Coming Out Read Free Page A

hours poring over fashion magazines, or reading the gossip from Hollywood. She said she wanted to be a model or study acting. Veronica wanted to go to law school, like Harry and her mother, and was thinking about getting into politics after college.
    Charlie hadn't figured out his future career yet, although he had only another year to do so. He was thinking of working at his father's family's investment bank right after college, or maybe studying for a year in Europe. Max was the family mascot who made everybody laugh in tense moments, and hug him whenever they laid eyes on him. All three of his older siblings adored him. Max had never met anyone who didn't like him, and he loved hanging out with his mother in the kitchen, lying on the floor just for the fun of it, drawing, or building things with blocks and Legos when she was on the phone. He was an easy child to amuse. He was almost always happy. He loved everything about his world, particularly the people in it.
    Olympia handed him a Popsicle of real fruit juice and a cookie, while she flipped through the mail and poured herself a glass of iced tea. The weather had been warm for the past week, much to everyone's relief. It was finally spring. The warmer weather always took too long to come, as far as she was concerned. She hated the long eastern winters. By May, she was sick to death of warm coats, boots, snowsuits, mittens, and random snowstorms that came out of nowhere in April. She could hardly wait for the summer and their trip to Europe. She, Max, and Harry were going to the south of France for two weeks before they met the girls in Venice. By then, she'd be ready to escape the torrid summer heat in New York. Max was going to day camp until they left, where he could do art projects to his heart's content.
    The remains of Max's grape juice Popsicle were dripping copiously down his chin and onto his shirt as he ate the cookie, while his mother glanced at the last piece of mail in the stack, and set down her iced tea. It was a large ecru-colored envelope that looked like a wedding invitation, and she couldn't imagine a single person they knew who might be getting married. She tore it open as Max began to hum a song he had learned in school, just as she saw that it was not a wedding invitation, but an invitation to a ball that was to take place in December, a very special ball. It was an invitation to the very elite debutante cotillion where she had come out herself at eighteen. It was called The Arches, after the elegant name and design of the Astor estate where it had originally been held. The estate had long since vanished, but the name had held over the years. Several of the city's most aristocratic families had organized the event in the late 1800s, when the purpose of a debutante ball had been to present young women to society, in order that they find husbands. In the hundred and twenty-five years since it was established, the purpose of the ball had inevitably changed. Young women now appeared in “society” long before they turned eighteen, and were no longer kept sequestered in schoolrooms. Now the ball was simply a fun and rather special social event, a rite of passage with no greater meaning or intent than to have a good time in so-called polite society, and the occasion to wear beautiful white dresses for one very special evening. It was a little bit like a wedding, and there were all sorts of archaic traditions associated with it—the curtsy the girls made as they entered the ballroom under a flowered archway, the first official dance with their fathers, always a dignified and graceful waltz, just as it had been in Olympia's day, and long before that. It was an exciting moment in the lives of the young girls who were invited to make their debut at The Arches, and a memory most of them would cherish for the rest of their lives, provided no one got unduly drunk, had a fight with their escort, or had some ghastly accident to their dress before the