American Eve (19 page)

“Isn’t it too bad,” he said, holding out his hands to her, “that all the others invited have turned us down?”

A frowning Evelyn dropped into a large chenille chair, which was so big her feet didn’t touch the carpet. She picked at the arm of the chair, as if annoyed. White noticed her immediate mood shift and asked her what she was bothered about. Evelyn replied that she was upset, thinking there would be no party now. She squinted her eyes petulantly and peered distractedly around the empty room.

“Nonsense,” White answered, “we will have our own party.” He pulled a chair next to his at the dining table, patted the seat, and said that they could have just as much fun without other guests—a tea party in the woods with only Alice and her Mad Hatter. And no tea. Evelyn flopped down, sitting with one leg beneath her in a way her mother would have frowned upon as being “unladylike,” and characteristically shrugged her approval. She then began to fill her plate.

Throughout the meal the charismatic clubman did most of the talking, and since his brilliance always carried over into his conversations, she remembered, “I was not bored.” He talked of meeting Thomas Edison recently and said that he would arrange for another party and invite him so that Evelyn could meet a real wizard. He produced a brightly painted cast-iron mechanical bank purchased especially for her in London and placed it in front of her on the table. It was William Tell and his son. White put a penny in the father’s gun and told Evelyn to push a small lever. When she did, the penny shot into the apple on the son’s head. Evelyn clapped with glee and asked him for some more pennies. She also asked for a glass of champagne, which he poured into a crystal flute. When she tried to sneak another a short time later, to her added delight, Stanny didn’t seem to mind.

The jovial host then left Evelyn alone briefly. (This was not so strange to anyone who knew the architect, since he was always darting in and out of rooms, taking and making phone calls, wheeling and dealing his way across different time zones and continents at once.) She walked over to the piano and struck the first few notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. When he came back, she began to get ready to go home, grabbing the sleek red moleskin cape that White had given her.

“You’re not going?” he said as he took the cape from her shoulders.

“Stay,” he pleaded, “there’s a lot in this house you have never seen and it will amuse you.”

He gave her yet another flute of champagne and talked about artifacts he had bartered for or bought in order to furnish his and other homes of distinction. He described with glowing self-satisfaction particular items that he had purloined from China, Florence, Japan, and even more remote places around the globe.

“I have another room upstairs you have not seen,” he said, piquing her natural curiosity. With that, he steered her up a tiny flight of stairs, which indeed she had never noticed before. Promising her “something special,” White ushered her into a small back studio. Around the room were costly medieval tapestries, expensive paintings in equally expensive frames (most of which he had designed), as well as a smaller collection of antiques displayed prominently and lit dramatically from beneath. But most amazing of all to Evelyn was that

the walls and ceiling [were] covered with mirrors, the floor with imitation glass. The mirrors . . . were so cleverly set together that they gave the appearance of being a solid sheet of mirror-covering. Here again, indirect lighting cast a soft glow over everything. At one side stood a large, moss-green velvet-covered couch, immense in so small a room. The multiple mirrors created an extraordinary effect; you saw yourself repeated in endless vistas.

It was a narcissist’s dream. The novelty and unreality of the sight held Evelyn spellbound. She sat on the couch and had another glass of champagne, which Stanny offered. She was thrilled by the sight of her reflection at every turn and laughing because the bubbles tickled her nose—and because her benefactor seemed to have thrown caution to the wind with regard to the usual single glass of anything alcoholic. White looked at her expression and “smiled, as one who is pleased at a compliment.” He reiterated the fact that he had ranged the world to furnish this sanctuary, as if trying to impress the little girl who had yet to graduate from the ninth grade.

Like a conjurer building to his best trick, White then pushed open some tapestry hangings in a doorway and revealed with a flourish a still smaller apartment off the so-called studio. It was “a little bedroom, all hung in chintz” and dyed the darkest purple of midnight. A small solitary table stood next to a four-poster canopied bed, which overwhelmed the ten-foot-square room. The curtains around the bed drew apart or together with the pull of a golden silken cord. The headboard, as well as the dome of the canopy and the wall next to the bed, were three solid beveled mirrors. Hidden all around the top of the bed were tiny electric bulbs, “and within easy reach a series of buttons regulating the lighting effects. By pushing the button an amber glow was cast about the inverted mirror overhead. Another push produced a rose coloring, and yet another a soft blue.” She remembers that “with the room in darkness and only the bed lights working, the effect it produced was like the Fata Morgana. It also reminded her of “fairy-book descriptions of nymphs’ palaces under the sea.”

On the table was another bottle of champagne and a single glass. Evelyn laughed to herself. The only thing missing, she thought, was the white rabbit and a sign that read “drink me.” Over the mantelpiece hung a provocative painting of a nude woman done by Robert Reid, a well-known muralist, and draperies the color of pinot noir hung from ceiling to floor in regal folds. Being less articulate than White perhaps would have liked, when he asked her what she thought, she simply commented how “pretty it all was” and then drifted back into the studio with the sensation she was floating. She played the piano for a little while, feeling slightly warm in the pit of her stomach, flushed in her cheeks, and somewhat “fraying around the edges.”

Appealing to her love of “dressing up,” White then produced from behind his back a “ravishing yellow satin Japanese kimono embroidered in festoons of deep purple wisteria.” He drew her by the hand back into the bedroom, where a light-headed Evelyn stood again, as if mesmerized in front of the painting over the mantel. Her reverie was interrupted with the pop of the champagne cork, and she jumped at the noise. White laughed and took the only glass from the table, filled it, and offered it to her.

“Drink this,” he said.

She did, and as she would testify during one trial, it seemed that “the wine tasted unusually bitter.”

“I don’t much care for this,” she said, screwing up her face. White, however, encouraged her in a playful way to “drink it up” and warned her teasingly that such a sour face might stay that way permanently. So, minding what her mother had told her before she left about obeying Mr. White, Evelyn did. By the third or fourth sip, although it still tasted bad, she was reminded of something Stanny had told her numerous times about developing an educated palate.

Stanny began talking to his little bonbon “easily and naturally,” commenting again on the room, and “there was nothing in his voice or in what he said that might suggest anything out of the ordinary.”

Then, as she described it in 1914, Evelyn suddenly experienced “a curious sensation”:

There began a buzzing and a drumming, a persistent thump—thump— thumping in my ears. I felt dizzy and sick, and the objects in the room became blurred and indistinct. The sound of his voice came to me [as if he were] speaking from a great distance—then all went black.

In 1934 she described the same moment this way:

And then, because of the unusual quantity of wine I had had, I lost all self-control. I grew dizzy; the room whirled around faster and faster. I “passed out.” . . . Harry Thaw always maintained, afterwards, that the wine was drugged. I have never believed that to be so. I think it was simply a matter of too much champagne.

Whichever scenario was closer to the truth, the inexcusable result was the same. And whether or not the susceptible teenager was actually or wholly unconscious for some period of time—two hours? sixteen minutes?—all she knew was that when she opened her eyes in an approximation of some form of fuzzy awareness, she was lying on top of the silken sheets in the huge canopied bed next to Stanny, with midnight drawn tight around them. Stanny lay apprehensively beside her, taking in the contrast of her creamy skin against the violet folds of the sheets. She was clad only in “an abbreviated pink undergarment” that covered her small breasts, while White exposed “the naked body of his naked sins,” only slightly receded in the “full flush of his extraordinary physical powers.” She fixated blankly for a brief moment on the haphazard patterns of reddish hairs on his broad bare chest (and was not, at that point, aware of a thin reddish streak on her inner thigh).

In 1914, this is how she described the immediate scene that followed:

I could not realize what had happened. All that I knew was that something terrible had come to me and I screamed. With terror in his face, he tried to stop me. “For God’s sakes don’t!” he pleaded. It was horrible— horrible. I knew without understanding. What happened after I cannot tell.

In 1934, she added different details:

Catching a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror [above the bed], I think I let out one suppressed scream. I know I started to cry. I was utterly confused, still a bit dizzy, and terribly embarrassed and afraid.

Stanny hastily threw on a red satin robe, and gave Evelyn the purple-and -yellow kimono that had been tossed at the foot of the bed. She began to cry.

“Don’t cry, Kittens,” he said tenderly. “Please don’t. It’s all over. Now you belong to me.”

He then sat up in the bed, took her upon his knee, petted her tousled hair, and kissed her on the neck and cheeks. He tried to soothe her and stop her sudden trembling. After dressing in embarrassed haste, as if she had forgotten how, Evelyn was driven home, where Stanny left her alone, in the earliest hours of the morning, sitting in a chair by the window. Unable to sleep, Evelyn was overwhelmed by a sense of immeasurable emptiness: “I felt nothing, neither repulsion nor hate. He was a strange being to me; an aspect of life [had been] revealed in a flash and chang[ed] all my perspectives.”

As if still in a fog of intoxication, Evelyn rubbed her eyes and raked her mind, as if sifting through grains of sand, for even the smallest broken shells of information and misinformation she had come upon in French novels, the hootchy-kootchy doings she had heard joked about backstage, or the curious behaviors of tootsie-wootsies whispered about at parties. But none of it made any sense, and for a time she let her mind sink back into emptiness. Then her temples began to throb, and her “insides cramped in small waves of pain.”

“This is what people made such a fuss about,” she finally realized, arriving at the conclusion, “this, then, was what love meant.”

Years later, confronting the criticism and skepticism of those who could not believe that she could have been a studio model and chorus girl and maintained her innocence much less her virginity until that night, even though she was sixteen, Evelyn countered: “I went . . . that night a child with no knowledge of the big and stunning facts of life. . . . If you say to me, ‘How is it possible that you could live in such an atmosphere as you did, surrounded by significant evidence . . . that the world was less than the idyllic place you pretend, and still be innocent?’ ”

Her reply?

“There is an innocence which finds for evident evil an innocent explanation. ” Certainly her mother never told her anything about the “big and stunning facts” in a culture where the long shadow of Puritanism and “mid-Victorian prudery” kept girls in the dark about such things until marriage. Nor had Evelyn ever had so much to drink at one time, having previously heeded her mother’s warning about spoiling her looks (and ruining their livelihood). Then there had been Stanny’s own solicitous watchfulness, which years later she saw as having been motivated much more by his own self-interest: “He wanted control—of when I would have none.”

She sat staring trancelike out the window in the yellow hours of the morning, her knees tucked under her chin, her arms wrapped around her legs, as alternating ribbons of blue-gray and orange rose together over the rooftops. Evelyn conducted for what seemed the hundredth time a mental inventory of White’s character. Or the man she thought she knew as Stanny. Her reason and understanding teetered back and forth from moment to moment. Father. Lover. Protector. Seducer. All of White materialized before her like a roiling, boiling new planet suddenly careening through space on a straight path toward her. As she would later write, “He was a generously big man—and infinitely mean; he was kind and tender—and preyed upon the defenseless . . . a crude expression offended him; yet in some things he was shameless.” She then hit upon the phrase that summed up for her in an instant the man who had stolen her trust and whose prodigious appetite seemed never quite satisfied: “He was a benevolent vampire.”

It was in the same chair that Stanny found her when he called later in the morning, drumming on the door and then letting himself in when he got no response to his usual signal. He saw her illuminated by a shaft of sunlight, looking uncannily like the sadly beautiful, stony-eyed bust of Nefertiti in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where not far away in the sculpture hall sat George Grey Barnard’s marble statue
Innocence
(also known as
Maidenhood
), which Evelyn had posed for only a few months earlier.

Stanny immediately knelt before her and began pleading, half expecting the rage of virtue or shuddering tears of regret. He was therefore momentarily baffled by her stony silence. He kissed the hem of her baby-blue dressing gown in an extravagant show of remorse and shivered at its touch. Calling her his “Kittens,” he then began to claim that he had not really done her “the greatest wrong of all.” Evelyn seemed to look through him, motionless, the little Sphinx once again. Stanny proceeded to tell her in tones less frantic than urgent, but insistent, that everyone did what he and she had just done. In fact, he “ran on,” telling her essentially that “everybody was bad . . . [and] evil was the basis of life.”