The Two Mrs. Grenvilles

by Dominick Dunne

  “There is an attorney called Strasser who represented him when he broke into the market in Mineola.”

  “Engage him. Pay him whatever he asks.”

  “Who’s he?” asked Third.

  “Is he a detective?” asked Diantha.

  “No, no, he’s not a detective, children,” said Ann. She had not known her children would walk into her hospital room unannounced. She had always been successful in keeping the separate elements of her complicated life compartmentalized, and when one converged upon another, unexpectedly, she was thrown into confusion. “This is, uh, Mr. Mertens, from Kansas. These are my children, Diantha and Third.” She did not say to the children that Mr. Mertens from Kansas was their grandfather.

  Claud Mertens had a hard weathered face and the stance of a person uncomfortable with his surroundings. Shaving with nervous fingers in strange surroundings had left several unsightly nicks on his chin, and his round silver-rimmed glasses magnified the confusion in his eyes over his role in his daughter’s drama. Instinctively he knew, in front of these aristocratic little children, that his peaked baseball cap was wrong; he pulled it off and stuffed it into the pocket of the suit he had bought the day before.

  “Third?” asked Claud Mertens, covering the awkward moment, as if it were a name he had never heard of before, which he had not.

  “He’s named after his father, who was a junior, you see. His name is William Grenville the Third, but we call him Third, you know, as a nickname.”

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Third, Diantha,” said their grandfather.

  “How do you do?” each child replied, perfectly mannered.

  “We saw the detective,” said Diantha.

  “He asked us lots of questions,” said Third. “He wanted to know if you and Daddy had fights, but we said no.”

  “Grand’mère told us to say no,” said Diantha.

  “Children, Mr. Mertens is going to have to leave in just a minute. I’d like you to wait outside, and as soon as he goes, you can come in, and the three of us will have a lovely visit.”

  “We brought you flowers,” said Third, holding up a basket of carefully arranged carnations he carried on his arm. It looked to Ann as if their grandmother had sent them off with a basket someone had sent to her.

  “She’s a real Mertens all right, that Diantha,” said Claud Mertens, after the children left the hospital room. His eyes were brimming over with tears.

  It was true what he said, she realized, but Ann Grenville had long since forgotten that she was a Mertens. “She resembles her grandmother Grenville,” she corrected her father. “Her height. The dark-brown velvet color of her eyes.”

  “I always think of that last time, Urse, when you were eight, when we had supper that night at Crowell’s in Pittsburg, and you had the cheese delight and a chocolate milkshake, and—”

  “I was as old that night as my son is today,” she said, interrupting him. “Too much time has gone by. Too much has happened. It’s too late for us. You’ve got to understand that. I’ve lived a lifetime without you. I can’t take you back into my life now. I can’t cope with any more than I already have to cope with.”

  “There’s something I’ve got to tell you, Urse. It’s important to me that you know. I didn’t abandon you. I didn’t. It was your mother who told you that. I swear to God I didn’t. I tried to find you.”

  “All those Christmases. All those birthdays. Never a word,” said Ann, looking out the window at the East River.

  “But I sent you five dollars every birthday, every Christmas, even when I couldn’t afford it,” Claud Mertens said, standing by her bed in the same position Alice Grenville had stood the day before. Ann turned and looked at him. She remembered the five dollars. She had always assumed it was something her mother had managed to eke out of her small wages. “You must have gotten it, Urse, but I never heard back, and then you were gone from Pittsburg, and then you were gone from Kansas City, and I didn’t know where to send it anymore.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Ann.

  “You know something, Urse? Somebody told me you’d changed your name to Arden and gone into the show business, like you always wanted to when you was a little girl. You know what I thought? I thought that actress Eve Arden, I thought that was you, and I was proud of you that you done so good.”

  “Oh, Daddy,” she whispered, crying softly now.

  “When I first read about it in the papers, Urse, I didn’t even know it was you. Then Ken Simons from Pittsburg called me. Do you remember Ken? From the paper? He’s the one who told me that Mrs. William Grenville was you. Pretty soon the phone started ringing off the hook, and all these reporters from everywhere were trying to question me to find out about you. That’s how I got your number and your mother-in-law’s number.”

  “Listen,” she said.

  “I’m sorry if I told them you was forty instead of thirty-two, Urse, but I was confused.”

  “Listen,” she said. “It’s okay. When this is all over, after the grand jury, if everything goes okay, I’ll look you up. I’ll find you, and we’ll try to catch up, but not now. Please, please, Daddy. Not now. I can’t handle any more.”

  Horst Berger hoped Mr. Strasser would not make him go through the story again. He had spent most of the day with three detectives walking over the grounds of the Grenville estate in Oyster Bay, climbing the tree, walking across the roof of the house. He knew Mr. Strasser, who had been sent by the German consulate to represent him, did not believe his story.

  “Let me understand you, Horst,” said Mr. Strasser, speaking patiently. He noticed that the thin shifty young man rarely looked at him in the eye, fixing his stare instead on a color photograph of President Eisenhower in Western attire on the cover of the most recent copy of Life magazine that Inspector Pennell had left behind when he allowed his office to be used for this interview. In the magazine, both knew, was a ten-page article entitled “The Shooting of the Century” about the case that was the subject of this visit.

  “Is my picture in there?” asked Horst.

  “No,” replied Mr. Strasser.

  “They took my picture today, many times,” said Horst.

  “I want to get back to the night of the shooting, Horst,” said Strasser, the first tone of impatience in his voice. “You said you waited for hours outside the Grenville house when you believed it was unoccupied, when they were at the party.”

  “I didn’t know the cook and the kids were in there,” said Horst.

  “And you only tried to break into the house after Mr. and Mrs. Grenville returned home? That doesn’t make sense, Horst.”

  “I saw the lights go on and off in the different rooms after they got back, and then waited about half an hour when it was quiet in the house before climbing up the tree and onto the roof,” answered Horst.

  “Now, you say that you climbed the tree with a loaded shotgun in one hand?” asked the lawyer.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you were on the roof when you heard the shots from within the house?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “After you heard the shots, how did you get off the roof?”

  “I jumped to the ground.”

  “Still carrying the shotgun?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you aware, Horst, that it is twenty feet from the roof to the ground?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You jumped, carrying a loaded shotgun, in the dark, from the roof to the ground twenty feet below?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why is it I don’t believe you, Horst?”

  “The truth.”

  “Horst.”

  “Ja?”

  “Why did you say when you were first caught that you were not anywhere near the Grenville house that night?”

  “I thought they would think I killed the man.”

  “Did they force you to change your story, Horst?”

  “No, it is like I say.”

  “I want you to look a
t me straight in the eye, Horst, and answer a question,” said Strasser.

  Horst Berger looked at the lawyer and looked away again.

  “In my eye, Horst.”

  “Ja.”

  “Is someone from the Grenville family paying you to say you were on the roof of the house on Saturday night?”

  The young German immigrant concurrently shook his head in denial and reddened.

  * * *

  “You see, I knew he was unhappy. He didn’t have to tell me in those words, but I am his mother. I know. I have always been able to understand more from the tone of someone’s voice than from the words that are spoken, because we are trained from birth to say words that camouflage our feelings, but there is no way to hide the secrets of the tone of voice.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “It haunts me now that I did not say to him, ‘Come to me, talk to me, whatever it is, it’s all right.’ I would never have said to him, ‘I told you so,’ never, it wasn’t in my nature to do that, but I understood his terrible pride. I understood that he didn’t want me to know that the marriage had failed because he had gone so far out on a limb on a marriage that he knew was such a source of unhappiness for us.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  More and more pictures of Billy Grenville began to appear in his mother’s room. When Alice wasn’t meeting with Sam Rosenthal or Dr. Skinner or Mr. Mendenhall or Inspector Pennell, she poured through old scrapbooks and photograph albums and found pictures from the many stages of his life that reminded her of pleasant events and happy times and had them put in silver frames, on her bedside table and her writing table and her dressing table and the table by her chaise where she lay to rest each afternoon. Wherever she looked there were pictures of Billy.

  “Look how handsome he was there,” she said to Lyd, her personal maid. “That was the day of the Groton-St. Mark’s game when he made a field goal. He said it was the happiest day of his life, and, oh, Lyd, if you could have seen Mr. Grenville, he was bursting, absolutely bursting, with fatherly pride. I know he wanted to hug Billy, and I think Billy even wanted to be hugged by his father, but you know how they were, all the Grenville men, they just shook hands instead, and Mr. Grenville said, ‘I’m so proud of you, son,’ and Billy answered, ‘Thank you, Father,’ and I think it was the closest moment they ever had together. Oh, Lyd, why did this have to happen? Why? Why?”

  She was crying now, the sobs coming out of her in great heaving gasps. “I have led a good life,” she said. “I believe in God. I honor Him in my prayers every day. I attend church regularly. I attend to my duties as a mother, and to my obligations as a woman of wealth. Why? Why has this happened to me?”

  In secret Alice wished Ann had the decency to commit suicide, to swallow the pills or slit the wrists that would end her existence. She saw her daughter-in-law as a lowly cockroach, scurrying here, scurrying there, fighting for her existence, as if she mattered. At first she could not understand the feelings that were overwhelming her. She dared not confess them to anyone, not even Cordelia. They were all-consuming within her, hot and unpleasant, rage and anger and hate, all directed at Ann, for taking away the life of the son she loved so much. She hated this chorus girl who had undulated her way into Billy’s existence. She wished that in the beginning she had acted on her instincts about the woman, instead of going against her feelings, and capitulating, because she could not bear to disappoint Billy. Oh, how she regretted that. Cut off from his family, and his money, the marriage would not have outlasted the war, and the wretched girl could have been paid off and gone her way. Instead she usurped Billy, took over his life, ran it, used it, all to advance herself. Alice understood that it was a marriage cemented only by sexual pleasure.

  Awakening, she looked at the clock on her bedside table. She felt a longing for her son and a sense of the great void his loss was in her life. It was five-thirty in the morning. Soon there would be stirring in the kitchen and servants’ quarters in the house, and she knew that she would have to act quickly to do what she had to do before anyone ran into her. She got up from her bed, put on her slippers and her wrapper, and quietly opened the door to her bedroom and peered out into the hall. There was no one about. She walked out to the third-floor landing and looked down the several flights of stairs to the marble-floored main hallway below. No one. Quickly and quietly, pulling her wrapper around her for warmth, she walked down the three flights of red-carpeted stairway. Above, the twelve Caesars looked down upon her. She would meet their eyes on the way back up and think they were nodding in approval at what she was doing. The Caesars knew a thing or two about retribution.

  It seemed odd to her to be operating in stealth in her own home where she had lived for forty years. At the bottom of the stairs she walked across the hall beneath the chandelier and opened a door to a secondary hall leading to the back rooms and the garden. Stored there in open disarray was sporting gear for all seasons: walking sticks, velvet riding hats, umbrellas, ice skates, raincoats, gloves, and dog leashes. Chinese export bowls held car keys and spare house keys and dark glasses. On a marble-topped table, where she knew it would be, was a riding crop. It had been William’s. Then it had been Billy’s. Various grandchildren now used it when they came into the city and wanted to ride in Central Park. She picked it up and felt the leather strength of it. Below her on the kitchen floor she heard the first sound of stirring. Quickly she returned up the three flights of stairs, one hand on the banister, the other holding the leather riding crop close to her side to escape detection if old Lyd should make an early appearance.

  The activity heightened the adrenaline within her, but the rage she felt had not abated. She locked the door of the bedroom behind her. She stripped back the blankets and blanket cover on her bed. She placed in vertical position a long pillow. In her mind’s eye, she conjured up the image of her daughter-in-law, Ann.

  “Murderess!” she hissed at the pillow, repeating the word over and over. She raised the riding crop and began to beat the pillow. She beat it and beat it and beat it until exhaustion overtook her. The linen pillowcase was in tatters. Feathers from the down pillow rose in fright into the air, making Alice think of life leaving a body.

  After several minutes of resting on her chaise to collect herself and calm her racing heartbeat, she rallied again, feeling tired but strangely tranquil for the exertion she had put herself through. She hid away the mutilated pillow in the back of a closet and the riding crop in the back of her lingerie drawer, ready for another day, unlocked her door, and returned to her bed, pulling the covers up over her. It was thus that Lydia found her when she arrived with her tray of hot water and quartered lemons a few minutes later.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Grenville,” said Lyd. “Did you rest well? You look better this morning.”

  Sipping her hot lemon juice, Alice Grenville watched the woman who had waited on her for a quarter of a century perform the tasks of morning: draw back the curtains, pick up the clothes of the night before, arrange the newspapers, draw the bath. She felt overcome with affection for her.

  “Are you comfortable up there where you are, Lyd?” she suddenly asked.

  “I’m comfortable, ma’am,” replied Lyd.

  “It’s been years since I’ve been up on that floor. I can’t remember which room you have.”

  “All the way at the end of the hall.”

  “Does it look out on the park?”

  “The other end of the hall. I look out on Mrs. Vanderbilt’s house.”

  “Do you share it?”

  “Not since Mae died, ma’am. I have it alone.”

  “And the bathroom. It’s right next to you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And whom do you share it with?”

  “Kathleen and Mary and Bridgit and Maeve.”

  “Do you know what I think?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I think you ought to move down to the fifth floor, where the children’s bedrooms used to be. Take o
ne of those and have your own bath. Would you like that?”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am.”

  “I’ll have a television set put in there if there isn’t one already.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “Mr. Grenville always wanted this house to go to Billy when I died. Now I don’t know what will happen.”

  “You don’t have to worry about it now, Mrs. Grenville.”

  “I wonder what they must think upstairs.”

  “Who, ma’am?”

  “Fourteen of them up on that floor with only two bathrooms, and only me living in the rest of this enormous house.”

  “Your bath is ready, Mrs. Grenville.”

  “I’m here to see my client,” said the lawyer to the desk sergeant in the Mineola jail.

  “Your client?”

  “Horst Berger.”

  “Oh, yes, you are Mr. Strasser,” said the sergeant, going through some papers on his desk.

  “That’s correct.”

  “I have a message here for you, Mr. Strasser.”

  “Is it from the German consulate?”

  “No, sir.”

  “From whom?”

  “From Horst Berger.”

  “That’s who I’ve driven out from the city to see.”

  “He says to tell you he don’t want a lawyer.”

  “This is ridiculous.”

  “I’m just readin’ you the message as it was given to me.”

  “I would like to see Mr. Berger.”

  “It says here he don’t wish to see you.”

  “Do you know what I think, Sergeant?”

  “No.”

  “I think someone’s paying this kid to say he was where he wasn’t in order to back up this Mrs. Grenville’s story.”

  This time Chief of Detectives Stanley Pennell was not caught unaware when stopped by the reporters in front of the television news cameras. He was, in fact, prepared and almost rehearsed.

  “Our most searching investigation into the married life of this couple has revealed what is apparently a well-balanced marriage between two well-balanced people,” he said. “They had their minor disagreements, as all married couples do, but they were well adjusted and happy despite all rumors, published and otherwise, to the contrary.”