In the years when I was as famed in the media for my intimate, if platonic, friendships with some of the great ladies of New York, like Jeanne Twombley and Petal Wilson, neither of whom speak to me now, as I was for my exquisite little books, they told me things about Ann and Billy and the Grenville family that I would have had no way of knowing. Jeanne Twombley was the only one of the whole North Shore crowd who made any attempt to see Ann after it happened. She feels now that I betrayed her, but what did those ladies think when they whispered into my ear all the secrets of their world? After all, they knew I was a writer. You see, I have this ability to get people to talk to me. I don’t even have to maneuver, very much, to make it happen. I listen beautifully. I laugh appreciatively. I never register shock or dismay at shocking or dismaying revelations, for that will invariably inhibit the teller of the tale.
On that damn ship, where I wish now I’d never seen her again, my own life was in a precarious state. It could even be said that I feared for it. Not that my life was in danger. It wasn’t. At least not from criminal elements or terminal illness. What I feared was that the totality of it amounted to naught. Oh, the blazing moment here, the blazing moment there, of course, but too many wrong turns and different tacks along the way for it to be seriously considered by those concerned with such matters, and serious consideration was what I had always aspired to.
It was whispered more and more about me that drink and drugs and debauchery were interfering with my work, that I was throwing away my talent in drawing rooms playing the court jester, and in discotheques. The people who said these things let it be known that I was unable to complete what I had immodestly referred to as my masterwork when I appeared on television talk shows. Sometimes I called it a mosaic. Other times a collage. Or even a pastiche. In fiction, of course, depicting the thousand facets of my life that, when placed together, would present the whole of myself—mind, body, heart, and soul.
I was stung by their criticism. Trying to pick up the pieces of my wrecked life, I took to the sea to rethink my unfinished work. Ideas did not come. And then I saw her, Ann Grenville. A name from the past trying to pick up the pieces of her wrecked life. The idea began to form. So much had been written about her all those years ago. Was now not the time to tell her side of the story, to set the record straight? She, so much maligned, had never spoken in her own defense. We were there, on the same ship, and conversation would have to take place if a situation was manipulated. Yes, yes, yes, I admit that what I did was wrong, but I was helpless to resist the opportunity. I knew, I simply knew, that with time she would tell me, Basil Plant, what she had never told a living soul. I am the kind of person to whom people confess their secrets. It has always been so with me.
I, who can remember the commas in people’s sentences, began to think back on Ann Grenville’s story as I had heard it and read about it.
When you look at old photographs of Ann Grenville, at the yearling sales in Saratoga, for instance, sitting between the Ali Khan, with whom she was said to be having an affair, and Mrs. Whitney, of racing fame, or on safari in India, wearing huntress array from London, or at the de Cuevas ball in Biarritz, jeweled and haute-coutured, what you see is a woman at one with her world. Her world, however, was her husband’s world. When she married Billy Grenville, during the war, she forsook any prior existence of her own and stepped, with sure foot, into her husband’s exquisite existence.
Look for yourself at Mr. Malcolm Forbes’s list of the richest people in America, and you will see how the wealth in our country has changed hands over the last thirty years. There isn’t a Vanderbilt on the list. Even Babette Van Degan is not, nor are any of the people who appear in this tale. While those still alive continue to linger in the Social Register, except for poor Esme Bland in the loony bin, and Neddie Pavenstedt, who left Petal, and the bank, to run off with a television actor whom he later adopted, they are no longer considered rich by the rich today. But at the time of which I write, the Grenvilles were considered to be among the richest families in the land.
William Grenville, Junior, was used to many things, not the least of which was adoration. From his father. From his mother. And from the four sisters who preceded him into this world. It was never a spoken thing, but had he arrived earlier in the lineup of children, it is safe to say that there would have been fewer daughters. In a family like the Grenvilles, sons were the thing.
When he was born, he received a note from President Wilson welcoming him to the world, and, framed, it hung over all the beds of his life. The Grenvilles lived in a Stanford White French Renaissance mansion just off Fifth Avenue, across the street from old Mrs. Vanderbilt, next door to the Stuyvesant family home. Weekends were spent on a five-hundred-acre estate in Brookville, Long Island, summers in a cottage in Newport, following the annual sojourn to Europe.
It was a splendid life, and he emerged from it splendidly. His nanny, Templeton, and his tutor, Simon Fleet, and his dancing teacher, Mr. Dodsworth, were all enchanted with his sweetness, his shyness, and his exceedingly good manners. It was through Templeton, who had been nanny to his four sisters before him, that he acquired the precise manner of speaking that would distinguish his voice, for the rest of his life, from the voices of nearly everyone he encountered, except the few who were brought up in the exact manner that he was.
In time his father began to feel that he was too much adored and that the constant companionship of four sisters who could not get enough of holding him and passing him about among themselves might lead to a softness of character. He was sent to the same early school that his father had attended before him, expensive and spartan, in preparation for the great life and responsibilities that were to be passed on to him in time.
Indeed, there was a melancholy streak. He was fascinated reading about the two English princes who were beheaded in the Tower of London. It was a moment of history that he read over and over, and was always moved, often to tears. On an early trip to England, he was taken to the Tower on a guided tour, and a chill ran through him when he saw the room where they were held captive. He told his sister Cordelia, closest to him in age and spirit, that he felt he would die young.
In later years his most vivid memory of the New York house, where the family spent most of its time, was of the vast chandelier in the main hall. He was always to pass beneath it with trepidation and repeat the story to newcomers about what had happened on the eve of Rosamond’s coming-out ball. Rosamond was his eldest sister, already fourteen when he was born, a distant and glamorous figure of his childhood who married an English lord at nineteen, a year after her ball, and moved away to London. The chandelier, quite inexplicably, crashed to the floor, killing the man who was cleaning it. Funeral expenses and generous recompense were provided rapidly and quietly, and it was agreed, among the household, that it be unmentioned so as not to cast a pall on the ball. It was his first experience of death; it was also his first experience of closing ranks. Much was to be expected of him. There was the bank, the Cambridge Bank of New York, founded by his grandfather, of which his father was president. There were the directorships of half a dozen big corporations. There were the Grenville racing stables, and the Grenville stud farm, twenty-five hundred acres in Kentucky, a vastly successful commercial enterprise, having produced three Kentucky Derby winners. It was for all these things, and more, that the young boy was being groomed.
At some point doubt began to stir within him. There was a quality beneath his elegant shyness that eluded happiness, a consciousness of his own limitations. When he thought about such things, which was not often, the fear was deep that he would have been a failure in the world if he were not an inheritor of such magnitude.
His father sensed his secret fears and dealt with them contemptuously so as to shame weakness out of him. At one point his father said about him, in front of him, and his sisters, and his mother, that he should have been a girl. It was not a thing his father meant. It was said, like a lot of things he said, in careless dismissal without
thought of the psychic consequences. The wound to the young boy was devastating, made worse when his mother, whom he worshiped, failed to swoop him up, comfort him, and defend his gender. Nor did his sisters. None of them dared to contradict the head of the family.
“I don’t like my father,” said Junior one day.
“It’s not so. It’s not so,” cried Alice. “You don’t mean that.”
“But I do,” persisted the boy.
“No, you don’t,” insisted his mother.
He was never sure what he felt, because he was taught by the person he loved most, his mother, that what he felt wasn’t so, that what she told him he felt or didn’t feel was so. Her interpretation of his feelings conformed to the proprieties of their way of life.
Only Cordelia, the fourth daughter, the one closest in age to Junior, understood. And Bratsie; he understood.
It is of no significance to this story but of great significance to his character that Jellico Bleeker, or Bratsie, as he was known to one and all, except his mother, the partygiver Edith Bleeker, who loathed the nickname, that he had only four fingers on his right hand. He lost his index finger during a Fourth of July accident, when he was ten years old, holding on too long to a lit cherry bomb that he had been expressly forbidden to play with. On another occasion, a year or so later, he took one of the family sailboats from the house on Long Island, without supervision, or any real knowledge of sailing, and set sail for he knew not where. He was not missed until after darkness, and it was twelve hours before the Coast Guard, having nearly given up hope, spotted the small craft bobbing about aimlessly in Long Island Sound with the nearly frozen Bratsie safe and totally unconcerned about the drama he had caused. His smiling photographs in all the newspapers made him somewhat of a hero to his contemporaries, among them Junior Grenville, whose best friend he was.
The incident further confirmed Edith Bleeker’s strong feeling that her untamed colt needed to be tamed, and she was going to do it. Life thereafter became for him a game of getting even with her. He accompanied his mother to a relation’s society wedding and escorted her down the aisle wearing, unbeknownst to her, a yarmulke atop his head. He swung from a chandelier at Mr. Dodsworth’s dancing class and was asked to leave and not return. He listed his mother’s Pekinese, Rose, in the New York Social Register as Miss Rose Bleeker. He could imitate any limp or speech impediment with unerring accuracy, and did. He memorized the ritual of confession, although he was not a Catholic, and confessed elaborate sins to a shocked priest. He was the first of the boys in the group to smoke cigarettes, to sneak drinks, to masturbate, to get kicked out of school, to have sex with a prostitute, and to wreck the family car.
Bratsie Bleeker’s accounts of his escapades kept the less adventuresome Junior Grenville rolling on the floor in uncontrolled laughter. Junior Grenville adored his friend. They were chauffeured back and forth between the Grenville house and the Bleeker house in the city and the Grenville estate in Brookville and the Bleeker estate in Glen Cove in the country.
In contrast to the tall and handsome Junior Grenville, Bratsie Bleeker was small and compact, fair-haired and always tanned. Five generations of Long Island Bleekers gave him a natural look of haughtiness and superiority, which he interrupted repeatedly with the beguiling and mischievous smile that was his own contribution to his looks. He contradicted his upper-class accent with lower-class words, and he had a way of snapping Junior Grenville out of his melancholy moods as no one else could do.
“You didn’t have to explain that the fart on the elevator wasn’t yours,” said Bratsie one day after school. “No one said it was.”
“I felt guilty,” said Junior.
“Sometimes I think you don’t know who you are,” replied Bratsie.
“I don’t,” said Junior.
Except for Bratsie, with whom he was at ease, the boys at Buckley found Junior Grenville aloof and uncommunicative and often joshed him for the elegant ways his family’s lifestyle was manifested through him. It embarrassed Junior that he was driven the thirteen blocks to and from school each day in the family’s Packard limousine, but it was a thing his father insisted upon. Junior would have preferred to be left on the corner of Seventy-third Street and Park Avenue and to walk to the entrance of the school, because he dreaded the razzing of the other boys, many of whom were allowed to walk, or even take the bus. He appealed to his mother in heartfelt tones to decrease the grandeur of his arrivals and departures, and the compromise that was reached was that his nanny, Templeton, not ride in the car with him, and that the chauffeur, Gibbs, not open the door for him so that he could scoot in and out of the limousine by himself.
On a Friday afternoon, when he was being picked up to go to the country for the weekend, he bade farewell to Bratsie Bleeker and hopped into the Packard. A man wearing a wide-brimmed hat that partially concealed his face appeared out of nowhere in the crowd of boys mingling on the street and followed Junior into the backseat of the car. For a moment the boy thought the man was a friend of the chauffeur’s, and the chauffeur thought the man was a friend of the boy’s. It was a well-planned maneuver.
The man pulled a gun and took hold of the terrified boy and directed the equally terrified Gibbs, whose name he knew, to proceed to First Avenue and turn uptown, where, at a given point, there would be a rendezvous with the car of an accomplice. So expertly was it carried off that no one standing outside the school realized what had happened, even Bratsie, who had been standing there with Junior, and who would be jealous for years that the kidnapping had not happened to him.
At the corner of Seventy-fifth Street and First Avenue, Gibbs, old and nervous, ran a red light while reaching for the already-prepared ransom note that the kidnapper handed him, missing by inches a Gristede’s truck crossing First Avenue. Amid shrieking brakes and angry horns, a police car took off in hot pursuit, red lights flashing and siren screaming, and flagged the limousine to the side of the avenue.
Maintaining his calm, the kidnapper stepped out of the limousine as unobtrusively as he had entered it, hailed a passing cab, stepped into it, and was gone, never to be seen again, before the police officer arrived at the chauffeur’s door to deal with the privileged occupant who felt, the officer assumed, above the law in traffic matters. The only evidence of the six-minute drama, other than the weeping boy and frightened chauffeur, was the dropped ransom note.
“I hated it most when he touched me,” said Junior.
“Touched you? How did he touch you?” asked his father.
“He held me by grabbing my blazer in the back.”
“How did you feel?”
“I wanted to kill him.”
A call was made by Alice Grenville to Mrs. Sulzberger, whose family owned the New York Times, asking that the newsworthy story not be used, and it was not. Bars were put on the windows of all the bedrooms in the Grenville house. For the rest of the school year, Junior was driven to school in the Chevrolet that was otherwise used for family shopping and transporting the servants to the country on weekends. The following fall he was sent off to Groton.
As a precautionary measure, so as not to waste time in a future emergency, packets of money, thousands and thousands of dollars in hundred-dollar bills, were placed in manila envelopes beneath the leather jewel cases in a wall safe behind a Constable painting of Salisbury Cathedral in Alice Grenville’s bedroom. The money would sit there, untouched, for twenty-three years.
Junior graduated from Groton in 1938. All the family attended. His sisters thought he was the handsomest boy in his class, and he was. He would have graduated from Groton even if his father had not donated the new dormitory called Grenville House, but it did assure the certainty, as well as entrance to Harvard. Knowing that so much was expected of him, sometimes he froze in examinations, even when he knew the answers. His masters, which was what his teachers were called, and even Endicott Peabody, the headmaster, praised the young man’s beautiful manners. He won no prizes, either academic or athletic, but he sang in th
e chapel choir, which pleased his mother, and acquired a passion for guns, which pleased his father. He said that in time he would like to shoot big game, tigers in India, and the exoticism of the desire appealed to the entire family’s perception of son, brother, and heir to the name Grenville.
Europe was on the verge of war. A cross-country trip in Bratsie Bleeker’s new car, a Cadillac convertible, planned with meticulous care by the two friends, was deemed inappropriate by William Grenville for his son. It was decided instead that Junior would spend the summer in New York with his father, training at the Cambridge Bank, and in Saratoga, attending the yearling sales. He complied, as he always complied. He confessed to Bratsie and to Cordelia that he was not seriously interested in banking, but he applied himself diligently to the work that was expected of him. Unlike his sister Grace, who could quote the pedigrees of a thousand horses off the top of her head and who knew the stallion register backward, he was not much interested in the business of racing either.
“Every time I look at my father, all that I ever see in his eyes is his disappointment with me,” said Junior to Bratsie.
“That’s the problem with being an only son,” answered Bratsie. “Your life was mapped out for you the minute you were born. Buckley. Groton. Harvard. The bank. The horses. Marriage to a friend of one of your sisters in St. James’ Church with ten ushers in morning coats. An apartment on the Upper East Side. A house on the North Shore. And then another little Grenville for you to send to the same schools you went to, and it starts all over again.”
The Two Mrs. Grenvilles Page 2
