Answered Prayers (19 page)

“In other words—” I began.

“In other words”—Lady Ina picked up but waited until a captain, supervised by a perspiring M. Soulé, had finished ladling out the soufflé Furstenberg—“none of Ann’s story was true. God knows what she expected people to believe; but she just, after they reached home and David had stripped to take a shower, followed him there with a gun and shot him through the shower door. Perhaps she intended to say the prowler had stolen her shotgun and killed him. In that case, why didn’t she call a doctor, call the police? Instead, she telephoned her
lawyer
. Yes. And
he
called the police. But not until
after
he had called the Hopkinses in Bar Harbor.”

The priest was swilling another Gibson; Ann Hopkins, head
bent, was still whispering at him confessionally. Her waxy fingers, unpainted and unadorned except for a stark gold wedding band, nibbled at her breast as though she were reading rosary beads.

“But if the police
knew
the truth—”

“Of course they knew.”

“Then I don’t see how she got away with it. It’s not conceivable.”

“I told you,” Ina said tartly, “she got away with it because Hilda Hopkins wanted her to. It was the children: tragic enough to have lost their father, what purpose could it serve to see the mother convicted of murder? Hilda Hopkins, and old Mr. Hopkins, too, wanted Ann to go scot-free; and the Hopkinses, within their terrain, have the power to brainwash cops, reweave minds, move corpses from shower stalls to hallways; the power to control inquests—David’s death was declared an accident at an inquest that lasted less than a day.” She looked across at Ann Hopkins and her companion—the latter, his clerical brow scarlet with a two-cocktail flush, not listening now to the imploring murmur of his patroness but staring rather glassy-gaga at Mrs. Kennedy, as if any moment he might run amok and ask her to autograph a menu. “Hilda’s behavior has been extraordinary. Flawless. One would never suspect she wasn’t truly the affectionate, grieving protector of a bereaved and very legitimate widow. She never gives a dinner party without inviting her. The one thing I wonder is what everyone wonders—when they’re alone, just the two of them, what do they talk about?” Ina selected from her salad a leaf of Bibb lettuce, pinned it to a fork, studied it through her black spectacles. “There is at least one respect in which the rich, the really very rich,
are
different from … other people. They understand
vegetables
. Other people—well, anyone can manage roast beef, a great steak, lobsters. But have you ever noticed how,
in the homes of the very rich, at the Wrightsmans’ or Dillons’, at Bunny’s and Babe’s, they always serve only the most beautiful vegetables, and the greatest variety? The greenest
petits pois
, infinitesimal carrots, corn so baby-kerneled and tender it seems almost unborn, lima beans tinier than mice eyes, and the young asparagus! the limestone lettuce! the raw red mushrooms! zucchini …” Lady Ina was feeling her champagne.

MRS. MATTHAU AND MRS. COOPER
lingered over
café filtre
. “I know,” mused Mrs. Matthau, who was analyzing the wife of a midnight-TV clown/hero, “Jane
is
pushy: all those telephone calls—Christ, she could dial Answer Prayer and talk an hour. But she’s bright, she’s fast on the draw, and when you think what she has to put up with. This last episode she told me about: hair-raising. Well, Bobby had a week off from the show—he was so exhausted he told Jane he wanted just to stay home, spend the whole week slopping around in his pajamas, and Jane was ecstatic; she bought hundreds of magazines and books and new LP’s and every kind of goody from Maison Glass. Oh, it was going to be a lovely week. Just Jane and Bobby sleeping and screwing and having baked potatoes with caviar for breakfast. But after one day he evaporated. Didn’t come home one night or call. It wasn’t the first time, Jesus be, but Jane was out of her mind. Still, she couldn’t report it to the police; what a sensation that would be. Another day passed, and not a word. Jane hadn’t slept for forty-eight hours. Around three in the morning the phone rang. Bobby. Smashed. She said: ‘My God, Bobby, where are you?’ He said he was in Miami, and she said, losing her temper now, how the fuck did you get in Miami, and he said, oh, he’d gone to the airport and taken a plane, and she said what the fuck for, and he said just because he felt like being alone.
Jane said: ‘And
are
you alone?’ Bobby, you know what a sadist he is behind that huckleberry grin, said: ‘No. There’s someone lying right here. She’d like to speak to you.’ And on comes this scared little giggling peroxide voice: ‘Really, is this really Mrs. Baxter, hee hee? I thought Bobby was making a funny, hee hee. We just heard on the radio how it was snowing there in New York—I mean, you ought to be down here with us where it’s ninety degrees!’ Jane said, very chiseled: ‘I’m afraid I’m much too ill to travel.’ And peroxide, all fluttery distress: ‘Oh, gee, I’m sorry to hear that. What’s the matter, honey?’ Jane said: ‘I’ve got a double dose of syph and the old clap-clap, all courtesy of that great comic, my husband, Bobby Baxter—and if you don’t want the same, I suggest you get the hell out of there.’ And she hung up.”

Mrs. Cooper was amused, though not very; puzzled, rather.

“How can any woman tolerate that? I’d divorce him.”

“Of course you would. But then, you’ve got the two things Jane hasn’t.”

“Ah? ”

“One: dough. And two: identity.”

LADY INA WAS ORDERING ANOTHER
bottle of Cristal. “Why not?” she asked, defiantly replying to my concerned expression. “Easy up, Jonesy. You won’t have to carry me piggyback. I just feel like it: shattering the day into golden pieces.” Now, I thought, she’s going to tell me what she wants, but doesn’t want to tell me. But no, not yet. Instead: “Would you care to hear a truly vile story? Really vomitous? Then look to your left. That sow sitting next to Betsy Whitney.”

She
was
somewhat porcine, a swollen muscular baby with a freckled Bahamas-burnt face and squinty-mean eyes; she looked as if she wore tweed brassieres and played a lot of golf.

“The governor’s wife?”

“The governor’s wife,” said Ina, nodding as she gazed with melancholy contempt at the homely beast, legal spouse of a former New York governor. “Believe it or not, but one of the most attractive guys who ever filled a pair of trousers used to get a hard-on every time he looked at that bull dyke. Sidney Dillon—” the name, pronounced by Ina, was a caressing hiss.

To be sure. Sidney Dillon. Conglomateur, adviser to Presidents, an old flame of Kate McCloud’s. I remember once picking up a copy of what was, after the Bible and
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
, Kate’s favorite book, Isak Dinesen’s
Out of Africa;
from between the pages fell a Polaroid picture of a swimmer standing at water’s edge, a wiry well-constructed man with a hairy chest and a twinkle-grinning tough-Jew face; his bathing trunks were rolled to his knees, one hand rested sexily on a hip, and with the other he was pumping a dark fat mouth-watering dick. On the reverse side a notation, made in Kate’s boyish script, read:
Sidney. Lago di Garda. En route to Venice. June, 1962.

“Dill and I have always told each other everything. He was my lover for two years when I was just out of college and working at
Harper’s Bazaar
. The only thing he ever specifically asked me never to repeat was this business about the governor’s wife; I’m a bitch to tell it, and maybe I wouldn’t if it wasn’t for all these blissful bubbles risin’ in my noggin—” She lifted her champagne and peered at me through its sunny effervescence. “Gentlemen, the question is: why would an educated, dynamic, very rich and well-hung Jew go bonkers for a cretinous Protestant size forty who wears low-heeled shoes and lavender water? Especially when he’s married to Cleo Dillon, to my mind the most beautiful creature alive, always excepting the Garbo of even ten years ago (incidentally, I saw her last night at the Gunthers’, and I must say the whole setup has taken on a very weathered look, dry and drafty, like an abandoned temple, something lost in the
jungles at Angkor Wat; but that’s what happens when you spend most of a life loving only yourself, and that not very much).

“Dill’s in his sixties now; he could still have any woman he wants, yet for years he yearned after yonder porco. I’m sure he never entirely understood this ultra-perversion, the reason for it; or if he did, he never would admit it, not even to an analyst—that’s a thought! Dill at an analyst! Men like that can never be analyzed because they don’t consider any other man their equal. But as for the governor’s wife, it was simply that for Dill she was the living incorporation of everything denied him, forbidden to him as a Jew, no matter how beguiling and rich he might be: the Racquet Club, Le Jockey, the Links, White’s—all those places he would never sit down to a table of backgammon, all those golf courses where he would never sink a putt—the Everglades and the Seminole, the Maidstone, and St. Paul’s and St. Mark’s et al., the saintly little New England schools his sons would never attend. Whether he confesses to it or not, that’s why he wanted to fuck the governor’s wife, revenge himself on that smug hog-bottom, make her sweat and squeal and call him daddy. He kept his distance, though, and never hinted at any interest in the lady, but waited for the moment when the stars were in their correct constellation. It came unplanned—one night he went to a dinner party at the Cowleses’; Cleo had gone to a wedding in Boston. The governor’s wife was seated next to him at dinner; she, too, had come alone, the governor off campaigning somewhere. Dill joked, he dazzled; she sat there pig-eyed and indifferent, but she didn’t seem surprised when he rubbed his leg against hers, and when he asked if he might see her home, she nodded, not with much enthusiasm but with a decisiveness that made him feel she was ready to accept whatever he proposed.

“At that time Dill and Cleo were living in Greenwich; they’d sold their town house on Riverview Terrace and had only a two-room pied-à-terre at the Pierre, just a living room and a
bedroom. In the car, after they’d left the Cowleses’, he suggested they stop by the Pierre for a nightcap: he wanted her opinion of his new Bonnard. She said she would be pleased to give her opinion; and why shouldn’t the idiot have one? Wasn’t her husband on the board of directors at the Modern? When she’d seen the painting, he offered her a drink, and she said she’d like a brandy; she sip-sipped it, sitting opposite him across a coffee table, nothing at all happening between them, except that suddenly she was very talkative—about the horse sales in Saratoga, and a hole-by-hole golf game she’d played with Doc Holden at Lyford Cay; she talked about how much money Joan Payson had won from her at bridge and how the dentist she’d used since she was a little girl had died and now she didn’t know
what
to do with her teeth; oh, she jabbered on until it was almost two, and Dill kept looking at his watch, not only because he’d had a long day and was anxious but because he expected Cleo back on an early plane from Boston: she’d said she would see him at the Pierre before he left for the office. So eventually, while she was rattling on about root canals, he shut her up: ‘Excuse me, my dear, but do you want to fuck or not?’ There is something to be said for aristocrats, even the stupidest have had some kind of class bred into them; so she shrugged—‘Well, yes, I suppose so’—as though a salesgirl had asked if she liked the look of a hat. Merely resigned, as it were, to that old familiar hard-sell Jewish effrontery.

“In the bedroom she asked him not to turn on the lights. She was quite firm about that—and in view of what finally transpired, one can scarcely blame her. They undressed in the dark, and she took forever—unsnapping, untying, unzipping—and said not a word except to remark on the fact that the Dillons obviously slept in the same bed, since there was only the one; and he told her yes, he was affectionate, a mama’s boy who couldn’t sleep unless he had something soft to cuddle against. The governor’s
wife was neither a cuddler nor a kisser. Kissing her, according to Dill, was like playing post office with a dead and rotting whale: she really did need a dentist. None of his tricks caught her fancy, she just lay there, inert, like a missionary being outraged by a succession of sweating Swahilis. Dill couldn’t come. He felt as though he were sloshing around in some strange puddle, the whole ambience so slippery he couldn’t get a proper grip. He thought maybe if he went down on her—but the moment he started to, she hauled him up by his hair: ‘Nononono, for God’s sake, don’t do that!’ Dill gave up, he rolled over, he said: ‘I don’t suppose you’d blow me?’ She didn’t bother to reply, so he said okay, all right, just jack me off and we’ll call it scratch, okay? But she was already up, and she asked him please not to turn on the light, please, and she said no, he need not see her home, stay where he was, go to sleep, and while he lay there listening to her dress he reached down to finger himself, and it felt … it felt … He jumped up and snapped on the light. His whole paraphernalia had felt sticky and strange. As though it were covered with blood. As it was. So was the bed. The sheets bloodied with stains the size of Brazil. The governor’s wife had just picked up her purse, had just opened the door, and Dill said: ‘What the hell is this? Why did you do it?’ Then he knew why, not because she told him, but because of the glance he caught as she closed the door: like Carino, the cruel maître d’ at the old Elmer’s—leading some blue-suit brown-shoes hunker to a table in Siberia. She had mocked him, punished him for his Jewish presumption.

“Jonesy, you’re not eating?”

“It isn’t doing much for my appetite. This conversation.”

“I warned you it was a vile story. And we haven’t come to the best part yet.”

“All right. I’m ready.”

“No, Jonesy. Not if it’s going to make you sick.”

“I’ll take my chances,” I said.

MRS. KENNEDY AND HER SISTER
had left; the governor’s wife was leaving, Soulé beaming and bobbing in her wide-hipped wake. Mrs. Matthau and Mrs. Cooper were still present but silent, their ears perked to our conversation; Mrs. Matthau was kneading a fallen yellow rose petal—her fingers stiffened as Ina resumed: “Poor Dill didn’t realize the extent of his difficulties until he’d stripped the sheets off the bed and found there were no clean ones to replace them. Cleo, you see, used the Pierre’s linen and kept none of her own at the hotel. It was three o’clock in the morning and he couldn’t reasonably call for maid service: what would he say, how could he explain the loss of his sheets at that hour? The particular hell of it was that Cleo would be sailing in from Boston in a matter of hours, and regardless of how much Dill screwed around, he’d always been scrupulous about never giving Cleo a clue; he really loved her, and, my God, what could he say when she saw the bed? He took a cold shower and tried to think of some buddy he could call and ask to hustle over with a change of sheets. There was me, of course; he trusted
me
, but I was in London. And there was his old valet, Wardell. Wardell was queer for Dill and had been a slave for twenty years just for the privilege of soaping him whenever Dill took his bath; but Wardell was old and arthritic, Dill
couldn’t
call him in Greenwich and ask him to drive all the way in to town. Then it struck him that he had a hundred chums but really no friends, not the kind you ring at three in the morning. In his own company he employed more than six thousand people, but there was not one who had ever called him anything except
Mr. Dillon
. I mean, the guy was feeling sorry for
himself. So he poured a truly stiff Scotch and started searching in the kitchen for a box of laundry soap, but he couldn’t find any, and in the end had to use a bar of Guerlain’s
Fleurs des Alpes
. To wash the sheets. He soaked them in the tub in scalding water. Scrubbed and scrubbed. Rinsed and scrubadubdubbed. There he was, the powerful Mr. Dillon, down on his knees and flogging away like a Spanish peasant at the side of a stream.