xxx.
ANNE DE LARMESSIN—KITSEY’S godmother—was hosting our party at a private club which even Hobie had never set foot in, but knew all about: its history (venerable), its architects (illustrious), and its membership (stellar, running the gamut from Aaron Burr to the Whartons). “Supposed to be one of the best early Greek Revival interiors in New York State,” he’d informed us with earnest delight. “The staircases—the mantels—I wonder if we’ll be allowed in the reading room? The plasterwork’s original, I’m told, really something to see.”
“How many people will be there?” Pippa asked. She’d been forced to walk down to Morgane Le Fay and buy a dress since she hadn’t packed for the party.
“Couple hundred.” Of that number, maybe fifteen of the guests (including Pippa and Hobie, Mr. Bracegirdle and Mrs. DeFrees) were mine; a hundred were Kitsey’s, and the remainder were people whom even Kitsey claimed not to know.
“Including,” said Hobie, “the mayor. And both senators. And Prince Albert of Monaco, isn’t that right?”
“They invited Prince Albert. I seriously doubt he’s coming.”
“Oh, just an intimate thing then. For the family.”
“Look, I’m just showing up and doing what they tell me.” It was Anne de Larmessin who had seized high command of the wedding in the “crisis” (her word) of Mrs. Barbour’s indifference. It was Anne de Larmessin who was negotiating for the right church, the right minister; it was Anne de Larmessin who would work out the guest lists (dazzling) and the seating charts (unbelievably tricky) and who, in the end, it seemed, would have final say about everything from the ringbearer’s cushion to the cake. It was Anne de Larmessin who had managed to get hold of just the designer for the dress, and who’d offered her estate in St. Barth’s for the honeymoon; whom Kitsey phoned whenever a question arose (which it did, multiple times per day); and who had (in Toddy’s phrase) firmly installed herself as Wedding Obergruppenführer. What made all this so comical and perverse was that Anne de Larmessin was so disturbed by me she could hardly stand to look at me. I was worlds from the match she had hoped for her god-daughter. Even my name was too vulgar to be spoken. “And what does the groom think?” “Will the groom be providing me with his guest list any time soon?” Clearly a marriage to someone like me (a furniture dealer!) was a fate akin—more or less—to death; hence the pomp and spectacle of the arrangements, the grim sense of ceremony, as if Kitsey were some lost princess of Ur to be feasted and decked in finery and—attended by tambourine players and handmaidens—paraded down in splendor to the Underworld.
xxxi.
SINCE I DIDN’T SEE any particular reason I needed my wits about me for the party, I made sure to get good and looped before I left, with an emergency OC tucked into the pocket of my best Turnbull and Asser just in case.
The club was so beautiful that I resented the press of guests, which made it difficult to see the architectural details, the portraits hung frame to frame—some of them very fine—and the rare books on the shelves. Red velvet swags, garlands of Christmas balsam—were those real candles on the tree? I stood in a daze at the top of the stairs, not wanting to greet or talk to people, not wanting to be there at all—
Hand on my sleeve. “What’s the matter?” said Pippa.
“What?” I couldn’t meet her eye.
“You look so sad.”
“I am,” I said, but I wasn’t sure if she heard or not, I almost didn’t hear myself saying it, because at exactly the same moment Hobie—sensing we’d fallen behind—had doubled back to find us in the crowd, shouting: “Ah, there you are…”
“Go, attend to your guests,” he said, giving me a friendly parental nudge, “everyone’s asking for you!” Among the strangers, he and Pippa were two of the only really unique or interesting-looking people there: she, like a fairy in her gauzy-sleeved, diaphanous green; he, elegant and endearing in his midnight blue double-breasted, his beautiful old shoes from Peal and Co.
“I—” Hopelessly, I looked around.
“Don’t worry about us. We’ll catch up later.”
“Right,” I said, steeling myself. But—leaving them to study a portrait of John Adams near the coat check, where they were waiting for Mrs. DeFrees to drop off her mink, and making my way through the crowded rooms—there was no one I recognized except Mrs. Barbour, whom I really didn’t feel I could face, only she saw me before I could get by and caught me by the sleeve. She was backed in a doorway with her gin and lime, being addressed by a saturnine spritely old gentleman with a hard red face and a hard clear voice and a puff of gray hair over each ear.