The Two Mrs. Grenvilles

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The Two Mrs. Grenvilles Page 33

by Dominick Dunne


  “No, Mother. I’m going to Grand’mère’s for dinner,” replied Diantha.

  “Oh.” Outside, on Fifth Avenue, a siren screamed. Ann disguised the shiver that passed through her. She had never told anyone that every time she heard a siren she shivered with fear that they—the police, the law—were coming to take her away.

  Diantha watched her mother. “Why were you so hysterical on the telephone?”

  “The maid’s gone.”

  “So what else is new? Did she quit, or did you fire her?”

  “Quit.”

  “What did you do this time? Accuse her of stealing? Or did she iron creases into your sheets, and you told her how stupid she was? I don’t even know their names anymore, Mother, they come and go so quick in this house.”

  “Will you call the agency tomorrow and get me someone else?”

  “Will I call the agency and get you someone else? No. Did it ever occur to you that it’s you, not the maids, and the cooks, and the chauffeurs, and the nannies?”

  “I’m sick.”

  “I won’t do it. Get that Prince Tchelitchew you’re always talking about. Let him hire you a new maid.”

  “His great-grandfather killed Rasputin.”

  “At least you have something in common.”

  Diantha stood up. “I’m sorry I said that, Mother. It was uncalled for. It just came out.”

  Her mother turned her head away.

  “I don’t suppose there’s anything in that pharmacy by the side of your bed so simple as an aspirin?” asked Diantha. A memory of times past struck both of them at the same time, and they looked at each other.

  “There’s a Percodan, but it seems a shame to waste that on pain.”

  “I don’t want a Percodan.”

  “Your hair’s too short.”

  “I like it like that.”

  “Are you a dyke?”

  “I might have known I could count on you to reduce my life to a four-letter word, Mother,” said Diantha, letting com-tempt pour over the word “Mother.”

  “You are, aren’t you?” asked Ann. “It’s what I always suspected. Back at Château Brillantmont, that Greek girl in your class, what was her name, the one who didn’t shave her armpits in Sardinia that summer. Oh, I know all about her. I asked Ari and Stavros who she was. Not even one of the good Greeks. Salad oil, or something like that. I mean, they roared with laughter about her family.”

  “The next time you have one of your emergencies, don’t call me. I don’t want to hear from you again. I like living in Seattle. I like running a bookstore. I like never having anyone say to me, ‘Aren’t you the one whose mother killed your father?’ No one ever heard of us out in Seattle, and if people mispronounce my name and call me Granville, I never even correct them, because I know it’s me they’re responding to, not the name of my illustrious family.”

  “You can’t go back.”

  “Oh, yes I can. That’s why I’m having my farewell dinner with Grand’mère.”

  “I won’t leave you my money if you go. It won’t be easy for you.”

  “That’s what it’s all about with you, isn’t it, Mother, the money? You know, I don’t care about your money, but one of the things Grand’mère had me do while I was here was see old Mr. Mendenhall down at the bank, and you don’t have any say over your money. It’s only on loan to you for as long as you live. It’s not yours to give. My father saw to that. He was willing to have it taxed doubly and triply in order not to give you any rights over the disposition of it.”

  “Is that what Mr. Mendenhall told you?”

  “I’m going to be the richest one of anybody. I’m going to have your money, and Third’s money, and Granny’s money, when she dies. I’m going to be worth millions. I’m going to be one of the richest girls of my generation.”

  “I never saw this side to you before, Diantha.”

  “I may have my father’s looks, but I’m as tough as my mother when pushed to the edge, and you have pushed me to the edge. Don’t you think at some point in our lives, you owed us an explanation, Third and me, about what happened? Not your story, your famous story from which you never veered, not for your whole life, but what happened, what really happened that night? I was eleven years old, remember. I wasn’t any babe in arms. We heard you fighting with Daddy that night. Do you ever think about it? Do you ever dream about it? Do you ever run it over in your mind and relive those minutes when you picked up the shotgun and killed him?”

  “Is that what you’ve always thought about me?”

  “Always.”

  “And Third, too?”

  “And Third, too.”

  “Why didn’t Third ever say anything to me?”

  “He did. He jumped out a window. That was his statement to you. He sent you a Mother’s Day card. It was Mother’s Day, you know, the day he jumped. I often wondered if you had noticed.”

  “Dear God.”

  “You never talked to us about anything. You had a mother and a father and aunts and a life in Kansas, and you never told us a word about that part of your life, and we were your children. We wouldn’t have snubbed you. You never talked about your past for all the years we lived in your houses and hotel suites as your children. All we ever heard about was Jaime, and Pablo, and Paul, and Vere, and Gianni, and Gunther, and—”

  “Don’t leave me, Diantha. I’m afraid to be alone. Jaime’s gone. Jaime left me. He opened up my purse and took all the money out and called me some terrible names and left. He said I was old.”

  “I have to go. I can’t be late for my grandmother. Goodbye, Mother.”

  For several long moments I stood there staring after the retreating figure of Ann Grenville. Was this, I wondered, the point of my trip? Nowadays, with all the legal technicalities available to criminal offenders, the guilty walk among us, exonerated, and a few I could mention are lionized as social catches by some of the same people who slammed their doors in the face of Ann Grenville nearly three decades ago.

  My story began to form. I am the receptacle of other people’s secrets and have long understood there is no point in having a secret if you make a secret of it. Yes, she warned me off her, but I sensed that in time, the next day, or the next, she would return to her post by the ship’s rail to stare at the coastline. She had started to talk, and then withdrew, but she would come again, and I would be there.

  It was her Fracas perfume I smelled before I realized she was standing beside me, her elbows leaning on the rail. She made no sign of greeting.

  “Do you suppose that’s Seattle we’re passing?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “My daughter, Diantha, lives there. She runs a bookshop, of all things. I once longed for her to be a figure in social life, but she, wise girl, wanted no part of it. We are—what is the right word to use?—estranged.”

  “How many children do you have?” I asked, knowing perfectly well how many children she had.

  She hesitated a moment, eyeing me deeply. “Why is it I never trusted you, Basil?”

  “Too much alike, maybe,” I offered for an explanation.

  “I think I recognize in you the things I dislike about myself,” she said.

  “That’s what I mean,” I answered.

  “I had two children, and one of them is dead, as you probably know.”

  “Yes, yes, I had heard.”

  “It’s hard when people ask how many children I have. I never know whether to say ‘Two, and one is dead,’ or just ‘One.’ If I say ‘One,’ I feel guilty about poor Third, but when I say ‘Two, and one is dead,’ I have to explain.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I am, too. I was a lousy mother. In many ways I was frightened of my kids when they were little. They were so incredibly upper class. They were Grenvilles, and I was always an outsider with the Grenvilles.”

  “I’m sure your kids didn’t feel that.”

  “That’s what my daughter told me the last time I saw her.”

 
“Was it an illness?”

  “No.”

  “An accident?”

  “No. It was a suicide. I spent several years saying it was an accident, that his jump out the fifth-floor window of his grandmother’s house was a fall. But it wasn’t. Heirs to ten million dollars don’t wash their own windows, especially at five o’clock in the morning, in a house filled with servants. But that is what I insisted happened, and if I was able to convince people of that, then I believed it was so.”

  “Perhaps it was so,” I said.

  She shook her head slowly. “There was a note, written on a Mother’s Day card. Did I tell you it was Mother’s Day when he jumped?”

  I was moved by her admission. “Terrible things have happened to you,” I said.

  “Sometimes I think I make terrible things happen,” she replied quietly.

  “Ann,” I said, matching her quietness, my business unfinished. “Esme Bland told Jeanne Twombley you were married before Billy married you, and you’d never gotten a divorce.”

  What was it I read on her face at that moment? Shock? Fear? Or relief? “Perhaps that’s why Esme Bland is in the loony bin today,” she answered, as if it were an answer.

  “Is it true, Ann?” I persisted, but she had turned away.

  I longed for a drink. Cruise festivities were in high gear in the public rooms of the old ship. I pretended I did not see Mr. Shortell from Tacoma waving to me to join his table of merrymakers in party hats. In my stateroom were dozens of the miniature bottles of Scotch whisky that I had taken to stuffing my pockets with in recent years, for bathroom gulps during editorial meetings, and I repaired there. One. Two. Three. I gulped them down and reached for one of the lined yellow tablets by my bunk and took a sharpened soft-lead pencil from a drawer and began to write in my neat precise hand.

  The telephone rang. It was long after midnight. I knew before I picked up the telephone that it was going to be her.

  “Hello?”

  “Basil?”

  “Hi.”

  “It’s Ann Grenville.”

  “I know.”

  “There’s something that’s bothering me that I’ve got to get off my chest,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Are you writing down everything I was saying to you?”

  “Of course not,” I replied, rising from my bunk, letting go of both tablet and pencil.

  “This is my life. These are my secrets. It would be very painful for me,” she said, discounting my reply. “I’ll sue you if you betray me.”

  “I’m not,” I repeated.

  “Basil?”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t want to walk into that bar alone with all those people in funny hats,” she said.

  “Want me to walk in with you?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Five minutes?”

  “Yes.”

  You see, at some subliminal level of her, she was setting it up for me to do what she said she did not want me to do. That was the night I decided to write her story.

  She did not want the solitude of the deck. She wanted to be where the crowd was, but not part of the crowd. There was but one table left in the noisy bar, and we made our way to it. I ordered a bottle of wine, and for a moment or two we watched the revelers on the dance floor.

  “I always wanted to dance with you,” I confessed to her.

  “Now’s not your chance,” she replied, but she was pleased to have been asked.

  “Once I saw you dancing at the Stork Club, and you sang the lyrics of the song into the ear of the man you were dancing with, and I thought to myself, ‘This is the reason I came to New York, to see people like this.’ ”

  “That was probably Billy,” she answered, smiling. “He used to love it when I did that.”

  The wine came. I poured for us both. She drank a glass in a few swallows, and I poured her another.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said finally. She did not raise her voice to combat the din of the room. Instead she turned her head and leaned toward me, her chin on her hand, so that she talked directly into my ear. “You’re the first person who ever said that to me, what you said about Esme Bland.”

  “Was it true?”

  “Do many people know that? Is it a thing that’s said about me, that I was married before Billy Grenville and not divorced?”

  “I don’t think so. No one believed Esme,” I said.

  “She’s in the bins, Esme,” said Ann.

  “So you said.”

  “Funny that she would have known.”

  “Is it true?”

  “Billy bought an airplane a week before he died. The plant where they built the plane was in the very same little town in southwest Kansas where I was born and where I fled from when I was seventeen and had returned to only once, when I went home to bury my mother. It was just a coincidence. I didn’t know until the night he died that that was where he’d gone to buy the plane.”

  “And that’s where Billy found out?”

  “He said at the factory that he thought his wife was from that town, but no one remembered me, which is the way I always wanted it. But one of the men at the aircraft plant called Billy later at the motel where he was staying and they went out for dinner in a Chinese restaurant, and he told Billy that if his wife’s name was Urse Mertens, he was married to me.”

  I reached for the bottle of wine. She placed her fingers over the glass to tell me that she cared for no more, but I poured anyway, over her fingers, between her-fingers, filling her glass again, and all the time she went on talking, so absorbed was she in releasing her secrets, even licking her wine-coated fingers before drying them on a cocktail napkin, as if she had not noticed.

  “His name was Veblen. Billy Bob Veblen. I was only married to him for two days, and he went off to join the Marines. Then I left Kansas City for New York to do an audition for George White’s Scandals, which I didn’t get, but I never went back. I changed my name and started a career in clubs. I always intended to get a divorce one day, but I didn’t do anything about it, and then I met Billy Grenville, and everything happened so quickly.”

  “I always heard you met and married in ten days,” I said, but she seemed not to have heard me and proceeded with her story at her own pace as the noise level in the ship’s bar grew louder and louder.

  “There’s no way to describe to you what it was like, the romance, the glamour of it, being pursued by a young man like Billy Grenville. It was like being in the midst of a drama, and nothing, absolutely nothing, was going to mar that chance for me, to make a marriage like that. The reason he fell so madly in love with me—and make no mistake about that, he did fall madly in love with me, in a way that he could never have fallen madly in love with any of the ladies of his own circle—was that I saved him from what he most deeply feared about himself.”

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “You of all people ought to be able to figure that one out, Basil. It happened in a lot of those families. And he wasn’t going to let me go. His family hated me. Oh, they were polite and courteous, as they always are, even to this day, but I was not what they had in mind for their darling Junior, which is what they called him in those days. When they saw he was determined, his mother tried to talk him into waiting until after the war, but if we had done that, it never would have happened. I knew I could only marry him if it happened quickly. One more obstacle besides the fact that I was a show girl, like having to get a divorce first, or even being divorced, and I would have lost him, and I took the chance.”

  “Go on,” I urged quietly, as she seemed to falter.

  “I used to live in horror that what happened would happen, that Billy would someday find out, but when it didn’t, I gradually forgot about it, that first marriage, and as the years went by it became to me like a thing that never happened. And then about six months before the acc—before Billy was killed, I saw my first husband in the coffee shop of the Astor Hotel and pretended I didn’t know who
he was. It was like an omen of what was going to happen.”

  “What was he doing there?”

  “He was on a convention for the aircraft plant where Billy later bought his plane,” she said. “It was all in the works, I guess. I’ll say this for Billy. He was always a gentleman. He asked me for a divorce on the way to Edith Bleeker’s party that night, and I turned him down flat, saying he knew my price, which was exactly half of all his money, knowing he’d never agree to that. I still thought I had the upper hand. It wasn’t until we got home from Edith’s party, where I had made an ass out of myself over a phone call Billy got, that he told me he’d met my first husband and that I was still married to him when we were married. He called me Mrs. Veblen. It was like the bottom fell out of my life. It meant that he didn’t even have to leave me with sufficient financial provision. I panicked, you see. I totally panicked. The only thing I could think of was the newspapers saying that I was a bigamist. He went in to take a shower, and I went down to the gun room and got the gun. There was that prowler, you remember. Fortuituous, that prowler. Billy had said, about the prowler, that we would shoot first and ask questions later. I screamed, as if the prowler were in the house, and Billy came charging in and I fired twice and killed him. I didn’t know what I’d done until after I’d done it, and then it was too late.”

  She pulled back from me, reached in her bag, and got out a cigarette. While I reached for a match, she lit her own cigarette, inhaled deeply, and exhaled as she quietly said, “People say I got away with it. Ha. Do you call this getting away with it? Sometimes I wonder if prison wouldn’t have been better.”

  I didn’t answer, nor did she expect me to. “It was madness what I did,” she went on. “I thought his family would turn on me, publicly disavow me. I thought the shooting would be proof positive to them that I was everything they ever thought I was, and worse.

  “But no. They publicly embraced me, for all the world to see. They stood by me. They said they believed me. They said they grieved for me.

  “And they did. Publicly. Privately was something else. But you see, Basil, Alice Grenville didn’t do it for me. She did it for my children. For the Grenville name.

 

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