Everybody Rise

by Stephanie Clifford

  Agathe, the Bal’s chairwoman, took the stage, welcoming the guests with a wave as waiters served generous chunks of lobster over green beans with a sauce béarnaise. She introduced the evening’s honoree, the head of the European studies department at Columbia. He was the third choice, Evelyn recalled from one of the planning meetings, after the first two selections had awkwardly declined, citing the professional difficulty of associating themselves with debutantes.

  The lights went down as the presentation began, and the master of ceremonies, the head of fixed income at Whitcomb Partners, who was married to one of the hostesses, looked down at his first note card.

  “Wythe Van Rensselaer is the director of a documentary film on street-graffiti artists in the style of the German Expressionists, a champion two-hundred-meter sprinter on varsity track, has had the pleasure of spending summers doing nonprofit work in Laos and Botswana, and likes playing poker. Her brothers John and Frederick were escorts at the ball in the past. She will be attending Yale in the fall.” There were audible “oohs” from the crowd when Yale was mentioned. Wythe, decisively, came out on the arm of her escort, curtsied, and walked excruciatingly slowly toward the edge of the dance floor as Phoebe stepped forward.

  “Phoebe Rutherford speaks fluent French, Latin, ancient Greek, Serbian, and Latvian. She especially enjoys archery and needlepoint.”

  Souse whipped her head to look at Camilla, who put her hand in front of her mouth.

  “What?” Camilla whispered. “We thought it was funny. She could be into needlepoint and archery and all those languages.”

  “This is not a joke,” Souse hissed.

  “It is a joke,” Camilla said.

  “Do you know how hard I’ve worked on this? How hard all these women have worked on it?”

  “Oh, Mother, honestly. It’s a party.”

  “Evelyn got here at five o’clock today. You didn’t even bother to show up until after the party started, and it isn’t Evelyn’s sister out there tonight. I don’t demean your events.”

  “It was just a joke,” Camilla said. “I thought it would be funny.”

  “Well, it isn’t.” Souse was tapping her fingers frantically.

  Evelyn, on the other side of Souse, leaned toward her and said, in a voice low enough she hoped Camilla couldn’t hear, “I’m so sorry. I would never have let her put that in the bio had I known.”

  “Thank you,” said Souse, abruptly pushing her chair back from the table. She had disappeared by the time the MC said, “Jennifer Foster is a champion fencer, has released a CD of her own songs, and recently had her painting entitled Empty Houses as a finalist for the prestigious Courbet Award, the first girl from Spence to do so in two years. In the fall, she will be attending Whitman College, a small liberal-arts college considered the Williams of Washington.”

  Evelyn noticed Souse at the side of the stage, whispering something to Agathe, the chairwoman. Agathe gave their table a worried look, then she nodded.

  The girls lined up with their escorts behind them, stiffly smiling as the photographer took pictures, then filed onto the dance floor for a jolting waltz.

  The orchestra finished “Try to Remember,” and Evelyn poked Camilla. “Is that a reference to how blacked out all the debs are going to get tonight?”

  “If they’re not already,” Camilla said.

  “Phoebe looked fantastic.”

  “She did, didn’t she?”

  The lights went back up onstage, shining on Agathe, who looked nervous and was saying something to the MC. “Very well,” he boomed into the microphone, not realizing it was on. Agathe skittered to the side of the stage.

  “Now, as is the tradition at the Bal Français, we have la danse d’honneur, in which we ask a former debutante to come forward and begin the second dance with our esteemed ambassador,” the MC said. The spotlight swooped over to Evelyn’s table, where Camilla sat up and gave a humble Oscar-nominee nod. “This year the hostesses of the Bal Français are pleased to ask Miss Evelyn Beegan to lead the dancing. Miss Beegan?”

  Evelyn was squinting in the spotlight when she heard the applause, and looked to see Camilla smiling and looking straight ahead.

  “Miss Beegan?” the MC said.

  Evelyn stood up, her legs feeling awfully shaky. Her mother had enrolled her in a waltzing class at some strip-mall dance studio when she was a teenager, despite Evelyn’s protests that she would never, ever need to know how to waltz. Well done, Mom, she thought. Evelyn looked once more at Camilla, who was staring at the MC, clapping, and dipped her head. It was all meant to be, wasn’t it? The applause crescendoed, and it felt like it was washing around her in lovely warm waves. Then a more intense spotlight hit her, so bright that she couldn’t see anything. A flashbulb went off from her left side. She could picture Jaime looking at the photograph later, realizing just who she was. She smiled, tentatively at first, then broad and confident as the applause and the light lifted her up. It was for her this time. At last, it was all for her.

  The spotlight followed her as she walked to the center of the dance floor and held out her hand to the ambassador. “C’est un plaisir,” she said in a mellifluous tone. She focused on his feet—if she was supposed to have debbed, she should know how to waltz perfectly—and matched his steps as the orchestra played “Que Sera, Sera.” It had been one of her mother’s favorite piano pieces, but it sounded so much lusher and realer here. Back-two-three, back-two-three, they whizzed around the room, covering the length and width of it as the ambassador turned her and spun her and they picked up speed, whirling and twirling and practically galloping. As the final notes played, the ambassador held her hand in an elegant arc as he gave a deep bow and she a modest curtsy. The ballroom lights came up, and a bright pop momentarily blinded Evelyn. Then the bulbs started flashing all around her, and she heard her name gather power like a wave: “Evelyn!” “Evelyn, over here!” “Evelyn, to the left!” “Evelyn, who are you wearing?” “Evelyn, straight ahead!” “Evelyn!” “Evelyn!” “Evelyn!” No more was she an and-guest, and-friend, the perennial second tierer. Everyone whom she’d ever met could see she was there, that she was worthy of attention. Joseph Rowley, who had audibly groaned when they were paired together at the Eastern Tennis Club’s twelve-and-under mixed doubles round-robin. Margie Chow, her Sheffield prep-year roommate who hadn’t wanted to room together after the first year. The people bothering her about rent and Barneys would find out who she was and that they shouldn’t have been upsetting her. They would all shake their heads, rueful, regretful. Evelyn had that spark all along, didn’t she? Wasn’t she something? Weren’t we stupid not to see it? Camilla, and Jaime, and Nick, and Charlotte. Preston, Preston would forgive her. And her mother, her mother! How happy Barbara would be. “Evelyn, over here!” “Evelyn!” The flashbulbs exploded, and everyone watching finally knew her name. They knew that she, Evelyn Beegan, belonged.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  After the Ball

  On Sunday morning, Evelyn rose early and went to look at Appointment Book’s new postings. She was pictured in a gliding waltz at the top of the page, with the caption “Dancing Dreams—Evelyn Beegan selected for the danse d’honneur at the Bal Français.” She browsed through Patrick McMullan and saw herself in photo after photo. For kicks, she logged in to People Like Us and searched for her name. Someone in Istanbul had reposted a photo and written, “LOVE her Naeem.”

  She had sent Camilla an e-mail upon reading it, “Look at Appointment Book! Good picture of you,” which was true, though Camilla was in a group photo and Evelyn was shot alone. Camilla didn’t write back. A couple of hours later, she emailed Camilla again: “The dancing went soooo late. So tired:(”

  Still nothing. To try and mend things secondhand, Evelyn wrote Souse a particularly eloquent, or so she thought, thank-you note about the ball, assuming she would get some feedback about it from Camilla. Then she sent Nick some lighthearted texts about the coming weekend at Lake James and the Fruit Stripe, which Souse
had decreed would be held then, to gauge whether Camilla had said something about her to him, but his responses were normal. She thought, frequently, of calling Preston, but how would she start the conversation?

  Evelyn alternated between leaving her phone at full volume for when Jaime called—he’d have to have heard that she’d done the danse d’honneur by now—and turning it off so that she wouldn’t be distracted by waiting for him to call back, but in either case she stared at the phone like it was a bomb. She turned it on, and off, and on, and off, and no new missed calls or voice mails came up. Not from Jaime. And not from Camilla.

  To clear out her voice-mail box so there would be room if Jaime needed to leave a message, she eventually listened to the voice mail from her father from Friday. It was a single sentence: “I thought you’d want to know that my guilty plea was today, which you apparently forgot,” he said in a quiet voice. An image of him, ashamed, in front of the judge, popped into her mind, then she rerouted herself. He had gotten himself into this, and it was all his doing. What did her parents expect from her? Comfort? Support? As though they were offering the same? They weren’t doing anything to help the family’s situation. She was. They’d have to get by on their own.

  On Tuesday, a weird number began calling her; she answered the first time, hoping Jaime was calling from Venezuela. Instead, it was a different collection agency, this time for AmEx. Evelyn had said that they had the wrong number, then briefly quarantined the phone in her refrigerator.

  By Wednesday morning, with no word from Camilla or Jaime, Evelyn deduced that something terrible must have happened to Jaime. His grandmother dying, maybe. Even if he hadn’t liked her, he would’ve gotten in touch. She was a fellow houseguest at Camp Sachem and had done the danse d’honneur at the Bal Français, for God’s sake. Unless Verizon had had some sort of outage when she’d sent the text with her phone number? Had Verizon had an outage? Where was Camilla? She needed people on her side.

  These billiard-ball thoughts were angling around her head as Evelyn hurried toward Central Park on the warm Wednesday afternoon. She had gotten nowhere with the Sloan Kettering associates committee, and certainly wasn’t going to get Preston’s help with his mother now, so she had signed up to volunteer for it with the hope that work on the ground would turn into a committee role. Evelyn had been assigned to help pass out water at a 5K run/walk to raise money for the children’s hospital.

  As Evelyn picked up tiny paper cups from the setup station, she practically collided with Brooke Birch, also wearing a VOLUNTEER badge, carrying an armful of energy-gel packets.

  “Brooke?”

  Brooke looked around quickly, but found no obvious exit route. “Evelyn,” she said.

  “What are you doing in town?”

  “We’re here through the wedding. At the end of June.” Brooke was looking past Evelyn’s head.

  “That’s fantastic. So nice of you to volunteer.”

  “Thanks for the encouragement,” Brooke said.

  “Hey,” Evelyn said quickly. Her unanswered messages for Camilla and Jaime were nagging at her. If she was slipping, she needed more stability. More friends. The pictures in the social pages were good, a very good start. She wasn’t quite secure yet, though. She needed allies. “Have you seen much of Camilla while you’ve been in town?”

  “Honestly, Evelyn, I’m pretty sure you know we’re not exactly on the best of terms. How was the Bal? Did you have fun as Camilla’s assistant or whatever that was?”

  “Look,” Evelyn said softly as she stacked paper cups. “I don’t really know what Camilla was doing with the Bal, but I didn’t mean to—I didn’t want to take your place.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “It was kind of nuts, the way she cut you out of it. I wanted to say something at the time, but I wasn’t sure what to do.”

  Brooke started to walk away. “We don’t really need to talk about it, okay, Evelyn? You’ve known Camilla for, what, two minutes? Congratulations, you get to be her new best friend.”

  Evelyn walked after her, a calmness settling over her. She thought of her father, standing in his office and putting a paperweight on a stack of court documents. The secret to settlements, he had said, is to find out the essence of what’s important to the other party and make sure they believe they’re getting it.

  “I love your ring, by the way. I didn’t get a good look at it when we met,” Evelyn said. “Did Will pick it out himself?”

  Brooke halted her militant walk. “He did.” She let one of the gel packs drop and didn’t pick it up. “He actually got the idea for it from a ring my grandmother has that I’ve always loved.”

  “It’s so beautiful on your hand. It catches the light so well. So you have your dress already? What does it look like?”

  Brooke’s frozen face relaxed a bit. “Oh, it’s so pretty,” she said, then paused, and Evelyn gave her an encouraging smile. “It’s strapless, then fitted at the bodice, with a mermaid back and a train.”

  “In ivory?”

  “True white.” Brooke’s voice almost trilled.

  “Gorgeous. That will look great with your skin tone.”

  Brooke smiled, and Evelyn, who knew from fake smiles, thought it was a real one. Evelyn inquired about the bridesmaids’ dresses, and Brooke, releasing the energy packs into a big bowl, began describing their grosgrain trim. Evelyn reached out and touched Brooke’s hand. She knew what Brooke wanted to hear. Of course she did. “I just wanted to say that I’m sorry about Camilla. Well, not about Camilla, but about the Bal.”

  Brooke’s voice was kinder now. “That’s Camilla, right? I’ve thought about it so much, and it’s just, like, she was so patently jealous that I was getting married and she wasn’t. It’s like, sorry I’m happy and not totally dependent on you.”

  “She seemed to be a little upset by the idea that you were engaged.”

  “I can’t believe she said that to you.”

  Evelyn stayed quiet; that was another part of negotiations, her father had said. Letting other people talk leads them to reveal more than they think they are revealing.

  “I guess I can believe it, I just—I’ve known Camilla since we were thirteen. We were prefects together at St. Paul’s. I can’t believe she’s running around complaining that I have the nerve to get married. You think someone is your friend, and then poof. She’s done it to everyone else; I don’t know why I was surprised when she did it to me. At St. Paul’s there was basically a Camilla castoff every year. One of them was truly odd. She had to wear sports goggles over her glasses for lacrosse games. Camilla gets her shiny new toy, plays with it, and then tosses it out. Now she’s running around New York whining about how I’m getting married. Couldn’t she just be happy for me? Like, for once, be on my side?” Brooke waved her hand, signaling a conversational change. “I saw on Appointment Book that you did the danse d’honneur.”

  “Yes,” Evelyn said, wondering what had become of the goggles girl.

  “Camilla must’ve been furious,” Brooke said.

  “She didn’t seem angry,” Evelyn said.

  “She was planning on being chosen. I heard she even got a dress that would coordinate with the ambassador’s military ribbons,” Brooke said.

  Evelyn thought back to it. Camilla’s dress had had shades of red and gold, which would’ve matched the ambassador’s lapel adornments. Her insides began to feel loose. She had taken a moment away from Camilla, which was a very dangerous thing to do. Evelyn was squeezing one of Brooke’s gel packs so hard it was about to burst all over her arm.

  “I’m surprised she’s still talking to you after that,” Brooke was saying.

  “I think…” Evelyn began to make up some excuse to explain what had happened, but she stopped herself, perceiving that if she wanted Brooke’s alliance, her best bet was to be frank that she, too, could be on the outs with Camilla. She began to laugh. “I’ve emailed her about eight times since then and I haven’t heard a thing.”

  Brooke stared a
t her, alarmed, then started laughing, too. “Well, she was supposed to be a bridesmaid in my wedding.”

  The two started guffawing, Evelyn’s eyes watering as she gasped for breath. “A coordinating dress for the danse d’honneur!” she shrieked. “She’s going to have me shot!”

  “She hasn’t even sent her RSVP card yet!”

  They were clasping each other’s arms now, both bent over with laughter. “Don’t you ever want to just tell her…” Brooke stood up, serious now.

  “That she doesn’t have total control over the social scene?” Evelyn said.

  “Maybe it would be good for her to hear it. Everyone is always so scared of her.”

  “I think it would be good for her to hear it.”

  The two women looked at one another, nudging each other toward the edge of a cliff.

  “That photo of you on Appointment Book must’ve given her a heart attack,” Brooke said after a pause.

  The laughter had felt so good that Evelyn wanted it back. “Like, how do you even know what the ambassador’s ribbon colors are going to be?” she asked. They both started laughing again, and a whistle blew. Evelyn looked back; it was fifteen minutes to race time. “I’ve got to get to my station,” she said. “Brooke, it was really good to see you. Maybe we’ll run into each other again. Cancer or something else.”

  “Maybe so,” said Brooke.

  The giddy feeling evaporated as soon as Evelyn walked to her water station. By the time she met Scot for dinner that night at Le Bilboquet, a couple of blocks from Camilla’s apartment, she was frantic and distracted, wondering if she’d said too much to Brooke. She tipped her chair back and forth as she waited for him, reading the menu over and over, Cajun chicken and endives aux Roquefort, Cajun chicken and endives aux Roquefort.…

  “Hi,” Scot said when he arrived. He was more nervous than usual and was practically hopping.

  “Hi.” She kissed him, counting out five seconds, then pulling away.