Full of Grace by Dorothea Benton Frank Read Free Book Online Page A

with two fingers. “She never recognized my voice, not even for one second. She thought I was my father, that it was a Sunday afternoon in the sixties and what did he want for dinner…Then she just stops in midsentence and drifts away again. My own mother doesn’t know me. Nice, right?”
    “Oh, Michael, I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine such a thing.”
    “Yeah, and I can’t stand seeing her like this. You know?”
    Changing the subject, I said, “Do you have a headache?”
    “Yeah, probably pollen…”
    “Or stress…”
    “Yeah, maybe. I’m fine. I’ll take an antihistamine and it will be fine. Listen, Bomze called.”
    “When?”
    “This afternoon. I tried calling you on your cell, but it didn’t go through.”
    “I hate cell phones. I wonder what…Well, I’ll call him back when we get home.”
    Eric Bomze and his elegant third wife, the famous Romanian baroness Adriana Katerina Kovacs, were the designer travel source for successful executives and their families. They were known throughout the industry as Bomze and the Baroness. I was their favorite rising executive in a cast of sixty or so others in assorted offices around the world. They’d nicknamed me La Principessa.
    If you wanted to book the rambling eight-bedroom chalet at Suvretta House in St. Moritz that had once belonged to Reza Pahlavi, the former shah of Iran, you called Bomze Platinum Travel. If you wanted to cruise the Mediterranean on the yacht once held by Niarchos or Onassis, you called them. In fact, every CEO, COO and CFO spending their retirement years as a guest of the state once had the Bomzes’ personal cell-phone numbers on speed dial—before they were confiscated, that is. It was true enough that all the SEC investigations had cut into their business, but not enough to cause substantial alarm to Bomze and the Baroness. They merely raised their fee by six percent to cover the losses and continued on their merry way.
    But a phone call from Bomze on a holiday weekend was unusual and I knew something must have happened.
    “I’ll call him later,” I said again.
    As we talked and ate and drank, the round and square pegs of our life fell back into their round and square holes and our comfort with each other was easily reestablished. But it was only so easily established because somebody—both of us actually—weren’t exactly forthcoming with the facts.
    I skirted the details of my weekend at my parents’ home like an Olympic dodgeball gold medalist—Nonna’s jungle of hanging pasta, her OCD for yarn and communion with her dead husband, the Niagara Falls of Big Al’s dees, dems and dozes, the sheer mass of my brother’s children and how the noisy choir of their voices and Regina’s shrieking reprimands sent me scouring my makeup bag for ten milligrams of something, anything to smooth the edges of my ruffled nerves. Never mind my brother Nicky and his idiotic Marianne and all the rest of it. It was just better left unexplored.
    Michael’s recounting of the holiday was equally false. He didn’t tell me until much later about his mother and how he had found her half-naked and crying. That she had screamed bloody murder at his arrival. He said not one word to me about his mother’s violence when he tried to dress her and wash her face. Or that Michael had wept all night in the dark silence of our carriage house wondering what kind of loving God would do such a thing to his beautiful mother, who had never hurt anyone in her entire life.
    His mother had been a dignified woman, every inch of her refined and lovely. When his father was alive he remembered seeing them waltzing to recordings of big-band music in their living room on Murray Boulevard, Dom Pérignon chilling in one of his mother’s ancient silver wine buckets—one of many alleged treasures I had never seen, all of them stored away with antiques and other things for Michael to have if and when he needed them to furnish a house.
    The lives his parents led had been