The Dying of the Light

  Diana went to call the train station as Clarence changed into his old driver’s uniform, to see if the train was late, but the phone was out, and dinner was wordlessly over. Things were put away. She helped with the washing up, the putting away, but her hands shook so badly, she had to stop and let Priscilla take over. Priscilla had helped at Ashton’s birth; she had wiped the blood and snot from his mewling body before handing the pristine baby to his exhausted mother. Priscilla did not for one second believe that this storm, or any show of the elements, would stop Ashton from returning to take up his rightful place now. White people were so delicate, so easily frightened. So foolish.

  As Clarence appeared in his full chauffeur’s regalia, the lights went out. They caught a glimpse of his gleaming black knee boots, his black jodhpurs, his smartly buttoned jacket, now too tight, cap under his arm, but just a glimpse, before they were sunk into blackness and the scramble for candles and matches began. There were hundreds of half-used candles from evenings a decade ago, but they were scattered in drawers all over the house, and it took some time, so by the time the kitchen was lit by the warm glow of candlelight, Clarence was already gone. The rain was coming down in sheets, drowning out any sound the car might have made, pulling down the drive.

  Once the business of illumination was taken care of, the two women had nothing to do. They sat anxiously at the kitchen table, both still in their aprons.

  “We need to find us something to do,” said Priscilla. “It’s no telling how long they’ll be. Can’t just sit here like lumps.”

  “We’ll polish those candlesticks.”

  “All of them? They haven’t been touched in years. Could take hours.”

  “You’re the one who said we had time.”

  They heard the crack and crash of a tree outside, in the garden, struck by lightning that lit the room like daylight, like noon in July. They felt the chill air that suddenly filled the room, blowing in from the library, and thought the same thought at the same moment, “The books!” Diana jumped up.

  They ran into the library, forcing open the broad double doors, to find the giant half tree that had been split by the lightning and crashed through the diamond panes of the windows, destroying everything, letting in the slashing rain, pulling books from the shelves, the soggy pages flapping in the wind, the rug soaked, the ruination of all that Diana held most dear. She gasped and almost fell, but Priscilla caught her, and another lightning flash showed them clearly, two women alone in a giant house, frozen in the face of what seemed to Diana to be the destruction of the library at Alexandria.

  Frozen, but not helpless. “There’s not a second, not a second to lose,” said Diana evenly. “Get towels, get rags, get mops, get buckets. Now!”

  They rushed around the house, grabbing blankets and trying to hang them in front of the broken windows, but the windows were fourteen feet tall, and it was a useless exercise, so they began to cart what books they could get to into a dry space, looking behind to see that there were still hundreds of books they couldn’t get to. Water was now covering the floor, and books floated freely. The blankets, soaked, fell from the windows, and the high western wind was free to blow the blinding rain straight into the room. Diana screamed, and went back again and again, to little avail. They had pulled out perhaps a third of the books, and even those were sodden.

  Priscilla caught her by the shoulders. “Child, there’s nothing more we can do. Stop now. Clarence will get to work when he gets home. Any minute now. The boys will be here. Now we wait.”

  “We have to do something.”

  “Then we polish, like you said.”

  Diana busied herself, and got the polishing things together, turning always to look at the library doors, shut against the storm, listening for every clap of thunder, watching for every lightning strike, as Priscilla brought in the candelabra, two by two. There seemed to be so many of them. So much silver in this house. The long trickle of inheritance through the funnel of death.

  They set to work. The minutes passed in silence, except for the rubbing of the rags, the rasp of the toothbrushes in the hollows of the repoussé. They tried not to look at the clock, but they did, often. The train was supposed to arrive at eleven, so the car should be back at one fifteen. It was past that already. Then it was two o’clock, and they were done. They sat blankly, staring at their handiwork, six gleaming candelabra. Diana took off her apron, smoothing down her wet rose-colored crepe dress with a lace collar, no jewelry.

  “Let’s set the table.”

  “What for? Who for? It’s the middle of the night.”

  “For his homecoming. For the rightness of the thing. Like in the old days. Because it seems like the right thing to do.”

  Priscilla, too tired to argue, just followed her to the dining room. The wind was wild in the house, glass all over the library floor, water everywhere. The books. Floating. Lost or salvageable? She felt an ache in her heart for her grandfather’s library, for the comfortable hours of her childhood spent between the covers of those adventures and romances, curled up in a leather wing chair for the light. Wandering the alleyways of that history. But that was tomorrow, tomorrow’s work; nothing to be done now. “Never cry tomorrow’s tears today,” Priscilla always said, and Diana clung to that. She had grown used to it. So much that could not be saved. Lost in a night, no matter how careful. The inevitable loss. Of everything, in time.

  They opened the big closet that held all the linens. First they put down the pad on the enormous Duncan Phyfe table, and then spread a heavy linen tablecloth over it, embroidered with a tangle of vines and roses, ironing the cloth on the table so there wouldn’t be the tiniest crease. Then they put their gleaming candlesticks down the center of the table, all six of them, with the best candles they could find, none of them whole, and then began to lay out the silver, the forks almost a foot long, all of it heavy, Victorian, coming gleaming from the blue felt bags in which it was kept to ward off tarnish. It hadn’t been used in years.

  “How many?” asked Priscilla.

  “How many what?”

  “How many place settings?”

  “Eight. I think eight.”

  “You don’t even know no eight people no more.”

  “This is not about that.”

  Eight places. Eight snowy napkins. And forty glasses—water, white wine, red wine, champagne, sauterne.

  “Flowers,” said Diana, and she rushed into the garden, into the maelstrom of rain and wind, grabbing at hellebores, and brought them into the dining room, still dripping, Diana dripping now, too, disheveled, her rose dress dark and damp, her hair wild, and filled the epergnes that completed the lineup in the middle of the table. Then the blanc de chine Chinese figurines. All of this in the ghostly semidark of the house, the electricity still out, now past two o’clock in the morning.

  Suddenly the lights came back on, and the table was revealed in all its splendor. Like the old days; it hadn’t been laid like this for years, and it gave her a thrill even though Pricilla was right—she didn’t know eight people anymore. She had systematically cut them from her life. Still, if she did know eight people and if they came, she would be ready. The linens were immaculate, the silver polished. The wine cellar was filled with hundreds and hundreds of bottles of the Captain’s excellent wines. Her dresses from fifteen years ago, dresses sent for from Lanvin and Patou and Chanel, hung in her closet still, like dreams you forget as soon as you wake up.

  “Miss Diana,” said Priscilla, “you’re soaked to the bone. Run upstairs and change your dress. Run a brush through your hair. Mr. Ashton will be here any minute.”

  The wind wouldn’t die, but somehow, mercifully, as she was upstairs pulling on a simple black dinner dress she hardly recognized as being anything that belonged to her, she heard Clarence drive up, and a door slam. Ashton was safely home.

  Diana panicked: the table looked foolish. Priscilla was right. What had she done this for? What festive effect had she hoped to achieve? There was no festi
vity left in this house. It had slowly died, as Diana had slowly given up hope, had slowly relinquished her youth to a watchful age, becoming the caretaker of a house that she could be asked to leave at any moment. She closed the bedroom doors behind her and ran down the winding stairs in her bare feet, suede shoes in hand, to open the big double doors to the night and Ashton Cooke Copperton III.

  He was too thin. Even under his perfectly tailored Chesterfield coat, his tweed suit and his perfectly polished brogues, she could see that he was too thin.

  “You’re as lovely as ever, Mama,” said Ashton. “Give me a kiss.”

  He was at least six feet tall. He dwarfed her. His embrace was so forceful and warm, it was like being buried alive. She was lost in the darkness of the folds of his coat, and she barely heard him as he said, “Oh, how I have missed you. I have so much to tell you.”

  Turning back, she looked at Ash’s beautiful face, “What happened to you, darling? Precious?”

  “Nothing, really. And so much. I’ll tell you all about it. Gibby has come to stay with us. Won’t that be jolly?”

  There was someone with him. A short, solid man with red hair. His roommate. Gesturing, as though they had never met, Ash said, “And of course you know my partner in crime, Mr. Gibson Fitzgerald Cavenaugh.”

  “Hello, Gibby,” Diana said, holding out a trembling hand, which he grasped warmly.

  “But, Mama,” Ash said. “You look white as a sheet. And you’re wet to the bone. What’s happened?”

  And she finally broke down and sobbed so hard she hardly made sense. “In. There was. Lightning, a tree crashed. Into the library. My books, floating . . .”

  He didn’t even let her finish. Taking her hand, he said, “Show me. Show me now.” She took his hand and the three of them raced to the library.

  “My God,” said Ash to his mother, who hung back, as though she couldn’t bear to face it one more time.

  “What are we going to do?” she cried. “Ash, what are we going to do?”

  When he spoke, Ash’s voice was so calm, so comforting, almost a whisper, like a doctor at the bedside of a dying woman. “Mother, listen to me. Yes, it’s terrible. Yes, it’s a disaster. But there’s a solution. But not now. It’s the middle of the night. There’s nothing to be done that you haven’t already done.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to close the doors of the library, and sit down to supper—God, I hope there’s something to eat, I’m starving—and in the morning, I will do what needs to be done. I will take care of everything.

  “I’m home now, Mama. Your problems are my problems. I will fix this. You’ll see. Can you trust me, just a little bit, just for one night?”

  And looking into his bright eyes, she did, and she said so, and he took her arm, and the three of them walked into the dining room and sat down, the library doors and all the disaster inside, closed behind them until the next morning.

  “Miss Priscilla? Would you open the windows to air out Mr. Ashton’s room? The storm is passed.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  And Ash and Gibby bounded up the stairs, laughing and punching one another’s arms.

  WHEN ASH CAME down, twenty minutes later, in an immaculate white shirt, pleated gray flannel trousers, and black velvet slippers with his initials embroidered on them, Diana could see immediately what his greatcoat had concealed. He wasn’t thin at all; instead she saw the contours of his beautiful, fit young body, tiny at the waist, broad at the shoulders, a boy who had the muscular chest and shoulders and neck of a man. A Greek god, with his curly brown hair and his laughing eyes, so like his mother’s, his eagerness for life’s pleasures, how unaware he was of what disappointments it might hold. He had what Diana had so bitterly learned; he had no regret. He lacked the sadness that turns a boy into a man, a girl into a woman. He was followed by Gibson, whose tweed jacket did little to conceal the power of his torso, just as his flannel trousers barely held the strength of his legs. Power and grace, he joined them as though he had always been there, showing a knack for making himself instantly at home.

  Diana had brought up a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé 1910 from the cellar, and Ash expertly uncorked it, poured a glass, and then one for his mother and for Gibby, offering it to Priscilla and Clarence, who both refused. He raised his glass in a toast to all of them, before taking a bite of food. “Here’s to my beloved family. My beloved mother. My finest friend. My dear Priscilla and Clarence. I am finally where I am meant to be, in my heart’s true home.”

  And then, with the wind still howling and careening against the trees outside, Ashton and Gibby drank deeply and began to devour their dinners as though they had never seen food before.

  “But Ash!” Diana cried at one point.

  “Shhhhhh. . . . Stay calm, Mama. I’m home now, remember? To protect and provide. Peace will reign again. A toast to peace.”

  And they drank, in the flickering candlelight of two dozen candles.

  12

  AFTERWARD, THEY SAT in the vast sitting room, warmed by roaring fires in the two enormous fireplaces. Diana hadn’t sat in here in years, and only now, in the wavering light of the fire, did she notice how decrepit, how shabby, it had become. It was all cabbage rose and saddle leather, masculine and feminine in a perfect marriage of taste and style. It was at least dusted, kept up, the drinks table gleaming with crystal and silver. The Captain used to say that there were only two kinds of drinks, earth tones and clear, and she had plenty of both, the drinks table a monument to a time that was, most of it at least, ten years past. Liquor didn’t go bad, and the bottles were dusted every week by Priscilla or herself, a temple to the sort of fun that was never had at Saratoga anymore.

  Suddenly chilly, she shivered. Ash started to rise, but Gibby jumped up and wrapped an old cashmere lap robe around her legs. “Here,” he said. She looked at Gibby and noticed how the muscles in his arms strained the seams of his jacket. Then, panicked, she looked at her son. She saw the glint of jealousy, just a flash, in Ash’s eyes.

  The red damask curtains sagged and shredded on their heavy wooden poles, the finials the size of grapefruits, and everywhere hung more family portraits, the men with their stern, handsome faces, the women pale, barely alert after all that childbirth, always against a velvet swag looking out on a bucolic scene, cows grazing, always, in the distance, the peaceful river flowing.

  There was even a portrait by John Singer Sargent of herself as a young girl. So hopeful in white muslin and silken bows. She looked very much the same, even still. Brown hair cut in wings around her face, a brightness to her blue-gray eyes, the pale skin and the pink cheeks, the expectation, the firm jaw. There was a kindness in her aspect that she hoped she still showed, but she couldn’t be sure. A string of pearls, the last one left to her. A pretty girl, a viewer might have said, not a raving beauty but memorably pretty, and with a charm about her, and a hint of the mischievous, a sparkle like the large yellow diamond that was later in her engagement ring. Out of the ordinary.

  This visit was different from all of Ashton’s other visits—the Christmas holidays, the spring breaks, the summer windfalls, the endless leisurely days when she sacrificed and opened the Olympic pool so he could swim laps every morning at dawn, determined to do ten more every day. This visit was not finite like all the others, was not momentary. Now he was actually here for good. Changes would have to be made. Secrets revealed about the true state of things. An accounting. Cards shown.

  She sat on the immense brown mohair sofa, four cushions across, with her shoes off and her feet curled under her. She knew she looked good that way, gamine and carefree. Beaton had once photographed her in that pose, and she liked it, and struck it as often as she could. Ashton saw her just that way as he entered the room, carrying a stack of phonograph records.

  “Ash, it’s four o’clock in the morning,” she said.

  ‘New music and old brandy,” he said. “The perfect ending to the night.”

  “I don’t know if i
t even still works. It hasn’t been turned on in years.”

  “Ah, but it has. It worked just fine at Christmas. Don’t you remember? We kept you awake all night.”

  “You’re a wicked child.”

  “You said you liked it.”

  “I did. I liked the fact that people were having fun in the house again. Even if only for one night.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  And before she could stop it, the tears welled up in her eyes and coursed down her cheeks. Where were the mischievous eyes now, the cloudless sky? As cold and dead as the Sphinx, and as ancient. Ash was at her side in an instant.

  “Mother, darling,” he said, and she could feel the vibration of his voice in his chest as he stroked her hair. “I’m here now. I’m not going away. We’ll make it all right. Just the way it was. However you want it to be. That’s what all this money’s for.” And she felt something she hadn’t felt in a long while: the kindness, the warmth another human body could impart. For the first time since she’d married the Captain, she didn’t feel alone.

  “I didn’t want to bother you,” she said. She looked up, and there were tears in his sad eyes.

  “And I was too stupid to notice. But not anymore. From now on, I see it all through your eyes, and I see what it was, and I now see what it will be. I promise. I have a friend in New York, a guy I stay with sometimes, and he has the most amazing apartment, done by a decorator who he says is a genius. I will call her to come help us. Her name is Rose de Lisle. When she’s done, everything will be splendid, more splendid than ever. Then we’ll have people for dinner and dances, like in the old days when I would listen and watch from that window in the upstairs hall and it all seemed like a fairy tale. I would kiss you through the glass as you whirled by. You were the queen. Always the queen.”

  “Don’t be silly. I’m hardly a queen.”

  Ash knelt on the floor in front of her. “Oh, Your Majesty, will you forgive me?”

  “Then bring me a drink. Forgiveness never comes without brandy.”