The Two Mrs. Grenvilles

by Dominick Dunne

  They drove over the Long Island roads from Viking’s Cove in Locust Valley to Oyster Bay in murderous silence. Ann stared out as the windshield wipers made a swish sound, back and forth, back and forth. She dared not tell him he was driving too fast. She feared he might stop the car and strike her if she cautioned him about his speed. She pulled her sable fur around her and sat as far away from him as she could.

  She knew she had gone too far. Inwardly she always suffered from remorse when she lost control and created scenes in public. For someone who cared so much about belonging, she could not understand about herself why she continually sabotaged herself socially. She wondered if there was a connection between it and her menstrual period, which she could feel was beginning.

  The speedometer on the dashboard hovered at seventy-five. The dark roads were wet, and she closed her eyes and tried to remember exactly how much she had had to drink. Usually she nursed a single drink for the entire evening when she was out with the North Shore group, but the talk about divorce in the car on the way to the party had unsettled her. There were two Scotches before dinner, she counted, and white wine with the fish, and red wine with the beef, and champagne with the sweet, while most of the food was left fashionably uneaten. No brandy, she had turned down the brandy, but there had been another Scotch, or maybe two, not counting the one she had hurled across the library that had broken Edith Bleeker’s Lowestoft platter. She shuddered at the thought and forced it out of her mind. She wondered if the pills she took that Dr. Sidney Skinner prescribed for her—for diet, and nerves, and sleep—could have had an adverse effect on her system combined with all the liquor she had had.

  He turned off 25A onto Berry Hill Road without looking left or right, but the wet roads were empty. As they pulled into the driveway, she could see that they had made the trip in only sixteen minutes. The lights were brightly lit along the long driveway, reminding them both of the prowler. In her corner of the front seat, Ann removed her earrings, her rings, her bracelet, her brooch, and her necklace, placed her jewels in the leather bag she had put into the glove compartment, and put the bag in the pocket of her fur coat. The car pulled into the courtyard and around to the side door of the Playhouse.

  For a few seconds they both sat in the car and surveyed their house. The bare branches of the large oak tree to the left of the side door scratched the roof of the house over Ann’s room, and dead brown leaves, soaked by the rain, covered the cobblestones of the courtyard.

  “Who were you talking to on the telephone, Billy?” she asked.

  “None of your business,” he answered.

  “Are you going to put the car in the garage?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to turn off the driveway lights?”

  “No.”

  They opened the doors of the car and got out. Billy walked up to the side door, put his hand on the knob, and found it locked. She saw for the first time that he was holding his revolver.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “What?”

  “It’s locked.”

  “Of course it’s locked. You gave what’s-her-name locking instructions for fifteen minutes before we left.”

  “I forgot to bring a key.”

  “Great.”

  “You didn’t bring one?”

  “Of course I didn’t bring one.”

  “How the hell are we going to get in?”

  “Wake up cookie.”

  He ignored her and walked over to the window of his bedroom and peered in. The curtains had been drawn, but the window was unlocked, and he pushed it up and crawled in. Ann stood outside in the wet courtyard, uncertain if she was supposed to enter the house in the same fashion or if Billy would return and open the door for her. A chill went through her, and she felt frightened, as if someone were watching her. Then the front door opened.

  “Lock all the doors and leave the windows open!” said Ann sarcastically, to hide her fright. “Guaranteed to fool all the burglars in the neighborhood.”

  “Why don’t you shut your big fucking mouth,” said Billy at the door. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough to say for one night?”

  She walked into the narrow hall past Billy. Her bedroom was to the right and Billy’s was to the left. She went into her room and took off her fur jacket, removing the bag of jewels from the pocket. She placed it on her dressing table. She switched on a lamp in the room and saw that Anna had unpacked her cosmetics, as she had asked her to, and had repressed her sheets so that the offending creases had been removed.

  “I don’t suppose your motherly instincts would include going upstairs to check on the children?” asked Billy.

  “You go upstairs and check on the children,” she replied. “You’re the one with the gun.”

  “I wonder if I always thought this was a creepy house,” he said, “or if it just seems creepy to me tonight.”

  “Billy.”

  “What?”

  “Bring me back a beer, will you?”

  “Funny.”

  “What?”

  “I thought you were going to say bring you back a gun.”

  They looked at each other for a minute. He turned away from her and opened the door of the bedroom hallway that led into the front hall of the house. To the right was the dining room and kitchen. He switched on the lights. Across the hall was the paneled living room that looked down on the indoor tennis court. He entered the living room and switched on the lights. He crossed the length of the living room. Beyond it was another hallway. He switched on the lights in the hallway. To the right were the double doors that led to the vast music room. To the left was a stairway that led upstairs to where the children and the cook were sleeping. He switched on the stair light and walked upstairs. At the top of the stairs he turned on the upstairs hall light and entered Diantha’s room. He pulled her blanket up over her and kissed her on the cheek. She sighed in her sleep and hugged the dog that slept next to her. Then he walked into Third’s room and looked down at his son. He turned back to the hall and then walked over to Third’s bed and leaned down and kissed him.

  “Goodnight, little boy,” he whispered.

  “Night, Daddy,” whispered Third.

  “Why aren’t you asleep?” he asked.

  “Are you going to take me flying tomorrow?”

  “Yes, yes. Now go to sleep.”

  He retraced his steps through the house, turning out all the lights he had turned on. Passing through the living room, he walked to one of the windows and peered out at the grounds as if he expected to see someone out there.

  “What was that called?” she asked.

  “The final fuck,” he answered.

  He was different to her. She did not understand why he seemed to be in control, but she did not change her performance.

  “Good, I won’t have to fake it anymore,” she said, preparing herself for bed, putting on the black brassiere that she always wore beneath her nightgown, for the support of her beautiful breasts.

  “I’ll say this much for you, Ann—you’ve still got great tits.”

  “Such gallantry,” she replied.

  “Let’s talk divorce.”

  “You want a divorce, Billy? Fine. Shall I go over the figures? I want five million dollars. Plus this house. Plus the house in New York. Plus full custody of the children. When you’re ready to talk my language about divorce, then we’ll talk divorce. Now go to bed. We have people coming for lunch.”

  “Those aren’t the kind of figures I have in mind, Ann.”

  “What do you think this has been like for me, this marriage? How do you think it feels to know that your mother and sisters loathe me, have always loathed me, will always loathe me, even if we should happen to stay married fifty years?”

  “All the more reason to divorce.”

  “I don’t want a divorce.”

  He picked up his revolver, which he had placed on her bedside table, and started for the door.

  “Did I tell you I saw your old hou
se on West Quincy Street in Pittsburg last week?” he asked.

  “Yes, you did,” she replied. She was sitting at her dressing table. She swallowed a few sleeping pills with some beer, which she drank from the bottle.

  “I went to the cemetery, too,” he said, “and looked up the Mertens plot. I didn’t know that, uh …”

  She watched him in the mirror as she applied cold cream to her face. There was something about his voice and manner that gave her a feeling of warning and apprehension.

  “You don’t look as well nude as you used to,” she interrupted him, hoping to deflect the conversation away from her past, that part of her life that she no longer considered part of herself.

  “… that you had a little brother. Odd you never mentioned him,” continued Billy, not feeling uncomfortable in his nudity.

  “He was only three when he died,” said Ann, relieved. “I never think of him.”

  “Claud his name was, in case you forgot.”

  “I didn’t forget. Why this great interest in my family all of a sudden? You haven’t evinced much curiosity about my background all the years we’ve been married.”

  “Curious,” he said, reflecting on the word as he spoke it.

  “What’s curious?”

  “Life.”

  “What are you babbling about, Billy? You’d better go to bed. It’s very late. Aren’t you taking Third flying in the morning?” She lifted the bottle of beer to her lips and took several deep swallows, all the time not taking her eyes off him in the mirror. She knew there was more he had to say; her curiosity was intense but her desire not to hear any more of it was equally intense.

  “Don’t you think it’s odd, in the overall scheme of things, I mean, that the particular airplane that I wanted to own should be manufactured in the very tiny little town in the southwestern corner of the state of Kansas where my wife was born?”

  “Are we getting mystical at one o’clock in the morning? Fate? Is that going to be next?” She got up from her dressing table and went into the bathroom, wanting to get away from him, and began brushing her hair in the bathroom mirror away from his gaze.

  “I said to them, at the aircraft plant, that my wife was from that town, I believed.” He walked across her room and leaned against the bathroom door, again watching her in the mirror.

  “I wish you’d go to bed, Billy,” she said. “I want to put in my Tampax.”

  “I said her name was Urse Mertens, but no one seemed to remember you.”

  “I left there years ago, Billy.”

  “Except one fella. He remembered. He didn’t speak up at the time, though. He was an accountant with the firm, not one of the big honchos, as he referred to them later when he called me at the Vel-Fre Motel. We had dinner in a Chinese restaurant on South Broadway, new since your time, right next to Crowell’s Pharmacy. He said you used to be a waitress at Crowell’s when you were in high school.”

  “I’m going to close this door.”

  “Four pens in his breast pocket, that kind of person. He’s the one who took me out to the cemetery. Nicely attended, your mother’s grave, and little Claud’s. He called you Urse. Urse Mertens, he said. Funny. You don’t look like an Urse Mertens.”

  “If you’re just deciding that you married beneath you, Mr. Grenville, that’s something your mother and sisters tried to tell you years ago,” she answered.

  “Aren’t you curious to know what his name was? Billy Bob Veblen! He said he went to high school with you.”

  Ann stared at her husband. She could begin to feel panic rising within her.

  “He said he was in Lady Windermere’s Fan with you.”

  She continued to stare.

  “HE SAID HE WAS MARRIED TO YOU!”

  Hatred and wrath, which had been accumulating within her for the whole evening, suddenly boiled over. “THAT IS NOT TRUE!” she screamed.

  He grabbed her by her arm, pulled her across the room to her bed, pushed her down on it by her shoulders and leaned over her, breathing heavily, poised to enter her or kill her. He was what he thought he would never be, out of control. Saliva dripped from his loose mouth onto her. The thought of striking her, and worse, went through his mind.

  “He said he joined the Marines and when he came back, you had vanished from the earth, as far as he knew. He didn’t know you had changed your name to Ann Arden. He said he never got a divorce from you.”

  “No,” she screamed.

  “You know what this means, don’t you? This is not a moment that either of us should be deceived by. We’re not even married! You’re still Mrs. Billy Bob Veblen, the bigamist, from Pittsburg, Kansas!”

  Pushing down on her, he heaved himself upward, off her and off the bed, terrified by the thoughts of violence that had entered his head, that he knew she had read. She snaked her body away from him while they continued to stare at each other.

  “What has happened to us?” he asked, aghast.

  “You’re drunk,” she said.

  “No, I’m not,” he replied.

  She was not listening. Why had she not paid more attention to him when he told her he was going to Kansas to buy his airplane? She dreaded to think of Alice Grenville’s reaction to her earlier marriage. She wondered if even Sam Rosenthal, the divorce lawyer who had been so sympathetic to her marital plight, would have the same regard for her when he heard there had been an earlier marriage that she had never dissolved.

  Billy walked to the window and peered out at the cobblestone courtyard. He thought he heard footsteps outside.

  “You know my motto, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Shoot first and ask questions later.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The prowler.”

  * * *

  Upstairs, at the other end of the house, Anna Gorman, the new cook, whose duties this night included keeping an eye on the sleeping children, heard voices below. They were not the voices of conversation; they were the voices of combat. She picked up her ticking clock from the bedside table and saw that it was half past two in the morning, then remembered that she had forgotten to reset her clock from Daylight Savings Time to Eastern Standard Time. Spring forward, fall back, she remembered, as she turned the hands back an hour, all the time listening to the sounds below.

  The door to her room was ajar, as were the doors across the hall to the rooms of Diantha and Third. Anna Gorman rose, shivered in the cold, pulled her heavy wool comforter around her, and knotted its braided cord. She slipped her feet into fleece-lined slippers and padded to the door.

  A flight of stairs and the length of a long living room and hall below separated her from the bedrooms, across the hall from one another, of Mr. and Mrs. Grenville, but through some quirk of construction in this house that was conceived to be a playhouse and not a domicile, with its indoor tennis court and music room, the sounds of anger and reproach traveled eerily across rooms and up the stairs. Anna Gorman, who believed in God and family, felt that it was her duty to close the doors of the children’s rooms, not only to assure their sleep but to shield them from the ugliness below should either of them awake.

  Diantha, she saw when she peered into the dark room, was already awake. With her in the bed, listening to the fight below, was Third. Between them was Diantha’s dog, Sloppy.

  As she often did in moments of panic and despair, Ann missed her mother, the only person who had ever understood her completely, the only person with whom she had never had to pretend to be anything other than what she was. That Billy Bob Veblen, long since forgotten, should reenter her life twelve years into her marriage and bring her enviable existence crashing down was inconceivable to her. Her mother had discovered her all those years back engaged in sexual intercourse with Billy Bob Veblen, the captain of the Pittsburg High football team, the handsomest boy in the school, on the davenport of the front room of the house on West Quincy Street. To her surprise there was no reprimand. Or punishment. What her mother said she had never forg
otten. “Don’t waste it here,” said Ethel Mertens, meaning Pittsburg, Kansas. “That’s the mistake I made.” Her elopement several years later from Kansas City across the state line to Oklahoma, before Billy Bob Veblen enlisted in the Marines, was the event that precipitated her mother to move her to New York.

  “As they say in the movies, ‘My lawyers will be in touch with you,’ ” said Billy to his ominously silent wife. He began to whistle as he turned to walk back to his room.

  Her lips curled back from her teeth. Her eyes flashed dangerously and Billy saw the fiery gleam that he had come to dread in them, like a flash of lightning in the sky preceding terrifying thunder. She made an inarticulate, almost animal sound in her throat. “I’m glad you’re leaving,” she snarled at him. Her voice was low and guttural. All traces of tonal culture evaporated. “I’m glad you’re leaving.” She repeated the words, her crescendo building. Nothing could stop the savage force of her rage. “I’m glad you’re leaving!”

  Billy watched her distorted face as she screamed up at him from her bed, like a caged animal.

  “I hope you don’t think you’re being impressive,” he said quietly as he turned and walked back to his room, unaware that his earlier words to her about the prowler had set in motion a lethal train of thought. His bed had been turned down. His pajamas and dressing gown had been laid at the foot of the bed. His slippers, velvet with embroidered initials, from Lobb in London, were on the floor by the side of the bed. He walked to the window and opened it to the cold night, looking across the cobblestone courtyard as he did so. For an instant he thought he saw a shadow moving toward the house, but decided that it was the branches of the large trees that surrounded the courtyard, still lit by the bright exterior lights that he had not turned off.

  His armpits felt moist, even in the cold; the result, no doubt, of the triumph of his disclosure to Ann, the secret that he had nurtured within himself for over a week now, sharing it with no one, not even his lawyer, saving it for just the right moment. He felt exultation within himself for the freedom that was at hand for his life. He walked into his bathroom, turned on both taps full blast, and stepped into the shower.