“Didn't you ever ask your mother why she traded a Park Avenue penthouse for that little dump you lived in?” Zoe had demanded once when they were about sixteen or seventeen.

“She wouldn't have wanted me to ask,” Carrie had said.

“You lived in a frigging palace, and she took it away. Didn't that ever make you mad?”

“She didn't think she was taking anything away from me. She thought she was giving me the perfect life.”

“And you believed her? Talk about drinking the Kool-Aid.”

But Carrie hadn't drunk the Kool-Aid. Not totally. She'd felt guilty about it, because she knew her mother's life of self-sacrifice was noble and admirable—everyone said it was—but Carrie had wanted to know about the days before Rose became noble and admirable. Over the years, she'd pieced together as much of her mother's history as she could using snippets she remembered and filling in the gaps with what she'd read. An awful lot had been written about Rose Manning.

The most recent article about Rose had appeared in People magazine the week after her death. It had been a clip job, put together fast to make a deadline, but it followed Rose's metamorphosis from glamorous showbiz wife to philanthropic wheeler-dealer in detail. Carrie had crammed the issue of the magazine into her purse. Now she pulled it out, and even though she'd read it enough times to have memorized it, she turned to the story again.

“When Rose Manning was the chatelaine of her Park Avenue apartment,” the article began, “she was a leader of that subsection of Manhattan where the arts, society, and money come together. She went to all the good parties, gave many dazzling bashes of her own, and she was a lunchtime regular at La Toque Blanche. For dinner it was usually Sardi's or one of the theatrical watering holes in town, always on her husband Bobby's arm—that would be Bobby Manning of Broadway musical fame. Rose was a fixture on the best-dressed list, and she and her husband showed up regularly on the society pages of all the major New York City newspapers. And, of course, they went to every opening night on Broadway.

“In those days, friends say, Rose wasn't a serious person, and her concerns seemed limited to the season's new hemlines. She was married to a theatrical powerhouse and was content with that role.