Read Online The Summer We Read Gatsby by Danielle Ganek - Free Book Online Page A

or “my mother,” or even “ my mum.” Just Mum . As though she were a universal British parent. But Peck was not British and, thankfully, Mum was not anyone else’s mother.
    Mary-Alice O’Sullivan was a reasonably attractive Irish housekeeper with red hair hired to clean my dad’s apartment twice a week, back in the seventies, when he was a bachelor artist. According to my mother, who told the version she’d heard from Lydia, Mary-Alice had parlayed that assignment into a lukewarm love affair, and then into marriage the old-fashioned way, through pregnancy. They were both Catholic and my father had remained unmarried into his late thirties—“There were rumors he was gay, of course,” my mother told it—so it wasn’t too much of a challenge, and Peck was born six months after the wedding. It was the late seventies in New York and even if anyone had been interested enough to do the math, nobody cared.
    Once she was Mrs. George Moriarty she poured all her ambitions into her daughter. She called her Pecksland, a name she insisted had somehow been passed down through her family of potato farmers, and filled Peck’s head with fanciful notions about the proper way to live a well-mannered life. She bought her daughter clothes that were too expensive, fostering her love of fashion, and insisted on lessons in diction, piano, and acting. She fueled Peck’s fantasies about the life she would go on to lead, as a star of the stage or perhaps a fashion icon.
    While Peck was still a baby my father had gotten more interested in music, letting his hair grow and staying out late at concerts. He met my mother, a Smith College graduate working on a PhD in philosophy she never finished, at a Grateful Dead show in Virginia. She was only twenty-two and, to hear Lydia tell it, extremely beautiful, with long streaked hair down her back. My mother told me they fell instantly and passionately in love, and that it was a love so deep and true they were powerless to ignore it, despite the fact that my father was married with a young daughter. The intensity of their love allowed them to rationalize what happened afterward, when George behaved badly, abandoning his wife and child to follow the Dead with my mother, never looking back.
    Lydia was the one who used those words, behaved badly . My mother always told it as a straightforward love story, as though it was destiny that they should be together, previous wife and child or not. She’d leave out any judgment, or guilt, at their behavior. When she told the story, she used a lightly ironic tone, as though she herself were distanced from the emotions she described, as though God or some higher power had been at work and to refuse to go along with it would have been foolish. “Once in a while,” my mother would say, quoting “Scarlet Begonias,” “you get shown the light.”
    It hadn’t been easy for Mary-Alice once my mother diverted her husband’s attentions. She was a single working mother—she’d gone back to school and become a nurse—but there were arrangements where she traded housekeeping and other services for things like singing lessons for her daughter, and there’d been scholarships, too, although those were harder to come by as Peck grew older and less interested in academic success. Peck had always taken small jobs to help out, babysitting and that sort of thing, but I knew it had been hard for her, growing up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan without money.
    But Peck never complained. She’d simply convinced herself that the upbringing her mother had struggled to give her (the 10021 zip code, the girls’ school, the many private lessons) was not a facsimile of a privileged existence (a one-bedroom rental on First Avenue, scholarships, and bartered agreements) but the real thing. She believed she was extraordinary and that her background, as she chose to view it, was exactly the way a young woman who would go on to be a woman of style and creative substance would