My two children were little - five years old and two - on the day I took them to my parents' suburban country club in my hometown of Rochester, New York.
I was on a summer visit to my parents, from Los Angeles. It was hot: upstate-New-York, lake-effect-sweaty-humid hot, and our suburban manse did not have a swimming pool. (A yuppie couple who bought it when my aging parents left for a one-story ranch house corrected that.)
"Do we still belong to the country club?" I asked my mother. "Can I take the kids there?"
Yes, she and Daddy assured me.
So I drove my kids to the nearby property where, in the sixties, my stylish parents had been one of the first Catholic couples to be admitted. How magical it had seemed to me then! Teen summers, in the weeks before and after my two-month stay at a rich-girls' summer camp, I joined those rich girls around the pool to flirt with boys from private schools and boarding schools. It was exciting to know that, to them, I was a rare bird; I didn't go to the private school where the other girls went, nor was I a boring family friend. I was an exotic Catholic school girl who wanted to be an actress. I basked in their attention, showing off my diving skills. I signed my father's name on chits at the snack bar, ordering lunch; I was a daughter of privilege in a world where happy-ever-after seemed assured.
That day, as a young mother, I got to the pool and it seemed all but deserted.
I don't remember anyone coming into the ladies' locker room while we changed into our bathing suits. I don't remember anyone at the snack bar when we passed, or any delicious scent of grilling burgers.
I signed us in as my father's guests, on the damp paper attached to a clipboard at the gate, and walked my children over to the Baby Pool, where I thought I could finally let go of their hands and let them play under my watchful eye.
As they stepped in, I snapped their hands back. In the water, bobbing against the hole with the suction of the filter pump, was a huge, dead rat.
And I knew it was over: the WASP Ascendancy of upstate New York, born of pluck and entrepreneurial wile in the nineteenth century, sustained by smart investment, inherited portfolios, and good genes in the twentieth, had passed. It was gone, like the ante-bellum south.
Someone called my name, and I turned my head towards the diving boards, where suburban mothers had once gathered on the wide patio, sipping iced tea and gin-and-tonics in their chaises. (How judgmentally I'd once eyed their spreading midriffs, thinking, "I'll never let myself go like that!")
As if in a dream, a blond woman about my age walked towards me, said her name was "Peg," and that she recognized me from my TV acting and had known me back in the days when we'd both gone to the country club dances.
She'd married one of those golden boys.
And she'd divorced him recently, she'd said. The alimony struggle had been bitter, but his parents were wonderful, helping out with their handicapped granddaughter; Peg's child had been born with cerebral palsy.
I felt the patio around us press in; the old oasis of flirtation and pleasure had become a refuge for medical respite for stressed caregivers.
Yet I couldn't help but ask - like the boy-crazy girl I'd been - what had happened, if she knew, to all those people. Those boys whose names still survive on a dance card I've kept all these years in a memory trunk. She knew - and every story was one of decline: B. had become a doctor and had recently died of a pill overdose, no-one knew if it was intentional, but his will had left everything to his new wife, which had infuriated his parents. T., an "older man" with a playboy's reputation, had died of cancer that people were beginning to suspect had really been AIDS.
Peg had to get back to her daughter. She said goodbye and we promised to keep in touch. I think I called her, once, to let her know her stories had started me on a long-writing journey. But the truth is, she'd birthed an image of herself, with a few fragments of information, that lived so vigorously in my mind that I didn't dare keep touch with the real person.
Memory erases anyone else at the pool that day. Peg came out of the mists of the past like the woodsman in Sleeping Beauty, with stories of the royal family asleep in the castle in the bramble forest, felled by a curse.
Over time, I remembered other things I'd heard about people in my hometown: my friend whose first baby was born with a hole in his heart; my friend who'd married a country club boy whose testicular cancer had rendered him infertile; my friend's sister whose baby had been born with its organs outside its body. The daughter of a friend of my mother's - my mother had called me in tears to tell me this - who'd had all her reproductive organs removed due to rare vaginal cancer connected to a pill her mother had taken in pregnancy, twenty years ago. "We're so lucky!" my mother had sobbed.
I remembered driving on the Rochester Expressway in the rain, another summer day, when the lush leafy green all around me was dripping wet. And how I'd suddenly seen the water cycle not as a life-giving blessing, as I always had in childhood, but as a poison delivery system. It was drenching my favorite part of the earth in pesticides, mercury, sulphuric acid and other toxins. They were permeating us, steeping us in the consequences of scientific ignorance and heedless denial.
When my parents died, I was compelled, by love, to revive them in story, and all their friends, and their society. I traced my personal transformations along a historic timeline from 1967 to 1988. In the years before Google, I combed files in the Los Angeles and New York libraries, reading about environmental law history and molecular structures. Sometimes I phoned people at random, in the days of dialing Information to get the numbers - and often I found exactly what I needed, immediately, at the other end of the line. Slowly I plotted my personal changes against the history I vividly remembered (race riots, assassinations) and that which had been hidden to me(the development of civil rights law and environmental law.)
"You've been invited to make your debut at the club," my mother told me when I was seventeen and a senior at Catholic high school, where students didn't make social debuts. "You know your father and I don't believe in that." Sensitive and obedient to my mother's cues, I declined to debut. But I attended the debut of my peers, and grand exclusive club party, as an "extra girl." I will never forget them in their ivory dresses, descending the curved staircase with their fathers on one arm and a bouquet of red roses in the other.
One of the protagonists I named Peg. She enters a vanishing society. And what happens to her and the others is the story of After the Hollygreen Ball.
