She is wearing a long black simple Chanel gown, leaning back in a Billy Baldwin slipper chair in the small room beside the dining room. Thinking: Why don’t you all just leave? Please. I’ve been awake since six in the morning. Please, just go… The light is muted, seeping from the electrified flanges of old gas lamps. The sliding doors are closed. She can hear the clatter of dishes beyond the doors, as the remains of dinner are carted away, down the hidden back stairway that leads to the basement kitchen. Two large French windows open to the dark garden. The glass panes now streaky with rain. A gaunt bony man in his fifties is talking. Two older, heavier men are together on a small couch. They remind Cynthia of those two theater producers from Dublin, the ones they called Sodom and Begorrah. The room itself reminds her of Dublin. What did Sam once call it? A tabloid version of Merrion Square.
Sodom is smoking a cigar, flicking ashes into a ceramic dish. They are a couple, from an immense white-shoe law firm.
— Of course, I always liked Cummings’s poetry, after I learned to read it out loud, says the gaunt man. Cynthia thinks of him as a bone-colored Giacometti or an exclamation point under mild sedation. At once laconic and blasé. His name is Carson, retired after many years at an old-line publishing company, a big supporter of the library. He goes on about Cummings in a dry voice.
— But I much preferred his paintings, he says. If he’d painted more, he’d be known today as one of America’s greatest painters ever.
Sodom: I didn’t know he painted.
Begorrah: Nor did I.
— Oh, yes, says Carson. After the Great War, he went to Paris, painted up a storm.
— I’ll be damned, says Sodom.
— That’s a Cummings, Cynthia says, gesturing casually at a portrait between the windows.
The painting shows a brooding young man, in a mildly cubist style, the colors glowing. Sodom stands up, wheezing and squinting, laying the cigar in the ashtray. All eyes turn to the painting, and Cynthia remembers buying it through a dealer in the year she took her first apartment in this building. Nineteen eighty-one. Before she bought the entire building and made it her last home. What was his name, that dealer? She remembers his ferrety face, his oily manner, but no name. My mind rusts. How in the name of God did I get to be sixty?
— Just marvelous, Sodom says. In her head, Cynthia hears a song. “Too Marvelous for Words.” Sinatra singing it on a late-night jukebox. Or Sam, in the shower upstairs.
— Yes, Carson says. He has been in this room at several earlier dinners for the library. Before the collapse of everything. Has seen the painting before. Has looked it up.
— It was painted in nineteen twenty-eight, he says.
— Marvelous.
The word bounces musically in Cynthia’s mind.
— Did he paint it here in Patchin Place? Sodom says.
— Paris, I think, Carson says. Cynthia nods in a vacant affirmative way. Yes. Paris.
— What would he have become if he’d stayed there? Sodom says.
— A corpse, Begorrah says. Hitler would have had him gassed, for using Semitic punctuation!
The partners chuckle in a dark way.
Goddamn you, Sam. Why couldn’t you be here tonight? For an hour, anyway. On the way to the paper. And answers herself: Maybe he heard that the boss was coming, formerly known as Little Dickie Elwood. They couldn’t call him Little Richard. His mother was a wonderful person. So was his father, Harry. And young Dickie, Dickie at nine or ten, was a nice boy. Not now. Bosshood is a curse. And Sam’s boss was the youngest person at table tonight. Called to dinner at the invitation of someone at the library. A check sent this afternoon by messenger, so he could avoid touching it in front of strangers. A lesson from his parents. No show, please. Polite and modest in his matching paisley cummerbund and tie. Until asked about newspapers. Then he fell into bosschat, all about the digital age and why newspapers were doomed, not now but eventually, and a century of their content could be carried in a single laptop. Or better, on various electronic readers. Content provided by Google or somebody. He owns the New York World, for God’s sake. Which is made of words on paper. Better that Sam wasn’t here. He might have thrown him out the window.
Dickie departed early, pleading a morning meeting. So did that hedge-fund swindler, Myles Compton, or was it Compton Myles? How did he get on the list? Sitting in laconic reserve, with performed smiles, poking at the food. He delivered an early check too.
— Well, Carson says, rising from his seat like a long unfolding Swiss army knife. He must be six-four. I’d better go, he says. If my heart bursts here, the ambulance could never get through the gate.
Laughter.
— Thank you, Mr. Carson, Cynthia says, rising to shake his bony hand. Hoping the others would follow. The top of her head is level with his shoulder.
— Can I give you fellows a ride? Carson says.
— Well, yes, as a matter of fact, yes, says Sodom, eagerly tamping out his cigar. He and his mate stand up now, glancing around for the door. All the others rise too. Cynthia Harding is relieved. The smoke rising from the murdered cigar makes Cynthia think of other good-nights, other cigars. Her second husband smoked cigars at breakfast. That’s why he became the last husband. Sam was a cigarette guy then.
She leads the way down the stairs to the basement. From behind the door to the kitchen, Latin music plays softly from a radio. Dishes clatter. The coats of the guests are on a rack near the door that leads up a few steps to the street. Overcoats are donned, hats clamped on heads. Each wears gloves. Cynthia thinks they look like musicians from some aging society band of the early 1960s. A nostalgia act even then. The door opens and they all leave. The cold damp night air enters, rain seeping from the dark sky, promising worse, maybe even snow. They exchange hugs and good-nights. The door closes behind them.
Cynthia Harding places the flat of her back against the papered wall at the foot of the stairs. She exhales deeply. Breathes in. Exhales again. Thinking: I want to squat down here on the floor. I’m so tired I want to bawl. There were so many things to go over, from the napkins to the coffee. Mary Lou helped as always. As always, I chose the flowers myself. Like Mrs. Dalloway.
Then she gathers energy and goes into the kitchen. The chatter stops. The radio is switched off. The two younger waiters are doubling as dishwashers, a skill not taught at acting school. The air is liquid. Odors of the meal. One Mexican dishwasher is eating. At the far end, standing before the gleaming double-doored stainless steel Bosch refrigerator, is their boss. Thirty-one, maybe, handsome in a George Hamilton way, as if practicing for a career on the Food Channel. He devised five menus, and Cynthia chose one. The billi-bi soup, thick with mussels, with zwieback-like toast made from artichoke flour. Roast of veal, in fines herbes sauce. Braised Bibb lettuce. No salad, because of time. Spanish melon with lime and ginger.
Brooke Astor would have been proud of the meal. Even though the veal was a shade overcooked. Cynthia moves into the room, begins shaking hands.
— Thank you, everybody, Cynthia says, and smiles. You were all just wonderful.
— It was marvelous to be here, the boss says. She hears a fragment of the song. He smiles a practiced half-crooked smile, showing perfect white teeth. She imagines his body, gym cut, hairless. If he’s gay, he gives no obvious signals.
— Yes, thank you, Mrs. Harding, a slim young aproned woman says. Your guests were fabulous. It was like having ten different Charlie Rose shows at the same time. So cool.
Out of sight, the chef already has the envelopes with the fee and the tips. Mary Lou took care of that too.