Evelyn poured herself a big glass of wine, wondering what Camilla, her attitude completely changed from hours earlier, was up to; she was now asking Brooke about her preferred bridal-gown silhouettes. It was only when the rest of the group had come to attention that Camilla stopped, letting a Brooke statement about necklines hang in the air.
“Birchie,” said Camilla, though she was addressing the room, “it sounds like the wedding will be an absolute ton of work. I don’t want to take you away from that, so I’ll be a good friend and let you out of the Bal.” Before Brooke had swallowed her sip of wine, Camilla tossed her hair and turned toward Evelyn. “Evelyn, you can do it, right? You’ll have time?”
Evelyn looked up from her glass. Everyone but Will had frozen midsip.
“Evelyn? You were a deb, so you know the whole thing,” Camilla said.
“I do. I do. I’d love to. I mean, if Brooke—”
“Brooke’s a bride-to-be now. She has flowers and guest lists and becoming Mrs. Brodzik to deal with. Right, Birchie? Ev,” Camilla said, thrillingly shortening her name for the first time Evelyn could remember, “you are going to love it. I think it’s one of the best parties in New York.”
“That’s fine,” said Brooke, her eyes bright. “That’s fine. I will be busy in June, Camilla, you’re right.”
“That’ll be great,” said Evelyn. “That’ll be fabulous.”
Will, oblivious, finished his glass with a slurp. “Anyone up for golf tomorrow?” he said.
“It is a city weekend, Will. You can golf back in San Francisco,” said Camilla, who had turned to look out the window.
Later, when Evelyn stepped over a supine Preston to go to the bathroom, he tapped her ankle with the Cohiba he was smoking. “The Bal. That’s all right,” he said.
Part Two
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Rich and Happy
When Evelyn had seen the e-mail with the subject line “FW: Bal tea and planning meeting,” she had made herself wait to open it, just to savor its deliciousness. She half expected Camilla to forget about her offer, or to reinstate Brooke on the committee, but there in bright black and white was the information: “hi Ev see below excited xx.” To her delight, she saw it was at Margaret Faber’s apartment, the woman who had been so friendly at Sachem, and then she saw Margaret Faber lived at one of the best addresses in all of New York.
She wasn’t sure what her mother’s reaction to the debutante-committee invitation would be, but her mother had been thrilled. Warm, even. “I’m so happy for you, dear,” Barbara had said. “It’s supposed to be a really wonderful party. I’m so glad you’re finally doing all this. I’ve been telling you for years how interesting these people are.” Barbara even called back later, to ask about party details, and sounded genuinely happy. For once, Evelyn had made her mother that happy.
Evelyn felt success at the Bal was vital. If she was a smash here, that could lead to not only more credibility at PLU but more invitations on her own merits. She could be a guest at the Junior League and the Infirmary in the winter, and maybe even join the committees once her children were old enough.
As she arrived at Margaret Faber’s apartment on Park, a man in a Hermès tie hurried around Evelyn, and the doormen rumbled, “Good day, Mr. Shuder.” Rob Shuder, Hollywood producer, Evelyn thought: new purchaser, a half floor, and a New York Post–chronicled fight with neighbors over what constituted public space when his interior decorator added brass studs to the shared hallway.
Evelyn followed him. “Hello,” she said. “Evelyn Beegan, for Margaret Faber.”
The doorman—or should she call him a concierge?—on the right smiled. “Yes, Miss Beegan, Mrs. Faber is expecting you,” he said, without consulting a list. “Please, follow me.” His footsteps barely made a sound as he walked across the marble floor, while hers, embarrassingly, squeaked. He called the elevator, and yet another attendant was inside there. “Miss Beegan for Mrs. Faber,” he told the attendant. The attendant put his key into the panel and turned it, pressed 12, and with his arms straight at his side and his eyes high, rode up with Evelyn.
“Thank you, Miss Beegan,” the attendant said as the elevator swallowed him again, the doors whooshing shut. Evelyn took an uncertain step forward toward a room with rows of chairs and looked—for what? a maid? a butler?—when she saw Margaret Faber, in a waist-nipping blue suit (bouclé like hers, Evelyn noted with relief) sprint into the hallway.
“The cheeses are practically frozen!” Margaret said.
Evelyn pulled herself tall; she hoped she had not been mistaken for a caterer. “I’m sorry to hear it,” she said. She looked to her left, down the hallway, where she saw the hostesses, their husbands, the debs-to-be, and the girls’ parents mingling in a large living room with built-in bookshelves. The windows overlooked Park, with heavy-looking rose and taupe brocade curtains framing them. Something about the couch looked familiar; Evelyn wondered if she had seen it in Architectural Digest before. In an adjoining room, Evelyn could see a camera’s flash.
“I’m Camilla Rutherford’s friend, Evelyn,” she said. The woman’s pleasantly expectant smile didn’t change. “We met at Sachem? I’m helping out with the debs?”
“Ah, yes. Of course. I didn’t realize you were one of Camilla’s friends when we met at Sachem. Souse and I have been friends for years, and I’ve known Camilla since she was a tiny thing. Souse! Souse!” Her voice was booming and loud, and she had no compunction about hollering through the museumlike foyer.
A blond woman came running from the room of minglers—Souse Rutherford, bristling with even more energy than her friend, with a golden tan and beautifully toned arms that were bared in a wool shift dress, also bouclé. “The macarons are coming!” Souse shouted, like an epicurean Paul Revere.
“Camilla’s friend is here! Evelyn!” shouted back Margaret.
“Evelyn? Evelyn!” Souse leaned in to inspect her, and Evelyn smelled a mix of perfumed face powder and Chanel No. 5. “Well! I’ve heard so much about you, and Camilla has been keeping you from me all this time! Look at her. Just adorable. Look at that jacket. That’s fabulous. Isn’t that fabulous?”
“That is fabulous. It is vintage?” Margaret said.
“Yes, I got it from my mother,” Evelyn said. She had gotten it from a consignment store, but the two women’s smiles widened, as she hoped they would.
“I wish my daughter would wear my old things.” Margaret frowned. “I have a few old Balmains that are just turning into colonies of moths.”
“Camilla is, predictably, late, but you ought to come in and meet everyone. The tea’s being served in the living room, and the girls are getting their photographs taken in the library, but we have to have a business meeting first with the committee members, just in the anteroom,” Souse said.
“We’re starting that in five minutes, though half of the women are always late, and unless we rectify this cheese situation—the cheeses are really so hard…” Margaret trailed off, looking quite disturbed.
“I can do it. Handle it. The cheese situation. If you just point me in the direction of the kitchen? Just a few seconds in the microwave, I know it’s terrible, but it will make them soften.” Evelyn could hear her mother’s voice: Everyone appreciates a helpful guest. And her own: Sing for your supper, Evelyn.
“Yes!” Margaret clapped. “How clever! Rosa does not know what to do with cheeses, and they are blocks of ice, practically. A cheese needs to breathe! It wants to be out in the world! You don’t have to go. I’ll call her in here and tell her. Wonderful. Wonderful!”
Evelyn was looking behind Margaret, trying to figure out why the rosy-cheeked drummer boy in the painting seemed so familiar, when she heard Souse say, “Push, should I wait in the lobby, so they don’t give the macaron fellow a hard time?”
The round O of Evelyn’s mouth matched that of the drummer boy. The apartment appeared to lift up and start spinning around her, and she saw that vase, that table, that rug from years ago. Her hand closed
and dampened, as though it were still wrapped around that wadded Tinker Day ribbon, as though it, too, remembered the pressure her ten-year-old self felt to try to hide everything, to try to fix everything, to plaster over her mother’s silences and inappropriate grasping and make New York what she and her mother both hoped it could be. But no, Evelyn thought. No. She was not that girl anymore. She would not let herself be unmoored by some old memory, by some past weakness. She had changed. She could show she belonged. She just had to show she belonged.
She tried not to stare at Push, now with darker hair and in a different apartment but otherwise the same woman as all those years ago. As a third woman who had joined them discussed finishing school in Lausanne, Evelyn unclenched her hand and forced her heart rate to slow.
“Such a shame that the girls these days insist on finishing schooling in New York,” the woman said, and Evelyn shook her head in sympathetic solidarity.
“This is why we must put them through this debutante season, isn’t it? The training is so lacking,” said Push.
“All of us are, to a degree, insecure, so anything that gives us confidence can’t hurt,” said the Lausanne woman, whose calves were thick with muscle.
“Well, American schools used to be different,” Push said. “At Hollins, we were required to wear gloves to dinner, if you can believe it, and take flower-arranging classes. Of course, it was a hundred years ago.”
“Hollins?” said Camilla, stepping off of the elevator at just the wrong time. “Hi, Mom. Hi, Push. Hi, Mrs. Egstrom. Sorry I’m late. Didn’t your mother go to Hollins, Evelyn?”
“Oh? What’s her name?” Push and Souse said together.
“She’s so much older than you, I’m sure you didn’t meet,” Evelyn said. “She was”—she did some subtraction quickly, trying to find a big enough age gap that the women wouldn’t inquire further—“class of ’fifty-three.”
“My!” said Push with a frown.
Realizing she had just cast her mother as somewhere north of seventy, Evelyn let out a Tinker Bell laugh. “I was a late-in-life baby,” she said.
“I have one of those, too,” said Push with a wink. “Wythe’s probably setting fire to the tartlets as we speak.”
Wythe, Evelyn thought. She remembered Push having a small child, back when Push was a Van Rensselaer.
In the anteroom—Evelyn was happy she now knew what an anteroom was—the hostess committee gathered for a brief meeting. The ball’s chairwoman, Agathe, with wispy white hair and the thin frame of a twentysomething, tallied the debs for this year—three Spence, two Brearley, four École, and one Chapin—then admonished the members. “We did an outing, as you are aware, to the children’s center in Harlem in September. It was the only site visit of the year, and the number of people who came could be counted on less than two hands. We must decide whether we ought to continue combining the ball with a charity component when clearly our members have only lukewarm interest in that.”
“I think the ball is focus enough—we have so many other fund-raisers,” said an old and watery-voiced woman in the back, either turning her hearing aid on or off; Evelyn couldn’t tell. “I think it’s lovely to see the young girls learn how to dance and how to behave. Perhaps the site visits and all of that ought to be secondary.”
“I went to finishing school in Lausanne,” boomed the stout brunette, “and there we learned how to speak, how to carry ourselves in society, which the girls are learning as debutantes. I, too, think that’s a marvelous element.”
“Yes, but I point to the trouble of finding the debs. Yes, our daughters will do it, but we have the Assembly, the Infirmary, which really are taking the top tier of New York girls,” protested Agathe. “There’s a feeling among the younger girls that these parties aren’t quite democratic.”
“What is more democratic than helping children?” the Lausanne woman said.
“We are inconsistent to tell our daughters and their friends to participate for charitable reasons when our group cannot go to a children’s center for one afternoon to see a program we are supporting,” Agathe said.
The women looked at their shoes and out the window.
“Well, we have two young women here. What do you think of the tradition?” Agathe said, squinting at Evelyn.
Evelyn looked at Camilla, trying to hand off the question, but Camilla reached into her bag to fiddle with her phone and Evelyn saw she had to respond.
“Being a debutante,” Evelyn said, stalling. “I think it’s a wonderful way to connect with history. To connect with what our mothers and grandmothers did, to learn about proper social behavior.”
The faces were still looking at her expectantly, and she saw she needed to establish her bona fides, even if they weren’t very bona, or fide.
“I was a debutante in Maryland, where my family is from,” she said. She saw nodding heads of sleek silver and pale yellow. This was the right track, then. “In a world where anyone can be anything, and everyone can go everywhere, and so few people know how to behave, isn’t it nice to have a tradition that says that someone is really someone?”
“Also,” said Camilla, looking up from her phone, “it’s basically champagne and pretty dresses, which teenagers like.”
Souse looked like she might clap.
“We have to go to so many tedious events—we all do, Louise, don’t look at me like that—where it’s white wine and broiled fish and the speaker going on about the Abercrombie and Kent safari at the silent auction,” Margaret Faber said. “I mean, terrible. So this is a big party with a group of people you know. Having the debutantes makes it younger, fresher, and I think it’s a lovely family event. Many, most, of us here were debs and remember it fondly, and given that our daughters are on their phones and computers constantly, isn’t it nice to give them a flavor of tradition and the world that we grew up in?”
Mrs. Faber’s defense silenced the naysayers, even Agathe.
The issue apparently decided on, Agathe dismissed the meeting, and the group wandered in to the tea. Each of the debs was having her photograph taken, and each wore a fussy sweater and lacy skirt, with carefully styled and curled hair.
Then there was a clatter, and Phoebe, Camilla’s younger sister, jumped into the room, followed by a girl who looked just like Margaret Faber: her daughter, Wythe Van Rensselaer. Phoebe stomped her foot and threw up her arms in a forties-movie-star pose. Her top was a wrinkled white oxford, and she wore ripped jeans and Keds, one with pink laces, one with chartreuse.
“Do the Phoebe, man, that’s what they say on the runways,” said Wythe, and Phoebe popped her hip to the side and strutted toward Camilla.
“Mom’s finally free?” Phoebe asked loudly. “I feel like this is her thing and I’m just standing there looking pretty. And, Milla, the other girl from Spence who’s getting her picture taken now is, like, a subzero loser. Jennifer. Ugh. I have no idea what she’s doing here.”
Camilla tapped her sister’s wrist. “Hello. You’re not standing there looking pretty. Pull your shoulders back. You look like a hunchback.”
Camilla herself was in a particularly odd outfit given that this was an afternoon tea, wearing a dress made of tweed and black leather, and spiked boots with a distinctly dominatrix air about them. Evelyn, though, was glad she had gone with bouclé: the CEO can swear and have affairs, but the aspirational junior executive has to show up to meetings on time and be polite.
“They’re total randos, Milla. I don’t know why Mom is making me do this with all these girls,” Phoebe said.
“Because Ari wants you to. Evelyn! Come meet my pest of a sister and her BFF. Phoebe, Wythe, this is my friend Evelyn.”
After Evelyn shook the girls’ hands, the Lausanne woman cast a worried look toward the library, where Jennifer was sitting for her photograph, and tapped Evelyn on the shoulder. “It is Evelyn, yes? Can you please go make sure these photographs are going all right, the girls are appropriate?”
Evelyn walked into the other room, where Je
nnifer’s mother, a brunette with thyroid-bulged eyes and curling-iron ringlets that matched her daughter’s, was trying to wrest the camera from the photographer to review the photos. “She has to get her dress made because she’s too petite,” the mother said.
“I’m a double zero,” the girl agreed.
The photographer seized the camera back and aimed it at the girl. “So it’s Jennifer? Tell me about what you like to do when you’re not at Spence.”
“I hardly have time not to be at school,” Jennifer said. “I’m taking four APs and doing fencing.”
“She just won a painting prize, the Courbet Award. Her teacher said she’d never heard of anyone actually winning the prize in all the years she’d been submitting Spence girls,” her mother said.
“Okay. Relax the lips. You must be off to college, right?” the photographer asked.
Her mother fielded this one, too. “Whitman. In Washington. It’s essentially the Williams of Washington.”
“Have you always known you’d be a deb?” the photographer asked, moving her tripod over a few inches.
“I—”
“When she was asked, which was just after she sent in her Whitman acceptance, in December, Jennifer said to me, ‘Do women still do debuts? It’s so old-fashioned.’ I said to her, ‘It tells people who you are. If you do it, for the rest of your life, you can always say, ‘I was a debutante.’ It was her decision, entirely,” her mother said.
“You were one, too?” the photographer asked.
“I could have been.” The mother took notice of Evelyn at this point, and Evelyn evaluated her quickly. Just behind her was another painting Evelyn remembered from before, an abstract in angry daubs of black and blue, tinged with malice. No, this mother could not have been. This mother was a product of a suburb in New Jersey, who had probably not known that debutantes still existed until she made it into the city and pushed her stage-managed daughter to add one more credit to her social résumé. Jennifer’s very presence here cheapened the whole ball, made it something that the Infirmary and Assembly attendees could frown upon.
Everybody Rise Page 17
