A Season in Purgatory
Page 41
Rosleen Shea Bradley returned to Nogales, Arizona. She has resumed her position as dental technician in the office of Dr. Hector Sabiston. Her son, Desi Bradley, has returned to Arizona State, where he is majoring in journalism. Other than Maureen’s son, Gregory, no member of the Bradley family saw Desi, although he and his mother were visited at their hotel by Sims Lord. A handsome financial settlement was offered Desi, which he declined.
Six months ago, in February, Kitt Bradley Chadwick burned to death in her bed in her apartment at the Rhinelander Hotel in New York. According to the newspaper accounts, the cause of the blaze was a dropped cigarette. At the request of her family, the alcoholic content of her body was not made public. The funeral Mass was at St. Thomas More Church in New York. I slipped into the choir loft, unobserved, to watch and say good-bye to dear Kitt. They were all there, including Cheever Chadwick, the estranged husband whom she had never divorced. The Mass was low. There were no eulogies. There was no music. Only the unexpected appearance of a hysterical, grief-stricken woman, who threw herself on the casket during Communion, upsetting the spray of white orchids, marred the tranquillity of the service. It was Agnes Bradley, wearing Esme Bland’s gray wig, who escaped from the Cranston Institute in Maine to attend the service for the only member of the family who had consistently visited her and brought her presents over the years. Kitt once told me she told things to Agnes she told to no other person in the world. “She is the only person I feel safe discussing my family with,” she said. Grace, Countess Bradley, recognized Agnes at once, but the others didn’t, not having seen her for years and years. She was returned to the Cranston Institute in Maine the following day.
Later, I met Claire for lunch at Borsalino’s. She wanted to hear about Kitt’s funeral. Claire and I have gone back together. The boys are overjoyed. As are we. We talk now. She reads everything I write. “Put yourself into this more,” she says. Or, “Distance yourself here. You’re too involved.” We are having another child in August. We are hoping for a girl this time, although we refuse to let the doctor tell us what he knows it is going to be.
At the 1992 Democratic Convention at Madison Square Garden in New York, Constant Bradley did not make the vice-presidential nominating speech for Senator Albert Gore, as had been his father’s fervent wish and for which his father had pulled strings and called in markers. Nor did he make the seconding speech. He was at the convention, however, on the floor of the Garden, often glimpsed in intense political conversations with important figures in the party. He was interviewed often by television newspersons, several of whom he had come to know during his trial. Each time he let it be known that he was going to run for his old seat in Congress. “I am sensitive to the fact that the electorate’s perception of me personally has become an issue,” he said. Before he could finish, however, his interviewer spotted Mrs. Harriman in the crowd and shifted his camera over to her.
Grace Bradley was granted her most ardent wish: she was made a papal countess by Pope John Paul II for her philanthropic work. She does not use her title in the United States, but she does register as Countess Bradley at the Ritz Hotel in Paris when she goes abroad twice a year to order her clothes. She still belongs to The Country Club. She dines there every Thursday night, her cook’s night off, accompanied now by Sis Malloy, who has become Grace’s companion. “Get my shawl, Sis. It’s chilly in the dining room tonight. Ask Corky to turn up the heat.” Corky does quite a good imitation of her. Sometimes a granddaughter accompanies them, a daughter of Maureen or Des. Grace goes early and is out before most of the members arrive. No one speaks to her. She has not heard from her Southampton friends Honour and Baba and Sonny and Count Stamirsky since Constant’s trial. She still goes to Mass at seven every morning, driven by Bridey, who has surrendered her kitchen duties to a younger relation. “I never sit in the same pew with Missus,” said Bridey to Fatty Malloy recently. “She don’t like that. I always sit in the back of the church, and she’s way up in front where the priest can see her.”
“I don’t see any of them from one year to the next,” said Mrs. Leverett Somerset. “Someone could have a dinner dance for two hundred, and they wouldn’t be there.”
Hurricane Carmela blew out the windows on each side of the main doors of the Bradley Library at the Milford School in Connecticut, severing the arm of Gregory Bradley Tierney, the grandson of the late Gerald Bradley, who donated the library in 1973. The arm has been sewed back on, but it will be a year before doctors can tell whether the operation was successful. An associate at the Boston office of Louis I. Kahn, the late architect who designed the building, issued a statement today saying that the windows were not part of the original plan for the library, but had been added later at the insistence of the patron’s daughter.
In the hurricane, the porte cochere of The Country Club in Scarborough Hill was ripped off. Grace Bradley was not asked, as her late husband had once been, to undertake the rebuilding of the porte cochere, which was not covered by insurance. Nor would she have contributed if she had been asked.
In August, two boys were fishing off a rowboat in Whalebone Cove in Hadlyme, Connecticut. It was the season for carp. One boy had a bite on his line. Or thought he had a bite. He needed assistance from his friend to pull in his catch, but it was not the giant carp he thought it would be. Instead, it was a brown garbage bag, years old. Inside, they found part of a baseball bat. There was a shirt with a label from Brooks Brothers, old and worn after years in the water, darkly stained on the shirttail. There was a pair of loafers from Lobb in London, and another pair from Kofsky’s. The boys took their find to the Country Store in Hadlyme.
“What do you suppose it is?” asked one.
Paul, the proprietor, remembered that several years earlier two divers sent by the police in Scarborough Hill had spent several days in Whalebone Cove looking for a brown garbage bag. Somewhere, in some drawer, he had their card.
I was struck by the memory of Johnny Fuselli, blood pouring out of his broken nose, his eyes accepting the fate that was befalling him. “Tell me, Johnny,” I screamed at him. “Where? Where did you dump the garbage bag? It will be your salvation, Johnny. Tell me! It will be your salvation!” His head was going underwater; only his lips showed. “Whalebone Cove,” he said. I told it to Luanne Utley. I told it to Captain Riordan. I told it to the new chief of police in Scarborough Hill. They found the name on a map, a tiny little cove off the Connecticut River, but the searches came to naught.
Salvation at last. Purgatory behind him, I know now that Johnny Fuselli has ascended into the Kingdom of Heaven.
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To Hannah
with love
By Dominick Dunne
Fiction
ANOTHER CITY, NOT MY OWN*
AN INCONVENIENT WOMAN*
PEOPLE LIKE US*
A SEASON IN PURGATORY*
THE TWO MRS. GRENVILLES*
THE WINNERS
Nonfiction
FATAL CHARMS*
THE MANSIONS OF LIMBO*
* Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group