The Two Mrs. Grenvilles

by Dominick Dunne

  “We have to stop meeting like this,” she said to him as she squeezed past him the second time. She laughed at her own joke, and he joined in the laughter, and the contact was made.

  “I’m Junior Grenville,” he said.

  “I’m Ann Arden,” she replied.

  “Hello, Ann.”

  “Hi, Junior.”

  There was a moment of stillness amid the racket of the packed nightclub as they looked at each other.

  “Junior, are you going to join us?” called out Brenda Frazier.

  “In a minute, Brenda,” he called back.

  Ann’s heart was beating very fast. It astonished her that anyone would not leap at the chance to sit at the table of the beautiful Brenda Frazier.

  “I should be getting back,” said Ann.

  Later, when she was dancing with Arturo again, not singing into his ear this time, Ensign Grenville cut in on the dance floor, tapping Arturo heavily on the shoulder. Arturo turned around to the tapper.

  “May I?” asked Junior, holding out his hands.

  “See here, Lieutenant,” said Arturo, annoyed.

  “Ensign,” corrected Junior.

  “This sort of thing is just not done here at El Morocco. Save it for the proms back at the base.” He turned back to Ann to resume his fox-trot.

  “Oh,” said Ann, gleeful at the possibility of a scene. “Get into a fight over me, why don’t you? Let’s have pictures in all the papers! Finally I’ll get a screen test.”

  Arturo, furious, walked off the dance floor. “I’ll be at the table,” he said, not pleasantly, over his shoulder.

  Ann and Junior stood on the dance floor looking at each other for a moment, and smiled.

  “It was just one of those things,” she started to sing. She held her arms out and he stepped in to dance with her.

  “Just one of those fabulous things,

  A trip to the moon on gossamer wings,

  Just one of those things.”

  He told her he liked her voice more than Libby Holman’s, and Libby Holman had been his favorite singer. She moved in closer to him.

  “I suppose it would be impossible for you to extricate yourself from whoever that is you’re with?” he stated as a question.

  “And do what?” she asked.

  “Leave here with me,” he answered.

  She liked his precise manner of speaking. It was a voice peculiar to a tiny portion of the Upper East Side of New York City and the North Shore of Long Island.

  “No,” she replied. “That wouldn’t be impossible at all. Meet me at the front door.”

  Her bedroom was in morning disarray. Her fastidiousness did not begin until later in the day. Stockings and underwear were strewn where they fell, and chairs were smothered with clothes and towels. From the bathroom came the sound of the shower stopping; it awakened her, although she was not used to awakening until noon.

  Through mostly closed eyes she watched him dress. She liked the look of him in undershorts and shirtsleeves—shaved, bathed, combed—tying his tie in front of her mirror, completely concentrated. She wished she hadn’t sat on his face on the first date, but she always got carried away with the rich boys, the old-money boys, not the new-rich ones you met around the stage door, but the ones who had that look that comes from generations of breeding, and that speaking voice that identified them all to each other. On top of that, Ensign Grenville was without doubt the handsomest boy she had ever seen. She longed to know who he was.

  All of a sudden Arturo de Castro, who she had thought was so divine for so long, looked like a greaseball to her, even if he was, as Babette Van Degan had told her, from one of the oldest families in Argentina. She felt, suddenly, patriotic that the good old U.S.A. had produced a specimen of aristocracy that was right up there with the best that England had to offer with all their dukes and earls, and, of course, their king, or, rather, their ex-king. Her mother, lately departed, always called him the catch of catches, and the lady who landed him, Mrs. Simpson, now the Duchess of Windsor, was the women she, and her mother, admired more than any woman alive.

  She supposed she shouldn’t pray for such things, but she prayed that Ensign Grenville wouldn’t think that she sat on the face of every man she went out with, especially the first time. It was just that he was so beautiful, and young, and well-built, but also so totally inexperienced that she had inadvertently assumed the role of teacher, and her passions, which were abundant, had simply run away with her. Even at the moment of climax, he had retained his wonderful accent, and that, more than anything else, brought her to new heights of desire.

  She stared at his profile as he finished his tie and went looking for his shoes. She surprised herself as she heard herself say, in her first words of the day, “I like to see a man’s shoes in my closet.”

  She saw his shirttail stand out in excitement at what she had said. He blushed; she liked his shyness. Watching him, she lit a Camel. She lipsticked the tip, inhaled deeply, and held it, and when she exhaled allowed some of the smoke to escape up her nose.

  “Come over here,” she said, “and let me get a good look at that in the daylight.” She remembered from last night that her rough talk thrilled him. He walked over to her, and she reached into the opening of his shorts. “It’s really lovely,” she said. “I could be awfully happy with this for a while. How long’s your leave?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer. Her mind was on other things. As he lunged for her hungrily, she said, “No. No, stand back. This one’s on me.” She pulled his shorts down his legs and knelt on the floor in front of him. She didn’t know if she should let him see how good at it she really was.

  Looking down, he was mesmerized watching her, still holding her Camel. He thought he had never seen such a beautiful woman. He knew he had never seen such beautiful breasts.

  “You’re much too quick, you know,” she said afterward. “Speed is not of the essence. I’m going to enjoy teaching you. How long did you say your leave was?”

  Ensign Grenville could not get enough of Ann Arden. Everything about her fascinated him. The ashtrays in her apartment were from the Stork Club, and her refrigerator was filled with splits of champagne, wilted gardenias, and doggie bags from El Morocco. V-letters from captains and lieutenants in far-off places vanished from her desk top after his first night with her, and 8-by-10 glossy pictures taken in nightclubs with a variety of men disappeared from the walls of her bathroom. She had records of all the show tunes and knew every lyric to every song.

  Each noon he met her in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, or the St. Regis Hotel, or the old Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and they ordered martinis, and ate lobster salad, and stared into each other’s eyes. Each night, to the consternation of his mother and sisters, who wanted to show him off so splendidly uniformed, he sat, transfixed, in the Music Box Theater and watched Ann descend a silver stairway and sidle across the stage, as if there were not another person on it. He was consumed with curiosity about her radio career and listened avidly to each daily episode of “Marge Minturn, Girl Intern,” in which she played Marge’s best friend, thrilling him with the sound of her deep actressy voice. She talked of Chet Marx, her agent, and her hopes of a screen test, and the possibility of a meeting with Humphrey Bogart.

  He did not withhold information about himself, but he did not thrust his suitability at her either. Of the two of them, he found her to be the stellar attraction; everything about her was new to him. Once aware of the possibilities of him, beyond his good looks and beautiful manners, she asked the pertinent questions impertinently, and bits and pieces of his story came out.

  “Where did you go to school?” she asked him.

  “Just the usual places,” he answered, and when she looked at him, he went on, “Buckley, Groton, and Harvard.”

  “Oh,” she answered over her rush of pleasure.

  “Not exactly expanded horizons, is that what you mean?” he asked, fearing she thought it was too conventional.

  “No, that wasn�
�t what I meant at all,” she replied.

  She knew he was someone very swell, but as with all very swell people, there were no hints forthcoming. Finding out would be up to her. It was after he told her about the near kidnapping that she decided to pay a visit to her old friend Babette Van Degan, and check out, as Babette would say, the lay of the land. She took a Madison Avenue bus from Murray Hill, where she lived in a tiny penthouse, to Sixty-seventh Street, and walked over to the Park Avenue apartment where Babette lived. Babette was everything that Ann wanted to be.

  She had started out life as Barbara, then Baby, then Babette Lesniak, somewhere in the middle of a large Lithuanian family in Willimantic, Connecticut, where her father was a milkman. She left home early and made for New York, where she somehow ended up as a show girl at the Copacabana nightclub. She had no theatrical ambitions whatsoever and no real aim; she simply waited for life to happen to her and rolled with whatever did, all with life-of-the-party good humor. Her luck was astonishing. Dickie Van Degan, the stupidest of the very rich Van Degan brothers, swooped her up in a whirlwind romance and eloped with her to Elkton, Maryland, a marriage that captivated readers of the tabloid press for its Cinderella theme. With no guile on her part, simply forgetfulness, she became instantly pregnant. By the time the marriage ended a year and a half after it began, to the intense relief of all the Van Degans, she was the possessor of not only the first Van Degan heir but the largest divorce settlement in the history of New York. Since her great good fortune, she became a meticulous reader of all things financial and read the stock market quotations with the same enthusiasm that she had once read the gossip columns. In time her divorce settlement would double, treble, and, perhaps, quadruple under her uncanny ministrations.

  Babette claimed that she knew Ann before anyone else in New York knew Ann, and she was very nearly correct. She was one of the very few in Ann’s life who overlapped from one phase to another, and she was probably the only one in New York who ever knew Ann’s mother. Unlike Ann, who never looked back, or remembered back, Babette was a great one for reminiscence. “There was a guy around New York in those days called Chet Marx,” she once said. “He called me up one day and said, ‘Babette, I need a black dress and a pair of size six shoes,’ and I said, ‘Chet, what the hell do you need with a black dress and a pair of size six shoes? You’re not going nelly on me, are you?’ And Chet says, ‘You of all people ought to know me better than that, Babette.’ We had a good laugh over that one. He told me there was a new girl in town, and he got her an audition for the Copa, and she didn’t have a thing to wear. So I took the dress and shoes over to Chet’s place, where she was staying, and that’s how I met Ann.”

  Babette’s Park Avenue apartment was big and sloppy; the few pieces of Van Degan furniture were lost amid the more florid examples of her own imperfect taste, and the rooms were littered with her son’s toys. Her poodle, Phydeaux, had untidy habits, and her maids sometimes didn’t wear uniforms, but there was about the place a pleasant and relaxed atmosphere.

  When Ann entered Babette’s bedroom, she found her friend sitting up in bed, breakfast tray in front of her, grumbling over the Wall Street Journal. “Ann,” she said, looking up, “what brings you out at this hour of the morning?”

  “Are those sheets yellow satin?” asked Ann.

  “Yes,” said Babette, caressing the satin against her. “I bet you don’t know who said yellow satin can console one for all the miseries of life.” She buttered her corn muffin, using her index finger as a knife and then licking the finger.

  “Some queen,” asked Ann, not interested in literary talk, impatient to get on with the business at hand.

  “It was Oscar Wilde,” said Babette grandly.

  “That’s what I said, some queen,” replied Ann. Their conversations were bawdy and their language blue, and they always laughed at each other’s vulgarities. “Now listen, Babette. I’m here on important business. I need some information on somebody I’ve met.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “If he’s the real turtle soup, or merely the mock.”

  “Look him up in the Social Register.”

  “Do you have one?”

  “My husband got kicked out of the Social Register when he married me and was promptly reinstated when he divorced me, so it’s not a book I happen to have lying around.”

  “How, then?”

  “Who is it?”

  “His name is Junior Grenville.”

  “William Grenville?”

  “Junior.”

  “Oh, my God! Millions.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Millions.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “No, but the Grenvilles are right up there with the Van Degans. The old boy was quite dashing. I saw him at the track once. He cut quite a figure in racing circles, flower-in-the-buttonhole, that kind of look. Courtly manners, but only with his own crowd. Terrible snob otherwise. Mrs. Grenville has the same table at the Colony every day for lunch. What’s he like, this Junior? Is he good-looking?”

  “Very.”

  “Are you in love?” asked Babette.

  “I’m in physical attraction,” replied Ann.

  “What is it you notice first about a man?” asked Babette. It was the sort of conversation she liked best, and she settled in for a long chat with her friend. Babette was several years senior to Ann, but they were not women who discussed their age, even with each other; they simply allowed the older woman/younger woman relationship to occur.

  “His hands,” replied Ann.

  “Hands!” exclaimed Babette. “What an odd thing to notice first.”

  “I can’t bear small hands on a man.”

  “Why even think about them?” asked Babette.

  “You know what they say, don’t you?”

  “What do they say?”

  “Small hands, small dick.”

  “I never heard that,” said Babette, screaming with laughter.

  “And by the same token, large hands, large, uh, need I go on?”

  “Dickie Van Degan had small hands,” said Babette, captivated by the conversation. “As a matter of fact, Dickie Van Degan had a small dick too, now that I think about it. What kind of hands does Junior Grenville have?”

  “Large, darling,” replied Ann, stretching luxuriously.

  “Have you, uh—”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he a good lover, then?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Those swell families, you know. Prep-school sex. Slam, bam, thank you, ma’am.”

  “When I kissed him the first time, he held his lips together, and I could feel his teeth pressing against my mouth.”

  “Not one of the great feelings.”

  “No. But you know, he’s just waiting to be taught.”

  “Knowing you, you probably sat on his face on the first date, and he probably thought he’d died and gone to heaven.” They screamed with laughter again. “Am I right?”

  “Something like that,” conceded Ann.

  Babette told her to look up the Grenvilles in the Social Register at the Rhinelander Florist on the corner of Madison Avenue and Seventy-second Street. She saw that Junior’s mother’s name was Alice Pleydell Grenville, and that he had four sisters named Rosamond, and Felicity, and Grace, and Cordelia. There were other abbreviated things that she could not understand, and the addresses and telephone numbers of the house in New York, and the house on Long Island, and the summer residence in Newport. Her heart began to beat faster. She felt that the florist was watching her, which he was not, and ordered flowers, a half-dozen roses, to be sent to Mrs. Babette Van Degan.

  She walked fourteen blocks up Madison Avenue until she came to the street where the address was that she had memorized and turned left toward Fifth Avenue until she came abreast of number 9. It was a châteaulike gray stone mansion. In front of it was parked a Packard limousine. From inside the house a butler opened an iron-grilled door, and a tall woma
n past middle age, beautifully attired, emerged from it and entered the rear of the limousine, helped and then covered with a blanket by a chauffeur, to whom she spoke warmly.

  Standing opposite, Ann watched. She did not know if she felt elated or depressed. She retraced her steps back to Madison Avenue deep in thought. When people asked her when it was that she fell in love with Junior Grenville, she did not tell them that it was then.

  He called her later in the afternoon to make arrangements for meeting that night after her show. Already she had given him keys to her apartment, and she asked him to meet her there, as he had to dine with his family.

  “And Junior?” she said in closing.

  “Yes?”

  “When you open the door to let me in?”

  “Yes?”

  “Be naked.”

  If, indeed, a man could swoon, she knew, over the telephone, that William Grenville, Junior, had just swooned.

  He was astonished by the magnitude of her passion for him. “Hold it!” she had ordered him the night before as she felt his excitement building to a too early conclusion. “Not yet, for God sake! We’re just getting started.” It thrilled him when she barked out her sexual orders to him.

  He slipped away from his mother’s dinner when Horowitz began to play and let himself into her tiny penthouse in Murray Hill. It worried him that there was not a doorman or an elevator man in the building where she lived. Since his near kidnapping ten years before, he was always conscious of personal safety for himself and his friends. Throughout dinner at his mother’s, he had talked to plain and pretty Esme Bland about the importance of having a gun for her own protection. He did not notice her stricken look when he told her he was going to slip out.

  He lit Ann’s rooms by candlelight. He moved the two dozen long-stemmed roses to a more pictorial spot. He arranged champagne and ice and glasses. When he heard the gentle and excited taps of her gloved hand on the doorway of her own apartment, he undid the belt of his silk foulard dressing gown and let it slide off his shoulders and drop to the floor. He walked naked toward the door in his loose casual stride, elongating in front as he moved, in anticipation. He opened the door.