by Kwan, Kevin
CHAPTER TWO
821 Fifth Avenue
Upper East Side
Even in the thin air inhabited by Manhattan’s stratospherically high-end property agents—where no one bats an eyelash at a $35 million listing—821 Fifth Avenue was considered hallowed ground. It was built in 1918 to the most exacting standards of luxury, and each apartment in the twenty-one-story building occupied an entire floor, creating sumptuous mansions in the sky. But it wasn’t the size of these residences that made the building so renowned; rather, it was the plain fact that 821 was considered to be one of the top five most exclusive buildings in Manhattan. Two ambassadors, one retired Supreme Court justice, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and even a deposed European monarch were politely turned down from purchasing by its notoriously difficult co-op board.
Much of this was due to the fact that a majority of its apartments were still held by the original families who had owned since 1918, and few units ever changed hands. To paraphrase the Patek Philippe slogan, it could be said that one never actually owned an apartment in 821—one merely looked after it for the next generation. So the building remained, well into the twenty-first century, a bastion of privacy for some of the East Coast’s most rarefied and discreetly influential families, among them Lucie’s grandmother, Mrs. John L. Churchill, or as she was known to everyone in her exclusive circle, Consuelo Barclay Churchill (privately tutored / Miss Porter’s / Institut Villa Pierrefeu).
Consuelo’s pedigree was unimpeachable. Born a Barclay, one of America’s landed gentry families whose storied history went back to the Virginia land grants of King James I, she was on her maternal side the last surviving granddaughter of the Industrial Age tycoon who built the Northeast Atlantic railroads. Her marriage to John L. Churchill, scion to a Gilded Age fortune and president of Churchill Brothers Averill & Co., one of the oldest private banks in the United States, cemented her pole position within New York’s Old Guard, but she had neither the interest nor inclination to follow in the footsteps of Bunny, Jayne, or Brooke and become a society doyenne. Intensely private and cosseted since birth, she never felt the need to make much of an effort. While she once presided over the Fifth Avenue residence, an estate in Southampton, and an hôtel particulier on Paris’s Right Bank, these days she preferred to spend most of the year at her “winter home” in Hobe Sound, Florida, coming to New York only during the fall ballet season.
Tonight, however, Consuelo had made the exception of traveling to the city and opening up the apartment for her granddaughter’s engagement party, which is how Lucie found herself standing in the middle of her grandmother’s drawing room in a pretty Zimmermann white eyelet dress, receiving the relatives and friends on her father’s side who had gathered from all over the country on a beautiful late-spring evening and who, truth be told, were mystified by how Lucie had pulled off the feat of becoming engaged to a man they had all read so much about.
“So how did you meet him again?” Teddy Barclay (Rippowam / Phillips Exeter / Harvard) asked his cousin pointedly as he grabbed another pig in a blanket from the istoriato Italian Renaissance platter being held by a uniformed maid.
“We met in Rome five years ago, Teddy. Charlotte and I were touring the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, and Cecil came walking down the hallway with the owner of the palazzo and saw that we were admiring a particularly beautiful painting of Saint Sebastian. So he started telling us about it—even educating the prince about his own art collection. He’s incredibly knowledgeable about Italian art.”
Teddy twitched his nose, unimpressed. “So what precisely does Cecil do these days?”
“Cecil’s the busiest man I know. He’s got dozens of projects. He’s funding about thirty start-ups, he’s on the International Council of the Louvre, he started a nonprofit that restores frescos in Naples, and he’s—”
“None of those sound like real jobs to me,” Teddy remarked, as he chewed openmouthed on a pig in a blanket.
“Teddy, give it a rest,” his wife, Annafred (Rippowam / Deerfield / Benenden / Saint Catharine’s, Cambridge), cut in.
“But this was only my third piggy!” Teddy protested.
“I’m not talking about the piggy! Stop harassing Lucie. What does it matter what Cecil’s job is?” Annafred said.
Charlie Spencer Houghton (Rippowam / Phillips Exeter / Harvard), an uncle on the Churchill side, jumped into the conversation. “Cecil Pike doesn’t need a job. Billennialsfn1 these days don’t bother putting in time at the office for appearances’ sake. They just jet around the world with their laptops. Do you know how much that father of Cecil’s personally pocketed when he sold Midland Gas to Texaco? Seven billion. That was in the eighties, Ted, and that was before his widow decided to invest all the money in a little start-up called Google.”
Teddy raised his eyebrows. Now that he had heard it from Charlie, he was finally a little bit impressed.
“Speaking of the widow, Lucie, is it true that Cecil’s mother couldn’t get into 740 Park or 1040 Fifth, so she bought up half a block’s worth of town houses and turned it into a behemoth that dwarfs the mansion that the Qataris built?” Lucie’s preternaturally poised cousin from Boston, Caroline Cabot Churchill Reed (Brimmer & May / Miss Porter’s / Wellesley), who went by Cacky, asked provocatively.
“Um, I don’t know about that, but Cecil’s mother does have a beautiful house,” Lucie replied, trying to be diplomatic and discreet.
“Oh, come now, Lucie, spill the dirt! Are you going to be moving into the Texas embassy? I hear it’s got its own hair salon and an underground pool bigger than the one at the University Club.”
Lucie tried to laugh it off casually. “I have no plans to move in with my mother-in-law—Cecil’s in the process of finishing up our own place in the West Village.”
“The West Village, how quaint! I remember once going to some cute little theater down there to see a Eugene O’Neill play, and we had dinner at the most adorable art deco restaurant decorated with this big socialist mural.fn2 Now, isn’t Reneé Pike supposed to be more royal than the Queen? Do we have to bow when we meet her?”
“I don’t know how you got that impression, Cacky.”
“Charlotte told me she was very grand.”
“Charlotte? She’s never even met Reneé!”
“Really? She spoke as if they were BFFs. Pray tell, where is Charlotte tonight? I would have thought she of all people would be here, since she was the yenta responsible for all this.”
“Charlotte moved to London last year, didn’t you know? She’s very bummed to be missing tonight, but after Amuse Bouche folded she got this fantastic job working on special projects for Mary Berry, you know, who used to be a judge on The Great British Baking Show, and they’re filming something right now. Anyway, I think you’ll find Reneé to be very friendly. She’s not grand at all, is she, Mom?” Lucie said, turning to her mother.
“Grand? No. Pretentious, yes,” Marian replied.
“Oh, Mother!” Lucie moaned.
“Just kidding! Yes, Reneé is very nice; she can just be a little intimidating, that’s all. She’s a dynamo, very smart and very intense. Wait till you see her—she’s always dressed to be camera ready, and she’s got wedding makeup on every day.”
Cacky arched her eyebrows. “She has to wear wedding makeup, doesn’t she, because she’s very social and entertains a great deal.”
Lucie knew only too well that for Cacky and her Boston Brahmin crowd, being “very social and entertaining a great deal” was one of the worst insults one could give. High WASPs like Cacky didn’t need to throw parties, be photographed at “society events,” or endow wings at museums to cement their social position—they simply were privileged. She realized that she had one-upped Cacky by marrying a man whose vast fortune eclipsed even hers, and Cacky was feeling sore about it. Her cousin had always been competitive and a little mean since they were kids, calling her nicknames like “Lucy Liu” and “Shun Lee Lucie.” She decided to ignore her barbed comments, even though Cacky w
ould not let go of her strange fixation on Cecil’s mother.
“I see her all the time in those awful ‘society’ rags at my podiatrist’s. Reneé Pike is always front and center in pictures with presidents, European royals, and those overnight tech trillionaires—I assume if you don’t own a search engine that’s flagrantly violating every privacy law in the world or you’re not buying up whole islands in Hawaii, she’s not interested in hobnobbing with you.”
“Last time I checked, Cacky, you were still pretty high on the Forbes list, and don’t you own half of Nantucket?” Lucie’s great-aunt Cushing (Rippowam / Miss Porter’s / Radcliffe) cut in. “I think you just might scrape through Reneé Pike’s hobnobbing requirements, har har har. I, however, do not. Don’t worry, Lucie, I shall stay out of sight.”
Lucie looked at her mother for some support, but Marian seemed totally checked out—as she always did around her father’s family—and was fixated on picking the bits of dill off her smoked salmon crostini. Annafred, thankfully, leaped to her defense again.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Aunt Cushing. Reneé Pike may be social with a capital S, but she’s actually done quite a bit of good. The Times listed her as the most charitable individual in the country last year! Speaking of which, Teddy, we really need to get her involved with the Prince’s Trust. I’m told she’s singlehandedly keeping the oldest lace maker in France in business, thanks to her commitment to only wear couture.”
“My, my, Lucie, are we dressed up enough for your new family? I hope you won’t be too embarrassed of us,” Cacky teased, as she adjusted the cuffed sleeves of her floral Carlisle jacket.
“Who’s embarrassed?” Lucie’s grandmother asked, entering the drawing room with a gin and tonic in her hand.
“Granny! My goodness, how pretty you look!” Cacky exclaimed.
Great-Aunt Cushing fingered the collar of her silk jacquard blouse and said, “Yves, isn’t it? That looks like it must have cost a hundred thousand dollars.”
“Two, actually. Yes, I may be an old lady with outdated clothes, but I decided to try to smarten up for Lucie’s new family, so she won’t be ashamed of us now that she’s marrying money,” Consuelo quipped, giving her granddaughter a sideways glance.
Freddie came into the room sucking on a lollipop and smiled at his sister. “Chupa Chup?” he said, offering the one from his mouth.
“No thank you, but could you go find me a shovel?”
“What for?”
“I need to dig a hole and bury myself in it right now.” Lucie sighed. She glanced at her watch again. Where the hell was Cecil, and why was he late to his own engagement party?
Seventeen floors down on Fifth Avenue, Reneé Pike (Saint Cecilia / Port Neches Middle School / Central Senior High / UT / Harvard Business School) peered at the handsome burgundy awning outside the building and said to her driver, “Circle the block one more time.”
Reneé gave her son a tight smile. “I don’t want to arrive until at least six forty-five.”
Cecil glanced at the new watch that he had commissioned Rexhep Rexhepi to create just for tonight and noted that it was 6:32 p.m. He hadn’t seen his mother this nervous in a very long time, not since right before she gave her TED Talk, and observed quietly as she fidgeted with the clasp on her JAR pink-sapphire-and-diamond bracelet, before finally taking it off and putting it in her Moynat clutch.
“Well, I think you finally struck the right note with the Oscar,” Cecil said.
“Yes, thank you for making me change,” Reneé said. “These high WASPs just love Oscar, don’t they? I’m paying tribute to Lucie’s kin by wearing a dress that’s twenty years old.”
“Wasn’t that when you were first named to the International Best Dressed List? Twenty years ago?”
“It sure was. You have such a faculty for dates, son.”
“I remember because WWD published a photo of you wearing this houndstooth pantsuit when they announced you on the list. I still have the page somewhere.”
“Well, I think it’s a timeless look, very restrained. It won’t offend anyone, and they can’t accuse me of trying to put on airs.”
“They will be the ones putting on airs, Mother. You know how these Old Guard types are. Their fortunes have dwindled down to practically nothing, so the only thing they have to cling on to is their snobbery.”
Reneé nodded. “Annette did warn me: ‘Consuelo Barclay will be judging you from scalp to toenails the moment she sets eyes on you, and she doesn’t miss a thing.’”
“I don’t know about the grandmother, but frankly, I don’t think anyone will notice what you’re wearing. My God, wait till you meet them. You can practically smell the mothballs. I met most of them at this godforsaken affair they called a clambake in Bar Harbour last summer. Lucie’s mother—you already know the situation there. The rest of the lot take great pride in looking like they haven’t bought new clothes since Eisenhower was in office.”
“They need to make extreme efforts not to look entitled,” Reneé said with a throaty laugh.
Cecil chuckled. “Lucie has a cousin who, I believe, shops only at that horrid place in midtown that closed down last year? Lord & Swift?”
“Lord & Taylor, you mean. I bought my prom dress at Lord & Taylor.” Reneé shook her head, as if she didn’t quite believe her own words. “I made my mother drive me two hours all the way to the Galleria in Houston. It was a peach-colored dress with big bouffant roses at the shoulder, and it reminded me of an Ungaro I had seen in Vogue. It cost my mom two months’ salary, but it was worth every penny—I was voted prom queen. No one in Beaumont had ever seen a dress like that!”
“You had such a flair even back then,” Cecil said.
“That was the night Ronnie Gallen asked me out, and if it wasn’t for Ronnie, I never would have met your father.”
Cecil turned away from his mother and looked out the window onto Park Avenue. It made him slightly uncomfortable whenever his mother talked of her past. In his mind, he liked to imagine that she was born on an elegant plantation in Louisiana, the descendant of a family with roots stretching back to the Valois kings of France. In truth, his mother may have been born Reneé Mouton in Lake Charles, Louisiana, but she was the illegitimate daughter of Charles Mouton, who owned a trio of Conoco service stations, and Marcia Nuncio, who worked the front register at one of the stations and hailed from a family of oil refinery workers from Corpus Christi.
Most of the time, he forgot this bit of trivia about his mother, but tonight he was reminded of it as they prepared to meet the members of Lucie’s tribe. He suddenly noticed that his mother’s shoulder-length blond bouffant hair had extra highlights tonight and silently cursed her hairdresser, Fabrice. He too was racked with nerves and had obsessed over his hair and his outfit, changing several times until he finally just put on his oldest navy pin-striped suit, the first one he ever had made at Huntsman, with his simplest Argenio tie. He didn’t want the men in Lucie’s family thinking he was making too much of an effort, and besides, he knew they wouldn’t understand the Rubinacci.
Why was it that he and his mother felt far more comfortable among their international jet-set friends than a bunch of WASPs? Was it because even the Texas WASP contingent had turned their noses up at them all those years ago, when they tried living in that house on Lazy Lane? Oh well, it was all ancient history as far as he was concerned. For heaven’s sake, he had more than three hundred thousand followers between all his social media platforms, they had just dined with the King and Queen of Jordan two nights before, and his mother had the pope on speed dial. They could handle cocktails with the Churchills. The Bentley pulled up in front of the building again.
“Ready, Mother?”
Reneé gave Cecil a wink. “Let’s slay ’em!”
CHAPTER THREE
The Seventeenth Floor
821 Fifth Avenue
The chauffeur opened the door, and Reneé and Cecil stepped from the Bentley onto the burgundy carpeting, passed through the revol
ving doors of 821 Fifth Avenue, and found themselves in the hushed, elegant Belgian Art Nouveau lobby. A pair of doormen dressed like deserters from the Franco-Prussian War gave them the once-over.
“We’re going up to Consuelo Barclay Churchill’s. I’m Cecil Pike,” Cecil announced.
The older doorman checked a list in a leather-bound logbook before giving them a curt nod. “Seventeenth floor, Mr. Pike. Ivan will show you the way.”
Even the doormen are snooty, Reneé thought, as they were shown to the elevator by the younger doorman. She remembered walking past the building years ago when she first began house hunting in New York and admiring its splendid facade.
Danielle, her property agent, had shaken her head and declared, “Don’t even think about this one. It’s a good building.”
Reneé was confused. “If it’s a good building, why can’t we consider it?”
“Sorry, let me explain … A ‘good’ building is realtor code for the few buildings left in Manhattan with co-op boards that will never allow people of a certain, ahem, background in.”
Reneé’s jaw tightened. “What do you mean by ‘background’? I have an MBA from Harvard and letters of reference from the governor of New York, Cardinal O’Connor, and Barbara Walters. Are you telling me we aren’t qualified?”
“It has nothing to do with your qualifications or references, Mrs. Pike, which I can assure you are sterling.”
