Free You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz Page B

off at a birthday party in a Park Avenue penthouse where the windows framed breathtaking views on all four sides. From where she stood on the mosaic floor of the entranceway, just off the private elevator, the children could be observed beyond a marble archway, tearing around the massive living room in pursuit of a magician in a bowler hat. Grace had just handed over a gift-wrapped science kit to an employee of some kind (secretary? party facilitator?) when the hostess gaily passed by.
    This hostess, this birthday party mother—Grace did not know very much about her, except that her first name was Linsey and she hailed from somewhere in the South. She was willowy and tall, with breasts disproportionately high and suspiciously spherical, and she made good use of the catchall pronoun substitute y’all when navigating morning drop-off at the third-grade classroom doorway. ( Y’all was admirably useful when you couldn’t recall someone’s name, Grace had to admit. She was not at all sure that Linsey, three years after their sons had been assigned to the same class, knew her name.) In addition to Henry’s classmate, Linsey’s husband had older children at Rearden, from his first marriage. He was something at Bear Stearns. It had to be said that Linsey had never been anything but pleasant, but past the veneer of good manners there seemed to lurk nothing at all.
    One other important fact that Grace had gleaned about Linsey was that she had a mind-boggling collection of Hermès Birkins, a veritable color wheel of them in ostrich, crocodile, and occasional leather. Grace noticed Birkins, and she possessed exactly one, in basic brown-pebbled Togo, a gift from Jonathan on her thirtieth birthday. (Poor Jonathan had been made to jump through many hoops down at the Hermès store on Madison, where, in his charming naïveté, he had assumed he could just walk in and purchase a Birkin bag. It was adorable, really.) She took care of this beautiful object with great devotion, and it lived on a cloth-lined shelf in her closet with its dowager aunts, the two Hermès Kellys she had inherited from her mother. Grace secretly itched to see Linsey’s bags, especially in situ, wherever in the great apartment they might reside (possibly in their own closet or, indeed, vault!), and was hoping to be offered a tour.
    â€œHello!” Linsey had said when she saw Henry and Grace arrive. Henry, without prompting, took off to join the kids in the living room, and Grace stood before her hostess, wondering if some kind of actual intimacy was about to be launched. She could see, through yet another archway, and down past a very long dining room, and through an open door, a few other mothers positioned around a kitchen island, drinking coffee. She could do coffee, actually, Grace thought. It being Saturday morning. And though she had made a special arrangement to see a couple in crisis that afternoon, she had no obligations until then. “So glad y’all could make it!” the hostess said with her customary warmth. The party would be over at four. Then she let Grace know that one of the doormen would be glad to hail a taxi for her, if she needed one.
    The doorman would be glad to hail a taxi for her.
    Grace had moved numbly to the door and stepped numbly into the elevator for the long ride down. In her own building, where she had grown up and still lived, the doormen were mainly Irish or Bulgarian or Albanian, friendly guys who volunteered for their local fire squad in Queens and showed you pictures of their kids. They also held the door and took your bag unless you waved them off. And they hailed taxis, of course. Of course they did. She did not need to be told that they did.
    Stepping out onto Park that morning, she had had a queasy feeling, like a twister-tossed girl from Kansas emerging into unreal Technicolor. This particular apartment building, Linsey’s building, was famous and had been the home of