People Like Us (12 page)

“How do you know how much Bernie earns?” asked Justine. “I don’t even know how much he earns.”

“Uncle Laurance checked him out.”

“Mother, I can’t tell Bernie that. The ring belonged to his mother.”

“Yes, I’m sure it did.” Lil turned to look out the window again. “Look, my God, there’s Loelia Manchester holding hands on Fifth Avenue with Mickie Minardos. I can’t believe my eyes. Look! He’s kissing her, right there on the street!”

“And Loelia’s kissing him right back. Don’t leave out that part of the story, Mother,” said Justine.

“I don’t know what the world’s coming to,” said Lil. She sat back in her seat and stared straight ahead. “I’ll get out here, Joe,” she called to the chauffeur when he pulled up in front of the Van Degan Building. She turned to Justine. “I have to see Uncle Laurance, Justine. There’s no need for you to come in. Why don’t you take my hair appointment at Bobo’s? Then if you’d pick up my shoes at Delman’s and then go to Tiffany’s and see if the invitations are in for the engagement party. Nevel wants you to look at some preliminary sketches for the wedding dress, but you can always do that tomorrow. I’m meeting Matilda Clarke for lunch at Clarence’s, and I’m sure Matilda would love to see you, so join us, but, for God’s sake, don’t show Matilda that ring.”

“Jesus Christ, Lil,” said Laurance Van Degan. He stood and walked to the window of his office, shaking his head slowly in disgust as he gazed down on the street forty
stories below, while Lil told him, in the roundabout fashion she always used when speaking to her brother of Hubie, the son she adored, about Hubie’s latest transgression. “I always thought people like that shot themselves.”

“Laurance, how could you say such a dreadful thing about Hubie?” screamed Lil, like a tigress protecting her young. Lil, of course, didn’t want Hubie to shoot himself, because she loved him in a way that she had never been able to love Justine, but she had always thought, when she and Laurance were growing up, that there was something noble when “people like that” did commit suicide, like Warkie Taylor, who hanged himself at Yale, and poor sweet Mungo Fitz Alyn, Dodo Fitz Alyn’s uncle, who quietly slipped over the side of the
Queen Elizabeth
one midnight somewhere between New York and Southampton and wasn’t missed for two days, after that terrible situation on board with the sailor who lied so at the inquiry.

“Now, calm down, Lil,” said Laurance.

“Once the right girl comes along, Hubie will settle down and be just fine, Laurance. I guarantee it. Look how marvelously he’s doing with his art gallery.”

“Okay, Lil,” said Laurance. “I’ll make a couple of calls. Tell Hubie he’s got to come in and see me.”

“He won’t, Laurance.”

“If he wants to keep his name out of the newspapers, you tell him to come in.”

“Yes, Laurance. Thank you, Laurance.”

“Oh, and one thing, Lil. I want a little something in return.”

“Of course, darling, anything,” said Lil, gathering her bag and gloves and holding up her mink coat for her brother to help her put on.

“When the invitations go out for Justine’s wedding, I want you to invite Mr. and Mrs. Elias Renthal. They live in Matilda’s old apartment.”

“You can’t be serious, Laurance.”

“I am serious, Lil.”

“You mean that fat man with the powder-blue gabardine suits, and the big smelly cigars, and the wife who’s trying to push herself onto every committee in New York? Not on your life. Justine’s wedding is just for family and friends.”

“Family, friends, and the Elias Renthals, Lil.”

“But why?”

“Because I asked you to.”

9

It was at the opening night of
Carmen
at the Metropolitan Opera, the new
Carmen
, straight from Paris, that everyone said was to be “too divine for words” and “full of surprises,” that Loelia Manchester and Mickie Minardos made their first public appearance together since the word of their romance began to titillate New York society. Even then, observing propriety, they were not together as a couple, merely seated in the same box as members of an extremely fashionable group. Loelia arrived with Ezzie Fenwick, the society wit, who had often in the past few years served as her approved escort when Ned Manchester, tired after squash at the Racquet Club, began to beg off going out every night of the week with the artistic people that Loelia found so fascinating and Ned found so boring.

“Mickie Minardos?” gasped Lil Altemus, in her box, keeping her eyes averted from Loelia’s box. “I don’t believe it. It can’t be true. I mean, Mickie’s divine. Such a sense of fantasy. So amusing. And
such
a good dancer. Have you ever tangoed with Mickie, Matilda? To die. And the best possible fun on a weekend, or on someone’s boat. But marriage? Loelia can’t be thinking of marrying him. I mean, she just can’t.”

All eyes were riveted on Mickie’s box. They called it Mickie’s box, and Mickie played host, but they knew, those in the know, that it was Loelia who paid.

“Do stop staring up at their box, and, for God’s sake, don’t stare with your opera glasses,” whispered Ruby Renthal to her husband Elias from their orchestra seats, although her fascination with the romance of Loelia Manchester and Mickie Minardos, if anything, exceeded her husband’s.

“She’s standing with her back to the audience, so she can’t see me,” said Elias.

“You sure?” asked Ruby.

“Unless she’s got eyes in the back of her head,” answered Elias.

“What’s she wearing?”

“Pink.”

“Long sleeves? High neck?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s a Nevel. I almost ordered that dress,” said Ruby, wishing she had, imagining the furor it would cause if she and Loelia Manchester, whom everybody considered to be the best-dressed woman in New York society, turned up at the opera in the same Nevel dress.

“Who’s that fat man staring up at us with his opera glasses?” asked Mickie Minardos, looking down from his box. Mickie Minardos had found fame and fortune as a designer of women’s shoes, although his artistic talents, he and his acolytes believed, and none more fervently than Loelia Manchester, were scarcely tapped by his occupation. He could have been, they said about him, a stage designer, or a ballet designer, or, even, an opera designer, and his comments on the opera designs of that evening had been scathing, but amusing.

“He’s called Elias Renthal,” replied Ezzie Fenwick. “Worth a billion, I understand, at last count, and made it all in the last eight or nine years.”

“Oh, and his wife is so pushy,” said Loelia, not turning around to look. “Ruby she’s called. They bought
Matilda Clarke’s apartment, and Cora Mandell’s doing it up for them, and you should hear Cora’s stories about them. Too funny.”

“What’s he like?” asked Mickie.

“He calls a dinner jacket a monkey suit,” replied Ezzie.

“Oh, dear,” said Loelia.

“But everything he touches turns to gold. He can’t seem to get enough money. And they learn very quickly, those people,” said Ezzie, who knew all there was to know about everybody.

“He’s supposed to be a great art collector, courtesy of Maisie Verdurin, who guides his every move, and they’re doing the apartment around the pictures, according to Cora,” said Loelia.

“Elias Renthal has a great collection, but I most certainly don’t think of him as a great collector,” said Jamesey Crocus from his corner of the box, and they all turned to listen because Jamesey Crocus knew more about fine French furniture and art collecting than any man in New York. Although Jamesey was originally from Seattle, he spoke with an upper class British accent acquired during a year’s training course at an auction house in London, and he claimed to have studied as the last pupil of Bernard Berenson at I Tatti in Florence. “He has probably thirty true masterpieces, and many fine lesser pictures, but you have to realize that he acquired the entire collection in a couple of years, and only buys pictures for specific locations in his apartment. A great collector never stops buying. And, besides, you can’t take anyone seriously as a collector, no matter what masterpieces he has, if he also collects all those Steuben animals Elias has.”

“How do you make so much money in such a short time?” asked Mickie Minardos.

“Airplane wheels first, somewhere out in Ohio. Then a hamburger franchise. The real money came from the takeover of Miranda Industries, where he is
supposed to have cleared three billion in under two years,” said Ezzie.

“Heavens!” said Loelia, and they all gasped at the amount of money. “But can that possibly be legal?”

“Anyone who acquires that much money in that short a time can’t have done it legally. It’s simply not possible, but that, whether we approve or not, is not our concern,” said Jamesey Crocus, who was involved with fundraising. “Look what he’s doing for the museum. What I like about Elias is that you can call him up and ask for six hundred thousand or seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, or whatever it is you need, for an exhibit, or a purchase, and he simply gives it to you, or he doesn’t. There’s no board of directors that has to vote on it. He makes all his own decisions, and, of course, he’s very generous. But, there’s only X number of times you can do that with someone like Elias Renthal before he expects something in return.”

“The problem with people like that is before long they want to come to dinner,” said Loelia.

“And more,” said Jamesey.

“Like what?”

“Like a position on our board at the museum.”

“Oh, no. No, no, no,” said Loelia. “That would never do. Too rough around the edges.”

“Exactly,” agreed Jamesey Crocus, nodding his head gravely.

“I play a certain amount of men’s doubles,” said Laurance Van Degan, from the back of the box, “but I’ve never played with anyone like Elias Renthal. The way that man plays tennis. To kill. I never saw anything like it.”

“I’m told that’s the way he conducts his business as well,” said Jamesey.

“I’m dying to turn around and look at Mr. Renthal,” said Loelia. “Give me your opera glasses, Mickie. His wife stares at me at the hairdresser, and Bobo says however I wear my hair she wants the same thing.”

“She looks pretty,” said Mickie.

“She might be if only her nose were her own,” said Loelia, staring back through her glasses at the Renthals. “Dr. Apted.”

“Who?”

“Dr. Apted does those little turned-up noses where you can see right up the nostrils.”

When the photographers from the social and fashion press began to descend on the closed doors of Dimitri Minardos’s box during the intermission between the first and second acts, hoping to get a picture of Loelia Manchester and Mickie together, Loelia, always cooperative with the press because of her numerous charitable activities, came out and posed in animated conversation with Ezzie Fenwick, who loved to be photographed, but who was not the one they wanted to photograph, while Mickie remained inaccessible in his box.

Ezzie Fenwick was critical of everything. With so much free time on his hands, he was always the first to see the new films, new plays, new art shows, new musical events, new fashion collections, both in Paris and New York, and he could amuse at lunch and dinner parties with his witty critiques, because, quite frankly, he enjoyed watching failure.

“Simply ghastly!” he said, rolling his eyes in mock horror, about the
Carmen
that was being sung in front of them, and declared out loud that the role of Carmen was beyond, simply beyond, the vocal capabilities of the soprano at hand. During the second act, after the photographers had returned to the bar until the next intermission, Ezzie rallied the inhabitants of Loelia’s box to sneak out, giggling, on tiptoe, to a marvelous party he knew about at the Rhinelander.

After the opera, Ruby Renthal, disconsolate, sat at her ten-thousand-dollar table on the promenade of the opera house and surveyed the empty table next to hers. With a promise to Janet Van Degan of a large donation by her husband to the Opera Guild, Ruby had secured a
table strategically placed next to the table that was supposed to be occupied by Loelia Manchester and Dimitri Minardos and their friends, but they, alas, had fled.

“Elias, you’re not supposed to wipe the plate clean with your dinner roll,” whispered Ruby, irritably. “You’re supposed to waste some of the food.”

“I get hungry, Ruby,” said Elias.

“I tell you what we’re going to do. I’m going to have the cook feed you before we go out to these functions, and then you can pick at your food, like all these people do, when we sit down to dinner.”

“I’ll buy that,” said Elias, reaching out to hold his wife’s hand. Elias’s bow tie was black on one side and red on the reverse, and, in the tying, the left half was black and the right half red. He seemed inordinately proud of it, as if he were dictating a new fashion.

“Honey, that bow tie has got to go,” said Ruby.

“I just bought this tie,” said Elias. “What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s the only two-tone bow tie here; that’s what’s wrong with it,” she said.

“It’s the latest thing, the guy in the shop told me,” insisted Elias.

“The latest thing somewhere else, not here.”