“I miss Winkie so. Oh, Addison, I can’t believe he’s gone!” Lil said, grabbing his hand, swept up in her grief for her friend and forgetting for a moment the disdain she normally felt for Addison Kent. Her eyes began to well up with tears. She turned to Adele. “I got a letter from him just this morning. And look at this exquisite orchid he sent with it!”
Addison squeezed her fingers and said, “I know, I know. He didn’t want a fuss made over him.”
Lil continued talking.
“That’s just like Winkie, not to want a fuss. When I gave those large dinners at the old apartment I always asked Winkie to do the seating. He was a genius at placement.”
Lil turned to Adele and mouthed the word suicide, and Adele nodded, wide-eyed.
Adele, always kind, in an attempt to get her dear friend’s mind off of her shocking loss, looked around at Lil’s new apartment and raved about it. “It’s sweet, Lil, so sweet, and I recognize those red damask curtains from the Fifth Avenue apartment,” she said.
“Rosalie Paget said they overpowered the room. I think Rosalie was right, don’t you?” asked Lil, “In his letter Winkie said I should get new ones, that tangerine is the color of the season.”
“Perhaps if you took the valances down,” said Adele.
“The rooms are small, Adele, and the ceilings are low, and the furniture all looks much too large. I suppose I’ll get used to it. There are so many things to get used to these days. Thank God for Gert. I don’t know what I would do without Gert. You must let me know if the Canaletto of Westminster Bridge overpowers the dining room, which is tiny, tiny, tiny.”
“It looks lovely, darling,” said Adele. “It’s supposed to overpower a room. That’s the point of owning a Canaletto.”
“You are dear, Adele. My grandfather bought it from Lord Duveen when he was building the big house on Park Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street,” said Lil. “I’m so glad I grabbed it right out of my father’s dining room after he died, or my stepmother, the dreaded Dodo, would have nicked it for herself.”
“I have to sit down,” said Adele. “Addison, will you help me over to that chair?”
“Let’s go right in to lunch,” said Lil. “The soufflé’s ready. Adele, you’re sitting next to me, with Addison on the other side. And you here, Ormolu. And Kay Kay’s there. And Jamesey Crocus between. I asked Prince Simeon of Slovakia, but he had to back out at the last minute.”
“Simmy flew to Monte Carlo for the sale of the Krupp diamond,” said Addison, who loved to impart new information, as a way of securing his position. “Faye Converse, the movie star, is selling it in great secrecy. She wants fifty million, and there’s a Saudi prince who’s interested.”
“Faye Converse was always my favorite actress,” said Adele.
“My friend Gus Bailey, you met him at my house at Easter, produced one of Faye Converse’s movies when he was in the movie business, but I never can remember the name of it. Let’s sit down.”
“I so enjoyed having Winkie Williams on occasions like this. I just can’t believe he’s gone,” said Lil in Adele’s ear, to deflect attention from Addison, who was telling a story about Faye Converse as if he knew her, which he didn’t. “I think we should drink a toast to Winkie. I heard from Brucie when he brought over the centerpiece this morning that Addison went to the cremation. Tell us about it, Addison.”
Addison, usually loquacious, chose not to offer his information on the cremation. He didn’t want Lil and Adele and the other ladies and Jamesey Crocus to know that he and Francis Xavior Branigan, with whom he had had a quickie in the men’s room of the Grant P. Trumbull funeral home, had sung “The Extra Man” by Cole Porter as Winkie’s body turned to ashes. “It was brief, just the way Winkie wanted it,” said Addison.
“I heard that Ruby Renthal wants to buy Winkie’s ormolu chest before the Boothby auction,” said Kay Kay Somerset. “I haven’t seen Ruby in years, ever since Elias went to prison.”
“Ruby sees almost no one,” said Addison, who had never met her.
“Almost no one sees Ruby would be a better description of the situation,” said Kay Kay Somerset.
“I have a letter from Winkie asking that the ormolu chest be auctioned off and the proceeds be given to me. But just imagine Mrs. Renthal of all people, coming to my rescue with her checkbook. Little does she know I was the one who blackballed her from getting an apartment at my old building on Fifth Avenue.”
Addison, who had more news to impart, spoke up. “It looks like someone bought the Tavistock mansion on East Seventy-eighth Street and is having it done up inside to a fare-thee-well. Even an indoor swimming pool, I heard,” he said.
“Didn’t somebody’s cook jump out the window in that house?” asked Ormolu Webb.
“It was Tootie Scott-Miller’s cook,” said Lil. “Tootie criticized the soufflé, rather harshly, apparently—you remember how Tootie could get at times—and the cook was so hurt she jumped from the cook’s room on the sixth floor. Right in the middle of a lunch party. Plop, right outside the dining room window.”
“I was there for lunch that day,” said Adele Harcourt. “So was Winkie Williams. It was years ago. She still had her apron on, the poor thing. Plop she went. If you ask me, I think it’s a bad-luck house.”
NONE OF them knew that the cook they were talking about who had jumped out the window of the Tavistock mansion during Tootie Scott-Miller’s lunch party twenty-seven years earlier was Addison Kent’s mother. Addison, who was once called Artie, could listen to such a story about his mother and not react. He had been not quite a year old when his mother, who was still suffering from postpartum depression, jumped out the sixth-floor window after being rebuked by Tootie Scott-Miller for a disappointing soufflé. An aunt, his mother’s unmarried sister, who was the cook for Miss Winifred Staunton, the richest lady in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, took him in and raised him in the servants’ quarters of the vast Tudor mansion where she worked. As the years passed, the rich lady, now confined to a wheelchair and lonely, began to take an interest in the handsome boy. It was she who thought Addison would be a more suitable first name than Artie. She liked to have him dine with her. By the time he was ten, Addison knew how to remove the doily and finger bowl from the dessert plate and place them ahead to the left before serving himself the ice cream in a silver bowl held by his aunt Agnes, the cook. By the time he was twelve, he could look at a diamond and tell how many carats it was. Miss Staunton, who adored him and might have left him everything, gave him a jeweler’s loupe as a stocking present that Christmas. He often said, when asked about his history, “I was brought up by a Miss Winifred Staunton in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. We had a summerhouse in Harbor Springs.”
What was virtually unknown in Addison Kent’s history was that Miss Winifred Staunton, the richest woman in Grosse Pointe, ultimately felt betrayed by Addison Kent, whom she had championed, whom she had intended to send to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, until a sapphire ring, the disappearance of which had caused great consternation in the household, was discovered in a rolled-up pair of socks in his bureau drawer. There were no scenes, no police, no punishment. He was simply sent on his way to whatever life held for him. His mortified aunt Agnes offered to resign her post, but Miss Staunton did not accept her resignation. They never mentioned Addison Kent’s name again, until they read about him in the papers years later, where he was pictured in the society pages on the arm of Adele Harcourt.
Miss Staunton, who was very old by then, looked at Agnes, who was still her cook, and Agnes, holding a silver tray with Miss Staunton’s morning hot water and lemon juice, looked back at Miss Staunton. “It’s quite Dickensian in its own way,” Miss Staunton said to Agnes as they peered down at the photograph. “Quite what, ma’am?” Agnes inquired. Miss Staunton then folded the paper, said it didn’t matter anyhow, and put it aside.
AFTER THE fig mousse, which was Adele Harcourt’s favorite dessert, they continued to sit in the little dining room for their demitasse.
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“I think moving to the living room sort of breaks up the mood, don’t you?” asked Lil.
Adele started to get up from the table.
“Where are you going, Adele?” asked Lil, leaning in. “Oh, the fig mousse. I know it’s your favorite. That’s why Gert insisted on serving it, although she thinks it goes better with dinner than with lunch. Shall I ring for Gert? She’d be so thrilled.”
“No, I’ll go in the kitchen,” said Adele.
“You’ve always been the most thoughtful person, Adele. Mother used to say that about you. Addison, will you please help Adele into the kitchen?”
“It was delicious, divine, better than ever, Gert,” said Adele.
That night Addison headed off to a dinner party. “To say Gert was ecstatic at Adele’s praise would be the understatement of the year,” he told the other guests. He didn’t bother saying that it was during the moment that he let go of Adele’s arm so that he too could shake hands with the cook that everything happened.
As Adele turned to reenter the dining room for the champagne toast to the new apartment, she tripped on the linoleum floor that had become slippery from overuse over the years by prior old tenants of the apartment and broke her hip.
“Such screams as you’ve never heard,” continued Addison, who was the center of attention. “Adele was gallant, simply gallant. Lil, on the other hand, was crying and wringing her hands, saying she’d been meaning to have the linoleum changed ever since she moved into the apartment.”
WHEN LIL returned from the hospital, after having ridden in the ambulance with Adele and Addison, whom she didn’t like, Gert, who had brought her a cup of tea, said to her, “It was Mr. Kent. He let go of Mrs. Harcourt’s arm to shake hands with me, copying the way Mrs. Harcourt did, and that’s when she fell, when he let go of her.”
“I’ve been meaning to change that linoleum ever since I moved into this damn apartment, ever since that Guatemalan maid slipped, do you remember, Gert? The one who recently worked for poor Winkie.”
“Immaculata,” said Gert.
“What?”
“Immaculata. That was the Guatemalan maid’s name.”
“She couldn’t sue, thank God. Wasn’t she an illegal alien?”
“I don’t know, Missus.” said Gert.
“They all are these days.”
“Missus, I know this isn’t a very convenient time, but there’s something I have to talk to you about,” said Gert.
A nervous expression passed quickly across Lil’s face, as though she knew what Gert was going to ask and she dreaded the answer she knew she had to give. She was careful not to betray herself to her cook.
“And there’s something I have to talk to you about, Gert. About the trip to Ireland this year to see your niece. It’s just not going to work out for me. Ever since Dodo, that ghastly stepmother of mine, got all the money that was supposed to come to me, and since young Laurance is keeping me on such a tight financial leash, I think we’re going to have to put the trip off until next year. From now on, make it every other year rather than every year.”
CHAPTER 8
IT WASN’T UNTIL THE BOARDS WERE REMOVED FROM THE windows of the old Tavistock mansion on East Seventy-eighth Street between Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue and the limestone was washed for the first time in sixty years that people in the neighborhood began to notice that there was magnificence in the French château that they had walked by every day for years but overlooked in its neglected state. The original owners, back in the 1920s, were the Clarence Pierpont Tavistocks, who brought so much of the exquisite paneling in the library and dining room from Kingswood Castle in Wiltshire, as arranged and brokered for them by Lord Duveen, then in the twilight years of his famous career of providing art and sculpture from the great houses of England, France, Italy, and Spain for the new great houses of New York, Boston, and Newport. The house itself had been designed by Odgen Codman, a Bostonian architect and decorator not much remembered these days other than as the collaborator with Edith Wharton, whose novels dealt with the occupants of such grand houses, on her book on the art of decorating. The Clarence Pierpont Tavistocks never lived in the beautiful mansion they had so lovingly built and decorated. On the night before they were to move in, they were killed while returning from the opera in an automobile accident caused by their chauffeur, O’Connor, who ran a red light and crashed into a telephone pole on the corner of Park Avenue and East Seventy-eighth Street. O’Connor, who was drunk, served ten years.
On East Seventy-eighth Street, people were beginning to wonder who was spending the fortune that it must be taking to restore the house to its former grandeur. Even very rich people who never had to worry about money and could always have anything they wanted without thinking about cost couldn’t stop discussing how much money someone was spending on the extensive renovations.
“I heard whoever bought it paid in excess of forty million dollars,” said Christine Saunders, the famous television news star and interviewer, at one of Maisie Verdurin’s dinner parties, honoring former president Bill Clinton. Maisie Verdurin, the most prominent real estate broker in the city and a hostess of note in the media society of New York, was rumored to have brokered the deal between client and estate, but Maisie, who was notoriously tight-lipped on pending deals, chose to remain mum on the subject.
“Come on, Maisie. Tell us who is spending all that money. I’ve never seen such beautiful front doors in my life. The bronze work is simply ravishing. If anyone knows, you know, Maisie. It’s become the most discussed house in the city.”
“I don’t know any more about it than you do,” Maisie replied, holding up her arms in mock innocence and enjoying being the center of conversation at her own dinner party, as the former president listened in amusement.
“What do you think, Mr. President?” asked Christine Saunders, turning to Mr. Clinton, who was seated prominently next to her. Gus Bailey, who mostly listened at dinner parties these days and seldom spoke up, admired the way Christine Saunders asked a teasing question of such a world-renowned figure.
“I haven’t any idea,” replied the president.
“Make a guess,” insisted Christine.
“Someone getting out of prison maybe,” the president observed, grinning.
Everyone laughed except Maisie. It was at that very moment that Maisie rose from her seat to give her charming toast to the president, although the hired waiters had not finished passing the crème brûlée or pouring the champagne. Gus, observing the moment from his end of the table, knew exactly who would shortly be getting out of federal prison in Las Vegas, Nevada, after having served seven years and paid fines of seven hundred million dollars, but he said nothing. He had stopped telling his stories at dinner parties, ever since he had been sued for slander for something he had said on Patience Longstreet’s under-watted radio show.
“THERE’S THIS man in England I’ve been meaning to tell you about,” Ruby said over the telephone to Elias when she told him she wouldn’t be out to Las Vegas that weekend as she was going to England. “His name is Simon Cabot. He’s very much a background figure. You wouldn’t have read about him or seen his picture in the papers, which is the whole point of him.
“His speciality is people with tarnished reputations, like ours. Whenever one of the young English royals smokes pot or gets drunk or something, they call him in, and he deals with the media in the most ingenious ways.”
“Why are we talking about a man named Simon Cabot, whom I’ve never heard of?” said Elias.
“He will be perfect for us,” said Ruby. “He’ll get us back where we were. Look what he did for Perla Zacharias at the murder trial in Biarritz. To the public, Perla came out smelling like a rose. The crowds cheered. The chief rabbi of France came to Biarritz as a witness. He arrived from Paris in Perla’s plane. That was all Simon Cabot’s idea. Simon wouldn’t let Perla use the Rolls-Royce to go from the hotel to court. It was his idea for her to arrive in an SUV, along with her staff all cro
wded in, like she was just real folks instead of the third richest woman in the world. He wouldn’t let her wear any jewels, even gold jewelry, nothing except her wedding ring from Konstantin. It was Simon’s idea that she wear that twenty-five-year-old Yves Saint Laurent pantsuit on the opening day of the trial, and she looked divine in it. Gus Bailey had a picture of her in it in his article in Park Avenue. Nasty as the article was, she still looked perfectly resplendent. Simon Cabot could do the same for you, Elias, when you get out of that dump. He’ll turn the whole affair into something very positive. There will be an enormous amount of publicity, and he’ll think of some wonderful thing that you can do for families of people in prisons, or something. He’s brilliant, absolutely brilliant.”
RUBY ASKED Martin, Claridge’s famed hall porter, to arrange a discreet corner table in the reading room at Claridge’s, out of sight of the fashionable lobby crowd, as both she and Simon Cabot, although not famous, were each recognizable faces to certain of the guests who frequented the hotel, and their meeting would certainly be commented upon and give rise to speculation that Elias Renthal was going to use Simon Cabot to help ease the way back into society after a long prison sentence. It was the sort of situation that Martin understood perfectly, and their tea meeting went unobserved.
“Perla spoke so highly of you, after the trial of her husband’s alleged murderer in Biarritz,” said Ruby. “She said you gave her such marvelous advice.”
“Fascinating woman,” said Simon. “Like someone in a novel.” Simon was not one who talked about his clients.
“Yes, yes, she is fascinating,” said Ruby. “Have you seen the villa in Biarritz? I’m sure you have. Most beautiful house I ever saw. And the French furniture! My God. Better than the furniture at Versailles.”
“I have been to the villa in Biarritz, yes,” said Simon.
“So awful, that terrible fire in Biarritz. Poor Konstantin dying like that. He didn’t actually burn to death, you know, as people say. My husband always says that Konstantin was the finest banker of his day.”
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