The Two Mrs. Grenvilles

by Dominick Dunne

  Yesterday evening, dining at Le Cirque, at a less good table than I used to receive, I looked up from the desultory chatter of my companion, the former wife of a television personality, whom, in truth, I would not have had time for in the days when I was riding high, and peered straight into the relentless stare of Diantha Grenville. My face, already flushed from red wine, pinkened in distress, and our eyes locked for what seemed an eternity, every eon of which I hated. It was she, finally, who broke the look, and when her eyes discharged mine I saw in them the disdain of the two Mrs. Grenvilles, her grandmother Alice and her mother Ann.

  Don’t you think it’s odd how, in death, people beatify for sainthood the most unlikely prospects? Bratsie Bleeker, for instance. Everyone knows that Bratsie was shot because he was screwing the wife of the foreman on his mother’s plantation, but to have listened to Edith Bleeker, in the years after Bratsie’s elimination, you would have thought that Bratsie died helping the Boat People. Such is the strange commanding power of death. It’s the same thing with Diantha Grenville. She couldn’t stand her mother. Everyone knows that. They didn’t even speak for the last two years. But once her mother died, that all changed. She lives, they say, in rooms as overcrowded as her mother’s, with all that French furniture that once belonged to famous ladies that her mother collected for so many years, and that Diantha always laughed at. Diantha tried to see me several times, but there was no point to that. Once I did see her, face to face, on Ninth Street, in the Village. I screamed at her, “Stop following me!” How was I to know her psychiatrist was in the same building that my psychiatrist was in?

  No. No. No. I am not responsible for what happened to Ann Grenville. I don’t care what that priest said that she telephoned at the last minute. Imagine Ann Grenville asking someone to pray for her! So likely. That’s the trouble with those Catholic priests. They always think everyone wants to convert. Her trouble was that she had all those face lifts, and the wrinkles were still coming, and there were no longer men in attendance as there had been all her life, and without a man around, she couldn’t function. “I always like to see a man’s shoes in my closet.” That was one of her lines.

  There was nothing in my story that she had not told me herself, or that I had not heard firsthand from someone in her life. At least, almost all of it. I wanted not to let go of my theory. I didn’t want it to turn out to be an accident, like she said, in that story she stuck to, like Bette Davis in The Letter.

  Last night I dreamed of Alice Grenville. Her face was covered with mourning veils, but I was able to see through them to her. She was trying to tell me something, but I could not understand what it was that she was trying to tell me, except that she was, slowly, shaking her head, as if telling me that I had intruded into places where I did not belong. She was, I suppose, still protecting her daughter-in-law, from outsiders, like me, as if, finally, she, and the rest of them, had accepted Ann as one of them.

  For my son

  Alexander Dunne

  About the Author

  DOMINICK DUNNE is the author of The Winners and producer of the films The Panic in Needle Park, Ash Wednesday, Play It As It Lays, and The Boys in the Band. He is a contributing editor of Vanity Fair.