Princess Daisy (3 page)

Nevertheless, Prince Valensky owned nine ponies, rather than the more usual five or six, because he rode like a barbarian. It is not safe to ride a polo pony, galloping and turning at top speed, for more than two chukkers in any single game. Stash rode so aggressively that he preferred to have a fresh pony for each of the six chukkers and he chose neyer to have fewer than three animals in reserve. According to the rules of the Hurlingham Polo Association, under which he played, no man is allowed to “Ride at an opponent in such a manner as to intimidate and cause him to pull out.” Stash stopped just short of that ambiguous distinction, but he never rode at an adversary without the clear mental intention of unhorsing him. There were many players who thought that the HPA Field Rules should have contained some special penalty which would disqualify Valensky, although no umpire had ever yet ordered him off the field.

It was a gala day in Deauville as the crowds pressed politely into the stands for the polo finals. When the Mayor of the city had been informed by the management of the Hotel Normandy that Francesca Vernon was their guest, he had called at the hotel in person and, with great formality, asked if she would present the cup to the winner of the day’s match.

“The honor was to have been mine, Mademoiselle,” he
told her, “but it would be a great day for Deauville if you would consent.” The Mayor understood perfectly that with the participation of a film star the outcome of the play would be covered more prominently than if it were a mere sporting event.

“Well …,” Francesca said, hesitating for form’s sake, but already she saw herself clearly at the center of the competition.

“She’d love to,” Margo assured the Mayor. She owned a white silk suit trimmed with touches of navy that she hadn’t worn yet on this trip. She had suspected that it might be too formal for polo, but if Francesca had a place in the proceedings it would look entirely suitable. Margo was a great fan of pictures of royal personages presenting things to natives, something she would never have admitted, even to Matty. Sometimes Margo saw herself standing, gracious, smiling and about five inches taller than she was, being handed a huge bouquet of roses by a small curtsying child. It would never happen to her, but why shouldn’t it happen to Francesca?

The Firestones and Francesca watched the match with interest which soon turned into confusion. The play was really too fast to follow without some familiarity with its intricate rules. However, the atmosphere of the match was electric. Polo spectators are elegantly dressed, superbly perfumed and given to a kind of upper-class hysteria which balances the intense knowledgeability of the bullring crowd in Madrid with the polite, dandified excitement of Ascot. All three of them soon gave up trying to figure out what had triggered the moments of applause or groans and gave themselves up to the spectacle of eight great athletes riding fast horses. What ballet is to dance, what chess is to board games, polo is to sport.

A burst of cheering signaled the end of the match. The Mayor of Deauville approached their seats and held out his hand to Francesca. “Quickly, Mademoiselle Vernon,” he said. “The ponies are hot—we must not keep them out on the field.”

Francesca, holding the Mayor’s arm, picked her way across the polo grounds, now marred by divots which had been kicked up by the ponies’ hooves. The full skirt of her green silk dress, printed with tiny blue and white flowers, snapped like a sail in the stiff breeze. She wore a large white straw hat with an undulating brim, banded and
ribboned in the silk of her dress. As she used one hand to keep it on her head, Francesca realized that at some time during the match she must have lost her hatpins. The actress and the Mayor approached the spot where the eight players, all still mounted, were waiting for her. The Mayor spoke briefly, first in French and then in English. Abruptly he handed Francesca a heavy silver trophy. Automatically, in order to receive the trophy, she took her hand off her hat. It blew off at once, and went skimming along the ground, bounding from one tuft of turf to another.

“Oh no!” she exclaimed in dismay, but as she spoke, Stash Valensky leaned down from his pony and scooped her up in one arm. Holding her easily, across his chest, he urged his mount after the wayward hat It had come to rest two hundred yards away, and Valensky, still holding Francesca to him, bent down from his saddle, picked the hat up by its ribbons and carefully replaced it on her head. The stands rang with laughter and applause.

Francesca heard nothing of the noise the spectators made. Time, as she knew it, had stopped. By instinct, she remained silent and waiting, passive against Stash’s soaking-wet polo shirt She could smell his sweat and it confounded her with desire. Her mouth filled with saliva. She wanted to sink her teeth into his tan neck, to bite him until she could taste his blood, to lick up the rivulets of sweat which ran down to his open collar. She wanted him to fall to the ground with her in his arms, just as he was, flushed, steaming, still breathing heavily from the game, and grind himself into her.

Collecting himself, Stash trotted his pony back to the other horsemen. He slid to the ground, Francesca still in his arms, and placed her gently on her feet. Somehow she was still holding the trophy and she tottered in her high heels. He took the cup from her, let it drop to the turf and grabbed both of her hands to steady her. For an instant they stood facing each other, linked. Then he bent from the waist and kissed one of the hands he was holding. Not the formal kiss that barely brushes the air above the hand, but a hard, hot imprint of his mouth.

“Now,” he said, looking right into her astonished eyes, “you’re supposed to give me the cup.” He reached down for it and handed it to her. She gave it back to him, silently. The crowd applauded again, and under that sound, she said, in a barely audible voice, “Hold me again.”

“Later.”

“When?” Francesca was shocked at her abrupt, naked voice.

“Tonight. Where are you staying?”

“The Normandy.”

“Come on, I’ll take you back to your seat.” He offered her his arm. They
didn’t
speak again until she had been restored to Matty and Margo. Everything essential had been said. Anything else was impossible to say.

“Eight?” he asked.

She nodded agreement. He didn’t kiss her hand again, but just bowed slightly and strode out to the field.

“Jesus Christ, what was all that about?” Matty demanded. Francesca didn’t answer him. Margo said nothing, because on Francesca’s lovely and familiar face she saw a dazed expression which, to Margo, was instantly apparent as a
new
expression, one that had been created by something outside the borders of Francesca’s previous experience.

“Come on, darling,” she said to the actress, “everybody’s leaving.” Francesca merely
stood
where she was, not hearing. “What are you going to
wear
?” Margo said in her ear. This time Francesca heard her.

“It doesn’t matter what I wear,” she answered.

“What!” Margo was shocked, genuinely shocked, for the first time in twenty years. “Come on, Matty. We’ve got to get back to the hotel,” she ordered, and, leaving him to escort Francesca, she led the way, muttering incredulously to herself. “Doesn’t matter! Doesn’t
matter
? Has she gone mad?”

Francesca Vernon was the only child of Professor Ricardo della Orso and his wife, Claudia. Her father was head of the Foreign Language Department at the University of California in Berkeley, to which he had immigrated from Florence in the 1920s. Both of Francesca’s parents had origins, centuries old, in the many-towered, once noble hill town of San Gimignano, near Florence. In each of their families there had been strikingly lovely women, too many of whom had come to dishonor or disgrace, according to the strict values of their times. For hundreds of years, many a noble Tuscan gentleman had ridden to San Gimignano, attracted by the legend of the glorious daughters of the della Orso and Veronese families. Often, too often, they had not been disappointed.

As soon as Ricardo and Claudia della Orso saw the hereditary features appear in their daughter they realized that she would, inevitably, be beautiful, perhaps unsuitably beautiful. They hoarded their one precious child, keeping her to themselves as much as possible, although Francesca needed the companionship of children her own age. Years in the battlefield of a playground sandbox, and more years in the rough and tumble of kindergarten, throwing things, building things, and playing with all manner of boys and girls, would have been far more healthy for this girl, who had inherited the wild blood of all those dark and captivating women of San Gimignano, than the hundreds of hours that were spent nourishing her fantasy life as, endlessly, her mother read fairy tales out loud.

In their effort to keep Francesca safe, her parents fed her growing mind on old stories of gallant deeds performed for love, of heroes and heroines whose lives were filled with risk and honor. They were a willing audience for the dozens of plays she soon began to perform for them with plots borrowed from the tales on which she had grown up. Her parents, innocent and proud, never understood that they had encouraged Francesca to view herself from the outside, to watch herself
being someone she was not
and take deep pleasure in it, to find role playing more real than anything else life had to offer.

When Francesca was six and went to school, she found her first wider audience. In the part of the crafty Morgiana in a first-grade production of
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
, the same “Open Sesame!” that revealed the treasure cave gave her a sure knowledge of her future. She would be an actress. From that moment on, although she seemed, to the outward eye, to be following a normal course through school, she acted in her head. When she wasn’t actually involved in the yearly class play, she would come to school in the character of the heroine of the book she was currently reading, and such was her cleverness that she was able to go through an entire school day without betraying herself to her classmates. They found her full of unexpected responses and unexplained moods, but that was just Francesca, who had, by reason of her inaccessibility, come to occupy a high position in the pecking order of school. Everyone wanted to be her friend because so few were granted the privilege.

Year after year, Francesca was given the lead in the school plays, and no one, not even other mothers, ever
complained that it was unfair, since she was so clearly better than anyone else. A production in which she played a lesser role than the central one would have been lopsided. She had only to walk out onto a stage to project an inescapable flash of aroused expectation. There was an inevitable quality in her smallest gestures. Francesca didn’t learn how to act: she merely turned her roving fancy toward the character she was playing and became that person with such naturalness that it appeared as if all she had done was to unwrap her emotions and let them appear on her face.

“Of all the occupational hazards of an agent’s life, high-school plays are my least favorite,” complained Matty Firestone.

“What about actresses’ love affairs?” asked his wife Margo. “Last week you said they were even worse than negotiating with Harry Cohn.”

“Point well taken. At least a play is over quickly,” Matty agreed, although he still felt deeply aggrieved at being condemned to seeing a Berkeley High presentation of
Milestones
by Arnold Bennett; a warhorse of a production much favored by graduating classes.

“Don’t you dare fall asleep with your eyes open again,” Margo warned him affectionately. “It makes me nervous … and anyway, the Hellmans are your old friends, not mine.”

“But you’re the one who had to let them know we were in San Francisco. You should have remembered that it’s June—graduation month,” Matty grumbled. He always expected Margo to have his private life as perfectly organized as her enormous wardrobe. She was the ideal agent’s wife; cynical, but never without harmless illusions, warmhearted, unsurprisable and totally kind, just as Matty was the ideal agent; a man of audacity and loyalty, gifted with a keen sense of exactly how far to go in a negotiation; of how much was too much and how little was too little; added to a scrupulous disinclination ever to tell an actual lie, yet not cursed with a dangerous compulsion always to reveal the truth. Neither he nor Margo could ever become the victims of flattery, but they were incapable of resisting the seduction of talent.

In the first act of
Milestones
, Francesca della Orso appeared as a young woman about to be wed; the woman
who would, in the last act, be seen celebrating her fiftieth wedding anniversary.

“That brunette!”
Matty said in Margo’s ear in a tone whose meaning she knew well. It heralded good tidings. It was a voice loaded with solid gold. They looked at Francesca together, exploring the exquisite oval of her face, the small, rounded slightly cleft chin, the straight nose, the eyebrows set high so that her eyelids were of a strange and touching importance. Matty had only seen one woman as beautiful as this girl before and she had started his career and made his fortune. Listening to Francesca speak her lines, he felt sweat suddenly beading his upper lip. The hairs on the back of his neck rose; he felt his sinuses constrict. Margo, for her part, was keenly aware of the dark promise in the girl’s wide, calm, imperious eyes, of the passionate spirit that was evident in spite of her smooth forehead and long, docile neck. Neither of them yet could understand the force of Francesca’s fantasy life, the intensity of her moods, the fury of uncompromising emotions into which she could fling herself.

As soon as it was decently possible after the curtain rang down, Matty and Margo deserted their friends’ lackluster daughter and went in search of Francesca della Orso. They found her backstage, still in the make-up of a woman of almost seventy, surrounded by an admiring crowd. Matty didn’t bother to introduce himself to her. It was her parents who were his target.

His siege of Claudia and Ricardo della Orso lasted for weeks. Although they had always been filled with quiet joy and wonder by their daughter’s performances in school plays, they were bewildered and outraged at the agent’s proposal that he sign Francesca to an exclusive personal contract and that she come to live in Los Angeles under his wife’s strict supervision. But eventually, to their own astonishment, they overcame their deep mistrust of Hollywood, vanquished by their perception of Matty Firestone’s excellent intentions and the satisfactory protective qualities they saw in Margo.