by Kevin Kwan
“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. Billennials*1 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.*2 Now, isn’t Renée 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 Renée!”
“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 Renée 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, Renée 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 getting engaged to 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 would 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. Renée 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 Renée 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. Renée 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, Renée 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.”
Renée 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,” Renée 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.”
Renée 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 Harbor 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,” Renée said with a throaty laugh.
Cecil chuckled. “Lucie has a cousin who, I believe, shops only at that horrid place in Midtown? Lord & Swift?”
“Lord & Taylor, you mean. I bought my prom dress at Lord & Taylor.” Renée 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 Renée 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 among 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?”
Renée gave Cecil a wink. “Let’s slay ’em!”
*1 Billionaire + millennials = billennials
*2 She would be referring to Grange Hall, the much-missed restaurant at the corner of Bedford and Commerce Streets.
III
The Seventeenth Floor
821 FIFTH AVENUE
The chauffeur opened the door, and Renée and Cecil stepped from the Bentley onto the burgundy carpeting, passed through the revolving 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, Renée 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.”
Renée 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.”
Renée’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.”
“Then what is the problem?”
Danielle lowered her voice to a whisper. “No Jews, Mrs. Pike. And that means no one with a drop of Hispanic blood either. You need to have come over on the Mayflower to get into this building.”
Now, Renée scrutinized herself one last time in the inlaid mirror of the elevator. With her expertly balayaged hair and her expensively sculpted nose, did she still look like she had any Hispanic blood coursing through her veins?
“I can’t wait to see this place,” Cecil whispered in his mother’s ear. “How much do you want to bet it’s decorated like Frank E. Campbell’s?”
The elevator opened onto an entrance hall, and both Renée and Cecil were taken aback by the sight of the enormous pair of Assyrian sphinxes that were at least ten feet tall flanking a faux marbré set of doors in vibrant malachite and turquoise. They could hear the murmur of the crowd just beyond the doors. This wasn’t the typical Sister Parish meets Mark Hampton decor they had been expecting; the place had a sumptuous, exotic flair that exuded a relaxed grandeur.
“Can you believe it? Old money with actual style,” Cecil whispered to his mother.
Renée scanned the room quickly, quietly impressed, as Cecil wondered if he had time to sneak a few pictures. “Stand there, Mother. I’m going to take a picture of you before anyone sees us.”
Cecil took a few covert shots on his phone before clearing his throat and asking in a loud voice, “Now, where’s everyone?”
“There they are!” Lucie said, the relief evident in her voice as she caught sight of Cecil poking his head into the drawing room. She steered Cecil and his mother to the corner where her grandmother was perched on the edge of a deep-buttoned ottoman, chatting animatedly with her friends Jeannette and Alex. “Granny, here are Cecil and his mother, Renée Pike,” Lucie proudly announced.
Lucie’s grandmother stood up quickly, her posture still ramrod straight after more than eight decades. “Howdoyoudo?” Good, good, Cecil is taller than I would have thought. And the mama’s wearing Oscar from one of his last couture collections for Balmain. I almost bought that suit. She’s much prettier in person than her pictures. No wonder she hooked her pike.
Renée flashed her signature million-watt smile and said in her unabashed Texan drawl, “Mrs. Churchil
l, it’s such a pleasure, at long last! I’ve been wanting to thank you in person for over fifteen years now, for rescuing the Württemberg tapestries and giving them to the Cloisters.” Grandma looks like Vanessa Redgrave! And she’s wearing an Yves Saint Laurent dress with…holy moly…are those Tina Chow rock crystal cuff bracelets? Not what I was expecting—this is one cool dame.
“You are much too well informed, Renée. That was supposed to be a secret,” Consuelo said, a bit taken aback. I’m going to get everyone fired at the Met tomorrow.
Cecil bowed ceremoniously. “Mrs. Churchill, I can finally see where Lucie gets her artistic flair. Just. Look. At. This. Room! I’m dying for these moss-green stamped velvet walls! And those Giacometti end tables! May I ask if Geoffrey Bennison was somehow involved in this mise-en-scène?”
“Stéphane* did the original work for me, but, yes, Geoffrey gave it a bit of a refresh in the late seventies,” Consuelo replied, eyeing him curiously.
“He really did a marvelous job—it holds up beautifully. Tell me, that portrait of you over the fireplace, is that by Magritte?” Cecil asked in amazement, staring at the painting of Consuelo’s face half obscured by clouds.
“Indeed it is. It was the last portrait he did, so I’m told,” Consuelo said in the blasé tone of someone who’d uttered that statement a thousand times. Despite this, Cecil was genuinely awed. He couldn’t quite believe he was engaged to the granddaughter of a woman so fabulous.
He was about to ask Consuelo if she wouldn’t mind posing with her Magritte portrait and him for an Instagram shot when a portly man with a bushy silver mustache cut in front of him and gave Consuelo a hug.
“Ah, Harry! Come meet Lucie’s beau, Cecil Pike. Cecil, this is Harry Stuyvesant Fish, a dear family friend. He’s about to become our ambassador to Norway.”
“Congratulations, young man! I knew your grandfather!” the illustrious ambassador-to-be (Rippowam / Groton / Harvard) said to Cecil as he pumped his hand jovially.
