Gossip (4 page)

The minister wore sandals and little round wire-rimmed glasses, and the wedding march, played by a local jug band, was the Beatles song “When I'm Sixty-Four.” Toasts were drunk in fizzy cider that packed quite a wallop, brewed by the bearded philosopher from the next farm over. We square-danced in the dairy barn, and when the full moon was high, the bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes, departed on horseback. It was incredibly romantic, and the first wedding I'd ever been to where the newlyweds turned up in jeans the next morning to join all their friends for breakfast.

A lot of fates were sealed that night. Certainly Meg's. One of the groomsmen introduced a game in which you whirl around and around holding a broomstick while everyone claps and then at a signal, drop the stick and try to jump over it. The second fellow who tried it missed the jump by a mile, fell over, and cracked his head on a stall door and nearly put his eye out, but later he married the bridesmaid who drove him to the hospital. And I met a man who changed my life. He was Meg's godfather. We were the only two people there from New York, and he gave me a ride back into the city Sunday evening.

Chapter 4

P
robably the man who most changed Avis's life was Victor Greenwood. We went together to his funeral three years ago and afterward she told me the story of what turned out to be her job interview.

She'd been one of the bright young things from the
Social Register
working at Sotheby Parke Bernet when Victor noticed something special in her and asked her to come see him. This was in 1970. When she went to her boss to ask for an hour off one afternoon, he said, “Victor Greenwood asked you to come to his house?”

“Yes.”

“Why you? He doesn't collect Old Masters.”

“I have no idea,” said Avis. “He was mooching around some Dutch still lifes while we were preparing the catalogue, and he started asking me questions.”

“What kind of questions?”

“Which one was better. More important. If I could buy one painting in the gallery, money no object, which one would I buy.”

Her boss had laughed. “That's Victor. Well, go, of course. Give me a call when you're done, I'd love to know what he wants.”

Although she was twenty-eight and probably as toothsome as she would ever be in her life, Avis didn't imagine Mr. Greenwood wanted her body. His taste in women was well known, and she wasn't it. Naturally I asked what she wore. She said she had chosen her usual uniform of very simply cut grays and blacks that caused her roommate to call her the Art Nun. Apparently this had been the right call.

She'd arrived on time at his house, a five-story limestone edifice in a French château style on a quiet side street in the east seventies, and been shown into a vast room on the second floor hung with nineteenth-century paintings. The butler offered her coffee, tea, or a cocktail but she had declined, not thinking she would wait as long as she eventually did. When her host failed to appear, she got up and began to examine the paintings. One small Caillebotte she recognized at once as having been sold by Sotheby's two seasons before for a record sum for the artist. To a dealer named Gordon Hall, she thought. And he'd sold it to Greenwood for even more? Or he'd been bidding for Greenwood all along? Greenwood was squirrelly, everyone in the auction business knew. Sometimes he came to the auctions himself and bid, sometimes he came but sat like a stone Buddha while someone in the annex room was bidding for him, sometimes he bid by phone, and sometimes he was bidding by secret agreement with the auctioneer when he pulled his ear or took off his glasses. He enjoyed the sport of it.

Avis was lost in a painting of a young girl sitting in a wood with a boy lying on the grass beside her when she realized Greenwood was in the room watching her.

“What do you think?” He was looking pleased with himself.

“This is Edward Arthur Walton, isn't it?”

His eyebrows went up. “Very good.”

“But isn't this
The Daydream
? I thought it was a lost work.”

“Someone found it.”

Someone who obviously knew well what Greenwood was looking for. She turned back to the painting.

“Do you like it?” He was observing her like a cat studying a cricket.

“I do like the Naturalists. But I'm surprised
you
do.”

“Why?”

“Most people like either the Impressionists or the realists, but not both.”

“Is that so.” He seemed amused. “And which do you like?”

“I like both.”

“What don't you like?”

“In paintings?”

“Yes.”

She considered. “I don't think I like surrealism very much.”

She was beginning to wonder if he would apologize for keeping her waiting so long. But instead he crossed the room and stood before an Eakins, one of his absurdly beautiful shirtless young men, rowing on a river.

“What's the best picture in this room?”

“I can't answer that.”

“Why not?”

“You know why not,” she said, and then realized she'd been rude. He didn't seem to mind.

“Then what's the most important?”

“For me? The Caillebotte.”

“Why?”

“Because he painted so little and it's a very good one.”

“But very small.”

“Size isn't everything.” Oh god. Was that suggestive? She wished the butler would come back. What the hell was she doing here?

“What's your favorite Eakins?”

“The portrait of Louis Kenton.”

“Why?”

“Because I love portraits. Because he floats there in space, looking unhinged and sad.”

“Kenton was Eakins's brother-in-law, wasn't he?”

She smiled. “You do your homework.”

“Only a fool would spend this kind of money without doing his homework. You didn't think I was a fool, did you?”

“I did not.”

“Why do you like portraits?”

“I like it that you can stare at them and wonder about them the way you can't with actual people. You have time.”

“I like that picture too, but I don't see Kenton as sad, I see him as weak. An interesting subject, weak men. Did you know that he hit his wife in the face and she had to run away from him in the middle of the night?”

“I did. But he isn't doing it in the painting. In the painting he's alone and sad.”

“Why do women tolerate men like that? I'd kick him down the stairs.”

Greenwood was tall, and she realized, powerfully built, although he didn't move or dress like an athlete.

She said, “This is really not my field.”

“No. I'd buy the Kenton, though. Would you?”

She turned and looked at him. Okay, it's a test, she thought. I'm good at tests.

“Yes. I don't think the Met is selling, but there's an oil study of it at the Farnsworth we might take a shot at.”

He grinned. “Now how do you know that?”

“I told you. It's my favorite Eakins.”

“There's a Renoir coming up at your spring sales.”

“
Le Pecheur
?”

“How much do you think it will go for?”

She quoted him the estimate.

They moved to a picture of a river in spring, with a rowboat. “Is this Seurat worth that much?”

A thoroughly loaded question. She said, “I can't tell you.”

“Should I sell the Seurat and buy the Renoir?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you already have two Renoirs in this room alone and that's enough.”

“Really.”

“Yes.”

“Two paintings by one artist are enough?”

“No, two Renoirs in one room are enough. You can see too many Renoirs, and once you have, they all start to look like cake frosting.”

He laughed aloud. “Did Henry offer you anything? What would you like? Tea? A drink?”

“Coffee, please.”

He went to the door and pressed a buzzer hidden behind a damask hanging.

Henry arrived with a silver tray bearing a Georgian silver coffee service, a plate of cookies, a can of Tab, and a glass of ice. He settled the tray and poured the Tab, as if he were serving Perrier-Jouët, as a grizzled dachshund trotted in at the open door, stopped in the middle of the room, glared at Avis, and started to bark.

“Mabel! Stop it,” said Greenwood, in a tone that said he had long given up hope that Mabel would obey him in anything. “Do you mind dogs?”

“Love them.”

They sat down together on a sofa and Mabel jumped up between them, still growling softly at Avis.

“Hello, little girl,” Avis said to the dog. She offered her hand. Mabel sniffed it and fell silent, appearing mollified. Avis leaned forward to pour herself a cup of coffee, and Mabel lunged, teeth bared, at her nose. Fortunately, in her surprise, Avis laughed.

“No, that's enough!” said Greenwood angrily, seizing Mabel. He carried the dog to the door, threw her into the hall, then pulled the door closed. Then he apologized, a thing she guessed he had little practice at.

“Don't worry,” said Avis, truly unruffled. “I was brought up by women like that.” Mabel reminded her strongly of her nanny, Miss Burns. This appeared to delight her host.

He said, “I'd like you to work for me.”

There was silence. As often when she didn't know what to do, Avis did nothing.

“You don't have to leave Sotheby's,” he said. “I'd just like to be able to ask you questions from time to time. Give me your opinions. Maybe bid for me now and then.”

“But you don't collect Old Masters,” she said.

“I don't?”

Another silence.

“Wouldn't it be a conflict of interest?” she asked.

“No. Why would it?”

She couldn't think of a reason.

“Ask your boss. I'm not asking you to do anything shady. I'm still learning, you know. Always learning. I don't have time to get a fancy degree, so I like to be able to call on people who know more than I do. But I don't like to take advantage of people, and no one takes advantage of me. I'll make sure you earn your money.”

“There are a lot of people who know more than
I
do.”

“I know. Some of them work for me too.” He drained his glass, making a sibilant gurgling sound around the ice. Then he stood and said, “Come with me.”

She followed him out of the room and up the stairs with growing misgiving. On the third floor he led her down a long hallway to a small round room in something like a turret. It was lined floor to ceiling with dark carved glass-front cases that had surely come from some Old World library that predated this house by several centuries. “This is the treasure room. Your boss has been in the room downstairs, but he's never seen this.”

She wanted to ask why not, but Greenwood added, “It's always good to hold something back. Come here.”

He led her to a vitrine that held what looked to be Egyptian glass statuettes and ornaments, medieval icons, and some coins.

“Did you know that glass is actually a liquid?” he asked. “It's supercooled, so it seems stable at temperatures where ice would melt. But in fact glass is melting all the time, just very slowly. With pieces as old as this, many millennia, you can measure the slump.” He was smiling at his pieces as he spoke, as if they were pets.

He tapped on the pane at a gold ring with a coat of arms worked in glass and enamels.

“Do you know what that is?”

“May I see it?”

He took his key ring from his pocket, unlocked the case, and opened the front. Then he waited to see what she would do.

Very carefully, she removed the ring and turned it around to examine the underside of the bezel. He gave a laughing bark.

“That's what I thought,” he said.

Behind the crest, worn next to the skin, was an enameled green grasshopper.

“How did you know? Have you seen one before?”

“A Gresham grasshopper ring? Never. I didn't know there were any in this country.”

“Aha. And my point is,
this
isn't your field either.”

Chapter 5

A
graduate of our boarding school was at that time the social secretary to the First Lady of the United States. My grandmother made dismissive remarks about “ladies marketing their social graces,” but I could see that rather than being a drawback in that extremely populist mood of the early 1970s, my otherwise fairly useless boarding school education was an advantage in the industry in which I found myself. I had also by chance chosen one of the few fields in which it was not a hindrance to be a woman.

Mme. Philomena thought a good next step for me would be one of the fashion magazines, where I could be an ambassador for her collections. She offered to put in a word with Mrs. Vreeland at
Vogue,
or with China Machado at
Harper's Bazaar,
and I was tempted; magazine jobs were glamorous. But when glamour is a perk of the job, the salary is generally reduced by whatever the employer discovers the glamour is worth, and I had my living to make.

Mme. Olitsky thought that I might make a buyer for one of the department stores. But the buyers I had met at the atelier could be beastly; they had power, and it seemed to make them rude. Power always presents a challenge to the average mortal soul. Still, there is usually a point in any process where there's a chance of grace. In film, the casting director owns the happiest moment, when the project has a green light, talented people are being told Yes, and everyone is full of hope. In fashion, you might think it's the moment the designer emerges to applause after presenting a collection, but you'd be forgetting how many collections fail, not to mention the pressures of paying suppliers and banks, guessing what people will want in six months when the clothes are actually in stores, or the chances that your best ideas will be knocked off and lining someone else's pocket before you can get them to market. No, I'd say the best moment in fashion is the point of sale. The moment an actual human wants to buy the dress and wear it out of the store.

I realize this is a minority opinion.

Selling is a service profession. It's not waiting on tables, but it's in the category. It doesn't suit everybody, but it suits me; there are worse things in life than serving.

I wanted to be Mme. Olitsky. Mme. Philomena already had her vendeuse; it was time for me to find someone who needed what I was good at. Mrs. Bachman at Saks, my grandmother's saleswoman, had maintained an interest in me. She came to Mme. P's shows, though of course she didn't buy from us, since she got a hefty employee discount at her own store. She came to see what our customer was wearing and what she liked from our line. Once in a while she took me to lunch, clanking with heavy gold bracelets and piling up Kent cigarette butts stained with scarlet lipstick in her ashtray. When at last I sent her my résumé, she called me and said in her marvelous ruined voice, “Your grandmother will never forgive me.”

When I told Mme. Philomena I was leaving, you'd have thought she'd caught me selling her toiles to the competition. “I have nurtured you! I've spent years training you!” she howled in French. When she was not exercising her Gallic charm, she often looked like a man in a bouffant wig. That day she wore heavy green eye shadow and had a run in her stocking. Apparently I was a hurt bird she'd been plying with worms, and now I'd had the ingratitude to take flight. It was good, I thought, that she hadn't taken up nursing.

Mme. Olitsky assured me that Mme. P would get over it. “She doesn't like it any better when her protégées stay too long—she likes them to move on and shine, so she can claim she made them.” Mme. Olitsky took me to lunch on my last day and gave me a little book called
Your Future in the Fashion World,
wishing me luck and signed with affection. The book covered every job except selling.

T
hat same year, 1972, Dinah's oldest son was born. She called me at six in the morning. “Eight pounds six ounces,” she crowed. “I was a star! All natural, not even aspirin!” I went to the hospital after work with a plush panda and a helium balloon. Dinah was glowing, and the room was filled with flowers and tributes. Her sisters were with her when I came in.

“Have you seen the baby?” they cried. “Doesn't he look just like Daddy?”

I had seen him through the nursery glass, and he did.

“Richard is furious,” said Dinah, beaming. “He claims I must have conceived by parthenogenesis.” Just then Richard walked in, looking goofy with joy, kissed her and handed her a milk shake, which she fell upon with happy greed.

Simon Snyder, the impresario of “New York Eye,” appeared and declared, “My god, it looks like a funeral home,” as a nurse came in with another arrangement of flowers.

“The biggest ones are all from press agents,” Dinah said. “These must be from an actual friend. Oh isn't that nice, Constantia Lord! That's really so sweet of her! Do you know Constantia?” she asked me. “You'd love her. I'll introduce you.”

“I do know her, but I'd love to see her again.”

Dinah paused for an infinitesimal beat. “You do know her? How?”

“We happened to be staying at the same house in Southampton one weekend,” I said. Another beat.

“Whose house?” Simon demanded. He had seated himself on Dinah's bed and was passing around the chocolate truffles he'd brought her.

I reluctantly named a much-photographed hostess of the day. “Really,” said Dinah again. “That sounds amusing,” making it sound as if she'd rather be trussed and grilled over open flame.

“She's a very good customer.”

“Is she.” I knew she was waiting for more information.

“There was someone she wanted me to meet,” I said.

“I'll bet. Monty, the chinless wonder?”

As a matter of fact, it
had
been the hostess's son Monty, who was a very sweet man though unlikely in my view to provide her with grandchildren.

“He's a marvelous bridge player,” I said.

“Bridge!” Dinah laughed her famous laugh. “Bridge! You spent a weekend in Southampton playing bridge with Monty Mayhew? Lovie, you do surprise me.”

There was quite a stretch after that when every time she called me, Dinah would say, “Am I taking you away from your bridge game?”

D
inah's marriage to Richard Wainwright had surprised many, including me. I thought she was in love with a photo-realist painter named Barney she'd been half living with in SoHo, or what became SoHo, I'm not sure it had a name yet in those days. Richard, by contrast, was the most conventional man I'd ever seen her with. Dinah had met him at a boarding school glee club dance, then run across him years later on one of her nightlife prowls. He was quite wonderful in his way, handsome, solid, and with a cheerful wit. But he came from a town outside Chicago so like Canaan Woods that it might as well have been the same place. The Wainwrights were country club people, Junior League people, people who'd never met a Negro who wasn't a servant. Richard was far more than that, but he wasn't in New York because he was fleeing where he came from, as Dinah and I were. He was in New York because he'd been offered a job with J. P. Morgan when he got out of Dartmouth and thought it would be neat to live here. The fact that Dinah could hear her companion utter a sentence like that and remain serene proved to me that she loved him, but there was also the fact that Richard Jr. was on the way.

They found a huge rent-controlled apartment on East Eighty-sixth Street across from Carl Schurz Park, and Dinah began a sort of salon, supper every Sunday night for a rotating cast of hundreds from all the worlds she and Simon Snyder inhabited, the theater, fashion, music, books, the art world, society friends, and of course a selection of Richard's more eligible colleagues. Invitations were prized, and Richard happily bankrolled it all and stood around on the edges, smiling. This was the New York he had hoped for. No one was terribly interested in talking to him, but he met most of the people one read about in the gossip columns, and he generally thought it was very entertaining. He was an easy man to please.

I was invited to perhaps one in three of Dinah's Sundays. I couldn't always go, as at that time I often went to the country on weekends with my friend, the man I had met at Meg's wedding. He had inherited a house in northwestern Connecticut that we both adored. But when we were in town he enjoyed going, and the crowd was always eclectic enough that his presence wasn't surprising. Few even realized we were together, and those who did wouldn't have talked about it. What happened at Dinah's was never reported outside, unless by Dinah herself, and she protected her friends. She protected me, by making sure my friend and his famously difficult wife were elaborately mentioned as a couple whenever Althea deigned to come up from Palm Beach or back from Paris or Rio to attend some grand function with him.

R
ichard Jr., called RJ, was all boy, early to walk and late to talk. I remember him wheeling around the kitchen on his little plastic motorcycle with frightening skill while Dinah was cooking. He could steer in reverse better than I could. I brought him the record of
Free to Be . . . You and Me,
which was supposed to teach him that boys could express their true feelings, and I suppose it worked because from the get-go he freely showed that what he loved best in the world were trucks and guns. Show him all the flowers and birdies you wanted, he'd look politely and blink with those huge brown eyes, but let him catch sight of a big rig and he'd go “brmmm, brmmm” and jig with excitement.

Dinah was working as hard as ever the first few years of RJ's life, reporting with Simon on “Eye” and writing “Dinah Might” for Fridays. She collected so much material for the columns at her weekend gatherings—people told her everything, they couldn't seem to help it—that she didn't have to go out as much in the evenings, but she was still very much the girl about town, turning out for friends' openings and concerts and whatever sounded amusing. Sometimes they kept the nanny overnight and Richard went with her, but mostly he stayed home with RJ in the evenings.

Dinah was pregnant again, with Nicholas, when a society lady named Serena Tate showed up in my department at Saks one day. This must have been late 1974. I was rushing around the selling floor with an armload of debutante gowns and found her browsing among the Halstons. She was Colombian, and had been a dancer—with the Joffrey, I think—and still had a dancer's body, with a dancer's turned-out feet and a neat dark head on a swan neck. I had helped Mme. Olitsky with her chez Philomena.

She said in her elegant Latin accent, “Lovie, how nice to see you. You're looking radiant.” I was surprised she remembered me.

“I'm so sorry, I have an appointment in minutes, Mrs. Tate, but I'd love to help you. Are you looking for something special?”

“I do need a dress for an evening wedding, but there's no great hurry.”

I got my book, and we made an appointment for a late morning the next week.

“And if you're not too pressed, perhaps I could take you to lunch afterward,” she added. This was, believe me, unusual. Mrs. Tate was decades older than I, at least I thought so at the time, and we shared few if any common points of biography. I began to demur.

She put a finger on my wrist briefly, looked at me very directly, and said, “Please.”

“Well then . . . of course, that would be lovely.” I watched her walk toward the elevators without another glance at the Halstons. She had not come in to shop. I was still watching, noting how still she stood and how self-contained she was, as if she never entirely lost the sense that even holding a pose in the corps de ballet while the premiers danced, she was part of the performance. She didn't shift her weight or check her sleeve for lint the way most people do when alone.

Then my debutante arrived, with her very determined mother.

S
erena took me to La Grenouille, which worried me for two reasons. French food is rich, and I usually eat only fruit during the day. And, I only got an hour off for lunch.

“Don't worry,” she said, seeing me glance at my wristwatch. “Marjorie is a great friend; you have permission.” Marjorie Bachman, my boss.

So now I was worried for a third reason. La Grenouille cost a fortune. What did she want from me?

She ordered for us, and I can remember to this day what we ate; I'd never tasted food like that in my life. I also remember how easily she made the time pass, how she made me feel witty and likeable and as if there needn't be a hidden agenda beyond the pleasure of my company.

But there was, of course. It arrived with our coffee soufflés. (With a pitcher of crème anglaise, if you're wondering, and a plate of tiny petits fours.)

“I don't know if you've met Simon Snyder?” she said, a question. In fact, Simon was one of the things in Dinah's life I envied. He and Dinah shared a completely congruent sense of humor. I always think of one of the Sunday salons, when Dinah and Simon collapsed in a corner, undone by the giggles. The collector Victor Greenwood was there that day with a Swedish actress, and I think there was a Hindu swami as well. Allen Ginsberg came with a poet Dinah knew from Vassar, and after a while he took off all his clothes and recited, quite beautifully I thought. Everyone wanted to know what Dinah and Simon found so funny, and neither of them could explain it without setting each other off again. Later I learned that a self-important impresaria someone had brought and no one had liked was found to have pissed in her chair. Ruined the upholstery, of course, but Richard would have it redone.

“A really beautiful man,” said Serena of Simon. “Such a profile. And, of course, so amusing.”

I agreed. Serena made a tiny hole in her soufflé and poured in a slim stream of the crème. Showing me, in the politest way possible, what to do with it. She took a microscopic bite.