Wakefield hall, p.11
Wakefield Hall, page 11
It was a hot July day, with a moody sky and the threat of thunder.
I choose a seat two rows behind her. Dealers were filing in—talking, sipping coffee from paper cups—and telephones were being set up. It was a good sale as they go, but not a splendid one: “Fine” jewelry, not “Important.” The most coveted pieces came from the estate of an eccentric widow from Boston, an invalid who had spent her life hoarding jewelry (visions of an old woman propped up in bed, counting brooches and cataloging species of pearls).
Leafing through the pages of the catalog, I glanced up every so often at Christina von Shouse, trying to divine in that face the good friend, the confidante, of Joanna. She looked at no one else, seemingly oblivious to the goings-on around her, studying her catalog and occasionally marking it with decisive strokes. The precision of her look, its very sureness, fascinated me: the polished layers of her short black hair, with its bold frontal streak of gray; the hard sheen of her pearl earrings against the pale, matte skin; the perfectly delineated stamp of dark red lipstick. Her profile, with its high, severe nose, was reminiscent of Piero’s twin portrait of the Montefeltros—at once hawklike and incongruously sweet. There was about her an odd mix of girlishness and the strictness of the belle laide.
Moments later, glancing at her watch, she stood up, suddenly impatient, her eyes scanning the room; a small-boned, perfectly groomed woman in a red linen suit and a pair of cufflike gold bracelets, her prettily shaped legs and feet fitted with costly black pumps. She left the room for a moment, clutching her catalog with a charmingly anxious look—her posture impeccable, her movements quick, coltish—only to return minutes later to immerse herself in the catalog once more.
At last the sale began. It was only after twenty lots or so that she raised her paddle, which was number seven, for a twisted-pearl-and-diamond bracelet, a bracelet she did not succeed in getting and which fetched almost three times its estimate. I saw an expression of dismay cross her face, only to be replaced seconds later by her habitual calm.
Ten lots later she tried again, this time for a pair of ruby earrings.
Still no luck. She shrugged her shoulders almost imperceptibly and put down her paddle once more.
It was a half hour later, perhaps, that the brooch she coveted appeared: an enormous dark butterfly, pavéd in rubies, seemingly caught in mid-flight, its diamonds en tremblant. It was French, according to the catalog description, and had most likely been dismantled from the center of a large, elaborate necklace. I could understand why Christina von Shouse had been drawn to the jewel: its scale and colors, its very boldness, suited her perfectly.
The bidding began slowly. At first she sat quite still, her eyes fixed on the podium, the catalog in her lap. At last, after the low end of the estimate had been passed, she raised her hand. Someone in the back of the room—I strained to see who—had begun to bid against her. She bid again, and then again, always bidding against the one other person in the room who was also determined to get the piece—a dealer perhaps, whose bids were placed with a faint nod and whom I still had not been able to identify, or a telephone bidder. Finally, the bidding having surpassed the high end of the estimate by five thousand dollars, I saw Christina von Shouse’s hand, with its red lacquer tips, slowly descend; she placed her paddle beside her and shook her head. The sound of the gavel signaled the end of the bidding. She had lost.
I wondered what she would do now and watched her closely.
For many moments she did not look up, but sat quite motionless.
Her feet moved slightly; she coughed; with her left hand she smoothed her hair. Then her face assumed a bright, set expression. It was only her smile that was mysterious—indeed, I thought I discerned a suggestion of triumph in it. Peculiar, because she had lost, after all!
Her head high, her expression inscrutable, she stood up to gather her things. Holding her red umbrella and leaving a trace of tuberose perfume in her wake she left.
It was easier, having seen her, to imagine calling her.
In the meantime, I continued to find out as much as I could about her background. She had worked, as a young woman, in England; in London, she had married a moderately rich man she divorced soon afterward. A second husband, acquired after she had moved to New York—vaguely in the shipping business—left her what is commonly known as “some money” (enough to live on comfortably, but not lavishly, by New York standards). She had one daughter, from the first marriage, who had committed suicide in the late seventies.
Still, it was Patrick Rossiter’s words that reverberated in my mind even as I jotted down the facts of this woman’s odd life. “Christina is everything manqué: artist, mother, scholar.” Scholar? I had asked, thinking that seemed incongruous—an aspect of her personality I would never have surmised. Yes, he had replied, adding that she was an intimate friend of Neville Somerfeld, the British publisher, with whom she shared a mania for history. It was Somerfeld who had encouraged her to write some sort of book, the subject of which she had never disclosed, though some thought it had to do with the decorative arts in tsarist Russia. Apparently, she had been working on this book for years. “And it’s to do with Russia?” I queried again. Yes, Patrick had reiterated. “That’s her obsession. It has been for a long time—long before it became fashionable.” To this he had added: “No doubt the money she ‘borrowed’ from Joanna was used to fund more of her Russian acquisitions. Or her jewelry. You see, she and Joanna shared a passion for jewelry—” he had paused, “—and for secrets.”
She was listed as C. von Shouse in the telephone directory; no address. The following Tuesday, about four-thirty, I called her.
A maid with a Spanish accent answered the telephone. “I will see if madam is here,” she told me. A long time passed, it seemed, before I heard a new voice on the other end: a low, lilting voice with an elegant accent verging on the English, a younger voice than the one I had anticipated.
She listened while I explained my reason for calling: the book about Joanna; my research; I had heard so much about her and hoped she might “give me some insight into Joanna Eakins.” There was a pause. For a second I thought she might refuse to speak with me. But that did not happen. Instead, she said, “You must come see me later this week—for tea. Does four o’clock on Friday suit you? Perfect.” I asked her address: 778 Park Avenue.
“Until soon, then,” she said.
I put down the phone and took a deep breath: I had expected the call to be much more difficult; I had expected her to resist, to ask many more questions (my background, specific areas of Joanna’s life we would discuss). Instead, she had acquiesced in an instant, had invited me to meet her so readily that instead of feeling relieved, I felt—at least for an instant—strangely uneasy.
12
Early the following evening I lay in bed, perspiring and half covered with a sheet, while Jack, beside me, spoke with someone in his office on the telephone. Outside, the summer air was heavy, humid, the curtains motionless by open windows. The air-conditioning had broken down, and murky heat had long since penetrated the rooms of my apartment.
I had raced home from the office to meet Jack late that Wednesday, preparing myself for his arrival with the excitement and anxiety that always preceded our assignations—afraid, as I was increasingly, to deprive his eye of stimulus. Into my skin, parched from the summer sun, I had rubbed a rose-scented lotion; from scented drawers I had taken black satin, lace-edged lingerie.
We made love shortly after Jack’s arrival. The heat, coupled with the villagelike quiet of the abandoned city, seemed to have quickened desire: even now I recall the shivery pleasure of Jack’s tongue, how frenziedly our bodies came together. Afterward, I lay beside him, spent, while he spoke of numbers, contracts, and stipulations in a language I did not always understand—a language so coldly different from the one he had taught me so expertly, and with such erotic tenderness, in bed.
I remember being fascinated by his ability to shift abruptly from world to world; I remember how the ruthless wielding of his power on the telephone excited me, and that, secure in the knowledge that his ruthlessness did not extend to me, I marveled at how he exercised it elsewhere—at his company, Northtech Communications.
He put down the telephone and sat in silence, his eyes distant.
Still gazing ahead, he pressed my hand to his lips before murmuring, “I’d better call home.” His family was in East Hampton, as they always were in summer, leaving Jack and me the glorious weekdays to ourselves in the hot, deserted city.
He took his robe from the bed, knotting the belt around his waist.
“I’ll go into the other room,” he said, standing near me.
“No. Stay here. Don’t leave me.”
“It only upsets you,” he replied with a knowing glance. “It’s better if I go into the other room.”
“No, stay here,” I repeated, pulling him toward me; it seemed more prudent to listen than to be left with my imaginings.
He sat down reluctantly and dialed the number from the edge of the bed; meantime, I donned a silk kimono and moved to the dressing table before the window, ostensibly to brush my hair.
He spoke with his wife, Alice, and afterward, with infinitely more tenderness, to each of his four daughters. He asked about the girls’ tennis and a match at the Maidstone Club; he asked about their riding lessons and whether they had taken the dogs to the vet. I bit my lip and looked down into the distending, mirrored surface of the dressing table, listening with fascination and resentment to the details of this orderly life. I knew, and yet did not want to know, how much Jack loved his children—how much he loved his eldest daughter, Amanda, especially. I wanted this, our life together, to be his one and only universe. I had come to hate the telephone.
His wife came on the line again. He began to speak of their vacation plans, of Mougins, of a house they had rented there, in the south of France, for August.
At last he said goodbye to her and to his daughters.
“Mougins?” I said, turning to him, a grain of anger in my voice.
“You never mentioned France.”
“I’m sure I did.”
“No, you never did.”
“It’s only for August.”
“There are four weeks in August.”
“I’ll be back and forth,” he replied, adding something about the Concorde.
“Why France?” I asked bitterly. It was painful to think of him in Mougins without me—I, who loved France so and who always dreamt of being there with him.
“It was Alice’s idea,” he said, flipping through a magazine. “For the girls. For their French.”
“But I speak French, too!” I cried in a voice I hardly recognized, the voice of a pleading, needy creature—the voice I had never let my father hear. “You love to hear me speak French.”
“Yes,” he reassured me. “I do. I do.” He held me tight and whispered, “Say something in French to me now.”
I pulled away again and resumed my place before the dressing table, my eyes filled with tears, my entire being overwhelmed with the sordid disarray of my life—its clandestine pleasures and futureless delights. “When will you tell her about us?” I asked, turning to face him. “When will you take that step?” I sensed him drawing back, as he did increasingly when the Subject came up.
“Only I can make that determination,” he said.
A moment passed; I struggled not to be irritated by his verbose language.
“Come here, darling,” he said, taking me in his arms, his mouth momentarily stifling my voice.
“I want to be with you always,” I murmured. “I love you so much. I want to give you a son.”
But here, even as I felt him grow hot and hard, his mouth stopped me from speaking. “Don’t ruin what we have together, darling,” he whispered between kisses. “Trust me to do what’s best, at the time that’s right for us both. You know how much I love you. You know the pleasure you give me …” He kissed my hair, my eyelids, my cheeks, lulling me to acquiescence. “I’ve never loved any woman the way I love you.” Then: “Trust me. Be with me. I adore you.”
Once more I pulled away and sat before the mirror, barely able to focus on my pale, disheveled reflection.
“Let me watch you dress,” he said gently. “I love to watch you dress.” I felt his mouth upon my nape. “Let me brush your hair.” I gazed into the mirror as he did so, feeling the hard strokes of the brush tingling against my scalp as he murmured, “I love your hair. I wish you hadn’t cut it.” He ran his fingers through my hair, pressing them against my temples as he looked at my reflection in the mirror. “I love the way it feels.”
I smiled gratefully, though still tensely at his words, and began to apply some makeup, searching my reflection all the while for a new wrinkle, a new flaw. I ran my hand across my neck, to a small purplish bruise which I proceeded to conceal with powder, and which made me recall other such bruises—in Leningrad, in Brussels—which I had also concealed, with a queer sort of pride, with fur collars or silk scarves. A year before, two years before, this wound, achieved in lust, might have thrilled me. (For others had, with Jack—a graze upon my lower lip and bruises on the small of my back that had meant forsaking certain bathing suits once, in Positano.)
I began to stand up, but his hands, upon my shoulders, held me down. I felt the rigid cold buckle of his belt and, the next moment, his hands, parting the silk folds of my kimono as he caressed my breasts. Bending over to kiss each nipple—stiff at his touch—he finally asked, “Where shall we go to dinner?”
Silently, I disengaged myself and went to choose a dress.
“Where would you like to go to dinner?” I heard him ask again.
From the innermost part of the closet I told him I would like French food.
“Anything you want, darling,” he said.
13
It was the handle of Christina von Shouse’s umbrella—the red umbrella she had carried at Hutchinson’s—that I first glimpsed after stepping off the elevator two days later. The handle was carved of ebony to resemble the head of a black swan, its cabochon sapphire eyes peering from a porcelain stand as if to question me and my intentions, and making me recall in that instant its owner’s exit from the auction the previous week—how determinedly she had moved, how firmly she had grasped the black swan handle.
Still feeling hot and disheveled from the brutal heat outside, I rang the bell to her apartment.
For many moments no one answered, so I stood alone in the hall, examining the splendid architectural drawings that lined the walls:
Quarenghi’s renderings for the tsar’s palace at Tsarkoye Selo, it seemed. Again I thought of Russell Heywood: “She has a passion for Russian history and objects,” he had told me. “Her apartment is unlike any other. Wait—you’ll see.”
A maid in a gray uniform finally appeared, opening the door with a murmured greeting and bowing her head slightly as I entered. The room where I now found myself—a stark, decisive foyer with faux stone walls—was air conditioned to an arctic chilliness. I looked around, shivering slightly as I continued to study the room. An object spot—lit on a pedestal in the opposite corner caught my eye. I walked toward it, marveling at the diminutive ivory statue of a warrior figure rearing on horseback; I wondered whether it, too, was Russian.
Still cold, I clasped my arms about me, waiting.
The maid returned. “Madam will be here in a moment,” she said, averting her eyes from mine as she led me into the drawing room.
No doubt I caught my breath as I entered that remarkable room, a room redolent of Petersburg luxe, whose walls were painted a rich Slavic blue that was strange, deep and foreign. I suddenly felt out of place in my light summer dress, though it was July, for I sensed that this was a place that had never known summers and from which the vicissitudes of weather and even time had been excluded.
Meantime, I let my eyes wander, trying to grasp all the details that contributed to the whole. Never had I felt so keenly that what I had entered was more than a room but a whole expression of being, its objects—poised on tabletops, bureaux plats, and consoles—the evidence of experience and a distinguished eye.
It was a gracefully proportioned though not vast space, its ceiling dominated by an inset of a moody blue-gray nineteenth-century “sky” with clouds softly lit by a central crystal chandelier. I continued to walk about, taking in the smooth barrel shape of the birch chairs, the portraits of stiff Russian aristocrats, the blood-red of heavy silk curtains against the blue walls and, finally, the quasibarbaric touch of the leopard-patterned carpet that knit together the whole.
Indeed, nothing that my friend Russell Heywood had told me had prepared me for the utter luxuriousness of the room, the richness of its furniture and objects. I remember thinking that Christina von Shouse must have been left a great deal more than just “a little money” (Russell’s words) by her husband—but then Russell’s concept of “a little money” had changed of late, for he had become all too accustomed to the vast new fortunes of the eighties.
I was still in the throes of this fascinated and absorbed state when Christina von Shouse finally appeared: a small yet powerful presence next to whom I felt rather too tall, awkward, and skimpily dressed. Her clothes were deceptively simple—narrow black skirt and white silk shirt—her only jewelry a strand of large, lustrous gray pearls. Again I was struck by her singular profile, at once delicate and feral, and by the way she radiated self-possession and control, the sort that comes from having known the darker side of life.
Greeting me and shaking my hand, she said with a solid look,
“How good to meet you.” Then: “You’re not at all what I expected. I would have thought you much older from your voice on the telephone. And from your writing.” She smiled, the edges of her mouth, precisely lined in matte blue-red lipstick, turning up slightly. “But then life is full of such surprises.” Her voice was low, with a hearty vibrato unexpected in such a frail-looking woman. “Come,” she said to me. I noticed her hands, with their red-lacquered nails—capable hands adorned with a single heavy gold ring inset with a scarab in carnelian.
