Gossip by Beth Gutcheon Read Free Book Online Page B

I thought she was in love with a photo-realist painter named Barney she’d been half living with in SoHo, or what became SoHo, I’m not sure it had a name yet in those days. Richard, by contrast, was the most conventional man I’d ever seen her with. Dinah had met him at a boarding school glee club dance, then run across him years later on one of her nightlife prowls. He was quite wonderful in his way, handsome, solid, and with a cheerful wit. But he came from a town outside Chicago so like Canaan Woods that it might as well have been the same place. The Wainwrights were country club people, Junior League people, people who’d never met a Negro who wasn’t a servant. Richard was far more than that, but he wasn’t in New York because he was fleeing where he came from, as Dinah and I were. He was in New York because he’d been offered a job with J. P. Morgan when he got out of Dartmouth and thought it would be neat to live here. The fact that Dinah could hear her companion utter a sentence like that and remain serene proved to me that she loved him, but there was also the fact that Richard Jr. was on the way.
    They found a huge rent-controlled apartment on East Eighty-sixth Street across from Carl Schurz Park, and Dinah began a sort of salon, supper every Sunday night for a rotating cast of hundreds from all the worlds she and Simon Snyder inhabited, the theater, fashion, music, books, the art world, society friends, and of course a selection of Richard’s more eligible colleagues. Invitations were prized, and Richard happily bankrolled it all and stood around on the edges, smiling. This was the New York he had hoped for. No one was terribly interested in talking to him, but he met most of the people one read about in the gossip columns, and he generally thought it was very entertaining. He was an easy man to please.
    I was invited to perhaps one in three of Dinah’s Sundays. I couldn’t always go, as at that time I often went to the country on weekends with my friend, the man I had met at Meg’s wedding. He had inherited a house in northwestern Connecticut that we both adored. But when we were in town he enjoyed going, and the crowd was always eclectic enough that his presence wasn’t surprising. Few even realized we were together, and those who did wouldn’t have talked about it. What happened at Dinah’s was never reported outside, unless by Dinah herself, and she protected her friends. She protected me, by making sure my friend and his famously difficult wife were elaborately mentioned as a couple whenever Althea deigned to come up from Palm Beach or back from Paris or Rio to attend some grand function with him.
    R ichard Jr., called RJ, was all boy, early to walk and late to talk. I remember him wheeling around the kitchen on his little plastic motorcycle with frightening skill while Dinah was cooking. He could steer in reverse better than I could. I brought him the record of Free to Be . . . You and Me, which was supposed to teach him that boys could express their true feelings, and I suppose it worked because from the get-go he freely showed that what he loved best in the world were trucks and guns. Show him all the flowers and birdies you wanted, he’d look politely and blink with those huge brown eyes, but let him catch sight of a big rig and he’d go “brmmm, brmmm” and jig with excitement.
    Dinah was working as hard as ever the first few years of RJ’s life, reporting with Simon on “Eye” and writing “Dinah Might” for Fridays. She collected so much material for the columns at her weekend gatherings—people told her everything, they couldn’t seem to help it—that she didn’t have to go out as much in the evenings, but she was still very much the girl about town, turning out for friends’ openings and concerts and whatever sounded amusing. Sometimes they kept the nanny overnight and Richard went