The Two Mrs. Grenvilles

by Dominick Dunne

  But Ann was never interested in Billy’s endless reminiscences of dead Bratsie Bleeker and was not listening. Instead she was mourning for her gold-and-diamond compact given to her only the day before by Ali Khan.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Grenville,” said the old and distinguished butler, Dudley, who bowed formally at the entrance.

  It was a mark of distinction on the North Shore to be personally greeted by Edith Bleeker’s celebrated butler. He was an indispensable contributor to the success of Mrs. Bleeker’s frequent entertainments, so highly thought of that the late George Bleeker’s will provided generous bonuses for every five years that Dudley remained in his widow’s service. He knew all the connections and cross-connections of the North Shore, but of no one was he more fond than Billy Grenville.

  “Good evening,” answered Ann, not looking at him as she passed him and entered the hall. She walked straight to a gilt Chippendale mirror over a console table and eyed her windblown hair critically in it.

  “Good evening, Junior,” said the butler.

  “You know, Dudley, you’re the only person who can get away with calling me Junior still,” said Billy affectionately.

  “I’ve known your husband since he was ten years old, Mrs. Grenville, when he used to come here for poor Jelly’s birthday parties,” said Dudley.

  “Don’t tell me we’re the first ones here?” asked Ann in reply.

  “Mr. Freeman’s already in the drawing room,” replied Dudley.

  “The piano player, you mean?” asked Ann.

  “Yes,” said Dudley. “Mrs. Bleeker has had him learn all the new tunes from The Boy Friend.”

  “We’re the first ones here,” said Ann, looking at Billy.

  “You wanted to be on time,” replied Billy.

  “I stupidly have come off without my compact, Dudley,” said Ann. “Do you suppose I could go upstairs?”

  “Of course,” said Dudley.

  “You go on, Billy. I’ll join you,” said Ann, walking up the sweeping staircase.

  “Say, Dudley?” said Billy in a confidential voice when Ann had disappeared from sight.

  “Yes, Junior,” answered the butler, moving closer.

  “I may be receiving a call later.”

  The doorbell rang. Other guests were arriving.

  “I’ll find you, sir,” said Dudley.

  “Long distance,” said Billy.

  Outside the drawing-room windows the grounds and gardens were flood-lit, and beyond, ships bearing freight sailed silently by on Long Island Sound. Only the piano player, hired for the evening, found the breathtaking sight more compelling than the guests.

  “Everyone’s been to the vault, I see,” observed Ann, surveying the jewels in the room, knowing her own stacked up. She was, she knew, madly chic, just as Fydor Cassati often described her in his column. She heard the sound of her satin and smelled the scent of her perfume and caught the gleam of her diamonds. She looked down the front of her strapless dress at her lovely breasts, and pleasure filled her. She breathed in deeply. She was ready to make her entrance.

  “Who is that marvelous-looking creature?” asked Lord Cowdray, pointing his whiskey glass toward the entrance doors of the room where Edith Bleeker stood to receive her arriving guests.

  “Which?” asked Tucky Bainbridge, following his gaze toward the gathering assemblage of the proudest peacocks of the North Shore of Long Island—the Phippses, the Hitchcocks, the Schiffs, the Guests—spilling in one upon another, the nobility of North America, or so they thought, honoring their hostess’s request for promptness in arriving before the Duchess of Windsor.

  “Brightly painted. Blazing jewels. Sweeping in,” said Lord Cowdray. “Ravishing.”

  “Oh, her,” said Tucky, putting withering scorn into the two words. “That’s Ann Grenville.”

  “Now that’s the way a woman should enter a room,” he went on, not taking his eyes from her.

  “Her Copa training, no doubt,” said Tucky sourly, losing interest in her assigned task of pointing people out to the visiting Englishman.

  “Her what?”

  “She used to dance at the Copacabana. We call them the prince and the show girl out here. Hello, Brenda,” she called to Brenda Frazier.

  “I do hope Edith has seated me next to her.”

  “To Brenda?”

  “I meant Mrs. Grenville.”

  “If not, don’t fret, Lord Cowdray. When she hears your title, she’ll seek you out.”

  “Not one of your favorites, I take it?”

  “The life and death of every party. How Billy Grenville could have thrown himself away on her is something I’ll never understand,” said Tucky.

  “Billy Grenville who owns Tailspin?”

  “The very one.”

  “The best horse in America. Is that Billy Grenville next to her?”

  “Yes. He’s got the class, and she’s got the brass.”

  “They appear ideally suited.”

  “Just an act. Lord Cowdray. Just an act.”

  I was always reading in the social columns of the brilliant conversations that took place at Edith Bleeker’s dinner parties, but what I heard was nothing more than desultory chatter, where they had been, where they were going, that sort of thing. “Were you at Cornelia’s?” “Ghastly.” “Who was there?” “Taytsie and Winkie and the Delissers, and old Mrs. Altemus with all the white powder and bright red cheeks.”

  But I can tell you this much about that night: Ann Grenville was surprised to see me in that grand house at that august gathering. From across the room I could see the wheels working in her social climber’s mind. What in the world is Basil Plant doing here at Edith Bleeker’s? she was thinking. Edith Bleeker’s parties, like Alice Grenville’s, were closed to newcomers and outsiders. Even the recent successes of my slender volumes, particularly Candles at Lunch, thirteen weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and soon to be a major motion picture, did not qualify me for social entrance to Viking’s Cove. However, my success had made me a favorite of certain of the North Shore ladies with literary leanings, particularly Jeanne Twombley and Petal Wilson, and I was spending that weekend with the Twombleys when Alfred was felled by the flu at the last minute and Jeanne pressed me into service as her escort. That’s how I got there and bore witness to Ann Grenville’s performance.

  Once, urged on by Bertie Lightfoot, who was intent on launching me, Ann had traipsed up flight after flight of dark stairs that she complained smelled of cat urine to the tenement flat way over east on Seventy-second Street where I then lived and worked. Once there, the style of it surprised her; she had hardly expected to see a gesso console table in a fifth-floor walk-up. It was, I told her, a gift from Kay Kay Somerset, who was redecorating and getting rid of things. We drank red wine and gossiped about Salvador Dali and her portrait, and Bertie, and people in society, and laughed a great deal. She could see the possibility of me as a witty addition to her dinner parties, but something about me made her cautious. I think she felt that I saw through her the way Dali had, past the soda fountain waitress, into her self. She never did invite me.

  “Ah, the beautiful Mrs. Grenville,” I said when our eyes met, and I crossed the room to greet her, whiskey spilling over a bit from my glass onto Edith Bleeker’s Aubusson carpet.

  “Hellohowyou,” she answered, all in one word, in that chichi voice of hers, the way she had heard Billy’s sisters do when people spoke to them they didn’t want to talk to. She moved on away from me to greet Neddie Pavenstedt, leaving me with egg on my face. I looked after her, my eyes boring into her splendid back, and made a mental note for my journal.

  It was the duchess only; the duke was not there. She said business in Paris had delayed him from making the trip in time. His absence in no way diminished the splendor of the occasion; she had eclipsed her royal husband as a social curiosity. It was not yet fashionable to decry the Duchess of Windsor. That would come later, after the duke died, and the sum total of his wasted life was laid bare
. At the time of which we speak, the duke and duchess were considered to be exquisite still, and those who basked in their light acquired a patina of exquisiteness themselves in the upper echelons of New York society.

  “Wallis,” said Edith Bleeker, taking her guest of honor around her drawing room, “you know this attractive couple, I know. Ann and Billy Grenville. Billy Grenville was my son Jellico’s best friend.” In death Bratsie Bleeker had taken on a nobility he had not possessed in life, and the shabby circumstances of his unsolved murder had passed from memory.

  “Hello, Billy,” said the duchess, extending her hand.

  “How’s your divine mother?”

  “She’s well, Your Grace,” said Billy, inclining his head.

  “Do give her my love.” She moved and spoke as if she were a royal presence, which is what she believed her marriage had made her. Ann watched her, glowing in her reflected glory. She was in green. Ann knew that her dress was from Dior, and that the emeralds at her neck, on her ears, and at her shoulder were Queen Alexandra’s emeralds, left to the duke for his future queen when he was the Prince of Wales. She also knew they had been reset in Paris at Cartier’s, secretly, so that they could not be reclaimed by the English royal family. The man from Cartier’s who had made the ear clip that pinched her lobe had told her that. It was the sort of information that Ann always knew.

  “Good evening, Ann,” said the duchess. “What marvelous color you have this evening.”

  Ann Grenville had never looked so lovely as now. It thrilled her that the Duchess of Windsor should call her by her first name, and the mixture of excitement and success of the moment enhanced her already striking appearance. She bobbed a curtsy, somewhat less deep than she would have liked to give, and the duchess beamed at her for this recognition. “It’s lovely to see you again, ma’am,” said Ann. She wondered what her mother would have thought if she had witnessed this familiarity with the famed romantic figure she had admired so extravagantly.

  She longed to prolong the conversation. She knew that the duchess found her more entertaining than the Long Island ladies, and she enjoyed the feeling that it gave her. Although it was not a thing she discussed, even with Billy, she was aware that the ladies of the North Shore, like Tucky Bain-bridge for instance, did not care for her and tolerated her only because she was married to William Grenville, Junior, whose position in the society of New York and Long Island was as inviolate as any of theirs. With the men, it was another thing. It was only to Babette Van Degan, who was never asked anywhere anymore, that she confessed she saw a parallel between her marriage to Billy and Wallis Simpson’s marriage to the Prince of Wales.

  “I’m so sorry you missed the race at Belmont, ma’am,” said Ann, placing her hand on Billy’s arm with wifely pride. “It was thrilling.”

  “We read all about Tailspin in Paris,” said the duchess.

  “It’s so exciting for you, Billy.”

  Billy Grenville was constantly astonished by the performance of marital bliss his wife was able to enact in the presence of others, always managing to confuse the skeptics who were certain that the stormy union had run its course. As always he fell into step with her performance, and the conversation between the duchess and the attractive Grenvilles became animated and filled with laughter, prompting the duchess to say about them, to Edith Bleeker, that they were an ideally suited couple.

  “It’s not funny, darling. Poor Ann is terribly worried about the prowler. He broke into Billy’s car last night.”

  “She’s not so worried she’d miss a party. After all, who’s home with the kids if she’s so damn worried? Some new cook who just arrived.”

  “She was never going to get mother-of-the-year award.”

  “I don’t believe that prowler story anyway. I bet it’s Ann. Ann always has to create a drama with herself at the center of it.”

  “But of course there’re prowlers, darling. It’s the North Shore. People like us are fair game.”

  “It’s only food he’s after. He’s probably just a vagrant.”

  “I have the most marvelous idea,” said Kay Kay Somerset.

  “What’s that?”

  “Why not set a trap for him?”

  “What kind of trap?”

  “If all he’s after is food, make him a sandwich and leave it in the fridge of your pool house, and sprinkle some sleeping pills on it, in the mayonnaise or something, and he’ll fall asleep, darling, right there on the chaise by your pool, and the police can catch him, snoring away, and take him off to the slammer toute suite. Now how’s that for the idea of the evening?”

  “Did you hear Kay Kay’s idea for the Grenvilles’ prowler?” asked Tucky Bainbridge, screaming with laughter. “Kay Kay said to put sleeping pills in a sandwich. Don’t you think it’s divine?”

  “God knows, and so does everyone else, that Ann has enough sleeping pills around to fell an army of prowlers.”

  After eleven the telephone rang in the house in Oyster Bay. Upstairs Anna Gorman put aside reading The Messenger of the Sacred Heart and wondered about people who called that late. There was no telephone in the room where she was sleeping, and she felt quite sure that by the time she rose and put on her robe and went downstairs to the telephone in the hall, whoever was calling would have hung up. The night outside was dark and wet, and the house was strange to her, and she decided not to answer it. Instead she switched off her bed light.

  Later in the evening, after dinner, Dudley, the butler, whispered in Billy’s ear that there was a telephone call for him.

  “Is it the cook from the house?” Billy asked Dudley, knowing it wasn’t, for the benefit of his companion.

  Dudley, who was used to the complicated affairs of the people he served, met Billy’s eyes and mouthed the words “long distance.”

  “Excuse me, Brenda,” Billy said to Brenda Frazier. “There’s been this damn prowler.”

  Across the room Ann talked to Lord Cowdray about Princess Margaret and Peter Townsend, her equerry, if she would marry him or if she wouldn’t. It was a conversation that Ann could carry on in great detail without giving her full attention to it. She watched the butler whisper in her husband’s ear, and she kept on talking. She saw her husband nod his head, and she kept on talking. She met her husband’s eye as he glanced furtively at her and looked away again, and she kept on talking. She followed with her eyes as her husband left Edith Bleeker’s drawing room, and she kept on talking. She listened to an illicit proposition being made to her, and she let the Englishman know it might be a future possibility.

  “You will ring me when you are in London next?” he asked her.

  She smiled at him. “Excuse me, will you?” she said and rose and walked out of Edith Bleeker’s drawing room.

  Whatever the conversation had been, it was brief. By the time Ann quietly opened the doors of the library, she saw her husband across the room standing by the desk with his back to the door. He was speaking into the telephone in an extremely low voice, but she was able to hear him say, “Goodnight, my darling, sleep well,” make a kissing sound, and end the conversation with “I love you, too.”

  Ann threw the Baccarat glass containing Scotch and soda that she had carried with her from the drawing room. It narrowly missed Billy and crashed into a Lowestoft platter on a teakwood stand that separated the leather-bound copies of Melville from the leather-bound copies of Dickens on the shelves of Edith Bleeker’s library, smashing the armorial platter into worthless fragments.

  Within an instant she was across the room and pulled the telephone receiver out of his hand. “Listen to me, you wop whore!” she screamed into the instrument. “You leave my husband alone!” If it was Simonetta d’Este, she heard no more, as Billy broke the connection.

  “Are you out of your mind?” he said to her.

  “How dare you embarrass me like this?” she screamed at him, at the same time slapping his face.

  “You understand, don’t you,” he said to her, grabbing her hand from his face a
nd holding it hard, “that if you make one of your scenes in Edith Bleeker’s house, it will be the end of you on the North Shore. Not of me, mind you. Just you.”

  She knew what he said was true.

  “All that Jet Set trash at de Cuevas’s ball may have forgiven you for the scene you made there, but you won’t get away with it here.”

  Behind them the doors to the library opened, and Edith Bleeker, the grande dame of Long Island, walked into her room. In the hallway outside stood Basil Plant and Kay Kay Somerset and Jeanne Twombley staring into the room as more guests arrived to look in.

  “Edith, my darling, I am sorry. This is totally my fault,” said Billy Grenville. “My elbow must have hit this beautiful platter, and I knocked it off the stand. We seem to have caused quite a spectacle at your lovely party, and I would very much appreciate it if you would excuse us and allow us to leave through the kitchen, and I will be in touch with you tomorrow to make amends and restitution for the damage I have caused.”

  Edith knew, as did everyone else, that Billy Grenville was covering for his wife. Tucky Bainbridge was sent upstairs to fetch Ann Grenville’s fur jacket, and Dudley retrieved Billy’s coat from a hall closet. Stan Freeman, accompanied now by a bass and drums, struck up some of the tunes from The Boy Friend, and Mrs. Sanford grabbed Lord Cowdray to dance with her, and other guests followed suit, anxious to keep Edith Bleeker’s party from being destroyed by the disgraceful fight of the Grenvilles. Long after their flight into the cold October night, the Grenvilles were discussed in various corners of Edith Bleeker’s drawing room. Many of the conversations ended with the words “Poor Alice,” meaning Billy’s beloved mother, Alice Grenville, who had never from the beginning approved of her son’s misalliance with the Broadway show girl who wanted so terribly to be part of the Grenvilles’ world.