William F. Buckley Jr. (14 page)

Danny got up, clutched his glass, thought better of it and left it on the table. “Be right back,” he said to Gus and Amy.

He walked up the two flights of stairs to the sitting room. “Hi, Mom, terrific party—”

Silent, she motioned him to the chair. He stopped talking. His eyes looked furtively around the small room with its dressing table, armchair, and couch.

“Somebody has stolen my necklace.”

Danny shook his head. “Which necklace?”

“What do you mean,
which
necklace. The one I was wearing tonight. The one Harry gave me. My
diamond
necklace.”

“When did you take it off? Why did you take it off?”

“
Because it was irritating me
,” she barked. “I have a little rash back there,” she pointed.

“Are you absolutely sure, Mom, that you had it on tonight?”

“
Sure I had it on?
” Rachel Bennett was incredulous. “Are you drunk, Danny? I could hardly
imagine
having it on, or
imagine
having taken it off before dinner—”

“Have you looked everywhere?”

“Well,” her eyes were spitting out contempt for her only son, her
stupid
son. “No, I haven’t looked
everywhere.
For instance, I haven’t looked in the coffeepot downstairs. I haven’t looked inside the bassoon or whatever that thing is they’re blowing into down there.

“The questions you ask! When I took it off before dinner I stuck it the only place I ever stick it”—she pointed to a small velvet jewel case sitting on the dresser. “I put it
in that case
and stuck the case
in that drawer.
” She opened the drawer in question, shut it, opened it, shut it, opened it, finally slamming it shut. “Obviously somebody stole it.”

“Mom, I feel terrible about this, but what—”

“We are talking about a piece of jewelry worth fifty thousand dollars.”

“Is it insured?”

For a moment, Rachel Bennett calmed down. “Yes. Of course. But not for its present value.… But that’s not the point. We have to do something about it.”

“What? I mean, Mom, exactly
what?
”

She gritted her teeth. “I’m going to go and talk to Cam Beckett.”

“Mom, he’s undoubtedly asleep. And if he isn’t, what could he
do?
And besides, Mom, he might feel a little guilty just because it’s, well, his house.… Is it his servants around, or people you brought from New York?”

“Hal. Al, Cal, whatever his name, he’s with the Becketts. The rest were with the caterers, except, of course, for Helen.…
Obviously Helen didn’t do it. Why should she wait eight years, if she was going to steal my necklace—she’s been with us eight years.” Impulsively Rachel got up, opened the door to the little study and called out to straggling members of the staff on the floor below. “Is Helen down there? Please ask her to come up.”

She came quickly and Rachel reported the missing necklace. Helen looked perplexed.

“What is it, Helen? Do you have any ideas about it?”

“Mrs. Bennett, I don’t think you brought that necklace up from Palm Beach.”

Rachel was dismayed. Was she losing her mind? Helen didn’t make mistakes of that kind. But Rachel was not about to rebuke Helen using the same kind of language she was prepared to use with Danny. “You are wrong about that, Helen,” she said impatiently. “But never mind. Thank you. Good night.”

Danny didn’t think it wise to revisit the question whether the necklace had actually been worn, and so said, “Mom, I’m truly sad about this, but since there isn’t anything I can do, shouldn’t I get back to the party? You, er, you don’t want me to say anything about the necklace to, I mean, let the word out, do you?”

She shook her head and motioned to him brusquely to go.

“Anything wrong, Danny?”

“Not a thing, Caroline.… Only thing that’s wrong is that tonight is still twenty-four hours away.” They kissed. There was a round of applause. The following day, after a telephone call to the caretaker at the Palm Beach estate, who verified that he could not find the necklace in the room upstairs where he had been instructed to look, two state troopers quietly questioned members of the staff, those who worked for Cam Beckett and the half dozen there from New York who had catered the night before and would do so again after the wedding at noon. Helen continued to insist the necklace hadn’t been brought up, that it would turn up in Florida. Inevitably, the word got out that Mrs. Bennett’s necklace was missing. But there was nothing like an uproar over it. “She might have left it in Newport
and just forgotten,” Danny said to Henry dismissively. Henry demurred, saying he thought he remembered its being worn during the cocktail party the night before. But other matters pressed, and the state troopers soon left, while others prepared to go to the church.

L
ILA O’HARA, someone remarked to Lawrence Callard, the Director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, went from adolescence to matronliness, eschewing all stages in between as—well, as a waste of time, really. Lila was a feverishly diligent woman. She had breezed through her Ph.D. in history at Harvard; the envy of those of her colleagues who labored on at normal metabolic speeds. Lila read quickly, remembered everything she read, wrote quickly and made decisions quickly. Her style, whether speaking or writing, was not distinctive, but it was orderly. She was conscious of her work habits and liked to remind all who would listen, which meant everyone Lila could corner, of the effectiveness of the work habits of Anthony Trollope.

He was, Lila would inform you, the “greatest nineteenth-century
novelist, when you really come down to it; yes, greater than Dickens.” Trollope, Lila had discovered, began to write at six every morning. He pre-marked his writing tablet at calculated intervals into which Trollope could fit 250 words, written in his customary hand. “So,” as she detailed it to her older brother Danny when first she read about it, “at six-fifteen he would look for the mark he had etched on the pad. If it was farther down on the page than where he was, why—he would write faster until the thirty-minute check. If the mark came
before
he finished, he would slow down.” This for Lila was a metaphor of her working habits. She would decide what she wished to accomplish in a day. If it was necessary to work harder in order to accomplish it, why she would do so. If she found herself advancing toward the end of the day, her work mostly done, she would simply slow down. She was greatly satisfied by the handle she had on her scholarly, clerical life.

She did her major in modern American history, writing her dissertation on her grandfather’s fourth presidential race. She was disappointed that one publisher after another declined to publish her thesis. She received her fifth rejection at Palm Beach where she was vacationing during the spring break with her mother. Lila had permitted herself a total relaxation—this too was a part of her programmed life: When you go to Mom’s house in Palm Beach, take advantage of the beach, of the sea, of the swimming pool, of the large staff, and
do nothing.

She was told at the pool that the telephone call was for her.

It was her roommate at Cambridge, staying in for the holidays to make up for the three weeks of work missed earlier in the season, when she was doing volunteer work for Senator John Kennedy’s campaign against Hubert Humphrey in West Virginia. Clara had been instructed to open any letter from Cornell University Press addressed to Lila. Clara read her the rejection letter, including the sentence to the effect that the editors would be willing to reconsider if Miss O’Hara, in a future version, succeeded in introducing more “fresh material.”

Returning to the pool, she sat down on the beach chair, waiting for the Bloody Marys before lunch. She did not usually share
professional developments with anyone, but this time she blurted it out to Rachel: Her thesis had been turned down yet again.

“I hope you can see what they’re up to, Lila dear,” Rachel commented.

“What you talking about, Mum?”

“Well, it’s pretty obvious to me. You are my father’s granddaughter, and they’d like it very much if you would stir up Daddy’s files at Hyde Park and scoop in some sexy stuff.”

Lila looked at her mother, took off her heavy black-lacquer glasses and said, “Ah. Yes. I understand.”

She might have been a little late, this time around, in tying all the loose ends together, but now it was incandescently clear: She needed her mother to lean on Hyde Park, pure and simple.

The only teaching offer she had received had been from a respectable but unexciting college in the Midwest. Accordingly she had been exploring an alternative, an opening not to teach, but to engage in library work at a college that did not have a library comprehensive enough to permit her to continue the research to which she was attracted. She could not
understand
why she hadn’t thought before about the obvious direction to go.

She should be working at Hyde Park, exploring the voluminous collection of material assembled around the career of her grandfather. This, after all, was the first formal presidential library in American history funded by the government and designed one part as an academic and scholarly trove, one part as a memorial.

“Mum,” Lila said, peering through her glasses and adjusting the straps over and under her bathing suit, “are you on … very good terms with Grandmother?”

“Sure. She is always very busy, of course, and isn’t well. I plan to go up to see her sometime this summer.”

“Would I have any problem making an appointment with her?”

“No, I don’t think so. I hope you sent her a Christmas card? I think I see what you have in mind. You want to go through the archives?”

“I want more than that. I want to be hired full-time to work in
the FDR Library. Then I will put in a lot of time researching the 1944 campaign. Then I will rewrite my dissertation. Then it will be published. Then I will be famous as Dr. Lila O’Hara, not just a social footnote as granddaughter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”

Rachel patted her daughter on the back. “Careful, dear. Thou shalt not be overbearing.” Rachel reached for her drink. “But don’t worry, darling Lila. I’ll write Mother this afternoon and ask her to see you. And … I’ll tell her what you have in mind. Mother prefers it that way.

“Now, come along to lunch.”

D
ANNY PICKED UP the phone on his desk. It was Cutter Malone, chief accountant, full-time employee of Martino Enterprises.

“I’m ready with the second-quarter reports. Shall I come up? Or you want to do it at the hotel?”

“No. Here’s okay. Nobody’s going to interrupt. But tell you what, Cutter. Let’s wait … meet at five-thirty.”

“Okay, I’ll come by then.”

Danny buzzed Margie. “I’ll be staying on for an hour or so, but don’t worry about me, just a meeting with Cutter to go over the financials. Please call Caroline. Tell her, oh, sometime before eight, I figure I’ll get home.”

“All right, Danny. Some coffee?”

He turned down the coffee and, Montblanc pen in hand, checked the list of things he needed to do, the people he needed to call. On that list of things to do, every morning and every afternoon of his life, was a call to the old man, to the boss. To Mr. Martino. To Giuseppe Martino. Giuseppe. Might as well get it over with.

Giuseppe Martino answered the phone and spoke with a tremolo that had got much wobblier since the death of Marita. In part this was owing to age—next week Giuseppe would be eighty-four—but a mini-warble had been there even when Mr. Martino was young. Generations of employees of the Trafalgar hotel chain had amused themselves by imitating it.

“The curse, Danny”—Giuseppe had tremoloed yesterday, during one of the daily telephone talks with Danny—“is mine, not Marita’s. The curse to live on and on, childless. You are very lucky, with five beautiful children.” Danny knew that, in Giuseppe’s idiom, there was only a “beautiful” child. If Danny’s five children had been chimpanzees, Giuseppe would not have referred to them otherwise.

The exchange, the reference to children, did not on this occasion immediately speed on to Giuseppe’s recounting the details surrounding the death of their only son, by drowning, thirty-three years ago. He had done that once to Danny, and Danny thought that once quite enough. Not that Danny wasn’t sorry about the death of thirteen-year-old “Gippy Jr.” by drowning, just that Danny simply found it difficult to activate any retroactive grief: What happened, happened, he figured. So Gippy Jr. died, too bad, but what is the point in bringing it up all over again? He had been required to weep, that first time around, when Giuseppe gave in to his own convulsive grief. Danny’s histrionic skills were well developed, but he had not that often had occasion to make himself weep, so he had thought it best to turn his head, spread open his left hand, raise it fatalistically to his forehead, and then let his shoulders palpitate in little forward thrusts. It was a tribute to Danny’s performance that Giuseppe had ended by consoling Danny—the surest sign of success, Danny, gratified, thought.

Giuseppe always initiated a conversation, whether with Danny or anyone else, with a personalized remark or a question. The one exception to this rule had to do with his sister Angelina, whose calls, however infrequent, he attempted to cut off as quickly as he could; Giuseppe would rather abandon congenital protocols than speak to his sister more than the required time to exchange vital information.

So that when Danny said, “Hello, Giuseppe, it’s Danny,” Giuseppe replied by saying, “You do not need to tell me it is you, Danny. I know your voice as I knew the voice of my own son.” Danny reckoned he had better get on with the business of his call, but he felt a filial need to acknowledge the gesture, and so said, “I am flattered, Giuseppe, that in any way I should remind you of your son.” And then, quickly, “The Chicago hotel is not going very well. The usual business. The labor unions. The slowdown of last spring lost us the patronage of some of our regular clients. I am sure we will get them back, but probably we’ll need to coax them with a schedule of special rates, that kind of thing.”