People Like Us

by Dominick Dunne

  Dolly turned to see who Ezzie was looking at and saw Florian Gray retreating toward the men’s room. With a dismissive shake of her head, she said, “I can’t imagine why Elias and Ruby asked him.”

  “Oh, Dolly, he’s not worthy to kiss the hem of your garment,” said Ezzie.

  Wishing to talk with Florian Gray, but not wishing to be seen talking to him, especially by Dolly, Ezzie spoke hurriedly to him in the men’s room and arranged a rendezvous in a small room on the second floor that was used for cigar smoking and poker playing.

  When he entered the room ten minutes later, Ezzie found Florian already there waiting for him.

  “Stinks in here,” said Florian.

  “Cigars, probably,” said Ezzie.

  “Let me open this window.”

  “You mustn’t say that you learned this from me,” said Ezzie in a lowered voice, although there was no one but the two of them in the small room.

  “Yes?” said Florian, eagerly. The sheer beauty of the notion that Ezzie Fenwick, the clandestine supplier of society news to Dolly De Longpre, should be giving him what could only be a hot story was not lost on the youthful professional gossipist.

  And then, as if thinking better of his rash act, Ezzie hesitated, but Florian prompted him on.

  “You don’t mean about the workman who was killed raising up the weeping willow trees, do you?” asked Florian.

  “No, no, I didn’t know that,” said Ezzie.

  “What then?” persisted Florian.

  “Oh, listen, the waltzes are starting,” said Ezzie, again regretting that he was here with Florian. “I specifically asked Ruby to set aside twenty minutes for waltzing, and she remembered, with all she has to remember. Marvelous woman, isn’t she? I’ll arrange for us to meet later.”

  Florian understood that Ezzie was having second thoughts about revealing whatever it was he was going to reveal and knew that, once lost, the moment would never be reinstated.

  “You mean about someone having a heart attack?” asked Florian.

  “Someone had a heart attack? Here at the party? No, I didn’t know that. Who?” asked Ezzie.

  “I haven’t found out yet,” said Florian.

  “I must get back, really. They’re going to release the butterflies, thousands of them, all yellow and orange, on the stroke of midnight. They’ve been flown here from Chile. We can’t miss that.”

  “Tell me, Ezzie,” insisted Florian.

  “They’re going to indict Elias Renthal for trading on insider information,” whispered Ezzie, drawing closer to Florian to indicate the confidentiality of his information.

  “No!” said Florian, eyes wide, knowing a scoop, a scoop of scoops, was coming his way, more important by far than yellow and orange butterflies flown up that day from Chile, the kind of scoop that might be frontpage news, superseding not only his own column but the financial page of his newspaper as well.

  At that moment the door of the small room opened, and Lil Altemus walked in, with Dodo Fitz Alyn Van Degan, looking for Ormonde Van Degan, whom they both felt certain would want to see the release of the butterflies before they took him home to bed. As if caught out in something nefarious, Ezzie and Florian leaped back from each other, blushing.

  “Oh, excuse me,” said Lil, with great ceremony.

  “Quite all right,” said Ezzie. “I was just giving this young man the names of the out-of-town guests he doesn’t know.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Dodo, with a wink.

  “You haven’t seen my father, have you, Ezzie?” asked Lil.

  “He came up here for a cigar over an hour ago, and we can’t find him,” said Dodo.

  “I haven’t seen him,” said Ezzie.

  “Nor I,” said Florian.

  “What’s in that room?” asked Lil.

  “Where the pool table is,” said Ezzie. “Apparently it’s off bounds tonight. Elias didn’t want anyone putting drinks on it. Old felt, or something.”

  “It’s locked,” said Dodo, who was trying the door.

  “He must be in there. There’s not another room in the house we haven’t checked,” said Lil. “Look in the keyhole, Dodo.”

  Dodo knelt down on the floor and squinted one eye, while placing the other next to the keyhole.

  “Look! He’s asleep, right on the pool table. It’s too sweet,” she said, with musical intonations in her voice, like a bird cooing. “Look, Lil, at your father.”

  “I’m going down to see the butterflies,” said Ezzie.

  “Me too,” said Florian.

  “Let me look, Dodo,” said Lil, kneeling down to peek through the keyhole.”

  By now all four hundred guests had heard about the ten thousand butterflies, yellow and orange, just arrived that day from Chile, that were going to be let loose at midnight during the waltzes to flutter about hither and yon in the bowers of flowers and weeping willow trees. Those nondancers who had been sitting out the evening in the drawing room and library in conversation, gossip, or cards, preferring the soothing strains of gypsy violins to the strident beat of society dance music, now descended the stairs into the ballroom, like New Year’s Eve revelers awaiting the countdown until midnight.

  Mickie Minardos, with Loelia Manchester by his side, issued last-minute instructions to his staff. Ruby and Elias, with the First Lady, the Earl and Countess of Castoria, and Faye Converse, grouped together in a trellised gazebo. Waiters in green jackets, designed by Mickie to blend with the flora, raced about replenishing champagne. Ezzie Fenwick was back on the dance floor, whirling Adele Harcourt about. Laurance Van Degan was dancing with Janet. The band played society music. Excitement was high.

  The ballroom lights dimmed, and the partygoers gasped at the beauty as the regular lighting was replaced by pink-and-turquoise fluorescent light, giving the illusion of total fantasy. Then, with a pull of a golden rope, the clouds above burst open, and butterflies, thousands of butterflies, descended from the ceiling of the ballroom, fluttering here, fluttering there.

  “Oh, heaven!”

  “Divine!”

  “Spectacular!”

  “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” cried Ruby Renthal. Ruby reached out and took hold of Elias’s hand, and he, in turn, clasped his hand over hers. They looked at each other and knew that they had made it, as they always knew they would, but beyond their wildest dreams.

  “Too marvelous for words,” said the Countess of Castoria.

  “Oh, look,” said the First Lady, clapping her hands in delight.

  Ezzie Fenwick, who knew beauty when he saw beauty, had tears in his eyes. “Divoon,” he said.

  People raced for the dance floor. Everyone wanted to dance. Abandon was the order of the night, as couples gave themselves over to the music and beauty of the Renthals’ ball. The dance floor was full when the first scream came, from Rochelle Prud’homme, followed by screams from Matilda Clarke and Violet Bastedo, as the ten thousand butterflies, yellow and orange, flown up from Chile only that day, began dropping to their deaths, having been fried by the pink-and-turquoise fluorescent lights. Secret Service men rushed in past the dancers, who were now wiping dead butterflies from their hair and backs and shoulders, to rescue the First Lady before total pandemonium broke out.

  “The odor!” cried Ezzie, waving his hand in front of his nose like a fan, as the dying butterflies kept descending.

  “Turn out those fucking fluorescent lights!” screamed Elias.

  “Don’t say fucking, Elias,” whispered an agitated Ruby into her husband’s ear.

  Mickie, nervous sweat pouring off his brow, pulled the switch that turned off the pink-and-turquoise fluorescent lights, and the ballroom was plunged into total darkness. Fernanda Somerset screamed. On the crowded stairway, an enormously fat Albanian princess fainted and, falling, knocked over several people.

  “Turn on the ballroom lights!” screamed Elias.

  “I can’t find the switch!” screamed back Mickie Minardos.

  “Yo
u ruined my party!” Ruby screamed at Mickie.

  “How dare you yell like that at Mickie!” screamed back Loelia Manchester.

  “Cobbler!”

  “Twat!”

  “Someone puked on my back,” yelled Constantine de Rham.

  “It was Binkie Castoria,” said Jamesey Crocus.

  “Adele Harcourt swallowed a dead butterfly!” cried Minnie Willoughby.

  “Lights!”

  “Lights!”

  “Has someone called the police?”

  “The phones are out!”

  “Laurance, Father’s dead on the pool table,” screamed Lil Altemus.

  “What do you mean, Father’s dead on the pool table?”

  “Let’s get out of here!”

  “The elevators don’t work.”

  “The Greek shoemaker blew all the fuses in the building!”

  “Who are these terrible people anyway?”

  “I’ve only met them once before,” said the Countess of Castoria.

  “He’s being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission.”

  “What do you expect from the kind of people who spend a million dollars on curtains?”

  “Are those sirens I hear?”

  “Is that police or fire?”

  “Break the windows!”

  “Not with that bergère chair, don’t break the windows,” cried Ruby.

  By the time the police and firemen arrived, using the same cherry-picker crane that Julio Martinez had fallen to his death from the night before, the orchestra was playing “Nearer My God to Thee.”

  36

  The newspapers reported, in addition to the death of Ormonde Van Degan, “whose roots in the city go back for generations,” that there were two broken ankles, two broken arms, and a broken leg in the melee that had occurred when the power failed at the Elias Renthals’ ball the night before, at which four hundred people, including the First Lady, had been present. The papers further reported that Adele Harcourt, the grande dame of New York, had very nearly choked to death on a dead butterfly but was resting comfortably in her room at Harcourt Pavilion of Manhattan Hospital.

  “They’ve gone. They’ve flown the coop,” said Ezzie Fenwick, over the telephone later that day.

  “At least that saves us writing thank-you notes, or sending flowers, not that Ruby would ever want to see another flower again,” said Matilda Clarke.

  On the morning following the ball, the Elias Renthals left for Europe on their private plane, although no such plan had been in the making the day before. Later, people wondered if their flight was less for the embarrassment of the fiasco of their ball, which, knowing them, people like Ezzie Fenwick and Lil Altemus pointed out, they might have brazened out, than it was that Elias had heard the rumor at his own party of the investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission of his financial dealings, and it was imperative for him to dispose of his extensive foreign holdings by transferring them to his wife’s name before a freeze was put on his fortune.

  “Today? We’re going today?” Ruby had said, aghast, reported Candelaria, her maid, to Lourdes, Lil Altemus’s maid. Ruby’s eyes were still red and swollen from crying.

  “Today,” answered Elias. “In three hours, in fact.”

  “Elias,” said Ruby, in a pleading tone. “I want to go. You know I want to go. I can’t face anyone in this city, but I can’t possibly be ready to go in three hours.”

  “Two hours and fifty-five minutes now,” said Elias.

  “But my clothes! My trunks! I can never get my things together for a two-month trip in that short a time,” she said.

  “Candelaria here,” he said, pointing his thumb at the maid, “can pack up your stuff and ship it to you, and, in the meantime, buy new things there.” Elias walked out of their bedroom and down the stairs. He was surprised in a minute when he heard Ruby following him.

  “Is something going to happen, Elias?” asked Ruby.

  “What do you mean?” asked Elias.

  “Some sort of misfortune.”

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “I feel it.”

  “Have you heard anything?”

  “Look, Elias, don’t play games with me. You told me we were a team, do you remember?”

  “I remember, Ruby.”

  “A team means good times and bad times.”

  Elias walked into the drawing room and looked out the window onto Central Park. A weeping willow tree was being lowered on a crane outside his window from the ballroom above to the street below, as his party of the night before was being dismantled.

  “Do you need money, Elias?” asked Ruby, following him into the room.

  “God, no,” he answered, with a laugh.

  “I mean, I have all this jewelry,” she said. She opened her black lizard jewelry cases, which she had brought downstairs with her and began taking out the pieces. “You can have all of this back, Elias. We can sell it. And there’s all the money you signed over to me. It’s yours.”

  “No, thanks, Ruby. I’m okay in the do-re-mi department, but I’ll never forget what you offered.”

  “Tell me what’s the matter, Elias. You’re in trouble, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. Maybe.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What a lot of other people have done before me, and a lot of other people will do after me.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “I, uh, used, uh, insider information that I bought and paid for from young fellas in the brokerage offices who knew about mergers that were in the works.”

  “That’s illegal?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You knew it was illegal?”

  “Yeah.”

  She breathed in deeply. “What do you want me to do, Elias?”

  “Swear to my lies, if it comes to that.”

  It surprised Elias that Ruby’s eyes filled with tears. The tears did not fill her eyes slowly, but sprang forth, as if he had slapped her. He understood that his wife’s tears were not for his plight, which he knew she would see him through, but because he had asked her to lie for him. She walked away from him to one of the tall windows of their drawing room and looked out at Central Park across the street, where a bag lady began her preparations for the day on a bench on Fifth Avenue. Standing there, framed by the persimmon-colored damask curtains, with the fringe that had taken six weeks to be delivered from France, Ruby Renthal wept. When Elias walked toward her, to comfort her, for he loved her, she raised her hand to halt him, without turning, having felt his footfall on her Aubusson carpet that she bought from Justine Altemus Slatkin, that Lil Altemus gave Justine for a wedding present, that had come from the Van Degan house in Newport and had once been a wedding gift from the Belgian court to the ill-fated Empress Carlotta of Mexico.

  Elias Renthal was a nonconfidential man, and, as a result, he had few confidants. One of the few was Max Luby, his crony from Cleveland. Elias had sometime back taken the stand at Max’s forgery trial as a character witness. “Nonsense. Utter nonsense!” he had said in the courtroom. “If a man’s gonna steal, he don’t steal for a lousy ten thousand dollars, which is all he wrote the check for. If he needed ten thousand bucks, there were any number of people, myself included, who would have given him the money in five minutes. What it was is, quite simply, a case of temporary aberration.” Although his logic was thought to have carried weight with the jury, Max still had to serve six months, but he was known to be grateful that such a great financier as Elias Renthal had come to his rescue in court and even invited him to his ball.

  “Listen, Max,” Elias said, in a confidential tone on his private telephone, after having received Max’s consolation on the failure of the ball. He was sitting in the little room Ruby had arranged for him to smoke his cigars, the same room where Ormonde Van Degan had died the night before. “Ruby and I are taking off. There’s a little heat on me, if you understand what I’m saying.”

  “Right,” replied Max, in his pe
rfect second-in-command voice.

  “There’s a few things I’d like you to do for me, and then maybe you can meet up with me in Paris in a week or so. Check out for me, in a discreet way of course, the consequences of canceling my pledges to the museum and the opera. I think I pledged ten million to each, over a seven-year period. Just in case there’s a temporary cash-flow problem, I’d hate to be shelling out that kind of moola to some nonsense like the opera and the museum. They got money coming out their kazoos, those people.”

  “What about the Julio Martinez fund?” asked Max.

  “Who the fuck is Julio Martinez?” asked Elias.

  “The workman who was killed hoisting the weeping willow tree for the ball.”

  “Christ, I forgot about him.”

  “It was only yesterday, Elias.”

  “Gimme a break. I got a lot on my mind. Better stick with that.”

  “Right.”

  “Oh, and one other thing, Max,” he said, butting out his cigar in an ashtray where a dead butterfly lay. “You better stop payment on that check I gave to Faye Converse last night for AIDS.”

  Loelia Manchester wished with all her heart that Mickie Minardos had not called Ruby Renthal a twat the night before when Ruby screamed at him that he had ruined her party. She hated the word, had never used it herself, and knew that it must have caused pain to Ruby, who had worked so hard to put her background behind her. Loelia liked Ruby and had enjoyed their friendship, although she understood that Mickie had made a resumption of it impossible. Loelia had never seen Mickie cry until the night before, when they returned to the Rhinelander. He had held it in, all during the elevator ride up to the thirty-second floor, not only because of the elevator man, whom they both knew, but because the Earl and Countess of Castoria were in the same elevator, returning to their suite on the same floor. Wearing several Band-Aids and still drunk, the Earl had laughed hysterically for all thirty-two floors every time he looked at Mickie, and the Countess, who had a dead butterfly in her chignon that she was unaware of, held her ripped dress together in the front. On parting, the Earl had made a Latin American farewell by yelling, “Buenas noches, amigos,” as the Countess led him to his room. “He’s not Mexican. He’s Greek, Binkie,” she could be heard saying as they went down the hall.