The Whiteness of Bones

by Susanna Moore

  “How did she know?” Mamie asked.

  “What?”

  “That the horse loved it.”

  Claire shrugged. “Women know these things.”

  Mamie laughed. Claire looked up at her, pleased. “I believe it,” she said.

  “You would.”

  “I’m happy for the farmer,” Claire said.

  “I’m happy for the horse,” Mamie said, putting on her dress. She was wearing a lavender flocked-velvet cheongsam she had found in an antique store in downtown Los Angeles. Alysse had wanted her to borrow something of hers, but Mamie had politely refused. Alysse thought that Mamie always looked as if she were going to a costume party. Like Selena, she thought that Mamie’s way of dressing was perverse. She had convinced Claire to wear one of her cocktail dresses and, in fact, it was Claire who looked like she was disguised as a middle-aged rich lady.

  Alysse had gone to great trouble for the party. The apartment was filled with thousands of ruffled pink peonies and Mamie, who did not know about peonies, was delighted with the millions of rounded petals, as soft as powdered skin, and the sweet fragrance that seeped from room to room.

  Four round tables had been put up in the dark green dining room. Alysse was very proud of the place settings. She had stolen the idea from Vivi Crawford. The china and silver and glasses were set on top of three or four large art books arranged on the tables before each gilt chair. Mamie, who had on her right a plump interior decorator and, on her left, a man named Alder Stoddard, had been lucky enough to draw Monet at Giverny, Avedon and English Country Houses. This stack of books in front of each guest diminished by quite a bit the distance from plate to mouth and it wasn’t until the second course, a Poitrine de Veau Farcie, that they adjusted to this awkward foreshortening. The other difficulty was that there was nowhere on the table to place their arms, so in moments of stillness they looked like very good schoolchildren at their desks, hands folded obediently in their laps.

  Mamie looked at the faces illuminated by candlelight. The women and their jewels, and the shining cloth of their dresses, shimmered with a glittering, pearly iridescence and the bare-shouldered women stood out whitely against the green walls, as if they were in a forest at night. As she looked curiously around the table, Mamie noticed for the first time that some women as they grew older, became increasingly hard, just as men became softer and more effeminate.

  Mr. Stoddard was a tall man in his early thirties. He was wearing a well-cut navy blue pin-striped suit. He had dark, short hair and dark, serious eyes that flicked restlessly over the surface of things. Mamie had the sense that he was a man who was easily bored. He was frowning, with his head cocked so that he could listen to Lady Studd, who was on his other side, without having to look at her. Lady Studd ate stealthily off his plate as she told him of the time Slim Pomerantz jumped into a bonfire in Jamaica because her husband was flirting with the waitress.

  “She said, ‘Look, look, I’m Jeanne d’Arc!’ ”

  Mamie turned to the man on her right. He was very famous for having recently introduced Toile de Jouy to the new world. There were very few good apartments or country houses that did not have at least one room covered in toile. Alysse’s bedroom was done in a red and white toile hunting scene.

  He said to Mamie, “Look at the Grand Duke. He is the exact image of the Dowager Empress, isn’t he?”

  Mamie allowed as how he did resemble her greatly.

  “Of course, they never got on,” the decorator said. “He hated his father.”

  “That’s not so uncommon, do you think?” Mamie was trying to be a good dinner partner. “It is the classic Oedipal struggle. ”

  “The what?” He looked at her for the first time.

  “The Oedipal struggle.”

  He was very perplexed. With some suspicion, Mamie took it upon herself to briefly explain to him the story of Oedipus. When she finished, there was a long pause.

  “That is the single most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” he said loudly. He was shocked and outraged. Mamie looked around nervously, but no one was listening to them. “Want to kill your father and marry your mother? It’s ludicrous! Judas priest, girl, wherever did you hear such a thing?” he shouted.

  Mamie was so taken aback that she pulled away from him and knocked Mr. Stoddard’s knife from one of his art books, Balthus, onto the floor. She leaned down to pick it up at the same time as Mr. Stoddard bent down to find it. Mamie looked at the top of his head, and she looked at his black shoes, and then, inches apart, heads pressed against the moiré tablecloth, they looked at each other.

  “She’s explaining to me how she masturbates her corgis,” he said solemnly to Mamie. “She says that everyone does it.”

  “I don’t,” said Mamie.

  “I didn’t think so,” he said and they sat up.

  Claire was standing behind Mamie’s chair. She grinned a little drunkenly at Mr. Stoddard and leaned down to whisper to Mamie. “I’m next to someone fat from Newport who keeps talking about his ‘Mummy.’ ” Mamie could smell whiskey and cigarette smoke in Claire’s hair.

  “Alysse says it’s a good sign,” Mamie whispered back to her. “It means he had an English nanny, remember?”

  A young, handsome waiter stood behind them, impatiently waiting to pour more wine. Mamie gently nudged Claire away. The waiter, with great sulkiness, leaned around her to pour the wine.

  “Is that your sister?” Alder Stoddard asked abruptly. He had given up dinner parties, especially Alysse’s dinner parties, years ago.

  “How did you know?”

  “I met her before dinner. That gentleman over there, the man who is laughing, the Ambassador, is very sorry that the American military did not bomb Vietnam into submission. He believes it should be done now in Nicaragua and that we would regain the respect of our allies by ‘standing tall.’ He was describing just how Navy Seals kill village headmen when your sister interrupted him to ask a question. She wanted to know if his wife cupped his balls when he came.”

  Mamie, under less inhibiting conditions, would have laughed. She saw that it wouldn’t do. I am now in terrible trouble on both sides, she thought. The homosexual on my right thinks I lied to him about a conspiracy to kill fathers and Claire has deliberately insulted the State Department.

  Mr. Stoddard looked sternly at Mamie. She was angry and embarrassed to be put in the position of having to defend her sister, but she knew, from the past, the futility of explanation.

  “Well, does she?” Mamie asked. “Cup his balls, I mean.”

  He leaned toward her. “Let’s get out of here.”

  He pushed back his chair. He pulled back Mamie’s chair. She saw Alysse look up quickly. The decorator who had never heard of Oedipus did not bother to look at them.

  Mamie, who was passive because she was still waiting to see what would happen in the world, and Alder, whose passivity came from having already seen what would happen and not much liking what he had seen, were unlikely conspirators. Or perhaps they only seemed unlikely. Alysse would never have insisted that he come to dinner had she known that her niece would attract his attention. Alysse would have thought Alder too jaded for Mamie—he was more her kind of man. She could never have guessed that Mamie, whom she secretly found a little too sincere, a quality she considered deadly, reminded Alder of himself before he was overwhelmed with disillusionment and the laziness that is so often the penalty for falling out of love with the world.

  Mamie rose gravely from the table. Alder, with his impatience and intelligence, drew her toward him like a tidal pull. Mamie, who was never able to say exactly what she meant, or do exactly what she wanted, in fear that the whole tremendous weight of human fury would come down on her head, recognized immediately that Alder was not only unafraid of its crashing down on him, but not very interested in it. Of course she would follow him.

  For a moment, she stood trapped between her chair and the precarious place setting of art books and china. She looked at him. He gently t
ook her arm, nodded and smiled at Alysse, and led Mamie out of the still, startled room.

  It was a warm night, like a night in the tropics. The light breeze hit Mamie full in her smiling face as she stepped with her big, graceful stride onto the street, and she felt the soft air like an emblem of her liberation. She walked south on Park Avenue and Alder Stoddard walked beside her.

  “I hope that you are someone I can talk to,” she said. “I know now that this has been a problem. When Claire arrived, I thought I’d be all right. I sometimes think my reluctance to speak out is a form of acquiescence with the enemy.”

  “The enemy?”

  “Oh, with men, or my aunt, or the ambassador who wants to kill everyone in Nicaragua. I am upset and silent; Claire is upset and goes into her karate stance.”

  “Most people have a punt or two in their repertoire,” he said. “They kick the ball away and hope for good field position. It’s just that your sister is punting all the time. That’s all.”

  This was the most he had yet said to her and Mamie took time to consider it.

  “Why were you at the party?” she asked.

  “Your aunt was, for some little time, married to my uncle. Your aunt, in fact, is responsible for my having been sent to boarding school against my will.”

  “She was very happy about boarding schools. You must know the sisters.”

  “Your aunt tried to seduce me in the men’s changing room of the Rowing Club in Southampton the summer I was twelve. It was on one of those very narrow benches in front of the lockers. I had never made love before, and I didn’t then.”

  She looked across at him. He walked with his hands in his trouser pockets. He seemed all irritable joints and angles.

  “She was afraid that I would tell. That’s why I was sent away. It wasn’t the failed seduction that mattered, of course. Only the lack of faith.”

  “It’s always that,” Mamie said. She was so fervent that he looked at her and laughed and pulled his hands from his pockets.

  “You mustn’t mind so much on my behalf. I would have had to go to boarding school anyway.”

  “She didn’t know that.” She was completely on his side.

  “She sometimes spoke of your family. It was a bit Uncle-Tom’s-Cabin, as I remember.”

  Mamie laughed. “Now, of course, she knows better. I’ve often felt that she is a little embarrassed by me here in New York. Although not by Claire. When she behaves badly, I try to picture something my mother once told me. Buddy Klost took her to Paris for the first time and someone in Oklahoma had told her that the correct way to look at the Eiffel Tower was upside down, so she stood on her head, right there on the pavement, and made Buddy hold her by the ankles. She was upside-down for a long time because she really wanted to do it right.”

  They walked without speaking for quite a distance before Mamie said, “In a way, she’s still trying to get it right.”

  “Are you still speaking about your aunt?” he asked in surprise.

  “What would you like to talk about? The disappearance of myth? The success of disco? Don’t you think it is the great loss of the twentieth century? Everyone talks about existentialism and Camus and the failure of Marxism, but really all of that is just symptomatic of something much larger and more important, don’t you think?”

  “You’re referring to ‘the success of disco’?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  The warm, quiet night had filled her up with her best self.

  She was living in the present. It was an unusual sensation for her, full of tranquillity and lightness.

  “May I ask you a very intimate question?” she said. “You’re the first person I’ve felt I could ask.”

  “I would be delighted,” he said solemnly.

  His formality stopped her only for a moment. “Do you think I’m mysterious?”

  He drew her back in mid-step with his hand, and turned her so that he could see her face.

  “No,” he said.

  She was very disappointed. She looked down at her slippers.

  “You are always going to do the best thing,” he said. “It makes you predictable.”

  He held on to her arm. She felt, incorrectly, that he was embarrassed for her, and when he wanted to say more, she quickly stopped him by putting her hand over his mouth. Her face had flushed bright pink.

  “No, don’t say it! You don’t have to. It was a stupid question!”

  They let go of each other and began to walk again. The big lighted buildings at Forty-sixth Street shimmered over them, like the outer gates of an illuminated city, locked at sundown, leaving them enclosed and encircled until the heavy doors were pulled open again at dawn.

  NINE

  “Alysse says she fucked him when he was a kid,” Claire said.

  “Yes, I’m sure she did.”

  They had moved that day, the day after the Claire-and-Mamie dinner, to the Crawfords’ apartment on West Sixty-seventh Street.

  “Said it, I mean,” Mamie said. “Not fucked him.”

  They were sitting, a little uncomfortably, in the slippery Eames chairs in the small, crowded living room. Claire read a magazine and idly stroked a copy of a Brancusi head that was on the table next to her.

  “She was not very happy when you left.”

  “I’m sure not.” Mamie sighed. She had a headache. “I don’t think you should be stroking that.”

  “You always say sculpture is a tactile art.”

  “No wonder you think I’m pedantic.”

  “I just wish you had taken me with you. I was stuck for hours and hours with Mrs. Miller who just finished decorating their plane. You can imagine that conversation. Alysse told me later it was a payoff.”

  “A payoff?”

  “She caught him with two sixteen-year-old boys and he let her do the plane.”

  “Not much of a payoff.”

  “Mamie! This is just what I like to hear—a little cynicism!”

  “It’s my headache.”

  “I thought it was maybe Alder Stoddard. He was the only interesting person there. Why was he there, now that I think of it? Oh, this is great,” Claire said, interrupting herself. “Gentleman magazine’s idea of men is William Walker writing endlessly about his last alcoholic breakdown, but its idea of women is an article on who you’d like to sit next to at dinner. Madame Chiang Kai-shek! She’d be fun, wouldn’t she? Maybe she’d let slip where they hid the gold. Or how about Mrs. Reagan? One caption is ‘the sweet, siren smell of her chemise.’ Not Mrs. Reagan’s. Faye Dunaway’s.”

  “He’d seen Alysse by chance at the lawyer’s, the family lawyer, and she insisted that he come.”

  “The sweet, siren smell of his jockey shorts.”

  “Oh, Claire,” Mamie said, standing up. She bumped her head on a Japanese kite suspended from a wooden beam. “You’re such a pig.”

  Mamie went into the tiny library she had chosen to use as her bedroom. Mamie had quickly picked this room over the brighter bedroom down the passage. She liked its dim masculinity. In the center of the room was a steel Empire camp bed, covered with paisley shawls and bolsters. There was not a Staffordshire cow or moiré ribbon or basket of potpourri to be seen.

  Vivi Crawford was the only one of Alysse’s friends who had remained with her first husband. This singular fact was rare enough to be pointed out—“That’s Vivi and Whit Crawford. They’ve only been married to each other”—like a prison record or an obscure foreign honor. Vivi and Whit were kept together by a shared loathing for the wife of Whit’s guardian. She had also been the last wife of Vivi’s late father. Being the wife of both men had made her very wealthy, and the sublime hatred that both Vivi and Whit bore this rather interesting older woman had bound them together for years. Whit, a composer, had inexplicably been given a grant to study in Florence. One of their first excursions, “my hajj, really,” as Vivi put it, was to view the Uccellos. Vivi’s other goal in life, after adoring the Uccellos, was to have a rose named after her. She had al
ready written a book, Alysse told Mamie, a cookbook of Zen recipes. Hard to imagine, Mamie thought. “Take one bow. Let the bow shoot you into the kitchen.”

  Mamie lay down on the camp bed. She could hear Claire on the telephone, squealing and howling. She folded her hands behind her head. The pillows smelled of dust.

  She had returned the night before to her aunt’s apartment after her long walk with Alder Stoddard. He had taken her into the lobby of the building and waited for the elevator to come for her. He had shaken her hand.

  He did not live in the city. His mother, a Lee from Boston, had left him a large property in Pennsylvania and he lived there alone with some animals and what he called a Katharine Hepburn housekeeper. It was not that the housekeeper resembled Katharine Hepburn, but that she was like the idealized, maternal servant in movies about spirited New England rich girls. His father, his mother’s husband before she married Harry Shannon’s younger brother, had been a scholarly chief justice whom his mother had tired of almost immediately after her first, and only, child had been born. She had insisted on naming him Alder Herzen after she read an article on famous lovers in the February issue of Vogue, the Valentine issue. She liked that Alexander Herzen’s father, a Russian prince unable to give his son his real name, had called him herzen, “my heart.”

  She named him Alder after the small tree that grows on the banks of rivers.

  She fell in love with the very handsome and irresponsible Teddy Shannon at about this same time, for although she was a Lee from Boston, she was one of the silly Lees. Alder grew up under the inattentive care of his mother and Teddy Shannon during the school year, and was sent each summer to his cantankerous father. It was perhaps this yearly mixture of extreme hedonism and extreme judiciousness that made Alder himself an unusual combination of languor and grimness. His mother and stepfather lived in alcoholic immorality in Sutton Place and his father, who never remarried, lived in irritable, unforgiving morality in Boston, his only pleasure the pages and pages of unpublished manuscript that littered the chairs and tables of his dark rooms. His few gentlemen friends were other academics and intellectuals. Alder could not remember ever seeing a woman in his father’s chambers—and “chambers” is the word his father would have used to describe his house in Cambridge.