‘Is that what they are?’
‘Hamptons bimbos, bimbos with manicures and pedicures and Saks Fifth Avenue glad rags and enough gold to weigh ’em down and drown ’em if they ever fall off their boyfriends’ yachts. They have gold-digger plans to match their gold chokers, but they still bimbos. That about the full reach of your daddy’s and your uncle’s tastes, Mr Gwynne, ’cept I haven’t mentioned they also like fake eyelashes, big hair, big boobs and very small flat backsides.’
‘Shannay,’ Vanderbilt laughed, ‘what a wicked satirist you are.’
‘Mr Gwynne,’ Shannay said. ‘Don’t you go trying out those big words on me. Don’t you go Dryden on me, now.’
The dining-room table and the sideboard were magnificent with arrangements of gourds in various autumnal colours and contorted shapes. There were stunning swathes of leaves – crimson, dark tangerine, bright yellow – and fresh oranges studded with cloves, and a massive centrepiece of pomegranates, cranberries and glossy magnolia leaves. The whole penthouse smelled of sage and rosemary and thyme. Shannay played fifth wheel to the caterer’s team in the kitchen and was expected to stay there. The family and guests were waited on exclusively by black waiters and black wine stewards dressed in tuxes with starched white shirts and black bow ties.
‘Well,’ Vanderbilt’s father said, ‘I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the report from the school. Seems there’s a chance that Dryden can make a man out of you after all. This is your Uncle Harry, by the way, my older brother. He’s the one who got everything except this penthouse when our father died, so they’d never have let him marry a crazy Frenchwoman, chateau or not, lucky man.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Uncle Harry.’ Vanderbilt braced himself for the crunch of his finger bones but found Uncle Harry’s handshake moist and slack.
‘This family has never believed in dispersal of assets to siblings,’ Vanderbilt’s father explained. ‘Oldest son gets all, or almost all. It’s a way to keep the family holdings intact.’
‘I let you use our house in the Hamptons whenever you want,’ Uncle Harry said.
‘You do. And you never let me forget who owns it. And this is your cousin Billy, son, and eventually you’ll have to grovel to him when you want to use the house in the Hamptons.’
‘Running part of the family business now,’ Billy said. ‘Plus racehorse breeding on the side.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Billy.’ Billy’s handshake was firm and aggressive.
‘So,’ Billy said in such a way that Vanderbilt instantly knew Billy was privy to the blue dress and to every excessive devotional practice of his mother. ‘Made any friends at Dryden?’
‘Had to turn down a Thanksgiving invitation from the Cabots,’ Vanderbilt said nonchalantly. ‘And another one from the royal House of Saud. But family comes first, right?’
His father, his uncle and his cousin all paused. They all looked at him. ‘Which Cabot?’ Billy asked.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ Vanderbilt said vaguely. ‘His father teaches at Harvard and consults for the State Department. Or at least, he did before the election. Which Cabot would that be? I don’t know much about the family.’
This statement seemed to have much the same effect on Vanderbilt’s closest relatives as the Vanderbilt limousine had had on Dryden. ‘So,’ Uncle Harry said. ‘Nephew of Henry Cabot Lodge Jr? Or second cousin? Or son of a second cousin? Either way, that Nixon–Cabot Lodge ticket lost us the election, dammit. Those Boston Brahmins are too well-mannered to know how to fight to win.’
‘Too well-bred to take off their kid gloves,’ Billy said. ‘Might as well go up against those Kennedy crooks with a butter knife.’
‘Just the same,’ Vanderbilt’s father said. ‘Useful contact. Don’t underestimate its value. Rumour is that Kennedy will tap Cabot Lodge Jr for an ambassadorship. JFK’s got to watch his own back and his own back door, after all. He can’t afford to have the Cabots ganging up against him in Boston, especially not after he whipped Cabot Lodge Jr’s ass twice, first for his senate seat and then for the White House. So. An invitation to the Cabots, huh, even though we’re not quite sure which family offshoot that is. Excellent. Excellent. You should accept. For Christmas, you should accept. I knew the school would straighten you out if anything could.’
The caterer’s steward appeared with a tray of champagne glasses and smoked oysters. ‘Exit politics, enter revelry,’ Vanderbilt’s father said. ‘So now I’d like to introduce my friend Lisette, this gorgeous creature.’
‘How do you do, Lisette?’ Vanderbilt offered his hand. ‘That’s a French name. Are you French?’
Lisette laughed. ‘Christ, no! I’m an actress. My agent thought the name would be a good sell.’ Lisette, who must have been all of twenty and who was indeed gorgeous if one’s tastes ran in a certain way, took Vanderbilt’s hand in both of hers and stroked her own cheek with it. ‘You’re such a cute little slip of a boy,’ she said, ‘you look like a choir boy. You’re so adorable, I could just eat you right up.’
‘I’m dessert,’ Vanderbilt said archly. ‘I think you have to work through the cold cuts first.’
His father roared with laughter. ‘Chip off the old block,’ he said. ‘Smart as a whip. A lot smarter than your Billy, Harold, wouldn’t you say?’
‘That wouldn’t be hard,’ Uncle Harry said. ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen to the family business after I go. I don’t see how I can trust you, Lawrie, even supposing you don’t drink too much and play so hard that your lights go out before mine do. Maybe Gwynne can step up to the plate by then? Meanwhile, I’m putting as much as I can into trust funds with managers of my own choosing, because Billy is hopeless. He just doesn’t have the killer instinct or any head for management at all, and I don’t see his MBA making a difference worth peanuts.’
Billy gave both his father and his cousin a thunderous look.
‘Speaking of playing too hard,’ Vanderbilt’s father said. ‘Aren’t you going to introduce your current playmate to my son?’
‘Forgive me, Gwynne Patrice. Allow me to present my friend Celise,’ Uncle Harry said.
Celise was not at all in the same gorgeous-creature category as Lisette and yet she gave off the air of someone who thought she was, of someone who had a clear sense of what was due to her, of someone who saw herself in a different mirror. Vanderbilt sensed that any mirror into which Celise looked took orders from her, though what everyone else saw was what Vanderbilt’s mother – la comtesse – might have primly described as une femme pas belle au rabais, a plain woman available at a discount price.
This discrepancy between what others saw and what Celise clearly believed they saw fascinated Vanderbilt. He had observed the nature of entitlement up close at Dryden and was becoming finely attuned to its gradations. Celise’s air of what was rightfully hers was not remotely like Cabot’s or like that of the scions of Middle-Eastern potentates who were all so many generations deep in inherited privilege that they were not even faintly aware of its existence or of how it affected their behaviour and their views. The sheer oblivion of the entitled, the sheer level of ignorance about other life forms, Vanderbilt was thinking, made these people charming and generous and impeccably mannered, like the elegant and gracious Comtesse de la Vallière Vanderbilt, for example.
Here surely was a subject for a term paper, in philosopy perhaps, or economics, or social anthropology. A Comparative History of Privilege: A study of impoverished inheritors of ancient titles vs inheritors of wealth at least two centuries old vs American nouveau riche. There would certainly be an inverse relationship to civility and graciousness. He imagined how Father JG might set the brilliant and learned but low-born Cardinal Wolsey against Henry VIII. Discuss this, he might have said to Cap and Ti-Loup.
Unbidden, a sudden sickening memory flashed before Vanderbilt’s eyes like one of those high-speed subliminal ads on TV. He saw a pompous little boy in a chateau courtyard and a wild girl with matted hair dropping from a tree. Fat cat, she
accused. Gros richard …
‘But not anymore,’ he protested.
‘Not anymore what?’ his father said. ‘Are you speaking of your Uncle Harry or his girlfriend?’
‘Uh, sorry, I was thinking aloud.’ Vanderbilt had to go and stand at one of the French windows and look out over the park, such a dizzy moment of loss and disorientation overcame him.
‘Thinking about what?’ his father demanded.
‘Oh, nothing really. Dryden, the Cabots, my tutor in France …’
Someone put a hand on his arm and stood so close he recoiled. ‘Forgive me,’ Celise murmured. ‘I don’t mean to take liberties but you look as though you need comfort.’
‘Thank you, but you’re mistaken,’ Vanderbilt said politely. ‘I’m fine.’
Celise stepped closer and put her hand on his arm again, her fingers applying pressure. She put her lips close against his ear and whispered something which he did not catch but her grip sent a low electrical buzz from his forearm to his shoulder. There was something faintly menacing about this, all the more so because her touch purported to be tentative.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I didn’t quite –’ but even as he spoke, he took note of a curious segue in her manner. She was fluid. She had quicksilver costume changes. She became timid and shy. She touched his cheek fleetingly but this time with a nervous air of trespass.
‘Forgive me. I didn’t mean to offend,’ she said softly, with lowered eyes. He had a weird sense of being directed on a stage, of being cast in a play whose script he did not know, but then she raised her eyes to meet his. Hers were large and mournful (cow eyes, he thought) and he was completely unable to translate what language they spoke. He was also incapable of looking away. He sensed that if he blinked, she would strike. She had cloudy no-colour eyes (hazel, perhaps?) and a way of maintaining intense eye contact for a disconcertingly long stretch of time, a habit that seemed to mesmerise Uncle Harry and make him jealous.
‘Gwynne Patrice,’ his uncle said sharply. ‘You are monopolising Celise and that is very bad form.’
‘Oh, Harry,’ Celise said. ‘It’s so sweet of you to be so possessive.’
‘You’ll have to make allowances for my nephew,’ Uncle Harry said. ‘He’s half French and half Catholic, and his mother is full-time French Catholic neurotic, but we try not to hold it against him, especially since the half-French part is also part royal.’
‘My goodness,’ Celise said. ‘Can I hug the part-royal part?’
‘I don’t let that part hang out,’ Vanderbilt said, deadpan. ‘Are you an actress like Lisette?’
‘Oh, she’s an actress all right,’ his father laughed.
‘I believe my mother had French ancestry,’ Celise said demurely. ‘Or perhaps merely fantasised that she did. She had old Louisiana French connections, or so she said. Neither your father nor your uncle has remotely done you justice, Gwynne Patrice. Men with soulful eyes and long lashes make me go weak at the knees.’
‘That comment is going to cost you one diamond pendant,’ Uncle Harry said.
Celise turned in close to Vanderbilt’s uncle and nuzzled him. ‘I’m just being nice to your relatives,’ she murmured. She bit Uncle Harry on the neck and drew blood.
‘Excuse us,’ Uncle Harry said. ‘Don’t hold up dinner on our account. We left something in our guest room and we may be detained.’
‘Last year,’ Shannay informed Vanderbilt in the kitchen when he snuck out for a break from the horse talk, stock-market speculation, predictions of doom in the wake of the election and the general unbearable tedium of the dinner-table conversation, ‘Celise was your father’s girlfriend. She knows what she’s after, that one. I have to make their beds and change their sheets, you know, so there’s not much I miss. She’s a widow, or so she claims, but there are plenty of rumours. No one knows where she came from. She just popped up like a mushroom at Upper East Side parties and fundraisers – and at the opera, of course. I know most of the housekeepers between East 42nd and East 96th. Even if only half of what I hear about her is true, it would scorch your ears and rot your socks.’
‘Is she hoping to marry Uncle Harry?’
‘Last year, she was hoping to marry your father but divorce was out of the question, he told her, on account of the kind of Catholic your mother is. I heard him tell her that. So this year she’s pitching for your uncle, who’s not a Catholic and whose ex-wife is already married to someone else. Good luck with that, is what I’d say. He’s the mistress kind, not the remarrying kind, and anyway he’s got a son and heir. So she’ll strike out there.’
6.
Vanderbilt could not bear the thought of Christmas on Fifth Avenue so when Cabot offered again, he accepted. Christmas in Boston, Christmas on Commonwealth Avenue in the Back Bay: this sounded far more attractive than Fifth Avenue, but he needed to call Shannay to apologise and explain.
‘Don’ need to explain nothing to me,’ Shannay said. ‘You think I’d put up with your father if anywhere else paid enough? Besides, now he’s planning to stay in the Hamptons, which means I can leave earlier for the Bronx.
‘But I’ve got to tell you something, Mr Gwynne. Those Goldberg people, I like them, and you are not treating them right. I go visit once a week. I have afternoon tea with them. They make me feel like a lady. Madame Goldberg, she doesn’t know what to think. She doesn’t understand. She says you don’t answer her letters. She says she has information that will break your heart but she can’t reach you.’
Vanderbilt wanted nothing to do with information that would break his heart. He had space-walked into a parallel universe and he was not going to leave it. The mere thought of stepping into nothingness again – of freefalling in an intergalactic nowhere where there was zero chance of not being an alien – this caused him a nausea so extreme that he would have to pause and lean against a wall or hang onto a stair rail in order not to lose his balance and fall.
‘I don’t know what Madame Goldberg means about her letters,’ he lied to Shannay. ‘It must be a postal problem.’
Christmas with the Cabots in December 1960 was both sumptuous and restrained, as warm and gregarious as it was well-mannered and refined. There were many Cabots with many young children underfoot. The children were exquisitely dressed and were immaculately well-behaved and polite. The house smelled of fresh evergreens. There were pine-bough garlands and mistletoe thickly draped across mantels and twined around staircase banisters. There were Renaissance angels on sideboards. There were many candles in high carved candlesticks and in silver candelabra.
‘Your house reminds me of my mother’s chateau,’ Vanderbilt said. ‘You have some beautiful Louis XV pieces.’
‘You have to say that to my mother at dinner,’ Cabot said. ‘Please. She’ll be delighted.’
‘I promise.’
‘I have an idea. We should go to the Loire Valley instead of Florence this summer,’ Cabot suggested, suddenly inspired. ‘I’ll ask my parents. You could travel with us and we can all visit your chateau. Maybe your father will join us?’
‘That’s …’ Vanderbilt’s panic was so sudden and extreme that he could not draw breath. A hot pain shot up his spine and smouldered at the back of his neck. ‘My mother,’ he said carefully, ‘is … well, she’s on the reclusive side.’
‘Oh, I forgot.’ Cabot thumped his forehead with the palm of his hand. ‘I think I heard something about that. I’d forgotten. She’s a bit … the Emily Dickinson kind, right?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Thoughtless and careless of me, Vanderbilt. I’m sorry. Forgive me?’
‘Of course I forgive you. Can I ask you something, Cabot?’
‘Of course.’
‘What do you think of McVie?’
‘I admire him. He’s pulling himself up by the bootstraps. Between the two of you, we are going to win the cross-country crown. That’s what Dryden does: gives boys like McVie a shot at grabbing the gold ring.’
‘Where exactly is S
omerville?’ Vanderbilt asked.
‘Other side of the Charles. North of Cambridge.’
‘How would we get there?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I told him I’d be in Boston for Christmas and he invited me to drop in. Why don’t we go meet him tomorrow?’
Cabot stared as though Vanderbilt had suggested they step in front of a subway train. ‘Well, you know,’ he said, ‘oil and water don’t mix and you can’t make them mix.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘He’s just not our sort, that’s all.’
‘You said you admired him.’
‘I do. But that doesn’t mean … I’ve never been to Somerville is what I mean. It’s not the kind of place where Cabots go.’
In the spring term of 1961, Cabot cajoled Vanderbilt into a role in Dryden’s annual stage production, always part of the graduation ceremonies. ‘We’re very Shakespearean,’ Cabot said. ‘It’s always a hoot, men playing the female parts in drag. This year we’re doing Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and we want you to play Earnest, who is really Jack, or also Jack, because you’re so good at accents. It’s all about multiple identities and social masks.’
‘I know,’ Vanderbilt said. ‘What part will you play?’
‘I’ll be Algernon. McVie has agreed, under duress, to play Gwendolen. After all, you two spend hours together playing chess so we figured you might as well play at getting married. And I’ve tricked Benson into playing Lady Bracknell because he’s too stupid to know what he’s doing.’
‘In that case,’ Vanderbilt said, ‘I can’t resist.’
In April, Cabot received notification of his acceptance at MIT and in May the Dryden graduation production of The Importance of Being Earnest went down in the annals of the academy as a sensation.
In the fall semester of 1961, when Cabot was no longer at Dryden, Vanderbilt and McVie became even closer, running cross-country every morning, playing chess every weekend. But in November, come Thanksgiving, they went their separate family ways.
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