A Season in Purgatory

by Dominick Dunne

  Ahead of me, beautifully situated, was the Bradley Library. The last time I saw the building, on the day of my graduation, when Gerald Bradley took me inside and gave me the plane tickets for Europe that were to ensure my silence, it was in its final stages of completion. The handsome red-brick Georgian facade was still bare. Now ivy had grown up its walls, and lovely elm trees, transplanted fully grown, were in place around it. It appeared to have been there for a hundred years.

  I went in. It was almost twilight. The lights were on. Ahead was a reading room. On a table were magazines and newspapers, neatly lined up. On a green leather chair, an old man in a tweed jacket and bow tie was sleeping. His hornrimmed spectacles had slipped down his nose. A copy of the New York Times had fallen to the floor beside him, open to the page he had been reading. It was Dr. Shugrue. I wandered about, looking here, looking there at the lovely building. It was early evening, and there were no students about. When I looked back at the figure in the chair, I saw he was looking at me. He had righted his glasses.

  “It’s Harrison, isn’t it?” he asked. “Harrison Burns?”

  “It is, sir. I am flattered that you would recognize me after so many years, and so many students,” I said.

  “We have your two books here in the library. We’re quite proud of you,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Is Elias Renthal still in jail?”

  “Prison, not jail.”

  “Prison, of course.”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “Good. And Max Goesler?”

  “Yes, and for a long time to come.”

  “Nasty piece of work, wasn’t he?”

  In my years there as a student, the headmaster and I had never actually engaged in conversation. I was colorless then, not the type of student sought out by a headmaster. My one extended conversation with Dr. Shugrue occurred when I was sent to his office from study hall and he told me my parents had been murdered. I spent the night in the guestroom of his house, comforted by his kind wife, whom I knew must have thought it odd that I shed no tears.

  “Sit down. Sit down,” he said. “This is a lovely, quiet time here. The boys are in the dining room. That’s why I come now. Of course, I should say the boys and the girls are in the dining room. Milford’s coed now. It’s something I have never gotten used to. I took it as the signal that it was time to retire.”

  He told me that he continued to live on the grounds of the school in a small Federal house that the trustees had given him for life. He enjoyed coming to the library each evening to read the Times and the latest magazines. He said he took no part in the running of the school, appearing officially only at fund-raising events and graduation ceremonies. He had kind words for his successor. It was an enjoyable conversation, but I felt that there was something he wanted to say to me, a reason he had for holding me. There was.

  “You are involved in quite an event, Harrison,” he said.

  “You are aware, then? I wasn’t sure,” I replied.

  He laughed. “How could one not be?”

  There was a long silence. Neither of us knew whether to proceed or to withdraw from the topic.

  “The library is lovely,” I said finally. “When I graduated, it wasn’t quite finished.”

  “Yes, it’s a marvelous building. One thing about Gerald Bradley: once committed, he went all the way. There were no cut corners. If his name was going to be carved into the granite over the front door, it was going to be beautiful and built to last. It is considered the greatest accomplishment of my twenty-seven years here as headmaster. I was the envy of every headmaster of every boys’ school in New England when it was built. Too bad about those two windows, isn’t it? It’s the one architectural flaw. Poor Mr. Kahn, the architect. Dead now. How he hated giving in on that.” He lowered his voice. “It was Maureen Bradley who insisted.”

  “I remember. I was there that day. I heard the exchange. It was a foretelling of her life, in a curious way,” I said.

  “Her son is here, Gregory,” said Dr. Shugrue. He beckoned me to lean forward to him and whispered, “A terribly spoiled boy.”

  I smiled.

  “Have you remained Catholic, Harrison?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I guessed as much. So you haven’t confessed your complicity?”

  “Only to the law. Not to a priest.”

  “I admire what you have done, Harrison,” he said. “Coming forward as you have.”

  “You do?” I replied, surprised. “So few seem to. Betrayer is the word I keep hearing.”

  “Oh, but I know you are telling the truth,” he said.

  “Tell me why,” I said.

  “Do you remember when Constant was expelled over those pornographic magazines?”

  “I certainly do.”

  “Cardinal Sullivan was sent to see me by Gerald about Constant’s reinstatement.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “A library was offered.”

  “Yes.”

  “I have to confess to you that I was bewitched by all that Bradley money. I knew that the credit would come to me for the building, that the public appearance would be that I was a brilliant fundraiser. Still, I hesitated. It had nothing to do with the dirty magazines. Certainly I’ve coped with far worse than that over the years. Fruity Suarez, for instance. But that’s another story. What I knew was that Constant Bradley, for all his charm and beauty, was a lightweight, a snob, and, worst of all, a lout.”

  I was fascinated. I have learned over the years of interviewing people never to interject, or exclaim, or agree or disagree when a person begins to talk in earnest about a private matter, lest he think twice about his revelation and reroute his conversation. I am a person to whom information comes. People tell me things. They always have. Fatty Malloy, the most unlikely source, kept me abreast of the goings-on in the Bradley house once the family closed the house in Southampton, decided not to open the house in California, and moved back to Scarborough Hill. Dr. Shugrue continued.

  “There was a maid here in those days. You would have no reason to remember her. She did housework for Mrs. Shugrue in the headmaster’s house. She was a local girl from the village. Teresa Miller. Her father worked in the piano factory in Deep River. There was an incident.” He looked at me. “You didn’t know this?”

  “No.”

  “I wondered. Your great friend Constant never told you?”

  “No.”

  “He tried to seduce her, you see. Apparently, she was not unwilling. But, uh, how shall I put it? He failed. He could not perform. He became enraged, as if his failure were her fault. He struck her. He would have hit her more, but she screamed, and he ran. He had a totally different version of the story, of course, but I believed her. That was why I was so unreasonable about the pornographic pictures.”

  We looked at each other.

  “No one ever said this world was a fair place, Harrison. Even my wife, who was captivated by Constant’s pretty face, said the girl had to go, not Constant. When that poor Utley child was killed so brutally a year later, and you and Constant came back from the Easter holiday, after attending her funeral, I stared at him, and stared and stared. He could not meet my eye. I saw the color rising in his face. I was tormented by what to do. A Captain Riordan from Scarborough Hill came here to ask about Constant, and about you, too, by the way. Character things. He knew that Constant had been expelled, and wanted to know the reason why.” He stopped talking for a minute. He turned his face away from me. “By that time, ground had been broken for this new library. The foundation was laid. The lovely red bricks, truckloads of them, arrived from Vermont on the very day of Captain Riordan’s visit. I said, uh, nothing about Teresa Miller.”

  He rose from the green leather chair. He folded the New York Times neatly and replaced it on the library table, on top of the previous day’s edition. He looked very old.

  “I think Mrs. Shugrue will be getting worried about me. We usually have a glass of sherry about
this time. Or a cocktail. Would you care to join us, Harrison?”

  “I think not, Dr. Shugrue. I’m driving back to the city.”

  “Yes, I understand. I’ve never told that story before. I’m glad I did. Perhaps you should tell it to your prosecutor. Good-bye, Harrison.”

  “Good-bye, sir.” We shook hands. “Please give my warmest regards to Mrs. Shugrue.”

  “I will. I will. She has always remembered the night you spent in the guestroom of our house. I would like to repeat that I admire you.”

  “Did you tell all that to Cardinal on the day Gerald sent him to see you?” I asked.

  He paused. “Would you mind terribly if I didn’t answer that?”

  “What happened to Teresa Miller?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he replied softly.

  I walked to the door with him and opened it for him. We both walked out. It had grown cold, but neither of us remarked on the weather.

  “Do they despise you?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Yes, I imagined as much. Are you frightened of them?”

  For what seemed a long time, I didn’t answer. Then I said simply, “Yes.”

  17

  FROM THE

  New York Times, October 29, 1991:

  The Countess de Trafford, the former Mary Pat Bradley, daughter of the multimillionaire Gerald Bradley, has arrived in New York from her home in Paris to attend the trial of her brother, onetime Connecticut gubernatorial candidate Constant Bradley, who is accused of murdering Winifred Utley in 1973. The countess was met by her sisters Maureen Bradley Tierney and Kitt Bradley Chadwick.

  “The whole thing is too absurd, too utterly absurd,” said the countess, in a brief statement to reporters, after her plane landed at Kennedy Airport this afternoon. “It is a travesty that such a trial could take place. My brother is innocent, totally innocent. This man who has accused him was once in love with him.”

  The sisters proceeded immediately in a family limousine to Scarborough Hill, Connecticut, the home of the Bradley family. The trial will begin on Monday in Stamford.

  During the four weeks of the trial, the Bradley sisters and sisters-in-law came to be known in the press as the Bradley Ladies. Arriving each day in a serviceable car, all wearing dark glasses, they gave an unprecedented display of solidarity, waving at the reporters, smiling at the photographers, nodding in a friendly manner. Their attitude bespoke confidence in Constant’s innocence. “That’s Charlotte, Constant’s wife,” spectators would say as she raced past. “Isn’t she pretty?” Or, “That’s the Countess from Paris. Mary Pat. Do you think that’s a Chanel suit she’s wearing?” Or, “Which one is that? Is that Kitt, or is that Maureen? I get those two mixed up.” “Have you noticed, Maureen and the Countess are always guiding Kitt, one on each side of her? Is there something wrong with her? Kitt’s not the crazy one, is she?”

  Any one of the Bradley Ladies, except Kitt, was capable of stepping up in front of the bank of microphones and addressing the large crowd that waited outside the courthouse to stare at the famous family as they gracefully alighted from their car. Actually, it was a rental car that the Bradley Ladies were driven in. Maureen thought it looked better than for them to have one of their own more fashionable cars. “No limousines and no chauffeurs,” she said, laying down the law. “It won’t look right. It will be misinterpreted. People don’t like it if you look too rich.”

  Maureen had finally found the role she always craved. She became the organizer. She made the rules. “No mink coats, no matter how cold it gets,” she said another time. Each night, with lists in hand, she designated which of the family would go to the courtroom for the next session, who would drive in which car, and who would sit where. “It’s important for the jury to see that we are a family,” she said over and over. It was she who gave them answers to say in the event that any of them was asked a question by a member of the media. It was she who located the priests who sat with the family in the courtroom each day. “Tomorrow it’s Father Dennehy from St. Justin’s in the morning session and Father Collins from Our Lady of Sorrows in the afternoon. Make sure they sit where the jury can see them,” she said. “Behind Constant and to the right. That way they can see Father over Constant’s shoulder.”

  Behind the scenes, there was occasional disharmony. Sis Malloy told Fatty of family scenes, and Fatty passed them on to me. Kitt had developed a disturbing habit of disappearing from the courthouse, often to a bar on the corner, O’Malley’s, so Maureen and Mary Pat kept her between them at all times, never letting her out of their sight. In private, Charlotte had ceased speaking to Constant or to any member of her husband’s family, except Kitt, although she complied with her daily instructions as outlined each evening by Maureen and Jerry in a strategy session in the dining room of the house in Scarborough Hill.

  Except for Constant, it was Charlotte that the crowds wanted to see most. She was the most frequently cheered and the most often photographed. Her popularity irritated Maureen. “Look this way, look this way, Charlotte,” the photographers yelled at her, and she obliged. She no longer made a secret of her dislike of Maureen. She found her bossy and pushy and couldn’t stand the way she always took the front seat of the car and the aisle seat of the courtroom, as if the best seats were hers by rights.

  One morning, as they were preparing to leave the house to go to the courthouse, Charlotte grabbed the back of Maureen’s Adolfo suit as she was getting into the front seat of the rented car and pulled her back.

  “I am Constant’s wife, Maureen, and you are only one of his sisters,” she said, in no uncertain terms. “Or, at least, I am Constant’s wife until this trial is over, when I intend to be on the first plane to Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic public or wherever it is these days that they have the quickest of quickie divorces. Until then, I am Mrs. Constant Bradley. It is my husband who is on trial for murder. I go first. I sit in the front seat of the car. I sit in the aisle seat in the courtroom. Do you understand?”

  “Oh, a thousand pardons, madam,” said Maureen sarcastically, at the same time bowing elaborately and abjectly as if to a queen.

  “Besides, they’re more interested in seeing me than you, Maureen. I’m prettier. Those litters of children of yours have taken their toll.”

  That day Maureen, still bristling from her setback with Charlotte, walked up to the bank of microphones the reporters set up to interview Valerie Sabbath and Bert Lupino each morning and evening, or Constant if he could be persuaded to speak, or any member of the family who would be willing to talk, and began to give a speech.

  “Good morning,” she said. “I’m Maureen Bradley Tierney. My whole family is here to support my brother Constant—our brother Constant, I should say. Oh, are the microphones on? And the television cameras? I said we are all here to support Constant, who has served so ably in the House of Representatives in Washington and who, until this, uh, this tragic circumstance, intended to run for the governorship of the state. And will again, when this is over, you can mark my words on that. My brother Senator Sandro Bradley is here from Washington, as is my brother Dr. Desmond Bradley, the chief of staff at St. Monica’s Hospital. And my brother Gerald Junior, whom we in the family call Jerry. And my sisters Kitt and Mary Pat, the Countess de Trafford, who has come all the way from her home and family in Paris to be with her brother. This trial is a sad spectacle, as I’m sure you all know, the revenge of a jealous man who never had a family of his own, who took, took, took from our family—if you only knew what my mother has done for him—and then paid us back with this ugly smear.”

  Valerie Sabbath, entering the courthouse with her staff and Jerry Bradley, stopped for a moment to listen to Maureen. “Will you get your sister the fuck out of there, Jerry,” she said, and walked on.

  Maureen looked up and saw Jerry signaling to her. “What? What, Jerry? Oh, I think my brother is giving me the speed-up signal,” said Maureen. “Thank you so much for letting me speak. I just want to
say that we are a very close family, and I wish all of you the gift of loyal family relationships.”

  On the way into the courtroom, Maureen swanned past Charlotte and smiled sweetly. “Where’s Father Lynch? Has anyone seen Father Lynch? He was going to sit with us today.”

  Outside the courthouse, leaning against the family station wagon in a leisurely fashion, Constant appeared to be waiting for someone. His new Testarossa was nowhere in sight. It remained on blocks in the twelve-car garage of the house in Southampton, locked away from public view as too expensive a toy to be understood by the masses. Women crowded around to look at him or snap his picture with their Instamatic cameras. He was fully aware that he was attracting everyone’s attention, that his presence was enough to astonish some people, mostly young women, but he was as much at ease as if he were leaning against the mantelpiece in his parents’ drawing room.

  “Are you worried, Constant?” asked one young woman.

  “Not for a minute. There is not a shred of truth to the absurd story, not a shred,” said Constant. He smiled at the assembled group, dazzling them, and enjoying their bedazzlement. Each day, the crowd of women who cheered him when he entered and left the courtroom grew larger.

  “Hello, Miss Maureen,” said the woman standing in the corridor outside the courtroom.