People Like Us
Page 22
When Elias hung up, he looked at his watch while lighting up a cigar. He picked up the telephone again and dialed some numbers. “Operator, this is a collect call to Mr. Rufus Courtauld, in Nassau, from Mr. Nolte.”
Elias drummed his fingers on the table while waiting for the long-distance call to go through.
“Nolte here,” said Elias, when Rufus Courtauld picked up the receiver on the other end. “Fine, fine,” he went on impatiently, getting over with the pleasantries that his Swiss connection invariably engaged in at the beginning of every conversation. “Buy a hundred and eighty thousand shares of Omaha Natural Gas the instant the market opens in the morning.” With that he hung up the telephone.
The door to the little room opened, and Ruby entered. She was dressed in evening clothes. “I can hardly see you through all this cigar smoke, Elias,” she said.
“That’s why you gave me this smoking room, Ruby, so that I could cloud up the air here and not in the swell rooms up front.”
“I’m not complaining. I’m just commenting.”
“You look beautiful, Ruby,” answered Elias. “New dress?”
“Of course, it’s new,” she said, tweaking his chin. “You wanted a wife on the best-dressed list and you’re going to get a wife on the best-dressed list. I need some help with this necklace, Elias. Can you do the clasp?”
“With pleasure,” he said, standing behind her. When he finished, he leaned down and kissed Ruby’s bare shoulder. “Did I ever tell you I was crazy about your shoulders?”
“Yeah, but it’s not something I get sick of hearing,” said Ruby, rubbing her shoulder against his lips.
“Where are we going tonight?” he asked.
“Adele Harcourt’s, and we can’t be late.”
“Oh, Adele Harcourt?” he said, impressed. “Fancy-schmancy.” He pulled himself out of further amatory pursuit.
“Don’t say fancy-schmancy.”
“Why?”
“It’s tacky. We’re past that.”
27
After Sweetzer Clarke died, Matilda felt very lucky to be able to finally sell the great Fifth Avenue apartment Sweetzer had grown up in and later inherited after his mother’s death. The building had been constructed on the site of what had once been the Clarke townhouse, and the apartment, forty-one rooms on the top three floors, had been built to the extravagant specifications of Sweetzer’s father in the late 1920s as part of the transaction for selling the land and tearing down the Clarke house to make way for the building. Matilda and Sweetzer and their children lived there for nineteen years, first closing up rooms and then whole floors as the cost of maintaining the vast establishment drained their steadily diminishing resources.
When the lawyers handling Sweetzer’s estate told Matilda that she would have to give up either the apartment in town or the place in the country, she said, without a second thought, that she would give up the apartment, as life without Malvern, the Clarkes’ place in Bedford, would have been absolutely unthinkable for Matilda, who raised Norwich terriers and rode horses every day of her life. Her two sons had married early and advantageously and retreated to other parts of the country, away from the sight of their mother in decline.
At the time of Sweetzer’s death, forty-one-room apartments were not in great demand, and the apartment stood empty for several years. Finally, in desperation, Matilda sold it for a negligible sum to someone whose name she pretended she could never remember. The problem had been getting the purchaser, Elias Renthal, approved by the board of directors of the building, and it was only the purchaser’s guarantee, in writing, that he would not break up the apartment into smaller apartments that finally assured his acceptance into a building that otherwise was deeply selective about what Matilda called “the sort of people” who lived there.
The first time Lil Altemus visited Matilda’s new small flat, which she had taken for the few nights a week she spent in the city, she pronounced it charming, calling it Matilda’s pied à terre, as if Matilda had done something “frightfully clever,” in abandoning such an enormous establishment for something so very manageable. But Matilda brushed aside all compliments on its charm, or coziness, a word she despised, referring to it always as “my little hovel,” because it was, at least in her eyes, a little hovel compared to the grandeur of her former home that was now being done up by the Renthals. She was often heard to exclaim, “The things they’ve done to it!” about the new owners, rolling her eyes and shaking her head, although she had not seen it, did not know anyone who had, and knew, from personal experience, that Cora Mandell was not only the best decorator in New York but had been her own decorator when she still had money.
“Sweetzer left me high and dry,” said Matilda. “And I was a very good wife to Sweetzer, except for that one time. I had to auction off all the French furniture and sell the apartment. I wasn’t doing all that because I chose to live a simpler life, as Dolly De Longpre, dear sweet Dolly, told her readers. I sold everything to survive.”
“But, darling Matilda,” cried Lil. “We’ve been friends all our lives. You could have come to me, and I would have seen that Laurance took care of you.”
“Oh, no. That sort of thing never works out,” said Matilda. “I’m not a charity case. And, besides, along came Rochelle Prud’homme, and she put me on the board of directors of Prud’homme Products, and pays me a salary. Now, I know you don’t give Rochelle the right time, Lil, and won’t have her to your house, but she happens to be a damn nice woman, and a damn rich woman, and a damn successful woman in the hairdryer business. They call her the Petite Dynamo. All she wanted was to become a queen in society, and she couldn’t get to first base. She needed me to open some doors, and I needed her, and everybody’s happy. What Ezzie Fenwick calls tit for tit.”
“But what in the world do you do on the board of directors?” asked Lil. “You’ve never worked a day in your life.”
“I don’t do anything,” answered Matilda. “I just go to meetings several times a year and sit there, and Rochelle nods to me which way to vote.”
“Then why does Mrs. Prud’homme want you on her board of directors?” asked Lil.
“Oh, Lil,” answered Matilda, as if the answer were so apparent the question needn’t have been asked.
“Why?” insisted Lil.
“For the same reason Elias Renthal has your brother and Loelia Manchester and Lord Biedermeier on the board of Miranda Industries. We add class.”
“Heavens!” said Lil, clapping her hands, and the two old friends roared with laughter.
28
Among the New People, with whom Loelia now felt more comfortable, everyone that season called Mickie Minardos and Loelia Manchester the lovebirds. “We’ve just had lunch with Mickie and Loelia,” people said, and it immediately identified them as intimates of the most in-love couple in the city. If, at dinners, they weren’t seated together, which they preferred to be, they wrote notes to each other during the meal and passed them behind the backs of the intervening people, read them, and then shrieked with private laughter together, or simply met each other’s eyes and stared deeply. Everyone in this group said, leaving them, “They’re madly in love.”
The altogether splendid invitation to the Elias Renthals’ ball in honor of the Earl and Countess of Castoria was the talk of every table at Clarence’s that day. Ezzie Fenwick, who usually waited until the very last minute to reply to invitations, in case a better one to a grander party should come along, accepted his invitation on the same day it arrived, because he knew, absolutely knew, that on that night, June 21, there would be no better place to be in the whole world.
The ladies who gave parties never invited Matilda Clarke and Fernanda Somerset to the same parties, because Matilda had once had an affair with Fernanda’s husband, and Fernanda never spoke to Matilda again, but Ruby Renthal invited both of them, and everyone was curious to see how the two ladies in question would handle the problem. At the large charity dinners, when it was inevitable that bo
th would attend, the ladies who seated the tables knew that they had to seat Fernanda and Matilda as far from each other as possible, in separate rooms even, if there were more than one, with Fernanda Somerset always getting the better seat in the better room because she was a benefactress, which Matilda Clarke, for economic reasons, could no longer be.
“You’re not going to the Renthals’, are you?” asked Lil Altemus.
“Of course, I’m going,” said Matilda to Lil.
“I’m not,” said Lil.
“You have to play along with these New People,” said Matilda.
“Why do I have to play along with these New People?” asked Lil.
“People like us, WASPS in the Social Register, we’re practically an extinct race. These New People are the ones who are taking charge.”
“My brother Laurance is still in charge. The Van Degan bank is his. The Van Degan Foundation is his. The Van Degan Building is his,” stated Lil. “You can’t get more in charge than that.”
“But Laurance is the exception to the rule. Most of the kind of people who were the heads of Wall Street and the banks when Laurance took over from his father have been sent out to pasture. All these New People are the people with the money nowadays. The kind of money we thought was money is nothing to the kind of money these New People have.”
“I have no intention of playing along with them,” said Lil emphatically.
“You’re going to have to,” said Matilda quietly.
“Have to what?”
“Go to the Renthals’ ball.”
“Why am I going to have to?”
“Because Laurance is going to insist you go.”
Lil looked at Matilda. It was impossible for her to understand her brother’s affinity for a lout like Elias Renthal, but she would never discuss her brother with anyone, even someone she had known all her life, like Matilda Clarke.
29
Lil Altemus had Easter that year. It alternated each year between Laurance and Janet Van Degan’s apartment and Lil’s, and it was Lil’s turn, although she felt a bit put upon by so much family so soon after Justine’s wedding. Justine and Bernie were there, of course, although their roles as newlyweds had been superseded by Ormonde and Dodo Van Degan, recently returned from their Hobe Sound honeymoon. Hubie came, without Juanito, of course, who always caused a scene whenever Hubie was summoned to one of the family rites. Christmas he could understand, he said. Easter he couldn’t, even after Hubie told him they had been having Easter lunch, at either Uncle Laurance’s or his mother’s, ever since he could remember, and the practice had been started long before that, at Grandfather Van Degan’s when he and Grandmother, dead for years, still lived in the old Van Degan house on 79th Street. “If it’s any consolation to you, Juanito, I hate going,” said Hubie, leaving.
“I really wish you wouldn’t dress like that, Hubie, especially with the whole family here,” said Lil to her son, when he greeted her on his arrival.
“What’s wrong with the way I dress?” asked Hubie.
“You know perfectly well what’s wrong,” said his mother. Although Hubie dressed in blue jeans and cowboy boots, he did not remotely resemble a denizen of Greenwich Village, which his mother insinuated, as his shirts, with their button-down collars, were so unmistakably from Brooks Brothers, and his tweed jackets, with their double vents, were made to order for him by Mr. Sills. Even during the period when he exasperated his mother even more by wearing his hair too long for her taste, and certainly too long for the taste of Uncle Laurance, he had it trimmed every two weeks by the barber at the Butterfield, his father’s club, so that he ended up by being an outsider in the world he was born into as well as the world he aspired to be a part of.
Ned Manchester, Lil’s cousin on the Altemus side, who, since the romance of Loelia Manchester and Mickie Minardos, had to be taken care of on family occasions, was present that Easter, as he had the two children who refused even to meet Mickie. “What a wonderful father Ned is,” everybody always said. The lunch party was filled out by old friends like Matilda Clarke, whose sons lived in Santa Barbara and Santa Fe, and who always came. And then there were what Lil always called her strays, like Gus Bailey, who had no family that she knew of and no place to go. Ezzie Fenwick, who usually came, backed out at the last minute when he was asked to spend the weekend in the country with Elias and Ruby Renthal at Merry Hill, their new weekend retreat.
“Tell me about this marvelous picture,” said Gus Bailey, admiring a large family painting over a sofa in the drawing room.
“That’s the whole Van Degan family painted by Mr. Sargent in nineteen ten,” said Lil, who loved to describe the picture to newcomers. “That was the drawing room in the original Van Degan house on lower Fifth Avenue, where the New York Public Library is now. You see, there’s the Commodore, and his wife Annie. She was one of the Houghton sisters, meant to be ugly beyond belief, but look how beautiful Mr. Sargent made her look. And that little boy there, in the pale blue satin suit, playing with the collie, is my father, Ormonde, age six.”
“My dear, look at your dogwood! Too beautiful!” cried Janet Van Degan, entering her sister-in-law’s drawing room. “Lorenza’s been here, I see.”
“Only just left minutes ago. It’s getting harder and harder to get Lorenza these days,” said Lil. “Of course, her success pleases me, but, after all, it was I who discovered her.” She spoke in the possessive way that she claimed also to have discovered Bobo, her hairdresser, and Nevel, her dress designer, meaning that she had been the first of the ladies in her group who had her flowers arranged each week by Lorenza. “Mrs. Renthal seems to be monopolizing all her time.”
“Mrs. Renthal, Mrs. Renthal, that’s all I ever hear these days,” said Janet, throwing her hands up in the air in mock horror.
“And that damn ball. I can’t believe the things Lorenza’s been telling me about it,” said Lil.
“Unbelievable,” agreed Janet Van Degan.
“Imagine brand-new people like the Renthals giving this kind of party,” continued Lil. “And inviting all of us. Two years ago no one ever heard of them. I wouldn’t dream of going.”
Laurance, overhearing, said to his sister, “We should talk about that, Lil.”
Their conversation was interrupted by the arrival of the young Van Degans, Laurance and Laura, with little Janet, and the baby, Laurance III, whom everyone called Third. Little Janet, whom everyone said was a handful, made a dash for her grandmother.
“Who is this who is coming to see me? Who is it? Who?” cried Janet Van Degan, as her granddaughter ran to throw herself into her arms. Amid great screams of laughter, Janet picked up the child. “The preciousness of her! Look at this adorable creature, Lil. Edible, that’s what she is. Edible.”
Lil watched her sister-in-law and envied her her joy. If she had a grandchild, which she did not have and which she might never have, she suspected, she wondered if she would, and doubted if she would at the same time, feel the kind of joy that Janet felt every time she saw her granddaughter.
“I suppose I should ask Bernie to carve the lamb,” Lil said to her daughter. “Does Bernie know anything about carving, Justine? Hubie is so hopeless at it, and you know how cross Uncle Laurance gets if the roast isn’t carved right.”
“You ask Bernie, Mother,” replied Justine.
Bernie, as it turned out, carved very well. Bernie played games very well. Bernie danced very well. Bernie knew how to decant wine. Bernie knew how to give charming toasts. Lil always wished that Hubie took as naturally to these things that she thought so important in a man, or gentleman, as Bernie, whom she did not think of as a gentleman, did.
“No more peanuts, children. You won’t believe the goodies Gertie has in store for us,” said Lil to the Manchester children. “Laurance, help me with the seating. Where shall I put our new stepmother?” she asked, pointing ironically toward Dodo. “She’s so used to sitting at the wrong end of the table, but I suppose I have to move her up this year.”
There were two tables at lunch, the long table with the Chippendale chairs, called the grownups’ table on family occasions, and, in the window, the smaller round table, called the children’s table. Looking down, Lil admired the vermilion-colored border of her fish plates. She loved her dozens of sets of dishes and took as much pleasure in their selection for each course as she did in the exquisite food that her cook prepared to go on them. Glancing down from her place at the head of the grownups’ table, Lil was glad to see that Matilda Clarke, dear Matilda, her oldest friend, was making Ned Manchester laugh, the first time anyone had seen Ned laugh since Loelia ran off with Mickie. Across from Matilda, she looked at her new stepmother, Dodo Fitz Alyn Van Degan, poor Dodo, no longer poor Dodo, rich Dodo, who would always remain poor Dodo to Lil. Dodo’s appearance in the brief weeks of her marriage had improved, and Lil wondered if she were dieting strenuously or better corseted, and if her suit was a real Chanel. A curious alliance in the family was the friendship of Dodo and Hubie. Dodo, it developed, had bought several of Juanito’s paintings at Hubie’s gallery in SoHo and hung them in the hallway of Ormonde Van Degan’s apartment on Fifth Avenue, a few buildings up from Lil’s, that was now hers to do with as she saw fit. “I think they’re charming,” she said, about Juanito’s work, the first time she saw them, and she did. She sent several other people to Hubie’s gallery to buy Juanito’s pictures too. In reurn, Juanito got her the dirty movies that she was too embarrassed to rent herself to show old Ormonde night after night.