“I’m trying to locate Diantha. I wondered if you knew where she was.”
“She lives in Seattle.”
“I know, but she’s not there, and I thought she might have been in touch with you. You see, I haven’t seen her in quite a while, and I would like to talk to her.”
“Is something the matter?”
“I need to talk to her.”
“I’m playing bridge, Ann. Couldn’t you call tomorrow?”
“Goodbye, Mère.”
She had not called her mother-in-law Mère for many years, and Alice listened.
“I’m sorry,” said Ann, very quietly.
“About what?” asked Alice.
Ann’s answer could scarcely be heard. “About Billy,” she said.
“You’ll have to talk louder, Ann. You know I have trouble hearing. What are you sorry about?”
“I’m sorry that I disturbed your bridge game.”
She sat down at her ormolu escritoire and began to write a letter to her daughter. “I want to set the record straight,” she wrote, offering her estranged child the explanation she had never given her. From the bathroom cabinet she took a vial of Seconal pills and began, slowly, to swallow them with the iced vodka as she wrote.
She remembered that in her closet, hidden behind racks of clothes and furs, was the Salvador Dali portrait, and she wanted to look at it. The pills were starting to work, and she knew that she had to act quickly. She pulled the picture out and looked at it. The slash where she had once attacked it with a knife had been repaired, she could not remember how. She looked at the face of the beautiful young woman in whom the artist had seen evil. She wondered why she had not destroyed the picture. Weakened by her intake of pills, she had to return to her bed before she could replace the picture in its hiding place.
On her bed she picked up her telephone once more and dialed the number of her house in Oyster Bay. The telephone was immediately answered.
“Hello?”
“May I speak with Father Hodiac, please.”
“This is Father Hodiac.”
“This is Ann Grenville, Father.”
“Oh, Mrs. Grenville.” His voice sounded glad to hear her.
“Has the man come to see you about your darkroom yet?”
“The darkroom? I don’t understand.”
“For your photography.”
“Oh, no, not yet.”
“Are you all right, Mrs. Grenville?”
“Yes.” Her voice was weak. “Father?”
“Yes?”
“I’m not a Catholic.”
“I know.”
“Can you pray for someone who’s not a Catholic?”
“Of course.”
“Pray for me, Father.”
“Of course.”
“Do you like the house?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Once I went upstairs in that house, after my husband’s death, and I was standing in the bedroom where my children had slept when they were little. From downstairs, way on the other side of the house, in the rooms where my husband and I slept, I could hear people talking as clearly as if they were in the room next to me. Through some acoustical fluke in the architecture, their voices carried up through the walls. That was how I realized that my children had heard their father and me fight on the night that he was killed. It has always haunted me. If you should ever meet my daughter, Diantha, will you tell her that, Father? Will you tell her I’m sorry? Will you tell her I love her.”
“Mrs. Grenville, are you all right?”
“Promise, Father.”
“I promise.”
“I have to go, Father.”
As she lay there dying, her hair, makeup, dress, nails, all perfectly attended to, she wondered if anyone would come to her funeral. She wondered if Alice Grenville would bury her next to Billy and Third in the family plot. She even wondered about God, if there really was more afterward, if you really did meet up with those who had gone before. She looked forward to the possibility of encountering Billy Grenville.
* * *
The obituary said Ann Grenville had been found dead in her duplex apartment on upper Fifth Avenue. It said she was the widow of sportsman William Grenville, Junior, the mother of Diantha Grenville, the daughter-in-law of Alice Grenville, the philanthropist. It said she had a history of heart ailments. It said she was fifty-two years old. It said she had been cleared in 1955 of slaying her husband.
A lot of people didn’t see the obituary, and by the time the word was out, most of the ones who might have come had gone to the country for the weekend. The service took place at St. James’ Episcopal Church, on Madison Avenue and Seventy-first Street, with not a single photographer or reporter in sight and barely thirty people in attendance. The thing that was on each person’s mind was the other funeral of twenty years before, the companion piece to this, when one thousand people had crowded into the same church, with thousands more lined up outside to watch, and the flags of the Brook Club, the Union Club, the Knickerbocker Club, and the Racquet Club had flown at half-mast, in tribute. No flags flew today.
One who did see the obituary was Babette Van Degan. She became aware of the slow thump of her heartbeat against her ample breast. Tears welled in her eyes. If Ann Grenville had been hovering about, as some think the dead do, watching the reactions to her demise, she would have been surprised to see that Babette Van Degan, who had not figured importantly in the events of her life for many years, exhibited a remorse, in the privacy of her boudoir, greater than that of any of the principal players in her story. But then, for someone who created the role she played in life, as Ann Grenville had created her role, she very often misjudged the effects of her spectacular performance.
“They could have held this at the side altar,” whispered Babette to the man beside her, Bertie Lightfoot, as they waited in a pew midway in the nearly empty church for the service to begin. “Surprised to see you here, Bertie,” she added when he did not reply.
“I’m only here because of dear Alice,” whispered Bertie Lightfoot in his precise and slightly sibilant voice, feeling it necessary to declare what branch of the grand Grenville family he was allied with. “Alice is my friend.”
Babette looked sideways at Bertie Lightfoot and decided not to say what it was on her mind to say. Instead she took in his exquisitely groomed self and leaned closer toward him, squinting her eyes, knowing how uncomfortable it made him, and decided his eyes had been “done” and his reddish-tinged hair touched up.
“I didn’t know Ann had a history of heart ailments,” whispered Bertie in a conciliatory manner, anxious to have Ba-bette’s scrutiny of him terminated.
“She wasn’t fifty-two either, darling, as you perfectly well know,” answered Babette, pulling the voluminous folds of her mink coat around her. She was glad the weather had turned autumnal and brisk. She was sick to death of Indian summer. She felt less obese when she could lose herself in her furs.
“You mean she didn’t have a history of heart ailments?” whispered Bertie again, a bit of excitement in his whisper, as it began to dawn on him what might have happened.
“Shhhh,” said Babette, tapping the forefinger of her gloved hand against her lips, smearing it with lipstick the way she smeared her coffee cups with lipstick. “Your eyebrows are hitting what used to be your hairline.”
“You don’t mean …?”
“There’s your friend Alice coming in.”
“She’s such a wonderful woman,” said Bertie. Whenever people mentioned Alice Grenville’s name, they invariably said about her that she was a wonderful woman. Everyone knew what she had done for her daughter-in-law.
“Did you ever stop to think how many caskets she’s followed down this aisle?” asked Babette.
Bertie Lightfoot looked back to where the eight pallbearers were lining up, four to a side, by the rose-covered casket in the rear of the church, and then back at Babette Van Degan again, questions churning within him.
Alice Grenv
ille moved slowly down the aisle to the front pew of the church where she had worshiped most of her life. Tall, slender, erect of carriage, her only concession to her advanced years was the ivory-handled ebony cane that she carried. Black-veiled, formidable still, she evoked feelings of awe from the scattered assemblage. She stared straight ahead, but it was not lost on her how few were there, or even that Babette Van Degan, a name from the past, had grown enormously fat.
Beside Alice, but not assisting her as one assists the elderly, walked and sat her granddaughter Diantha Grenville. Hatless, plainly dressed, only just returned to New York for the occasion at hand, she was unmistakably her parents’ daughter, although she possessed neither the beauty of Ann Grenville nor the aristocratic elegance of Billy Grenville. Like her grandmother, she was there to do her duty.
Old Dr. Kinsolving, who had performed at Grenville baptisms, weddings, and funerals for nearly forty years, was gone, of course, long since dead, and a new minister, without connections to the family, went about the religious duties: a few psalms; a hymn, some prayers for the dead; no personal words of farewell; the amenities observed, nothing more.
Alice Grenville looked up at the rose window that she had given in memory of the three William Grenvilles who had gone before her, her husband William, her son Billy, and her grandson Third. The late-morning sun shone through its stained glass, and rose and violet rays fell on her and Diantha, missing the casket of Ann Grenville.
Her doctor had forbidden her to make the long journey to Woodlawn Cemetery, but Alice overruled his decision, as she knew she was going to when she agreed to comply with it, and accompanied the small cortege to watch her daughter-in-law be buried in the Grenville plot, between her husband and, her son. Never could it be said of Alice Grenville that she had failed to honor her beloved son’s widow.
Afterward, for the reception, the receiving of the loyal who had attended the service and journeyed to Woodlawn Cemetery, Diantha volunteered to take over the hostess obligations at her mother’s apartment on Fifth Avenue, freeing her grandmother to return to her own home, her duties completed. Ann Grenville’s apartment was shortly to be sold and its contents to be auctioned. James Crocus, of the Parke-Bernet auctioneer firm, was already at work—sorting, cataloguing, appraising—but he remained upstairs throughout.
Some of the guests knew each other. Some of them didn’t. A few came out of curiosity, attracted by the negative glamour of Ann Grenville’s story. There was Babette Van Degan, of course, and Bertie Lightfoot, and Kay Kay Somerset, and Prince Tchelitchew, who had been friends of Ann’s at different points in her life. There was a Brazilian woman whose name none of them seemed to know. There was a crisp and tweedy Miss Petrie, who had once been a social secretary for Ann. And a few others. And me, Basil Plant, who looked and felt awkward, as if I should not have been there.
The entrance hall had a black-and-white marble floor and a graceful winding stairway. To the right was the drawing room where they gathered. It was a high-ceilinged gilt-and-white room, but dark. Antique furniture, in far too great abundance, filled it in multiple groupings in the French manner. She always had far too much furniture, far too many dresses, far too many fur coats, far too many pairs of shoes. It was one of the things about her that gave her away. Of course, there were very good pictures in gilt frames lit from above, and collections of jade and porcelain and Fabergé eggs. A cheerless fire beneath an elaborate mantelpiece did not draw the group to it. Among the disparate company there was a low-spirited intimacy, for the common bond of the occasion, that would evaporate at the completion of the rite.
“It was good of you to come,” said Diantha, repeating the same words to each, but she remained a hostess on the outskirts of the gathering. Bottles and glasses crowded an ornate table, and she indicated self-service, with a wave of her hand, when the single servant, a butler from a catering agency, was hard pressed in pouring and passing and replenishing. No frou-frou about her, I noticed. She picked up a bellows and began to puff at the dying fire, coaxing it back, until the firelight danced on her face.
“Hello, Mrs. Van Degan,” she said.
“Oh, Dolly, it’s been so many years,” said Babette.
“I’m not called Dolly anymore. It’s Diantha. I always hated the name Dolly. I think my mother used to think that Dolly Grenville would look good in the society columns when I was a debutante, but I never became a debutante and my name never appears in columns.”
“Where is it you live?” asked Babette.
“Seattle,” replied Diantha.
“And what’s that like?”
“Quite nice.”
“Far from the madding crowd, I suppose?”
“The very point.” She smiled for the first time. Her looks grew on you as she talked, I noticed, watching the exchange. There was a shyness about her that was appealing.
“You sounded like your mother when you said that,” said Babette. Diantha rose from her kneeling position by the fire, placed her fingertips on the mantelpiece between delicate pieces of china on teakwood stands, and stared into the renewed fire. It occurred to me that she was not, perhaps, pleased with the comparison to her mother.
The Brazilian lady approached to speak to Diantha. Turning too abruptly to acknowledge her, she knocked over a piece of china, and it crashed to the hearth, smashing. People rushed forward to assist. “It doesn’t matter,” said Diantha, meaning it, waving away their concern for smashed porcelain. She is nothing like her mother, I thought. For her mother it would have been a tragic experience.
Some of the people she remembered, like Bertie Lightfoot, who had decorated all their houses. Others she didn’t, like Kay Kay Somerset, except by name. A few she had never known, like Prince Tchelitchew, who had entered her mother’s life after her own defection from it.
“You’re meant to take anything you want to take,” said Diantha, waving around the room, indicating other rooms, and upstairs, with her expressive hands. “As a memento, if you desire, of Mother. It is what she would have wanted.”
“Except the Balenciaga dresses,” piped in the crisp and tweedy Miss Petrie, a model of efficiency. She put her clipboard bearing lists and check marks and Polaroid photographs of paintings on one of a pair of glass-topped tables skirted in heavy velvet and covered with small objects of great value, each with its individual history. “The Balenciaga dresses are earmarked for the Fashion Institute.”
“Except the Balenciaga dresses,” repeated Diantha, not caring, but remembering other instructions. “And, oh yes, certain of the paintings. The Modigliani, the two Vuillards, the Fantan La Tour, the Manet of the prunes, the Cézanne drawings, and the Bonnard of the two women. They are going to the Metropolitan Museum. Other than that.” She shrugged, or shuddered faintly, as she indicated her mother’s possessions.
Racks of dresses and shoes and furs were out on display in the dining room, and the table was laden with pieces of silver. Babette Van Degan, the richest by far of the assembled group, took a sable coat. Bertie Lightfoot could not decide between two Fabergé eggs and was told he could take both. Kay Kay Somerset, who loathed Ann Grenville but liked to go to funerals, took the small vermeil clock that King Ludwig had given to the Empress Elizabeth. The Brazilian lady picked a pair of Georgian candlesticks, and Prince Tchelitchew decided upon, of all things, the Salvador Dali portrait of Ann that had so enraged her she had gone to court over it.
During the rummage-sale atmosphere, I sought out Miss Petrie. “There’s that lovely little jade Chinese clock. Would you like that?” she asked, trying to be helpful.
“No, no, thank you,” I said.
“There’s the Alejo Vidal-Quadras drawings of her. And the René Bouché portrait’s lovely, in the white evening dress.”
“There’s something I must know, Miss Petrie,” I said.
“Luggage!” she cried, clapping her hands as if the solution had been found. “She had all the good kind of Vuitton, before the wrong sort of people took it up. Masses of it.”
“A manila envelope?”
“With a magazine inside.”
“What magazine?”
“Monsieur.”
“I don’t recall seeing it. Why?”
“Would you tell me something, Miss Petrie?” I looked around to make sure no one was listening.
“If I can.”
“Did Mrs. Grenville commit suicide?”
“No.” She clipped the word and closed her eyes, signifying a termination to the way the conversation had turned.
“It’s vital that I know.”
“The medical examiner’s report isn’t in yet.”
“Did she leave a note?”
“Mrs. Grenville had a history of heart ailments.”
“So I read.”
A burst of thunder and the sound of rain against the curtained windows ended our conversation. People started to leave. When the door opened, fat round raindrops plopped on the sidewalk noisily.
“How about that photograph of Mrs. Grenville on safari in India, with the ten-foot tiger she shot?” suggested Miss Petrie, wanting to be rid of me. “She was so proud of that.”
“No, thank you.”
“There must be something, Mr. Plant.”
“An umbrella,” I answered.
“An umbrella?” repeated Miss Petrie.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s all I want.”
My choice resulted in a single moment of intimacy, only a look, between myself and Diantha, as if she understood that, like her, I didn’t want anything either in this stage set of props and dressing.
“Goodbye,” I said to her.
She, not knowing me, made a vague gesture of farewell.
Upstairs, in a drawer of the escritoire that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette, James Crocus, the man from Parke-Bernet, found an advance copy of Monsieur. In the magazine was an unsealed envelope containing a letter on pale-blue stationery written in the hand he had come to recognize as Ann Grenville’s. “Dear Diantha,” the letter began. “I would like to set the record straight.”
Propriety did not allow James Crocus to peer further, but, in replacing the pale-blue pages with shaking fingers in their matching envelope, he could not help but read these words: “When last we met, you said to me, ‘Don’t you think at some point in our lives you owed us an explanation, Third and me, about what happened, what really happened, that night?’ Now Mr. Basil Plant has taken it upon himself to tell, not only you, but anyone with the price of a magazine what promised your grandmother I would never tell.…”
The Two Mrs. Grenvilles Page 35