The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  “I was running out of felonies,” said the adventurer, Sherman McCoy.

  Haw haw haw haw haw haw haw haw, went Bobby Shaflett.

  Ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho, went Nunnally Voyd.

  Hah hah hah hah hah hah hah, went the X-ray and the two men in navy suits.

  Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh, went Sherman McCoy, as if his time in the holding pen had amounted to nothing more than a war story in the life of a man.

  The di Duccis’ dining room, like the Bavardages’, featured a pair of round tables, and at the center of each table was a creation by Huck Thigg, the florist. For this night he had created a pair of miniature trees, no more than fifteen inches high, out of hardened wisteria vines. Glued to the branches of the trees were scores of brilliant blue dried cornflowers. Each tree was set in a meadow, about a foot square, of living buttercups sown so thick they touched. Around each meadow was a miniature split-rail fence made of yew wood. This time, however, Sherman had no opportunity to study the artistry of the celebrated young Mr. Thigg. Far from being stumped for a conversational mate, he now commanded an entire section of the table. To his immediate left was a renowned social X-ray named Red Pitt, known sotto voce as the Bottomless Pitt, because she was so superbly starved that her glutei maximi and the surrounding tissue—in the vulgate, her ass—appeared to have vanished altogether. You could have dropped a plumb line from the small of her back to the floor. To her left was Nunnally Voyd, and to his left was a Real-Estate X-ray named Lily Bradshaw. Sitting on Sherman’s right was a Lemon Tart named Jacqueline Balch, the blond third wife of Knobby Balch, heir to the Colonaid indigestion-remedy fortune. To her right was none other than Baron Hochswald, and to his right was Kate di Ducci. During much of the dinner all six of these men and women were tuned in solely to Mr. Sherman McCoy. Crime, Economics, God, Freedom, Immortality—whatever McCoy of the McCoy Case cared to talk about, the table listened, even such an accomplished, egotistical, and ceaseless talker as Nunnally Voyd.

  Voyd said he had been surprised to learn that such vast amounts of money could be made in bonds—and Sherman realized that Killian was right: the press had created the impression that he was a titan of finance.

  “Frankly,” said Voyd, “I’ve always thought of the bond business as…ummmmm…rather poky stuff.”

  Sherman found himself smiling the wry smile of those who know a big luscious secret. “Ten years ago,” he said, “you’d have been right. They used to call us ‘the bond bores.’ ” He smiled again. “I haven’t heard that for a long time. Today I suppose there’s five times as much money changing hands in bonds as in stocks.” He turned toward Hochswald, who was leaning forward to follow the conversation. “Wouldn’t you say so, Baron?”

  “Oh, yes, yes,” said the old man, “I expect that’s so.” And then the baron shut up—in order to hear what Mr. McCoy had to say.

  “All the takeovers, buy-outs, mergers—all done with bonds,” said Sherman. “The national debt? A trillion dollars? What do you think that is? All bonds. Every time interest rates fluctuate—up or down, it doesn’t matter—little crumbs fall off all the bonds and lodge in the cracks in the sidewalk.” He paused and smiled confidently…and wondered…Why had he used this hateful phrase of Judy’s?…He chuckled and said, “The important thing is not to stick your nose up at those crumbs, because there are billions and billions and billions of them. At Pierce & Pierce, believe me, we sweep them up very diligently.” We!—at Pierce & Pierce! Even the little Tart on his right, Jacqueline Balch, nodded at all this as if she understood.

  Red Pitt, who prided herself on her bluntness, said, “Tell me, Mr. McCoy, tell me—well, I’m going to come right out and ask you: What did happen up there in the Bronx?”

  Now they all leaned forward and stared, enthralled, at Sherman.

  Sherman smiled. “My lawyer says I mustn’t say a word about what happened.” Then he leaned forward himself and looked to his right and then to his left and said, “But, strictly entre nous, it was a robbery attempt. It was literally highway robbery.”

  They were now all leaning forward so far it became a huddle around Huck Thigg’s wisteria tree in the buttercup meadow.

  Kate di Ducci said, “Why can’t you come out and say so, Sherman?”

  “That I can’t go into, Kate. But I will tell you one other thing: I didn’t hit anybody with my car.”

  None of them said a word. They were spellbound. Sherman glanced at Judy at the other table. Four people, two on either side, including their vulpine little host, Silvio di Ducci, were honed in on her. McCoy & McCoy. Sherman pressed on:

  “I can offer you some very sound advice. Don’t ever…get caught up…in the criminal-justice system…in this city. As soon as you’re caught in the machinery, just the machinery, you’ve lost. The only question remaining is how much you’re going to lose. Once you enter a cell—even before you’ve had a chance to declare your innocence—you become a cipher. There is no more you.”

  Silence all around him…The look in their eyes!…Begging for war stories!

  So he told them about the little Puerto Rican who knew all the numbers. He told them about the game of hockey with the live mouse and of how he (the hero) rescued the mouse and threw it out of the cell, whereupon a cop crushed it with his heel. Confidently he turned to Nunnally Voyd and said, “I think that falls under the heading of a metaphor, Mr. Voyd.” He smiled wisely. “A metaphor for the whole thing.”

  Then he looked to his right. The lovely Lemon Tart was drinking in his every word. He felt the tingle in his loins again.

  After dinner quite a cluster it was that gathered around Sherman McCoy in the di Duccis’ library. He entertained them with the story of the cop who kept making him go through the metal detector.

  Silvio di Ducci spoke up: “They can force you to do that?”

  Sherman realized the story made him sound a bit too compliant and was undercutting his new status as one who had braved the fires of hell.

  “I made a deal,” he said. “I said, ‘Okay, I’ll let you show your buddy how I set off the alarm, but you’ve got to do something for me. You’ve got to get me out of that fucking’ ”—he said fucking very softly, to indicate that, yes, he knew it was in poor taste but that under the circumstances the verbatim quote was called for—“ ‘hog pen.’ ” He pointed his finger in a knowing way, as if he were pointing toward the holding pen in Central Booking in the Bronx. “And it paid off. They brought me out early. Otherwise I would have had to spend the night on Rikers Island, and that, I gather, is not…too…terrific.”

  Every Tart in the cluster was his for the asking.

  As the bodyguard, Occhioni, drove them to his parents’ house, to drop Judy off, it was Sherman who was enjoying a social high. At the same time, he was confused. Just who were these people?

  “It’s ironic,” he said to Judy. “I’ve never liked these friends of yours. I guess you’ve deduced that.”

  “It didn’t require much in the way of deduction,” said Judy. She wasn’t smiling.

  “And yet they’re the only people who’ve been decent to me since this whole thing started. My so-called old friends obviously wish I’d do the right thing and disappear. These people, these people I don’t even know, they treated me like a living human being.”

  In the same guarded voice Judy said, “You’re famous. In the newspapers, you’re a rich aristocrat. You’re a tycoon.”

  “Only in the newspapers?”

  “Oh, are you feeling rich all of a sudden?”

  “Yes, I’m a rich aristocrat with a fabulous apartment by a famous designer.” He wanted to get on her good side.

  “Hah.” Quietly, bitterly.

  “It’s perverse, isn’t it? Two weeks ago, when we were at the Bavardages’, these same people froze me out. Now I’m smeared—smeared!—across every newspaper and they can’t get enough of me.”

  She looked away from him, out the window. “You’re easily pleased.” Her voice was as far off as h
er gaze.

  McCoy & McCoy shut down for the night.

  “Whadda we got this morning, Sheldon?”

  As soon as the words left his mouth, the Mayor regretted them. He knew what his tiny assistant would say. It was inevitable, and so he braced himself for the vile phrase, and sure enough, here it came.

  “Mainly plaques for blacks,” said Sheldon. “Bishop Bottomley is here, waiting to see you, and there’s been a dozen or so requests for you to comment on the McCoy case.”

  The Mayor wanted to remonstrate, as he had several times before, but instead he turned away and looked out the window, toward Broadway. The Mayor’s office was at ground level, a small but elegant room on the corner with a high ceiling and grand Palladian windows. The view across the little park around City Hall was sullied by the presence, in the immediate foreground, right outside the window, of rows of blue police barricades. They were stored there, permanently, on the grass—or rather on bare patches where grass had once been—for use whenever demonstrations erupted. They erupted all the time. When they did, the police created a big blue fence with the barricades, and he could look out at the broad beams of the cops as they faced whatever raggedy horde of demonstrators was yammering away on the other side. What an amazing array of stuff the cops carried on their backsides! Billies, blackjacks, flashlights, handcuffs, bullets, citation books, walkie-talkies. He continually found himself gazing upon the hulking cluttered backsides of cops, while various malcontents shouted and growled, all for television, of course.

  Plaques for blacks plaques for blacks plaques for blacks plaques for blacks. Now the vile phrase was running through his mind. Plaques for blacks was a small way of fighting fire with fire. Every morning he went from his office across to the Blue Room, and amid the portraits of bald-headed politicians of years gone by, he handed out plaques and citations to civic groups and teachers and prize-winning students and brave citizens and noble volunteer workers and various other tillers and toilers of the urban terrain. In these troubled times, with the surveys going the way they were going, it was wise, and probably good, to single out as many black recipients of these trophies and rhetorical flourishes as possible, but it was not wise and it was not good for Sheldon Lennert, this homunculus with his absurdly tiny head and his mismatched checked shirts, jackets, and pants, to call the process “plaques for blacks.” Already the Mayor had heard a couple of people in the press office use the expression. What if some of the black members of the staff overheard it? They might even laugh. But they wouldn’t be laughing inside.

  But no…Sheldon continued to say “plaques for blacks.” He knew the Mayor hated it. Sheldon had the malicious streak of a court jester. Outwardly he was as loyal as a dog. Inwardly he seemed to be mocking him half the time. The Mayor’s anger rose.

  “Sheldon, I told you I don’t want to hear that expression in this office again!”

  “Awright, awright,” said Sheldon. “Now whaddaya gonna say when they ask you about the McCoy case?”

  Sheldon always knew exactly how to distract him. He would bring up whatever he knew confused the Mayor most profoundly, whatever made him most dependent on Sheldon’s small but amazingly facile mind.

  “I don’t know,” said the Mayor. “At first it looked pretty clear-cut. We got this Wall Street guy who runs over a black honor student and takes off. But now it turns out there was a second black kid, and he’s a crack dealer, and maybe it was a robbery attempt. I guess I take the judicial approach. I call for a full investigation and a careful weighing of the evidence. Right?”

  “Negative,” said Sheldon.

  “Negative?” It was bewildering, the number of times Sheldon challenged the obvious—and turned out to be absolutely right.

  “Negative,” said Sheldon. “The McCoy case has become one of those touchstone issues in the black community. It’s like divestiture and South Africa. There are no two sides to the question. You suggest there might be two sides, and you’re not even-handed, you’re biased. Same thing here. The only question is, is a black life worth as much as a white life? And the only answer is, white guys like this McCoy, from Wall Street, driving their Mercedes-Benzes, can’t go around running over black honor students and taking off because it’s inconvenient to stop.”

  “But that’s bullshit, Sheldon,” said the Mayor. “We don’t even know for sure what happened yet.”

  Sheldon shrugged. “So what else is new? That’s the only version Abe Weiss is even willing to talk about. He’s running with this case like he’s Abe Fucking Lincoln.”

  “Weiss started all this?” The thought troubled the Mayor, because he knew Weiss had always entertained the notion of making a bid for mayor himself.

  “No, Bacon started it,” said Sheldon. “Somehow he got to this drunk on The City Light, this Brit, Fallow. That’s how it started. But now it’s caught on. It’s gone way beyond Bacon and his gang. Like I say, it’s a touchstone issue. Weiss’s got an election coming up. So do you.”

  The Mayor thought for a moment. “What kind of name is McCoy? Irish?”

  “No, he’s a Wasp.”

  “What kind of person is he?”

  “Rich Wasp. All the way. All the right schools, Park Avenue, Wall Street, Pierce & Pierce. His old man used to be the head of Dunning Sponget & Leach.”

  “Did he support me? Or do you know?”

  “Not that I know of. You know these characters. They don’t even think about local elections, because in an election in New York City voting Republican don’t mean shit. They vote for President. They vote for senator. They talk about the Federal Reserve and supply side and all that shit.”

  “Unnnh-hunnnh. Well, what do I say?”

  “You call for a complete and thorough investigation of McCoy’s role in this tragedy and the appointment, if necessary, of a special prosecutor. By the governor. ‘If necessary,’ you say, ‘if all the facts are not forthcoming.’ That way you give a little jab to Abe, without mentioning his name. You say the law must be no respecter of persons. You say McCoy’s wealth and position cannot be allowed to keep this case from being treated the same way it would be if Henry Lamb had run over Sherman McCoy. Then you pledge the kid’s mother—Annie, I think, is her name—you pledge the kid’s mother your full support and backing in bringing to justice the perpetrator of the foul deed. There’s no way you can lay it on too thick.”

  “Kind of rough on this guy McCoy, isn’t it?”

  “That’s not your fault,” said Sheldon. “The guy hit the wrong kind of kid in the wrong part of town driving the wrong brand of car with the wrong woman, not his wife, in the bucket seat next to him. He doesn’t come away looking so wonderful.”

  The whole thing made the Mayor feel uneasy, but Sheldon’s instincts were always correct in these can-of-worms situations. He thought some more. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll grant you all that. But aren’t we making Bacon look awfully good? I hate that son of a bitch.”

  “Yeah, but he’s already hit a home run with this thing. You can’t change that. All you can do is go with the flow. It isn’t long until November, and if you make a wrong move on the McCoy case, Bacon can really give you some grief.”

  The Mayor shook his head. “I guess you’re right. We put the Wasp to the wall.” He shook his head again, and a cloud came over his face. “The stupid bastard…What the hell was he doing tooling around on Bruckner Boulevard at night in a Mercedes-Benz? Some people are just determined to bring the roof down on themselves, aren’t they? He was asking for it. I still don’t like it—but you’re right. Whatever he gets, he was asking for it. Okay. So much for McCoy. Now, what’s Bishop What’s-his-name want?”

  “Bottomley. It’s about that Episcopal church, St. Timothy’s. The bishop is black, incidentally.”

  “The Episcopalians have a black bishop?”

  “Oh, they’re very liberal,” said Sheldon, rolling his eyes. “It coulda just as easy been a woman or a Sandinista. Or a lesbian. Or a lesbian Sandinista.”

  The
Mayor shook his head some more. He found the Christian churches baffling. When he was growing up, the goyim were all Catholics, unless you counted the shvartzer, which nobody did. They didn’t even rate being called goyim. The Catholics were two types, the Irish and the Italians. The Irish were stupid and liked to fight and inflict pain. The Italians were stupid and slob-like. Both were unpleasant, but the lineup was easy enough to comprehend. He was in college before he realized there was this whole other set of goyim, the Protestants. He never saw any. There were only Jews, Irishmen, and Italians in college, but he heard about them, and he learned that some of the most famous people in New York were this type of goyim, the Protestants, people like the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Roosevelts, the Astors, the Morgans. The term Wasp was invented much later. The Protestants were split up into such a crazy bunch of sects nobody could even keep track of them all. It was all very pagan and spooky, when it wasn’t ridiculous. They were all worshiping some obscure Jew from halfway around the world. The Rockefellers were! The Roosevelts even! Very spooky it was, and yet these Protestants ran the biggest law firms, the banks, the investment houses, the big corporations. He never saw such people in the flesh, except at ceremonies. Otherwise they didn’t exist in New York. They barely even showed up in the voting surveys. In sheer numbers they were a nullity—and yet there they were. And now one of these sects, the Episcopalians, had a black bishop. You could joke about the Wasps, and he often did so with his friends, and yet they weren’t so much funny as creepy.

  “And this church,” said the Mayor, “something about Landmarks?”

  “Right,” said Sheldon. “The bishop wants to sell St. Timothy’s to a developer, on the grounds that the membership is declining and the church is losing a lot of money, which is true. But the community groups are putting a lot of pressure on the Landmarks Commission to landmark it so that nobody can alter the building even if they buy it.”

  “Is this guy honest?” asked the Mayor. “Who gets the money if they sell the church?”