Rise and Shine Read Free Page A

or parks).
    In the world of fund-raising events, honoring Meghan Fitzmaurice, who has anchored
Rise and Shine
for the past ten years, is the ultimate double threat, publicity and philanthropy both. Coverage in the newspapers, perhaps the local affiliate of the network, a brace of tables, a crowd drawn by the opportunity to hear and see her. She does not disappoint. Unlike some other honorees, Meghan always shows up sober. She always looks good. She always speaks well. She is always cordial to those who approach her table, even the young television reporters who say they have been watching her since they were in elementary school, which makes her feel a hundred years old.
    We were raised with good manners, first by the housekeeper, then by our aunt. We let them down only when we are alone.
    I rarely go to events like this. Meghan doesn’t ask me. She doesn’t even ask Evan, her husband, unless the event is particularly high profile or she suspects that there will be lots of other investment bankers and that he can therefore turn it into a business opportunity. Once, years ago, Evan, Alex Menninger, and Tom Bradley got pleasantly drunk at a dinner party and created what they called the Denis Thatcher Society, an organization of men married to powerful public women. Any time the Denis Thatcher Society is mentioned, all the men roar with laughter and all the women get very still, their faces flat.
    Occasionally Meghan brings Leo to one of these events as her date. In this way her son has met the president of Ireland, two presidents of the United States, a couple of Supreme Court justices, and that guitar player who organizes all the big relief rock concerts and is now a lord. “Today it’s boring,” Meghan said once when Leo groused in the car on the way to the hotel. “Tomorrow it’s history. Think of the stories you’ll have to tell your kids.”
    “I’m not having kids,” Leo always says.
    “You’ll change your mind,” Meghan always says.
    I arrived too early and circulated busily with a glass of wine in my hand, looking as though I was looking for someone when I was merely trying not to look like someone who knew no one. The wife of one of Evan’s partners was doing the same, and she seemed overjoyed to see me although we’d met in a perfunctory way only once before. She talked for ten minutes about their newborn twins, a conversation that seemed to take place underwater in slow motion. Baby nurse, teak crib, glub, glub. She drifted off and was replaced by Meghan’s associate producer, the one she had been threatening to fire during our Saturday morning Central Park runs for at least three months. I could tell he hadn’t gotten my name because twice he referred to my sister as “the queen of all media.”
    “You,” came a throaty voice from behind me, and I turned to Ann Jensen, who was the chair of the event. “You. You. You.”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “You are my hero. Or heroine. Do you mind which? Because whichever it is, you are it. All day I have been saying, Bridget Fitzmaurice is my hero. Or heroine.”
    “It was nothing. Really. I was happy to do it.”
    “Nothing? Four hundred and thirty additional guests is nothing? Last year we made a million dollars at this dinner. This year it will be one point six million. That…is…not…nothing.”
    Manhattan Mothers had given the women’s shelter program where I work a good-size grant the year before. In exchange I had delivered Meghan for this year’s dinner. I was a hero. Or a heroine.
    “And let me tell you something about your sister,” Ann Jensen said, leaning in more closely so that I could look directly into her eyes, which had the preternatural stare of someone who has had lower and upper lifts. People always feel the need to tell me something about my sister, as though we don’t know each other well. “Oh, I could tell you a few things, honey,” I was tempted to reply, but instead I looked rapt. I tried not to look down. Ann Jensen had