Most Likely to Succeed
After a tense goodbye, Detective O’Brien leaves.
Sam and I walk back toward the house, moving at a steady clip. “We need to find the jogger,” he says. I
scan the police r eport, searching for any information about him—any information we have about the Coopers.
“We’ve got the Coopers’ contact information on the police r eport,” I say. “I’ll start there. See what they
can tell me about him.”
Sam holds the screen door open. And I st ep ahead of him, up onto the back porch.
“I’m going to search Dad’s office,” he says. “I want to push down on why he changed his plans. According
to his calendar, the event in New York was for Inez. Dad would have wanted to be there for that.”
Inez Reya. She was wife number three (ex-wife number three), and certainly my preferred st epmother for
the brief period that she was. She created a holistic skin care line that Noone Properties featured in most of
their spas. This was how my father met her. It was his shortest marriage (less than three years) but it became
one of his most important friendships. My father stayed incredibly close to Inez and her now wife, Elizabeth.
And their daughter, Luna.
If Inez had a launch event, my father would want to show up to support her. Why did he decide he had to
be at Windbreak instead?
Sam walks into the house, disappearing down the hall toward our father’s office. I walk into the kitchen,
the galley kitchen, a blast of light and familiar smells greeting me—the potted sage on the windowsills,
coconut soap, sandalwood candles on the island.
I love the feel of the kitchen, which, like the rest of the house, is relaxed, and low-tech: a vintage oven, a
farmhouse sink, not even a dishwasher. I lock in on
the drying rack next to the sink. It almost does me in, the stupid empty drying rack taking me back to that
last visit here. Jack asle ep. My father turning the record player on but low, just the two of us, washing and
drying that night’s dishes together.
I run my finger over the rack and lean against the counter, centering myself. Then I pull out the Coopers’
contact number. I call it, but I’m greeted with an out-of-country ringtone. I click off and send an email instead,
hoping that a note will find its way to them quicker.
I leave the kitchen and head through the rest of the house. I pass by the two bedrooms (the second of which
my father used as his office), the one full bathroom, the tiny powder room. All the walls are painted a soft
white, the furnishings spare and thoughtful.
The clean beach air feels like it is running through all of it, especially in the room I enter last. My favorite
room, the living room, which is more like a makeshift library, complete with tall white bookshelves
surrounding a bay window, the walls adorned with wild bird–splattered wallpaper that doesn’t exactly feel like
my father, but which I love. And which somehow fits more than anything else here.
For me, a project always starts with a central image. Something that identifies what a space or a property
most organically can be. In how I approach my work, this is a fundamental principle: How am I going to take
that image and build out from it? Build out from the feeling of it to craft something that isn’t only beautiful,
but also that utilizes the right materials and design elements to create something healing, something hopeful.
The whole of this house, the loving force that swings out from it, seems to have started with someone
imagining what this room could be.
I walk over to the bookshelves, filled with so many gorgeous books stacked in every direction. There are
only two shelves not overflowing with books, two shelves that are tightly filled with framed photographs and a
variety of other personal items, scrapbooks and a couple of yearbooks, old journals, old playbills.
I lean in and start leafing through some of the playbills. I can’t remember ever going to a play with my
father, and yet he must have two dozen playbills here that he’s chosen to hold on to: The Real Thing, Lost in
Yonkers, King Lear.
Then I turn to the photographs. Many of them I recognize—photographs of me and my mother that she had
framed at her house too. Several are of Sylvia and my brothers, of Inez and Elizabeth and their little girl, Luna.
One is with a past president.
The other shelf has photographs and framed newspaper clippings of my father at work. Some are with my
brothers. Some are with Grace and Uncle Joe. There are photographs of the team in the New York office,
clippings from hotel openings in Aspen, Whitefish, Cabo San Lucas. My father smiling happily, completely in
his element with his sons; and with Grace and Joe, both of whom had remained by his side for decades, from
the early days of Noone Properties until Grace passed away earlier this year—a heart attack taking her too
young. Which left my father and Joe to run the business together. One trusted advisor left.
It makes me wonder how that shifted the dynamic between my uncle Joe and my father. Though, in
fairness, I didn’t really ke ep up with how the dynamics had worked before. My mother rarely talked about my
father’s company, and I followed her lead. You only need to remember two things about Noone Properties,
she’d said. It happened after me. And it has nothing to do with you.
Of course, that is revisionist history. My parents may not have been together by the time my father had
turned Noone into the empire that it now is, but they were still married when he took over at Hayes. They were
married for the early part of that empire-building, for those early years of his meteoric rise. They had actually
met during his second year working there, my father still fairly fresh out of business school.
My mother was a music teacher and a session musician at that point. On occasion, though, like the night
they met, she would sing with her friend’s wedding band at the Hayes Hotel in Watch Hill, Rhode Island.
My father was spending several months on property, overseeing a renovation there. She saw him sitting at
the hotel bar during her dinner break, my mother feeling fierce in her gold jumpsuit. She was the one who
approached him. She took the barstool beside him and asked him if he wanted to buy her a drink.
My mother said he intrigued her: this too-serious young guy with his mop of blond hair who seemed out of
place in a family-focused hotel. My father felt like
she didn’t belong there, either. She belonged on a movie set. She belonged on a world stage. He said one of
the things he liked most about my mother was that she was so comfortable in her own skin that people just
wanted to be around her —wherever she was.
He was correct about that. My mother was confident in a way you could only be when you really knew
yourself. When you really knew what you wanted. And, at least then, she wanted to get to know him. She also
didn’t want to change her life. She loved her old farmhouse in Croton. She loved walking to work at the high
school and only going into the city for studio sessions, or the occasional night out.
So my father sublet his West Village apartment and moved in with her. He started doing the hour-plus
commute to Midtown Manhattan each morning and back every night, not begrudging her that it added two
hours to his day.
And my mother didn’t begrudge him when their marriage started to show strain and he started coming
home less, staying at his West Village apartment again.
She didn’t begrudge him when shortly after Walter Hayes died and left him the company, my father started
spending longer days at the office in Manhattan, which led to even more nights spent in that West Village
apartment, and (eventually, as they grew further apart) to a new friend, the travel expert on a popular morning
show. The new friend named Sylvia.
I spent almost no time at my father and Sylvia’s place while I was growing up. Sylvia had little interest in
having a st epdaughter around—a point she made clear by purchasing a penthouse apartment for her and my
father’s growing family and conveniently not designating a bedroom for me. One of the few times I visited
them, I overheard my father insisting that I have my own space to decorate in a way that made me feel
comfortable, to which Sylvia r eplied, without a hint of irony: There are Frette sheets in the guest room. If those
aren’t comfortable, I can’t help her.
Even if Sylvia had been welcoming, my father would have siloed his different families anyway. He was
more comfortable focusing on each of us s eparately rather than figuring out the implications inherent in
merging all of us. He liked
to come up to visit me in Croton most Friday evenings, so the three of us could have dinner together.
He often came up for dinner, even when I was older and I chose to spend most free nights with my friends
instead of with him.
He and my mother would take walks by the river or drive to Cold Spring to get an early supper, just the
two of them. Sometimes, they’d just sit on the porch and catch up.
It wasn’t romantic between them. My mother started dating another musician, Julian, shortly after she and
my father s eparated. From day one, she was completely devoted to him. They were devoted to each other.
She’d often say to me, I was meant to meet your father so we could have you. I was meant to meet Julian for
me. As for my father, he was the one who left their marriage in the first place.
I pick up a photograph of the three of us at my college graduation—my mother in the middle of my father
and me—our arms wrapped around each other, all of us laughing. I zero in on their faces, easy with each other,
relaxed. They’d been divorced for over a decade at that point, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at them.
You would only see how close they seemed.
So how do you explain it? My father’s desire to ke ep my mother close, long after it was about me. How
could I begin to understand his need to start new lives but never to walk away from the old ones?
Oh, for Pete’s sake, my love, my mother used to say when I’d ask. It’s like you don’t know your father at
all.