The Two Mrs. Grenvilles

by Dominick Dunne

  “Yes.”

  “Have you brought pictures? I hope so. The girls will want copies. Their only brother, you know. Ah, your ring, do let me look at it.”

  Ann, barraged, moved forward and held out her hand. For the first time she was glad her pear-shaped diamond was not as big as Babette Van Degan’s.

  “Lovely,” said Alice, looking at it but not taking her daughter-in-law’s hand. “Mr. Glaenzer, I suppose.”

  “No, Cartier’s,” corrected Ann.

  “Mr. Glaenzer is our man at Cartier’s,” said Alice.

  “Oh.” She felt she could say nothing right. She turned toward the mantelpiece. “Is that what you do with invitations?” she asked, grasping.

  “What?”

  “Pile them up like that on the mantelpiece?” It did not seem to demand an answer, and none was given, but she continued to pursue an inane topic. “It looks very smart. You get invited to an enormous number of things.”

  “I’ve noticed this about you before,” said Alice.

  “What?” asked Ann.

  “You talk about props to avoid talking about issues,” answered Alice.

  “Props?”

  “But you are theatrical, Ann. Surely you know what that means. The last time we met you talked about my ermine coat and a photograph of Queen Mary. Today you talk about the placement of invitations on a mantelpiece. Then you had designs on my son. Now you are married to him. Shall we begin this conversation?”

  Ann Grenville tried to look straight into Alice Grenville’s eyes, but she found them impenetrable and unwelcoming.

  “I know you don’t think I’m good enough for your son, Mrs. Grenville,” she said. Alice Grenville did not deny the allegation. She simply did not answer.

  “Your parents are dead?” she asked instead.

  “Yes.”

  “They were what?”

  Unsure what she meant, Ann answered, “Poor.”

  “I meant what occupation.”

  “My father was a farmer. My mother was sometimes a teacher.”

  “Were they divorced?”

  “Yes. When I was eight. My mother married again and divorced again.”

  “Good heavens.”

  “Why is it you don’t like me?”

  Alice, taken aback by Ann’s directness, replied, “You are ambitious.”

  “I am ambitious,” conceded Ann. “I didn’t know it was a bad thing to be.”

  “Too ambitious, which is very different.”

  “Teach me how to be.” She said it simply, without guile. “I love your son. I have never loved a man as I love him. I intend to be an excellent wife. My career on the stage is behind me. Are these the issues you wish to deal with?”

  “You needn’t be belligerent, Ann,” chastised Alice. Her brown velvet eyes assessed anew the woman in front of her. “After all, you are already Mrs. William Grenville, Junior.”

  “I know I am,” said Ann. “I only feel tolerated by you because I am married to Billy Grenville. I feel you are waiting for my marriage to be over, as if it were a wartime thing. It isn’t, you know. Till death do us part.”

  For a while Alice did not answer. She reached out and twisted off a brown leaf from the cyclamen plant. “You call my son Billy?” she asked finally.

  “Yes. I didn’t want to marry a man called Junior.”

  “You’re right. I suppose he has outgrown that name. Where will you live?”

  It was a conversation full of starts, stops, and stumbles. Each, in her different way, was used to controlling, but each knew she had met her match. Until Billy Grenville returned from the war, a state of unspoken truce would be observed.

  The sisters, with the exception of Billy’s favorite, Cordelia, remained aloof. What they thought of their sister-in-law, that she had trapped their brother, was never expressed, except among themselves, since their code would permit no outside criticism of their brother’s wife. But what they felt was sufficiently plain for their friends to form an opinion.

  Esme Bland, for one, rolling bandages one afternoon in the Grenville library for the war effort, watched Billy Grenville’s glamorous new wife, fascinated. Poor plain Esme Bland had always nurtured the secret hope that one day she would become Billy’s wife. She watched the sisters talk about people Ann did not know and parties she had not been to, using nicknames and private allusions, familiar to them, incomprehensible to her.

  Ann began appearing at family lunches and dinners without being accepted by the family itself. It soon became apparent that Alice, resigned, had taken her daughter-in-law in hand to show her the ropes of the life she had married into. She suggested books for her to read, which Ann read, and made subtle suggestions about the way her hair was done and the kind of clothes she wore, and Ann listened and acted upon the suggestions.

  “I very much hope you won’t mind if I make a suggestion,” said Alice, determined to make the suggestion whether it was minded or not.

  “No,” replied Ann, who said about herself that she never had to be told a thing twice.

  “When you’re in conversation, Ann, your eyes should not dart around the room to see who else is there. Give your undivided attention to the person with whom you are talking.”

  “Right,” said Ann.

  “And just pass your hand over the top of your wineglass before the butler pours if you don’t want any wine. Never turn your glass upside down.”

  “All right.”

  “Don’t cut your roll with a knife. Break it always.”

  “Yes.”

  And on and on.

  Ann sat among them, a stranger in their midst. When she realized that no amount of friendliness would change their impression of her, she stopped extending herself. She watched, listened, and learned, improving herself in small ways not at first apparent to them. Although she was aware of the importance of her new position almost immediately, from the attitude of salespeople in shops she began to frequent, she was content to wait before she began to make her presence felt in her new family.

  When living accommodations at the Grenville house were not offered Ann, Babette Van Degan found her a sunny apartment on Park Avenue that she moved into and began to fix up. Babette remained in her life, but she did not try to bring Babette into her new family, not wanting Babette to see her cold-shouldered by Billy’s sisters, nor wanting Billy’s sisters to size them up as a pair of Cinderellas. In a very short time she began to see her old friend through Grenville eyes.

  “With freesia, you know, if you crush the end of the stem, they live longer,” said Cordelia when she and Felicity came to see Ann’s new apartment. Ann, who did not see the point of crushing stems to make blossoms last longer when you could simply buy fresh blossoms, wondered how they knew all the things they knew, these people, that had so little to do with survival. She wondered if she would ever settle into their kind of life.

  “I think you’re using the wrong brocade,” said Felicity. She will never get it right, Felicity thought: candles at lunch, chrysanthemums in summer, gold brocade.

  “You don’t like it?” asked Ann, crestfallen.

  “Gold, you know, it’s not quite the thing. It’s so …” She stopped before she said “Babette Van Degan,” of whom they all made fun.

  “ ‘Show girl’?” asked Ann, bristling. “Is that what you were going to say?” One day, she thought, she would get even with Felicity.

  “Pas avant les domestiques,” said Felicity to Ann, knowing the Irish maids did not understand, knowing Ann didn’t either.

  She changed the brocade. She softened the color of her hair. Even her handwriting changed: the round letters of the Palmer method taught in the Pittsburg, Kansas, school system gave way to the fashionable backhand printing of the Farmington–Foxcroft–St. Timothy’s school system. In everything the sisters were her models. She had an eye for the aristocratic gesture, and she acquired that. She had an ear for the aristocratic voice, and she acquired that, with the help of a teacher, found for her by Count Rasponi,
whom she paid handsomely for social guidance.

  “But you are Mrs. Grenville,” he said to her the first time they met, reassuring her.

  “They sense that I am different,” said Ann.

  “But that’s what makes you special,” he insisted.

  “I want to talk like them, dress like them, handwrite like them, think like them. Then I’ll add my special thing on top of that.”

  Count Rasponi laughed with delight.

  One morning, in the seconds before awakening, Ann saw Billy’s face clearly, brightly. Awake, she was sure he was dead. She examined her feelings. She missed terribly the handsome young man she barely knew, who had defied his family for her, and realized how deeply she needed him. She wondered what would become of her. She knew she would be dropped by the family that had only tolerated her. She knew that even in so brief a time she was beyond returning to the chorus line. The stage had been no more than the means to an end, and the end was where she now was. Later, to her joy, she discovered that Billy Grenville was not dead at all. Rather he had distinguished himself in battle in the Pacific.

  The news of Billy’s heroism in the Pacific, saving the life of an enlisted man, for which he was awarded a Silver Star, coincided with Ann’s announcement to the family that she was going to have his baby. Providence, again, was on her side. It was a miracle of timing, and even Felicity rose to the occasion.

  “She don’t get up until noon,” Ann heard her maid say on the telephone to whoever was calling. Certainly it was true what the woman said, she didn’t get up until noon, but the sound of it, at least in Mary’s brogue, was wrong to her ear, and she began her day by firing Mary for insubordination, although it might have been for bad grammar. Later, she told Babette Van Degan, who called to remind her of their lunch date, that she couldn’t possibly have lunch because the baby was kicking and her goddam maid had walked out on her, leaving her high and dry.

  “Hello, is that you, Ann?” said the voice on the other end of the telephone, in a gravelly kind of way that Ann recognized immediately as the voice of Kay Kay Somerset.

  “Yes, it is,” she answered brightly.

  “It’s Kay Kay Somerset.” No matter who Kay Kay Somerset married, and she married quite often, three times before she was thirty, she was always called Kay Kay Somerset. Ann read every word about her in the society columns, where her name constantly appeared, and listened avidly to the stories Cordelia told her about Kay Kay’s early pursuit of Billy. “She came out, of course, but she wasn’t taken into the Junior Assembly,” explained Cordelia. “Pots of money, though.”

  “Oh, hello,” said Ann, hoping the thrill she felt at being called by Kay Kay Somerset was not too apparent in her voice.

  “I thought you looked so pretty at the Eburys’ last night.”

  “Thank you.” She hadn’t known she had been noticed. “I feel so enormous these days.”

  “When will it be?”

  “Not for three more months.”

  “I wondered if you’d like to have lunch today.”

  “Well, I’m, uh …” She thought of Babette, just abandoned.

  “I’m driving back to the country at three, but I thought it would be fun to get together. You know, we’ve never talked.”

  “I think that sounds marvelous.”

  “I’ll meet you at the Colony at one. In the bar. Away from all the old ladies.”

  Ann was ecstatic. She bounded from her bed, ran her tub, picked out her most becoming maternity outfit, and wished she had not fired her maid. She walked into the Colony at fifteen minutes past one in splendid good looks and high good humor and was escorted by Mr. Cavallero himself to Kay Kay Somerset’s table. It was the beginning of her first friendship in her new life.

  “Weren’t you on the stage?” asked Kay Kay.

  “Oh, only very briefly,” answered Ann quickly. “My family really didn’t approve at all. And then I met Billy.”

  “Oh,” said Kay Kay. It seemed quite a disappointing answer to Kay Kay, who would have preferred her new friend to flaunt her theatrical past, especially as it was well known that the Grenville family considered her a totally unsuitable choice for Billy to have made. Ann, on the other hand, thought she had answered Kay Kay’s inquiry marvelously. She felt no qualms in the least about letting go of any of her past story before becoming Mrs. Grenville. She was more interested in hearing about Kay Kay’s life than in revealing to Kay Kay anything about her own life, and she drew out Kay Kay, who loved talking about herself, into hilarious stories of her marital failures.

  “It was our usual conversation,” she said about her most recent ex-husband. “ ‘Where’s the check?’ ‘It’s in the mail.’ ‘Fuck you.’ Slam.”

  The happy occasion was marred somewhat by the appearance in the same restaurant of Babette Van Degan and her luncheon replacement for Ann, another former show girl. Babette, through indignant looks, made no secret of the fact that she was offended by her friend’s defection. Ann realized that the time had come to lessen her attachment to Babette, whose loyalty to her former show-girl friends now seemed excessive to Ann.

  Kay Kay fascinated Ann, and she treasured her new friendship as she once had treasured her friendship with Babette. She began going places on her own, away from the grudging sponsorship of her Grenville relations.

  “Who painted that?” asked Ann, pointing to a large pastoral scene hung over a console table in Kay Kay’s apartment. She was ever alert in the learning process.

  “I don’t know, some Italian,” answered Kay Kay, not even bothering to turn around to look at it. She was constantly moving, a new apartment to begin a marriage, a new apartment when the marriage ended. Wherever she was was in the process of being done up or dismantled. Disarray prevailed; she entertained in restaurants, arriving late to her own dinners, face flushed, eyes glazed, placement left behind. “Oh dear, you go there, and you go there, by Binkie,” she would say, trying to remember her seating plan. Beneath the madcap air, Ann began to sense the deep insecurities of the very rich heirs and heiresses of this group she was beginning to meet.

  After several meetings, Ann’s awe of Kay Kay began to diminish, and she started to take charge of the friendship, using Kay Kay to meet people she read about in the papers. “I sat between Vere Cecil and Bluey Chisholm,” she would say to her sisters-in-law, hoping to impress them with the excellence of her placement. More often than not, they did not reply, and she went on, recounting the guest list, at least the illustrious names.

  “Let me look them up in the old S.R. here,” said Felicity, picking up the Social Register. The Grenvilles thought of themselves as old New York, and therefore superior to Kay Kay’s flashy friends. “Surprise, surprise, here they are.” She was disappointed to find them.

  * * *

  Ann hoped and prayed that the child she carried would be a son. Pregnancy was for her a long and tiring period that impeded the progress of the great new life that awaited her. Even Billy, in his letters from the Pacific, referred to the unborn child as “he” and “him.” It was, however, more for Alice Grenville than her husband that she wished to deliver the Grenville heir, as if by preserving the name and continuing the tradition she would cement her place in the family and win the affection she yearned for from this woman rather than merely the politeness she received.

  All the Grenvilles went to Archie Suydem, and, it seemed, had forever. He’d been in attendance when all the Grenville children were born, and he’d been at the girls’ weddings. Archie Suydem was the best doctor in New York, everyone knew that, they told Ann, and furthermore he belonged to the Union Club and the New York Yacht Club, and that said a lot.

  Ann, who longed to do the right thing, to conform to all things Grenville, at least until she was sufficiently established in their midst to develop into the self she foresaw, could not bear the thought of such an old man as Dr. Archie Suydem placing his brown-spotted hands on and in her body, Union Club or no Union Club. As there was no one in the family to whom sh
e could speak of her revulsion, she was determined, as her mother would have said, had she been alive, to grin and bear it.

  “I have such trouble sleeping, Dr. Suydem,” she said during an examination in her final weeks.

  “Hot milk and honey before bedtime,” replied Dr. Suydem.

  “You suggested that last time, doctor, and it hasn’t worked. I would like a prescription for some sleeping pills.”

  “No, no, that’s not a good thing,” he said, shaking his head. “In all my years of practice, forty-odd, I’ve never heard of anyone dying from lack of sleep.” He chuckled his old doctor’s chuckle. “Hot milk and honey and walks in the afternoon. Exercise is very important.”

  From Babette Van Degan and Kay Kay Somerset, Ann heard about Dr. Skinner. Sidney Silkwood Skinner was fifty, with luxuriant hair, gray turning white, and wavy. Both his hair, of which he was inordinately proud, and his pencil-line mustache appeared always to have been freshly trimmed, and his nails were manicured and polished to a sheen. He was not a member of the Union Club or the New York Yacht Club, and people like the Grenvilles referred to him, snobbishly, as a Park Avenue doctor. He was thrilled when the beautiful Mrs. William Grenville, Junior, forsook the doctors recommended by her husband’s family and sought out his services. He was putty in her hands, made house calls day or night, and prescribed a potpourri of refillable prescriptions for the tensions and stress of New York life.

  From Dr. Skinner, she heard about Dr. Virgil Stewart, then very much in fashion with the young matrons of New York, and, much to the disapproval of the Grenville family, switched from Dr. Suydem to Dr. Stewart to deliver her baby. When her time was at hand, she picked the fashionable Doctors Hospital, overlooking the East River, with Dr. Skinner’s and Dr. Stewart’s blessing, rather than Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where all the Grenvilles were born, and ordered her meals to be sent in from the Colony Restaurant.

  Following an easy birth at an inconvenient hour, Dr. Stewart, who arrived at the hospital in evening clothes to deliver the Grenville heir, informed Ann that she was the mother of a bouncing baby girl. Her disappointment in the sex of her child was apparent to both the doctor and the nurses present in the room, and she tried not to let show the resentment she felt toward the baby when it was placed in her arms. While she was reflecting that she would have to go through the ninemonth ordeal again, the thought of Alice Grenville’s four daughters before the son flashed through her mind, not for the first time. Rather than dwell on a subject so disagreeable to her, she inquired of Dr. Stewart what party her inconveniently timed birth-giving had dragged him away from.