by Gore Vidal
“I am not,” Caroline said, “curious about her.”
“Do tell her! She will be shattered. She thinks herself the most interesting woman on earth, and now that old Mrs. Astor’s started to fade, Mamie means to take her place, or, rather, Harry Lehr means to install Mamie as our uncrowned queen.”
“Such excitement,” murmured Caroline, wondering if there might not be a story to be passed on, most anonymously, to the Tribune.
They entered the cool boisserie-lined study, where a marble bust of Marie Antoinette gazed, like a regal sheep, out the window at a lawn ready for munching. “When Mrs. Leiter was here, she asked me if Rodin had made that head.”
On principle, Caroline laughed at any mention of the wealthy Chicago lady who had launched, successfully, three splendid girls into the great world’s marriage market, of whom the most attractive married Lord Curzon, now viceroy of India, where the vice-reine was known as Leiter of India. “Naturally I told Mrs. Leiter that Rodin had sculpted the entire French royal family, starting with Charlemagne. She said that she was not surprised as he did only the best people. In fact,” Mrs. Delacroix suddenly inhaled, making a sound that could only have been described as a snort, “Mrs. Leiter said that I must see the bust that he has just done of her daughter’s hand.”
Then Mrs. Delacroix proposed that they drive to the Casino, a rustic shingle-and-wood building which provided marble Newport with a sort of village center, a Petit Trianon for would-be simple folk. Here tennis was played on grass courts, while in the Horse Shoe Piazza, Mullalay’s orchestra could be heard throughout the day as unenergetic ladies took the air, often together, while the energetic men were all at sea in sailboats and the unenergetic ones had withdrawn to the Casino’s Reading Room, where they were safe from ladies, cads and books.
But Caroline said that she had—she almost said the unsayable word “work” but quickly remembered the common phrase—“letters to write,” and clothes to be changed. Mrs. Delacroix let her go; and took to her carriage alone except for a poor relation called Miss Aspinall, who acted as companion during the high season. The rest of the year, Miss Aspinall rusticated at Monroe, Louisiana, where she could enjoy the quiet pleasures of a pastoral spinsterhood.
Marguerite had laid out an elaborate costume from Worth; perfection, except that it was three years old, a fact that the sharp eyes of Newport’s ladies would be quick to notice. But Caroline’s reputation for eccentricity had its social uses. Also, was she not a Sanford? and had she not been taken in by Mrs. Delacroix, supposedly a mortal enemy of her mother, Emma?
Supposedly? Caroline sat in an armchair covered with worn Aubusson and looked out at the sea where sailboats tacked this way and that, and white spinnakers filled with wind; blasphemously, she found herself thinking of pregnant nuns; the influence, no doubt, of her hostess. What indeed did the old woman feel about her mother? What indeed did she feel about her mother’s daughter? and why the sudden peremptory invitation that had taken precedence over the annoyed Mrs. Jack? Yet they had come to enjoy each other’s company; also, there were, despite the high season, no other houseguests, something of an oddity. Vague references to Louisiana relatives who were too ill to travel suggested to Caroline that she might be a stopgap, a last-minute improvisation. If anything, the emptiness of the huge marble house was more to be revelled in than not. The servants were well-trained; that is, invisible when not needed; and a number were French, to Marguerite’s uninhibited joy. The great cool, sunlit rooms smelled of roses, lemon furniture-wax and, always, the iodine-scented sea-air.
There was a good deal to be said for idle luxury, thought Caroline, carefully placing side by side on the parquet floor the front pages of the nine newspapers that were her daily reading. By now, each newspaper was like an old acquaintance. She knew why one newspaper relentlessly played up—when the editors did not invent—every Boer victory in South Africa: the publisher’s wife and daughter had not been received at the Court of St. James’s; while another newspaper spoke only of British victories, a tribute to the managing editor’s long affair with a British lady whose husband owned an auction house in New York City. Caroline was now able to predict how any American newspaper would respond to almost any important event. Only Hearst occasionally baffled her, because he was, in his way, an artist; mercurial, unpredictable and devoted to invention.
Newport itself was featured inside two New York City papers; and not much elsewhere. Currently, Newport was in the news because William K. Vanderbilt, Jr., had driven a French motor car from Newport to Boston and back, some one hundred sixty miles, in three hours and fifty-seven minutes. She memorized the item. This would get her nicely through Mrs. Fish’s lunch, where Harry Lehr was now full-time major-domo. Old Mrs. Astor no longer entertained as much as she had; she preferred to remain in her cottage, receiving only the faithful. Power was shifting—everyone said—to Mrs. Fish, though Mrs. Ogden Mills, born Livingston, was the ranking American archduchess at Newport, and when Mrs. Astor let the sceptre fall she should, by the very number of her democratic quarterings, succeed. When asked her views of the Four Hundred, Mrs. Mills had said coldly, “There are really only twenty families in New York.” Mrs. Mills did have one marvellous, even unique, gift: she could make absolutely anyone feel ill at ease in her presence. “A priceless gift,” Mrs. Delacroix had observed, mournfully, unaware of the permanently terrified expression of the spinster Aspinall, always at her side.
Other, lesser, candidates for the throne included the lively, clever Mrs. Oliver Belmont, “the first lady ever to marry a Vanderbilt,” she would say with some satisfaction, particularly if there was a descendant of the old tugboat commodore in the room, “and the first lady ever to get a divorce, on her own terms. I was also the first American lady to marry her daughter to a duke of Marlborough, for which I shall, doubtless, suffer in the afterlife. But I meant well. And, of course, I am the first lady ever to marry a Jew, my darling Oliver Belmont. Now,” she would say, with a formidable glare in the dark intelligent eyes that fascinated Caroline, “I shall be the first woman—not lady—to see to it that every American woman will one day have the vote. For women are the hope of this country. If you doubt this, then pray to God,” she had said when she first met Caroline, and tried to recruit her for women’s suffrage, “and She will help you.” Caroline revelled in Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, but no one else in the great world did. She was too shocking and too advanced to be popular; she was also too rich and too powerful to be ignored. But she was definitely not in the line of succession to Mrs. Astor; nor wanted to be, any longer. There had been a time when Alva had threatened to replace the Astor-Plantagenets with the Vanderbilt-Tudors. But divorce had intervened; and, more dismally, good works.
Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, heiress-presumptive, greeted her guests in the great hall at Crossways, a Colonial-style mansion, with a dining room that could seat two hundred, said Harry Lehr, greeting Caroline warmly.
“That means you must eliminate half the Four Hundred,” said Caroline. “So which will it be? The gentlemen or the ladies?”
“We shall never experiment, because Morton won’t let us. Sixteen is now his limit for lunch.”
Morton was the English butler, who had served rather too many dukes, thought Caroline, who also wondered why Mrs. Fish was so impressed by the number of his grand employers while ignoring the briefness of his service with each. Morton was a tall florid man, who treated Mrs. Fish and her guests with a disdain that they may have deserved but ought not to have allowed. Caroline was not charmed.
The ladies proved to be the season’s best; the men were not. The young and vigorous were sailing off Hazard’s Beach; or driving motor cars. Lispinard Stewart was present, however; he seemed to have stepped from the pages of a “silver fork” novel of the early nineteenth century; he was elegant, effeminate and wondrously boring. He fluttered about Caroline; who fluttered, as best she could, in the general direction of Mrs. Fish, who stood, one eye on the door to the dining room, to make sure that t
he magnificent Morton would not be kept waiting once he had announced that dinner was served.
Mrs. Fish received Caroline with an interest that might have passed for warmth had Caroline been less experienced in the social wars. Mamie Fish was a plain but interesting—and interested-looking—woman with deep-set wide eyes beneath arched brows; but the rest of the face had not been worked out with the same care: the jaw was large but characterless and the mouth had been crudely sketched in, rather as if the Divine Artist—plainly, a woman, as Mrs. Belmont maintained—had decided not to undermine with incongruous beauty the easy wit of Mamie Fish, who had, in any case, captured early in life a descendant of not only the Puritan but the Dutch founders of the nation, one Stuyvesant Fish, known fondly to Mamie in Puritan parlance as “the Good Man.” As it was, the good man preferred his old house at Garrison on the Hudson to Newport or New York, an arrangement that perfectly suited Mrs. Fish and the sparkling Harry Lehr, now grown plump and somewhat less sparkling of eye.
“I feared we should never capture you.” Mrs. Fish stared interestedly at Caroline. “We are used to Blaise in New York. But you are the enigma of Washington, a city no one ever visits. Old Mrs. Astor—not well, you know, not well at all—thinks you a great addition. But to what? I asked.”
“Washington, perhaps.” Caroline was tentative. “Where, if you’re right, no one will ever visit me.”
“Washington does not matter, dear child. If you like that sort of a place, try Charleston, during the azalea season, or New Orleans, where Mrs. Delacroix still keeps slaves. Oh, she’ll deny it! But the war has never been accepted in that part of the world. Just as we don’t accept Washington. Are you quite sure you don’t want to marry one of us?” The question was delivered with the famous Mamie Fish drawl.
Caroline was surprised to find herself blushing. “There is so much to choose from.” Caroline indicated the nearest man, James Van Alen, a moneyed widower, who had modelled himself on the sort of English gentleman seen not so much in London society as on the Broadway stage. When Van Alen had first met Caroline at Mrs. Belmont’s, he had said, loudly, “Zounds!”—a word Caroline had never before heard spoken in real life—then, as he withdrew, still staring at her, he announced, “A most delectable wench, forsooth”; and placed a monocle over one eye.
“I think,” said Mrs. Fish, “nothing could be simpler than for you to become the bride of Mr. Van Alen.”
“I am rather near-sighted.” Caroline blinked her eyes. “I didn’t see who it was.”
“But then you are going to marry Del Hay. You see? We do keep up. But when will he come back from South America?”
“South Africa.”
“It’s all the same, sweet pet. Anyway, here’s Helen. And Payne.”
Caroline and Helen embraced. Payne’s wrist was in a sling, from tennis. “Otherwise, I’d be in the race today.” He looked with youthful displeasure at the room filled with elderly beaux, each armed, as it were, with his hereditary silver spoon as well as fork.
“Father’s in New Hampshire. New Hampshire!” Helen seemed more than usually exuberant. “He’s been told to spend at least two months there, even if all his open doors slam shut.”
“Has he heard from Del?”
“Nothing since you heard last week. Everything’s diplomatic pouch. So he can’t say what he means. But the English are losing. Losing! It’s horrible!”
At that moment Morton, ominously, announced lunch, and, dutifully, even hurriedly, Mrs. Fish took the ranking gentleman’s arm and hurried to her place at the Sheraton mahogany table, which, although set for Morton’s optimum sixteen, had all its leaves in place, giving each guest a considerable amount of room to accommodate the season’s enormous skirts. Down the center of the table an elaborate solid gold series of pagodas and bridges complemented the somewhat chinoiserie appearance of the hostess.
Caroline was placed—as she knew that she would be—between Lispinard Stewart and James Van Alen. Longingly, she thought of her small office in Market Square, and of the flies, both living and dead, her familiars.
“The test of a good cook,” announced James Van Alen, “is codfish cakes.”
“Is Mrs. Fish’s cook going to give us some?”
“Egad, Miss! This is not breakfast.”
Lispinard Stewart explained to her, in elaborate detail, his relationship to the Stuarts, and why his family had modestly replaced the “u” with “ew” in order not to embarrass the current ruling house of England, who feared, more than anything else, a claimant from his family to their throne, “which, by rights, is ours, as they know.”
“And of what kingdom,” asked Caroline, remembering at last how to make conversation, “is Lispinard the royal house?”
There was a dance that night at The Elms, given by the Burke-Roches. When Mrs. Delacroix announced that she was going home early, Caroline went with her. “Tomorrow,” she said, “I must spend the morning on the telephone, talking to Washington.”
“When I was young, I danced all night. I was always in love.”
“I am not in love, Mrs. Delacroix. So I sleep … and talk on the telephone.”
“We enjoyed ourselves more. There were no telephones, of course.” They were seated in the small study off the drawing room. Although it was late July, the night was cool and a fire was burning. Mrs. Delacroix poured herself brandy, while Caroline took Apollinaris water. The old woman laughed. “Mamie’s completely under that butler’s thumb. He’s convinced her that in all great English houses, Apollinaris water must first be boiled.”
“I would boil him if I were her.”
Mrs. Delacroix held up a small painting on ivory. “This is your father, and my daughter.”
“I thought you had no painting of him except in uniform?”
“I suppose that’s because I never look at him when I look at this. I see only Denise. She was so happy. Can you tell?”
But Caroline, like the old woman, only saw what she wanted to see—not the pretty rather banal girl but the round-faced, small-lipped young man whom she had never known, and could not associate with the red-faced loud figure of her own youth. “They were both happy,” said Caroline, neutrally; and gave the picture back.
“Your mother came here once in the summer of ’76. She was beautiful.”
“She was happy, too. Wasn’t she?”
“My daughter died, giving birth to Blaise.” The spider’s web across the old woman’s face tautened suddenly: had a fly been trapped? was the spider, ever watchful, close by? “Your mother was her best friend, at that time.”
“This is all before I was born.” Caroline did not like the direction that the conversation was taking. “My father never spoke—to me, at least—of his first wife. He seldom spoke of my mother, either. So Blaise and I are each motherless.”
“Yes.” Mrs. Delacroix crossed her tiny ankles, just visible beneath the watered pale blue silk of her evening gown. “It is curious how Emma died in much the same way as Denise, as a result of giving birth.”
“Emma. At last. You have said her name. Now tell me, was she really so dark? And why?” Caroline hurled the question at the old lady, who visibly winced; then rallied. “Your mother,” she said, most evenly, “killed my daughter, and that is the precise nature—and quality—of her darkness.”
Caroline had often observed women swoon either from too-tight corseting or as an act of desperate policy. She wondered whether or not this was a proper moment for her to experiment, entirely as a matter of policy, with a sudden dead-faint. But she recalled herself. She would give blow for blow. “How was this … murder, as you do not quite call it, achieved?”
“Denise had been warned that she could never have a child. Your mother encouraged her to have one, by the man your mother wanted to marry, even then, your father-to-be, Colonel Sanford.”
Caroline bared her teeth in what she hoped might be mistaken by firelight for a young girl’s sweet smile. “I find no darkness here. Only your surmise. How does one woman e
ncourage another to have a child, when each knows the consequences?”
“There was a lady—I use the word ironically—who specialized in such matters. Emma sent for her. Emma got her to say—paid her to say—that Denise would survive. Since my daughter wanted a child very much, she had one. Then she died, and her husband went on to marry …”
“Darkness?”
“Yes. Then you were born, and in due course she died, a proper vengeance I always thought.”
“I do not believe your story, Mrs. Delacroix, nor can I understand why you choose to tell me so terrible a thing, assuming you believe what you’ve told me, when I am a guest—briefly, may I say—in your house.”
“I hope not briefly.” The old woman poured herself more brandy. “I have told you because I cannot tell my grandson.”
“Are you afraid—of Blaise?”
The head, silver hair aglitter with diamonds, nodded. “I am afraid. I don’t know what Blaise might do, if I were to tell him.”
“As he seems to have been born entirely without conscience, he will do nothing at all. He will not be interested.”
“Now you are unkind to him. You see, he is so like her.” Quite unexpectedly, tears began to leak from the bright black eyes. “I look at him, and it’s Denise come back to me. You see, I’d given her up. The way we must always give up the dead until such time … So, having forgot my child, let her go, kept only a picture or two, poor likenesses all, she suddenly comes back to me, alive and young, and I look at her—him—and can’t believe what I see. Think I am dreaming. I see the same eyes, hair, skin, voice …”
“Blaise is very much a male.”
“A beloved child is without gender to its creatrix, as you may have the good—or bad—fortune to discover.” Mrs. Delacroix withdrew a lace glove from her left hand; dried her eyes with the wadded glove. “He is my heir, not that I am as wealthy as people suppose.”
“Good. Perhaps you can then persuade him to give me my share of our father’s estate.”