Tales of the City 03 - Further Tales of the City

Magnin’s, an invitation to Vita Keating’s Italian Earthquake Relief concert, a thank-you note from that Giroux woman, and a chain letter from Dodie Rosekrans.
This is the Socialite Chain Letter. Break it and you invite risk to life, limb, and personal or inherited wealth. Chrissie Goulandris broke the chain, and a week later broke not one but two nails on the evening of Helene Rochas’ Red Ball in Geneva. Ariel de Ravenel broke the chain, and broke a collarbone at Gstaad the same day. Betty Catroux broke the chain, and three weeks later her two-year-old Asti had to be quarantined in a tiny kennel in Managua for eight months without cohabitation privileges. DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU!!!!
Mail six copies of this letter to friends whom you KNOW to be serious minded when it comes to fun. Add your name to the bottom of the list and place your return address on the envelope. In six weeks you will have 1,280 new addresses. Ideal for planning international get-togethers. P.S. Husbands who try to interfere with the chain will also be hit by bad luck. Paquita Paquin’s husband threw her copy into the wastebasket and a week later his foundation lost its tax exempt status in Argentina. THE FORTUNE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN!!!!
D.D. Ryan
Marina Cicogna
Delfina Ratazzi
Dominique Schlumberger de Menil
Nan Kempner
Paloma Picasso
L.oulou Klossowski
Marina Schiano
Apollonia von Ravenstein
Countess Carimati de Carimate
C.Z. Guest
Douchka Cizmek
Betsy Bloomingdale
Nancy Reagan
Jerry Zipkin
Adolfo
Dodie Rosekrans
    It was cute of Dodie to send the chain letter, but Frannie knew she was beyond the cheering-up stage. That list of names, furthermore, depressed the matriarch more than all her other tribulations combined.
    This desolation took tangible shape when she watched the afternoon movie on television: Susan Hayward in Back Street. Even Mary Ann Singleton’s perky mid-movie commentary on homemade refrigerator magnets failed to revive her sagging spirits.
    She seemed like such a nice girl, that Mary Ann.
    Couldn’t she at least have called back?
    Or had she simply deduced the reason for Frannie’s call and chosen to ignore it?
    Emma, of course, had been dead right. Dead right. An uncannily accurate choice of words. DeDe was dead. The first person to receive that news had been the last to accept it as the truth.
    Now she accepted it.
    DeDe was dead and Edgar was dead and Beauchamp was dead and Faust was dead and Frances Alicia Ligon Halcyon was utterly and inexorably alone in the world.
    It was time to join her family.

Où est Vuitton?
    I T LOOKED, TO PRUE, LIKE A SCENE FROM A DINOSAUR movie.
    She was standing on a U-shaped ridge, peering down into the dark green center of the U—a primeval lake-turned-swamp ringed with tree ferns so large that she half expected a sixty-foot Gila monster to come lumbering into view.
    Her Maud Frizons were killing her.
    Still, she pressed on, following the path that led her deeper and deeper into the unpopulated regions of the park. “Vuitton,” she called. “Vuiiiitton.” If the wolfhound was there, she would know; he had never failed to respond to his name.
    The swamp, she decided, was a bad idea. Most of the terrain around it was too open to be able to conceal her beloved dog. She chose instead a westerly route—at least, she thought it was west—and skirted the Paleolithic bowl until the landscape fanned out around her to form the rhododendron dell.
    The flowers were almost gone. They lay against their dusty green-black foliage like a thousand cast-off corsages on the morning after the prom. Prue thought about that for a moment: Like a thousand cast-off corsages on the morning after the prom.
    That was really good. She dug her little notebook from her purse and made another notation. She was getting so much better at this writing business.
The asphalt eventually petered out. The path became whatever route she could weave for herself through the mammoth rhododendrons. Some of them were as big as small carousels. Hmm. The rhododendrons were as big as small carousels as I continued my relentless search for my beloved …
    The notebook came out again.
    Then Prue plunged onward. “Vuitton … Vuitton.” Her ankle straps were almost more than she could take now, but she tried not to think about them. What a foolish mistake. She would just have to leave out the Maud Frizons when she wrote the story.
    One of the rhododendrons repeated itself. Or maybe there were two rhododendrons with the