A Season in Purgatory

by Dominick Dunne

  More praise for Dominick Dunne

  “Dunne’s antennae are always tuned to the offbeat story.… He is magazine journalism’s ace social anthropologist whose area of study is the famous and infamous up close and personal.”

  —San Francisco Examiner

  “He knows every story there is to tell, precisely how it happened, and why.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Dunne is a card-carrying citizen of the glittery world about which he writes—who somehow is able to keep his passport to it despite his keen eye for its foibles.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “He is one of those writers who seem effortlessly to collide with copy. Movie stars confide to his answering machine. Wanted men hail the same taxi. Heiresses unload their life stories in elevators. Except, of course, Dunne’s luck is not luck. People love to talk to him because he has a gift for intimacy that is real and generous.”

  —TINA BROWN

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1993 by Dominick Dunne

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Portions of this book have appeared in Vanity Fair.

  www.randomhouse.com/BB/

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-96718

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81512-5

  This edition published by arrangement with Crown Publishers, Inc.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Two

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Three

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Afterword

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  PART ONE

  1972

  Harrison Burns

  1

  The jury is in its third day of deliberation. Early in the day, the jury foreman requested that Judge Edda Consalvi have the testimony of Bridey Gafferty, the Bradleys’ cook, read back to them, and in the afternoon the foreman asked to see the weapon—half of a baseball bat—and the autopsy pictures of Winifred Utley’s bludgeoned body, the pictures that had caused so much distress to Winifred’s mother, Luanne Utley, when they were presented as exhibits by the prosecutor during the trial. After both requests by the jury, there was much comment in the press corps as to the interpretation and, as always in this case, considerable diversity of opinion. The air is charged with tension. Judge Consalvi has proved herself a martinet. Yesterday she ordered the bailiff to oust from her courtroom the reporter from Newsweek after he grinned broadly and snickered when the court reporter reread Billy Wadsworth’s statement that the defendant, Constant Bradley, after cutting in on him at the country club dance, said to Winifred Utley, “Do you mind dancing with a man with an erection?”

  They, the Bradleys, have a special room where they all sit together during recesses and breaks, so as not to be on view to the media or the merely curious, but occasionally one of them emerges to use the telephone or the bathroom facilities. Today I saw Kitt in the corridor of the courthouse. We passed so closely that the skirt of her blue-and-white silk dress brushed my trouser leg, but she walked past me, eyes straight ahead, without speaking. It was not so much that she cut me. She simply did not, by choice, see me. I have become nonexistent to her. By now I am used to that, both from Kitt, who once meant so much to me, and from the whole Bradley family. I won’t even mention what happened yesterday in the men’s room, when I encountered Constant at the adjoining urinal. Oh, hell, perhaps I will mention it. What difference does it make? Constant was standing there next to me when, suddenly, without speaking a word, he turned and aimed the strong steady stream of his urine in my direction, soaking my blazer and trousers. Once before, in my youth, I had seen him do such a thing, to a boy no one liked called Fruity Suarez, when we were in school at Milford. His face then was filled with impish levity, a spoiled boy playing a mischievous prank. Yesterday, there was no trace of mischievousness in his look. Only hate. But it was Kitt’s disdain, not Constant’s piss, that was the more wounding.

  Of course I know that, in telling the story that I am about to tell, I run the risk of losing everything that I have achieved and acquired in my life, including my reputation. I know also that I will be earning the eternal enmity of the family, and I have witnessed over the years, sometimes at very close range, the meaning of their eternal enmity, when it was the lot of others to experience it. They, the family—who are referred to, among themselves and even sometimes in the press, as the Family—are not my own family, but the family that I was accepted into twenty years ago.

  I first came as a school chum of Constant’s, a month-long visitor at the Bradley estate. We were then at Milford, a school in Connecticut for privileged boys from rich Catholic families, which had been founded seventy-five years before by a Catholic millionaire, whose wealth came from copper mines, and whose son had been turned down for admission to Groton, because, the millionaire felt, he was an Irish Catholic. Constant’s four older brothers had preceded him at Milford, all having excelled there, and all were still affectionately remembered by the headmaster and faculty.

  We were not taught by priests but by lay teachers, who were called masters. Priests would have made it a religious school, which it was not, although there was chapel every day, with prayers, and Mass twice a week, on Sundays and Thursdays, at seven in the morning. We went unquestioningly through the motions of Mass, Communion, morning and evening prayers, First Fridays, and Lent without a thought about the existence of God.

  After Constant’s early disgrace and expulsion, which coincided with the somewhat sensational death of my parents, I, bookish by nature, was thought by his family to be a good influence on Constant. In time, I was pleasantly but remotely tolerated by his famous father, Gerald Bradley, who had little time for anyone not of his own flesh and blood or connected importantly to the worlds of politics, high finance, or, occasionally, I was to learn, the criminal element.

  On the day of Constant’s expulsion, he leaned out the dormitory window looking for the family chauffeur, Charlie, who was being sent to take him home.

  “Oh, my God,” he said, pulling himself back into the room when he saw the long black Cadillac drive slowly down the hill from the entrance to Hayes Hall, where our rooms were.

  “What?” I asked.

  “My father’s come, too,” he answered. For a moment his calm left him. From the dormitory window we watched Charlie open the door for Mr. Bradley to get out of the car. He was dressed in a chesterfield coat with a velvet collar and a gray homburg. Even from afar, it was easy to see that he was a man to be reckoned with. His face had the peculiar characteristic of being composed of features that were at odds with one another, mismatched pieces, out of scale, each more properly belonging to
someone else. His nose was too large. His lips were too tight. His eyes were too dark, both in hue and intensity. Yet, in time I would learn that women, for whatever reason, found him attractive, although his fortune may have accounted for some of his attractiveness. His manner was aggressive; he lacked gentleness. Even in moments of affection with his daughters, whom he adored, there was a roughness about him. It was said that he inspired fear in those who worked for him. I never doubted that. I believe his sons feared him, too, although they also loved him and would have done, did do, anything he asked of them, right up to the time that his malady affected his requests.

  He made his way to the headmaster’s office. When he emerged forty minutes later, we were summoned to the car. Charlie, nodding a hello, loaded Constant’s bags and my small suitcase into the trunk. We were aware that boys were watching the awkward family scene from all the windows of Hayes Hall.

  I might as well not have been there, for all the attention Gerald Bradley paid me. The chauffeur drove. Gerald and Constant sat far apart on the backseat, each in a corner. I sat on a jump seat. We drove in silence most of the way. Finally, nearly two hours later, as we arrived at the long drive that led up to the Bradley house, Gerald spoke. “You’re not like your brothers,” he said. “You’ll always get caught.” Unmistakably, there was contempt in his voice. I turned slightly. Constant looked at his father, beseechingly. I assumed this look was to implore his father not to proceed with his contempt in front of me, but it wasn’t. He wanted only to please him.

  “What could I have done?” he asked.

  “You could have lied, you damn fool. You could—should—have lied, said those pictures weren’t yours.”

  In time, I became a great favorite of Constant’s mother, Grace, which was a lesser honor in that household, as she was sometimes a figure of fun to her own children, particularly her sons, because of her religious fervor, which was excessive, and her obsession with fashion, which was equally excessive. She was consumed with what she always referred to as “the latest style,” although often she was overwhelmed by the splendid clothes she wore, so that the impression left was of the color or cut of her garment rather than of her. There was a chapel in the house where a private Mass was said for Grace Bradley every afternoon. Her greatest friend was Cardinal Sullivan, who often came to tea and talked of family and religious matters with her. “Cardinal is coming to tea,” she would say excitedly on the day of his visit. She never said “the cardinal,” when speaking of Cardinal Sullivan. She said only “Cardinal,” as if Cardinal were his first name. She enjoyed kissing the cardinal’s ring, which she accompanied with a deep curtsy, like that of a lady-in-waiting to a monarch. For an instant there would be a look of ecstasy on her face, as if the contact between her lips and the emerald of the cardinal’s ring—an emerald believed to have once belonged to Cardinal Richelieu, which Grace had bought at auction in Paris, and given to Cardinal Sullivan on his elevation—brought her closer to a communion with God.

  “We’ll put him in Agnes’s room,” said Grace, about me, figuring out the logistics of the bedrooms of her house on her fingers. “Tell Bridey to make up Agnes’s room for Constant’s friend.” I had never heard of Agnes, and no one explained who she was. I felt I shouldn’t ask, and didn’t.

  Later, I became a friend of some of Constant’s brothers and sisters, but not all. Gerald Junior, who was called Jerry, never liked me much, nor did Maureen; but Sandro did, and Desmond, when he appeared, and Mary Pat, and Kitt, the youngest of the girls, although, until it happened—the thing that happened with Winifred Utley—most of the older ones remained shadow figures to me.

  “He writes,” said Constant, by way of explaining me to his siblings at dinner on my first night in the house.

  “I hope to,” I corrected Constant.

  Gerald Junior snorted, a sneering sort of snort, as if the admission of such a future vocation suggested a maimed masculinity. He was maimed himself, a cripple, the result of an early car accident that had left him partially paralyzed from the waist down, the cause of which being one of the many things that went undiscussed in the family.

  Then, surprisingly, the old man, who had more or less ignored me, came to my rescue. “Books? Are you going to write books?” he asked me in a loud voice from the head of the table.

  I, scarlet with embarrassment at being the focus of attention, replied, somewhat incoherently, “I hope to. Yes, sir. In time.”

  “Hmmm. Interesting,” he said, as if filing away some information for future use. Then he turned to Gerald Junior. “People respect people who write books.”

  “I just love to read,” said Kitt, then only fourteen, looking over at me with approval.

  Actually, I had been to the Bradley house once before, six months prior to Constant’s expulsion, on an unannounced visit, accompanying Constant, while his parents were away, his mother in Paris ordering clothes, and his father in California on business. Or so he thought. We had slipped away from Milford School on a holiday afternoon, when we were presumed to be hiking, and hitchhiked the sixty-eight miles from the school to his family’s home. He said that it was something important, but it turned out to be the sort of thing that was important to Constant, though hardly worth the risk that was involved with the adventure, especially as it was, months later, the cause of his expulsion.

  The purpose of the trip was to retrieve some magazines he had ordered, of naked women, which were sent to the recipient in plain brown wrappers. He had not dared to have them sent to the school, where, under the prying eye of Miss Feeley, the headmaster’s secretary, who sorted the mail and had an instinct for the prurient, he risked detention and expulsion. Instead, he had had them sent to his home, alerting Bridey, the Bradleys’ housekeeper, who doted on him, to keep an eye out for the envelope and put it away for him. It never occurred to poor Bridey, a daily communicant, that she was secreting pictures of naked ladies, in sexual frolic with each other, beneath her darning basket in the sewing room on the second floor of the Bradley house. It was Bridey’s secret hope, never voiced, that Constant might one day become a priest.

  We were picked up by a nice woman in a blue Buick who spotted us for the prep school boys we were by our tweed jackets and gray flannel trousers. She was going in the direction of the city where the Bradleys lived and offered to drop us off at a junction where it would be easy to get another ride into the city. Constant, of course, charmed her during the drive, as he always charmed ladies of all ages, and she ended up taking us directly to the gates of the Bradley house, twenty miles and twenty-five minutes out of her way, where she gaped openly at the huge Tudor edifice beyond. She had a daughter, she told him, whom she hoped he could meet one day. Her daughter’s name was Winifred Utley, and she went to Miss Porter’s in Farmington, she said. If he had asked her to come in, she would have.

  Constant had an uncanny ability to readjust the features of his face for an instant and assume the expression of another person. This minor talent, combined with the further ability to assume another’s voice and gestures, sent people into gales of laughter, which was not always kind laughter. While waving farewell to her, he became our just-departed driver. We laughed all the way up the driveway to the house, as he enacted an imaginary scene in which he begged Mrs. Utley to let him marry her daughter.

  “This is some house,” I said, as the Tudor mansion loomed in front of us. “My God!”

  “They’re all away,” he replied. “Ma’s in Paris with Maureen. My father’s somewhere on business. I never know where. Kitt and Mary Pat are at Sacred Heart. Jerry’s usually with Pa. Sandro’s in graduate school at Yale. Desmond is a doctor, practicing at St. Monica’s Hospital downtown. That about sums it up.”

  “No slaves?”

  “Yeah. Lots of Irish girls, but I don’t think any are here. Probably only Bridey. She runs the place.”

  At the front door, he took out a key and inserted it. We walked into the hallway. Ahead was an impressive winding stairway with a wrought-iron ra
iling. To the left was a large living room, extravagantly decorated in dark-red velvet damask and Chippendale-looking furniture. I stared.

  “Ma’s always having the place done up,” said Constant. “I never know what to expect. That room was green last time I was here.”

  It was not a room in which they sat much. It was, according to Constant, “for show,” used only for parties, or when Cardinal Sullivan came to dine, or on the magnificent occasion when the Pope was received. Was there anyone who did not know that the Pope had visited the Bradley house in Scarborough Hill on his last trip to the United States? Oh, of course there was, but there weren’t many Catholics who did not know, and all of us, every single one, at Milford knew. It set Constant apart from the rest of us. “The Pope visited his family,” the masters always said when they talked about him, and they said it with awe.

  Alone, as family, they used the room they called the family room until Sally Steers, their decorator, convinced Grace to begin calling it the library. In the place of honor over the fireplace was a large color photograph of His Holiness. Elsewhere, on every table, were family photographs, including the annual Bradford Bacharach Christmas-card portrait of Gerald and Grace and all the children, except Agnes, posed in great formality in front of the fireplace in the living room, which was sent to an ever-increasing list of more than a thousand people. There were pictures of Gerald with political figures: Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and Eugene McCarthy, all of whom had dined at Scarborough Hill. There were pictures of the girls in riding habits and velvet hats, and of the boys in various athletic uniforms, including Jerry, before the accident, erect and handsome, in ski clothes on the slopes of Aspen. There were cups and trophies on the mantelpiece and on the shelves of the bookcases, and red and blue ribbons from horse shows framed on the walls. Here also was the piano that Grace liked to play after dinner, when she gathered her children around her to sing Irish songs.