The real sad thing about this thing tonight was that Annie wouldn’t be there. Charlotte wouldn’t invite her, and if Charlotte did—and hell froze over—Annie wouldn’t come. David wondered when it had gotten to the point that having money meant never being able to do anything you wanted to do.
8
It was eight o’clock, and Charlotte Deacon Ross was in a state of high piss-off unmatched in all her fifty-two years on earth, except maybe by the time that Marietta Hand had shown up at her own debutante ball in a black dress. Charlotte’s mother had put that particular tantrum down to “Charlotte’s sensitivity to nuance,” by which she meant she thought Charlotte was afraid a black dress would bring bad luck. It wasn’t true. Charlotte did not believe in luck. She did believe in the divine right of kings—and, more to the point, queens—but she saw that as predestined, the way her solidly Presbyterian forebears had seen their election to heaven as predestined. God chose, before the start of time. Charlotte was one of the chosen.
Charlotte had been angry at Marietta Hand because she hadn’t thought of that black dress first. Forever more, when people wrote those over-illustrated histories of Society in its prime, it would be Marietta, not Charlotte, singled out as the daring innovator that nobody could stop talking about. It gave Charlotte a great deal of satisfaction to remember that Marietta had eventually married an impecunious nobody she’d met at college, only to have him fail in one business after the other until Marietta’s money was gone, or nearly gone. Marietta hadn’t had to go to work, of course. She probably had ten million dollars left. Still, ten million dollars wasn’t enough to live like this, or even approximate it. Now, when Charlotte saw Marietta, it was only by accident, at parents’ day at one of the schools, where Marietta’s children were proving to be just as stupid as her husband had been. Really, the whole thing was ridiculous. Anybody with a brain would have known better. If you’re going to marry poor, you wait to see how he’ll turn out. You marry somebody like Steven Spielberg or Steve Jobs. You don’t pick some intense brooder in your Introduction to Philosophy class and decide that he’s a genius.
Marietta’s husband had committed suicide, in the end. It was the kind of thing people like that did. Charlotte had no idea what Marietta did with herself. Now she looked around the longest of the buffet tables, counting china crocks of beluga caviar, and feeling so worked up she almost thought steam might be coming out of her ears. There was the danger of television, and of all entertainment like it. Once the vulgar images got stuck in your head, you could never get them out again. She counted the crocks again. She took a deep breath. She considered blasting the caterer and decided she couldn’t risk it. If he walked out this late, there would be a disaster. She was, she thought, willfully misunderstood, by everybody around her. She wanted only what was best for everybody. She wanted only perfection.
She counted the crocks again. She counted the plates of sliced salmon. She counted the canapés set out in slanting rows on a long silver serving tray. She was nearly six feet tall and, even at this age, and in spite of the Main Line prejudice against plastic surgery, a magnificent-looking woman. Her neck was long and thin. Her eyes were huge and blue. Her hair was as thick as the evergreen bushes that comprised the topiary garden at the bottom of the terrace. She had no idea why she was so angry she could barely see straight, but she had been this way most of the evening, and she was going to be this way for as long as she had to stand here listening to twaddle from people who pretended not to know all the things she knew. Charlotte had never believed all that talk people put out about how different everything was now than it had been in the fifties. Nothing was ever different. Blood will tell. And what it told was the story of the necessity to keep people properly sorted out.
There were exactly as many canapés as there were supposed to be. There were exactly as many china crocks of caviar as there were supposed to be. There were probably as many crackers as there were supposed to be, but she hadn’t counted those, because there were too many of them. She wanted to do something physical, to get the poison out of the veins of her arms, to cause destruction. People would be arriving any minute and, of course, now that it was too cold to open the doors to the terrace, there wouldn’t be enough room.
She looked to the other side of the ballroom and saw Tony deep in conversation with that man Bennis Hannaford had brought. Leave it to Bennis to hook up with some godawful immigrant wreck who couldn’t even look comfortable in a dinner jacket. The man reminded her of Henry Kissinger, although he was better-looking, and a lot taller. It was the tone. You could always tell the ones who were trying too hard. They strained, and the strain radiated out of them like an aura. Charlotte believed in auras, in just the way she believed in reincarnation, and in predestination too. The best people were always the same people, culture after culture, time after time. They’d just been transported from one body and one place to the next ones, and as they shifted, the fate of civilizations shifted too.