Free Judith Krantz by Dazzle

Malverns’ unearned income was no more than two hundred thousand dollars a year. Inflation had made that a small sum indeed in Valerie’s Manhattan circle, which had been infiltrated, and quickly taken over, during the last decade, by a class of new people of impossible wealth, wealth on a breathtaking scale that had not been known since the heyday of the Robber Barons.
    Incredibly, she and Billy had become
nouveaux pauvres
, Valerie thought, with a familiar pang. Their large Fifth Avenue apartment had been paid for in the 1960s, and their house in Southport, Connecticut, in the early 1970s, but there was no possibility today that they could afford to buy a vacation house in ski country or the Hamptons. The Malverns were invited everywhere, of course, but it wasn’t the same as having their own place. Valerie had employed all her ability in redoing their no-longer-highly-fashionable Southport clapboard house so that it was occasionally photographed for magazines. In addition they gave two large, well-publicized annual parties, one in Southport and one in New York, without which theywould have no visibility as multiple home owners, the new coinage that signaled wealth.
    Billy Malvern Jr. deeply cherished his position in the rapidly changing cosmos of New York, still seeing himself as the glamorous young man he had been in the 1960s. However, it was the money Valerie earned that now permitted them to stay in New York.
    She had graduated from the New York School of Interior Design and apprenticed to an older decorator before she opened her own small business. Although Valerie would never have an innovative talent, she was able to create and supervise a workmanlike, professional job for women who craved the cachet of employing a “society decorator” from an old family.
    Valerie charged her clients a straight thirty-three-and-a-third markup above wholesale on what they spent, plus a design fee. She did several jobs a year, as much as she could handle with one assistant and a secretary-bookkeeper. As long as nobody guessed that the Malverns needed the money, those jobs would continue to come her way.
    Of course, Valerie mused, as the limousine proceeded north, she and Billy and their children could move to Philadelphia, her maternal ancestors’ Philadelphia, where she could abandon the struggle to maintain a façade, where she never need set her feet in the abominable Decorating and Design Building again, where they could comfortably coast along on income and still take their place among the old families of the city. There, where New York values didn’t prevail, where Valerie was related to half the town and friendly with the other half, they would be perceived correctly as having as much money as anyone really needed.
    But Billy was the first generation of his family to attain a place in society. He had none of the attitudes of an old-money, bred-in-the-bone aristocrat, who would have scorned to maintain a position in the social-climbing Bedlam of New York in 1990. On the contrary, Billy Malvern was infatuated with his niche in society and he refused resolutely to move to Philadelphia,a city he considered stuffy, dowdy and unthinkably provincial.
    There could be no question of divorce. Marriage to a presentable man, however ineffectual, however puffed-up, was far better, Valerie knew, than living on her own, earning her own keep as just another divorcee, while Billy was snatched up by some Fort Worth billionairess as any available man as attractive as he would inevitably be.
    Whenever she thought of divorce, Valerie shivered in fastidious distaste, wondering how her younger sister, Fernanda, had endured, in her careening career, the disruptions of being once widowed, thrice divorced and now married to a fifth husband who obviously wasn’t going to last any longer than the others. Yet Fernanda seemed to thrive on the hurly-burly of marital adventure, buoyed up by the money her first husband had left her, and a knowledge