People Like Us (40 page)

“Oh, my God,” said Robert.

“He must have it,” said Herbie. It was the thing they all most feared.

“That’s just the way Sam looked,” said Boy.

The meal itself, excellent as always, was, however, a dispirited affair because death was in the air. Boy Fessenden, breaking one of the silences, said, “How sensitively you’ve cooked the fish, Hubie,” and, briefly, they talked about the proper way to roast red snapper. Then Boy, a raconteur, set out to save the evening and made everybody laugh by retelling the story, with embellishments, of Hubie’s encounter with the lifeguard at Bailey’s Beach when they were both teenagers staying with Hubie’s mother in Newport.

“What an exaggerator you are, Boy,” said Hubie, laughing, as he got up to clear the dishes. “That wasn’t the way it happened at all. You were just lucky that you didn’t get caught.”

He carried the dishes over to a tray on the sideboard. Ted, a singer, who was Boy’s companion, rose to help Hubie. “No, no, Ted,” said Hubie. “I can do it. I have it all down to a system.”

In the kitchen the chill began to come on him. He sat down for a few minutes, fearing that he might faint. Then he got up and left the kitchen. The others, listening to another of Boy’s stories, about two men called Cecil, whom their friends called the two Ceciles, assumed that Hubie was going to the bathroom. In his bedroom, he lay down on the bed and wished that Juanito was there, instead of out tomcatting, which Hubie was sure he was.

“Where the hell is Hubie?” asked Boy fifteen minutes later, when he had not returned. On the kitchen table was a chocolate cake and a silver bowl filled with raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries.

“I thought he went to the bathroom,” said Robert.

“I’ll knock,” said Boy.

The bedroom was dark when Boy went in.

“Hubie?” he asked. There was a note of fear in his voice at what he might find.

“I’m here on the bed,” said Hubie.

“What’s the matter?”

“Can you get me to Saint Vincent’s Hospital, Boy?” asked Hubie.

“Taxi or ambulance?” asked Boy.

“A taxi’s okay,” said Hubie.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Hubie?” asked Boy.

“What good would it have done?”

“What about your doctor?”

“There’s her number there. I tried to dial her, but I was too faint. Dr. Alicia Montego,” said Hubie.

“Dare I ask where Juanito is at a time like this?” asked Boy.

“Don’t knock Juanito, Boy. He’s been good to me lately. He needed a night off.”

“Should I call your mother? Or Justine?”

“They’re at the Renthals’ ball. You’ll never reach them.”

As Mickie Minardos was tied up right until the ball itself with the last-minute preparations, Loelia Manchester was alone that evening. She had asked Gus Bailey to pick her up and take her to Ruby Renthal’s dinner for forty before the ball, but Gus had already been asked for by Matilda Clarke and could not oblige Loelia. Dressed and ready, she was planning to walk around the corner to the Renthals’ apartment when there was a knock on her door. A man, with a hearing contraption in his ear, whom she immediately recognized as a Secret Service agent, told her that the First Lady would like a word with her in the Presidential Suite on the floor above.

Inside the Presidential Suite, Loelia was surprised to find the First Lady still in her negligee and her hair not yet attended to.

“How pretty you look, Loelia,” said the First Lady.

Loelia, complimented, smiled. “Thank you.”

“I saw your mother today. Adele Harcourt had a little lunch this noon.”

“Mother says unkind things about me these days,” said Loelia.

“Not to me she didn’t,” said the First Lady.

“You’re not dressed. Are you not going to the dinner first?”

“No. Nor the ball afterward.”

“But why?”

“Oh, reasons.”

“You mustn’t miss this. You mustn’t. Ruby will be crushed. At midnight, you know, ten thousand butterflies, live butterflies, just arrived today from Chile, all yellow and orange, are going to be released in the ballroom. It will be so divine. Please change your mind,” pleaded Loelia.

“May I confide in you, Loelia?” asked the First Lady.

“But of course.”

“I have heard there is a possibility that …” Alone, only the two of them in the room, she whispered in Loelia’s ear what had been told to her earlier by the presidential adviser.

“Elias? Never!” cried Loelia, in total dismissal of the absurdity of the charge, as if the Pope himself in Rome had been accused of financial malfeasance.

“You’re sure?”

“As sure of anything as I have ever been in my life,” said Loelia. “I have never known a friend like Ruby Renthal. Not well born, perhaps, but a delight. She tells me everything, really the most extraordinary things, of extraordinary intimacy. If there were even a possibility of what you are suggesting, she would have told me.”

“Perhaps she doesn’t know. Perhaps Elias hasn’t told her,” suggested the First Lady.

“Oh, no, impossible. They have a marvelous marriage. Elias always says about Ruby, ‘What a team we are,’ and they are. They share everything.”

The First Lady, who wanted to be convinced, was.

“I’m so happy to hear that. You know, she gave me those marvelous console tables, with the inlaid rams’ heads, for the Green Room of the White House, and I have a special affection for her myself,” said the First Lady.

“You’ll reconsider then?” asked Loelia.

“Perhaps I’ll go for an hour, to see the butterflies.”

“I’ll come back for you at eleven, if you’d like. It’s only around the corner.”

The Renthals hired the same red-and-white striped marquee, but covered on both sides, that Justine Altemus had used at her wedding at St. James’s, so that their guests could pass into their building without the throngs who had gathered on Fifth Avenue to watch the arrivals of the fashionable folk being able to see the jewels that had been taken out of every vault for the party. It also
shielded their guests’ eyes from that part of the sidewalk where Julio Martinez had so few hours before fallen to his bloody death.

Whether the new apartment of the Elias Renthals was beautiful or not depended on the eye of the beholder, but it was deemed, by universal consent of the forty favored guests who were asked for the dinner preceding the ball, awesome and magnificent in size and contents. “Never have I seen such pictures,” said Lil Altemus, who would have preferred to be in Rome visiting the Todescos, as she always was this time each year, but, alas, Laurance had requested that she postpone her trip until after the ball, and, always, all her life, she had accommodated her brother. Although Lil felt that her hostess had an excessive fondness for ancestral portraits of other people’s ancestors—lords and ladies by Sargent, countesses and duchesses by Boldini, and an empress by Winterhalter that she had once seen in a museum—she could not help but be impressed.

“I’m surprised to see you here, Fernanda,” said Lil to Fernanda Somerset, the mother of Loelia Manchester, who had only nodded to her daughter when they met in the elevator a few minutes earlier.

“I only came to see the furniture,” answered Fernanda.

“How do you suppose these people collect so much in such a short time?” Lil said.

“When Mr. Duveen helped my grandfather collect, it took twenty years for the pictures alone,” Fernanda Somerset replied. Then, holding her fingers in front of her mouth, she added, “Ezzie Fenwick tells me the curtains alone cost a million dollars.”

“Imagine!” said Lil.

Everything had to move like clockwork that night. The dinner guests, asked for eight sharp, had to be in their seats in the dining room by eight forty, so they could be up and out, four courses later, before the first of the four hundred guests who would be arriving for the ball entered the apartment.

When dinner was announced, Lil looked about for Justine and Bernie, surprised that they were so late. She had heard from Bobo when he had come to her apartment to do her hair how pretty her daughter looked with the rubrum lilies in her hair, and she was eager to see herself how her daughter looked.

“I don’t see Justine,” said Lil to Ruby when Ruby came to tell them it was time to go into dinner.

“But she canceled at the last minute,” said Ruby, surprised that Lil did not know.

“Justine? Canceled? I can’t believe it,” said Lil. “Bobo told me he set her hair only at five this afternoon.”

“She canceled at six. I was at a wake at the time, someone who works for Elias, in Queens, and didn’t hear until I got back. I’ve had such a hard time replacing them, but I finally got the nice Trouts to fill in.”

Lil looked quizzical, wondering about Justine.

“Come along, Rochelle,” said Ruby to Rochelle Prud’homme. “I’ll show you where you’re sitting.” Although one of the dinner guests was still missing, Ruby, aware that precision was necessary to keep to the schedule of the evening, herded her guests to the dining room. Rochelle, feeling jealous of the magnificence of the Renthals’ life-style, was already planning in her mind a party of her own that would rival the Renthals’.

Matilda Clarke, with Gus Bailey on her arm, wandered in silence through the rooms where she had once lived. It was a different kind of opulence than the opulence of Sweetzer Clarke’s family, but even she would have to admit, if questioned, that it was an opulence to be reckoned with.

“How lovely you look, Matilda,” said Ruby.

“A new dress for the occasion,” said Matilda.

“I bought her that dress,” whispered Rochelle to Ruby. “Otherwise she would have worn that damn black-and-white polka dot again. Terrible thing to go down the drain like the Clarkes did.”

“Dinner for forty and everything matches,” said Matilda to Gus, gazing around the dining room while
looking for their seats, at the crystal and china and silver, all bearing the letter
R
.

Only a year before Ruby would have said, “I could have dinner for a hundred and everything would still match,” referring to the Rothschild cache, but she had learned that Loelia Manchester would never have said such a thing, and now neither did she.

“You sit here, Rochelle,” said Ruby, pulling out a chair for her.

Rochelle was concerned always as to where she would be seated, and an excellent seat at table could make her as ecstatic as a humble seat could make her miserable. Now her eyes darted around the dining room. Four tables of ten, she saw, with Lorenza’s beautiful arrangements on each. She picked up the place card next to hers to see whom she was seated next to. Augustus Bailey, she read, written in a calligrapher’s hand.

“Oh, no, no,” she said to Ruby. “I don’t want to sit next to a writer. They always want to do articles about me.”

“You have the Honduran ambassador on the other side, Rochelle,” answered Ruby. “You know Jaime.”

“I feel a draft on my shoulders,” said Rochelle. “I think I might be cold here from the air conditioning. Where’s Elias sitting? I’ll sit next to Elias. We’re such old friends. I’ll move Matilda over here where I was, next to the writer. She brought him anyway, didn’t she? I’ll sit next to Elias, and the ambassador’s wife can go there.”

“The Petite Dynamo has ruined my seating,” said Ruby to Loelia. “Poor Elias. He begged me not to seat her next to him. Look, my God, the poor ambassador is now seated next to his own wife.”

Although Ruby was desirous of becoming a member of only one set in New York, the set that she considered the best and most impenetrable, she, in turn, when she entertained her new intimate friends, always provided a celebrated person from the outside
world to enhance the sociability of the evening. She liked hearing it said about her, “Last night I met the famous Dr. Priestly at Ruby Renthal’s house.” Her celebrated guest of that evening had, alas, not arrived.

Seated, finally, the thirty-nine of them, the waiters, in uniform and white gloves, began bringing in the caviar that made up the first course. Ruby engaged in animated conversation with her guest of honor Binkie Castoria on her right and, like the experienced hostess that she had become, signaled to a waiter to bring the Earl more caviar, for which she noticed he had an inordinate appetite, and, at the same time, with a gesture that indicated approval, let Maude Hoare know that her black dress, just arrived from Paris in time for the party, was perfection.

Arriving late, as she was famous for arriving late, entered the film star Faye Converse, ablaze with diamonds, and every eye in the dining room turned to stare at her. Faye, whose intimate circle of friends was of a more raucous variety than the refined friends of Elias and Ruby Renthal, played her role of movie star to the hilt, apologizing with the greatest charm to Ruby and Elias, both of whom had risen to greet her, as if they were the oldest friends, when, in fact, they were just meeting. A deal had been made, engineered by Gus Bailey, that Faye Converse would attend both the dinner and the ball afterward in exchange for a bountiful contribution toward the cure of the pestilence for which Faye worked so hard, although Elias was attributing to himself a nobility of purpose that was at odds with his true motive. Should his party be criticized in the press for its extravagance, he had in Faye the ready answer, that a contribution of enormous proportions had been made, as he intended to later point out in his speech, “toward a cure for the pestilence that is dwindling the ranks of the artistic community of the city.”

Ruby took Faye’s arm and led her to what was supposed to have been her place, on the left of Elias,
but Rochelle Prud’homme, firmly entrenched in her usurped seat, showed no sign of surrendering it. Blocked by silence from Elias each time she attempted to engage him in conversation, Rochelle assumed that he was a nervous host, which was not the case, and she called across the table to Ezzie Fenwick, as if Ruby and Faye Converse were not standing there.

“The Duchess left me some gold plates,” Rochelle called out. “What do you think I should do with them? Use them for ashtrays?”

“Or earrings,” answered Ezzie, who had turned over his plate to examine the markings on the back. “China like this you only see today in the showcases of dukes’ houses open to the public,” he added.