Scruples (21 page)

Six months after their marriage in Barbados the Ikehorns went to Europe on what was the beginning of their many travels. Their first stop was Paris, to which Billy wanted to return in triumph, and triumph she did. A four-room suite at the Ritz, facing on the noble symmetry of the Place Vendôme, became their base for a month. Their rooms had great high ceilings, walls tinted in the most delicate “château” tones of blue and gray and green, superbly intricate moldings picked out in gold leaf, and the most comfortable beds on the Continent. Even Ellis Ikehorn, for all his anti-French bias, had to admit that it wasn’t a bad place to stay.

Lilianne de Vertdulac had seen Billy off on the boat train back to the United States just about two years before. Now she gasped in surprise as she saw the changes that so little time had made in the girl. It was something, she thought, like seeing pictures of the young Farah Diba, that lovely, almost lanky, shy and unassuming student, soon after she had been transformed into the absolute and unquestioned consort of the emperor of Iran. The same face, the same body but an altogether different air, something touchingly new in the way she moved and looked at those about her, something unexpectedly splendid, tentatively imperial, yet wholly natural.

Now Billy, too, saw a side of the Comtesse emerge that was a complete novelty in her experience of that lady. Lilianne flirted with Ellis as if they were both no more than twenty-three, found nothing more endearing than his uneasy attempts to speak a few words of French, called him frequently and under almost any circumstances “my poor darling,” and freely exhibited her command of Oxford-accented English. She accepted Billy as an adult woman, called her Wilhelmina the way Ellis did, and insisted on being called by her own first name, which Billy found, at first, strangely difficult to do.

Ellis escorted the two women to all the couture collections. They asked the concierge at the Ritz to arrange, by phone, for their invitation cards to each showing, as is the custom when tourists visit Paris, but their place in the showrooms was not a detail the concierge could guarantee. The same haughty directrices who had, only a few years earlier, granted the Comtesse seats during the fifth or sixth week of showings, and not necessarily good seats at that, took one look at Ellis, a great tanned chieftain in a Savile Row suit, barely bothered to register Billy and Lilianne with peripheral vision, and instantly led the three of them to the best seats in the house. A couture directrice can spot a rich and generous man almost before he comes through the door; some say she must be able to smell him at a hundred paces—blindfolded—in order to really merit her job.

They went first to Chanel, whose two-thousand-dollar suits were being worn like uniforms by every chic woman in Paris. It was a period during which women, lunching together at the Relais Plaza of the Plaza Athénée Hôtel, the most elegant “snack bar” in Paris, invariably devoted the first hour of their meal to deciding which of the other women in the room were wearing
“une vraie”
and which were wearing
“une fausse”
Chanel. Clever copyists were able to reproduce everything, even to the gold chain that weighed down the bottom of the jacket lining and made it hang perfectly, but something always gave
une fausse
away: a slightly less than authentic button, fringe on the pockets that was two millimeters too long or one millimeter too short, the right fabric in the wrong color.

At Chanel, Billy ordered six suits, still in part guided by Lilianne’s advice. Ellis, to Billy’s surprise, seemed to be making notes on the tiny pads they had been handed when they entered, using his old Parker fountain pen rather than the dinky little gold pencils that were passed to the others. As the three of them walked up the Rue Cambon, back to the Ritz for tea, he said, “Lilianne, your first fitting is ten days from today.”

“My poor darling, you are quite mad,” she answered.

“Nope. I ordered three suits for you, numbers five, fifteen, and twenty-five. You didn’t expect me to sit through all that without having a little fun, did you?”

“It is totally out of the question,” said Lilianne, deeply shocked. “I could not possibly let you. Never. Absolutely never. You are too kind, Ellis, but no, simply no.”

Ellis smiled indulgently at the stunned Frenchwoman. “You have no choice. The directrice gave me her solemn assurances that she was going to be personally responsible for making sure that work will have been started on them this very minute.”

“Impossible! I wasn’t measured and they would never do anything without measurements.”

“This is an exception. The directrice promised me that she could make an excellent guess. She’s almost exactly your size. No, they’re under orders to go ahead, no matter what. If you won’t wear them, I’ll have to give them to the directrice.”

“This is ridiculous,” Lilianne said, protesting wildly. “I told you at lunch that I’ve disliked that woman for years. Ellis, I accuse you of using blackmail.”

“Yup. You can call it whatever you like, poor darling.”

“Oh. Oh!” For once in her life the Comtesse couldn’t find the right words, and the right words to a Frenchwoman come with the milk of maman. Ellis had picked exactly the suits she would have chosen for herself. She would do anything short of murder to own either number five, fifteen, or twenty-five. But all three!

“Look at it this way, Lilianne, either you do it my way or you’re in big trouble with me. You don’t want that, do you? I’m forcing you, poor darling, in my brutal American way, and you can’t help yourself.” Ellis tried to look as menacing as possible but only succeeded in looking delighted.

“Well, of course,” the Comtesse said, more mildly, “I am totally helpless, after all, am I not? When you are fond of a crazy man, you cannot risk offending him.”

“Good, that’s settled,” said Ellis.

“Ah, but wait. Tomorrow we go to Dior and there you must promise not to play those tricks on me.”

“I won’t order anything else without letting them take your measurements first,” Ellis assured her. “But those suits at Chanel were all for the daytime, weren’t they, Wilhelmina, my sweetheart?”

Billy smiled assent with tears of pride in her eyes. To be able to give to someone who had given her so much was a joy she had never known existed.

“So, Lilianne, you still have to get some things for evening, right Wilhelmina? Only makes sense.”

“No, I will not go with you under those conditions.”

“Oh, Lilianne, please,” Billy pleaded. “Ellis is having such a good time. And I wouldn’t enjoy it if you weren’t there. I need your advice. You simply must come—please?”

“Well,” the Comtesse relented, filled with bliss, “in that case I will accompany you, but Ellis may choose only one, only one number for me.”

“Three,” countered Ellis. “It’s my lucky number.”

“Two, and that is final.”

“You’ve got a deal.” Ellis stopped in the middle of the dazzling, long corridor lined with showcases displaying the best Paris has to offer that connects the back of the Ritz to the front. “Let’s just shake on that, poor darling.”

The press soon became particularly fascinated by Billy’s wardrobe. The average rich woman doesn’t come into her own, in fashion, until she has been married a number of years, if, indeed, she ever finds the style that suits her. But Billy had had that intensive apprenticeship with Lilianne de Vertdulac to educate her to the limitless potential of elegance, and now, with Ellis behind her, insisting that she dress as superbly as she had ever dreamed of, as much to delight him as herself, she became one of the fashion world’s chief customers.

Billy could carry any dress ever made. The carte blanche she received at the age of twenty-one might have made a laughingstock of a woman with less taste and less height, but Billy never overdressed. Lilianne’s strict sense of perfection as well as her own innate eye kept her from excess. Nevertheless, when grandeur was called for, she went full out. At a state dinner at the White House she was the most resplendent figure there, only twenty-two years old, wearing pale lilac satin from Dior and emeralds that had once belonged to Empress Josephine. At twenty-three, when she and Ellis were photographed on horseback on their thirty-thousand-acre ranch in Brazil, Billy wore plain jodhpurs, boots, and an open-necked cotton shirt, but at the presentation of a new Yves Saint Laurent collection two weeks later, she wore the landmark suit from his previous collection, while Ellis, who was becoming an old Paris hand, whispered to her the numbers of the dresses he thought she should order in a way that made people with serious fashion backgrounds remember the black-tie spring collection at Jacques Fath in 1949, sixteen years earlier. At that presentation the late Aly Khan, sitting beside a young, glorious Rita Hay worth, had decreed, “The white for your rubies, the black for your diamonds, the pale green for your emeralds.”

Billy, too, had a treasure of princely jewels, but her favorites always remained the peerless Kimberley Twins, the perfectly matched eleven-karat diamond earrings that Harry Winston had said were, among the finest gemstones he had ever sold. Heedless of convention, she wore them morning, noon, and night, and they never looked inappropriate. In her twenty-third year Billy spent more than three hundred thousand dollars on clothes, not counting furs and jewelry. A substantial part of the money was spent in New York because Billy, a perfect size eight in American designer clothes, wanted to avoid too many of the time-consuming fittings in Paris that kept her away from Ellis and their enjoyment of the city. That was the year she first appeared on the Best-Dressed List.

Soon after their return to New York the Ikehorns rented and redecorated an entire floor high in the tower of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel on Fifth Avenue, which became their main address. From their windows they had a 360-degree view of the city: All of Central Park spilled like a green river at their feet. Ellis Ikehorn still dominated the vast holdings of which he held a voting majority of the stock, and they were often in Manhattan. Since Ikehorn Enterprises was a publicly-owned company, his board of directors and executive officers had been consistently and brilliantly chosen by him to carry on after his death. All of them owned enough stock to guarantee their loyalty. Now, increasingly, he found that he was able to spend his time with Billy in far-off places. When Billy was twenty-four they bought a villa at Cap-Ferrat with legendary gardens and grassy terraces that descended toward the Mediterranean like a vast Matisse; they maintained a permanent suite of six rooms at Claridge’s for their frequent trips to London, where Billy collected Georgian and Queen Anne silver whenever Ellis had to spend part of the day in business meetings. They bought a hideaway house on a hidden cove in Barbados, to which they often flew for a weekend; they traveled widely in the Orient; but of all their homes, they both preferred the Victorian manor house in Napa Valley, where they could watch the grapes for their Château Silverado wines being tended in a countryside as pastoral, as comforting to the spirit as that of Provence.

Whenever Billy and Ellis were in New York, Aunt Cornelia, who had been widowed shortly after Billy’s marriage, came to spend a week or two with them. A deep friendship had sprung up between Cornelia and Ellis, and he was almost as bereft as Billy when Cornelia died suddenly some three years after their marriage. Cornelia, to whom bad health was something one simply didn’t do, had a first and fatal heart attack, dying, as she would have wanted to, without fuss, in a brisk and well-organized fashion, without even waking the servants. Billy had resisted going back to Boston during her marriage because the city held such painful memories for her, but now, of course, she and Ellis traveled there for Cornelia’s funeral.

They stayed at the venerable Ritz-Carlton, a dowdy relation of the parade of other Ritzes they knew so well, the Lisbon Ritz, the Madrid Ritz, and, still best of all, the Paris Ritz. Nevertheless, the hotel beat with the heart of a
Ritz
in spite of its muted Boston flavor.

Before setting off for the church in Chestnut Hill where the services were to take place and where Cornelia was to be buried next to Uncle George, Billy looked one last time at herself in the mirror. She was wearing a sober Givenchy dress and coat in black wool with a black hat that she had telephoned Adolfo to send over to her as soon as she heard the news of Cornelia’s death from her cousin Liza. Ellis watched as she removed the diamonds from her ears and slipped them into her handbag.

“No earrings, Wilhelmina?” he asked.

“It’s Boston, Ellis. I just think they look wrong.”

“Cornelia always said you were the only woman she’d ever known who could look natural wearing them in the bathtub. Seems a shame.”

“I’d forgotten, darling, so she did. And why am I worrying about Boston anyway? Poor Aunt Cornelia. She spent so many years trying to make this ugly duckling into a swan—you’re right, I should do her proud. She’d like that.” Billy put the earrings back on, and as they flashed the winter sunlight back into the mirror in a most un-funereal splash of brilliance, she said softly, “Supremely vulgar for church, especially in the country. I wonder
if
anyone will have the gall to tell me that?”

If anyone even thought it at the Bostonian version of a wake that followed the burial, in the drawing room of a great house in Wellesley Farms, which belonged to one of Aunt Cornelia’s sisters, it was never mentioned aloud. As always, after a funeral, everyone drinks either a lot or at least a little more than usual, and the subdued exchange of greetings of the first half hour was soon followed by a surprisingly hearty hubbub of talk. Soon Billy realized that she and Ellis were the center of a group of her relations who seemed sincerely and openly delighted to renew old acquaintance with her, some of them even claiming a closeness that had never existed. She had been braced for remarks like, “Just what kind of name
is
Ikehorn, Billy? I’ve never heard anything like it before. Where on earth was he born, my dear? What did you say his mother’s maiden name was?” But these remarks never came.