The Wrong Kind of Money

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “What things? What important things has he got on his mind?”

  “Ballachulish-Fifteen? Don’t you remember? He’s making the presentation to the sales conference tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Oh, that,” Hannah says.

  Oh, that, Carol thinks. Noah has told her that it will cost the company between twenty and thirty million to launch and test-market a new label, and his mother is able to dismiss it with “Oh, that,” Noah has devoted most of his time and energy to this for more than a year. He has agonized over it, spent sleepless nights over it. But now it is just “Oh, that.”

  Slowly, Hannah Liebling rises from her desk and begins moving about the room, fingering small objects as she goes—a crystal paperweight, an onyx obelisk. “The thing is,” she says, “that this is all wrong from a public-relations standpoint. I’ve discussed this with my sister Bathy, and she agrees with me. For years, you know, Bathy was our director of advertising and public relations, and she was the best one we ever had. We both feel that the publicity your proposed party has already generated has been very bad for us. Any more publicity like this will only make it worse. You see, we’ve always tried to project an image of—what shall I call it? Probity. Responsibility. Respectability. Trustworthiness. ‘Ingraham—the label you can trust.’ That was one of our slogans. We showed a visual of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The subliminal message was, ‘You can trust the Leaning Tower of Pisa never to fall down,’ The copy said, ‘You can trust Ingraham never to let you down,’ Bathy’s famous Christmas ad. It stressed sobriety—responsibility, consideration for others. We’ve tried to avoid anything that would show us as frivolous, or extravagant, or show-offy. People think the Lieblings have too much money, anyway. And they think of it as dirty money, tainted money, money with the blood of bootleggers all over it. Anything we do in any public way that seems the least bit ostentatious, like the kind of party I’ve been reading about, simply reinforces this view in the public’s mind, and that’s not good for business. That’s why we’ve tried to stay out of the society columns and the gossip columns. An article in Fortune or Forbes or Business Week we don’t mind. But stories in Roxy Rhinelander’s column are something else again. Reading things like that, the public, who are our customers, think, ‘Well, what can you expect? Rich, vulgar Jews.’”

  “I know exactly what you mean, Nana,” Carol says. “That’s why I came to see you today. To ask you how we can contain, or control, this situation.”

  “We? It seems to me that you’ve got yourself into this situation, Carol. It’s up to you to get yourself out of it. Why not just tell this woman that you’ve changed your mind? Just tell the woman no.”

  “I can do that,” Carol says quickly. “But there’s another aspect to this that I’d like you to consider, Nana.”

  “Oh? And what is that, pray?”

  “Truxton and Georgette Van Degan own an extremely important collection of Chinese and Japanese export porcelains. The collection was started by Mr. Van Degan’s great-grandfather. His grandfather added to it enormously, and his father added even more. Right now it is one of the most important collections in the world, probably worth at least a hundred million dollars, but really priceless. The public has never seen any of it. Some of it is displayed in vitrines in the Van Degans’ Fifth Avenue apartment, but most of it is in storage, gathering dust. It’s such a shame—a princely collection.”

  “They’ve always been in the glass business. It stands to reason they’d collect porcelain. But what’s that got to do with a coming-out party for a couple of silly girls?” She pronounces it guh-uhls.

  “The museum would die to have the Van Degan collection. The museum’s been after it for years, and even Mrs. Astor couldn’t get them to part with it. Now, thanks to me, the Van Degans are thinking of offering at least part of it. Their lawyers are working on a gift proposal now. But there’s a hitch. Mrs. Van Degan told me last night that if I didn’t go along with this party, they might withdraw the gift.”

  “So she’s blackmailing you into giving this party. No party, no porcelains.”

  “In a sense, yes. But there’s more to it than that. For one thing, just think of how important this gift would be to the people of the city of New York, and to the museum-going public in general. And, for another, if I could be the person who got the Van Degan collection for the museum, it’s almost certain that I’d be placed on the museum’s board.”

  “You think so? That would feed your ego, I suppose.”

  Carol smiles. “I admit I’d be Hattered to be put on the board,” she says. “I’ve been working for the museum for nearly twenty years, after all. But I also think that if I were on the board, it would add a certain luster to the Liebling family image—the image you say you’ve been trying to cultivate for all these years.”

  Now Hannah Liebling is smiling, almost to herself, stroking the facets of the crystal paperweight with the tip of her right index finger. “Why, yes,” she says softly. “Mrs. Noah Liebling, named to the board of directors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

  “One of the country’s most important cultural institutions.”

  Hannah chuckles. “It’s something my husband would never have dared to dream of,” she says. “If he could have lived to see that …”

  “Mrs. Noah Liebling, wife of the president of Ingraham’s.”

  Hannah throws her a quick look. “I’m still president,” she says.

  “I know. But someday …”

  “Well, yes. I suppose. We’ll see how things work out with this Bally-whatchamacallit business.”

  “Ballachulish.”

  “I can never remember that name. They’re going to have to get a better name for it.”

  “They will,” Carol says.

  “But there’s only one thing I can’t figure out,” Hannah says. “Why did the Van Degan woman pick us? Why did she pick you? Why didn’t she pick one of her fancy friends from Roxy Rhinelander’s column?”

  “Probably because she and I have daughters the same age, who went to Brearley together.”

  “No, there must be more to it than that. There always is. Oh, I know what it is. Her husband’s behind it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The glass business. My husband would never buy from the Van Degans after what they did to us. But now the son’s probably heard we’re about to launch a new brand. There’ve been rumors in the street—there always are. Van Degan wants our bottling contract. It’s as simple as that.”

  Carol feels her cheeks redden. “I suppose you have a point,” she says. “I hadn’t thought of that, frankly.”

  “That’s business. In business there’s always a tit for a tat, as my husband used to say.”

  “Then perhaps you should consider giving him that contract,” she says. “In light of him giving the museum his collection. And my going on the board.”

  “It’s worth thinking about, I admit,” Hannah says. “Though Jules would be spinning in his grave.”

  Carol decides to press this point no further. “There’s just one other thing,” she says.

  “What’s that?”

  “Noah.”

  “What about him?”

  “When I tell him about this, as I’m going to have to when he gets home tomorrow night—flushed with triumph, I hope, after his presentation—he’s not going to be very happy. I know exactly what he’s going to say. He’s going to say we can’t afford this sort of thing.”

  “Why? Why would he say that?”

  “The way Georgette is talking, Nana, this is going to be a very expensive party.”

  “How expensive?”

  “I have no idea, but perhaps as much as two hundred thousand dollars. The orchestra alone is costing twenty-five thousand, and Georgette is talking about hiring a second band, a rock group in a separate tent.”

  “Well, money shouldn’t be a problem for you, should it? Speaking of princely things, your husband gets paid what I’d consider a rather princely salary!
”

  “But we have a lot of expenses, Nana—Anne’s tuition, my mother’s care—”

  “Ah, yes. Your mother.”

  “Noah worries about money a lot.”

  “Really? How very strange!”

  “And so what I was thinking, Nana,” Carol says, hurrying along, “was that if you could tell him that you approve of this party, that you’re in favor of it—”

  “But I do not approve of it! I am not in favor of it. I think I should have made that quite clear by now.”

  “But if you could say you were, it would make Noah think about this a little differently.”

  “What you’re saying, Carol, if I understand you correctly, is that what I say to your husband is more important than what you say to him.”

  “Yes. That’s what I’m saying, Nana.”

  “Which is not the way things should be in a family, is it?”

  “Perhaps not. But that’s the way things are in this family, Nana. It’s always been that way.”

  “I see,” she says carefully. “And I also think, if I hear you correctly, that you’re not just asking me to endorse this idea for an expensive party. You’re also asking me to pay for it. Am I correct?”

  Carol sits forward in her chair. “Yes,” she says simply. “If you could do that, it would solve everything. Unless—”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless you’re ready to finally turn the company over to Noah.”

  “My dear young woman,” her mother-in-law says, “I offered to turn the company over to Noah less than ten days ago. On New Year’s Eve, at your house, in fact. I have offered to turn the company over to him repeatedly in the past—on one small condition. But he has repeatedly refused to accept that small condition.”

  “I know about that, Nana.”

  “Then perhaps if you could persuade him—”

  “He’ll never accept that condition, Nana.”

  “Why? Why not? His feelings about my sister are so irrational. They make no sense at all. He refuses to explain—”

  “He feels he was betrayed by his aunt Bathy.”

  “Betrayed? How betrayed? What did my sister ever do to betray him?”

  Carol bites her lip again. There is no point in pursuing this line of conversation, either. At this point she does not want to risk making her mother-in-law angry at her. She averts her eyes and says, “Noah’s feelings about your sister are very personal ones. They’re his feelings. Not mine. They have nothing to do with me.”

  “But they do now, don’t they? They’ve become the only stumbling block. You see, my dear, there are a great many things about Bathy that you do not understand, and that Noah doesn’t understand. There are things that only I know about, and they are things that matter deeply to this entire family. I could tell you things—but I won’t, because I promised long ago that I would never tell another living soul, and if there’s one thing I am, it’s a woman of my word. Suffice to say that this family owes Bathy a great deal. She was treated very shabbily by this family years ago. She wasn’t left a penny in my husband’s will, and she should have been amply provided for. The family has a great debt to Bathy, and you will have to take my word for that. She has suffered a great loss because of us.”

  “What kind of debt?”

  “The debt exists. That’s all I’m going to say. I know it, and Bathy knows it, and she and I are the only ones who need to know. And she’s been very patient about never demanding the reward she’s due. Do you think you could convince your husband of that?”

  “I doubt it,” Carol says.

  “Would you be willing to try?” She is smiling now. “After all, any grudge my son bears against my sister is a very old grudge. Surely it isn’t a grudge worth bearing after all these years. Could you convince him of that? Could you convince him that any—injustice—which he may feel Bathy committed against him did not occur at all in the way he supposes it did? Could you convince him that he has nothing to forgive Bathy for—that, in fact, he has a great deal to thank her for? Could you at least convince him that it’s time to let bygones be bygones? Could you convince him that what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him, and that what he thinks he knows is only a tiny fraction of the whole truth? If you could convince him of that—well, that would shed an entirely different light on things, wouldn’t it? What do you say? Will you try to convince him?”

  “I will try,” Carol says. “But—”

  “If you could do that, a great many old wrongs from the past would be set to rights.”

  “And, Nana, if you’ll agree to go along with the party, I’ll see to it that Georgette stops sending column items to Roxy Rhinelander.”

  “Roxy Rhinelander! I can remember when her name was Rose Ruttenberg!”

  “I promise that any publicity this party gets will be more dignified, Nana. It will reflect more—what was your word? More probity.”

  “Now, wait a minute. I haven’t agreed to anything yet. I’ll agree to think about it. And you agree to try to get Noah to be kinder to Bathy. So do we have a deal on that?” She extends her hand. “As my husband used to say, doing business is just giving a tit for a tat.”

  “I’ll try,” Carol says again. “But it won’t be easy.”

  “Good,” Hannah says, and takes Carol’s hand in hers. “Let’s shake on it. My husband used to say that a man’s handshake is worth more than his signature. I agree to think, you agree to try. And getting a Liebling—just think of it, the Booze Baron’s daughter-in-law, no less!—on the Met’s board of directors should be worth the effort, don’t you think? And remember I warned you years ago that being a Liebling in this city was not going to be easy, Carol dear. I may not have told you everything I know about this family, but I’ve never lied to you.”

  At Mortimer’s, Patsy Collingwood and Pookie Satterthwaite are in a lunchtime huddle over Perrier with lime at one of the thin tables. “Well, I’ve found out who Carol Liebling’s supposedly best friend is,” Patsy is saying. “She’s somebody called Beryl Stokes, and she’s supposed to be a real nitwit.”

  Pookie squeals, “Beryl Stokes! She lives at River House, too! And she is a nitwit. She and her husband are always voting for extra assessments. Everybody in the building hates her.”

  “Well, that doesn’t mean you can’t be nice to her. Why don’t you have a little cocktail party for some of your River House neighbors? The Lieblings and this Stokes person. Including me, of course. And Roxy.”

  “Well,” Pookie says hesitantly, stirring her drink with a red-lacquered fingertip, “my apartment isn’t quite finished yet, you know. My furniture, which is all being hand-made in Morocco, hasn’t arrived yet.”

  “I thought it was Majorca.”

  “No, Morocco.”

  “Well, have the party downstairs at the club.”

  “Well, actually,” Pookie says, “Darius and I aren’t members of the club.”

  “Really? I thought everybody at River House belonged to the River Club, lovey.”

  “They charge a little extra to belong. And, well, Darius and I—since we have the biggest apartment in the building—we just didn’t feel we’d use the club that much.”

  “Well, do something, darling. After all, since you live at River House, you’ve got the inside track. I don’t. And it seems like ages since you’ve done any entertaining, darling.”

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right,” Pookie says, but she doesn’t sound convinced.

  “Remember, every minute we waste is a minute that Carol Liebling and that rat Georgette will be gaining on us with the coming-out-party nonsense. The reason you and I haven’t been getting any column mentions is because we haven’t done anything. I wouldn’t tell you this if you weren’t my best friend.”

  14

  Lightning

  Grandmont is gone now, as you know—gone to a wrecker’s ball and a developer’s cupidity. A thousand little tract houses cover that lovely hillside now as part of a development called, regrettably, Morewealth Villas
. Why is it that the grandest of American houses seem to fall to ruin first? Answer that riddle.

  “After a war,” Jules used to say, “real estate values always drop.” Well, he was wrong about what happened after World War II. Soldiers, home from the war, and rich from GI loans, each wanted a little piece of suburbia, a square of lawn to mow, with a split-level house at its center with foundation plantings and a picture window and, framed in that window, the ultimate table lamp. And yet Jules Liebling hung on to Grandmont, even as he saw estates all around him being torn down and broken up into half-acre lots. After the war Grandmont became an anachronism. But then perhaps it always was.

  On that particular early spring evening, it was unseasonably warm, and there was a full moon, and it reflected palely on the surface of the river below, and Hannah was out walking in the garden. The gardens of Grandmont had become her particular domain. She had supervised the design and planting of the parterres, and the beds of perennials that they contained, and now she oversaw their pruning and maintenance. As she usually did when she walked in the garden, she carried a small pair of pruning shears in one hand, and a basket over her arm to collect the cuttings, as she snipped off the occasional browned leaf, or blasted bud, or pulled the occasional weed the gardeners had missed, always paying particular attention to her dahlias, including the prize-winning white hybrid which she had developed herself, and which had been named the Hannah Sachs Liebling dahlia. Turning a corner on one of the graveled walks, she was startled to come upon a figure in dahlia white seated on a stone bench, and she let out a little cry. “Oh, it’s you!” she said.

  “Just me,” Bathy said.

  She sat down beside her on the bench. “Lovely night, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Yes.” The night sky brightened briefly, then was dark again. “Lightning,” Bathy said. “Is there going to be a storm?”

  “Just heat lightning, I expect,” Hannah said. “See?—there’s no thunder.” There was another small flash, followed by dark and silence.