The Dying of the Light

by Robert Goolrick

  There were no tears, nothing to ruin her makeup, but there was a deep and terrifying sense of tragedy in her eyes. Her mother rose and held her softly in her arms for a long time, careful not to disturb so much as a hair on her head. “I know, my darling, I know. But the thing is done. Isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Done. Hold my hand.”

  And they held hands for a time, mother and daughter, and then the mother dropped her hand and slowly left the room, but not before saying, “My darling girl. You have given yourself to this man for all of us. It was a great sacrifice, and your father and I love you, as we have always loved you.” She squeezed her hand. “This is your life. Your only life. Do whatever you want to do, my sweet lovely daughter. If you want to call it off, we’ll find some way to do it. Even at this hour. Your father will make a little speech, and you will be free of it, of him. Our love will be with you just the same.” Then she was gone.

  Diana rose from her dressing table and moved to the window and looked over the waiting crowd. Waiting for her. She saw the boats in the river, the hungry-eyed cameras. Waiting for her. And Copperton. Waiting for her. She was wearing the diamond cuff he had given her a lifetime ago in Baltimore. She smoothed down her golden Fortuny dress, smoothed her hair, put her hand on her stomach, and breathed deeply. She threw open the window, and the sweet, warm spring air came in. She leaned out and yelled, so that everybody could hear, “Oh my darlings, forgive me. A case of girlish jitters. I am so sorry to keep you waiting. How rude of me, my darlings. If you’ll sit for one more second, I’ll be right down.” Then she ran and opened the door and skipped down the stairs and out the door and into the golden light of the approaching evening.

  On the stone terrace, with every eye on her, she took her father’s arm and smiled a radiant smile, and together they moved down the stone steps and down the long aisle, preceded by twelve bridesmaids. The aisle was strewn with spring flowers, and Diana’s radiance never faltered, never failed, as every woman, and some of the men, gasped at the daring and beauty of her, naked beneath the clinging, golden Fortuny dress. The shock that rippled through the crowd was exactly the reason she had chosen this dress, this one daring dress, over every spun-sugar confection in Paris.

  Only her father knew how she trembled, how close she came to falling.

  It was a simple silk column, golden, and pleated with what seemed like hundreds and thousands of pleats, the fabric so light it was almost transparent as it clung to her naked body. Glass beads weighted it down on each side and at the hem, which puddled around her on the ground, revealing golden, beaded silk shoes with every step. It was so light a confection it seemed the slightest wisp of air might have blown it away altogether, and she carried a single golden lily at her waist that hardly covered what every woman saw immediately: Diana Cooke was pregnant.

  The cameras clicked so madly from the boats in the river that even across the water, everybody could hear them, like a swarm of bees, as she approached the altar, her veil of golden lace flowing out, sunlit wings from the beaded band around her forehead. She smiled lovingly at Copperton, who stepped forward in relief that barely concealed his irritation. He took her elbow from her father, and together they faced the minister.

  Weddings are brief affairs, no more than fifteen minutes to seal two lives together for life. Diana and Copperton stood erect, facing the river, enduring the ceaseless clicking of the cameras, Copperton welcoming the notoriety, Diana horrified, and they spoke only when spoken to. They exchanged rings, hers tiny, his massive, and they said I do, and then they kissed, Diana’s stomach churning, and then it was over. They turned to the crowd and waved to applause, and with ravishing smiles on their faces, walked the long, flower-strewn way back to the house. The crowd left their chairs and eagerly headed to any of the three bars that had been set up as the sun went down, and dozens of torches were lit to illuminate the reception, which was lavish beyond anything ever seen before in Virginia.

  There were endless roast Rappahannock oysters, with their slightly salty, almost buttery taste, ham biscuits, which the southerners devoured, and the Yankees eyed askance, because, as one of them said, “This tastes like something you’d put down on the driveway after a snowstorm.” There were mounds of caviar, gotten from God-knows-where, since by the end of the nineteenth century the American rivers were almost fished out of sturgeon, and trade with Russia had only just begun. There were gallons of St. Cecilia’s Society Punch, made famous in Charleston, and all the hard liquor the hardest drinker could want.

  Diana rushed upstairs to change her clothes. The golden wedding dress was thrown on the bed, and she changed into a peach-colored evening dress from Lanvin, tier after tier of peach silk down to her ankles, with a giant rose at the waist, and two teal streamers that fell almost to the floor.

  Then the guests sat down to filet and pommes Anna and Sally Lunn and magnum after magnum of Pommery, and the revelry went on and on, Diana the most boisterous of all, dancing with her new husband to a twenty-piece orchestra brought down from New York, playing swing music, the latest rage, and no one danced with more abandon than she did. There was a brief stop for the cake, a fantastic towering creation also brought down somehow from New York, covered in royal icing, shipped layer by layer and assembled in the great kitchen at Saratoga. At the top, Diana and Copperton in spun sugar, and they did the cutting with great hilarity, and then three hundred and fifty mostly drunk men and women each were given a piece, some in gold boxes to take home to say, “I was there, I saw it all, how it began.”

  The Virginia families left first. Copperton’s friends stayed until the sun was coming up, the staggering men helping bedraggled women to their cars, so many beautiful dresses in ruins, and then it was over and it was silent. The boats had long since moved away and the river was smooth as glass as the sun came up and the gray turned to rose and gold on the water and one eagle swooped through the lovely moonshot sky as Diana and Copperton stood on the dock, arm in arm, silhouetted against the brightening water. And then they kissed at last.

  Diana stood on the dock, the sun shimmering through her gossamer dress. Instead of tossing her bouquet over her shoulder, she dropped it with disdain in the river and watched as the tide quickly pulled it away. What had she done? Who was this vulgar stranger to whom she had sold herself?

  Finally they went to bed, the wedding clothes swept to the floor, and made love with a mixture of ferocity and repulsion, and so it was to be for the entirety of their marriage.

  The golden dress was wrapped in tissue in a box, where it lay until the night she wore it one last time, for Gibby, sweet Gibby, many years later, and then never again, given to a museum, the only people glad to have it.

  Ah, Gibby. Even now, he sweeps over her like warm water. Gibby, her life, her love, her brief reward for her girlish sacrifice. Gibby the golden boy. Gibby the lost. Gibby in flames.

  5

  THEY SPENT THEIR honeymoon doing the two things they did best—having sex and shopping. Diana, until so recently ignorant of the ways of both, took to them with a vampire’s eagerness for blood. She had been blind to sex before, but now that the veils were ripped from her eyes she saw everything as sexual—a ride in the back of a London taxi, where they kissed with a hunger that seemed criminal, an entrance into a Paris hotel where she was already known from her previous trip, and greeted with an obsequiousness that was mortifying, all these things did was make her want to rush to some private place where she could be relieved of the clothes that suddenly seemed to be strangling her. While the bellman stacked and emptied the trunks—there were four—she was almost at the point of screaming, whereas Copperton, to torture her, languidly dragged everything out, making conversation with the bellman, whom of course he knew by name, the bellman talking about his family and, with an apology lest the Captain think he didn’t like his job, about the relief of his days off, his pleasure in his children and his wife, while Diana inwardly moaned, until Jean or Jacques finally left, a load of cash in his hand, and a no
d to the Captain, and they were finally alone and she could lock the door and grab at Copperton, pulling him to the bed, where he came to life like a match struck in the dark and never disappointed, matching her desire with his skill. Sex between them was like war, she the conquered before the conflict even began, he the conqueror, with the freedom to enjoy the spoils of war at his leisure, picking through the ruins of battle, grabbing and biting, until finally he relented and gave her what she wanted, what she needed to have. And after, the joys of peace, her heart dancing in the streets, sipping champagne and embracing the sunset that would bring darkness and fiercer and more prolonged conflict.

  She hated herself, hated her desires, in particular her desire for this vulgarian, but like a caged animal given its first taste of freedom, she spread her legs to the whole world and was only truly at home when violated. This was not love, as she had dreamed it. This was something hungry, atavistic, rapacious. She devoured small birds in restaurants, letting the juices run down her chin. Her skirts were the shortest, the very shortest in Paris, and she used her body to bring Copperton to the brink of ecstasy, the edge of despair.

  Diana gave herself to her most fearsome and perverse desires, even though she was two months pregnant. There would be plenty of time for delicacy and rectitude. For now she was a warrior of love, blind to everything else. The rustle of the lavender silk of her evening dress only made her eager for the night to be over, for the sheets to be drawn back, the dress in a heap on the floor. The smell of the handsome waiters’ hair pomade. The way the foie gras melted on her tongue. She would take off her shoes under the table and run her feet up Copperton’s leg, without acknowledgment, without the slightest indication on his part that he knew she was doing it, increasing her furor to be alone with him. He seemed to take no note of any of this.

  Copperton ate ravenously, asking the waiter many questions about each course, deciding carefully, drawing it out, the dinner, the dancing, the evening, knowing he was torturing her, and smiling his thin, graceless smile, winking at her from time to time. The diamonds around her throat were a noose, strangling her, and he knew it, and enjoyed the spectacle.

  And when dinner was over, the last drop of oeufs à la neige wiped fastidiously from his chin, and an obligatory dance had been danced, he would suddenly and deliberately take her elbow and lead them from the orchestrated clamor of the dining room and up into their large suite of rooms, the one with the view, the one with the Whistler over the fireplace, the one with whatever distinction made it the best in the city, and in the shadowed light of the suite he would give her what she so obviously needed, as precisely as a brilliant general leading his troops into battle, and then and only then could she find peace, and lie with her head on his shoulder for a moment, limp, childishly pleased and smiling, but only for a moment, because soon he would rise from the bed and slip on his spotted silk dressing gown from Turnbull & Asser and walk away from her with a vague ‘Good night, darling. Sleep well,” and retire to his own room. What he did there, until late in the night—she could see the light under his door—was a mystery.

  He thought it vulgar for a man and woman to spend the whole night together. He found waking up next to a woman, even his wife, repulsive. He, the parvenue, announced it to be crass and middle class. The morning smells. The dishevelment. The twisted sheets. She would not see him again until after breakfast, when he would appear, immaculately turned out, ready for the day, surprised to find her still in her nightclothes, her tisane and her single boiled egg untouched, and he, irritated, would urge her to bathe, dress, and meet him in the lobby. He was eager to get to the shops. And she would gulp down her still-hot tisane and comply, as she did in all things having to do with Copperton.

  Europe was poor then. The war had left such poverty in its wake, and a man with cash could pick up treasures for pocket change. They came home with treasure after treasure—silver, furniture, a samovar four feet high that had belonged to the tsar—and with less love between them than they had felt when they left. The hollow between them had become a concrete thing, and they filled it with all the grandeur Saratoga had to offer, and all the baubles they could buy.

  He had begun to hurt her. The withholding of his desire, his seeming obliviousness to her obvious invitation, was the first thing. But then he began to cause her real pain. He would bite. He began to slap her during sex, sometimes leaving marks, but never where they might show when she was clothed. Sometimes she had to beg him to stop, but once taken with his desires, he wouldn’t stop. He tied her hands behind her back with the sash from his dressing gown; he tied her hands to her feet. He came at her from behind, a searing pain she, bound, was helpless to prevent.

  “Come on,” he said. “It’ll be fun. Exciting.”

  Diana found it to be neither, particularly as his advances became more complicated and more painful.

  He was raping her. Again and again, night after night.

  One morning her chambermaid knocked gently on the door exactly at seven thirty, as they had agreed, to bring in her tea and croissant. As she opened the door, she shrieked “Mon Dieu!” as she saw Diana, tied hands and feet, last night’s makeup smeared down her face in the rivulets of her tears. She quickly untied her and handed her her robe, and then she just sat on the edge of the bed and held Diana as she wept and wept into her shoulder. She finally got her to take a little tea and some bread, and Diana’s embarrassment overcame her pain and humiliation, and she asked to be left alone.

  She sat in the bath for a long time, nursing her sore wrists, her nipples, her violated body. Then, not knowing what else to do, she dressed and waited for her husband, telling herself that this was the last time, that she would not allow this to happen again, and knowing in her heart that it wasn’t, and she would.

  How do you walk out on the street after such belittlements? Surely the chambermaid had told the next chambermaid, who told the footmen, and so on, so that when she stepped into the lobby, everybody looked at her with complete knowledge of her imprisonment and her freedom.

  After each of these episodes a box would arrive by noon, from Cartier or Chaumet or Rousselet with some more elaborate and dazzling jewel inside, a brooch, a necklace, another tiara for which she had no use or desire.

  And yet she stayed with him. She didn’t know any better. She assumed this was what marriage was, and in some small way, she felt that she deserved it. She had allowed herself to be bought, and now she felt owned, her body no longer her own. Somehow it felt right, as if it was all she deserved, having no more to offer than a pretty foot.

  She was afraid of him. But she was bound to him. She had no other use. She couldn’t leave. She had not a single dollar of her own. Her beautiful handbag was empty.

  When they got back to Saratoga, and all the wonders they had bought were unpacked and placed, he ran the house like a military regiment. He was dismissive of her father once the ink dried on the contract. He was actively rude to her mother. They pretended not to notice, but they did, and it hurt Diana, who confronted him about it.

  “Couldn’t you just make an effort. For me?”

  “Why on earth would I do that, my darling?”

  “They did everything for me. You couldn’t know the thousand sacrifices they made. It cost them everything.”

  “They didn’t have anything, except some filthy old paintings. And now they have everything they could possibly want. Forever and ever amen.”

  He ran the house like a continuous party for a debauched set of people who arrived every Friday on the train from New York. Luckily, they had reached the part of her pregnancy where sex was inadvisable, so for the moment she was free from his desires and his terrors. She heaved a sigh of relief every night as she heard the lock turn in his bedroom door. He seemed to have lost all interest in her, and spent the days riding and shooting, in the brand-new clothes he had had fitted in London.

  He still threw parties, inviting his louche friends every weekend, filling the guest rooms, and the dancing and
champagne flowed from Friday to Sunday morning every weekend.

  Pregnant, she watched the dancing, the whole bacchanal, from her balcony in her dressing gown, alone.

  The family secretly prayed for a boy, an heir, and she, dutiful as ever, produced a boy, right before her twentieth birthday, a boy whom Copperton named Ashton Cooke Copperton III, another bunny out of the magic hat he had, the hat that was filled with infinite invention. Ashton III? Were there two others? It was never discussed.

  And the minute he was born, she was so overwhelmed by his fragility that he was taken from her into the nursery, where she would visit him only late at night, where she would pick him up and wake him from a sound sleep. Eventually he started to develop mysterious rashes, until the doctor concluded that it was in fact Diana who was causing them. Ashton was, after all, being woken in the middle of the night by a total stranger, cooed at and coddled by a lady all in furs and diamonds and perfume, the fairy godmother, and then given a kiss and a “Good night, darling” and handed back to his mammy. Then he would spend the rest of his night and day in his crib, fed by his mammy, wondering who that woman was and whether she would come again, not sleeping until he involuntarily fell asleep, weeping at his abandonment, and then suddenly the room was bright and the queen, the queen of the night, swept down and held him in her arms for ten minutes, and then she abandoned him again to darkness. He didn’t know who she was.

  She was twenty-one, and she had given birth and then had been given no sense, no idea, what she was supposed to do with her son. The doctor simply advised that she not visit him anymore, and the rashes went away. Copperton, meanwhile, never missed an opportunity to belittle her parenting skills, her looks, whatever he could find. I spent a fortune on that dress, and you look like a washerwoman in it. Change your shoes, darling, or we’re not leaving this room. Most women look beautiful when they’re pregnant—you looked like a bloated cow. An endless string of small, unnecessary jabs.