New York City, 1974
Watergate finally reached the Whitfield dinner table in earnest that spring, the way a storm that has been visible on the horizon for two years finally reaches the shore.
Richard read the transcripts excerpts in the Times with the particular grim satisfaction of a man who had quietly moved money away from certain exposures eighteen months earlier and was now being proven right in the worst possible way.
“I don’t understand why everyone’s so shocked,” Kit said one evening, ten years old and unable, for once, to keep the observation entirely to herself.
“Everyone already knew men like that lie. They’re only shocked there’s a tape.”
Richard looked at her over his glasses, the look he’d started giving her more often that year — not quite suspicion, more the look of a man rereading a paragraph he thought he understood the first time.
“That’s a fairly cynical thing for a ten-year-old to say, Kitty.”
“Is it wrong, though?”
He didn’t answer that, which Kit understood, even then, was its own kind of answer.
Margaux changed the subject to the resignation speech’s effect on the social calendar — half of official Washington’s summer invitations were reportedly in chaos — and Kit went back to her dinner and filed the exchange away with the others: don’t be right in front of them unless you can also be small about it.
The modeling world came to her sideways, the way most important things in Kit’s life arrived — not through any plan of her own, but through her mother’s orbit, which had a gravitational pull all its own.
Margaux had stayed close, over the years, with a woman named Vivian Kessler, who ran a boutique agency out of a townhouse on East Sixty-Third and had once, in the early sixties, tried to sign Margaux herself before Richard and marriage intervened.
Vivian had never quite forgiven the fashion industry for losing Margaux Whitfield’s cheekbones to Wall Street, and she said so, cheerfully, at least once whenever the two women had lunch.
“She’s got your bones,” Vivian said one Saturday afternoon, studying Kit across the parlor with the frank, appraising look Kit recognized instantly — the same look Yekaterina’s father’s men used to give a balance sheet, searching for the number that mattered under all the ones that didn’t.
“Better, actually. Yours were pretty, Margaux. Hers are architectural.”
“She’s ten, Viv.”
“I’m not talking about now. I’m talking about later. Bones don’t lie the way faces do — you can always tell early if the structure’s there.” Vivian turned back to Kit, who had been standing very still through this entire assessment, doing her best impression of a mildly bored child rather than a woman with thirty adult years of pattern recognition quietly cataloguing everything Vivian said.
“Do you know how to hold a room, sweetheart?”
“I don’t know what that means,” Kit said, which was a lie, because she understood exactly what it meant — she had watched her mother do it for a decade — but a lie delivered by a ten-year-old in a Peter Pan collar was the safest kind of lie there was.
“Stand up. Go on.”
Kit glanced at her mother, who gave the smallest permitting nod, and stood.
“Now walk to the window and back. Don’t think about it. Just walk like you’re not thinking about it.”
Kit walked to the window and back.
She had, of course, thought about nothing else the entire six-foot journey — Yekaterina had spent thirty years learning to move through rooms full of men who wanted to underestimate her, and the muscle memory of appearing unconcerned while being watched was, it turned out, exactly transferable to a Manhattan parlor in 1974.
She let her shoulders stay loose.
She let her chin find the angle she’d studied in a hundred magazine photographs without ever once practicing it in a mirror where anyone could see her practicing.
Vivian watched her the whole way, and when Kit turned back at the window, something in the older woman’s face had gone very still and very focused.
“Margaux.” Vivian didn’t take her eyes off Kit.
“Where did she learn to do that.”
“Do what?”
“That.” Vivian gestured, a small, frustrated circle of her hand, as if the word itself were beside the point.
“Girls her age don’t walk like that. Girls her age walk like they’re worried about tripping. She walks like she already knows the shot’s going to be good before anyone’s picked up the camera.”
Margaux looked at her daughter with an expression Kit hadn’t seen before — not quite pride, not quite unease, something adjacent to both, the particular look of a mother realizing her child contains more rooms than she’s been given a key to.
“I really couldn’t tell you, Viv.”
“Well.” Vivian recovered her professional composure, which came back to her the way a coat comes back onto a familiar hanger.
“When she’s old enough — and I mean properly old enough, Margaux, I’m not running one of those agencies — send her to me. Editorial work, tasteful things, nothing that’ll embarrass Richard at the bank. That bone structure is wasted standing in a parlor.”
Kit said nothing, because saying anything risked saying too much, but she filed the entire conversation away with the particular satisfaction of a person watching a plan — not quite hers yet, not quite consciously built, but a plan all the same — begin to assemble itself out of other people’s ordinary conversation.
Modeling had never been in Yekaterina’s life; there had been no cameras in that dacha, no magazines, only oil ledgers and shipping manifests and the cold arithmetic of holding onto what her father had built.
But Kit understood something Yekaterina never had the chance to learn: that a face, properly used, was its own kind of currency, the same as reputation, the same as a name on a door.
It could open rooms that numbers alone couldn’t, and Kit intended, eventually, to use every currency available to her.
She was ten years old.
She had six or seven more years of being not quite old enough to plan around, and Kit, who had once run informal calculations across decades without ever writing a single number down, found she did not mind the waiting nearly as much as an ordinary ten-year-old might have.
Waiting well, she’d learned in another life entirely, was the first skill anyone serious ever mastered.
She just had to make sure, this time, that the waiting led somewhere she’d actually get to keep.