A Trick of the Eye

by Jane Stanton Hitchcock

  “One is far safer with possessions and pets,” he used to say. “With them, at least, one always knows exactly where one stands, and the repairs are cheaper.”

  As we ate our supper, I told him about my encounter with Frances Griffin.

  “Frances Griffin . . . Frances Griffin . . .” He repeated the name, rolling the r’s, savoring it in his mouth as if it were an excellent claret.

  “What an interesting woman,” he said. “A woman of great complexity and depth. And a visual genius. Of course you know the story about her and the fireplace?”

  “No,” I replied, intrigued.

  “Oh, well, it’s a marvelous story, and absolutely true. I know—knew—the architect. He’s dead.”

  “Harry, you never disappoint me.”

  I sat back and prepared to listen to one of Harry’s anecdotes. He was my Marco Polo, coming home from exotic lands with tales of wealth and princes. As he spoke, he cut his veal chop meticulously with his knife and fork, careful to eat the American way—that is, putting down his knife and switching his fork from his left hand to his right before ingesting the slice. He called it one of his more time-consuming affectations.

  “It seems that after she built that wonderful house, The Haven—to which you, lucky soul, have been invited tomorrow—she was walking through it with the architect on the day it was finished to make sure everything was absolutely correct. When she got to the living room, she stopped dead, looked around, and said, ‘There’s something wrong here.’ The poor, dear architect froze in his tracks and stammered something. History hasn’t recorded those immortal lines, but it’s safe to say he was worried. She, meanwhile, turned around slowly once or twice, then finally said, ‘The fireplace. It’s off-center, is it not?’ And so my friend, the architect, who also had a rather good eye, looked at the thing and said no he didn’t think it was off-center. He thought it looked absolutely right. The upshot of it was, they got a ruler and measured the damn thing. And by God, the fireplace was indeed about, oh, nine inches or a foot off the dead center of the room.

  “So Mrs. Griffin, having made her point, said, ‘Please fix it.’ At which juncture, my friend the architect said, ‘Mrs. Griffin, I promise you, you won’t notice it when the room’s all decorated.’ ‘Oh, but I will,’ she assured him. So then he said, ‘But Mrs. Griffin, you don’t understand. I can’t fix the fireplace without tearing down all five floors.’ To which, according not only to legend but to my friend the architect who was there and to whom she said it, Frances Griffin replied, ‘I didn’t ask you how you were going to do it.’

  “She then walked straight out the door, and he proceeded to tear down the entire house and rebuild it—at her expense—with the fireplace dead center. Two years later, she walked into the house again, pronounced it perfect, and moved in. Now if that ain’t a modern-day ‘Princess and the Pea’ story, I don’t know what is!”

  “Astonishing.”

  “She’s a pathological perfectionist,” Harry continued. “Brilliant at proportion. Famous for going into people’s gardens and rooms and telling them exactly how to replant the rosebushes or rearrange the furniture. And the thing is, she’s always right. She has such a great eye that she actually once went into a museum and told them they had a fake Greuze painting on display. It caused such an uproar you can’t believe it. But, by God, fake it was!”

  “Where did she learn it all?”

  “You can’t learn what she knows. Her sense of taste and proportion are like perfect pitch—you either have it or you don’t. But she’s very informed. She has bothered to learn things. She has curatorial knowledge of old master art and eighteenth-century furniture.”

  “Where’s she from?” I inquired.

  “No idea. She wasn’t anybody one knew,” Harry sniffed. “I believe prior to her marriage, she was a rather murky figure on the social horizon. Of course, she cleared up brilliantly when she married Holt Griffin. Someone once told me she claimed her father was a diplomat. One suspects the most diplomatic thing he ever did was to fade from view before anyone could call his daughter a liar.”

  We both chuckled. Harry began building a little pyramid with discarded artichoke leaves. He went on:

  “I remember seeing pictures of her. She certainly wasn’t beautiful but she had great style. And apparently she was marvelous company, wonderful fun. Somehow she managed to break into the top drawer and pull out the very sought-after Mr. Griffin—outraging every single dreary ex-debutante around. Caused quite a scandal at the time. It amuses me to think how they all kowtow to her now.”

  “She has something, there’s no doubt about it,” I said. “Even meeting her once there’s a kind of mystery about her. I bet she was very sexy in her time.”

  “Weren’t we all?” Harry said, toppling the artichoke pyramid with his fork.

  “Well, of course,” he went on, “the great rumor was that Holt Griffin was just about gay—sort of teetering on the edge of gay—when she managed to ensnare him with certain exotic sexual wiles. It was thought that she enabled him not to go over the top, as it were. She was always being compared to the Duchess of Windsor in that respect. You know—cocaine on the genitals, Cleopatra’s Grip, all that sort of thing.”

  “Cleopatra’s Grip?” I said innocently, forking in a bite of veal.

  “Contraction of the vaginal muscles so that the penis has the sensation of being massaged,” he replied without apparent interest. “It’s an effective exercise known to courtesans and, I imagine, to a few other enterprising ladies. But, to tell you the truth, I don’t believe any of it. I think he just fell in love with her. She was fascinating and fun. Compared to all those ghastly little socialites he was used to, she must have seemed like a breath of fresh air. And she took care of him like a medieval chatelaine. The ‘on dit’ was that she painstakingly researched everything about him before actually meeting him—what his habits were, his favorite wines, liquor, food, hobbies, interests, books, sexual proclivities, etcetera. That way when he finally did meet her, she made him feel as if he were returning to the womb, so to speak.”

  “How do you know all this?” I asked.

  “Oh, it was rather well-known. Nobody could believe she got him, so there was all sorts of speculation as to how she managed to do it. You know how people are—they like to get to the root cause of everything and then trash it. The truth of the matter is men like Holt Griffin need to be catered to. They’re not interested in neurotic upper-class girls who are constantly complaining, disappointed with life, who won’t put out when they don’t feel like it, and who wind up drinking too much because they think they’ve been shortchanged. Men like Holt Griffin want professional pleasers. That’s what Frances Griffin is—or was: a professional pleaser.”

  “This is certainly a different picture than I expected. I thought she was supposed to be so grand.”

  “She is, my dear. She’s the grandest,” Harry proclaimed. “Don’t think people aren’t grand just because they have a dubious past. Dubious pasts make people grander. Think of what they’ve had to overcome. These silly little asses who think they’re grand because they’re born into some sort of Junior League nightmare—don’t make me laugh. Frances Griffin is grand in the old style—tough and independent, self-made. She’s grand like an Amazon.”

  “Did you know her personally, Harry?”

  “Oh well, she’s not the sort of woman the likes of me knows personally,” he mused. “I knew her rather impersonally though. I met her years ago. She came into my shop and bought an extraordinary Riesener commode on the spot. She bargained with me. She was a very shrewd bargainer but not—how shall I say it?—offensive about it. It was one of the best pieces I’ve ever had, that commode. Unquestionably. One of the best pieces anyone’s ever had, I suspect. I knew she had to have it. She told me she liked my taste. I remember she asked me to look for a few things for her at auction. And I did. We found one or two.
All marvelous quality.

  “That’s the thing about coming from nowhere and having to invent yourself,” Harry observed. “You know the difference between the real and the fake because you’ve had to sort it out so carefully in yourself. Well, some people have. Others never learn. Anyway, she knew. I would have given my right arm to see the inside of one of her houses, but no such luck. I actually thought of going along with the moving men when they delivered the commode. But I decided it was too tacky.”

  “I’ll take Polaroids tomorrow, Harry,” I said, teasing.

  “God forbid!” Harry cried. “Anyway I’m getting too blind to see ’em. I’m getting blind, you know.”

  I patted him on the cheek. He reminded me of a droopy hound.

  “I wish I were getting deaf instead,” he said. “I’ve heard quite enough in my life. But I still love to look at things. God how I love a beautiful object. Love going to museums and galleries. Damn it!” He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. He seemed weary and exasperated.

  I got up from the table and cleared our places. I brought in the tarte tatin and cut Harry a large slice, which he attacked with gusto.

  “My favorite! You good girl.”

  I lit a cigarette and sat back in my chair, watching Harry eat.

  “So, she got what she wanted,” I said. “It’s nice when people do that.”

  “She’s had a tragic life really.”

  “What do you mean? Sounds good to me.”

  “Well, all that terrible business about the daughter.”

  “What about the daughter?”

  “Do you mean to say you don’t know? I thought everybody knew. The daughter, called Cassandra—don’t you love it? Only the rich think they can name their children things like Cordelia and Electra and Cassandra without consequence. They feel exempt all around.”

  “What’s the matter with her?” I asked.

  “She’s dead for one thing.”

  “Really? Oh dear. How did that happen?”

  “I can’t believe you don’t know this story,” he said, sounding very pleased, and looking more animated. Gossip always seemed to invigorate him.

  “Cassandra Griffin was stabbed in her room by an unknown intruder over fifteen years ago.”

  “No!” I gasped.

  “To this day they don’t know who did it,” Harry said. “Never solved the case.”

  “My God, how horrible.”

  “Horrible isn’t the word. It happened right in The Haven. It’s a wonder old Frances can still live there. I don’t think I could live in a house where my child was stabbed to death. How about you?” Harry inquired somewhat facetiously.

  “God, people’s lives . . .”

  “It was a huge scandal for a while, but for some reason it died down very quickly and one never heard about it again. I suppose out of deference to the family.”

  “And how long ago did this happen?”

  “Fifteen, sixteen years ago. Holt Griffin was still at the U.N. Ambassador or some such thing. I’m surprised you never heard about it. It was really quite something. I suppose you were too young.”

  “I was in a fog in those days,” I said, thinking back. “How old was she—the daughter?”

  “About twenty-five, twenty-six. Somewhere around there,” Harry replied.

  “So she’d be about my age now. A little older.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “What a nightmare. And they never solved the case? That seems extraordinary,” I said.

  “Does, doesn’t it? I’m sure there are endless things we don’t know about it.”

  I saw Harry eyeing the tarte tatin.

  “More?” I offered.

  “Just a sliver, thanks.”

  I cut him another large slice. This time, he ingested it slowly, picking the apples from the top, saving the crust to eat with his fingers.

  “Good, this crust. Like a cookie,” he said. “I never taste things properly until the second time around.”

  “How do people ever recover from something like that? It’s ghastly enough to lose a child through illness or accident, but murder . . . She was an only child?”

  “The only one,” Harry said.

  “Mrs. Griffin told me she wanted me to paint the ballroom she’d built for her daughter’s coming-out party. And then she said I reminded her of her daughter.”

  “Really?” Harry seemed interested. “I believe the daughter was very wild. That was the rumor anyway. She married some gigolo type after a rather checkered career.”

  “Well, she said I did.”

  “Maybe you look like her.”

  “Poor thing.” I shrugged.

  “No getting down on yourself tonight, please, Faith,” Harry said, patting my hand. “Well,” he continued, “it doesn’t always pay to have money, does it?”

  I reflected for a moment on Frances Griffin’s visit to me that afternoon.

  “You know it’s funny really,” I said. “I never would have imagined in a million years that the woman who came to see me today was the woman you describe. It changes the color of the whole encounter. I’m much more curious about everything now. What do you suppose she really wants?”

  “You’ll just have to go and find out.”

  “God, Harry—I’d have to give up all my other work.”

  Harry pinned me with his eyes.

  “Don’t be a fool, Faith. You’ve got to work for her if she wants you to. It’s like working for royalty. Better. She knows more. It’s that kind of an opportunity, don’t you see? Her name is a great provenance. You’ll be able to write your own ticket after that.”

  “I write my own ticket now,” I said proudly.

  “Yes, but you’ll be able to write it for the Concorde.”

  Brush jumped up on the dining table and began pawing Harry’s sleeve. Harry stroked his dipping back. I tried to shoo him away.

  “Leave him be,” Harry said. “He’s just hungry for a little affection, aren’t you, Brushie?”

  “How old is Mr. Spencer now?”

  “About a hundred and twelve. He’s toothless, ruthless, and useless, but I adore the little bugger. You must come and have dinner with us next time. He’d love to see you.”

  Dinner at Harry’s apartment was always impossibly chaotic. There were at least three different sauces for everything. In his zeal, he often got them confused. I remember once we had an otherwise delicious leg of lamb topped off with a caramel sauce he mistook for the gravy.

  “I wouldn’t worry about your other business, if I were you,” Harry said. “You’ll have plenty of business after you work for her.”

  “Do I want to be cooped up in the same house for months?”

  “We’re not exactly talking about a hovel, dear. The Haven is one of the great houses of the world. And you’re going to make it greater. Frankly, Faith, I think a change would do you good. You’re much too insular. It’s as though you’ve packed it in already. I didn’t pack it in until I was much older than you.”

  “Have you packed it in, Harry?”

  “Oh well, you know . . .”

  He leaned back and put a cigarette in his holder. He was so heavy I thought the poor little Regency chair would break. He picked up the silver lighter in the shape of a monkey he’d given me for my birthday some years back. He flicked the tail. A flaming tongue shot out. He lit the cigarette.

  “Want some words of wisdom from an asthmatic old gentleman?” he said, tilting his head backward, exhaling a fine plume of smoke into the air. I nodded.

  “I’ve only regretted the paintings I did not buy, the trips I did not take, the people I did not love. That is to say, I’ve only ever regretted the things I didn’t do—never the ones I did,” he said with an air of authority. “One’s only real regret in life i
s the failure to act.”

  I thought about this for a long moment, wondering if, in my own case, it was true. The longer I reflected on my life, the more gray and pallid the canvas became. In the distant past, there had been a sudden burst of color—a brilliant red associated with my one great love affair—but even that had faded to a watery pink with the passage of time. Had there been, I wondered, moments when I should have done things I had not done, loved people I had not loved?

  I’d always known exactly where I was going. There’d rarely been a question that I was doing the wrong thing or that there was another path to consider. My feet, except during my great love affair, had always been firmly planted on the ground. I’d always walked straight ahead without qualms. Straight ahead to my grave, I thought.

  “It all ends so fast, Faith,” Harry said. “Much faster than you can imagine when you’re your age. Suddenly you feel the whole thing sort of grinding to a halt and you look back and think, was that my life or someone else’s? You can’t really grasp it. It all seems like a dream. I suppose that’s why old people talk about the past so much, because they’re trying to figure out what it was that actually happened to them. And, of course, what it was is Life, capital L.”

  Harry’s sardonic little chuckle turned into a brief hacking cough. I made him drink some water, which soothed him. The two of us then lapsed into a reflective silence in which we each stared off into space at nothing in particular. Harry cleared his throat once or twice.

  “Faith, dear, I must leave you now,” he said wearily, hauling himself out of his chair. “Thanks for the vittles. Very delicious.”

  “Take the rest of the tarte tatin. I can’t finish it.”

  “No, dear, I’m on a diet.” He glanced at his watch. “Oh heavens, look at the time. Mr. Spencer will be extremely irritated with me. He’ll have undoubtedly peed all over everything in the house by now.”