The Dying of the Light

  “You could never understand, not fully, and that’s not your fault. You are a creature of the imagination, wholly created from the ground up, and I admire that, I really do. I am all bones and history. The chains of history. My great-great-grandmother Catherine Esten sat in this very chair having her cocktail, just as we are, except that her liquor was made up in the woods, I can show you where. Who would erase that, just wash it over with a color named Eating Room Red? Or Jesus knows what. We are trammeled by where we came from. The bloodlines, like horses. We were Americans before there was an America. My aunt, somewhere back there, was Pocohontas. How could I put that in a wheelbarrow and send it off to auction? That ormolu clock you so casually dismissed was my grandfather’s wedding present to my grandmother. Underneath, right below ‘Cartier et Cie’ it says ‘Per Sempre,’ and maybe he didn’t know his languages, but he knew his heart, and I will not turn it over to some newly rich lawyer on Park Avenue or some movie mogul in Hollywood. Okay, end of sermon. There’s no way to put it into words, but I hope you understand a little bit, just a fraction, of my heart now, what it all means.”

  Rose reached out her hand and took Diana’s in hers. Her voice was softer and kinder than it had been since she was a child in the Midwest, genuinely loving.

  “It doesn’t matter whether I do or I don’t. It’s your house. You can do anything with it you want. Anything. With my blessing. Not every lily needs gilding. Or painting, as the poet actually wrote. It was my dream, not yours.”

  “I have a check here for three thousand dollars for all the work you’ve put in so far.”

  “I’m flabbergasted.”

  “And here’s another check. This one is for five thousand dollars, and it’s for the project, miracle really, you’re going to pull off for me in the next two weeks.”

  Rose was stunned. Eight thousand dollars was a fortune. She could buy an enormous apartment on Park Avenue, after all, make it a world-class showplace for her work, invite smart people over. These smart people would spread the word to other smart people. Her phone would never stop ringing from both aristocrats and the new booboisie, asking her to make a palace on a shoestring (the boobs) or with budgets so vast the mind reeled (the aristocrats.) The future unfurled like a golden carpet in her mind. She squeezed Diana’s hand even harder, and when she spoke, you could hear the tears behind the voice.

  “One doesn’t know what to say. I’ve never seen so much money.”

  “The budget for this project is limitless. You may have noticed. At the four corners of the big house are four of what the old folks used to call dependencies—for cooking, I suppose, for washing laundry, for the farm manager to keep the records, and one, hidden from the eyes of the rest of the house, far from the west corner of the house, the biggest but also the most secret, a model of Saratoga that my father built as a playhouse for me. Probably also as a place for secret trysts of his own devising, I’m ashamed to say. He may have lost a leg, but he still needed pleasures my mother no longer would provide.

  “It has four rooms—a kitchen, a drawing room, and two bedrooms. I used to go there when I was blue. It’s sort of my Petit Trianon. You have complete freedom to make it the most beautiful little house in the world. There is one condition. This is what I’m really paying you for—your absolute and total secrecy. Not even my son can know where it is, or what its purpose is. Not even you will know what its purpose is. Are we of the same mind?”

  “You have my word. When can I see it?”

  “Let’s walk over there now. There’s enough light left. Priscilla will make us a shaker of cocktails to take with us, and you can see the whole thing. It’s kind of marvelous, really.”

  So, drinks in hand, they set out, through the kitchen door, toward the setting sun. It was a ten-minute walk along a hidden path through the pines, set in a grove of rhododendron and magnolia, the whole wrapped, almost totally obscured, in what had once been climbing roses, pink, probably for a little girl, now gone wild, the canes shooting as much as twenty feet above the slate roof. And it was astonishing, a perfect miniature of Saratoga, built as a birthday present for a ten-year-old girl. A Georgian jewel, invisible from the house behind thick screens of privet—invisible from everything, in fact. Rose thought she had never seen anything so beautiful. They walked in through the unlocked door. She was amazed she’d never seen it, but then her infrequent walks had always been toward the river, not away from it, and it was so perfectly situated, so perfectly hidden, that anybody who wasn’t specifically looking for it would miss it.

  Inside, there were four graceful, perfectly proportioned rooms with arched doorways framed by columns, surprisingly high-ceilinged, two fireplaces, and a bathroom, with a big marble Roman bathtub. Obviously he had spared no expense, her father, and his eye for detail had made sure that everything was just right.

  In the kitchen there were still the paraphernalia of a child’s fantasy: a play stove, bowls and wooden spoons, hand towels with her initials on them, everything pink pink pink. The bedroom faced the water and, miraculously, had a view of the sunrise and the river. The largest room, the sitting room, also had a fireplace and a sliver of river to catch the eye. Everything was filmed with dust.

  Diana’s voice caught when she spoke. “God, I haven’t been in here for years. Decades, probably. How I loved this place. Nobody, not even Ash, knows it’s here. Imagine. Ten years old. My own house. I give it to you to do with it what you want. You know me. You know what I’d like. I’d like to use as much stuff from the big house as possible—rugs, china, pictures, things like that. It’s all in the attic. Nobody will even miss them. I’ll pay all expenses. You can hire whomever you want, bring them from anywhere.

  “There’s one thing I’d like. I’d like a bedroom that’s painted, walls and ceiling, with a high-gloss green so dark it’s almost black.”

  “You said I had complete license.”

  “Just give me this one thing. Decorate it however you want. But that color. That exact color. The color of the iron railings in London.”

  Rose was in some sort of a trance, her mind racing. “You must leave me alone now. I want to spend what light is left here, alone. I’ll be home for supper. Tomorrow I’ll come back with my book and a tape measure. Just now I want to feel the house, catch its spirit like rain in a bucket. This is probably one of the finest examples of Georgian architecture in America. And nobody, nobody knows it’s here. And nobody ever will, at least from me. That’s both a joy and an enormous burden for me. I don’t want to fuck it up. Excuse my language. You say I have a free hand. Do you really mean it?”

  “Cross my heart. There’s a flashlight in one of the kitchen drawers. Maybe it still works. I’ll see you at supper.”

  Dusk was coming on fast, the way it does on the river. Rose had, at most, twenty minutes of light left. She used it well. When she appeared at the dinner table, along with sad-eyed, mute Gibby, her face was flushed and she ate quickly, impatiently, as though she had someplace important to go. And she did.

  She was up all night with her books and her swatches and her telephone, picking carefully her accomplices in the transformation she had two weeks to accomplish. “Darling!” she would start every conversation. “You won’t believe!”

  She already had a thick book of ideas for the big house. The challenge was to take those ideas and write them small. Little Saratoga would be the most beautiful small house in America. In two weeks.

  BY MORNING, WHEN Priscilla arrived with her coffee, she was ready for battle. At nine she picked up the phone, and at eleven she put the receiver back in its cradle. She ordered marble busts, obelisks and minarets, and boxes, and certain curiosities that only she and the dealer would recognize as valuable. He was to pack them in a crate and put them on the train that morning.

  She ordered cotton chintzes, cabbage roses and wide stripes and narrow stripes and dupioni silk in a color like unwashed cement.

  She went up into the attic and explored the hidden stash of china. She p
icked Chinese ginger jars and beautiful vases, French and English, porcelain and silver, from small to large, and had them brought down and sent to a tiny man who could make them into lamps.

  The next morning Rose got up very early. Each worker, as he got up, was made to sign a confidentiality agreement, under threat of a million-dollar lawsuit. You could have built a skyscraper for that money in 1941, so it tended to get their attention.

  The workers already bustling about, Rose had herself driven to Richmond, to the art school at Virginia Commonwealth, and asked to see the portfolios of the very, very best students. They shyly stood as she went through their work, looking in particular for figure drawings after the classical. She found plenty, and bought every one she liked, paying each student a dollar per drawing. She dyed them all in weak tea and hung them on the clothesline to dry. She pressed them with a hot iron while Priscilla shook her head and thought about her sweet Lucius.

  And Diana was true to her word. She kept her distance from the project. She spent her days wandering in and around her house. She saw Gibby only at night. She napped in the afternoons in Ash’s room.

  Ash. Oh, Ash. He had outgrown the night terrors, and now he had outgrown her. He had entered a strange netherworld of which she knew nothing, to which she had no entrance, no access. He was gone, and who knew if he’d ever forgive her, ever come home? She was truly bereft, but when she heard Gibby’s foot on the stair, she was overcome with longing all over again, consumed with desire for her lover, for the man, the coup de foudre, that she had chosen over propriety, over her own son.

  31

  FOR THE NEXT several days, Diana and Gibby walked by the river for hours, holding hands like schoolchildren, sometimes lying down in the sand to make love. And every night, joined by Rose, they behaved quietly and with grace as they ate their lavish dinners and raided the best of the wine cellar. They drank a lot, and the lovers went to bed early so they could feel each other’s skin, hers cool, his radiating heat, the only thing they had a true appetite for.

  He had actually gone to the drugstore and, in a highly embarrassing encounter, bought condoms, so they made love without restraint.

  He told her, “The guy, the old man in the drugstore, when I asked for condoms, looked at me, and said, ‘I don’t see no wedding ring,’ and I said, ‘I’m getting married on Tuesday. It was in the paper. Didn’t you see it?’ He didn’t believe me for a second, but he sold me the damned things anyway. It’s like having sex through an umbrella, but anything for you, darling.”

  For the first time since Ash left, she laughed.

  Gibby said, “I would, you know. I would marry you on Tuesday.”

  “And regret it by Wednesday. Besides, this is Tuesday.”

  A quietness came over them. They were suddenly aware that time was passing. Two weeks had already gone by. The alarm was ringing, and she turned it off with sorrow and fear. Ash could be home any day.

  They slept chaste as babies. They lay in bed, exploring with their hands the body that would soon be gone, not in sadness entirely but also in gratitude. They didn’t speak of it, but soon there would be no indentation on the pillow next to Diana, no crumpled sheets, no nightclothes casually tossed on the floor.

  Gibby went to town, December winds blowing off the river and turning bone to ice. He had been at Saratoga almost a year. When he came back, in time for lunch, Diana was alone at the table, while Rose was busy at Little Saratoga doing whatever she did. His cheeks flushed with excitement, he said, as he sat down at his place, “I’ve joined up.”

  “Joined what?”

  “The army, of course. America is going to enter the war any day, and it’s my duty. If I join up, instead of waiting to be called up, I get a chance to choose what I want to do, and I want to fly planes.”

  “When do you leave?”

  “First thing tomorrow. Don’t worry. I’ll stay out of the way when Ash gets back.”

  “You forget. He’s coming today. We can’t hide you or stash you in some bed-and-breakfast. You are my lover and my family. We’ll just have to explain and face it. I would keep you here for as long as I live. I love you.”

  “Try to think clearly. What am I supposed to do? Ash will kill me. Diana, this cannot happen. I love you. I would crawl naked howling through the dirt to get to you. If I come back, I’ll come back to you and stay as long as you’ll have me.”

  “Forever.”

  “Forever. But now I have to go. The country needs men just like me. Brave and foolish. There’s no reason to it, there’s only the answer. Besides, I’ve signed the papers already. I get on the train tomorrow morning at six.”

  “I won’t, I can’t, come to say good-bye.”

  “Let’s do this. Go upstairs, and we’ll write each other letters. To be opened only when one of us dies. We’ll say what’s in our secret hearts. I’ll carry yours in my uniform pocket, next to my heart; you will lock mine away in your dressing table.”

  They left the dining room, and spent the whole morning writing their letters to each other, hers on her lavender-bordered stationery from Mrs. John L. Strong in New York, his on plain yellow lined schoolboy paper.

  “My dearest darling,” they both wrote, and then they both put down their pens, paralyzed. After a few minutes, Gibby picked up his pen and wrote a quick note and sealed it in a plain envelope. His handwriting was surprisingly eloquent and fine. Then he sat and thought for long time, finally taking his note and tearing it up and starting over, and this time it took him a long time and several pages to say what he meant to say.

  They dressed for dinner, she in a rose-and-turquoise dress from Dior that was fifteen years old, Gibby in his tuxedo that was beginning to take on a sheen. They behaved with perfect decorum; even Rose joined them, resplendent in a golden Chinese gown, with a red turban, held in place by an eighteenth-century miniature painting of a child’s eye under glass, surrounded by tiny diamonds. Rose knew she wasn’t to talk about her work, so, for the three of them, there was really no topic except the war and Gibby’s recruitment.

  “How splendid,” said Rose. “Heroic and grand and perfectly right. In addition to which, dear boy, you’ll look so sexy in your uniform they’ll gobble you up in every port.” She made a growling sound. “My philosophy, looking back at a life of lost opportunities, is to sleep with anybody who’ll have you.” Gibby and Diana looked down into their crab bisque. “Short women,” Rose went on, “tall women, black and white, Chinese, Ethiopian, women with one leg. Ugly women. Women who smell nice. God, the life I could have had, and I regret it. I live with that regret all the time, every night in my skinny bed, always cold when I sleep, always struggling into alertness in the morning, if I do sleep at all. Tell them, ‘Don’t be here when I wake up,’ and go at it, dive into pleasure like you’re diving into a crystalline pool of warm water.”

  “Rose,” said Diana, looking up. “We’re at the dinner table.”

  “Oh, so now we’re ladies and gentlemen. Do you want to talk about furniture? About demilunes and fauteuils and bergères? No, I thought not. Because one must talk about something.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Gibby. “Silence is, as they say, golden.”

  “And all that glisters is not gold,” retorted Rose, a bit too quickly.

  Going on, she turned to Diana. “Your house is ready for you. Two weeks, you said. Tomorrow you can see it, and then I’ll be gone. Not to the eight-room apartment on Park Avenue I told you about, but to my little Barrow Street walk-up, with my cat and my crossword.

  “Now I will really live on Park, and my Chinese coats will sweep behind me up the winding staircase, and I cannot, cannot begin . . . I cannot begin to tell you how you have changed me with your generosity and with your love. Gibby, I sincerely wish you every safety, every happiness. You are not to die in the war. Promise me. Promise.”

  “I promise. If such a promise means anything, I promise.”

  Rose took from her finger an ancient rose-gold intaglio signet ring and sli
pped it on Gibby’s little finger. “This will keep you safe.”

  They sat in stunned silence for a long time. It was Diana who spoke first.

  “In the library there’s a completely beautiful illustrated complete works of Shakespeare. Volume after volume after volume. I want you to have it.”

  “I’ve seen it. Moroccan leather. Seventeenth century, in perfect condition. Completely beautiful, and wildly valuable. The old Rose probably would have nicked it had you not made this wonderful gesture, which I accept with all gratitude. In turn, I want you to have this.” She unpinned the brooch with the child’s eye, a thing so rare and beautiful it made Diana gasp, and she pinned it on Diana’s dress. “It is the eye of an angel who will watch over you. The diamonds, I admit, are small, but they’re fine. It will always keep you safe from harm in your perfect house.”

  Rose merely bowed her head. She stayed that way for a long time, while Gibby and Diana exchanged awkward glances.

  Suddenly Ash appeared at the door. At the sight of Gibby, he stopped dead in his tracks.

  “I wanted you gone. I made it clear.”

  Diana stepped between Ash and Gibby. “Ash, he’s joined the army. He leaves tomorrow on the bus at four in the morning. There was no place for him to go. Please. Be reasonable.”

  “Reasonable?” screamed Ash. “After what you’ve done? In the bed, in the house I gave to you?” He turned to Gibby. “And you . . .”

  Gibby looked at Ash. “I’m so sorry, Ash. I’m sorry I hurt you. I’ve never had a better friend. I’m so sorry.”

  Ash ran from the room, Diana after him. Rose and Gibby raced to their rooms, slamming the doors behind them.

  Diana found Ash facedown on his bed, sobbing. Very softly, she said, “I have something to say to you. You don’t need to answer, just listen. You’re my son, and I love you forever and always. There is no circumstance that could change that. I don’t give a damn who you sleep with. I hope it gives you some measure of happiness. I hope you find a man, a true love, who will stand by your side for the rest of your life.