Swan Song

by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott

  It was well after four when she heard it. The low growl of a speedboat, increasing in ferocity as it neared.

  The sound of L’Avvocato returning.

  Her heart felt it might break through her heron’s breast, beating in time with the motor, just outside the porthole. Then… silence. Footsteps above—Two sets? Three?—followed by the muted tones of… strings? The baroque plucking of a—was it a lute?

  Marella slipped into a robe and tiptoed up the stairwell to the deck above. There she hung back, watching from the shadows.

  A lone musician sat on the prow, plucking at a mandolin.

  A few feet away, there they were, forms merging in the moonlight. Gianni, holding Jackie close. Bare feet shuffling against the polished deck, dancing to the quiet strains of the mandolin. Jackie was wearing a pair of Countess Galitzine’s palazzo pajamas in pale green silk, shimmering like a mermaid’s tail in the reflection of the moon-bright sea.

  Marella held her breath as Gianni whispered something into Jackie’s ear, though she couldn’t be certain what. She thought she saw Jackie nod, but she may well have been tossing her chestnut hair, a habit she was as prone to indulge as the baby voice and halting speech. Marella thought she saw the mandolinist’s gaze meet her own across the divide, with what she might have interpreted as an expression of compassion.

  It was there that Marella left them, just before dawn, dancing beneath the Agneta’s claret-colored sails, which billowed gracefully in the breeze.

  THE NEXT MORNING she found Gianni alone on deck, eating the rest of her pasta from the previous evening. He grinned at her… then, finding the gesture unrequited, resumed his ingestion.

  Marella approached, sitting down beside him.

  ‘I suppose you’re angry.’

  She shook her head in reply.

  ‘I took Jackie to the Countess—for those ridiculous pajamas.’

  She nodded.

  ‘And then she wanted to see the Number Two nightclub, so we all went—the Countess, Mario, Jackie and I—meaning to stop briefly. But of course you know how those places are. By the time we left, the waters were too choppy to return right away. Dangerous…’

  Again, she held his gaze.

  ‘Well, dammit! Say something!’

  Marella hesitated, then leaned in, placing her head for a brief moment in his lap. He ran his fingers through her short curls. She lifted entreating eyes.

  ‘My love, may I ask something of you?’

  ‘I knew it. You’re angry. You want to make a scene.’

  ‘My darling, I’m no longer angry. It’s pity that I feel. I no longer care where you were, or with whom. Doesn’t matter. I no longer remember your lies. It’s just a favor I want to ask.’

  ‘What is it you want—a gold leash on which to keep me close?’

  ‘Don’t laugh at me.’

  ‘Laugh at you? What for! What do you want from me, angelo?’

  ‘That you change your ways. That you slow down.’ It was the first time she’d asked anything of him in a serious way. No crying, no yelling. Asking. Gianni stared at her, taken aback. Then he started to laugh—a defiant, boisterous laugh.

  ‘Good for you, mio amore! Keeping me in line!’

  ‘Please don’t laugh.’

  ‘Good for you!’ He threw his head back with mirth.

  ‘I’m worried…’

  ‘We’re fine, angelo.’

  ‘No—I’m worried… for you.’

  He sat, silent, a shadow from the blood sail passing over his countenance. Marella rose, and—in an unexpected gesture— Gianni grabbed her hand. He placed it over his heart and held it there. And in that moment, he seemed to Marella ageless and ancient at once. He looked to her like that lost boy, orphaned by speed; the beautiful satyr, kissed by Dionysus’ lips; a very old man, for whom the definition of hell would be dying alone. She felt, hand on his breast, what made his heart beat. Velocità! La bella vita! The glory of humanity!

  And in that moment she knew. To change him would be to diminish the very thing she loved most in him. ‘Ah!’—barely audible, Marella released an exhalation of breath. She stood for a long moment, feeling the beating of his heart, his hand holding hers. Finally he squeezed her palm, then released it.

  ‘Now come. Let me eat. And if you wish, eat with me.’ He lifted his fork, twisting a ribbon of pasta around it, passing it to her.

  Marella resumed her seat at his side. She took the fork, pouring two glasses of wine. They sat, wordlessly. Sharing a meal, watching the new sun crest the horizon.

  CODA

  IT WASN’T LONG before the rumors began to surface—salacious ones.

  Ones we take little pleasure in repeating, save to refute them, and certainly—let us be clear—these in no way reflect our personal views.

  Rumors of an Agnelli envoy being flown back to Washington to retrieve Jackie’s diaphragm. Or did they say it was sent direct, care of Air Force One?

  Truly vicious whispers over the years, by the most callous of shit-stirrers. John John looking more like Gianni than Jack Kennedy. (We blush to admit that we each paused to count the gestational months, and were relieved to find that the timing simply didn’t add up.)

  Those in the Radziwill party have invariably denied that anything untoward took place.

  ‘Jackie was devoted to Jack,’ Benno has insisted. ‘She was all about Caroline on that trip. Waterskiing. Making spaghetti. Real maternal stuff.’

  ‘Gianni wasn’t interested in complications,’ Mario, who knew L’Avvocato’s habits well, has concurred. ‘That would have been complicated.’

  ‘Preposterous,’ says Lee, lighting a defensive cigarette when we quiz her over lunch. But then we’ve known Lee to bend a few truths in her time, especially when it comes to her sister.

  Of course the most dangerous of rumors can be traced back to Truman, who is the only one apart from Lee who knew all the parties well and thus claimed to speak with authority.

  ‘Oh, trust me,’ Truman would say, a few Negronis in—usually his segue into such indiscretions—‘I know what happened that August on the Isle o’ Capri! I wasn’t there… but I have it on very good authority.’

  When his source was demanded, he batted those flaxen lashes.

  ‘Noooo! A stool pigeon I is not—I keeps my sources to myself!’

  When we’d give up—All right, just tell us!—he’d lower his voice, almost to a whisper, so confidential was the intelligence.

  ‘Weeeeullll. Let’s just say that juuuuust before dawn, on the thirteenth of August, Mrs. Kennedy received a proposal.’

  A marriage proposal? We’d look perplexed.

  ‘Well, of course, honey. I wouldn’t sully my tale with any other kind!’

  But they were both already married!

  Truman would fish the orange—‘the healthy bit’—from his Negroni, insisting, ‘Lee was mid-annulment… I told you about the Pope on a speedboat, to whom Gianni flashed his package.’

  It was a priest—not the actual Pope.

  ‘Perhaps another Barnacle Bouvier was gunning for Vatican services.’

  But Jack Kennedy was alive at the time! And still a sitting President!

  He’d grin, sucking the pulpy orange from its peel.

  ‘I couldn’t begin to speculate. I’s just knows what I’m told.’

  FOR ALL TRUMAN’S efforts, the strand of buzz we most enjoyed took a surprising slant.

  The following year JFK made his own presidential visit to Italy.

  Like Jackie before him, he charmed local leaders to common men; visited the Pope and caused a paparazzi frenzy. Yet there was one night of his visit that remained, officially, unaccounted for. It is known that he rented a magnificent villa at the foot of the Alps in Lake Como… a short drive from Turin.

  It is said that he dismissed the staff, awaiting a highly confidential guest.

  The locals still speak in hushed tones of a Fiat car pulling into the grounds, a heron-like woman with an exceptionally long neck behind
the wheel.

  A woman who looked a great deal like Donna Marella Caracciolo di Castagneto Agnelli.

  When asked years later if it had been her, if she had arrived to spend an evening alone with President Kennedy, Marella would shrug, cryptically.

  ‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. I really can’t remember.’

  NINE

  1975

  VARIATION NO. 6

  WORD LATER GETS around that tru has taken special care to mail Babe a copy of the Esquire edition the day before it hits newsstands.

  It arrives first class in a brown Manila envelope, he having paid extra for the service. He’s tucked a note inside, penned on the Tiffany stationery Babe had helped him select: eggshell correspondence cards, with a dapper navy monogram.

  For My Beautiful Babyling, always my muse. Your Tru.

  The envelope goes unopened, lost in a stack of mail, when Babe spends the morning at Sloan Kettering—needle-pricked and pumped full of chemicals—then the better part of the afternoon at Kenneth’s for a full servicing: facial peel, brows arched and nails lacquered in an attempt to still feel human. She misses having her hair done; these days she hides the duck-fuzz she has left beneath chic, silk turbans—or bespoke wigs, masterfully styled, which she carries off so gracefully a stranger would be hard-pressed to know that anything was wrong.

  She summons the strength that evening to host the Guinnesses for dinner, but finds she tires before the meal is served and retreats to her bed.

  The envelope is thus discovered early the next morning, as Babe sifts through the neglected mail. When she sees Truman’s brief missive, she’s delighted by the gesture and beams with pride as she always does when he sends her his work. She takes it into the oak-paneled dining room, opens it to the page he’s carefully marked with a gold paperclip, and begins to read, over the little she can stomach of her sectioned grapefruit and espresso.

  At first she is amused, chuckling at his cleverness, placing her and Bets next to Jackie and Lee and other recognizable faces, in a setting we know so intimately. La Côte Basque. Haunt de rigueur. How funny to be cast as a ‘background artist.’

  The more she reads, however, the more she begins to feel a tightening in her chest… the grapefruit sticking in her throat. From the second paragraph, Babe knows that this is bad. As Tru’s ventriloquism-show gets going in earnest, his Lady Ina dummy is given Slim’s catchphrases. Regurgitates her cadences. Her details appropriated, down to her pet lunch order—Soufflé Furstenberg—the spinach, the custard, the specially sunken yolks.

  It’s clear that Jonesy is an idealized version of Truman, captured by Lady Ina and forced to dine and gab—she having been stood up by the Duchess of Windsor.

  The others are easily guessed, an eeriness in their thin disguises: faces concealed with cheap dime-store masks that could snap with the snip of a string. The Ann Woodward bit strikes Babe as particularly vicious, but nothing like what Babe feels are shameless shots at Slim. Slim, whom Truman so adores!

  Slim—in reality recently split with Husband Number Three, His Lordship Kenneth Keith. Babe knows how much Slim loathed that whole English horsey set. She had too much pizzazz for foul teeth and fox hunts. It simply wasn’t a match. Keith was dull, dull, dull. The opposite of Slim. We’d all commented on it— How could she stand it? (What had gone unsaid is the very fact that Truman has so cruelly pointed out in print… It was obvious to anyone why Slim lasted as long as she did—At least she wasn’t alone.)

  Babe is stunned to find that Tru has painted ‘Lady Ina’ as a champagne-guzzling wreck by the end of her Jonesy lunch, sobbing into her soufflé, confessing fears of aging and dying on her own. She has Slim’s height and breeziness. Carries Slim’s Bulgari compact. Refers to Papa Hemingway, to whom we all know Slim was close. The likeness is uncanny. Then there are the digs about Coolbirth being ‘fortyish,’ on her way to Mexico to end yet another marriage. Worse still, he paints the Coolbirths as a stodgy English prick and crass western broad—two people who barely tolerate one another, whose split is instigated by Lord Cool, who rejects Lady Ina while she’s stuck beside him on a transatlantic flight, stuffed full of booze and Thorazine. Most heartbreaking of all is the vulnerability Truman foists upon her.

  Slim must have discussed these fears with him, after what happened with Leland… having kept her secrets close for years (while telling ours in their place, we’re quick to note, indulging in a moment of bitterness).

  For Truman to single Slim out in the wake of a divorce as someone needy, as sour milk, past its expiration date… Babe thinks the breach unconscionable.

  How could Truman say these things?

  As Babe reads on she can’t help but note that the prose is lewd as well. Gone are the honey drawls, the croaks and squeaks and cicada drones. Gone, the voices of these things from whence he came, the music that shaped his prose.

  Truman has always had a salacious side, but this reads as pornographic. An ex-lover of Ina’s is mentioned, a photo of whom she keeps tucked in a copy of Dinesen’s Out of Africa, an author Babe knew Slim to love, she having met her through Truman on their famed trip to Copenhagen. The image depicts said lover with his member exposed, posing for the camera. A lover Ina fondly identifies as ‘Dill’ on the back of the snapshot.

  And then there is the Sheets business.

  The moment Babe reads it, she feels in her bones that it’s Bill. Despite her Good Wife pretense, she does know that Bill is who he is. More than she lets on. Far more than Bill is aware of…

  Years earlier Babe had found evidence of a love affair—not Bill’s usual passing bit of tail, but a proper fling. There were—of course—dozens, but this is the one Babe uncovered, rifling through Bill’s desk. There were jewelry receipts. Hotel bills. So cliché they seemed like evidence from a cheap B-movie.

  There were letters from the girl, who clearly thought her position more secure than it had been. When it ended—Bill having feared she was becoming too attached—she flung herself from the nineteenth floor of a third-rate hotel, leaving a note for him in her room, thanking him for his generosity, without the faintest trace of irony.

  Babe felt the bile rising in her throat as she read it. She’d heard about the girl in the papers, who made her grizzly exit front-page news, though they’d kept Mr. Paley’s name out of their reports, as had the New York Police Department. (It’s been whispered there were generous ‘donations’ made to editors and precinct chiefs, courtesy of the network.)

  Babe had of course phoned Truman right away. He arrived within the hour to find her chain-smoking L&Ms, filling three open suitcases on the bed with carefully folded clothes.

  One look at her bloodshot eyes and he knew.

  (Actually, Truman had known all this before… He had introduced Bill to the young lady in question, had helped arrange the hotels, even selected the jewelry. He’d told us he had, the little two-faced pimp… Of course this Babe knows nothing of… It would kill her if she knew.)

  ‘Oh, Babyling—What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Leaving. I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t—I deserve better. I deserve more.’

  ‘Sweet-pie. You deserve the world on a solid-gold stick. And guess what? You got it.’

  Tru had gestured in the manner of a Renaissance jester to the Park Avenue palace around them.

  Babe shook her head, taking a deep drag, dumping a stole into the nearest case. A stray lock of hair had escaped her neat bouffant. She pushed it from her eyes, uncharacteristically frazzled.

  ‘I have nothing.’

  ‘Baby, you have everything. Everything there is to have.’

  ‘I don’t have love. And that’s all that matters.’

  ‘But darling, you do! You have me.’ Confessor, confidant, he opened his miniature arms to her and she fell into them, weeping on his shoulder. Truman stroked her hair, smoothing the silver strand back in place. ‘Listen to me… I love you, Barbara Paley. I love you more than life itself.’ He leaned in and kissed her forehead,
with the most exquisite tenderness.

  How she wished this was enough to make a marriage. If only she loved Bill half as much as she loved Truman… If only Bill loved her at all.

  ‘Babyling. You must listen very carefully. You, my angel-girl, have ascended into the clouds of heaven. And you’re gonna stay there. Come hell or high water.’

  Babe stared at him, listening, his graveness commanding her attention.

  ‘You are Mrs. William S. Paley—goddess. Bill didn’t create her. You did. You’re a glorious work of art. And I’ll love you. I’ll love you forever.’ Babe sank back into his arms, quiet as he stroked her hair. ‘Darling, just think of being Mrs. William S. Paley as a job. The most wonderful job in the whole wide world. And remember—you have the one thing that’s better than love…’

  Babe turned her head to meet Tru’s eyes.

  ‘What’s that?’

  His thin lips had curled into an infectious smile.

  ‘Power.’

  AFTER BABE HAS placed her early call to Slim (the lapse in protocol acceptable in a crisis), she phones Bill at the office, something she hardly ever does. She greets the CBS switchboard operator by name, inquiring after her children—then waits for Bill to answer, enduring an anesthetizing muzak rendition of ‘Satisfaction’ as she holds.

  When he comes on the line, his voice is clipped—‘Paley.’

  ‘Darling?’

  ‘Oh, hello, Baby. Everything all right?’

  ‘Yes, of course…’A pause, while Babe fingers the glossy pages.

  ‘Can it wait till tonight, whatever it is? It’s a hell of a day here, trying to hammer out this scheduling and—’

  ‘Has anyone said anything to you today…’ Babe interrupts him, something she almost never does, ‘… about Truman?’

  No reply.

  She can just picture him in the high-backed swivel chair she’d selected for his office, an Eames for Herman Miller, pausing to read a memo, or to open an envelope. (Or receive oral favors from the interns in the office, or so the rumors go…) Classic Bill. Always juggling ten things at once. It was seldom she ever had his full attention.