Daisy rushed to the phone to accept, wishing she could suggest doing it in oil and charging another hundred dollars. No, better not—she didn’t have the money to buy oils and canvas.
Any well-trained, competent artist should be able to draw a horse, but there are special abilities involved in understanding the movements, the stance, the anatomical differences and the variations of color necessary to make one horse look entirely different from another. Daisy had been drawing and riding horses most of her life. As for the children, she’d drawn them too, by the thousands, during all those years of making drawings for Dani, and she’d taken advanced courses in portraiture at Santa Cruz. Her sketch of the Middleton grandson had revealed an innate and pronounced knack which was to give her equestrian portraits a lively quality of sympathy and immediacy.
When she arrived at the Davises, a larger and more luxurious Monticello, Daisy was introduced to Penny Davis, who was already dressed in her best riding clothes. Daisy took one look at the child’s rigidly set face and apprehensive eyes.
“I thought we’d all have lunch together before you get started, Princess Valensky,” Mrs. Davis said. “And you must be ready for a Bloody Mary after the trip out”
“That’s awfully thoughtful, but what I’d really like to do first is ride with Penny,” Daisy answered. She wasn’t about to work with a model who not only was miserably shy but didn’t want to have her portrait painted under any circumstances.
“But what about lunch?”
“We’ll manage. Penny, why don’t you put on some jeans and show me the stable?”
When the girl returned, looking a tiny bit less uncomfortable, Daisy whispered to her, “Is there a McDonald’s near here?” Penny looked around quickly to see if her mother could hear. Out of the corner of her mouth, she confided, “It’s only five miles if you ride across country. But I’m not allowed to go there.”
“But I am. And you’re my guest. Let’s just git!” The little girl’s eyes lit up as she glanced with surprise at Daisy.
“Are you really a princess?”
“Sure. But to you I’m Daisy.”
“Do Princesses like McDonald’s?”
“Kings like McDonald’s. Come on, Penny, I’m having a Big Mac fit.”
Penny led the way over fields and fences. Within ten minutes and double Big Macs, Daisy discovered that Penny thought portraits were dumb. Worse than that, who would want to have a picture of herself with braces on hanging around for the rest of her life?
“Penny, I promise, cross my heart, I won’t paint your braces. In fact, if you want, I’ll paint you the way you’re going to look when they come off—with a gorgeous smile. But think of it this way: an equestrian portrait is as much a portrait of the horse as it is of the person. You’ll have to sell Pinto in a year or two, the way you’re growing, and now you’ll always have a picture of her to remember her by. Hey, could you eat another of these—I’m having one. Good—maybe I can get them to give us extra sauce.”
“They’re all having trout in aspic for lunch at home.”
“Ugh, ugh, ugh! Wonder what’s for dinner?”
“Roast duck—it’s going to be very fancy—she’s invited practically everyone we know.”
“Oh, well,” said Daisy philosophically. “Duck’s better than trout.”
That afternoon, as the young girl posed, relaxed and willing, Daisy made dozens of sketches to pin down the natural, spontaneous gestures and characteristic expressions of Penny Davis. She also took many pictures with the Polaroid she’d borrowed from the studio. They would be used as visual aids for the watercolor she planned to complete at home. She blessed the classes in anatomy she’d taken as she carefully sketched Penny’s hands holding the reins, and further blessed the natural limitations which surrounded an equestrian portrait, since they ruled out too great a variety of pose or attitude. She sketched lightly, without any tightness or stiffness, not trying for perfection, but for a feeling of the child in relationship to her pony.
On Sunday, as Daisy traveled back from the Davises’ estate, driven home by their chauffeur, she reflected on the fact that Mrs. Davis, like Mrs. Middleton, had ceremoniously and importantly introduced her as Princess Daisy Valensky at the big, formal dinner party last night. After her four years as Valensky at Santa Cruz, Daisy had almost forgotten that she had a title. Obviously it was a business asset—in Horse Country, anyway. Since painting kids on ponies was probably the most commercial way in which she could use her talents, Daisy ground her teeth and resolved to milk the princess routine for every penny it was worth. When she had finished the watercolor of Penny Davis, she signed it in clear, careful lettering, “Princess Daisy Valensky.” It meant six hundred and fifty dollars for Danielle.
Slowly, through word of mouth, after the Middleton sketch and Davis commission, Daisy got requests to paint other kids on ponies. Her prices rose steadily. Now, not quite four years later, Daisy was able to ask and get two thousand, five hundred dollars for a watercolor. These commissions, which had started to come just before the Fabergé money ran out, represented the difference between being able to support Danielle and being forced to try to get Ram to pay, any way she could. Daisy had never told Anabel where her money came from, because she didn’t want her to know that she had been left penniless after the bankruptcy of Rolls-Royce. Nor did Daisy tell anyone at the studio why she spent so many weekends flying to Upperville, Virginia; Unionville, Pennsylvania; and estates near Keeneland, Kentucky. She knew they considered her to be a full-fledged member of the social, horsy set, but as long as she did her job, she didn’t see that it was any business of theirs what she did with her own time. Of course, Kiki, who saw her working night after night to finish the watercolors, knew about her work, and in certain circles a portrait of one’s child on a pony by Princess Daisy Valensky was quickly becoming a status symbol.
When Daisy had had to leave Santa Cruz to get a job, she finally told Kiki about Danielle. There was no other possible way to explain her leaving college a mere four months before graduation except by telling the truth—or part of it.
She remembered the scene as she had told the strange, sad story, the variety of expressions that crossed Kiki’s winsome, urchin’s face; disbelief, astonishment, sympathy, indignation and wonder replacing each other in quick succession. Daisy had anticipated the two questions she knew her friend would eventually ask when the reality of what Daisy was telling her finally struck home.
“But why won’t Ram support Danielle?”
“It’s a way to get at me. We had a serious and permanent quarrel over a family matter, and nothing can change that or make us friends. Believe me, it’s final. He doesn’t consider Dani his sister anyway—he’s never even met her. It’s out of the question.”
“Then why won’t you let me help?” Kiki asked, warned by Daisy’s tone not to pry into the nature of the family quarrel.
“I knew you’d get around to that. First of all, I have to do it alone because it’s going to be a permanent thing—even you, generous as you are, can’t take on someone else’s relative for an indefinite period. But I’m not too proud to borrow a couple of hundred dollars just until I get my first paycheck.”
She hadn’t expected Kiki’s last reaction. “I’m leaving school, too—we’ll go together,” she proclaimed, when Daisy had finally managed to convince her that she wouldn’t let Kiki support Dani on a regular basis.
“Never. No way. That’s out! I refuse to be the reason why you don’t get a diploma from somewhere. Your mother’d never forgive me. But I’ll rent someplace that’s big enough for the two of us and the minute you graduate I’ll be waiting for you with open arms and half the rent bill—retroactive. It’s only four months. Do we have a deal?”
“Christ, you’re bossy,” Kiki complained. “Can I pay for the furniture? At least?”
“Half of it.”
“I assume it’ll be Salvation Army.”
“Unless you can get your mother to ship us some of her ext
ra stuff—anyone who redecorates once a year must have leftovers. The idea is that well accept donations of things, just like any other deserving organization, but we won’t take money—because that gives people a right to say what we do. Got it?”
“Can we take money on Christmas and birthdays?” Kiki asked wistfully.
“Definitely. And we never go out with anyone who doesn’t pay for dinner. Dutch treat is out. Together, we’ll bring back the fifties.”
As Daisy climbed up the steps to their third-floor apartment in a shabby building on the corner of Prince and Greene Streets she sniffed the pervasive smell of fresh baking in the air. Cinnamon rolls today, she decided. SoHo, only fifteen years before, had been declared the city’s number-one commercial slum. Now it was the boiling, self-conscious main outpost of Bohemia, a boom town for artists where the current dress code called for paint-encrusted overalls, whether, as Kiki remarked disdainfully, you had ever held a paintbrush or not.
But then Kiki had finally discovered how to cope with her preoccupation about the right way to dress in any given locale. Thanks to the timely death of her grandmother, she was rich enough in her own right to become the owner, producer, and permanent leading lady of her very own off-off-off Broadway theater, The Hash House. She was, in fact, the recognized Ethel Barrymore-Sarah Bernhardt of SoHo, and she dressed to suit whatever play she was currently mounting. Her latest production, The Lament of the Pale Purple Faggot, was keeping the theater comfortably full, especially on weekends when the up-towners came down to see what was going on in playland. Casting herself as the protagonist’s only female confidante, Kiki had been drifting around for the last few weeks in an arrangement of a lavender leotard, pink tights, purple suede boots and a mauve feather boa, all of which suited her admirably.
Daisy unlocked the door and looked around. The apartment was empty. That meant that Kiki was probably still at the theater and Theseus was with her. He consented to spend the day lying on a bean-bag pillow at Kiki’s feet or following her around the theater. He was only totally happy when Daisy came home, but it was impossible to have a lurcher on a set The caterer’s table would have been denuded before the first sleepy grip asked for a cheese Danish in the morning.
Kiki and Daisy’s place in SoHo wasn’t one of those enormous lofts that many artists had carved out of former cast-iron, palazzo-styled, industrial buildings. It was an apartment on a human scale in a shabby building that boasted a small art gallery on the first floor. But it was large: big enough to contain a rambling living room, three bedrooms, a studio for Daisy, a fairly large kitchen and two bathrooms which unfortunately seemed to still have their original plumbing. The style could only be called free-floating. At various times their apartment contained bits and pieces from the sets of Kiki’s plays; odds and ends from the junk dealers of the neighborhood, and much fine furniture from Grosse Pointe. The only constants were a fireplace, Daisy’s working materials, decent-enough beds and the mural with which one of their friends had been inspired to decorate a living-room wall: a pastoral scene featuring Theseus engaging in various criminal acts in a series of farmyards. Neither Daisy nor Kiki had the instincts of a homemaker, and when they weren’t invited out to eat—a rare situation—they bought something from a local delicatessen for dinner. When they bothered about breakfast, they snatched it at a little street stand right around the corner which sold a doughnut and coffee for fifty-five cents, and, mysteriously, featured fresh coconut.
Daisy flopped down with a sigh of relief on the latest couch, brown satin and agreeably overstuffed, that had recently arrived from Kiki’s mother. Every time she sent them a new shipment they promptly sold their old furniture. Eleanor Kavanaugh found it strange that they’d been able to absorb such quantities of objects, but she said, sniffing in disapproval, she supposed Kiki needed them for that theater.… Thank heaven Grandmother Lewis hadn’t lived to know what had happened to her money. Although, of course, if she had lived, there wouldn’t have been—oh, never mind, just don’t tell her all the ghastly details.
“She’s actually thrilled,” Kiki declared. “I know that she boasts about me at the country club—she calls me a patroness of the arts.”
Daisy roused herself from her comfortable place on the couch long enough to take off her baseball jacket She’d bought it right after going to work as a production assistant for North. She’d appeared on that first morning in her newest jeans, freshly pressed, her best beige cashmere turtleneck sweater and a checked hacking jacket that had been made for her in London years before.
“Oh no!” hissed Bootsie, when she saw Daisy arrive.
“What’s wrong?” Daisy asked, alarmed.
“Christ—do you have to look so much like old money?”
“But it’s my oldest jacket”
“That’s the point, dummy. It reeks of that good green stuff. And besides doing your job, you have to spend as much time as possible getting friendly with the crew so that they’ll tell you everything you need to know, something I positively do not have the time to do. You’re going to be pestering them with questions from morning to night and you’re going to be dependent on their good will. They’re the sweetest guys in the world if they think you need help, but no way do you look like a working girl who needs a job. That jacket says that you ride, you’ve ridden for years, you have better riding clothes somewhere else, and you’re probably still using them. And they’re hip to that. So get rid of it!”
“But you look very put together and expensive,” Daisy objected.
“I’m the producer, kiddo. I can wear whatever I want”
Now that Daisy had Bootsie’s job, which paid four hundred dollars a week, she still wore the baseball jacket from time to time. It reminded her of those first frantic, panicked months when, just as Bootsie predicted, she floundered around from grip to gaffer, from the sound man to the assistant cameraman, from the hair stylist to the set designer, from the prop man to the script supervisor, asking what now she realized must have been incredibly stupid questions, and writing down all the answers in a little notebook. Her jacket had won her friends by its mere existence, developed dialogues, created innumerable opportunities to join in mutual nostalgia for the lost team. It had made her one of the boys at a time when she desperately needed to be one of than.
She looked at her watch. In one hour she would be picked up for dinner at La Grenouille, followed by the opening of the new Hal Prince musical. Her hostess, Mrs. Hamilton Short, lived on a large estate in Middleburg, and she had three children, none of whom Daisy had been asked to paint … yet Cinderella time, she thought, and reluctantly got up and went to her room to start the transformation from working stiff to princess. Or rather, from working stiff to working stiff, if the truth were known.
Ram was thirty. He lived in a perfect house on Hill Street, only a step away from Berkeley Square, a house decorated by David Hicks in severe bachelor sumptuousness. He was a member of White’s Club, far and away the most exclusive and difficult to enter of British gentlemen’s clubs, and he was a member of Mark’s Club, that private restaurant which is the haunt of the most languid and most privileged of the young elite of London. His suits, which cost nine hundred dollars each, were made at H. Huntsman and Sons, the best tailor in England, as were all his riding clothes. He was counted as one of the best shots in the British Isles and owned a pair of shotguns, made to his measurements, from James Purdey and Sons, a firm that had existed in the time of George HI. It had taken three years before they were completed, at fifteen thousand dollars the pair, and they were, Ram thought, well worth waiting for. His shoes and boots came, of course, from Lobb’s and cost from two hundred and fifty-five dollars a pair upward, depending on the style and the leather. He collected rare books in a major way and avant-garde sculpture in a minor way. He wore white silk pajamas piped in a sober burgundy, heavy silk dressing gowns and shirts made from the finest Sea Island cotton, all made to order at Turnbull and Asser. He considered Sulka vulgar. He never left the house w
ithout his umbrella from Swaine, Adeney, Brigg and Sons. It was made of black silk and the handle and shaft were carved out of a single piece of exceptional hickory. He drew the line at a hat—perhaps in ten years, but not now, except for fishing, riding and yachting, and his dark hair was cut in the privacy of one of the ancient wooden rooms at Trumper on Curzon Street. He dined out every night, except on Sunday.
Ram’s name appeared with frequency in those sugary columns about society written by “Jennifer” for Harper’s and Queen magazine. Jennifer invariably described him as “the notably handsome and totally charming Prince George Edward Woodhill Valensky.” He also often was mentioned in Nigel Dempster’s purposefully bitchy column in the Daily Mail, where he was sometimes called “the last, dare we hope, of the White Russians,” although Ram had made it a point not to join the Monarchist League run by the Marquess of Bristol. He had no interest in a group he considered fundamentally frivolous, nor did he care to rub elbows with archdukes in exile, who, even if they might be cousins, would almost surely prove to be needy. His business sense had led him to multiply his fortune many times. Ram was a full partner in an investment trust, Lion Management, Ltd., which had had impressive success in supervising the placement of large amounts of money from the pension funds of trade unions and corporations in highly imaginative and productive international investments.
If he had wanted to spend a weekend at one of the country estates which still, in spite of taxes, exist in Great Britain, Ram had but to pick up a phone and call any one of dozens of the young lordlings he had known at Eton. An equal number of the most spirited and desirable young beauties of 1975 would have invited him to their beds with enthusiasm, for Ram was one of that small group of rich and wellborn young men whose name appeared on every list of the Most Eligible Bachelors in England.
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