The Wrong Kind of Money (8 page)

The butler might have made one pertinent observation: Evenings when Truxton and Georgette Van Degan dine at home alone are extremely rare, but at least during this one they have been actually having a conversation.

River House! He must have been out of his mind, Noah Liebling often thinks, when he bought an apartment in this building, and he must have been further out of his mind when he agreed to be elected president of the building's board. Noah and Carol have discussed selling their apartment at River House, even though the market for apartments like theirs is soft right now. With Anne away at college, they hardly need these five bedrooms and five baths. But now that Noah is the board's president—well, selling would seem like a gesture of bad faith, wouldn't it? A coward's way out.

Besides, this is—River House! Thirty stories high, a full city block in width, and containing only seventy-three apartments—many of them duplexes, one of them a triplex with a two-story living room—when it was put up it was heralded as the most luxurious, and most expensive, apartment building in the world. It still is. It is also an unpluggable sinkhole for money. The building soaks up money like a blotter, like a giant sponge. It always has.

River House was built, Noah often thinks, as an act of sheer defiance, or an act of sheer folly—though not on the builder's part. He got his money out of it right away, and left the owner-tenants with the burden of maintaining his extravaganza. Ground was broken in 1930, hard on the heels of the great stock market crash of 1929. “A symbol of the city's faith in its economic future,” the
Times
called it at the time. But in 1930 the city's economic future looked decidedly grim, and during the next decade, as the Great Depression deepened, things got even grimmer. The building faces the East River, and when it was built, it had its own private marina for its tenants' yachts. Yachts were in short supply during the 1930s, and the tenants heaved a collective sigh of relief in 1941 when the city acquired the riparian rights from the building in order to construct the FDR Drive.

But this was only one economic burden lifted from the building. Another burden has always been the River Club, which occupies five floors and includes dining rooms, party rooms, tennis courts, a swimming pool, and twenty-one guest bedrooms. Originally, the River Club was to be for the exclusive use of the building's tenants. Of course, this didn't work when many tenants declined to purchase club memberships and pay club dues. The River Club was advertised as “a family club,” just as River House was supposed to be a family building, meaning that bachelors and single women were discouraged. But soon the club found itself forced to sell memberships to families outside the building, and to rent out its party rooms for outside functions. The twenty-one guest bedrooms remain a problem. They were designed to be available for “overflow house guests” of the tenants. But since few families suffer from overflow house guests nowadays, these rooms are usually vacant and, in any cooperative building, vacant space stands for lack of revenue. When Noah suggested that these rooms might be rented out to transients, there was consternation among the tenants. “You mean running the building like a
hotel?”
cried one. “With total strangers coming in and out?”

“No new assessments!” Each new board president has made this valiant promise to his neighbors. At least Noah knew better than to promise such a never-never world. There will always be new assessments. The need for new assessments arises as often as once a month, at the monthly tenant meetings, and of course the owners of the largest apartments always scream the loudest. It is no wonder that the tenants' meetings often turn into name-calling, free-for-all shouting matches. Sometimes it seems to Noah as though no one in the building is really happy living there.

Tenants' meetings are designed to follow the format of the New England town meeting, with each tenant permitted to have his or her say. As happens in New England, this means that very little actually gets accomplished. Here are some of the issues covered at the most recent tenants' meeting over which Noah Liebling attempted to preside:

The building's exterior badly needs a cleaning, and to sand-blast and steam-clean the facade will cost about a million dollars. (Everything that needs to be done to the building seems to cost about a million dollars.) Of course, that will mean a special assessment. There are cries of outrage over this. But the contractor has warned that sand-blasting may loosen the mortar between the bricks, and if that happens, the entire building will have to be repointed, and this will cost a good deal more.

Then Mr. Dellamore on fourteen got up to say that he has heard of a new method for cleaning buildings involving an acid wash. But Mrs. Corning on seventeen pointed out that acid washing would cause acid to drip down the sides of the building into the surrounding plants and shrubbery, killing it all, and Mrs. Ellinger on seven declared that she didn't want her section of the building washed with acid. Didn't acid have poisonous fumes? She had no intention of wearing a gas mask around her house for a month.

Mr. Gerridge on twenty-one suggested that only the building's facade that faced the street be washed, but Mrs. Conklin, on eighteen, pointed out that the side facing the river was the dirtiest and deserved the cleaning most, since that was the side the tourists saw when they went up and down the river on the Circle Line cruises. And speaking of views, Mrs. Townsend on nine interrupted, she would like to ask Mrs. Laidlaw, also on nine, to stop drying her panty hose from her windowsill, of which Mrs. Townsend's dining room had a full view. Mrs. Laidlaw hotly denied doing any such thing. In the end it was decided to appoint a committee to study ways and means of getting the building cleaned.

Next on the agenda was the matter of the building's entrance drive, which needed to be resurfaced. Caroline Taylor, on seventeen, claimed she had nearly broken an ankle when she caught her heel in a crack in the pavement. What if that sort of thing happened to a visitor, who might then sue? Very simple, said Mrs. Vadrick on nine. Simply tell your taxi driver to take you straight to the front door, and you won't have to walk on the pavement. Anything to avoid another assessment, she added, and besides, didn't the building have insurance to cover accidents of that kind?

That brought up another problem, Noah reminded them. The building's insurance carrier had announced a rate increase of fifty thousand a year. An assessment would have to be levied to cover the added premium. Mr. Sturtevant, on twenty-four, reminded the group that he was president of an insurance company. He was sure his company would give River House a new insurance policy at a much lower premium. It was decided to form two committees, one on the need for repaving the drive and another to look into new insurance policies.

Then there was the problem of Dr. Skidmore's storm windows. Dr. Skidmore, who lived on four, wanted to install aluminum-frame storm windows throughout his apartment. He was willing to have this done at his own expense, so no additional assessment would be involved, but a number of the other tenants thought aluminum-frame storm windows looked tacky. Leading the tacky contingent was Monica McCluskey, the mouthwash heiress. After Ms. McCluskey made her point, Dr. Skidmore got up and made a long, impassioned speech about the environment, and the importance of conserving energy, and stressed the fact that his aluminum-frame storm windows would help reduce the building's heating and air-conditioning bills, which were already staggering and getting bigger all the time. Ms. McCluskey replied that it wouldn't be so bad if the Skidmores occupied “one of the more desirable upper-floor apartments,” such as her own, where storm windows would not be visible from the street. But as it was, from their “less desirable” space on the fourth floor, and in full view of passersby, “Dr. Skidmore wants to add tacky-looking storm windows that will make the whole building look tacky.” Dr. Skidmore then called Ms. McCluskey “a postmenopausal old bag.” Ms. McCluskey called Dr. Skidmore a “creep.”

It was decided to table the storm-window issue for the time being, until tempers cooled. Sometimes it seems to Noah that everybody in River House hates everybody else.

“But while we're on the subject of floors,” Mrs. Curtis LeMosney rose to say, “as we all know, Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton, who live on the floor below mine, have recently, on their own and without the building's permission, hired a contractor and knocked down the wall between their living room and library in order to enlarge their living room. My apartment has the same configuration as the Hamiltons', or it did before they removed that wall. And now my living room floor squeaks when I walk across it, which it never did before.” This drew no comment, since the knocked-out wall was a
fait accompli.
“I would like the board to reprimand the Hamiltons,” Mrs. LeMosney added.

The last matter of business involved the canvas entrance canopy over the front door, which had been ripped in a recent storm and needed to be replaced. “The individual assessments for this should be relatively small,” Noah added in what he hoped was an encouraging tone. Everyone agreed that the torn canopy looked awful, but there was considerable disagreement about what color the new canopy should be. A few traditionalists favored the same color as before, a sober dark brown. But others wanted something different for a change, dark green, perhaps, or a deep Venetian red, or dark blue, or black “to match the black marble in the entrance foyer.” Each color, it seemed, had its small band of advocates. Monica McCluskey suggested a color that would be “bright, gay, and inviting,” like yellow, orange, baby blue, or pink. There were boos and hisses when she got to pink. The argument over colors grew quite heated until it was decided to appoint a committee to study canopy colors and collect fabric samples.

There being no further business, Noah could always count on his old friend Frank Stokes to move that the meeting be adjourned, and on Beryl, Frank's wife, to second the motion.

Everyone who lives in River House is supposed to be rich. But, Noah sometimes suspects, some of the building's tenants may not be as comfortably off as they pretend to be. There is the curious case of the Darius Satterthwaites, for example. Joanne (called “Pookie”) Satterthwaite and her husband are in the
Social Register.
Pookie and Darius Satterthwaites' names are often in the columns and, in fact, Pookie Satterthwaite, Georgette Van Degan, and Patsy Collingwood are often referred to as “The Big Three” among New York's social ladies. The Satterthwaites own one of the grander duplexes in River House, on the twenty-ninth and thirtieth floors, and yet they have no furniture. Not a stick of it. Where do they sleep, Noah often wonders—on the building's famous mahogany parquet floors?

And then there is the perennial problem of Graham Grenfell, the famous interior designer. Mr. Grenfell's apartment is lavishly furnished in antique pieces of museum quality. In fact, some people suspect that Graham Grenfell uses his apartment as his showroom, though this is strictly against the rules. Graham Grenfell has decorated a number of River House apartments, including Monica McCluskey's, who is said to have spent fifteen million on interior decor, including Fortuny wall coverings and window hangings, marble bathrooms, and a Baccarat chandelier in her dining room that cost a cool million in itself. Too big for the freight elevator, the chandelier had to be hoisted up from the street by a construction crane mounted on the roof. And yet despite assignments the size of this one, Graham Grenfell is always at least three months delinquent in his monthly maintenance payments. Just when the board is about to write him a letter, threatening to cut off his services, meaning he will have to carry out his own garbage to the street, Mr. Grenfell makes a partial payment and the board withdraws the letter. Noah Liebling has promised to do his best to put River House on a sound fiscal basis, but with tenants the likes of Graham Grenfell, this is going to be hard to do.

Noah and Carol Liebling own what is considered a midsize apartment at River House, and on a middle floor, the fifteenth. Their friends Frank and Beryl Stokes—Frank is an Ingraham vice-president, and Noah helped the Stokeses get into the building—have the same apartment on the floor below. Tonight Carol has set her dinner table for ten, with place cards. She has, in fact, given considerable thought to
placement.
She and Noah will sit at either end, of course, and since the sexes are not evened out—six women, four men—she will give herself two women: Noah's mother, on her right, in the place of honor, and Ruth's daughter, Becka, reunited with her mother at least for the time being, will be on Carol's left. Noah will then be given two women: sister Ruth, on his right, and Melody Richards on his left. Carol had thought it would be fun for the two girls to have the young celebrity author sit between them, and so she has placed Bill Luckman between Melody and Anne. Across the table, next to Becka, will go Ruth's new beau, whose name is Ector, and then Cyril, on Ruth's right. The table looks very pretty, with yellow tulips, out of season, as a centerpiece, but the candles have not yet been lighted. After receiving Mr. Nelson's telephone call from the car about the traffic situation on Park, Carol told Edna, her cook, to take the roast out of the oven so it won't be overdone. It can be slipped back in again when the last three dinner guests arrive.

Now the other seven are in the living room having cocktails. Mary, Carol's maid, is passing hot hors d'oeuvres. The lights from Long Island City, across the river, glitter from the tall windows, and William Luckman has assumed center stage, spreading his arms in wide demonstration before his temporarily captive audience. “The trouble is,” he is saying, “is that the so-called modernist poets have lost the power to express emotions.
Feelings.
Lost it—they've thrown it away! When somebody like Keats talked about high-piled books in charactery, you could just see, you could almost reach out and
touch
all those wonderful, dusty old volumes. Thumb-worn, with heavy leather bindings—all piled in a sloppy sort of stack. Just in those five words you can feel the lamplight, feel the almost
runic
content of those books. Now someone like Merwin, on the other hand—”