The Two Mrs. Grenvilles

by Dominick Dunne

  “I’m going to walk for a bit before we start out,” Billy said to his driver and proceeded toward Park Avenue. At the corner he stood through two light changes before crossing and failed to notice an acquaintance who greeted him. He was unused to examining his feelings and could not tell if the deep distress he was experiencing was because he loved his wife so much, or because his wife had not valued sufficiently the name and position that he had bestowed upon her. He wondered how many of their group knew of the liaison. He wondered if he had been made to look a fool.

  That night, back at El Morocco, after another cocktail party, and another dinner party, Billy, drunk, finally said what it had been on his mind all day to say, but, out of sheer weakness, he ascribed his accusation to others. “Someone came to me with a s-s-story about you,” he said.

  “Who?” she instantly demanded.

  “D-d-don’t you want to know w-w-what was said before w-w-who said it?” he asked. His speech was interrupted by an occasional stammer, a slight impediment of childhood, long since overcome, that reappeared only during intoxication.

  “What, then?” she asked, knowing in advance what he was going to say. She had meant to tell him of her plan to visit Harry Kingswood, to shoot, but the moment had not presented itself.

  “A-d-d-dultery,” he replied.

  “Really, Billy,” she laughed. “How drunk are you?”

  “Who said I was d-d-drunk?”

  “You begin to stutter.”

  “I d-d-do not.”

  “Yes, you d-d-do.”

  During scenes she focused on things. She looked at the candlelit flowers, leaned forward and moved a rose, surveyed it with satisfaction, as if it made a difference. But there was no scene. They sat on interminably, nearly never speaking, watching, like a movie, the drama of nightclub life. Once they had thought there would never be enough time for them to say all the things to each other they had to say. She placed her hand over his finally and squeezed it. She wanted his feelings for her to remain constant, even while hers expanded to include others.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “You don’t love me, Ann,” he replied, no longer drunk. “You just love the life that happens around me.”

  What he said frightened her. She lipsticked her mouth crimson, using the blade of her table knife as a mirror. Billy found her gesture vulgar and exciting. It was when he liked her best. At home later, enticing him to sexual frenzy, she erased his suspicions of infidelity. With the outpouring of her lover still within her, she received the fresher outpouring of her husband. And peace prevailed again.

  A few nights later they went to a ball on the North Shore. A Hutton heiress was being presented to society in an indoor tennis court attached to a guesthouse on one of the great estates still in full swing. Young couples wandered about in the formal gardens. Ann took in the scene at a glance. The Eburys. The Phippses. The Hitchcocks. The Schiffs. The lot of them. The cream of the North Shore. She felt she had never seen anything so beautiful, and she valued her life and her marriage. Hello, Sass, she said. Hello, Titi. Hello, Molly. Marvelous dress, Brenda. Kiss-kiss, Lita.

  She wandered about with Billy in tow. In the guest house—nicknamed the Playhouse—were a living room, a dining room, many bedrooms, and a vast music room with acoustics so perfect that combinations from the New York Philharmonic often came to play for the musically inclined hostess. Billy told her that the family used the Playhouse mostly as a guesthouse and a place to relax after tennis. Its courtyard, he said, had been brought from Fotheringay Castle in Scotland, and its cobblestones were the very ones Mary Queen of Scots had walked over on her way to the block.

  “Enjoy it,” Billy said about the ball and the estate. “It’s the end of an era. No one will be able to afford to give parties like this or live on places like this for long.”

  The orchestra played “Full Moon and Empty Arms.” She sang into his ear as they danced, “Full moon and empty legs.” He laughed with delight and remembered their first meeting in El Morocco.

  “This is where I want to live, darling,” whispered Ann into Billy’s ear.

  He laughed again.

  “I don’t mean this whole vast place,” she said. “I mean the Playhouse, and the grounds around it.”

  “What about old lady McGamble? Don’t you think she’d have a thing or two to say about that?” asked Billy, who never quite understood her sudden passions for having to have things instantly, not always with the best results. He still smarted over her squabble with Salvador Dali.

  “I had a feeling about this house the minute we drove up the drive,” she said. “It was meant for us. I can feel us living here. It would be perfect for the children. We can’t go on staying at your mother’s house every weekend. I think we’ve worn out our welcome there. I know her servants all complain about me, not that I care one damn bit about that, but it’s time for us, Billy, to have a weekend place of our own.”

  The walking ring outside the Saratoga sales pavilion was dark except for the orange glow of a hanging lantern on a stable door. The bidding was over on the yearling Thoroughbreds that had been walked around the ring on the last night of the sale. About a hundred yards away in the garden of the Spuyten Duyvil bar, horse breeders and buyers from around the world were drinking whiskey and talking horses. The main topic of conversation was the record price paid by the neophyte breeder Billy Grenville for a yearling colt he had already named Tailspin.

  “You’ve got an eye like your father’s,” said Sunny Jim O’Brien, the old horse trainer from the Grenville stables who had known Billy since he was a child and had been brought reluctantly to Saratoga by his dashing father.

  “Do you think so, Jim?” asked Billy. “Really?”

  “A chip off the old block,” replied Sunny Jim, knocking back the only whiskey he allowed himself. “This Tailspin of yours is a winner, and you spotted it the instant you saw him. Your father had that instinct with Ishmael.”

  “This Tailspin of ours, you mean. We’re going to do the same things, you and I, that you and my father did. Come on now, Jim, break your rule and have another drink. This is a night to celebrate.”

  Alfred Twombley and Piggy French, the two biggest names in racing, joined in the celebration. It thrilled Billy that old Sunny Jim thought he approximated his father. All his life he only remembered disappointment in his father’s eye. He wished his father had lived longer.

  Ann could not believe that she was in the company, for the weekend, of one of the English princesses. Sometimes she marveled at her life, to herself only, for she would not have admitted, even to her husband, that she did not take in stride whatever happened to her. It was times like this that she missed her mother. Her mother would have understood, her mother would have been overjoyed. She felt, alternately, thrilled and disappointed: thrilled with the event, disappointed with the person. She wanted the princess to be slimmer. She wanted her country tweeds to be less country, and her diamond pin to be more country. The perfection of royalty interested her. She was determined to buy herself an amber cigarette holder when she got to London, at Asprey’s, like the one the princess had, and she stared and stared at her until she was able to memorize exactly the way the princess held the holder, in an elegant way she had not seen before, and the way she inhaled and the way she exhaled.

  She took up her camera and, almost surreptitiously, snapped a photograph of the princess, who was in conversation with Harry Kingswood, listening to him explain the history of Kingswood Castle. Ann liked the way it looked, the informality of it, the princess in a tweed skirt and a silk blouse and walking shoes for the tour of the gardens and the grounds that was about to come. It was not a way many people saw her, and Ann could see the picture of the two of them, Harry and the princess, sitting on the chintz-covered sofa, in conversation, on one of the pages of her scrapbook. She took another picture, feeling braver, and then another. She wished the camera did not click so loudly. What a marvelous gift this will be for Harry, she thought t
o herself, as if she were a historian preserving an important moment of history, unconscious, in her zeal, of the looks the other guests were giving her to desist from her mission. There was silence in the room, but the clicking of the camera persisted. Looks of royal displeasure were to be evermore preserved in the scrapbooks of Ann Grenville. She was by this time aware of her faux pas, but she could not stop herself until the roll ran out, and the roll, alas, was of thirty-six exposures.

  “I feel, Harry,” came the royal voice of the royal princess, in ice-water tones, “that I am on duty at a charity bazaar being click-click-clicked away at instead of being a guest in your house. When is she going to stop taking my picture?”

  Ann blushed in embarrassment, knowing that all eyes were upon her. From the sofa where the princess remained seated, she heard muffled excuses from Harry for her. “American, you know. She didn’t know, ma’am.”

  Her love affair with Harry, so successful in New York, had, like some wines, not traveled well. “I say, Ann,” said Harry, bearing down on her, in a hissing whisper, “this sort of thing is just not done. For God’s sake, put that camera away!”

  That evening Ann pleaded a headache and did not come down to join the house party for dinner. The telephone was located, for facts only, not confidences, in an upstairs hall of the castle, with not even a chair by it, lest one linger. By now Ann was familiar with Harry Kingswood’s frugality. The next morning, before the other guests arose, she left by car for London, reliving the scene all the way, wondering if they were laughing at her, hoping the story would not get back to New York, knowing she would never see Harry Kingswood again. She understood instinctively that when one was married, love affairs had a natural termination. She flew to Rome and looked forward to a reunion with Billy.

  Thereafter her passion for the English abated. Later, in another city, introduced to the same princess again, she gave no recognition of ever having met her before as she bowed her head and bobbed her curtsy.

  * * *

  “His robes, my dear, are made for him in Paris by a couturier. They shimmer and sparkle and are said to outdo in grandeur the robes of the Pontiff. Don’t you love it? Fulco told me.” Lipsticked already, Ann took a comb from her bag and ran it through her hair, automatically.

  “He’s a priest?” asked Billy.

  “No, no, a monsignor, and a great wit and diner-outer. I mean, everyone knows him.”

  “He’s American, you say?” Billy did not share his wife’s passion for European society, and the endless stream of gossip that she brought back with her each day from her forays into the palazzos of Rome went, for the most part, in one ear and out the other.

  “Yes. He married Tyrone Power and Linda Christian. I told you that. But, now, listen to this!”

  “I’m listening.”

  “He has arranged an audience for us with the Pope, and I have bought a black lace mantilla that is so divine, and I thought I’d wear that black dress that I wore to your sister’s party in London.”

  “But we’re not Catholic.”

  “You don’t have to be a Catholic to have an audience with the Pope, for God’s sake.”

  “When?”

  “May fifth.”

  “May fifth?” Five, five, five, five. The fifth day, the fifth month, 1955.

  “That’s what I said. May fifth. Ten A.M.”

  “I can’t go.”

  “Why can’t you go?”

  He turned away from her, embarrassed to tell her what day it was. “That’s the day that … ”

  “What day? Oh, for God’s sake, Billy, do you mean the day you’re supposed to die?”

  “I know it sounds insane, but I’ve never forgotten what that fortune-teller in Tacoma said. Five, five, five five. It seemed so far off then, and now here it is upon us.”

  “You don’t believe that?”

  “No, of course I don’t, but I do, too.”

  “Well, if you’re going to die, what better way to do it than to see the Pope first? It’ll pave the way right to heaven for you.”

  “What will we talk to the Pope about? The latest parties?”

  “It won’t be just us, for God’s sake, there’ll be others, and afterward the monsignor is giving a lunch for us at the Palazzo Doria.”

  It rained steadily on the morning of the papal audience. Eruptions of thunder preceded daylight, and rain beat angrily on the windows of the Grenvilles’ suite at the Grand Hotel in Rome. Awakening late, after a night of too much drink, each was reminded of the morning of their wedding day in Tacoma twelve years earlier. Both bad-tempered, they dressed and drank coffee in silence. Why, Billy wondered, had they sat up until four drinking brandy at Bricktop’s with a strange trio from Pasadena whom they had never seen before and would, probably, never see again? Why was it they always were out, out, out?

  Below, in the downpour, there were at least thirty people ahead of them waiting for taxis in the drive-through of the hotel, and the hour of the audience was fast approaching.

  “Whatever will I tell the monsignor?” wailed Ann.

  “That we sat up until four drinking brandy at Bricktop’s with a ménage à trois from Pasadena that you picked up. The Pope will understand. So will the monsignor in his couturier robes,” said Billy.

  “Sometimes I hate you,” she said to him. Their eyes met in mutual discord.

  “It looks hopeless,” said Billy, about the taxi situation.

  “I can’t understand why you didn’t hire a car and driver when you knew perfectly that we had to be at the Vatican by ten.” She, feeling mocked, was ready for a fight.

  At that moment a car and driver went by and then stopped abruptly. A woman called out the window, “Is that really you, Billy Grenville?”

  “Esme!” cried Billy. “I simply don’t believe it! Could you drop us at the Vatican? We’re late for an audience, and there’s not a taxi in sight, and we’re soaked.”

  Esme Bland, who had always loved Billy Grenville from afar, had never voiced her opinion on the subject, even to her great friend Cordelia, but she thought Billy had wasted himself on Ann.

  “You have met Ann, haven’t you, Esme?” asked Billy when they were settled in the back seat.

  “Yes,” replied Esme.

  “At Cordelia’s,” said Ann.

  There was a silence.

  “It’s raining cats and dogs,” said Billy finally.

  “My mantilla will be ruined,” said Ann.

  “Here, take my umbrella, Ann,” said Esme.

  When they left the Vatican, the sun was shining brightly on St. Peter’s Square.

  “He was adorable, just as cute as he could be,” said Ann about the Pope.

  “His flock will be touched by your description,” replied Billy.

  “Now I’m stuck with this damned umbrella of Esme’s,” said Ann.

  “Why don’t we wander around the cathedral a bit,” said Billy.

  “We haven’t time,” said Ann, looking at her wrist.

  “I can’t imagine having to report to Mère that we’ve been here and haven’t looked at the Pietà.”

  “Billy, we’re due for lunch at Monsignor Herrick’s at the Palazzo Doria,” said Ann.

  “I’m not going to lunch at Monsignor Herrick’s at the Palazzo Doria,” replied Billy, repeating her words exactly, diminishing them in importance.

  “Of course you are.”

  “I’m not,” he said. He was quiet, and his face did not have the stubborn look it assumed when he took a stand on something. She looked at him in the May sunlight, crowds of tourists jostling them, and realized she did not understand his withdrawn mood.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “I’m going to look at the Pietà, and then I’m going back to the Grand Hotel and order a chicken sandwich in the room, and then I’m going to lie on my bed and look off into space.”

  “Simonetta d’Este’s going to be there for lunch, and the Crespis, and Princess Ruspoli,” went on Ann enticingly, as i
f he, like her, would have his mind changed by titles.

  “You should be in hog heaven.”

  “Does this have anything to do with that damn fortuneteller?” she asked in a mocking voice.

  “I’ll put you in a taxi, Ann.”

  Later, after the lunch, Ann returned to the hotel, bubbling with gossip about what he had missed and thrilled that she had gotten them invited that evening to a ball at the Pecci-Blunts. Billy said he didn’t want to go. His refusal exasperated and infuriated her.

  “Let’s not get into a fight over this, Ann.”

  “I did not come all the way to Rome to sit here in this room because in 1943 some fortune-teller in Tacoma, Washington, told you you were going to die today. It’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of. If fortune-tellers know so damn much, why do they always live in some filthy hovel?”

  “You don’t have to sit here. Go to the ball. Enjoy yourself. I’m quite content here.”

  “I may be quite late.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “It gives me the creeps, all this silence and gloom.”

  He wore a maroon polka-dotted dressing gown over his undershorts and shirt. The only light on in the room was the lamp between the double beds. Lying on one of the beds, he read the international edition of the Herald Tribune and the Rome American. He listened to the radio. He napped. He thought about his children. He thought about his father. He wondered why, with so much, he felt so dissatisfied with his life. He wondered, as he always wondered, in his rare moments of introspection, if he would have amounted to anything if he had not inherited so much money. He felt that the deference he received from people, for the name and fortune he possessed, was unearned and undeserved, and he wondered if others thought this about him.

  He started to say the Lord’s Prayer, but he felt embarrassed, as he always felt embarrassed, when he prayed outside of St. James’ Episcopal Church, which he attended only for weddings and funerals. He felt the urge to get off the bed and get down on his knees to say the prayer, but he thought how extremely foolish he would feel if Ann should happen to walk in the door at that moment, even though he knew it was highly unlikely that Ann would ever leave her ball for any reason. He wondered if he minded dying, and it surprised him that, yes, he did mind, although only yesterday it had not seemed such a terrible loss to him.