CHAPTER TWO

821 Fifth Avenue

Upper East Side

Even in the thin air inhabited by Manhattan’s stratospherically high-end property agents—where no one bats an eyelash at a $35 million listing—821 Fifth Avenue was considered hallowed ground. It was built in 1918 to the most exacting standards of luxury, and each apartment in the twenty-one-story building occupied an entire floor, creating sumptuous mansions in the sky. But it wasn’t the size of these residences that made the building so renowned; rather, it was the plain fact that 821 was considered to be one of the top five most exclusive buildings in Manhattan. Two ambassadors, one retired Supreme Court justice, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and even a deposed European monarch were politely turned down from purchasing by its notoriously difficult co-op board.

Much of this was due to the fact that a majority of its apartments were still held by the original families who had owned since 1918, and few units ever changed hands. To paraphrase the Patek Philippe slogan, it could be said that one never actually owned an apartment in 821—one merely looked after it for the next generation. So the building remained, well into the twenty-first century, a bastion of privacy for some of the East Coast’s most rarefied and discreetly influential families, among them Lucie’s grandmother, Mrs. John L. Churchill, or as she was known to everyone in her exclusive circle, Consuelo Barclay Churchill (privately tutored / Miss Porter’s / Institut Villa Pierrefeu).

Consuelo’s pedigree was unimpeachable. Born a Barclay, one of America’s landed gentry families whose storied history went back to the Virginia land grants of King James I, she was on her maternal side the last surviving granddaughter of the Industrial Age tycoon who built the Northeast Atlantic railroads. Her marriage to John L. Churchill, scion to a Gilded Age fortune and president of Churchill Brothers Averill & Co., one of the oldest private banks in the United States, cemented her pole position within New York’s Old Guard, but she had neither the interest nor inclination to follow in the footsteps of Bunny, Jayne, or Brooke and become a society doyenne. Intensely private and cosseted since birth, she never felt the need to make much of an effort. While she once presided over the Fifth Avenue residence, an estate in Southampton, and an hôtel particulier on Paris’s Right Bank, these days she preferred to spend most of the year at her “winter home” in Hobe Sound, Florida, coming to New York only during the fall ballet season.

Tonight, however, Consuelo had made the exception of traveling to the city and opening up the apartment for her granddaughter’s engagement party, which is how Lucie found herself standing in the middle of her grandmother’s drawing room in a pretty Zimmermann white eyelet dress, receiving the relatives and friends on her father’s side who had gathered from all over the country on a beautiful late-spring evening and who, truth be told, were mystified by how Lucie had pulled off the feat of becoming engaged to a man they had all read so much about.

“So how did you meet him again?” Teddy Barclay (Rippowam / Phillips Exeter / Harvard) asked his cousin pointedly as he grabbed another pig in a blanket from the istoriato Italian Renaissance platter being held by a uniformed maid.

“We met in Rome five years ago, Teddy. Charlotte and I were touring the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, and Cecil came walking down the hallway with the owner of the palazzo and saw that we were admiring a particularly beautiful painting of Saint Sebastian. So he started telling us about it—even educating the prince about his own art collection. He’s incredibly knowledgeable about Italian art.”

Teddy twitched his nose, unimpressed. “So what precisely does Cecil do these days?”

“Cecil’s the busiest man I know. He’s got dozens of projects. He’s funding about thirty start-ups, he’s on the International Council of the Louvre, he started a nonprofit that restores frescos in Naples, and he’s—”

“None of those sound like real jobs to me,” Teddy remarked, as he chewed openmouthed on a pig in a blanket.

“Teddy, give it a rest,” his wife, Annafred (Rippowam / Deerfield / Benenden / Saint Catharine’s, Cambridge), cut in.

“But this was only my third piggy!” Teddy protested.

“I’m not talking about the piggy! Stop harassing Lucie. What does it matter what Cecil’s job is?” Annafred said.

Charlie Spencer Houghton (Rippowam / Phillips Exeter / Harvard), an uncle on the Churchill side, jumped into the conversation. “Cecil Pike doesn’t need a job. Billennialsfn1 these days don’t bother putting in time at the office for appearances’ sake. They just jet around the world with their laptops. Do you know how much that father of Cecil’s personally pocketed when he sold Midland Gas to Texaco? Seven billion. That was in the eighties, Ted, and that was before his widow decided to invest all the money in a little start-up called Google.”

Teddy raised his eyebrows. Now that he had heard it from Charlie, he was finally a little bit impressed.

“Speaking of the widow, Lucie, is it true that Cecil’s mother couldn’t get into 740 Park or 1040 Fifth, so she bought up half a block’s worth of town houses and turned it into a behemoth that dwarfs the mansion that the Qataris built?” Lucie’s preternaturally poised cousin from Boston, Caroline Cabot Churchill Reed (Brimmer & May / Miss Porter’s / Wellesley), who went by Cacky, asked provocatively.

“Um, I don’t know about that, but Cecil’s mother does have a beautiful house,” Lucie replied, trying to be diplomatic and discreet.

“Oh, come now, Lucie, spill the dirt! Are you going to be moving into the Texas embassy? I hear it’s got its own hair salon and an underground pool bigger than the one at the University Club.”

Lucie tried to laugh it off casually. “I have no plans to move in with my mother-in-law—Cecil’s in the process of finishing up our own place in the West Village.”

“The West Village, how quaint! I remember once going to some cute little theater down there to see a Eugene O’Neill play, and we had dinner at the most adorable art deco restaurant decorated with this big socialist mural.fn2 Now, isn’t Reneé Pike supposed to be more royal than the Queen? Do we have to bow when we meet her?”

“I don’t know how you got that impression, Cacky.”

“Charlotte told me she was very grand.”

“Charlotte? She’s never even met Reneé!”

“Really? She spoke as if they were BFFs. Pray tell, where is Charlotte tonight? I would have thought she of all people would be here, since she was the yenta responsible for all this.”

“Charlotte moved to London last year, didn’t you know? She’s very bummed to be missing tonight, but after Amuse Bouche folded she got this fantastic job working on special projects for Mary Berry, you know, who used to be a judge on The Great British Baking Show, and they’re filming something right now. Anyway, I think you’ll find Reneé to be very friendly. She’s not grand at all, is she, Mom?” Lucie said, turning to her mother.

“Grand? No. Pretentious, yes,” Marian replied.

“Oh, Mother!” Lucie moaned.

“Just kidding! Yes, Reneé is very nice; she can just be a little intimidating, that’s all. She’s a dynamo, very smart and very intense. Wait till you see her—she’s always dressed to be camera ready, and she’s got wedding makeup on every day.”