34

Mary Price Barton, once the supreme New York interior decorator, celebrated as the niece of Edward S. Price, had been a familiar presence in the nouvelle society of New York for over twenty years, since she had been exiled from Brooklyn by her father in 1967, when, by her grandfather’s order, she had become Mary Price. When she took up her exile in Manhattan, through her uncle, a leader of the old guard of the nouvelle, she sought out the leaders of the nouvelle for the growth and steady continuance of her decorating firm. She had been a cultivated young woman, beautiful, rich (in addition to her decorating business, her grandfather had given her 5 percent of the income from the city-wide restaurant and bordello linen supply business as an allowance), well-educated, with an incomparable knack for making clothes seem as important as great literature. She knew French and Italian. She was a renowned gourmet and opera authority, so that, at the end of the 1970s, when she ascended to the right hand of Edward S. Price as his executive assistant in the direction of the manifold financial complexities that he controlled (and in the administration of the institutional mercies that were his far-reaching philanthropies, and in his earnest cultivation of the arts, from within the shelter erected by the crazying amounts of his ever-burgeoning fortune), her position in the nouvelle was quadrupled in strength. She became one of the four instantly recognizable women in W, that indelible record of the nouvelle peerage and of the dressmakers of North America.

Therefore, when she compounded the increments of her glory with a brilliant marriage to Charles Macy Barton, successor to Edward S. Price, who had become a candidate for the highest office in the land, it was, by the measurement of the nouvelle, as if she had been beatified.

While the vast PR staff at Barker’s Hill built the mountainous public record of the Macy-Barton ascension in all the media, from the day of the Price-Barton wedding to the moment when they moved into the quadriplex of houses on East Sixty-fourth Street, the nouvelle of New York waited with dread that any one of them might not receive invitations to Charles and Mary Barton’s housewarming.

The moment came on the thirtieth of May 1992. One hundred invitations for two hundred of Mary Price Barton’s closest friends had gone out by Federal Express. One hundred and ninety-three couples who did not receive invitations left the city for doctrinaire Memorial Day weekends. The hotels and motels at Gettysburg and Richmond were packed out. The one hundred to whom had been accorded the peace that exceeds all understanding poured out their gratitude in the form of commissions to the dressmakers for which the nouvelle existed and nailed down instantly the longest of the city’s available stretched, rental limousines.

It was a transcendent night for every one except Charles Macy Barton. His wife had danced again and again with a man whose looks Charley didn’t like, a youngish man who looked sex-crazed and was too handsome, maybe even a little gay. At twenty minutes after two on the morning of May 31, Charley confronted his wife as they prepared for bed.

“Who was the guy?”

“What guy?”

“Don’t jerk me around!” Charley snarled.

“You mean Jake Hapworth?”

“I mean the guy you kept dancing with, pressing your hips into him, staring at his face as if it would go away and your life would be ruined.”

“Oh, Charley, fahcrissake, he’s a seeded walker.”

“What’s that—a walker?”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“No more parties.”

“What’s that going to solve? If you have decided that if we went to parties that I would spend my time with Jake Hapworth, then what’s to stop me from seeing him if I don’t see him at parties?”

“You’re a married woman. You have two children.”

“You feel the knife, Charley? Good. I felt the knife for twenty years. Every time you looked at a woman, I thought I would lose you. Now, it’s my turn.”

His eyes got wild. “The don is dead, Mae. I don’t need to keep doing what I’m doing for a living with all my working time. I don’t even know Jake Hapworth, but if you start screwing around with him, he isn’t going to last long.”

“You think you can go back to being Charley Partanna? You can’t. He’s dead. You haven’t got anywhere to live except inside your new skin. You can’t take Hapworth out or anybody else because you are stuck with being legit, Charley.”

“There were plenty of women with big eyes for me tonight.”

“So—that’s up to you. But remember one thing. Every time you take on a woman, and I’ll know every time you do, I am going to take on two men. You’re fifty-five years old and I’m stronger than you. It’s time you put the fires out.”

“I haven’t done anything!”

“My intuition tells me that you’ve been thinking about doing something. Let my moves with Jake Hapworth warn you that you had better not make that one false step because I’m on my way to take over this town, Charley. The arbiter can’t live forever and I’m going to be the arbiter. I’m going to run the nouvelle, the opera, the ballet, the theater, the museums, the libraries, the universities, the choice committees, and the big charities, and I can’t do that if I have to think every minute of the day that you might be sniffing up the skirts of some woman. I won’t need you any more if that’s the way you want it to be, Charley. You can shape up or ship out. There are plenty of Jake Hapworths.”

Charley looked at her and knew she meant it. Reluctantly, he pushed Claire Coolidge into a far closet of his mind and locked the door. He wondered if he could have some kind of operation to get the stone out of his private parts.