Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [52]
The Daggers’ New Year’s Eve extravaganza was, for Megan, the party to end all parties. First, it was a truly great, well-planned gathering. Drinks at seven, buffet dinner at nine, desserts and coffee at eleven for a little jolt of caffeine and sugar, watch the ball drop at midnight, karaoke and drunken dancing after that. The party ended with a hot breakfast the next morning, where bedraggled women avoided meeting the eyes of the friends whose husbands they had made out with in dark corners of the enormous suburban house. Second, it was a social coup to be invited to the best New Year’s eve party on the Main Line. Most important, for Megan, it was a taste of the life she wanted, the life she was working toward, the life she was destined for.
Megan had prepared like an athlete, sleeping in this morning, eating a big lunch, laying down a base. When she jumped on the subway at Girard Avenue and Front Street bound for 30th Street Station and then the Paoli local to Bryn Mawr, she was ready. It was only a one-hour trip but it was a journey to another world.
Megan had inherited her family’s home in Fishtown, a former blue-collar ghetto that was being steadily gentrified. She was renovating it, bit by bit, to improve its value, watching the real-estate market for the right time to sell. Many young professionals would love to live in increasingly fashionable Fishtown, but Megan dreamed only of an address on the Main Line.
Megan was one of Bess Dagger’s best friends. Bess, having spent the day in Bryn Mawr helping her sister Anise prepare, picked Megan up at the Bryn Mawr train station. As they drove through the lovely town to Anise’s large, comfortable house, Bess chattered away about the guest list. Both Anise’s daughters were home. Glamourous Carrie had brought home a girl, a classmate from Yale, while her slightly mousy sister Celia had brought home a boyfriend from law school. Anise wasn’t sure which of her girls she was more worried about. Celia’s boyfriend from Georgetown Law was tall and good looking. Her sister Carrie had already wondered aloud why Celia could get such a prize and she couldn’t. Of course, Celia wasn’t unattractive. She was a Dagger, after all. Beauty was an acknowledged family trait among the Daggers. Beauty and loyalty, Meg mused, really defined them.
Among the older set, Anise’s neighbor and best friend Paula and her faithless husband, the cute French bond trader Henri, had split up. Again. Paula was coming, naturally, but everyone wondered if Henri might just turn up too, since he had always been invited before. They were trying to decide what to do about it if he did. The ugly next-door neighbors were already there, of course. They didn’t have a life of their own, with their ramshackle house and ghastly, troubled children—they virtually lived through Anise and Thom.
As they drove from the station, Bess went on and on, pausing only to admire Megan’s low-cut gleaming dress and her newly botoxed forehead that matched Bess’s own. Megan listened, looking out the car window, drinking in the snowy town. Bess, who had grown up in nearby Ardmore, was nonchalant, but it still took Megan’s breath away. Philly’s best address. One of the East Coast’s most exclusive moneyed enclaves. The fabled Main Line.
Bess and Megan were both a little over forty, although each admitted only to thirty. Bess was lovely, blond like all the Daggers, smooth-skinned, perfectly made up, dressed in vintage Versace. Megan herself was still quite attractive, no matter what the old hag had said, with her gym-toned body, her chic auburn shag, her bronze sheath, her Judith Lieber lioness minaudiere.
Bess worked in corporate marketing, Megan in Philadelphia’s top ad agency. They both made good money, lived well, took care of themselves. They didn’t really date anymore—there were no straight, single, solvent men between forty and sixty-five left in Philly, as everyone very well knew—but they went out with each other or various friends and colleagues several nights a week, and frequently drank a bit too much.
At New Year’s, though, Megan