THE SUN KING by David Ignatius

Author:David Ignatius [David Ignatius]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Love Story
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2000-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

BETTY RIDGWAY LIVED INan old stone mansion in Georgetown, just west of Wisconsin Avenue and a few blocks from Candace’s own house. The cobblestone street looked to be a hundred years old; the ancient streetcar tracks were still embedded amid the stones, making driving treacherous. The house itself was gray and forbidding, but as with so many of these Georgetown houses, it concealed a vast, bright garden that had been lovingly tended. Mrs. Ridgway was in her sitting room; a small fire had been laid by her maid. (Somehow, she had kept enough money through her widowhood to afford a maid, but that was the true secret of the WASP elite, wasn’t it?—the preservation of capital.) She had her feet up on a stool and was reading an Agatha Christie novel. It was a scene that might have occurred just this way at any time over the last fifty years. That was another thing I envied about the WASP elite: their utter imperviousness to time and fashion.

Mrs. Ridgway reluctantly said hello to me. She had been looking forward to chatting with her daughter and had prepared a little cold plate for lunch—tiny lettuces and bits of meat that wouldn’t be enough for a bunny.

“My goodness,” she said. “You’re certainly tall.”

I lied and said I’d already had lunch, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She sent the maid into the larder to come up with something manly to eat, which turned out to be a cold, half-devoured joint of roast beef that was graying at the edges and looked to be a week old. The maid served it up just like that, on a big plate, with a knife and fork and some ketchup.

We all picked at our food. Candace tried to stoke up a little conversation by explaining to her mother that before joining theSun, I had been editor ofReveal magazine and one of Washington’s social arbiters. Mrs. Ridgeway took a look at me and nodded severely. The notion that the stringy young man across from her had anything to do with society confirmed her worst fears. “Whoare all these people I read about inReveal ?” she asked. “The Bernsteins and the Rubins and the Greens? Who are they?”

“They’re Jews,” I said. There was a long pause—very long—and I thought that I had blown it forever. But I saw Candace trying to suppress a chuckle, unsuccessfully, and suddenly she was laughing and so, incongruously, were Mrs. Ridgway and I. Hard to be sure who was the real anti-Semite in the group, but it didn’t matter. It broke the ice.

We talked for a few minutes about parties and charity balls. Candace mentioned a survey we had done once called “Bang for the Buck”—about how much it cost to put on each of the big charity events, and how little was left over for the underlying good causes. Mrs. Ridgway remembered it—had loved it, in fact, for it had confirmed her conviction that the balls were a fraud conceived by nouveaux-riches social climbers to get their pictures inReveal magazine.

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