“Looking forward to those pearls of the Orient?” Richard Cavanaugh, or Dicky, as he was known, was dressed as an Indian dancing girl—complete with kohl-rimmed eyes and swathed in pink silk shot through with gold thread.
“Get ready now,” he said, swiveling his hips in a faux seductive dance. “They’re supposedly ruinous.” Dicky’s exuberance was his calling card and his fondness for costume the stuff of legend. Months ago, he’d come to the Union Club’s formal New Year’s Eve party clad only in an enormous costume diaper, though it was snowing, wearing an immense frilly bonnet and holding a gallon-sized baby bottle full of rye in his hand—a horrendous Baby New Year. He’d attended that debutante ball in Baltimore in a tuxedo with a Pied Piper hat on his head and set loose one hundred white mice on the dance floor, smuggled in a writhing tennis valise. The club had sent him the extermination bill.
“I prefer Ohio girls,” Ambrose said. “Buckeyed beauties.”
“Bucktoothed is more like it.” Dicky was frequently embarrassed by Ambrose’s penchant for the flowery. “I’ll pass.”
“Best to pass on the buckeye, they have poisonous nuts.” Ethan smiled.
“Nuts are not fearsome,” Ambrose replied.
“You’re a nut.” Dicky did the hip swivel again, and Ethan backed away in exaggerated defeat, hands up as if at gunpoint.
Ambrose knew this was when his brother felt best, welcoming people like a paterfamilias in training, though he was still a bachelor. Ethan preferred the beginnings of any party, those he attended or his own—before someone spilled a drink on his shirt, before the flowers wilted, before the champagne ran out—and why not? Ethan had built his house for parties.
Finished only last month, the faux Cotswolds mansion was meant to impress with its scale, its grit stucco and stonework, its leaded glass windows. Country, yes, but large enough for house parties with a half-dozen couples in the guest rooms and a small herd of bachelors sleeping on camp cots in the open third-floor dormitory. Ethan imported the coffered ceilings in the front hall from some monastery in Italy, and the library was paneled in black walnut milled on-site from trees felled on his land. The architect ordered all the furniture in one day from a Grand Rapids cabinet-maker—a different color and theme for each bedroom. The green bedroom furniture was painted with flowers and vines, the blue bedroom suite with a geometric Moorish pattern, the white bedroom with gilt and French curves. The rest of the house was styled in popular reproduction Tudor and fake Jacobean befitting a magnate in training.
“Come on now, you two.” Dicky rounded on them, linking one arm with Ethan, the other with Ambrose, and marching them out on the lawn, mindless of their drinks. “Form a brother team. Can’t have a race without the host and guest of honor.”
On the grass, Dicky organized pairs for a three-legged race. Men leaned forward, drunkenly tying their interior legs together with silk neckties.
“Really, I don’t want . . .” Ethan started. But before he could finish, Ambrose had loosened his orange and black striped tie, pulled it over his head, and leaned down, knotting it around their knees.
“Defend the Quincy name,” he said as he rose.
They put their glasses down and put their arms around each other. Someone to the side snapped a picture. At Dicky’s “go,” the contestants stumbled, some with glasses in hand, to the cheers of the onlookers. Ethan took off at a swift hop, rearranging his arms and hefting Ambrose with a forearm under the ribs. The brothers stumbled once. Ethan insisted Ambrose match his rhythm. Ethan huffed them across the grass so quickly that Ambrose felt like he might fall face-first. They were neck and neck with the Rensselaer twins when Ambrose’s foot slipped. They fell to the sound of tearing silk.
As the Rensselaers crossed Dicky’s makeshift finish line, May rushed to them and awarded the winners a ragged bouquet of late summer flowers ripped from a nearby garden bed. Each twin tucked a posy behind an ear and, with a mincing pose in their white flannel knickers, smiled for a photograph, their lady victory between them, laughing.
Pale in white chiffon with a bunch of violets pinned low in her dark hair, May played the hostess well. A sheen of excitement covered her heart-shaped face, her huge doll eyes alight. She was usually languid, carrying a sense of easy dreaminess wherever she went, but she brought her full attention to a party.
Ambrose unknotted what was left of his shredded necktie and swept the grass from his knee. He stood, fumbling in his pockets for a cigarette, which he lit, and then exhaled a plume of smoke through his nose. Shading his hand above his brow, he watched May walk toward them, her swinging gait mindless of two full glasses in her hands.
She’s happy, Ambrose noted, though she’d been arguing with him for the last week. She reached up and kissed Ethan’s cheek in greeting and handed him a coupe of bubbles. Ambrose watched his brother blush and look away and felt a lightning flash of pride. May charmed most anyone. Then she turned and landed a loud smack near Ambrose’s ear, saying, “They’re all drunk.” She reached for his low-burning cigarette.
He took his silver cigarette case out of his shirt pocket and nudged it into her elbow. “Come on, May, have your own,” he said, taking her offered drink.
She shook her head and lodged his cigarette in the side of her mouth, talking around it. “Nuh-uh. Nice girls don’t smoke in public. Just steal little bits here and there.”
“Since when are you a nice girl?” he asked, surrendering his cigarette to her and repocketing his case.
She laughed. It was one of the things he liked about her, that she could laugh at herself. She hip-checked him, and to hear her laugh again he purposefully fell down on the ground and rolled forward in an exaggerated somersault, as if she’d really toppled him. He spilled his drink in the process.
Righting himself and brushing his white flannels, he said, “Now look what you’ve done.” He reached for his overturned glass and picked bits of grass off it. “?‘Waste not, want not’ is the motto of all Quincys.”
A look of annoyance crossed May’s face, and then she resettled it into its usual bright social arrangement. “How was it down at the mines?” she asked, handing Ambrose back his ashy cigarette and surveying him through a haze of smoke. “Saying good-bye?” She turned to Ethan and, in an exaggeratedly confidential tone, said, “He was down at the mines this week.”
Ambrose’s eyes widened; he hadn’t told anyone he’d been out there. May had a way of finding out all his secrets.
“You can’t possibly accomplish anything down there,” Ethan said to his brother, ineffectively masking his irritation.