Ruth merely smiles.
“Can you tell us what it’s about?”
She hesitates. “Love, I suppose,” she says at last.
“Wonderful. Every great novel must contain a great love story.”
Ruth has learned one thing from her days in films. She has learned how to find the key light. She has found it now, in a tiny low-voltage ceiling spot that was placed to illuminate Andy Warhol’s Double Marilyn with purple hair and green lips. When this light touches the tip of Ruth’s nose, the tiny lines of aging, aided by periodic collagen injections, seem to fade away. Still, Carol thinks that Ruth, at fifty-five, has kept her beauty remarkably well, along with her figure. If only Ruth didn’t always seem to be so unhappy …
“… You’re brave to hang your Warhols,” Bill Luckman is saying. “A lot of people nowadays are nervous about owning Warhol. They’re saying he’s not a has-been but a never-was.”
“Noah and I buy pictures we like. We don’t think of them as investments, if that’s what you mean.”
“I admire your courage, Carol,” he says. “I truly do.”
“Have you ever thought of writing a novel, Bill?” Melody asks him. “Perhaps you should.”
He gives her a sudden, hard look. “Are you suggesting that Blighted Elms is fiction?” he says.
“No, I only meant—”
“I assume everyone here has read my book,” he says.
There is a brief, embarrassed silence, and Carol moves about the room with a plate of tiny sausages wrapped in pastry. “Do try one of these. My cook makes them herself.…”
Ector yawns noisily. (“It’s Ector, not Hector,” he said when introducing himself. “It’s a Welsh name.” And Carol has been so busy remembering this unusual first name that she has forgotten his last, which is something simple like White or Smith or Jones.) “Anything good on TV?” he asks now. “New Year’s Eve, there ought to be some really neat shows.” He looks around the room. “Hey, where is your TV?” he asks.
“There’s a set in the library,” Carol murmurs, “but—”
“You got a library here? Like the public library?”
“The room where we keep our books.” She smiles brightly at him.
“You don’t have a TV in the living room, where you can watch it? Are you shitting me?”
From the moment he entered the room, Carol suspected that Ruth’s new beau was going to present a problem. For one thing, he must be less than half Ruth’s age. For another, he is not appropriately dressed, in a blue windbreaker and an open shirt that is unbuttoned down to his chest hairs. He looks like a young thug, or a stevedore. He has heavy, pouting lips, like the young men who pose in leather zip-front bikini briefs for some of the kinkier menswear catalogues that show up in your mailbox. Carol Liebling suddenly has the wild thought that Ruth may have hired him for the evening from an escort service. He looks like a boy toy, and she wonders, with a sense of grim amusement, what Ruth’s mother, when she arrives, will think of Ruth’s newest romantic interest.
Ector, apparently sensing that he has said something out of place, stands up. “Gotta take a leak,” he says. “Where’s the john?”
“Straight down the hall, on your right,” Carol says brightly. She glances at Ruth, who is following Ector adoringly with her eyes, and she hears Bill Luckman murmur the words “free spirit,” but she is not sure whether he is referring to her, and her choice of artists, or to Ector.
Bill Luckman, without missing a beat and not wishing to lose his audience, turns to Ruth. “It’s such a pleasure to meet you, Countess,” he says. “I happened to watch The Archbishop’s Wife on television the other night, and now that I’ve met you I can see that you would have been perfect to play the part of Rosalie. Brenda Scofield, who ended up playing your part, just didn’t do the role justice.”
“Thank you,” Ruth whispers.
“Was it wonderful working with the great John Mardsen?”
She nods, and smiles, and spreads her hands in what-can-I-say gesture.
He turns to Carol. “You see, I’ve done my homework on the Liebling family,” he says, and the implication is left floating in the air that the Liebling family has not done sufficient homework on him.
“I know you’re all going to be impressed with Bill’s book when you’ve had a chance to read it,” Melody says. “It’s really a blistering indictment of academia in the nineties.”
“That’s what the New York Times says,” he says.
Ector has returned from the bathroom, and now makes a point of sitting in a loveseat next to Becka, rather than Ruth, which Ruth notices but pretends not to notice. “What do you do, Ector?” Becka asks him.
“Do?”
“For a living, I mean.”
“Oh. Entertainment business.”
“You’re an actor?”
“More in the entertainment end, I guess,” he says.
“Interesting.”
Now there is another small crisis. Though he is sitting on a sofa next to a needlepoint pillow with the legend THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING, Bill Luckman has just casually reached into his jacket pocket, removed a pack of Dunhill cigarettes, and is lighting one with a slim gold lighter. There are several anxious glances in Carol’s direction, but she merely says, “Let me see if I can find you something to use for an ashtray, Bill.”
And as Carol goes to the drawer of a small table in search of an ashtray, Ector, seeing what Bill is doing, reaches in his own windbreaker pocket for cigarettes. Ruth raises her fingertip in a small warning gesture.
“Hell, if that guy can smoke, why can’t I?” Ector says angrily. “What’s so special about that fucker?”
“Let me see if I can find ashtrays for you both,” Carol says, rummaging through the drawer, feeling suddenly short of breath.
There is something almost arrogant in Bill Luckman’s smile, and in the way he holds the cigarette poised in his hand, waiting to be served an ashtray. Turning to Noah, he says, “Melody tells me you and Carol are almost like foster parents to her, Noah,” he says, exhaling sharply.
“Surrogate,” Noah says. “More like surrogate parents. At least at holiday times. We’re all very fond of Melody.”
“Tell me, Bill,” Carol says. “Are you working on another book?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact I am,” he says, looking pleased with the question.
“Can you tell us what it is? Or is it a deep, dark secret?”
“Well, Blighted Elms is about sex, as I guess you all know. Sex is one of the two most powerful forces in human life. Sex itself is an act of raw power. In every sexual act there is one partner who is the victor, while the other is the conquered. Sex is an act of overpowerment. There is only one other source of power to equal it, in fact, to surpass it, and that is what I am writing about in my new book.”
“Is sex really an act of overpowerment? Not for me.” This is from Carol, in a bemused tone. “It seems to me more like a kind of sharing.”
“Money,” he says. “Sex is about physical power. Money is about emotional and psychological power. My book will be about America’s secret rich.”
“Oh? And who are America’s secret rich?” Becka asks him. Becka, Carol thinks, does not much care for this young man.
“Take families like the Pritzkers of Chicago. They’re enormously rich. They’re a family of lawyers, but lawyers whose only clients are themselves. They’re into all sorts of things. Hotels. Vast real estate holdings. But nobody really knows anything about them. Then there are the Weyerhaeusers of the Pacific Northwest—lumber barons. Except for the extraordinary number of vowels hi the family name—six—nobody knows anything about them, either. But all these families have skeletons in their closets, family secrets that they make sure no one ever knows about. Shameful secrets.”
“The secret rich and their shameful secrets,” Becka says.
“Exactly,” he says.
“What makes you so sure there are secrets? And if there are secrets, that they’re so
shameful?”
“There always are. There’ve got to be. If there weren’t any secrets, they wouldn’t be rich.”
“Hmm,” Becka says. “Interesting.”
Melody, Carol notices, has been oddly silent through all of this, her eyes fixed on some indeterminate middle distance.
“And then there are the Lieblings of New York,” he says.
Carol laughs lightly. “I’m not sure the Lieblings have any shameful secrets,” she says. “But we’re a family who’ve always enjoyed a certain amount of privacy. Most of us intend to keep it that way.”
“Gotta take another leak,” Ector says, standing up again, and Carol wonders briefly if he is possibly on some sort of drug.
“Some rich families have enjoyed too much privacy.”
“And how,” Becka asks him, leaning forward, “do you intend to go about extracting these secrets from the families you plan to write about? How do you go about shaking family skeletons out of closets?”
“That,” he says with a little smile, “may take a certain amount of engineering.”
Carol watches as Ector returns to the room and slumps in the loveseat again beside Becka, who barely seems to notice him.
“Engineering?”
“It’s part of the creative process. Causing things to happen that wouldn’t happen otherwise. It’s part of the artist’s job, molding the ordinary realities of life into what becomes a work of art.”
“Do you mean to say you’ll simply make things up?” Becka asks him.
“I assure you,” he says sharply, “that my book will not be a work of fiction. It will, on the other hand be a work of art.”
“Fascinating,” Carol says, to fill the little silence that has fallen across the room. “Another little quiche before they get cold?”
“Shit,” Ector says, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray that Carol has provided. He turns to Ruth. “Is this all your family ever does? Talk about shit like this? Books and art and stuff? Let’s see what’s on TV.”
But the moment is saved by the sound of the doorbell.
“They’re here,” Carol says, and hurries to the door to greet Hannah Liebling, Cyril, and Anne. There follow the usual apologies for being late, descriptions of the state of traffic on Park Avenue, the collecting of coats and scarves, greetings and kisses. Cyril kisses Carol on both cheeks, then turns to his sister, performs a deep bow, and lifts her thin hands to his lips. “My dear Contessa,” he says. “Looking lovelier than ever, and younger than springtime.” He turns to Ector and stares at him imperiously. “And this must be your new beau. Oh, my. Will wonders never cease.”
“I need to tell Edna to put the roast back in the oven,” Carol is saying.
“Yes. I like my lamb pink, but not bleeding. At least my slice. Noah, I’d like to have a few words with you alone after dinner.”
“Sure, Mom.”
During all this Becka returns to Bill Luckman. “You used the word engineering,” she says. “Do you mean you can engineer family scandals in these rich families you’ll be writing about?”
“I’m simply describing the artistic process,” he says. Turning life into art.”
Not too many city blocks away, on upper Fifth Avenue, Georgette Van Degan is lying across her bed weeping. “Please, darling,” she is saying to him, “please let me do what you like the most. Both your balls in my mouth at once. Isn’t that what you like the most, darling? Isn’t it? Let me do that for you now.”
“Make that phone call first,” he says. “Then you can do that.”
“Please,” she sobs. “Take off your clothes, darling. Let me get both of those fat juicy balls—”
“Make that call now! Call Carol Liebling now! Do you hear me?”
“But it’s New Year’s Eve, Truck! People don’t call other people—people they hardly know—on New Year’s Eve!”
“Make it now, I said. I want to watch you make it.” He hurls the heavy Manhattan phone book onto the bed beside her. “Look up their number and make that call.”
She stifles one final sob, blows her nose into a Kleenex, wipes her eyes, and rolls over on her side and reaches for the telephone book.
4
A Telephone Call
“Your roast is perfect, dear,” Hannah Liebling is saying to Carol at the table. “Just the way I like it. Pink, but not bleeding. And yes,” she says to Mary, who is passing the lamb roast a second time, “I do think I will have a second slice.” She helps herself from Mary’s outstretched platter.
“When I heard you were going to be late, I had Edna take it out of the oven,” Carol says. “So it wouldn’t overdo.” And yes, she thinks, her table looks perfect, too—the Spode, the Baccarat wineglasses, the lighted candles in their heavy silver candlesticks, the flatware freshly polished by Mary just this afternoon, even though Ector has clearly had some trouble selecting which fork to use and left his dinner fork in the bowl in which the carrots were being passed. Mary quickly removed it, replaced it with a serving fork, and gave him another dinner fork. The yellow tulips in the centerpiece are drooping gracefully, just so, and Carol dares to hope that the rest of the evening will go well.
“I’m glad to see you using the Sachs family silver,” Hannah says. “You’re taking such good care of it, too, just the way my mother used to do. My mother always said that good silver should be polished every day.”
Bill Luckman lifts a dessert fork and balances it between his thumb and forefinger. “This is German silver, isn’t it, Mrs. Liebling?” he says.
“Indeed it is. In my mother’s day, German silver was considered to be the best.”
“How’d you know that?” Ector asks him from across the table. “How’d you know it was German silver?” His tone is almost aggressive, and the two young men, who are roughly the same age, exchange cool looks. This is the first acknowledgment that Bill has made of Ector’s presence at this gathering.
“A Yale education, I suppose,” Bill Luckman says, a bit drily.
“Huh!”
“Bill has written a book about Yale,” Melody says, trying to be helpful.
“The traffic was really terrible coming down Park Avenue,” Hannah says. “Bumper to bumper. I told my driver he would have done better to come down Third. There are more lanes, and the lights are synchronized.”
“Excuse me,” Bill says, “but isn’t Third Avenue an uptown street?”
There is a little silence, and then Cyril says, “There is one thing you should know about our mother, Mr. Luckman. If she wants Third Avenue to run downtown, even for a few minutes and for just a few blocks, she will pay to have it done.”
There is polite laughter at this, and then Hannah says, “And there was the most awful-looking group of young Negroes, with the strangest hairdos, who came right out into the street, and were jumping over cars, including ours. Right on Park Avenue! This isn’t the same city I knew when I was growing up.”
“But Mother has her pistol, and her can of Mace,” Cyril says. “Our mother is always armed to the teeth, ready to do battle in any contingency.”
There is more polite laughter. “New York just isn’t the city it used to be,” his mother says. “It just isn’t. It’s all those Negroes who came up from the South after the war.”
Carol reaches out and touches her mother-in-law’s wrist, and glances toward the kitchen door where Mary, who is black, is emerging to pass the vegetables a second time.
“It’s true. That’s what it is,” Hannah says.
“Of course Mother is referring to the first war,” Cyril says. “The Battle of Ardennes. Now, that was my idea of a battle. No, thank you, Mary,” he says to the vegetable plates, one in each hand.
Now there is a little lull in the conversation.
“Beautiful tulips,” Melody says.
“Tulips in midwinter.”
“They force them in hothouses.”
“Delicious roast. Be sure to tell Edna.”
Bill Luckman clears his throat. “You’
re all so kind to include me in this little family gathering,” he says.
“Of course,” says Cyril, “it would be more of a family gathering if Aunt Bathy were here.” He winks slyly at his brother, and Noah and Carol exchange glances down the length of the table.
“Aunt Bathy?” Bill says. “What a charming name. Who is Aunt Bathy?”
“My baby sister,” Hannah says. “Her name is Bathsheba, after my father’s grandmother, but we’ve always called her Bathy.”
“Bathsheba? Wasn’t Bathsheba an adulteress in the Bible?”
“Yes, but she and David repented, and the Lord forgave them. She gave birth to Solomon, whom the Lord loved.”
“Of course, you’re absolutely right,” he says.
“Bathy is what my mother called her change-of-life baby. She’s seventeen years younger than I am.”
“With that much difference in your ages, she must have seemed more like your daughter than your baby sister, Mrs. Liebling.”
“Well, perhaps. More like a little doll I could play with. My father used to call us his three graces—my big sister Settie, my baby sister Bathy, and me.”
“And why isn’t she here tonight?” he asks.
There is a little silence around the table, and then Cyril says, “Let’s just say that some people in the family see Aunt Bathy, and some people don’t.”
“I see her all the time,” Hannah says. “She lives in Brooklyn Heights. Bathy’s tragedy was that she never married. And she was the prettiest of all of us. But she just never seemed able to find Mr. Right.”
“Or perhaps Mr. Right turned out to be Mr. Wrong,” Cyril says.
“She just never found her one true love,” she says.
“Granny’s one true love wasn’t Grandpa,” Anne says with a giggle. “Right, Nana Hannah?”
“Anne, whatever are you talking about?”
“You said so in the car.”
“I said no such thing!”
“No, but I could tell it was true when you changed the subject, Nana Hannah.”
“Anne, don’t tease your grandmother,” Carol says.
“What’s this?” Ector asks as Mary places a finger bowl on the silver service plate hi front of him.
The Wrong Kind of Money Page 7