People Like Us (21 page)

“Let’s go.”

Juanito opened the door and, with a flourish, waved Hubie out the door.

“After you,” said Hubie.

“No, after you. AIDS before beauty.”

Hubie shook his head. “You’re a class act, Juanito.”

“I do wish you wouldn’t pee in my new bidet, Elias,” said Ruby. “It’s disgusting. The new maid is going to think we don’t know anything.”

“Let’s worry a lot what Candelaria with the harelip who can’t speak a word of English thinks about us,” said Elias.

“I’m not wearing too much jewelry, am I?” asked Ruby.

“You look great, Ruby. New dress?”

“Of course it’s new. Pretty soon they’re going to say about Ruby Renthal that she never wears the same dress twice. Do you think mink or sable?”

“Honey, I don’t know.”

“This is the first time we’ve been to one of these affairs where we haven’t had to buy tickets to get in.”

“Nervous?”

“Yeah.”

“Me too.”

“Don’t leave my side the whole time, Elias.”

“I won’t.”

“Elias, I just love my new ring.”

“I hear you had the about-to-be bride and groom out to the country for the weekend, Matilda,” said Maisie Verdurin, walking down Madison Avenue to St. James’s church after Violet Bastedo’s lunch at Clarence’s.

“Just a little dinner for the Bedford crowd,” said Matilda.

“Bernie and Justine met at one of my parties. Did you know that?” asked Maisie, pleased with her matchmaker role.

“I’m not sure the Van Degans are going to send you a thank-you note for that, Maisie,” said Matilda.

“Don’t you like Bernie?”

Matilda Clarke, who thought Bernard Slatkin was very attractive, hesitated for a moment before answering. “Tall, dark, handsome, clever. Too clever. Won all the word games as if his life depended on it. And he might, just might, have a bit of a roving eye. My God, look at the crowds outside the church.”

Yvonne Lupescu pushed open the door of Constantine de Rham’s den, entered, and closed the door behind her. The room was, in the absence of its occupant, dark, but she dared not pull back the red velvet curtains to let in light or turn on the wall lights. She knew exactly how much time she had. Constantine was in the lavatory off the entrance hall. She stood for several moments until her eyes became accustomed to the dark. Then she crossed and seated herself behind Constantine’s ormolu-encrusted Boulle desk. She opened the long center drawer and felt around inside, under papers and leather address books. She closed the drawer quietly and opened the top drawer of the two drawers
on the left and immediately she felt what she was looking for. At that instant the door opened and the lights went on.

“What are you doing here?” asked Constantine.

Yvonne Lupescu, frightened, rose.

“There is no money in that desk if that is what you are looking for, Yvonne,” said Constantine.

“My passport, Constantine,” she replied. One of her hands was behind her back. “I cannot leave without my passport.”

“Your passport, Yvonne, is in your traveling case where you always keep it. What are you looking for in my desk?”

“Where’s Ramon?” asked Yvonne.

“It is Ramon’s day off.”

Yvonne smiled.

“I asked what you were looking for in my desk,” he repeated.

Constantine walked over to the desk where Yvonne was standing. Calmly she brought her hand around from behind her back and pointed a pistol at him.

“Oh, Yvonne, don’t be ridiculous,” said Constantine, dismissively, as he moved around the desk toward her.

“You can’t think, Constantine, that I am going to walk out of here without any, shall we say, compensation,” said Yvonne, thrilled by the excitement of such a scene, as she backed away from him.

“For the past six months I have given you a home such as you have never lived in,” said Constantine.

“Am I supposed to consider that a generous act?”

“There are some who would think so.”

“Without what I do to you, Constantine, you can’t get erect, and you know it, and that’s worth a lot more than a free bed with some of your dead wife’s Porthault sheets on it.”

“I will have the accountant send you a check for your services,” said Constantine.

“You’re in a vile mood because you weren’t invited
to Justine Altemus’s wedding, and in an ugly mood because there are welts on your ass that you begged me to put there. Don’t hold either of those things against me.”

Constantine moved forward and held out his hand for Yvonne to give him the gun. She, defiant, continued to hold it on him. In an instant, Constantine leaned forward and grabbed Yvonne’s wrist.

“What in the world do you want with that gun, you foolish girl?” he asked.

Instead of releasing the gun, Yvonne pulled it back toward her. Laughing at her, Constantine pulled it up toward him, as a shot rang out in the room. For an instant they held each other’s eye, disbelief on his face, excitement on hers. She watched as the color drained from his face and he crumpled in front of her and fell to the floor.

“Oh, my God, Constantine,” she said. She moved to his body, knelt by him, and listened to his heart. Sitting up, she leaned into his face. His eyes, glazed, stared back at hers.

“You pulled that trigger, you son of a bitch. I didn’t pull that trigger,” she hissed at his face.

Then she carefully erased her fingerprints from the trigger and handle of the gun with a handkerchief she took from Constantine’s jacket and placed the gun in his hand, arranging his finger on the trigger. Slowly she rose from the floor, closed the drawers of the desk, and walked to the door of the room. In the hallway she listened for a minute to the silence of the mansion. Closing the door of the room behind her, she raced for the marble stairs and ran up them. In her bathroom, she turned on the taps of her shower to full blast, rushed to her closet, and began pulling out dresses, rejecting one after the other, until she found the yellow one that looked so right for the occasion at hand.

On the third ring, the message machine in Gus Bailey’s apartment answered. “Hello, this is Augustus Bailey. I’m not able to come to the telephone right now. Leave your name and number and the time you called, and I
will get back to you as soon as possible. Wait for the beep.”

“Call me, Mr. Bailey. I have some information for you.” The voice was Detective Johnston and Detective Johnston never called Gus unless there was a very good reason.

There were so many more people on the bride’s side of the church than on the groom’s side that the ushers ceased to ask the guests on which side they wanted to be and seated the later arrivals on the groom’s side to correct the imbalance. Only the Elias Renthals, not wishing to be thought of as friends of the groom, insisted to the usher, whom they mistook for Chinese, that they be seated on the Altemus side rather than the Slatkin side, although they had barely met Lil Altemus and only knew Justine from seeing her across the rooms at Maisie Verdurin’s parties or nodding to her at Clarence’s. However, their credentials, coming as they had from Laurance Van Degan, were the best, and they were seated impressively toward the front of the church, only two rows behind Loelia Manchester and Matilda Clarke, who were practically family, and one row behind Ezzie Fenwick, the social arbiter, beneath the famous rose window given to the church by the late Alice Grenville in memory of her son.

Ezzie Fenwick knelt, head bowed in a devotional attitude for a minute, and then sat back in the pew and looked around to see who was there. He waved to the Todescos across the aisle and blew a kiss to old Aunt Minnie Willoughby and Cora Mandell. Ruby Renthal nudged Elias to watch Ezzie. Then both Elias and Ruby knelt, heads bowed in devotional attitudes for a minute, and then sat back in their pew and looked around to see who was there. Ruby waved and blew a kiss to Cora Mandell who was the only person present she knew well enough to wave and blow a kiss to.

Everyone was enchanted with the string quartet on the altar that Jamesey Crocus, who knew more about
Bach fugues than anyone, had found for Justine, who wanted Bach, and Bach alone. The flowers, fully opened peach and coral roses in great abundance, all arranged by Lorenza, were admired by everyone. There were nods of approval for old Ormonde Van Degan, as he inched his way up the aisle on his walker, helped along by a smiling and considerate Dodo Fitz Alyn.

“I think Ormonde must have had a stroke,” said Aunt Minnie Willoughby to Cora Mandell. “Something about his mouth doesn’t work very well. Droops a bit.”

“Drips a bit too,” said Cora.

Aunt Minnie Willoughby mouthed but did not speak the word
incontinent
.

“Poor Dodo. She looks happy though. Lil says she’s been an angel to Ormonde,” replied Cora.

“Nevel did Justine’s dress and all the bridesmaids’ dresses and Lil Altemus’s too,” whispered Ruby to Elias.

“Who’s Nevel?” asked Elias.

“Leven spelled backwards,” whispered Ruby.

After forty minutes, the guests became restless and began to wonder if the wedding was about to be canceled. Then, led by Ezzie Fenwick, who loved social drama, they began to speculate, pew by pew, to great guffaws, that the holdup was because Bernie Slatkin was refusing to sign the prenuptial agreement that Lil Altemus, as a last-minute precaution against fortune hunting, had insisted upon. It was not so. Bernie Slatkin, whose broadcasting income was far more impressive than any of Justine’s Wall Street suitors’ incomes had ever been, had willingly signed a prenuptial agreement several weeks earlier, but, waiting in the groom’s room for the bride to show up, he told his best man, Fielder Black, the coanchor on the evening news, that he bet the people in the church were making jokes about his not wanting to sign a prenuptial agreement. He worried about his aunt and uncle, whom he could see sitting in the front row, and hoped they would not think that Justine was not going to show up.

Sol Slatkin, seated in the front row on the groom’s side, patted his wife’s hand. Hester, staring straight ahead, nodded her head in acknowledgment of Sol’s pat.

“I hate to think what these flowers must have cost,” said Hester.

“They can afford it,” said Sol.

“Where do you suppose she is?”

“Aren’t brides always late?” asked Sol.

“I wasn’t,” said Hester.

Sol smiled at his wife. “There’s Bernie. Do you see Bernie? Peeking out the door of the groom’s room.”

“It’s not Bernie I’m worried about, Sol. I know Bernie’s here. It’s Bernie’s intended I’m worried about. Do you dare turn around?”

“Why?”

“Pretend you’re looking for the Perelmans and see if there’s any activity at the back of the church. You don’t think she wouldn’t show up, do you, Sol?”

Sol Slatkin turned discreetly in his place. He waved a half wave to the Perelmans and then turned back. “Something’s happening back there,” he reported.

Lil Altemus, helped out of her car by her driver Joe, smiled at the photographers who took her picture. She was wearing a gray chiffon afternoon dress under her sable coat. Lest it be considered too somber in coloring, Nevel, who designed it, had added shades of coral and peach into the gray chiffon hat that he also designed. Lil wore, as always on great occasions, her famous pearls, inherited from her mother, and a sunburst of diamonds on her shoulder. Hubie Altemus, very thin, but sober, took his mother by the arm and led her up the steps into the church, but his presence was so overwhelmed by his mother’s magnificence that the makeup he wore to cover the lesion on his face went unnoticed.

In the backseat of the Van Degan limousine on the way from Lil Altemus’s apartment to St. James’s church, a distance of only a few blocks, but a journey made slow by one-way streets and late afternoon traffic, Justine Altemus, her face veiled, sat next to her father.

“Are you happy with this guy, Justine?” he asked.

“Daddy, what a time to ask me such a question. You’ve had weeks to ask me that.”

“But I never see you alone,” he said, turning to lode at her through her veil.

Justine smiled fondly at her father. She remembered the smell of his kisses when he used to stop by to kiss her good-night on his way to whatever dinner or party he was always going to: a romantic mélange of Floris shaving lotion, Camel cigarettes, and scotch from the scotch mist he always drank while he was dressing.

“I’m sorry about Belinda, Daddy, that Mother wouldn’t let her sit up with the family.”

“We’re all used to your mother by now,” said Hubert. From a small silver flask, he hastily swallowed a gulp of scotch whiskey.

“Here we are at the church,” said Justine nervously. “Oh, look, an awning. I’d forgotten there was to be an awning. I adore awnings at weddings.”

“This is where your mother and I were married,” said Hubert Altemus.

“That’s a very somber thought,” said Justine. They both laughed. “Yes, Daddy, I am very happy with this guy.”

“Good,” he said and patted her hand. “An awful lot of photographers out there.”

“That’s not for the Van Degans, you know, or the Altemuses. That’s for Bernie Slatkin. My guy’s a star, Daddy.”

“Good God.”

In the vestibule, the small bridesmaids, nervous and tittering in the final moments before the processional, greeted the radiant bride on her arrival with her father. Lil Altemus and her former husband looked at each other.

“Hello, Lil,” said Hubert.

“Hubert,” replied Lil, in a return greeting.

“You’re looking well, Lil,” said her former husband.

Lil Altemus, who had never been able to deal with
the fact that Hubert Altemus had left her, bent down, in a rare motherly gesture, to straighten out the cream satin folds of Justine’s train.

“Your bouquet is lovely, Justine,” said Lil, rising, eyes away from Hubert. “There’s no one like Lorenza for flowers.”

“Do I look all right, Mother?” asked Justine.

“Perfect. Nevel at his best.”

“I meant me,” said Justine.

“You look beautiful, Justine,” said her father.

“I guess it’s time for you to take me up, Hubie,” said Lil to her son, who had been watching the family exchange from a corner of the small room.