Dance on a Sinking Ship

by Kilian, Michael;

  Diana lifted her head, pressing the back of her hand against her eyes in an almost theatrical gesture. She was wearing pink, which looked delightful against her blond hair, though her flesh this morning was utterly colorless.

  “Of course, Duff. As I always say, any time.” As the husband of Lady Honor Guinness, Chips could afford to be breezy about money. Guinness stock was down, according to the Paris Herald Tribune, but the Guinness family’s brewery firm was far from succumbing to the world depression. Misery was its best business partner.

  “Where’s H.R.H. now?” Diana asked, lowering her hand and blinking.

  “Shopping.” Duff grunted. “With Madame.” He signaled the waiter for a second round, then called the man back again as an afterthought to order a bottle of Guinness stout as well. It was as if this insignificant purchase was a payment on account for anything he might borrow from Channon, or perhaps a reminder that the riches Channon so freely dispensed were far from entirely his own.

  Chips smiled. He knew he’d end up paying for the Guinness and all their drinks himself.

  “Sea voyage or no,” said Diana, “I shall be glad to get out of Paris. I’ve never seen it quite so beastly. You’d think it was the days of Robespierre and The Terror again.”

  “‘A thought from an Englishman is worth ten years’ devotion from these squalid, misshapen, Jewish, vulgar, loud-tongued, insult-asking Frenchmen,’” Duff recited.

  “What?” said Diana.

  “Your words, darling,” Duff said, “You wrote them to me in a letter once.”

  “How is it you’ve remembered it so perfectly?”

  “I probably haven’t. You probably wrote something much worse.”

  “Oh, dear. Well, I apologize. That was awful of me.”

  Chips could not tell whether she was sorry for insulting Jews or the French, and so remained silent.

  “You were very young then,” Duff said. “It was before the war. But I remember it still.” Cooper hated the Nazis for their public persecutions of German Jewry and could not abide the reflexive anti-Semitism of his class, but he was not beyond an occasional slur himself. One rainy night when the enormously rich Philip Sassoon refused to lend him his Rolls-Royce, Duff had been heard to say “These bloody Jews are all the same.” He had later apologized for it—to Sassoon, and to himself.

  “Do you suppose H.R.H. and Mrs. Simpson might get married on the ship?” Diana said.

  “You forget that she’s already married,” Duff said.

  “So does she,” said Chips, with a feeble laugh.

  “If the ship’s captain can perform marriages, then he ought to be able to grant divorces as well,” Diana said.

  “And to crown queens,” said Duff.

  They all laughed. The waiter returned with three kiss-me-quicks and a small Guinness, which Duff ignored entirely.

  “Do you suppose it’s true that she’s Jewish? Mrs. Simpson?” said Chips. He’d been wanting to ask that question for days. His hangover made him feel reckless enough to attempt it now. “Someone said her name was originally Warfeld.”

  “Malicious gossip,” said Duff.

  “The problem is that she’s common,” said Diana. “Dreadfully common. But rather nice. I like her, don’t you, Duffie?”

  “She has great courage.”

  “I can’t believe Emerald going off and leaving us for the day,” Chips said, realizing it was time to change the subject.

  “Someplace north of Paris,” Diana said. “Château Reanville.”

  “Don’t you remember who lives there?” said Duff. “That’s where Nancy has a house.”

  “Oh, dear God,” said Diana. “Quel bruit.”

  Lady Cunard had the chauffeur of her hired car proceed all the way through Reanville and continue on along the road to the next village. He slowed and glanced back hesitantly after a few kilometers, but she urged him on with a whisk of her hand. She had postponed this reckoning for nearly five years, knowing that the passing of time only deepened the bitterness that divided her from her daughter and only child. Nearing old age herself and with Nancy herself now almost forty, these horrible feelings could well become a permanent condition, rendering any reconciliation impossible. In part, Emerald supposed she lacked the courage to confront her daughter now on any subject, but her reluctance stemmed also from a lingering conviction that she was absolutely right in her anger. Nancy had brought all this on with behavior so outrageously shameful it seemed intended to incur its obvious consequences.

  The uproar had begun with a deliberately provocative remark tossed into London society like a well-aimed bomb by Lady Margot Asquith, wife of the former prime minister. She had swept into one of Emerald’s luncheon parties to say, with memorable loudness, “Hello, Maud, what is it now?—drink, drugs, or niggers?”

  The candid response to this calculatedly devastating public inquiry into Nancy’s troubles would have been “All three.” But Emerald—Maud, as she was still called then—had been too shattered to reply with any quickness. Though Nancy’s indulgence in narcotics was occasional and largely social, her drinking was shocking even in a society as accustomed to alcoholism as it was to adultery. Nancy’s affairs went far beyond simple promiscuity. Her love life was slovenly, casual, joyless, and constant. It was said she went to bed with men just to decide whether she wanted to get to know them better.

  As a caring mother who could never understand her continual difficulties with her only child, Lady Cunard tried to accept this. What bewildered and confounded her most was Nancy’s embrace of Negroes seven years before. She had immediately begun taking them to bed at every opportunity. At least Edwina Mountbatten’s brief dalliance with Paul Robeson had been only that—a clumsy self-indulgence and churlish swipe at the monarchy she despised. Nancy had taken up Negroes with the fervor of a Christian seeking martyrdom—especially the American jazz musician Henry Crowder. When she was not living with him, she was supporting him with gifts, loans, and outright stipends.

  With Margot Asquith using Nancy to bat down Emerald’s pretensions as London’s premiere hostess, Lady Cunard had had no choice. She was being made the object of laughter from friends and enemies alike. She had only one weapon against Nancy—money—and she began pulling the purse strings more and more tightly, till Nancy rebelled with horrendous social violence.

  She had a pamphlet published in Paris lambasting Lady Cunard and all of British aristocracy for their racialist attitudes and conduct toward blacks and those who consorted with blacks. Then she helped produce and exhibit in London a notorious obscene film that could have caused her jailing. She traveled twice to the United States with Crowder, attracting scurrilous write-ups in the American press about her activities in Harlem. “Disinherited by her Mother for her Unconventional Conduct, the Heiress of the Famous British Steamship Fortune takes up Residence in the Harlem Black Belt,” one long headline ran. A picture caption read: “Lady Nancy Cunard Enjoying Herself Among Her Colored Friends in Her Apartment in Upper New York.” Her ultimate blow was the publication in 1934 of her enormous book Negro, which with poems, histories, and polemics said everything there was to say on the subject of colored people—none of which Lady Emerald Cunard wanted to hear.

  At every turn, Emerald feared to do or say anything, lest she provoke Nancy to some new ghastly public act—for all Emerald knew, stripping naked on the steps of Trafalgar Square and taking on Zulu warriors. But the present impasse simply could not continue. Emerald’s flirtation with von Ribbentrop, her close friendship with the Prince of Wales, her perpetual salon for Britain’s titled and literary great—all these were extremely important to her, but they could not replace what she was losing from her daughter. Emerald had been brought up in California as the “niece” of the heir to the Comstock lode fortune. Nancy was her daughter, not her “niece.” She would not let that go.

  “Monsieur,” she said to the driver. “S’il vous plait, retournez à Reanville.”

  The house was long but modest, large enoug
h only for one or two servants and a handful of guests. It occurred to her mother that, as Nancy would invariably take one of the guests to her own bed, the lack of space probably didn’t matter much.

  As they sat there, parked at the edge of the road outside Nancy’s gate, Lady Cunard thought of sending the driver up to the door to fetch Nancy down. But her daughter might simply not come, and that would be the worst thing of all.

  Emerald opened the door. “Attendez ici,” she commanded. He grumbled. The drive had been long. “All right,” she added. “Go into the village and get something to eat and drink. Return in an hour. Précis.”

  “Oui, madame.”

  The house lacked heating, and on this sunny October day, all the doors and windows had been opened to the warmth. Emerald stood a long moment at the principal entrance. Nancy should have heard the car approach and stop, its door close; heard Emerald coming up the flagstone steps. But there was no sign of her. If Emerald knocked, it might only be ignored. That would justify escape. A few brisk raps, a long pause, and then Emerald would have done her duty. She could go.

  Lady Cunard stepped inside. She found herself in a long, narrow room with a fireplace at one end and a doorway leading to the rest of the house just beside it. The chamber had not been cleaned since an apparent party the night before—or perhaps since months of parties. There was an empty wine bottle on the floor in front of the divan, and it looked quite dusty. Beside it was a woman’s rumpled garment. On a nearby table sat a plate still heaped with uneaten food. Emerald also saw a small crumpled square of metallic paper, as from a packet of cigarettes, though this it decidedly was not. Bringing it close before her eyes, Lady Cunard saw the residue of white crystalline granules.

  “Mother?”

  Nancy was standing in the doorway, her arms as usual covered from wrist to elbow in her signature: multicolor African bracelets. She wore a much-wrinkled green velvet dress—a cocktail frock, really—and looked much disheveled in it. The two women resembled each other greatly—small, thin-legged, rather birdlike. They were obviously mother and daughter, though Emerald seemed a bejeweled parakeet, caught in midchirp and chatter, while Nancy was deeply serious and almost beautiful, her large, pale, blue-green eyes a haunting presence in any room, on any occasion.

  They were fully focused on her mother’s face, but with the faintest movement Nancy glanced to what her mother held in her hand.

  “Yes, Mummy,” she said, her voice now as bitter as their years of separation. “Drugs, drink, and niggers!”

  Beside her in the shadows was the dark, broad face of Henry Crowder, Nancy’s Negro musician. He looked terrified.

  Spencer spent much of the day recovering from his hangover in his flat, ignoring the Lindbergh story for the moment and staying out of touch with Chief of Correspondents Carlson, who had supplanted dictators, wars, mobs, and police bullets as the major menace in his life. It seemed altogether likely now that Carlson not only could send him back to Chicago but was bent on it, willing to seize upon anything at all untoward in his behavior as sufficient provocation to impose this most terrible of fates. Spencer avoided him as he might those leather-coated political police in Germany. Though he guessed, with good reason, that some of the calls might be from Whitney, he let the telephone ring on unanswered the several times its insistent summons interrupted his drowse and sleep, so fearful was he that it might be Carlson.

  Spencer had his instructions. Denise had brought him his steamship ticket. It sat in a large, unopened envelope on the mantel, representing escape. Once he was aboard ship, Carlson could not reach him. Once he had the Lindbergh story in hand, it would not matter what awaited him on the New York docks—even a telegram recalling him to Chicago at once. As he thought upon it, the Lindbergh story would be more than just a protection against recall. It could secure his ultimate, indefinite, infinite freedom.

  Spencer had resented Hero Lindbergh, the man that the bitter humorist James Thurber had devastated in his satire, “The Greatest Man in the World.” Lindbergh was undeniably a superb navigator and a brilliant engineer, but no better a pilot than any Spencer had flown with in the war, perhaps much worse than most, for he had a reputation for abandoning aircraft and taking to parachute at the first sign of trouble. It was true that Lindbergh had demonstrated a lonely kind of courage in coursing through his thousands and thousands of miles of forbidding emptiness in that great solo trans-Atlantic crossing of 1927. But it was the courage of the gambler and the egoist, smaller stuff than the terrible ferocity and murderous skill called forth from those who had clawed at each other with such fear and passion above the trenches. Lindbergh had never danced the dance of death in the air. He had not known flame or the stinging bullet or the grotesquerie of the fall from flight of a smashed-up, burning airplane with its pilot still alive and flailing. Lindbergh had been a man who had stayed awake long enough to cross an ocean—nothing more.

  But now Spencer cherished this strange, aloof, self-consumed man. He wished Lindbergh well with the most solicitous ardor. He forgave the man his every frailty and flaw and wept for all his sadnesses, including most especially the loss of his little child. Lindbergh meant Paris for Spencer; he meant the love and the touch of Whitney Ransom. He meant life—the only life that could sustain Spencer. Lindbergh had become a holy vessel.

  Spencer had no doubt that he could get the Lindbergh story, or whatever was Carlson’s vague idea of it. He did not question that he could achieve this prize, this goal so unattainable for so many of his colleagues. He would succeed as he had succeeded four years before in following a hard road of rock and dust more than a thousand miles to the village of Juichin in China’s Kiangsi Province, from which he had returned with the story of the fanatical Mao Tse-tung’s proclamation of a Chinese Soviet Republic. Lindbergh would be trapped aboard a ship for seven days or more. Spencer’s newspaper and most of the world had ignored Mao Tse-tung’s proclamation. No one would ignore what Spencer would have to say about the greatest hero in the history of mankind. They would learn of it even in Kiangsi Province. He would no longer be a journalist but the most successful journalist in the world, a twentieth-century counterpart to the New York World’s Henry Stanley, who had entered history by greeting a fabled eccentric in the African jungles with the words “Dr. Livingston, I presume.” Spencer might become so successful that he could give up journalism, as Whitney so ardently wished.

  His mind would not hold this dreamy vision. Instead, it went back to that long-ago road in China. To a hot, humid day with the air as thick with dust as it was with incipient rain, when he had come upon an old man sitting cross-legged at the roadside, his face a sculptor’s expression of pain and years and fear, his eyes staring at the ages, not seeing. Spencer had continued on, but when the road began to climb again into the yellow hills, he had realized he’d taken a wrong turn and so retraced his steps. Coming upon the old man again, he found him in much the same cross-legged position but fallen over on his side. He was dead, but his expression was entirely unchanged. He’d been dead when Spencer had looked into his ancient face the first time. Spencer had seen the secret of life. The secret of life was death.

  On the mantel next to the steamship tickets was a silver-framed photograph of Whitney. He rose and went to it, turning it slightly to avoid the glare of the light from the window. It was a rather formal picture, Whitney in white dress and gloves and picture hat seated on a carved stone bench in her garden, her hair and eyes as perfect as the cut roses she held cradled in her arm, the most beautiful woman Spencer had ever known, the most beautiful woman in the world. She was smiling slightly and her gaze at the camera lens was friendly. Her husband had taken the picture.

  Spencer stepped back from the mantel, then went for his jacket. He would see Whitney that night. He would not leave for America without doing so, even if he had to break into her house.

  Nora had had a truly fabulous day. She had spent hundreds and hundreds, of francs, possibly thousands of francs, in a shopping binge that
had taken her from the Galéries Lafayette to Lucien Lelong to the Samaritaine de Luxe on the Boulevard de la Madeline. She had taken lunch on the Champs-Elysées with a very handsome Paris film critic and tea with an American lady she met in her hotel elevator who proved to be one of the Vanderbilts. She’d dined aboard a floating restaurant in the Seine with several people from the Theater de la Michodiere. Now she was a starring guest at a party in the Passy district of Paris that was the most elegant she had ever attended, as glittering and aristocratic in her newly purchased Maggy Rouff evening gown as anyone there. Several attractive men had been attentive to her, the most persistent a French nobleman who wore medals on his jacket and possibly too much cologne.

  He followed her out into the dusky shadows of the huge garden adjoining the house. She instinctively moved away, but found herself in deeper darkness. He caught up with her quickly, but, though he stood very close to her, he remained circumspect and deferential. Clearly he was chasing her, yet his conduct was so altogether different from the pawings and leerings she’d become accustomed to in Southern California that she was a little charmed. They walked. She kept her arms folded against her chest lest he take her hand, or reach for her breast.

  “I cannot believe that you are leaving tomorrow,” he said. “I have only just met you and now you are being taken away from me. This is most unfair. I am being made to suffer like King Tantalus.”

  Nora had never heard of King Tantalus and wondered if he were someone she should have met.

  “Then, Monsieur le Comte,” she said, “you must come to America.”

  “But I shall. Of course. Very soon. This winter perhaps. But that will be of little good to me in my sadness tomorrow.”

  She smiled. What was she dealing with here? Flirtation? Seduction? Love? Marriage? Perhaps all of these things. She was thrilled with the fact of this aristocratic attention, but felt awkward and somewhat helpless. She did not know what was expected of her or what she expected of herself. She wished for her father, or at least his advice, but he would only have told her to stick with her own kind. “The rich will never be any good to us,” he always said.