Social Crimes Read online

  The night of my birthday, I was wearing a long white silk sheath to show off the possession I loved most in the world: a black pearl, ruby, and diamond necklace that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette. Lucius had given it to me as a present for our first anniversary.

  I was wending my way through the crowd when I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Tutankhamen Betty holding a large glass of scotch in her hand.

  “Christ, Jo, it’s bankbooks at dawn around here,” she said. “I want you to know that I’ve been trapped in three separate conversations about private planes. How much can you say about jet decoration?”

  We both paused to listen to a man standing near us who was loudly boasting about the billion dollars he had just raised for his hedge fund despite the flagging economy. Betty rolled her eyes heavenward and said under her breath to me: “Tell me there aren’t people here who’ve made a pact with the devil.”

  “I would, too, if I knew where to get in touch with him.”

  “I’ve tried. His number is constantly busy.”

  Betty, who was on a roll, lifted her gaze to the enormous crystal chandelier sparkling above the center of the tent. She raised her voice and said: “Satan, are you listening? If you want to round up all the souls in Southampton, all you have to do is land here in a G-5! And I’d rather fly with you than most of these assholes!” Then she turned to me with a tipsy look in her eye. “I have an idea, Jo. Let’s go say ‘fuck you’ to everyone we hate.”

  “I have a better idea. Let’s go find your houseguest,” I said, hoping to divert her attention away from the bonfire she was bent on lighting.

  “I’m so fucking sick of the rich,” she said as we walked through the crowd.

  “You need to meet some new people.”

  “No new people! Not unless their names begin with X, Y, or Z. No room in the old address book . . . Oh! There she is over there.”

  Betty pointed to the back of the tent where a pretty, pixie-faced, younger woman with short dark hair was seated by herself, sipping a glass of white wine, surveying the crowd from a distance. Her skin was very white and glowed with a kind of ethereal pallor. She was dressed in a long black skirt and a simple black top with a single strand of pearls around her neck. She looked vaguely disconsolate, as people often do when sitting alone at big gatherings.

  “So what’s her story now?” I said under my breath as we approached.

  “I told you. Her husband, Michel, was a friend of Gil’s. He died about a year ago. We ran into her at a party in New York and I—fool that I am—casually invited her out here. I mean, who expects anyone to take them up on an invitation like that? Fuck. And of course the English come and stay forever. Let’s hope the French are different.”

  Betty introduced me to Countess Monique de Passy, who rose from her chair as deferentially as if I were the Queen Mother and shook my hand. Her grip was firm and forthright, not one of those tepid, tentative extensions you get from so many European women.

  “Countess.”

  “Monique, please, Mrs. Slater.”

  “Call me Jo.”

  Having got that straight, we all sat down.

  “It’s an honor to meet you, Jo,” Monique said with a very light French accent. “I’ve admired you for so long.”

  The Countess’s sparkling brown eyes and open manner were an engaging combination. She was not sycophantic but sympathique, as the French say. I sensed her relief at having someone to talk to. Giving the unknown newcomer a warm welcome is not something our little group was known for—unless they were very, very rich.

  “It’s fascinating to meet an American who is so interested in Marie Antoinette,” she said.

  “In the Louis Sixteenth period,” I corrected her. “Marie Antoinette was a bit of a featherbrain, I’m afraid.”

  “She had great taste, though. That belonged to her,” Betty said, pointing to my necklace, which I touched without thinking.

  Monique seemed impressed with the provenance. “Really? That necklace belonged to Marie Antoinette? Where did you get it, if I may ask?”

  “My husband gave it to me for our first anniversary.”

  “Tell her the whole story,” Betty said.

  I was happy to comply.

  “Actually, it’s quite interesting,” I said. “After she was imprisoned, Marie Antoinette smuggled this to one of her maids with instructions to go to England and sell it. The maid was supposed to return to France with the money to help the Queen and the royal family escape. She obeyed two of the Queen’s instructions. She went to London and she sold it to a duke. But she never went back to France. She stayed in England and set herself up in high style.”

  “Even then good help was hard to find,” Betty said with a laugh.

  “It’s all documented,” I said. “Lucius bought the necklace directly from the duke’s family.”

  Monique was delighted. “My late husband would have adored that story. He used to take me to the Conciergerie where they list all the people who lost their heads on the guillotine. There are about six or seven de Passys on the register. It’s a wonder there are any left.”

  A little fanfare from the orchestra signaled it was time for dinner.

  “Speaking of the guillotine, you should see who I’m seated with. Oy!” Betty swiped her index finger across her throat as if it were a knife. The three of us rose to go to our respective tables. Monique shook my hand good-bye.

  “It was lovely to meet you, Mrs. Slater—Jo, excuse me. I hope to see you again.”

  “Why don’t you and Betty come over for lunch tomorrow?”

  “Can’t, sweetie,” Betty said. “I’ve got the plumbers coming at one. All Gil cares about these days is the goddamn water pressure in the shower. But you go,” she said to Monique.

  The Countess demurred. “I don’t want to impose.”

  “For Christ’s sake, you’ve been bugging me to see Jo’s house. Now’s your chance,” Betty said. Monique blushed. “You’re her idol, Jo. She told me the first thing she did when she got to New York was to go to the Slater Gallery.”

  Betty often had the habit of talking about people in the third person as if they weren’t standing right there. I felt sorry for the Countess, who continued to redden with embarrassment. I was very flattered. How nice to be someone’s idol, I thought. I remembered the days when Clara Wilman had been my idol and how thrilled I’d been the first time I met her.

  “Do come,” I said, feeling the need to rescue the young woman from Betty’s barrage. “I’d love to show it to you if you’re interested.”

  Monique smiled. “In that case, I accept with pleasure.”

  The dinner was long and predictable. No expense had been spared. For the first course, waiters passed around silver tubs from which we all scooped heaping portions of caviar onto silver dollar-size stacks of blinis. Next came salmon en croûte, then salad. Just before the birthday cake, I caught Dick Bromire flinging a glance at Ethan Monk, who was on my other side. I guessed what was about to happen.

  “Please God, no toasts,” I whispered to Ethan.

  He patted my arm as he rose from his seat: “Courage, ma chère.” He walked to the standing microphone on the dance floor in long strides, intent as a marsh bird hunting for food. A chorus of pinging crystal sent a hush over the room. I sat in my chair, very erect, with a frozen smile on my face as he began a witty, Ethanesque voyage down Memory Lane, starting with the early days of our friendship and concluding by describing the Slater Gallery, which Lucius and I had donated to the Municipal Museum in 1990.

  He told the now-famous anecdote about how I’d recognized a great eighteenth-century portrait by David hanging in an obscure library in upstate New York. He talked about how my generosity had contributed to “the cultural heritage of America.”

  Here, he tooted his own horn a little. But he deserved to. Many agreed that the collection of eighteenth-century French furniture I had bought with Ethan’s invaluable counsel rivaled even the glorious Wrightsman Rooms at t
he Metropolitan. I thought about how, just the other day, when I was on my way to a Muni board meeting, I’d stopped by the gallery and been so pleased and touched to see a group of inner-city schoolchildren standing in front of the replica of one of Marie Antoinette’s private apartments asking all sorts of questions about the beautiful room they were looking at and the ill-fated queen who had lived there. I felt I’d had a hand in opening up a new world for them.

  When Ethan sat down, I thought I was out of the woods. But no. I saw Lucius stumbling to his feet at the next table, then walking to the microphone in measured steps. I held my breath. Lucius toasting me in public was a first.

  “Jo, now don’t you give me that look!” he shouted so loud into the mike feedback ricocheted throughout the tent. Everybody laughed. “As most of you here know, the only kind of toast my wife can abide is served with butter and jam. But there comes a time in a man’s life when he has to stand up and show everyone who’s boss . . . So, Boss,” he said, looking directly at me, “tonight, at the risk of being redundant, I’m gonna tell all your pals something they already know: what a remarkable woman you are. And for once, you’re just going to have to shut up and listen. Okay?”

  Though I shook my head no, the truth is I was secretly pleased.

  As my frail husband talked about my life and how I came to be Mrs. Slater, telling that old lie about how he’d fallen for me at a dinner party given by Betty and Gil Waterman, I glanced around the room. I wondered how many people still referred to me behind my back as “the salesgirl.” To this day, the only person in the world who knew the truth about how Lucius and I really met was Lucius’s lawyer, Nate Nathaniel.

  Lucius finished by saying, “I’m grateful to you, Jo, for getting me through these godawful last few months and for being a great wife and a great woman. Here’s looking at you, kid!” The round of applause that followed was meant more for him than for me. Feeble as he was, he was a survivor. People admired that. I walked over to him, and gave him a big kiss. The room went wild.

  Once we sat down again, Dick Bromire stood up and signaled the orchestra. They played a few fanfare bars of the “Marseillaise.” At that point, I caught sight of the Countess, who was staring at me. She smiled and nodded a silent tribute. She looked so pretty, yet so forlorn.

  Two waiters wheeled a huge cake out onto the dance floor—a miniature replica of Le Petit Trianon covered in vanilla frosting.

  Everybody sang “Happy Birthday” to me, after which Dick Bromire gave the final toast of the evening. He went on about my “legendary style,” “extraordinary taste,” and “stupendous generosity,” concluding his kind remarks by raising his glass of champagne to me and addressing me directly:

  “Jo, you’re a great benefactress in all ways. I, personally, am tremendously grateful to you for your generosity to me and to Trish. In being our guest of honor tonight and in letting us celebrate your birthday, you proclaim to the world what you think of us. And let me say this . . . If we’re good enough for you, dear lady—the standard by which all elegance is measured—then we are quite simply . . . good enough! To the one and only, Jo Slater!”

  The next thing I knew, everyone was on their feet applauding me. I was so touched and pleased, I didn’t even realize I was crying. I wished my parents had lived to see me that night, being the toast of the cream of New York. My dad would’ve gotten a real kick out of it, but my mom would have been solemnly proud. I thought to myself, still with continuing amazement, Kiddo, you’re a galaxy away from that poor little hick in the sticks you used to be. How did you ever get here?

  Chapter 2

  The old saying that some people are “born in the wrong cradle” applies to me. Early on I knew I wasn’t destined to spend the rest of my life in Oklahoma City, where I was born and raised. Still, my steady progression from student to restaurant hostess to salesgirl to collector and philanthropist and, finally, to one of the grandes dames of New York is a pretty remarkable story, even if I do say so myself. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, in the wake of all that’s happened to me. Sometimes you need to go backward in order to go forward. You need to understand where you’ve been in order to make any sense of where you are.

  I was born Jolie Ann Meers, only child of Myrna and Dyson Meers of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. I have to give credit to my parents, who tried their best to raise me as a God-fearing, responsible citizen. This is not an easy task under any circumstances, but it was particularly taxing in our family, where several of our closest relatives were at least “two cards short of a full deck,” as my father used to say.

  Uncle Laddie, my mother’s brother, a funeral director, wasn’t crazy in the conventional sense. But he came within a hairsbreadth of being indicted for murder. The police suspected that he had pushed my crepe-hanging Aunt Tillie out the window of a hotel in Tulsa on New Year’s Eve, 1964. Uncle Laddie claimed she jumped and produced a suicide note that was subsequently examined by several handwriting experts with inconclusive results. We all thought he did it—and with good reason. Aunt Tillie was a font of gloom who hated life and those who enjoyed it. My mother declared that she was the perfect companion for a funeral director. My father said, “Apparently not.”

  Then there was my cousin Derek, my father’s sister’s son, who never finished high school and somehow became a millionaire. He used to give cars to perfect strangers, just like “the King,” as he referred to Elvis, who had the same birthday as Derek. When Derek got out of jail, he was still rich, which made it hard for my parents to insist that crime didn’t pay.

  My mother, Myrna, was a salesperson at Balliet’s, an upscale women’s department store in Oklahoma City. She was also an excellent seamstress and did alterations on the side to make extra money. As a teenager, she had been the runner-up in the Oklahoma State Beauty Pageant. She was still a very attractive woman, and I don’t think she quite understood how her looks had failed to purchase her a better situation in life.

  My father, a chiropractor, had a chronic roving eye. It seemed he liked aligning women’s bodies in more ways than one. Mother suffered his infidelities silently, sublimating her grief in glossy decorating magazines. Sometimes, she would sit me down beside her and we would thumb through the pages, pointing out the rooms and objects we liked best. Surprisingly, my mother had more than a provincial’s sense of style—though where she learned it, I’ll never know. The more I see, the more I think that style is like relative or perfect pitch. Some have it, some don’t. Mother was fairly sophisticated in her tastes. Relative pitch, not perfect.

  One day, when I was fourteen, she took me to an appointment she had with one of her clients, Mrs. Fortes, an oil-rich lady with a huge house. While Mother was fitting clothes on Mrs. Fortes in the bedroom, I went off exploring. I remember picking up an exotic china figurine from one of the side tables in the cavernous living room. I was examining his colorful turban when a voice across the room yelled, “Put that down!” I was so startled, I nearly dropped the little man. The voice belonged to a peeved maid who strode across the room and grabbed the figure away from me.

  “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to touch things in other people’s houses?” she said, setting it back gingerly on the table.

  She yanked me by the hand and sat me down on the sofa, spreading a big picture book that was on the coffee table across my lap.

  “There now. You just sit here and look at this ’til your mother finishes. Understand?”

  There are certain moments in life that you remember so clearly—not because they’re particularly memorable at the time, but because when you look back on them you see your destiny crystallizing. Thumbing through the pages of that book was just such a moment. It was filled with pictures of an extraordinary house, a spectacularly beautiful place. I thought that maybe God lived there. Or if He didn’t, He should.

  When it was time for Mother and me to go, I closed the book and noticed the title emblazoned on the cover in big gold letters. It was called, simply, Versailles.
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  On the way home in the car, I asked my mother what Vur-sails—as I pronounced it then—was. Typical Mother, we immediately stopped at the library and she checked out a young reader’s book for me on the history of that great palace. That night, she started reading it to me. The kings, queens, and nobles of the French court invaded my imagination like an army of archangels. After that, I devoured everything I could get my hands on on the subject. I became fascinated with the story of Marie Antoinette.

  The year I graduated from college my father had a stroke. He was partially paralyzed on his right side and couldn’t walk or talk. He sat in a wheelchair at home, seemingly quite alert despite his condition, watching television all day. He still had a twinkle in his eye. It’s odd to say, but having my father at home like that, completely dependent upon my mother, seemed to make her happier than she’d ever been—maybe because he was now hers at long last, and hers alone. She fussed over him day and night.

  Naturally, my father’s chiropractic office closed. His medical bills wiped out our savings. We got into a real financial crunch. Though I was scheduled to go to graduate school at the University of Tulsa on a scholarship, there was no way my mother could make ends meet by herself. For the time being, I abandoned my hopes of an M.A. in French history and took a job as a hostess at Burnham’s, a steak house located near the Penn Plaza. The hours were decent, the tips were great, and it wasn’t a bad job meeting and greeting the upscale crowd who dined there.