“Thanks!” said Peter.
When Peter turned toward Holly after this exchange, he saw that she was gazing at the full moon. She quickly turned her head and looked at him with a sheepish smile. A dozen couples were shuffling toward the door of Beeche’s house in a formless queue. Holly and Peter joined them. After a moment of staring at the backs of heads and overcoats, Holly gave a nod to the rear.
“Full moon,” she said.
“I noticed.”
“It’s silly,” Holly said. “You know, how many full moons have I seen in my life? But whenever I do see one, it makes my heart race a little.”
“I know what you mean.”
“It always makes me think,” Holly said, “that something is going to happen.” She looked over at Peter with another sheepish smile. “Do you know what I mean?”
“I know what you mean.”
Arthur Beeche’s house stretched across an entire block of the avenue and looked as if it might have been built three hundred years earlier. It was three stories high and nine bays across. The central section formed a faux portico, with a pediment and four decorative Corinthian columns. Carvings of vines, flowers, snakes, dolphins, stags, and other plant life and beasts stood in relief around the central windows, along the architrave, and within the pediment. With some effort, one could discern that the arabesques on the keystone of each window depicted two Bs, back to back. Light burst from all the windows as if they were the apertures of a roaring furnace.
Two servants patrolled the sidewalk, helping guests out of their cars and instructing the drivers where to move. Another two stood on either side of the doors, which one reached by a short flight of steps. More servants met the guests inside. They were dressed in several different types of livery: tails and fancy waistcoats on a couple of them, tunics, simple black dresses. A man took Peter’s coat and Holly relinquished hers to a maid.
When Peter saw Holly without her coat, he almost jumped backward. She was wearing a gray silk dress with a long, flowing skirt. The bodice was held up by the thinnest possible straps and had been sewn with tiny pearls. She wore no adornments whatsoever, creating a thrilling line, interrupted only by those thin straps, from the fingertips of one hand to those of the other.
“Wow,” Peter said. “You really do look beautiful.”
“This old thing?” said Holly. “I think my aunt got it forty years ago. But thank you.”
“Good evening, Mrs. Speedwell. Good evening, Mr. Russell,” one of the senior servants said. “If you will kindly mount the stairs and go to your right, you will find that drinks are being served in the Hall.”
Holly and Peter thanked him and were suitably impressed by his ability to recognize them. The entrance hall was a large cube, with fireplaces on either side and, on the ceiling, an enormous painting of Zeus visiting Danae as a shower of gold (this had apparently been an earlier Beeche’s idea of a mercenary joke). Holly and Peter went up two flights of marble steps and, as instructed, turned right. Here they found a corridor with a floor inlaid with marble of different colors and lined with paintings, a few busts, and two rows of V-backed gilded chairs. Looking at the chairs with awe, Holly whispered to Peter (whispering seemed appropriate), “Venetian.”
At the end of the corridor there stood another servant, who raised his right arm and said, “This way, if you please.” They stepped through an archway and then stopped simultaneously. They were on the landing of another marble staircase, which led down to a vast, two-story room—the Hall, evidently. Holly and Peter could look down on the guests, survey the room as a whole. A painting or fresco containing innumerable gods and putti, all twisting and turning dramatically, covered the ceiling. More epic scenes filled the upper halves of the walls. Piers, moldings, and any other spare surface were all carved. Medieval and Renaissance religious paintings lined the lower half of the walls. Spaced along the walls at regular intervals, busts sat on pedestals.
They walked down the staircase and entered the crowd. One servant asked them what they would like to drink, and another appeared with their order almost immediately (wine for Holly, scotch for Peter). They strolled a bit. Trying not to crane his neck too conspicuously, Peter studied the noble marble heads, the muscular bodies of the gods, the putti hurtling toward him from the ceiling. He tried not to stare at the guests, among whom he saw celebrated financiers, dancers, blue bloods, movie stars, and tycoons; legendary members of the firm; and also people of both sexes whom he did not recognize but who were young and incredibly good-looking. Then, about twenty feet away, at the end of a gap that had opened in the crowd, he noted a person of particular interest. There stood Arthur Beeche in a group of three or four others. Peter recognized him immediately, although he had never seen Beeche before in person and his likeness only rarely appeared in the press or company publications. He was unmistakable. Peter was surprised by the strength of his physical presence. He was taller than Peter had thought and had broad shoulders and a commensurately wide, solid-looking torso. But the most striking thing about him was his head, a large oblong block. It looked like a medium-sized stereo speaker.
Beeche was wearing a double-breasted dinner jacket, black pants with a line of satin down the sides, and black patent leather pumps. There was nothing at all out of the ordinary about any of this. Nevertheless, Peter found the clothes arresting. They not only fit perfectly, they fit as if they were Beeche’s pelt. Further, the material seemed different from that used to make Peter’s own evening clothes and those of the other guests. The black was both deeper and more vivid. The fabric seemed only to absorb light, reflecting none; it had a kind of glow of blackness. Meanwhile, the stripes down the legs and the lapels, also satin, resembled the smoother, glossier passages in an all-black painting.
Peter nudged Holly and nodded in Beeche’s direction. “Our host,” he said.
Holly looked at Beeche for a moment. “He’s different from what I would have expected,” she said.
“What did you expect?” asked Peter.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Holly said. “I thought that after so many generations of having so much money, families were supposed to decline and produce weak, effete, coupon-clipping, zillionth-copy epigones of the founding titan. But Mr. Beeche there seems pretty robust.”
“Yes, I guess he is,” said Peter. “He runs the firm, he’s absolutely the boss, so he’s not rising at noon and playing snooker all day.”
“What do you know about him?” Holly asked.
Peter shrugged. “I’ve never met him or talked to him,” he said. “Everyone says he’s very smart, and the firm is certainly doing well. He’s never been interested in creating a financial supermarket and all that stuff. He doesn’t hire a lot of people during a boom or fire a lot during a bust. He got into bond futures early. Over the years he’s done just about everything, and he will still go down to the trading floor and talk to those guys. He’s famous for glancing at somebody’s screen and telling him that he’s got a great trade going, or a terrible one, or is missing the one he should be doing. With the bankers, he’ll call on clients or potential ones, and once in a while he likes to be right in there as part of the team doing a deal, even if it’s a fairly small one, staying up until all hours, complaining about the lawyers, all that. People say that he’s a really nice guy but always quite formal. He’ll laugh and all, but he’s a real square.
“What else? He has six or seven or eight houses around the world. He might not visit one for a few years, but they are always kept fully staffed, of course. He likes shooting, he rides, he collects just about everything, but what he seems to like even more is having people make stuff for him, like custom cars. Then there are all the charities; he’s very discreet about it, never his name on anything, but everybody knows that he gives away millions, tens of millions.
“Oh, and finally, from what I understand he was married to someone he really loved. She died years ago, and he’s never stopped mourning her and will never marry again. Or that’s what people say.”<
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“Did they have any children?” Holly asked.
“No, I’m pretty sure they didn’t,” said Peter.
“But then what about an heir?”
“Well, that’s a problem, especially since he’s an only child. You know, the Beeches believe in primogeniture, not strictly but pretty close. Arthur owns the firm, and all the houses and so forth that his father owned. Over the years of course there have been settlements on siblings and cousins, and they are all just fine. But Arthur himself owns basically everything.”
“That’s amazing,” said Holly.
“Yes,” said Peter, “isn’t it?”
“Well, I don’t want to hold you back in your career. Aren’t you supposed to be going up to him and making him like the cut of your jib or something?”
“I probably should,” said Peter. “Uh-oh, wait. There he goes.” Beeche shook hands with a couple of the people he had been talking to and then began to walk away. At the same time, the crowd filled in behind him. “I’m not sure that it would be a good idea to push through people and run after him,” said Peter.
“No.”
“They say he goes around after dinner and makes sure he’s had a word with everyone,” Peter said. “So I guess I’ll have my chance to make an impression.”
They moved along slowly through the crowd and headed toward a predella mounted on the wall. After they had undertaken some further sightseeing, a couple of colleagues stopped to talk to Peter, and he introduced Holly, and after a while he did detach himself from her in order to mingle, joking with one colleague about his—Peter’s—lack of competence at golf, with another about the lousy performance of a competitor’s product, with a third about an office romance. Eventually, stewards (or whoever) appeared to say that dinner was served. Waiters unburdened the guests of their drinks and the crowd was brought through an enormous doorway. Tables had been set in two adjoining rooms (neither the actual dining room), and these, though smaller and with lower ceilings, were in their own ways even more remarkable than the Hall. The first was light, feminine. On the walls hung eighteenth-century panels that showed rose-cheeked girls and boys in pursuit of each other through flamboyant gardens. The second room was dark, masculine, with wood paneling and life-sized carvings of fish, birds, game, and flora on the walls and chimneypiece.
Peter accompanied Holly to her table in the first room. Two guests were already there. On the far side stood a tall young man wearing a shawl-collared dinner jacket; he had a dense head of straight black hair and an aquiline nose. This was the English rock star who was reputed to be so cultivated and literate, everyone’s favorite guest for a country-house weekend. A woman in her seventies was sitting down. Her face looked as if it had been fixed for decades in an expression of utter boredom, and she wore a diamond necklace, diamond earrings, a diamond bracelet, and, on her left ring finger, a diamond the size of an ice cube. Holly whispered to Peter, “The Principessa Elisabetta Foscari.”
“How do you know that?”
“She was from Chicago. Betty Jones. My grandmother knew her.”
Peter pulled Holly’s seat out for her.
“So,” Holly said, “this is dinner with the boss?”
“Yep.”
“Well, it should be interesting.”
“I hope so,” said Peter.
Most of the guests throughout the room seemed now to be sitting down; Peter went off to seek his own place. Before he had gone too far, he looked back. Holly looked beautiful. The man seated to her right had arrived, and Peter recognized him as a senior member of the legal staff at Beeche, a man reputed to be one of the smartest but most approachable in the firm, and who, Peter had heard, read Virgil in the bathtub. So that should be enjoyable for her. He was probably in his seventies and was quite short and had one of those faces that, while semirepulsive, also had a certain sex appeal. He was the type of man whom Holly liked talking to perhaps more than any other and whom she had a knack for charming.
A servant guided Peter to his own table, which was in the second room. As he walked toward it, he found he had a little spring in his step; he even discovered himself to be humming. You couldn’t help but be exhilarated by the surroundings and the people. This was good. And then there was the blessing of the driver-sprite. And the full moon.
Peter was the last to arrive at his table. As he sat down, he first greeted Isabella, who was seated on his left. She exclaimed her hello. “I thought I might be sitting with you!” she said. They kissed on the cheek and caught up for a minute. “How is Charlotte? I have been meaning to call you guys.” “Have you been back home recently?” Peter, to be frank, had a difficult time carrying on his side of the conversation. Isabella had jet black hair and silky white skin, not a cold, translucent white, not like porcelain, but warmer—alabaster. Peter’s eyes followed her long neck up to her chin and then traced its sharp turn and those of her lips and the tip of her nose. Looking down, Peter saw that the straps of her dress held two narrow panels of fabric that simply hung down from them, concealing very little. All of this was quite distracting.
Peter and Isabella’s brief chitchat drew to an end, and the man on her left, to whom she had been speaking before Peter arrived, leaned in to introduce himself.
“Hello. Seth Bernard,” said the man, reaching his hand over to shake Peter’s. Seth Bernard. Seth Bernard!
“Peter Russell. How do you do?”
“Very well, thank you.” Bernard spoke to the woman next to him, a lean, elderly woman. “Mrs. Beeche, do you know Peter Russell?”
“I don’t believe I do,” she said. “How nice to see you, Mr. Russell.”
“How do you do, Mrs. Beeche?” Peter said.
The other guests introduced themselves with a nod or a wave: Otis Bell, Athina Kakouilli, Jack Thorndale, Lisa Eisler. Peter nodded and repeated, “Peter Russell. How do you do?”
With Bernard and Isabella talking on Peter’s left, and Lisa Eisler and Jack Thorndale on his right, Peter had a moment to pretend to study his menu card (old-fashioned: homard aux aromates, gigot de pré-salé braisé). In fact, he needed time to collect himself. His heart was pounding and his head throbbing; he was so astounded by the identities of his tablemates that he thought he might faint. Seth Bernard was Seth Bernard, Arthur Beeche’s alter ego. Mrs. Arthur Beeche was Mrs. Arthur Beeche, Arthur’s mother. Otis Bell had recently been appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Athina Kakouilli, a poet, had won the Nobel Prize for Literature a couple of years back. Jack Thorndale was a legend as a sportsman and adventurer who had known everyone, slept with everyone, been everywhere, and done everything. Finally, Lisa Eisler. Now, who was Lisa Eisler? Peter knew that he recognized the name and had seen pictures of her somewhere. Oh, yes! Lisa Eisler ran an organization that had just completed one of the largest and most successful relief missions in history. There had been stories about her in the papers and magazines. Tens of thousands of lives had been saved.
Which, except for the astoundingly beautiful Isabella, left: Peter. Good old Peter. Peter, who worked up on the fifty-eighth floor of the Beeche Building, and, it was true, had done a couple of decent things in his job. Peter, who had started on the JV hockey team in college. Peter, who was perfectly nice-looking in a boring sort of way. Now, how did this stack up against the people whom he was supposed to impress for the rest of the evening?
Seth Bernard (Seth Bernard!) was a little above medium height and had a smooth oval face that was becoming heavy in the cheeks and an oval build. He was bald, and the top of his head looked polished, as indeed did his entire appearance. His very clothes might have been buffed. The slight downturn of his eyes and the corners of his mouth gave him a mournful air. Bernard’s influence upon and closeness to Arthur put him in a category entirely separate from all other executives. According to the stories Peter had heard, the two had grown up a block from each other and had attended the same nursery school, all-boys elementary school, boarding school, and college. Arthur then had his Wanderjahr b
efore joining the firm, whereas Bernard studied in England for a couple of years and attended law school. From there he went to Beeche, hired by Arthur’s father, who made him superior to Arthur, and soon began giving him firm-wide responsibilities. The elder Beeche came to rely heavily on Bernard, moving him to a nearby office soon after his arrival. Arthur actually rose toward Bernard in the firm’s hierarchy, but by the time Arthur took over for his father at forty, he and Bernard had worked closely together for years. Throughout, they remained extremely close friends. After Maria died, Arthur lived with Bernard and his wife and three children for months.
Bernard was famous for his startling competence. Ten minutes after someone had mentioned a problem to him, he would call back, having arranged a solution. He disparaged political maneuvering within the firm, but he was highly competitive and tough: if he had been allowed to mutilate all the antagonists he had vanquished, he could have lined his walls with scrotums, like shrunken heads. Except for Beeche himself, there was no one in the firm who could help, or hinder, a young man more than Seth Bernard.
Mrs. Beeche must have been in her eighties. She was slender and had bright blue eyes and carefully tended white hair. Charlotte often liked to go on and on about how stunning some shriveled old woman was, and while Peter always tried to respond with the appropriate sensitivity, he tended to discount Charlotte’s comments as claptrap intended to demonstrate her own appreciation of true beauty. She’s just a wrinkly old lady, he would think, who would kill to be eighteen again. But in this case, Peter found himself outdoing what would have been Charlotte’s likely estimation. Mrs. Beeche’s skin hung loosely around her jaw, it was true, and age spots marked it in an all-over pattern, but one hardly noticed these imperfections. She did not wear much in the way of jewelry: wedding and engagement rings; a brooch in the shape of an elephant, encrusted with various small stones.
Love In the Air Page 30
