Maggie now descended the single stone step from the moist, fragrant conservatory into the ballroom—Reggie Chang followed at a respectful distance snapping pictures. Entering the enormous space always took her breath away, but especially before a bash, when it was not cluttered up with people. A maid bustled about lighting candles in the wall sconces. The two bartenders, Felix and Jesus, were busy cutting limes. Kenneth was nowhere to be seen.
At the far end of the room, disposed against an immense arched window twenty-four feet high by twenty feet wide, composed entirely of six-inch glass panes, stood the eighteen-foot-high Christmas tree. Upon it hung hundreds of Venetian glass balls, a wing squadron of Florentine papier-mâché cherubs, yards of honest cranberry ropes, and countless tiny brilliant electric lights. The inside surfaces of the barn were left unpainted. The timbers, soaring up into the half-open lofts, retained their natural burnt umber patina of age. The carpenters had added lovely scrolled brackets at the junction of every post and beam. The old lofts had been reconfigured into a horseshoe-shaped upper gallery, open at the end where the big tree stood against the enormous window. Along this eight-foot-wide gallery, sofas, soft chairs, and tables were arrayed, where guests could repose and look down upon the action below. A section of the gallery at the side, center, served as a musicians’ balcony, and members of a six-piece chamber orchestra now milled around up there, unpacking their instruments and adjusting their chairs.
Downstairs, a hardwood dance floor was framed by flagstones. The whole floor was heated by a complicated system of hot water pipes running in a grid below so that even on a cold winter night one could walk around the vast room barefoot in perfect comfort. Round café-style tables naped in pale pink damask stood on the flagstones around the dance floor. Opposite the musicians’ balcony stood a fieldstone fireplace so large that Maggie could stand inside it in flat shoes. Tonight, of course, a Yule log blazed on a bed of glowing embers.
Maggie asked Felix for a sherry, and she stood contemplating the room in the evening’s last still moment, effectively ignoring the whir and snap of Reggie’s camera. The still moment was a bit of a ritual for her before a big bash. This was the time when she tried to tell herself to let go, to relax, to cease trying to control things around her. Even as she entertained these therapeutic thoughts, her eye fixed on the swags of pine roping that scalloped the rail of the gallery above, and Maggie wished that she had decorated the fastening points with sprigs of holly rather than red ribbon. In fact, it was not easy for Maggie to turn off her mind. Though the sherry produced a thrilling buzz, especially on an empty stomach, it also perversely brought a thousand and one worrisome details bubbling into Maggie’s forebrain. She had to hold on to a thick wooden post to keep herself from racing into the kitchen, where, she imagined, Nina had unaccountably burned every victual on the menu. Reggie’s strobe flashed as his camera caught Maggie staring dreamily at the tree, the anarchy of her thoughts completely concealed from his lens. Then the Mosleys (of ABC Television) stepped into the ballroom and the Christmas Feast for Two Hundred was under way.
The Mosleys were always the first ones to arrive at a Maggie Darling affair because Paul was the longtime producer of the Good Morning America show and his schedule had him up at three-thirty every morning and in bed by nine at night. They were soon joined by Leonard and Hattie Moile of the powerhouse Manhattan law firm Moile, Moile, and Schlange, which handled the legal work of Throop, Cravath. The Moiles lived in Cross River, just a stone’s throw over the Westchester county line.
There were air kisses. A waiter materialized bearing flutes of pink Dom Ruinart; all happily hoisted except Leonard Moile, who limped to the bar for a Scotch.
“Your house is so gorgeous,” said Eva Mosley, “that I don’t see how in good conscience I can ever have company again.”
“I gave up entertaining years ago because of Maggie,” Hattie Moile said. “Honestly, darling, this is carrying perfection to the last limit.”
Maggie wanted to jump out of her skin. Her still moment was shattered. She hated this phase of a party, when the early arrivals showered her with inevitable compliments in their nervousness at being the first ones there. She loved to see people having a good time, but she couldn’t stand being the object of attention. She knew she was a good hostess—she was a professional. It depressed her to hear how inadequate others felt. It made her feel like a freak, as though paying attention to details and having standards were pathological symptoms of a loathsome disease. Hattie Moile, for instance, was a superb cook. So what if she was so disorganized that supper at their house rarely appeared on the table before ten-thirty (as though they were Spaniards). And Eva Mosley grew fabulous hybrid roses, even if she kept the cheapest imaginable plastic furniture on her bluestone terrace. “You can take the girl out of Woolworths,” Maggie’s mother always said, “but you can’t take Woolworths out of the girl …”
The musicians tuned their strings overhead, lending more discordant overtones to Maggie’s racing thoughts. She glanced at the huge window beyond the tree and saw snowflakes whirling under the eaves. In her imagination, more cars crashed on the slick country roads. Then, she felt a queer sensation, as of a bubble bursting in her head. Suddenly the stone floor seemed to give way, and the room wheeled as pangs of terror rifled through her.
“Excuse me a moment,” she said and, managing a cracked smile, hurried out through the conservatory to the powder room off the library, locking the door behind her. She barely recognized the glamorous creature she saw in the mirror. She felt, at that moment, like a mental patient. Her heart pounded in her chest like a galumphing beast. Her breath came in short, shallow huffs. Rivulets of sweat ran down her side and disappeared damply into her bra strap. She started to shake like a malaria victim.
Maggie ran the cold water and stoppered the sink, then patted her forehead with a wet guest towel. She did not want to disturb her eye makeup, minimal as it was. When the sink was full, she plunged her hands in the icy water up to her elbows. Maggie had discovered this trick of hydrotherapy in college, about the same time that she first began to experience anxiety attacks—coincidentally, about the same time she first met Kenneth.
As her arms grew numb, her pulse and breathing slowly returned to normal. She pulled the stopper from the sink and shook the excess water off her forearms. It was over. Everything would be all right. These anxiety attacks had become a ritual before any large affair. The exquisite terror of them had nearly ceased to terrify her after all these years. They had become something more like a religious obligation. By the time she emerged from the powder room, the musicians had begun playing and guests were trooping in by the carload. The faces seemed to have leaped directly off television screens and magazine covers into Maggie’s broad foyer, all crying “Merry Christmas!” and shaking snowflakes out of their hair.
Here, for instance, came Nate Blankenship, owner of the New York Mets, all six foot eight of him, a Chrysler Building of a man, and his wife, Holly, an obelisk of a woman. Behind them was Lula Baron, the powerful editor at Knopf, towing in her wake like a waterskiing sheepdog the beloved but beleaguered novelist Harry Pearce, who was between wives and rehabs. Next came Hal Whitten, the menswear designer who had rediscovered the vest. Taking off her ankle-length nutria coat beside him stood the long, languid S curve of model and MTV personality Kathy Clevenger, all legs and lips. Here was Tony Provenzano the award-winning playwright (Flesh to Spirit) and his longtime companion, the actress Julie Petard. Now Lucius Milstein, the young painter; Clare Fanning, the New Yorker columnist; Earl Wise of Odeon Records; Connie McQuillan of People magazine; Fedo Prado, principal dancer with the NYC Ballet; Duff Woodcock, executive chef of the Four Seasons; Connecticut senator Dick Pierson and wife Tina (they lived practically up the street in Rumford Center); Janet Higgenbotham of the Metropolitan Opera, her highly acoustic bosom exploding out of a red moiré dirndl—in short, more celebrities than you could shake a gutta-percha cane at. Even the faces that one could not instantly conne
ct with celebrity seemed to glow with distinction and achievement.
Uh-oh. Crossing Maggie’s threshold like a rodent entering the world’s loveliest cheesebox scurried the furtive figure of Lawrence Hayward, arbitrageur supreme, limping like Shakespeare’s Richard III (“War wound,” he always said of his shorter left leg—but he was too young for World War II and too old for Vietnam and had been nowhere near Korea, so what could one say?). Lawrence (“Call me Larry and you’re dead on Wall Street”) Hayward (rumored to be an Anglicized version of Havaarti) had materialized in New York from Cleveland (of all places) in the mid-1970s, having built an empire of suburban car washes, drugstores, and overnight dry cleaners. On Wall Street he proceeded to pile up a second-layer fortune—now estimated to be $27 billion— buying and selling enormous quantities of stock at tiny margins at absolutely the right moment. It was really the stupidest kind of scam imaginable, Maggie thought, and almost certainly rife with illegality, the way a Roquefort cheese is veined with blue mold. “But if it’s so stupid, then why can’t everyone else do it?” Kenneth always asked Maggie when she started in on Hayward, and he would answer the question himself: “Because the truth is, Lawrence Hayward is a genius.” This, after all, was the reason Hayward was there: Kenneth wanted him to come. He was a baleful presence at Christmastime, Maggie decided, watching Hayward hand over his funereal black vicuña cloak to one of the college kids. He was Jacob Marley in fresher clothes. His face had the same sunken, half-starved, vole-eyed, semi-mummified look of John D. Rockefeller at ninety—except Hayward was fifty-seven. They said he subsisted entirely on celery sticks and rice crackers. She would make it a point to observe what he ate tonight.
The hired help swarmed through the rooms hoisting trays of hot and cold hors d’oeuvres: the wild boar empanadas, the angels on horseback, the endive with codfish gunk, the crab sticks, the crudités (she saw Hayward snatch a celery stick, by God!), the Gorgonzola tartlets, the figs and prosciutto, the salmon beignets, the mustard-glazed boneless miniribs, the drunken prawns, the delicate seafood-sausage tidbits, and the darling little pigs in blankets—this final item a tribute to Maggie’s dad, Frank Hadjuk, of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, gone now almost ten years to the night. She carefully wiped a tear from the corner of her eye, thinking of him, a million miles and a million years away from her present situation in the world.
She rode the tide of guests into the ballroom, as though she were flotsam on some enchanted sea. The musicians in the balcony above played one of Dowling’s stately sixteenth-century galliards. It was barely audible over the vivid thrum of conversation. Waiters plied the enormous room refilling champagne flutes. At last Maggie sensed that the evening had achieved a certain momentum that no disaster short of a conflagration could halt. The party was like a great improbable engine, a steam-powered carriage on wheels, a mass of fascinating machinery, valves, shafts, pistons, whistles, and bells, which, once rolling, could run to the ends of the earth at full throttle. Maggie felt the familiar palpable sensation of release, as of a two-ton office safe being lifted off her shoulders, that comprised the very essence of what she lived for. Her lips crept upward until her face quietly beamed and she was able, at last, to admire what she had accomplished.
3
Cruise Control
Maggie began to work the room like a honeybee visiting blossoms in her garden. She had a gift for swiftly engaging other minds, knowing, to some degree, what stirred and animated her friends, and quick to reach the heart of things without any nervous preliminaries. With strangers she had a sort of policy: focus on them, draw out a thing or two about their hopes and dreams in the first minute, be genuinely interested in what they say—you might learn something, she sincerely believed—and always remember that every individual is a universe. This policy she almost completely violated when she turned around in the vicinity of the great holiday tree and found herself confronted with Lawrence Hayward. He seemed to flinch as their eyes met.
Attempting to recover his poise, Hayward took her hand and bestowed a European-style air kiss on it. “Charmed to meet the renowned lady of the house,” he said. The whole gesture was so pompous and fraudulent that Maggie wanted to smack him in the head. The violence of this sudden urge amazed her. But then a waiter swerved by with a tray of angels on horseback, and she was seized by a yet more vicious impulse.
“Won’t you try one, Lawrence?” she said, snatching a plump oyster enrobed in bacon off the silver tray, and dangling it before him.
“No, thank you,” he said, recoiling with a weird little wave of his long waxy fingers.
“You can’t be worried about cholesterol?”
“Never liked seafood,” Hayward muttered.
“Come on now, open. Wider.”
Hayward drew back, like Quasimodo in that scene on the pillory when Esmaralda attempts to give him water and he, at first, shrinks from her. Maggie adroitly penetrated Hayward’s defenses, though, and deposited the plump tidbit in his mouth.
“That’s a good boy,” she said.
Hayward’s discomfort thrilled her. His face turned a perfect shade of verdigris, as though Maggie had just antiqued him. He chewed the oyster perhaps three times before swallowing it, as a man might chew and swallow some incriminating wad of paper just when the FBI agents arrive. His ensuing smile seemed wan and unpersuasive. Just then, Maggie caught the eye of Guido Pasquelini, curator of the Met’s medieval collection. She told Hayward to try the wild boar empanadas and buzzed away on her rounds.
4
A Dark Vision
It was while listening to Pasquelini discourse on Christmas traditions of the Veronese that Maggie happened to spy Kenneth across the ballroom before the great hearth. He and Charlie Duckworth, a colleague from Throop, Cravath, stood on either side of a young woman, name unknown. A slender, long-necked thing, she was pale as a swan in her strapless black dress (Ungaro?). Just then, an alarming thing happened. Maggie thought she saw Kenneth pat her on the bottom. Did that really happen? she wondered. Pasquelini jabbered on, something about little nut cakes and a procession through the streets. Did Kenneth do what she thought she saw him do? It was hard to really know, because the next moment, a clump of guests drifted between them, making further surveillance impossible. No, Maggie told herself decisively, no such thing happened. It was some trick of the light and the eye. And so resolved, she helped herself to a flute of champagne as a waiter glided by.
Maggie squelched her impulse to visit the kitchen just before dinner was served. Nothing would bolster Nina’s confidence more than to be left completely in charge without interference from the boss. When the victuals did appear, they arrived on the buffet tables brilliantly and piping hot, each platter, bowl, basin, and salver garnished impeccably, with curlicues of steam wafting up into the rafters.
At Maggie and Kenneth’s table sat PBS anchorman Jim Nealon and his wife, Dory Dean, editor of the New York Times Wednesday Style section; Henry Cravath, surviving founder of Throop, Cravath, and his wife, Betsy; Harold Hamish, Maggie’s editor; Joyce Munger, the ruthless but charming literary agent (known in the business as “the White Whale”); Red Oldham, dean of the New York restaurant critics; Brian Sharpe, the interior decorator with a record twelve House and Garden covers, and his boyfriend/assistant Tony Sargent; and Dick and Tina Pierson (ten years earlier, the senator had been West Rumford town supervisor while Maggie and his wife took turns heading the PTA).
“Who was that young thing standing with you and Charlie Duckworth a little while ago?” Maggie asked her husband quietly.
“Who?” Kenneth seemed to have trouble hearing.
“The black strapless number. With Charlie.”
“Oh. Some girl he’s going with.”
Well, Charlie had been divorced two years, it was true.
5
A Perfect Angel
Any other time of year, saxophones might have struck up a Gershwin tune, but tonight, after the waiters swooped in to clear the supper dishes, the Fairfield Conservatory Fi
ddle-Di-Diddlers, as the ensemble called themselves, began to play a series of eighteenth-century English country dances: “Dick’s Maggot,” “The Maid Peeped Out,” “Rufty Tufty,” “The Waters of Holland,” tunes evocative of an old-world Yuletide, while Fedo Prado and three members of the corps de ballet demonstrated some authentic dance steps of the era. Soon, they had a dozen of the younger and more elastic guests going at it in the center of the room. Leaning against the wall beneath the musicians’ balcony, Maggie found Denny Sherlock following the action. Sherlock worked in Throop, Cravath’s takeover department. He could take a perfectly good, profitable company and suck out its assets quicker than Count Dracula could drain a young countess’s blood supply. An avid amateur cook, he was always grilling Maggie for information and ideas.
“Say, Maggie, how do you keep those little seafood sausages from falling apart?” he asked.
“I cheat a little,” Maggie answered briskly. “Cornstarch.” They had to speak right into each other’s ears to hear, the music and conversation was so loud. Meanwhile, a colossal chocolate cake in the traditional Yule log shape—decorated with meringue mushrooms and sprigs of candy holly—was carried out by a pair of strapping Yale boys and placed triumphantly on the buffet to a chorus of admiring “oohs” and “aahs.” Maggie stood on tiptoe to ask Sherlock, “Who’s that young thing with Charlie Duckworth?”
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