Chapter 1
Eugenia Ward had spent the morning minutely going over her personal accounts and
all her accounting records online, the same records that had been causing her
endless anxiety and sleepless nights for the last eighteen months, ever since the
pandemic began. She was a tall, slim, blond, serious-looking woman, impeccably
trained as a fashion designer, and had been in the business for thirty-three years. She
checked her accounts diligently, while making notes on a yellow legal pad of things she
wanted to move and change and watch out for, expenses she could carve out of her
overhead, and others she would eliminate from her life if she was forced to. It had been
a long, slow process as she did everything to keep her business afloat. She was
divorced with five adult children, two of whom she still helped to support. She had
started her own company fourteen years before, when she turned forty. She made the
most elegant, luxurious evening gowns and wedding gowns. They were ready-to-wear
that looked like haute couture. They were worthy of the finest design houses and highend
labels in Europe and the U.S., and a year after she’d opened the doors of her
Eugenia Ward stores, she added another dimension, her own haute couture line of
evening and wedding gowns, which was her dream come true. They were made to
order, entirely by hand, in her own ateliers by sewers who had been trained in Paris.
Like some of the finest French designers, she now created both ready-to-wear clothes
and haute couture. Her made-to-order handmade gowns were shown, ordered, and fitted
in her exclusive private salons. She made it a memorable experience for her clients.
Her business had been a brilliant success and had taken off like a rocket, and much
to everyone’s amazement, Eugenia had been able to pay off her investors in five years.
She had loyal clients around the world, and had had several offers to buy the business,
but she had always refused. Both arms of the business were a gold mine, and she loved
what she did. Eugenia was involved in every aspect of the business, with her haute
couture gowns made under the label Princess Eugenie and her ready-to-wear line
eponymous, as Eugenia Ward.
As a respected American designer, she showed her next season’s line of ready-towear gowns
at Fashion Week in New York twice a year, in February and September,
and her haute couture line in Paris, with the other remaining couture houses, in January
and July. She had a store in the Seventies on Madison Avenue in New York for her
ready-to-wear gowns, and above it her very elegant haute couture salons, where they
had fittings. She also had an office on Seventh Avenue where they took ready-to-wear
orders. She had a store on the Avenue Montaigne in Paris, and a business office above it
for orders in Europe. It was an impeccably run operation, and extremely lucrative for
Eugenia. Until the pandemic hit them like a bomb. The entire world had been in
lockdown for months, repeatedly, and curfews were in force around the globe. Social
events, even small dinner parties, were canceled, as well as every socialite jet-set
wedding. No woman in any city in any country had worn an evening gown in almost two
years. Evening wear and the events where one wore it had vanished overnight. Eugenia
was one of the most famous and successful designers in fashion history and poured
much of what she made back into the business, and in the blink of an eye, she had
become obsolete. Now women were wearing yoga pants, exercise clothes, blue jeans
and sweatshirts, fleece-lined slippers and running shoes, and down jackets instead of
satin evening coats. Their jewelry to go with the evening clothes had been in vaults at
home or the bank for almost two years, and the calendars of the most popular socialites
were blank.
Eugenia hadn’t arrived at the pinnacle of her success by accident or casually. Her
father had wanted her to get a law degree, and her mother thought she should study art
history and work at the Louvre in Paris or the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Her
parents were serious, conservative, well-educated people from respectable families.
Her mother had gone to Vassar, her father to Yale. Her mother had never worked. She
played bridge, served on charitable committees, and oversaw their only daughter’s
education and well-being. They were good parents. Her father was the president of a
New York bank, and both came from solid but not wealthy families. Her mother had
gotten a master’s in Renaissance art at Columbia, and painted still-lifes and landscapes
in the style of the Old Masters as a well-executed hobby. The walls of the Park Avenue
apartment where Eugenia had grown up were covered with her mother’s art.
Eugenia had been passionate about fashion all her life. It fascinated her, particularly
the glamorous gowns created for movie stars and famous women. Creating them herself
was all she wanted to do. It was her dream. Her parents thought it undignified,
irrelevant, and frivolous, but they couldn’t stop her.
Her mother had tried to redirect her artistic impulses into a more educated,
intellectual career, and her father thought she would do well as an attorney and tried to
convince her to go to law school. But Eugenia’s passion for the fashion world was
limitless. She was constantly sketching clothes, and fascinated by the history of fashion
and great designers, both in France and the U.S. She made her mother an evening gown
for Christmas when she was sixteen. It was inspired by a gown designed by Christian
Dior in the 1950s, and she sewed it herself. Her mother was bowled over by it and it fit
perfectly. Even her parents didn’t deny she had talent, though they wished she would
turn it in a more intellectual direction. But all Eugenia wanted to do was design
beautiful clothes for real live women to wear, to make them look like movie stars.
Before that, she made clothes for her Barbie dolls that were miniature works of art. She
turned them into an art project in college and made a video of them. She had spent hours
dressing her dolls as a child, and making their clothes by hand. She made clothes for her
friends in school. She was obsessed with fashion.
Her determination to work in fashion was the cause of the first major disagreement
she and her parents had ever had. Their relationship had been strong, easy, and
harmonious before that. Her mother was properly dressed, but not interested in fashion.
After tearful battles with Eugenia, they had finally given in, and Eugenia had gone to
Parsons School of Design, as well as NYU, majoring in fine arts, with a minor in art
history to satisfy her mother, and graduated at the top of her class with honors. It had
calmed her parents down for a while.
She had done an internship in the haute couture ateliers of Valentino in Italy, right
after she graduated, and then worked at Dior in Paris for two years, at first in ready-towear
and then in the sacred halls of haute couture. It was the high point of her time in
Paris.
She came back to New York after two years at Dior, and at twenty-four, was hired
by Oscar de la Renta, where she became his head designer and stayed for sixteen years,
until she started her own business with his blessing. He was her mentor and advisor,
and the man she respected more than any on earth, other than her own father. Oscar
thought her immensely talented, which no one denied, not even the critics, who
worshipped her and rarely criticized her work. They said she was “inspired,” with an
undeniable gift for creating the most glamorous gowns in the last thirty years, gowns that
no one wanted now, because they had nowhere to wear them. Eugenia knew they would
come back eventually, when the last of the pandemic had skittered away like a rat off a
ship, but in the meantime, no one was there yet. People were depressed and suffering
the effects of PTSD, after a year and a half of fearing for their lives and watching the
world crumble around them.
The kind of women who wore Eugenia’s dresses and didn’t shrink at her prices had
fled to their country homes when the first alarms sounded, and most of them were still
there. New York had been a ghost town for more than a year. It was finally reviving
slowly, but a third or more of the shops were boarded up. Stores that had existed for
decades had gone out of business. In good weather, people were eating in jeans at
casual restaurants with outdoor terraces. In bad weather, they stayed home. Most of
Eugenia’s clients were hidden away in Connecticut, Long Island, or the more elite areas
of New Jersey with stables of horses on their estates. In Paris they were in their
châteaux that dotted the countryside in Normandy and other regions. In England, they
were in their country manors and on grand estates, and even those who gave hidden,
forbidden parties in the privacy of their homes weren’t doing it in black tie and ball
gowns. There were no debutante balls and cotillions, nor fairy-tale weddings. Fashion
Week had been canceled season after season for two years, fashion shows were virtual,
and plans for the coming seasons were still tenuous. Large gatherings were strictly
forbidden. Eugenia had kept her shops open in New York and Paris, with one or two
employees, but she had no customers, and her overhead was crushing. She was hanging
on by her fingernails, and didn’t want to lose everything she had built. Supporting and
educating five children, plus her own expensive husband and the divorce, had all been
costly. She spent a fortune on rent, payroll, and exquisite fabrics, and the fashion shows
she put on four times a year had all weighed heavily against her greatly reduced profits.
It all worked as long as the money kept rolling in. And now it had stopped. The
pandemic was strangling her business and she was hemorrhaging money. Her business
was gasping for air and she was determined to hang on.
Fashion Week in New York was going to happen in a month, in September right after
Labor Day, and in a daring move, fighting for survival, Eugenia was going to try
something different. She had gone through all the fabrics she had in stock, trying to use
what she already had, and was making a small selection of exquisite satin and lace and
silk tops that her customers could wear with leggings or jeans. She was designing cozy
wraps and double-faced cashmere jackets with the exquisite trimmings she had been
saving for years to put on evening gowns with matching coats. She was trying
desperately to raise her clients’ spirits, and give them glamorous, fun things to wear that
would make life seem less dreary and keep her in business. She couldn’t charge her
usual high prices for what she was going to show this time, but everything helped. She
had ordered commercial down jackets, which was all anyone wore now, and added
fabulous patterned silks as the linings and exquisite French “frogs” as the closures. As
an experiment, she had been personally hand-sewing jeans she bought commercially,
decorating them with rhinestones, synthetic pearls, and colored beads in exotic patterns
and using braid, gold tassels, and trim to dress up the jeans and make each pair a unique
creation. She was selling them for five thousand dollars apiece, ten in some cases, and
her clients were eating them up. She had bought bolts of denim from merchants who still
had it in stock, and sewed it herself into suits and pants with tops. She had let all her
sewers go, and they were at home on unemployment. In the meantime, she was selling
what she had. And now she was creating a most unusual line for Fashion Week this
season, with white jeans encrusted with pearls and rhinestones for the spring/summer. It
was a valiant effort to keep her business alive, after it had been on life support for
months. She was using as much as she had in her stock and storerooms, to minimize her
purchases. She was trying to be as careful and creative as she could.
Eugenia herself was wearing nothing any different from her clients. She was living
in jeans and sweatshirts. She had noticed that during the worst of it, she felt better when
she wore color, and she was making sweatshirts in vibrant tones that made her happy
just looking at them. Hopefully they would make her clients happy too. It was a long
way from her training in traditional design and haute couture, and what she usually
created, but these were special times that required desperate measures. In the scheme of
real life, fashion had shrunk to invisible proportions for everyone, and yet wearing
clothes that made one feel ugly on top of it was even more depressing. There was a
happy medium somewhere that would meet the current need and she was determined to
find it. She wasn’t going to gouge people when she priced the new daywear line, except
for the handmade one-of-a-kind items, which were of the highest quality and virtually
priceless, made by the designer herself. There was a lot of hand-stitching involved in
what she was doing now, and that was worth something. But she wanted her designs and
creations to be mood elevating, to make people feel hopeful and happy when they wore
them. Each piece was unique.
They looked expensive. Some were, but most weren’t. She wanted them to be fun to
wear. It was an odd time for everyone. She had no idea how the collection would be
received. The critics might blast her off the runway. But she had to do something. She
was born to create. She even covered one sweatshirt with tiny feathers. It was a work of
art as much as a piece of clothing, which was how she felt about fashion. To Eugenia,
fashion was an art form, like music or dance or painting. And people’s bodies were the
canvases she worked on. She was almost ready for the runway show after Labor Day,
and she was taking some time off in August to spend with her children. Her five adult
children were her greatest source of joy and the center of her private universe.
She was one of those women who had thought she could have it all, a husband, a
family, children, and a rewarding career, which in her case had supported them all for
three decades. Three of her children were self-supporting now, her oldest child and
only son, Stefano, her middle child, Daphne, and her youngest, Sofia, an independent
spirit who danced to her own tune and thought fashion was defined by army surplus. Her
other two daughters, Eloise and Gloria, couldn’t live on what they made and needed
assistance, so she helped them with additional support. They were underpaid in their
jobs. She was the safety net under all of them in one way or another. They ranged in age
from twenty-six to thirty-one. They were her masterpieces, and she couldn’t let them
down by going bankrupt. They counted on her, and she tried to provide them with a role
model, proving that hard work was its own greatest reward.
She felt she had failed them during the pandemic, by nearly running aground. The
tidal waves of the coronavirus had all but swept away the success she had built and
enjoyed, and the life she had created for her family and herself through her business.
She was hanging on, but when she studied her accounts, as she did regularly with
overwhelming anxiety, she was desperate to find a way to shore up her failing business
until normal life returned. She was running out of money. And she was determined not to
lose her business.
Lately, she’d been considering looking for investors again, as she had in the
beginning to get started, to tide her over this time and keep her from drowning. She had
had four solid, faithful investors when she established her brand, and she hadn’t let them
down. What she had sold then made sense at the time, but how could she convince
anyone now of the importance and validity of expensive evening gowns, when there was
no opportunity to wear them, and might not be for many years, if the scientists didn’t get
a grip on the pandemic situation. Things had improved considerably, but there was still
danger lurking that no one could deny, and the pandemic was not yet over. She had to
hang on until it was. She felt certain it would end, as the Spanish flu had eventually
slunk off into the mists. But after what they’d all been through, would women still want
evening gowns? Would anyone care?
Of her four original investors, two had died, one had moved back to China and
retired, and the fourth had suffered severe reversals of their own. None of them were
still an option.
There had been blessings in the pandemic too.
The dangers of the pandemic had brought people back to basics, reminded them of
the importance of family. Some of her clients had gotten to know the children they
barely knew before and had spent too little time with. There was nothing to do at night
in the first year. People actually talked to each other, spent time together, helped their
kids with online school and homework, went for walks. They slowed down after having
run a race for years, a race to be the biggest, fastest, richest. Now they were all at home
on “pause” and they didn’t need an haute couture evening gown,
or even a ready-towear one, for that.
All the men dressed like lumberjacks now in the winter and campers
in the summer, and the women dressed like schoolgirls. There were no fancy hairdos,
and their jewels had been in the safe or at the bank for two years. Eugenia had dressed
them for the life they no longer had, not the one they were living now. She was hoping
that her upcoming runway show would change that. She wanted to play too. She had no
idea how the fashion critics would react to it, and she was afraid they would deal the
final death blow to her business. It wouldn’t take much. She had little money left of
what had been a very sizable fortune she had made herself, having poured most of it
back into her business and spent the rest on her kids. Who else would she spend it on?
And the divorce had hit her hard before Covid. She had wanted to be fair to her
husband, and he had kept pressing for more. She didn’t want a big battle, all in the
press. She had paid a high price for discretion and fair play. Her ex-husband was a
taker, not a giver, and had cost her a fortune for years before the divorce. He had taken
full advantage of her success, and contributed nothing to it.
Sometimes she cried in her bed at night, terrified of the future. She hadn’t been this
frightened since she was a child, afraid that something bad might happen, or when her
parents died within a year of each other when she was in her twenties with five young
children, but she had her husband, Umberto, then, and the illusion that he would always
be there for her. She’d been frightened when they got divorced too, although she was the
pillar that had held up their world. Her parents and grandparents had left her a little
money, but it had finally run out, just as her business took off. The timing had been
providential. She had never been as frightened as she was now, afraid her whole world
was caving in. She couldn’t see a light on the horizon. She knew it was there, like the
darkness before the dawn, but she couldn’t see it yet. She had to find it soon, before the
ship she had built with her own hands ran aground, and it would soon if she didn’t do
something dramatic. Of that she was certain. She just didn’t know what. She had no one
to talk to about it. Covid had separated her from her friends, with all the lockdowns and
restrictions. Most of the people she knew had left town and were isolated in their
country homes. She had never felt so alone in her life. With no partner and her kids
grown up, her business was failing and her money running out.
Everything she had ever done seemed fated, like part of a plan, with perfect timing.
As one thing ended, another started. Her first internship, her jobs, her business. She had
met her future husband when she did her internship at Valentino in Italy. He was an
Italian prince, a descendant of the royal house of Florence, which had existed when
Italy had been divided into states and principalities for centuries, which it no longer
was. Umberto was the most elegant, charming, aristocratic man she had ever met, and
the most beautiful. He made her feel like Cinderella. Shy as a child, and in a foreign
country, she had never met anyone like him, and innocently had had no sense of her own
beauty and strength, only confidence in the designs she created. She was certain of her
designs and never doubted them. She was naïve, talented, and young, and he was so
sophisticated. Umberto was magical. She was twenty-one when they met at a ball in
Venice. Someone from Valentino had taken her to it. It was the most extraordinary
setting she had ever seen, a fifteenth-century palazzo, with candles everywhere.
Umberto caught her when she tripped on the dress she had made. She hadn’t had time to
finish the hem properly and had taped it, as they did with the models sometimes when a
dress wasn’t finished right before a show. Umberto had been struck by her innocence
and vulnerability and natural beauty. He was forty-five years old, one of the most
desirable men in Italy. He oozed aristocracy and charisma. Her discreet, conservative,
respectable parents and their world were of an entirely different breed. They seemed
dull compared to Umberto. He was so glamorous. She felt like a princess in a fairy tale
when she was with him, and he wisely sensed that with her talent, passion, and energy,
she would go far. He had good instincts about people and how they could be of use to
him. Umberto was showy without appearing to be, and dazzling. He lived in Rome, and
took her under his wing, which was flattering and exciting. He took her to parties all
over Europe, and introduced her to people she had read about and never dreamed of
meeting. He had a reputation for dating models and movie stars, and rich and titled
young women. He had endless charm but not a penny. He told her she would be famous
one day, he was certain of it, which seemed absurd to her. She wanted to create
gorgeous designs, she wasn’t seeking fame. Fame was for other people. She didn’t care
about fame, she just wanted to make beautiful clothes.
Her parents objected to Umberto when they met him, because he had never had a
real job. He “connected” people, brought them together in the most elegant, gracious
way and helped them buy houses, meet jewelers, charter yachts or buy them, and he
made a commission on every transaction, doing it so smoothly that no one objected to
how much he charged them. He was a very special European breed where a title
became a job and was turned into a handsome profit, especially by a prince. He had a
talent for pulling money out of thin air and other people’s pockets painlessly. Her
parents thought none of what he did was respectable. Her father called him an operator
and a con man, which he wasn’t. Umberto wasn’t dishonest, he was just clever, greedy,
and charming. He was like a magic trick that everyone loved and watched with
admiration. They got what they wanted, and so did he.
Despite her parents’ objections, Eugenia married him less than a year after they met.
He followed her to New York to close the deal. They had a small wedding,
commensurate with her parents’ displeasure, and she became a princess. Afterward, she
was never sure why he’d married her. She only had a very small inheritance from her
grandparents, and later a barely larger one from her parents, but he saw the potential she
had and her money disappeared quickly in his hands. She got the job with Dior in Paris
after they married, and he didn’t object to her working. Umberto was absolutely certain
Eugenia would become a success, with her talent. She was delighted because she loved
her job and was learning everything she would apply later to her own designs, all the
techniques of haute couture. Everyone who worked with her saw her potential too.
Umberto di San Benedetto was a passionate man, and Eugenia was madly in love
with him. She got pregnant three months after they married, which dashed her parents’
hopes that she would come to her senses, see him for what he was, leave him, and have
the marriage annulled. He had her in his thrall. She was young and healthy, worked hard
in the daytime, and went to parties and danced with him at night. Their son, Stefano,
was born on their first anniversary. Eugenia was twenty-three, and Umberto was now
forty-seven, wildly proud of his firstborn, his son and heir. All his father had to give
him was his title, which meant everything to Umberto, and little to her. Much to
Eugenia’s amazement, they lived in a very grand apartment in the 7th arrondissement,
which a friend had loaned to Umberto in exchange for a favor. It came with two servants
who took care of the baby too. Eugenia loved the glamorous life Umberto created for
her, and she made enough to support them between his “commissions.” They never had a
lot of money, but Umberto was always able, with his connections, to create a grand
lifestyle out of thin air. Her parents disapproved of everything he did.
When Stefano was a year old, they moved to New York. Her father had just died
suddenly and her mother was ill, and Eugenia wanted to be near her in New York. She
was already pregnant with their second child, Eloise. Eugenia got an amazing job
immediately, working for Oscar de la Renta, who recognized her talent. It was a
bittersweet time. Her mother died of cancer and grief after losing her husband, weeks
after Eloise was born. It was a time of sorrow mixed with joy. The baby was beautiful,
with her mother’s exquisite, delicate features and her father’s noble bloodline. Umberto
was once again very proud. And Eugenia made enough by then to hire a nanny so she
could work.
Eugenia didn’t quit her lucrative job with Oscar de la Renta when Eloise was born.
She couldn’t afford to. Umberto had rapidly made the same profitable connections he’d
had in Paris, and used them well. There were always homes in Palm Beach being
loaned to them for vacations, trips to the Bahamas on yachts and to Europe on private
planes, free clothes, and free hotels. And Eugenia’s salary supported them, along with
the inheritance her parents and grandparents had left her. Umberto was very grand,
while Eugenia managed it all, two young children, a demanding job, an expensive social
life that kept them out every night. The nanny Eugenia hired helped her deal with the
children. Her life was a juggling act. Eugenia spent as much time with the children as
she could and Umberto would allow. When she insisted on staying home with them, he
went out alone, almost every night in black tie. Eugenia was still desperately in love
with him and under his spell. He was cavalier about their love life, and she got pregnant
accidentally when Eloise was three months old. Daphne was the result nine months
later. Stefano and Eloise looked like blond cherubs, and Daphne was a beautiful baby
with dark hair. Eugenia was back at work in a month. Their constant social life
continued, although Eugenia couldn’t keep up anymore with three children and her big
job with de la Renta. She was increasingly being noticed in the fashion milieu and by
the press, and Oscar was very good to her, allowing her to shine. Eugenia had two more
babies after Daphne, Gloria a year later and Sofia ten months after that. She’d had five
babies in five years, was Oscar’s chief designer, and was twenty-eight years old, with a
highly coveted job. Eugenia was keeping them afloat. Somehow, they always managed.
By the time Sofia was born, they had lived in New York for four years, and Umberto
was homesick for Europe. He began to travel more and more to balls in Italy, weddings
in Paris, shoots and house parties in England with his international friends. He would
come home to Eugenia from time to time, and take off again. He spent no time with their
children, and very little with her. She spent the weekends with the children, after
working all week, all of which bored Umberto. He loved the idea of the children, but
not the reality. He loved showing them off when they were clean and dressed beautifully
in matching outfits Eugenia made for them when she had time, or sketched and had one
of the design assistants make. They looked like the little prince and the four little
princesses they were, but she wondered sometimes if Umberto could even tell them
apart. He was proud of them, but barely knew them. Years slipped by and with what
was left of her own money, and her salary, Eugenia put them in the best private schools
in New York. Her life was a relay race of children and work, and it was Oscar, her
mentor and friend, who finally encouraged her to find investors and start her own brand.
He became one of the investors, because he had so much faith in her, and he guessed
easily the burden she was carrying, with five children and an absentee husband. He had
seen Umberto at enough parties around the world, without Eugenia, to understand what
was going on. Eugenia suspected by then that Umberto wasn’t faithful to her, but she
didn’t have the courage to ask, and really didn’t want to know. The children needed at
least the illusion of a father, and she didn’t want a painful and embarrassing divorce, or
to be completely on her own. She realized by then what she hadn’t understood before.
The worldly women he knew had recognized him for the opportunist he was, and never
married him. He had needed an innocent like Eugenia when they married. She was
destined for success, and followed him with stars in her eyes. She worked hard to
provide everything he wanted, and a family, but she wasn’t naïve anymore.
When she’d left the job with Oscar and opened her own business fourteen years
before, she had laid the groundwork so carefully that it was almost an overnight
success. Within a year, she opened the haute couture arm. Oscar was the first of her
investors whom she paid off, out of gratitude for all he had done for her. She could
never have done it without his help. He had replaced her with a very capable designer,
and Eugenia and Oscar remained friends. Umberto showed up for her opening parties,
but very little else. They hardly saw each other anymore. It wasn’t a marriage. He was
more like a houseguest, an occasional visitor. She didn’t cheat on him. She didn’t have
the interest, the energy, or the time. Her children and her business took up all of her
attention. She had a marriage in name only, which suited Umberto. Eugenia had served
her purpose, giving him the life he wanted. And after Sofia was born, the physical
attraction between them came to an end. Eugenia began to hear about his affairs, which
ended it for her. She couldn’t handle or afford more than five children. Umberto had
started traveling more then, and spent more time in Europe than New York. He said he
had never felt at home in New York, although he had many friends there. And the women
he pursued were mainly in Europe.
Four years after Eugenia opened her business, Umberto asked her for a divorce. It
wasn’t a heartbreak, but it was a sadness and a disappointment that he wasn’t better than
he was. They had been married for twenty-two years. The time had flown. It had been
ten years now since the divorce. She had paid less than the settlement he demanded, but
much more than she should have. He wanted half of her business, which she refused, but
he hired a very aggressive lawyer and drove a hard bargain. He was sixty-eight years
old, had no money or profession, and said he was too old to get a job and work, and the
judge agreed. Umberto had no skills or training for anything. He always came out ahead
in his deals, and he did with her as well. She knew she would never recoup what she
had given him in the divorce, but her business was solid at the time, she managed to pay
her investors back in spite of it, and she was able to support herself and their children
until they grew up.
When the pandemic happened, the bottom dropped out of everyone’s world, and no
one wanted to buy evening gowns. No one could have predicted or even imagined it.
The bulk of her income stream dried up, and she had no way to recoup her losses for the
moment. But she was determined to hang in and work her way back to the top. She was
never afraid of hard work.
She had heard that Umberto was still living like a prince in Italy, and she had no
idea if he was living on new deals he made, or simply on what was left from her
settlement. He visited their children once or twice a year, took them out for glamorous
evenings, and was always charming and fun. He turned his visits into an adventure of
some kind and then floated away, while she lived the day-to-day existence of running a
business and being the mother of five young adults who barely knew their father. She
was too gracious to malign him to the children, and she didn’t want to upset them, but
she had lost any semblance of respect for him years before. Her father had been right.
Umberto was an operator, brilliant at what he did, and how he achieved it. She doubted
now that he had ever loved her. She was just a convenient opportunity he could tell
would turn into a gold mine for him one day, and she had. She had provided a stable
base for him to operate from and eventually a golden life he felt entitled to, and five
wonderful children, all of which gave him an aura of respectability that was
undeserved. It didn’t matter anymore, the past was the past, and she felt nothing for him
by the time they divorced. Everything she had felt for him was dead. He was seventyeight years old now.
They had a long history together, and five children, and she was
grateful for them. She regretted their settlement, with the effect of the pandemic on her
business. All she could think of was how to stop the ongoing loss of money, how to
shore things up and fight her way back to financial stability. There had to be a way, and
she was determined to find it. She refused to give up.
She sat at her desk for a moment, pondering the figures she had just studied again.
She was taking all her children on vacation for a week, as she did every summer. She
had rented a compound of small houses in East Hampton. She had visited the property in
February, and had set the money aside for it, as she always did. It was a treat for all of
them. She was driving to East Hampton that night and her children were due to arrive
the next day. Daphne and her husband, Phillip Brooke, had a beautiful estate in
Southampton that he had inherited from his parents. Daphne had followed in her
mother’s footsteps with an older husband, and four years ago had married a man twenty two years older than she.
Eugenia was twenty-two when she married Umberto, but
Phillip was nothing like him. He was a rock-solid, responsible, kind man, a good
husband and father, who had inherited an enormous fortune and had made a career of
running his own investments. He provided Daphne a lifestyle that none of Eugenia’s
other children had, and she handled it well. She was a wonderful wife to Phillip, and
mother to their three-year-old son, Tucker. Eugenia knew she would never have to
worry about her. Daphne was set for life. She was a sensible, intelligent, responsible,
loving, good person, and a joy to be around. It was her other four children that Eugenia
worried about, none of whom were as comfortably set as Daphne and never would be.
Fortunes like Phillip’s were inherited, not made.
—
Eugenia got up from her desk, turned off her computer, and left her office. She still had
to finish packing before driving to the Hamptons that night. She was looking forward to
the week with her children. Her business problems could wait while she took a week
off. And a week before the Labor Day weekend, they would get together again for
Gloria’s elaborate, very expensive wedding that they had been planning for a year,
waiting for Covid to subside. The time had finally come, and it seemed safe. Gloria was
marrying a young lord from England, who, like Umberto when Eugenia married him,
was rich in blue blood and short on funds. Geoffrey and Gloria were both writers, and
Gloria had a job at a publishing house in London to support her. Eugenia wasn’t crazy
about Geoffrey, but it was Gloria’s life and what she wanted. Gloria was twenty-seven
and Daphne was twenty-eight now. The two women couldn’t have been more different.
Geoff and Gloria were flying in from London to join them, at her mother’s expense, as
they couldn’t have come otherwise. And Eugenia wanted the week with her children. It
was sacred to her.
Eugenia left her office, exiting through the separate doors to the haute couture salon.
She walked past her store and saw the single salesclerk she still employed, in spite of
having no clients, but she didn’t want to just close her doors. Eugenia waved, and the
young woman waved back and smiled. Eugenia walked the two blocks to her apartment
on Fifth Avenue in the Seventies. She had been thinking about selling it if her business
didn’t recover. There were so many changes in store. She tried not to think about it, and
to focus on the week ahead with her children. None of them knew how frightened she
was. She always tried to model strength to them, and calm. None of them had guessed
the waves of panic that seized her at night, or the weight of carrying all the burdens
alone. But they were her children, and she felt she owed it to them to be strong, or at
least appear to be. She couldn’t wait to get to the Hamptons and relax for a week. She
hoped that everything would go smoothly, but the one thing she had learned in the past
eighteen months was that nothing was ever sure. Everything in life, both good and bad,
was a surprise and totally unpredictable.
