Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty Read Online Free Page A

actually want horses or sailing lessons in the British Virgin Islands.
    During her pregnancy, the veins in Mary’s legs had swelled into thick, raised ropes. Her calves were less pale skin and more twisting strands of blue. The doctor instructed her to keep them elevated above her heart, to massage them with particular oils. She would spend the rest of her seaside summers with a towel over her legs, the rest of her sundress days in thick stockings. Mary had wept over these things. She felt as if she had aged seventy years in the space of nine months, like the growing baby had detonated something poisonous inside her.
    The doctor joined Hugh and Mary in the hospital room. “We’ve named him Edgar,” she announced.
    “That’s a fine name,” the doctor said. “Stately and proud. He’ll go on to great things.” This seemed like an official pronouncement and Mary logged it as fact. “May I?” he asked, pulling the blanket down from her lap. Her legs were dark with bruises, the blood gathered in underskin pools. Her veins were high and fat. “I would feel worse about this if you’d just had a daughter,” the doctor started, “but with such a beautiful son to carry on the family name, it’s easier for me to tell you that you can’t have any more. The risk of a blood clot is too great. You could die.”
    Edgar was asleep in his bassinet and both of his parents looked at him. Wrinkled little monkey-faced newborn, still looking halfway like a water creature. The ghost of the family they had intended to become, the fleet of them in matching Christmas outfits, matching tennis outfits, matching riding outfits, dwindled to a quiet three. Neither Hugh nor Mary cried while the doctor was still in the room, but for the first months of Edgar’s life, as he slept less andlooked around more, as he fattened up and learned to grab things in his dimpled fists, their eyes were red-rimmed and swollen.
    —
    Edgar had to live the childhoods of all his brothers and sisters who did not exist. He took fencing, tennis, rowing and ballroom dance lessons. He learned to jump horses, sail boats, speak French and Latin, and recognize the architectural features of each great era. At age ten, he was enrolled in a figure drawing class in which he sat with a herd of older women and rendered the slack necks and falling breasts of a variety of models. His mother wanted him to play an instrument but his father vetoed most of the options: violin (too screechy), saxophone (too black), piano (too feminine), flute (homosexual), until he was left with a clarinet, an instrument that none of them could even remember having heard. All through his school years Edgar was busy from seven in the morning until he fell asleep. There was no time for friendships and he found himself talking to peers only while they were all otherwise occupied with something that their parents hoped would make them better, rounder adults.
    —
    Edgar’s father floated above the social pressure. He felt that they had earned their way and had nothing to apologize for. Which was what led him to the Mercedes-Benz dealership on a bright Saturday in summer where a flock of suited men lit and relit his cigar, poured him bourbon, slapped him hard on the back while they walked the perimeter of a jewel-bright coupe, blue as blue, like they were circling a high-mountain lake. “I won’t say it’ll change your life,” one of the suits said, “but it’ll change your day. How many times are you going to press your foot on a gas pedal?Thousands. This is the pedal you want to be pushing.” Hugh handed over his old keys and a banknote and left with the windows down and the new leather warming against his back. He took his fedora off while he drove and let his hair tousle in the breeze. He pulled into the construction dust of the family’s forthcoming country summerhouse in the middle of a hundred acres of prairie and forest, the horse paddock to his right, the place where the swimming pool