Before You Know Kindness Read Online Free PDF Page A

top-heavy tower in northern New Hampshire, the siblings would try to convince themselves that Mother only
seemed
to have a vast storehouse of energy inside her because she didn’t have young children the way they did. When she had been their age and they had been children themselves, she couldn’t possibly have been so . . . vigorous.
    Oh, but Nan Seton was, and in their hearts John and Catherine knew this. They remembered from their childhoods that between the Junior League and the Mayflower Society and the mornings she spent as a volunteer at the public schools in Harlem and Chinatown and the South Bronx, or the time she spent riding her bicycle in Central Park or attending lectures at the Fifth Avenue museums near their apartment, the woman never stopped moving. And that was just during the school year.
    In the summer she was even more active: Then there were those train-schedule-precise, rigidly programmed days in New Hampshire in which she would play golf in the morning, swim in the afternoon at the lake or in the Contour Club’s pool, take them on nature walks before dinner, and then insist—insist, as if it were homework—that they play badminton with her before the sun had set or they had cleared the dishes from the dining room table. Those days, John and Catherine lived very much the way their daughters did now for a month every summer, when the girls would attend what they called the Seton New England Boot Camp and spend the better part of their days hitting buckets of golf balls at the club, practicing the crawl or learning to dive at the pool, swatting tennis balls with the girl from Dartmouth who was serving this year as the club’s informal teaching pro, or learning the nuances of bidding in the club’s Young People’s Summer Bridge League. Charlotte and Willow, too, had their nature walks with Grandmother and—a new addition this year—a vegetable garden the size of a truck farm to weed and fertilize and thin.
    Granted, Nan Seton always had the luxury of help when her own children were young: There was an endless stream of au pairs, a cleaning woman twice a week in Manhattan and another once a week here in the country. And, until he died, there had been Richard Seton. Richard didn’t do a whole lot around either the apartment or the house in New Hampshire, and by his own admission what went on in either world between, say, seven in the morning and seven at night was a complete mystery to him. But he was very, very good at running what had been his father’s advertising agency, and then he was even better at managing the enterprise when the agency went public in the late 1970s. He never wrote a single line of copy or bought even fifteen seconds of airtime, but he created an estimable litany of frivolous but impressively glossy innovations, such as the “Button Club,” a training program for young account executives that taught them such presentation morsels as the importance of buttoning their suit coats before speaking and of using their hands when they shared marketing and media plans with their junior clients. He made sure that his more senior clients received complimentary subscriptions to
Advertising Age
and the
Wall Street Journal
. And in an era well before e-mail and digital cameras and budgets that were lean to the point of malnourishment, he gave lavish holiday parties for the companies whose advertising dollars he spent. These parties, in his opinion, were about friendship—not pandering—because in his experience a person was far less likely to fire his friend than his ad agency. Granted there were always cases of Château Aile d’Argent and burgundies from La Vignée Bourgogne there, too, and Richard certainly was willing to look the other way in the late 1960s and 1970s when the younger account executives and copywriters were also offering their age-appropriate clients marijuana and controlled substances that Richard knew well were illegal.
    But advertising for Richard was