The Carnation Milk Palace

Was she beautiful, or was she only someone apart?

—Edith Wharton, “New Year’s Day”

FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD CHARLOTTE FISHED THE INVITATION from between unpaid bills—PG&E electric, her dermatologist, Dr. Gass—and a lapsed subscription to Ladies Home Journal. On the engraved card, cartoon bubbles fizzed from a champagne glass, bumped around the words: join glen and stibsy! ring in 1964!

The Haldens were the richest people her parents knew.

She slid the invitation back in with the more-ordinary mail on the antique sewing machine her mother had turned into a side table by painting it avocado green. The Masseys couldn’t afford new things, so her mother had made a domestic career of slapping one of two popular decorating colors over everything in sight. Mr. Massey joked that one day he would wake to find himself painted harvest gold.

The Haldens lived two suburbs over, in the Republican stronghold of Hillsborough, in a mansion her father liked to call the Carnation Milk Palace, like Daly City’s indoor arena, the Cow Palace. Jack Massey and Glen Halden had been students at UCLA’s law school when Glen came into an early inheritance, something to do with Carnation Condensed Milk. Charlotte knew those milk tins, red and white with ruffled, pink carnations; it was her job every Christmas to puncture the squat cans with the church-key opener when she and her mother made marshmallow fudge. Still, it was an unfathomable distance from tins of sweetened yellowish milk to the Hal-dens’ estate with its ironwork gates, circular driveway, two-tiered fountain, multistoried house, Olympic-sized swimming pool with a blue and white striped cabana. “Filthy rich,” Charlotte’s father, a probate attorney, would say of his old college friend. “Observe how the stinking rich half lives.”

Charlotte had visited the Carnation Milk Palace once when she was ten, a time when a mansion with opulent rooms unfolding in every direction and a green, wandering estate still meant the pleasure of discovery and eluding the vague, condescending gaze of grown-ups. She remembered sitting beneath a broad valley oak, small moths cupped and panicking in her hands, the dark gold dust from their wings leaving smudges on her white palms and party dress. She couldn’t remember if she had been alone or with other children.

The Masseys attended the Haldens’ New Year’s Eve party every year, and for two to three days afterwards, Charlotte’s mother boiled over with rage. Compared to the Haldens’, her life came up irredeemably short, and she took it out on everyone and everything around her. Even the ivory invitation displayed on the mantel would be ripped in half and thrown out, along with its matching envelope and green foil lining. The sight of it sparked a sick envy in Mrs. Massey even as it lent status, a status she suspected derived more from nostalgia than equality.

Years later, one week shy of Mrs. Massey’s eighty-first birthday (did one never stop learning uncomfortable things?), she began confiding secrets to her daughter, small burdens of conscience Charlotte supposed her mother didn’t want lugging to her grave. Glen Halden, for instance, whose untimely death years before in a boating accident had put an end to the New Year’s Eve parties and to Stibsy Halden’s charmed life, had once been madly in love with her mother. For an entire college year, every Friday, he’d had scarlet tea roses delivered to the modest bungalow where she lived with her parents. One Christmas Eve, he proposed beside the unlit fireplace with its cold brass andirons and single stocking dangling from the mantel. Scissored from red felt, the stocking had a green sequined cuff with her name, Hazel, looping in green glitter down to the toe.

Clouding the whole of her mother’s adult life was regret, self-recrimination. Who might she have been, what sort of glamorous life might she have led, as Mrs. Glen Halden? She had...