The Dinner Party (2 page)

He was home now, around on the driveway to the rear of the house, where the four-car garage bordered on Dorothy's vegetable garden. A month or so ago, an interviewer had scratched around among the local real estate people and learned that the senator had refused an offer of two and a half million dollars for his house and the five acres of lawn and plantings and swimming pool and tennis court that went with it; and as a result of this, Cromwell had spent an extra hour talking the magazine writer out of printing it. He pleaded that when his mother-in-law built the house, or rebuilt it more properly, it had cost less than fifty thousand dollars, and that it was really his wife's house, not his, and that he was not to blame for the years of inflation that followed, and that he actually did not live in a two-million-dollar house. He won his point and the worth of his house remained unrevealed, and in any case, the man who had made the offer to buy had been a Texan, which put the price in a special category.

Nevertheless, he lived well. The car alongside of his in the garage was a chauffeur Cadillac; and on the other side of the Cadillac, a Buick Executive station wagon; and after that, Dorothy's four-door Volvo. Outside the garage, three more cars, a Datsun pickup, which Baron MacKenzie, chauffeur, gardener, and man about the place, drove; an ancient Volkswagen which his son, Leonard, would not part with; and the old Ford driven by his daughter, Elizabeth. Seven cars in all, and if another nosy newspaper man had scratched around the way the magazine writer did, he might have wondered how a United States senator could run the place on a salary of seventy-five thousand dollars a year. Strangely, for reasons the senator did not fully understand, nobody ever remarked on this; and even if they had, the senator bore no guilt. He had married a very wealthy woman. Others had done the same. It was respectable and even admirable in his circles, since more and more men in politics were not of the old Eastern establishment and thus faced the necessity of building their own class position in a society where rich was admirable and poor was unenviable. Still and all, most voters were far from rich, and a senator needed voters. Wealth would not make them mistrustful, only envious, and envy was not the best vote-getter.

The senator sighed, accepted the fleet of cars without further mental demur or internal conversation, and walked into his house.

TWO

B
aron MacKenzie set his alarm for half past six each morning, but this time he was awake a few minutes before the alarm sounded, and he reached out and turned it off.

“You don't have to do that,” his wife, Ellen, said. “I'm awake.”

“The best few minutes are right now,” MacKenzie said, pressing his face into his wife's warm bosom. He was a big man, and the only way he could keep all of him in the bed was to sleep on the bias.

“I'll be on the floor in two minutes,” his wife complained. “I am not a linebacker.”

“You want to be rid of me, presto, you are rid of me.” He rolled out of bed and made his way into the bathroom. The servants' quarters were pleasant enough, including their own bath and shower and a small sitting room, which contained armchairs, couch and television, as well as a wall of shelves for their and their kids' books. They used to have a second bedroom, where their daughter, Abbey, slept. Their son, Mason, had slept in the sitting room, where the couch opened into a bed. But now both kids were gone, and Nellie Clough, the white housemaid, slept in what had been Abbey's room.

The MacKenzies' quarters were comfortable enough, certainly miles better than the bedbug-infested flat in East Harlem where they had spent the first five years of their marriage before they gave up the struggle to raise two kids in New York, bought a stack of out-of-town papers, and eventually answered Dorothy Cromwell's ad. That was twenty-three years ago. “Nevertheless,” MacKenzie said, coming out of the bathroom, “it gets to me. We are servants. We have spent our lives as servants. Every time I stand in front of the mirror and shave this ugly face of mine, it gets to me. I am no goddamn cotton-picking sharecropper. I am a high school graduate and a trade school graduate. I am a first-rate mechanic and machinist—”

“Stop it!” Ellen snapped at him. “I been hearing that sad litany too damn long. I tell myself he's a nigger and he got the right to sing the blues. But enough is enough.”

“Now don't you ever use that word ‘nigger' at me. Never. Never. Never.”

“I will use what I want to use. Tell you something, Mac, and this is the last time I got to squeeze it into your dumb black head. We busted the system, busted it wide open. We got us a job where we could put away better than half of what we earned, and that's the only job that could do it for us, and we got a daughter who is a pharmacist and who is married to a pharmacist, and they got their own store, and we got a son who is interning in one of the best hospitals in this state, and that, you poor dumbbell, is revenge enough to cover at least a dozen of them nigger-hating Dixie states—”

He fell into bed and put his arms around her. “Shut up. You are too smart. I should have never married a smartass fox like you.”

“I can just imagine what you would have married if I hadn't got there first.” She pushed him away. “Just stop that. I am not going to drag my ass around all day.”

“I got a date for tonight?”

“Nighttime is a proper time. You're too old to be so horny.”

“Oh? It's supposed to wear off?”

“Come on, Mac. We got us a large day. We got that big dinner party tonight. You got to pick up her folks at the airport, and then you got to do the silver, and I still have three meals to get out. So just pick yourself up out of this bed and get dressed.”

MacKenzie sighed, rolled out of bed, pulled off his pajama top and then peered out of the window as the two-seater drove into the garage.

“Who is that at this hour?” Ellen wondered.

“The senator. Been out running, I suppose.”

THREE

D
olly,” they called her, everyone, and that was possibly because she had never liked the name Dorothy. Dolly suited her. She weighed only a hundred and twenty-two pounds, yet she gave the impression of being plump, perhaps because of her broad hips and round face. Since college, Sarah Lawrence in her case, she had worn her hair in a pageboy bob with bangs across the front. A very small nose made her face quite pretty, and her hair, which had once been black, was now at age forty-five iron gray, contrasting pleasantly with her pretty and unwrinkled face. She was one of those women who expressed authority without irritation, and who appeared usually to be poised and content.

On this morning, Dolly had set her alarm for six forty-five, and she had already showered when the senator drove in. Her bathroom faced the front of the house, and she saw his sleek little Mercedes swoop down the driveway and around to the back. She guessed that he had been out running, and as always his energy and determination amazed her. His determination was like his ambition, boundless—as, for example, in his approach to baldness. He had begun to lose his hair in his late forties, and he immediately started the process of having patches from various hairy parts of his body surgically transferred to his scalp. It had worked quite well, and now he had a proper head of white hair, befitting a United States Senator. Perhaps she was amazed because she had so little of what she thought of as ambition. She had never considered her fight to exist as a woman a manifestation of ambition.

She almost never wore make-up during the day, thankful that her skin remained good and healthy, and even more grateful for the fact that she could put herself together in a few minutes. On this day a shower, a toothbrush, and a comb through her hair did it. She then slipped into a blouse and skirt, and ran down the steps and outside to get a breath of the cool morning air before it turned warm, or hot and muggy if this were to be an uncomfortable summer day. But it had begun as a glorious morning. Dolly took such weather as a gift, and she whispered aloud, “Oh, I do feel enriched—so enriched.” She walked the length of the long driveway and back, not as exercise but because she had no appetite for breakfast unless she had used her body first.

Ellen MacKenzie had put up the coffee pot, and the aromatic smell filled the big kitchen. She was cutting bread for toast; Dolly would have no presliced bread in her house.

“I'll set the table on the terrace,” Ellen said. “It's warm enough, isn't it?”

“Oh yes, just right. And don't let the kids drive you crazy.”

“No, ma'am. No way.”

“Did the meat come?”

“Yesterday. I put it in the big fridge in the pantry.”

Turning to the pantry, Dolly said, “I do hope he sent us four small legs, properly filleted and dressed.” Ellen stared after her, puzzled, as Dolly opened a door of the big refrigerator, bent down, and confronted an enormous fresh ham.

“Mistake,” she said. “Ellen, he sent us the wrong meat. Did you tell him exactly what I wanted, four small legs of lamb, filleted and dressed?”

Ellen sighed and shook her head. “I do hate to get into the middle of things and I should have asked you; but the senator said that you knew about the fresh pork.”

Damn liar, she left unsaid. You did not call your husband a liar in front of your housekeeper. “He asked for it?”

“Yes—yes, he did. Do you want me to call the butcher?”

“No, he won't deliver today. I'll run over there myself. Just pour me a cup of coffee. That's all I want, and find a big bag or something that we can put the ham in.”

The ham was heavy, at least fourteen pounds, and as she stepped out of the back door, MacKenzie appeared and took her package.

“It weighs like a sack of potatoes.”

“It's a fresh ham.”

“Don't see many of those these days. I do love fresh ham.”

“It's going back.”

“Oh? Do you want me to take it to town.”

“No, I'll do that myself.”

Dolly took the Buick station wagon. The senator made few public appearances in the Mercedes; his public image sat better in the Buick though he would not have complained had Dolly taken the two-seater. She had no feelings about a German car, but her father, who had been an infantry officer in the Seventh Army in World War II, detested the car enough for her to shy away from it. She never understood why she had to please her father when he was not there to be pleased, she simply accepted it as one of her minor quirks. Anyway, the fact that it was so definitely the senator's car and not the family's made her uneasy the few times she had driven it.

Driving to town, she tried to make some sense out of the puzzle of the switched meat order. Not only had Richard never tampered with a meat order before, or indeed with any process in the kitchen, but he loved lamb as Dolly served it. She would have the butcher bone the lamb leg, then remove the slightly tougher small end and trim away any excess fat. She would then marinate it for about four hours in wine with onions and spices, after which it would be broiled instead of roasted and served in slices like a roast of beef—often to guests who mistook it for tender beef, the slices being pink at the center.

The butcher, Mr. Schiller, shook his head about the fresh ham. “I'll take it back if you want me to, Mrs. Cromwell, but I don't know what I'll do with it. I had to send to the packer for it, special, and I don't know if they'll take it back. I don't get many orders for fresh ham. You know the way people are about it.”

“Then I'll keep it,” Dolly agreed. “The kids are home, so we'll eventually eat our way through it. But you will find me four small legs of lamb.”

“Absolutely. I'll have them out at your place in an hour and a half—tops.”

Dolly felt foolish, lugging the ham back into the kitchen. She should not have tried to return it. It was ridiculous, as if she could not afford both cuts of meat at the same time. She had done it out of sheer pique; and Ellen's gentle inquiry as to whether the ham would be served after all, elicited an irritated response.