27

After Sweetzer Clarke died, Matilda felt very lucky to be able to finally sell the great Fifth Avenue apartment Sweetzer had grown up in and later inherited after his mother’s death. The building had been constructed on the site of what had once been the Clarke townhouse, and the apartment, forty-one rooms on the top three floors, had been built to the extravagant specifications of Sweetzer’s father in the late 1920s as part of the transaction for selling the land and tearing down the Clarke house to make way for the building. Matilda and Sweetzer and their children lived there for nineteen years, first closing up rooms and then whole floors as the cost of maintaining the vast establishment drained their steadily diminishing resources.

When the lawyers handling Sweetzer’s estate told Matilda that she would have to give up either the apartment in town or the place in the country, she said, without a second thought, that she would give up the apartment, as life without Malvern, the Clarkes’ place in Bedford, would have been absolutely unthinkable for Matilda, who raised Norwich terriers and rode horses every day of her life. Her two sons had married early and advantageously and retreated to other parts of the country, away from the sight of their mother in decline.

At the time of Sweetzer’s death, forty-one-room apartments were not in great demand, and the apartment stood empty for several years. Finally, in desperation, Matilda sold it for a negligible sum to someone whose name she pretended she could never remember. The problem had been getting the purchaser, Elias Renthal, approved by the board of directors of the building, and it was only the purchaser’s guarantee, in writing, that he would not break up the apartment into smaller apartments that finally assured his acceptance into a building that otherwise was deeply selective about what Matilda called “the sort of people” who lived there.

The first time Lil Altemus visited Matilda’s new small flat, which she had taken for the few nights a week she spent in the city, she pronounced it charming, calling it Matilda’s pied à terre, as if Matilda had done something “frightfully clever,” in abandoning such an enormous establishment for something so very manageable. But Matilda brushed aside all compliments on its charm, or coziness, a word she despised, referring to it always as “my little hovel,” because it was, at least in her eyes, a little hovel compared to the grandeur of her former home that was now being done up by the Renthals. She was often heard to exclaim, “The things they’ve done to it!” about the new owners, rolling her eyes and shaking her head, although she had not seen it, did not know anyone who had, and knew, from personal experience, that Cora Mandell was not only the best decorator in New York but had been her own decorator when she still had money.

“Sweetzer left me high and dry,” said Matilda. “And I was a very good wife to Sweetzer, except for that one time. I had to auction off all the French furniture and sell the apartment. I wasn’t doing all that because I chose to live a simpler life, as Dolly De Longpre, dear sweet Dolly, told her readers. I sold everything to survive.”

“But, darling Matilda,” cried Lil. “We’ve been friends all our lives. You could have come to me, and I would have seen that Laurance took care of you.”

“Oh, no. That sort of thing never works out,” said Matilda. “I’m not a charity case. And, besides, along came Rochelle Prud’homme, and she put me on the board of directors of Prud’homme Products, and pays me a salary. Now, I know you don’t give Rochelle the right time, Lil, and won’t have her to your house, but she happens to be a damn nice woman, and a damn rich woman, and a damn successful woman in the hairdryer business. They call her the Petite Dynamo. All she wanted was to become a queen in society, and she couldn’t get to first base. She needed me to open some doors, and I needed her, and everybody’s happy. What Ezzie Fenwick calls tit for tit.”

“But what in the world do you do on the board of directors?” asked Lil. “You’ve never worked a day in your life.”

“I don’t do anything,” answered Matilda. “I just go to meetings several times a year and sit there, and Rochelle nods to me which way to vote.”

“Then why does Mrs. Prud’homme want you on her board of directors?” asked Lil.

“Oh, Lil,” answered Matilda, as if the answer were so apparent the question needn’t have been asked.

“Why?” insisted Lil.

“For the same reason Elias Renthal has your brother and Loelia Manchester and Lord Biedermeier on the board of Miranda Industries. We add class.”

“Heavens!” said Lil, clapping her hands, and the two old friends roared with laughter.