People Like Us by Dominick Dunne

and her own immense fortune had always protected her from having to fraternize socially with any of them, except when she asked them for money for one of her charities. Recently, however, with the publication of Mr. Forbes’s annual list of the four hundred richest people in America, she was aware that her still immense fortune was less immense than the fortunes of such New People as Elias Renthal “and hisilk,” meaning the Bulbenkians, and the Zobel brothers, and the Jorsts. The feeling was unsettling.
    “Imagine anyone wearing a pale blue gabardine suit,” said Lil, still staring over at Elias Renthal. Then she added, “Who’s Bernard Slatkin?”
    “He’s the man I’m going to marry,” answered Justine.
    “Goodness,” said Lil.
    Justine expected a great furor of protestations from her mother, and possibly a scene. Bernard Slatkin possessed none of the requisites that Lil Altemus, who never let anyone forget that she was born a Van Degan, adhered to in past suitors for her daughter’s hand. Surprisingly, Lil was, if not exactly enthusiastic, at least not defiant in her opposition to Justine’s choice. Justine was, after all, thirty, or, to be precise, practically thirty-one. The kind of boys she had grown up with, gone to dancing school with, spent weekends with at Yale or Princeton, and who now worked downtown, in banks or brokerage houses, almost never married girls as rich as Justine Altemus was going to be. As one after another of them had drifted into solid if less spectacular marriages, Lil’s greatest fear was that Justine would fall into the clutches of one of the fortune-hunting foreigners who preyed on American heiresses. Every time she thought of her childhood friend, Consuelo Harcourt de Rham, she shuddered at her sad fete. The sight of Consuelo’s widower, Constantine de Rham, several tables away, spending Consuelo’s money on a blond strumpet half his age, wearing for too many jewels for daytime, may have softened Lil’s opposition to Bernard Slatkin.
    “Slatkin,” said Lil. “I don’t know that name.”
    “It’s not in the
Social Register
, Mother,” answered Justine.
    “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”
    “He earns a great deal of money, Mother.”
    “A television announcer, someone told me.”
    “No, he is a broadcaster. On the evening news.”
    “Not the little Chinese?”
    “No, Mother, that’s the weatherman, and he’s Korean, not Chinese. Bernie is one of the anchormen.”
    “Oh, yes, of course. Is he the one with the dimple or the one with the toupee?”
    “The dimple. He’s very handsome, Mother.”
    “Of course he is, darling. Where in the world did you meet such a person?”
    “At Maisie Verdurin’s.”
    “Mrs. Verdurin has all those celebrities to dinner, doesn’t she? I’m forever reading about her in Dolly’s column. What were you doing at Mrs. Verdurin’s?”
    “We’re here to talk about the man I’m going to marry, not about Maisie Verdurin.”
    “What do you suppose old Cora Mandell and Ezzie Fenwick are being so intense about at the next table?” asked Lil.
    “Mother!”
    “I’m listening, Justine,” said her mother, sharply. “Forgive me if I can’t absorb it all in a flash. This is quite important news, and, after all, we don’t know anything about Mr. Bernard Slatkin, now, do we?”
    Justine knew, before her mother even said it, that she was going to say, “Who is he?” She also knew that her mother meant, “Who is his family? What are his schools?”
    “Who is he?” asked her mother.
    “His parents are dead. He was raised by an aunt and uncle, Sol and Hester Slatkin. Sol is in the printing business. They live in New Jersey. Weehawken.”
    “Hmm,” said Lil.
    “Bernie went to Rutgers on a scholarship,” said Justine. She loved saying, “He went to Rutgers on a scholarship,” as if it added to the worth of him, a romantic asset to his history. In all her life she had never known anyone who had gone to school on