The Dying of the Light

  As Ash grew older, he was let out of his crib, out of the nursery, was taken downstairs, and Diana was there, cuddling him again. But she was in tweeds and cashmere, not the lady who had come to him at night, and he had to begin slowly to realize that this lady was his mother.

  But it wasn’t until he was four that he looked at her across the breakfast table and said, his voice trembling, “Good morning, Mother,” and she, as though this strange act had not played itself out over the years, looked up from her marmalade and toast and said, “Good morning, darling,” and after that they were inseparable.

  His name was Copperton, but Ash was Diana’s son, and she vowed that he would know everything about the Cookes, and about Saratoga. Someday he would understand, as is common in many southern families, that there had been a stately marriage of blood to money, the Cookes to the Coppertons, but that of the latter family, she knew nothing. So for now, when he was all hers, she would just show him the property, the secret places. She went through the architect’s drawings of the house, the original plans, drawn in 1789, and she shared with him her love of family and place. She went through the catalog of his ancestors, the duel that had been fought at dawn down by the river in 1792, a fight for the hand of his great-great-grandmother in marriage, who watched the whole thing from the very window where Ash had watched his mother twirl in her golden Paris dresses, massive jewels at her wrist and neck and ears, everywhere, really, diamonds and emeralds and rubies, and fountains of jewels sparkling in the torchlight that lit up the dance floor, watching, like his great-great-grandmother, who had had her portrait painted in that same window.

  Remarkably, the great-great-grandmother had married the victor, and lived with him through a placid and altogether happy marriage for forty years. Diana taught him that from there to here was not a very long time, that the Civil War dead still sat with them at table, that they were his people. That they die, but they do not stay dead. He was part of something, a family, and that something meant something, something he had to live up to. It meant courtesy. It meant honor. It meant impeccable posture. It meant having a good seat on horseback. It meant treating a duchess and a kitchen maid with the same courtesy. It meant never seeming drunk, no matter how drunk you were. It meant going to the Episcopal Church, where his family had sat in the same pew for two hundred years. It meant a love of the land. There was a chain, she had told him, and he was the last of the links on that chain. And that meant everything.

  All this to a bewildered four-year-old child, just out of the elaborate dresses boys wore then. By the time he was six, he would feel the weight of the past and the looming duties of the future. He would dream of the Civil War dead, the piles of bodies at Antietam, until the rotting mound of dead boys was replaced by the lady in diamonds and rubies who danced him through his sleepless nights.

  6

  HE HAD WANTED her so desperately. From the moment he saw her rise from her curtsy in Baltimore, he knew he had to have her. He researched who she was and what her lineage meant, and that only added to his desires. He immediately sent twenty dozen white roses to her hotel room, every white rose in Baltimore, in fact. And he stalked her as he would a deer or a bear. City to city, he would check in to the same hotel she had checked into, although they were never the finest. And, every time she reached a new city, a new room, there were massive bouquets, dozens of white roses with his card, which said simply, Copperton.

  And in every city, he danced with her. Once. More would have been unseemly, and he meant to behave with perfect rectitude. Occasionally she would reach into his evening jacket and feel for the flasks she knew were there, and they would sneak out for a drink, and flirt. He had never been more charming, more alert to the tiny movements of another person’s eyes. His goal, each time, was to make her laugh, just to hear the southern magic of it, and he always succeeded. And then she would leave him and return to the endless waltz with her dazzling smile.

  And then there were the clandestine dinners and the little blue velvet boxes, presents decorum would not let her wear so that, in every city, with a new bauble hidden in the bottom of her steamer trunk, she made her curtsy, by now famous and widely imitated, still in the one good strand of pearls.

  Her presence drove him mad. Equally so her absence. And once he knew who she was, who her people were, he realized that she was not only her beauty but also his elevation into a legitimacy of blood that he could not even pretend to have.

  He knew that they didn’t have a nickel to their name. Making her, in his mind, all the more easy to capture.

  His ardor, then, was genuine. This was, he thought, the love he had waited for; this was why he had slaved through his twenties to amass his fortune—so that he might offer something besides his looks to the woman who captured his heart. And she had caught him whole and entire. They would marry. They would have children. The children would be called Copperton, but they would also be Cookes and therefore, by blood, members of one of the great families of America. If she were a washerwoman he would have desired her, as did every man in America with eyes and working organs, but now she was his lifeline into the long cavalcade of American aristocracy.

  He would treat her with such sweetness, or so he thought. He would kneel at her feet and thank her every day from pulling him from the bog, the riffraff of the general public, the general milieu of men who came from nowhere to make fortunes that were everywhere for the taking.

  So he traveled all that way, to Saratoga, and after his talk with her father, during which his lawyers patiently went through an endless list of numbers on pieces of paper, while Copperton quietly snoozed, at the end of which the father said yes as Copperton knew he would because he had to, he was set free to ask Diana to marry him. He found her alone in the yellow study, the sunroom. At first he knelt on the floor, and asked so tenderly, and with such a soft adoration in his voice, that he was shocked that she hesitated. He lay prone on the rug and begged her again. She laughed and said, “Copperton, my love, you look ridiculous. Get up off the floor and put the ring on my finger and I’ll say yes, yes with all my heart. My papa has given you permission because he wants me to have what makes me happy, and you make me happy.”

  The fabulous ring was then put on her finger. His face was glowing with victory, as well as with love. The love that would ignite his life, and give everything else a meaning, and him a sense of place.

  7

  HE DID LOVE her, and he had meant to be so gentle and loving. But he was selfish through and through, and jealous of the one thing she had that he did not: respect. From the time he had nothing, through the years when he began to acquire more and more, vast holdings across the country, he had pushed and bullied and cheated and lied and grabbed, and taken the last dime out of old men’s hands. Now he was splendidly and unassailably rich beyond measure, and he reveled in that, although he no longer had to pay much attention to it. That was done by other people like himself, which left him bored and restless.

  So when he saw Diana Cooke rise into the brightness of the moon and sun, he knew she was the jewel in the crown and he pushed and charmed and wangled his way into her life, if not fully into her heart. He had adored her from the moment she flashed her dazzling eyes on the grand dames of Baltimore, her perfect skin rosy with candlelight on red velvet.

  She had her own reasons for marrying him, and although he filled her with excitement, those did not necessarily include love.

  She knew that beneath his veneer of politesse, his carefully learned manners, he was unspeakably vulgar, and that he was not, and never would be, as her mother would have said, “our kind.” She had married him for his money, and the fact that he was tall and handsome and well-mannered and smooth as glass in public did not disguise the fact that he was the kind of man who would put his feet on the table and treat the servants badly. Her sexual need for him produced the same frisson she would feel having sex with one of the stable boys. He was forbidden fruit. Not our sort.

  And this drove him wild.
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  Once he had her, once he was a part of one of the most distinguished families in the country, she and her parents slowly became like bile in his mouth. He knew they condescended to him, that they held him in a regard slightly lower than the servants, even though, without his money, there would be no servants, no house.

  He worked hard to fit in. He hired an English riding instructor and began to ride, and ride well. He hired a valet to teach him dress and manners. He tried, laughably, to speak with a southern accent. He learned mostly from Priscilla, the housekeeper. He didn’t know any better, so he came out sounding like the child of slavery.

  But he did have one great virtue. He loved his son with a pure and innocent adoration. Even Diana was moved when she saw them, Ash and his father, walking hand in hand down to the paddock for the riding lessons. And it wasn’t long before Ashton had a pony of his own, and beautiful riding clothes. Diana had grown up riding in jeans and ragtag shirts, and there was a sweetness in seeing her son at four in his boots and jodhpurs, holding Copperton’s hand.

  She began to join them. Phaeton was brought from his stall, wild from too much leisure, and she had to tame him all over again, but she knew more about riding than the instructor, so it wasn’t long before he was easy in the hand again and they could all circle the ring of the paddock.

  And when the horses were put away, Copperton would carry Ash back to the house on his shoulders, telling him all the way what a great rider he was on his little pony, and what a great man he was going to be.

  “But Poppa,” Ash would say, “when I’m a grown man, what will we do? Where will we go?”

  And Copperton would describe India to him, or Venice with its gondolas, Greece with its white-and-blue boats in the white sun in the blue sky, pounding the octopus they would catch a hundred times on a flat rock before they grilled it, and Ash would laugh, saying he didn’t believe any of it.

  “Is it true, Mama? Is it true? Are there really such places?”

  And Diana would laugh herself, such a relief, and say that yes, there were such places, and places even more strange and wonderful, she would show him in a book.

  But underneath it all, Copperton seethed. There are so many ways that love can turn into carnage, marriage into casualty. He was unkind and abrupt with the servants. He was rude to his mother-in-law; he picked apart his father-in-law’s war stories, proving to him that his heroism was a fable of his own invention, taking from him the one thing of which he was most proud.

  There was a glass wall between himself and his wife, and he would never get through. But with a constant barrage of insult and obliviousness, he could crack the glass wall a bit every day. He was sickened by his own behavior, but it seemed to soothe his desperation. So the more cruel he became, the calmer his heart beat, the better he slept at night.

  A man sees a beautiful flower on a tree. He reaches up and picks it, and then he crushes it into a soggy mess in his hands. There is no reason for his behavior. But he can’t stop himself. Every day, Copperton rose from sleep and crushed the flower of the morning, the evening, and the night.

  8

  COPPERTON NO LONGER recognized the line between what was acceptable and what was sheer cruelty. He felt he had bought her, bought them all—the haughty mother, the crippled father, the house he was progressively filling with more and more servants, as he simultaneously filled it with loose and looser aggregations of houseguests. He bought the yacht, and a crew, along with a ludicrous captain’s uniform for himself, and he would sail up and down the river, sometimes all night. One guest carelessly fell from the deck into the river’s dark waters and wasn’t even missed until dawn, when they had to send out boats to dredge her limp, blue, bejeweled body from the cold waters.

  He would sometimes lock Diana in her room for days, until she learned, as he said, to behave, meaning, in his mind, to drink more, laugh more, have more fun, instead of showing to the world the perpetual shock and sadness on her face. So she became a fierce drinker; her laughter was vicious and never-ending, her carelessness immense. She wept herself to sleep whenever he gave her a few hours.

  At dinner one night, after he saw Copperton handling her roughly in the pantry, his hand beneath her dress, Diana’s face covered with shame to be seen used this way in the shadows of her father’s house, Diana’s father shouted, “Get away from my daughter! You abuse her, sir. You mishandle her and humiliate her in front of her family. If I see that kind of thing again, I will shoot you to death right here in the dining room. I won’t have this in my house.”

  “Your house?” Copperton laughed. “You pathetic old man, this has not been your house since the day I slipped the ring on your darling daughter’s hand. Never forget that. You live here at my pleasure.”

  Arthur’s shoulders slumped; his ashen face turned to stone. “I wish I could forget,” he said. “As it is, I regret everything. This life has made me so weary.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” said Copperton, eating heartily. “You have a thousand niggers around here to do whatever you want for you.”

  “Sir! We don’t talk like that in this house. Never. Do you understand me?” There was a pause. “Do you understand me?”

  For once Copperton seemed cowed. He looked the old man straight in the eyes. “Yes, sir.”

  Then the real Copperton returned. “You do understand, I assume, that in actual fact I own everything here, do you not? I own this table, this fork, your daughter, of course, the hairs on your head. The drinks table at which you spend most of the day wearying yourself. Everything. Everything. Now do we understand?”

  “Some of these families have been with us since before I was born. Since before the war.”

  “Ah, the sainted southerner who treated his slaves with compassion, except that decades later they’re still here because they don’t have a pot to piss in and nowhere to go. Nappy-headed slaves without the shackles.”

  “That is enough. You are trash, sir, and there is only one reason you’re here.”

  “My unmatchable charm?”

  “My daughter doesn’t love you. She may have, once, but what she loves is this house. She had one reason to marry you. To save this house. So you live here at her pleasure. Do you understand that?”

  Copperton stood to his full height, mockingly bowed, and clicked the heels of his boots. “Whatever you say, sir.” He turned and quickly left the room.

  Diana’s father looked at his wife with a slight nod. “I believe we’ll take our sorbet in the library.” And his wife rose, and took the back of his chair and wheeled him from the dining room and into the shadows of the hall until they couldn’t be heard any longer.

  The next morning they moved their bedroom into a large, sunny suite on the third floor, stopped coming to dinner, and were rarely seen again, except in death, which came soon, but not soon enough to suit them. Her mother died sitting in a crewelwork slipper chair doing a needlepoint prayer for Ash, who came to see them every day. O Lord, bless us and keep us. She finished the last stitch, tied off her thread, said, “Arthur, I have always loved you,” turned to look at the river, and died. After that, Diana sat by her father’s chair all day long every day, sometimes with Ash at his feet, holding his hand, and read to him from Dickens as the girls ran up and down with fresh bottles of brandy until he poisoned his liver beyond repair and one day, looking up from her book, she saw that he was dead. It took only twenty-seven days.

  Diana wept at their gravesides—so sweet they had been, so kind and loving to her—the river breezes blowing her black silk veil. Ash stood straight and confused. Where had they gone? People came from three counties. So many funerals of these great families. The old ones were almost gone now, and the rest hobbled up the hillside to the family graveyard, Diana’s mother and father surrounded by graves from as far back as 1760.

  Copperton did not attend.

  As Diana walked back to the house from her parents’ graves, holding Ash’s hand, she could hear her mother’s voice. I’ve always said
you had a pretty foot. And she knew that, in her way, her mother had loved her.

  9

  COPPERTON HIRED TUTORS for the boy, dressed him perfectly, tucked him in every night, in effect cutting Diana out of his life. He bathed him, telling him stories of pirates at sea and lonely men lost on desert islands. After he was all tucked in, Diana was allowed her fifteen or twenty minutes with the boy, to say his prayers, to talk about his grandmother and father, whom Ash barely remembered but missed dearly—their scents, and the peppermint sticks his grandfather always seemed to have one more of in his pocket. He was so proud the day he could read his grandmother’s needlepoint prayer over his bed by himself.

  Every morning Ash came to breakfast before Copperton got up, blessed time she spent alone with her son. When his father appeared, Ash raced to get into his riding clothes and they ran down to the paddock and rode for an hour before Ash’s lessons began. Then Copperton rode alone, faster and faster.

  He had heard of endurance races, races that ran for fifty or a hundred miles, and he wanted to do one. The only problem was that his horse wasn’t suited for them. They were races for Arabians, and Diana had the only Arabian in the stable.

  He tried with his big gelding. Diana and Priscilla and her husband Clarence, whose duties were many but undefined, would stand at the kitchen door and watch him race the woodland trails, pell-mell, pushing the horse into a sweat, beating him mercilessly with his crop, wrecking his mouth with his cruel use of the bit. Priscilla and Clarence would just hold on to each other, as they had in times of trouble since Diana was a girl.

  Copperton would beat the horse on his haunches, on his legs, and he would bring the horse back to the stables in disgust, whipping him one more time, the gelding’s head bowed almost to his knees, the sweat of rage making Copperton’s clothes stick to his body, and throw the reins to the stable boys, who applied salves and bandages and did what they could to get Copperton on any of the other ten horses for the week or two it took the gelding to heal. Except for Phaeton, Diana’s Arabian. It enraged Copperton to see her cantering so freely across the fields, taking the fences, snaking the trails, always seeking the light, coming back to the stables, both rider and horse, rested and exhilarated. God, she loved that horse. Over the years, they had become almost a single being. The slightest shift of her hips was enough to turn him. Phaeton had a soft mouth, and had never once been whipped or used harshly.