The Auerbach Will Read Online Free

“Tell me, Josh,” she says. “I want to know everything. I want to know how young Josh is doing with the company.…”
    After dinner, Essie finds herself on the arm of young Mr. Carter, who has asked her to show him the rest of the apartment.
    â€œGolly, is that a real Picasso?” he asks.
    â€œYes, and in fact all four of the big paintings in this room are by Picasso. We wanted one from each of his periods—the rose, the blue, the cubist …”
    â€œOh, wow.”
    â€œI call this the Picasso room,” Essie says and, leading him along, “… and this little room I call the Gainsborough room, though the two paintings on that wall are by Romney. Both Gainsborough and Romney have gone out of fashion, I’m told, but still I’m quite fond of them.
    â€œâ€¦ And this we called the Oriental room. As you can see, my husband also collected Chinese Export porcelains. I think it looks pretty displayed against the Coromandel screens, don’t you? And these”—pointing to the locked glass bookcases—“are all incunabula.”
    â€œIncunabula?”
    â€œBooks printed before the year fifteen-oh-one. They’re also called cradle books, for some reason.”
    â€œHow did your husband have time to collect all these things, on top of everything else he did?”
    â€œWell, there was a Mr. Duveen who helped us. And the Post-Impressionists were all bought when the prices were very, very low. Tell me, Mr. Carter—what do you do with the Parks Department?”
    â€œNothing as interesting as this,” he says. Then he says, “Karen drinks too much.”
    â€œI know. What do you propose we do about it?”
    He shakes his head. “She says she drinks because she’s unhappy. But how can she be unhappy with all this—beauty—in her life? Golly, it’s beyond me, Mrs. Auerbach. Beyond me.”
    â€œIt’s her mother. Joan hounds her. She hounds everybody.”
    He hesitates, as though wondering whether or not it would be proper to agree. “Mrs. McAllister is—a very good looking woman,” he says.
    â€œOh, yes. When she was younger, there were some who said that she bore a resemblance to Gene Tierney, who was an actress,” Essie says.
    Now is it time to trim the tree and give the toasts, and everyone is gathered in the big sitting room where the tree has been set up and where Yoki has lit the fires. By tradition—how it started Essie cannot remember—each guest selects an ornament, fills a glass with champagne, and mounts the stepladder. From the ladder, he pins his ornament on the tree, and then proposes a toast. Sitting on one of the French sofas, Babette is still chattering, as she has been most of the evening, about Palm Beach, where she and Joe will soon be going to spend the rest of the winter in the Addison Mizner house they have bought there. Of her two daughters, Essie has to admit, Joan got the brains, whereas Babette—well, Babette has a mind more suited to the society type of life she chooses to live. Babette is saying, “Do you know that ever since Marjorie Post died, and now that Rose Kennedy is nothing but a shell, the Shiny Sheet is calling me one of P.B.’s leading hostesses? Isn’t that extraordinary?”
    Essie claps her hands. “Time to begin the toasts,” she says.
    As the president of Eaton & Cromwell, it is up to Josh Auerbach to make the first, and to carry the big star up and pin it to the top of the tree. It’s funny, but whenever Essie sees Josh’s name and photograph in the papers she has trouble reconciling this graying, good-looking “business leader,” as he is usually called, in his early fifties, with the picture in her mind of the bright little boy who was her youngest son. Surely this tall man in a dark business suit who is mounting the ladder rather carefully, the star in one hand and his champagne glass in the