago time. Sonny Welborn gave a report, designer by designer, on the clothes she and my mother had seen on the runways of Paris. Two uniformed maids appeared to serve tea and sandwiches. Someone else launched into a bitter complaint about the number of foreigners who were buying houses in Palm Beach.
    When, after repeated pleas on my part about moving things along, we finally got down to business, I was horrified to learn that everyone in the room felt an overwhelming need to restate the obvious. After an hour I felt like I’d been nailed to my chair for an eternity. I was seized by a distinctly unladylike desire to scream.
    When one of the maids came to tell me that I had a phone call from the office, I made my excuses gratefully and realized that truly, any business crisis was better than this. I ducked into the library and picked up the phone. It was Cheryl.
    “I thought you might need rescuing,” she announced. “Bless you,” I replied fervently.
    “Besides, I had a question.”
    “What?”
    “Does Daniel Babbage like you very much?”
    “What do you