Everybody Rise

by Stephanie Clifford

  Evelyn laughed. “The Never Satisfied I should’ve been a clue.”

  When the parental Beegans joined them at dinner, Charlotte abruptly got up from the table, claiming she had promised to sit with her old swimming coach. That meant Barbara seated herself next to Scot, where her conversation grew seemingly more and more random, though Evelyn knew precisely what Barbara’s aim was as she brought up tennis to see if Scot played, then talked about great Baltimore families that Scot couldn’t have known, then asked where he prepped. When he said he had gone to high school in Arizona, Barbara inquired if it was a public school, and when he gave an affirmative, she asked if it was on an Indian reservation.

  Evelyn was eager for the break when the speaker, an alumnus who was now ambassador to China, spoke. She drifted away during the boring thrum of his speech, but snapped back during the question-and-answer session when she saw Scot’s hand raised high. Her mother inclined her head, and Evelyn put one hand on his knee. “It’s not really that sort of an event,” she whispered with a light smile.

  “They just asked for questions.”

  “I know, but people don’t really ask questions at these dinners,” she said.

  “I think it’s fine to ask questions,” Dale, sitting on Evelyn’s other side, said loudly. “Fire away. Good to hold people in power responsible.”

  From across the room, an old alumnus croaked out a question about the Yangtze cruise accommodations, and Scot gave Evelyn a quizzical look, raising his hand higher.

  “Yes,” Scot said when someone brought the microphone to him. “I was curious about whether there’s any movement on the notion that President Bush should pressure Hu Jintao on the artificially low value of the yuan, and how you’re thinking about the effect of that on American manufacturing versus the effect a freely traded yuan could have on U.S. interest rates.”

  Preston, sitting across the table, made spirit fingers at Evelyn, Barbara gripped her napkin, and Dale grinned, entertained. The ambassador answered the question, and Scot then indicated he wanted the microphone back, but Evelyn waved off the microphone holder. “That’s good, Scot. That’s enough,” Evelyn whispered.

  “I thought—”

  “That’s good,” she said, with an eye on her mother’s knuckles.

  “I like his spunk,” Dale said.

  As they got up from their seats, Barbara clutched Evelyn’s shoulder. “This is a Sheffield alumni event, not a news conference,” Barbara hissed. “I presume the ambassador thought he was speaking to friends, not interrogators.”

  Evelyn rearranged her napkin on the table. “Well!” she said to the napkin. “Should we get going?”

  “So. He’s from Nevada,” Barbara said, as she steered Evelyn toward the coat check.

  “Arizona.”

  “His family is still in Arizona?”

  “His mother is.”

  “A widow?”

  “No, she’s divorced.”

  “Divorced.” Barbara pursed her lips. “I’ll tell you something, Evelyn. The Topfer women may not have been happy, but we have never resorted to divorce.”

  This was true; even after Barbara’s father had fled with the secretary, Barbara’s mother, who spent most of her time smoking cigarettes and cutting coupons, never filed for divorce. Evelyn pulled two singles from her wallet for the coat-check girl.

  “I told you to start wearing suntan lotion on your hands,” Barbara said. “You have to be careful about wrinkles. The hands are the first to go, Evelyn. The hands and the knees. Have you been wearing suntan lotion on your knees?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They’re a dead giveaway for age. You’re already almost twenty-seven. Is this really the best way to be spending your time? With this Arizonian?”

  “Twenty-six. Most people my age aren’t married.”

  “A lot are. Palling about with an Arizona boy is fine when you’re just out of college, but at this age—”

  “Mom, he’s, like, he’s really smart. Charlotte says he’s one of the smartest people at Morgan Stanley. He was recruited there by David Greenbaum, who’s a hotshot, and he’s one of the youngest VPs there, which is a position even higher than Nick has. It’s not like he’s a subway musician.”

  “I’m sure he’s perfectly qualified for his work. I thought your website job would take you into new circles, however. Lead you to meet new people.”

  “It has.”

  “It’s just with the investigation—” Barbara guided Evelyn to the end of the hallway, where no one was listening.

  “Everyone’s father is getting investigated these days,” Evelyn said. She had been trying to convince herself of this ever since Camilla had said it, and the mantra sometimes helped tamp down her anxiety about the investigation, but it rang false when she said it aloud.

  “Oh, are they?” Barbara’s tone was sarcastic. “How nice to know New York has become so accepting. In Bibville, they do care, as it happens.” Barbara extracted a mauve lipstick from her bag and applied it precisely. “To tell you the truth, all of my friends at the Eastern have been asking me about you, and saying they just don’t know why someone hasn’t snapped you up yet. Because deep down, people think something is wrong with you when you aren’t married or engaged at twenty-seven. It starts to be strange.”

  “Why don’t you tell them I’m dating someone?”

  “I don’t want you to make the same mistake as I did. Marrying someone on the fringes of the circle just puts you on the fringes of the circle, don’t you see? The life you’re conscripted to, of constant social adjustments because your husband doesn’t bother with what he thinks are silly social niceties, isn’t a pleasant one. Rules are rules for a reason. Scot doesn’t even play tennis. Do you really want to spend your life with someone who can’t play tennis?”

  “Mom, that’s so old-fashioned,” Evelyn said. Yet Evelyn had felt disappointment when Scot sat on the sidelines during the tennis games at Nick’s, lost in his history book, not caring that he couldn’t play, while Evelyn had to partner with Nick’s fat friend from Enfield who flung sweat all over the court.

  “I wanted to talk to you about Jaime Cardenas. He’s on all the junior benefits committees, and went to Harvard and Stanford business school. Fernando Cardenas’s son. Do you know him yet?” Barbara said.

  Evelyn was often amazed by her mother, who managed to track young New York social circles almost as closely as Evelyn now had to, despite Barbara’s barely knowing how to use the Internet. Evelyn didn’t know Jaime, but she knew of Jaime; she had Googled Jaime several times after seeing him in some pictures with Camilla. The family fortune started with a Venezuelan bottling plant a few generations ago, and then Jaime’s grandfather had built up a conglomerate of consumer products, retail and banking businesses. Jaime was now a vice president at the family business and had hit the New York social scene with some force, including an unheard-of election to the Met Museum’s board of trustees at the age of twenty-eight. He was one of her eventual targets for People Like Us, but she hadn’t yet run into him to give him the pitch. “It’s pronounced ‘Haime,’ Mom, and ‘de Carden-yaz.’ Or ‘de Carden-yas.’ Jaime de Cardenas. Scot went to Harvard, too.”

  “The business school isn’t the same thing as the college. Jaime de Cardenas.” Her mother said it slowly and as if there were olives stuffed in her mouth; Evelyn wondered if it was the only Spanish she’d ever spoken apart from “Rioja.” “Good. So you do know him.”

  “Not really.”

  “Now, normally I’m not sure how I’d feel about someone, you know, Chicano,” Barbara was saying.

  “I don’t think people say ‘Chicano’ anymore.”

  “The fact is, the world is changing.”

  “I’m sure Jaime will be delighted to hear that.”

  “Stop that sarcasm. It’s unbecoming. I think you should consider dating him.”

  It was Sheffield all over again. Her mother thought a simple directive was sufficient to make Evelyn achieve social gl
ory. Just make friends with so-and-so from Watch Hill. Just date a Venezuelan billionaire. Yet her mother had never made it at that level, Evelyn thought, and had been trying to make up for it ever since.

  “I have a boyfriend,” Evelyn said.

  “Call it what you will. Evelyn, I hate to say it, but your looks will start to fade, and your body will start to sag. It’s been happening to me for the last thirty years, and it’s just dreadful. When I think about what I could have done at twenty-six—well. Jaime de Cardenas is linked to Spanish nobility. That is something you just can’t argue with. Susie—you remember Susie, her daughter is in Washington—was saying he’s heading the Save Venice ball this year.”

  Save Venice, and the young friends of the Frick, and the Apollo Circle at the Met Opera, yes, yes, Evelyn knew.

  “You ought to keep an eye out for him. He sounds like the last of the eligible bachelors,” Barbara said.

  Evelyn saw Scot, at the other end of the hallway, waiting for her and doing an awkward arm stretch. Her mother’s verdict was in; Evelyn was silent for a while, pressing her thumb over the top joint of her pinkie.

  “That’s all I wanted to say,” Barbara finally said. “Can you please help me with my coat?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Summer in the City

  Camilla had deemed one of the final summer weekends an “urban incursion,” ignoring Scot’s correction that an “incursion” was a sudden invasion and not the opposite of “excursion.” “It’ll be fabulous,” Camilla had said to Evelyn. “All of the restaurants will be practically empty, and we can go anywhere we like, and do Pilates, and don’t have to wait for appointments at Exhale.”

  “You never have to wait for appointments at Exhale,” Evelyn had said.

  Camilla had just smiled.

  Evelyn snuck out of PLU at noon that Friday, after an intense and tiring argument with Arun and Jin-ho. The Habsburg founder was unhappy with the membership numbers, and Arun and Jin-ho called her into one of the conference rooms to discuss it. They wanted more traditional marketing, they said; Evelyn should do whatever it took to get the numbers up.

  “Like what?” she’d asked. “You want me to buy mailing lists from real-estate records in tony neighborhoods? Do you know how expensive those are, and how much unsolicited mail those people get? The point of this site is that it’s selective. If you want mass, you can go to MySpace, and even Facebook isn’t restrictive about colleges anymore. We don’t need to copy what they’re doing.”

  “We need something else,” Arun had said. “The one-off events you’ve held have been expensive and haven’t resulted in big yields.”

  “It’s a long-term strategy. At this point we shouldn’t be doing huge events with huge numbers. If you want to spend on a real launch party, terrific. I’ll happily get behind that. But that’s going to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and I don’t think we have the budget for it. The smaller events are relatively cheap and are building buzz: we’ve been on Page Six, we’ve been in Styles, and the members we have are purely A-list: Bridie Harley, Caperton Ripp, Camilla Rutherford, Preston and Bing Hacking, to name a few. That’s precisely where we want to be.”

  “Ulrich feels the numbers should be higher by now,” Arun had said.

  “Ulrich is Swiss and, with respect, in his seventies. We’re going after American twentysomethings. He’s going to have to trust us.”

  “One of my buddies works in the Rangers front office,” Jin-ho had said. “You should talk to him once hockey season gets going. They’re pros at comarketing.”

  “The Rangers? Are you kidding?” Evelyn said. “I don’t think providing foam fingers as men knock out each other’s teeth screams elite. We’re trying to prove that this is a site for the highest social strata. If we do something off-brand now, we lose them. They can smell error. They can smell weakness.”

  Arun had twisted his lips, then smiled; he was nicer than Jin-ho. “Okay, Evelyn, but like it or not, we all work for Ulrich, and if he says we get the numbers up, then we get the numbers up. It doesn’t have to be a Rangers game, but you’ve got to figure something out.”

  Evelyn had folded her arms, not wanting to commit to anything. When she’d seen Arun and Jin-ho leave the building at noon, headed for some Vegas bachelor party, she’d strode out onto the street, hitting the pavement so hard she made dents in her heels, to meet Camilla at Takashimaya, a Japanese department store on Fifth.

  It was quiet as a library in there when Evelyn found Camilla on the second floor, examining a travel nail-care kit encased in crocodile. “This is cute, don’t you think?” Camilla said when Evelyn arrived. Evelyn felt like her head was emitting clouds of steam.

  “What?” asked Camilla.

  “Work,” Evelyn groaned. “They won’t listen to a thing I have to say.”

  “Who won’t?”

  “The co-CEOs. Arun and Jin-ho.”

  “Whoosie and whatsit? Who are they?”

  “Stanford grads. Random Stanford grads, I might add. Jin-ho buttons his top button, and Arun unbuttons to, like, three or four buttons, so we can all share in his chest hair. Yet they think they know more than I do about what to do for the site.”

  “That’s cray-cray. Ignore it!” Camilla said gaily. “My acupuncturist says we have to dismiss all negative energy in our lives. I want leather sandals.”

  As though Camilla had summoned a genie, a white-haired man approached. Evelyn let her eyes slide over him, mimicking the frostiness with which Barbara had always treated salespeople, and expecting Camilla to do the same. Instead, Camilla leaned in.

  “Hello!” said Camilla, as if the man were a favorite uncle. “How are you? Isn’t it beautiful outside today? I love your tie pin. I’m hoping for some sandals. Size seven.”

  The man gave her a gap-toothed grin that made him look sweet and alive, not like a laid-off office worker who could only find a job selling ladies’ shoes. This was the magic of Camilla. “Sandals,” the man repeated, and headed into the back. He returned with three large boxes and squatted below Camilla.

  “You’re too funny,” Camilla said, as he fastened one pair on her feet.

  “I’m sorry,” Evelyn said. “I’m still thinking about this work thing. They actually mentioned doing a marketing event at a Rangers game today.”

  “Ew. I don’t want my profile on there if there are going to be sports people on it.”

  “No, no no no no. They’re not actually going to do it. I’m not going to let them. I will preserve the site, I promise.” Evelyn couldn’t lose Camilla as a member, and she quickly formed a new idea. “Members should come from people like us, per the site name. I was thinking they should do something with, say, the new crop of debs.”

  She watched; it worked; Camilla bit. “Ooh, that would be good. I could totally see the deb set using it,” she said.

  Evelyn turned her head, trying to keep the smile from spreading over her face. She had been studying debutantes lately for her PLU work, reading about them at the New York Public Library. In microfilm and microfiche, she had learned—with some difficulty, as part of the code of being a deb was you didn’t speak or write about being a deb—about New York debbing.

  She had first gotten wind of the New York debutante scene at Sheffield, where Preston had been an escort at some of the balls. “The season,” to the degree that it was still a season, was an approximation of the London Court parties that inspired the American debutante tradition.

  The Bal Français was the first of the balls, held in June, just as the seniors were graduated from high school. With the prestigious balls occurring over the holidays, the Bal served as a training ground. The Junior League, at Thanksgiving, was a bit new-money, though considered a fun party. At Christmastime, the Infirmary was the big social event, with girls from old Greenwich and Boston and D.C. families in addition to New Yorkers; since the debs could invite friends, it was a popular party for the young set. The Junior Assembly was the real deal, a small, old-school ball limi
ted to debs, family, and escorts, where it still raised eyebrows if a girl was Catholic. The International, held close to New Year’s, completed the season, but it was for new-money arrivistes, the daughters of Russian oligarchs and Southern chicken-parts kings.

  Evelyn had read, too, about the sociology of debutante balls, about why this seemingly archaic tradition still occurred in cities all over the country—from Dallas to Seattle to Boston—and why they kept going even as eighteen-year-old girls were clearly no longer being introduced to society for the first time at them. “Rite of passage marked with social status symbolism,” she had scribbled in her notebook. “Effort at social stratification.” “Way to pass on class markers/place in society to children b/c Americans have no Brit-like titles—same fxn as Social Register.” “Cultural capital.” “Invitation-only means elite get to decide invitees. Distinguish elite from not-so-elite.”

  “Right,” Evelyn said. If Camilla was talking about debutantes with her, she must assume that Evelyn had debbed, too; that was the code. “Absolutely. I’d think it would be a big draw for the site. Even just the content around the balls—where should I look for my dress, where should we postparty, et cetera.”

  “I could see it,” Camilla said.

  “I had such issues with my dress, because I was fitted for it in the summer and then went off to school and gained eight pounds, and the dressmaker was so angry with me.” The words tumbled out, and Evelyn didn’t even want to stop them. She wanted to see where this would lead.

  “Where did you deb?” Camilla asked, pointing at the sandals.

  “The Bachelors’ Cotillion,” Evelyn said casually. She hadn’t spent all that time with microfiche for nothing.

  “The Bachelors’ Cotillion,” Camilla repeated.

  “In Baltimore.” Evelyn quickly added to her pitch. “It’s so funny and old school. When my grandmother did it, they all had to wear long-sleeve dresses, and there was complete chaos when one of the girls wore a strapless dress. We used to see that woman at the tennis club, and by this time she was seventy, wearing caftans, and my grandmother still considered her so risqué.” She was fascinated by how the words sprinted out faster than her brain seemed to form them.