The Two Mrs. Grenvilles

by Dominick Dunne

  In secrecy Ann would have liked to name her daughter Wallis, after the Duchess of Windsor, or Brenda, after Brenda Frazier, who were the kind of women she admired, as had her mother before her, but she knew better than to risk the derision of her sisters-in-law at these suggestions. She rejected all the names of the Grenville women. She didn’t want an Alice, she said to Babette, or a Rosamond, nor a Grace, nor a Cordelia, and most certainly not a Felicity. She decided on Diantha, a name she had read in a novel, and agreed to call her Dolly when Alice said she thought Billy would find the name contrived and theatrical. Dolly Grenville. She began to like the sound of it. It was a name that would read well in social columns, she thought, when that time came.

  The Reverend Dr. Kinsolving performed the baptismal service of Diantha Grenville in the chapel of St. James’ Church on a cold afternoon in March. Observing every family tradition, she wore the Pleydell christening dress that had been worn by Alice and all of her four daughters. Cordelia was the godmother. Bratsie, in absentia, fighting in North Africa, was the godfather.

  A small party followed at Alice’s great house off Fifth Avenue. Ann, looking exceedingly smart in dark blue, sat on a sofa in an elegant and relaxed pose, made loving references to Billy, and allowed herself to remain a sideline figure. Outside, the St. Patrick’s Day parade passed by—marching bands, baton twirlers, waving politicians, Irish songs, and a cheering populace. Inside, where the christening party assembled for cocktails, only the maids, passing canapés, bothered to look out, and their glances were stolen.

  Finished with the photographs and a lengthy discourse on the heirloom baptismal dress, Alice Grenville did not linger in grandmotherly attitudes. “Find the nanny, will you?” she said to her butler, handing him the baby.

  I like it when you whisper all the filth in my ear,” Billy confessed to Ann, holding her tightly, his face in her hair. Jealous by nature, she liked to drain him of desire before leaving in the evenings for the constant round of dinner parties that had begun to make up their life. They were in their bed, where they were good together; there they satisfied and understood each other. Elsewhere it was not always so.

  For all her years it seemed to Ann she had been waiting for her life to begin. When Billy returned home from the war, she felt that finally that beginning had come. The apartment, finished, was not satisfactory. Billy, used to large houses, felt constricted by the proximity of the child’s nurse and nursery sounds that began too early in the morning. It was felt, by Billy and his mother, that a house would better serve their needs, and a house was found in the East Seventies between Park Avenue and Lexington Avenue, less grand by far than the grand Grenville house but grander by far than the abodes of nearly every other young couple in the city.

  Ann was attracted to her young husband’s spoiledness. She realized how little she knew him out of uniform. She realized also that the battle of winning him having been won, the heightened and heady drama of their courtship and wedding had now settled into real life. She was anxious for him to see and approve of her advancements in the years that he had been gone, but she found instead that she merely bewildered him.

  “Sometimes I don’t recognize you anymore,” said Billy. “You’re like a different person.”

  “I thought you’d be proud of me,” said Ann.

  “If that was what I wanted, I could have married the real thing,” he answered. Her eyelids flickered, and her eyes, moistening slightly, widened. She had been hurt. He had not meant the remark to sting her, but it did.

  Billy suggested a sojourn to his mother’s country house in Brookville, Long Island, as a kind of honeymoon to reacquaint themselves with each other and to introduce Ann to the friends of his childhood with whom he had grown up. The house, called Fairfields, was to be theirs for the several weeks they stayed, without Alice, without the sisters, without Diantha and the nurse. It was Ann’s first encounter with the North Shore. Days were filled with sport, at which Ann proved herself to be surprisingly proficient. Nights were filled with parties at neighboring estates.

  That night Ann observed the group at Alfred and Jeanne Twombley’s: the Chesters; the Dudleys; the Webbs; the Chisholms; Teddy Plum; Bratsie Bleeker; the McBeans; Sass Buffington; Tucky Bainbridge; the Eburys; Petal Wilson. No stray noblemen here, no late-blooming millionaires. This was the core: friends from childhood they were, and their parents before them. Sixty percent of the land of the North Shore of Long Island could be traced to the ownership of those present. In advance she knew their histories: past stories of suicided parents; kidnapped brothers; institutionalized children; divorce; depravity; drink; depression; death in crashed planes, on sunken yachts, off fallen horses. But how elegantly they behaved. She was transfixed by the aristocracy of them.

  She noticed how very alike the young women all were. They talked the same way, in the same accent, as if they had shared the same nanny. Their hair was done in the same pageboy style, held back with gold bar pins, and their long skirts, blouses, and cashmere cardigan sweaters over their shoulders were interchangeable. She realized that for country life she was overdressed, overcoiffeured, overjeweled, a mistake she would not make again.

  Ann, entering Jeanne Twombley’s bedroom after dinner, knew instinctively the women were talking about her. She shrank back against the yellow-distempered wall, undetected by the others, as if to lose herself in it, and heard her background or lack of it discussed.

  “She’s the cheapest thing I’ve ever seen,” said Sass Buffington, combing her hair.

  “Felicity said you must go to one of her parties before she finds out it’s the wrong way to do it,” said Tucky Bainbridge, and the other ladies laughed.

  “Piggy said she went through two polo teams on Gardiners Island before the war,” said Petal Wilson.

  “N.O.C.D., darling.”

  Smarting, she turned and left the room, walking down the curved stairway to rejoin the men left behind in the dining room with cigars and brandy. On her entrance, the men rose as one to greet her into their womanless turf. She was pleased to see that Billy felt a glow of proprietorship over her, and she smiled charmingly at him as she sidled next to him.

  Later, when the party reassembled in the chintz-slipcovered drawing room, Ann asked Billy, “What’s N.O.C.D. mean?”

  “ ‘Not our class, darling.’ Why?” he replied.

  “No reason.”

  To herself she vowed that someday these ladies would eat their words, and, silently, she dedicated herself to achieving the social acceptance her husband’s family and friends denied her. Ignored by the women, she ignored being ignored, and plunged herself amid them, wanting to be accepted by people who did not want to accept her, prepared to play the waiting game. She looked over at the handsome, rich, socially impeccable young man who had married her and would enable her to open any door, and smiled at him affectionately.

  “Bratsie likes you,” said Billy, back home.

  “But not for the right reasons,” replied Ann.

  “What does that mean?”

  “He likes me because I’m wrong.”

  “Wrong?”

  “Wrong side of the tracks.”

  “He didn’t say that.”

  “He didn’t have to. I can read the look.”

  It filled Ann with inordinate pleasure when her name appeared for the first time in the New York Social Register. “Grenville, Mr. and Mrs. William, Jr. (Ann Arden),” it read, and then a list of incomprehensible abbreviations that turned out to be the many clubs that Billy belonged to. When she arranged her sitting room, she liked having the black-and-terra-cotta book in a prominent place on her desk, visible to the eyes of visitors and readily available to her touch. She remembered the time when she had looked up the address of the Grenville family in the same pages of an earlier edition in a florist shop. Now, listed herself, it provided proof positive of who she was.

  Ann did not understand Bratsie Bleeker’s early admonition to her not to try to become one of them but to remain her own
self among them and therefore be special. What she wanted most was to become one of them, and on the occasions when she was asked, by a new acquaintance, if she had gone to Farmington or if she had been there on the night Bratsie Bleeker swung on the chandelier at Kay Kay Somerset’s coming-out party, she felt that she was succeeding in her performance.

  She bought her books at Wakefield’s, was photographed by Dorothy Wilding, had Dr. Stewart as her gynecologist, and ordered her flowers at Constance Spry. She worshiped at St. James’, when she worshiped, which was not often, and lunched at the Colony, which was very often. Caruso did her hair, Blanchette her nails, and she was massaged by Gerd. Hattie Carnegie dressed her for day, and Mainbocher for evening. Jules Glaenzer jeweled her. She was attended to by a cook, two maids, a chauffeur, and a nanny for her daughter. It did not appear that she was unused to this way of life.

  As time went on, Ann feared sometimes that there was less to Billy than had at first appeared. He seemed like a second son in a first-son role. When he arrived late at his office, after a night of parties and nightclubs, Ann knew that it did not matter. There was no one to chastise him for unseriousness of purpose. He spent a number of hours there each day, involving himself in unimportant business, reading newspapers and magazines, checking with his stockbroker on conservative investments, making dates for squash or backgammon. He lunched at one of his clubs with friends and stopped for a drink at another on the way home, and his men friends would say about him, after he was gone, what a perfectly lovely fellow he was. Sometimes it surprised Ann that he had seen films that she had not seen, and she discovered that he often went alone, or with Bratsie, during the afternoons. He did not think much about advancing in life, because where he already was, financially and socially, was where most ambitious men he knew wanted to be.

  Billy’s feelings for Ann were ambivalent. He loved her. She gratified his sexual desires. She made him laugh. She stood up to his sisters. For a long time she even made him happy.

  At the same time he disapproved of her. It was an ongoing fact of her life that she could not keep help. Servants, in their various capacities, came and went in varying degrees of haste, stung by her suspicions and imperious tones. Mostly, her social ambition was too apparent for him. She did not give parties to enjoy herself but to advance herself.

  “Tell her she doesn’t have to climb so hard. Tell her she’s already there,” Bratsie said to him one night, observing her work the room, as Bratsie called it, at one of Edith Bleeker’s parties, collecting future invitations, and Billy, though honor-bound to support his wife, agreed with his friend.

  He accepted, without curiosity, the minimal facts of her history that she gave him. References to her past were sparse. If pressed, she presented the life of Fredda Cunningham as her own. When she showed no longing to return to Kansas to present him to relations or friends, he felt relieved of that obligation. When he discovered, applying for a passport, that she was a different age than she had told him, he wondered about other things.

  Having provided her with so much that she had never had before, he expected that her gratitude would continue and become the basis of their relationship. Instead, he watched her not only settle into her role too quickly but become the dominant member of their match. Where once he had ruled the relationship, because the world into which he had brought her was his and he had acted as her interpreter and guide, she was now overtaking the reins. He felt anger, and the anger that he felt persisted, but he did nothing to rid himself of it.

  As if sensing the rumblings of his disaffection, Ann invariably would accomplish something that would make Billy proud, and harmony would be restored. Preferring men’s pastimes to women’s, she took up backgammon and then skeet shooting, and became proficient in both, winning skeet tournaments at Piping Rock. She loved the feel of a gun in her arms and longed, as Billy longed, for big game. But it was the son she produced and the home she created that cemented her marriage in seeming permanence.

  Loathing pregnancy, for the time it took away from her life, and the distention of her lovely body and breasts, she undertook it and the doing of her new home concurrently. She knew her bridal apartment had not been a success, but she found herself unable to get along with the series of fashionable decorators suggested by her mother-in-law to help her: Rose Cummings came and went, as did Mrs. Wood, Mrs. McMillan, and Mrs. Parrish. To a lady they pronounced the young Mrs. Grenville impossible. Then, at a party of Babette Van Degan’s, Ann met Bertie Lightfoot. Bertie Lightfoot was the director for her life she had been longing for without realizing it. Under his tutelage she began to give the performance she had been waiting all her life to play.

  Ann never firmly committed herself to one of Babette Van Degan’s invitations in case something more social should turn up. She said she thought she might have to dine that evening at “the family’s,” as she referred to evenings at Alice’s, or that Billy might be working that night. Babette had become the kind of woman greatly admired by men who would never marry. Decorators and designers filled her rooms, and merriment prevailed. Junior said No, Absolutely Not, he would never go there again. Uninterested herself in that kind of appreciation, Ann, on the occasions she did attend, took to dropping in briefly, on her way to somewhere else, where she would be meeting Billy. On what she vowed would be her last time ever at a Babette Van Degan party, she met Bertie Lightfoot. He was at the time helpless with laughter at one of Babette’s stories of her chorus-line days. His eyes, vividly Alice-blue, matched his shirt exactly and looked, to Ann, sad beneath his merriment.

  “You’re not leaving, darling?” asked Babette, breaking in on her own story. “You just got here.”

  “I must,” answered Ann. “I’m meeting Billy.” She was evening-dressed, carrying a fur, refastening a bracelet.

  “What smart place are you off to tonight?” asked Babette. Bertie Lightfoot watched the exchange with fascination. So this was Mrs. Grenville of the society columns.

  “Kay Kay Somerset’s having a dinner for Lady Starborough,” answered Ann. She had learned to neither flaunt grand names, as she once did, nor minimize them.

  “She’s gone swell on us,” explained Babette to Bertie and turned away to take several cheese puffs from a tray passed by her young son, Dickie Junior, and to yell out a request to Edie and Rack, who were playing at twin pianos, to play “Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year.”

  “Printemps is in the air,” said Bertie.

  Ann nodded farewell to Blue Eyes.

  “Linger awhile, so fair thou art,” he said.

  “Gallantry in Mrs. Van Degan’s drawing room,” replied Ann. She liked him instantly. He made her laugh.

  Not one to let an opportune moment pass, Bertie admired Ann extravagantly: praised her clothes, her hair, her style. Unused to compliments, other than sexual, from her husband, Ann responded to Bertie’s flow.

  “Tell me again what your name is,” she said.

  “Lightfoot. Bertie Lightfoot.”

  “And what do you do?”

  “Decorate.”

  “Decorate what?”

  “Whatever.”

  She hesitated leaving.

  “Cigarette?” he asked, snapping open a smart leather cigarette case.

  “Leather? In town?” she asked, in mock social horror.

  Again he collapsed with laughter. She enjoyed having her humor appreciated.

  “I have a new house I’d like to show you,” she said.

  The house which Billy Grenville had purchased for his family was on a quiet street lined with leafy trees in the East Seventies between Park Avenue and Lexington Avenue. On each side of the street were elegant brick and brownstone houses in which still lived, in those days, but one family apiece and the servants who administered to their needs. The stucco exterior of the Grenville house, at number 113, was freshly painted a cream color, and its doors and shutters were lacquered black, as were its geranium-filled window boxes. Exceedingly smart, like its new occupants, it was a ho
use meant to be noticed and commented upon.

  Within, Bertic Lightfoot, making his name in New York, decorated the rooms in muted luxury. The furniture Billy’s family handed over to Ann, in English and French shapes, she realized they did not value highly, assuming that she would not know the difference. It was Bertie Lightfoot, turning the pieces upside down, who, contemptuously, pronounced them reproductions. They were discarded or put aside for country-house guest rooms, when a country house of her own became a reality, which, she knew, it would, and fine furniture was sought in its stead. With Bertie she began to attend auctions, and visit collections, and develop an eye for only the best.

  “You have a faggot’s eye,” he said to her admiringly, “for being able to spot exactly what’s right.” Bertie was good at intimacy with women but devoid of passion for them.

  “I think I’ll refrain from repeating that compliment to my mother-in-law,” she answered. They enjoyed being together and maintaining absolute secrecy about the interior of the house until it was completed and could be presented as her creation.

  Bertie of the light blue eyes was a merry man with a fund of camp wit, a knowledge of eighteenth-century French furniture, and a passion for rough trade. After his evenings in society, or at the opera, especially if he had been drinking, Bertie often changed from black tie and patent-leather pumps into less distinctive gear and took to the streets.