People Like Us (57 page)

Do you know what I think, Peach? I think it’s possible to be happy again. Even here.

With love,
Gus

51

Efficient in her duties, Justine Altemus walked through the rooms and wards of St. Vincent’s Hospital, as she walked through the rooms and wards of St. Clair’s Hospital and Bellevue Hospital, bringing magazines and sweets to the victims of the disease that people called a pestilence, making telephone calls or writing letters for those who were no longer able to do such things for themselves. Steeled now, her duties before her emotions,
she could smile and banter with the boys. “Hi, Justine,” they would call out to her. “Hi, Billy,” she’d call back. Or Phil. Or Christian. Or whomever. She knew all their names, and most of them knew hers.

“Hi, Justine,” she heard someone say in the same bed where Phil, her favorite, had died a few days before.

“Hi,” she called back brightly. She could see at once, whoever he was, that he was beyond caring for reading material or Hershey bars with almonds.

“Would you like me to write a letter for you, or call anyone?” she asked. He didn’t answer. “I’d be happy to read to you. I have all the latest magazines.”

“Don’t recognize me, do you, Justine? Do I look that bad?” the patient asked. “I used to be a good-looking guy.”

She knew that he was young, even though he looked old. His arms were like the handles of a broom. Then, on his earlobe, she noticed a diamond, the diamond that her father had given her mother in an engagement ring, and that her mother had given to Hubie when she had vain hopes that Hubie would marry Violet Bastedo, and that Hubie had given to Juanito Perez.

“Oh, Juanito,” she cried, sinking to her knees by the side of the bed. She knew she would be asked to leave by the nurse in charge of the ward if she was seen crying, but she could not help herself, burying her head in the bedclothes to muffle the sounds. “I hadn’t heard. I didn’t know.”

“Imagine, you crying for me, Justine,” he said, with wonder in his faint voice.

“I’m sorry.”

“I heard about this volunteer lady called Justine, real classy, everybody said, who comes here every afternoon, and I thought to myself, I bet that’s Justine Altemus they’re talking about.”

“That’s me,” said Justine.

“You had a baby, I heard.”

Justine smiled and nodded her head. “I called him Hubie. He’s beautiful, Juanito.”

“Got a picture?”

“Not here. Next time I’ll bring you one,” she said. They exchanged glances, each wondering if there would be a next time they would see each other.

“You’re beautiful, Justine,” said Juanito.

“Oh, no, I’m not,” she replied. “Interesting looking. Almost pretty. Those are the adjectives that are applied to me, but it’s sweet of you to pay me the compliment.”

“Hubie always said you sold yourself short,” said Juanito.

Justine smiled. “That’s what Hubie used to say. You’re right. I’d forgotten that.”

“You seeing anybody since Bernie?”

“Not really. I’m turning into one of those women who call up men to take them places. I-have-two-tickets-for-the-theater-on-Tuesday-can-you-come?”

“One of these days you’ll meet some nice doctor.”

“You’re different than I imagined you were going to be.”

Juanito smiled. “I used to be a bum, but I classed up when I became a millionaire.”

Justine smiled.

“There’s a few things I want to tell you, Justine.”

“What?”

“You know those chairs your mother wanted so bad?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Justine.

“Charles-something chairs?” It was an effort for him to speak.

“Tenth. Charles the Tenth. Doesn’t matter.”

“No, you gotta hear this, Justine. Your Aunt Minnie Willoughby’s chairs that your mother sent Jamesey Crocus to con me out of.”

Justine nodded, knowing he spoke the truth.

“I left them out in the street one at a time, for
those people who furnish their apartments with the discarded furniture they find on the sidewalk at night.”

Justine started to laugh.

“Eleven poor people have got some pretty good chairs, if only they knew it,” whispered Juanito.

“I think Hubie would have liked that, Juanito,” said Justine.

“One more thing.”

“Don’t tire yourself, Juanito.”

“About the money Hubie left me.”

“Oh, I don’t care about the money that Hubie left you. That was Hubie’s money, and he wanted you to have it.”

Juanito raised a hand to let him talk. “You have to know this. He wanted Herkie Saybrook to make a new will. He wanted the money to go to a hospice for guys without any money to die, to be able to die decent, but he died before Herkie could get here to make the change.”

“It doesn’t matter now, Juanito, really it doesn’t, but you’re nice to tell me that.”

“But that’s not it. I had Herkie Saybrook down to the loft before I got so sick they had to put me in here.”

“Herkie? Why?”

“I know what you’re thinking. I’m the first Puerto Rican Herkie Saybrook ever wrote out a will for.”

She stared at him.

“I know you and your mother thought I was going to leave the money to a leather bar or something trashy, but I want to do with it what Hubie would have done if he’d lived a few days longer. It’s all going, every cent of it, all those Van Degan bucks, to a hospice. Let me tell you something, Justine. Hubie and I may have had our problems, but he was the only person in my whole life who ever treated me nice.”

“Oh, Juanito.”

For a few minutes they remained in their positions, thinking their own thoughts. “Do you have any
family you want me to get in touch with? That’s one of the things I do.”

“No,” he said.

“Nobody?”

“There’s an aunt, but she don’t want to hear from me.”

“A mother? A father?”

“My father kicked my mother in the stomach when I was a little kid, and she died. I grew up in a home for boys in San Juan. I don’t even know if my father’s alive or dead, and I don’t care.”

“Good lord,” said Justine.

“That’s the same thing Hubie said when I told him that story the first time. ‘Good lord.’ You swells all talk alike.”

“Tell me more.”

“I’ve led a dicey kind of life, Justine.”

“What’s dicey?”

“I used to hustle.”

“That means doing it for money?”

“That’s right. I knew from the time I was a teenager in that home that my looks were my only asset in life. There’s not much I haven’t done. Even porn, if you want to know the truth. After Hubie left me all that money, you don’t know how proper I got. I mended my ways, and then I got sick. And here you find me.”

“Oh, Juanito, I’m so sorry.”

“I’m not afraid to die, Justine. I’m afraid of what happens between now and dying. I’ve watched some of these guys, what they go through. I don’t know if I’m up to it. Hubie was a class act dying. I’m not a class act like Hubie,” said Juanito.

“I think you’re a class act, Juanito.” She squeezed his hand.

Juanito squeezed hers back.

“Can I get you anything?” asked Justine finally.

“Just some water,” he replied. “There’s none left here.”

“I’ll fill the Thermos,” she said.

When she returned a few minutes later, she poured him a paper cup of water and held it for him to drink. Then she puffed up the pillows behind his head. Juanito, sleepy now, smiled at her.

“I want you to have this, Justine,” he said.

She looked at him. He reached out and took her hand. In it he placed the Altemus diamond.

It wasn’t until she read it on the front page of the
Times
that Lil Altemus learned that Juanito Perez, the lover of her late son, had left his entire ten-million-dollar inheritance to a hospice for AIDS victims to be known as the Hubert Altemus, Jr., Hospice.

52

After Gus Bailey went to prison, Ruby Renthal vanished from sight. The name Renthal was so well known and so associated with greed that even people in shops looked up and stared at her when she gave them her charge cards. She became altogether separated from the grand people who had once fought to sit at her table and to dance at her ball.

Ruby, however, in spite of the bad turns her charmed life had taken, was still the possessor of a large fortune, settled on her by Elias in their halcyon days. Her withdrawal from social life to a simpler existence in the country was from choice, not financial adversity, as many people thought. She enjoyed the quiet life, the country walks, and tending her garden. She saw a small group of country friends whose names never appeared in Dolly De Longpre’s column, or Florian Gray’s, and their sort of entertaining was of the last-minute variety,
with dinner on trays in front of a fire, rather than with all the grandeur of her former life in New York society.

“The relief,” she said to her maid, Candelaria, settling in to another quiet evening at home. She felt no yearning for the competitive life of charity events and nightly dinner parties and daily fittings that had consumed her for so long.

Ned Manchester, who lived nearby, taught her to play tennis and took her riding and eventually declared his love for her, but she resisted his attempts at love, although she was attracted to him. “I can’t marry while Elias is in prison,” she said to Ned. “I can’t. He was too good to me. It would kill him.”

Elias was still important to her, and she continued to visit him in prison, even after she divorced him. Their relationship, while not romantic, became as it had been in the beginning between them, before their financial and social fame.

Loelia Manchester, meanwhile, who had discovered that the object of her desire, Mickie Minardos, was not worthy of the sacrifices she had made for him, married him, at his insistence, although she no longer wanted to marry him. In the beginning, the romance of Loelia and Mickie had titillated New York society for about six months. They were pointed out wherever they went. Photographers fought to take their picture. They were asked everywhere. Then, used to the sight of them, they ceased to fascinate. People began to wonder if Mickie wasn’t a bit of a user, if Loelia wasn’t drinking a bit too much, or if her last facelift hadn’t been a ghastly mistake, with her popping-out eyes. On the rare occasions that Ned Manchester appeared in New York, at weddings, or funerals, or memorial services, people began to say how attractive he was, a gentleman to his fingertips, and hadn’t Loelia been a fool to leave him for such an opportunist as the cobbler. Later they began calling her a damn fool, and then a goddamn fool. And then just poor Loelia.

Late in September of that year, Elias Renthal made
several collect calls from Allenwood Federal Prison Camp in Pennsylvania. The first was to Max Luby. The second was to Laurance Van Degan. The third was to Ruby. Of the three, only Laurance Van Degan was haughty to him although Laurance, like Max and Ruby, took the advice that Elias gave them from his confinement, for not one of them ever doubted that Elias was a financial genius. “Get out of the stock market,” he told them. “There is going to be a crash.”

53

“Talk louder, Janet, or stop crying, or
something!
I can hardly hear you,” Lil yelled over the transatlantic wires.