People Like Us

by Dominick Dunne

  “I feel that I have come at a wrong moment,” said Gus.

  “It’s all right, Gus,” said Loelia. Sitting, she lit another cigarette.

  Loelia Manchester he saw, was fastidious in everything but her cigarette habits. Her smoking was constant and slightly furtive, as if she had been told over and over again that smoking was bad for her, a filthy habit, and that statistics showed all sorts of dire consequences were in store if she did not stop, but she, powerless, could do nothing but continue, even in the face of constant disapproval. She only half stubbed out the butts into a green Meissen dish that served as an ashtray. A dozen or more butts already lay smoldering and smoking there, but she seemed not to notice. With a table lighter she used with two hands, she lit another cigarette.

  “You didn’t really want tea, did you?” she asked suddenly.

  “No.”

  “Lil Altemus tells me you don’t drink.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How about a Coke? Will that do?”

  “Perfect.”

  “I’ll have one too. I drink about twenty Cokes a day. I seem to have all the noncriminal addictions, cigarettes and caffeine.”

  She rose and went into a small kitchenette to get the Coca-Colas. He could hear the sounds of a refrigerator door being opened and closed, of ice being removed from an ice tray, of glasses, of bottles being opened, of pouring. Looking around the room he thought, how alike they all are, these women. Bowls of roses, dozens of buds and blossoms, were on every table, all arranged, he knew by now, by Lorenza. Scented candles, needlepoint pillows, baskets for magazines, sofas covered in chintz, photographs in silver frames. Their houses were beautiful, and expensive, and interchangeable. When Loelia came back into the room, she carried a silver tray with the two glasses. She handed him a small linen napkin on which to place his glass, in which a thin slice of lemon had been placed. Her mind, he could see, had remained fixed on the cause of her distress during her bartending duties.

  “I’m afraid you might laugh.”

  “I won’t.”

  “The listener, they call you.”

  “Who calls me that?”

  “Ezzie Fenwick. He says you’re going to write about us all.”

  “Then don’t tell me.”

  “But I have this urge to talk to you.”

  “Then I’m listening.”

  “It’s not as if I am unaware of the consequences of falling in love with a man like Mickie Minardos. I am aware. I would have criticized any friend of mine who did what I did, but I can’t help it. It is like another of my addictions. I cannot give him up. I absolutely adore him.”

  Gus did not reply.

  “When I am not with him, I cannot stop thinking about him,” she continued. “There’s nothing about him I don’t know, and I don’t care. He’s a snob. I know he’s used me to make it socially in New York, but I don’t care. He’s bad-tempered at times. But when he’s a good boy, and he’s a good boy more than he’s a bad boy, there is no one whom I’ve ever known I would rather be with. And the presents he gives me, to make up, are perfect, always perfect, exactly right.”

  Gus looked out the window.

  “You see, he is frustrated by his enormous success because he wanted to be a success designing for the ballet and the opera, but he became a millionaire designing these damn shoes that he hates so much, and, in the meantime, all his creative energies are being wasted.”

  Gus, the confessor again, merely stared at Loelia.

  “Mickie fell in love with my feet. Did you know that?”

  “How would I know that?” asked Gus.

  “He adores feet.”

  “I see.”

  “I, of course, had heard of people who admired feet, but I had never met anyone, nor ever expected to for that matter.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “He likes me to wear shoes with very high heels, and black stockings, with seams up the back. Rather tartlike. Imagine! Me! He likes to watch me walk in them, back and forth across a room, his eyes riveted on my feet. He then likes to take off my shoes, very slowly, first one and then the other, the left one always first for some reason, touching, rather featherlike, the back of my legs and the bottom of my feet.”

  Gus, embarrassed, rose. “Would you mind if I got myself another Coke?” he asked.

  Loelia nodded that she didn’t mind and continued talking. “My own mother barely nodded to me when I saw her at Flora Spalding’s memorial service. My brothers are tolerant but disapproving, and my sisters-in-law are, of course, siding with my mother. My daughter, Charlotte, played Roxanne in Cyrano de Bergerac at St. Cyprian’s and didn’t ask me to any of the three performances. I only found out she was in the play from Violet Bastedo, who has a daughter in the same school. Yesterday, before I saw you in church, my son, Bozzie, told me he wouldn’t spend his summer vacation with me if Mickie was about. I know it’s a terrible thing for a mother to say that she loves one child more than another, but it’s true. It’s always been rare and special between Bozzie and me, and now he doesn’t want to have anything to do with me because of Mickie. But I can’t give up Mickie, Gus. I can’t. I just can’t.”

  35

  As the ball drew near, Lorenza, the florist, and Mickie Minardos, the designer, fought bitterly for artistic supremacy, and each complained to Ruby Renthal about the other. Mickie called Lorenza a shop girl, and Lorenza called Mickie a prima donna. Lorenza thought her bowers for lilies and tulips and orchids were going to be overwhelmed by the weeping willow trees that Mickie thought were a necessity for the ten thousand live butterflies, in yellow and orange colors, that he planned to release at midnight on the night of the ball itself, and Mickie thought that Lorenza’s bowers for lilies and tulips and orchids were no more than a backdrop to the fantasy of flora and fauna into which he was transforming the Renthal ballroom. Finally people had stopped referring to the apartment as Matilda Clarke’s old apartment, or the Sweetzer Clarke apartment; it had become, if not forevermore, at least for now, the Elias Renthal apartment, and Matilda Clarke herself, who had lived in it for twenty-two years, could not recognize it as having been her own.

  After midnight on the night before the ball, fifty flower arrangers and scene builders arrived at the Renthal triplex to begin the transformation of the first-floor rooms into sit-out rooms and the ballroom into a fairyland of flowers and twinkling lights for the ball. For Elias, who needed his sleep, the sounds of hammering and talking were too much, and he departed for the Rhinelander Hotel around the corner on Madison Avenue to secure his rest.

  The weeping willow trees that Mickie Minardos insisted were absolutely essential to the décor of the Renthals’ ballroom were too large by far to fit in the freight elevators of the building, and cranes were hired to raise the trees the sixteen floors from the street to the penthouse floor. Windows on that floor had to be removed for the trees to get into the apartment. When the crane stalled between the fifteenth and sixteenth floors, a workman, Julio Martinez, reached out to keep the weeping willow from swinging into the windows of the apartment below and fell to the ground. As if aware of the exclusiveness of the neighborhood he was working in at that hour, his fall to his death was unaccompanied by a scream.

  Elias, asleep finally at the Rhinelander, was roused by a call from a hysterical Ruby. “Come back immediately, Elias,” she said, crying. “Something terrible has happened.”

  In case the point was not made a police car arrived at the hotel to bring Elias the half block from the hotel to his apartment.

  “This is a terrible thing,” said Elias Renthal, and then repeated, “a terrible thing,” all the time pacing back and forth on Fifth Avenue in front of his building, a fat cigar in his hand, waiting for the ambulance to arrive and put the mangled body of Julio Martinez in a body bag.

  “We won’t have to cancel the party, will we, Elias?” asked Ruby, nervously, when the policemen and foreman were out of hearing distance. She had pulled on a sweater over a pair of trousers
.

  Elias, without an answer for once, just looked at her.

  “I know it sounds awful, Elias, but we have to be practical. The First Lady told me this evening when I was talking to the White House that she is ninety percent sure she’s going to be here. She’s opening a drug center or orphanage or something in Harlem. The Castorias have arrived from England and are staying at the Rhinelander. There are people from all over the world here for the party. We’re going to look like fools.”

  “I don’t know how I can keep this out of the papers, Ruby,” said Elias.

  “Bucks, Elias, bucks,” said Ruby. “You once told me that there’s nothing that bucks can’t do.”

  “It ain’t going to look good: father of four kids falls to his death raising weeping willow trees sixteen floors up to a forty-one-room apartment at two o’clock in the morning so the Elias Renthals can carry out a butterfly theme for their ball for four hundred guests from around the world.”

  “You sound like you used to work on a newspaper.”

  “Well, that’s what it’s going to be. Count on it.”

  “You can delay it being in the newspapers until after the party, Elias. Or at least have it buried in the back pages.”

  “How?”

  “You’re the country’s success story, Elias. Figure it out.”

  “Help me, Ruby.”

  “What’s the poor man’s name?”

  “Julio Martinez.”

  “He’s got four kids?”

  “And a widow.”

  “As soon as it’s light, let’s get in a car and go out to the house, in Queens or wherever he lives. Bring some lawyers with us. Set up educational trusts so that each kid’s college education is paid for. Pay off the mortgage on their house so it’s free and clear. Set up a trust fund for Mrs., uh, what’s-her-name again?”

  “Martinez,” said Elias.

  “For Mrs. Martinez, guaranteeing her an income for life that exceeds the yearly salary of her husband.”

  “That’s a good idea, Ruby,” said Elias, recovering himself.

  “We’ll go to the wake. We’ll say the rosary. We’ll send flowers like they never saw before and provide the limousines for the funeral.”

  “What about the papers?”

  “Workmen are always falling off cranes. Just see that the address isn’t given and our names aren’t mentioned.”

  “You’re a wonder, Ruby,” said Elias.

  “Are you carrying one of those big gangster rolls of bills in your pocket, Elias?” asked Ruby.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Big tips to all the cops, all the doormen, and bonuses to every guy on the crane crew, after they get the last weeping willow tree up to the sixteenth floor.”

  Late in the afternoon on the same day, Bernard Slatkin telephoned his wife Justine at Bobo’s hairdressing salon, where she was having her hair set with ribbons and rubrum lilies to match the new dress Nevel had designed for her to wear to the Renthals’ ball that night.

  “Just wait till you see me,” said Justine to Bernie, looking at herself in the mirror while Bobo continued his work. “Bobo is so clever. He’s taken the centers out of the rubrum lilies, the yucky part that gets all over your fingers and makes everything such a mess, and they look so beautiful. Why haven’t I ever thought to do that? Now, don’t tell me you’re going to be late.”

  Justine’s joyful attitude changed to one of dismay when Bernie told her to back out of the Renthals’ party because there was something important that he wanted to talk to her about. Concerned with propriety, she wanted to plead that she couldn’t, absolutely couldn’t, upset Ruby Renthal’s seating arrangement at the last minute like this, especially as they were two of only forty people who had been asked to dine first before the swarms of people came in after dinner for the dancing, but there was something in Bernie’s voice and manner that forbade her from doing that. He was probably, she thought, calling from the control room at the studio and would hate to have to carry on that kind of conversation, about seating, with his buddies from the newsroom listening. “Justine’s Crises,” Bernie once told her his friends in the studio said about her kind of problems.

  “Everyone will be there,” said Justine wistfully, although she knew, even as she said those words, that they would not entice Bernie to change his mind, because, unlike most of the people she knew, missing a party where “everyone” would be was not a matter of great concern to him. What Justine feared more than anything else in the whole world was that Bernie was going to tell her that they were going to be transferred to Los Angeles and that he was going to have his own show as sole anchorman. Justine hated, absolutely hated, Los Angeles.

  She didn’t want to tell Bobo, after all his work, to take out the flowers and ribbons because she wasn’t going to go to the ball at the Renthals’ after all, so they were still in her hair when Bernie came home from the newscast. When she called Ruby to back out of the dinner, she was told that Ruby was attending a wake in Queens, which seemed odd to Justine, but that she would be back by seven, an hour before her dinner.

  “Who is this speaking?” asked Justine, not recognizing the voice.

  “This is Mrs. Renthal’s calligrapher.”

  “Her what?” asked Justine.

  “Her place-card writer.”

  “Oh,” said Justine. “Just the right person. Will you tell Mrs. Renthal that an emergency has arisen, and Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Slatkin will have to cancel for this evening.”

  “Oh, dear,” said the calligrapher.

  When Elias and Ruby made their second call of the day on the family of Julio Martinez in Queens, this time at the Margetta Funeral Home, for the wake, they expected to stay only ten minutes. Neither realized that the arrival of Father Francis X. Mulcahey, from the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, whom they felt it was politic to meet before departing, signaled the saying of the rosary.

  “It’s a great pleasure to meet you,” said Father Mulcahey. His gentle voice still bore the traces of his Irish birth. “Poor Teresa has told me of your generosity to the family during their great loss. Now, if you’ll just sit here behind Teresa and the children, we’ll be kneeling for the rosary. Are you Catholic, Mr. Renthal?”

  “No, no, I’m not,” said Elias.

  “Mrs. Renthal?”

  “Uh, no,” said Ruby. She had been once, but wasn’t anymore, and didn’t want to get into the matter, at least at this time, with forty guests arriving for dinner in two hours, and four hundred for dancing thereafter.

  “We’ll be saying the Sorrowful Mysteries,” said Father Mulcahey.

  Elias and Ruby looked at each other, dismayed. The massive bouquets of lilies and roses that they had sent were displayed near Julio Martinez’s closed casket, mingled with the carnation and stock sprays, with lavender ribbons and gold condolence lettering, that had been sent by family friends and relations, and the air in the un-air-conditioned room was oversweetened and close.

  “I hate the smell of stock,” whispered Ruby. She took a perfumed handkerchief from her bag and held it up to her nose. “How many of these Sorrowful Mysteries are there?”

  “You’re asking me?” Elias answered.

  “The first Sorrowful Mystery. The Agony in the Garden,” said Father Mulcahey. “Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done,—”

  “Bobo’s coming to do my hair at six,” whispered Ruby, pulling back the sleeve of her dark blue suit to steal a look at her oval-shaped Cartier watch with the Roman numerals that had once belonged to the Duchess of Windsor.

  “He’ll wait,” whispered back Elias.

  “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” said Father Mulcahey, and the other mourners in the room prayed along with him.

  “I still have to put out the place cards,” whispered Ruby.

  “Just don’t seat me anywhere near Rochelle Prud’homme,” whispered back Elias.

  “The second Sorrowful Mystery,” said Father Mul
cahey. “The Scourging at the Pillars.”

  Dorisette, the youngest of Julio Martinez’s children, began to cry. “Daddy, Daddy,” she wailed, by the side of her father’s casket, as Teresa Martinez held on to her, and her older brothers and sisters patted her head.

  “Do you think I dare faint?” whispered Ruby.

  Elias looked around him in the crowded room of the funeral parlor and considered the logistics of his wife’s suggestion. If his chauffeur and his bodyguard had been in the room, he could have signaled them to pick up Ruby after her faint and carry her out, but he had asked them to remain in the limousine, so as not to appear conspicuous during what he had supposed would be a ten-minute call. He arrived at the conclusion that a faint would cause further delays with the upheaval that would certainly occur among the mourners. “No,” he whispered.

  “Then make a beeline for the door after the last Sorrowful Mystery,” whispered Ruby.

  That afternoon, in the prestigious law firm of Weldon & Stinchfield, a weeping young lawyer named Byron Macumber was arrested and handcuffed and taken out the rear entrance and down the service elevator, so as to attract a minimum of attention. It happened that Gus Bailey, still investigating the financial affairs of the late wife of Jorgie Sanchez-Julia for the article he was writing, was in the law firm at the time and witnessed the hasty exit.

  “What happened?” Gus asked.

  Beatriz Love, the young lawyer with whom he was meeting, simply shrugged her shoulders in a gesture that indicated she knew nothing of the matter at hand. She pushed her horn-rimmed spectacles up on her nose with her forefinger and returned her attention to the court papers in a manila file folder in front of her.

  Gus Bailey knew when not to press, and he went on with his questions about the tangled estate of the crippled septuagenarian millionairess Geraldine Sanchez-Julia, establishing a friendly rapport with Beatriz Love at the same time. It was when he finished his questions and was ready to leave that he said, referring back to Byron Macumber, “Rather a dramatic exit for that poor fellow, wasn’t it?”