You stare at the blackened bones of Saratoga, once the biggest house in the state of Virginia. The rafters lie in ash in the middle of cruel weed and wreckage, the land returning to what the first Cooke first saw centuries ago, the odd stand of tobacco or cotton or soy poking up through the weeds, even now, the house built to last a thousand years gone in three incendiary days, the heat enough to melt the glass in the windows into glittering crystal puddles in the black of the brick. Like icicles in the flame.
The closer you get, the more the bones are lost. The outer walls are just too far apart. You hack your way into the darkness of the house. You stand in what was once the entrance hall, the rosewood parquet, the famous curving staircase, and you are there, with them, through the centuries.
And you stand in the black rubble, like the ashes in the urn from the crematorium, and you think, Where is the hidden door that leads to the secret room, the trapdoor, the safe that holds the long-lost letter that tells the story? Where is the crystal icicle now to point the way? But there is only this, this mess of history and the wind from the river and the gulls crying.
Then it happens. The silence opens, and you hear their voices. A jazz band plays. A boy dives, knifelike, into the suddenly crystalline aquamarine pool, leaving only the slightest ripple. Cary Grant makes his wicket, and the girls swoon at how beautiful he is. Suddenly, gamine, as light as meringue, as cool and crisp as mint, she appears at the top of the stairs and begins to descend without the slightest hint of haste. Diana Cooke Copperton Cooke welcomes you to Saratoga. She invites you into her house. She is wearing a long silk dress with pants, recklessly tied at the waist, the streamers trailing behind her on the stairs, the dress swirled diagonally with wide black-and-white stripes, to the left on the legs, to the right over her full bosom, a double strand of magnificent pearls trailing down her back, and it is as if she were made, put on this earth, just for this moment, just so that the shaft of late sunlight might catch her in just this way, already laughing, her Manhattan already icy in her hands, her jewelry already jangling like Eastern music as she reaches for the banister, as she comes to greet you as she has greeted hundreds of others to this, her house, her realm, this Saratoga. Her breathless laugh drifts down the stairs, there must be forty, and she takes her time, for no one is ever late at Saratoga, time is infinite in the glass house, the scent of Jicky, falling like rain from heaven, all of it like water to a man dying of thirst in the desert. Like every man who stood at the bottom of the stairs fifty years before and waited for her descent, you fall in love with her instantaneously and you know that you will never recover your heart. Not in this life. Diana Cooke Copperton Cooke. She is everything every man wants. She always has been. In a black-and-white dress any woman might wear but none ever has, not like that. And now she will descend and you will wait, just like this, for as long as there is breath left in your body. She the enchantress. You the bedeviled. And now you both will be that way forever. History has been written and has moved on. There are other histories, but this history will only happen once, and, once happened, it will happen forever, both fluid and static.
“Welcome,” she says, laughing, “there are scads of people here you simply must meet. I don’t even know who half of them are myself.” And she pulls you inside, and there is no going back.
I
Copperton
1
SHE WAS BORN with the century. She was born as well into the memory of two wars—her grandfather had been Jeb Stuart’s aide-de-camp, her father had lost a leg in the Phillipines—and then, when she was fourteen, she knew the agony of the Great War. Her whole childhood was touched by the present evil of war, as it was war that killed all six of her cousins, Penny, Carter, Stuart, William, Augustine, and Uncle Charlie, who was called that because by the time he was born, his oldest sibling already had children of his own.
The memory of the Civil War still hung over them all like a shroud, as present as yesterday, and the Great War stabbed at the heart of the great families as sure as a bayonet. The cousins had been such handsome, kind, fun boys, the youngest only eighteen, her favorite playmates and her idols, so brave in the uniforms. Heroes. Two died on the same day, at Verdun.
It seemed the walls of her house, Saratoga, were lined with portraits of heroes of the life’s blood of America itself, and now only she was left, a girl, the last Cooke, her sex a disappointment to everybody. She now held the place of honor, which was a source of pride but also a shackle, tied as she was to upholding and carrying on the family history. Sometimes she looked at all the portraits and felt she was choking. There was not one place in the house where their bright eyes did not follow her, and she wanted, more than anything, to escape.
Now nineteen, she stood at the top of the stairs, suitcases and servants surrounding her. She wept into a small embroidered, lilac-scented handkerchief her grandmother, Miss Nell, had made for her. Her father had said the night before that the world waited for her, was hers if she wanted it, and she had screamed at him for the first time in her life to let it wait, she was happy right where she was, thank you. Saratoga was everything. It was her world. What would she do without it? Her glory. Her burden. And he had reminded her with enormous sadness in his red-rimmed eyes that unless she did this thing, got on the train with him, observed the rituals, and won the victor’s spoils, there would be no more Saratoga, that they would lose it all. A husband. A very rich husband. That was all that stood between them and total ruin. She had been given everything, every advantage. They had put everything they had into the making of this moment, and now it was time for her to do the one task she had been raised to do. They both knew what task he was speaking of.
She was headed off on the train to Baltimore to the first of twelve debutante balls. They were the first since the beginning of the war. During the war, darkness fell, and long-necked aristocratic beauties found their husbands however they could, at drab little dances held almost in secret, with only the most clandestine show of lavishness. All the handsome young men were gone to France, few to return. An entire generation of beautiful boys lost. Boys who might have been husbands. Now, with Germany collapsed and a peace treaty signed, people of means and breeding felt it was all right to dance again, to have the debutante balls that were such a necessary part of the social construct of the world they lived in. There was almost nobody younger than thirty who would be suitable, so behind the smiles she was going to meet the survivors and the memory of the dead.
Accompanying her on the social march would be her father and a hired chaperone from Richmond, Miss Lucy Ackerly, whose sole skill in life was shepherding young girls through the vagaries and complications of balls like these, for which there was a single purpose: to find a rich husband, a man who had escaped death in the war, either by luck or by cowardice—claiming flat feet or a mother whose sole support he was. Her father’s only purpose was to lend an arm to lead her onto the floor so she could make her deep curtsy to society.
The curtain had lifted on a new world of gallantry and luxe. Miss Ackerly, nervous as a bride’s mother, was there to see that, throughout the exhausting season, Diana Cooke did not put a foot wrong, ever, that she knew the name and lineage of every man she met before she met him, that she didn’t put her heart in the wrong hands before she knew her mistake.
It all was costing Arthur Powell Page Cooke, her father, a fortune, the last of the money that could be scraped together. Twelve dresses, made by Diana and her mother out of bits of wedding dresses and family lace and peau de soie from Washington that nearly broke the bank and caused Diana’s father to stay up especially late with Sir Walter Scott and one of the last bottles of the really good cognac. A small morocco leather case with a lock, containing the jewels she was to wear, the last the family owned or could borrow from relatives, nothing flashy—the pretty but insignificant pearl necklace, of course; diamond earrings; a thin circlet of a tiara from Mappin & Webb that her mother and her mother’s mother, Miss Nell, had worn at their debuts and on the
ir wedding days, cascading family lace draping behind, a tiara like a Greek warrior’s laurel wreath, which had to be woven, not pinned, into her dark hair, in an arduous process that took hours—every piece planned and labeled for the dress it was to be worn with. Twelve pairs of satin shoes, from Montaldo’s in Richmond. Her grandmother Miss Nell’s demure mink coat for chilly nights. Twelve pairs of opera-length gloves, kid and satin. The full equipage of the debutante. Her father was gambling everything on her, and losing was unthinkable.
Everything in her life had led to this moment. Surrounded as she was, it was she who would step on the dance floor alone, leaving her father’s trembling arm, she who would take the hands held out to hers, it was she who would have to separate the dross from the gold and come home with the husband who would save them. The point of finding Prince Charming, for Diana, was not to live happily ever after; it was to save the house, to secure the five thousand acres, and in so doing find a man with whom to live out her days who was not too disgusting or vulgar. Love, she understood, was not part of the equation.
Her father had been willing to sell another thousand acres, to send her to New York to the finest stores, the best designers, to acquire everything she would need, but she had sat down gently on his lap where he sat in his wicker wheelchair and said to him, handing him a brandy, “We’re country folk, Papa, we’ll do it our way. We’ll make it ourselves, out of what we have. And it will all be fine. Divine. You’ll see.” And she kissed him tenderly on the forehead, sitting on his lap in his wheelchair, weeping for what he was willing to lose for what he hoped to gain.
As she was leaving him to his book and his brandy, he called out to her softly, and she turned to find tears in his red-rimmed eyes.
“Diana? Darling?” And then he stopped, as though that were the end of what he was going to say.
“Yes, Papa?”
He looked up at her. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want. You know that, don’t you? I hate the idea of offering you up like a calf to the slaughter. You are too precious to me.”
“Papa . . .”
“Yes, we need saving. But there are ways, other ways. I could sell all the paintings, the silver.”
“And what happens when that money is gone, Papa? What happens when the money is gone, and there’s nothing left to sell, and I’m too old to be a calf, as you put it?”
“I’ll think of something else.”
“No, Papa. It’s up to me now. The weight of Saratoga is on my shoulders. You rest, darling. It must have been so hard for you, all these years, watching it go in dribs and drabs. You kept it from me, my darling Papa. I thought we were rich, because you made sure I had everything I wanted, down to the most trivial little things, a fox muff, all that claptrap I needed, or thought I did, to fit in with the rich girls at Farmington. The worry you spared me from. Let me take it now. I love you and Mama with all my heart. I know now why Mama so rarely comes out of her room. Every foot out of this house costs money. I sorrow for the fear that keeps her spellbound, a prisoner in her own house, overlooking the tattered rug, the frayed curtain. It was all for me.”
“We did it because we wanted to. In my heart, you will always be Cinderella.”
“Well, the carriage awaits. At least until midnight, let’s try to have some fun, and I will bring down the richest turkey in the flock with a single shot.”
Her father laughed.
“You are a remarkable shot.”
“Every man left around here, every suitable man, is a cousin. I have to get out in the world. I tremble with excitement. And I will win the day. If I can carry a book on my head for two hours at Farmington while reading Madame Bovary in French, surely I can bring down some unsuspecting billionaire.”
Her father laughed again. “I know you can do it. I’ve seen you. But men are wily creatures. A harder shot than a whole rafter of turkeys.”
“We’ll see about that, my darling papa. Rest now. Do you want another brandy?”
“I always want another brandy.”
“I’ll get you one, then go help Mother make these damned dresses.” As she handed him the brandy, she kissed him and smoothed back his thinning hair.
They say he was once the best rider in Caroline County. He was master of hounds for the Saratoga Hunt. To watch him ride, both assured and reckless, was something that was still talked about today at hunt meets. Now, a legend confined to a wheelchair, he sat alone most of the time, drinking himself to death in the largest and most beautiful house in Virginia, a house that had hung around his neck like an albatross since he came of age. And soon it would hang around hers. Forever and ever.
The invitations came, from people she’d never heard of. She was invited solely based on her lineage. She was a jewel of American society, whether she knew it or not. The Bachelor’s Cotillion in Baltimore. The St. Cecilia Ball in Charleston, the Veiled Prophet Ball in St. Louis. Twelve in all. So she and her mother had sat for hours, planning each dress as each invitation arrived, looking through books of designs from Paris and New York, searching through the trunks upstairs for pieces of dresses that might be usable to make other dresses, going into Richmond to bargain with hawk-eyed shopkeepers for silks and satins of pure white, laces of a delicacy that frightened her. And they had constructed the dresses, each to be worn once and only once.
She knew that she was being put on the auction block, like one of her grandfather’s father’s slaves, brought to market and weighed and inspected. She was appalled at the thought—her family tree looked up and discussed and found to be a kind of American perfection, nobility and grace, unspoiled by too much sophistication and therefore malleable. She realized that her whole past had led to this moment, this shamefully mercenary endeavor, but she knew her worth, at least in the eyes of the American blue bloods. She’d been invited to the ancient rituals only because of her name and her great hulk of a house. The fact that she was southern was, in their eyes, a plus, as long as she wasn’t a clumsy cow. She was slender, with lovely breasts and wide hips, good for bearing children.
And she knew, even as she imagined her teeth inspected by dowager after dowager, that this had to be done. It was what she’d been raised and educated for, to capture the brass ring of the nouveau riche, vulgar, pretentious aristocracy who had everything except what they vulgarly called “class.” She had class to spare and no money. It would be like shooting fish in a rain barrel, and her hostesses felt their mouths water for their first sight of her.
Girls in her situation were marrying dukes and earls and even princes because the royals lived in these big piles they couldn’t afford to heat. But these were rich girls, the awkward daughters of the new robber barons. She was poor. They had lived by their wiles and an aristocratic condescension even the rich girls couldn’t muster.
She thought of her grandmother’s fur coat, and she smiled.
Her grandmother’s fur came from Montaldo’s; she had gone all the way to Richmond to buy it. She charged it. Three years later, a woman from Montaldo’s had called, gently reminded her of the purchase, and politely asked when they might expect payment. Her grandmother erupted in full dowager’s rage. “How dare you harass me in this way, as though I were some common streetwalker?” she said, and slammed down the phone. She could not fathom why a store would dare to call her and ask for their money, even after three years.
So the rest of the family had to get together and scrape up the money to pay Montaldo’s in cash, like sharecroppers.
Still, the invitations that came in, envelopes inside envelopes, like wedding invitations, on thick stock the color of fresh cream, came not because Diana was rich or well known but because her family tree had been studied by people who do those things. She could trace her ancestry all the way back to Pocahontas, the Indian princess who saved John Smith but married John Rolfe and was taken back to England and paraded at court in full regalia with a ruffled cuff around her neck, choking her. There Pocahontas, now christened Rebecca, bore one son, Thomas, from
whom they all sprang. She didn’t even speak English, and the ladies of the court got together and embroidered her prayers on all her nightgowns. She endured the cold, damp English winters, died of pneumonia on her way home, before she even got out to sea. So Diana was a kind of royalty, her family tree an American perfection, and she was asked by committees of people she didn’t know to dances in places she’d never been to not for who she was but for what she was, an example of the finest bloodline America had to offer, breeding without blemish.
In fact, she saw herself as a slave to her own lineage.
Now she looked down the stairs at her family waiting below. She was wearing a trim periwinkle-blue traveling suit, with a cloche hat, kid gloves, and the one strand of real pearls the family had left.
They all looked up the stairs at her, as so many would look up so many stairs at her in the months to come, dressed in one of the twelve dresses in the twelve boxes spread out around her.
“I’ve always said you had a pretty foot,” said her mother, hardly looking up from her needlepoint, and after that moment Diana Cooke lost all hope, all reason to believe in romance. Her hair was carefully arranged around her face in a sweep of dark waves, her face without makeup. Her eyes sought the light, drew the light to her. She was, at nineteen, a stunningly gamine creature who was just setting off to burn the topless towers of Ilium, and all she had to go on was the knowledge that she had a pretty foot, the Tidewater’s prettiest foot, now in pale-blue suede shoes that buttoned across her arch.
The Dying of the Light Page 2