“To whom?”
“A Miss Green. Rhoda Green. From Brooklyn.”
“Oh, dear.”
“His poor mother.”
“Jewish, do you suppose?”
“Only on her mother’s and father’s sides.”
“Felicity! Really!”
“When I was growing up, we all knew each other.”
Ann was always to remember that room as she first saw it in the fading winter sunlight with her own senses heightened by the impression she hoped to make and the conversation that came to her in snatches from the group seated far distant in front of a fire. The pale-green drawing room was dominated by white-and-gilt furniture, great gold consoles, and a chinoiserie mirror. The upholstery picked up the colors of the Aubusson rug. Everywhere was a profusion of books, paintings, and flowers massed in Meissen bowls. She tried not to let it show that she was speechless.
Alice Grenville was an exceedingly observant woman. What she saw, in the moments it took for Junior and the beautiful woman who accompanied him to enter the room and walk the considerable distance to the fireplace where she was seated with her daughters and where the tea table had been set, was that her son was madly in love for the first time in his life. She knew that the other girls who had come before this woman were no more than crushes. She sensed instantly that her son and this woman were involved in an already consummated love affair. She felt a pang of distress that she had too quickly dismissed the lovely Brenda Frazier as a publicity-mad adventuress. This, coming toward her, was the adventuress.
Alice set aside her needlework on a bench overflowing with magazines and rose from her chair to extend her hand to Ann, peering at her through the dark glasses she always wore as if she recognized a person with whom she was meant to interact in life. Elegantly, but not modishly, dressed in plain black silk, with pearls and a small diamond brooch, her reddish-brown hair simply arranged, Alice looked just as she had looked for a number of years and would continue to look for a number of years more.
“Mère, this is Ann Arden,” said Junior proudly. He looked absurdly handsome to his mother in his smartly cut naval uniform, his eyes barely leaving the face of the woman, as if he could not get enough of looking at her.
“I am so pleased you could come, Miss Arden,” said Alice. Her smile was warm. Her handshake was firm. “We are all alone, you see. Just family. We have asked no one else,” she continued, as if Ann might be expecting a cocktail party. She introduced her daughters: Rosamond, Felicity, Grace, and Cordelia. Felicity, still reading the Times, gave Ann her hand without looking at her. Ann seated herself carefully so that her skirt would fall gracefully about her. She pulled at the fingers of her gloves, removing them.
Alice asked if people wanted India tea or China and went about the business of pouring, with assistance from Cordelia, whom the sisters called Cookie. She said there were cucumber sandwiches, and also watercress. She said she had been to the new production of La Bohème at the Metropolitan Opera the night before and that Jarmila Novotna was glorious. She said she had lunched across the street at Grace Vanderbilt’s and a general had told her the invasion would be in April. She said she adored the new musical Oklahoma, and had Ann seen it? She said she was in the midst of a new novel by John P. Marquand and was enthralled. She said she never missed Edward R. Murrow’s broadcasts from London, no matter what. She said her English grandchildren were coming to the country for the weekend.
If Ann thought she would be quizzed about herself, she was wrong. Not a single personal question was asked. Alice Grenville was extremely friendly, as was Cordelia, but the conversation was of the general sort.
“I’m off, Mère,” said Felicity, putting down her cup and gathering up her things. “I have a million things to do still. I’m going to the Soldiers and Sailors Ball tonight, and I have to get my hair done. Goodbye, dear Mère. Kiss kiss. Goodbye, Miss Eden.”
“Arden,” corrected Junior.
“Arden. Excuse me. Walk out with me, Junior.” When they got to the door of the room, she whispered to him, “I liked your blonde.”
“Her name is Ann.”
“Marvelous figure.” She was off.
“Would you like another cup of tea, Miss Arden?” asked Alice. “This cake, by the way, is the cook’s specialty.”
“No, thank you,” replied Ann, handing her empty cup to Junior to replace on the tea table.
“Perhaps a sherry, or a drink even?”
“No, thank you, but I would like to use your ladies’ room,” said Ann.
Cordelia and Junior both leaped to their feet to show her in which direction to go.
“I’ll take Miss Arden up to my room,” said Alice. “Stay here and talk to your sister. You never see enough of her.”
As they ascended the stairs, Ann looked up at the topmost floor, where twelve male heads were painted, friezelike, into the wall just below the ceiling, looking down on the house.
“One, two, three, four …” she started to count.
“There’re twelve,” said Alice.
“The twelve apostles?” asked Ann.
“The twelve Caesars,” replied Alice. “My husband was a student of Roman history when he was a young man, and he had them designed into the plans of the house when he built it in 1918. I’ve become quite fond of them over the years.”
“This is a very beautiful house, Mrs. Grenville.”
“It’s not beautiful really. It’s just big.”
“It could be a palace.”
“One day I’m sure it will be an embassy, or a school, but I like it and I’m going to stay here until the end of my life. Junior was born in this house, and one day I would love to see him take it over.”
The two women looked at each other. Ann wondered if the remark was meant to exclude the possibility of her in their lives. She had smiled sweetly in the face of Felicity’s rudeness, and she would continue to smile sweetly, no matter what.
“This is my room,” said Alice when they reached the third landing. “Those are guest rooms over there, and all the children’s rooms are on the next flight up. Junior still has the same room he always had, except he has his own sitting room as well, and the other rooms that used to belong to the girls are always filled with Junior’s friends. I expect you’ve met Bratsie.”
“Yes, I have. How lovely this room is,” Ann said, walking to the bed with its great pale-green canopy cascading down from the ceiling. “Green again.”
“What?”
“You like green, I said.”
“Yes, I do. You notice things, don’t you?”
“Is that wrong?”
“No, no, it’s not wrong. I was a triplet. Did you know that?”
“Junior told me.”
“We were identical. No one could tell us apart, sometimes not even our parents, so we wore different color ribbons always. Amelia wore red, and Antoinette blue, and I wore green, and it stayed my favorite color. The bathroom’s over there.”
Ann wondered why she had been brought up here rather than sent downstairs to the bathroom off the reception room. In the lavender-scented dressing room she leaned to look at the dozens of framed family photographs: childhood pictures on the decks of ocean liners and foreign beaches, the sisters in coming-out dresses and wedding gowns, Junior on a football team, Junior an usher in a wedding, Junior in a nightclub picture with Brenda Frazier. She realized how little she knew about his life, or his family. Apart from the others was a photograph of Junior’s father taken at a racetrack, a forbidding figure, but dashing: a cigar in his mouth, held arrogantly; a carnation in his buttonhole; a hard glint in his eyes behind glasses; an expression of how-dare-you-take-my-picture on his face. She felt instinctively that they had all feared him in the family; she would rather have had him to contend with than the mother and the four sisters. Men she understood.
She made up her mouth with scarlet lipstick, combed her hair, appraised herself favorably. She had, she felt, behaved demurely. Around here were the personal ef
fects of Alice Grenville—her swansdown powder puff, her Floris soap, her gold-backed brushes and mirrors. She noticed her clothes had been laid out for the evening ahead: a black evening dress on a cushioned hanger, shoes, stockings, purse, gloves, and an ermine coat. She wondered what kind of party or ball Alice was going to. She ran her hands in a backward motion down the pelts of the ermine coat and longed to try it on. She thrilled at the kind of arranged and prepared life it was that this woman led.
In the bedroom Alice sat back on her chaise. Behind her was a large marquetry table covered with expensive photographs of elegant people in silver frames. A photograph of Queen Mary was signed simply “Mary,” with the letter R following.
“Tell me about yourself, Miss Arden,” she said in her distinctive manner of speaking.
Alice Grenville was a woman to be reckoned with, and Ann recognized her instantly for the adversary she was going to be. She decided that truth, or at least proximity to truth, in her own background story was the route to take.
“Is that Queen Mary?” asked Ann, pointing to the photograph while sorting out her tale in her mind.
“Yes,” answered Alice simply, not turning to look at the picture, understanding the diversionary tactic, waiting for an answer to her question.
“I was born in Kansas,” began Ann.
“Ah, yes, Kansas,” said Alice. “Mr. Grenville and I were there some years ago, for a wedding. Lottie Holmes of Kansas City married my husband’s second cousin, Eustice Coffin. Do you know the Holmeses? They live in that area, what do you call it, just outside Kansas City, like Greenwich, or Grosse Point, what do you call that part?”
“We were from Pittsburg, Kansas, in the southwest corner of the state, about a hundred and twenty miles from Kansas City,” said Ann rapidly, almost all as one word. All her life she had hated the name of the town she was from; always she had to explain she was not from the Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania but the Pittsburg in Kansas that no one had ever heard of, and inevitably a joke was made.
“What do your people do?” asked Alice.
“I’m an orphan, Mrs. Grenville,” she said. She felt a momentary pang of guilt that she was glad her mother was no longer alive so that she would not have to explain her to this tall and formidable woman. Early the previous spring her mother had died, and she had taken her back to the place where she was from and about which she never spoke, buried her in the Mertens plot, contacted no one, and returned to New York—contacted no one, that is, except her father’s cousin, who owned the pharmacy, and that had been by accident.
“You’re not staying on?” he had asked.
“No, no, I’m up for a part in Hollywood,” she had answered, dazzling him. She hadn’t told him that she was no longer called Urse, or Mertens, or that this was the last time she would ever be there.
“Sad,” said Alice Grenville.
“Sad?”
“Being an orphan.” She rose. The interview was over. “I’m tired, Miss Arden. I think I shall rest before this evening. Will you send whichever of my daughters are left up? I’ve so enjoyed meeting you. If you’re dining with Junior, tell him not to stay out late. We’re leaving for the country early tomorrow. His nephews are coming, and I have a large party on Saturday who particularly want to see him before he leaves.”
Ann felt dismissed, as if her visit were a onetime thing with no follow-up to be expected. It was a feeling she remembered from an earlier time. Rarely did she think back—her life seemed always to begin at the period in which she was living—but an old rejection consumed her as, dispirited, she descended the stairs of the house that one day Alice Grenville hoped her son would take over. She fought down feelings of rage at having been asked to give an account of herself, and having inadequately accounted.
Below, the sisters’ verdict, after the departure of their brother and his blonde, was unanimous, but not favorable.
“The cheapest woman I ever saw.”
“Reeks of scent.”
“Eye shadow in the afternoon, my dear.”
“Those blood-red nails.”
“Poor Mère.”
“You go up, Cordelia. You’re the favorite.”
Above, Alice Grenville lay back on the chaise longue by her fireplace. The point of the afternoon had been to accommodate a sailor’s crush, but she felt a sense of unease about the power of the woman who had walked into her home. As a mother, she had seen to it that her children were exposed only to the eligible from the world in which her family played a dominant role. Her daughters, well married into the kind of families of high social standing that she and her late husband approved of, used to tease their mother that no one would be good enough for Junior but one or the other of the English princesses. She had watched every moment of the meeting while she poured tea and carried on the middle-of-the-road conversation that had ensued. She saw that Junior was solicitous of including Ann in the conversation and listened avidly to the few remarks she had made, as if they were more clever than they were. “It’s this damn war,” she said to herself. If it weren’t for the war, he wouldn’t have met a girl like that.
Cordelia entered the room. She handed her mother the needlework that she had discarded below. She picked up a magazine and turned the pages.
“Have they gone?”
“Yes. To the theater. She’s an actress. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“Well?” asked Cordelia finally.
“The look on my face is disappointment, in case you need to have it translated,” said her mother.
“All of a sudden Brenda Frazier’s looking awfully good,” said Cordelia.
“I wish you hadn’t felt it necessary to say that, but, yes, I would welcome Brenda to my bosom at this moment,” said Alice.
“But she has become Mrs. Kelly,” said Cordelia.
“Alas.”
“Did you think Miss Arden was beautiful?”
“Yes, but too conspicuous,” replied Alice. “She is a conspicuous character.”
“I thought that was a good-looking bag.”
“I hate lizard.”
“Actually, so do I. Are you interested in the consensus of the sisters?”
“Tell me.”
“Rosamond says gold digger. Grace says trash. You saw Felicity’s performance—”
“I wasn’t proud of Felicity.”
“Junior said Felicity was a bitch and why hadn’t he ever noticed it before.”
“And you, Cordelia? What did you think?”
“I say, ‘Poor Junior.’ On top of which he wants me to take her to lunch. He’s mad about her.”
“Besotted.”
“Do you suppose they’re having an affair?” asked Cordelia.
“Absolutely,” said Alice. “That’s her secret weapon.”
“The thing is, Mère, I’ve never seen Junior so happy.”
“If only your father were alive. He would put the fear of God into him. He loathed stage people.”
“It would be absurd for him to even consider marrying anyone so far beneath him.”
“If you want to make him marry the girl, tell him that.”
“Of course, you’re right.”
“She conceals her past. She gave me vague answers.”
They sat together in silence. Cordelia switched on a rose-shaded lamp. On the table were Ann’s gloves.
“Look, Mère, she’s left her gloves.”
“I saw them.”
“Shouldn’t we have the chauffeur deliver them to her doorman? That way she won’t have to come back.”
“Women like her don’t have doormen,” answered Alice Grenville. Her meaning was clear to her daughter. “Junior hasn’t told us anything at all about Miss Ann Arden,” she continued, placing a scornful stress on each syllable. “For all we know, that’s not even her name. How old do you think she is?”
“Older than he is.”
“I think so too. Why is it I don’t like her?”
Alice’s question was a statement
and didn’t demand an answer. There was another long silence in the room. They listened to the logs crackling in the fireplace. Alice took pains that the shudder that ran through her body not be evident to Cordelia.
“Are you all right?” asked Cordelia.
“Yes, of course. Just thinking,” replied her mother.
“About her?”
“It’s odd, isn’t it, how someone like that waltzes into your house one day, from out of nowhere, and some deep inner instinct tells you to beware.”
“You came along from out of nowhere” went the lyrics to the song. She was wearing his ensign’s hat, cocked on one side of her head, her lovely blonde hair cascading from under it. There were strands of hair in her mouth and a dark-brown Scotch in her hand. She sat on the floor of her tiny living room with her back against the sofa, moodily crooning the words to the song.
“You get mean when you’re drunk,” said Junior.
“Your sister gets mean over tea,” answered Ann.
“I’ve apologized for Felicity,” he said helplessly.
“One of my least attractive traits is that I always get even,” she said. “It’s the outsider in me reacting. It may take a long time, but the moment will present itself, it always does, and I will take advantage of that moment.”
“You’re scaring me,” he said, alternately meaning it and feeling aroused by her emotion. The Grenvilles did not show emotion.
His leave was drawing to a close. He did not wish it to end on a discordant note. Neither had declared love for the other, only passion and mutual admiration of bodies. (“I’m mad for this hair below your belly button,” she would say, kissing his stomach. “I adore the color of your nipples,” he would say, his face buried.) She waited for him to declare his love for her before she declared her love for him. She never rushed it. Like sex, it was a thing she understood. She never talked marriage, or even a permanent liaison, and when the subject came up, obliquely, she not only did not leap on it, she let it pass by. Every debutante he had ever known would have leaped at the oblique suggestion.
“I have a present for you,” he said quietly.
“You do?” she asked, her mood brightening, her heart beginning to beat fast.
The Two Mrs. Grenvilles Page 6
