The After Party

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

Copyright © 2016 by Anton DiSclafani

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eBook ISBN: 9780698161238

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: DiSclafani, Anton, author.

Title: The after party : a novel / Anton DiSclafani.

Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016002782 | ISBN 9781594633164 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Upper class families—Texas—Fiction. |

Debutantes—Texas—Fiction. | Socialites—Texas—Fiction. | Social

status—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Contemporary

Women. | FICTION / Family Life. | FICTION / Coming of Age.

Classification: LCC PS3604.I84 A69 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002782

p. cm.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Peter Smith, who was with me the whole time I wrote this book, and in memory of Peter DiSclafani, 1928–
1990

I
t's the women who still ask me about Joan. Young women, who have stumbled upon her story and my part in it. Old women, who used to admire her photographs in the gossip columns: Joan the jewel, a glimmer on some man's arm. Frank Sinatra's, Dick Krueger's, Diamond Glenn's. They want to know who she was. First, I tell them, she was Furlow Fortier's little blond darling. From the very beginning, she was adored.

Then she was Houston's most famous socialite. They won't ever know what it was like to stand in her presence, but I try to paint a picture. There wasn't anything subtle about Joan, a woman born to be looked at. She was slender, but she wasn't a twig. Her dresses clung to her, drew attention to her shapely hips, her strong arms, her famous bosom. Wherever she went, champagne flowed
like a fountain. She made people happy. She was beautiful, certainly, but she was more. She was lit from the inside.

I stop here. They want to know how she disappeared. But I can't tell them that.

I don't say that loving her was my earliest instinct, my first memory. I was her best friend since infancy, her modern-day lady-in-waiting, her sister in all but blood.

She disappeared for the first time in 1950 when we were seniors in high school. It didn't take us long to figure out that she had run away to Hollywood to become a star. And if you had stood in a room with her at that time you would have been sure she'd make it. Because she was everyone's dream, in those days; why not some studio executive's? She was gone for a year, trying, and then she returned, and life as we all knew it resumed its orbit, with Joan at the bright, hot center. She disappeared in a thousand small ways after Hollywood. For a day, for an evening, for a week. Even when she was with me it felt as if she were vanishing.

It was the one constant in our friendship: she would leave and I would look for her. Until I would not.

•   •   •

I
n the beginning, we were both Joan. Joan One and Joan Two when our nannies dropped us off at River Oaks Elementary School for our first day of kindergarten. Our teacher, a young blond thing who was teaching rich babes their ABCs and colors until her beau finally proposed, paused as she was going through names. Paused at us, the two Joans. One fair, one dark. One, it seemed evident,
even at this young age, destined to be beautiful; the other one dark, with clear, even features. Pretty enough.

“What is your middle name?” she asked me, the dark girl.

“Cecilia,” I replied. I was five years old. I knew my middle name, my address, my telephone number.

“And you?” she asked, kneeling before Joan, taking her tiny hand and holding it as if a fragile bird.

I removed Joan's tanned hand from the teacher's grasp. I didn't like people taking liberties with my friend, even then. I was used to people wanting to touch her. I understood, but I didn't like it.

“She doesn't have one,” I said, and Joan nodded cheerfully in agreement. She wasn't scared of strangers, or big men with deep voices, or anything really. She'd started swimming lessons the year before and was already diving off the high board at the pool.

“I don't.”

“Well,” the teacher said, her hands on her hips. In my memory, she wears a pale blue dress dotted with delicate flowers, her hair in a modest bob. I could see the lacy edge of her slip when she knelt down to speak to us. It was 1937, and she must have been desperate to be married, desperate to teach her own children the ABCs, to identify for them the many hues of the bright and colorful world.

“Let's say you're Cecilia from now on. No, Cece. Has a nicer ring to it. And you”—she smiled at Joan, reassuringly—“don't worry, you're still Joan.”

Our mothers weren't friends, but they were friendly. We'd met because our nannies, Idie and Dorie, were sisters. They'd wanted
jobs close together, in River Oaks, and they'd gotten them only a street apart with Mary Fortier and Raynalda Beirne, two very different kinds of women. Their differences stemmed from money, as so many differences do. Mary, Joan's mother, had grown up poor and plain in Littlefield, Texas. She was in high school when she met Joan's father, fifteen years older than she and already wealthy. Mary understood the magnitude of her good fortune, the unlikelihood of her escape from dusty, dead-end Littlefield. Joan was born when Mary had thought her childbearing years were through. She made Furlow a daddy, Mary a mother, and both parents seemed forever grateful to her for the gesture. Furlow, an oilman from Louisiana who kept making money right through the Great Depression, believed in divine providence, the way that lucky men often do, and Joan's late arrival into the world was proof of his blessed life.

My family was rich, too, but not like the Fortiers. My mother had her inheritance, and my father was an executive at Humble, but he wasn't a diviner of oil like Furlow Fortier. My mother's married life was a steep decline from her childhood. She'd grown up with maids and butlers and nannies in Savannah; in River Oaks she employed one maid and one nanny, and lived in a house that wasn't even close to being the biggest.

But still, both women had named their firstborn daughters Joan. The gesture seems hopeful to me now. Joan: such an elegant name. And strong, too: they must have felt like they were bestowing their tiny babies with men's names. Perhaps they hoped their daughters would inherit a man's world, with a man's privileges. Probably they thought nothing of the sort. Joan was the fifth-most
popular name for little girls in 1932. Mary and my mother named us Joan just like everyone else did, because that's what people do, generally: what everyone else does.

But back to that first day in kindergarten. That night, after my nanny, Idie, had fed and bathed me and my mother had come to tuck me in, I told her that my name had been changed. She was furious, naturally. My mother was always furious. But the name stuck, and from then on Joan got to be Joan, and I was Cece, less a name than a sound, a whoosh of air, twice; a near-whistle.

I got used to
it.

1957

J
oan sat in my living room, on my squat orange sofa, sipping a dirty gin martini, her usual drink. It was her second, but Joan had always held her liquor like a man. On this hot, humid day in May—summer comes early in Houston, always—our lives were still normal. By August Joan would be gone.

Joan and I lived five minutes from each other, still in River Oaks, the most beautiful neighborhood in all of Houston, house after spectacular house. You felt like you were a person who meant something, if you lived in River Oaks. The lawns so big they could have been pastures, the houses so grand they could have been mistaken for castles, the gardens and esplanades so manicured they could have belonged to Versailles. There were other nice neighborhoods in Houston, sure, but West University wasn't quite rich
enough and Shadyside wasn't quite big enough, more like a collection of houses than a neighborhood. River Oaks was another world. You entered its borders and found yourself in a land both spectacular and unending.

I was twenty-five, the mother of a young child, and I spent my days tending to my house and making social calls and generally fulfilling the role of a wealthy young housewife. Not that any of us women in River Oaks were anything besides housewives. What else would we have done? I belonged to the River Oaks Garden Club, to the Junior League of Houston, to the Ladies' Reading Club. Joan did, too, though she was careless with her memberships, rarely came to meetings. But no one would have thought of revoking her memberships. She was Mary Fortier's daughter, and Mary had ruled River Oaks in her day. And besides, I would have raised holy hell.

Lounging on my couch, Joan wore a brown shirtdress from last season, cinched at her waist with a red belt. The dress was all wrong: meant for fall, too big in the shoulders, a stiff material that did her no favors. She had no style when it came to clothes; I had always dressed her for evenings out. Or the ladies at Sakowitz sent over full outfits, from shoes to dress to underthings to earrings, a black-and-white Polaroid of the ensemble clipped to its sleeve.

I
was always the better dressed of the two of us. Today, even though I'd only left the house once, for a Junior League meeting, I wore a knee-length, pale blue taffeta skirt that moved with me as I walked, sprouting from my waist like a flower. It made me bolder, to wear fine clothes.

All I had to do was lean forward and touch the hem of her skirt and Joan rolled her eyes.

“I think what you want to say is let's put that up forever and forever. Send it to the clothes graveyard.” She set her martini on the little chrome-and-glass drinking table I pulled out for cocktails, clasped her hands behind her head, and stretched. There was something mannish about the way Joan moved. She wasn't careful with her gestures, her limbs. She looked around the living room, at everything but me. She was bored.

“Where's Tommy?” she asked, in a bright, false way that made me think I had misread her completely. Maybe Joan wasn't bored. Now that I was noticing, her famous brown eyes were a little swollen.

She saw me staring and raised her eyebrows.

“What? Is there a piece of chicken in my teeth? I had chicken enchiladas again for lunch today at Felix's. With a side of lard. Pretty soon I'm going to turn into an enchilada . . .” She trailed off, plucked an invisible piece of something off her lap.

“Are you all right?”

“Are you sure there's not a piece of tortilla?” she asked, batting away the question with a joke. She drew her lips apart, revealed two neat rows of beautifully white teeth. For a second I forgot what I had been asking Joan, and then why I had asked her in the first place.

“Tommy?” she asked again.

I called for Maria. A moment later she appeared, dark and petite, Tommy on her hip. Maria was our housekeeper, technically, and she helped with Tommy. People—the women in our
circle—thought it strange I didn't have more help, a nanny for Tommy, and though it bothered me that people might think we couldn't afford a nanny, I didn't want one. The idea of holding Tommy up to more scrutiny from a stranger, even a stranger in my employ, unnerved me.

“He can walk,” I chided. “Tommy, come see Miss Joan.”

If Tommy ever did start speaking,
when
he started speaking, he might as likely speak Spanish as English because of Maria. She and I communicated in a tangle of words and gestures.

The servants Joan and I had grown up with were all colored, with a few white country people mixed in. Most of the servants in River Oaks were still colored, descendants of that first generation, but I'd scoured Houston for someone who didn't remind me of Idie.

Tommy stared at me, then held out a hand for Joan. He was three years old, just, and still hadn't uttered a single intelligible word. He loved Joan. He loved a lot of things: Water, dogs, slides. A book about a flying monkey. The way I patted his cheeks and kissed both of them, left, then right, the very last thing before I tucked him in at night. And yet sometimes, to me, only to me I hoped, there seemed to be a vacancy in his gaze, an absence.

Joan crossed the room in three big strides and took Tommy from Maria's arms into her own.

“Why walk when you can be carried?” she sang while she fussed with his collar, smoothed his pretty brown hair against his head.

I watched them and felt happy. Joan herself seemed happier.

It was an easy thing, to feel happy with Joan. My husband, Ray,
was where he belonged right now, at his office downtown. But he would come home soon, and later, after Joan and I had changed and Ray had put on something more comfortable, we would go out on the town. Pretend we were young again. Tonight there would be dinner and drinks at the Cork Club. There would be dancing, joking, general feelings of goodwill amplified by champagne. Wherever Joan went, the drinks were on the house and people were desperate to be near her, to know her, to catch her eye.

But of all the places in the world she could be, she was here, with me. In my living room, holding my little boy's hands in her own, trying to teach him how to dance. In a second she would ask me to put a record on.

There was always a future, with Joan. Another moment to look forward to. Tommy glanced at me and I smiled; he seemed to be, if not dancing, exactly, trying. Like he understood what Joan was asking of him.

•   •   •

J
oan sat on a shaky fence that summer. All the girls we'd used to float around with had married, produced children, fallen neatly into the ranks. Like me. Since high school Joan had enjoyed a reputation as a wild child but that didn't matter so much in Houston, not when you were young. Not if you had money; beauty helped, too. And Joan had both. Another town wouldn't have forgiven her Hollywood jaunt—who knew the men she'd been with, or what she'd tried out there. But Houston was magnanimous in all things.

Yet she wasn't eighteen anymore. And last month in the
powder room at the Confederate House I'd heard Darlene Cooper tell Kenna Fields that Joan Fortier was getting a little long in the tooth to wear her hair in a high, blond ponytail like a little girl.

I'd stayed in my stall, stared at the black-and-white striped wallpaper, mortified. A better friend would have marched out and told Darlene Cooper, whose husband, everyone knew, was light in the loafers, exactly what she thought of her and her cheap gossip and cheaper dress. Darlene had been in our circle since high school. She should have known better.

But I'd been hearing a lot of murmurs about Joan lately. A man was a game she tired of playing after a month or two. Nobody used to care that she hadn't had a serious boyfriend since high school—but now that she was getting older people were noticing. It was time for the great Joan Fortier to settle down, was the general feeling.

But I had to pick my battles. This one didn't seem worth fighting, that's what I told myself, but really I thought perhaps Darlene was right.

•   •   •

A
fter Joan danced with Tommy, she went home to change. She reappeared several hours later, running across my lawn in a blue velvet dress and pearl earrings the size of walnuts.

I'd slipped outside when I heard her Cadillac pull up and watched her leap out of the pale green car before Fred, her chauffeur since forever, could assist her.

“Ta-da,” she sang as she approached, barefoot, ignoring the neat brick path to march instead straight through the grass. Her
heels were in her hand, her face unmade, her hair undone: she looked like she'd just gotten up from tanning by the pool. Which she probably had.

I tamped down a flare of irritation; she was forty-five minutes late.

“We've got to get moving,” I called.

She smiled, gave an elaborate shrug, kissed me on the cheek. I could smell her coconut tanning oil.

“Did you even take a shower?” I asked. “A bath?”

She shrugged again. Her eyes were unfocused, like she'd been in the sun too long.

“What's the point?” she asked, and walked past me into the house, dropping her shoes—Ferragamos—onto the hardwood floor of the foyer.

I made her sit at my vanity and, mindful of Darlene's ponytail comment, fixed her hair into a French twist. I applied a little powder to her forehead but skipped the rouge because her cheeks were already red.

“If you stay out in the sun too long,” I said, “you'll turn into a lobster.”

Joan ignored me, fiddled with a diamond bracelet Furlow had given her when she'd turned twenty-three.

Joan's parents still lived in Joan's childhood home, Evergreen, her father in his eighties and losing his mind, Mary his faithful companion turned caretaker.

“Sit still,” I murmured as I filled in Joan's brows with pencil. These days, Joan only tolerated makeup when I applied it. I knew her face better than my own: the mole at her right temple that was
somehow pretty instead of distracting; the sharp cheekbones; the faint scattering of freckles on her forehead that emerged only in the summertime.

“Did you hear about Daisy Mintz?” she asked.

Of course I had. Daisy Mintz, née Dillingworth, had caused quite a stir in River Oaks three summers ago when she'd left to marry a Jew from New York. Her parents had disowned her, briefly; apparently the Mintz fortune had soothed their outrage. Just last week I'd heard from our friend Ciela that Daisy was asking for a divorce. Mr. Mintz had been unfaithful, which was a story as old as time itself. Older. I couldn't help but be bored by it.

“What did she expect? She chose glitz and glamour and money. A stranger, practically. And it all fell apart.” Joan said nothing. “Anyway, it sounds nasty,” I continued. “He wants the child to stay with him. Ridiculous,” I murmured, as I smoothed a dot of foundation onto her chin. “Children belong with their mothers.”

“She's going to get a lot of money,” Joan said abruptly. “Tons.”

“And?” We all had a lot of money. “That child's going to grow up with parents who hate each other. What did she want with him?”

“Maybe she loved him.”

“Maybe she was being shortsighted,” I countered.

“Oh, Cee,” Joan said, “don't be such a yawn.” Her voice was easy; I wasn't offended. I
was
a yawn, between the two of us. I didn't mind.

“I might be boring, but at least my life's not a wreck.”

“Daisy Dillingworth Mintz,” she said. “Stranded on the great island of Manhattan.”

“You're flushed,” I said, feeling her forehead with the back of my hand.

“Am I? Must be the weather. It feels like the sun came out just for me.”

“Maybe it did,” I said, and Joan smiled, and there was such an understanding between us, such a feeling of grace.

It went without saying that summer was Joan's favorite season. She loved to swim, to dive, to do anything that involved water. The rest of us wilted a little bit in the heat, even though we were used to Houston's climes, but Joan seemed made for it.

“She got to see the world,” Joan said, and at first I didn't know what she was talking about. “Daisy,” she said, impatiently. “She got to do whatever she wanted for three years.”

“I hope she fit a lifetime into them.”

•   •   •

T
he Shamrock Hotel was wildcatter Glenn McCarthy's green baby. Sixty-three shades to be exact: green carpet, green chairs, green tablecloths, green curtains. Green uniforms. The hotel sat next to the Texas Medical Center, which Monroe Dunaway Anderson had founded and bequeathed nineteen million dollars to in his will. It was like that, in Houston: there was money everywhere, and some people did very good things with it, like Mr. Anderson, and some people built glamorous, foolish structures, like Mr. McCarthy. Mr. Anderson
helped
more people than Mr. McCarthy, certainly, but where did we have more fun?

The rest of the country was worried about the Russians, worried about the Commies in our midst, worried about the Koreans.
But Houston's oil had washed its worries away. This was the place where a wealthy bachelor had bought himself a cheetah and let it live on his patio, swim in his pool; where a crazy widower flew in caviar and flavored vodka once a month for wild soirees where everyone had to speak in a Russian accent; where Silver Dollar Jim West had thrown silver coins from his chauffeur-driven limo, then pulled over to watch the crowds' mad scramble. The bathroom fixtures at the Petroleum Club were all plated in twenty-four-karat gold. There was a limited supply of gold in the world; it would not regenerate. And Houston had most of it, I was convinced.

We valeted our car and headed straight to the Shamrock's Cork Club; Louis, our Irish, gray-haired bartender, was there, and he handed me a flute of champagne, Joan a gin martini, up, and Ray a gin and tonic.

“Thank you, doll,” Joan said, and Ray slid a coiled roll of money across the bar.