It didn’t last six months, but that was not the point as far as Billy was concerned. Bratsie was his friend, and not to have honored his marriage would have been an affront to the friendship. Billy remembered, even if Ann didn’t, that Bratsie had made his way to Tacoma, in wartime, to attend their shunned wedding ceremony, and it troubled him that Ann had put a distance between him and Bratsie, without any conflict ever having taken place.
There were stories in the gossip columns about Bratsie from time to time, chumming around with Errol Flynn and Bruce Cabot in Hollywood, or sailing with Freddy McEvoy in the South of France, always in the company of starlets and playgirls. Very often he was drunk, and in time he was prevailed upon to enter a sanitarium in South Carolina near his mother’s plantation for the purpose of drying out.
He invited Billy and Ann to the plantation for a shooting weekend of quail and turkey after he left the sanitarium, but Ann chose not to go when she heard from Edith Bleeker who the other guests would be—“Jellico’s cast of characters,” Edith called them, in that tone of voice that told, without a single word of reproach being spoken, that the cast of characters were not, by any stretch of the imagination, the right sort.
Ann prevailed upon Billy to go on safari in India instead, a longtime dream that appealed to Billy as well as herself, and they were there, with a maharaja and a maharanee, shooting tigers, when they heard, days after he had been buried, that Bratsie was dead, shot mysteriously while racing his jeep at two o’clock in the morning on the grounds of his mother’s plantation.
Ann was quite unprepared for the depths of Billy’s grief, and she suspected again, as she had before, that there was something in the rigidity of Billy’s character that cried out for the devil-may-care attitude that Bratsie had always expressed toward their upbringing, as if he knew there was more to him than what he was getting out of himself, but he didn’t know what it was or how to seek it.
When they returned to New York, Billy and Ann paid a condolence call on Edith Bleeker at her red brick townhouse on upper Park Avenue. They were shown into the library by her butler, Dudley.
“Oh, Edith,” cried Billy, embracing his best friend’s mother.
“Sit here by me, Billy,” she said, patting a place next to her on the red damask sofa. For half an hour they talked and reminisced and laughed about Bratsie. Edith Bleeker had always wished that her son were more like Billy Grenville, with his unfailing good manners and obedience to his family, except in the matter of his marriage, and without the wild streak that had always been a part of Bratsie’s makeup.
“I’m glad he had you for a friend, Billy,” said Edith.
“I hope they hang the guy who did it,” said Billy.
For a moment there was a silence in the room, and Ann, who saw nothing wrong in what Billy had said, felt that an awkward moment was in progress.
“The case has been closed,” said Edith Bleeker. She changed her position on the sofa and reached over to push a button to summon Dudley to bring fresh drinks.
“Closed?” asked Billy, shocked.
“Yes,” she said quickly, rising, wanting an end to the conversation.
“How could that be?” persisted Billy, and Ann watched the interchange between them.
“It was an accident,” said Edith, and added, “an unexplained accident.”
“But surely you’re not satisfied with that?” asked Billy, wanting to see his friend’s death avenged. “What they have is nothing but inconclusive evidence.”
“Oh, Dudley,” said Edith to her butler, who had entered the room. “Will you bring the drink tray in here.”
Later, at dinner at Alice Grenville’s house a few blocks away, Billy related the conversation to his mother. “So much better this way,” answered his mother, serving herself asparagus from the tray that Cahill held out for her.
“Why?” asked Ann from her end of the table.
“Poor Edith doesn’t need all that dirty laundry brought out,” answered Alice, and, like her friend Edith Bleeker ordering the drink tray, signaled an end to the conversation.
Later still, at El Morocco, where they stopped for drinks on the way home, Ann related the story to Babette Van Degan, whom she encountered in the ladies’ room. “It was odd, Babette,” she said, adjusting her makeup and combing her hair. “It was as if Edith Bleeker didn’t want to know how Bratsie was killed.”
“You understand that, don’t you?” asked Babette.
“No, I don’t,” answered Ann, wanting to know.
“It’s those old families. They don’t want outsiders getting near them. They’d rather let whoever did it get away with it than have their family secrets all over the newspapers. Their theory is, it’s not going to bring him back.”
“My word,” said Ann, evening her lipstick with her little finger.
“You can be sure Bratsie was up to something unsavory,” Babette continued, “like screwing the foreman’s wife.”
“That’s what he was doing, apparently,” said Ann. “Edith’s maid told that to my mother-in-law’s maid.”
“You see?”
* * *
Ann needed constant proof that she was who she had become. She wanted a signet ring with the Grenville seal. She wanted a guest book on her hall table for signatures of the fashionable people who attended her parties. She wanted scrapbooks and photograph albums. It wasn’t enough for her to write “Harry Kingswood” in her diary, for having been at her house for dinner, or beneath a photograph. The point hadn’t been made, for either herself or others, unless she wrote “Viscount Kingswood” or “Lord Kingswood” at the very least.
She wanted her portrait painted. From the day she had first walked into Alice Grenville’s house and seen the Sargent and the Boldini and the Lazlo, she wanted to have her picture done. She knew where in her drawing room she would hang it and could imagine herself lounging elegantly beneath it on her damask sofa surrounded by needlepoint pillows.
It was Bertie Lightfoot who suggested that Salvador Dali paint her, and the instant she heard his suggestion she knew how right it was, how unpredictable, how original, how like her. “That was my mother,” she could imagine Diantha saying in years to come, regaling her friends with passed-down stories of the amusing and bizarre sittings that had taken place in the late afternoons in the painter’s suite at the St. Regis Hotel.
Ann reveled in the exoticism of the court of the famed Spanish surrealist. The ends of his black waxed mustache turned roguishly upward to almost the corners of his eyes. She liked the scented candles, leopard-skin pillows, and bowls full of birds of paradise. An entourage, led by his red-haired wife, Gala, eyebrows plucked out and painted on in black arches of perpetual surprise, and handsome young men and pretty young women, convinced him daily of his genius.
“Let me peek. Let me peek,” Ann would say playfully, about the easel that faced away from her, but Dali would not, and her enticements, which bordered on the flirtatious, were of no avail. He was not interested in the opinions of his expensive sitters, only in his interpretations of them. If they were thrilled with the results, he was pleased. If they were not, he was indifferent.
On the day of the unveiling, Ann brought Billy with her, check in pocket. She passed in front of the picture and turned toward it. When her eyes met her image, she drew back, and her cheeks flushed for a moment. An outsider might have thought it was a flush of modesty. Someone who knew her, like Billy, knew it was a flush of displeasure. A look of hostility came into her eyes, as if she sensed that the artist recognized some hidden depths of herself that she preferred to keep hidden.
“I want everybody out of this room except Mr. Dali and my husband,” she said to his wife and the assembled court, and the rage in her voice and the anger in her face made them retreat quickly and quietly to other rooms of the suite, where they listened in fascination through the doors to the screams of the disenchanted sitter. It was Billy’s first encounter with the enormity of his wife’s temper. He was startled by her cruden
ess. Her words were not used by women of his class. He blew out his lower lip, as he did when she did things that embarrassed him; it replaced the reprimand that he did not give.
Billy would have paid for the portrait and left it behind, treating it as a bad investment. Not Ann. She grabbed the check from her husband and tore it and threw the pieces at the bemused artist. “Never!” she cried. When she grabbed her mink coat off the chair where she had dropped it, she knocked over a vase of flowers but made no attempt to pick it up.
She thought, and Billy thought, the matter was at an end until she read in the papers a few days later that the artist was suing her and her husband for immediate payment. Billy was shocked to find themselves in a story in the tabloids.
“I’m going to pay it, Ann,” he said. “I can’t have this sort of publicity. It makes Dali more famous, and it makes us look ridiculous. You should have heard the razzing I got at the Brook Club this noon.”
“You are not going to pay it,” she said. It was a trait of hers that she would not back down, ever.
When the newspapers reached Billy at his office for a statement, he backed his wife’s position.
“I looked at the picture,” he said, “and walked away scared. It was like walking away from a monster. It was ugly and grim, and I feel Mr. Dali just sort of slapped it together. It is a heck of an unpleasant picture.”
“Are you going to pay up, Mr. Grenville?” asked a reporter.
“No,” answered Billy.
Dali, clever about publicity, kept the story alive in the papers. “The personal opinion of Mrs. Grenville is not for me so interesting. From an artistic point of view, it is not interesting at all.”
The Grenvilles did not attend the court hearing and were shocked to be informed that they had lost the case and were ordered to pay the artist in full for the portrait. Billy, without consulting Ann, paid the money.
The picture was delivered to their house by the lawyer who represented them, never to hang over the damask sofa in the drawing room. One night, when Ann had been drinking, she slashed it, and it vanished to the rear of a closet in her bedroom.
“What are all those pills?” Billy asked her one evening.
“Sidney,” she answered, meaning Dr. Sidney Silkwood Skinner, as if the mysteries of medicine were beyond her, and the answer sufficed. Her daily intake of appetite suppressant spantules increased, and she began eating almost nothing. Obsessed with slimness, she allowed waiters and maids to remove her plates, the food fashionably untouched. You can’t be too rich or too thin, Bertie told her the Duchess said, and she agreed.
At Voisin one afternoon for lunch, she looked across the crowded restaurant and saw, in a far corner, in deep conversation, Billy and a woman whose hat masked her face. She wondered why Billy never engaged her in intense conversation. Jealousy began to squirt its poison into her system. She gulped her second martini, and, combined with her pills, it prompted her to reckless action. Abruptly excusing herself from her luncheon companions, she charged across the restaurant, prepared for a public scene with the woman who was usurping her husband.
“Why, hello, what a surprise!” she said loudly as she approached his table, heavy irony in her voice. She was surprised that Billy did not blanch when he saw her. Then she saw that the expensively dressed woman was Cordelia, his own sister, with whom he was lunching. She realized, from the look on Cordelia’s face, that they had been discussing her, and blushed. She would rather have come upon him with a mistress.
Her date book was filled for weeks in advance. She liked to know that on two weeks from Thursday they would be dining with Eve Soby, black tie, and that a month from Friday they would be sailing on the Queen Mary for Europe. Tonight was Bertie Lightfoot’s dinner to show off his brand-new apartment.
Ann took in the room at a glance. Like an art connoisseur having an instant and total reaction to a painting, she could reel off in her mind the entire guest list of a crowded room. The Chesters. The Dudleys. Billy Baldwin. Lady Starborough. George Saybrook. Thelma Foy. The Webbs. The Chisholms. Cole Porter. Elsa Maxwell. Barbara Hutton. Nicky de Guinzberg. Lanfranco Rasponi. Dear, dear, dear, so much disinclination toward women, she thought. Basil someone or other. Plant, maybe. She could never remember his name and didn’t care much. He was petit, pale, unprepossessing, and poor, the type who could be counted upon to appear in a dinner jacket at the last moment when someone else dropped out. Ah ha, the handsome Viscount Kingswood, mercifully without Kay Kay Somerset. Things were looking up. She smiled her dazzling smile as she entered the room, aware, as she always was aware, that she understood how to enter a room better than anyone she knew.
“Bertie!” she cried out in greeting. Her voice was less a society woman’s voice than the voice of an actress playing, and playing very well, the role of a society woman in a drawing-room comedy. Or drama. Early regional traces had long been obliterated, and a glossy patina of international partying had given her a sound so distinctive as to make people remark on what a lovely speaking voice she had. “It’s heavenly! I’m mad about the color!” she said about the new apartment.
They were each other’s favorite person, Ann and Bertie, and they kissed elaborately on both cheeks.
“Billy,” said Bertie in greeting.
“Bertie,” said Billy in greeting.
“Isn’t this the apartment where Hillary Burden jumped out the window?” asked Ann.
“Mrs. Grenville chills the room again,” said Billy.
“Come in. Come in. Who don’t you know?”
When Harry Kingswood bowed to kiss her hand, in the Continental manner, Ann was astonished and thrilled to feel the wetness of his tongue on the back of her hand. As he raised his head, their eyes met, for an instant only, before she moved on to greet the other guests, but both sets were eyes of experience and recognition, and a sexual encounter was agreed upon without a word being exchanged. If he had been of less lengthy lineage, she would have resented his understanding of her availability, but it was, of course, the very thing that made her available.
“Hello, Elsa,” she said to Elsa Maxwell.
Later, near the conclusion of the evening, she brought out a small Fabergé box and swallowed two pills she took from it.
“What are those?” asked Harry Kingswood.
“For sleep,” Ann replied. “If I take them here, they will have started to work by the time we get home.”
“Why not a brisk walk with the dogs to tire you out?”
“Not for me.”
“Or warm milk with honey.”
“You sound like the Grenvilles’ doctor.”
Billy appeared with her mink coat. Without knowing why, he resented Harry Kingswood. “Come along, mother of two,” he nagged.
“Coming, father of one,” she replied. “Goodnight,” she said to Lord Kingswood.
“You must ring me when you come to London,” he said. He knew she would. So did she.
“And how many heartbeats did you quicken this evening, my dear?” said Billy, in a sort of mock-caressing tone he sometimes adopted toward her, as they waited in front of the apartment building for their chauffeur to bring the car.
“You know I adore Bertie,” said Ann irritably. “No one makes me laugh more, but I do think it’s tiresome of him to palm off his arty friends on us at dinner. I mean, I was dying to talk with Harry Kingswood—he’s supposed to have the best shoot in England—but I got stuck next to that Basil Plant with the tiny hands.”
“The writer?”
“They say.”
“What does he write?”
“Slender volumes no one reads.”
“Overly shy, wasn’t he?”
“I think shy people should stay home.”
“Let’s go to the country tomorrow.”
“I told Elsa we’d go to the opening of Cole’s show.”
“Christ,” Billy muttered.
“Didn’t you have a good time?” she asked when they were settled into the back seat of their car.
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“No, I had a terrible time,” he answered.
“But it was a marvelous party! Why didn’t you have a good time?”
“I feel uncomfortable with all those people. They all do things. They accomplish. After all, who are we? We’re the couple with all the money whose name is in the papers too much for going out every night to too many parties.”
“I wish there were eight nights in the week. I’d be out every one of them,” said Ann.
“Look at Neddie Pavenstedt, my old Groton roommate. He’s number-two man at the bank where my grandfather was president, and then my father, and where I was supposed to be after him. As for Basil Plant, with the tiny hands, his slender volumes get printed. I’ve never done anything. I feel like a failure, Ann.”
“Oh, really,” she said. It was a conversation she had heard before and was sick of before it began.
“Do you know what’s happening to me, Ann? I only feel safe with people just like myself, out on the North Shore. I’ve become just who I swore I’d never be, one of those fourth-generation blank-faced men with sad eyes who laugh all the time. When I married you, I wanted you to save me from all that, and all that I did was get in deeper.”
“How can you be a failure, Billy, when you have ten million dollars, and God knows how many more millions to come, après Mère? This is the most ridiculous conversation I’ve ever heard in my life.”
“That’s just the outsider in you talking. You don’t understand.”
“Oh, so I’m an outsider, am I?” she asked indignantly, readying herself for a fight.
“Let’s not turn this conversation around to be about you, Ann. It’s so rarely I get a chance to talk about myself, and how I feel, and what I think.”
“Oh, poor Billy, poor, poor Billy. Let’s all feel sorry for Billy.”
“God, I miss Bratsie. He’s the only person who ever understood. Why did you have to die, Bratsie?”
“Because he fucked the foreman’s wife, darling, and the foreman shot him dead, that’s why.”
“Ah, the meaning of life, as explained by the fashionable Mrs. Grenville.”
The Two Mrs. Grenvilles Page 14