When New York heiress Belle Burden and her then-husband, Henry Davis, decided to quarantine their family at their home in Martha’s Vineyard when the pandemic first started, she had no idea it would be the end of her marriage.
The granddaughter of legendary magazine editor and heiress Babe Pailey wrote in an excerpt of her new memoir “Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage” published in The Sunday Times that six days after their family arrived at their vacation home, after a normal dinner in their kitchen, she received a phone call from a number she didn’t recognize, so she didn’t answer.
When she played the voicemail left, it was a man’s voice.
“He said, ‘I’m trying to reach Belle.’ He paused,” she wrote. “’I’m sorry to tell you this, but your husband is having an affair with my wife.’”
She didn’t even have to confront her husband, who seemed to know she knew.
He initially claimed the affair, which he said had only been going on for weeks, meant nothing, and that he loved only her.
While still trying to hide her world shattering from her children, and baking them turnovers as they requested that night, she called back the husband, who revealed he couldn’t talk because his wife had just tried to kill herself.
She moved through the next few hours in a daze, and after sleeping separately, and staying awake most of the night trying to decide if she could forgive him, he gave her another shock.
The heiress wrote that her husband of 20 years walked into their bedroom, fully dressed, and told her matter-of-factly that he wanted a divorce, and he was leaving — right at that moment, apparently.
He later told her she could have custody of their children.
“In the days that followed, I tried to hide the truth from the girls,” she continued. “A therapist I spoke with said I should wait to tell them until the pandemic was less scary.”
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She added, “But instead of easing, the pandemic became more frightening. And so did I, appearing at dinner with swollen eyes and unwashed hair. I cried as I did laundry and scrubbed our lavatories. I spent hours behind the closed door of my bedroom. I decided not to drink, knowing it would make me sadder, but also found it hard to eat.”
She said her husband never explained to her what went wrong, and after initially supporting her, her husband’s family eventually cut her off.
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“Had life been normal, had we been in New York, had I been able to find him on the street and make him look me in the eye, maybe I would have had some understanding of what was happening,” she mused. “But I was on one island and he was on another, and I knew nothing — only the shock of his disappearance.”
Five years later, she says she’s no wiser about what went wrong.
Burden wrote that her husband hasn’t remarried, and he works at a hedge fund and travels. He sees their children occasionally, but hasn’t changed his mind about not wanting to co-parent.
“I don’t know why he left,” she added. “I don’t think I ever will.”
“Strangers” was released on Tuesday.
