Blood in the Water(3)

“Ah,” Cortina said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Arthur said.

He opened his phone and punched in the speed dial number again. This time, Martha’s phone started ringing almost immediately, crashing its way through a tinny rendition of “I Enjoy Being a Girl.”

Arthur got up and followed the sounds into the family room.

Martha’s big Coach handbag was sitting on the coffee table in front of the couch, closed up tight and looking like she’d put it down there half a minute ago.

2

Caroline Stanford-Pyrie was at the end of her rope, and her ropes were never very long to begin with. It just went to show, really, that it was always a bad idea to sign yourself up for organized hospitality. Organized camaraderie might be more like what this was supposed to be—oh, she didn’t know what it was supposed to be. She didn’t even care anymore. She just wished the world would go back to being what she remembered it being, and then she’d be able to sit down and relax for a little while. As it was, she kept herself up at night, worrying that things were going to go wrong and it was somehow going to be all her fault.

Right now what was going wrong was this meeting, and it was going to go on going wrong as long as everybody insisted on showing up late. That was one of the ways you could tell the right people from the wrong ones. The right people were always absolutely punctual, even if they’d had a snootful the night before and felt like death warmed up. Caroline felt that way quite a lot of the time, but that didn’t stop her from doing what she’d promised to do. Character, that was what mattered. Character and breeding.

Caroline made her way from the foyer of the Waldorf Pines country club to the big dining room at the back. There were no cars coming down that absurd circular drive. There was nobody at all arriving for this meeting, and she had set it for seven o’clock precisely to escape all those lame excuses everybody had for needing to be into work early. To hear these women talk, every business in America expected its junior executives to be at their desks and hard at it before dawn. It was nonsense, and she knew it. She knew that they knew she knew it.

She went through the big double doors into the dining room proper and looked around. Little Susan Carstairs was sitting at one of the tables near the big wall of windows looking out on the terrace. Susan was a mouse. It made Caroline crazy. It didn’t matter who had done what or when or why, Susan apologized.

“Well, that’s it,” Caroline said. “Not a sign of anybody. And I’ll bet there won’t be a sign of anybody. They all say they want to be on committees. They all say they want to be part of things. Then when it comes time to do the work—well.”

Susan sniffled. “Well,” she said. “Maybe it really is the time, Caroline. Maybe we should hold meetings in the evenings.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Caroline said. She went up to the big wall of windows and looked out. The swimming pool was blocked off by what looked like crime scene tape. It was just a yellow caution bar, because there were repairs going on in the cabana and the pool house. Repairs were supposed to be going on, but they weren’t. Nobody was there working on anything. Nobody would be there working on anything today. The job would wait and wait and wait, just as it had waited and waited and waited since Labor Day. Then they’d bring somebody in at the last minute in the middle of the winter, and everything would cost more than twenty times what it would have if they’d managed to get it all done at the right time.

“Honestly,” Caroline said.

Susan made a strangled little noise.

Caroline ignored her. “Can you imagine,” Caroline said, “what our mothers would have thought of this place if they’d ever seen it? Do you remember what it was like, growing up on the Main Line when we did? Waldorf Pines. My God. It sounds like the kind of thing some backstreet hooker would make up for the name of her fantasy estate. It’s a cotillion committee, for God’s sake. It’s not rocket science. They all want cotillions and they want their daughters to ‘come out’ and get their names in the newspapers, even if it isn’t in the right part of the newspapers, except they don’t know that, either. They don’t know anything. It’s enough to make you scream.”

“I think they just want things to be nice,” Susan said. “I know it isn’t like what we had when we grew up—”

“I came out at the Assemblies. You did, too. You know what a cotillion is supposed to be about.”

“Yes,” Susan said. “Yes, I know, but—”

“There aren’t any buts,” Caroline said. “There are ways you do things and ways you don’t. These people get jobs in brokerage firms and they think they’ve—oh, I don’t know what they think they’ve done. A gated community. Can you honestly believe that? My mother would have died of embarrassment.”