Social Crimes Read online

  In a town like Oklahoma City, which is full of fast-food restaurants, Burnham’s was considered a fancy joint. It was decorated with wood paneling, ersatz Remington sculptures of cowboys, and reproduction C.M. Russell paintings of migrating Indians in the old west. The clientele consisted mainly of businessmen and out-of-towners.

  I’d been working at Burnham’s for about eight months when, on April Fool’s Day, 1974, a regular customer named John Shanks called to say he would be late and I was to take good care of his guest, a Mr. Lucius Slater, when he arrived. A little before eight, a silver-haired man with deep-set navy blue eyes and an elegant bearing walked up to the hostess station. He was one of those people who fills a room with his presence, a man of substance. He approached me and said, “Good evening. I’m meeting Mr. Shanks for dinner,” in a husky, cultured voice.

  I figured he was from back east. Though he carried himself well, there was a certain diffidence about him that I found instantly likable. He had none of the swagger of his absent host.

  “Mr. Slater?” I said. He nodded with a hint of surprise. “Mr. Shanks just called to say he was running late. Would you like to have a drink at the bar or would you prefer to be seated?”

  “I’ll go to the table, thank you.”

  I picked up a menu and showed him to Mr. Shank’s regular table in a quiet corner of the restaurant directly under a painting of two Indians on horseback in the snow. He sat down on the red leather banquette. I handed him the menu and asked if I could get him a drink. He folded his hands in a little cathedral and thought for a moment.

  “I think I’m in the mood for a kir royale.”

  I had no idea what that was. “I beg your pardon?”

  He smiled. “Champagne with a little crème de cassis?”

  I’d never heard of it.

  “I don’t think we have that, sir.”

  “All right. Then just a glass of plain champagne, please.”

  “I think you have to order a whole bottle, sir. We don’t serve champagne by the glass.”

  “Fine. I’ll order a bottle. Will you help me drink it?” He flashed me a quick smile but lowered his eyes. I sensed the question had just slipped out, that it wasn’t calculated.

  I replied, “I wish I could.” My response wasn’t calculated, either. To this day I don’t know how I had the nerve to say it. I’d never flirted with a customer before.

  He looked up at me again. “Why can’t you?”

  I felt myself blushing to my toes. “Oh, I just . . . can’t.”

  “Tell you what. I’ll order a bottle anyway and maybe you’ll change your mind. Maybe?”

  “Maybe.”

  He stared at me with those wonderful wise eyes of his. I could tell he liked me. And I liked him, even though he was obviously much older than I was and, indeed, much older than anyone I’d ever dated. I figured he was probably close to fifty or fifty-five, which was nearly my dad’s age. Probably that was part of the initial attraction. I don’t think I’d really come to grips with how frightened I was of losing my dad to another stroke at that point. Maybe falling in love with Lucius was a way of holding on to my father.

  Years later, when Lucius and I reminisced about our first meeting, he maintained he knew he was going to marry me that very night. I could never have predicted it then, and as my mother always warned me, the course of true love never does run smooth. Lucius came to Oklahoma City more and more often on business. He always dined at Burnham’s. One night he dined there all alone and asked me out. On our first date he told me he was in the process of separating from his wife, to whom he had been married for twenty-one years. According to him, the divorce was amicable, and the only reason he and his wife had stayed together was on account of their son, Lucius Slater Jr., who was eighteen years old (only about five years younger than I) and about to enter his freshman year at college. I was satisfied he was telling me the truth. We began seeing each other regularly, and before long, we fell madly in love.

  Lucius assured me his divorce was proceeding as planned and he begged me to move to New York. Though I longed to go with him, I didn’t relish carrying on with a married man. It went against my moral grain. I didn’t fancy joining the ranks of “other women,” like the ones who had made my mother so unhappy all those years before my father got sick.

  I quickly learned, however, that when Lucius Slater wanted something, he wouldn’t stop until he got it. He made it very clear he wanted me. I wanted him just as badly. For starters, we were physically crazy about each other. The chemistry between us was so intense that when he took me to Paris to show me the city of my dreams, we spent the first two days in bed and I saw nothing but four walls and a ceiling. But sex wasn’t the only thing that bound us together. We seemed to have the same rhythms, likes, and dislikes. Paris was where we really got to know each other.

  For a naïve young woman from Oklahoma City, the City of Light was a revelation. I was bowled over by its luminous beauty. Lucius knew his way around and he spoke French. But I knew a lot of things that he didn’t. For me, it was kind of like visiting a huge historical theme park where I finally got to see all the places I had read about and studied. When he took me out to Versailles, for example, he was amazed at how much I knew about it. I managed to get by on my college French and found I had a real affinity for the language. I was speaking with a credible accent by the time we left.

  On our last night together, we had dinner in one of Lucius’s favorite little bistros. He took my hand across the table and said: “I’ve got it all worked out . . . You move to New York. I’ll get you an apartment. The minute I’m divorced, we’ll be married.” He reached into his pocket and slipped a diamond ring on my finger.

  “What about my mom and dad? I can’t just leave them.”

  “I’ll see to it that your parents are very well provided for. I’d planned to do that anyway—even if you decide not to come to New York. That is, if you’ll allow me to.”

  I thought he was the sexiest, kindest, most wonderful man I had ever known. I nodded like an obedient little girl. There was no point in protesting. I wanted him. And I wanted another life.

  After a tearful good-bye to my parents, I moved to New York to be with Lucius. My father was almost completely out of it at this point, and my mother was too tired and too concerned about my father to press me about where I was getting the money. She was grateful for the help I was giving her. I’m sure she knew I had a “sugar daddy,” as she called rich men, but she didn’t ask any questions. She just wished me luck and told me I deserved everything good in the world.

  Lucius set me up in a nice little apartment in a modern building on Third Avenue and Sixty-fourth Street. I got a job working at Tiffany’s in the silver department. On the application, I wrote Josephine Meers instead of Jolie Ann. I liked people to call me Jo, however, because it was what Lucius always called me, plus it sounded so much more sophisticated, like Josephine.

  New York was as intoxicating to me as Paris, but in a completely different way. I went to the opera, the ballet, the symphony, the theater. I visited all the museums—the Metropolitan, the Modern, the Frick, the Museum of Natural History, the Municipal Museum.

  But the thing I loved best about the city were the antiques shops and the auction houses where I could actually touch and examine some of the greatest furniture and paintings ever created. I was astonished to learn that one could actually buy pieces made by the great ébénistes, such as Jacob and Riesener, and that there were people in New York who had collections rivaling any museum in the world.

  Lucius told me about a few very expensive antiques shops and art galleries that were tucked away in private houses with no sign on the door indicating they were there. It began to dawn on me that New York was a city where many of the things one wanted to see, like many of the people one wanted to know, were hidden from view.

  The settlement agreement was all drawn up when Ruth, Lucius’s wife, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I felt ten times more guilty
about her than Lucius, who had been openly scornful of his wife: “Ruth’s idea of stimulating dinner conversation is assisted suicide versus managed health care.” That was the one thing I really didn’t like about Lucius—the disrespect he had for Ruth.

  I, on the other hand, obsessed over the idea that I had somehow caused her illness. I pictured Ruth as a worthy, if dull woman, certainly undeserving of such a terrible blow. But Lucius swore to me she didn’t have a clue about us. I told Lucius that I wouldn’t see him until her fate had been decided. I even urged him to try to get back together with her. He assured me she didn’t want a reconciliation.

  The progress of Ruth Slater’s grave condition gave me a good idea of how desperate women in New York were to snag a rich man. Though I refused to see Lucius, he called me every day with fresh tales of how several of Ruth’s friends, both married and single, had made passes at him already, veiling their real purpose in supposed concern for Ruth. They wept with her at her bedside, only to wink at Lucius behind her back. He caught one of her very best friends having a confidential chat with her doctor, trying to ascertain how long she had to live. Two months after she was diagnosed, Ruth died. Lucius was on the open market.

  A widower is the Holy Grail of eligibles. His fortune is still intact, and men who have liked being married once tend to want to be married again. It is the state of married bliss, as much as the deceased, for which the widower presumably mourns. No decent interval had passed before Lucius was attacked by a swarm of hopeful females anxious to be the next Mrs. Slater. But he kept his word to me.

  Now Lucius had to figure out a way to introduce me into his life without ever letting on we’d been lovers for the past year. It was at this juncture that I learned how very crafty my future husband was. He worked out an ingenious plan.

  He arranged for me to be invited to a dinner party at Betty and Gil Waterman’s house. Then he announced that we had met there for the first time.

  “Betty introduced us. She seated us next to each other and I was madly in love by dessert,” was his line. And naturally, no one believed him. Clever New Yorkers knew better: They knew that Lucius Slater had really met me while I was working behind the counter at Tiffany’s. There was this urban legend of how Lucius went in to buy a silver pen and how I recognized him from a picture I’d cut out from Fortune magazine on America’s leading businessmen. Apparently, I had then slipped him my phone number and subsequently snared him with certain celebrated sexual skills. All his friends referred to me as “the salesgirl” behind my back.

  Lucius made me promise one thing: “If anyone ever asks you if you worked at Tiffany’s, you have to deny it,” he told me.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s true. And because it’s so easy to find out you worked there.”

  I was still perplexed.

  Lucius explained: “It’s simple. If we give the gossips something really good to gossip about, they won’t look beyond their noses. You deny you were a salesgirl. They’ll find out you were. They’ll think they’ve discovered the deep dark truth about you and be so bitchy about that, they won’t bother to dig any deeper. Take my word for it: The lie within the lie always works in this town.”

  Lucius was right. His strategy was on the mark. No one suspected we’d been lovers before Ruth died and that he’d brought me to New York as his mistress. We were married in a small ceremony at the Fifth Avenue apartment of his great friends June and Charlie Kahn. The only other people present were his son, Little Lucius, Betty and Gil Waterman, and Nate Nathaniel, Lucius’s lawyer and friend.

  My father was too ill to attend. Though Lucius offered to fly my mother to New York in a private plane, she declined, saying she didn’t want to leave my dad. However, I sensed there was a deeper reason. She didn’t really approve of Lucius or of me for having married him. She had an idea of the real story and I remember her telling me then, “Watch your step, Jolie Ann. What they’ll do to one, they’ll do to another.”

  The fact that people made fun of my humble background irked me at first. But—and as I said, in New York nothing counts until the but—I learned that I was far from an anomaly. Very few people in so-called New York Society were to the manner born. In fact, it was chock-full of former salesgirls, secretaries and stewardesses and ex-hookers who, like myself, had married rich men. Caesar’s wives, I called us, because our husbands’ power made us above contempt (if not suspicion)—at least to our faces.

  The great sorrow of my life was that Lucius and I never had a child. I had wanted one, but he didn’t. I thought it had to do with the fact that his only child had been such a disappointment to him. Whenever I brought up the subject of having a baby, Lucius would grow hostile and distant, saying he didn’t want another enormous responsibility. “You have a duty to your flesh and blood no matter what,” he said. “When you get to be my age, you’ll realize you can’t just have a child without dedicating your life to it. And I don’t want to dedicate my life to another kid.”

  I resigned myself to the sacrifice, consoling myself with the rather absurd and erroneous notion that the lack of a child would somehow keep our marriage ever young and vital.

  Even though I was coasting into middle age—not the easiest time for a woman—I have to say I loved my life and considered myself extraordinarily lucky. Though I tried never to take anything for granted, after twenty years of marriage, I naturally assumed I was on a set course, that whatever happened to Lucius and me in terms of health and the usual ups and downs of everyday life, we were a team: I would always take care of him, and he would always take care of me. I thought I was in the right cradle at last.

  Given all that, it’s still hard for me to believe that I, Jo Slater, supposed great connoisseur of furniture, failed to detect the deep and ancient rot beneath the veneer in my very own house.

  Chapter 3

  Our house in Southampton was a mammoth brown-shingled “summer cottage,” as they were once called, located on five acres of land on First Neck Lane, about an eighth of a mile from the ocean and the Beach Club. Built at the turn of the century for a prosperous New York lawyer named Thaddeus McClelland, the huge beetle-shaped house had a long, wide porch enhanced by a row of massive white cylindrical columns. The four-story interior boasted large entertaining rooms and comfortable quarters, plus a rabbit warren of servants’ rooms and a huge kitchen and butler’s pantry. Lucius and I had purchased it from a busted bond trader years ago, mainly for the grounds, which were spacious, lush, and green, planted with stately old shade trees that towered above the lawn. It was originally called “Three Fountains” but Lucius renamed it “Beer Hall,” mainly to tweak the sensibilities of some of our stuffier friends. He found Southampton a little pretentious sometimes.

  The morning after my birthday party, the phone started ringing at eight o’clock. For me, big parties were generally much more fun the next day when I rehashed the details with pals. Everyone who called pronounced the evening a great success—even Betty—which in New York, oddly enough, has nothing to do with whether or not it was fun. It was simply the place to be, which is what counts.

  After breakfast, I wrote a thank-you note to Trish Bromire and had it hand-delivered immediately, along with a basket of flowers from the garden. (I had already sent her an antique gold box to thank her before the evening. Giving and receiving pretty presents is something our little group loves to do.) Early on in my New York life, I’d changed my handwriting from the loopy script I’d learned in public school to a breezy boarding school print that resembled Clara Wilman’s. Lucius told me handwriting was like an accent; it gave your background away. He was conscious of such things in others, but oblivious to them in himself. His own handwriting was atrocious.

  Since his heart attack, Lucius and I had occupied separate bedrooms. I insisted he take over the former master bedroom because it was so cheerful with its crisp blue and white decor and elongated bay windows overlooking the garden. On a clear day a ribbon of ocean was visible in the distance. Luc
ius usually stayed in bed until ten or so, having breakfast and reading the papers, but this morning he was not in his room. I found him downstairs in the library, seated behind the desk, on the phone. He peered at me over the tops of his spectacles and motioned me to come in and sit down.

  “So how’s the birthday girl?” he said, hanging up the phone.

  “Everyone loved the party.”

  “The hell with everybody. Did you love it?”

  “I did. I really did. I especially loved your toast. Why are you up so early?”

  “Is it early? By the way, Nate’s Fedexing some stuff out to me this morning. I need to sign it and send it back today.”

  Nate was Nathaniel P. Nathaniel, Lucius’s lawyer. It was he who had drawn up the harsh prenuptial agreement in which I waived all my rights to Lucius’s estate should we divorce or should Lucius die. He bet Lucius I wouldn’t sign it. But, of course, I did. I wasn’t interested in Lucius’s money—I didn’t even know he had a fortune in the beginning. But Nate didn’t trust me. I think he was surprised when I put up no protest whatsoever. I wanted Lucius to know in no uncertain terms that I had not married him for his money. Having lost face, Nate told Lucius in confidence to watch out for me nonetheless.

  “I know her type,” he had said. “She’ll try to change it in a few years. Mark my words.”

  Naturally, Lucius repeated this remark to me. I vowed to myself then and there that I would never, ever try to change that agreement. I was bound and determined to prove Nathaniel P. Nathaniel, Esq. wrong. There were even times when I prayed Lucius would lose all his money just so I could show everyone that I had once, did now, and would forever love my husband for himself, and himself alone.