On his way out again after a dinner with Billy and Ann, a young man spoke to him on the street in an easy friendly way. “Hi,” he said. “How’s it going?” When he smiled, he had a dimple and good teeth, and there was a directness in his eyes. Bertie, who was more than a little drunk, thought for a moment that perhaps he knew him, from a party, or somewhere, and said, “Hi,” back, in a matching easy friendly way, and asked him back to his apartment, blessing his luck for the easiness of the conquest.
Bertie had another drink, and a marijuana cigarette that the young man offered him, and a line or two of cocaine, all of which Bertie took without noticing that the young man took none.
The first punch was to the Adam’s apple, rendering Bertie speechless. It was a full minute more before he realized what was happening to him: the sound of the switchblade knife opening, its cold blade being pulled across his cheek and neck, its point scratching the skin of his chest and stomach; the thirty-foot telephone wire tying his hands behind his back and attaching his feet and his hands; the pleasant young man of the street turning into a schizophrenic monster, destroying the antique-filled apartment, kicking the inert body, taunting, snarling, hating. He put a brown grocer’s bag over Bertie’s head and dropped lit kitchen matches on the paper.
Death was in the air. The end of his life was at hand, but his thoughts were not yet with God. Instead they were on the tabloid papers, and what they would say, after he was dead. He heard another match being struck and knew that his face would burn if that match dropped on the bag.
“God, help this man who is killing me,” whispered Bertie. “God, help this man who is killing me.” Again and again he whispered it, as in a litany. For a long time there was silence, and then he heard the click of a closing door. Amid the carnage of smashed antiques he lay there in shame long after his near-murderer had departed. The most he could do to extricate himself was to shake the brown grocer’s bag off his head. There was no way he could untie the cord that bound his hands and feet behind him.
In time he crawled parameciumlike across the floor to the telephone and removed the receiver by knocking it off with his head. It did not surprise him that the telephone was out of commission; his night caller had removed the diaphragm from the earpiece to ensure that it would not be used after his departure.
He struggled more with the cord but did no more than tighten the knots. Had he been able to see his hands and feet behind him, he would have seen that they were turning white from blocked circulation.
He thought of the morning, and the maid coming and finding him in the deplorable state that he was in. Gerta, the maid, a German woman, came to him several mornings a week. The shame of being so discovered by Gerta was overwhelming, naked and bound as he was, and the subsequent story from maid to other clients, including Basil Plant, the writer, to whom she went on Fridays, was a kind of hell that further paralyzed him in its contemplation.
There was another telephone, hidden away in a linen closet, with a different number entirely, for his business calls. Again he crawled across the floor, proceeding by inches, down the hall, across the bedroom, and into the bathroom where the linen closet was.
Again he removed the receiver by knocking it off with his head, and the dial tone to a world outside sounded precious to him. Holding a pencil stub in his teeth, he slowly began to dial.
The number he dialed rang, and rang, and rang again, and then it was answered.
“Hello?”
“Oh, thank God, I thought your telephone was off.”
“It is, but I could hear it ringing downstairs. Who is this?”
“Bertie.”
“Are you crying?”
“I need help, Ann.”
“Where are you?”
“My apartment.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m in a jam.”
“Isn’t there anyone else you can call?”
“No.”
“I’ll leave right away.”
Ann Grenville rose from her bed and dressed quietly while her husband slept. Arriving at his apartment after three, she let herself in with a key he had given her. She untied him, covered him, poured him a brandy, massaged circulation into his whitened wrists, picked up broken things, and helped him into bed.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.
“I was on my way out to meet some friends from California at the Westbury, but I forgot my money, so I came back here to the apartment, and I must have interrupted the guy in the middle of a robbery, and he …”
“Save that story for the maid, Bertie,” said Ann quietly, as she picked up the vial of cocaine and the plastic bag of marijuana. “Where do you want me to put this stuff?”
“I don’t care.”
“Talk about it, Bertie.”
“Every year in the Daily Mirror I read about some decorator on the Upper East Side they find garroted and murdered, and that’s all I could think of, how it was going to look in the papers,” he said, crying.
“Why did he stop?” she asked him.
“I suppose I gave up.”
“Bertie?”
“Yes?”
“While you thought you were dying …”
“Yes?”
“Is that all you thought about? The papers? What people would say about you after you were gone?”
“Yes.”
“Not about God, and all that?” She waved her hand vaguely heavenward.
He looked away from her. Tears filled his eyes again.
“I’m not criticizing you, Bertie. I’m afraid that’s how I’d be thinking, too, how it would look, if something terrible ever happened to me.” She breathed deeply. There was a long silence. “I’d better go. My husband will think I’m at Doctors Hospital having the baby.”
“Ann, I want to explain to you how it happened.”
“Oh, Bertie, it’s not necessary for you to explain the particulars to me. I get the overall picture.”
“I’ll never forget this, Ann.”
When her child was born three weeks later, it was the much-needed son. Amid family joy for the name preserved and the tradition of Grenvilles carried on into a new generation of New York, Ann vowed, privately, that her childbearing days were over. Now was the time for her much-postponed life to begin. They named the child, of course, William Grenville III, and when Alice and the sisters began cooing the name Willy to him in his Grenville family cradle, Ann said she wanted her son called Third, and Billy was delighted with her inventiveness and agreed.
She was, frankly, disappointed with the size of the sapphire in the ring he gave her when the baby was born. She placed it on her finger, looked and looked at it, and looked again, holding her hand at one angle and then another.
“It’s just not me,” she said, taking it off.
He was crestfallen, she could see that, and she sought quickly to make up. “But the flowers, my darling, the orchids are so lovely, and we have our wonderful son.”
“Yes,” he said. “There was another sapphire there that I could exchange this for, perhaps.”
“Billy.”
“Yes?”
“I’d like to go with you when you buy me jewelry.”
* * *
“Look at this, isn’t it marvelous, what Billy bought me when Third was born,” said Ann, showing her sapphire ring at the christening party in her splendid new house, finished finally. Over the mantelpiece in the living room was a Monet of irises, which Bertie said was the final touch in the beautiful and greatly admired room. In the thrill of acquisition, there was a resumption of warm feelings between Billy and Ann, and their guests, including his mother and sisters, were struck by the appearance of harmony between them.
So as not to seem completely without antecedents, Ann began to mention her mother, although the mother she mentioned bore little resemblance to the mother that had been. Her mother was the one person who had understood her completely. She had been the first to perceive her inner longings and help t
o mold them into ambitions which she encouraged her to pursue. “Things happen to you, and they always will,” said her mother. That she had become who she had become surpassed even her mother’s wildest dreams for her, and she sometimes wished for that look of admiration she had grown to expect in her mother’s eyes when she began to make her ascensions.
Ethel Mertens had not minded that she was left alone each night when Ann was at the Copacabana performing; nor did she expect her back after the final show, knowing and glowing in the fact that her daughter regularly attended the nightclubs of the city with eligible men who sent her gifts, one of whom might, she hoped, marry her one day. Ethel was quite content with her tabloid papers and gossip columns, over which she pored in the hopes of finding Ann’s name; she became as well versed as Elsa Maxwell or Maury Paul in the comings and goings of such prominent social figures as Wallis Simpson and Barbara Hutton and Brenda Frazier.
Sad as it was, Ann knew that her mother’s death the spring before she met Billy had been timely. It was not a thought she cared to formulate, but her ascent into the Grenville family, difficult as it was, would have been more difficult, perhaps impossible, with Ethel Mertens to explain. It was a threshold her mother would not have dared to cross. Once uprooted from the Kansas plain she had longed to flee, she invariably did the wrong thing in social situations, knew it, and suffered remorse when she embarrassed her daughter. Eventually she was content to stay behind, root for her daughter, and listen to her stories of life in the great world. Ann, to assuage her guilt from the unformed but lurking thoughts about her mother, began to bring her into conversations, referring to her not as Ma, but as Mother, the way Kay Kay Somerset talked about her mother, as if she were some elegant creature, now gone, whose silver it was, or whose tureen, that was being admired. “Oh, that was Mother’s,” Ann would say.
Then there appeared the portrait, not prominently placed, to call too much attention to it, but in the hallway of the second-floor landing, over a Regency bamboo settee that was never sat upon. It was Bertie Lightfoot who pointed out the picture to her in the back room of an antiques shop they were scouring through. It was turned against the wall because the frame was broken and the glass cracked, a forgotten lady of gentle birth painted in pastels in a style favored by society painters in the years preceding the First World War.
“She looks like you, Ann,” said Bertie in great excitement. “I think maybe it’s a Brocklehurst.”
Later, when Bertie had gone to see about other matters, Ann returned to the antiques shop and purchased the picture, which did indeed resemble her. “That was Mother,” she would say sometimes about the picture, in passing, to new friends not familiar with her history, and she came to believe it was so.
The picture, however, nearly ruptured the remnants of her friendship with Babette Van Degan, who came to call to see the celebrated house. Ann greeted her and led the way back for a tour room by room of the five-story house.
“Look,” she said, at the door of her splendid drawing room, looking at it herself, yet again, with a pride of ownership. She moved a needlepoint pillow imperceptibly to the left and surveyed its symmetry with its matching pillow. Each day she secretly reexperienced the beauty of her home. Babette, always enthusiastic at her friend’s progress in the world, responded accordingly to each fashionable room.
“Oh, how swank this all is,” she said.
Upstairs, on the second-floor landing, on the way to Ann’s bedroom, Ann said, in the offhand manner she had acquired about the portrait, waving her hand at it in passing, “You remember Mother, don’t you?”
“Of course I remember your mother,” replied Babette, “but who’s the broad in the picture?”
“How was Babette?” asked Billy later.
“Oh, fine,” answered Ann listlessly.
“Not much conviction in your voice.”
“She’s so cheap, Babette.”
“But rich.”
“And getting richer by the minute.”
“Is Hyman Wunch still in the picture?”
“On and off.”
“Think she’ll marry him?”
“Darling, you don’t change your name from Van Degan to Wunch,” said Ann. “I mean, you just don’t. A name like Van Degan makes life easier. That’s all there is to it. It’s a name people like to say, like Vanderbilt, or Rockefeller, or Astor. All over the world it’s a name people recognize.”
“Is that what Babette said?”
“That’s what I said, but it’s what she feels.”
“You two have a falling-out?”
“Oh, let’s not talk about Babette. I’m not going to see her for a while. You’d better get dressed. We’re due at Eve Soby’s.”
She worked as hard as an office girl on the daily advancements of her insatiable ambition. Next it mattered exceedingly to her that she be named as one of the best-dressed women in New York. When she achieved that distinction, she pretended to consider it an inconsequential thing.
Bratsie Bleeker, her early champion, began to dislike her. Sensing this, she withdrew from him, not wanting to be what he wanted her to be, the single act of defiance in Billy’s life. Neither spoke of their disenchantment to Billy; he would have had to side with one, and neither wanted to risk banishment.
Reluctantly in some quarters, it had to be acknowledged that Ann Grenville had made it. She was not the only maiden of modest social and financial pretensions to marry into a fine old family of wealth and position, but she was the first of the Cinderella girls, as Babette Van Degan called them, to conquer the highest brackets of New York.
Wherever one went, one heard her name. As a new word, once learned, suddenly appears constantly in conversation and print, so her name was spoken in every social gathering. Everyone seemed to know her, or to have heard of her, and to have opinions about her. People who had not intended to take her up took her up. She was seen in the best seat at the best table at the best parties. Men liked her exceedingly; she danced every dance, sang lyrics in their ear, and her conversation was ribald and spicy. Women liked her less but could not deny she was an asset at their parties and on their committees for their charities. Her husband’s family, once so reluctant to accept her completely, in hopes the alliance would be brief, were astonished that she so rapidly penetrated an impenetrable world. An intruder in the family, she had become its most highly visible member, eclipsing her husband’s sisters in social life.
There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that she intended to make a go of her marriage and avoid becoming a former wife with a great last name, like Babette Van Degan, relegated to the sidelines of the social world. She understood that her power lay in remaining Mrs. William Grenville, Junior, no matter what. Despite the mismatch that they may have been as a couple, she knew that she still exercised a fascination over her husband that was stronger than the doubts he sometimes felt about their union.
Fydor Cassati, the society columnist, wrote constantly about the young Grenvilles in his column, far too often for Billy’s taste, not often enough for Ann’s, whose thirst for prominence was unquenchable. He said they were one of the most glamorous couples in New York and that no party was complete without them. Ann purred in silent pleasure at the superiority she now felt as she read every word about herself, and clipped the clippings, and pasted them in scrapbooks, along with photographs and telegrams and invitations, as if to prove that what was happening to her was, in fact, happening, but also, as if she knew, at some deep level of herself she was not in contact with, that it could not possibly last and should be recorded. If she created in her scrapbooks a perfect picture of a perfect life, then that was how it was.
Their pace of living became more and more frantic. Be here. Be there. Be everywhere. Know this person. Know that person. She could take in a room at a glance with a skilled and rapid eye and understand perfectly the circles within circles of the overlapping groups that composed the fashionable life of New York. Alice Grenville, always sensible, knew that a young couple
who went out every night of the week were a couple who didn’t have much to say to each other at home. The times of being alone together, just them, became less and less frequent, and their conversational moments, about family, about children, and nannies and nursery school, occurred only at parties, giving them the appearance of togetherness.
Her dinners were noted as much for the careful selection and placement of those invited as for the style shown in the decoration of her tables with their marvelous arrangements of exotic flowers, and embroidered clothes, and antique porcelain, which she had begun to collect with a passion. The very latest novels, which you were going to read the reviews of in next Sunday’s New York Times, were already on her tables, artfully arranged. People came on time and stayed late. Billy, standoffish all his life, found himself, not unwillingly, at the center of a pleasure-bent society.
“I don’t see Felicity,” said Billy to Ann, looking around their crowded living room.
“The point of the party,” answered Ann. Her eyes wandered around the room as her husband talked to her, looking over shoulders, glancing sideways, in case there might be a more interesting conversation in progress.
“You mean you didn’t invite her?” asked Billy about his sister.
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“There’ll be hell to pay for this.”
“Worth it. Go talk to Wallis. Bertie’s hogging her.”
* * *
By the time Bratsie Bleeker eloped with a Mexican movie star, several inches taller than himself, who spoke no English, his friends, with the exception of Billy Grenville, had become less tolerant of his antics. They were raising children and beginning careers in banks and brokerage houses and settling down in small houses on their parents’ estates on Long Island. It was Billy, rather than Ann, who went to Cartier’s and ordered from Jules Glaenzer the silver box on which was engraved, in Billy’s handwriting, “To Bratsie and Maria Theresa with love from Billy and Ann,” because Ann said it seemed ridiculous to spend four hundred dollars on a gift for a marriage that wouldn’t last six months.
The Two Mrs. Grenvilles Page 13
