Thursday lunch
CUSTOM DICTATED THAT NONMEMBERS OF THE COLONY CLUB USE THE side entrance on 62nd Street just west of Park Avenue.
“Daisy’s meeting us up in ‘Strangers,’” Mary said while Rannie held out a hand to help her mother-in-law from the cab.
Strangers’ Dining Room. Ah yes. Such a welcoming name.
Mary swiveled her legs around and hoisted herself up, wincing slightly as she did. Then slipping her arm through Rannie’s, she proceeded gingerly to the building in the cautious way of elderly ladies who had yet to break a hip and intended to keep it that way. “Don’t you look darling. I love that suit on you.”
They were both in red, Mary in a short-sleeved dress, Rannie in a faux-Chanel braid-trim jacket and kick-pleat skirt—her interview outfit.
“Good. We’re right on time.” Mary checked the clock by the elevator. “Twelve-thirty on the dot. I hope you’re hungry.”
Behind its dignified four-story Georgian facade, the Colony offered its twenty-five hundred or so members, all ladies with a capital “L,” a well-stocked library, sitting parlors, a card room, a sweeping ballroom for weddings and coming-out parties, a pool and gymnasium that put Chaps’s vaunted facilities to shame, beautiful rooms for overnight guests, and a rarefied, Republican atmosphere.
Daisy Satterthwaite, at a table by a large window set in an arch, acknowledged their presence by lifting an empty martini glass and waggling the fingers of her other hand, which held an unlit cigarette. “Over here!” she called in a husky smoker’s voice.
As they made their way to the table, Mary stopped more than once to greet friends—“girls,” she still called them—many from her days at Chapin and Smith. Like Mary, these women came from families so blue-blooded that many of their last names had once been Manhattan telephone exchanges. Rhinelanders. Schuylers. Lehighs. “A forest of family trees” was the way Edith Wharton, a founding member, had described the club’s membership.
“Forgive me for getting a little head start. I’ve already ordered martinis for you.” Daisy was dressed in a double-breasted linen coat dress in a strange color that called to mind infant diarrhea. There was a stain on the collar.
As Mary and Rannie sat down in two Chippendale-style chairs, three more martini glasses arrived.
“Rannie, Mims told me you suspect murder! Now wouldn’t that beat everything! So unattractive and grisly!” Daisy said with unconcealed glee followed by a wheezy, deep-lung cough and a generous sip from her martini glass.
“Mims, I remember necking with Larry when we were teenagers on Fisher’s Island. He was damn cute.”
Daisy Satterthwaite had short, coarse, dyed-blond hair; a deeply lined face; and a perpetual tan because, she once told Rannie, “Tan fat looks so much better than pasty white fat.” The gold buttons on her dress strained across her bustline and were nearly identical to the gold earrings she was wearing.
“So? You want all the dirt about Larry and Laura Scales.”
Rannie laughed. “So much for chitchat.”
“Don’t be embarrassed, Rannie dear. Daisy adores to dish.”
“I won’t deny it. I always remember Alice Roosevelt’s motto—she was a member here. ‘If you can’t say something nice about somebody, then come sit next to me.’” Daisy coughed again, then continued. “I was crazy about Laura Scales. Simply crazy. Only woman I knew whose luck with men was almost as bad as mine. I’ve been divorced three times. Laura only twice.”
Rannie found herself sitting up straighter while she and Mary listened to Daisy. One thing about Wasps, they had terrific posture.
“We met at Foxcroft. She was a year older, from the South, and took me under her wing. Foxcroft back then belonged to the Southern girls, it was their school; they were the most popular and tended to look down at us Yankees. But Laura was a smoker and so was I. We used to sneak out to the stables, nearly burned them to the ground once. We became best friends.”
The trip to a buffet table laden with silver chafing dishes interrupted conversation, which continued to remain on hiatus while everyone ate, Daisy with gusto, Mary only nibbling. The Colony chicken with vegetables that Rannie selected, while unexceptional, was far tastier than the grim fare served chez Lorimer.
From where she sat, Rannie could see the beautiful loggia that adjoined the dining room. She wished it was warm enough to eat out there surrounded by frescos of birds—cormorants, flamingos, parrots, all painted in a vaguely Chinese style and in intoxicating shades of blues, yellows, greens, scarlets. So unlike the understated decor of the rest of the club, so giddy and beguiling.
Daisy reclaimed her unlit cigarette, which she’d placed beside her dessert fork as if it were another piece of flatware. “Christ! These idiotic laws! I tell a much better story when I’m smoking…. Anyway, I was in Laura’s first wedding, to a boy from Richmond, Virginia. Henry Shackelford. Lovely but light on his feet. A fairy. Laura claimed they had sex twice the whole time they were married and I have no reason to doubt her word. The most well-moisturized man I ever saw. Not a wrinkle. Not one!” Daisy laughed raucously. “Finally ran off to Palm Springs with someone in the same eating club at Princeton. Cap and Gown, I think.” Daisy stamped out her cigarette on an empty butter plate as if she’d actually smoked it and had barely raised her arm before the waiter nodded and appeared with another martini along with Rannie and Mary’s order of coffee. “After that, Laura became involved with a married man—Ted Scales. Plenty of sex with him, puh-lenty, and after eons of carrying on, he finally leaves his wife to marry Laura. And what does she do? Divorces him within a year! No fun anymore for either of them! Can you stand it?” Daisy looked around the table, clearly delighted. “So she moved here and met Larry. That’s what I loved about Laura. She was a little crazy. She really was.
“I brought some things to show you, keepsakes Laura left me.” From a scuffed navy leather purse with a bamboo handle and knob closing, Daisy produced a velvet jeweler’s bag with drawstrings. She handed it to Rannie who was surprised by its heaviness.
Loosening the drawstrings, Rannie let a disk of jade, the size of a blini pancake, fall into her palm. The shade of green was so pale that it approached white. A Chinese dragon was etched deeply into the surface, its eyes almost comically fierce, a small globe held in its mouth. “She was wearing this in one of the photos you showed me,” Rannie said to Mary.
Sipping her coffee, Mary lifted her shoulders in a gesture that implied she didn’t recall.
“Larry gave it to her. She loved dragons. He used to call her his Dragon Lady.” Daisy rummaged around in her purse and found a red leather box with gold edging that she flipped open. Inside was a gold ring of a dragon’s head with tiny ruby eyes. “Also from Larry,” she said. “These, too.” There were several stick pins ornamented with dragons. They lay on a bed of cotton in a box from a London antiques shop.
Daisy sighed and replaced everything in her purse. “He was a thoughtful man, and they loved each other. Larry got a kick out of Laura. She was good fun. If Larry wanted to go rafting down some river in South America, Laura was game. It was Laura’s only grown-up—” Daisy interrupted herself. “—oh, I despise the word ‘relationship,’ but that’s what it was.”
“Why did it end?” Rannie asked.
Daisy fell silent.
“I always assumed it was Larry,” Mary put in, as if providing her friend with an opening. “There were a lot of ladies who liked him.”
“Well, Larry did end it. But not for the reason you think.”
Both Mary and Rannie set down their cups of coffee and waited.
“Daisy, is that all you’re going to say?” Mary was clearly exasperated. “After Rannie raced down from Harlem to have lunch? When did you suddenly become so tactful?”
“Laura hadn’t been feeling well,” Daisy offered.
Mary nodded. “I remember she was looking awful. Puffy. I thought maybe after he called it off, she was drinking.”
Daisy laughed. “No, Mims. That’s my cure for a broken heart…. My cure for just about anything, come to think of it!” Daisy drained her glass as if to prove the point. “Laura was gaining weight but not from booze. One day we were in a dressing room at Saks, and I remember saying to her that her boobs looked so much bigger.”
“Daisy, please. Stick to Larry. Nobody’s interested in Laura’s bra size.”
Rannie touched her mother-in-law’s arm gently to silence her. Rannie was beginning to see where Daisy Satterthwaite was heading.
“Larry wanted Laura to remain in New York with everything exactly as it had been.” Daisy stressed those last few words. “Just the two of them, spending lots of time with each other but keeping separate apartments. Laura didn’t want that anymore. Things had changed. So she moved back South, to Asheville, North Carolina.”
“She was pregnant, wasn’t she?” Rannie said.
Daisy nodded. “Yup. Preggers.” She paused. “I know they’re both dead and buried…well, that’s not exactly true, Larry’s dead and eventually he’ll be buried…. But I’ve never told a soul about this before. And I have a big mouth; you needn’t pretend otherwise, Mims.”
“That’s absolutely true, dear. I’m amazed by your silence all these years.” Mary lifted her coffee cup in salute to her friend.
Half an hour later, on the Madison Avenue bus, heading uptown from the Colony, Rannie mulled over the rest of what Daisy had divulged. Actually, to be more accurate, she hadn’t divulged anything else; instead, Daisy simply continued to nod whenever the answer was “yes” to one of Rannie’s questions. All Rannie could piece together was that Mr. Tutwiler wasn’t enthusiastic about becoming a husband or father. Laura, on the other hand, considered the pregnancy something that was meant to be. She returned home to have her baby and that’s where she’d remained.
Tut’s indifference to having a family of his own disappointed Rannie. By her calculation, he was nowhere near codger-dom, so for him was it a matter of, “Yes, I like kids but only from nine to five”? To be so selfishly set in his ways lessened Tut in her eyes.