But a killer could be an artist, he discovered. And an artist a killer.
The soul-searching, the exhaustion of reality, of bearing witness, of coming to the aid of a fellow man, even a killer—he must hold it all at bay. He could not examine it, for fear of what it would do to the work, which was the most important thing. This masterpiece he had crafted, astonishing himself with every perfect word, every exquisitely crafted paragraph. The book was all. He must write it, and he did, that last chapter coming quickly for a change, as usually he agonized over endings.
And the book was all he had dreamed it would be, all he had told everyone—his swans, his literary rivals, the doorman to his apartment building, the grocer on the corner, his crazy family back in Alabama, even his sniveling deadbeat of an attention-hog father. In Cold Blood was a masterpiece, and this time the critics all agreed. And now that he was at the top of the heap—had become that spire in the great city beckoning others from lesser lands—he must rejoice in his success. For enjoying the fruits of his labor was just as serious as the writing itself.
So now he was throwing a party. The most swellegant, elegant party evah.
—
LATER, TRUMAN SAID THAT the morning the invitations went out, he made five hundred friends and fifteen hundred enemies.
Only one of these was an exaggeration.
CHAPTER 13
…..
A summit. A counsel. Of utter fabulousness.
The day before Truman’s party, Betsey Cushing Roosevelt Whitney, accompanied by her sisters, Minnie Cushing Astor Fosburgh and Barbara Cushing Mortimer Paley, sailed into the Palm Court at the Plaza. Her head held high, she didn’t slow down, only barely nodded at a ma?tre d’ who scurried ahead of her to pull out a chair just as she sat down at an intimate table, one of her own choosing. Betsey Cushing Roosevelt Whitney did not wait to be told where to sit, not even at the Plaza.
It was afternoon tea; all around them were adorable little girls dressed in pink dresses with matching hair ribbons, white gloves, patent-leather shoes, accompanied by indulgent parents or grandparents. There were other—lesser—socialites present, too, and out-of-towners who couldn’t help but gape at the trio of fabulously dressed women, all with cheekbones as prominent as their good breeding, but the triumvirate paid the tourists no attention. This was a sister meeting, a ritual from their childhood. Long ago, their tribunals had centered around who could borrow whose hair ribbon, or what birthday present should they pool their money for and purchase for their mother. But as they grew up and into the beauty and elegance laid out for them, like their school uniforms, by their mother, the conferences had turned to more serious matters, usually presided over by Gogs. Minnie’s long affair with Vincent Astor, for instance, had been discussed and dissected and determined to have run long enough at one of their summits; Vincent found himself proposing soon after. And Babe’s miserable marriage to Stanley Mortimer had come to a merciful end after one of their conclaves; Gogs and her daughters had weighed the pros and cons and finally determined that Babe could remove herself with her reputation intact. And so, she did.
There had been no summit, however, when Babe decided to marry Bill.
Tea, too, was a constant from the sisters’ youth; back in the big Cushing house in Brookline, their mother, Gogs, had introduced the ritual of afternoon tea, ostensibly for the family, but before long it became a salon of a sort, a place where the best and most socially desirable of the medical and academic communities could “drop in.” Every afternoon, a tempting assortment of tea and punch and finger sandwiches and pastries would be spread in the drawing room and a crush of people would arrive; the Cushing sisters grew up watching their mother preside over the tea table and flit among her guests, seeing to their every wish and comfort. Their father, however, rarely attended; he was always in surgery.
The girls watched—and it wasn’t for amusement; Gogs insisted on their being involved in the preparations long before they were old enough to take part in these elegant soirees. They observed their mother see to every detail, no matter how small: the spotlessness of the aprons worn by the Irish servant girls, the ritualistic polishing of the silver, the placement of the cherries atop the pink-iced tea cakes.