The Summer Hideaway by Susan Wiggs

Talmadge’s residence,” said her assistant.
    “It’s Ross,” he said. “Is my mother available?”
    “Hold a moment, please.”
    “Ross, darling.” Winifred Talmadge’s voice trilled with delight. “Where are you?”
    “On my way from the airport.”
    “Is the car all right? I told the service to send their best car.”
    “Oh, yeah, it’s great.”
    “I can’t tell you what an utter relief it is to know you’re back. I nearly lost my mind worrying.”
    It was natural, even normal for a mother to worry. When your son was in a battle zone, it was to be expected. “Thanks,” he said.
    “I mean, what can he possibly be thinking?” she rushed on. “I haven’t slept a wink since he announced his intention to go off to the Catskills in search of his long-lost brother.”
    “Oh,” said Ross. “Granddad. That’s what you’re worried about.”
    “Well, aren’t you?”
    “Of course. Listen, traffic doesn’t look bad at all. I should be there soon. Can we talk about it then?”
    “Certainly. I’ll have all your favorites for dinner.”
    “Great, thanks.”
    She paused. “Ross.”
    “Yes?”
    “Just refresh my memory,” she said. “What are your favorites?”
    He burst out laughing then. There was nothing to do but laugh. Here he’d been thinking she might be having a moment. Might be genuinely sentimental about him.
    “Hey, anything that’s not served in a metal compartmentalized tray is fine with me,” he said.
    He rode the rest of the way into Manhattan in blissful silence, leaning back against the headrest. In a way, he was grateful for the mother he had. Seriously, he was. He learned as much from her bad example as other people did from having good mothers.
    Winifred Lamprey Bellamy Talmadge was a creature of her own invention. Lacking what she regarded as the right background, she had invented a whole new persona for herself.
    Few people knew she had grown up in a seedy section of Flatbush, in a thin-walled apartment above her parents’ pawn shop. Early in life, she’d learned to be ashamed of her humble roots, and had made it her life’s mission—as she’d put it when Ross questioned her—torise above it. She’d made a study of the upper classes. She practiced speaking in an ultrarefined, boarding school accent, slightly nasal and beautifully articulated. She studied the way the wealthy dressed and ate and comported themselves. She totally hid who she was.
    She buried her past, insisted on being called Winifred instead of Wanda. She feasted on novels of the mannered elite. As a high school girl, she set a goal to attend Vassar College—not so much for the education, but for its traditional social affiliation with Yale. She wanted to marry a Yale man, and attending Vassar was the way to do it. With the focus and dedication of a nationally ranked scholar, she applied herself in high school. She knew she had to work twice as hard as the privileged girls of private schools. And she did, even winning lucrative scholarships. Such dedication, her teachers had said. Such discipline. She’ll probably do something extraordinary with her life.
    It could be argued that she had, in a way. He had to give her props for that. It was no small feat to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps, in a single generation going from Flatbush to Fifth Avenue simply by sheer force of will.
    Ross knew all this about his mother because his grandfather had told him. Not to gossip or be mean but to try to give a hurting, grieving boy some perspective with regard to his mother, who had all but turned her back on him after the death of his father. Ross would never understand a person who ran from her past and hated who she really was. But he learned to put up with her paranoia and self-absorption, and his grandfather had, in time, made it cease to matter.
    Ross gazed out the car window at the landscape passingby en route to the city—first the tenements and creaky wooden row houses of the outskirts, the