A Trick of the Eye

by Jane Stanton Hitchcock

  “In New York City,” I replied. “I was born there.”

  “And what did your father do?”

  “He disappeared,” I said, laughing slightly.

  Mrs. Griffin didn’t share the joke.

  “Actually,” I continued more soberly, “he was a doctor, but I never really knew him. He and my mother were divorced when I was very young.”

  “And your mother—did she work?”

  “She taught music in a small private school,” I said.

  “How difficult for her, bringing you up all by herself.”

  “Yes, I think it was.”

  “You’re an only child?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like my daughter,” she sighed. “So difficult being an only child, don’t you think?”

  “It’s difficult being anything really.” I smiled.

  “Were you happy?”

  It was an unexpected question.

  “I didn’t think about it,” I replied.

  “Do you think about it now?” she said, eyeing me.

  I thought for a moment. Her questions were so strange. She seemed to be searching for something.

  “Actually, I think happiness becomes more of a decision as one gets older. I think at some point you just decide you’re going to be happy with what you’ve got.”

  “That’s all very well,” she said. “But what about longing and regret? Where do we put them—in storage?”

  She looked away at nothing in particular. We remained silent for a long moment.

  “This is delicious tea.”

  “Oh, do you like it? I’m so pleased,” she said, snapping out of the trance she was in. “I have it specially blended in London. Shall we go and have a look at the ballroom? It’s just across the way.”

  “This house is like the Thousand and One Nights,” I said as we walked through the garden. “It keeps having more stories to tell.”

  Mrs. Griffin ignored my nervous remark, maintaining the detached air of a tour guide.

  “There used to be a proper arbor all along here,” she said, using her hands to point out the way. “For Cassa’s coming-out party, I put a thousand candles on the path and decorated all the trees and trellises with fresh flowers and ribbons and lanterns. I wanted it to be an enchanted wood, like youth.”

  Soon I got my first glimpse of the ballroom peeking through the trees up ahead. It was a beautiful little building, nestled in the middle of an elevated clearing, very classical in feeling, square, domed, with columns in the front, and wide, shallow steps leading up to the entrance. A miniature Palladian villa. Moss was growing up the sides and it was surrounded by tangled underbrush. It hadn’t been kept up.

  “This way,” Mrs. Griffin said, leading me up the steps.

  She thrust open the French doors, and we went inside, where I paused for a moment to take in the scene. Standing atop the wide circular steps flowing down into the room, I saw that the entire building consisted of a single space: a round marble dance floor ringed by a low balustrade in front of a deep, elevated gallery for people to sit and dine, or walk around, observing the dancers. There was a special podium for musicians; French doors opened out onto the garden. The area was quite large, yet so skillfully proportioned it retained a sense of intimacy.

  Mrs. Griffin let me wander around by myself while she stayed near the main entrance, watching. I circled the room, examining the walls, running my hand along the marble columns, the steps, and the gallery railing. No expense had been spared in either materials or craftsmanship. I decided the snowy white marble of the dance floor and that of the columns was almost certainly from Carrara. It had the unmistakable luster of that famous quarry.

  “Does it speak to you?” she said after a time.

  “Oh yes, it’s chattering away,” I said happily.

  “Getting any ideas?”

  “Hundreds. The trick is to narrow them down to one.”

  “Quite right,” she agreed. “It’s so important to specify one’s vision. Don’t you find that ideas often shimmer in front of you like a mirage, but when you try to get close to them, to make them concrete, they vanish?”

  “Unfortunately yes.”

  “Making a theme or an idea real in human terms is the secret, isn’t it?”

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, for example, we may yearn for love in the abstract until we have a lover or a child. Then our notion of love becomes defined by that person, and we can’t think of it without the embodiment in mind.”

  I didn’t attempt to respond. I just listened as she went on:

  “So I suppose the moral of all that is one can’t be vague—in life, or art, or even decoration. One must find the embodiment of one’s passions.”

  I found myself wondering what might have happened had this remarkable woman applied her talents to something less ephemeral than style.

  “Did you ever think of becoming an artist?” I said.

  “No, heavens no!” she cried. “I leave art to the strong.” She paused for a moment and then said wistfully: “You remind me so much of my daughter.”

  “Do I? In what way?”

  “Well, it’s not so much the way you look, although, as I said, there’s a certain similarity. It’s more, well, a sort of presence you have. A kind of enthusiasm. I can’t tell you how much you remind me of her, standing there.”

  “You built this just for your daughter’s coming-out party?”

  “Yes. Just for that.”

  “Only for that one occasion?”

  “Yes . . . well, of course, we did think we’d use it again. But you know how things are. We never did,” she said sadly.

  Mrs. Griffin was staring at me from across the room. Perhaps it was the physical distance between us that made me bolder. She didn’t seem so formidable, perched on those sweeping steps, and I thought to myself that now was the perfect opportunity to let her know I was aware of the tragedy. I felt I needed to bring up the subject in order to lay it to rest. So I blurted out my next sentence before I could take too much time to think about it.

  “I understand your daughter died,” I said.

  She stiffened slightly. “You understand correctly.”

  “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Griffin, I didn’t mean to offend . . .”

  “Don’t apologize.” She raised her hand to cut me off. “Let’s discuss what we’re going to do in here, shall we? I assume you’re going to accept the commission.”

  “Yes. I accept it.”

  “Good,” she said firmly. “Well then, I think trompe l’oeil, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I concurred. “Trompe l’oeil seems appropriate.”

  Chapter 3

  Having accepted the commission, I finished up all my other work and notified my clients I was taking a leave of absence until further notice. Two weeks later, I drove out to The Haven to begin my preliminary sketches of the ballroom. The butler showed me through the garden to the little pavilion, which, to my amazement, looked completely transformed. The scruffy vines around it had been cleared away, the grit and moss scraped from its walls. Scrubbed clean, it gleamed proudly in the bright spring sun.

  “My lord, what’s happened to it?” I asked the butler as we approached.

  “Mrs. Griffin’s had it prepared for you,” he said.

  “How very thoughtful of her.”

  He led me inside and asked if he could bring me anything. I requested a chair, a small table for sketching, and some black coffee, very strong. When he left, I began to settle in.

  The ballroom was cool despite the rising heat of the morning. I stood at the center of the round dance floor turning slowly in place, focusing on each wall until I could imagine the entire area with my eyes shut. I always needed to feel the structure and rhythm of a room before attempting any sort of scheme for it
. I tore it down and built it up again in my imagination in order to know it inside out. Though the ballroom was a much grander scale than I was used to, my goal was the same: to fit my artistry over the space like a glove; to enhance without overburdening.

  The butler came back promptly with the things I’d asked for. As he worked setting them up, I studied him for the first time. He was a slim, older man of medium height, with slack, nondescript features, and fine white hair combed meticulously over a bald spot at the top of his head. In his black-and-white uniform he looked as neat as a printed page. He set up the table and chair and poured the coffee, moving swiftly and quietly with the precision of one who takes pride in the art of serving others. I thanked him and asked him his name.

  “Henry Deane, but I’m called Deane,” he said quickly, as if the question somehow embarrassed him.

  I thought about Deane after he left. I wondered how long he’d been in Mrs. Griffin’s employ, wondered what he knew about the murder. Had he known Cassandra? Had he been here when it happened? I wondered if I’d ever get up the courage to ask him.

  I sat down on the chair Deane had brought and began to draw. My preliminary sketches were quick and rough, abbreviated renderings of the room itself. I viewed them only as notes to myself, useful for going over the room’s architectural details and discovering where some of my main problems might lie. After these had been completed, I sketched out several ideas for schemes off the top of my head, though none of them seemed exactly right. It wasn’t turning out to be a particularly productive morning, but I wasn’t discouraged. I knew there would be many frustrating days to come, and many rewarding ones—that was the nature of creation.

  I had hoped Mrs. Griffin would make an appearance to discuss some of my ideas, but there was no sign of her all morning. At twelve-thirty, Deane came back and asked me if I cared for some lunch. I held up the sandwich I’d brought with me and shook my head.

  “Wouldn’t you like something a little more substantial?” he said coaxingly.

  I thanked him, but declined. It was my habit to have a quick, light lunch on the job so as not to interrupt my train of thought. I ate alone in the garden and mulled over the morning’s work. However, as I sat there on the lawn eating my sandwich and sipping my Coke, I couldn’t help but reflect on the weird nature of this assignment: trompe l’oeiling a room built for an antiquated ritual in honor of a girl who’d been dead for years!

  My thoughts kept drifting toward Cassandra. I wondered what the enigmatic girl in the photograph in the library had thought of her first step into society. Had she felt the glory of her moment and danced the night away with a dozen admiring suitors? Or had she watched it all from a distance, isolated from the crowd, feeling herself to be an excuse for yet another party? I suddenly felt a chill and shivered, as if a ghost had swept by me. I got up and went back inside.

  Returning to my worktable, I tore up all the sketches I’d made, including one or two I’d thought were quite promising. They were all too stilted and formal. None of them captured the haunted quality of the room. I hadn’t found the key.

  Toward the middle of the afternoon, I decided to call it a day and let the power of a good night’s sleep work on my subconscious. I left The Haven at three-thirty and drove back to the city. Instead of settling into the car and relaxing, as I usually do when I drive for a distance, I felt myself becoming more and more tense. At first I thought it had to do with the day’s unproductiveness. But gradually I became aware it was something else, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, having to do with Cassandra Griffin.

  Before going home, I decided to stop off at the library. An assistant helped me locate the pertinent New York Times microfilm on Cassandra Griffin. I went upstairs to one of the cubicles and settled into the story.

  Newspaper references to Cassandra Griffin began with a feature about her coming-out party entitled AN AMERICAN PRINCESS MAKES HER DEBUT. The article was accompanied by grainy photographs of the ballroom, both under construction and completed. There was also a picture of Cassandra, the same picture I’d seen in her mother’s library.

  There were no more articles about her until her murder eight years later, when she was twenty-six. The brief explosion of news associated with the crime engendered lurid headlines in the city section. Her old deb photograph ran with every article about the crime. One couldn’t help imagining that young, privileged girl sprawled out on the bedroom floor of her palatial house, stabbed through the heart like any other blood-spattered victim in the tabloids. Yet there was a difference, and perhaps more of a fascination, because of who she was and what she represented.

  In several follow-up features about the case, the paper printed elegant pictures taken of Frances and Holt Griffin, as well as a stern-looking tintype of Holt Griffin’s entrepreneurial ancestor, Elias Holt, the founder of the fortune. The photograph of Frances Griffin, a cool studio portrait of a woman of style taken by Cecil Beaton, surprised me. I hardly recognized her. The Frances Griffin I knew looked like a former beauty who had aged well. The woman in this picture was not even very pretty. The youthful face seemed devoid of a certain character and mystery which the aged one possessed. They might have been two different people.

  All the articles made reference to the great ballroom that had been built especially for Cassandra’s coming-out party, the extravagance of which had apparently caused quite a stir in the late sixties when such rituals were considered wasteful and passé. All delved into the unfortunate girl’s illustrious heritage, reminding readers that she was the sole heir to the Griffin millions. They referred to her as “the Griffin heiress” or “the tragic American Princess.” One or two articles noted briefly that Cassandra had married a ski instructor—one Roberto Madi.

  Tantalizingly little was written on the subject of Mr. Madi and nothing on the event of the marriage itself. I searched and searched, but there was no wedding announcement. This meant that the marriage probably hadn’t been conducted in any celebratory way, which was rare for girls of Cassandra’s background. Nothing in any of the articles on the murder elaborated on Madi’s life or gave any indication of what had become of him after the crime. He seemed to begin and end in one or two sentences. However, from the moment that I read he existed, Roberto Madi was there, lurking like a shadow between the lines.

  At precisely the time when, presumably, public interest in the case had reached fever pitch, the press fell inexplicably silent. There suddenly wasn’t one more word or mention of the crime, and nothing further regarding any of the various leads, suspects, or impending arrests. There were no more human interest stories on the family, no further speculation, no more articles, period.

  Then, several months later, there appeared a follow-up item tucked away in the back pages of the city section, headlined “Socialite’s Murderer Still Eludes Police.” This innocuous story briefly described a trail of inconclusive evidence in the case leading to a dead end.

  The last references to the crime I managed to locate were largely indirect. One was the obituary of Holt Griffin, in which the glowing record of his generosity and service to the nation seemed to dwarf the murder of his daughter, making it almost an afterthought in this distinguished life. The piece did say, however, that the still-unsolved crime had taken its toll on the great philanthropist and diplomat, and probably contributed to his death from a heart attack at the age of sixty-six.

  Then there was the obituary of the police detective who had been in charge of the frustrated investigation. In this article, Cassandra Griffin was mentioned almost as many times as the deceased himself, and I suspected Detective Miles M. Sarnoff received a more prominent death notice than he might have otherwise on account of his role in the case. He was quoted as saying he could never forget the “vile sight of that young girl lying all bloody on the carpet,” and that the sorrow of his life was having failed to solve that particular crime. All told, the coverage was as puzzling as the murder
itself. I photocopied the articles from the microfilm and took them home to study.

  Out on the street in the twilight, I felt depressed. Here I was, I thought, walking home with a young woman’s entire life tucked under my arm, a life of extraordinary privilege, that could be summed up by nothing more than a few sensational articles in a newspaper.

  I recalled the human skeleton in a satin wedding gown I’d once seen in the window of a Mexican folk-art store on Third Avenue. I had stared at the mantilla draped over her skull, mesmerized by the grin under that veil of white lace.

  Morbid thoughts have plagued me throughout my life. I’ve often wondered what would have happened had I not been granted a certain facility as a craftsman. Having no family left, no husband, no children, no ties to the world through its traditional trade routes, I might easily have succumbed to the forces of self-destruction. I’d been saved from the abyss only by my firm belief that art is a kind of salvation, a footpath through the wilderness. But what about Cassandra? What had she believed in? Who was she really? Was she the victim of circumstance or of her own dark impulses?

  When I arrived home, a delicate white narcissus plant was waiting for me outside my door with a note attached to it. The note read, “Art is the accomplice of love. Work well.” It was signed, “Frances Griffin.”

  I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this. “Art is the accomplice of love.” What did she mean? I took the plant inside and set it on the kitchen table while I fixed myself and Brush some dinner. I was slightly skeptical of this gesture. Was it simply a kind offering, or the first step in some sort of seduction? I was wary.

  As the sun in a solar system of her own creation, Frances Griffin was undoubtedly very adept at drawing people into her orbit. The question was why did she want my good opinion of her? I was just another person in her employ. Something about it was odd. I looked at the plant again and again, wondering what it was meant to cover up. I was good at spotting coverups. They were, after all, my trade.

  That night in bed, with Brush curled up beside me, I studied the newspaper articles on the murder more carefully. The clippings raised more questions than they answered. However, after going over them a couple of times, I began to form in my mind an interesting, if spotty, picture of Cassandra Griffin’s life.