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Bryce Bingham Fowler was an only child and arrived as a breech birth via Cesarean section nearly a month earlier than his due date. He’d grown up with his parents, Thornton and Katherine—her friends called her “Kitty”—and assorted hired help in a tony neighborhood on New York City’s Upper East Side. His apartment was located in one of those grand buildings on Fifth Avenue that overlooked Central Park and was guarded by snooty doormen who wore regal uniforms and white gloves and tipped their hats when residents entered or left. Thornton managed other people’s money for a living and, as a result, was able to rake in plenty of his own. Kitty sat on the boards of several philanthropic organizations and decided which commoners were worthy of a charitable handout. Her afternoons were spent lunching with the affluent and powerful, while her evenings were taken up with a ball here or soiree there.
For Bryce, a life of privilege was all he’d ever known and he had only the vaguest of awareness that it wasn’t the norm for everyone else. He attended the prestigious Kipling Academy, an elite private school for boys, with a hefty tuition and a guaranteed ticket to the Ivy League. By all accounts, his achievements in just about every endeavor he attempted there were marginal at best. He didn’t participate in sports, although he almost made it to the last cut of the field hockey team before a hernia scuttled his chances. In the classroom, he struggled to maintain a consistent mediocrity and was warned by the headmaster that if he hoped to follow in his father’s footsteps and attend the renowned Wharton School at the University at Pennsylvania, he needed to spend more time with his nose in the books and less time with his head in the clouds.
When the winter holidays arrived, there were vacation trips to Aspen and Staad, while summers were spent at the beach house in Southampton with a stable of horses, a polo field, and a heliport. Bryce knew what foie gras was before most kids had figured out how to spread peanut butter on a slice of Wonder bread. His equivalent of a burger and fries was a Kobe steak tartare and a truffle-buttered baked potato. Not that he didn’t ever have an urge for a Big Mac every now and then. But when he did, a chauffeur drove him to pick up his meal in a Bentley, although Bryce often preferred the silver Rolls Royce Phantom because it attracted more gawks and finger-pointing from passersby.
With his father and mother preoccupied maintaining their social standing with the movers and shakers of New York, Bryce spent an inordinate amount of his early years alone. This meant returning home after school to a twenty-room apartment occupied by strangers—a bevy of servants, and his Bulgarian nanny, Lilyana, who tried her best to entice him outside to the playground in the park. Most often, though, Bryce was content to pop an old movie into his DVD player and spend the rest of the afternoon nestled in some bygone era. He preferred classic musicals and had watched My Fair Lady so many times that he could sputter out Rex Harrison’s lines before his character, Professor Higgins, could. The hours he spent in these fantasy worlds of song and dance were the happiest ones of his childhood, but came to a screeching halt exactly one week after his thirteenth birthday.
Bryce walked through the door of his family’s apartment that day and was greeted by the sight of a troop of burly men removing the furniture. He found his mother in the empty living room, a blank expression on her face, as she dabbed at her tears with a tissue. She hugged Bryce and explained that from now on he was to live with his Uncle Kenny—her brother—and his family in Poughkeepsie, upstate, about sixty miles north of Manhattan. “Things had changed,” she said, and Bryce needed to be strong while she and his dad “sorted things out.” He later found out that those “things” were why his father was to spend the next decade in a federal prison on charges of embezzlement, fraud and generally plundering client accounts to beef up his own. The Fowler fortune was gone and soon so was Bryce’s mother. Ostracized by her glitzy friends and castigated as a persona non grata on the charity circuit, Kitty fled to Gainesville, Florida, moved in with her sister Margie, and took a job as a hostess at a local IHOP.
The transition from the upper class to the depths of the low-middle wasn’t as traumatic as Bryce had imagined. It didn’t take him long to become familiar with the previously foreign concepts of leftovers and sharing bedroom space in the tiny ranch house that sat next to the city sanitation garage. Fraternal twins Hoyt and Jeremy were only too delighted to have their seldom-seen well-to-do cousin help them with chores, in particular the ones that involved the latrine or the cat’s litter box. Kenny was a drunkard, but a benign one, who zonked out as punctually as his Timex on the family room sofa every evening, halfway through Family Feud. His wife of seven years, Dottie, tolerated her third husband’s boozing with frequent after-hour visits to the rectory at St. Aidan’s church for counsel and prayer in the cozy private quarters of the Monsignor Devin Cleary.
Despite the sudden downturn in lifestyle, however, Bryce flourished. Without the peer pressure and expectations that suffocated him in Manhattan, he felt an unbridled freedom to explore his true passions. He signed up for the high school drama club, and his revisionist take on Sir Lancelot in Camelot (Bryce played him as a sensitive and tortured soul wracked by self-doubt and an ambiguous sexuality) won him adulation of the kind he had never before known. To take a bow after a performance and soak in the audience applause proved intoxicating. Bryce had discovered his niche, and after a well-received turn as Felix in The Odd Couple (a reviewer conceded he couldn’t recall anyone who took on the role “with as much natural abundance of grating fervor”) was awarded a scholarship to study at the nearby Eisenhower College Department of Theatre. His freshman year, however, proved trying, as his swollen ego, burnished to a glossy sheen by the gushing praise heaped upon him in high school, found little tolerance among fellow students, with whom he often clashed. In a production of Shakespeare’s Othello, his attempt to stylize his role of the villainous Iago into a mincing buffoon with a lisp was roundly panned and scuttled by his appalled professors, who deemed Bryce’s radical approach as nothing less than “an affront to the Bard himself.” It wasn’t long before his prickly reputation spread throughout the department, and, as a result, Bryce was relegated to portray the most minor and humdrum of characters. It was early in the second semester of his sophomore year that he saw a notice posted on a campus bulletin board about upcoming auditions for a student film titled, Letter 13. Bryce knew exactly which soliloquy he would prepare to wow the director, one S. E. Heberling…