THE WEDDING wasn’t going to turn out to be all that modest, Caroline realized as the date neared. Cam Beckett had told Henry that the family trust could come up with three thousand dollars for “such an important event.” And then word got around, in Lakeville and in neighboring Salisbury and Sharon, that the daughter of the late President was the mother of the groom. It was even rumored that the widow herself would turn up for the wedding of her dashing grandson—after all, Lakeville was only an hour away from Hyde Park.
Friends popped up, resourceful friends, anxious to help; many of them volunteering to put up for Friday and Saturday night members of the wedding party, or even just plain guests from out of town. “In Lakeville, guests-from-out-of-town means practically everybody,” Caroline chatted to Henry about their home town with its twenty-five hundred inhabitants.
She sat allocating expected guests to hostesses, all details carefully logged in her thick white-leather register designated to keep a record of everything that pertained to the wedding. Already a half-dozen pages listed presents and the addresses of the friends and acquaintances who sent them. Preponderantly, they came from friends of the groom. That was to be expected. Henry looked over his sister’s shoulder. “Caroline, you will be glad to know that you will begin married life owning three toasters.”
“Yes. I’m beginning to hope that somebody will send us some bread. Have you counted the pitchers?”
“What did Mrs. Bennett—Rachel—contribute?”
“The honeymoon. Sweet. I persuaded Danny to take our two weeks in Scotland. He’s never been. We’ll fly Pan Am on the twentieth. Wish you were coming too, Henry. No! That isn’t a proper thought for a honeymoon. I’m glad you won’t be there, Henry!” She laughed and went to answer the telephone in the study.
Henry could hear her talking to Cam Beckett. The conversation ended and she returned to the living room. “He is a sweetheart. If I hadn’t decided on Danny, I’d have proposed to him.”
Henry said that conceivably Mrs. Beckett would have been uncooperative.
“She certainly hasn’t been uncooperative about the wedding.” The Becketts were moving into the guest house on their property, vacating the five-bedroom house for Mrs. Bennett and her retinue. “I wish we could think of something really nice to do for them.”
“Maybe I can persuade Henry Luce to put Mr. Beckett on the cover of Time?”
“Yes, Henry, that would be very nice. ‘Portrait of a Connecticut Yankee.’ ‘New England Lawyer Lightens the Load of Orphaned Smith Grad Marrying into Royal Family.’ How’m I doing, Henry?” She scratched an entry into the wedding-present list.
“Fair. How many people is Rachel inviting to her party on Friday?”
“Danny said she didn’t place any limit on it. I shouldn’t think all that many people would want to come in on Friday for a noon Saturday wedding. It means finding someplace around here to spend the night. My invitation list is only about forty, counting Smithies. Danny, needless to say, is inviting half the Yale class of 1950.—Henry, I haven’t told you about Madame Landowska.”
“Don’t tell me she’s coming? Will she bring her biographers? The studio technicians?”
“Henry, quiet. No. Actually, I rather hoped she would come. Every now and then … did you read the Time magazine article about her? Dumb, of course you read it. Did you do any legwork on it?”
“Actually I did. I went and spent three hours with Denise Restout, her librarian, researcher, counselor and cook. She’s not yet thirty, you know. I gave Max five thousand words of Landowskiana I got from Denise.”
“Well then you know she has been known to attend a party, though maybe only one every couple of years, and usually it’s a party for the fiftieth anniversary, or whatever, of a Caruso or Schnabel type, you know. But she’s been nice to me since I was ten and she made me play on her Pleyel harpsichord. She would just sit there and mumble in French to Denise, and Denise would then tell me what I was doing wrong, and the old lady would just nod. It is such a glorious sound and when she plays her fingers are like little pistons, straight up and down. So anyway, I thought: Why not ask?”
“How’d she take it?”
“It was wonderful. She got up from the chair and sat down at her harpsichord. You know, the famous one, yes, the Pleyel, and she played something very simple, not anything I knew or recognized. Just a couple of minutes, then she told me it was an epithalamium—she taught me that word, taught it to me in French, Henry—a lyrical wedding ode. It was written for her by Poulenc, who was just a young man, as a tribute to her husband when he died in 1919.”
“What did she say about the wedding?”
“She said,” Caroline’s voice was excited, “she said no, she would not come. But that she would give me a wedding present. On Thursday or Friday before the wedding I can bring up to eight people to her house, and she will play for us, for one hour. Henry! A private concert by Wanda Landowska! How do you like that!” She was radiant. The telephone rang; she darted out of the room and was back in a minute or two and returned distractedly to the acceptance list she had been discussing. “Yes, I told you Danny was inviting half your class.”
“What’s the matter with the other half of the class of 1950?” Henry got up from the floor. “There,” he said, putting down the scissors. “That’s the lot for today. God knows how many more packages will arrive tomorrow. But you’ll be on your own, Carol. I leave for New York after supper.” Impulsively, Caroline got up and embraced her brother. She hung on to him for a full minute.
Mrs. Bennett had been in residence at the Becketts’ for two days before her party began. For it, she brought in caterers from New York. A large tent, in red and white vaulted stripes, materialized on the lakeside lawn of the Becketts’. Inside the tent were chairs and tables for two hundred guests, a wooden platform for ten musicians, a substantial dance floor, clusters of roses and chrysanthemums and azaleas punctuating the seemingly endless circular buffet.
Cocktails were served in the Beckett house from two bars. The guests began to flow in at seven. By eight, the older generation was overwhelmed. Jeff Lowry suggested to Danny that Zeta Psi could proceed to do its business—“we’ve got a quorum!” Harriet bounced about, a pinball touching every base. They filled the house’s rooms, upstairs and downstairs. The buzz of animated conversation became seamless, as incessantly exuberant in the little study downstairs as in the little drawing room on the second floor.
—“She is ever so pretty, Rachel. And the expression on her face is heavenly.”
“What else would you expect? She spent the entire summer sprinkling holy water on Mexican orphans. You would look heavenly too, Alice, if you did that.”
—“I don’t mind telling you, Jim, that girl is something else. And she adores me. But that doesn’t surprise you, does it, Jim? I mean—Jim, do you adore me?”
—“Gus, cut it out. You’re making me sick. Come to think of it, you’ve made me feel sick every one of the five hundred times I’ve been with you in the past four years.”
—“So what I’m gonna do, Johnny, is—Listen. Well, get closer then, I’m not going to go to a loudspeaker t’tell you. What I’m gonna do is spend the night at Millbrook with the Abbotts, then I’ll pick you up at the Coleys’ at—exactly, exactly 10:25. That way we’ll get to the church by 10:40 which is when we have to begin ushering the—ushering the—Aw, screw you, Johnny. Can you remember just one thing: 10:25? At the Coleys’?…
—He pressed her hand. “You having fun, doll?”
Caroline nodded. “As long as you’re here, Danny, I’m having fun.”
The party was down to the twenty or thirty bitter-enders. The bandleader sent in his question: Did Mrs. Bennett want the musicians to go beyond one o’clock? The same messenger who brought back the word (“No”) then went to Danny and whispered to him that his mother wished to see him right away in the main house. “In her sitting room.”
Danny got up, clutched his glass, thought better of it and left it on the table. “Be right back,” he said to Gus and Amy.
He walked up the two flights of stairs to the sitting room. “Hi, Mom, terrific party—”
Silent, she motioned him to the chair. He stopped talking. His eyes looked furtively around the small room with its dressing table, armchair, and couch.
“Somebody has stolen my necklace.”
Danny shook his head. “Which necklace?”
“What do you mean, which necklace. The one I was wearing tonight. The one Harry gave me. My diamond necklace.”
“When did you take it off? Why did you take it off?”
“Because it was irritating me,” she barked. “I have a little rash back there,” she pointed.
“Are you absolutely sure, Mom, that you had it on tonight?”
“Sure I had it on?” Rachel Bennett was incredulous. “Are you drunk, Danny? I could hardly imagine having it on, or imagine having taken it off before dinner—”
“Have you looked everywhere?”
“Well,” her eyes were spitting out contempt for her only son, her stupid son. “No, I haven’t looked everywhere. For instance, I haven’t looked in the coffeepot downstairs. I haven’t looked inside the bassoon or whatever that thing is they’re blowing into down there.
“The questions you ask! When I took it off before dinner I stuck it the only place I ever stick it”—she pointed to a small velvet jewel case sitting on the dresser. “I put it in that case and stuck the case in that drawer.” She opened the drawer in question, shut it, opened it, shut it, opened it, finally slamming it shut. “Obviously somebody stole it.”
“Mom, I feel terrible about this, but what—”
“We are talking about a piece of jewelry worth fifty thousand dollars.”
“Is it insured?”
For a moment, Rachel Bennett calmed down. “Yes. Of course. But not for its present value.… But that’s not the point. We have to do something about it.”
“What? I mean, Mom, exactly what?”
She gritted her teeth. “I’m going to go and talk to Cam Beckett.”
“Mom, he’s undoubtedly asleep. And if he isn’t, what could he do? And besides, Mom, he might feel a little guilty just because it’s, well, his house.… Is it his servants around, or people you brought from New York?”
“Hal. Al, Cal, whatever his name, he’s with the Becketts. The rest were with the caterers, except, of course, for Helen.… Obviously Helen didn’t do it. Why should she wait eight years, if she was going to steal my necklace—she’s been with us eight years.” Impulsively Rachel got up, opened the door to the little study and called out to straggling members of the staff on the floor below. “Is Helen down there? Please ask her to come up.”
She came quickly and Rachel reported the missing necklace. Helen looked perplexed.
“What is it, Helen? Do you have any ideas about it?”
“Mrs. Bennett, I don’t think you brought that necklace up from Palm Beach.”
Rachel was dismayed. Was she losing her mind? Helen didn’t make mistakes of that kind. But Rachel was not about to rebuke Helen using the same kind of language she was prepared to use with Danny. “You are wrong about that, Helen,” she said impatiently. “But never mind. Thank you. Good night.”
Danny didn’t think it wise to revisit the question whether the necklace had actually been worn, and so said, “Mom, I’m truly sad about this, but since there isn’t anything I can do, shouldn’t I get back to the party? You, er, you don’t want me to say anything about the necklace to, I mean, let the word out, do you?”
She shook her head and motioned to him brusquely to go.
“Anything wrong, Danny?”
“Not a thing, Caroline.… Only thing that’s wrong is that tonight is still twenty-four hours away.” They kissed. There was a round of applause. The following day, after a telephone call to the caretaker at the Palm Beach estate, who verified that he could not find the necklace in the room upstairs where he had been instructed to look, two state troopers quietly questioned members of the staff, those who worked for Cam Beckett and the half dozen there from New York who had catered the night before and would do so again after the wedding at noon. Helen continued to insist the necklace hadn’t been brought up, that it would turn up in Florida. Inevitably, the word got out that Mrs. Bennett’s necklace was missing. But there was nothing like an uproar over it. “She might have left it in Newport and just forgotten,” Danny said to Henry dismissively. Henry demurred, saying he thought he remembered its being worn during the cocktail party the night before. But other matters pressed, and the state troopers soon left, while others prepared to go to the church.