The Whiteness of Bones (17 page)

This was the most he had yet said to her and Mamie took time to consider it.

“Why were you at the party?” she asked.

“Your aunt was, for some little time, married to my uncle. Your aunt, in fact, is responsible for my having been sent to boarding school against my will.”

“She was very happy about boarding schools. You must know the sisters.”

“Your aunt tried to seduce me in the men’s changing room of the Rowing Club in Southampton the summer I was twelve. It was on one of those very narrow benches in front of the lockers. I had never made love before, and I didn’t then.”

She looked across at him. He walked with his hands in his trouser pockets. He seemed all irritable joints and angles.

“She was afraid that I would tell. That’s why I was sent
away. It wasn’t the failed seduction that mattered, of course. Only the lack of faith.”

“It’s
always
that,” Mamie said. She was so fervent that he looked at her and laughed and pulled his hands from his pockets.

“You mustn’t mind so much on my behalf. I would have had to go to boarding school anyway.”

“She didn’t know that.” She was completely on his side.

“She sometimes spoke of your family. It was a bit Uncle-Tom’s-Cabin, as I remember.”

Mamie laughed. “Now, of course, she knows better. I’ve often felt that she is a little embarrassed by me here in New York. Although not by Claire. When she behaves badly, I try to picture something my mother once told me. Buddy Klost took her to Paris for the first time and someone in Oklahoma had told her that the correct way to look at the Eiffel Tower was upside down, so she stood on her head, right there on the pavement, and made Buddy hold her by the ankles. She was upside-down for a long time because she really wanted to do it right.”

They walked without speaking for quite a distance before Mamie said, “In a way, she’s still trying to get it right.”

“Are you still speaking about your aunt?” he asked in surprise.

“What would you like to talk about? The disappearance of myth? The success of disco? Don’t you think it is the great loss of the twentieth century? Everyone talks about existentialism and Camus and the failure of Marxism, but really all of that is just symptomatic of something much larger and more important, don’t you think?”

“You’re referring to ‘the success of disco’?”

“Yes,” she said.

The warm, quiet night had filled her up with her best self.

She was living in the present. It was an unusual sensation for her, full of tranquillity and lightness.

“May I ask you a very intimate question?” she said. “You’re the first person I’ve felt I could ask.”

“I would be delighted,” he said solemnly.

His formality stopped her only for a moment. “Do you think I’m mysterious?”

He drew her back in mid-step with his hand, and turned her so that he could see her face.

“No,” he said.

She was very disappointed. She looked down at her slippers.

“You are always going to do the best thing,” he said. “It makes you predictable.”

He held on to her arm. She felt, incorrectly, that he was embarrassed for her, and when he wanted to say more, she quickly stopped him by putting her hand over his mouth. Her face had flushed bright pink.

“No, don’t say it! You don’t have to. It was a stupid question!”

They let go of each other and began to walk again. The big lighted buildings at Forty-sixth Street shimmered over them, like the outer gates of an illuminated city, locked at sundown, leaving them enclosed and encircled until the heavy doors were pulled open again at dawn.

“Alysse says she fucked him when he was a kid,” Claire said.

“Yes, I’m sure she did.”

They had moved that day, the day after the Claire-and-Mamie dinner, to the Crawfords’ apartment on West Sixty-seventh Street.

“Said it, I mean,” Mamie said. “Not fucked him.”

They were sitting, a little uncomfortably, in the slippery Eames chairs in the small, crowded living room. Claire read a magazine and idly stroked a copy of a Brancusi head that was on the table next to her.

“She was
not
very happy when you left.”

“I’m sure not.” Mamie sighed. She had a headache. “I don’t think you should be stroking that.”

“You always say sculpture is a tactile art.”

“No wonder you think I’m pedantic.”

“I just wish you had taken me with you. I was stuck for hours and hours with Mrs. Miller who just finished decorating their plane. You can
imagine
that conversation. Alysse told me later it was a payoff.”

“A payoff?”

“She caught him with two sixteen-year-old boys and he let her do the plane.”

“Not much of a payoff.”

“Mamie! This is just what I like to hear—a little cynicism!”

“It’s my headache.”

“I thought it was maybe Alder Stoddard. He was the only interesting person there.
Why
was he there, now that I think of it? Oh, this is great,” Claire said, interrupting herself. “
Gentleman
magazine’s idea of men is William Walker writing endlessly about his last alcoholic breakdown, but its idea of women is an article on who you’d like to sit next to at dinner. Madame Chiang Kai-shek! She’d be fun, wouldn’t she? Maybe she’d let slip where they hid the gold. Or how about Mrs. Reagan? One caption is ‘the sweet, siren smell of her chemise.’ Not Mrs. Reagan’s. Faye Dunaway’s.”

“He’d seen Alysse by chance at the lawyer’s, the family lawyer, and she insisted that he come.”

“The sweet, siren smell of his jockey shorts.”

“Oh, Claire,” Mamie said, standing up. She bumped her head on a Japanese kite suspended from a wooden beam. “You’re such a pig.”

Mamie went into the tiny library she had chosen to use as her bedroom. Mamie had quickly picked this room over the brighter bedroom down the passage. She liked its dim masculinity. In the center of the room was a steel Empire camp bed, covered with paisley shawls and bolsters. There was not a Staffordshire cow or moiré ribbon or basket of potpourri to be seen.

Vivi Crawford was the only one of Alysse’s friends who had remained with her first husband. This singular fact was rare enough to be pointed out—“That’s Vivi and Whit Crawford. They’ve only been married to each other”—like a prison record or an obscure foreign honor. Vivi and Whit were kept together
by a shared loathing for the wife of Whit’s guardian. She had also been the last wife of Vivi’s late father. Being the wife of both men had made her very wealthy, and the sublime hatred that both Vivi and Whit bore this rather interesting older woman had bound them together for years. Whit, a composer, had inexplicably been given a grant to study in Florence. One of their first excursions, “my hajj, really,” as Vivi put it, was to view the Uccellos. Vivi’s other goal in life, after adoring the Uccellos, was to have a rose named after her. She had already written a book, Alysse told Mamie, a cookbook of Zen recipes. Hard to imagine, Mamie thought. “Take one bow. Let the bow shoot you into the kitchen.”

Mamie lay down on the camp bed. She could hear Claire on the telephone, squealing and howling. She folded her hands behind her head. The pillows smelled of dust.

She had returned the night before to her aunt’s apartment after her long walk with Alder Stoddard. He had taken her into the lobby of the building and waited for the elevator to come for her. He had shaken her hand.

He did not live in the city. His mother, a Lee from Boston, had left him a large property in Pennsylvania and he lived there alone with some animals and what he called a Katharine Hepburn housekeeper. It was not that the housekeeper resembled Katharine Hepburn, but that she was like the idealized, maternal servant in movies about spirited New England rich girls. His father, his mother’s husband before she married Harry Shannon’s younger brother, had been a scholarly chief justice whom his mother had tired of almost immediately after her first, and only, child had been born. She had insisted on naming him Alder Herzen after she read an article on famous lovers in the February issue of
Vogue
, the Valentine issue. She liked that Alexander Herzen’s father, a Russian prince unable to give his son his real name, had called him
herzen
, “my heart.”

She named him Alder after the small tree that grows on the banks of rivers.

She fell in love with the very handsome and irresponsible Teddy Shannon at about this same time, for although she was a Lee from Boston, she was one of the silly Lees. Alder grew up under the inattentive care of his mother and Teddy Shannon during the school year, and was sent each summer to his cantankerous father. It was perhaps this yearly mixture of extreme hedonism and extreme judiciousness that made Alder himself an unusual combination of languor and grimness. His mother and stepfather lived in alcoholic immorality in Sutton Place and his father, who never remarried, lived in irritable, unforgiving morality in Boston, his only pleasure the pages and pages of unpublished manuscript that littered the chairs and tables of his dark rooms. His few gentlemen friends were other academics and intellectuals. Alder could not remember ever seeing a woman in his father’s chambers—and “chambers” is the word his father would have used to describe his house in Cambridge.

His father died, much honored and little loved, one Christmas when Alder was in Palm Beach with his mother and Teddy. His mother was furious when Alder insisted on flying to Boston to put his father in the ground when she had already promised Gloria McMahon that he would walk out the first debutante at the Snowflake Ball. She didn’t see then, and nothing would indicate that she ever came to see, the claims of the dead over the living. When Teddy Shannon choked to death on magic mushrooms on Maui, she moved to Dublin, for the horses, and left the farm in Bucks County to her son.

Alder, with his austere luxuriousness and his sour wit, was like both his parents. If he had been asked to choose between them, to choose which one he would prefer to resemble, it
would have been impossible for him to pick one over the other. Alder had disliked both of them.

“Alysse says he’s married,” Claire yelled from the living room.

“Did you hear me?”

Mamie did not answer.

“And there’s a kid somewhere!” There was a pause as Claire waited for Mamie to say something. Mamie still did not answer and Claire, with her own odd combination of malice and good will, did not press her point, but returned happily to her conversation.

Mamie knew that Alder Stoddard was married. She knew that his wife lived with their child, a one-year-old girl named Delores, in Florida. He had tried to keep the child. His wife belonged to a powerful and vindictive Cuban family and her three brothers had fought for the child in court, and they had won her.

One of the first things that Mamie learned from Alder was the futility of questioning behavior. “But why did you marry her?” she asked at Fifty-seventh and Park. “Why did you have a child?” she asked at Fifty-ninth Street.

He had calm answers to her questions, but they were logical explanations and did not satisfy her. She did not want facts: his wife was not a good mother; she was a compulsive gambler; she lived with her father in Coconut Grove and the baby was looked after by illiterate girl maids.

“Why don’t you just take the child?” Mamie asked indignantly.

All Alder said in answer to that question was a patient “Mamie …”

She had spoken to him on the telephone earlier that day, when Claire was at the market buying pineapples and dark
rum. He was coming to the city in a few weeks and he would stay with his grandmother.

“Everyone in New York has a grandmother with an apartment on Park Avenue,” Mamie had said in wonder, and he had laughed. “At home, grandmothers collect ferns. They don’t wear diamonds and go out to lunch. I might as well be on Mars.”

“You might as well be,” he had said.

Felix Villanueve, of Spanish and French descent, claimed nobility on his mother’s side (“I don’t use my title in this wonderful country,” he often said). He had made an enormous amount of money for years, and those least favorable to Felix said that his clothes were patterned directly from designs he stole each season from the French couture. It was of no consequence. His clothes made American women happy and he liked making women happy very much.

It appeared that he only allowed very pretty girls to work for him, not just as models, but as accountants and secretaries. The girls called him “Mr. Feel” and it was obvious that many of them were old girlfriends who remained unusually devoted to him. The staff of young, well-dressed, beautifully made-up girls caused Mamie to think that she had been inducted into a very glamorous sorority house. It took her a few days of listening quietly, looking through old copies of
Women’s Wear Daily
while she waited for Felix to arrive, to understand that they were professionals, after all, and that Felix’s business was run by very able women. What she had at first taken to be a girls’ club now impressed her, and she realized that she had judged them by that prejudice she so hated, the distrust of her own kind.