Helen of Pasadena Read online

  Now, two hours after the service, here in the green and chintz foyer of the venerable Pasadena Town Club, I just wanted to stop shaking hands and nodding my head, accepting condolences and “thoughts and prayers.” No more thoughts and prayers, I wanted to scream. Just get me out of these boots!

  It was the suddenness of Merritt’s death that got most of them. I could sense what everyone was thinking: One day you could be president-in-waiting to run the Tournament of Roses, and the next, panda fodder. That was too much for people who had been living in the same town since birth.

  Aiden had already asked to step out of the receiving line to go “hang with my friends.” Dozens of Millington classmates had come with their parents and were treating the funeral reception like a school dance, laughing, flirting, exchanging cell phone numbers. Adolescent narcissism can be a gift at a time like this. Go, I said, I’ll handle this. And I could.

  My own family—my out-of-place parents and my handsome little brother, Des—stood in the corner, munching on chicken salad tea sandwiches (do they know there’s meat in there?) and making small talk with one another. Classic Castor family behavior when they come to visit. My parents, now in their late 60s, had repositioned themselves as fiber artists and gallery owners in the growing vacation-home market of central Oregon, which had completely transformed from my youth. High-end restaurants, bookstores and antiques shops had replaced the empty store-fronts. The area was now rich with Nike, Microsoft and California millionaires looking to decorate their large log homes with the giant pieces of tufted wool art that my father churned out. But my parents had not abandoned all their hippie ways. Hence the formal Birkenstocks and the clear violation of the club’s shirt-and-tie requirement for men; it was their way of sticking it to The Man. Even on the happiest of occasions, a trip to Pasadena was like a foreign exchange program for them.

  My mother, Nell, had been lovely over the last 24 hours. All those soul-searching workshops in the ’70s made her particularly good at tragedy in later life. And the twelve-step program for marijuana addiction had given her clear eyes and a sense of purpose. She took a quiet and pragmatic approach to adversity: soup, tea, Joni Mitchell.

  My father, Peter, was overwhelmed with emotion, not that he and Merritt ever had any deep bond. The two had almost nothing in common, except me, Aiden and a love of backgammon. But my father, too, had a giant well of empathy bubbling inside, and he felt the sadness of the situation deeply. Unfortunately, unlike my mother, he could not control that well. He’d cried nonstop since landing, sobbing dramatically at the church, much to the discomfort of the entire Fairchild clan and the board of Fairchild Capital. Even Aiden started to laugh at the waterworks. Raw emotion was not a Fairchild family trait.

  Letting it all hang out was a Castor family trait. Which is why I usually took Aiden to visit my parents in Oregon only when Merritt was away on business.

  My brother Des, a ski patroller at Mt. Bachelor in the winter and a rafting guide on the Deschutes in the summer (yes, he was named after the river), was trying to rehydrate my father with white wine, a suspect choice. At least he'd stopped crying.

  Merritt’s mother, the imposing Millicent “Mitsy” Forester Fairchild, stood near me but not next to me, which pretty much sums up my relationship with her for the past fifteen years. She had her own receiving line going, which normally would have annoyed me, but today I let it go. Merritt’s older sisters, Mimi and Mikki, flanked their mother in matching black suits. I was glad I didn’t have to stand with them. Their sorrow was genuine.

  The receiving line went on for hours. I welcomed the mayor of Pasadena, the president of USC and various movers and shakers of various vaunted institutions. The headmistress of Millington, Adele Arnett, and her husband, Michael, gave me deep hugs. Over Aiden’s nine years at the school, I’d come to know them quite well. Would I replace Merritt on the board of trustees? Or would they just name some other father who managed a fund of some sort? God knows there were plenty of them at Millington. Another worry.

  Then came the squads of women who had stood next to me at games or school plays or holiday look-in tours. The women who had worked alongside me at charity events or religious-ed pizza-dough sales. So many of them were crying or choked up. Were they really that fond of Merritt? Or was it just that when they looked at me they thought of their own lives? I wasn’t sure, but it was touching. Their pain made me feel, well, good—which in turn made me feel odd.

  Then, of course, came an army of slightly peeved White Suiters, whose thoughts and prayers, I’m guessing, included the hope that there would be no legal action on my part. Believe me, there wouldn’t be. I needed to move on.

  Tina stood behind me, plying me with Arnold Palmers, the half lemonade, half iced tea concoction that fueled most of the lunches in town. There was no rum in the punch, but I was thinking I could use a little right about now. Candy stood to my right, employing her amazing facial identification skills, honed over years at the best parties, whispering names and relationships as the crowd moved through the line. Dexter Olmstead, Historical Preservation commissioner of Pasadena. Nancy Tully, president of Near and Far Bank. Jeff Smithson, managing partner, the Capital Fund. I’d met all these people at all the fundraisers and galas and award dinners over the years, but I was never good with name recall, except when it came to history, and today, my brain was a sieve. Mercifully, the line was coming to an end when I heard Candy harrumph.

  “What is she doing here? It’s just tacky to bring a news van to a funeral. I can’t believe the club even let her in the parking lot,” Candy fumed.

  I looked up and my legs buckled inside my calf-elongating boots. Freaking Roshelle Simms, Fox 11 news anchor and the woman my husband was texting when he hit the float.

  “I need a big fucking drink.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “That news ho slept with Merritt?! I’m going to freakin’ kill her!”

  “Thank you, Tina, because I’m not sure the cater waiters heard you the first time. Now that the staff of the Pasadena Town Club knows my husband was about to leave me for Roshelle Simms, I can stop the grieving widow charade,” I hissed, between sobs and deep breaths, head in my hands as we sat on the tasteful striped couch in the ladies’ lounge.

  Candy regrouped, as she always did. “Start at the beginning. What are you talking about?”

  I glanced at Anna, the lovely Guatemalan attendant who has managed the ladies’ lounge at the club for two decades. Always ready with a tissue, a kind word for a botched Botox or a cup of coffee for a drunken bridesmaid, Anna was discretion personified. Her giant haul of holiday tips was proof that she knew more about moneyed Pasadena than the CIA. I knew she could be trusted, and she knew I’d make good next Christmas.

  “Merritt was leaving me for Roshelle Simms. He told me New Year’s Eve, right before he had to report for duty at the parade. He said he was madly in love with her, she was his “soul mate,” only she understood his needs, and it was over between us. Fifteen years and he was leaving me for a woman who wears teal suits and can’t pronounce cinco de Mayo.”

  “Jesus, did he actually use the words soul mate?”

  “Tina, please!” Candy commanded. “You know her real last name is Slusky. I think that says it all. And she was only a Rose Princess, you know. Not the queen. And the ’90s were not a good decade for the Rose Court.”

  “Really? More relevant than the soul mate bit?” Tina snapped.

  Candy refocused. “Let’s support Helen. Merritt told you New Year’s Eve? Did you know about the affair, about any of this?”

  “No, no idea. I felt like such an idiot. Totally duped. You know that I barely saw Merritt. His work was endless. He had a million meetings. Or, at least he told me he had a million meetings. He had his life; I had mine. We had Aiden, the house, the club—it was all very quiet and easy. Not exhilarating, but not awful. But I never thought he’d do this to me. To Aiden.”

  “Oh my God! Did he meet her at the benefit last year?” Candy g
asped, eyes wide with recognition. Yes, he did. The benefit that Candy, Tina and I had chaired to Save the Deodar Pines in the Arroyo Seco. “Give Green, Go Green” had been our adorable theme, and Roshelle Simms had been our adorable Mistress of Ceremonies. How great to get a minor celebrity, we’d all thought. A news anchor! Even if she did work for Fox.

  All the major celebs lived on the other side of Los Angeles, the westside, home to the Above the Line types: movie stars, big-time producers, directors, studio heads. The Below the Line folks lived in the Valley: crew, caterers, accountants. In Pasadena, we had the Between the Lines crowd: studio executives, studio lawyers and regular lawyers, bankers and real estate investors. Plus character actors and lots and lots of news people, from the anchors to the weather guys to the producers. Roshelle lived in a condo in the hip Old Pasadena area. So convenient for her to get to the studio when news broke, and to entertain the many married suburban dads who lived nearby.

  Like Merritt.

  At the gala, all Roshelle had to do was thank the sponsors and introduce a short film, “The History of the Deodars in Pasadena.” She was wearing a pale blue low-cut evening dress that she’d gotten off the rack at Loehmann’s, even though the invitation said “Green Attire Encouraged.” She’d gushed about how wonderful it was to “give back to the community” but failed to mention that she’d been giving back to my husband in her dressing room.

  “Yes, it started that night, and Merritt seemed compelled to tell me all the details, like … like I could understand that it was ‘bigger than him.’ That’s what he kept saying, ‘I couldn’t stop it. It was bigger than me.’ Nothing’s ever been bigger than him. He’s not a guy who gets carried away. His life has been completely predictable since the minute he was born: Millington, Ignatius, USC, summers at Camp Longbow, vacations in Hawaii, living two miles from his childhood home. This is a guy who doesn’t like to shop at Brooks Brothers because the suits are ‘too modern.’ But one night with Roshelle and it’s bigger than him.”

  Anna produced a perfectly limed Tanqueray and tonic from her broom closet of cures and I carried on.

  “And get this, Merritt wanted to stay in the house like we were the happy couple. Oh, he was still going to sleep with Roshelle, but he wanted to get my blessing to stay until April. Good father that he was, Merritt didn’t want to hurt Aiden’s chances of getting into Ignatius.”

  Tina and Candy shook their heads in disgust. Next to parade season and the mixed-doubles tournament at the club, the most important day of the year in Pasadena was the Friday in April when the private school acceptance letters went in the mail. From preschool up through college, school acceptance was the one topic of conversation in which every Pasadena parent could engage. Endless discussions about which school was better, more exclusive, had the most homework, did the most with arts education, offered the finest language program, had the highest rate of Ivy League acceptances. At Hospital Guild meetings, Y basketball games, in parks and at nail salons, mothers engaged in behind-the-back conversations about which 4-year-old was “Millington material,” which hedge fund director’s son got into Cloverfield because his dad promised a new theater, which school had “too many legacies” or “too many siblings” in the application pool, which girl would never get into Martindale because of a Facebook page scandal involving the P.E. teacher. Private school admissions wasn’t a sport, it was a full-time occupation.

  And it didn’t stop at acceptance.

  Parents spent years justifying their school choice, long after the letters had been mailed. Even Merritt, with his blue-blood pedigree, appreciated that.

  Merritt was not going to jeopardize his son’s acceptance into the prestigious Ignatius Prep for Boys with a scandalous affair and a messy divorce. That would be admissions suicide, particularly at a Catholic school. He’d wait until after the acceptance letters went out to announce our separation. That’s what he’d told me on New Year’s Eve, anyway, shortly before putting on his official white suit and heading out the door to do his civic duty at the parade.

  The Pasadena police had recovered his Blackberry at the scene of the accident. I checked the texts. The deed is done, read the message sent to soulm8 seconds before the collision. Yes, the deed was in fact done.

  “I’m sorry he died, but I’m not sorry he’s dead,” Candy said. “Me either,” Tina echoed.

  “What’s going on in here, Helen? The mayor is waiting to say goodbye to you before he can go. He’s talking about renaming one of the streets off the parade route in honor of Merritt. Isn’t that kind?” Mitsy Fairchild, in a vintage black-and-white St. John Knit suit, burst through the ladies’ lounge door. Tall, athletic and looking like she'd be ready for a set of doubles on a minute’s notice, she still terrified me after fifteen years in the Fairchild family.

  In the study of classics, scholars spend a lot of intellectual time on “myths of origin” of the gods and goddesses, trying to determine their beginnings in a religious, artistic and archaeo-logical sense. My theory on Mitsy’s creation, formulated while I was hiding out in the kitchen during holiday events to escape the Fairchild family’s hyper-competitive games of Trivial Pursuit, was that Mitsy had been born to be a matriarch, like the ancient Minoan Snake Goddess, one part civilized, one part un-tamed. Depictions of the Bronze Age Snake Goddess show her holding an angry, writhing snake in each hand, illustrating her threatening power and her connection to the natural world. If someone immortalized Snake Goddess Mitsy, she’d be holding a vodka martini with two olives in one hand and a checkbook in the other.

  Mitsy had been widowed at 50, when Mitchell Fairchild dropped dead on the 17th green, but she hadn’t missed a beat. She used her Amazonian stature, solid breeding, sharp intellect and patronage of the arts to build her reputation. She gave her presence more than her money to good causes, going to every theater, opera, symphony and gallery opening. (“My God, if I have to write one more description of your mother-in-law’s elegant evening gown and dramatic bejeweled wrist cuffs, I will cauterize my eyes,” Candy had complained once.) Mitsy could speak knowledgeably about the importance of the arts in underfunded public schools in the Rotunda of the Athenaeum at Caltech, then walk outside and cut the valet parking attendant down to his knees if the radio of her Mercedes had been turned up too loud. Like the Snake Goddess, she could be benevolent or she could be destructive, but she could not be denied.

  Funny though, with all her reading and study of the human experience through the arts, one thing she could never understand was Merritt’s attraction to someone from Oregon. Connecticut, of course. Even some counties in Ohio, maybe. But Oregon?

  Now, here in the PTC’s ladies’ lounge on the day of her only son’s funeral, I saw the familiar Were You Raised in a Barn expression on Mitsy’s superbly tightened signature Dr. Weismann face. “Pull yourself together, Helen. You can break down tomorrow. No one will be looking then.”

  The words were on the tip of my tongue. I could feel the slights of fifteen years rising up in my gut, the comments about my lack of style, my housekeeping, my choice of gardeners and their tendency to plant marigolds, the tackiest of all the bedding flowers. Hey old lady with the two-carat diamond! Your son died because he was texting a 27-year-old news anchor that he was sleeping with at the family beach house! That’s right, your beach house! Yes, perfect Merritt was about to leave your beautiful grandson in the middle of a holy mess. And speaking of holy, you can just forget about getting the best table at the St. Perpetua’s annual auction, because Monsignor frowns on adultery! How do you like that awkward social situation, you freakishly tall Minoan Snake Lady?

  Oh, I would have enjoyed that moment of truth after an exhausting day of cover-up. But that’s when I remembered the promise I’d made to myself, right after getting the call from the Pasadena Police. Merritt’s dirty little secret would stay my dirty little secret. If I’d learned anything in my years in Pasadena, it was the truth of the old dictum: Discretion is the better part of valor.

  In o
ther words, keep your mouth shut and you’ve won half the battle.

  I knew I could trust Candy and Tina. They had their own skeletons and wouldn’t reveal mine. But with Mitsy, it was more than just withholding information, it was self-preservation of my reputation and Aiden’s. And truthfully, I really didn’t know how she would react to her son’s behavior.

  We’d never shared a single personal conversation. We’d discussed logistics of birthday parties, news events not related to politics, the latest Masterpiece Theater production (“The only television worth watching,” Mitsy said more than a hundred times, even though I knew she watched Regis and Kelly on the sly.) The two of us were more comfortable dissecting the decline in pickup-and-delivery dry cleaners than the state of our souls. Revealing Merritt’s bad behavior would be new territory for us, and the prospect terrified me.

  I knew I would miss Merritt, just not today. He had given me Aiden and an entrée into his life that I wouldn’t trade for the world. Someday, maybe soon, I would forgive the affair and grieve his death, but right now, I had to keep acting. Telling Mitsy about Roshelle Simms would be indulgence of the highest order. I’d rather she resent me than Merritt. That’s all the love I could muster right now.

  Mitsy cocked her head. My short silence must have been unsettling to her, as I usually stammer along until I can muster up a cogent thought to blurt out. But not this time. Jackie Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy. Tina and Candy watched me expectantly. Candy was actually licking her chops.