I'll Take Manhattan (10 page)

“Hopeless. You just don’t know what you’re missing.” Joe Shore shook his head in wonder. “I bet you don’t even have your own set yet.”

“I looked at Barney’s once and all I saw was a bunch of
midgets. They’ve got to do better than that. Give me a movie or a Broadway show anytime. Coffee?”

Imagine, Zachary thought, as he walked back along the busy streets, Joe Shore, a man who had as much tangible power as any man he’d ever personally known, couldn’t make a dinner date on any Tuesday night because of Milton Berle. Did Eisenhower and Mamie watch? Did Senator Joseph McCarthy watch, and Estes Kefauver? Personally he was too restless to sit still for long, except for an occasional ballgame. Whatever importance television had, it was as a competitor for the advertiser’s dollar, and not one to worry about nearly as much as he did about other magazines. He stopped abruptly at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street. Did the whole country come to a stop on Tuesday at eight? Probably it did and probably it came to a stop for Lucille Ball and Sid Caesar and “The Honeymooners” and who the fuck knew what other shows? He, Zachary Amberville, was a shortsighted, ignorant horse’s ass who had almost made the fatal mistake of thinking that he could judge the American public by his own tastes. But not too big a horse’s ass to learn when he’d been one and to do something about it.
Television Week
? Too businesslike.
This Week on Television
? Too long.
Television Weekly
? There was something overtly intellectual about that, it smacked of
Harpers
or
The Atlantic. Your T.V. Week
? Still too long.
T.V. Week
. That would do. He crossed the street, imagining the first issue clearly. A square book, eight by eight, on good-quality paper, crammed full of photos and text, and television schedules of course, with a large color picture of Milton Berle on the cover. As his pace quickened, Zachary Amberville returned to his office, already, although he did not yet realize it, worth tens of millions of dollars more than when he’d left for lunch.

Months before the plans for the redecorating of the great gray marble house on East Seventieth Street had been completed, Lily discovered she was pregnant. Her immediate reaction was fear: what would this do to her body? Then she smiled at herself. That was a typical
dancer’s reaction and she had given up her career for a normal life. This baby would be the proof, if one was needed, that she was free, her own woman, a double rejection of that hermetic little world she had put aside. She always did her barre exercises for an hour every morning in the large suite at the Waldorf Towers where the Ambervilles had settled temporarily, but she hadn’t so much as been to the ballet since she’d come to Manhattan. The barre was a habit, a way of keeping in shape, nothing more.

Her marvelous new clothes! Her hands flew to her mouth in dismay. They wouldn’t fit in a matter of weeks. Well, it simply couldn’t be helped. She’d go to Mainbocher this afternoon and ask him to design a complete maternity wardrobe. Should she write her mother immediately, or even telephone? It wasn’t a minute too soon for Mother to start looking for just the right nanny to come over from England and take charge. Doctor Wolfe had told her to watch her weight … a good doctor, she thought, but a silly remark. When in her life had she not watched her weight? Lily hugged herself in the beginnings of enjoyment. Inevitably her slight dancer’s breasts would become voluptuous. How nice she’d look in a low-cut gown. She’d tell Mainbocher that she wanted deep necklines for evening; wonderful, wide-skirted dresses, tied under the breasts in the Empire style. She might as well enjoy having a bosom while it lasted, for of course she wouldn’t nurse the child. Her cousins had all nursed their children and it had seemed to her to be a most appalling waste of time; hours and hours of sitting patiently, night and day, while some little thing used you as a human cow, a baby who couldn’t possibly remember if it had been nursed or not and most certainly wouldn’t be grateful one way or the other.

She made a mental note to tell her decorators where to put the nursery. It should be so far from her bedroom that under no circumstances would she be disturbed by the noise the baby would make, day or night. A baby’s crying was unquestionably the single most irritating sound in all of nature and she didn’t intend to endure it, any more than she would buy dresses off the rack.

A mother at her age? Well, she might as well get it over with while she was young, as the Royals always did,
especially since she had no choice. But it was rather a pity really since she had so recently come to Manhattan, so recently begun to realize what it was like to be able to have everything she wanted, when she wanted it, at the slightest tug of desire. Still, a baby didn’t mean postponing any satisfactions for more than a few hours. She’d known in London that Zachary was tremendously rich, but Lily now understood that he was far, far richer than she could have imagined, and far, far more generous than any man she’d ever known. Her father had been rather stingy, now that she came to think of it, he believed that children should be brought up with strict discipline about pocket money. She’d never needed pocket money, since she’d had no interests to spend it on, but since she had given up ballet, there seemed to be a multitude of things she did rather like buying. The shops of Manhattan were irresistibly tempting, and it was quite … cozy … to know that there wasn’t anything in any of them that she couldn’t buy, nothing Zachary didn’t want to give her.

“Wealthy”—a disgusting word. Rich. The only way to say it was flat out. Rich.
Very, very rich
. Perhaps, when the baby was presentable, she’d let
Style
photograph her for its pages. The Honorable Mrs. Zachary Amberville, and her child. No, not
Style
. It wasn’t designed for the very rich. Perhaps that was why it sold so well.
Vogue
then, or, better yet,
Town & Country
. There was a certain cachet, now that she reflected on the subject, to making her first appearance in the society magazines everyone in New York read every month, as a young mother rather than just as another young bride.

Of course New York society was one vast joke. In London you were either in society or not in society. If you were a viscount’s daughter you would always be a viscount’s daughter, no matter whom you married. You had your relatives, you had your ancestors, you had your place in the constellation. A girl could marry a title or into county society—or even an American—but everybody would always remember who you had been before your marriage. It would take generations before it didn’t matter, or perhaps it would always matter, perhaps people would say hundreds of years from now, “Oh yes, Lady Melinda … her
great-great-grandmother was some banker’s daughter before she married the Earl of wherever.” Snobbish, fearfully snobbish, she supposed. Nevertheless that was simply the way it was.

But New York! So many of their “great ladies” were three—or at the most four—generations removed from robber barons, and robber barons were simply successful thieves. Of course they had their
Mayflower
descendants and that Society of the Cincinnati, descendants of officers in Washington’s army. In other words, Lily mused, they were descendants of colonials who had rebelled against a rather good sort of king, not even two hundred years ago. Apparently it was considered fearfully impressive to be a member, although Zachary, who could have joined, had never bothered. As her mother had told her in the few weeks before the wedding, although fifty families considered themselves to be historically “Old New York,” there were only a handful of them who could claim really good Old World ancestors. The Van Rensselaers, whose coat of arms came from the Prince of Orange, had no land left. The Livingstons however were alive and prospering and they went back to the noble Scottish House of Callenders; the Pells too had been aristocrats in England and the Duers and Rutherfords had pedigrees with which anyone could be satisfied. Ancestor worship had its place, Lily thought mockingly, but shouldn’t the ancestors have a bit more patina on their graves? Only a few years before the American Revolution, Louis XIV of France had sold titles for six thousand six hundred livres, whatever that might be in today’s money, leaving blank the space in which the newly noble Frenchman would write his name. So little really stood up to the inspection of more than a few centuries. Even the Adamsfields had only been squires until the 1300s. No, being a title snob was quite nasty, and beneath her.

However. However, she was going to live in Manhattan and sheer self-respect demanded that she receive proper consideration. Once the baby was out of the way she’d meet the few really quite decent people, and know them. Invariably she’d be asked to join many charitable committees, or whatever they called good works here—it seemed to be a New York mania—and she’d pick several,
choosing them very cautiously. It was so very unwise to make friends too quickly in a new place, her mother had always said. You spent the next ten years getting rid of them.

Lily stretched agreeably. The house, the superb antiques she was buying to fill it, endless new clothes, the reign over Manhattan that was hers for the taking, the servants, the trips they would make when New York grew too hot or too cold, the jewels that she was beginning to contemplate and compare at the great jewelers of Manhattan … it all seemed to merge into one comfortable and busy circle of pleasure. She must have been quite mad to have spent most of her life chained to a discipline that allowed for no pleasure except the fleeting enjoyment of an exceptional performance. Ballet dancers, especially prima ballerinas, were truly
slaves
, she reflected, shaking her head. Slaves to their own impossible set of standards, slaves to their teachers, slaves to their bodies; slaves, above all, to the public who, by possessing a ticket, demanded a perfection the price of which none of them could possibly understand. Dancers were like trained animals, brought out to go through the hoops and yet, unlike animals, they had chosen to be slaves. How fortunate she was to have escaped in time. For once she had become a prima ballerina, as of course she would have, it might have been far more difficult to abandon that obsessive life.

The phone rang, and Lily stirred, her reveries broken. “Oh. Yes, darling, I slept beautifully,” she said to Zachary. “No, nothing particularly new, just another day of talking to upholsterers and decorators.… Don’t be silly, dear, I
am
having fun.” She supposed she could have called to tell him the minute she found out about the baby but it had slipped her mind. Well, tonight would be time enough. Of course he’d understand that soon they would have to stop going to bed together. Soon, quite soon. She put down the phone and then picked it up again. She’d phone Miss Varney, her saleslady at Mainbocher, and make an appointment for tomorrow. No … for this afternoon. Why wait?

“Not nurse
my son
? No, darling, I couldn’t possibly have said that.”

“Lily, darling, come on, don’t you remember? I distinctly heard you telling Minnie that all the stuff about antibodies in mother’s milk was some American fad and fresh air and a good nanny were what counted.”

“Perhaps. I’m sure you’re right. But what does it matter since I’ve changed my mind? Where is that nurse with my son? She should have been here five minutes ago. Zachary, could you please go and find her? I’m terrified the hospital and staff might give him a bottle of formula for their own convenience … they hate mothers who nurse. It makes more work for them.”

While Zachary roamed the corridors of
Doctors’
Hospital looking for a nurse, any nurse, Lily fretted impatiently in her bed. Tobias had been born three days before, an easy birth, and as soon as she had seen him, with his little pointed cap of blond curls, his fat cheeks and perfect body, she realized that she had never loved before. Not her parents, not ballet, not Zachary, not herself. The last thing she had expected was to be taken by surprise by a wave of maternal emotion but she had spent the entire day after the birth weeping because her son was not by her side but in the nursery with the other babies. He
was
her, he was
part of her body
, how could they take him away as if he didn’t belong to her? It was simply too late to arrange for “rooming-in,” keeping the baby in her own room in a little crib, her doctor explained. Every other mother in the hospital it seemed had opted for rooming-in and they didn’t have the necessary equipment for half of them. If only she’d asked for it a few months ago, he had said, as if, a few months ago, she could possibly have
known
her baby would be Tobias?

Of
course
she’d had a boy. All that nonsense that people talk about not caring about the sex of a child so long as it’s healthy! Everyone knew in the heart of hearts that the first child should be a boy. Cavemen knew it and so had all humans since then.

“Here he is!” Zachary said, pushing open the door for the nurse, “and he sounds hungry. I tracked him down by the noise.”

“He needs to cry, it’s good for his lungs,” Lily said, sounding as expert as her mother before her, holding her arms out greedily.

“Shall I leave you and Father alone with the baby?” the nurse asked.

“I don’t need you now, thank you, nurse. Zachary, darling, would you mind? I’m rather new at this … I think I’d like a little privacy. Come back in, oh, an hour or so. He does enjoy taking his time.”

“You’re sure?” Zachary tried not to sound as deeply disappointed as he felt. “Won’t you need anything?” He looked at her lovingly, propped up on half a dozen pillows, their silk cases thickly encrusted with fine old lace, as were the sheets and coverlet she had brought from home. Lily had never looked so angelic as she did at this minute with her hair spread over her shoulders. At her ears were the enormous sapphires set in diamonds he had just given her from Van Cleef and Arpels—sapphires for a boy. The box that had contained the necklace and the bracelets that completed the parure lay open on the table beside her and the jewels themselves were heaped near the lamp, captured dreams of a midsummer’s night.