The Dying of the Light

  Priscilla knew exactly what had happened from the second she saw the lines of grief on Diana’s face. She changed the cloths, hid the blood, kept watch.

  The history of the world is the history of the unspoken bond between strong women.

  29

  MORNING BROUGHT NO sunrise, no familiar ball of fire rising over the opposite shore to glint on the gilt around the edge of Rose’s breakfast cup. It was just a slight lightening, the water barely moving, stippled with black. Rose woke from a short nap, as she always did, in despair. She was a lonely woman in a narrow bed, not old but getting older, a genius at what she did, producing splendors up and down the East Coast and, before the war, all over the world. Without extravagance, she was horrid, and she knew it. She was horrid to look at, beyond strange, so she made herself stranger, more extravagant, so that people would look beyond the stooped posture, the fingers crooked by arthritis, the hooked nose, all like something out of a child’s nightmare.

  They looked at her various getups, and took them for the whole. Nobody ever saw the kindness in her heart, the true generosity, the longing for love. She desired these things as a man dying of thirst in the desert craves water, but there was no oasis. People thought her a splendid ogre, no more.

  She took her breakfast hastily and bathed in the huge claw-foot bathtub, washing carefully with the Roger & Gallet soap that always traveled with her, carefully washing the few clumps of hair that dotted her scalp, unseen by anybody, ever, not even her random lovers. She had been struck by alopecia in her twenties, only then learning that her mother had it, too, hidden by wigs and glorious hats. The doctor said it might go away of its own accord, so she had begun wearing turbans, at first fanciful and colorful, amusing. But it never went away, and she switched to black, as though she were in mourning for her lost hair. They always wanted her to take her turban off, those men and then women who took her to bed out of pity or desperation, and who were usually zipping up their pants by midnight.

  She finished washing her paper-thin body, so thin she was almost weightless, emaciated beyond fashion, beyond desire, and dressed as extravagantly as she knew how, wondering why, if she loathed herself so much, she was driven to call so much attention her way, to shine the spotlight always on herself, when she longed to hide in the shadows, pricking her thin arms with a needle, her own tattoo of hatred.

  She sat at her dressing table in an expansive bedroom in one of the greatest houses in America, adjusting a cascading garnet pin on her tightly wrapped turban, and when everything was done, everything finished, she paused for a minute before she got up, and spat at her face in the mirror and watched as the spit ran down the crystalline surface, shattering her reflection, so that her face ran down the glass. Priscilla would clean it up, as she did every day.

  She arrived in the dining room all smiles and sparkles, ceaselessly on the move, like a black hummingbird. Like a hummingbird, if she stopped for a moment too long, she would die. The speed of her speech gave off a draft like a hummingbird’s wings, and she wanted nothing less than to know everything. She knew something had happened, something monumental, something that changed the music of everything, but she couldn’t figure it out. Things seemed to be as they always were, everything held in place by Diana’s obvious sorrow as Priscilla brought out one steaming dish after another, eggs, bacon, grits, oatmeal, sticky buns, ham on the bone, enough for an army, everybody eating as though it were the last meal on earth, except for Diana, although she almost never ate anything at breakfast, anyway. Diana’s eyes were like tightropes, noticing every turn of the head, the whip that tamed the lions in the cage.

  They were silent for a while, the clatter of knives and forks the only sound. Diana had been absent for three days, lying in her bed, attended by Priscilla, although nobody, out of politeness, remarked on this unusual fact. This is what Rose wanted to know. Where had she been? What sea change had occurred during those three days? Diana hadn’t been sick, of that she was sure. Diana was never sick.

  Ash spoke first. Looking directly at his mother, he said coldly, “Mother, did you love my father?”

  Diana stared at her son, white-faced, and said nothing.

  “I’m leaving here in half an hour. I need to know.”

  “Leaving?”

  “Yes. Leaving. I don’t belong here anymore, not after . . .” He looked at Gibby, who looked down at his breakfast, congealing on his plate.

  “After what?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. Did you love my father?”

  “I’m sorry to say that no, I never did.”

  “Did he hurt you?”

  “He never meant to, but, yes, he hurt me. I hurt him too. People always hurt each other, married people.”

  “How did you hurt him?”

  “I made him feel small.”

  “What a cruel woman you are.”

  Diana whitened, but said nothing.

  “One more question. Do you love Gibby? I know you are lovers, but do you love him?”

  Gibby shot up from his chair. “Ash!”

  “Shut up!”

  “Do you love Gibby?” His stare was cold as blue ice.

  Diana paused a long time, as though paralyzed. She looked at Ash. She looked at Gibby, still standing in shock, and back to Ash. Rose sat silent and still as a rock.

  Finally, she whispered, “Yes. Yes, I do. With all my heart.”

  “Then it’s over. That’s the end. You’re dead to me now. Both of you. I’m leaving this afternoon for Richmond. I’ll be gone for a while, and when I come back, I want him gone. Forever. I never want to see him again. Can you do that for me?”

  Knowing it was a promise she could not keep, she said, “I promise.”

  They were frozen around the great table, the platters and plates of food getting cold without another bite being eaten. They were frozen in space, in time, in their hearts, as though they were already a photograph in someone’s album, glimpsed years later.

  “Ash,” she said, across the long length of the mahogany table. “You’re my son. I love you with a love so strong I feel ashamed. I feel helpless in the face of my love for you. You have a home in my heart, a bed in my soul. Saratoga will be yours when I die. Don’t underestimate the power of a mother’s love. My love can’t be thrown away like a sock with a hole in the toe. It can’t ever be thrown away or broken, or forgotten or lost, like a hat on a train. Maybe you think I’m awful. But you came out of my body, and that cord can never be cut.”

  “I spit on your grave. You, my dear mother. Gibby, I will see you dead.”

  Ash rose and without a backward glance, hastily left the room. She heard his car starting, and then spitting gravel as he roared out of the driveway. She sat completely still until there was no more sound.

  Rose turned to Gibby. Her voice was harsh, demanding. Her turban was beginning to come unraveled. Her bony hands quickly flew to hold it in place. “Do you see what just happened? Are you so callous you can’t see it? She risked her life for you. Do you understand me?”

  “I . . .”

  Suddenly ferocious, Rose stood up and shouted, “DO. YOU. UNDERSTAND. ME?”

  Gibby sat, looking straight ahead, at nothing. He let Rose’s words sink in, until the silence had settled, the way the water eventually smooths after you throw a stone into a pond. Then he said, in a quiet, soft voice, with tears trickling down his face, “I would die for her. You’ve probably never felt that. I don’t think a lot of people have. But I have, and I know.”

  Diana turned to her and said coldly, “Rose, please wait for me in the study. We need to talk. And I need to be alone with Gibby. The whole world has come apart, and I can’t bear the sight of you right now. Forgive me.”

  ROSE, SHUNNED AND excluded, listening for voices, waited in the study, as instructed. Diana never came. At one, Priscilla appeared with a tray of sandwiches, crab salad, cucumber, and peanut butter and jam, which Priscilla knew Rose adored. She ate listlessly, staring out at what was once a knot
garden, the kind of thing that took years to perfect, the delicate up and over of the box and rosemary plants, the precision, like hearts entwined, and only a season or two to fall into ruination.

  Like her life, she thought. Everything she told the world about her life was a lie. There was no Park Avenue, no cocktail with Billy Baldwin and Cecil Beaton and Gertrude Lawrence on a piano singing “Stormy Weather.” There was only her third-floor walk-up on Barrow Street, her fat papillon and the Sunday crossword puzzle, not finished until Wednesday, the table lamps draped with scarves so that everything was always in shadow. There was soup out of the can and, yes, peanut butter and jam sandwiches. Even her name was not real. She was not born Rose de Lisle; she became her, through wit and imagination, like a picture in a coloring book. She loved men who dressed as women because they, like herself, were wholly creatures of their own fervent imaginations.

  There were invitations. Mountains of invitations. She was not a nobody. Most of her day, when she was not actively working, was taken up with getting ready to go out for one cocktail or another, always in demand for her wit and her sense of the exotic. Her life, as described, was a borrowed one, and she loved the rich as a nun loves Jesus, because she could pretend that the miraculous rooms she created for them were her rooms, her chairs, her Aubusson rugs, her little lapdogs, her needlepoint footstools.

  Rumors that she was in fact a man abounded, and that only added to her allure.

  She was considered brilliant at what she did. A Rose de Lisle room was a room for history. A room for the camera.

  But it always came back to this, peanut butter and jam on a piece of bread with the edges cut off. She hadn’t cast off all civility, after all.

  30

  SHE WAITED ALL day. What Diana and Gibby were doing all that time was a mystery to her. She didn’t like mysteries, but with the river flowing by the windows, it was not unpleasant. She had picked, whatever Diana said, a room that faced east, toward the water, and its endless fascinations beguiled her. The sun had long come up out of the thin orange horizon; a razor moon was fading as it rose into the cerulean sky. She wished for change, for violence in the weather, but it was just a nice, fair, cold day, the oystermen already having filled their nets and gone home. She stirred beneath her harem pants when she watched their massive forearms pulling in the nets, their thighs like tree trunks in their canvas pants and leather boots covered with salt. If only . . . if only she could go home with one of them, be his woman, buy his beer and kiss his round, hairy belly and feel his strong forearms pull her to the bed. Her life was a high-wire act of degradations and mirages. And she always plummeted to her tea and her sandwiches and Butch, who ate the rest of her sandwiches after she fell asleep, snoring.

  She had a knot of fear in her stomach. She knew Diana was about to fire her, and the indignity was too much. She had learned certain things in her life, and one of them was that if you think you’re getting fired, you are.

  But, as she had learned from Priscilla, there’s no point in crying tomorrow’s tears today, so she lost herself in the new gardens, what they would look like in the spring. Perfection was the answer. The gardens now were cold and dead. But they would come alive, all of them, the monstrous blue and pink hydrangeas in the summer, the hideously expensive tulips that might or might not survive the ravenous deer, each bulb planted with a clove of garlic tied to it, the narcissus, the old Edwardian roses. Diana, like all gardeners who don’t know much about gardening, had asked that everything bloom all at once, and Rose, after trying to explain that the lilac never sees the lily, gave in and pretended that she was giving Diana what she wanted, knowing that she would not be here to see the magical succession of bloom that was the true miracle of a great garden. She gave her Beverley Nichols to read, and Diana was delighted by the thatched roofs and the cows in the narcissus, but she was not educated by the small books.

  Except for the lawn, there were scrub pines all around—not a beautiful landscape at all. Now that the gold and rose were gone from the deciduous trees, it was like living in a hostile forest of gray-fringed spikes, some reaching to the moon, some tilted in despair, waiting for the woodsman’s ax. This ugliness was what made those beautiful fires in the house’s eighteen fireplaces every night so necessary, when the dark brought with it a cold that wouldn’t be denied. These old piles were unbearably cold; the furnaces put in in the twenties never worked when it got cold. The beautiful fires never worked, either. People just froze, either sitting in steaming baths for hours or in their sweaters in the Great Room, fires going, what the English called bum warmers at every fireplace and always in use, alternately, lap robes for everybody, and strong cocktails.

  Then dinner in the frigid dining room, both fireplaces going and of no use whatsoever. Sometimes they ate in their coats. Then upstairs to their warm bedrooms, where fires had been going since four, and then sleep, the sparkle of the molten embers leading into dreams and leaving them there during the night, so they woke frozen as ice cubes and raced to dress in tweed or cashmere dressing gowns and race down to breakfast, the men sometimes in full hunting gear, silk long johns, flannel shirts, and so many pieces of clothing they could hardly reach to eat. But warm.

  This all was Rose’s surmise as she waited. At exactly four thirty, as the far shore was lit up by the sun sinking behind the house, as the needle point of every scrub pine turned from ash to gold, Diana walked into the room, followed by Priscilla, with two icy cocktails on a silver tray—a perfect Manhattan for Rose, who had never wanted one more, and a frosted old-fashioned in a silver cup for Diana, with fresh mint (from where? In November?) as a garnish. Along with the drinks, the inevitable sterling bowl of peanuts and, of course, ham biscuits, which meant that this was business and not pleasure.

  Diana still had on her riding boots and a stock shirt under her moth-eaten cashmere sweater. She’d been galloping. The seat of her pants was wet with sweat. She threw herself casually into a wing chair next to Rose’s and flung her boots up on the same enormous ottoman. Rose delicately removed her feet and hoped she wasn’t noticed. It was then that Rose noticed that Diana held two checks in her hand. The dustman was being put in the dustbin.

  “Rose, sugar”—and in that beginning, Rose knew just how powerfully mendacious the rest of the conversation was going to be—“you know, I hope, just how fond I am of you.”

  “Well, I haven’t broken anything.”

  “You’ve brought such excitement to the house, it’s been such an amusing ride. But it can’t go on.”

  “You’re firing me.” Rose sipped her Manhattan and lit a cigarette.

  “Yes! Yes! Let’s smoke!” Diana took a large gulp of her old-fashioned. “God, I love drinking. How had I forgotten that? Let’s get really drunk. Firing you? No, dear Rose. Nothing so dire as that. I’m just saying we stop here. We’re mostly painted, even the dadoes, a word I had never heard before you came into my life, like so many others. We’re waiting for the no doubt exquisite curtains. And that’s it. Finito. Priscilla?” she yelled out, as Priscilla came into the room, right on cue. “Two more of the lovely cocktails, please, and don’t be stingy. Make them like you made them for my father.”

  “You gone get crazy, like him.”

  “Exactly the point.”

  “You gone start crying.”

  “Worse things have happened. Now get your butt in the kitchen and make us our drinks.”

  While waiting, they watched the water in silence, like children waiting for the magician to pull the rabbit out of the hat. The drinks came, and they resumed their conversation.

  “Firing?” repeated Diana. “Nothing so gauche as that. I’m just saying the work stops here. I want everything brought back from wherever you’ve hidden it and put exactly where it was.”

  “But it was a mess. A yard sale with a roof over it. The rug in the living room is a pathetic scandal.”

  “There are dozens of rugs in the attic. There’s no need to look further. Rose, you’ve gone to a lot of trou
ble, and I thank you with all my heart. Maybe, in your words, they’re a bit tatty. Maybe they’re not ready for the garden club tour, but I don’t want all those women tramping all over my house anyway.”

  “I don’t know how to do that.”

  “I do. I remember where every teaspoon goes.”

  “You brought me all this way to slap on some paint and make some curtains? This could have been the most beautiful house in America.”

  “It is the most beautiful house. To me. To. Me. I want it as close as possible to the way it was. Tell the painters to finish what they’re doing, then put down their paintbrushes and go home. There are checks for all of them in the kitchen. Tell the floor sanders to wax and then go home, the plasterers the same. Nothing half done. Nothing overdone.”

  “But . . . ,” Rose tried.

  “I know. I don’t want the most extravagantly beautiful house in America. I want the house I grew up in, the house where everything was treasured and nothing was lost or ever thrown away. Yes, the pictures are valuable beyond anybody’s wildest dreams. But I don’t want a house that calls attention to itself. I like my shady lady. What do you suppose a Gilbert Stuart is worth, a Sully, a Stubbs, and on and on? The biggest Turner in America? Incalculable. The more the house calls attention to itself, the greater is the possibility of thieves in the night. Nobody knows they’re here. Ash has gone to Richmond. He may never come back. You know the reasons. When I die, it will all be his. He can do whatever he wants. Part of what I pay you for is your silence. You must never speak of this house once you leave. Let Ash tart it up like an Easter bonnet, if that’s what he wants. I’m sorry. I thought I wanted that. But I don’t. I don’t. Did you know that I was run over by a car when I was a little girl? I was. Memory. This house is a museum to memory, and it’s memory I want. The South and my life, my place in it, is built on that. I want to be warmed by my memory, not live in a spread in a glossy magazine.”

  “I think I understand.”