The Two Mrs. Grenvilles

by Dominick Dunne

  In Marrakesh she was asked to leave the Villa Naylor by the Countess de Guigne for luring young Moroccan boys over the wall at night.

  During her brief friendship with Chiquita McFadden, before she slept with Chiquita’s husband and ruined it, Ann and Chiquita traveled together in India, on safari, visiting various maharajas and maharanees along the way. Dressed in a pink mohair coat, a chiffon scarf over her head, pearls at her neck and wrist, she was not an inconspicuous figure when she rendezvoused with her lover at the gates of the pink palace in Jaipur.

  “Who are all these people?” she asked the wife of an American film star at a cocktail party in Gstaad. She knew perfectly well who they all were. They were the second echelon of society in the resort and climbers from the third. She realized she had been recategorized in the social structure.

  “Why doesn’t she marry again?” she heard someone say about her at one of her own parties.

  “Who would want her?” was the reply. “She gives it away so freely.”

  “Please remember that this is my party and I’m paying for it,” said Ann, flushing with anger, pointing her finger.

  “How could I forget, Mrs. Grenville?” said Count Stamir-sky. “If you weren’t paying, you wouldn’t have been invited.”

  “She made herself available to too many men for the kind of man she wanted to marry to feel he had to marry her. And the shooting was always with her.”

  Alfred Twombley

  “That woman is in town. Will you be a darling, Bertie, and come to dinner?” said Alice Grenville to Bertie Lightfoot.

  Every time Ann returned to the country, whether by ship or air, Alice Grenville sent the car to meet her. There were always flowers waiting for her at the apartment on upper Fifth Avenue that she took after she sold her house, and an invitation to dinner. It was part of a ritual that was to continue always. At least once a year, never more than twice, each of Billy’s sisters had Ann to a party. One often heard, in the drawing rooms of the city, “Yes, I saw Ann last night at Cordelia and Jack’s” or “Ann was at Felicity and Dexter’s anniversary dance last week.” Her inclusion was often noted in the society columns, and the impression was given, as it was meant to be given, that the Grenville family, in all its various branches, remained on friendly terms with their widowed in-law.

  Behind the scenes it was different. Disapprovingly, Alice Grenville saw her daughter-in-law going about with too many men, flaunting the independence of widowhood.

  “I thought you would take a house somewhere and start a new life. I never imagined you would live in hotels and wander from resort to resort with the seasons. What kind of way is that to bring up your children?”

  They were more comfortable with each other on the telephone. When they met in person, there was always another person there, usually one of the sisters, and they talked of inconsequential things—clothes, parties, plays they had seen, books they had read. On the telephone, however, Alice said what was on her mind.

  “ ‘Unseemly’ is such an old-fashioned word, but unseemly is exactly what it is.”

  “It suits you, however.”

  “They say you are often drunk or drugged.”

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  “What difference does that make, Ann? It is what is being said about you.”

  “And where there is smoke, there is fire. Is that what you’re going to say next?”

  “You are not a beloved figure, Ann, or a tragic one either. You are a mess. An embarrassing mess. Dinner is at eight promptly.”

  Ann would have liked not to go, but she did. Alice would have liked not to have her, but she did. “Do you know my daughter-in-law?” she asked new friends, taking Ann about her drawing room, and the friends marveled at the solidarity of the family and the goodness of Alice.

  Ann was not pleased to see that her mother-in-law had seated her next to Bertie Lightfoot at the table. If it had been in any other dining room in New York, she would have switched her place card, not to improve her position, as she had in the past, but to remove herself from Bertie, for whom she felt bitterness for not having rallied to her side in the months following the tragedy.

  “You’re looking marvelous, Ann,” said Bertie, knowing her to be unembarrassed by praise of her looks and appearance. He took the tactic of compliments to override the awkwardness between them.

  She chose not to answer him. She could tell that he was nervous and as displeased as herself to be so seated at Alice’s table. On the other side of her was the Spanish Ambassador to the United Nations, and she conversed with him in Spanish, about Madrid, the Prado, Horcher’s restaurant, and the marvelous towels at the Ritz Hotel. After two courses, the lady on the other side of him, Alice’s old friend Beth Leary, usurped the ambassador, with a withering look at Ann, and when he turned his head toward her, to answer her questions about the possible restoration of the monarchy after the death of Franco, she found herself excluded.

  “Are you planning on keeping the house in Oyster Bay?” asked Bertie, making a second attempt at conversation.

  “It is not a house in great demand on the real estate market,” she replied coldly, without looking at him.

  “You are living in Switzerland?” he asked.

  “I will be taking a house in Sardinia for the summer and will probably go to Ireland in the fall.” She looked straight ahead. She wondered if he had heard from Basil Plant about what had happened in Switzerland.

  “Why did I think you were in Switzerland?” he asked.

  “The children are in school there. I go there several times a year to be with them.”

  “How is Dolly?”

  “She prefers to be called Diantha,” said Ann, spacing her words, letting him know that he was intruding.

  “Look here, Ann,” he said. “I don’t know why you’re taking this position with me. Alice thought that—”

  “Oh, Alice thought, did she?” interrupted Ann. “You’ve moved up in the world to become Alice’s confidant now, have you? It’s called ‘taking advantage of a situation.’ ”

  “Please, Ann.”

  “You should have written me, Bertie, or telephoned me, at the time of the accident, or come to see me,” she said. Her words were very precise and she was very angry, although she kept her voice down and did not call attention to herself.

  “I wanted to write, but I didn’t know what to say,” said Bertie. “It was so awful.”

  “Bullshit, Bertie. You’ve never been at a loss for words about anything. If you think I’m not going to remind you that I came to your aid when you were in trouble and had no one else in New York to turn to, you’re quite wrong, because I am going to remind you of exactly that.”

  “I know, Ann. I know you did,” he replied quickly, panicked that others would pick up on the conversation.

  “I was eight months pregnant at the time, Bertie.”

  “I know.”

  “I could have made you the laughingstock of New York if I had told that story,” she said, her fury building quietly.

  “Please, Ann.”

  “All tied up and fat and naked, amid the carnage of smashed antiquities. You don’t think that would have gotten a laugh in these very circles and dining rooms where you take your position as the number-one escort of New York so seriously?”

  “Please, Ann.”

  “I never told one soul that story, not even my husband, and you couldn’t find the time or take the trouble to write me or call me because you didn’t know what to say? You, who have something to say about everything?”

  “I’m sorry, Ann,” he said, crushed by the scene. “I’m deeply sorry for you, for Billy, for the children, for the terrible tragedy that’s happened.”

  “Too late, Miss Lightfoot,” she said, meeting his gaze, knowing she had gone too far once more, mocking him at a gender level, finishing forevermore the possibility of resurrecting a friendship that she had once cared about.

  The dogwood was fading and the daffodils already withered. I
forgot to look at spring this year, thought Ann.

  She was alone in the house in Oyster Bay, without servants, without children. There was no one to observe her. She walked through the rooms of her house deciding if she could be there, or if the terrible event had darkened the premises for habitation. The furniture was covered with cretonne. Rugs were rolled up. She felt no ghostly reverberations. There, on that slipper chair, she thought, had been the gun. She walked toward her bedroom door, melding into an image of herself in her blue nightgown, black brassiere, and blue bedjacket. She opened the door, expecting him to be there to relive the scene with her so that she could know and quiet her demons.

  “Who’s there?” cried Ralph Wiggins. “Oh, my God, it’s you, Mrs. Grenville.”

  She walked past him, out to the courtyard, and got into the Rover. When she reached New York, she made plans to return to Europe. Her publicized past lingered with her, as much a part of her as a hump on her back.

  “There are some people they widen the ranks for; she was not one of them.”

  Kay Kay Somerset

  Ann had always liked Rosie Fairholm. She was one of the few, she used to say, out of that inner-circle group, who was nice to her, not because she was Billy’s wife, but because she was Ann. But Rosie Fairholm cut her dead at Harry’s Bar in Venice. She heard Rosie say, to one of the Van Degan brothers, “You simply have to draw the line somewhere. I mean, she did kill him.”

  Slowly Ann began to pass from the center of things. She was heard of as being in Marbella with a handsome French boy, but out of season. Someone saw her in Ireland at the rented castle of a Hollywood film director. There was a story about a problem in Tahiti on somebody’s yacht, and the threat of lawsuits for damages done. Brookie Herbert said she was at the feria in Seville with her two children quietly following her with brand-new cameras. But she no longer belonged anywhere. She was no longer a part of a group. She was at a side table watching the dinner party in the center of the room. She was a rich nomad, wandering from place to place, creating incidents and moving on. Banished from her land, the heights that had been her aspiration had crashed down on her like an avalanche.

  There were always young men in tow, but she clung to her distinguished name as if it were a title.

  Paco came and went. Pablo came and went. Each complained Ann was ungenerous with him on his departure. And then there was Paul. Paul was English, twenty-two years old, handsome, like all of them, but, as Ann was the first to say about him, different from all of them. He worked. He was the bartender at the Gringo Club in Sardinia, outside of Porto Cervo, where, that season, late-nighters ended up their late nights, after the dinners and dances on the Costa Esmeralda. He spent his days, when he wasn’t at the beach, where he turned very brown, and swam very well, writing a screenplay on a battered Olivetti about a Cambridge drop-out who worked as a bartender at the Gringo Club in Sardinia at the height of the season.

  It was, for Ann Grenville, lust at first sight. The group she arrived with, some second-rate titles she had met at a second-rate party on the same night the Aga Khan was entertaining the first-rate titles at a first-rate party, became bored and tired and cranky that the first-rate crowd hadn’t shown up at the Gringo and wanted not to mix with the third-rate crowd who were already there.

  “Let’s go, Ann,” said Jaime Carrera, whose well-trimmed goatee did not totally disguise his unfortunate chin. She had seated herself at the bar, on a stool, and pushed her glass toward the handsome bartender for a refill.

  “But we just got here,” she answered.

  “It’s a dog’s dinner tonight,” Jaime said, contemptuously, about the crowd. Ann, once so particular about being in the right place at the right time with the right people, yearned less those days about social perfection, knowing it had escaped from her grasp forever that night in Oyster Bay.

  “I’m staying,” she replied.

  “Lucille’s got a crowd at her house. We thought we’d go there,” he insisted.

  “You go on,” said Ann.

  “How will you get back to Cervo?” he asked.

  The bartender handed Ann a freshened drink. For the first time he met the eyes of the beautiful woman who had been staring at him for the last fifteen minutes.

  “Do you have a car, bartender?” she asked him.

  “I do,” he answered. She liked the sound of his voice. It was not too eager.

  “That’s how I’ll get back to Cervo, Jaime,” she said to her escort, gesturing her blonde head toward the bartender.

  “Anyway, I can’t stand Lucille.”

  “Don’t mix with the help, Ann,” said Jaime.

  “Buenas noches, Jaime,” she replied, dismissing him.

  She did not look after him as he left. Instead she lit a cigarette and further examined the face and figure of the young man behind the bar.

  “You don’t look like a bartender,” she said.

  “So they tell me,” he answered.

  “Let me guess. You’re really a painter.”

  “Guess again.”

  “A writer. You’re here writing the great English novel.”

  “The great English screenplay,” he corrected her.

  “Ah, movies. You see, I wasn’t that far off. You be good to me, and I’ll introduce you to my friend David Ladera. You know who that is, don’t you?”

  “Of course. He directed Candles at Lunch.”

  “By that little shit Basil Plant.”

  “You don’t like Basil, I take it.”

  “Don’t tell me you know Basil?”

  “Everyone knows Basil.”

  She opened her purse and took out some cash. “Turn this into lire, will you, and put it all in that jukebox, and let’s you and me dance for a bit.”

  “It’s a hot night to dance in here.”

  “Take off your shirt if you’re hot,” she answered.

  “You don’t mean that,” he said, smiling at her.

  “Oh, yes, I do,” she replied. “Here, I’ll unbutton it for you.”

  “Let me get somebody to take over back here,” he said, stripped to the waist. “José.”

  “You know who that is, don’t you?” whispered José to him when he asked José to take over the bar duties.

  “No.”

  “She’s the rich American lady who shot her husband.”

  “I have to go,” he whispered. Although shades and curtains and draperies kept the bedroom of this rented villa in darkness from outside, he knew that dawn must be breaking.

  “No, no, don’t go,” she whispered back, looking down on his young and handsome face. The bed they shared was lit by a lamp covered with the head scarf she had worn when he drove her home from the Gringo Club several hours earlier. He reminded her of Billy, not the Billy she had killed, but the Billy of the beginning, the beautiful Billy, when life seemed so full of love and hope.

  “I have to. I have to work.”

  “You just got home from work.”

  “My other work. I write for three hours every morning.”

  “Just put your head down there again,” she whispered. “I love the way you do that. It looks so nice, watching the top of your head do that. Oh, my darling bartender, you have what is known as a magical tongue. Now, swing around here, the rest of you, but don’t stop what you’re doing. I want to return the favor.”

  “I can’t come another time.”

  “At your age, of course you can.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Try.”

  In the building frenzy of rekindled passion, neither heard the door of the bedroom open, nor noticed the child, Third, who stood there.

  “I don’t even know your name,” she said, lifting her head from its sexual duties and then returning to them when she finished speaking.

  “Paul,” he answered, lifting his head from his.

  “Paul what?”

  “Cooper.”

  “As in Duff and Diana?”

  “I can’t talk and fuck at the same time
, and you’re getting me very close to blast-off time.”

  “My darling bartender.”

  Later, finished, he pulled on his trousers, put his feet into loafers without socks, and stuck his shirt into his belt. Dressed, ready to leave, he stood at the foot of her bed and looked down on her.

  “Was this a one-night stand, or did you have something more affairlike in mind?” he asked.

  No, she thought to herself, he isn’t a bit like Billy Gren-ville. Beneath his youth and beauty, there was a wantonness, without refinement, that matched her own. Lying nude, she looked back at him; her magnificent breasts, she knew, were at their most appealing angle. She smiled.

  “How much do you earn at the Gringo Club?” she asked.

  “Why?”

  “I’ll triple it, whatever it is. You move in here, write your movies, teach my kids how to swim and sail, and spend your nights doing what we just did all night.”

  “Will I get to meet David Ladera?”

  “He’s in Ireland.”

  “When I finish my screenplay, can we go to Ireland and show it to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re quite a lady, Mrs. Grenville.”

  “How did you know my name?”

  “You’re pretty famous, Mrs. Grenville.”

  “It’s Ann.”

  “Ann.”

  “Write well.”

  “Did you know your bedroom door was open all the time?” he asked.

  Paul was unlike Paco and unlike Pablo. He seemed to want nothing from her. In Milan she had some suits made for him, and shoes, and shirts, but they were not things that he had asked for. They were things that she wanted him to have. When the season was over in Sardinia, and they went on to the next place, after the children returned to school in Switzerland, she wanted him to look presentable, so that their situation, which was obvious to most of the people in their set in Porto Cervo, would not be so obvious when they checked into the Ritz in Paris in the fall.

  Diantha and Third had reluctantly come to accept him in their lives, although at first they were resistant to him in a way that Ann could not understand. Diantha was now fourteen. Third twelve. Sometimes she wondered about the open bedroom door and wondered if one or the other had come in that night and seen what was going on, but she did not pursue the subject with them. She was, she knew, afraid of her children in a way. When they looked at her sometimes, they looked with the look of Grenvilles, not the look of Mertenses, and she reexperienced each time the feelings of her first visit with Billy’s family when he had brought her to the great New York house to meet his mother and sisters for tea. She had always meant to sit down with her children and explain to them the circumstances of the night of the shooting, but she never had, other than repeating to them over and over in the hospital that it had been an accident. She would have been satisfied with that if she had not made the discovery that the acoustics of the house in Oyster Bay made everything that was said in her bedroom audible to the bedroom upstairs at the far end of the house where her children slept.