Rubout (9 page)

After my parents died and I moved in with my grandparents in the city, I hung out at the library near my grandparents’ city store. The Carpenter Branch Library smelled dark, old, and mellow. It was different, but I liked it. My favorite, though, was the main library downtown. It was built in 1912, when St. Louis was still a mighty river city and wanted a book palace for its people. Cass Gilbert, the same guy who designed the U.S. Supreme Court, designed an opulent library. Every time I went in the place, I took my own tour. The main room was oval and done in a warm, soft pinkish gray marble. It had molded plaster ceilings, a huge oak counter, and carved church pews to sit in while you waited for your books to be brought from the stacks.

Today I wanted History and Genealogy, another grand room with a ceiling modeled after an Italian palace. It had helpful librarians. I called and told them what I was looking for, and they assembled everything they had on Ladue. I took the pile of books and files and sat at a long oak table, next to a husband and wife who were researching their family tree.

The librarians dug up good stuff. I couldn’t wait to tell Lyle what I found. He wanted facts on why I didn’t like Ladue, I’d give him facts. Hah. Old and new, Ladue was one strange place. It had no public pool, no tennis courts, or recreational facilities. If you wanted those, you had to join a country club. Ladue had the highest concentration of private clubs in the area, places that excelled at keeping more people out than they let in. They included the St. Louis Country Club, the Log Cabin Club, the Bogey Golf
Club, the Deer Creek Club, Old Warson Country Club, and the Racquet Club Ladue.

Ladue believes we’re just jealous, which we are. They also say Ladue isn’t as rich as everyone thinks. Huntleigh Village, a tiny St. Louis suburb of 392 people, has a median family income of more than $135,000 a year. Ladue families, on the average, scrape by with around $121,000. Ladue has 108 people living below the poverty level. Huntleigh has none. Not one person. So why don’t we pick on Huntleigh? Why aren’t we calling it elitist and snobbish?

Because Ladue has this attitude, see. It has more to do with Ladue minds than Ladue money. Ladue likes to sue the socks off people—for reasons that would have the rest of us shrugging and turning away.

Only Ladue would sue a respectable cohabiting couple, because the city had a rule that more than one family couldn’t live in the same house. Ladue won that lawsuit, too. Took it all the way to the Supreme Court. My hairdresser friend told me the suit had a curious outcome: a gay couple living in Ladue were worried they were next. So the older one adopted the younger. They now commit incest, with the blessing of the city.

Then Ladue turned around and sued Margaret Gilleo, a woman who was worried about war. She put up a yard sign that said,
SAY NO TO WAR IN THE PERSIAN GULF, CALL CONGRESS NOW
. The sign was the size of a
FOR SALE
sign, but Ladue carried on like she was advertising X-rated videos. Gilleo thought she was guaranteed free speech. She challenged Ladue’s sign
ordinance in federal court—and the ordinance was struck down as unconstitutional. Ladue then adopted a new sign ordinance, which wasn’t much different from the first. And Margaret taped a sign the size of a piece of typing paper in a window that Said,
FOR PEACE IN THE GULF.

For that modest wish, Ladue sued her all the way to the Supreme Court. Ladue lost that one. Some Ladueites complained to the press that the sign was tacky. Evidently, it was not tacky to have Americans die in the desert. But it was tacky to mention the problem in a Ladue yard.

That was Ladue for you—so self-absorbed in petty city politics, it forgot there was a world out there, where people died. My Ladue friends keep telling me “We’re not all like that. Some of us are normal,” and I believe them. Because otherwise, Margaret Gilleo wouldn’t have fought the good fight for free speech. She would have put her sign away and shut up.

Some people say this rash of lawsuits is a recent thing. But it’s not. Ladue has been getting itself in stupid public scrapes for years. My favorite example was back in the 1940s when Ladue had a ghost library. St. Louis County wanted to set up a county library district and tax everybody ten cents per hundred dollars of assessed valuation. But some municipalities in the county already had thriving libraries, so they were exempt. Ladue did not have a library—until it looked like it would have to pay that ten-cent tax. Then people quickly donated a bunch of old books, and Ladue got a subscription to
Life
magazine. These intellectual treasures were kept at a fire station. Ladue said it had a library and voted to tax
themselves one cent to maintain it, and save nine whole pennies. Except the courts didn’t let Ladue get by with it. This cheap trick was labeled “a new low in political subterfuge” in the newspapers back then. Ten years later, Ladue donated its ghost library to the prisoners at the county jail.

There was a lot more like this, including a nostalgic interview with an old Ladue resident who bragged he drank the best bourbon at a Ladue eatery all during Prohibition. He said a disgruntled employee tipped a prohibition officer that the place had 250 cases of booze stashed in an old cistern. The restaurant owner put three hundred dollars down on the bar and the agent forgot about the stash. This charming tale of bribery was repeated in an adoring newspaper article.

I’d been hearing Ladue stories like these all my life. But Lyle wasn’t from St. Louis, so he didn’t absorb these attitudes with the beer-perfumed air. Now I had more than an attitude. I had facts about why I did not like Ladue. So what did this information tell me about Sydney or the Vander Venter family?

Nothing. But I knew someone who could tell me: Endora. She was the
Gazettes
Ladue specialist. Endora had been at the
Gazette
so long she didn’t quite rate an office, but she had a three-walled windowless lair where the Family section petered out into the no-man’s land between Sports and Food. The economically correct pastel pods we sat in never came back this far. Neither did anyone who was on the fast track for promotion. In this cramped, airless space that nobody wanted, Endora had accumulated two battered gray desks piled with yellowing newspapers
and old books, a three-legged bookcase (she used a brick to prop up the fourth side), an assortment of straggling plants, a phone, and an old, slow computer.

Endora sat on a straight-back wooden chair that would have crippled an ordinary person. She was handsome in a horse-faced, WASPy, don’t-give-a-damn way. She let her hair turn gray and she pulled it straight back in a ponytail. Her strong body had softened and thickened and her face had more lines than one of her daddy’s railroad maps. But on her it looked good.

Endora was the last survivor of a robber baron who made his money in nineteenth-century railroads. Like the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers, he kept his fabulous fortune one step ahead of the law and became a pillar of society. He built a huge stone-and-marble mansion on Portland Place, with a two-story Tiffany window and fireplaces from a French chateau. About 1924, when gloomy Victorian palaces were unfashionable, his son—Endoras grandfather—moved to Ladue, so he could be closer to his favorite country clubs. Grandfather was good at investments. His son, Endoras daddy, inherited Grandfather’s gambling streak without the old man’s shrewdness and eventually lost most of the family fortune at the gaming tables. When he was down to his last half million, Daddy skipped with his secretary for Mexico. They did not take the train.

Endora’s Mummy, who always did the right thing, quietly pined away, with a little help from the liquor cabinet. But Endora was healthy as a horse, and, alas, she rather resembled one. With no family
money, a lumpy figure, and outrageous opinions, it was doubtful she would ever marry. There was almost nothing left after the family home was sold off and Daddy’s debts were paid. Something had to be done. Her grandfathers friends let her live in a charming guest cottage on the old Gravois estate. The cottage was big enough for a family of four. Then they got her a job at the
Gazette.
Endora, the product of the best private schools (she hung her Vassar degree in the guest John, in case we didn’t know) wasn’t a bad writer. The editors soon found her enormously useful. Endora covered all those touchy stories that had Ladue-ites on the phone squealing to their lawyers and had their lawyers on the phone threatening to sue the
Gazette.
Writing about Ladue was financially and emotionally draining before Endora, and the paper avoided it whenever possible. But there were times when they couldn’t, especially when one of their suits made federal court. That’s when Endora proved to be worth her considerable weight in gold. She wrote stories with such wit and style, you actually thought she said something. Everyone was happy. Ladue had one of their own reporting things the way they wanted, and the
Gazette
staff didn’t have to tangle with Ladue. On the rare occasions when Endora overstepped herself and offended someone there, nobody complained to the
Gazette.
Her invitations simply dried up for a while. She never failed to get the point. A few younger writers at the
Gazette
groused because Endora seemed to do so little. The rest of us realized her true worth. Endora was getting up there and we dreaded the day she finally retired.

At first I thought Endora was not in her lair today. Then I saw her behind a screen of wilting philodendrons she kept on the bookcase. Someone must be dumping
Gazette
coffee in the poor things again. She was at her desk, reading a book. She looked up from her paperback novel. “Yeah, Vierling, what can I do for you?” she said in a voice that could be heard on the other side of a hockey field. She always called me by my last name. It sounded very private school.

“I’ve got the Sydney Vander Venter story,” I said. “I don’t know why they didn’t assign it to you in the first place.”

“Because you were there when she was killed,” she said. “Anyway, Wendy stuck me with the Shop Till You Drop section about stores for the St. Louis super-rich. You know that’s like walking on goddamn eggs.”

“I don’t envy you,” I said. I meant it. Some of that area’s biggest advertisers were not the most fashionable stores. Endora had to steer a delicate course to please editors and advertisers. “If anyone can carry it off, you can.” I meant that, too. I was on a roll, telling the truth twice in a row. I’d better quit while I was ahead. “I’m looking for information about Sydney. What can you tell me?”

“Let’s see . . .” She stared straight ahead, as if the answer were written on her dingy wall. I knew she was going through the Ladue data bank in her head. “You know Sydney came from an old St. Louis family. A minor branch of the Gravois. Made their money in shoes, back when St. Louis was known for shoes, booze, and blues. The Gravois family had some money then, although most of it’s gone now.
Not as much as the Vander Venters—they must be worth twenty million minimum—and that’s not counting the business.”

“That much? And I heard Sydney’s mother-in-law Elizabeth was a tightwad.”

“Elizabeth,” Endora said, and smiled. “That woman is a hoot. She’s the real brains of that family, you know. Elizabeth lives well, but she’s not ostentatious. Quality of life is what’s important to the Vander Venters, mother and son, and I admire them for that. She has another house in Maine, a fifty-foot sailboat, and I think she still has her place at Palm Beach, too.

“Anyway, you asked about Sydney. Her father left her a small trust fund. Sydney went to Stephens College, you know, because she could take her horse to school with her.”

“Did the horse learn anything?”

“Very funny, Vierling. Don’t go South Side on me. I’m trying to help. I think Sydney married Hudson right after college. I know she was a model Ladue wife: devoted to her son, played bridge and tennis, chaired the right charity events, weighed the same at forty as she did when she married.”

“Did she fool around on Hudson?”

“Not that I ever heard. But he screwed around on her all the time. Mostly wives of friends. It was pretty quiet until he met Brenda and dumped Sydney.”

“Why did he dump the perfect Ladue wife?”

“Because she
was
the perfect Ladue wife. Hudson got tired of living with—and, let’s face it, maintaining—all that perfection. Sydney was expensive. I
heard he met Brenda at Tom Schlafly’s Saint Louis Brewery. You know it?”

“Of course. They have wicked french fries and sticky toffee pudding. Lyle likes their porter.”

“Hudson told me about the first time he had lunch with Brenda. It was strictly business. Nothing was going on then. Brenda ordered a beer, a cheeseburger, and french fries. Sydney would never do that. She starved herself. Always on a diet. If she did eat anything, she’d go on about how many fat grams she consumed until your eyes crossed. Well, after her cheeseburger and beer, Brenda said, ‘That was good. Think I’ll try the oatmeal stout.’ Hudson had never been around a woman who acted that way. He said that’s when he fell in love. I felt sorry for Sydney, but virtue is its own punishment. She spent her whole time talking about her kid, her worthy causes, and her diets. I can see why the poor guy dumped her. Plus, I heard Brenda was pretty good in the sack. Sydney looked like she’d clank if you got on top of her.” An attractive, skinny woman wouldn’t get much sympathy from Endora.

“What would have happened to Sydney if they’d divorced?”

“Hudson hired a real shark. If Sydney was lucky, she might have been able to get a house in Chevy Chase.”

“Where’s that? Isn’t Chevy Chase a suburb of Washington, D.C.? I couldn’t imagine Sydney living anywhere but here.”

Endora looked at me like I lived on another planet. I guess I did. “Chevy Chase is a subdivision in Olivette, right on the edge of Ladue. The southwest
comer of Price Road and Bonhomme. It’s where divorced Ladue wives go when they get a bad settlement. If you live in Chevy Chase, you are still in the Ladue school district, so your kids can go to Ladue schools. A lot of Catholics and Jews live there, too. It’s mostly brick-and-frame houses, built in the twenties. You’d probably like it, but it would be a comedown for Sydney.”