New York City, 1977
Jimmy Carter took the oath of office in January in a plain blue suit and walked part of the parade route on foot instead of riding in the limousine, and Richard Whitfield watched it on the color television in the study with an expression Kit had learned to read as reserving judgment.
“Peanut farmer,” he said, not unkindly, more like a man testing the phrase for weight.
“We’ll see.”
“You didn’t vote for him,” Kit said.
It wasn’t a question.
She was twelve now, sharp enough with faces and rooms that she rarely needed to ask what she could simply observe.
“I didn’t vote for Ford either, if you want the truth of it. I voted for whichever one was less likely to do something stupid to the discount rate.” Richard glanced at her, the fond, faintly bemused look he gave her more and more often these days.
“You’re the only person in this house who’d find that an interesting answer, Kitty-cat.”
She was.
Margaux found the inauguration interesting chiefly as a matter of Rosalynn Carter’s wardrobe, discussed at length over lunch with women who had opinions about whether a president’s wife should look wealthy or look plain, and landing, generally, on disapproval either way.
Kit listened to both conversations, father’s and mother’s, the way she always had, and understood — with the ease of someone who’d been running this particular translation for seven years now — that they were arguing about the same thing from two directions: what does authority need to look like to be believed.
Carter had bet that authority looked like humility.
Half of Manhattan’s moneyed class was fairly sure he’d bet wrong.
Vivian Kessler called in March, true to her word from three years earlier, and true to her promise that it would be nothing that embarrassed Richard at the bank.
“A junior editorial thing for a spring catalog. Children’s tailoring, very tasteful, very Bergdorf’s-adjacent,” Vivian told Margaux over the phone, loud enough that Kit, hovering in the hallway with the particular stillness she’d perfected for eavesdropping, could hear every word.
“One afternoon. A photographer I trust completely. I think she’s ready, and frankly, Margaux, if we wait until she’s sixteen some other agency’s going to have found her first.”
The shoot happened on a gray Tuesday in April in a rented studio on West Twenty-Sixth Street, fluorescent lights and a rack of children’s spring coats that smelled like a department store, and Kit stood in front of a seamless paper backdrop feeling, for the first time in this life, something she recognized instantly from the other one: the specific, cold pleasure of being looked at and understanding exactly what the look required of you.
“Chin down a touch. There.” The photographer, a thin, patient man named Aldo who worked mostly in catalog and rarely raised his voice, studied her through the lens with real attention. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
“Good. Hold that. You’ve done this before?”
“No,” Kit said, which was true, in the sense that mattered to him.
“Huh.” He took the shot anyway, and three more after it, and later Vivian would tell Margaux, with the satisfaction of a woman who’d been right about something for three years and finally got to say so, that Aldo had asked, unprompted, whether the girl was available for anything else that came up.
Kit didn’t think about the money from the shoot — a flat fee, modest, deposited straight into the custodial account beside her unglamorous Series E bonds — so much as she thought about the mechanism underneath it.
A face could be priced the way a bond could be priced: a known quantity, evaluated, purchased for a fixed return.
The difference was that a face’s yield could grow over time in ways a savings bond’s never would, if you managed the asset properly, and Kit turned twelve that spring already quietly cataloguing what “managing it properly” might eventually mean.
Diane, when she found out, was thrilled in the specific loud way only Diane could be thrilled.
“You’re going to be famous, Kit, you’re going to be in magazines—”
“It’s a coat catalog, Diane.”
“Today it’s a coat catalog.” Diane said this with the absolute confidence of a twelve-year-old who read Tiger Beat religiously and considered herself an authority on fame’s supply chain.
“Everyone starts with the coat catalog.”
Not everyone at Chapin was thrilled.
A girl named Cordelia Ashe — new that year, transferred in from a school in Boston, blond and precise and visibly unused to not being the most interesting girl in whatever room she occupied — took the news with a thin, careful smile that Kit recognized immediately, because it was the exact smile Yekaterina had once worn watching a rival board member get praised for an idea she considered beneath her own.
“How nice for you,” Cordelia said, in the tone of a girl filing something away for later use.
“My mother says modeling’s rather common, actually. But I’m sure it’s different for some girls.”
Kit, twelve years old, could have said any number of things.
She had thirty-plus years of practice reading exactly which comment would land and exactly which one would cost her later, and she chose, deliberately, to say nothing at all — only smiled back, pleasantly, the way you’d smile at a market you had already decided not to compete in on its own terms, and let Cordelia have the small, hollow satisfaction of thinking she’d won something. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
She thinks the game is who’s more interesting today, Kit thought, watching Cordelia flounce off toward a knot of other girls.
That’s not the game.
The game is who’s still standing in ten years.
Summer arrived with a heat that sat over the city like a held breath, and 1977 became, all at once, the year everything seemed to happen on top of everything else.
The papers Kit read each morning were full of a killer the tabloids had named Son of Sam, and for the first time Margaux enforced an actual curfew, unwilling to risk her daughter anywhere near a parked car after dark no matter how many locks were on the townhouse door.
In late April, a new club called Studio 54 had opened on Fifty-Fourth Street, and even at twelve Kit understood, listening to her mother’s friends discuss the velvet rope with something between horror and envy, that she was watching the emergence of an entirely new kind of currency — access itself, priced not in dollars but in whether the man at the door decided you belonged.
Then, in July, the lights went out.
The blackout hit at nine-thirty at night, the whole city dropping into darkness within seconds, and Kit stood at the townhouse window watching Manhattan disappear block by block into a dark she’d never seen it wear, while somewhere below, sirens started and did not stop for a long time.
Her father sat up all night listening to a battery radio, murmuring about looting downtown, about a city that felt, that whole strange humid week, like it might genuinely be coming apart at the seams the newspapers had spent a decade warning it was held together by.
“It’ll come back,” Kit said, at some point past midnight, more to herself than to him.
“Cities like this always come back. They just need someone to bet on them while everyone else is busy being afraid.”
Richard looked at her for a long moment in the candlelight, that paragraph-reread look she still hadn’t entirely trained him out of giving her.
“Where do you get these ideas, Kitty-cat,” he said quietly — not really a question, the way it never really was anymore, just a father slowly, half-consciously making his peace with a daughter he was beginning to suspect he’d never fully see the bottom of.
Kit only shrugged, and watched the dark city outside the window, and thought, with the particular patience of someone who had already once watched an empire collapse in a single night and understood exactly how much opportunity usually hid inside a catastrophe for whoever kept their head.
New York would come back.
Everything worth building always demanded surviving its worst year first.
She intended to still be standing to watch it happen.
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