Where It Began(69)

“My mother does animal rescue,” Huey says. As if this isn’t already a well-known fact. Then he climbs out of the car and grabs the dog by the scruff of its neck.

We crunch up the gravel path toward the house with the three dogs and a really pushy lamb. The front door is so tall, it seems as if you would need the eighteen-inch keys from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland to unlock it.

The inside of Huey’s castle involves a lot of sweeping, curved staircases and tapestries you could always use to tent normalsized houses when you spray for bugs and vermin. We climb up a bunch of these staircases while a uniformed lady follows at our heels, offering snack food. Through an open door on the way up, we see Huey’s mother in a room with a big table and cages and baskets, feeding what looks to be a tiny ferret with a baby bottle.

She says, “Hi, sweetie,” not looking up. You can’t tell if she’s talking to Huey or the ferret.

Huey says, “Mom? This is Gabby.”

This causes Mrs. Hewlett to look up fast.

“Yearbook,” Huey says. He doesn’t actually say what about yearbook, so it’s not like he’s technically lying.

“Well, keep your door open, Hewbo,” she says. Hewbo? And then she registers my face and the rivulets of eye makeup and the red eyes, and maybe I remind her of a wounded raccoon or maybe I’m just more pathetically enthralling than the ferret and a box of baby moles put together because she wipes her hands on the sides of her jeans and she hands her little ferret to the accommodating lady with the snack tray.

She is in animal rescue mode for sure and I am the unfortunate mammal.

“Madeleine Hewlett,” she says, extending her sticky hand, and all at once she’s got me in her grip, pulling me in for a hug. “Hello, dear.”

“Gabby Gardiner,” I say into her shoulder.

“My cousin Lolo used to visit Gardiner Island!” she says. “Lovely!” As if I were in line to inherit the place, or was in touch with rich and famous Gardiners, or knew them, or could recognize them in a crowd.

“Well then,” she says. “Tea!”

You can tell from Huey’s whipped demeanor that there’s no point in fighting this onslaught of maternal involvement no matter how weirdly crazed he is to haul me upstairs. He kind of leads me back down to his kitchen, which is the size of my house, and sits me down at a grotesquely long rustic table where Louis XVI probably had orange juice with his entire court dressed up as shepherds.

Only probably Marie Antoinette didn’t open the backdoor for the pushy lamb to come in and pour it a big bowl of livestock kibble.

The room is filled with black-and-white photos, Mr. and Mrs. Hewlett when they were still young and still hippies, posed in front of what appears to be their house when it was still in Europe, and a bunch of candid photos of someone you have to figure is either the Pope or a highly skilled Pope impersonator.

“I’m going to get your friend some tea,” Mrs. Hewlett says, looking at me quizzically, still in rescue mode. This involves silently telegraphing to the other maid that she’s supposed to make a cup of tea appear in front of me with a scone and a pot of jam.

“She’s upset about her boyfriend,” Huey says. It’s hard to tell if this is for parental consumption or if he thinks this covers it.

“Oh dear!” Mrs. Hewlett says, in the parental mode of being deeply concerned but even more deeply not getting it. “I was always upset about my boyfriend until I met Jeremy Jr.”

Mrs. Hewlett is still pretty without makeup at the age of fifty, wearing jeans and a sweater covered with ferret fur and wet spots you don’t even want to think about, a gazillionaire from birth, and married to a fellow gazillionaire who likes the Grateful Dead, writes music for a living, and puts up with a house full of rodents and farm animals because he loves her so much. It’s hard to relate to anything about her.

“Remember Buddy Murphy, Huey?” she says. Buddy Murphy is this two-hundred-year-old former studio head who everyone has heard of. “I was crazy about him, and then it turned out he was allergic to dander!” Mrs. Hewlett smiles with the faraway look of a woman imagining old Buddy Murphy doubled over and sneezing uncontrollably. Then she scoops up a cat and plops it on my lap.

“There,” she says. “That always makes me feel better.”

There you have it. Billy and Aliza are going to be coronated at Fling and I have a one-eyed cat on me, licking my scone. I can’t exactly throw her against the wall. She’s a one-eyed cat. So we all sit there at the grotesquely long table watching the cat eat my jam. It so does not make me feel better.

I don’t know what’s supposed to happen upstairs, and I only like surprises that involve candy, but I hand Mrs. Hewlett back the cat.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Yearbook,” Huey says.

And I can feel his mother watch me somewhat limp away, trying to figure out if she should report my condition to the Humane Society.





LVII


HUEY’S PHOTOGRAPHY ROOM IS A BIG, SUNNY octagonal place in the top corner of the house with a skylight and a black-and-white tile floor. It is the kind of room you design on purpose, because you want to be able to sit in exactly that space with those windows and that cold, hard floor whenever you feel like it, not a room you just end up with because it’s in the cheapest house on a ritzy street and you can just kind of afford it so you buy it and you’re stuck with it no matter how dreary it looks.