Fundraising the Dead (5 page)

I had to admire the way the words rolled off his tongue as though they were spontaneous, which I knew they weren’t, because I had written them for him. And of course that last line was a delicate hint to those present that they should take out their checkbooks.

I sneaked a quick look at the audience, which appeared well lubricated. Time to begin herding people toward their tables—no easy task, even though elegantly hand-lettered place cards had been carefully distributed by Carrie, after days of soul-searching over seating charts. With my eyes I gathered the junior staff’s attention: they moved promptly to the double doors into the reading-slash-dining room, armed with fresh copies of the seating charts so that they could steer the guests in the right direction. I joined Charles at the dais and addressed the throng.

“Thank you, Charles. Let me add that I am delighted to see so many familiar faces here, and even more delighted by the new faces among you. You are the heart—and the backbone—of the Society, and none of this would be possible without you. Now, ladies and gentlemen, in a few minutes we will begin serving dinner. If you have any trouble locating your table, just ask one of the staff members stationed by the doors, and they will be happy to help you.”

I gave the assembly a bright smile, which was lost on the majority of them as they surged in the opposite direction toward the bar for a final refill.

Charles leaned forward slightly to speak softly in my ear. “Nell, you’ve done a magnificent job, as always. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” His breath was warm against my neck as I continued to beam brightly at the crowd, alert for any glitches. He went on, even more softly. “Will I be seeing you later?”

Without turning, I replied in the same low tone, “Of course—we can do our own celebrating. But I’ll have to stay until the caterer’s wrapped things up, so it’ll be late.”

“And worth waiting for, my dear.” With that, he moved purposefully toward a latecomer, a senior board member who had just come in and was wrestling with his coat. “Ah, Arthur, I’m so glad you could make it.”

I watched Charles cross the room, admiring the elegant cut of his jacket, and the elegant back it covered. Then I squared my shoulders and went to supervise the dinner seating. My staff was ready and waiting at the doors. Alfred, I noted, had not moved from where Felicity had parked him, but he had been accosted by one of the more inebriated guests, who looked to be haranguing him about something. Poor Alfred—but I didn’t have the time to rescue him now.

Those lucky souls who have never had the privilege of planning a major event such as a wedding are probably unaware of the hair-pulling and hand-wringing that goes on among the people who have to arrange seating. Since this was, for us, a major event, we had begun well in advance; unfortunately the process continued as people walked in the door. The staff scuttled around, swapping place cards, eliminating those for the no-shows, and strategizing all the while, trying to seat the right people together and keep others apart. And then, of course, the guests themselves often messed it all up by deciding that they absolutely, positively had to sit with somebody else entirely. Or they simply sat down at the first place they came to and refused to budge. Or they brought along guests of their own—usually nonpaying—and expected us to juggle everything to make room for them. Which of course we had to do, because the point of the whole game was to keep the guests (that is, the donors) happy so that they’d continue to love us and write us big checks.

Marty Terwilliger knew all this, but she still surged into my line of sight accompanied by someone I didn’t recognize. “Okay, Nell, where’d you put me? And I need a seat for Jimmy here—he’s my guest.”

I looked at Jimmy. More precisely, I looked up at Jimmy, who towered over me by several inches, despite my heels. But the height was nicely balanced by the breadth, although I might’ve said that his tweed jacket was a little casual for the occasion. However, when I made it as far as his eyes, they were anything but casual. Even in a few brief moments, I got the impression that he didn’t miss much.

“It’s a pleasure to have you here, uh, Jimmy. Marty, let me check the seating chart, but I’m sure we can work it out. Would you excuse me a minute?” Tall Jimmy nodded once, then headed for the bar, while Marty waited near the door. I snatched a seating chart from one of my minions. Luckily I usually planted a staff member or two at each table, someone who could be discreetly withdrawn under just these circumstances, to open up a table space. I ran my eye over the list and turned back to Marty. “Ah, here we are—table twelve, at that end.” I waved vaguely in the right direction, then accompanied Marty toward the door, where she paused to wait for her companion. Dropping my voice, I said, “About that matter we discussed earlier, I’ve asked Alfred Findley to look into it.”

Marty fixed me with an odd look, but I didn’t have time to think about it as Jimmy came up beside us, his hands clamped around a pair of glasses, one of which he handed to Marty. “That’s all well and good, but I still expect to see you and Rich in the morning,” Marty said firmly. “Come on, Jimmy, we’re over there somewhere.” She grabbed his free arm, but he turned briefly to say, “Nice to meet you,” before he was hauled away.

I’d done all I could for the moment, and I had more immediate issues to attend to. While I and my elves had arranged for a truly delightful dinner menu, complemented by some outstanding wines, I didn’t expect to have the opportunity to enjoy it, since it was my job to make sure that everyone was where they were supposed to be, that the caterer was on his toes, that the glasses stayed filled, that the microphone at the head table worked, and that nobody dribbled wine (or worse, threw up) on any of the valuable collections that lined the perimeter of the room. I allowed myself a few brief seconds to admire the handsome room, filled with happy, noisy revelers. I wondered if the room had ever experienced such a noise level in its staid existence. I patted myself on the back, figuratively:
Job well done, Nell—and it’ll all be over in another couple of hours.
This warm glow of self-satisfaction lasted no more than half a minute: I was interrupted from my reverie by one of the caterer’s assistants, who was yammering on about a tripped circuit breaker in the kitchen, and I followed her to the back of the building to quench yet another crisis. The work of a professional fundraiser is never done.

The last guests trickled out the door after eleven,
helped into their waiting cars or taxis by the security manager. It was nearly midnight when the caterer loaded the final crates of dirty dishes into his truck, and I handed him his hefty check and thanked him profusely, even as I noticed that his assistants were still folding chairs and rolling tables toward the loading dock. He’d done a good job, and we might want to use him again. The edible leftovers were stowed in the staff refrigerator for tomorrow’s lunch. The maintenance manager and a couple of helpers were busy moving the library tables back into position for the readers who would be arriving in ten hours. I thanked him for his help and headed out myself.

The cool and bracing October night air cleared my head. It was only a few minutes to Charles’s house off Rittenhouse Square, and by day I would have walked, but it was late and I was wearing heels . . . so I treated myself to a taxi. It pulled up in front of the brick-fronted townhouse, and I dragged myself out. I lingered briefly on the pavement, looking up at the building’s façade, before ringing the bell. Even in the dark, Charles’s place was exquisite: early nineteenth-century glass in the multipaned windows, original door frames and window sashes, all meticulously maintained, gleaming with fresh paint. The street was quiet, lined with similar elegantly appointed houses. It more than suited Charles, who had outstanding taste in all areas, as far as I could determine. Including women, I reminded myself. Charles had been married once upon a time, and he and his wife had produced a brace of smart, quiet children, now in their teens, who lived in another state but visited at wide intervals to dutifully troop around the significant sights of the city. Their mother had agreed to an extremely amicable divorce, and having family money, had made few demands on Charles since their split. He reciprocated by diligently remembering the children’s birthdays, travelling to attend the major milestones in their lives, and generally ceding all responsibility to his amenable ex. Everyone seemed very happy with the situation, including me.

I’d been married once myself, a million years ago—a college sweetheart, and we did the big wedding thing and lived happily ever after for about three years, at which point we decided we really didn’t have anything in common. When he was offered a good job in California, I think we both sighed with relief for the excuse to split up. He still sends Christmas cards, and I see him when I’m on the West Coast, which is almost never.

After the divorce, I decided that I needed some stability in my life, so I bought myself a charming (that is, tiny) converted carriage house that sat behind one of the grand old estates west from the city on the Main Line in Bryn Mawr, where the power players of Philadelphia had moved when commuting by train was still new and exciting. I like to think of those upper-crust types having been delivered to the Victorian train stations—which somehow cling to precarious life—in carriages driven by their chauffeurs, or later in motor cars, greeting each other on the platform as they went off for another day of dabbling in banking and lunching at the club.

But back to my carriage house: the grand house in front has long since been broken up into smaller units, and at the moment I think it houses a group of psychiatrists—the tenants seem to change every few years—but my little place is completely separate. When I bought it, it was barely livable: two rooms upstairs, two down, with minimal plumbing, antiquated wiring, and no insulation. The kitchen was nothing but a jumble of secondhand appliances shoved behind a screen in one corner. In the ten-plus years since I bought it, I’ve added a real kitchen, upgraded the plumbing, heating, and wiring, and filled it with funky, homey semi-antiques, the sort of stuff found at upscale yard sales in Bryn Mawr. Which is exactly where most of them came from, since after paying for the mortgage, and the second mortgage to cover the improvements, I didn’t have a whole lot left over. Small nonprofits don’t pay very well. But the little house was mine, and I loved it. And I loved being able to walk to the train station, since I took the train into the city most days (when I didn’t have a special event or other engagement to keep me in Center City), and I loved being able to leave the city behind at the end of the day and come home to the cool, leafy green suburbs, to the elegance of a bygone day (if you closed one eye and squinted).

Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy spending time at Charles’s house. It was everything that mine was not: elegant, tasteful, clean (thanks to a series of cleaning personnel who came and went invisibly). He kept his immaculate black and white kitchen (dark granite counters, glossy white tile, halogen lights tucked out of sight so that the light seemed to emanate from the walls and ceiling) well stocked with delightful and expensive goodies, and there always seemed to be a bottle of champagne lurking at the back of the stainless-steel refrigerator. Sometimes it was hard to believe that a real person lived there, since it looked almost like a movie set—what some California director thought an upper-crust Philadelphia row house should look like. No matter: it was like playing dress-up for me anyway, only I was putting on a fancy house rather than fancy clothes.

I rang the bell, and Charles opened the door promptly. He had been home long enough to divest himself of his jacket, vest, and tie, and his still-crisp white shirt was open at the neck, which for him was the height of casual. He stood courteously aside to let me come in, but as I passed by him, he lifted my hair off my neck and kissed my nape. I shivered, and not from the cold. He moved on to the kitchen, and I followed.

“Champagne?” He had already pulled a bottle out of the refrigerator and was peeling away the gold foil, twisting off the wire cage that held the cork. “I thought that went very well. Several of the board members said that they were going to write us nice checks—in fact, several did, and I had them left on your desk.” He mentioned that one new local CEO whom we had been courting for some time, who had come as the guest of a board member, had hinted at six figures, as long as we put his name on something. “Actually, I think it’s his wife who’s pushing him—thinks he needs a bit of class, now that he’s established here. I’m sure we can accommodate him.” He poured two glasses of champagne and handed me a flute threaded with lacy trails of minuscule bubbles—only the best French champagne, of course.

“No problem. Let me know what he’s interested in, and I can work up a proposal. This tastes wonderful,” I said, sipping the wine, savoring the delicate tingle on my tongue. “God, I’m tired—it’s been a long week, and it’s going to be an early morning tomorrow with the staff meeting at eight.” I wandered toward Charles’s living room, then slipped off my party shoes and wiggled my toes happily, sinking them into the lush carpet.

“Not too tired, I hope,” he countered. On anyone else, the look Charles gave me could best be described as a leer. On him, it looked like aristocratic passion. Intense, brooding, lascivious—what was it about Charles that made me want to multiply my syllables?

“Not hardly, sir,” I responded flirtatiously. “Shall we go up?” Charles was already leading the way up the narrow but highly polished walnut staircase.

“Would you like to use the bathroom first?” he asked.

“You, sir, are a gentleman.” In his bedroom, I stripped down to my slip and made my way to the pseudo-Victorian bathroom. To an inexperienced eye, it would have looked exactly like an 1880 bathroom, which was the intent; to someone like me, who had put in many hours refinishing my own period bathroom, searching for replacements, stripping, sanding, and so on, it was clear that everything was a modern reproduction. But the ensemble drew on the best of the old and the new, and it worked. I washed my face and decided I could wait until morning for a shower. “Charles, where’s my nightgown?” I usually left one—an absurdly expensive Victoria’s Secret silk number that I devoutly hoped made me look slinky—hanging on the hook in the bathroom, where, tonight, it was not.