Page 17 of Blush
Asher sighed. “A few weeks?”
The answer stung. Leonard liked autonomy when it came to the business, but she had helped build the winery. She was his wife. There was no justification for Asher knowing about this before she did.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Mom, come on. It’s not my place. Dad was still working things out—he told me he’d tell you as soon as the decision was final.”
“It never crossed your mind that I might want some say in what happens to the business I helped create?”
Asher adjusted the towel behind his back and reached for his sunglasses. When he turned back to her, she marveled at how handsome he was. She just wished his looks weren’t his only asset.
“Mom, is this really about the engagement? I’m sorry I didn’t tell you ahead of time. But I know how you feel about Bridget, and I didn’t want to argue with you.”
“The engagement is the least of your mistakes lately,” she said, patting down her hair. She could feel that the flurry of activity all day had set it askew. “But then, dealing with conflict has never been your strong suit.”
But itwashers. She walked off in search of her husband.
Ten
Standing at the window of the master bedroom, Vivian had always felt like a queen looking out from her castle. Now, with her kingdom at risk, she had to remember that there had been other hard times and they had gotten through them.
“I’m not ready to give up,” Vivian said, turning back to look at Leonard, who was readingThe Wall Street Journalin bed. “And I can’t believe that you are.”
“It’s not giving up,” he said, not even glancing at her. “It’s being smart.”
She walked over to the bed and pulled his paper away. “We were under pressure in 2012, and look what happened the following year—a glorious vintage.”
The 2013 season had started late after Superstorm Sandy and a rough winter. But then the fall came, and the area went without rain for fifty-seven days. The grapes were able to reach optimum levels of ripeness in the dry climate, with no threat of mildew and rot. It was like a miracle.
Their entire life together felt like a miracle sometimes.
In the beginning, the vineyard had been a giant leap, a gamble. Or, as her father had put it, pure folly. Vivian had been born to live a gilded life in Manhattan, not to till the soil out in the country. Hergrandparents, Avigdor Freudenberg and his wife, Ida, had been German Jews from Bavaria who created a department store empire before dying in each other’s arms on theTitanic.
Vivian’s father was the sole male heir, and he passed the business down to Vivian’s brother, who remained at the helm until a hostile takeover in the mid-1980s. If there was one lesson Vivian had learned early in life, it was that business was a man’s world.
All her parents wanted for her was to make a “good” marriage. Wedding at the Plaza, followed by moving into a town house on Fifth Avenue and, eventually, a winter home in Palm Beach.
Growing up, her experience of Long Island had been summers in East Hampton and weekends at riding stables to train as a competitive equestrian. Nowhere in that picture was there an imagined future that landed her on a defunct potato farm in Cutchogue. But she had fallen in love with Leonard Hollander.
“There won’t be anything to save us this time, Vivian,” Leonard said. “Not even the most perfect harvest in the world.”
“You’re just letting Marty get to you. He’s very conservative. You know that.”
Leonard shook his head.
She felt a chill. In the hours since the meeting in the library, Vivian’s one consolation had been her certainty that ultimately, this was much ado about nothing. Earlier, when she confronted Leonard about looping in Asher before telling her, he’d said, “I didn’t want to worry you unnecessarily.” Leonard, for all his faults, had always been her protector. When he’d proposed, after he said, “Will you marry me?” he’d said, “Let me take care of you for the rest of your life.” It was as if he’d read her mind, as if he’d seen into her soul and understood how, despite the material comforts of her childhood, she had never felt truly cared for. She had never felt loved.
So she could accept that he kept the problems of the winery from her because he didn’t want to upset her. But she also knew that on some level, he didn’t believe—had never believed—she could possibly have asolution where he could not find one. She didn’t fault him for this thinking; she might have married into the wine business, but it was in his blood.
The name “Hollander” was not from Holland but from a town in Lithuania settled by the Dutch. In the late nineteenth century, Ashkenazi immigrants fleeing the pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe settled in Argentina because of its open-door immigration policy. In 1910, Leonard’s grandfather Mordecai Hollander was given a Mendoza winery as payment for a debt. Thirty-five years later, his son, Samuel, would go on to create the first branded Argentine wine, a Malbec he namedgema de la tierra—gem of the earth.
But after World War II, the rise of Nazi sympathizer Juan Perón worried the Jewish population. Samuel Hollander moved his family—his wife, Gelleh; his eight-year-old-son, Leonard; and his six-year-old daughter, Rose—to the United States and settled on the Lower East Side of New York City. There he worked as a merchant, never reaching the success he’d had as a winemaker in his native country. Gelleh, no longer recognizing the depressed man who was her husband, suggested they try to find a way to reproduce their old life in America. Samuel moved his family again, this time to California, where he created a successful winery he named after his supportive wife. Leonard had grown up on Gelleh Estates Vineyard, where he had learned everything he knew.
So yes, Leonard—a third-generation winemaker—was the authority, and he never failed to remind her of this. It didn’t mean he didn’t love her. After all, he’d created Hollander Estates just so they could be together.
She slipped into bed next to him.
“I know we can think of something. We always do. You simply can’t allow this to happen.”
