Swan Song

by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott

  ‘Did she really jump out the window?’ Maura asks.

  ‘Yes. Technically it was a suicide. But she died of a broken heart. You know, I think about the people who might have happened to look out of their windows the moment that she jumped. What they were doing… What seeing that might have done to them. Had Babe Paley, mere blocks away at the St. Regis, seen a body fall, would she have thought of the unfortunate young lady who’d done the same when Bill jilted her years earlier? Would Slim Keith, but a few blocks further west at the Pierre, have even looked up from her paper and Scotch? I’ve given Maggie Kate McCloud to bear witness, but what if nobody saw her fall? What if no one witnessed her mackintosh filling with air in that brief moment of weightlessness before reality struck and the poetic gesture became nothing more than a tawdry mistake?

  ‘I think about who found her on the pavement outside 550 Park—they say it was a gardener, arriving to trim the hedges, but Mrs. Vreeland swears it was her maid. I think about whoever cleaned up the mess that a perfectly buttoned coat couldn’t begin to hide.

  ‘And finally I think about what must have gone through Maggie’s mind on the way down. What flashed through her brain as she fell with the rain into nothingness? Did she think of her girlhood, dancing Charlestons? Of first loves and last kisses, or drinking Singapore Slings?

  ‘Or did Maggie Case think of Azurest, where Answered Prayers will end? A tranquil place on Long Island, with clam boats and scallopers bobbing in the water. Families on beaches with black and tan faces, basking in their own private paradise. Or of Father Flanagan’s all-night cafe, where we’ll all wind up in the end?’

  (Smiling to the Felkers …)

  ‘I do wonder.’

  And with that he dumps the last of the Stoli into his glass, polishing off his bottle.

  ‘It’s a knockout, Truman.’ Clay, getting down to business— ‘When can I expect it? I’ll run it as the cover.’

  ‘Soon…’ Truman replies cryptically, nibbling a scrap of sweet bun. ‘I just have to tighten a few screws. Thirty-five grand still okay?’

  ‘Thirty-five grand,’ Clay confirms.

  Truman beams his thousand-watt smile, pleased as punch with the outcome.

  LATER, LAST DROPS of Grapefruit and Stoli depleted, they call him a taxi and watch him totter down the sandy path to the road. He stops dead in his tracks, staring with disbelief at the name of the cab company, emblazoned on its flank—‘Hedge End Cabs’, which Truman in his bleariness reads as ‘Hope’s End.’ He hesitates, as if pondering whether he’d like to take the ride or not.

  The Felkers watch the driver take his grocery bag and help him into the backseat; they see him wave at them in the window, and wave back from the porch. Afterward they head back inside and begin to clear the breakfast table, plates caked with dried yolk, four hours after the fact. (Truman had, as promised, orated the remainder of the chapter as he glugged, plus ‘previews’ of two more.)

  And it’s there, over a sink filled with suds, that Clay confesses to Gail, she washing, he drying—‘You know, he could’ve asked six figures for that goddamn chapter and I think I would’ve considered it.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Thirty-five grand’s a bargain…’

  Gail completes the sentence for him: ‘… if it exists.’

  They finish the dishes in silence, lost in their separate thoughts, in their own sacred visions of Azurest.

  FIFTEEN

  1978

  BABE

  ELEGY

  AFTER A LIFETIME of Entertaining, she throws the luncheon to end all luncheons, the crowning achievement in a career of relentless hospitality.

  She is both here and not. We can feel her presence in the most minute of details as we approach the line of white-coated waiters, gloved hands offering trays of Babe’s favorite Pouilly-Fumé de Ladoucette. Another corps of servers emerges with champagne flutes, passing one another in a careful pavane, maids carrying plates of quivering aspic. The choreographed steps of the waitstaff are something we observe with gutted smiles and splintered hearts, expecting nothing less from her.

  During the long prelude to this day, she had discussed each choice with us as we came and went, together and alone, sitting at her bedside in those last molasses months. As ever, sipping our gimlets and Vespers, nursing our Scotches and hangovers, as Babe continued to chain-smoke her darling L&Ms, taking what remaining pleasure there was to be had in them; a moth courting the fatality of the flame.

  Without leaving her room, she planned her final send-off.

  ‘Two menus?’ we’d exclaimed, taking our turns looking at the thick stack of lists, the sketches and clippings, the recipes written in her tidy script.

  She’d stared at us, as if we were the most impossibly ill-prepared of creatures, and replied without a trace of sentimentality—‘Of course! One if I die in winter, one if I die in spring. One couldn’t possibly serve the same spread.’

  She had gone in summer, as it happened. On the 6th of July, the morning after her sixty-third birthday, dressed in an imported lace bed jacket, her bald head concealed beneath an elegant satin turban. Mask of perfection intact.

  She herself had seen to that, her last act of exertion having been the careful application of her Face. With a shaky hand she darkened her lashes and colored her lips to match the cinnabar console she’d prized in her collection. She’d set her makeup box on its varnished surface for the last time and drifted into a morphine-induced reverie, walking—as we are now—through the visions of the al fresco picnic she was so determined we enjoy. Realizing a June departure was likely, she had tweaked both menu and tables-capes to reflect the season. Centerpieces of Chinese porcelain bowls, brimming with black cherries. Tray-passed lobster salad, served in cucumber cups. As we stroll the manicured gardens of her beloved Kiluna, past its lush dell and pristine beds, we can almost see her in her wide straw sun hat, gloved hands covered in dirt, turning the soil, planting the seeds for next season’s azaleas. Pruning, digging, taming vines and flowers in a way she failed to tame her ungrateful children. Shaping shrubs and hedges with garden shears, watching with pleasure how they complied, in a way that Bill and his roving eye never could.

  We picture the pleasure with which she’d walk us through the blossoming flowers, proudly pointing out her favorite, the dusty-lilac Heliotropium arborescens. We can smell their faint vanilla scent now, as we sip our champagne and ingest the loveliness of the Eden she’d created over decades. Meticulously planned hedges and flowering trees, sloping down to a tranquil oval pond, which Babe spent hours sitting beside.

  The last time she had the strength to walk the dell unchaperoned, she happened upon a man admiring the property. People often wandered the woodland glen and got turned around. She told us she smiled at the man, who smiled back. They exchanged hellos and chatted briefly about the grounds. As they were parting, he pulled a business card from his pocket and handed it to her. She recognized the name—a local real estate shark, known for buying up land in Manhasset, building suburbs of cookie-cutter boxes on its unblemished greenery. Realizing she’d been flattered into a dialogue with the enemy, she handed the card straight back.

  ‘Now you just run along, Mr. Builder Man,’ cause they’re gonna carry me out of here feet first!’ (Babe found herself channeling Truman’s Southern cadence for the rebuff.)

  We feel her in the gentle breeze, think we hear her silver laughter in the rustling leaves of the twin linden trees, as we overhear more than one dolled-up mourner whisper, with a glance in Bill’s direction—‘Poor Bill. He must be so lonely…’ Barely concealing their designs.

  Inside, the house is brimming with flowers, as if the gardens had been extended indoors. In the famed red-lacquered dining room (from which Truman cribbed the concept for his own), an abundance of cut stems rise from cloisonné vases, each floral variety hand-picked by Babe at Petrov’s on Sixth Avenue. She was eager—this being her last shot—to make selections she thought might inspire surprise. Unusua
l choices. Memorable ones. Ranunculi in a deep oxblood, a dead ringer for Babe’s favored nail varnish—a bloom she loved for growing more complex as it unfolded, layer by delicate layer.

  She’d always loved the architectural nature of cherry blossoms, but Bill made such a fuss when they shed. ‘What’s all this pink shit?’ he’d grumble at the sight of a dusting of petals on a table or sideboard. Babe had selected them with grim pleasure at the thought that she would not be around to either hear his complaints or hop to, tidying the mess.

  Of course it’s Slim, Babe’s first lieutenant, who has executed her battle plan, down to the last detail. And between her devotion and their long-standing friendship, it shouldn’t be surprising that it’s on her arm Bill chooses to lean. We’ve commented on it before, the ease with which Bill and Slim seem to interact, although on this occasion both appear so raw, even the most cynical of us refrains from voicing a hint of speculation. We know how deeply both had loved her, how both had—while being the two most taxed by her oft-maddening perfection—depended on her as a vital piece of their very souls. Both must be flailing, wondering how a day might pass without her there to soften their sharp edges. They sit beside one another, Slim and Bill, each staring into middle distance, thighs brushing. Hardly touching the Poulet à l’Estragon, swimming in wine and cream.

  In earlier, happier days, when Babe had fallen in love with the dish in the bistros of Montmartre, Slim had joked that it sounded like ‘chicken à la estrogen.’ Whatever one called it, they narrowed the best interpretation to one unassuming establishment—Le Moulin Joyeux, to which they returned time and again. The key to the dish, they’d determined, was the faint aniseed of the tarragon, though Babe suspected it had as much to do with the varietal of wine. As means of confirmation, she cajoled the recipe from the chef de cuisine at the bistro in question. Bewitched by the beauty of les femmes américaines, the smitten chef had written both ingredients and instructions on the back of a picture postcard Babe procured from her handbag. A photograph of a gargoyle perched high atop Sacré-Coeur—a winged creature with an extraordinarily long neck and severe expression. Babe had sent one to each of us, writing that its extended features reminded them of our own. Slim, smoking beside her at a cafe table, had taken her pen and added an ‘X, S & B’ for each. Babe had retained one gargoyle for herself and one for Slim—and kept her recipe incarnation for years in a French cookery book. It was this dog-eared postcard that Slim passed along to the battalion of luncheon chefs, so that they might get the Poulet à l’Estragon dead right. (The pun was Babe’s, and yes, it was intended.)

  From time to time Bill gropes for Slim’s hand and squeezes it, as if needing reassurance that they’re still of the corporeal world. Babe herself must have detected their closeness, even assumed it would flourish in her absence; that Slim would slip seamlessly into her place within days of her bucket-kick, adding Mr. Paley as the fourth in her line-up of husbands. In fact she’d assumed they were already at it. Both had earned their louche reputations over the decades. Why should now prove the exception? We’d all seen her lose her temper with Slim of late in ways she never had before; we’d noticed the narrowing eyes across her down mattress, as if trying to decipher precisely what Slim may or may not be guilty of. When we’d tried to broach the subject of such moments with Slim, she simply dismissed them with breezy resilience.

  ‘That’s the morphine talking. Not Babe.’

  Still, for all their closeness, Babe must have had her hunches, for she left a telling message in the meticulously selected bequests, which she had taken great care to detail. She made a master list recording the obvious, for fear that her mind was slipping. Listing, one by one, those who she mustn’t forget to remember: her family, closest friends, her secretary, and household staff(s). Her retinue of beauty gods, from her hairdressing team at Kenneth’s (who now cut and color her wigs), to manicurists, facialists, and her stylists at Bendel and Bergdorf’s. Her Pilates jocks, decor gurus, and terribly overtaxed chefs—to whom she leaves a bit extra, knowing what they’ll inherit with Bill, when she’s no longer present to mediate.

  In the months prior to her departure she had itemized and cataloged her wealth of possessions, designating a recipient for each. Writing names, gifts, and their values on lined index cards that she filed alphabetically for easy reference.

  She had hesitantly asked some of us if there was a specific piece of jewelry that we fancied—an item from her vast collection that particularly caught our eye. In some cases we brushed this aside, uncomfortable speaking about her inevitable demise, or the prospect of taking Babe’s things. Others had answered quite plainly, justifying their forthrightness as honoring Babe’s wishes. Gloria had been perfectly clear that she coveted Babe’s ivory and tortoise jewelry casket. (We bet she did, at three thousand, five hundred bucks!)

  In other instances Babe asked us each in confidence what we thought the others might like. A Chinese porcelain box, adorned with vines of primary shades (worth at least a thousand) had been set aside for C.Z.; we congratulated ourselves on the suggestion, as we knew it would remind her of their shared passion for gardening. Mrs. Vreeland receives the gold and white enamel Fabergé powder box that Truman long admired. He used to toy with it on Babe’s dressing table, sitting faithfully by her side, watching her apply her Face, brushstroke by brushstroke, with all the fascination of watching a geisha do the same.

  In fact, not only does Babe fail to leave Tru even the smallest of tokens, she leaves explicit instructions that he is not to be told of her death—he can read about it in the papers with the rest of the masses—and certainly he’s not to be invited to her luncheon, so painstakingly planned. She’s worried the little bastard will try to weasel his way in, appealing to Bill or Slim in a moment of weakness, asking C.Z. to plead the case on his behalf… saying that he always loved her, that he’ll be ‘bereft without his Babyling,’ that he ‘couldn’t bear not to have a last goodbye…’ bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Truman’s at his finest in heightened moments of drama, and Babe has been careful to ensure, as a last act of defiance, that he not steal her thunder in what will be her final, glorious exit. She’s even threatened Slim and ‘Old Bastard Paley’ in her morphine-haze that they’d best follow her instructions, as she’ll ‘be watching’…

  Perhaps, as we say, she meant to assert her lasting omnipresence in more realms than one, for it’s clear that, whether opiate or instinct-induced, she suspected Slim and Bill of a long-term dalliance. This Babe made clear in her bequest left to Slim—a pair of Japanese ceramic crab tureens, worth a measly two hundred bucks. To her dearest friend of thirty years?! We wonder if Babe was trying to communicate something more significant in her choice of that which could suggest infidelity; a veiled reference to more than a guileless crustacean. Still, Slim remained unfazed, and would in fact take pleasure serving bisque in the crab tureens at many a dinner to come, thinking of Babe with unmarred affection as she ladles portions.

  IT IS SPRING 1978. We know this because last week was Easter.

  This being April, Babe is still alive, though not entirely and not for long.

  She’s made the eccentric decision to move into her closet-cum-dressing room, where she sits propped against an Empire campaign bed she’s had moved into the space, nesting contentedly, surrounded by her things. There’s a vanity across the room, and shelves upon shelves housing everything from her wardrobe to handbags to stacks of beautifully wrapped packages, arranged in a still-life tableau. The packages have been her project these last weeks; since the arrival of her jewelry from Chase Manhattan, she having turned to the business of personalizing bequests. All were delivered to her dressing room lair, where she’s sat for days, meticulously wrapping—taking breaks for drags from either her cigarettes or oxygen tank as needed—priceless jewels that used to be locked in vaults, preparing them to be dispersed into the world, which Babe thinks a more pleasing fate for them.

  She’s totaled the value of her estate: the jewelry, fine art, an
d furniture, the furs, gowns, et al.—not to mention the stocks and bonds, of which she holds many; a hefty chunk of CBS shares, acquired before they were valuable. She’s calculated that it comes to something in the region of eight million. Eight million dollars. Is that worth a life she fears that she’s only half lived? Can one put a price on such choices?

  These have been the questions she’s asked herself as she’s filled out her notecards, determining what will happen to her life’s worth when she’s gone.

  Through this process, fighting the pain of her body betraying her, carefully wrapping each gift, she has selected the exact shade of paper she knows that each of us favors, or ones that she identifies with us. Slim is always yellow—sun-kissed, golden. C.Z. is blue—free association with Boston blue blood? She can’t recall the reason, but C.Z.’s a pale ice blue, where Marella is cobalt, conjuring visions of the Adriatic. Gloria is any one of a rich palette of greens, palm leaves and key limes and ripe avocados. The bold Diana Vreeland is of course crimson red. Truman would have been orange—a bright Hermès hue, a shade darker than his Orange Drinks. But fuck Truman. He isn’t getting a present, as she’s made explicitly clear. For each gift she takes the time to construct a farewell missive, written on her engraved correspondence cards. For each she notes the name of the recipient on the envelope, seals it, then ties it to the box with a ribbon, knotting the bows several times for good measure.

  She wills herself the strength to drag her emaciated form from the campaign bed and makes what feels like the long pilgrimage to her dressing table. Here she sits, lovingly fingering items scattered across the surface, fingers straying to a silver brush, a family heirloom which she keeps on display. She notices, in its fine boar bristles, strands of her graying chestnut hair, left from the last time she had need to use it. She pulls a tuft out and turns it around, studying it like a curiosity in a sideshow exhibition. Looking in the mirror, she unwraps the silk charmeuse scarf she’s skillfully twisted around her head in a makeshift turban. Removing it, the silk sweeps against her bare scalp, a rare sensory pleasure.