The Wrong Kind of Money Read Online Free PDF Page B

says. “Remember, she holds the purse strings.”
    But Anne, blond and bubbly, knows she’s pretty, and she knows her grandmother thinks she’s pretty—a fair-haired Elizabeth Taylor, that same oval face when she was about Anne’s age and played in National Velvet . ( National Velvet is Nana Hannah’s favorite movie.) And so she doesn’t really mind dressing up and looking her prettiest for her grandmother, sitting with her ankles crossed in the visitor’s chair, balancing her teacup in its saucer. And of course she can’t resist teasing her grandmother a little bit. Not too much, just a bit. She has discovered that her grandmother actually enjoys the teasing—if it doesn’t go too far, that is.
    â€œTonight there’s a real sexpot coming for dinner,” she said to her grandmother this afternoon. “I hear he’s a real hunk.”
    â€œReally, Anne, such language!” her grandmother said. “If I talked like that when I was a girl, I’d have my mouth washed out with Fels Naphtha soap.”
    Have we mentioned that tonight is New Year’s Eve? This accounts in large part for the amount of traffic on Park Avenue. Everyone is on his way to a party somewhere else in town, or to a nightclub or restaurant, or to the theater. But New Year’s Eve is another ritual in the Liebling family. It is the night that Carol and Noah Liebling have their annual family dinner and it, too, is a command performance, and that is where the Lincoln is headed now. Carol and Noah live at River House, on East Fifty-second Street.
    At six o’clock, Cyril Liebling joined his mother and his niece in the morning room at 1000 Park. He did not have far to go, since he lives on the floor above. After Jules Liebling died, Hannah decided to divide the duplex apartment horizontally. “I don’t need all this acreage,” she said to Cyril, “now that I’m all alone. I’m going to have the staircase taken out and the upstairs sealed off. You can live up there. You’ll have your own elevator entrance, complete privacy, and I’ll pay the maintenance on both apartments.”
    It was not an arrangement designed to please Cyril, exactly. While the idea of a large, luxuriously furnished, and rent-free apartment at a splendid address was not without its appeal, Cyril did not much fancy the idea of living in such close proximity to his mother. With the income generated by his father’s trust, he could easily have afforded an elegant place of his own.
    â€œI suppose this is your way of keeping me under your thumb,” he said.
    â€œI’d like to keep my eye on you, Cyril. To make sure you stay out of trouble. You know what I’m talking about.”
    â€œBut, Mother, that was a long time ago, and it was just a childish prank.”
    â€œA childish prank at age twenty-two? A little early to be entering your second childhood, don’t you think?”
    â€œJoey Fernandez was the child. It was all his idea, not mine.”
    â€œI do not wish to hear that name again! Anyway,” she added in a gentler tone, “as I get older, living alone, I like the idea of a family member living close to me. You know—in case something should happen to me.”
    And so he had agreed to go along with her, though not for the reasons she outlined. It was because, secretly, for years he had been in love with that particular apartment. He had always hoped that when she died, she would leave that apartment to him. When it was his, he would reinstall that gracefully curving staircase between the two floors. He would redecorate the rooms to his somewhat more extravagant taste. He would turn the downstairs library into a screening room for his private collection of films. He would give large and lavish entertainments for glittering gatherings of his beautiful friends. “Darling Cyril,” they would say to him, “no one lives as magnificently