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“Well, I think you finally struck the right note with the Oscar,” Cecil said.
“Yes, thank you for making me change,” Renée said. “These High WASPs just love Oscar, don’t they? I’m paying tribute to Lucie’s kin by wearing a dress that’s twenty years old.”
“Wasn’t that when you were first named to the International Best Dressed List? Twenty years ago?”
“It sure was. You have such a faculty for dates, son.”
“I remember because WWD published a photo of you wearing this houndstooth pantsuit when they announced you on the list. I still
have the page somewhere.”
“Well, I think it’s a timeless look, very restrained. It won’t offend anyone, and they can’t accuse me of trying to put on airs.”
“They will be the ones putting on airs, Mother. You know how these Old Guard types are. Their fortunes have dwindled down to practically nothing, so the only thing they have to cling on to is their snobbery.”
Renée nodded. “Annette did warn me: ‘Consuelo Barclay will be judging you from scalp to toenails the moment she sets eyes on you, and she doesn’t miss a thing.’?”
“I don’t know about the grandmother, but frankly, I don’t think anyone will notice what you’re wearing. My God, wait till you meet them. You can practically smell the mothballs. I met most of them at this godforsaken affair they called a clambake in Bar Harbor last summer. Lucie’s mother—you already know the situation there. The rest of the lot take great pride in looking like they haven’t bought new clothes since Eisenhower was in office.”
“They need to make extreme efforts not to look entitled,” Renée said with a throaty laugh.
Cecil chuckled. “Lucie has a cousin who, I believe, shops only at that horrid place in Midtown? Lord & Swift?”
“Lord & Taylor, you mean. I bought my prom dress at Lord & Taylor.” Renée shook her head, as if she didn’t quite believe her own words. “I made my mother drive me two hours all the way to the Galleria in Houston. It was a peach-colored dress with big bouffant roses at the shoulder, and it reminded me of an Ungaro I had seen in Vogue. It cost my mom two months’ salary, but it was worth every penny—I was voted prom queen. No one in Beaumont had ever seen a dress like that!”
“You had such a flair even back then,” Cecil said.
“That was the night Ronnie Gallen asked me out, and if it wasn’t for Ronnie, I never would have met your father.”
Cecil turned away from his mother and looked out the window onto Park Avenue. It made him slightly uncomfortable whenever his mother talked of her past. In his mind, he liked to imagine that she was born on an elegant plantation in Louisiana, the descendant of a family with roots stretching back to the Valois kings of France. In truth, his mother may have been born Renée Mouton in Lake Charles, Louisiana, but she was the illegitimate daughter of Charles Mouton, who owned a trio of Conoco service stations, and Marcia Nuncio, who worked the front register at one of the stations and hailed from a family of oil refinery workers from Corpus Christi.
Most of the time, he forgot this bit of trivia about his mother, but tonight he was reminded of it as they prepared to meet the members of Lucie’s tribe. He suddenly noticed that his mother’s shoulder-length blond bouffant hair had extra highlights tonight and silently cursed her hairdresser Fabrice. He too was racked with nerves and had obsessed over his hair and his outfit, changing several times until he finally just put on his oldest navy pin-striped suit, the first one he ever had made at Huntsman, with his simplest Argenio tie. He didn’t want the men in Lucie’s family thinking he was making too much of an effort, and besides, he knew they wouldn’t understand the Rubinacci.
Why was it that he and his mother felt far more comfortable among their international jet-set friends than a bunch of WASPs? Was it because even the Texas WASP contingent had turned their noses up at them all those years ago, when they tried living in that house on Lazy Lane? Oh well, it was all ancient history as far as he was concerned. For heaven’s sake, he had more than three hundred thousand followers among all his social media platforms, they had just dined with the King and Queen of Jordan two nights before, and his mother had the pope on speed dial. They could handle cocktails with the Churchills. The Bentley pulled up in front of the building again.
“Ready, Mother?”
Renée gave Cecil a wink. “Let’s slay ’em!”
*1 Billionaire + millennials = billennials
*2 She would be referring to Grange Hall, the much-missed restaurant at the corner of Bedford and Commerce Streets.
III
The Seventeenth Floor
821 FIFTH AVENUE
The chauffeur opened the door, and Renée and Cecil stepped from the Bentley onto the burgundy carpeting, passed through the revolving doors of 821 Fifth Avenue, and found themselves in the hushed, elegant Belgian Art Nouveau lobby. A pair of doormen dressed like deserters from the Franco-Prussian War gave them the once-over.
“We’re going up to Consuelo Barclay Churchill’s. I’m Cecil Pike,” Cecil announced.
The older doorman checked a list in a leather-bound logbook before giving them a curt nod. “Seventeenth floor, Mr. Pike. Ivan will show you the way.”
Even the doormen are snooty, Renée thought, as they were shown to the elevator by the younger doorman. She remembered walking past the building years ago when she first began house hunting in New York and admiring its splendid facade.
Danielle, her property agent, had shaken her head and declared, “Don’t even think about this one. It’s a good building.”
