“Who knows? The bastard’s in France, can you believe it?”
The doctor and his team came out of Ash’s room.
“How’s she doing?” Dina Alstetter asked with a bright tone and an anxious, uncertain smile.
Judging by the doctor’s expression, and discounting for the medical profession’s ability to maintain a poker face, Cardozo estimated that Lady Ash’s prospects were somewhere between negligible and none.
“She’s tired,” Dr. Tiffany said. “You’d better let her rest.”
Dina Alstetter absorbed the lack of information quietly. “May we say good-bye?”
“Of course. Just don’t take too long.”
With hugs and assurances Babe kissed Ash good-bye. “See you tomorrow, sweetie. Be good.”
Dina Alstetter stood staring at her sister, and then, slowly, her eyes began to tear over. “You two go along,” she said. “Don’t wait for me. I want to sit with Ash.”
Halfway to the elevator, Babe said, “She’s acting as though Ash were already dead.”
“How long has Ash been this way?” Cardozo asked.
“I honestly can’t say. It’s all been so damnably gradual. Ash has always been crazy—you’ve seen her, you know how she can be—infantile rages, no discipline, no realism at all. When she was a child, everyone said ‘It’s a stage; she’ll grow out of it.’ Then they said ‘It’s adolescence, she’ll grow out of it.’ Later they said ‘It’s her drinking,’ and no one said she’d grow out of that. Then her conversation got more and more bizarre. She’d change mood or subject right in the middle of a sentence. Go from laughter to tears, from the King of Siam to the cost of living in eight syllables. Everyone said ‘See what happens when you do too much coke?’ In the last few months it got far worse. There’ve been times she didn’t recognize people, or couldn’t find the word for something that was right in front of her, or called things by a completely wrong word—like giraffe for coffee. There wasn’t even Freudian sense to it.”
“Have the doctors ruled out stroke?”
“They haven’t ruled it out, but they say there’s got to be something more. Stroke wouldn’t explain the weight loss.”
It was sunny outside the hospital, with puffs of white clouds looking like splats of Reddi Wip in the blue sky. The winds of autumn were here, nipping like little dogs, and the trees were beginning to give up their leaves.
Babe turned up the collar of her coat. Crossing to the parking lot, Cardozo took her arm. They stopped at the gray Rolls.
“You love her very much,” he said.
“She’s my childhood. She’s my youth. She’s all the years I missed.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“I hate to say what I’m thinking. I hate myself for thinking it.”
“Think it. Say it.”
She stared at him, her eyes wide, her head slightly lowered. “The way she was today—it’s something new, and it’s bad … and it’s not going to go away.”
He put a finger under her chin. “Hey, what ever happened to hope?”
Her mouth opened a little wider, and she nodded just a little.
He reached for her quickly and she clung to him, pressing her face into his chest.
42
IN ROOM 1227 OF the Vanderbilt Pavilion, Dina Alstetter sat on a small armchair two feet from the bed, watching the IV drip into the anorexic bundle of bones that her sister had become.
She stubbed out her seventh cigarette.
She loaded a fresh cassette into her recorder and pulled the chair nearer to the bed. There was no sound in the sickroom but the faint whirring of the tape.
She held the recorder two inches from Ash’s mouth.
“Ash, can you hear me? This is important. Please try to focus. I have to ask you something.”
There was a stab in Gordon Dobbs’s heart when he saw Ash looking so tiny in that bed, smiling her heartbreaking, lopsided little grin.
She must have lost forty pounds, he calculated. Her hair was a gray-blond wisp bound with tortoiseshell clips. Shock welled up in him, and he put more wish than conviction into his greeting.
“Ash—great to see ya, hon.”
There was a deep haze in the blue skies of what had been her eyes and he wasn’t sure she recognized him.
He slid into a chair near the bed.
Ash was still smiling at him with that eager, childlike quality of hers, as though he were the magician at a birthday party who was going to pop a furry white miracle out of a top hat for her. He adjusted the press in his trouser legs and reached across to pat her hand.
He decided to begin with fluff. There was nothing like fluff for teasing smiles out of an invalid.
He talked to her about debs, show biz, newcomers, duchesses and gossip columnists, the two news anchors on different networks who were having a hot lesbian affair that was the talk of Mortimer’s.
He was trying very hard to be an easy person to be with, but she looked at him as though his clothes were slipping off.
“What happened to Mama’s dog?” she said.
He blinked, his face aching from the ready-to-guffaw expression he was powerless to keep it from taking on. “How many guesses do I get?”
She stared at him.
The impulse to flee was beating in his veins.
“What’s going on?” she said.
Whatever she meant by that, he decided to take it as a cue for a description of the week’s top parties—the usual smorgasbords of pedigrees, brains, fame, and nouveau Nueva.
She seemed to be following, but he couldn’t be sure.
“Look, I figured I could stop at Integral Yoga and get two pounds of tofu,” Dobbsie said, “or I could dig up some really fun yummies. So guess where we’re going. We’re going to Archibald’s! Faith Banks has reserved us the front table! Shall we start with an aperitif?”
He clapped his hands, and Felicien, the maître d’ from Archibald’s, entered, carrying a silver tray with a bottle of Evian and two small glasses. Sal, his young assistant, brought the ice and lime and laid two formal lunch settings—one on Ash’s hospital table and the other on a portable buffet table for Dobbsie. With a flourish, Felicien poured two glasses of mineral water.
Dobbsie raised his glass. “Health.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Ash said.
The appetizer was petite pastry shells heaped with gray beluga caviar, each topped with a quail egg. He watched Ash, wanting to be able to tell Tina Vanderbilt how well she was handling a fork. She didn’t touch her food and she didn’t chuckle once at his stories.
“There’s a new game,” he said, “making up names for people—but it has to be an article of clothing. Are you ready? The Von Auersbergs are the Newport blazers. Isn’t that too much? Well, you remember those parties they gave at Clarendon Court last summer. The Pendletons are the Saratoga breechers, that’s cheating a little, but Merce de la Renta thought it up and it really fits. The Fords are the Grosse Pointe loafers. Get it? Okay—who are Bill and Pat Buckley?”
No reaction.
“I’ll give you a hint. Stamford.”
She sat in a deep lethargy, saying nothing.
Dobbsie wolfed his dessert, fresh raspberries with crème Chantilly flavored with just a zeste of Benedictine—a secret he’d coaxed out of the chef at Grand Vefour in Paris. He managed to keep a semblance of patter going, but it was like playing both sides of the tennis net at once.
“I mean, you see Henry Kissinger’s Frau curtsying to this princess who is dressed so grotesquely, and you have to ask yourself, who is fooling whom? Well, they’re not fooling us old foxes, are they, hon.”
There didn’t seem much purpose in continuing what had become a monologue, especially when the audience had drifted away to some other universe.
He wiped his mouth and carefully folded Mrs. Banks’s beautiful Pierre Deux napkin.
Ash was staring, of all things, at a lipstick tube. It shocked Dobbsie to see what an effort thinking had become for her. Her brow was drawn painfully, her eyes were blinking.
“Dobbsie,” she said, “you know everything. Who was it who was asking me about this lipstick?”