A Season in Purgatory

by Dominick Dunne

  However, as Harrison Burns knew, people on the skids often had scores to settle. People on the skids often knew where the body was buried. Harrison was surprised that such a grand fellow as Rupert du Pithon answered his own telephone. He expected a butler. Or a maid. Or, at the very least, an answering service to monitor the calls. But the voice was unmistakably that of Rupert du Pithon. He had by then heard it imitated by several people, high, nasal, and bogusly aristocratic. Harrison identified himself. He said he was writing an article. He said he would like to meet Mr. du Pithon.

  “Oh, you’d like to meet me?” asked Rupert, chuckling. “I’d like to meet me, too, if I didn’t know me. But, unfortunately, there’s not enough time in life to meet everybody. Or, maybe, fortunately.”

  Harrison had had experience with reluctant interviewees. He knew instantly when the reluctance was an affectation. He knew not to press. He understood the power of withdrawal. “Well, fine, thank you very much, Mr. du Pithon. I’m sorry if I’ve taken up your time.”

  “What did you say your name was?” asked Rupert quickly. He missed reading his name in the papers and magazines.

  “Harrison Burns.”

  “Harrison Burns. Harrison Burns. Is it a name that I am supposed to recognize?”

  “No, no, of course not.”

  “Wait a moment. Let me turn down Maria Callas on the stereo. Now I can hear better. Are you still there? There are so many people writing these days, it’s hard to keep track of them all. So many magazines. So many books. One can’t keep up. I always skip the first third of every biography. I’m not really interested in reading about people before they become famous or rich. I don’t much care about humble beginnings. Don’t you think I’m right? I never want to read another word about any of the Mitfords, thank you very much. Or Sylvia Plath, spare me, please. And I’m sick, sick, sick to death of Vita Sackville-West and that nasty business with Violet Trefusis.”

  “Good-bye, Mr. du Pithon,” said Harrison.

  “Oh, yes, of course. I know who you are,” said Rupert. “Didn’t you write Candles at Lunch?”

  “No. That was Basil Plant.”

  “Oh, Basil Plant, yes. He used to be everywhere—you couldn’t go to a party where you wouldn’t see Basil—before he was dropped, with a giant thud, as he damn well should have been. It was so bad what he wrote. So naughty. He caused Ann Grenville’s suicide, you know. Oh, yes he did, just as surely as if he’d pushed those pills right down her throat. Ann may have killed Billy, but she didn’t fuck all those jockeys, like Basil said she did, believe you me. And what he wrote about poor Annabelle Mosley’s husband! Annabelle never forgave him, you know, and they’d been such close friends, glued at the hip for years. Basil was desperate to see her before she died—she was riddled with cancer—to beg her forgiveness for what he’d written, but she wouldn’t see him. Divine woman, Annabelle. But unforgiving.”

  Harrison knew he had a talker on his hands. “Basil Plant’s dead,” he said.

  “Oh, yes, I know. Drink. Drugs. They all go like that, don’t they?” said Rupert. “You know, the last time I saw Basil was at a brothel in Bangkok. I really shouldn’t be telling you this. I don’t even know you. Don’t even know what you look like. Well, anyway, I had been thinking at last, finally, I could be myself, do all the things I’ve always wanted to without a care in the world of meeting anyone I knew, and then I heard someone through the mist, calling out, ‘Yoo-hoo, fancy seeing you here,’ and there was Basil Plant. Can you imagine? I was furious. Simply furious. If you knew the position I was in at the moment, a different Oriental at each orifice. It was the most embarrassing moment. This is all off the record, of course.”

  Harrison didn’t reply.

  “Don’t tell me what you wrote. I’ll think of it myself.”

  “Good-bye, Mr. du Pithon.”

  “Friday!” said Rupert, jumping in before Harrison Burns could hang up. He spoke very quickly, all his words running together. “Perhaps you should come Friday. The phone won’t bother us. Everyone will be on his way to the country. Have a cup of tea. My Chinese lady who cleans for me comes Friday. Doesn’t speak a word of English. I call her Cleanie Cleanie. About four? Four-thirty?”

  Harrison Burns had failed to mention, not by accident, that the topic of conversation on Friday at four-thirty was to be Esme Bland, not Rupert du Pithon.

  The telephone call from Harrison Burns interested Rupert du Pithon greatly. Excited him even. He was sure something would come of it. He was sure it would open new doors for him. Seeing his name in a magazine would remind old friends that he was still there. Yes, of course, he would be happy to see him. He knew exactly who Harrison Burns was, just as he knew what the titles of his books were. All about law and order, that sort of thing. But, he would have explained to anybody, if there had been anybody to explain it to, that it didn’t do to let them think you were eager. The only people with whom he had daily contact were his Chinese maid, Cleanie Cleanie, who couldn’t speak English, and Eloise Brazen, the real-estate woman, in whose hands he had placed the sale of his apartment, and Czarina, his Norwich terrier, to whom he told everything.

  The very thought of having to sell his apartment, where he had lived for so many years, was almost too much for him to bear, but his money had run out. There was none left. Nothing. What had seemed like so much thirty years ago, when his mother, Sybil du Pithon, died, had dwindled to near nothingness. Mr. Mendenhall at the bank, boring, boring, boring Mr. Mendenhall, had called and written and begged him to take stock of his situation, but he had ignored Mr. Mendenhall, had made jokes about Mr. Mendenhall, had even imitated Mr. Mendenhall. He had not paid the maintenance on his apartment for nine months, and the board of directors of the building, many of whom he had snubbed over the years, had informed him that the services of the building would no longer be available to him. He would have to take his own trash down in the service elevator to the basement, as the staff of the building would no longer perform that service for him. He cringed in shame at the thought of himself carrying trash bags secretly, late at night, when everyone was asleep, down the service elevator. The elevator hallway outside his front door would no longer be cleaned by the staff. The lightbulbs would no longer be replaced in the outer hall. If the plumbing went awry, he would have to make his own arrangements. On and on. He was desperate to sell and fearful of selling. The market was down. He had no place to move to. He owed money everywhere. He was frozen with fear.

  Then Eloise Brazen entered his life. She was, he was told, highly regarded in the real-estate world. She had once been, years before, the mistress of Gerald Bradley, and never stopped talking about it. “He was a pretty good fuck for an old guy,” she had said to Rupert on the first day they met. Bradley had set her up in business. He had given her a mink coat from Revillon Frères that, even now, years later, had a rather distinguished look to it. “The only distinguished thing about her,” said Rupert.

  He loathed Eloise Brazen from the moment he met her. “Quite the most appalling person ever,” he said about her to Cleanie Cleanie, who couldn’t understand, but who didn’t like her either. He hated the way she didn’t seem to know who he was. He hated the way she walked through his apartment, without even bothering to take off her mink coat, peering at this, peering at that, flushing toilets, turning on switches, running water, opening windows, negative about everything. “This doesn’t work, that doesn’t work,” she kept saying. And Czarina loathed her and barked ferociously at her whenever she came to the apartment to show it to a prospective buyer.

  “Get away from me, get away from me,” Eloise screamed at Czarina the first time she went to the apartment, and the dog barked and barked at her. She kicked at it. “I hate dogs.”

  “Don’t you dare touch my sweet little doggie,” screamed Rupert back at her. He leaned over and picked up Czarina. “Now, look, you’ve upset her. She’s very high-strung. She has a pedigree of inconceivable grandeur. Can’t you tell that, just looking at her? Don’t you t
hink she’s elegant?” He covered Czarina’s face with kisses. “Yes, you are. Yes, you are. Elegant is the only word, my little darling.”

  “The happiest day of my life was when my dog ran away,” said Eloise. “What were you thinking of asking for this?” she asked.

  “I thought two and a half million, something in that area,” he replied grandly.

  “Oh, honey, no way,” she sang out. “Get real.”

  He looked at her. He couldn’t bear her intimacy. He loathed being called honey.

  She understood. She took off her mink coat, dropped it on a chair. Eloise said, “We’re in a depressed market, Rupie. All that two million, five million, nine million, was in the last decade. Times have changed. Ronnie and Nancy are gone, gone, gone. Good-bye, Ronnie. Now, let me tell you how it’s going to be. We’ll ask a million, and we’ll take eight hundred thousand.”

  “Eight hundred thousand! Oh, no. It has to be worth more than that,” cried Rupert.

  “No, it’s not. I don’t want to hurt your feelings or anything, but if this was a house rather than an apartment, it’d be a teardown. Let’s be practical here. The place is rundown. You’re smart to have those pink lightbulbs and pink lamp shades. It covers up all the cracks and peeling paint. The kind of person who would pass the board in this building would have to tear out the bathrooms, tear out the kitchen. It’s going to cost a million dollars to put this place in shape.”

  She wandered over to a table filled with silver-framed photographs. “Is that Rosalind Russell?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he replied. His voice was almost a whisper after the news of the true value of his apartment. He was trying to figure out how much he owed, how much it would cost to move, how he could make ends meet on so little money.

  “You knew Rosalind Russell? My God!” exclaimed Eloise.

  “Oh, I adored Roz,” he said, softening a bit. He liked to talk about his famous friends.

  “She was my mothers favorite,” she said. “Who’s that?” She picked up a picture and held it before him.

  “ ‘Who’s that?’ ” he said, mimicking her voice, which he told Cleanie Cleanie was too common for words. “You don’t know who that is? That’s the Duchess of Windsor, for God’s sake.”

  “Oh.” She replaced the picture. “Was she the one who took the king off the throne, or something like that?”

  “Dear God,” he said. “She’ll be written about in history books for the next five hundred years.”

  “Oh. And Marlene Dietrich! You knew her, too?”

  “Oh, I adored Marlene. She used to come here and sing at some of my Sunday-night suppers. Alice Grenville, Elsa Maxwell, Billy Baldwin, Pauline Mendelson, when she was in town—they all came. Marlene always brought her girlfriend of the moment.”

  “Marlene Dietrich was a dyke? I never knew that,” cried Eloise, thrilled with the inside news.

  “She was not a dyke, for God’s sake, woman. She was everything.” His voice was steely. “It is so ghastly when you people reduce everyone’s life to just that. She was a star, that’s who she was, a star, a great star, who happened, incidentally, to have had a girlfriend from time to time, along with a great many boyfriends.”

  “Go on, go on, Rupie,” replied Eloise, oblivious to his tone. “I want to hear everything. Who’s this one? Look at that jewelry!”

  “Oh, that’s Sunny. Poor Sunny. Still in a coma.”

  “What’s it like not to matter anymore?” asked Eloise. She asked it out of curiosity, not cruelty. “I mean, after being where it all was happening for so long, and now just sitting here all day long, with the phone never ringing.”

  He turned away from her. He did not want her to see how deeply she had hurt him. As he turned, she saw the wetness in his eyes.

  “I didn’t say anything wrong, did I?” she asked.

  “You were born wrong, darling,” replied Rupert.

  They came to a working relationship. But the apartment did not sell. People came to look and left. There was this wrong with it. There was that wrong with it. Eloise always relayed back their remarks.

  On the Friday afternoon that Harrison Burns was due to meet with Rupert du Pithon, Eloise Brazen arrived. She threw her mink coat on a chair in the hallway and walked into the apartment.

  “Hi, Rupie,” she called out. Czarina began to bark at her. “Shut up, you little piece of shit.”

  “Who is that?” Rupert called back, although he knew perfectly well who it was.

  “It’s Marlene Dietrich’s girlfriend, who the hell do you think it is?” said Eloise.

  “Out, out, out,” cried Rupert. “You can’t show the apartment today. I’m being interviewed for a national magazine, and I can’t have people wandering through the apartment.”

  “Listen, Rupie, I’ve lined up Mr. Rock and Roll himself. He’s a very important man. He needs a pied-à-terre—do you like my French?—in New York and he doesn’t care what it costs. You do not put off Mr. Sol Hertzog and think he’s going to come again some other time. These guys don’t grow on trees.”

  “No, no, impossible today. If you had called and said you had a client I would have told you, but, no, you just show up, as brash as brash can be. You have no feeling for other people, Miss Brazen. I don’t think it would look right in the story to say the apartment is for sale and have Mr. Hertzog wandering around complaining about the bathroom fixtures. It might look like I’m on my uppers.”

  “You are on your uppers, Rupie,” said Eloise. “The elevator man said you haven’t paid your maintenance in nine months. They’re dying for you to get out of this building, in case you don’t know it.”

  “I do wish you’d stop calling me Rupie. You don’t know me well enough.” He looked at himself in the mirror and noticed that his little toupee was awry. “Christ, I look like Georgia O’Keeffe,” he said, patting color into his face with his soft white hands with their protruding lavender veins. “Suppose he brings a photographer. I have to pull myself together. Go now, call me tomorrow, and we’ll set up another appointment for Mr. Hertzog. I don’t think I look eighty-four, do you?”

  “No, no, Rupert. Eighty-three, maybe. Not eighty-four.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “There just may not be another tomorrow,” said Eloise. “I’m mad, Rupert, goddamn mad.”

  In the hallway she picked up her mink coat. As she was about to ring for the elevator, the elevator door opened and Harrison Burns stepped into the hallway.

  “You’re not Sol Hertzog, I hope,” said Eloise.

  “No.”

  “You don’t look like a Sol Hertzog. You must be the reporter here to interview Rupie.”

  “I’m here to see Mr. du Pithon.”

  “I’m expecting this guy from Hollywood to see the apartment, and now Rupert won’t let me show it because you’re coming to interview him.”

  “Is Mr. du Pithon here?”

  “Oh, yes. He’s preening and primping for you.”

  “Is that the reporter? Is that Mr. Harrison? I mean Mr. Burns?” called out the high nasal voice of Rupert du Pithon.

  “Oh, he’s finished making his toilet,” said Eloise. “Yes, Rupie. Mr. Burns is here, waiting to see you.”

  “I thought you’d gone,” he called back.

  “I’m on my way out.” She picked up her mink coat off a chair in the hall and handed it to Harrison. “I always like a gentleman to help me on with my coat,” she said.

  Harrison held up the mink coat. Inside he noticed a Revillon Frères label and the intertwining initials EB.

  “What did you say your name was?” he asked.

  “Eloise Brazen.”

  He looked at her, as his mind went back many years to a late-night telephone call Constant made to his father.

  The room reverberated with Rupert du Pithon’s shrieks of laughter. “Wait there. Wait there,” he said to Harrison, covering the mouthpiece and indicating a chair for him to sit. “I’m on the telephone. Lil Altemus.” He whispered the last two words
, expecting Harrison to be impressed with the grand name. Then he returned to his call. “Are you there, Lil? Sorry. Someone came by. I’m being interviewed. I didn’t even think to ask what for. Where was I? Oh, yes. Eloise. And then she said, ‘People of our class,’ and I said, ‘Just a minute, Eloise, your class or mine?’ Don’t you love it? Don’t you love it?” Again there was a shriek of laughter. “No, no, I can’t tomorrow, Lil. I’m out all day. I’m lunching out. I’m cocktailing out. I’m dining out. Maybe Thursday. I’ll call tomorrow, first thing. Big hug.” He turned to Harrison. “Don’t mind the doggie. That’s Czarina.”

  Harrison looked at the dog. He nodded.

  Rupert du Pithon sat grandly amid red lacquer cabinets and porcelain tureens, on a Queen Anne chair. The face that he had seen in the mirror a half hour before—pale, lined, haggard—bore little resemblance to the face that greeted his guest. “I have been reading Baron de Charlus,” he said, holding up a book. “He is my favorite character in all fiction. What a sad end, don’t you think?”

  Harrison nodded.

  “Hello, I’m Rupert du Pithon. Do, please, sit. I once went to a costume ball in Venice as Baron de Charlus. I was a sensation. Well, I suppose, actually, it was Annabelle Mosley who was really the sensation. She went as the Duchesse de Guermantes. She wore all her emeralds. Marvelous night. There’s nothing like that these days. Oh, no. That’s all gone.” He held up the third volume of Á la Recherche du Temps Perdu. “You’ve read it, of course.”

  “Yes.”

  “In French?”

  “No. English.”

  “Oh, I think you miss so much if you don’t read it in French. The nuances. The subtleties. Don’t you think?”

  “I suppose,” said Harrison. “I don’t really know.”