The Swans of Fifth Avenue

by Melanie Benjamin

  Now, this was out in Oyster Bay, you know. And there had been some talk of prowlers around. Somebody breaking into people’s houses even when they were there. Not even taking much, just there, in the house, making a mess and then leaving. People were a little jumpy.

  (“I remember it so well,” Gloria whispered. “Billy and Ann weren’t the only ones who slept with a gun in the bedroom.”)

  (“Yes, but honestly, Gloria. Did you sleep with a loaded gun?” asked Slim.)

  (“No, but I did put my jewels in my pillowcase. I didn’t get a wink of sleep, it was so lumpy!”)

  (“Like the princess and the pea,” Truman exclaimed, clapping his hands.)

  Well, even though we all knew about them, Ann made a point that evening to mention the prowlers several times, and how nervous they made her. It was almost as if she was preparing her alibi.

  So that night, then, after she and Billy went home early, banished by Wallis because of their fighting—

  (“Bang!” whispered Pamela.)

  (Truman, his eyes round as an owl’s behind his glasses, jumped in his seat and squealed, clutching Babe’s hand to his heart.)

  Ann shot him. She shot him in the dark, turned on the light, called the ambulance—and called her lawyer, too. And sat there, working herself up to some convincing hysterics by the time the ambulance arrived. Oh, my poor Billy! Oh, my poor dear! I heard a noise and thought it was that prowler, that horrible prowler! Oh, what have I done! Apparently, the actress was quite effective. The police later said she ought to have been in movies.

  (“She’d calmed down by the time the lawyer arrived,” Slim observed, lighting up a cigarette. “She was perfectly clear-eyed, and wondering how quickly Billy’s life insurance might pay up.”)

  Now, Elsie (“Poor Elsie,” Truman said), the grand dame—Bill Senior died a couple years ago, remember?—was heartbroken. Not just for herself but for her grandsons, Ann and Billy’s two boys. So Elsie did what any respectable grand dame would do. We can’t imagine Mrs. Astor could have done it any better. Elsie opened up the vault and paid everyone off—we mean everyone! The police, the judge, the jury, the reporters. Ann gave a statement to the grand jury, and—miracle of miracles!—they determined there was no reason for a trial. It was an accident, pure and simple. Ann mistook her husband—who slept in a bedroom down the hall, away from her, conveniently so in this case—for a prowler.

  And so now Ann and Elsie are the two Woodward widows, and Elsie makes a show of inviting Ann to dinner, to lunch—

  All of them turned to stare at the two women in black, seated across from each other, barely eating, not speaking. There was the sense that some invisible alarm clock was set, and the two were only waiting for it to ring before they could escape their shared ordeal.

  Elsie takes her everywhere, parades her about, and Ann is utterly miserable—oh, she hates Elsie (“Dear Elsie,” acknowledged Babe), of course—but what can she do? She’s forever in her mother-in-law’s debt, if she doesn’t want to go to prison.

  (“I do wonder,” Slim mused, narrowing her feline eyes, “what they talk about. Don’t you? What in heaven’s name do those two talk about, sitting at the best table for all to see, putting on such a happy—well, at least inscrutable—face?”)

  (No one had an answer to that.)

  Soon, though, Elsie’s sending Ann to Europe. Away, leaving those two little boys with Elsie. Ann may have escaped trial by jury, but trial by mother-in-law is just as damning. Meanwhile, here they sit, just like us. Lunching at La Pavillon. Putting on brave faces for the photographers. A united front. So no one will gossip.

  “I understand that,” Babe said with a quiet sigh. “I really do. I don’t know if Ann is guilty or not. I’ve never been close to her. But I think poor, sweet Elsie did the right thing.”

  “I think Ann should rot in jail,” Slim declared. “Elsie should think about justice for her son, not about how the family Christmas card will look.”

  “No, but think how painful it would be for Elsie to admit that—that her son had made a mistake. That she had made a terrible mistake. To know that everyone is talking about you in that way—”

  “But we are, anyway, Babe! Elsie may drag Ann along to lunch, and keep inviting her over for dinner and family gatherings, but we all know what happened, and we’re still talking about it, so why even bother? Why not let Ann get what she deserves?”

  “I don’t know.” Babe frowned, her eyes darker than usual. She put a cigarette in her long ebony holder with a shaking hand, allowing Truman to light it for her. “It’s not easy, you know, trying so hard to—to act as if everything is just fine. To put on a united front in the face of such gossip. I simply admire Elsie so much, for trying to keep it all quiet, for being loyal, in her way, to her daughter-in-law, who, after all, is family, the mother of her grandsons.”

  “Even if that daughter-in-law murdered her son?”

  “Of course that’s terrible and tragic, and I’m not sure—I don’t think—it’s a private matter. That’s all. Between them. None of us should see anything untoward in Elsie’s behavior. No one should suspect the truth between them, because it’s only that. Between them.”

  Truman put a warm hand on Babe’s arm, soothing her.

  “Bobolink, you’re a dear. A sweet, naïve dear, and I love you.” He kissed her cheek, and Babe put a hand to his face, briefly, claiming him. “We’ll talk later,” he promised quietly, but Slim heard, and bit her lip, studying how grateful Babe suddenly looked, the eagerness in her eyes as she nodded at Truman and grasped his hand, like a lifeline.

  But then Truman grinned slyly at the rest of them and held up a card. “Breast job,” he whispered, nodding toward Ann, and the table erupted into laughter once more. Even Babe smiled wanly.

  However. After lunch, on their way to the powder room, they all stopped by Ann and Elsie Woodward’s table to say a kind word to Elsie, and to cut Ann cold. Except for Babe; Babe alone put a hand on Ann’s shoulder in greeting.

  Truman, too, acknowledged Ann, as Slim, hanging back and rummaging in her handbag for some change, happened to see. After Babe and the others passed on, Truman turned around. He and Ann locked gazes; Ann’s lip curled up sardonically. Truman pointed his fingers at her and whispered, “Bang! Bang!”

  Slim gasped; Truman heard her. He shrugged nonchalantly as they continued on their way toward the lounges, where they parted and Slim pulled Babe aside, ostensibly to see if she could borrow a dollar for the matron.

  “Babe, dear, be careful.”

  “Why? What do you mean?” Babe handed her five dollars with a slightly scolding frown. “Always five dollars, Slim, dear. It’s nothing to you, but quite a lot to them.”

  “Thank you. I know how private you are. I know how discreet, always—it’s not like you to gossip, and we all love you for it. It’s what makes you Babe and the rest of us mere humans. So with Truman, just—be careful. That’s all. Be careful what you talk about. We all should.”

  “Slim, you are sweet.” Babe smiled and kissed her friend on the cheek. “I so appreciate your concern. But Truman—why, he’s family. I rely on him more than I do Betsey or Minnie, even. He’s a true friend. I have to say, one of the dearest friends I’ve ever had.”

  “Yes, well, I hope so, Babe. For your sake, I hope so.”

  “Slim, Slim, Slim.” Babe shook her head and tucked her arm through her friend’s as they walked toward the ladies’ room. “So kind, so concerned and thoughtful! Are you and Leland coming out to Kiluna this weekend? I do hope you’ll wear that divine gown I saw you trying on at Bergdorf’s. You looked stunning. Like a tall glass of champagne.”

  Slim smiled. “Babe, they broke the mold with you.”

  “Well, I certainly hope so!”

  And the two women laughed. They were still laughing when they joined the others in the lobby. Truman was surrounded by C.Z., Marella, Pam, and Gloria; he was in the midst of one of his stories. But when he saw his two favorites approaching, their head
s bent together in intimacy and laughter, he stopped right in the middle of a sentence. Hopping up and down, rubbing his hands, his voice raised to stratospheric heights, Truman squealed.

  “Ooh, what’s so funny? What are you two talking about without me? Tell me! Tell me, do!”

  “Nothing, True Heart. So don’t strain yourself. It’s nothing.”

  “Really?” Truman looked up, first at Slim, then at Babe. His wide eyes narrowed; his jaw set. “Really, honey? Because you know me. You know I just can’t stand secrets, unless I’m the one telling them!”

  Slim didn’t join in the general laughter. She looked worriedly at Babe, who didn’t return her gaze.

  She couldn’t. Babe Paley was staring at Truman with the indulgent, yet hungry look of a proud mother.

  Or was it a lover?

  La Côte Basque, October 17, 1975

  …..

  “You know, I tried to warn her.”

  Slim ground out another cigarette; the crystal ashtrays were overflowing now with lipstick-stained butts, piles of ash spilling over the edges onto Monsieur Soulé’s fine linen tablecloth. There was even a small burn mark, which Gloria had covered up with a wineglass. The sun was lower in the sky; so was the champagne in the bottle (the third bottle, to be precise).

  “What, darling? What do you mean?” Gloria tried to stifle a yawn; she couldn’t remember sitting in one place for so long, not even at La Côte Basque. Her ass, quite honestly, was a little numb. And she had to pee.

  Instead, she raised her glass once more, and it was miraculously filled. Oh, being rich was simply lovely, when it came right down to it. Hold out a glass, and it was filled. Hold out an arm, and it was thrust into a satin-lined fur coat. Hold out a finger, and it was encrusted with jewels.

  Yet even as Gloria smiled to herself, her eyes half closed, the memories of her childhood and early youth were not far away. They never were; they were always lapping at the edges of her consciousness, persistent waves of fear and loathing and humiliation: Solo el que carga el cajón sabe lo que pesa el muerto.

  Just the other day, trying on a new pair of Ferragamo pumps, her narrow foot stretching out luxuriously in the supple leather, testing the cushioned sole, she’d felt a burning, stabbing pain in the pad of that foot, so acute that she’d cried out, startling the Bergdorf salesman. It was the phantom pain of having to walk barefoot on bad days, or in the thinnest huaraches on good, on the burning gravel streets of the village in Mexico where she had been born, sixty-three years earlier: Veracruz, to be precise. But she hadn’t said the name of her hometown aloud for years, decades. She’d hypnotized it out of her mind, for fear of blurting it out at an inopportune moment, one reason why she rarely drank much—del plato a la boca se cae la sopa, her father had often reminded her when she was a girl. But other details, stories, of her youth remained. That searing pain, for instance; how her feet never could get clean, how the gravel would disintegrate into a rough powder, grinding into her soles until they became ugly, thorny pads, not feet at all.

  How the first thing she did, once she had a little money from working in the local dance hall, where a man would grab the first available girl like he was catching a pollo in a yard, was to buy cream to rub into her feet every night, so that someday, when she slept with the kind of man who would notice, they would be smooth, soft as velvet: aristocratic feet.

  How the first time she did sleep with the kind of man who would notice, he didn’t. But he did notice her hands, her nails, and so then she started spending time on them, too. Pinching pesos—stealing pesos—to buy more creams, a pumice stone. How she learned to view her body then as a man would, by sleeping with many men, many different men. The other girls dressed and preened for one another, but Gloria soon recognized there was no currency in that. She must stand out, be the one men wanted, because men, at their most vulnerable (in bed, with their soft spots exposed and used up, red and tender, the curling tendrils of their upper thighs matted with secretions), would pay.

  Women never let themselves be that vulnerable. And women never had enough money, anyway. She knew women who slept with other women, saying it was easier, but she never did. Maybe it was easier, but it simply didn’t pay. So Gloria concentrated on the men, learning from each individual. There was the one who liked to lick her teeth, laughing at how crooked they were. There was the one who put his two hands about her waist and pinched at the roll of baby fat above her hips with a scowl. So she began to save, squirreling away the money to have the teeth fixed; she stopped buying sweets.

  They all were entranced by her neck, that long, lovely pipe stem holding up her flower of a head. A few even wanted to hold it in their hands, chokingly, during sex, which she allowed only once. That was enough; she’d blacked out, the bastard had stolen from her, and it set her back for months.

  But finally she found a man, a different man. A man who came to the dance hall one night and seemed entranced by the colored lanterns, the terrible mariachi band with the mismatched outfits, the dogs sprawling lazily around the edges of the dance floor, as hungry as the girls themselves were, but only the dogs could look forward to any scraps of food. A man who took his time to choose, and he chose her, Gloria Rubio y Alatorre, daughter of a journalist with lofty ideas and no money, and of a seamstress whose only useful piece of advice to her child was that she must learn how to sew a straight line with tiny stitches, and be nice to men.

  The man—his name? Gloria honestly couldn’t remember anymore—married her and took her away, and that was all that mattered. He took her to Europe, where she promptly left him at a train station in Paris, deciding that was where she wanted to be, not some village on an Alp. She took one look, one whiff of Paris—the scent of fresh cut flowers and warm bread, the saturated colors, even the grays were beautiful—and she planted her feet firmly on the train platform and said “Buenas noches” to her hapless German. Because Paris was where she belonged; instinctively, she knew that was where the wealthy men were. And her German, she had discovered on the boat over, when they’d settled for steerage and had to share a suitcase, was not wealthy. Bastard! Gloria detested men who lied more than she detested women who did. Women, after all, were trained to do nothing else from birth. We lie about pain, we lie about happiness, we lie about how happy men make us, how good they make us feel when really all we want is to sleep in a clean, warm bed. Alone.

  Suddenly Gloria cringed, remembering something she’d told Truman not long ago, her head muddled by the false intimacy fueled by too much champagne and not enough food. “Loel farts,” she’d pronounced with a tipsy giggle. “Like a farm animal, all night long—pooh, pooh, pooh! That’s why I can’t bear to sleep with him. Who on earth could? And why do men fart, anyway?”

  “Honey, if I knew the answer to that one, I wouldn’t have to rely on Seconal,” Truman had commiserated.

  Oh, God. What if that made it into a story or a book someday? La Guinness confided that she couldn’t stand to sleep with Loel due to his uncontrollable flatulence….

  What if something worse was made known to the world via the poison of Truman Capote’s pen? Her mouth tightened, the muscles in her lovely long neck strained. Even now, after all these years, she felt the raw, animal fear of all she had to lose, should someone find out.

  Gloria felt a grip on her arm; she looked up to see Slim’s cat’s-eye glasses askew, her lipstick smeared.

  “I also made that little bastard a shitload of money,” Slim slurred, beckoning to the waiter. “Vodka, baby. Champagne gives me the trots, to tell the truth, but we don’t normally do that, do we? Well, hell. Today, we do!”

  Slim turned back to Gloria, who steadily, silently downed an entire glass of champagne, her gaze never leaving Slim’s, as if to prove her superiority of constitution.

  “I made him the deal. The film deal for In Cold Blood. I did! Not Swifty, not anyone else. And so what does he do? He makes me the bitch in his story. The blabbermouth. Lady Ina Coolbirth. What the hell kind of a name is that, any
way?”

  “I think,” Pamela whispered, “there was a real person by that name, a long time ago….”

  “Shut up, Pam!” Slim grabbed the crystal highball glass full of vodka out of the waiter’s hands before he could set it on the table. She sipped, welcoming the icy-hot alcohol down her throat, and it brought tears to her eyes. Tears and memories, both.

  Because it had been so long since she had just been Slim. Nancy. Whoever. It had been so long since she had been herself, and that was a laugh. A hell of a laugh. “Oh, Slim! You’re such an original! No one’s like you! You’re true, the truest I know!”

  God. Truman had said that, hadn’t he? The little creep. The wise old soul. The friend who had broken her heart—and friends who betrayed other friends were simply the—the—

  Take Pam, for instance. Slim’s heart was already broken long before Truman’s deviltry, crushed and ground beneath the stiletto heel of one Pamela Churchill (Hayward). She gazed at Pam now, tempted to throw some ice water down that cleavage. God, Pam really was getting too old to dress like the slut that she was; her cleavage was a bit leathery, wrinkled. But Slim didn’t douse her rival with ice water; Leland was dead now, anyway. Dead, dead, dead, like all the other men who’d loved her.

  Almost all, that is.

  But she had been an original back then, hadn’t she, once upon a time? She’d reveled in it, rejoiced in it, chuckled to herself about it at night. All those men, those Hollywood men, those legends—how they’d all fallen for her, every one, and she’d pretended to be embarrassed or shy or confused or surprised. But she wasn’t; she’d made them fall in love with her by being her truest self to the point that it became a costume she put on in the morning, a mask she slipped over her head. The all-American girl, the blond California goddess, the outdoorswoman who could ride and shoot and fish, seemingly not caring about how she looked—secretly spending quite a lot of time, indeed, brushing that golden hair and buffing those natural nails and plucking those untamed eyebrows, choosing those clothes, unusual and tailored and clean when everyone else was wearing snoods and lace collars and giant hats with feathers, jersey dresses with jewel clips.