Privilege- Chapter One: Tradition Will Save Us Face

“Mrs. Adeline Taylor. I love how that sounds!”

Mrs. Madison nearly squealed the words as she gestured for Frances to serve the champagne.

Frances obeyed. She usually did.

She crossed the sitting room with the silver tray balanced carefully between her hands and offered a flute to Addy, who accepted it with a distracted nod of gratitude.

“Thank you, Frances.”

“Frances, go busy yourself elsewhere,” Mrs. Madison said. “I have things to discuss with your sister.”

Frances lowered her eyes and left without protest.

Addy watched her disappear through the doorway. Sometime during the years she had been away at school, Frances seemed to have ceased being an adopted sister and become something closer to a butler. It was strange, Addy thought, though apparently not strange enough to dwell upon.

Her mother had already seized her hand.

Alice Madison tilted the ring toward the light and admired the two-carat stone set into its platinum band. Addy found it rather gaudy for something she was expected to wear every day, but she understood the purpose of it. The ring announced Emmet’s success as loudly as it announced their engagement.

By all accounts, Dr. Emmet Taylor was doing extraordinarily well for himself.

That seemed to be the part her mother loved most.

Alice spoke of her future son-in-law’s medical practice to anyone willing to listen. There was little else about the man for her to discuss, and perhaps little else she cared to know.

For Addy, his success had begun to produce a different effect.

The longer she spent with Emmet, the more conscious she became of her own lack of accomplishment. She was a twenty-something barely out of school, still clutching a degree that had not yet opened a single door, while Emmet had already acquired the reputation, income, and social standing of a man whose life required no introduction.

When Addy confessed this insecurity to her mother, Alice appeared almost pleased by it.

That humiliation had taught Addy not to mention it again.

She had come a long way from her sorority days—or at least far enough that those days already seemed to belong to another girl.

She had met Emmet at a university reception for major alumni donors. He was decades her senior and possessed the sort of demeanor that made ordinary conversation feel like an appointment. Addy, raised to be gracious, had smiled and done her best to entertain him.

He scarcely seemed to notice.

Whenever she spoke about herself—her interests, her degree, even the small amount of modeling that had earned her some recognition among her peers—his eyes seemed to glaze over. More than once, he glanced at his telephone while she was speaking.

Addy was accustomed to boys her own age fawning over her, laughing too eagerly at her jokes and hanging upon every word she offered them. Emmet’s indifference unsettled her.

She took it as a sign that she was talking too much.

So she spoke less.

He left sooner.

Addy assumed that was the end of their acquaintance.

Several days later, a bouquet arrived with a card inviting her to accompany him to a political fundraiser the following weekend.

She accepted through his secretary.

The arrangement struck Addy as oddly impersonal, though she was not certain whether a man of Emmet’s stature was simply accustomed to having other people manage such things. When speaking to the secretary, she referred to him as Dr. Taylor.

Emmet corrected that mistake sharply when she climbed into his car on the evening of the fundraiser.

“You don’t need to call me that.”

There was something in his tone that made the instruction feel less intimate than disciplinary.

Addy did not make the mistake again.

Before long, the strangeness became ordinary.

Secretaries arranged dinners. Assistants passed along changes in plans. Flowers arrived without phone calls. Invitations appeared before conversations about whether she wished to attend them. Their courtship seemed to occur somewhere around them, administered by

unseen hands.

Emmet himself remained courteous, distant, and perpetually occupied.

The summer after Addy graduated, he proposed.

For one absurd moment, she had half expected him to send a member of his staff to do it.

What Addy did not know was that while she had been away at school, the Madison household had been quietly collapsing.

Nearly everything they owned had been pledged against something else.

Her father’s succession of entrepreneurial ventures had produced one failure after another: disastrous investments, ill-conceived business schemes, expensive litigation, and losses Tom Madison invariably described as temporary setbacks. No matter the enterprise, the Madisons possessed an uncanny talent for finding themselves on the losing end of it.

None of this was discussed.

Not with Addy.

Certainly not with Frances.

Only Mr. and Mrs. Madison understood how close the walls had drawn around them.

There was another truth they never acknowledged, even to each other: they had never been quite as wealthy as they pretended.

Tom’s inheritance had been considerably smaller than promised and smaller still than expected. Old debts were already multiplying by the time the anticipated trust money failed to materialize. What should have rescued him barely slowed the bleeding.

It was Alice who kept anyone from noticing.

Mrs. Madison had known limited means before becoming a trophy wife, and perhaps for that reason she understood appearances better than anyone in the household. Money could disappear. Appearances required only discipline.

The staff vanished gradually.

A maid here. A groundskeeper there. Someone who was suddenly said to have “moved on.”

Eventually, there was Frances.

Quiet Frances.

Obliging Frances.

Frances, who cost nothing.

Alice explained the arrangement as character building. Wealth must never be allowed to go to a young girl’s head, she said, particularly a girl fortunate enough to have been given opportunities beyond those into which she had been born.

It was a useful philosophy. It converted financial desperation into moral instruction.

Over time, Alice discovered that she genuinely preferred Frances as an unpaid servant to

Frances as a daughter.

Every additional responsibility placed upon the girl somehow made Alice resent her more. Frances was too awkward, too unpolished, too timid. Nothing about her seemed to justify what Alice believed had been bestowed upon her.

By the time Frances left for college, Alice was relieved.

She no longer had to supervise her.

Frances, meanwhile, had assumed Alice would miss her.

Even after all those years, she was not permitted to call her Mom.

The closest thing to affection Alice allowed was permission, in private, to call her by her first name.

Alice.

The Madison house had grown quiet while Addy was away.

Her engagement brought noise back into it.

Emmet insisted that he and Addy live separately until they were married. Addy found this old-fashioned, although old-fashioned described nearly everything about their relationship.

There was such formality between them that sometimes she had the peculiar sensation of being engaged to a man she scarcely knew.

Their relationship felt less romantic than contractual.

Yet Emmet offered something Addy increasingly doubted she could provide for herself: permanence.

Security.

The protected comfort of never having to discover whether she could survive on her own.

He had made his opinion of her modeling ambitions clear. He found the profession tasteless, though he usually expressed this with the detached concern of a physician discussing a dangerous habit.

Quitting became easy.

People had warned Addy about the industry anyway.

For a while she continued to cling to her degree in Theatrical Arts as evidence that another life remained possible. She imagined beauty might carry her into entertainment where talent had not. Unfortunately, Addy could not act particularly well. She could not dance particularly well. She could not sing particularly well.

She possessed the face for stardom without any obvious mechanism for achieving it.

The realization had come slowly and then all at once.

Her greatest humiliation had been overhearing several sorority sisters gossiping about her performance in the one substantial role she had landed in an off-campus production. They mocked her choppy delivery and the strange pauses she took between lines.

Addy had blamed a head cold.

Privately, she knew better.

The director had wanted her.

Not her talent.

Her.

She had understood this almost immediately and had played into his attraction enough to keep the role, an arrangement that disgusted her even as she benefited from it.

Afterward, she told herself the performance had simply gone badly.

A proper young woman did not advertise her weaknesses.

So Addy learned to speak about pleasant things. She learned to smile when asked what she intended to do with her degree. She learned to answer questions about the future without saying anything at all.

But beneath those manners lay the knowledge that she might have become a has-been before she had ever properly begun.

Being beside Emmet had a way of rubbing her nose in it.

Frances occupied an entirely different position in the Madison mythology.

There had never been much warmth in the circumstances that brought her into the family.

She was the illegitimate daughter of a distant relative, though Alice had carefully kept even that fragment of history from her. There were branches of the family tree Alice preferred left unexamined—secret benefactors, discreet arrangements, men with money and appetites for women whose names did not appear in respectable genealogies.

Frances knew none of it.

She knew only that she was different.

There had hardly been a day in the Madison household when she was permitted to forget it.

Her nose was not quite the right shape.

Her hair never fell properly.

Her posture needed correcting.

Her clothes never looked on her the way they looked on Addy.

Compliments arrived sharpened at one end.

When Frances surpassed Addy at something, the rules abruptly changed.

“Oh, you’re still doing that?”

Or:

“Don’t be so trivial, Frances.”

Achievement mattered only until Frances achieved it.

Addy participated in this cruelty differently.

She genuinely adored Frances, in the careless way a child might adore a beloved pet. She liked having her nearby. She liked her loyalty. She liked the certainty that Frances would listen whenever Addy needed someone upon whom to unload her disappointments.

But Addy rarely concerned herself with the details of Frances’s life.

She loved Frances without ever becoming terribly curious about her.

Anyone invited into the Madison home long enough to observe the arrangement might have wondered how Frances had endured it without going mad.

Perhaps that was one reason the Madisons so rarely entertained guests anymore.

Frances, socially starved and still wrapped in the thick shyness of childhood despite her first semester away at college, could not have been happier to have Addy home.

That night, after the girls had gone upstairs, Alice and Tom Madison remained together in the darkened sitting room.

Their voices dropped to whispers.

Their daughter was engaged.

Their daughter was marrying money.

Alice explained what could be done with a proper wedding. Not merely a beautiful wedding—a traditional one. The right church. The right flowers. The right names printed on heavy cream invitations. People who had stopped answering the Madisons’ calls might attend out of curiosity if nothing else.

The family could be seen again.

Tom smiled.

He was already thinking about investors.

There would be men at Emmet Taylor’s wedding who did not know Tom Madison’s history.

Men who had never heard about the failed ventures or the lawsuits or the money that had vanished into projects whose names changed more often than their prospects.

Fresh men.

Fresh money.

Alice spoke of restoring the family name.

Tom spoke of opportunity.

Neither used the word desperation.

Above them, the old house settled upon its foundation with a low wooden groan.

Every toast from that evening forward would conceal another purpose. Every flower, invitation, dinner, and ceremony would become part of the elaborate machinery by which the Madisons intended to haul themselves from the mud before anyone discovered how deeply they had sunk.

They had sold investments.

They had dismissed servants.

Soon there would be assets to sell, then heirlooms, then perhaps the house itself.

But not yet.

There was still the wedding.

There was still the Taylor name.

There was still tradition.

“Tradition will save us,” Alice whispered.

Tom repeated it.

“Tradition will save us.”

And in the failing Madison house, where appearances had survived long after prosperity had died, the words sounded almost like a prayer.