“It would be bad luck for me to change. I will not,” said Ann. “They must change.”
She could not, would not, back down. Her vehemence astonished the befuddled minister. She knew that if Billy had read his mother’s letter, he would not have married her. She felt if her wedding was postponed, even for an hour, it would not take place.
For propriety’s sake, Ann insisted that Billy spend the night before the wedding at his barracks at the base; they were not to meet until they saw each other at the altar of St. Andrew’s. This maidenly retreat pleased the sensibilities of Ann, who wanted to be sure that any word of her wedding that made its way back to New York would be well received.
Eruptions of thunder preceded daylight on the morning of the wedding, and rain beat angrily on the windows of Ann’s room. Alone, she refused to acknowledge the gloom she felt. She thought of her mother, who would have cherished this day, marrying as she was beyond the wildest dreams of either of them in the days back in Kansas, when they planned ahead what her wedding would be like. Her mother would have said about Billy Grenville that he was a gentleman to his fingertips, a favorite expression of hers that she had once applied to Mr. Percy V. Jordan. She wondered what Billy would have thought of her mother, whether the indications of snobbery she occasionally glimpsed in him would have surfaced. She felt twinges of guilt about her mother whenever she thought about her in relation to the Grenville family.
As she arranged flowers in the sitting room of the suite for the small reception that was to follow the ceremony, she regretted the furtive aspects of this day and wished she had someone from her own life to witness the occasion. She could only think of Fredda Cunningham from Pittsburg, but that friendship was long abandoned, and Babette Van Degan. She missed Babette terribly and wished that Billy had not dissuaded her from asking Babette to come out to be her matron of honor. She knew that the matron of honor she was to have, Gail Bumpers, the wife of an officer from the base, would never overlap to the new life she envisioned for herself and Billy after the war.
Late morning brought an uneasy dark-skied truce with the weather. When Bratsie Bleeker arrived, magically, the day seemed not to be lost. Ann’s delight in the unexpected arrival of Billy’s best friend was boundless, and the cheerless day brightened.
She dressed in white, bridelike, her face covered with virginal veils. Carrying a bouquet of stephanotis, she walked up the aisle of the nearly empty church on the arm of an officer, in the role of father, whom she had met only the night before, to be delivered to her groom. He, nervous as she, for the secretiveness of their act, lit up with pleasure when his bride appeared. He could not imagine a time when the sight of her would not erase whatever misgivings there were. He seemed not to notice the coldness of the minister, Dr. Tiffany, who performed the ceremony, or the noise of crowds of people outside the church waiting for the funeral to start.
It was too late for the press to print the change of time for the funeral of the slain Wentworth girl, and hundreds of people showed up only to be told they had to wait until the wedding inside was over. As the bridal party emerged from the church, for pictures to be taken and confetti and rice to be thrown, the mourners for the funeral lined up and somberly watched them.
By the curb in front of the church the flower-filled hearse and limousines carrying members of the heartbroken family waited until the wedding party had moved on its way. As the chauffeur opened the door of the car bearing the parents and two brothers of the dead girl, a gust of wind blew multicolored confetti into their car.
Bratsie, when not being irrepressible, observed his old friend’s new wife, and wondered. It had all happened so quickly from the night of their boisterous romp through the nightclubs of New York to this subdued wedding reception in a flower-filled but dour hotel suite in Tacoma, Washington, without family on either side. What sort of ambition was it, he wondered, that brought about this conclusion—and conclusion it was—against so many odds?
He wondered if, behind Ann’s squeals of delight, he did not sense disappointment in the proportions of her just-arrived engagement ring, from Cartier’s, impressive but no match for Babette Van Degan’s. He wondered if the matron of honor, Gail Bumpers, officiating in a fairy-tale performance, sensed she was being condescended to by the Cinderella of the piece. He wondered why, hours later, the Reverend Dr. Tiffany of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church had not made his obligatory minister’s appearance, his church hundreds of dollars richer through the bridegroom’s largess. He wondered about that funeral and those mourners waiting their turn to mourn while eyeing the bold wedding festivities, and shuddered.
“Surely this glum figure is not the infamous Bratsie Bleeker?” It was the bride speaking. A nascent hostess, she felt her party dragging and wanted the playboy to be a playboy and breathe life into it.
“But you haven’t provided me with a chandelier to swing from,” he replied, adjusting his mood to the role expected of him. Champagne was poured. Livelier music was suggested to the piano player. The rug was rolled back. Dancing began. With more officers than ladies present, the bride was cut in on incessantly, and the appropriate mood of mirth restored to the room.
“Where is the groom?” asked Bratsie, during one of his turns.
“Calling Mère,” answered Ann. She moved her cheek against his to avoid eye contact.
“To break the news,” he said as both a question and a statement. They dipped elaborately, and amusingly, he shorter than she, and would-be dancing partners held back from cutting in.
“Your career?” he asked.
“My career will be to be Mrs. William Grenville, Junior,” she replied.
“Theatrical aspirations abandoned, then?” he asked.
“What is it you are saying to me, Bratsie? You led me to believe you approved of me for Billy.” He liked her directness, and told her that, as he turned her, fox-trotting all the while.
“What I’m saying is, don’t try to become one of them, like Alice or the sisters, or any of the girls like that he might have married. Be your own self among them, and stay special,” said Bratsie.
“The unknown serious side of Bratsie,” said Ann, matching his steps expertly: Mr. Dodsworth’s classes and Broadway melding on the dance floor.
“Hark,” he said. It was a favorite word of his.
“Hark?” she asked. “Isn’t that what the herald angels sing?”
“It means, listen to what I’m saying,” said Bratsie.
The moment was ended by Billy, about whom Bratsie was speaking all the time.
“It’s Mère on the telephone,” said Billy. “She wants to talk to you.”
“Have you told her?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“Well, more surprised than anything else, I suppose,” he said, obviously relieved that the dreaded task was over.
In the bedroom, the door closed against the music, Ann answered the telephone.
“Hello, my dear,” said Alice Grenville. Her voice, aristocratic in tone, had resignation added to it, and disappointment. It was a voice that Ann would always fear. “This is, of course, a surprise, but I assure you I will have recovered from it by the time you return to New York. I look forward to getting to know you.”
“And I you,” answered Ann.
“Have you telephoned your parents?” asked Alice.
“What?” asked Ann.
“Your parents, my dear—have you telephoned them with the news?” persisted Alice.
“I don’t have a family,” said Ann.
“Oh, yes, yes. You told me that, didn’t you?”
“She’s bad news, that one,” said Alice Grenville to her daughters. She had minutes before hung up the telephone and presented her family with the disheartening news.
“But your letter, Mère,” said Cordelia.
“My letter was never mentioned,” replied Alice.
“Did he ignore it, do you suppose, or not get it?” asked Grace.
“My God!” said F
elicity.
“What?”
“Suppose it comes now, when he’s married to her, about all those men.”
“We must act now as if it never happened,” said Alice.
“Will you announce it to the papers, Mère?” asked Cordelia.
“I must.”
“What about the Copacabana? Will you mention that?”
“What about the Copacabana?” asked Felicity.
“She danced there,” said Cordelia.
“Growing up, I accepted the fact that no stage person would ever be asked to our house as a friend. And now look. We have a show girl in our midst,” said Alice.
They sat in the late twilight, each in private thoughts of explaining Junior’s extraordinary marriage to their relations, friends, and the press.
“In my day people like us knew who everyone’s parents were and where they came from,” Alice continued. “We were insulated from people outside of us. There was never any question of disobedience. If one of my parents said, ‘This is not a suitable person,’ that was it; there was nothing more to discuss.”
“What about her parents?” asked Felicity.
“She said she’s an orphan,” replied her mother. “No family whatever.”
“That could be a blessing, Mère,” said Grace. “At least you won’t have to invite her mother and father here or to the country.”
“It’s this damn war,” said Alice. “He would never have met her if it weren’t for the war. Going overseas, maybe not coming back. All those things are what she banked on, and she won. I knew the first time she walked into this house what was on her mind.”
“What will we do about her?” asked Cordelia.
“I won’t speak to her,” said Felicity.
“Nor will I,” said Grace.
“She is now Mrs. William Grenville, Junior,” said Alice quietly, reminding them of whom they were speaking. “We must make the best of this bargain.”
“She’s not the kind of girl a person like Billy Grenville marries. She’s the kind of girl you set up in an apartment on the West Side for however long it lasts, and when it’s over, as it certainly will be, you pay her ten thousand dollars and buy her something nice. And marry someone we’ve all heard of. Like Esme Bland.”
Jeanne Twombley, who heard it from Alfred, of course, told me that was the kind of thing that was said at the time at all those clubs where Billy Grenville belonged and where his father belonged before him. What they meant was that that sort of marriage, to a show girl with a dubious reputation, was all right for someone like Tommy Manville, but not for Billy Grenville. They felt, those members, mostly friends of his late father’s, that Billy had let them down, and that he had certainly let his mother down.
“What’s she look like?” asked Alfred Twombley.
“Bratsie says she has great tits,” said Piggy French.
It was not thought ill-mannered in the Grenvilles’ circle to ask, about a bride, “Who is she?” or “Who was she?” The new Mrs. Grenville fit into none of the categories of identification to which families like theirs surrendered their heirs: schools, summer resorts, clubs, and Social Register. It could not be said about Ann Grenville that she was a relation of someone they knew, or that she had been at Foxcroft with one of the sisters, or that Billy had met her when she visited with friends in Newport or Southampton. The name of the town she was from in Kansas required explanations—“No, no, it’s not Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, it’s Pittsburg, Kansas”—and her career as a show girl onstage and in nightclubs was an embarrassment. As was her reputation.
The brief announcement of the marriage in the New York Times, strategically placed, without a bridal picture, made by Mrs. William Grenville, Senior, said that the wedding of her son, Ensign William Grenville, Junior, to Miss Ann Arden had taken place at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Tacoma, Washington. It said that Miss Arden was from Kansas City and had attended schools in that city as well as Kansas City Junior College. It said that Ensign Grenville had attended Groton and Harvard and was the son of the late William Grenville, former president of the Cambridge Bank in New York and owner of the Grenville racing stables and breeding farm in Kentucky. It listed Ensign Grenville’s homes as being in New York, Newport, and Upper Brookville, Long Island.
Only Walter Winchell, the Broadway columnist, reported that the new Mrs. Grenville, of, as he put it, “the veddy social Grenvilles,” had “showgirled” behind Ethel Merman in Anything Goes and, before that, in the line at the Copacabana nightclub. If any of Alice Grenville’s friends read Walter Winchell’s column, they did not mention it to her. It was whispered, among themselves, that she was heartbroken over the match, although both she and her daughters professed to be delighted with the originality of her son’s choice.
Shortly after the wedding, when Billy was shipped to the Pacific, Ann returned to New York. Tacoma, as a waiting place, was not for her. Pregnant now, for sure, she kept her discovery a secret. She wanted her marriage to be dealt with before her motherhood. She lived, until other arrangements could be made, in her own apartment in Murray Hill. It occurred to her that she might be asked to stay in the huge Grenville house, even to occupy the same rooms in which Billy had lived all his life.
The first interview between the two Mrs. Grenvilles was not auspicious. When she arrived at her mother-in-law’s house, a lunch party was still in progress. Afterward she remembered maids in aprons and caps and the sound of heels on marble and parquet floors as she waited in the hallway beneath the giant chandelier. Cahill, in greeting her, assumed the attitude of the house in which he had been employed for so many years. Madam would be delayed due to the lateness of an admiral who was, at that moment, delivering a toast to his gracious hostess. Affectionate laughter and applause were heard from the dining room as Cahill led the new Mrs. Grenville across the marble hall to the elevator and up to the third floor, where she was taken to her mother-in-law’s sitting room off her bedroom to wait.
It was the first small room Ann had seen in the house, and she found it warm and cozy. Chairs were slipcovered in glazed chintz, and a biography of Lady Asquith had been left open on one of them. A portrait of a handsome young Alice Pleydell, sisterless here, by Boldini, looked down on the room. A needlepoint bell cord, for maids to be summoned, struck Ann’s eye, the first one she had ever seen, and she longed to pull it and issue commands. Engraved invitations, piled one upon the other, were propped against the mantelpiece. She wanted to look at them, but did not. The writing desk was littered with sheets of paper, the same pale-blue stationery Ann knew so well, as if Alice had been disturbed in her writing to greet her luncheon guests. Ann shuddered with the remembrance of the purloined and destroyed letter meant to expose her shabby history to her husband. Suddenly she saw that a Pekinese dog, nestled into a chair, followed her every movement. Their eyes met. She was glad she had not looked at the invitations.
She wondered if she would always feel like an outsider in this house. She had not been welcomed as a bride by Cahill, nor had she been asked to meet the luncheon guests downstairs, nor did the Pekinese staring haughtily at her seem to recognize her right to be there. She began to worry about her reception. Uncomfortable, undecided where to sit, she lit a Camel cigarette and inhaled deeply while walking around the small room. Looking for somewhere to drop her match, she saw there were no ashtrays in the room and placed the match beneath the luxuriant leaves of a cyclamen plant in full bloom. She cupped her hand and deposited, nervously, an ash in it. How, then, could she shake hands, she wondered, with ashes in her palm, when Mrs. Grenville came in? Finally, she took a Chinese plate from a teakwood stand on the mantelpiece, placed it on a table, and put out her cigarette on it.
It was the first thing Alice Grenville noticed when she entered the room fifteen minutes later, her luncheon guests having finally departed. Her nostrils flared as though offended by the disagreeable odor. Without comment, she emptied the cigarette butt and ashes into a wastebasket, wiped off the Chinese plate with
a piece of her pale-blue stationery, and replaced it on the teakwood stand.
“I cannot bear cigarette smoke in this room” were her first words to her new daughter-in-law. “It is where I tend to my affairs.”
“I’m sorry,” said Ann simply. She was determined not to be thrown. It was, after all, only a cigarette.
“But you had no way of knowing,” said Alice, relenting, willing to let the moment pass. It had made any sort of greeting—a handshake, an embrace—unnecessary.
It was said of Alice Grenville, by her triplet sisters, and her friends of old, that as a young girl she was superbly handsome, and the various paintings of her, particularly the Boldini, in her presentation dress and feathers, attested to this. As a young girl she would rather have been thought beautiful than handsome, but the beauties of her youth, whom she had envied, had not, for the most part, weathered the storm of the years in the way her handsomeness had. Ann was struck by her looks in a way she had not been at their first meeting.
“Have you met Winston?” asked Alice, displacing the Pekinese from her chair and sitting down. “We think he looks so much like Mr. Churchill. Here, Winston, I’ve brought you something lovely from the table.” The Pekinese went mad with delight at the attention he was receiving. Alice broke a cookie in two and threw first one and then the other half of it in the air, and watched in complete concentration as the dog scurried for his favors, yipping and yapping. Ann, forgotten, stared at the interplay between dog and mistress.
“What a good doggie you are, yes, yes, what a good doggie you are, and how your mummy loves you, yes she does, yes she does,” cried Alice, swooping the Pekinese up in her arms and holding him aloft. She pulled the needlepoint bell cord, and when her maid, Lyd, appeared, kissed her dog between his eyes and handed him to her maid. Lyd, in the family for years, took in the scene, understood, and departed wordlessly. That accomplished, Alice turned back to the business at hand. The two Mrs. Grenvilles looked at each other once again.
“You must tell me about your wedding,” said Alice. “Edith Bleeker, who heard from Bratsie, tells me you wore white. This was your first marriage?”
The Two Mrs. Grenvilles Page 10