People Like Us (44 page)

“Turn on the ballroom lights!” screamed Elias.

“I can’t find the switch!” screamed back Mickie Minardos.

“You ruined my party!” Ruby screamed at Mickie.

“How dare you yell like that at Mickie!” screamed back Loelia Manchester.

“Cobbler!”

“Twat!”

“Someone puked on my back,” yelled Constantine de Rham.

“It was Binkie Castoria,” said Jamesey Crocus.

“Adele Harcourt swallowed a dead butterfly!” cried Minnie Willoughby.

“Lights!”

“Lights!”

“Has someone called the police?”

“The phones are out!”

“Laurance, Father’s dead on the pool table,” screamed Lil Altemus.

“What do you mean, Father’s dead on the pool table?”

“Let’s get out of here!”

“The elevators don’t work.”

“The Greek shoemaker blew all the fuses in the building!”

“Who are these terrible people anyway?”

“I’ve only met them once before,” said the Countess of Castoria.

“He’s being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission.”

“What do you expect from the kind of people who spend a million dollars on curtains?”

“Are those sirens I hear?”

“Is that police or fire?”

“Break the windows!”

“Not with that bergère chair, don’t break the windows,” cried Ruby.

By the time the police and firemen arrived, using the same cherry-picker crane that Julio Martinez had fallen to his death from the night before, the orchestra was playing “Nearer My God to Thee.”

36

The newspapers reported, in addition to the death of Ormonde Van Degan, “whose roots in the city go back for generations,” that there were two broken ankles, two broken arms, and a broken leg in the melee that had occurred when the power failed at the Elias Renthals’ ball the night before, at which four hundred people, including the First Lady, had been present. The papers further reported that Adele Harcourt, the
grande dame
of New York, had very nearly choked to death on a dead butterfly but was resting comfortably in her room at Harcourt Pavilion of Manhattan Hospital.

“They’ve gone. They’ve flown the coop,” said Ezzie Fenwick, over the telephone later that day.

“At least that saves us writing thank-you notes, or sending flowers, not that Ruby would ever want to see another flower again,” said Matilda Clarke.

On the morning following the ball, the Elias Renthals left for Europe on their private plane, although no such plan had been in the making the day before. Later, people wondered if their flight was less for the embarrassment of the fiasco of their ball, which, knowing them, people like Ezzie Fenwick and Lil Altemus pointed out, they might have brazened out, than it was that Elias had heard the rumor at his own party of the investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission of his financial dealings, and it was imperative for him to dispose of his extensive foreign holdings by transferring them to his wife’s name before a freeze was put on his fortune.

“Today? We’re going today?” Ruby had said, aghast,
reported Candelaria, her maid, to Lourdes, Lil Altemus’s maid. Ruby’s eyes were still red and swollen from crying.

“Today,” answered Elias. “In three hours, in fact.”

“Elias,” said Ruby, in a pleading tone. “I want to go. You know I want to go. I can’t face anyone in this city, but I can’t possibly be ready to go in three hours.”

“Two hours and fifty-five minutes now,” said Elias.

“But my clothes! My trunks! I can never get my things together for a two-month trip in that short a time,” she said.

“Candelaria here,” he said, pointing his thumb at the maid, “can pack up your stuff and ship it to you, and, in the meantime, buy new things there.” Elias walked out of their bedroom and down the stairs. He was surprised in a minute when he heard Ruby following him.

“Is something going to happen, Elias?” asked Ruby.

“What do you mean?” asked Elias.

“Some sort of misfortune.”

“Why do you ask that?”

“I feel it.”

“Have you heard anything?”

“Look, Elias, don’t play games with me. You told me we were a team, do you remember?”

“I remember, Ruby.”

“A team means good times and bad times.”

Elias walked into the drawing room and looked out the window onto Central Park. A weeping willow tree was being lowered on a crane outside his window from the ballroom above to the street below, as his party of the night before was being dismantled.

“Do you need money, Elias?” asked Ruby, following him into the room.

“God, no,” he answered, with a laugh.

“I mean, I have all this jewelry,” she said. She opened her black lizard jewelry cases, which she had brought downstairs with her and began taking out the pieces. “You can have all of this back, Elias. We can
sell it. And there’s all the money you signed over to me. It’s yours.”

“No, thanks, Ruby. I’m okay in the do-re-mi department, but I’ll never forget what you offered.”

“Tell me what’s the matter, Elias. You’re in trouble, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Maybe.”

“What did you do?”

“What a lot of other people have done before me, and a lot of other people will do after me.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I, uh, used, uh, insider information that I bought and paid for from young fellas in the brokerage offices who knew about mergers that were in the works.”

“That’s illegal?”

“Yeah.”

“You knew it was illegal?”

“Yeah.”

She breathed in deeply. “What do you want me to do, Elias?”

“Swear to my lies, if it comes to that.”

It surprised Elias that Ruby’s eyes filled with tears. The tears did not fill her eyes slowly, but sprang forth, as if he had slapped her. He understood that his wife’s tears were not for his plight, which he knew she would see him through, but because he had asked her to lie for him. She walked away from him to one of the tall windows of their drawing room and looked out at Central Park across the street, where a bag lady began her preparations for the day on a bench on Fifth Avenue. Standing there, framed by the persimmon-colored damask curtains, with the fringe that had taken six weeks to be delivered from France, Ruby Renthal wept. When Elias walked toward her, to comfort her, for he loved her, she raised her hand to halt him, without turning, having felt his footfall on her Aubusson carpet that she bought from Justine Altemus Slatkin, that Lil Altemus gave Justine for a wedding present, that had come from the Van Degan house in Newport and had once been a
wedding gift from the Belgian court to the ill-fated Empress Carlotta of Mexico.

Elias Renthal was a nonconfidential man, and, as a result, he had few confidants. One of the few was Max Luby, his crony from Cleveland. Elias had sometime back taken the stand at Max’s forgery trial as a character witness. “Nonsense. Utter nonsense!” he had said in the courtroom. “If a man’s gonna steal, he don’t steal for a lousy ten thousand dollars, which is all he wrote the check for. If he needed ten thousand bucks, there were any number of people, myself included, who would have given him the money in five minutes. What it was is, quite simply, a case of temporary aberration.” Although his logic was thought to have carried weight with the jury, Max still had to serve six months, but he was known to be grateful that such a great financier as Elias Renthal had come to his rescue in court and even invited him to his ball.

“Listen, Max,” Elias said, in a confidential tone on his private telephone, after having received Max’s consolation on the failure of the ball. He was sitting in the little room Ruby had arranged for him to smoke his cigars, the same room where Ormonde Van Degan had died the night before. “Ruby and I are taking off. There’s a little heat on me, if you understand what I’m saying.”

“Right,” replied Max, in his perfect second-in-command voice.

“There’s a few things I’d like you to do for me, and then maybe you can meet up with me in Paris in a week or so. Check out for me, in a discreet way of course, the consequences of canceling my pledges to the museum and the opera. I think I pledged ten million to each, over a seven-year period. Just in case there’s a temporary cash-flow problem, I’d hate to be shelling out that kind of moola to some nonsense like the opera and the museum. They got money coming out their kazoos, those people.”

“What about the Julio Martinez fund?” asked Max.

“Who the fuck is Julio Martinez?” asked Elias.

“The workman who was killed hoisting the weeping willow tree for the ball.”

“Christ, I forgot about him.”

“It was only yesterday, Elias.”

“Gimme a break. I got a lot on my mind. Better stick with that.”

“Right.”

“Oh, and one other thing, Max,” he said, butting out his cigar in an ashtray where a dead butterfly lay. “You better stop payment on that check I gave to Faye Converse last night for AIDS.”

Loelia Manchester wished with all her heart that Mickie Minardos had not called Ruby Renthal a twat the night before when Ruby screamed at him that he had ruined her party. She hated the word, had never used it herself, and knew that it must have caused pain to Ruby, who had worked so hard to put her background behind her. Loelia liked Ruby and had enjoyed their friendship, although she understood that Mickie had made a resumption of it impossible. Loelia had never seen Mickie cry until the night before, when they returned to the Rhinelander. He had held it in, all during the elevator ride up to the thirty-second floor, not only because of the elevator man, whom they both knew, but because the Earl and Countess of Castoria were in the same elevator, returning to their suite on the same floor. Wearing several Band-Aids and still drunk, the Earl had laughed hysterically for all thirty-two floors every time he looked at Mickie, and the Countess, who had a dead butterfly in her chignon that she was unaware of, held her ripped dress together in the front. On parting, the Earl had made a Latin American farewell by yelling, “
Buenas noches, amigos
,” as the Countess led him to his room. “He’s not Mexican. He’s Greek, Binkie,” she could be heard saying as they went down the hall.

Mickie cried like a child. He was an artist, he told her, not an electrician. How was he supposed to understand about amps and wattage and voltage? Hadn’t he created the most beautiful party ever given until those motherfucking, cuntlapping, cocksucking fuses blew and wiped out in an instant his months of work? He sobbed uncontrollably. Loelia wiped his brow with a linen towel she had dipped into her scented rosewater.

They both knew they had to leave town, before the newspapers started to call. Loelia suggested Greece. “Good God, not Greece,” said Mickie. “My family. Think what my family will say,” and he started to cry again, as new rushes of shame that he had not thought about yet came to him.

“But I have the most marvelous idea,” said Loelia, finally. “No one will find us.”

“Where?”

“A clinic in Germany. Bavaria, actually. On Lake Tergernsee.”

“Tell me.”

“They give shots. Live cell shots from the fetus of unborn sheep. And it’s restorative. It will be marvelous. We will be brimming with health. And feeling as young as my children, and no one will know where to trace us, and by the time we get back, everyone will have forgotten about the ball. You go to bed, my darling—I’ll handle everything.”

Early on the morning following the ball, Lil Altemus called her daughter, Justine. At first she did not notice that there was lassitude in her daughter’s voice.

“Have you heard?” Lil asked.

“Heard what?” Justine replied.

“Your grandfather’s dead.”

“Poor Grandfather,” said Justine, although there was no tonal difference in the weariness of her voice.

“That’s all you can say? ‘Poor Grandfather.’ Like ‘poor dog’ or ‘poor cat,’ ” said Lil.

“He was eighty-five, Mother.”

“Eighty-four.”

“Well, in that case, I’m utterly shocked.”

“You sound odd, Justine.”

“I can sound odd if I want to, without accounting for it.”

“If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you were drunk.”

“You want to know something, Mother?”

“What?”

“I am drunk.”

“This is no time for jokes, Justine. You’d better get right over here. We have things to decide, about the funeral and all.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. Uncle Laurance just called, and he thought it might be nice if the younger generation, like young Laurance and Hubie and Bernard, of course, were pallbearers. I think it’s a marvelous idea, don’t you?”

Justine had hoped to not have to tell her mother that Bernie had left her, at least for the time being, because she was certain her mother would say, “I told you so,” but the news of her grandfather’s death now made that impossible.

“Listen, Mother,” said Justine, about to reveal her secret, but she couldn’t bring herself to say the words without crying. “Listen, I’ll be over. Have Lourdes make me some coffee. There’s something I have to tell you.”

“I expected to see you last night. The world was there, except you and Bernard,” said Lil.

Justine hesitated, again tempted to get the task over with on the telephone, but she still couldn’t bring herself to say the words. “Bernie had to work,” she said finally.