The Two Mrs. Grenvilles

by Dominick Dunne

  The reporters were disgruntled with his answer. Between them they thought of Inspector Pennell as a toady to the rich of the North Shore.

  “Why did she make a telephone call to some unknown person after the shooting before she called the police?” asked the Hearst reporter, not for the first time.

  “There was no call made by Mrs. Grenville after the shooting to anyone except the operator to ask for the police,” replied Pennell. “I would like to set that rumor to rest. Oyster Bay does not have the dial system, and therefore every call must be placed with the operator on duty. The telephone company has no record of any such call.”

  “We’ve all heard of telephone records being suppressed before, Inspector Pennell,” said O’Brien from the Daily Mirror.

  Stanley Pennell ignored the reporter and continued with his statement. “I have found nothing in all of this investigation to indicate that the shooting of William Grenville was other than purely accidental.”

  The strain had told upon her. She needed no mirror to remind her that youth had left her forever. That she was not three years younger than her late husband, as had always been supposed, by her own admission, but five years older had been made much of in the press, because of her father’s unfortunate interview with a reporter who had managed to track him down in a suburb of Detroit. The eight forgotten years, and more, had found themselves on her face in the twenty-two days since the night of the killing.

  She dressed in silence in the black of widowhood, stopping only to gulp black coffee and inhale deeply on a Camel cigarette that rested in the saucer. She brushed her hair and powdered her face without meeting her own eye in the mirror provided by Miss Toomey. Finally she put on her black broadtail coat and wide-brimmed black hat, to which a black veil had been attached, to drop when the time came. She was ready for the ordeal ahead.

  “I’ve put your tranquilizers in your gold pillbox inside your bag, Mrs. Grenville,” said Miss Toomey.

  “Thank you.”

  “Here’s your black gloves. It’s bitter cold out there today.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And your black glasses.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Dr. Skinner’s going to wheel you down in the wheelchair, and Mr. Rosenthal is already downstairs, and the two gentlemen will take you from the wheelchair to the car at the hospital entrance.”

  “Did my mother-in-law send her car?”

  “No, ma’am, it’s Lee, your own chauffeur, in your Rover. I heard Mr. Rosenthal say that would look better to the reporters than a great limousine.”

  “Thank you for everything, Miss Toomey. I would like you to take this,” said Ann, opening the black bag and taking out an envelope.

  “It’s not necessary, Mrs. Grenville.”

  “Please.”

  “I’ll pack up all your things, and the pictures of the children, and have them sent over to your house.”

  “Thank you.” Ann wanted to tell this good woman that she was frightened to go to Mineola to face the grand jury, but Sam Rosenthal, who knew about such things, had told her not to confide in other people about anything because they might sell her story to the press.

  “Good luck, Mrs. Grenville.”

  “Mrs. Grenville was greatly concerned with the prowler that night,” said Kay Kay Somerset on the stand. “As was Mr. Grenville. They talked of nothing else.”

  “You know of no argument that took place between Mr. and Mrs. Grenville at Mrs. Bleeker’s house?” asked the district attorney.

  “Argument? There was no argument that I know of,” said Kay Kay.

  “Are you aware that Mr. Grenville received a telephone call that night?”

  “I’m not aware of that.”

  “Did Mrs. Grenville throw a drink at Mr. Grenville and break some of Mrs. Bleeker’s china?”

  “Goodness, no. I certainly would have known about that if it had happened. I don’t know how these stories get started. Billy and Ann, Mr. and Mrs. Grenville rather, were as they always were that night, divine.”

  “Thank you, Miss Somerset. That will be all. Will you call the telephone operator, Mrs. Gaedgens, please. And have the cook, Anna Gorman, standing by.”

  Sam Rosenthal walked back and forth between the courtroom and an office that had been made available for Ann to wait in away from the reporters and photographers.

  “There’s a discrepancy between the time the guard said he heard the shots and the time the telephone operator said she got your call for help,” reported Rosenthal.

  Ann, pale, sat there knitting with a madness of speed, like a contestant in a knitting race. Both she and Sam knew they were talking about the time during which she had called Sam that night, but neither of them said it.

  “It was the night Daylight Savings ended, did you know that?” asked Sam. “So everyone’s fucked up about the time.”

  “Spring forward. Fall back,” mumbled Ann to herself.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  The door to the hallway was ajar. Ann looked up from her knitting as Horst Berger, the prowler of the North Shore, walked past accompanied by two uniformed guards. For an instant their eyes met. Each recognized the other from photographs in the newspapers. He, she knew, was her salvation. One of the guards roughly pulled him on.

  She heard the clang of a cell door swinging closed, and the sound of the key in the lock, loud and metallic. Her body stiffened as a shiver ran through it. When she raised her eyes, she saw that Sam Rosenthal was looking at her, as if testing her reaction to the sound of what might have been her own fate. A blush flushed her cheeks.

  “It’s warm in here,” she said, opening her broadtail coat.

  “Steam heat,” answered Sam in agreement.

  “They’re ready for you, Mrs. Grenville,” said a police officer.

  Her appearance before the grand jury was brief. Escorted to the stand by Sam Rosenthal, who stayed by her while she swore on a Bible to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, she spoke barely above a whisper throughout the proceedings. Both the judge and the district attorney deferred to her importance with unfailing courtesy.

  “I am sorry to have to put you through this, Mrs. Grenville,” said the district attorney, “but would you recount for us, to the best of your ability, step by step, exactly what took place on the night of October thirty-first at your estate in Oyster Bay.”

  It was a story from which Ann Grenville had never veered, from the night of the shooting, and was never to veer, not for the rest of her life. She recounted her devotion to her husband. She told of her deep fear of the prowler and the decision of her husband to take guns to bed that night for protection of themselves and their children. She was awakened, she said, by a sound. She rose from her bed. She picked up her gun, a double-barreled shotgun that her husband had had specially made for her. She opened the door of her bedroom. There she saw the figure of a man in the dark hallway that separated the bedrooms of her husband and herself. She fired her gun twice. Almost instantly, she said, crying hysterically now on the stand, she realized the man she had mistaken for the prowler was her husband. At that point she collapsed in grief.

  The eighteen-man jury hung on every word, completely fascinated by the former show girl turned society woman. Several of the jurors wept with her. Their verdict was swift. Ann Grenville was found blameless in the shooting death of her husband. It was termed a tragic accident. There were to be no criminal proceedings brought against her. There was to be no trial. Her ordeal was over.

  Driving back from Mineola to New York City that night, Ann returned to her house for the first time since the shooting.

  “Mrs. Grenville Blameless!” screamed the headlines.

  Sighs of relief were audible from Maine to Southampton. The sighs were not for the good fortune of Mrs. Grenville. The sighs were for the private, privileged, Protestant existences which Mrs. Grenville’s damnable deed had almost laid open for the world to see. They had closed ranks and pro
tected her, an outsider in their midst, but what they were protecting really was themselves. Now they could return to governing, to banking, to business, to sport, and to pleasure knowing that their superiority, although cracked a bit, remained undaunted.

  “Thank God for Alice Grenville,” men said at the Brook Club, the Knickerbocker Club, the Union Club, and the Racquet Club. “She did the right thing.” They were gentlemen in high places, and they looked after one another like the old schoolmates they once were.

  If the Duchess of Windsor should come,” she said to her maid, “or Mrs. Bleeker, be sure to let me know, and I’ll see them right away ahead of the others.”

  It was the day Ann Grenville had decreed she would accept her condolences. Declared blameless by the grand jury, she believed her acquittal and felt the suspicions of others would be allayed by it. The speculation of the press as to her culpability in the tragedy was at an end, and she was ready to begin her life again. She saw herself as a tragic figure, a participant in a ghastly accident, and she saw no reason why others would not accept the court’s validation of her situation. Through Cordelia she let it be known that she would like to see her friends on an early December afternoon. It had distressed her, during her hospitalization, to hear of the many condolence messages that had been sent to her mother-in-law and sisters-in-law, messages she felt should have been sent to her.

  She examined her house, from which she had been absent a month. She puffed up needlepoint cushions and arranged them in exact positions. She filled jade boxes with cigarettes. She lessened flower arrangements so as to diminish any appearance of festivity or party-giving. It was her intention to receive her callers upstairs in her bedroom one or two at a time while the others mingled in the living room with tea or drinks waiting their turn.

  Sheets from Paris, sprayed with flowers and butterflies, scalloped and monogrammed, adorned her bed. Dressed in a satin-and-lace nightgown with matching negligee, she arranged herself on a chaise longue by the window so that when her guests entered they would find her reclining gracefully against the velvet cushions.

  Her doorbell rang below. She speculated who it would be. The duchess, she thought. Or Edith Bleeker. Or both together probably. It rang again. Petal Wilson, she thought Jeanne Twombley. Even Kay Kay Somerset. Or Eve Soby, if she wasn’t tight already. From beneath her counterpane she produced her compact and applied powder again to her face and expressed satisfaction with her choice of a pale lipstick. There was a tap on her door.

  “Come in,” she said in a quiet voice.

  “You have a visitor, ma’am,” said the maid.

  “Thank you, Mary,” said Ann. “Send her in.”

  In came Babette Van Degan.

  “Oh, Babette,” said Ann. It was not who she was expecting. “Who else is here?”

  “Honey, there’s nobody here but us Cinderellas,” said Babette.

  Later, after Babette, she lay motionless on her chaise longue, beginning to realize that she had been ignored. Partially smoked cigarettes were ground into a Lowestoft plate by her side. Her eyes were red from crying. On a table next to her was a bowl of ice and half a dozen linen napkins, four of them soaked, that she used to keep her lids from swelling. Even Bertie Lightfoot, she thought bitterly, had not come.

  At a sound in the street she peered out through her drawn curtains. Outside gold chairs and round tables were being delivered to a neighbor’s house for a large party. She stared. A florist’s truck pulled up. From behind her curtains she counted the number of pink-and-red rose centerpieces and estimated there would be forty-eight for dinner. Feeling rejected, although she did not know her neighbors, she wondered if she would ever again be asked anywhere.

  In the shock of the happening, and the aftermath in the hospital and the court, she had buried deep within her all feelings of loss, grief, responsibility—perhaps, or perhaps not, to be dealt with at a later time. Now she experienced the sense of the void of his presence in her life. It was the hour that Billy usually came home after having stopped at one of his clubs to have a drink or play backgammon or talk horses with Alfred Twombley or Piggy French. He would open the door and call out, “I’m home,” and the children would scream, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” and madly running footsteps would be heard racing down the several flights of stairs from the nursery to the living room. At that moment her longing for the man she had killed was overwhelming.

  Her vermeil clock, which had once been given to the Empress Elizabeth of Austria by the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, struck three. She was exhausted, but sleep eluded her again. She twisted and turned, trapped by her own thoughts, her vitality ebbing away in the darkness of the room she had once shared with her husband.

  She could summon up no other picture of him than how he had looked dead, his face still so handsome, his head partially blown away. When that face crept into her dreams, as it began to do, she awakened from her pill-induced sleep, her satin-and-lace nightgown drenched with wet sweat, her moist hair clinging soggily to her face and forehead. She lay there in a state of near paralysis for several minutes until her heart calmed. Then she reached for the Porthault towel that she now took to bed with her each night, dried her face and armpits in the darkness, and took two more of the turquoise-and-scarlet capsules that were always at hand.

  “Everybody dropped her like a hot potato. Most people wouldn’t have her in the house.”

  Kay Kay Somerset

  “Was there any mail, Myrna?” Ann asked her secretary.

  “Only bills, which I have taken up to the office, a letter from the headmistress of Spence, which I did not open and left on your desk, an invitation to—”

  “To what?” asked Ann, too quickly, she realized.

  “To the showing of the Mainbocher collection.”

  “Oh.”

  “And the new edition of the Social Register, which I put on the telephone table in the sitting room.”

  “Thank you.” She had forgotten about the Social Register. She wondered if they had dropped her name. Poor Babette made it for the two years she was married to Dickie Van Degan and then was never listed again. And Patsy French was dropped when Piggy named the groom at their stable as correspondent in their divorce. And Bratsie Bleeker’s Mexican movie star disappeared from the pages in the edition following his demise. She did not want it to be apparent to her secretary that the matter was of any consequence to her, so she continued to read the latest issue of Harper’s Bazaar until Myrna left the room to attend to a household matter.

  When she was alone, she leaped to her feet and darted to the telephone table in her sitting room, where the latest edition of the Social Register had been placed next to her Louis Vuitton address book. She positioned herself in such a way that if Myrna English appeared in the doorway she would not be able to see what Ann was reading.

  From years of practice she opened the book instantly to the G’s, even to the Gr’s. She turned two pages to the correct page. There, of course, was Alice, Mrs. William Grenville, Senior, in all her social perfection. Ann hardly dared to lower her eyes to the next name, fearing in her heart that it would be Diantha and Third, without her.

  But it was there. Mrs. William Grenville, Junior, her address, her telephone number, her clubs, her children, all in their proper place. An immense feeling of relief passed through her. She felt that her own position in New York was inviolate, that she was not simply an appendage to her deceased husband.

  She looked at a photograph of Billy in a silver frame on her desk, looked away, looked back again. She did not care to meet its eye. Abruptly she placed it face down on the table. It remained so for several days. The maid dared not move it. One day it was gone.

  The velvet ropes were not put up to bar her way into the smart clubs and restaurants where she had become a fixture in the decade of her social success, but the attitudes of the proprietors and captains and maître d’s who bowed her in were different. They remained courteous as always, but were less effusive in their welcomes. There were those
, they knew, who did not wish to dine in proximity to the woman who had killed one of their own. For the first time Ann Grenville sometimes reached into her purse and rewarded her greeters with cash, in the manner of rich out-of-towners trying to establish credentials in fashionable watering holes.

  She walked into “21” at the height of the lunch hour, without a reservation, in the company of a Spanish couple who were visiting New York. For a moment there was silence throughout the chattering crowd; not a person did not turn to look at her. On her face she fixed an expression of nonchalance as Mac Kriendler led her across the first section of the room to the table where members of the Grenville family were used to being seated. All her life she had craved to be the center of attention, and, in disgrace, she had succeeded.

  Piggy French watched her entrance and turned quickly back to engage himself in conversation with his luncheon companions, hunching himself over his martini as if to make himself invisible.

  “Hello, Piggy,” cried out Ann, passing his table, in her exaggerated society-woman voice, as if the circumstances of their friendship were unchanged.

  Piggy French looked up as if he had not been aware of her and only half rose from his chair, saying as he did, “Oh, hello,” not calling her by name.

  Ann stopped and kissed him, first on one cheek and then on the other, in the fashion of their group, giving the impression of great friendship and the continuation of her husband’s lifelong affection. She looked him in the eye and held his gaze with almost a defiance. She had learned to tell what the other person felt about her by reading the look in their eyes. Piggy mumbled something in reply and did not introduce her to his guests. Ann walked on to her table and reseated the Spaniards, who had already seated themselves.

  “I wasn’t a bit pleased to be kissed by her,” said Piggy to his guests when conversation resumed.