Too Much Money (23 page)

“Well, Doddsie, how nice to see you again,” said Elias in a hearty voice. “Surely you remember Mrs. Renthal. This is the famous Doddsie, who’s been at the Butterfield for, how many years is it, Doddsie?”

But Doddsie had let go of the door and turned away without acknowledging either one. Doddsie was of the old school. For him, the Butterfield was a bastion for gentlemen of old New York, where Adele Harcourt had been the only honorary female member. Doddsie, who put propriety above everything else, had never forgotten nor forgiven Elias Renthal’s reverberating fart on his exit from the Butterfield nearly eight years earlier, after he had been kicked out of the hallowed establishment by Laurance Van Degan, Lil Altemus’s brother, whose reputation in the financial world Elias had sullied.

Elias and Ruby stood in the line leading to the stairway that many people thought was the most beautiful stairway in New York. Adele Harcourt’s social secretary, Emma Peasley, a maiden lady who knew her New York genealogy, sat at a small table at the foot of the stairs and checked off the mourners, most of whom seemed to know each other, on an alphabetized guest list before they ascended to the second floor, where the reception was being held. Emma’s voice could be heard saying, “Yes, yes, Mrs. St. Vincent, go right up. Hello, yes, Mr. and Mrs. Percy Webb. Go right up. Oh, the Aksams, yes. Oh, Mrs. Altemus, how lovely. She was so fond of you.”

“I was in the room when she died,” said Lil.

“Yes, I read that in Kit Jones’s column. Go right up,” said Emma.

“Mr. and Mrs. Elias Renthal,” said Elias, walking past Emma’s table and list and ascending the stairs. “Remember these stairs, honey?” he said to Ruby. “The most beautiful staircase in New York, they used to call it, probably still do. Remember when we had it copied at Merry Hill?”

“This stairway never looked quite right in our house,” said Ruby. “It looked nouveau riche in our house.”

“Better nouveau than never, I always say,” replied Elias. He stopped on the stairs and grasped the railing.

“Are you all right, Elias?” asked Ruby.

“Yeah, fine. Maybe we should have taken the elevator.”

By that time, they were at the top of the stairs and had entered the crowd, moving through to the far side of the room. Waiters came forward with trays of champagne glasses and cucumber tea sandwiches. At the bottom of the stairs Emma was aghast. She beckoned to Doddsie. “Mr. and Mrs. Renthal crashed the reception. They walked right past the table.”

“I
WAS
hoping to see Prince Charles,” said Perla Zacharias in her charming Johannesburg accent to Ethan Trescher at the reception. “I know how close the prince and Adele Harcourt were. I was told he was coming for the funeral.” Perla Zacharias paid a fortune each year to sit next to Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace or Clarence House, whichever royal residence was available on the night of the Prince of Wales Trust benefit. She had been known to call the prince and his wife Charles and Camilla. “Oh, Camilla’s divine,” she would say. “Charles is simply mad about her. Camilla will be a marvelous queen one day.”

“No,” replied Ethan. “The prince couldn’t come. He sent the Duke and Duchess of Chatfield to represent him.”

“Oh,” said Perla. “Bunny and Chiquita are here? I long to see them. Oh, there you are, Addison. You were a splendid
usher. What was in that velvet box that you handed Lil Altemus as you were taking her up to her seat?”

“W
HO IS
that woman simply beaming at me?” asked Bunny Chatfield. “She seems to be heading in our direction.”

“Mrs. Zacharias,” replied Chiquita.

“Oh, dear. Biarritz? Fire? Death? That one? With all the money? I would never have recognized her,” said Bunny Chatfield.

“It’s the face-lift. Too extreme by far. She’s making a bee-line for us. Quick. Let’s go say hello to the Renthals. No one is talking to them,” said Chiquita, steering her husband away. “I wonder who did Ruby’s face. It’s fantastic. Whoever it is, is who I’m going to.”

The Renthals were thrilled that the Chatfields came to speak to them. They felt safe in the company of the grand English stand-ins for the Prince of Wales and his duchess. The duchess kissed Ruby on both cheeks and then did the same to Elias. “You look divine, Ruby,” said Chiquita. It was the first time they had seen each other since Ruby had been turned down for membership at the Corviglia Club in St. Moritz, where she had been proposed by the Chatfields, denied a place in the exclusive club because her husband was in prison.

“Welcome back to civilization, Elias,” said the duke, who often said the wrong things but was never corrected because of the magnificence of his title. “What was it like in prison all that time? I talked to Cudlip, who flew out on his private plane to visit you. He complimented you for not complaining and making the best of it.”

“It’s not a topic I like to discuss,” said Elias, hoping the conversation was not being overheard in the crowded room. “I’m more interested in hearing about your shoots at Deeds Castle. Are you still having them?”

“Indeed we are. As a matter of fact, now that you’re out and free to travel again, why don’t you plan on coming over on your plane to stay with us on the weekend of March twelfth? Don’t you think so, Chiquita? I have an awfully good group coming, who would be happy to see you again.”

Elias looked at Ruby. They both knew that Elias had promised Max Luby, his oldest friend, who had visited him every weekend for seven years at the facility in Las Vegas, Nevada, that he and Ruby would be present at his testimonial dinner in Brooklyn on that date. As he looked Ruby in the eye, he remembered saying to her on the plane after his release, “I’ve known Max for forty years, and I’ve never seen him so excited about anything.”

“Yes, yes, I’m sure we’d love to come, Bunny,” said Elias. “Wouldn’t we, Ruby?”

“Oh, yes, yes. It sounds divine,” replied Ruby.

Just at that moment Ethan Trescher and Doddsie walked up to the group. “Excuse me, Your Grace,” said Ethan. “I would like to speak to Mr. Renthal for a moment.”

“Can you hold it up just a bit, Trescher,” said Elias. He saw in Doddsie’s face that he and Ruby were about to be asked to leave the reception they hadn’t been invited to. “I’m going to pop in that elevator and go down to the men’s room. Excuse me, Bunny and Chiquita. I look forward to seeing you at Deeds Castle on March twelfth.

“I’ll meet you downstairs, Ruby. It’s time we were off.” Breathing heavily, he moved swiftly toward the self-service elevator, ignoring Ethan Trescher and Doddsie.

Elias took up half the space in the tiny elevator. He was devastated by the snubs at the funeral, and by the fact that Ethan Trescher and Doddsie had been about to evict him from the Butterfield Club in front of the Chatfields, the only people who had spoken to him and Ruby at the reception. His heart was beating very fast again. He was planning how he would explain
to Max Luby that he and Ruby would not be able to attend the Man of the Year dinner in Brooklyn on March 12. He held his hand over his heart until the elevator stopped on the ground floor. He pulled back the elevator gate and walked directly to the men’s room, still breathing heavily.

S
TANDING AT ONE OF THE FIVE URINALS IN THE
men’s room was Gus Bailey, who had arrived late at the reception after his cell phone call with Peter Lombardo about the dates of the depositions in his upcoming slander suit, as agreed to by Kyle Cramden’s lawyer, Win Burch. The deposition occupied his mind as he was urinating. He knew that Win Burch might reveal secrets of his life, which had nothing whatsoever to do with what he had said on Patience Longstreet’s radio show about former congressman Kyle Cramden and his relationship with the famous missing intern, Diandra Lomax.

He had not as yet gone upstairs at the Butterfield, although Emma, Adele Harcourt’s social secretary, who did not know him personally but recognized him from his television appearances, had checked off his name on the list. “I never miss reading you in
Park Avenue,”
she said when he first walked in. “I loved your articles about the Zachariases in Biarritz.”

“Thank you,” Gus had replied.

She lowered her voice, looked in both directions to be sure no one could hear her, and whispered to Gus, “Do you think Mrs. Zacharias had anything to do with the whole thing? I do.”

“There is nothing to bear out that theory,” replied Gus.

“She’s here,” said Emma in a quiet voice that only Gus
could hear. “Perla is upstairs.” Her eyes indicated the top of the beautiful staircase where the reception was going on. People always told Gus things, in whatever circumstance he was in, and Emma whispered to Gus that the Elias Renthals had crashed the reception and that Ethan Trescher and Doddsie were upstairs at that very moment to ask them to leave, as they were not friends of Adele Harcourt’s and had not been invited to this private reception.

As Gus was zipping up his fly, he turned and found himself face-to-face with Elias Renthal, who, in his haste to get to the urinal, was unbuttoning the fly buttons of his Savile Row suit from Huntsman in London as he pushed open the door. He wished that Mr. Hope-Davies, his man at Huntsman, from whom Ruby had ordered the suit, had given him a zippered fly rather than a buttoned fly to speed up the process, so badly did he have to urinate. He felt like his bladder would burst.

For Elias, already upset, Gus Bailey—who had written about his trial in
Park Avenue
, who had believed him to be guilty, and who had rerun his television show on the eight-year-old case shortly before his release from prison—seemed exactly the person he needed to attack after a day of social humiliations. His face twisted into anger, turning red. He gave out a loud, mocking laugh. “I hear that you’re being sued for eleven million dollars,” he sneered. “I hear that Kyle Cramden has got himself the meanest lawyer in the country, snake of snakes, the kind that tears people to shreds on the witness stand until they cry. They’re going to get you. They’re going to get you. They caught up with you at last.” He moved closer to Gus, breathing hot, constipated breath on him as he pointed his finger into Gus’s face and repeated, “They’re going to get you. They’re going to get you.”

“Do you know what you look like right now, Elias?” asked Gus. “You look exactly like an ex-convict who crashed a high-society
funeral reception on your first day out of prison. You’re about to be kicked out of here, if you didn’t know it already.”

“You closet fag,” said Elias, fury in his eyes and a touch of foam at the corners of his mouth.

All of a sudden, Elias, breathing heavily, put his hand over his heart again and fell back against the wall of urinals. He reached out to support himself, grabbing the flushing apparatus of the urinals on each side of him to keep from falling. His penis, which he had already taken out of his trousers, began to urinate all over him and the tiled floor of the men’s room. Later that night, Gus wrote in his personal diary, “He must have pissed at least a quart.” Elias looked beseechingly at Gus.

“What are you having, Elias? A heart attack or a stroke?” asked Gus.

Elias looked at him. His mouth was hanging open.

“To be perfectly honest with you, I’d like to just leave you here to die, but I can’t do that. I’m too fond of your wife. Here, let me help you lie down on the floor, Elias, and then I’ll go and get help,” said Gus. “You pissed all over that six-thousand-dollar suit you’re wearing. A man your age shouldn’t work himself up into this kind of rage.” He put his hands under Elias’s armpits and lowered his head and shoulders slowly to the floor. He took a stack of face towels embroidered with the initial B for Butterfield from the sink and placed them under Elias’s head as a pillow.

“Tell me one thing, Elias. What did you mean just now when you kept saying, ‘They’re going to get you’? Who’s they?”

“You’ll find out,” whispered Elias.

Gus unfolded a towel and placed it over Elias’s unbuttoned fly and soiled trousers. “Now, just lie still, Elias, and wait. I’ll get your old friend Doddsie, who speaks so highly of you, about your famous fart, to call for an ambulance, and I’ll find Ruby upstairs and bring her down here.”

Gus told Emma what had happened. He got into the elevator and went up to the second floor.

“Doddsie, my name is Gus Bailey.”

“I see your show on television, Mr. Bailey,” replied Doddsie. “I read you in
Park Avenue.”

“I was just in the men’s room downstairs and Elias Renthal has had what I think is a stroke. Emma is calling an ambulance. Have you seen Mrs. Renthal?”

Doddsie nodded with his head toward the Chatfields, who were still talking to Ruby, and Gus went over to them.

“Ruby, may I speak to you a moment, please? It’s important.”

“I’m not speaking to you, Gus Bailey,” replied Ruby. “It was disgraceful of you to run that old episode of your series about Elias just before he got out of the facility in Nevada. You’d better not let Elias see you. He’s furious with you.” Once, before Elias had gone to prison, Gus and Ruby had been friendly. It sometimes saddened her that they could no longer be friends, since they had such an intense shared piece of their pasts, but what Gus had done to Elias and the jeopardy in which he had put their social standing felt unforgivable.

“None of that matters now, Ruby. Your husband just had a stroke in the men’s room. There’s such a thing as doing too much on your first day out of prison.”

“Oh, my god. Is he all right?”

“I don’t know. Emma called an ambulance. Doddsie is already down there. I’ll take you down in the elevator.”

“Oh, my god,” said Ruby. “I knew we should have gone straight home after the reporters screamed at him coming out of the funeral. It was awful, awful. They screamed at him, ‘Is it true you had to clean toilets?’ He was so hurt.”

A siren could be heard outside. Ruby started to cry. The word went through the crowd that Elias Renthal, who had just
gotten out of prison, had had a stroke in the men’s room on the first floor and urinated all over himself. People began lining the winding stairway to watch the drama. Lil Altemus pushed her way to the railing of the stairs. “Poor Adele,” she said. “This is all people will remember about her funeral.”