Mrs. Stuyvesant-Fish has been mysteriously absent for days now; I hope that anonymous note I had delivered to her handlers suggesting she had been studying "Bomb-Making For Beginners" at the library wasn't taken too seriously. She did send me to Hades this week, though. After accusing me of "picking" on her, she--with great ceremony, and with Mrs. Wilmerding (nee' Vanderbilt)--downed several cocktails and suggested that I don't announce my travel plans to the mainland so much. "Assassins, you know." "Oh," I replied, "I change my travel route every time." "There's only so many buses that go downtown," she snorted, tapped my shoulder, and left with, "NOW, we're even." Damn!

The original Mamie Stuyvesant-Fish was also a good friend of "the" Mrs. Astor, Caroline. Caroline was a strict and conservative matron while Mamie was the great trickster and did all she could to thumb her nose at the society Caroline ruled with her. This is her summer cottage in Newport, "Crossways"; like Mrs. Astor's cottage, "Beechwood", it is privately owned. Several books of the period mention that Mamie's Newport home was modest in comparison to the ones on Bellevue Avenue, a strange notion considering her banquets sat two hundred. During a severe recession in the early 1900's, Mrs. S-F threw a birthday party for her dog, invited other Newport canines, and bestowed a $10,000 diamond necklace on her pooch to the howls of the newspapers of the time. She didn't care; and, she never had to. She hated convention in a world strapped to it and continued with her gay, court jester, Henry Lehr, to tweak the noses of her stratified world. When The Grand Duke Boris was held up at the Goelet mansion, she annouced to her guests that none of than Tsar Nicholas II was arriving; two taps on the doors of the ballroom prompted all her guests to bow to the figure in the crown and robe. When they looked up it was Henry Lehr.

My Mrs. Stuyvesant-Fish is sort of like that, and you can never tell what she is going to do or say, either. Eyes roll when she enters my ballroom, but so do the expectations of a bawdy story. So, I hope she manages to chew her way out of her wrist restraints again and join Mr. Astor and myself tonight.