The Two Mrs. Grenvilles

by Dominick Dunne

  She suspected him of infidelity. Jealousy flooded her insides with its vile juices. It was Simonetta d’Este, she suspected, a princess, tall and dominant, as she was, strong, as she was, pedigreed, as she was not. She felt the insecurity of her position, unloved by both his family and his friends.

  “It’s not a good idea for us to go out anywhere alone, Billy. It would be misinterpreted, and I’m not keen about having a public encounter with the terrible-tempered Mrs. Grenville.”

  “Please, Esme.”

  “No, Billy.”

  “How about Hamburger Heaven, then? Isn’t that innocent enough? We could have met there by chance.”

  “All right.”

  “It’s hard, you know, when you’ve done something as unpopular as what I did, marry someone no one approved of, not a single person, not even Bratsie, to say, ‘Yes, everybody, you were right, all of you, and I was wrong.’ It takes a bigger person than I am for that.”

  “What is your alternative, Billy?”

  “The horses, I suppose. I have that. The farm is making money. And Tailspin, you’ve heard about Tailspin. He’ll be a champion.”

  “Mr. Grenville?” They were being interrupted.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Ashton Grimes.”

  “Hello.” Billy could not remember who Ashton Grimes was.

  “From Buckley School. I’m Third’s teacher.”

  “Of course. How are you?”

  “I don’t mean to interrupt.”

  “Quite all right.”

  “I had hoped to see you at Parents’ Day, and I thought we could talk then.”

  “Yes, I was in Europe.” He was, he remembered, in Biarritz on the day. “This is, uh, Miss Bland. Ashton Grimes.”

  “Hello.”

  “He’s not doing well, Third, is he?” asked Billy.

  “He’s not.”

  “What shall we do about it?”

  “I think we must meet, Mr. Grenville. Something must be done. He is, uh, disturbed.”

  “May I call you tomorrow?”

  “Yes, of course. Goodbye, Miss Bland. Goodbye, sir.”

  “He is disturbed, I suppose, about his mother and father,” said Billy. “I’ve often wondered if they hear us, the fights, the screaming. I guess they do, and the servants, too.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I never did well in school either, in my time. And then my father would give a gymnasium or a dormitory, and everything would work out all right.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “No, it’s not the same.”

  “That teacher is telling you your son needs help, Billy,” said Esme Bland, who, if asked, would know what to do.

  “I have to go,” said Billy. “The adulteress is expecting me for dinner.”

  * * *

  “Get yourself a smart lawyer, just in case,” advised Babette Van Degan, who had received the largest divorce settlement in the history of New York, and Sam Rosenthal was the smart lawyer Babette Van Degan advised her to get. There was something about Babette, despite her appearance that never outgrew her brassy show-girl look, that made you take her advice in matters of finance and legalities.

  “Tell me about him,” said Ann.

  “He is a snake, a liar, completely dishonest. He will be perfect for you.”

  “Where is he from?”

  “Oh, Minsk. Or Pinsk. One of those places.”

  “I meant what firm.”

  “His own.”

  Ann didn’t really have to be told who Sam Rosenthal was. Every wife in New York in a precarious marriage to a rich man knew who Sam Rosenthal was. She went to his office in Rockefeller Center. His intense black eyes showed white between the bottom of the iris and the lower lid, giving a hypnotic effect. His black eyebrows met in the center.

  Sam Rosenthal knew who the Grenvilles were and how much they were worth. “A lotta simoleons,” he said. He told her the name of a private detective who would be able to find out for her whether Billy was having an affair with Simonetta d’Este. She told him she wanted to keep their marriage together, not divorce. He advised her, when that moment came, to ask so much money that Billy would prefer to keep the marriage going. “Those old New York families like the Grenvilles would do anything rather than break up the fortunes,” he told her. She liked Sam Rosenthal and felt she had made a friend.

  “This is my private telephone number,” he said to her, handing her a card. “They will always know where to reach me, day or night. Put it in your book in case you ever need me.”

  * * *

  “Mrs. Grenville will be down directly, sir,” said the maid.

  “Thank you,” replied the man, whose name was McCarthy. He liked to guess people’s names from their looks, and very often he was right. He guessed the maid’s name was either Mary or Margaret. He knew she was Irish, like himself. He knew she had been to Mass that morning; the ashes of Ash Wednesday thumbed into her forehead by some Catholic priest paid tribute to that. He guessed that she was new in this grand household where he found himself, by invitation, and he guessed correctly. He guessed also, correctly again, that the word “directly” in Mrs. Grenville-will-be-down-directly had been taught her to say, like a line in a play concerned with gracious living. He would have lingered with her in conversation until Mrs. Grenville appeared, but she did not and so he did not. Pretty little thing, he thought when she left the room. She closed the door to the hallway, leaving him free to prowl the room. He wondered if these people called it a living room or a drawing room. His eye, unschooled in art, nevertheless recognized value, and he judged the pictures on the wall to be “museum-quality,” as he would later describe them to his partner, although this estimation, which was correct, was arrived at more from the elaborate gilt frames than from the pictures themselves.

  In a corner was a discreetly placed drink tray bulging with the right liquors, wines, and brandies. In an instant he lifted a decanter, cut-glass with a silver necklace identifying it as Scotch, gulped from it, and replaced it in a movement so swift that an observer, had there been one, which there was not, might have missed it. He heard voices on the stairs outside and seated himself on a bergère chair covered in gray silk, obscuring its delicate lines with the extra weight that he carried and always meant to rid himself of. He placed his left ankle over his right knee, and then shifted to his right ankle over his left knee, and then placed both feet on the floor, tapping the sole of his Thom McAn shoe on the Portuguese carpet. Finally he reached over and picked up a magazine that had been left open to a particular page. If it appeared incongruous that this red-faced, white-haired, stout man in an inexpensive three-piece suit should be reading Harper’s Bazaar, the incongruity was soon dispelled by his very real interest in the page he happened upon. There, elegantly seated in the very bergère chair in which he was now seated, was Mrs. William Grenville, Junior, photographed by Louise Dahl-Wolf in a setting of such high fashion and high style as to remove it almost from reality. He wondered if it had been placed there for him to see.

  From outside the room he heard:

  “We’ll be four for lunch, Mary.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You’ll have to help cook serve.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What’s-her-name left.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Just walked off the job.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What’s that smudge on your forehead?”

  “Ashes.”

  “What?”

  “You know, Ash Wednesday.”

  “Wipe it off before the duchess comes.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Mr. McCarthy guessed, correctly, that the next time he was in this house, Mary would have left, like what’s-her-name. The door to the room—living room? drawing room?—opened, and Mrs. William Grenville, Junior, entered, her expensive perfume preceding her. Tall, striking, blonde, lipsticked, exquisitely bosomed, she observed him observing
her.

  “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Mr. McCormick,” she said, advancing toward him, offering her hand, “but we have had a crisis in the kitchen.”

  “McCarthy,” he corrected her.

  “I beg your pardon. Mr. McCarthy. I have guests for lunch, and the little waitress has simply walked out.” Her gaze became distracted by a misplaced iris in a flower arrangement, and she repositioned it to her satisfaction.

  “Do please sit down,” she said. “I see you’ve seen my picture. Do you think it’s good? I’m terribly pleased with it, although my mother-in-law thinks I am too much in the papers and magazines. She is of that school that thinks a lady’s name appears in the papers only three times in her life.”

  Mr. McCarthy sensed that she was having difficulty getting around to the purpose of the meeting between them.

  “Are you interested in protection for your home, ma’am?” he asked, helping her out.

  “Do you mean like guards? Heavens, no! Is that what you thought?”

  “We do that sort of work.”

  “I heard of you through Mr. Sam Rosenthal.”

  “Ah, yes, Mr. Rosenthal. We do a great deal of work for Mr. Rosenthal. It’s that sort of thing?”

  She walked away from him toward the window. Seeing her from behind was as nearly pleasurable an experience as looking at her face-on for Mr. McCarthy. Every proportion was perfect. Her legs. Her back. Her well-exercised buttocks beneath her smart wool dress. She looked around at him from the window. The part of herself that she totally understood was her physical presence, and she was never displeased, during any circumstance, to know that it was being admired. She was not seductive to him, had no wish to be, but she warmed toward him when she realized he had responded to her.

  “I have reason to believe that my husband is being unfaithful to me,” she said. If it had been a play, and she had been its author, she would have assigned to the private detective the line “He must be mad,” referring to the deceiving husband, but it was not a play, and he did not say that line, but he thought it, or at least his own version of it.

  “I would like to have him followed—discreetly, of course. You see, I love my husband. There is no thought of divorce, but I am most anxious to protect my marriage. I trust this is all confidential, what we are discussing?”

  “Completely.”

  “I do not want him to be aware that I suspect him.”

  “No problem there.”

  “His office is on Wall Street, but he lunches most days uptown at the Brook Club, or the Racquet Club, or the Knickerbocker Club. The thing is, of late he has not been returning to his office in the afternoons, and I would like to find out where he is spending his time.”

  “Do you have a suspicion of a particular person?”

  “I do.”

  “Good.”

  “What do you mean, good?”

  “I don’t mean good in that sense. I mean if it’s a case of general philandering, it’s a more difficult thing to pinpoint.”

  “I would prefer philandering. There is no threat in philandering,” she added softly. She looked down at her vast ring, which he would later describe to his partner as a skating rink, as if it were a symbol of her marriage. When she looked up at him, she smiled sadly and blinked a tear away from her eye. Mr. McCarthy was absurdly touched, even though he realized he was witnessing a performance rather than a true emotion. He sensed, and quite rightly, that it was fear of loss of status and position that concerned her.

  “Her name?” he asked.

  She turned her back to him again and looked past the elaborate gray silk curtains to the street outside. Her slightly flushed face and stiffened back belied her serenity.

  “She is called Simonetta d’Este.”

  He reached for his pad and pen.

  “Princess Simonetta d’Este,” she continued.

  The correct spelling would come later. He did not interrupt her for that. He sensed that she felt rage toward this woman who threatened her marriage but at the same time was impressing him with the caliber of woman who was capable of unseating her. He realized she liked to have credentials established.

  “What aroused your suspicions?”

  “As to adultery or to the particular person?”

  “As to adultery, ma’am.”

  “That’s very embarrassing.”

  “Lipstick on a handkerchief, that sort of thing?”

  “I smelled another woman on his fingers.”

  The detective turned scarlet.

  They exchanged particulars: the address and marital status of the princess; the rates of his private detective agency, which she already knew from Sam Rosenthal, she said, anxious not to be overcharged. From below a doorbell rang.

  “My God, she’s early,” said Ann Grenville, glancing at a clock on the mantelpiece. Her assurance seemed to leave her, as if figuring out how to get rid of one element of her life before another entered. “You see,” she said to the private detective, who suddenly looked to her exactly like a private detective, as if he were wearing a badge proclaiming himself to be just that, so that explanations would have to be made, “it’s the Duchess of Windsor coming to lunch, and, uh …”

  “And you would like me to make a hasty exit down the back stairs, so as not to be seen, is that it?”

  As she shook his hand in hasty farewell, she said, “I would like photographs.”

  It was a rare family outing: Alice Grenville, Billy and Ann, Diantha and Third. They were sitting in the Grenville box at the Belmont track watching Tailspin. Alice detected, but did not address, the strain she felt between her son and his wife. After the race, and photographs, and congratulations to the jockey and trainer, Ann wandered off to greet friends in the bar, and the children were taken by their nanny to buy hot dogs.

  “What’s the matter with Ann?” asked Alice.

  “Nothing,” replied her son, waving to the reporters and photographers in a gesture concurrently friendly and dismissive.

  “Don’t say ‘nothing’ to me, Billy. I’m your mother.”

  “She’s jealous.”

  “Of whom?”

  “Simonetta.”

  “With reason?”

  “No.”

  The closeness that had once existed between them had never been the same since the night she had refused to sanction his marriage. She sensed his unhappiness now and wanted to reach out to him, but dared not. For an instant their eyes met.

  “Marvelous about the race,” she said rather than what she wanted to say, raising her field glasses and watching the track.

  “Wasn’t it?” he replied, hollow-voiced.

  “I think Tailspin’s going to win the Triple Crown next year.”

  “Wouldn’t it be marvelous.”

  “I’m proud of you, darling.”

  “Thanks, Mère.”

  “Your father would have been, too.”

  “Do you think?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  He sounded better. She felt better.

  * * *

  Inside, at the members’ bar, Ann ran into Babette Van Degan. They sat down at a table together and ordered daiquiris. Babette munched peanuts as she watched her old friend.

  “Why the morose silence?” she asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. La vie,” answered Ann.

  “What did you think of Sam Rosenthal?”

  “His eyebrows meet in the middle.”

  “You’re not seriously thinking of divorce, are you?”

  “Murder, yes. Divorce, no,” Ann answered.

  They roared with laughter.

  “I won a bundle on your horse,” said Babette.

  “Good,” said Ann. “I know you need the money.”

  They laughed again. Ann felt better.

  “How’s your son?” she asked, lighting a cigarette.

  “Just got kicked out of another school,” replied Babette. “How are your kids?”

  “Oh, fine, I guess,” said Ann.

&nb
sp; The coffee shop of the Astor Hotel on Times Square was jammed with a jostling crowd of conventioneers. Perfect, Ann thought to herself as she inched her way through to the booth where private detective Danny McCarthy waved to her. Better to meet here, she reasoned, near his office, than to risk meeting again in her home, especially as there were photographs to be viewed.

  She wore a raincoat, a last-minute decision, leaving behind her mink coat, and she was glad not to stand out. She turned her ring around on her finger, stone inward.

  “Coffee?” asked the waitress, pouring and spilling it over into the saucer.

  “Bring me a clean saucer,” Ann said to the waitress. It was a thing that always annoyed her exceedingly. She never allowed herself to remember that she had once, briefly, been a waitress in a coffee shop herself, at Crowell’s Pharmacy in Pittsburg, Kansas. Greetings with Mr. McCarthy completed, her favorite kind of sandwich ordered, she settled back for the business at hand. The photographs were handed to her in an eight-by-ten manila envelope.

  “Urse Mertens! Is that you? Urse?”

  Before she raised her eyes from the six black-and-white photographs of Billy and Simonetta d’Este sitting on a bench in Central Park, at opposite ends of the bench, turning to face each other, talking only, not provocative in the least, near the children’s playground, where her children were probably playing, Ann knew that the voice that addressed her belonged to Fredda Cunningham of West Quincy Street in Pittsburg, Kansas. At first she pretended not to hear as she perused the enlargements handed to her by Mr. McCarthy. She regretted her decision to dress down for the occasion. Her mink coat would have made her less approachable. Beneath the table she turned around to the outside the flawless emerald-cut pink diamond that she had turned inside for the meeting with Mr. McCarthy. It was too confusing a situation to cope with, explaining to Mr. McCarthy who Fredda Cunningham was, explaining to Fredda Cunningham that Mr. McCarthy was not her husband.

  “Urse?”

  “Are you speaking to me?” she asked, looking up at the childhood acquaintance she had once longed to be accepted by. There was grandeur in her voice. She brought her left hand up to her face, and the huge diamond, the skating rink, as Mr. McCarthy had described it to his partner, dazzled brilliantly in the fluorescent light of the coffee shop. Fredda, embarrassed, crimsoned.