She had done the same with her younger sister, Harriet, Hattie, and hadn’t seen her in six years since Robbie’s funeral. She had nothing to say to her either, and no energy left for their battles. As far as Melissa was concerned, her sister had suddenly gone off the deep end eighteen years before, for no apparent reason. Despite a budding and promising career as an actress, Hattie had joined a religious order at twenty-five. Melissa insisted it was some kind of psychotic break. But if so, she had never recovered, and seemed content in the life she’d chosen, which Melissa could never accept. Melissa had a profound aversion to nuns, and considered Hattie’s decision not only an abandonment, but a personal betrayal, after everything they’d been through together growing up.
Their mother had died when Hattie was eleven and Melissa was seventeen. She had been a cold, rigid, deeply religious woman from a Spartan, austere background, and had always been hard on her oldest daughter. Melissa had fallen short of her expectations and disappointed her, and once her mother died, there was nowhere for Melissa to go with her past resentments of how her mother treated her and no way to resolve them. She began writing seriously to vent her feelings in the only way she knew how. It made for brilliant books, which her readers devoured. But the memories of her mother remained painful. It was too late to forgive her, so she never had. In her own way, without realizing it, Melissa was like her mother at times now, with her harsh opinions, criticism of others, and black-and-white view of life after Robbie’s death. Hattie was gentler and more like their father, who hid from life with the bottle. He had been a kind man, but not a strong one, and had let his domineering wife run the show, and ride roughshod over him. She made the decisions about their daughters, which Melissa had been furious about. She wanted her father to temper her mother’s verdicts, but he never had. He’d abdicated his role and relinquished all power to his wife. Melissa resented him for it, while Hattie easily forgave him everything. But she had never suffered at their mother’s hands as Melissa had. She had taken the brunt of her mother’s harsh decisions, while Hattie was treated as the baby.
Once their mother died, when Hattie was eleven, Melissa became her stand-in mother. For fourteen years they couldn’t have been closer. Their father died a year after their mother, and Melissa was all Hattie had to parent her and it had been enough. Melissa was always there for her, to protect and encourage her. And then suddenly at twenty-five, Hattie had thrown it all away, and on what seemed like a mad impulse, had decided to become a nun, which Melissa told her was her way of avoiding life, like their father, and was the coward’s way out. All Hattie wanted was to hide in the convent, protected and removed from the world. She said acting was too hard.
She had had dreams of becoming an actress, and studied drama at the Tisch School at NYU, and gave it all up after her first trip to Hollywood and a single screen test. Melissa saw it as pure cowardice, but Hattie didn’t listen to what her sister had to say. She claimed that the religious vocation she had discovered was stronger than her previous desire to be an actress.
Once their parents died, there were no other adult influences in their lives, other than Melissa and a trustee at the bank who barely knew them. Both their parents were only children, and history had repeated itself. Their respective parents had died young too. Melissa and Hattie’s mother had been left nearly penniless, and had to drop out of Vassar College and get a job as a secretary. She’d been bitter ever since.
Their father had been left with a sizable inheritance, which dwindled over the years, after long bouts of unemployment, working at various banks, and mismanaging his money. It was the cause of endless fights between Melissa and Hattie’s parents, and their mother was terrified of being poor again. Their father was ill equipped to take care of himself once he was orphaned as a young man and began drinking heavily, which cost him many jobs. They often lived on what was left of his inheritance, with no other income. Despite that, there was enough of his money left when both their parents died for Hattie and Melissa to pay for their education and live in a small apartment, after they sold their parents’ Park Avenue co-op. Their father had had the foresight to pay for a large life insurance policy which would carry both girls for a long time securely, not in luxury, but in comfortable circumstances, as long as they worked at solid jobs after they’d graduated from college.
At eighteen, when their father died, Melissa shouldered their responsibilities and handled them well, better than their parents had. She was bright, determined, and capable. She saw to it that they both attended good colleges, and made sure Hattie kept her grades up. She was serious beyond her years, less stern than their mother would have been, and far more responsible than their alcoholic father. She moved them to a decent, less expensive neighborhood in New York on the West Side, and stuck to a rigorous budget so what they had inherited would last as long as possible. And she took good care of Hattie. Everything seemed to be going well, and then Hattie had run away to the convent. It shattered Melissa’s world yet again. After caring for her sister for fourteen years, she suddenly found herself alone, and began writing more seriously then to fill the void and try to process why Hattie had abandoned her dreams.
Melissa vented her anger at their mother in her first, very dark book, which was an instant success. She could better understand her mother’s bitterness at finding herself a pauper when her parents died than she could fathom Hattie’s flight from life. It made no sense to her. She’d had such a bright future ahead.
Losing Hattie to the convent came as a severe blow. Melissa wrote incessantly after that to exorcise her demons, with excellent results, once she met Carson, he became her agent, and sold her books for real money. But, she had never forgiven Hattie for retreating to the convent, nor could Melissa understand what Hattie had done, or why. Hattie had real talent, and Melissa had encouraged her. Hattie had had a few small parts on daytime TV, and a walk-on in a Broadway show. She got a chance to audition for a movie then, and went to L.A. for a screen test. Faced with a real opportunity, she had panicked, come back from L.A. in less than a week, and told Melissa about her impulsive plan to join a religious order. She said it had been a lifelong desire she had hidden from her sister, knowing how Melissa hated nuns. Eighteen years later she had never forgiven Hattie and the two sisters were still estranged. Melissa had barely spoken to Hattie at Robbie’s funeral. She didn’t want to hear what her sister had to say, the platitudes that Robbie was in a better place and his suffering was over. They hadn’t seen each other since.
Melissa wrote to her once a year, as she did to Carson, mostly out of a sense of duty in her sister’s case. And Hattie dropped her a note from time to time, determined to stay in touch with the sister she still loved and always had. She was convinced that one day Melissa would come around and accept the decision she’d made, but there was no sign of it yet. Melissa preferred to be alone now. She didn’t want anyone’s sympathy, which rubbed salt in the wounds left by her losses. All she wanted was her house and the satisfaction it provided her. She didn’t need people around, and certainly not her cowardly sister who had run away from the world, or her ex-husband who had cheated on her and was married to someone else. And she didn’t need an agent anymore, since she had stopped writing. She didn’t “need” or want anyone.