Page 6 of Old Money
We sit in the strained silence, arguing in our heads. I’m dimly aware of a pale stone wall running alongside the road. Theo sighs.
“I’m just worried, Alice,” he says. “I think this is a bad decision—an unhealthy one.”
“I remember,” I answer as the gate appears. “It’s ‘an unhealthy environment,’ for me. My hometown.”
We pull up to the entrance. The wrought-iron spears glimmer like fresh tar in the heat, and the car fills up with the sharp, green smell of lawn.
“I’m not just talking about the village,” Theo says quietly. “The village is one thing.”
“I know,” I finish for him, my own voice softening too. “I really do.”
I nod forward, and Theo obliges, driving slowly up the path.
On that point, Theo’s right—no question. I don’t need him to tell me, because I know better than anyone. The village is one thing. The club is another.
Chapter Three
The club isn’t as old as the village or the money in it, but it is one of the oldest of its kind in North America. And unlike others, it still maintains many of the original, overtly bigoted rules that used to be de rigueur for all country clubs. Membership is by invitation only, and it is entirely male and white. Not even wives are granted official membership, though the club does graciously permit them to use the tennis courts and pool and other facilities without their husbands present. I don’t know what the club board would do if a member married a Black woman or one with a Jewish last name, but as far as I know, in the hundred-odd years the club’s been standing, that has never happened.
The property is a rambling three hundred acres, and includes a golf course, a shooting lodge, stables and a riding ring, each section divided by dense swaths of the forest that once covered the land entirely. Virtually none of the member areas are visible from the outside, except for the clubhouse. It sits like a decorative box at the top of the steep, winding driveway—the highest point in the whole village.
Most American country clubs are modeled after the grand ancestral estates of the English nobility. But the Horseman’s clubhouse was purportedly designed in homage to Petit Trianon—Marie Antoinette’s private getaway palace, where she’d go to escape the bustle of court life at Versailles.
With its Doric columns and gleaming facade, it does have the look of a royal retreat. The clubhouse—its actual name is Brandywine, though everyone knows it as “the clubhouse” just as the Horseman Club is simply “the club”—was built with large slabs of peach-cream brick, the color of the inside of a seashell. It looks white in full daylight, then warms to a delicate pink after sunset, glowing as if lit from within. The western side is lined with four grand French doors that open onto a marble terrace overlooking the hill. Every party ends on the terrace, even in blistering winter, and that is one tradition I understand. The view is astonishing—a vast panorama of the Hudson River without so much as a treetop obstructing the scene. Rumor has it the club pays neighboring residents an off-the-books stipend to maintain their old oaks and evergreens at a specific height, so as to preserve the view.
Don’t ask me how I know these things. I just do. Everyone here just does. The club has always been the center of the village. The paradox is that it’s so supremely exclusive and exclusionary that most residents would never even fantasize about joining—and yet we’ve all been there, one way or another.
It feels as though I spent half my childhood at the club, though I know that can’t actually be true. I think those memories just loom larger than most. My parents weren’t members—not even close. I don’t come from a “nice family,” just a normal one, and that itself was a victory for my folks. They’d both grown up in households on the edge of broke, and considered themselves lucky to be merely anxious about money, rather than flat-out terrified. “It’ll be different for you,” Mom would say. “You’ll know people.”
That’s why they moved to Briar’s Green, although they couldn’t afford it. That’s why they sent us to the Wheaton School—though that would’ve been impossible had Theo not been such a wunderkind, accepted on scholarship at age five. I got in too, but not for free—I was just regular smart. We weretwo of a handful of “normies” among a sea of legacy students and the occasional celebrity kid. I grew keenly aware of the crushing cost, but my parents never seemed bothered. We were in. That’s what mattered. We attended Wheaton and we lived in Briar’s Green (in a rented house on the edge of the village, but still). Money worries were nothing compared to the soothing balm of proximity to wealth.
It wasn’t snobbery, understand. Wealth, they believed, was the surest protection in life, and it’s hard to argue they were wrong. They had no worshipful illusions about so-called American Royalty, like the Yateses or Kennedys. If anything, it was the opposite. They wanted us to know them as peers—“No different from you.” But we knew the truth early on: if we were really like them, it would go without saying.
Mom and Dad did their best to give us a steady, comfortable childhood, with birthday parties and boxed cereal. But doing so in Briar’s Green was nearly impossible for ordinary people, because the village simply wasn’t meant for them. Mom was a bookkeeper for a handful of local businesses, and Dad worked at a financial firm in the city. It was a grunt-work position in the tax department, from which he’d never be promoted but hung on to for dear life, because working in finance—like living in Briar’s Green—conferred a degree of clout you couldn’t get in other sectors. It would serve us, his children, in the long term, and for my parents, it was always about our futures. They earned a perfectly fine living, but you couldn’t just earn money to stay afloat here; you had to have it already.
They both worked endless hours to keep the small-but-pretty roof over our heads, never letting us know what a tenuous hold we had. Then one spring evening, two weeks after my eighth birthday, Dad collapsed in the street while walking home from the train. It wasn’t the stress, the doctors insisted, assuring Mom over and over. It wasn’t anything he did or didn’t do. It was a freak embolism—just one of those things. “Sometimes terriblethings just happen,” the surgeon told my mother, gently ushering us out of the hospital lounge. “And it’s nobody’s fault.”
Overnight, we lost both Dad and the life we’d had with him. Mom, Theo and I moved to a duplex on a wooded street in Ashborough, just outside the village. Mom had to work three times as hard to keep us under that sagging, mold-speckled roof, all while raising two grief-stricken children. She negotiated a payment plan with Wheaton, and learned basic tailoring from a library book to avoid buying new uniforms. We put them on and went back to school, for no other reason than it was important to her.
Theo and I understood then how different we really were. We were reminded each time we walked down the shaky steps of our apartment and into one of the wealthiest communities in the country—technically our hometown, but not one where we belonged. Belonging to the club was out of the question. We lacked the two prerequisites: money, and a man.
But even for us, the club was unavoidable. It was the silent center of our community, and the second-largest employer after Rippowat Prison. Everyone in the village who worked had worked at the club at one time or another. Most other normies at Wheaton were children of longtime club staffers, some of whom had been nudged into the school thanks to members. It wasn’t exactly a perk, but there was an understanding that a well-liked club employee—a bartender who knew everyone’s drink orders, a discreet powder-room attendant—might have a stroke of luck when applying for a spot. Such was the case with my best friend, Susannah.
Susannah’s parents were both career staffers there—her mother a catering manager, and her dad the junior tennis coach. On snow days and school breaks, we often got parked in the club’s breakroom, making Swiss Miss in the microwave and ignoring our homework. In summertime, the club became our secret, pseudo-day camp. Susannah and I would sneak aroundthe grounds, making an elaborate game of hiding from members and staff. I doubt anyone would’ve cared except for Mr. Brody, the club’s scowling, imperious butler, who had a preternatural sense for rule breakers. Like a vampire, he’d appear out of thin air the moment you even thought about sticking your gum in an ashtray. We were terrified of him, but that too was part of the fun. Really, those were the most magical days of my childhood—sneaking into ballrooms to practice cartwheels, scooping cups of maraschino cherries from behind the bar while the bartender smiled and made a big show of looking the other way. We never thought about our classmates, eating fries by the pool, charging sodas to their parents’ accounts. We didn’t feel different on those days. We felt like outlaws.
A few times a year, I came to the club as a guest. Caitlin and her parents, my aunt Barbara and uncle Gregory, were our only close relatives, and they frequently invited us to join them for parties or holiday festivities. Uncle Greg was a third-generation member, though he was also an exception: a warm, jokey guy who didn’t golf and was married to my mother’s sister—a born and raised normie. Aunt Barbara was great too, albeit a little more formal. Like many converts, she’d adopted the customs of my uncle’s world and practiced them more dutifully than he, who’d been born into it. But none of them were true snobs, and they took every opportunity to include us in their very different life.
Those times at the club were nice, but not exactly fun. The Dales never seemed to notice how out of place we were, but we felt like grubby interlopers in our borrowed shoes and overwashed, too-small outfits. The members never said so, but they always let us know—those little half glances, a scoot of the chair—that they agreed.
Chapter Four
I’d like to say it feels different, twenty years later. But standing in the staff lot behind the clubhouse, I still feel like an interloper. I’m coated with a sticky film of perspiration, and my hair is already coming loose in tiny wisps. I smooth my hair into a bun, making a mental note to buy a can of proper hairspray. Everyone here uses it; I’d forgotten.
Once I’m sure Theo is gone, I head toward the staff door. I keep my head up, taking in the sights and sounds around me. This is a grounding trick I learned in therapy, when I finally did go to therapy. I rarely use it nowadays, but it was my lifeline in my early twenties—the peak panic-attack years. Whenever I felt one coming over me, I’d stop in my tracks, look around and name three things I saw—then three things I heard, smelled, felt, etc. Within seconds, my feet would hit firm ground again, and I’d be back in the grocery store or the park, back in my safe and mundane adult life.
The trouble with this place is it hasn’t changed a bit since I left here as a traumatized, blood-stained child. What do I see? The hill I was standing on when I heard Caitlin screaming. What do I hear? Kids splashing and hollering down at the pool—the one that turned from blue to hazy lavender, because of all the blood. I’d forgotten that part, but one walk across the parking lot, and I’ve regressed all the way to eleven. So much for therapy.
I pause at the staff door, deep-breathing myself back into adulthood, and rap the brass knocker. The boom is so loud I hear it echoing inside.
