Justine had heard the conversation over and over again since the reading of the will in Uncle Laurance’s office. She had pretended not to hear when Uncle Laurance called Juanito “your brother’s catamite.”
“I’ve known Herkie Saybrook all his life,” Lil continued, with or without a reply from Justine. “His mother and I came out the same year. He should have told us that Hubie was going to leave everything to Juanito whateverhisnameis, and we could have done something about it.”
“It’s what’s called client privilege, I believe. Hubie hired Herkie. Hubie paid Herkie.”
“But Herkie Saybrook is one of us,” said Lil.
“So was Hubie, Mother,” replied Justine.
Lil turned away from her daughter.
“I’ll never speak to Herkie again,” she said, after a moment. “I think Uncle Laurance should talk to him about this will. I also think Uncle Laurance should have him put out of the Butterfield. I never liked him anyway. Arrogant.”
“You wouldn’t have minded if I’d married him at one time, I seem to remember,” said Justine.
“Let’s not get into whom you should and should not have married, if you please. I can only concentrate on one thing at a time.”
“What are you concentrating on now, Mother?”
“I’m concentrating on that horrible man with the earring performing unspeakable acts in Grandmother Van Degan’s bed from the house in Newport.”
38
The Renthals took a cream-colored villa in Monte Carlo and chartered a yacht. They sailed to parties in St. Jean Cap Ferrat, and Beaulieu, and Villefranche, and Antibes. The kind of people they met had not heard of the impending investigation, or, if they had heard, didn’t care, so pleasure-bent were they. Americans always took those things more seriously than they did. It was for the Renthals a period of calm before the storm.
At first Elias claimed to not take seriously the investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. He thought he was being persecuted by a self-righteous district attorney with political ambitions, hoping to bring him down simply because he was so rich. “I’m smarter than most of the people trading today,” he said, “and all those SEC people can’t stand that.”
When Ruby read in the Wall Street Journal that Elias had been implicated by a young lawyer from Weldon & Stinchfield called Byron Macumber, she remembered the night of her ball when Gus Bailey had asked to meet with her the next day. “Give me a hint, Gus, quick. You’ve got me curious,” she had said to him when the Albanian prince had cut in on her. “Byron Macumber,” Gus had replied. She knew now that Gus was trying to warn her. She also remembered that Byron Macumber had called once at the apartment when she was dressing for a party and Elias had acted strange when she told him, as if he didn’t know who Byron Macumber was, when all the time they had been in cahoots.
Elias thought of himself as a member of the establishment. He pointed out his membership in the Butterfield. He pointed out his friendships with people like Laurance Van Degan. “People like that, you see, are not about to allow anything to happen to me,” he explained to Ruby, pointing out that members of the establishment stood together. He pointed out the innumerable acts of charity he had performed in the past few years, all carefully recorded in the pages of the newspapers. “Maybe we should get that guy Bus Bailey to do another article on us, talking about all our charity work,” he said, making a mental note to check on whether or not Max had stopped payment on the check to Faye Converse for AIDS.
“Gus,” said Ruby.
“What?”
“It’s Gus Bailey, not Bus Bailey,” she said, quietly.
“Whatever. We could fly him over here in the plane.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Ruby.
“Why not?”
“I don’t think Gus Bailey’s the kind of guy who’s going to do a puff piece on us at this moment in time,” she answered.
“What makes you say that?”
“Did you read this piece he wrote on Jorgie Sanchez-Julia?” She held up a magazine with a photograph of Jorgie Sanchez-Julia dancing with the clubfooted Geraldine.
“Jorgie Sanchez-Julia was a fucking gigolo who stole an old lady’s money, for Christ’s sake,” said Elias, as if Ruby’s reasoning was flawed.
Ruby stared at Elias, without answering, but the words, “You’re a fucking thief who stole a lot more money, for Christ’s sake,” were in her thoughts.
Elias looked away, as if he could read her thoughts. “I’m going to call Laurance Van Degan right now to let him know I’ll be at the Paris apartment all next week. We’ll get this all figured out.”
Miss Wentworth said that Mr. Van Degan was in a meeting and not available. When Elias called an hour later, Mr. Van Degan was still in a meeting and still not available, Miss Wentworth said. Elias left his Paris telephone number with Miss Wentworth for Laurance to call him there. Mr. Van Degan was out of the office when Elias called from Paris the next day. No, he could not be reached at home either. Mr. Van Degan was at the Van Degans’ fishing camp in the Adirondacks. No, there was no telephone there, Miss Wentworth said.
Ruby, who had grown quiet and withdrawn, went where Elias planned for them to go, but she no longer arranged their social life with the passion she once had, as her passion for it had diminished, and her participation in it was obligatory rather than exuberant. Within her, she felt shame about the things that were being said about her husband, but, since Loelia, she no longer had anyone to talk to or to confide in. It was now Elias who insisted on going everyplace, saying that it was important for them to be seen. Ruby was content to follow Elias rather than lead him. Her sense of social reluctance was favorably interpreted, especially by the grand ladies she met who thought she was impeccably mannered.
At the hairdressing salon in the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, Ruby ran into Loelia Manchester. It was their first encounter since the night of the ball. They exchanged greetings, like old friends who had lost contact, but Ruby did not ask Loelia about Mickie, and Loelia did not ask Ruby about Elias.
“Are you all right?” asked Ruby.
“Oh, yes, I’m fine,” answered Loelia, smiling, but the smile covered a sadness. “And you?”
Ruby shrugged. “Fine, too, I suppose,” she answered.
The two friends looked at each other, longing to talk as they used to talk, to tell each other everything, but neither could make the suitable opening for such a conversation, at least in the hairdressing salon of the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo.
“We went to this marvelous place in Germany,” said Loelia, retreating into social conversation, and not mentioning Mickie by name. “We had these wonderful shots. Live cells from unborn sheep. So marvelous. Halts the aging process, you know. Goes right to all the vital places, heart, liver, kidneys. Not that you would have to begin thinking of things like that at your age, Ruby.”
Ruby watched her old friend and noticed how rapidly she was talking. She noticed that Loelia was wearing an excessive amount of makeup so early in the day. To an observer, who did not know either of them, it might appear that Ruby, in her expensive simplicity, was the more refined of the two elegant ladies. Then, surprising both herself and Loelia, Ruby placed her hand on Loelia’s chin and lifted it, turning her head to the left a bit. In the same way that poor dead Hubie Altemus had once applied makeup to his face at his sister’s wedding to cover the blemish of his first lesion, Ruby saw that Loelia Manchester had applied makeup to cover a black eye.
“I walked into a door at the Hotel du Cap,” said Loelia, although, even beneath her excessive base, a flush could be seen in her face.
“Will I see you at the collections?” asked Loelia. She meant in Paris, at the couture showings, where the skirts were going higher and higher and higher.
“No,” answered Ruby, shaking her head. Her passion for high fashion, like her passion for social life, had diminished. She knew she would have no place to wear the short, short skirts that had become all
the rage, even though she had the right kind of legs to wear them, because she understood she would no longer be invited when they returned to New York.
When they parted, with regret, for they missed each other, they made no plans to meet again.
“I sold the plane,” Ruby heard Elias say to Max Luby on board their chartered yacht, as they sailed to Antibes to lunch at a fashionable house. Max Luby came to visit them regularly. “No point in having anything they can seize. Whatever flies, floats, or fucks, rent, is my new policy.”
“How do I fit into that, Elias?” Ruby asked from her lounge chair on the deck, putting aside the book she had been reading. “Does that mean I’m rented?”
Elias blushed. “Just a figure of speech, Ruby,” he said. “I meant the plane. I meant the boat. I didn’t mean you.”
Ruby lifted her hand. She was wearing the enormous diamond that Elias had given her at the time of their rise, the same diamond that Ezzie Fenwick had remarked upon at Justine Altemus’s wedding reception, “If that rock is fake, it’s silly. If it’s real, it’s ridiculous.” With her thumb, she flicked the ring off her finger, and the huge flawless diamond fell into the Mediterranean Sea.
“Ruby, for Christ’s sake!” yelled Elias, jumping up and looking over the rail to the sea. “Do you know how much that’s worth?”
“Six million, two,” she answered quietly.
Elias, red-faced and infuriated, grabbed Ruby by the arm and pulled her up from her chair and stared at her with the kind of withering look that in times past brought tears to the eyes of employees who worked for him. Unflinching, Ruby held his gaze for what seemed an interminable time, at least to Max Luby, who witnessed it.
“If you are thinking of hitting me, Elias, don’t,” said Ruby, in a tone of voice that he had never heard from her before.
Elias dropped her arm.
“Seven years ago, when I was still a stewardess, a guy in L.A. beat me up. I said then, and I meant it, that if a man ever laid a hand on me again, ever, I’d kill him.”
“Jesuschrist, Ruby, I would never hit you,” said Elias, collapsing into a deck chair. “This whole thing is getting to me. I’m not myself. I mean, I’m under such a terrible strain.”
He put his head into his hands. Max Luby coughed.
“Get lost, Max,” Elias said, and Max Luby, who understood Elias, and had grown to love Ruby, gladly abandoned them to the conversation that both had avoided since their flight from New York. “What’s with you lately, Ruby?” asked Elias.
“You don’t know?”
“You’re not going to be broke, if that’s what’s worrying you.”
“How like you to interpret my distress for my marriage, my husband, and our lives as bucks, Elias.”
“What then?”
“I feel like you cheated on me with another woman.”
“I never have. I swear to God.”
“It’s the same kind of betrayal. The mistake I made was thinking you were brilliant, but you’re just like a kid who cheated in school.”
Elias flushed. Nothing Ruby said could have hurt him more. “I am brilliant. There’s no one who understands how to make money like I do.”
“You can tell that to the judge, Elias.”
“Oh, Ruby, don’t say that,” said Elias, reaching for her hand.
She let him take her hand but did not return his squeeze.
“I’m not being a bitch, Elias,” said Ruby. “I feel left out. You treated me like a mistress, not a wife. Buy her a new fur. Buy her a new jewel. If only you’d told me what was going on.”
“And if you’d known?”
“I would have stopped you,” she said. “It’s as simple as that.”
They looked at each other.
“Max explained it all to me,” she said. “Something you haven’t bothered to do, about the Swiss bank in Nassau, and the fake name on your account, my name, by the way, and paying off all those young cheats feeding you information, like Mr. Byron Macumber, and I could only think, why? What more did we need that we didn’t already have? We’d run out of new things to buy, and we still had more money than anyone else, so for a lousy few more million bucks, we end up in disgrace.”
“Who said we’re in disgrace?”
“Oh, Elias, please,” she said. “Let us face up to the reality of our situation. So we’re sailing on a yacht to Lady Montagu’s lunch at her villa in Antibes, but, back there, in New York City, they’re going to come after you and probably put you in handcuffs, just the way they put Byron Macumber in handcuffs.”
“No way,” said Elias. “Laurance Van Degan wouldn’t allow that to happen.”
“Laurance Van Degan doesn’t even answer your phone calls anymore, Elias.”
“He’s in the Adirondacks, and there’s no telephone at the fishing camp.”
“I don’t believe that somehow,” said Ruby.
“He’s my friend.”
“Do you really think Laurance and Janet are still going to ask us to sit in their box on the opening night of the opera?”
“Of course,” said Elias, expansively. “Laurance is a businessman. He understands. How the hell do you think old Ormonde’s grandfather started the Van Degan fortune in the first place?”
“Not this way, I’m sure,” replied Ruby.
He knew Ruby was right. He had not told her that Laurance Van Degan had been quoted in the financial section of the Times as saying, “I feel that Elias Renthal is insensitive to his fiduciary responsibilities to his policy holders.” But he felt that she knew all those things.
“What do you want to do, Ruby?” Elias asked, wearily.
“I want to go back home. Whatever’s going to happen, I want to let happen. Surely you’ve sold everything there was to sell by now.”
“I thought you liked this kind of life. Lunch with the princesses. Dinner with the duchesses.”
“Not anymore,” said Ruby. “Not anymore.”
That night, back at the rented cream-colored villa in Monte Carlo, Elias said to Ruby, “You never told me a guy beat you up in L.A.”
“It’s something I don’t talk about.”
“What did he do to you?”
“He knocked out a couple of teeth. He blacked my eyes. He fractured my jaw. He threw me down the stairs,” she said, quietly, reciting her injuries like a litany.
“Jesuschrist.”
She nodded.
“Did they catch the guy?”
“Not then.”
“What happened to him?”
“He killed Gus Bailey’s daughter.”
39
Since his separation from Justine Altemus, Bernard Slatkin had made no attempt to keep in touch with any of the people he had met during the period of his marriage, which was one more indication to the Van Degan family that he had not tried to use them in any way, although it was rather a disappointment to Lil, who would have liked nothing more than to have labeled Bernie as an opportunist who had badly used her child for self-advancement.
One night on Park Avenue, late, after visiting his former apartment to remove the rest of his clothes, Bernie ran into Gus Bailey, dressed in black tie, who was walking home from another New York dinner party. The two men greeted each other warmly.
“I was sorry to hear about your divorce,” said Gus.
Bernie shrugged. “These things happen,” he said.
“I know,” said Gus. “I wasn’t a great success in the husband department either.”
Bernie nodded.
“Going away?” asked Gus, indicating the luggage that Bernie had put on the sidewalk.
“No. Just picking up the rest of my clothes and junk that I left behind. Justine has put the apartment up for sale and wanted me to get everything out.”
“Where’s Justine moving to?”
“Back to her old apartment in her mother’s building. She’s really a Fifth Avenue girl, you know, cabbage-rose chintz, that sort of thing.”
“Oh, Bernie,” said Gus, reprovingly. “
That’s really not fair, is it?”
“No, you’re right. It’s not fair,” said Bernie, kicking one of the pieces of luggage. “I’m just feeling ornery, or maybe guilty. Justine didn’t even ask me to stay for a drink just now. I told her the station was sending a car for me to move the stuff, and she asked me to wait down in the lobby.”
“She’s hurt,” said Gus.
“I know,” said Bernie quietly. “Justine’s a wonderful girl. Justine tried to make it work. It was my fault, not hers. I’m a slut, as you’ve probably heard. It seems to me half of New York has heard, thanks to my ex-mother-in-law.”
Gus had heard. “I’m surprised I haven’t been reading about you in Mavis Jones’s column, taking actresses to opening nights.”
“I’ve gone into the low-profile business,” said Bernie, touching Gus’s black tie. “Who’s party are you coming from?” he asked.
“Let me see,” answered Gus, figuring out the relationship. “Your ex-step-grandmother-in-law’s.”
“Oh, Dodo,” said Bernie. “I always liked Dodo. Lil and Laurance treated her like she was a maid in that family, and then she fooled the two of them by marrying their father. Did you know she used to jerk old Ormonde off after showing him dirty videos that Hubie’s boyfriend got for her?”
The two men roared with laughter. “Of course, I didn’t know that, but it’s a bit of information I’ll store up here,” Gus said, pointing to his head.
“Ezzie Fenwick always tells people that you’re going to write a book about the bunch of them.”
“Oh, yeah, I’ve heard he says that about me.”
“Is it true?”
“Who knows? If I ever get the time.”
“Here’s my car,” Bernie said. “Hop in. I’ll give you a ride home.”
“I heard you had a nice place,” said Bernie, after they had settled in to Gus’s apartment. “ ‘Nifty,’ somebody called it.”
“Who’d you hear that from?” asked Gus, handing Bernie a drink.
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