One Fifth Avenue - Candace Bushnell [6]
“Yes,” James said, barely looking up from his computer.
“Mrs. Houghton’s dead.”
James stared at her blankly.
“Did you know that?” Mindy asked.
“It was all over the Internet this morning.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought you knew.”
“I’m the head of the board, and you didn’t tell me,” Mindy said. “I just ran into Billy Litchfield. He told me. It was embarrassing.”
“Don’t you have better things to worry about?” James asked.
“Yes, I do. And now I’ve got to worry about that apartment. And who’s going to move into it. And what kind of people they’re going to be. Why don’t we live in that apartment?”
“Because it’s worth about twenty million dollars, and we don’t happen to have twenty million dollars lying around?” James said.
“And whose fault is that?” Mindy said.
“Mindy, please,” James said. He scratched his head. “We’ve discussed this a million times. There is nothing wrong with our apartment.”
On the thirteenth floor, the floor below the three grand floors that had been Mrs. Houghton’s apartment, Enid Merle stood on her terrace, thinking about Louise. The top of the building was tiered like a wedding cake, so the upper terraces were visible to those below. How shocking that only three days ago, she’d been standing in this very spot, conversing with Louise, her face shaded in that ubiquitous straw hat. Louise had never allowed the sun to touch her skin, and she’d rarely moved her face, believing that facial expressions caused wrinkles. She’d had at least two face-lifts, but nevertheless, even on the day of the storm, Enid remembered noting that Louise’s skin had been astoundingly smooth. Enid was a different story. Even as a little girl, she’d hated all that female fussiness and overbearing attention to one’s appearance. Nevertheless, due to the fact that she was a public persona, Enid had eventually succumbed to a face-lift by the famous Dr. Baker, whose society patients were known as “Baker’s Girls.” At eighty-two, Enid had the face of a sixty-five-year-old, although the rest of her was not only creased but as pleasantly speckled as a chicken.
For those who knew the history of the building and its occupants, Enid Merle was not only its second oldest resident—after Mrs. Houghton—but in the sixties and seventies, one of its most notorious. Enid, who had never married and had a degree in psychology from Columbia University (making her one of the college’s first women to earn one), had taken a job as a secretary at the New York Star in 1948, and given her fascination with the antics of humanity, and possessing a sympathetic ear, had worked her way into the gossip department, eventually securing her own column. Having spent the early part of her life on a cotton farm in Texas, Enid always felt slightly the outsider and approached her work with the good Southern values of kindness and sympathy. Enid was known as the “nice” gossip columnist, and it had served her well: When actors and politicians were ready to tell their side of a story, they called Enid. In the early eighties, the column had been syndicated, and Enid had become a wealthy woman. She’d been trying to retire for ten years, but her name, argued her employers, was too valuable, and so Enid worked with a staff that gathered information and wrote the column, although under special circumstances, Enid would write the column herself. Louise Houghton’s death was one such circumstance.
Thinking about the column she would have to write about Mrs. Houghton, Enid felt a sharp pang of loss. Louise had had a full and glamorous life—a life to be envied and admired—and had died without enemies, save perhaps for Flossie Davis, who was Enid’s stepmother. Flossie lived across the street, having abandoned One Fifth in the early sixties for the conveniences of a new high-rise. But Flossie was crazy and always had been, and Enid reminded herself that this pang of loss was a feeling she’d carried all her life—a longing for something that always seemed to be just out of reach.