Olympia felt that adolescent girls were a lot tougher to deal with than little boys in kindergarten, to say the least, or even their college junior brother, who had always been quiet, easy to get along with, and extremely reasonable. Charlie was the family negotiator and peacemaker, anxious to see that everyone got along, particularly the two branches of his extended family. He often saw both his mother's and his father's divergent points of view and ran interference between them, and when one of his sisters had an argument with their mother, it was Charlie who translated and negotiated the peace. Veronica was the acknowledged hothead and rebel, with some occasionally dicey political points of view, and Virginia was the fluff in the family, according to her twin sister. Virginia was usually more concerned with her looks and her love life than with deeper social or political issues. Veronica and Harry engaged in long, heated discussions at night, though usually of a strikingly similar opinion. Virginia marched to a different drummer than her sister, and spent 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 presentation. Barring minor mishaps, it was a fun evening, and although admittedly somewhat old-fashioned and elitist, it did no one any harm. Olympia still cherished fond memories of her own debut, and had always assumed that her daughters would make their debut as well.

She had it in perspective, and knew how unimportant it was in the real scheme of things and world events, but also how much fun it could be for the girls who did it. It was a harmless even if frivolous landmark in a girl's life. She also knew that Chauncey expected the girls to do it, and would have been horrified if they didn't. Unlike Olympia, he thought coming out as a debutante really mattered, for all the wrong reasons. She was sure Veronica would grumble, and Virginia would be so excited she would want to go shopping for the dress within hours.

No one was expected to find husbands at debutante balls anymore, although now and then, and extremely rarely, a serious romance would be born that night, and then turn into marriage years later. But for the most part, the girls were escorted by cousins and brothers, or boys they had gone to school with. Asking a boyfriend to escort one seven months in advance was recognized as an invitation to trouble. At that age, on the eve of leaving for college, romances, no matter how hot and heavy they had been in June, usually didn't last till December. All the evening was about now was storing away one brief fairy tale memory for them to cherish and remember, and having a good time while they did it. Olympia was not surprised, but was nonetheless pleased that they had been asked. She had distanced herself so much from the official social scene in recent years that there had been the vague though unlikely possibility that the girls might have been dropped from the list. Both girls went to Spence, a school where many of the girls became debutantes, during the winter of their freshman year in college. There were other options, of course, and other debutante cotillions for slightly less blue-blooded girls. But The Arches had always been recognized as the ultimate deb ball in New York society.

Twenty-seven years earlier, Olympia had made her debut there herself, as had her mother and both grandmothers long before her, and her great-grandmothers once upon a time. It was a tradition she was going to enjoy sharing with her girls, no matter how much the world and society at large, or her own life, had changed in the meantime. Nowadays, women worked, people got married later than ever, and it was perfectly acceptable not to marry at all. And who one married had nothing to do with blue blood or society, as far as Olympia was concerned. All she wanted was for her daughters to marry good, solid, reliable, intelligent men who treated them well. Preferably, a man like Harry, and not their father. Now, more than anything, coming out was just an excuse to look lovely, and wear long white gloves and a beautiful white evening gown, often the first one the girls presented had ever worn. It was going to be fun helping Veronica and Virginia pick their dresses, particularly as she knew the choices the girls would make would be so different, as they always were. Having twins come out at The Arches was going to be double the fun for her. She sat staring dreamily at the invitation, with a gentle smile of memory and nostalgia on her face, as Max watched. He didn't often see his mom look like that. She felt almost like a young girl again, as memories of her own coming out flooded back to her, and Max observed her with interest. He could see that she was thinking of something that made her happy.

“What's that, Mom?” Max asked, wiping the grape juice off his chin with the back of his hand, and then brushing his hand against his jeans instead of his napkin.

“It's an invitation for your sisters,” she said, slipping it back into the envelope, as she reminded herself to ask the committee for a duplicate invitation, so she could start an album for each girl, just like the one she had of her own debut, tucked away in the bookcase upstairs. One day it would be fun for them to have, to share with their own daughters. The twins had often looked at hers, when they were very little girls. Virginia had always said, at about Max's age, that their mom had looked like a fairy princess.

“Is that an invitation to a birthday party?” Max gazed at her, intrigued.

“To a coming-out ball,” she explained. “It's a big party where you wear a beautiful white dress.” She made it sound magical, like being Cinderella for one night at the ball, which in effect was what it was.

“What do you come out of?” Max asked, looking puzzled, as his mother smiled.

“That's a good question. You don't really come out of anything. Girls used to come out of their homes to find a husband. Now they just go to a party and have a good time.”