The Dying of the Light

by Robert Goolrick

  She realized that, for all her expensive refinements, her French lessons, her schooling in the ways of the horse, her readings of the classics, read while walking around a large cold room with a book on her head, she was what she always was, always would be, just a wild child from the Middle Peninsula of Virginia. She had practiced and learned every sophistication—how to serve a tea, how to rule benignly over servants, how to waltz with a precision known only to Swiss watchmakers—but she was still and always the little girl who ran barefoot through the fields and barns of her beloved Saratoga.

  She had grown up alone, the only child on five thousand acres of field and forest and bright river. Her father had adored her, and that made up for his hurt in not having a boy, a boy child to carry on the name, the lineage unbroken for three hundred years.

  There were to be more children, a brood, boys, but after he lost his leg in the Spanish-American War, a change came over him, and brandy and cigars replaced desire, and she was left, the only heir.

  When she was seven, she was in the very first car accident ever to happen in Port Royal, Virginia. Her father, having not much to do, loved to drive into town, strapping on his painful and ill-fitting prosthetic leg, and get the paper and spend the morning talking with the boys on the porch of the general store. It was practically the last place he was treated with deference, and he liked that. Diana liked to go with him and take the nickel he gave her and dip her hand into the iced water of the metal box and slip out a soft drink and sit on the steps of the store, drinking a dope, as they called it then, and listening while the men talked about the war, their hopes for their crops. One day, for no reason she could remember, she set down her Coke and ran into the street, where the car ran over her. Cars in those days were so light and flimsy that it bounced over her without doing any damage at all, but it mortified her father that he had taken eyes off her, and so he told her she could have anything she wanted.

  “I want to have my hair cut like a boy’s” was her instant answer, and she and her father went to the barbershop, and they wrapped paper around her neck and draped her in a clean striped cloth, and they both watched with a combination of excitement and horror as her long, dark curls fell, one by one, to the floor. The barber swept up the curls and gave them to her in a paper bag, although what she might do with them wasn’t clear to anybody.

  They drove home, and Diana felt a freedom she’d never felt before, as though the tomboy in her had been let out of its cage. There was a gladness in her heart. At the door, her mother took one look, shrieked, and ran for her bedroom, but not before Diana could give her the paper bag filled with the hair she had only recently had on her head, as though her mother might find some way to get it all back on or, failing that, find some use for it.

  Diana was sorry to trouble her mother, but it was the first confirmation for her that if the fruit was forbidden, it was only because that fruit was the sweetest. She and her father sat at dinner with her red-eyed mother like the only gladiators who had escaped the Colosseum.

  From a very early age, she was fearless, almost feral. She was a wild child surrounded by wild children who lived in the adjacent great houses of some of the finest families in the state. She pretty much did as she pleased without attracting the attention of the preoccupied adults in the house.

  She had a governess, a thin, plain woman from France who taught her to drink red wine and know her domaines, to read Latin and to speak French passably well. When Mademoiselle Simone wasn’t looking, or was taking her little nap after lunch, she would dash into the little alcove in which the telephone table sat, and make a clandestine call to another child in the neighborhood. “Indian Rock,” she would whisper, or “Eagle Beak.”

  The word would spread, and each child—the Carter children, five of them, the Tayloes, ten, if you counted the cousins—would call one other, until they had twenty or more. She would hitch up her beloved pony, Pickle, to her wicker pony cart and race off, following trails through the woods that only she and the neighboring children knew, stirring up a fall of woodcocks, a herd of deer, the whispering glide of eagles resting on the draft high overhead, the majestic pines—she yelled it—“The majestic pines!” She listened as the ravens fluttered from the perches, black high up in the black, then settled again, the woods alive with animals only momentarily disturbed, and the boys and girls, ages eight to eighteen, would meet, each carrying a Mason jar full of clear liquor, moonshine bought with their allowance from the stable boys, trotting along through the dense woods in overalls, barefooted, imagining attacks by red Indians, enraptured by the flights of bald eagles high up in the tallest trees, no matter how many times they saw it, the way they floated on the breeze without a care, their astonishing seven-foot wingspan, the unimaginably beautiful symbol of their beautiful country since 1782.

  When the pack of children reached their destination, cove or cave, always by the river, just at the water’s edge, they would have their tea parties, eating ham biscuits, exchanging the news of their neighboring estates, always astonished at the business of running the great plantations, the peccadilloes of the workers, the tyrannies and lassitude of their parents, an unending gazette of the comings and goings of the farms, lying on the warm rocks, sipping from their Mason jars and passing them back and forth, letting their bare feet hang in the water, smoking the occasional purloined Cuban cigar. The willows trailed their tendrils in the water, the sun making explosions of fire on the tiniest ripple, their toes nibbled on by minnows, boys and girls in the wilderness, the best families in the tidal estuaries of Virginia, drunk at ten and eleven in the endless sun-blasted days.

  Once, the boys huddled and came up with a powerful dare. For every girl who took off her clothes and showed them her naked body, one of the boys would do the same. It was unthinkable. Nudity in front of boys was practically a mortal sin, even if you were drunk and even if the sun was warm and lovely on your back, and even if you swam every day of your lives, boys and girls together, in your underclothes, the bigger boys repeatedly dunking the smaller girls.

  Diana leaped at the chance. She longed, at eleven, to see what the stable boys called a man’s member, and so she stood alone, alone in a circle of aghast girls and boys who had already gone shy and regretful, and dropped her clothes piece by piece carelessly in a circle around her. And she liked it, all those staring eyes, although many suddenly found a reason to look away, to look anywhere but at Diana Page Powell Cooke. Diana laughed, and twirled for them. Her whole body so smooth, slightly pudgy still, but lovely, her short hair making her nudity even more shocking, nothing hidden. She loved the freedom, she loved the fact that she knew it was a dirty, filthy thing to do, pulling back her skin so they could see the pink smile of her hairless vagina, and so she did it until she was tired and everybody had lost interest. She hadn’t even reached puberty yet, and her summer body, all almond and cream, was so white, most alive in its secret bits.

  She finally sat, and put her clothes on, and pointed to Billy Carter. “I pick you,” she said, in a triumphant voice, but he merely laughed victoriously and said, “Are you crazy? I wouldn’t do that for anybody.”

  And they all shyly backed away, leaving Diana to dust off her bottom as they left her alone, so that it was darkening and she was alone as she climbed into her pony cart and, smashing her Mason jar in betrayal and disgust against some rocks, gave Pickle a flick of the whip and started home through the gloom, barely making it to the table in time for dinner.

  “And what did you do all day, young lady?” her father asked, pouring his claret.

  “Oh, I behaved excessively badly, Father,” she said, sitting straight-backed, all starched pique and lace, a ridiculously large grosgrain bow pinned to her short hair. “Quite horribly.”

  “I would expect no less, my dear,” her father said, “Not one iota less.”

  “Disgraced the whole family.”

  “Diana!” Her mother sat up regally straight.” I’m sure you didn’t, darling, but this is not a sub
ject for mirth.” Diana thought of all those children going home to their own dinner tables and telling of their day’s adventures, with Miss Cooke as the centerpiece, and wondered how long it would be before her mother heard the Awful Truth.

  “You must never, ever forget who you are, who your people are. Your great-grandmother was a duchess. Your grandfather was the governor.”

  “And the duchess, who bought her title for cash, was a terribly mean old woman who cheated at cards and practically ate and drank us out of house and home,” said her father. “And as for the governor, my father, I’ll just say this. He robbed the state blind and spent it all on fancy women in Philadelphia, where he spent most of his one term. Useless excuse for a human being. He wasn’t even rich by the end. Worst seat on a horse I’ve ever seen, and all we got out of it was that string of pearls you’ve got in the safe, which his long-suffering wife, my mother, got as an expiation for his infinite peccadilloes.”

  “You mustn’t talk that way, dear. Diana, you come from people of quality. You must behave accordingly at all times, whatever the circumstances. I know you’re joking, darling. Just keep your jokes confined to the family. And Father, don’t lead her on so.”

  “She’s a wretched child, and she’ll probably end up in prison.”

  “You really think so? Oooh, I can’t wait. Do you think I’ll get to wear one of those black-and-white-striped things and work on the roadside picking up trash, chained to the man in front of me and in back of me, while another man with a shotgun watches over us in case we escape?” Diana roared with laughter, and her mother, resigned, returned to chewing her bite of roast beef one hundred times before swallowing. “At least I won’t have to worry about what to wear. And I’d meet all sorts of interesting people. And I bet I could escape.”

  And still they laughed as they always did, that loving laugh that only fathers and daughters know. “If anybody could, you could, Diana Page Powell Cooke.”

  Her mother, at her end of the table, just assumed her usual air of amused tragedy, expecting correctly that there was more truth in Diana’s confession than was ever acknowledged by father or daughter. She had grown up on the river herself, and knew its chicaneries, its innocence and its too-early experience. Children play. Here, what did they have to play with except each other, what toys except their own bodies?

  But Diana never forgot it, her first betrayal, and she never forgave the cowardice. She loathed cowards, and she honored courage. She still went to the river in her pony cart every day, as though nothing had happened, and it pleased her to notice that she and she alone held her head high when her eyes met the eyes of her friends. Her humiliation was, after all, her victory.

  Her father carried on with a distant good humor, reading Sir Walter Scott after dinner with his brandy until Clarence, his manservant, had to carry him to bed. Her mother was still praised for her seat at the hunt and for her clear soup at the dinners they gave for thirty or forty, but they all knew the terrible truth: the money was gone. The superb wines came from a cellar that was only depleted, never resupplied. Every penny that was left went into Diana’s clothing and education. Unless she caught a good, a very good husband, Saratoga was lost.

  And that was her mother’s ultimate victory. When Diana was fourteen, she came home to dinner one night and threw up in her vichyssoise and then laughed. For the first time, her father was truly horrified by her behavior. Her mother sat up as straight as a plinth in her seat at what became the head of the table in an instant. She said only a few words, but she said them clearly, indelibly: “Farmington. As soon as possible.” Diana promptly fell off her chair and had to be carried up to bed herself. Even her father knew it had gone too far. Even he, so jocular, was not amused.

  She would go to Miss Porter’s in Farmington, the girls’ preparatory school and prison, whose sole purpose was to turn unrepentant little hoydens like Diana into graceful women who more closely resembled American versions of Princess Elizabeth of England. Diana wept, she yelled, she kicked and screamed and said vile things to and about her mother, the gentlest and most long-suffering of souls, who had, herself, been through the rigors of the school, and thought with a certain glee of the strict rules that would turn her wild savage into a woman of grace and, most of all, marriageability. “The most beautiful voice in the world is that of an educated southern woman,” said Winston Churchill, and at Farmington, as any graduate called it, Diana would become that woman, ramrod straight, both on the dance floor and on the back of a horse, graceful at tea, charming at table, never lacking for a topic of interest, her vowels beautifully rounded, her r’s soft and sweet as rain, her every utterance a sign of where she had come from, a beauty mark of a certain nobility—in short, an educated, gifted, beautiful lure with which the Cookes would bait the hook.

  She became all these things and more in her miserable days at Farmington. She learned that just because you’re miserable, that doesn’t mean you can’t have a wonderful life. She pushed her southern accent as far as she felt it could reasonably go, and they, in turn, from New York and New Canaan, looked on her as a kind of exotic pet, brought from the wilds of Borneo or someplace, simply for their amusement. No matter how much she might cry herself to sleep at night every night, she left a trail of laughter wherever she went. She had an impeccable seat on a horse. She could dance a waltz with a book on her head. Yes ma’am and no ma’am, a struggle for many of the girls, were second nature to her from the cradle. Her classmates vied to lure her to their palatial houses for the weekend, houses where Daddy went to Wall Street and Mummy went to Saks and the new wonder of fashion, Bergdorf Goodman. Her school chums, on the other hand, particularly the Jewish girls, had an irrational fear of visiting her, possibly out of fear they would be cornered and devoured by Negroes. She wrote perfect, charming thank-you notes in her graceful hand within minutes of returning.

  In other words, she started to become the woman she was to be, the woman who would dazzle a century, instead of the girl who seemed so jejune (her new best word) to her now.

  She had walked, kicking and mewling, down those long steps of home in the fall of 1914, a rough, untidy, charming but unfinished girl, her face a squall of fear and rage. She walked back up them in the spring of 1918, just as the Great War was coming to its end, everybody expecting victory any day—an ancient, as they say in Farmington, pulling off long kid gloves, chic in a red suit without being showy, a tall, willowy girl whose dark hair swept her shoulders, her eyes bright, her life an ascending stairway of illumination. She embraced her mother, she kissed her father, noticing in him the age and exhaustion the years had brought to his once jocular face. She had gone to Farmington on the eve of the Great War, nine million dead in Europe, and many at home exhausted, financially and emotionally, by the conflict. Some of her childhood friends—two Tayloe boys, one Carter, and several others—were lost in the mud of France. The days by the river seemed very far away. They’d still been so young, each one dead within days of his arrival, so quick to the slaughter in the greatest slaughterhouse ever known, as a somberness descended on the great houses of Virginia. Each one a local hero. There was talk of a monument to them, to be erected by the river they had loved so much, to stand where they could see the wide water, its tides and currents, its blues and greens and grays, its flurries and flights of plunging birds when the fish were running. But there was no money for monuments. Monuments cost money; grief was free. Everybody was broke. Everybody carried on, or tried to, as though nothing had happened—but the whole world had changed, and Diana had changed along with it.

  Into this mourning she walked, red on black, a big feathered hat on her perfectly held head, a hat so large she couldn’t really get close enough to kiss the faces she loved, so she laughed and threw it off, down the stairs, and gave them all proper kisses. She had not been home at all in her Farmington years. There was no money to ferry her back and forth during those holidays, and so she had spent them as a guest in one of the great suburban sprawls of the north,
where her charm and manners only expanded, her seductiveness grew, her power to flirt and attract bloomed like the roses on her cheeks. The northerners were captivated by her accent and the perfection of her handwriting when she wrote her thank-you notes, all of which made them want her back immediately. Everybody who saw her fell in love with her. She ate delicately and sparely. She played poker with the men. She rode cross-country, taking the fences with wild breakneck abandon and delight, and yet everything she did was pervaded by a delicacy, a gentility, that was never stale. Every day seemed fresh to her, a new chance for fun. She would appear for breakfast and, as she sat down to her place, look around with wide-eyed wonder and declare, “I’m having fun already!” She was the darling of every heart. The downy-cheeked boys at school dances knelt at her feet and wrote her notes of unbridled passion, which she politely but distantly answered. Her heart was far away, at the river, a jar of moonshine at her side, her friends around, the days endless under an azure sky that would never grow dark. Her heart was at Saratoga. She never spoke of it, for fear that even a mention of it might cause it to fall apart, wither, disappear into the fog that sometimes rose out of the mysterious blue depths of the Rappahannock.

  And now she was home, the war nearly over, walking up the stairs, pulling off her kid gloves, taking off her hat, and calling out, “Whom does one see to get a martini around here?”

  Her mother said, shocked, “It’s four o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “Time means nothing, dear mother. A martini means everything. Is there gin, Father?”