Free You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz Page A

always absent. The typical mom was a former attorney or analyst, now consumed with the work of running multiple houses and overseeing the development of multiple children. She was very thin and very blond and usually rushing to SoulCycle with her entire life mashed into a white-stitched Barenia Birkin. The school was preponderantly white (if no longer preponderantly Jewish), though there was now a sizable contingent of students from Asia and India. These students, and the even smaller number of black and Hispanic students, were featured prominently in Rearden’s admissions literature, but the truly—if far more covertly—advantaged students were hiding in plain sight: These were the offspring of Rearden graduates, alumni men and women who were not, in actual fact, titans of modern industry or its money-spinning equivalents, but simply men and women who toiled as their predecessors had, in the arts, academia, or—like Grace—the so-called healing professions. They had attended the school before the deluge of money, when it had been not nearly so consumed by a sense of its own importance.
    Her era (the 1980s) had been the last of the school’s innocence, before all those Masters of the Universe had swarmed the city’s independent schools and hurled the old guard over the parapets. Back in those Elysian days, Grace and her classmates knew they were not poor, but they did not exactly think of themselves as rich , either. (Even then there had been some quite rich children at Rearden, who were driven to school in long cars by men who wore caps—and appropriately ridiculed as a result.) Most lived in basic “classic six” apartments on the Upper East and Upper West Sides (back then, such apartments were within reach of most families with a single professional parent—a doctor, an accountant), though a few iconoclasts were in the Village or even SoHo. On the weekends and during the summers, they decamped to small (and not very well-kept) houses in Westchester or Putnam County, or in Grace’s case to the modest lakeside house in northwest Connecticut mysteriously purchased by Grace’s grandmother (and namesake) at the height of the Depression for the bizarre sum of $4,000.
    Today, the parents Grace met at Back to School Night visibly glazed over when they learned that she was a therapist, her husband a doctor. They would not have understood how it was possible to live in such cramped quarters as Grace’s three-bedroom apartment, or what was the point of driving all the way to Connecticut if not to a gated estate with its own horse barn, tennis court, and guest cottage. The world these parents inhabited was one of titans and the people they hired to do things for them. They dwelt on Fifth or Park Avenue, in homes fashioned from multiple apartments, purchased and merged and overflowing to two or three floors, configured for (and dependent upon) live-in staff and suited to lavish entertaining. When these new Rearden families went away for the weekend it was to private islands, soaring mountain estates, or Hamptons palaces where horses waited in their stalls and boats in their slips.
    She tried not to mind. She tried to remind herself that this was Henry’s school experience, not her own, and why should the inequity of rich versus disgustingly rich bother her so much when Henry himself was such an amiable, noncovetous type anyway? Henry’s classmates might be growing up in opulent apartments tended by resident couples (he the butler, she the cook) and shepherded by tag teams of nannies, then tag teams of tutors and private coaches. They might get iPhones in kindergarten and credit cards in third grade, but it didn’t seem to affect Henry. So she struggled mightily not to let it affect her.
    Then, one Saturday, had come the snub so artlessly dealt that it landed like a door in the face, and shattered her attempts at sanguinity once and for all. Grace had been dropping Henry