Moonlight Becomes You

I HATE COCKTAIL parties, Maggie thought wryly, wondering why she always felt like an alien when she attended one. Actually I'm being too harsh, she thought. The truth is I hate cocktail parties where the only person I know is my supposed date, and he abandons me the minute we come in the door.

She looked around the large room, then sighed. When Liam Moore Payne had invited her to this reunion of the Moore clan, she should have guessed he would be more interested in visiting with his cousins-by-the-dozens than worrying about her. Liam, an occasional but normally thoughtful date when he was in town from Boston, was tonight displaying a boundless faith in her ability to fend for herself. Well, she reasoned, it was a large gathering; surely she could find someone to talk to.

It was what Liam had told her about the Moores that had been the factor that made her decide to accompany him to this affair, she remembered, as she sipped from her glass of white wine and maneuvered her way through the crowded Grill Room of the Four Seasons restaurant on Manhattan's East Fifty-second Street. The family's founding father-- or at least the founder of the family's original wealth-- had been the late Squire Desmond Moore, at one time a fixture of Newport society. The occasion of tonight's party/reunion was to celebrate the great man's one hundred fifteenth birthday. For convenience's sake, it had been decided to have the gathering in New York rather than Newport.

Going into amusing detail about many members of the clan, Liam had explained that over one hundred descendants, direct and collateral, as well as some favored ex-in-laws, would be present. He had regaled her with anecdotes about the fifteen-year-old immigrant from Dingle who had considered himself to be not one of the huddled masses yearning to be free but, rather, one of the impoverished masses yearning to be rich. Legend claimed that as his ship passed the Statue of Liberty, Squire had announced to his fellow steerage-class passengers, "In no time a-tall I'll be wealthy enough to buy the old girl, should the government ever decide to sell her, of course." Liam had delivered his forebear's declaration in a wonderfully broad Irish brogue.