The Dying of the Light

by Robert Goolrick

  But word had already spread. Many of the diners had been at the ball. They strained their necks to catch a view of her, the already infamous Diana Cooke. They knew who she was and where she came from. They knew she was the jewel of the season, and of course Copperton had wanted her, and what Copperton wanted, Copperton got.

  When they were seated, and she had taken in the dazzling array of forks and knives, some almost a foot long, she raised her head and looked him straight in the eye. “First of all, where does the Captain come from?”

  “The Crimea. The Spanish-American War. The endless struggle to stamp out the devil. Who gives a rat’s ass? Next?”

  “The medals?”

  “Marksmanship, Whittling balsa-wood airplanes at summer camp. Saving my men in the Charge of the Light Brigade. General heroism, like the heroism it takes to ask the prettiest girl in the world out to dinner when her legend already precedes her like a lightning bolt. What right do I have? Ask my solicitors.”

  “Your people?”

  “They are the best-kept nobodies in the world.”

  “And home, where is home?”

  “I grew up in Cadstown, USA, and attended Cadsville University, from which I graduated with high honors. I fought a duel and killed a man.”

  “For what reason.”

  “He bothered me.”

  And where is home now?”

  “Any place that doesn’t bore me.”

  The waiters brought the menus, and Copperton waved away hers. “I’ll order. I know what’s good. By the way, as an hors d’oeuvre, I have a little something for you, to commemorate your triumph.” And he pulled from the pocket of his uniform a blue velvet box and handed it to her.

  Hesitantly, she reached across the table and took it. Inside was a broad band of diamonds, a cuff for her wrist. She immediately closed the box and handed it back.

  “Captain Copperton, would you call me a cab?” She rose from her chair as a tuxedoed waiter instantly appeared. “I’ve lost my appetite for supper.”

  “Oh, Lord, don’t be such a bumpkin. It was meant—”

  “It was meant as payment to get me into bed with you. Even you should know that ladies don’t accept jewelry from men they’re not married to, and, in this case, hardly know. Even the most cloddish of bumpkins, thank you, knows that. I wish to leave. Do you just carry these trinkets with you like Hallowe’en candy to amuse children? Are you so unloved?”

  He looked in her eyes. The lights from the candles on the table flickered in his own. His face collapsed, took on a new, less arrogant expression. “Miss Cooke, if you wish, I will escort you home. But if you stay, I will give you wonderful food, and I will drop the facade of my life and tell you the whole story, whatever you want to know. I am the most honest man you will ever meet, and I will invite you into my hardscrabble world, and I guarantee you every word will be true and honest and from the heart. I give you my word as a gentleman, which, whether you believe it or not, is true as scripture.”

  She started to sit down and then stood up again, the waiter moving the chair in and out,

  “What is your name?”

  “You must promise never to say it again. Never. That person is long gone.”

  She sat, and the waiter heaved a sigh of relief as he put her back in her place, asked if she wanted a pillow for her back, and then walked away to his clamoring chores.

  “I promise.”

  “Billy Lux. William. That is the first and only time that name will be heard.”

  “It’s a beautiful name.”

  “Or Charlie Mann. Or H. L. Mencken, or Harry Houdini. What does it matter?”

  “Where I come from, it matters a great deal. You promised the truth.”

  “And that is the truth. What does it matter? I am Captain Copperton from now to the grave. No fixed profession, no fixed abode, useless in every way but one.”

  “And that would be?”

  “I have an endless supply of money, and an endless ability to make more.”

  The food began to arrive, along with copious amounts of champagne the Captain had somehow ordered.

  “And if that’s not good enough, go off and marry George Washington the eighteenth or somebody.”

  “He’s very charming, but he’s my cousin.”

  And for the first time they both laughed, conspirators in courtship.

  “And he doesn’t have a pot to piss in. I, on the other hand, am also charming, and I happen to be the eighth richest man in America. You have nothing. Marry me, and you will have everything, things you can’t even imagine. Your father will live out his days in splendor. Your mother can do her needlework just as easily on the first-class deck of an ocean liner.”

  Oysters on the half shell were replaced by quail, followed by Dover sole. She was beginning to feel both drunk and faint. Then there were filet mignons, bloodred, and, finally, the lobster imperial for which the restaurant was famous. And through it all, an ocean of talk. Witty. Lewd. Seductive. It was almost three in the morning, and the dining room showed no signs of closing.

  Diana was tired, but Copperton’s energy didn’t seem to be flagging, and through it all his intense blue eyes never left hers, sparkling with merriment, the eyes of a seducer.

  It came time, finally, to leave.

  “Remember,” he said. “My heart, and my fortune, are yours for the taking. You may resist, but I mean to have you, and I didn’t get so rich by not getting the thing I want.”

  Drunk, she answered, “Talk of money is vulgar.”

  “Dear girl, when you have it, you never have to mention it again. It’s only poor people who talk about money.”

  In the cab, he kissed her; his hands touched her body, and she let him. In the lobby he clicked his heels and bowed, offering her a perfectly gauged and perfectly polite good night. She held out her hand, and he kissed it.

  The elevator doors slid shut, and she watched as his flame-red hair fell away from her, floor by floor.

  She slipped as quietly as she could into her room, where the Gorgon slept her holy sleep. She undressed, making sure to put everything away neatly, so that no one would know she had been out.

  She laid the things in her purse on the mirrored vanity table. There, in her purse, was a blue velvet box she had seen before.

  There was no need to open it. She knew what it was.

  3

  THERE WERE ELEVEN more balls, just like the first one, the red roses, the satin dresses, the gasp as she rose from her curtsy and her face caught the light. But in a sense, for Diana, the season was over. She had broken one of the cardinal rules of southern womanhood—she had accepted a lavish present from a man she hardly knew. She was famous now. Debutante of the year. She was on the cover of magazines, which outraged her mother, who believed women should be in the press only when they married and when they died.

  And he, this Copperton, if that’s what he wanted to be called, stalked her like a wild animal from city to city; in every city, he the wolf and she the rabbit. It was always the same: a swig from a silver flask, the clandestine dinner, the same flourishes from the waiter, food appearing from beneath silver domes, sometimes flaming at the table, the battle of wits, and somehow, at the end of it all, the velvet box she had to hide at the very bottom of her steamer trunk.

  Was this love? Was it like love? She hardly knew. He brushed away any other suitors like flies on a peach, so he was all she knew.

  After the last ball, she and her father made their way back to Saratoga, packing Miss Ackerly back to wherever she came from with a sigh of relief, arriving home to find dozens of invitations and letters of introduction from some of the finest American gentlemen, with bloodlines that stretched back to Plymouth Rock, filled with a kind of timid longing. But it was all set before it began.

  Copperton made the obligatory trip to Saratoga in the company of two lawyers to meet with her father to describe, not his lineage, but his fortune. There was oil in Texas, wells that kept pumping and pumping, always more; ther
e were copper mines and railroads, and vast forests of timber, and foreign investments, diamond mines and ships that carried cargo across the sea, a fleet of twelve tankers. It seemed endless, and it was.

  “She is the dearest thing in the world to me,” said Arthur sternly, tears in the corners of his eyes. “My wife is, well, she’s my wife, and I love her, of course. We were engaged before we were born. The family has done great things, important things. I would expect the same of you, were you to join us. This house has stood for generations, and we are poor, as you know, but I would rather see it burn to the ground than have my daughter experience one moment’s unhappiness.”

  “And there we are in agreement, sir,” said Copperton. “I would throw my fortune in the sea for her happiness. Live in a shack by the river. But, as my lawyers will explain, it needn’t come to that. I intend for her, and you, and your wife, to have the most elegant, the most luxurious, life possible. You will live in comfort for the rest of your life, and she will know a happiness that every woman in the world will envy.”

  Then the lawyers got out the ledgers and began to go over the long lists of numbers. It was more than impressive. It was unbelievable. When they were finished, and the ledgers were closed and put away in their black leather cases, Arthur wheeled himself to the drinks table and poured two brandies, and he and Copperton toasted and drank, and Copperton kissed him on both cheeks and called him Father, and so Diana Cooke was sold to the highest bidder.

  After dinner, he knelt before her in the moonlight on the terrace, both of them slightly drunk, and slipped a ring on her finger, a six-carat yellow square-cut diamond surrounded by smaller crystal-clear white diamonds. And then Diana shocked them both. She led Copperton to her bedroom, the house sleeping, and she gave him her body before she gave him her hand in marriage. He made love expertly, passionately, and he made allowances for her virginity, and was sweet and gentle with her, and the new world of womanhood opened like a lotus blossom and she found the passion that had been coursing in her blood since that long-ago day by the river when she had stood naked in front of all her childhood friends, only to find that her naked body could be both a joy and a humiliation.

  She was nineteen years old.

  Copperton devoured her, celebrated her body, claimed her as his own, as he would claim an oil well, another coup for his portfolio. After the heat of passion had passed, they lay in the dark and cool of the night air, wrapped around each other, under covers against the night’s chill, and talked about what fun they would have, a life of endless delights just waiting for them, trips and parties, and nights in hotels of such untouchable luxury that her breath would leave her body at the wonderment of it all. And sex, always sex, more and more adventurous, more intense. No two people on earth, he said, had ever enjoyed the pleasures they would find in each other’s bodies.

  And then they made love again, this time with greater intensity, greater freedom, and then again, until it was almost dawn, and Copperton slipped back into his clothes and back to his room, for an hour of sleep before it was time to appear at the breakfast table, where he showed up, freshly bathed and shaved, the picture of health and vigor.

  At breakfast they made plans for the wedding, which he insisted would be held as soon as the dress could be made. It would be made this time not by Lula in the village but by the finest couturier in Paris, now that is was safe to cross the Atlantic again, the Armistice having just been declared in November.

  In December they traveled first class on the Aquitania, with Diana’s mother along to chaperone. On board there was caviar and champagne before dinner, and then course after course of culinary delights. Everything en croute, or covered in a delicate cloud of spun sugar. Her mother was dazzled into silence. Diana took few clothes. She took two empty steamer trunks, which Copperton told her they would fill in Paris. He had done his homework. He knew the names of all the dressmakers, and had made appointments with each of them.

  Paris was alive and joyous with victory. People danced and kissed in the streets at night, practically having sex in public, shocking Mrs. Cooke. They stayed at the Ritz, glamorous beyond Diana’s imagination, where Copperton seemed to have stayed many times before; everybody knew him. Diana’s mother was stunned by the massive flower arrangements alone, and her room, with its majestic view of the Eiffel Tower, almost made her faint. They stayed in adjoining suites, so it was easy to slip discreetly between beds in the night; Diana’s mother retired early after a long day of walking the city, guidebook in hand, and slept, oblivious, in heavenly peace until breakfast was wheeled into the suite at eight. She had never seen a croissant, took an instant liking to them, and could consume several while poring over her ubiquitous guidebook for the day’s adventures, for which a sweet young English student served as her guide. In every room, by the bed, there was a button that merely read “Privé” that Diana was terrified to push, for fear of what it might summon. In her whole stay, she never pushed it, and she never knew.

  As for Diana and Copperton, their days were spent visiting the couture houses one after another. Going into the first, the House of Chanel, Copperton said to her in a low voice, “Never ask the price. It’s vulgar. Just nod at something you like. I’ll take care of the rest.” In each, they were brought by a trim, beautifully dressed middle-aged woman into a high-ceilinged, gilt-decorated room, seated on a sofa, and offered tea.

  At Chanel, she sat primly in her red traveling suit. The clothes the models paraded before her were overwhelming. She thought of her tomboy days, and the thrill of wearing pants in the daytime, and she nodded and nodded, and then came chic little black beaded dresses for night, and even though she could not imagine much need for them in Port Royal, Copperton encouraged her to get three, and so she nodded at her favorites.

  At the end, there were always the wedding dresses, amazing concoctions, like the spun-sugar clouds on the boat, but none was the right one, and she was careful not to nod her head.

  After the first parade, she was led into the atelier, where the great Chanel herself, smoking like a madwoman, welcomed her with a warmth tinged with jealousy and took her measurements, writing everything on a yellow card, while a helper noted the numbers on a mannequin that had her name on it.

  And then on to the next and the next, and more nodding and measuring, and kissing on both cheeks, and secret exchanges of money by Copperton and the stern-looking woman who appeared at the very end with a notebook marked with her name.

  At the end of a long week, with no wedding dress in hand, they went to the boulevard Haussman, to the House of Babani, who, besides showing his own designs, marketed those of talented foreigners, principally Mariano Fortuny, an artist and designer who lived in Venice and who was rumored to make dresses unlike anybody else’s. As soon as Diana saw the first one, she asked Copperton to wait outside. After only half an hour, she came out with a small bag, small enough to hold a bathing suit, and asked Copperton to go inside and settle up with Mr. Babani. There was a smile on her face, and she gave Copperton a wink as he passed her going into the shop.

  There was nothing more to do in Paris. They embarked the next day for New York, and seven more days of lap robes, champagne, and meringues. Mrs. Cooke was weary of monuments and paintings almost to death. Diana herself felt perfectly well, something that was to be her specialty the rest of her life.

  4

  ON MAY 15, 1919, three hundred and fifty guests sat in rented chairs on the sweeping back lawn on Saratoga, having been seated by twelve groomsmen. On the bride’s side sat one hundred and fifty representatives of the first and finest families in Virginia, families who had made the state, made the country. On the groom’s, two hundred sophisticates who were as strange and out of place as peacocks in the desert. The two sides of the aisle looked at each other with curiosity, like animals in a zoo. Still, these strangers were staying in the great houses of the Northern Neck and the Middle Peninsula. There was not a guest room that was not full, and an uneasy truce had developed between the t
wo sides.

  The men and women were in their seats by four fifteen, and there they waited. And they waited, and they waited. Copperton appeared at exactly four thirty, with his best man at his side. He had wanted to accept the many offers they had had from magazines to have the wedding photographed, but Diana’s parents firmly put their feet down and declared this an impossibility, and Copperton at last gave up. Still, the river was full of boats crowded with photographers hoping to catch a shot even at a distance, of the bride approaching, of the vows being taken.

  Upstairs, at her dressing table, already in the dress that was to enhance her fame, Diana Cooke sat and looked at her face in the mirror. She knew they were all waiting for her, but she was frozen in place. At nineteen, she was about to enter into the rest of her life, and she was paralyzed.

  By five o’clock the guests were getting nervous. It was cocktail time, and certain hands began to shake. Copperton, red-faced, stepped away from the flower-laden altar, under an arch of magnolia he had brought florists from New York to build, and walked the long walk back into the house. He stood at the bottom of the stairs and called her name, first softly and then with more force, so that he could be heard outside. “Diana? Diana, darling?”

  She could hear him as though from very far away, but she couldn’t find the strength to move or to answer. He loitered for a few minutes at the bottom of the stairs, where he was joined by Diana’s mother. “I’ll go up,” she said. “Just go out and start serving champagne and give some humorous explanation, and we’ll be down in a jiffy.”

  She went up, knocked softly on Diana’s door, and, not getting a response, let herself in quietly and closed the door behind her. She found her daughter ramrod straight in front of her mirror in the famous dress, and she went and sat beside her on a low stool, and she just waited. After what seemed like an eternity, Diana said quietly, not turning her head, “I’m making the worst mistake of my life.”