“You will be sure, won’t you, Parker, to tell Gertie how much we enjoyed the fish mousse,” said Lil to her butler, as he cleared away the first course. Gertie was her cook, and Lil always interrupted her own conversation to send her compliments via her butler. “You used to be able to drive through Southampton and know who everyone was. Or, if you didn’t actually know them, you knew who they were. Now you see all these new names on those same houses, and you don’t know who any of them are, except they’ve all got about fifty million dollars. Who, pray tell, are the Reza Bulbenkians who just bought Evangeline’s house?”
Lil, who had cases of champagne left over from the wedding, decided to dispense with red and white wines that day and serve only champagne throughout the meal, making the occasion more festive. She raised her glass and welcomed the new members of the family, meaning Bernie Slatkin and Dodo Fitz Alyn, although Dodo could not strictly be considered a new member of the family, having been a part of it, at a secondary level, since she was taken in by them as a teenager. Dodo, blushing, thanked Lil and raised her glass to Ormonde, who wore his napkin like a bib, whom she said had changed her life. Lil and Laurance exchanged glances, as if to say, “I should say so,” but only applauded both Dodo and their father. Bernie sprang to his feet and made everyone laugh telling what it felt like for a person like him to suddenly find himself a member of a family like the Van Degans. Justine hopped to her feet and kissed Bernie, whom she had started to call dear heart when she addressed him, although it was a name that Bernie could not bear to be called. It was not lost on Matilda Clarke that Bernie Slatkin found Justine’s excessive affection irritating. Old Ormonde, seated next to Matilda, told her three times how much he missed Sweetzer and what a keen sportsman he had been. The toasts ended with Uncle Laurance asking everyone to rise to thank Lil for the wonderful day she had provided for them.
The late spring afternoon had turned rainy and chilly, and Parker lit a fire as the group reentered the drawing room to settle in Lil’s dark red damask sofas and chairs for coffee. Hubie and Justine stood together in front of one of the tall windows and looked out at the park, talking quietly. Laura Van Degan minded little Janet, who needed changing. Dodo minded Ormonde, who needed changing. Bernie Slatkin settled into a spirited game of backgammon with Matilda Clarke, who considered herself a champion, and was mildly put out that Bernie kept winning. Ned Manchester talked with Uncle Laurance and young Laurance about the state of the stock market and expressed concern about what he, too, called the New People, like Elias Renthal and Reza Bulbenkian, who seemed to be running the financial world, but Uncle Laurance assured Ned that Elias Renthal was the most fascinating man in the financial community in years, and necessary to it. Gus Bailey, quiet that day, as he always was on holidays, talked with Lil Altemus, who had placed him next to her at lunch, about Trollope, who was her favorite writer, as she fed cookies to her King Charles spaniels. Bozzie Manchester excused himself to go to the men’s room but used the escape to telephone his mother, Loelia, at the Rhinelander Hotel to wish her a happy Easter; there was no answer and he did not leave a message.
Inevitably, during Van Degan gatherings, photograph albums were brought out and several people at a time pored over the pictures and captions. “Do you remember that time, Laurance, at Evangeline Simpson’s wedding? Look how pretty Evangeline was way back then. Poor Evangeline. She was so drunk the other night at the Dashwoods’,” said Lil.
“Look at Sonny Thomas. My God, Lil. Whatever happened to old Sonny?” asked Laurance.
“He married that woman with one leg, what’s her name, with the son on heroin. Betsy Babcock. He married Betsy.”
A sense of melancholy filled the air of Lil’s large room, as if they all knew that this would be their last Van Degan Easter.
“Where’s Juanito today?” asked Justine. She and Hubie were staring out the window at a bag lady establishing a beachhead for herself on a park bench across the street. Behind her a magnolia tree was in its first day of full blossom.
“Oh, lordie, I haven’t a clue,” replied Hubie, as if Juanito were no more than a casual acquaintance. It was not a truthful answer, but he did not wish to appear, even to his own sister, from whom he had no secrets, or very few, to be in the thrall of his Puerto Rican lover, even though he knew that she knew that he was. Juanito Perez had the power to make him miserably unhappy with his rampant promiscuity, as well as ecstatically happy on the occasions he focused his amatory attentions on Hubie.
“Hubie, when are you going to tell me?” asked Justine suddenly.
“Spring is bustin’ out all over,” replied Hubie, pointing to the magnolia tree.
“Hubie?” insisted Justine.
“Tell you what?”
“Hubie, it’s me, remember, your sister.”
“What’s to tell? You already know. I knew you knew.”
“How?”
“At your wedding. Just before you were going up the aisle. When you kissed me. I saw in your eyes then that you knew.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “What’s going to happen, Hubie?”
“I’m going to cool, I suppose.”
“Don’t be flippant about this, Hubie.”
“I’m not being flippant, Justine. Believe me. I just haven’t arrived at my attitude yet. I don’t know how to play this scene.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think it was Juanito who gave it to you?” asked Justine.
Hubie smiled. “Could have been. He tested positive. On the other hand, it could have been about six hundred other guys too. I was never what you would call inactive. Does that shock you, Justine?”
“I’m trying not to be shocked, Hubie.”
“Given my proclivities, there was a time not too long ago I even would have put the make on that hot number you got yourself married to.”
“Bernie?” They both laughed. “He would have broken your nose.”
“Wouldn’t have been the first time somebody broke my nose.”
“Oh, Hubie,” said Justine, putting her hand on her brother’s shoulder.
“Don’t cry, Justine. Just don’t cry. Not here. Not with all this family around.”
“I won’t, Hubie. What about Mother? When are you going to tell her?”
“After everyone leaves today.”
“Do you want me to be with you?”
“I think this is something I have to do alone. But, thanks, Justine.”
It rained the whole Easter weekend at Merry Hill, and the men of the house party, except for Ezzie Fenwick, were put out that the inclement weather thwarted their sporting plans.
The Renthals had bought a house where, years past, a shooting had taken place. It had belonged to a family called Grenville, a name long faded from day-to-day usage, but, still, a name that recalled past glories. “This was once the Grenvilles’ house,” people would say about it, traipsing through the woods to look at the structure, boarded up, unwanted for several decades, since the scandal that rendered it unlivable. “He was going to leave her, and she shot him. Something like that,” they would say.
For the Renthals, however, who didn’t know the Grenvilles, had never even heard of them, other than a feint recollection of grandeur associated with the name, there was not a moment’s hesitation about buying the property when the only daughter of that sad family decided to sell. They liked owning things that had once belonged to grand people. At a Rothschild auction in Europe, Elias bought every bit of glass, china, silverware, and household linen with the letter R engraved or embroidered on it, more than enough to accommodate vast groups at both his enormous apartment in town and his new estate in the country.
Ruby was awakened early by the sounds of her maids arguing below with Lorenza, about vases. Temperamental and demanding Lorenza, in her miniskirt, had arrived early from the city to arrange the peonies and delphinium, and the forsythia and lilac branches in the downstairs rooms, and she always argued with the maids about vases.
Far from being cross, Ruby stretched luxuriously and nestled into her linen sheets, enjoying hearing the bustle of a life below that was preparing for her day. She never took her new status for granted and always, in moments like these, when she stopped to notice, she said, to whomever it was one thanked, a short and shy prayer of gratitude. Then, glancing at her gold vermeil traveling clock, which had once belonged to the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, she knew, in her perfectly run life, that in nine minutes Candelaria would knock on her door with her tray, her mail, and her morning papers.
It had taken but one weekend at Castle Castor, the Wiltshire seat of the Earl and Countess of Castoria, for Ruby to learn most of the amenities of grand country life: bags unpacked by the butler, clothes pressed by the maid, biscuits and fruit and bottles of Malvern water on the bed tables, breakfast on trays for the ladies, breakfast in the small dining room for the gentlemen, and separate newspapers for all.
Elias Renthal, his eggs finished, lit the first cigar of the day as he read the business section of the Times. He and the male members of the weekend party had gathered for breakfast in the smaller of the two dining rooms in the house, while the ladies took breakfast in their rooms. Elias relished the thought that important men, in dressing gowns, reading newspapers, were his weekend guests, at his country estate, while their wives and lady friends breakfasted above in their rooms. It was not until his marriage to Ruby, whose desire for social life was insatiable, that Elias began to understand the pleasures of popularity. It was Ruby who made Elias understand the advantages of social life for his business career, knowing the players at dinner, as she put it, instead of only at lunch. He found to his astonishment that people found him amusing, and he decided that he quite liked being liked. He even began to enjoy dinnertable conversation, as it was a way of spreading the word on his ever increasing art collection. “You must let me show you my new Caravaggio,” he liked to say, or, “Personally, I prefer Picasso’s blue period.” His most fervent secret hope was that, in time, a place would be found for him on the board of directors of the museum.
“Journalism is not an exact science,” Elias stated impatiently, hurling the newspaper to the floor, a gesture that caused the others to look up from their papers.
“Is something wrong?” asked Lord Biedermeier.
“I gave this fella from the Times an interview, and he misquotes me all the way through the article,” said Elias.
“About what?” asked Mickie Minardos.
“My takeover of Miranda Industries. He says, in effect, that I took away the personality of the company. What he don’t realize is I gave the company its identity. In the first place, I’m the one who renamed it Miranda. It had nine names and no corporate identity at all until I bought the company. These are things I understand. This article makes me sound like a predator, for Christ’s sake, moving in for the kill. What I learned a long time ago is to sell a company, or a hotel, or a business as soon as I start to love it.”
“I don’t understand that,” said Mickie Minardos.
“What’s to understand?” asked Elias.
“If you love a company, why do you sell it?”
Elias looked at Mickie. “That’s why you’re not rich,” he said.
Mickie, who thought of himself as rich, assumed a look of one whose worth has been underestimated.
Elias understood his look. “I mean really rich,” he said. “What I am is a man who understands timing, the exact moment to make a move. That’s my instinct. That’s something I was born with. You either got it, or you don’t. I deal with hundreds of millions of dollars a day in my business. I didn’t fire more than five hundred people, and I brought in a whole new board of directors, responsible people like Laurance Van Degan, Loelia Manchester, Lord Biedermeier here, and my English friend the Earl of Castoria, high-profile people like that. Now we have a working operation. By the end of this year, I expect we’ll do something like a billion two, a billion five, around there.”
Elias’s guests listened avidly. Elias Renthal talked a great deal about himself: his takeovers, his boards of directors, his profits, his acquisitions. And his guests listened, mesmerized, as if they, too, would get rich by sitting at the table of such a rich man.
“All right now,” said Elias, clapping his hands, changing the subject. “Let’s see what you’ve got, Winston.”
Winston Bergerac, half French, half English, was famed for his paintings of horses. A modern Stubbs, they called him in the Sackville’s catalogue. He had painted the horses of the Queen of England and had only just completed a painting of Elias Renthal’s prize stud, Flash, which Elias had acquired from the Saratoga sales.
Winston Bergerac left the small dining room and returned in an instant with an easel, which he set up at the head of the table by the seat of Elias Renthal. He left the room again and returned in another instant with a painting under his arm, faced away from his audience, which he then turned around and placed on the easel. Murmurs of pleasure at the beauty of the elegant animal went around the table. Elias puffed at his cigar and stared at his latest commission, like a great collector collecting. He rose from his seat and went closer, bending in to look, stepping back to look, bending in to look again.
“I don’t like it,” he said finally, and a low gasp went around the table.
“But why?” asked the astonished Winston Bergerac.
“The prick’s too big,” said Elias. “I can’t hang that in my dining room like that, with that big dork hanging down there. Ruby wouldn’t approve.”
“But, surely, Mr. Renthal,” remonstrated Winston Bergerac, “that is the nature of the animal.”
Elias scowled at what he sensed to be a superior tone in the voice of the painter. Lord Biedermeier, who knew that Elias could be formidable in displeasure, stepped in to make the suggestion that perhaps that part of the beautiful animal’s anatomy could be repainted.
“All right. All right. Make the prick smaller, and I’ll reconsider,” said Elias, magnanimously. He gathered up the rest of his newspaper and walked out of the room to spend an hour on the telephone on business calls and to give some attention to the book on corporate takeovers that he was writing for Lord Biedermeier.
On a fireplace bench in the library lay newspapers and magazines from all over the world, rarely read, changed weekly by the butler, and available for any guest to take along to his room. Ezzie Fenwick, who disliked sport of any kind, excepting country walks, was the only member of the house party who enjoyed the bad weather. Long afternoons of bridge, or reading in front of the fire, or gossiping over drinks about parties and fashion and the upcoming Renthal ball, were to him infinitely preferable to swimming pools, or tennis courts, or golf links, or horseback riding, or, horrors, skeet shooting.
“Elias Renthal has taken to the grand life as if he’s afraid it’s not going to last,” Ezzie said to Loelia Manchester.
“Shh,” cautioned Loelia.
“These New People spend more for their houses than rich people in my day used to inherit,” went on Ezzie.
“Shh,” said Loelia.
“There’s a Toulouse-Lautrec in the gentleman’s loo. I’ve never seen that before,” Ezzie continued, undaunted.
“Shh,” said Loelia.
Like trophies, invitations to the best parties in town were lined up one next to the other on Ruby’s elegant mantelpiece. Ezzie nosed through them. Mrs. Sims Lord’s dinner. Mrs. Van Degan Altemus’s dinner. Mrs. Laurance Van Degan’s dinner. Mrs. Charles Bradley’s dinner. Miss Maude Hoare’s dinner. Mrs. Violet Bastedo’s cocktail party. Mrs. Loelia Somerset Manchester’s opera supper.
The door of the library opened, and Ruby Renthal entered, carrying her copy of the The Memoirs of Madame de la Tour du Pin, which Jamesey Crocus told her she simply must read if she wanted to understand about life at Versailles under Marie Antoinette in the final days before the Revolution.
“The flowers are beautiful, Ruby,” said Ezzie Fenwick quickly, moving away from the invitations, as he
nodded approvingly at the masses of blue delphinium and pink peonies that Lorenza had arranged on the console tables while they were all still at breakfast.
“Thank you, Ezzie,” said Ruby, beaming. The ladies of the group always craved Ezzie’s approval of their clothes, houses, flowers, and the seating of their tables. The men were less enthusiastic about Ezzie.
“I don’t understand why you kowtow to that guy, Ruby,” Elias had said to Ruby the evening before, in a loud whisper in the hallway, after Ezzie said that only waiters and bandleaders wore black tie on Sunday nights, when Ruby suggested they dress for dinner.
“Ezzie Fenwick’s an arbiter,” replied Ruby.
“Ezzie Fenwick’s an asshole,” answered Elias.
Ezzie pretended not to have heard. It was a way he had learned of ignoring the cruel taunts of his youth. Instead he went on chatting nonstop, over bridge, at which he excelled, about the terrible state of Aline Royceton’s teeth, and why didn’t she do something about them; about Evangeline Simpson throwing up in the powder room at Adele Harcourt’s during one of her book-club meetings, and why didn’t someone simply take poor Evangeline by the hand out to Minnesota where they do all those marvelous things about drunks; and about the vicious rumor that the Duchess of Windsor was really a man, and how can those terrible stories like that get started, when the truth of the matter was that not a soul in the room had heard the story before that moment.
Ruby took Mickie Minardos away with her, and they locked themselves behind closed doors to go over plans for the ball, which were being kept secret from even the closest of friends, except Loelia, of course, but Loelia wasn’t telling. After she left, everyone remarked on the beauty of Ruby Renthal. She had recently returned from a trip to Brazil with a changed chin and smaller breasts. Her marvelous clothes, even in the country, her fabulous jewels, even for day, her newfound ability to enter a room so that everyone turned to look at her, and the allure of vast wealth that had become a part of her drew people into her orbit. Near, they were not disappointed. Her voice, changed too, so like the voice of Loelia Manchester, her greatest friend, enhanced the wit and charm that had been hers to begin with. Had she met people from the earlier parts of her life, before her prominence, she need not have worried, and didn’t, for, most likely, they would not have recognized her. Ruby Renthal had become a great lady.
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