It was a heady notion, the thought of these three formidable ladies all in one room: Bankhead, Dorothy Parker, and Estelle Winwood. Boaty’s invitation was for seven-thirty, allowing an hour for cocktails before dinner, which he had prepared himself—Senegalese soup, a casserole, salad, assorted cheeses, and a lemon soufflé. I arrived somewhat early to see if I could be of any help, but Boaty, wearing an olive velvet jacket, was calm, everything was in order, there was nothing left to do except light the candles.
The host poured each of us one of his “special” martinis—gin of zero temperature to which a drop of Pernod had been added. “No vermouth. Just a touch of Pernod. An old trick I learned from Virgil Thompson.”
Seven-thirty became eight; by the time we had our second drink the other guests were more than an hour late, and Boaty’s sleekly knitted composure began to unravel; he started nibbling at his fingernails, a most uncharacteristic indulgence. At nine he exploded: “My God, do you realize what I’ve done? I don’t know about Estelle, but the other three are all drunks. I’ve invited three alcoholics to dinner! One is bad enough. But three. They’ll never show up.”
The doorbell rang.
“D-d-darling …” It was Miss Bankhead, gyrating inside a mink coat the color of her long, loosely waved hair. “I’m so sorry. It was all the taxi-driver’s fault. He took us to the wrong address. Some wretched apartment house on the West Side.”
Miss Parker said: “Benjamin Katz. That was his name. The taxi-driver.”
“You’re wrong, Dottie,” Miss Winwood corrected her as the ladies discarded their coats and were escorted by Boaty into his dark Victorian parlor, where logs were cheerfully crunching inside a marble fireplace. “His name was Kevin O’Leary. Badly suffering from the Irish virus. That’s why he didn’t know where he was going.”
“Irish virus?” said Miss Bankhead.
“Booze, dear,” said Miss Winwood.
“Ah, booze,” sighed Miss Parker. “That’s exactly what I need,” though a slight sway in her walk suggested that another drink was exactly what she didn’t need. Miss Bankhead ordered: “A bourbon and branch. And don’t be stingy.” Miss Parker, complaining of a certain crise de foie, at first declined, then said: “Well, perhaps a glass of wine.”
Miss Bankhead, spying me where I stood by the fireplace, swooped forward; she was a small woman, but, because of her growling voice and unconquerable vitality, seemed Amazonian. “And,” she said, blink-blinking her near-sighted eyes, “is this Mr. Clift, our great new star?”
I told her no, that my name was P. B. Jones. “I’m nobody. Just a friend of Mr. Boatwright’s.”
“Not one of his ‘nephews’?”
“No. I’m a writer, or want to be.”
“Boaty has so many nephews. I wonder where he finds them all. Damn it, Boaty, where’s my bourbon?”
As the guests settled among Boaty’s horsehair settees, I decided that of the three, Estelle Winwood, an actress then in her early sixties, was the most striking. Parker—she looked like the sort of woman to whom one would instantly relinquish a subway seat, a vulnerable, deceptively incapable child who had gone to sleep and awakened forty years later with puffy eyes, false teeth, and whiskey on her breath. And Bankhead—her head was too large for her body, her feet too small; and anyway, her presence was too strong for a room to contain: it needed an auditorium. But Miss Winwood was an exotic creature—snake-slim, erect as a headmistress, she wore a huge broad-brimmed black straw hat which she never removed the entire evening; that hat’s brim shadowed the pearl-pallor of her haughty face, and concealed, though not too successfully, the mischief faintly firing her lavender eyes. She was smoking a cigarette, and it developed that she was a chain-smoker, as was Miss Bankhead; Miss Parker, too.
Miss Bankhead lit one cigarette from another, and announced: “I had a strange dream last night. I dreamt I was at the Savoy in London. Dancing with Jock Whitney. Now there was an attractive man. Those big red ears, those dimples.”
Miss Parker said: “Well? And what was so strange about that?”
“Nothing. Except that I haven’t thought about Jock in twenty years. And then this very afternoon I saw him. He was crossing 57th Street in one direction, and I was going in the other. He hadn’t changed much—a little heavier, a bit jowly. God, the great times we had together. He used to take me to the ball games; and the races. But it was never any good in bed. The same old story. I once went to an analyst and wasted fifty dollars an hour trying to figure out why I can never make it work with any man I really love, am really mad about. While some stagehand, somebody I don’t give a damn about, can leave me limp.”
Boaty appeared with the drinks; Miss Parker emptied her glass with one swift swallow, then said: “Why don’t you just bring the bottle and leave it on the table?”
Boaty said: “I can’t understand what’s happened to Monty. At least he could have called.”
“Meeow! Meeow.” The cat-wail was accompanied by the sound of fingernails scratching against the front door. “Meeow!”
“Pardonnez-moi, señor,” said young Mr. Clift, as he fell into the room and supported himself by hugging Boaty. “I’ve been sleeping off a hangover.” Offhand, I would have said he hadn’t slept it off sufficiently. When Boaty offered him a martini, I noticed that his hands trembled as he struggled to hold it.
Underneath a rumpled raincoat, he wore grey flannel slacks and a grey turtle-neck sweater; he was also wearing argyle socks and a pair of loafers. He kicked off the shoes and squatted at Miss Parker’s feet.
“The story of yours I like, I like the one about the woman who keeps waiting for the telephone to ring. Waiting for a guy who’s trying to give her the brush. And she keeps making up reasons why he doesn’t call, and pleading with herself not to call him. I know all about that. I’ve lived through it. And that other story—“Big Blonde”—where the woman swallows all those pills, only she doesn’t die, she wakes up and has to go on living. Wow, I’d hate to have that happen. Did you ever know anyone that happened to?”
Miss Bankhead laughed. “Of course she does. Dottie’s always gulping pills or cutting her wrists. I remember going to see her in the hospital once, she had her wrists bandaged with pink ribbon with cute little pink ribbon bows. Bob Benchley said: ‘If she doesn’t stop doing that, Dottie’s going to hurt herself one of these days.’ ”
Miss Parker complained: “Benchley didn’t say that. I did. I said: ‘If I don’t stop doing this, someday I’m going to hurt myself.’ ”
For the next hour Boaty waddled between the kitchen and the parlor, fetching drinks and more drinks, and grieving over his dinner, particularly the casserole, which was drying out. It was after ten before he persuaded the others to arrange themselves around the dining-room table, and I helped by pouring the wine, the only nourishment that seemed to interest anyone, anyway: Clift dropped a cigarette into his untouched bowl of Senegalese soup, and stared inertly into space, as if he were enacting a shell-shocked soldier. His companions pretended not to notice, and Miss Bankhead continued a meandering anecdote (“It was when I had a house in the country, and Estelle was staying with me, and we were stretched out on the lawn listening to the radio. It was a portable radio, one of the first ever made. Suddenly a newscaster broke in; he said to stand by for an important announcement. It turned out to be about the Lindbergh kidnapping. How someone had used a ladder to climb into a bedroom and steal the baby. When it was over, Estelle yawned and said: ‘Well, we’re well out of that one, Tallulah!’ ”). While she talked, Miss Parker did something so curious it attracted everyone’s attention; it even silenced Miss Bankhead. With tears in her eyes, Miss Parker was touching Clift’s hypnotized face, her stubby fingers tenderly brushing his brow, his cheekbones, his lips, chin.
Miss Bankhead said: “Damn it, Dottie. Who do you think you are? Helen Keller?”
“He’s so beautiful,” murmured Miss Parker. “Sensitive. So finely made. The most beautiful young man I’ve ever seen. What a pity he�
��s a cocksucker.” Then, sweetly, wide-eyed with little girl naïveté, she said: “Oh. Oh dear. Have I said something wrong? I mean, he is a cocksucker, isn’t he, Tallulah?”
Miss Bankhead said: “Well, d-d-darling, I r-r-really wouldn’t know. He’s never sucked my cock.”
I COULDN’T KEEP MY EYES open; it was very boring, Red River, and the odor of latrine disinfectant was chloroforming me. I needed a drink, and I found one in an Irish bar at 38th Street and Eighth Avenue. It was almost closing time, but a jukebox was still going and a sailor was dancing to it all by himself. I ordered a triple gin. As I opened my wallet, a card fell out of it. A white business card containing a man’s name, address, and telephone number: Roger W. Appleton Farms, Box 711, Lancaster, Pa. Tel: 905-537-1070. I stared at the card, wondering how it had come into my possession. Appleton? A long swallow of gin brightened my memory. Appleton. Of course. We had a Self Service client, one of the few I could recall pleasantly. We had spent an hour together in his room at the Yale Club; an older man, but weathered, strong, well-built, and with a handshake that was a real bone-cruncher. A nice guy, very open—he had told me a lot about himself: after his first wife died, he had married a much younger woman, and they lived on the lands of a rolling farm filled with fruit trees and roaming cows and narrow tumbling creeks. He had given me his card and told me to call him up and come for a visit any time. Embraced by self-pity, emboldened by alcohol, and totally forgetful of the fact that it must be three in the morning, I asked the bartender to give me five dollars’ worth of quarters.
“Sorry, sonny. But we’re shutting down.”
“Please. This is an emergency. I’ve got to make a long-distance call.”
Counting out the money, he said: “Whoever she is, she ain’t worth it.”
After I had dialed the number, an operator requested an additional four dollars. The phone rang half a dozen times before a woman’s voice, deep and slow with sleep, responded.
“Hello. Is Mr. Appleton there?”
She hesitated. “Yes. But he’s asleep. But if it’s something important …”
“No. It’s nothing important.”
“May I ask who’s calling?”
“Just tell him … just say a friend called. His friend from across the River Styx.”
BUT TO RETURN TO THAT winter afternoon in Paris when I first met Kate McCloud. There we were, the three of us—myself, my young mongrel dog, Mutt, and Aces Nelson, all clumped together inside one of those little silk-lined Ritz elevators.
We rode to the top floor, disembarked there, and as we walked along the corridor lined with old-fashioned steamer trunks, Aces said: “Of course, she doesn’t know the real reason why I’m bringing you here …”
“If it comes to that, neither do I!”
“All I said was that I’d found this wonderful masseur. You see, for the last year she’s been suffering from a back ailment. She’s gone from doctor to doctor, here and in America. Some say it’s a slipped disc, or a spinal fusion, but most agree it’s psychosomatic, a maladie imaginaire. But the problem is …” His voice hovered.
“Is?”
“But I told you. Just now. While we were having drinks in the bar.”
Segments of our conversation replayed inside my head. At present, Kate McCloud was the estranged wife of Axel Jaeger, a German industrialist and allegedly one of the world’s richest men. Earlier, when she was sixteen, she had been married to the son of a rich Virginia horse breeder for whom her Irish father had worked as a trainer. That marriage had ended on very well-founded grounds of mental cruelty. Subsequently she had moved to Paris, and over the years, became a goddess of the fashion press; Kate McCloud on a bearhunt in Alaska, on a safari in Africa, at a Rothschild ball, at the Grand Prix with Princess Grace, on a yacht with Stavros Niarchos.
“The problem is …” Aces fumbled. “It’s as I told you, she is in danger. And she needs … well, someone to be with her. A bodyguard.”
“Hell, why don’t we just sell her Mutt?”
“Please,” he said. “This isn’t humorous.”
Those were the truest words old Aces had ever spoken. If only I could have foreseen the labyrinth he was leading me into when a black woman opened the door. She wore a smart black pants suit with numerous gold chains twisted around her neck and wrists. Her mouth was loaded with gold, too; her denture looked less like teeth than an investment. She had curly white hair and a round, unlined face. Asked to guess her age, I would have said forty-five, forty-six; later, I learned she was a child-bride.
“Corinne!” exclaimed Aces, and kissed the woman on both cheeks. “Comment ca va?”
“Never felt better, and never had less.”
“P. B., this is Corinne Bennett, Mrs. McCloud’s factotum. And, Corinne, this is Mr. Jones, the masseur.”
Corinne nodded, but her eyes concentrated on the dog tucked under my arm. “What I want to know is, who is that dog? No present for Miss Kate, I hope. She’s been muttering about getting another dog ever since Phoebe—”
“Phoebe?”
“Had to put her down. Same as they will me someday soon. But don’t mention it to her. It’ll just set her off again. Have mercy, I never saw a grown person cry that bad. Come along, she’s waiting for you.” Then, lowering her voice, she added: “That Mme. Apfeldorf is with her.”
Aces grimaced; he looked at me as if about to speak, but there was no need; I’d leafed through enough Vogue’s and Paris-Match’s to know who Perla Apfeldorf was. The wife of a very racist South African platinum tycoon, she was as much a figure of the worldly milieu as Kate McCloud. She was Brazilian, and privately—though this was something I discovered later—her friends called her the Black Duchess, suggesting she was not of the pure Portuguese descent she claimed, but a child of Rio’s favelas, born with quite a bit of the tarbrush which, if true, was rather a joke on the Hitlerian Herr Apfeldorf.
The apartment snuggled under the eaves of the hotel; the rooms, all dominated by large round dormer windows overlooking the Place Vendôme, were identical in size; originally they had been used as individual servant’s rooms, but Kate McCloud had strung six of them together and decorated each for a particular purpose. The effect, overall, was like a railroad flat in a luxurious tenement.
“Miss Kate? The gentlemen are here.”
And, magically, there we were inside Kate McCloud’s bedroom. “Aces. Angel.” She was perched on the side of a bed brushing her hair. “Will you have some tea? Perla’s having some. Or a liqueur? No? Then I shall. Corinne, would you bring me a drop of Verveine? Aces, aren’t you going to introduce me to Mr. Jones? Mr. Jones,” she confided to Mme. Apfeldorf, who was seated in a chair beside the bed, “is going to drive the demons out of my spine.”
“Well,” said Mme. Apfeldorf, who had slicked-black hair shiny as a crow’s and a voice with a crowlike croak, “I hope he’s better than that sadistic little Japanese Mona sent my way. I’ll never trust Mona again. Not that I ever did. You wouldn’t believe what happened! He made me lie naked on the floor and then, in his bare feet, he stood on my neck, walked up and down my back, positively danced. The agony.
“Oh, Perla,” said Kate McCloud pityingly. “What do you know about agony? I’ve just spent a week at St. Moritz and never saw a pair of skis. Never left my room except to visit Heinie. Just lay there munching Doridens and praying. Aces,” she said, handing him a silver frame that had been standing on a table near her bed, “here’s a new picture of Heinie. Isn’t he lovely?”
“This is Mrs. McCloud’s son,” Aces explained, showing me the picture in the frame: a chubby-cheeked solemn child muffled in mufflers and a fur coat and fur hat and holding a snowball. And then I noticed that placed around the room, there were really dozens of pictures of this same boy at varying ages.
“Lovely. How old is he now?”
“Five. Well, he’ll be five in April.” She resumed brushing her hair, but harshly, destructively. “It was a nightmare. I was never allowed once to see him alone. D
ear Uncle Frederick and beloved Uncle Otto. The two old maids. They were always there. Watching. Counting the kisses and ready to show me the door the moment my hour was up.” She threw the brush across the room, which made Mutt bark. “My own baby.”
The Black Duchess cleared her throat; it sounded like a crow gargling. She said: “Kidnap him.”
Kate McCloud laughed and collapsed against a heap of Porthault pillows. “Odd, though. You’re the second person who’s said that to me within the past week.” She lit a cigarette. “It isn’t quite true that I never went out in St. Moritz. I did. Twice. Once to dinner for the Shah, and another night some crazy fling Mingo had at the King’s Club. And I met this extraordinary woman—”
Mme. Apfeldorf said: “Was Dolores there?”
“Where?”
“At the Shah’s party.”
“There were so many people, I can’t remember. Why?”
“Nothing. Just rumors. Who gave it?”
Kate McCloud shrugged. “One of the Greeks. The Livanos, I think. And after dinner His Highness pulled his old stunt: kept everybody sitting at their table for hours while he told tasteless jokes. In French. English. German. Persian. Everybody howling with laughter, even if they hadn’t understood a word. It’s painful to watch Farah Diba; she really blushes—”
“Sounds as though he hasn’t changed much since we were at school together in Gstaad. Le Rosey.”
Answered Prayers Page 10