Coming Out

“What kind of rabble-rousing left-wing household are you running there, Olympia, if Veronica thinks that making her debut is a persecution of the Great Unwashed? You all sound like a bunch of Commies to me.” It was just the kind of thing Olympia expected him to say.

“Oh for God's sake, Chauncey, they're kids. They get emotional. Veronica has always had extreme political ideas; she's the champion of the underdog. She thinks she's a combination of Mother Teresa and Che Guevara. She'll outgrow it. This is her way of expressing herself. Seven months from now, I think she'll calm down and do it, if we don't make too big a deal of it now. If we do, she'll dig her heels in. So let's be reasonable, please.” Someone had to be. And apparently Chauncey wasn't going to be either, which was no surprise to her.

“Well, let me tell you where I stand on this, Olympia,” he said, sounding incredibly arrogant and haughty, which was typical of him. “I'm not going to tolerate having a revolutionary as a daughter, and I think that should be nipped in the bud right now. You should have done it years ago, if that's the direction she was heading in. I'm not going to tolerate this Communist crap from any of you, if you understand what I mean. If she decides that it is too politically right-wing to make her debut at The Arches, then I'm not going to pay her tuition at Brown next year. She can go and dig ditches in Nicaragua or El Salvador, or wherever she thinks she should be doing it, and see how she likes the life of a political radical. And if she's not careful, she'll wind up in jail.”

“She's not going to jail, Chauncey,” Olympia said, sounding exasperated. He was the other end of the spectrum, and possibly why Veronica was so extreme in reaction to him. There was no one on the planet more snobbish than Chauncey and his wife. They thought the entire world had polo ponies, or should, and that no one existed on earth except people listed in the Social Register. She didn't like his point of view, either. If she had to choose one ideology, she liked Harry's better, but he was being silly too. “She has a strong social conscience. We just have to let her calm down, and hopefully when she does, she'll see that no one is being hurt by this. It's just a fun evening, and something nice for them to do. Don't get in an argument with her, and if you threaten her about tuition, she's liable to do something ridiculous and decide not to go to school.”

“This is what you get for marrying a radical Jew.” His words rang out like shots, as she sat immobilized in her seat. She couldn't believe he had the nerve to say something like that. She wanted to strangle him.

“What did you just say?” she said in an icy tone.

“You heard what I said,” he fired back at her in clipped, aristocratic tones. He sounded so snobby sometimes that he sounded like a 1930s movie. No one spoke that way anymore, at any level of society, only Chauncey and Felicia did, and a handful of snobs like them.

“Don't you ever say something like that to me again. You're not fit to wipe his feet. It's no wonder Veronica is off the deep end over this, with an example like you. My God, have you ever bothered to notice that there's a whole world of people out there, not just idiots like you, with polo ponies?” He hadn't had a real job in twenty years. First he had lived off his grandmother, then his inheritance, and she suspected they lived off Felicia's trust funds, too. They were a worthless lot who had never done anything for the human race and never would. Maybe Veronica was trying to atone for their sins of indifference to the rest of the human race.

“You lost your mind when you converted, Olympia. I've never understood how you could do that. You're a Crawford, for chrissake.”

“No, I'm a Rubinstein,” she said clearly. “I love my husband. My converting was important to him. And it's none of your business. My religion is my business, not yours.” She was furious with him. He was precisely the kind of racist that Harry was objecting to when he said he wouldn't go.

“You betrayed your entire heritage just to please a man who's left of Lenin.” Chauncey stood his ground.

“You don't know what you're talking about. What we're discussing here is a party we want our daughters to attend, not your politics or mine. Leave Lenin to me. The problem is Veronica, not Harry.”