People Like Us (29 page)

“How about if I take you on a tour of the apartment, Mr. Bailey,” said Elias, standing up to terminate the interview.

Later, dressing for a party, Ruby said to Elias, “Who’s Byron Macumber?”

Elias, who was putting studs in his evening shirt, paused, startled. “Why?” he asked.

“Why?” repeated Ruby. “What kind of an answer is why to your own wife?”

“Oh, he’s just some kid who works for Weldon and Stinchfield,” replied Elias.

“He’s a lawyer then?”

“Yeah, a junior lawyer. Why this big interest in Byron what’s-his-name?”

“Charming on the telephone. He called you when you were taking Gus Bailey for the tour of the apartment. He wants you to call him. He said you knew the number.”

“He called
here?
” There was surprise in Elias’s tone.

“Yes, Elias, Byron Macumber called here, and your wife answered the telephone, and he asked that you call him as soon as you were free. Where are you going?”

“I’m going downstairs. I left my briefcase down there.”

* * *

“What the fuck are you calling me at my house for, you asshole?” said Elias, in whispered fury into the telephone.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Renthal, but you’d left your office, and I knew by morning that the word would be out, and I thought that you’d want to know.”

“What word?”

“Omaha Natural Gas has hired Weldon and Stinchfield as adviser in connection with a proposal by Tri-World, Inc., to acquire ONG,” said Byron Macumber.

“Holy shit,” said Elias.

“I’m sorry I bothered you at home, Mr. Renthal.”

“No, no, Byron. I’m sorry I blew my stack. You did the right thing. Now, listen, it’s not a good idea to call me here at home, but if you have to, here’s a different number, five-five-five, four-one-two-eight, my own private line. I’ll put a message machine on it by tomorrow, and just leave a message, and I’ll get back to you, and, listen, Byron, use a different name. You’re Mr. Brown. Okay?”

When Elias hung up, he looked at his watch while lighting up a cigar. He picked up the telephone again and dialed some numbers. “Operator, this is a collect call to Mr. Rufus Courtauld, in Nassau, from Mr. Nolte.”

Elias drummed his fingers on the table while waiting for the long-distance call to go through.

“Nolte here,” said Elias, when Rufus Courtauld picked up the receiver on the other end. “Fine, fine,” he went on impatiently, getting over with the pleasantries that his Swiss connection invariably engaged in at the beginning of every conversation. “Buy a hundred and eighty thousand shares of Omaha Natural Gas the instant the market opens in the morning.” With that he hung up the telephone.

The door to the little room opened, and Ruby entered. She was dressed in evening clothes. “I can hardly see you through all this cigar smoke, Elias,” she said.

“That’s why you gave me this smoking room, Ruby,
so that I could cloud up the air here and not in the swell rooms up front.”

“I’m not complaining. I’m just commenting.”

“You look beautiful, Ruby,” answered Elias. “New dress?”

“Of course, it’s new,” she said, tweaking his chin. “You wanted a wife on the best-dressed list and you’re going to get a wife on the best-dressed list. I need some help with this necklace, Elias. Can you do the clasp?”

“With pleasure,” he said, standing behind her. When he finished, he leaned down and kissed Ruby’s bare shoulder. “Did I ever tell you I was crazy about your shoulders?”

“Yeah, but it’s not something I get sick of hearing,” said Ruby, rubbing her shoulder against his lips.

“Where are we going tonight?” he asked.

“Adele Harcourt’s, and we can’t be late.”

“Oh, Adele Harcourt?” he said, impressed. “Fancy-schmancy.” He pulled himself out of further amatory pursuit.

“Don’t say fancy-schmancy.”

“Why?”

“It’s tacky. We’re past that.”

27

After Sweetzer Clarke died, Matilda felt very lucky to be able to finally sell the great Fifth Avenue apartment Sweetzer had grown up in and later inherited after his mother’s death. The building had been constructed on the site of what had once been the Clarke townhouse, and the apartment, forty-one rooms on the top three floors, had been built to the extravagant specifications of Sweetzer’s father in the late 1920s as part of the transaction for selling the land and tearing down the
Clarke house to make way for the building. Matilda and Sweetzer and their children lived there for nineteen years, first closing up rooms and then whole floors as the cost of maintaining the vast establishment drained their steadily diminishing resources.

When the lawyers handling Sweetzer’s estate told Matilda that she would have to give up either the apartment in town or the place in the country, she said, without a second thought, that she would give up the apartment, as life without Malvern, the Clarkes’ place in Bedford, would have been absolutely unthinkable for Matilda, who raised Norwich terriers and rode horses every day of her life. Her two sons had married early and advantageously and retreated to other parts of the country, away from the sight of their mother in decline.

At the time of Sweetzer’s death, forty-one-room apartments were not in great demand, and the apartment stood empty for several years. Finally, in desperation, Matilda sold it for a negligible sum to someone whose name she pretended she could never remember. The problem had been getting the purchaser, Elias Renthal, approved by the board of directors of the building, and it was only the purchaser’s guarantee, in writing, that he would not break up the apartment into smaller apartments that finally assured his acceptance into a building that otherwise was deeply selective about what Matilda called “the sort of people” who lived there.

The first time Lil Altemus visited Matilda’s new small flat, which she had taken for the few nights a week she spent in the city, she pronounced it charming, calling it Matilda’s
pied à terre
, as if Matilda had done something “frightfully clever,” in abandoning such an enormous establishment for something so very manageable. But Matilda brushed aside all compliments on its charm, or coziness, a word she despised, referring to it always as “my little hovel,” because it was, at least in her eyes, a little hovel compared to the grandeur of her former home that was now being done up by the
Renthals. She was often heard to exclaim, “The things they’ve done to it!” about the new owners, rolling her eyes and shaking her head, although she had not seen it, did not know anyone who had, and knew, from personal experience, that Cora Mandell was not only the best decorator in New York but had been her own decorator when she still had money.

“Sweetzer left me high and dry,” said Matilda. “And I was a very good wife to Sweetzer, except for that one time. I had to auction off all the French furniture and sell the apartment. I wasn’t doing all that because I chose to live a simpler life, as Dolly De Longpre, dear sweet Dolly, told her readers. I sold everything to survive.”

“But, darling Matilda,” cried Lil. “We’ve been friends all our lives. You could have come to me, and I would have seen that Laurance took care of you.”

“Oh, no. That sort of thing never works out,” said Matilda. “I’m not a charity case. And, besides, along came Rochelle Prud’homme, and she put me on the board of directors of Prud’homme Products, and pays me a salary. Now, I know you don’t give Rochelle the right time, Lil, and won’t have her to your house, but she happens to be a damn nice woman, and a damn rich woman, and a damn successful woman in the hairdryer business. They call her the Petite Dynamo. All she wanted was to become a queen in society, and she couldn’t get to first base. She needed me to open some doors, and I needed her, and everybody’s happy. What Ezzie Fenwick calls tit for tit.”

“But what in the world do you do on the board of directors?” asked Lil. “You’ve never worked a day in your life.”

“I don’t do anything,” answered Matilda. “I just go to meetings several times a year and sit there, and Rochelle nods to me which way to vote.”

“Then why does Mrs. Prud’homme want you on her board of directors?” asked Lil.

“Oh, Lil,” answered Matilda, as if the answer were so apparent the question needn’t have been asked.

“Why?” insisted Lil.

“For the same reason Elias Renthal has your brother and Loelia Manchester and Lord Biedermeier on the board of Miranda Industries. We add class.”

“Heavens!” said Lil, clapping her hands, and the two old friends roared with laughter.

28

Among the New People, with whom Loelia now felt more comfortable, everyone that season called Mickie Minardos and Loelia Manchester the lovebirds. “We’ve just had lunch with Mickie and Loelia,” people said, and it immediately identified them as intimates of the most in-love couple in the city. If, at dinners, they weren’t seated together, which they preferred to be, they wrote notes to each other during the meal and passed them behind the backs of the intervening people, read them, and then shrieked with private laughter together, or simply met each other’s eyes and stared deeply. Everyone in this group said, leaving them, “They’re madly in love.”

The altogether splendid invitation to the Elias Renthals’ ball in honor of the Earl and Countess of Castoria was the talk of every table at Clarence’s that day. Ezzie Fenwick, who usually waited until the very last minute to reply to invitations, in case a better one to a grander party should come along, accepted his invitation on the same day it arrived, because he knew, absolutely knew, that on that night, June 21, there would be no better place to be in the whole world.

The ladies who gave parties never invited Matilda
Clarke and Fernanda Somerset to the same parties, because Matilda had once had an affair with Fernanda’s husband, and Fernanda never spoke to Matilda again, but Ruby Renthal invited both of them, and everyone was curious to see how the two ladies in question would handle the problem. At the large charity dinners, when it was inevitable that both would attend, the ladies who seated the tables knew that they had to seat Fernanda and Matilda as far from each other as possible, in separate rooms even, if there were more than one, with Fernanda Somerset always getting the better seat in the better room because she was a benefactress, which Matilda Clarke, for economic reasons, could no longer be.

“You’re not going to the Renthals’, are you?” asked Lil Altemus.

“Of course, I’m going,” said Matilda to Lil.

“I’m not,” said Lil.

“You have to play along with these New People,” said Matilda.

“Why do I have to play along with these New People?” asked Lil.

“People like us, WASPS in the
Social Register
, we’re practically an extinct race. These New People are the ones who are taking charge.”

“My brother Laurance is still in charge. The Van Degan bank is his. The Van Degan Foundation is his. The Van Degan Building is his,” stated Lil. “You can’t get more in charge than that.”

“But Laurance is the exception to the rule. Most of the kind of people who were the heads of Wall Street and the banks when Laurance took over from his father have been sent out to pasture. All these New People are the people with the money nowadays. The kind of money we thought was money is nothing to the kind of money these New People have.”

“I have no intention of playing along with them,” said Lil emphatically.

“You’re going to have to,” said Matilda quietly.

“Have to what?”

“Go to the Renthals’ ball.”

“Why am I going to have to?”

“Because Laurance is going to insist you go.”

Lil looked at Matilda. It was impossible for her to understand her brother’s affinity for a lout like Elias Renthal, but she would never discuss her brother with anyone, even someone she had known all her life, like Matilda Clarke.

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