Answered Prayers (17 page)

THE CRISTAL WAS BEING POURED
. Ina tasted it. “It’s not cold enough. But ahhh!” She swallowed again. “I do miss Cole. And Howard Sturgis. Even Papa; after all, he did write about me in
Green Hills of Africa
. And Uncle Willie. Last week in London I went to a party at Drue Heinz’s and got stuck with Princess Margaret. Her mother’s a darling, but the rest of that family!—though Prince Charles may amount to something. But basically, royals think there are just three categories: colored folk, white folk, and royals. Well, I was about to doze off, she’s such a drone, when suddenly she announced, apropos of nothing, that she had decided she really didn’t like ‘poufs’! An extraordinary remark, source considered. Remember the joke about who got the first sailor? But I simply lowered my eyes,
très
Jane Austen, and said: ‘In that event, ma’am, I fear you will spend a very lonely old age.’ Her expression!—I thought she might turn me into a pumpkin.”

There was an uncharacteristic bite and leap to Ina’s voice, as though she were speeding along helter-skelter to avoid confiding what it was she wanted, but didn’t want, to confide. My eyes and ears were drifting elsewhere. The occupants of a table placed catty-corner to ours were two people I’d met together in Southampton last summer, though the meeting was not of such import that I expected them to recognize me—Gloria Vanderbilt di Cicco Stokowski Lumet Cooper and her childhood chum Carol Marcus Saroyan Saroyan (she married
him
twice) Matthau: women in their late thirties, but looking not much removed from those deb days when they were grabbing Lucky Balloons at the Stork Club.

“But what can you say,” inquired Mrs. Matthau of Mrs. Cooper, “to someone who’s lost a good lover, weighs two hundred pounds, and is in the dead center of a nervous collapse? I don’t think she’s been out of bed for a month. Or changed the sheets. ‘Maureen’—this is what I
did
tell her—‘Maureen, I’ve been in a lot worse condition than you. I remember once when I was going around stealing sleeping pills out of other people’s medicine cabinets, saving up to bump myself off. I was in debt up to here, every penny I had was borrowed …’ ”

“
Dar
ling,” Mrs. Cooper protested with a tiny stammer, “why didn’t you come to
me
?”

“Because you’re rich. It’s much less difficult to borrow from the poor.”

“But,
dar
ling …”

Mrs. Matthau proceeded. “So I said: ‘Do you know what I did, Maureen? Broke as I was, I went out and hired myself a
personal
maid. My fortunes rose, my outlook changed completely, I felt loved and pampered. So if I were you, Maureen, I’d go into hock and hire some very expensive creature to run my bath and turn down the bed.’ Incidentally, did you go to the Logans’ party?”

“For an hour.”

“How was it? ”

“Marvelous. If you’ve never been to a party before.”

“I wanted to go. But you know Walter. I never imagined I’d marry an actor. Well,
marry
perhaps. But not for love. Yet here I’ve been stuck with Walter all these years and it still makes me curdle if I see his eye stray a fraction. Have you seen this new Swedish cunt called Karen something?”

“Wasn’t she in some spy picture?”

“Exactly. Lovely face. Divine photographed from the bazooms up. But the legs are strictly redwood forest. Absolute tree trunks. Anyway, we met her at the Widmarks’ and she was
moving her eyes around and making all these little noises for Walter’s benefit, and I stood it as long as I could, but when I heard Walter say ‘How old are you, Karen?’ I said ‘For God’s sake, Walter, why don’t you chop off her legs and read the rings?’ ”

“Carol! You didn’t.”

“You know you can always count on me.”

“And she heard you?”

“It wouldn’t have been very interesting if she hadn’t.”

Mrs. Matthau extracted a comb from her purse and began drawing it through her long albino hair: another leftover from her World War II debutante nights—an era when she and all her
compères
, Gloria and Honeychile and Oona and Jinx, slouched against El Morocco upholstery ceaselessly raking their Veronica Lake locks.

“I had a letter from Oona this morning,” Mrs. Matthau said.

“So did I,” Mrs. Cooper said.

“Then you know they’re having another baby.”

“Well, I assumed so. I always do.”

“That Charlie is a lucky bastard,” said Mrs. Matthau.

“Of course, Oona would have made any man a great wife.”

“Nonsense. With Oona, only geniuses need apply. Before she met Charlie, she wanted to marry Orson Welles … and she wasn’t even seventeen. It was Orson who introduced her to Charlie; he said: ‘I know just the guy for you. He’s rich, he’s a genius, and there’s nothing that he likes more than a dutiful young daughter.’ ”

Mrs. Cooper was thoughtful. “If Oona hadn’t married Charlie, I don’t suppose I would have married Leopold.”

“And if Oona hadn’t married Charlie, and you hadn’t married Leopold, I wouldn’t have married Bill Saroyan. Twice yet.”

The two women laughed together, their laughter like a naughty but delightfully sung duet. Though they were not
physically similar—Mrs. Matthau being blonder than Harlow and as lushly white as a gardenia, while the other had brandy eyes and a dark dimpled brilliance markedly present when her negroid lips flashed smiles—one sensed they were two of a kind: charmingly incompetent adventuresses.

Mrs. Matthau said: “Remember the Salinger thing?”

“Salinger?”

“
A Perfect Day for Banana Fish
. That Salinger.”

“Franny and Zooey.”

“Umn huh. You don’t remember about him?”

Mrs. Cooper pondered, pouted; no, she didn’t.

“It was while we were still at Brearley,” said Mrs. Matthau. “Before Oona met Orson. She had a mysterious beau, this Jewish boy with a Park Avenue mother, Jerry Salinger. He wanted to be a writer, and he wrote Oona letters ten pages long while he was overseas in the army. Sort of love-letter essays, very tender, tenderer than God. Which is a bit too tender. Oona used to read them to me, and when she asked what I thought, I said it seemed to me he must be a boy who cries very easily; but what she wanted to know was whether I thought he was brilliant and talented or really just silly, and I said both, he’s both, and years later when I read
Catcher in the Rye
and realized the author was Oona’s Jerry, I was still inclined to that opinion.”

“I never heard a strange story about Salinger,” Mrs. Cooper confided.

“I’ve never heard anything about him that wasn’t strange. He’s certainly not your normal everyday Jewish boy from Park Avenue.”

“Well, it isn’t really about
him
, but about a friend of his who went to visit him in New Hampshire. He does live there, doesn’t he? On some very remote farm? Well, it was February and terribly cold. One morning Salinger’s friend was missing. He wasn’t in his bedroom or anywhere around the house. They
found him finally, deep in a snowy woods. He was lying in the snow wrapped in a blanket and holding an empty whiskey bottle. He’d killed himself by drinking the whiskey until he’d fallen asleep and frozen to death.”

After a while Mrs. Matthau said: “That
is
a strange story. It must have been lovely, though—all warm with whiskey, drifting off into the cold starry air. Why did he do it?”

“All I know is what I told you,” Mrs. Cooper said.

An exiting customer, a florid-at-the-edges swarthy balding Charlie sort of fellow, stopped at their table. He fixed on Mrs. Cooper a gaze that was intrigued, amused and … a trifle grim. He said: “Hello, Gloria”; and she smiled: “Hello, darling”; but her eyelids twitched as she attempted to identify him; and then he said: “Hello, Carol. How are ya, doll?” and she knew who he was all right: “Hello, darling. Still living in Spain?” He nodded; his glance returned to Mrs. Cooper: “Gloria, you’re as beautiful as ever. More beautiful. See ya …” He waved and walked away.

Mrs. Cooper stared after him, scowling.

Eventually Mrs. Matthau said: “You didn’t recognize him, did you?”

“N-n-no.”

“Life. Life. Really, it’s too sad. There was nothing familiar about him at all?”

“Long ago. Something. A dream.”

“It wasn’t a dream.”

“Carol. Stop that. Who is he?”

“Once upon a time you thought very highly of him. You cooked his meals and washed his socks”—Mrs. Cooper’s eyes enlarged, shifted—“and when he was in the army you followed him from camp to camp, living in dreary furnished rooms—”

“No!”

“Yes!”

“No.”

“Yes, Gloria. Your first husband.”

“That … man … was … Pat di Cicco?”

“Oh, darling. Let’s not brood. After all, you haven’t seen him in almost twenty years. You were only a child. Isn’t that,” said Mrs. Matthau, offering a diversion, “Jackie Kennedy?”

And I heard Lady Ina on the subject, too: “I’m almost blind with these specs, but just coming in there, isn’t that Mrs. Kennedy? And her sister?”

IT WAS; I KNEW THE
sister because she had gone to school with Kate McCloud, and when Kate and I were on Abner Dustin’s yacht at the Feria in Seville she had lunched with us, then afterward we’d gone water-skiing together, and I’ve often thought of it, how perfect she was, a gleaming gold-brown girl in a white bathing suit, her white skis hissing smoothly, her brown-gold hair whipping as she swooped and skidded between the waves. So it was pleasant when she stopped to greet Lady Ina (“Did you know I was on the plane with you from London? But you were sleeping so nicely I didn’t dare speak”) and seeing me, remembered me: “Why, hello there, Jonesy,” she said, her rough whispery warm voice very slightly vibrating her, “how’s your sunburn? Remember, I warned you, but you wouldn’t listen.” Her laughter trailed off as she folded herself onto a banquette beside her sister, their heads inclining toward each other in whispering Bouvier conspiracy. It was puzzling how much they resembled one another without sharing any common feature beyond identical voices and wide-apart eyes and certain gestures, particularly a habit of staring deeply into an interlocutor’s eyes while ceaselessly nodding the head with a mesmerizingly solemn sympathy.

Lady Ina observed: “You can see those girls have swung a few big deals in their time. I know many people can’t abide
either of them, usually women, and I can understand that, because they don’t like women and almost never have anything good to say about
any
woman. But they’re perfect with men, a pair of Western geisha girls; they know how to keep a man’s secrets and how to make him feel important. If I were a man, I’d fall for Lee myself. She’s marvelously made, like a Tanagra figurine; she’s feminine without being effeminate; and she’s one of the few people I’ve known who can be both candid and cozy—ordinarily one cancels the other. Jackie—no, not on the same planet. Very photogenic, of course; but the effect is a little … unrefined, exaggerated.”

I thought of an evening when I’d gone with Kate McCloud and a gang to a drag-queen contest held in a Harlem ballroom: hundreds of young queens sashaying in hand-sewn gowns to the funky honking of saxophones: Brooklyn supermarket clerks, Wall Street runners, black dishwashers, and Puerto Rican waiters adrift in silk and fantasy, chorus boys and bank cashiers and Irish elevator boys got up as Marilyn Monroe, as Audrey Hepburn, as Jackie Kennedy. Indeed, Mrs. Kennedy was the most popular inspiration; a dozen boys, the winner among them, wore her high-rise hairdo, winged eyebrows, sulky, palely painted mouth. And, in life, that is how she struck me—not as a bona fide woman, but as an artful female impersonator impersonating Mrs. Kennedy.

I explained what I was thinking to Ina, and she said: “That’s what I meant by … exaggerated.” Then: “Did you ever know Rosita Winston? Nice woman. Half Cherokee, I believe. She had a stroke some years ago, and now she can’t speak. Or, rather, she can say just one word. That very often happens after a stroke, one’s left with one word out of all the words one has known. Rosita’s word is ‘beautiful.’ Very appropriate, since Rosita has always loved beautiful things. What reminded me of it was old Joe Kennedy. He, too, has been left with one word. And his
word is: ‘Goddammit!’ ” Ina motioned the waiter to pour champagne. “Have I ever told you about the time he assaulted me? When I was eighteen and a guest in his house, a friend of his daughter Kek …”

Again, my eye coasted the length of the room, catching,
en passant
, a bluebearded Seventh Avenue brassiere hustler trying to con a closet-queen editor from
The New York Times;
and Diana Vreeland, the pomaded, peacock-iridescent editor of
Vogue
, sharing a table with an elderly man who suggested a precious object of discreet
extravagance
, perhaps a fine grey pearl—Mainbocher; and Mrs. William S. Paley lunching with her sister, Mrs. John Hay Whitney. Seated near them was a pair unknown to me: a woman forty, forty-five, no beauty but very handsomely set up inside a brown Balenciaga suit with a brooch composed of cinnamon-colored diamonds fixed to the lapel. Her companion was much younger, twenty, twenty-two, a hearty sun-browned statue who looked as if he might have spent the summer sailing alone across the Atlantic. Her son? But no, because … he lit a cigarette and passed it to her and their fingers touched significantly; then they were holding hands.

“… the old bugger slipped into my bedroom. It was about six o’clock in the morning, the ideal hour if you want to catch someone really slugged out, really by complete surprise, and when I woke up he was already between the sheets with one hand over my mouth and the other all over the place. The sheer ballsy gall of it—right there in his own house with the whole family sleeping all around us. But all those Kennedy men are the same; they’re like dogs, they have to pee on every fire hydrant. Still, you had to give the old guy credit, and when he saw I wasn’t going to scream he was
so
grateful …”

But they were not conversing, the older woman and the young seafarer; they held hands, and then he smiled and presently she smiled, too.

“Afterward—can you imagine?—he pretended nothing had happened, there was never a wink or a nod, just the good old daddy of my schoolgirl chum. It was uncanny and rather cruel; after all, he’d had me and I’d even pretended to enjoy it: there should have been some sentimental acknowledgment, a bauble, a cigarette box …” She sensed my other interest, and her eyes strayed to the improbable lovers. She said: “Do you know that story?”