Eleanor had been surprised when Rupert had indicated interest in attending the wedding. She had planned to send their regrets. “No, no,” he said. “I’ve never been to a posh Jewish wedding.” More than a cross-cultural experience, he wanted to know people in “Our Crowd.” His firm was a white-shoe firm, with only two Jewish partners out of fifty. He wanted more Jewish lawyers; he wanted more Jewish business. He hadn’t known Jews until he came to America and his relationships with the two who launched his career, Dean Rostow and Judge Friendly, made him think anti-Semitism was rooted in envy and insecurity. He never joined a club that discriminated against blacks or Jews; he thought it bad behavior and bad business, and he led the charge for the Century Club to admit women. When women were finally admitted in 1989, Eleanor was one of the first women invited to join, along with Jackie Onassis, Brooke Astor, and the dean of Columbia Law School. The Phippses had been members since the club’s founding and Eleanor assumed she was proposed as a “legacy” candidate. She turned them down, politely. “Rupert deserves a club of his own,” she wrote.
The year after he made partner, Rupert began advocating for hiring Jews, blacks, and women at Maynard, Tandy. He never appealed to the better angels of his partners’ natures, only to their business interests. Moving in their limos between the Upper East Side and Wall Street, most of them hadn’t noticed the changes the ’60s were bringing, except for the demonstrations. Nixon’s election in 1968 reassured them. Rupert, alert to the shifting zeitgeist, took it upon himself to rouse them out of their complacency. He made a list for them: A Jewish pitcher threw a perfect game; a month later, he refused to pitch the first game of the World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur. A black man was appointed to the Supreme Court. Actors let down their hair and took off their clothes on Broadway. Boston’s Cardinal Cushing had stopped eating grapes in support of farm workers. Yale College had voted to admit women, with only one faculty member dissenting. “Listen to Dylan,” he told his partners, “listen to what your children are listening to.” When he was forty-two, he was elected to the management committee, the youngest member in the firm’s history. Eight years later, he was made managing partner. Rupert was a first-rate lawyer but he had no illusions about his partners’ barometers; he owed his success within the firm to his English badges, the accent primarily, so irresistible to even the bluest bloods in the firm. His ability to speak in well-formed sentences also served him, though he knew, as his colleagues didn’t, that in England, his very articulateness would be held against him, the telltale sign of upstart origins. Upper-class Englishmen stammered like Hugh Grant, or said w for r, like Elmer Fudd or his old pal John Earlham. It fell to parvenus like him to speak like Olivier. Then there was his rudeness, which was widely admired in the firm. “If only I could get away with it,” old Mr. Maynard said. “It” came back to the accent, a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card for every occasion.
Eleanor watched Jim and Rupert shake hands. Rupert looked the happier of the two. Jim introduced them as Rupert Falkes and Eleanor Phipps. Anne smiled at them. “Thank you for coming,” she said, then turned to kiss a first cousin. To Eleanor’s surprise and relief, Jim’s parents were not in the receiving line. Mrs. Lehman had banished them. “We’re keeping it to Jim and Anne and my husband and me,” she told the in-laws. “Too many people to move through.” She had refused to accept any money from the Cardozos; they had offered five thousand dollars, an amount so paltry, she’d found it insulting.
Eleanor hadn’t seen Jim’s parents in fifteen years, not since the breakup in 1960, when they approached her. She was standing alone. Rupert had gone to the hors d’oeuvres table to investigate; the orphan in him was always drawn to food excesses. “How nice to see you again,” Mrs. Cardozo said. “Yes,” Eleanor said. “Now, please excuse me, won’t you?” She turned and walked away. It was an electrifying moment. She had never been so rude to anyone in her life. I must be careful, she thought. I could get used to this. She found Rupert gazing admiringly at a mountain of shrimp. “Not a cucumber sandwich in sight,” he said with satisfaction. “I think I’d like a gin and tonic,” she said. Rupert nodded. “I was thinking of having a scotch,” he said. Fortified with shrimp and scotch, Rupert began circulating, introducing himself to strangers, saying, “Ah, yes, of course. So glad finally to meet you.” Eleanor tagged along, as much as the other guests, seduced by his charm offensive. At their table, he sat next to Mrs. Lehman’s sister, Pauline Straus. On her way out, Mrs. Straus took Eleanor aside. “I think you may be the luckiest woman at this wedding,” she said, “luckier than the bride.” A week later, Mr. Straus called Rupert to talk about problems his company was having with IBM.
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Anne and Jim bought an apartment on East Eighty-Eighth, between Fifth and Madison. “Convenient to the Guggenheim,” Jim said, his idea of a joke. They hadn’t lived together before their marriage, and the two or three nights a week they had spent together had been spent at Anne’s place on Seventy-Eighth, off Lexington. Anne had wanted to stay in that neighborhood. It was lively, with good restaurants and shopping. “There’s nothing nearby on Madison except E.A.T.,” Anne said when Jim said he wanted to be closer to Central Park. “And it’s dead at night,” she said. “Yes,” Jim said, “like Paris.” Anne gave in. They split the down payment 50-50. They split everything 50-50, their mortgage payments, their vacation expenses, their food bills, their car loan, everything except devotion; that was 80-20. They had separate bank accounts, separate credit cards, separate savings. Am I the beneficiary of his life insurance? Anne wondered. Not knowing, she made her niece Caroline the beneficiary of hers.
Jim kept his old apartment as a study. Anne had seen it only once. He showed it to her early on in their relationship, evidence of why they should always stay at her place. It was on West 106th between Broadway and Amsterdam, a 250-square-foot studio, spare and elegant, with bookshelves, a fireplace, a sisal rug, a refectory table, a chair, and a daybed. The kitchen had a half-size refrigerator, like a college student’s, with a tiny stove that looked like a Fisher-Price toy sitting on top. The bathroom could not have been more than 16 square feet.
“Do I get a key,” Anne asked Jim, “now that we’re married?”
“Of course,” he said, “just call before stopping by.” Two months after this conversation, she called him on a Saturday morning, asking if she could drop by the studio. She was in the neighborhood, finishing up a long coffee break with a friend at the Hungarian Pastry Shop.
“I’m working against a deadline, honey,” he said. “Another time. See you at dinner.” She tried again two months later, in the early evening. She had been meeting with a colleague at Columbia’s Morningside campus.
“I’m sorry, honey,” he said. “I’ve got to finish my article. I was going to call you. I’ll be home late. Don’t wait up.”
“Honey” is shorthand for no, she thought.