The Dying of the Light

by Robert Goolrick

  Sitting with her father in his study, sipping her chilled martini under her mother’s withering gaze, all she would say of her years at Farmington was “Well, the school motto says it all. ‘Puellae venerunt. Abierunt mulieres,’ which makes us sound rather like mules, don’t you think, Father?”

  He chuckled. “Are you weak in Latin or just weak in the head?”

  She laughed. “They came as girls. They left as women. Or mules, depending on how you translate it. I rather prefer being livestock. Women are treacherous creatures. Livestock you can pretty much depend on, and if things get tough, and they do, they always do, livestock is at least edible. This martini is divine. It is the most divine martini I have ever had, although, to be truthful, I’ve only ever had one other. Is there time for one more before dinner?”

  “Do not, and I mean not, get drunk before dinner, darling.”

  “That is my whole intention, my dear mother, after four completely, and I mean completely, sobering years at Farmington.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to see your present?” her father asked.

  “There are presents? How thrilling. First the present, then a quick divine martini, then a supper where I promise I will not fall off my chair. I have at least learned something at Farmington.”

  Her mother and father led her out to the barn, and there he was, well over fifteen hands high—Phaeton, her father told her, was his name—an enormous black Arabian stallion, a true exotic beauty, really, purchased with what funds she dared not surmise, although she had noticed a large pale space on the staircase where the Landseer had always hung. Best not to think of these things; better just to look at her stallion in wonder, to run her hands across his muscular flanks, to peer into his bottomless black eyes.

  “Oh, Mother, Father, he is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. We can’t possibly afford him—but, oh, I do, I do want him.”

  “He’s called Phaeton. I went all the way to the Middleburg sales three times before I found him. Just don’t go and break your neck.”

  “My neck is now the most expensive single thing in Caroline County. I will take extra good care of it. When can I ride him?”

  “Not tonight, I think. You will break that pretty neck. Particularly after a martini.”

  “Martini! I completely forgot. Father, rush to the bar and start pouring that gin. Mother is so rigid about the dinner hour. Eight o’clock and in your seat or death,” father and daughter said in unison. Diana turned to her stallion, idling in his stall. “Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. Until tomorrow.” And she kissed him on his muzzle and backed away, her eyes glued to his.

  She could have predicted dinner. Ham. Sally Lunn, a bread that had defeated many of the best cooks in the South, green beans boiled to an indescribable color of gray, floating in ham fat, and for dessert, bread and butter pudding. She ate ravenously.

  “You mustn’t put on weight, darling,” her mother said.

  “I have an eighteen-inch waist,” said Diana, “and it will stay eighteen until the moon turns blue.”

  After dinner, a brandy with her father, who held the Richmond Times-Dispatch in front of him, slapping the page with irritation as he read of each new outrage in the Commonwealth. Women wanting the vote. People wanting to ban hard drink. It was a cold, hard world, and he wanted no part of it.

  Then they retired, but not before Diana sneaked out, as she had so often, this time to lie on the floor of her stallion’s stall and gaze up at him in wonder. “Oh, my darling, what places we’ll go.”

  Hearing her name called distantly from the house, she reluctantly rose, the smell of hay and horse and dung clinging to her traveling suit, and made her way into the house in the dark. And so to bed.

  THE SUMMER WAS all riding and answering invitations to debutante balls, invitations that they could not afford but which would not stop coming.

  It was time to go to work. She now realized what the years at Farmington had been for. Her one job in life was to save Saratoga from the creditors, to save for her father and mother a comfortable old age. It was to sniff out, like a hound after a fox, a man with huge amounts of money, and make him, force him, to love her. Her life was meant not for love but to save Saratoga.

  They left on a bright late-fall afternoon, her father, Miss Ackerly, and herself. They boarded the train for Baltimore on the first overnight sleeper, and into the world.

  They stayed in a hotel that was not the finest. It was proper, but it was not elegant, one step removed from a boardinghouse. Her room was large and spacious, and looked out on train tracks that seemed to go on forever, that could take her anywhere she wanted to go. She had two dollars in her purse, her father not much more.

  In the evening Miss Ackerly came to help her dress, and to weave the tiara, the insignificant laurel wreath of small but not great diamonds, into her hair. While dressing her, Miss Ackerly told her, as she had so many times before, exactly what to expect of the evening, the formalities, the intricacies of the etiquette, set in place decades ago.

  By the time nine o’clock came, she knew all there was to know, and she was as ready as she could be. She felt that every nerve was on fire. She had twelve chances. She held twelve cards in her hand, and one of them must trump everything else on the table.

  There was a dinner. She was seated next to some young banker, filled with ardor and charm, who unfortunately would not be coming to the ball itself. No man under thirty was considered old enough to have established a firm footing in the world, certainly not firm enough to have acquired the requisite pile of money to take on a bride. These young men were like delicious hors d’oeuvres, taken away exactly at ten, at dinner’s end, to be replaced by more substantial fare, older men who had the resources and the place in business to take on a wife. The older bankers and lawyers and landowners stood at the edges of the grand ballroom, filled with dozens and dozens of red roses, like horsemen at the sales at Keeneland.

  For a long interval, one divine girl after another, carrying the bouquet of red roses they had all been given, was led onto the floor by her father, who then left her alone to make her exquisite curtsy. One girl fell down, and then it was Diana’s turn.

  She made her entrance out of the shadows, through the velvet curtains, onto the floor under the scrutiny of all the regal eyes, of all those handsome men. For a moment she stood, freed from her father’s arm as he wheeled himself back from her, until she was alone in the light, eyes lowered demurely, under the hundreds of candles in the seemingly hundreds of crystal chandeliers, the luminous room catching the glitter from her warrior’s tiara, her luminous, flawless skin, and then she bowed her head, her swan’s neck bending so that her chin touched her neck, and made the curtsy that was so elegant, so graceful, it was forever to be named after her. She bowed to the floor and rose like an angel, shining eyes wide open, rose into triumph, rose into legend, rose into a beauty that was never to be touched or equaled. And then she stepped back, her head high, like a rider approaching a jump, looking past the hurdle. And then she just stood, seeming to look into every eye, her gaze piercing every heart. The most beautiful girl in the world in white satin, holding a bouquet of red roses, perfectly still, knowing that she had done it, done the thing she was supposed to do, and if not now, then on some night like this, Saratoga would be saved once and for all.

  Her father wheeled forward, gently took her arm, and escorted her from the light. Once they were out of the eyesight of the crowd, he looked up at her from his chair, tears in his eyes, and patted her arm. “Bless you, child,” he said, and she kissed his forehead. There was such a deep and loving understanding between them, there was no more to be said.

  2

  SHE HAD WON the season, she had won her place in every season to come, and she had won her place in the eyes of Captain Copperton, who approached her that first night in Baltimore like a snake in a barnyard, handed her his card, and said, “I’m Captain Copperton, and I’m going to marry you.”


  She laughed. “Don’t mock me. You think I’m just a simple country clod. But I have fangs. And I can shoot the head off a turkey at a hundred yards.”

  His card was oversize, as the Europeans make them. The first thing she noticed was that there was nothing on the card except his name, which was fancifully engraved in copper ink. The second was his hair, which was the same color as the large carnelian set in the signet ring into which his seal was deeply engraved, bright rust-colored, the seal that she would only later learn was, like everything else about him, completely fabricated out of his own sprawling imagination.

  There were so many of these evenings to come, every one alike, the fanciful dinners at which charming young men sat on either side, filled with talk of college and rugby and rowing. And then the dance itself—rich older men, that being the whole point of coming out; to go right back in, into a comfortable, fulsome marriage, into the babies and the nannies and the servants and the summers at the family cottage in Maine, vast, sprawling, mildewed places where families of thirty or forty would get together for the month of August. All this awaited her, and the goal was clear—to marry the richest man she could find so that Saratoga could be saved—she never took her eye off the gold ring that awaited. Still, the young men were more fun than the fossils she met later in the evening, at the actual ball, and she blushed with pleasure when one or another of them shyly slipped her his card. But then there was the rest of the evening to get through, on her father’s arm, regal in his wheelchair, and then alone in the middle of the floor at Savannah or Richmond or St. Louis, the curtsy, the rise, her neck arched as though her face were a flower, turning toward the light.

  And Copperton. Always Copperton.

  She had been a wild success. Debutante of the year, they said, a jewel out of nowhere, all the rarer for that, for the fact that although her bloodlines were impeccable, her presence, herself, her infinite charms, were fresh, never seen before. Her homemade dresses endeared her all the more, her undeniable beauty making the other girls look awkward and overdressed. She had been photographed so many times she had forgotten how many, and she drew to herself the handsomest and the richest and the most refined. In their etiolated manners, so perfect, so ancient, she found no joy. She was—Farmington be damned—still the girl who took a dare down at the river. These boring men wanted to trot; she wanted to gallop.

  Now here was Copperton. A big fish on her first cast. The notorious Captain Copperton. He stood before her in all his full-blooded vigor, the vastness of his wealth trailing out behind him into infinity, every penny of it brand-new, a strange figure out of nobody knew where, out of the ordinary and into the splendid sheerly through the vastness of his greed, his way of grasping at anything and anybody who would make him money, his fortune, like his hair, as red as a newly minted penny. Miss Ackerly, watching him follow her, had warned that he was not the sort, not our sort, a carpetbagger, entirely nouveau in money and manners. Diana looked at his splendid blue eyes and said demurely, “Do you have any hooch in that flask in your jacket?”

  “You have a sharp eye,” he answered.

  “It comes from shooting Indians in the wilderness from which I have no doubt you know I come.”

  “There is brandy on my right, and whiskey on my left. When my evening clothes were made in London, I had flasks in both pockets when they fitted me, so they could fit the coat to make them invisible, just as they fit the coat with your arms up, as though you’re dancing, so it hangs right.”

  “Not entirely. Invisible, I mean.”

  “They hadn’t encountered you, Miss Cooke. So I am well provided for a lady in distress.”

  “Because I am dying for a drink as a man in the desert is dying for lack of water.”

  “That can be arranged easily enough.”

  “Can it? My chaperone . . . the Gorgon, my father.”

  “I will be outside on the terrace in ten minutes. You will, no doubt, find a way. Clever girl like you.”

  “What makes you think I’m clever? I could be just another unschooled idiot from the sticks.”

  “In that case, I will have to make you sophisticated. You don’t have to be clever for that. You just have to read magazines.”

  “At Farmington, we only read movie-star magazines. And that only under cover of darkness. By daylight, we read Latin and Greek. Neither clever nor sophisticated, I’m afraid.”

  “We are alike, Miss Cooke.”

  “And how is that, Captain Everybody-Knows-Who-You-Are Copperton?”

  “We are entirely made up. Out of whole cloth. Out of nothing. Out of darkness we have become dazzling beings. From the moment you made your first curtsy on this ridiculous circuit of virginity, yours was the only face in the room, the rest just moon-faced hopefuls who will sink back into the tide of ordinary lives from which they came. You are a brightness on your way to a greater brightness. All you need is money. I am made entirely of money, you of beauty. And I mean to have you. To make you one of the great women of the world.”

  “I believe that is entirely in my hands, Captain Copperton. Entirely. At the moment you have only one thing I want. And I will somehow meet you on the terrace in ten minutes and have it. Good evening.”

  In ten minutes, she was there with a thirst that seemed insatiable. They drank from the silver flasks and talked about it all.

  “You’re a princess from the country, and I’m an utter black-hearted cad, and I mean to sweep you off your feet and marry you as soon as possible. I’ve done my homework. I will show you the world, dress you in the couture of the moment. You will be the beauty of the age. For every acre you have, I have a million dollars to back it up.”

  “I have five thousand acres and a famous house that eats money.”

  “I know all this, and I know you’re sinking like the Titanic. The band may still be playing, but there is nothing but ruin ahead. Besides offering you love, or what I call love, I offer you a fortune that is endless. Coal mines. Oil wells. Forests to cut. There is no end to it. I want somebody to love me, to have my children. I’m forty-two years old. I have flitted like a butterfly from this heiress to that, and now I want to settle in with a woman of quality.

  “I saw you rise from your curtsy, and I offer you my fortune, my heart, and you have to offer nothing except the sweetness of your love and the fruits of your loins. Let us be a happy, comfortable couple. I offer you everything I have, and all you have to give me is your heart. A fortune waits for you, anything you want, and my heart.

  “I’m not good at this. I have many flaws. But, flaws, flaws and all, it’s all yours for the taking. Your father is free to get in touch with my solicitors. They will verify everything I have said. Marry me, Miss Cooke.”

  “Oh, stop. You’re being extremely foolish. I don’t even know you. What are those medals for, anyway?”

  “It did sound sort of like malarkey, didn’t it? Except for the you-are-going-to-marry-me part. But first, we’ll have dinner tonight.”

  “Impossible. Miss Ackerly, my chaperone, shares my room.”

  “I should think that after four years of sneaking out after curfew at Miss Porter’s, evading that old mummy will be a cakewalk for you. After this travesty of a ballroom has turned into a wilted bloodred mess, I will pick you up at your hotel. Leave this dress in a puddle on the floor and meet me in something black and sexy.”

  “It’s . . . I don’t have . . .”

  “I know where you’re staying. And I bet in that luggage you have something suitable for melting a red-haired cad’s heart. Lose the tiara. Your hotel has the stench of sad desire about it. It was once grand, you know, like so many things. Let’s be grand again, for one night. Midnight. Good evening, Miss Cooke.”

  Her heart suddenly beat faster. She was Red Riding Hood, and she had met the Wolf.

  An hour later, having tucked her father in with his brandy and gotten out of the dress and the crinolines and the bustle that held it up, and gotten into her nightgown and feigned sleep until Miss Ackerly
was, indeed, sleeping like a mummy, her long, stringy hair splayed across the pillow, soft wheezing sounds coming from her nose, her nostrils flaring with each intake of breath, Diana got up and, in the light from the street, interrupted only by the sounds of the passing trains, got herself into a midnight-blue silk dinner dress, the simplest of shapes, and her pearl necklace, and descended the stairs to the shabby lobby where the night porter slept and found Copperton waiting, top hat in hand, still in white tie and tails.

  There was something so clandestine about it all, so sinful, it made her blood rush.

  “Beauty descends,” said Copperton. “We have a taxi waiting to take us to Marconi’s, ironically on Saratoga Street.”

  She had never been in a taxi. It seemed indefinably luxurious, watching the lights of the city going by, taking her far from the grime of her hotel and leaving them in front of the brightly lit grandeur of Marconi’s. They walked up marble steps, scrubbed to a blinding whiteness, and into the small foyer where the maître d’ greeted Copperton by name with great deference.

  “Captain Copperton, my friend, it’s so good to see you. Your usual table?”

  “I think something more intimate. Somewhere where we can talk. We have much to discuss. This is Miss Cooke.”

  “Pleased to have you, Captain,” said the maître d’ with ultimate slavishness. “And Miss Cooke, I looked to heaven for an angel, and then she walked through the door of my restaurant. I hope we can please you.” Diana blushed, flushing from the neck up. Mr. Marconi—she assumed that was who he was—led them to a quiet table in a small but grand room, chandeliers casting a perfect light on every face, the pale green of the walls making everything a kind of perfection she had never seen before, the tuxedoed waiters moving so silently it was like a magic act, eight waiters delivering eight dinners to eight diners at the exact same moment. She had never seen anything so grand in all her life. Men and women sat at tables for two, the men in evening dress, the women in dinner dresses that far surpassed her own, wearing jewels that made her own small pearls look like something a child would wear for her First Communion.