The Two Mrs. Grenvilles

by Dominick Dunne

  He disappeared into the kitchen and reappeared with a white cardboard box, which he handed her. It was not the kind of box she had in mind.

  “Ah, orchids!” she exclaimed delightedly, as though they were what she most longed for. She wondered why she couldn’t act onstage the way she could in life, concealing her disappointment with delight, as she was doing. She stared at them, white with yellow centers, and brushed her face against the scentless blossoms, collecting herself for the next moment.

  “You like them then?” he asked.

  “So much,” she said. She was reminded of what Babette had said about rich boys being tight.

  “Good,” he replied, settling himself in a chair contentedly; for an instant she thought of Percy V. Jordan, the way he sat, contentedly, with pipe and slippers. She shuddered. Since her interview with Alice Grenville, images of her long-ago past kept recurring to her.

  “Aren’t you going to put them in something?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, remaining sitting where she was on the floor. “I will in a bit.”

  “There’s more,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You heard me.” They looked at each other. “Dig deeper.”

  She lifted the bouquet from the heavy cardboard box. There, hidden among the flowers, was a small red leather box from Cartier’s. Junior was to discover in that moment that her joy in receiving gifts was wondrous to behold, sweeping away any dark moments that preceded it, restarting the evening in rapturous mood. The memory of Christmases past, giftless, entered and exited her mind.

  It was a pin, a circle of diamonds, such as his sisters wore on the collars of their suits, a gift for a lady, not a gift for a show girl, and she felt tenderness for him, and love. That mother, those sisters, she thought. She understood him better, having met them. Although they had pointed out to her, in their own secretive ways, the vastness of the chasm between them, she was not deterred.

  Later—sated, satisfied—she said to him, “Do you never discuss your feelings?”

  “What have we been doing for the last hour?” he asked.

  “Worshiping bodies. It’s not the same.”

  “But I told you.”

  “When you were coming. I don’t count that. It doesn’t commit you, you know. It’s a love affair, and you’re leaving soon, and who knows what will happen then? Let’s go to the moon for however long we have. Are you waiting for me to go first, is that it?”

  Enraptured, he stared at her but said nothing.

  “I love you,” she said.

  He felt unleashed. Torrents of blocked feelings flowed from him, a lifetime of withheld emotion. “I love you,” he whispered to her, and repeated and repeated and repeated the words. He could not stop saying them.

  When he asked her to fly with him out to Tacoma, Washington, where he was to be stationed, she refused. She had to earn her living, she said. She had been voted the most beautiful girl in radio, and she thought there might be interest in her at the movie studios. At least that was what Chet Marx told her, she told him. Chet Marx wanted her to dine with Humphrey Bogart; he thought she ought to get to know some of the Hollywood crowd. There was talk of a screen test, she told him.

  When junior’s favorite sister, Cordelia, called and asked her to lunch, Ann knew it was only as a favor to her soon departing brother, but, of course, she went, wearing her new diamond circle pin. When she walked into the Colony Restaurant, ten minutes past the appointed time, to make sure Cordelia was there ahead of her, even Gene Cavallero, who owned the fashionable restaurant and snubbed impostors at the door, could not tell that she had never been there before, so assured was her gait.

  When Cordelia admired her pin, she did not say it was from her brother. She did not call Cordelia Cookie. She did not talk excessively about Junior. Nor did she ask questions about the family. She did talk about her radio career and her hoped-for film career. She asked who various people were who waved at Cordelia and was delighted that she could wave at her friend Babette Van Degan across the room.

  She watched as people she read about in society columns passed by on their way to their tables. She studied the look of them. Catching sight of herself in the mirror, she realized her look was wrong, more show business than social, and that the time had come to do something about it.

  At two o’clock she looked at her watch and said that she had an appointment with her agent about a screen test and must depart. She shook hands charmingly in farewell and did not attempt to make a return lunch date.

  Cordelia reported to her mother that she definitely did not think that Miss Arden had marital designs on Junior. “She seems very keen on her career. Didn’t even stay for coffee. Rushed off about a screen test or something. She’s not at all designing, Mère. She’s terribly amusing, as a matter of fact. She told me the funniest story about that Lithuanian girl Dickie Van Degan was married to for about ten minutes.”

  “You relieve my mind,” said Alice Grenville.

  “It’s Junior sowing his wild oats, Mère, nothing more. She’s the wild oats. It’s probably a very good arrangement. He’d never marry her.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “She pronounces the ‘t’ in ‘often.’ ”

  * * *

  He was possessed with love. He didn’t want her to know how much for fear it would not be returned; at the same time he wanted her to know the full and total extent of it. His moods were up; his moods were down. His skin was sallow, and there were dark circles from sleeplessness under his eyes; he was more handsome than he had ever been.

  “Will you marry me?” he asked. Less than a week was left of his leave. He could not bear to think of being apart from her.

  “You must let me think it over,” she replied. “It’s such a big step. It would be mad to hurry. I don’t believe in divorce, you see. I’ve seen firsthand what it does.”

  “Nor do I!” he agreed. “There’s never been a divorce in our family. Except my Aunt Amelia, one of the triplets, and that’s only because Uncle Binkie was a fairy, something he neglected to tell poor Aunt Amelia.”

  “Let’s not talk about Aunt Amelia and Uncle Binkie now,” said Ann. “Let’s talk about us.”

  “I want to marry you, Ann,” he said again. The hesitancy of the first offer was gone. Having said it, he knew it was the thing he desired most.

  “I need a little time.”

  “For what?”

  “To make sure it’s the right thing.”

  He felt deflated. He had thought she would jump at the chance. Like Brenda Frazier, or Kay Kay Somerset, or Esme Bland, or any of a dozen ladies in society who had their eye on him.

  “I thought you loved me,” he stated.

  “I do,” she replied.

  “When will you let me know? My leave is up on Friday.”

  “I’ll let you know before then.”

  “When?”

  “Please, Junior.”

  “When?”

  “I’ll let you know this Thursday.”

  “For sure?”

  “For sure.”

  “It will be a wonderful life, I promise you that. After the war, I mean.”

  “Thursday.”

  There was never any doubt as to what her answer would be, except to Junior, and he shared with no one, not even Cordelia, that the very thread of his life was in abeyance, waiting for Thursday to arrive. He had moments of elation; he had moments of despair. He was bad-tempered and spoiled; he was loving and generous. The eyes of his mother and sisters would meet as his moods fluctuated. Except for her immediate present, he did not know a single thing about Ann, other than that she was an orphan from the Midwest. She never discussed her origins, and there was not a single picture in her small penthouse that suggested a past life.

  They were at tea, just the family, and Beth Leary, his mother’s closest friend, who was practically family, never having married, when the letter arrived. They had all heard the doorbell, and thought it must be one o
f the husbands come to join one of the sisters, but no one appeared, and they resumed their conversation about the war, which was all anybody talked about.

  Cahill entered, too early to clear away the tea things, but bearing a letter on a silver tray.

  “Yes, Cahill?” asked Alice.

  “It’s a letter, madam, for Mr. William, delivered by messenger,” said Cahill.

  Junior leaped to his feet, aroused from his lethargy, and his Scotch and soda, which he had preferred to tea, went flying all over his mother’s half-finished needlepoint rug. If he had not been in uniform, and with but a few days left of his leave, she might have expressed annoyance, but she merely lifted the rug to her lap and wiped off the liquid with a tea napkin, all the time watching her son as he reached out to take the letter off the tray proffered by Cahill.

  Junior’s heart sank. There, in Palmer penmanship, round and right-leaning, the i’s dotted with circles, was written “Ensign William Grenville, Junior, U.S.N.” Lower, on the left side of the envelope, was written “By Hand.” He felt with certainty that she had deserted him; why else would she have written to him instead of waiting to see him that evening? He could not bear to open the letter in front of his family, knowing all eyes were on him. He put the envelope in his pocket as if it were of no importance and returned to his place.

  “I’m sorry, Mère, about spilling my drink on your needlework. It was awfully clumsy of me,” said Junior.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she answered. “Lyd will know how to take out the stain.”

  “Soda water, I think, is how you do it,” said Beth Leary. “Simply soak it in soda water, and when it dries, the stain will have gone.”

  “Lyd will know,” said Alice, who wasn’t interested in that kind of conversation.

  “What’s in the letter?” asked Felicity.

  “I haven’t read it,” answered Junior.

  “Why not?”

  “None of your business.”

  “You’ve gotten so secretive, Junior.”

  “You’ve gotten so nosy, Felicity.”

  “I bet it’s from your blonde.”

  “You don’t have to call her that all the time in that bitchy way. Her name is Ann. You’re a real bitch, Felicity. I never knew that before.”

  “Junior!” cried Alice.

  He wanted the conversation to move off him onto other things: the opera, the theater, the war, he didn’t care which. His heart was beating ferociously, and he was trying not to let the feeling of loss that was lurking around him move in and envelop him. When Beth Leary started to tell a story about Grace Vanderbilt across the street, whom they all loved to discuss, Junior walked out of the room.

  Up two flights of stairs he charged and down the long thickly carpeted corridor paneled with bedroom doors to his own door. He entered his room and closed the door behind him, escaping into the white-tiled refuge of his bathroom, where he watered his face with cold water and dried it while looking at himself in the mirror and recognizing the fear in his eyes.

  He reentered his bedroom. It was the room that he had grown up in and was now in its fourth stage of decoration. Gone was the memorabilia of childhood, of teen-age, of college. Now it was decorated for a young man, tailored and dark-blue, with horse paintings by John Frederick Herring that had belonged to his father and drawings of prize horses from the Grenville racing stables. The handsome desk had also belonged to his father, and the wingback chairs. He stood there surveying it, as if for the first time, undecided which place to gravitate to that was not dominated by his father. He moved to the window seat in the large dormer window overlooking the park and the street five stories below. It was where he had sat most often as a child and seemed the least-changed part of the room. He peered out the window for several minutes and then reached into his pocket and took out the letter, which seemed to heat against his body. He looked at the envelope again, filled with trepidation, sat down and tore it open.

  It read:

  Miss Ann Arden

  accepts with pleasure

  the kind invitation of

  Ensign William Grenville, Junior, U.S.N.R.

  to become his lawful wedded wife.

  War whoops, cheers, screams of joy, and stamping of feet altered the mood of the room.

  * * *

  When Ann Arden was eight years old, and her name was Ursula Mertens, and she was called Urse, her father, whose name was Claud, and whom she adored, took her for supper, just the two of them, to the counter at Crowell’s Pharmacy on Broadway in Pittsburg, Kansas. They exchanged pleasantries with Paul Crowell, her father’s first cousin, who owned the pharmacy. Paul told Urse she was the prettiest young thing who’d been into his store all that day. Urse looked up at him, startled into a brilliant flush by the compliment, and beamed with pleasure.

  “You’re going to turn her head,” said Claud to Paul, looking affectionately at his daughter, although his mind seemed to be occupied by other matters.

  “What are you going to be when you grow up?” asked Paul.

  “I’m going to be an actress in the movies,” answered the lovely child without a moment’s hesitation. Paul chuckled, and her father, preoccupied, looked off into space.

  They ordered cheese delights, which Paul said were the specialité de la maison, melted cheese and bacon sandwiches served open-faced and eaten with a knife and fork, and chocolate milkshakes so thick and plentiful that each canister filled up the milkshake glass nearly twice. It was a rare treat in the young life of Urse Mertens, and she rose to the occasion by keeping her taciturn father entertained with an endless stream of chatter about the dancing lessons and music lessons she wanted to take, and the birthday present she was making for Grandma Smiley.

  Her social vivacity deflected totally the purpose of the meal. Claud Mertens had things to tell Urse, important things, about leaving Pittsburg, which was growing into such a big town, nearly fifteen thousand people now, not a place for farming anymore, and moving on to Hugoton to homestead. He was losing his farm on the outskirts of Pittsburg.

  “What’s ‘homestead’ mean?” she asked finally.

  “It means you live on the land for a year, make improvements on it, you know, fences and barns, like that, and then it becomes yours,” answered Claud, more at home in that kind of conversation than about dancing and music lessons that he could not afford to give her.

  Urse could feel her lovely evening on the town with her father beginning to crumble in front of her. “Is that where you were when you were out of town last month?” she asked.

  “That’s right, Urse,” answered Claud. “Beautiful country, good soil, you’ll love it.”

  She sat silently, absorbed completely in wiping up spilled milkshake from the marble counter with a paper napkin, frightened by the portent of the conversation.

  “Say something, Urse,” said her father.

  “Mama said there was a big black snake on the front porch up there in Hugoton. Mama said you have to go to the bathroom in a little house outside. Mama said there’s only a one-room schoolhouse, and the kids there don’t even speak good English. Oh, Daddy, please, please, don’t make me leave here and move to Hugoton,” pleaded Urse.

  “You’re your mother’s daughter, honey,” said Claud, nodding his head slowly and looking at her, holding back his tears. Ethel Mertens had come to Hugoton to look at the new life her husband envisioned for his family there, stayed one night, and returned to Pittsburg, vowing that she would never move there. When they were young and in love a dozen years before, it hadn’t mattered that he was just a farm boy with an eighth-grade education and that Ethel had attended normal school and was qualified to teach. But that was before Urse, and Ethel had great plans for Urse.

  Claud couldn’t bear to tell Urse what he had planned to tell her if his last-ditch hope of interesting her in a life that her mother had rejected failed. He was leaving her mother, allowing her mother to divorce him, moving out of her life.

  “I better get you home,” he sai
d. “It’s almost nine o’clock. If you weren’t such a big girl, I’d carry you out to the truck.” He wanted to hold her and hug her and tell her that he loved her and always would, but he couldn’t.

  The next day her mother told her that her father had moved away. Ethel Mertens consoled the weeping child.

  “Does a divorce mean he’ll never come back?” sobbed Urse.

  “Sure, he’ll come back and visit you, honey,” soothed her mother.

  “But why didn’t he even say goodbye, Mama?”

  “You know how hard it is for your daddy to say things. I know he wanted to, Urse, but he probably couldn’t find the words. Even when he gets mad it’s hard for him to say what it is he’s mad about.”

  “Is that why he took me out to Crowell’s Pharmacy for supper last night, to tell me he was going to leave us?” She wondered if Paul Crowell knew. She remembered herself prattling on about dancing and music lessons. She felt betrayed.

  “He wanted to tell you by himself, Urse, and explain to you what he wanted out of life, and that it wasn’t here in Pittsburg anymore.”

  “He did start to tell me that.”

  “You see?”

  “About homesteading in Hugoton and making improvements on the land.”

  “All that.”

  “But I didn’t know he was going to move out there and leave us if we didn’t want to go.”

  “It’s not the kind of life out there I want for you, Urse,” said Ethel Mertens.

  “What’s going to happen to us, Mama?” She shivered in fear as she looked around her at the holes in the linoleum floor of the kitchen and the broken steps out the kitchen door that you had to jump over. Their little frame house had not been painted in years, and tar paper covered holes in the shingled roof.

  “We’re going to be all right. Don’t you worry about that,” answered her mother, but neither of them knew whether to believe that.

  “When I grow up, Mama …”

  “Yes, honey?”

  “I’m never going to get a divorce, never, no matter what.”

  Urse Mertens always looked ahead to the time when her life would start. Her childhood and adolescence were years to be gotten through, in preparation for the time ahead when her life would really begin. She longed to be center stage in life, to have her world focused on her. When her celebrity finally came, in a manner radically different from her youthful dreams, reporters sought out her roots for early clues. It astonished them that so few people remembered her. She left no mark; she erased all traces of her deprived youth by remaining unmemorable.