Wakefield hall, p.22
Wakefield Hall, page 22
She’s disgruntled and nervous (though tries not to show it); pours herself a drink (vodka on the rocks), then asks if I’d like some. I say no thanks.
She excuses herself for a moment (goes into bedroom), while I continue to look around. In one corner, there’s a chilling study of a dispirited nude, in charcoal. No books, but lots of CD’s near a daunting black stereo system: David Bowie, Talking Heads, B52’s. Magazines on art deco table before sofa: Fortune, Business Week, Forbes, Interview, Runner’s World, and The Wall Street Journal, of course. (The last anchored with a pair of dark sunglasses and a half-eaten Tiger’s Milk protein bar.) I marvel at this type of mind, as well as the capacity to think in numbers and make vast sums of money. Friends on Wall Street tell me she is phenomenally talented at what she does—trading municipal notes—and generally recognized as a rising star at Goldman. The fact that she is Cassel’s stepdaughter has not been unhelpful, of course. She returns from the bedroom, eyes brighter, sits down on white sofa, still nursing vodka, and kicks off her shoes. I wonder if she’s nervous (this she would be horrified to admit). Picks up her “shades” on top of the Journal and holds them, folded up tightly in one hand, watching as I adjust the tape recorder. Then she lights a cigarette and begins to smoke.
Just as I am about to pose first question, the phone rings. She gets up to answer it. Doesn’t say hello, but, “Yes,” in low, impatient voice. It’s her secretary or someone from her office, I gather. During the next few minutes I listen with fascination:
“Tell the bastard to sell.”
Pause. Under her breath: “Shit.” Another pause. “Of course it’s do-able.”
Pause. “Okay, sell at fifty.” Pause.
“Tell him to leave it to me—unless he wants to fuck it up.”
“Okay. Done deal. Just get the paperwork done ASAP. I’ll check
in later. Gotta go.” Slams down phone. Returns. Sits down, curling legs (sheer black stockings) beneath her, proceeds to sip vodka and smoke. Then she looks at me with a cryptic smile, her almond-shaped eyes steely, impatient.
“Everything okay?” I ask her.
“Sure.” She’s calm, with no vestige of the harsh phone conversation. As if it belonged to another being.
“So where do we begin?” she says, already trying to control the thrust of the interview (which I’d expected she would).
I ask her to tell me her first memory of Joanna.
“Okay,” she says, looking up at ceiling, thinking, the next moment turning to me with a querulous, childlike smile. “I was never very good at this.”
I ask what she means.
“Talking about the past. Myself. Joanna. You know what I mean.
It’s like being shrunk.”
I smile. “Not quite. You’re not lying down, for one thing!” Then, facetiously, “Of course, if it would make it easier …”
She rolls her eyes, head bobbing slightly as she begins to reflect.
“Okay, okay. When did I first meet Joanna … When I was six or so. Just before she married my father. We went to see her rehearse—it was Christmastime. She was in Midsummer Night’s Dream at Stratford, that was it. I just remember sitting in the dark theater, watching her onstage. For hours. With Christina and her daughter.”
I think of Christina’s description of taking the little girls to the theater. “Joanna was in costume?” I ask.
“Yes. She played Titania. You can imagine. It must have been a dress rehearsal.”
“And then you went to see her backstage?” “Yes.”
“And what do you remember of that—being backstage with her for the first time?”
“A mess. I mean her dressing room was a mess. I remember that.”
“Disorder, you mean?”
She nods, stifling a yawn as she stretches out her legs on the sofa.
“Messy. Clothes around, a lot of mirrors. Makeup all over a dressing table. Cigarettes crushed into jars of cold cream. She had white cold cream all over her face when we walked in. I think I was probably scared shitless. She looked like a ghost.”
I try to imagine Rosalind as a little girl, wondering what she was like before she had embraced this tougher self—the plump little girl intent on an abacus that Christina had described. “Did you watch Joanna often at rehearsal?” I asked.
“Yes. I’d go there with my nanny. Or with Christina and Alexandra—her daughter. We’d sit there for hours. Sitting there, in the darkness, watching Joanna at dress rehearsals.”
“And your father?”
“He worked very hard. Didn’t see him much.”
“When did he die?”
“When I was twelve.”
“And you stayed with Joanna?” “There wasn’t much of a choice.” “Until she married David?”
“Right.” She smirks. “I came with the marriage, so to speak.”
“And were you ever close to her, to Joanna?”
She pauses. “For a moment, maybe.” Her expression is both implacable and wounded. “She was one very fucked up woman,” she says suddenly. Abruptly moves her legs as she bends over to sip her drink.
“In what way fucked up?”
“In every way. She wasn’t exactly the dream stepmother.”
I say nothing in response. “But I gather you got close to David?”
“Yes.”
“And you came to love Wakefield?”
“It’s okay.” But here it was hard for her to dissemble—for her attachment to the house is real, and deep.
“I assume you’ll inherit the house,” I say quietly.
“Probably.” A pause. “I haven’t really thought about it.”
But I continue to prod her. “Joanna had no children, and David’s son has been disinherited. Who else would inherit it?”
“You never know. Maybe David will donate it to NYU.” Her expression is acid at the mention of one of Cassel’s pet charities. “I’ve never thought about it,” she repeats after a pause.
I don’t believe this for a moment, and continue to press her: “You mean you’ve really never thought about it?”
She shrugs her shoulders. “It’s just a house. I can buy my own house.”
“But not that house.” The more she tries to deny her feelings, the more I feel her attachment to Wakefield: she has no children, no lover that I know of. Only her stepfather, and the house.
“I don’t like accepting things from people. I don’t like owing anybody anything,” she says after a moment. “I’ve always made my own money. Bought my own stuff.” She seems restless again; as she lights another cigarette, I notice her ring—a large gold ring, inset with a ruby: I assume it was bequeathed to her by Joanna.
I mention the ring and ask her if it was indeed Joanna’s.
“Yes,” she says warily. “How do you know?”
“I’ve looked up the will.”
“The will,” she murmurs to herself, smoking again.
“The letters and the things left at Thistleton which Joanna was so specific about—have you any idea why?”
“None. Except that she was pretty weird those last years. Going after strange men—workmen, David’s friends, anybody. Obsessed with the maze. Spending money like crazy. Paranoid about losing control. Irrational. In every way.” And then, “Who knows?”
I tell her I know that David and Joanna had come to lead separate lives, that they seemed to have had a falling out at one point. I ask Rosalind if she knows why.
“Maybe he got tired of coddling her,” she replies. “You know—the stage fright and all that crap. She wasn’t acting any more, she was just screwing around—with other men, with David’s money.”
“And so David had affairs …”
“Could you blame him?” she says fiercely, with a flash of her dark eyes. “The awful thing is that David really loved her—would have done anything for her—and she just treated him like dirt. Once she got what she wanted, of course.”
She pauses, considering this a moment while she drags on her cigarette; then she looks at me slyly: “Maybe she refused to suck his dick. Literally and figuratively.” Another sardonic glance. “But I’m getting a little crude for you,” she says, baiting me. “Wouldn’t want to shock the biographer.”
“Not at all,” I reply coolly, noting that she looks almost disappointed at my reaction to her swearing. I ask what she means by sucking his dick figuratively.
“You know—the wife thing,” she replies, raising an eyebrow.
“What most women do.” She pauses. “That’s why I’ve never been interested in marriage. The idea of being a nurse never appealed to me. Never was the Florence Nightingale type.” She smiles to herself, her eyes still upon me.
“But you seem to take care of your stepfather very well,” I
remark.
“Yes—but that’s my choice. No one’s forcing me to. No contract.”
I ask how long after their marriage Joanna and David had begun to use separate bedrooms.
“A year or so,” she says, adding, “The dirty secret of most marriages is how little sex there is.” Then, slyly: “But that’s something you should be an expert on, right?”
She catches me off guard—and knows it—with this oblique reference to Jack and his marriage to Alice; the fact that she’s aware of my affair upsets me, though I try not to show it. Instead, I carefully pose the next, crucial, question. “I’ve heard Joanna wrote a letter to David, a letter to be given him after her death.” I watch her expression as it seems to darken perceptibly. “Is there any truth to that?”
“Only if you believe vicious rumors,” she replies at once, with controlled fury. “People will say anything. You know New York.”
I resist the impulse to press further, knowing it will only antagonize her and jeopardize my chance of learning more. Besides, her face and her tone of voice are revealing enough. Instead I ask: “And your own relationship with David?”
“Good. Always has been.”
“Tell me about it.”
“We’ve always gotten along well. We have things in common—business, the market—things Joanna never understood. Maybe he’s proud of my career.” Then, under her breath: “Christ.” She has knicked her black stocking with her finger; a run speeds up her leg, a ladder of pale flesh from calf to thigh.
Rearranging her legs, she looks up at me with an expression of annoyance—fidgeting gestures, a deep sigh.
I ask what the matter is. “This interview, that’s what,” she says belligerently. “Haven’t you got enough about Joanna?”
No, I say, I haven’t. Not yet. “What else comes to mind when you think of Joanna?”
She ponders this, her eyes elsewhere as she distractedly smokes.
“Singing for her supper,” she says after a moment.
I ask what she means.
“When she married David,” she says, “I was fifteen.”
The circuitousness of her answer is not lost on me. “It was a very small, private ceremony, I’ve heard.”
“Tasteful.” Her expression is spiteful. “That was the word most often used to describe it. They spent a couple of nights in New York before going to Europe. I stayed at the apartment, too. I remember once I got up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water, and I heard them—I mean” her mouth tightens, “I heard Joanna singing for her supper.” The last words uttered in a near hiss.
I ask again what she means exactly, even though I’m aware this will exasperate her.
“What do you think I mean?” is her infuriated response. “They were having sex, making love—what else do you want me to call it? And Joanna was making all this noise, moaning, calling his name—a performance like any other.” She smiles sarcastically. “A private rendition of As You Like It.”
“What did you mean by moaning?” I interject.
Her voice is caustic: “What did you think I meant?”
“Moans of pleasure?” I ask, noting the vehemence of her reaction.
“Or— ’ ”
“Pleasure, obviously,” she retorts. “Or whatever passed for that with Joanna.”
“Why did you say singing for her supper?”
“Because that’s what she was doing. She married him for money, for security, for all the reasons that women marry, and then—well, she had to do her bit.”
“And that included satisfying David in bed?”
“Apparently.” She pauses. “The shitty part about it was that David actually loved her. Would have done anything for her. Just like my father! And the moment Joanna knew David was caught, she became restless. She had played that part—wife of David Cassel—and then she grew tired of it. On to a new part, a new audience.”
“Do you think you might possibly be too hard on her?”
“No. Why?”
“Wasn’t she kind to you—ever?”
“Sure, she gave me some attention. Told me what to wear. What men liked. Showed me all the jewels her lovers had given her.” A bitter expression crosses R’s face as she begins to reminisce: “I remember one time—I must’ve been sixteen—when I came into her bedroom in the city. She’d taken out all her jewelry—boxes and boxes of the stuff on her bed—” here Rosalind slyly imitates Joanna’s precise, slightly high-pitched English accent: “ ‘Come and look, Rosalind, at my treasures. I’ll let you borrow them one day.’ ”R pauses, brow furrowed, as she resumes in her own voice: “Then she held up a bracelet, a necklace, some earrings. ‘I only slept with the man twice, can you imagine, before he gave me this necklace! You can’t imagine the thrill I felt when I opened this box and found—what did he call it?—‘Everlasting gems for my everlasting love!’ She laughed as she threw the necklace on the bed.” R pauses. “I remember I felt sick.”
Rosalind’s gaze has turned inward; a moment passes before I feel her snapping back into her previous self. “But I wasn’t her real daughter, after all,” she continues brusquely. “You might have thought she would have welcomed a stepchild, especially since—but no, I was always just a burden to her.” She lights another cigarette.
“What do you mean when you said she might have welcomed a stepchild, ‘especially since’?”
“Don’t know. She’d had a child once, a boy, a long time ago—the baby died right after he was born, and I think she always felt guilty about it.”
“She told you that?”
“Once. Yes.”
“Nothing else?”
“Nothing else.” Pause. “She wasn’t exactly someone who’d let it all hang out. Her feelings, I mean.”
I ask about Christina von Shouse.
“What exactly do you want to know?”
“What do think of Christina?”
“Shrewd. Would have been a good trader.”
“You’re probably right,” I answer, smiling at the idea. And then: “What about your relationship with her?”
“I don’t dislike her. But I don’t trust her, either. Like a lot of people in this town.”
“Explain—”
“Because she used David. Used Joanna to get to him for money. She’s always lived beyond her means—would have married David if she’d had half a chance.” She paused to drag on her cigarette. “Christina was the only person really close to Joanna,” she volunteers for once. “Who really understood her.”
“Was she jealous of Joanna, do you think?”
“Who knows? Helped a lot with Wakefield, though—that was part of her bond with Joanna.”
“Helped with the decoration?”
“Yes. Among other things.”
“And Lawrence Brandt?”
“They never got along—Christina and Larry, I mean.”
“Why?”
“Larry thought she was a bad influence on Joanna. Christina knew it—that Larry had told Joanna and David how he felt.”
I ask Rosalind how she would describe the friendship between the two women.
“Christina had a knack for making herself indispensable—in Joanna’s life, I mean,” R considers this a moment, her unkempt hand moving along the run in her stocking. “Joanna couldn’t do without her, even though Christina used to annoy her. She even told me that—Joanna did. ‘Tina gets on my nerves, but I can’t manage without her,’ she’d say. There was the way Christina worshiped the acting—the Shakespeare and all that stuff. It fed Joanna’s ego. Almost amused her at times to see this woman so subservient. So adoring. She liked having that power over her, I guess—just as she did over David.”
“What did Christina get out of it?”
“She liked the association with Joanna—a famous woman, a stage actress. Having influence over her. You’d be surprised how some people will suck up to an artist! Christina was just there—always there. It began when Joanna was acting—she’d help with her lines, her costumes, her makeup, that kind of thing. She’d gush over Joanna’s performances, but she could also be critical. In her own way.” R. stops, puts her hand to her mouth as if tempted to bite her nails, but refrains. “I remember once after a performance—can’t remember which one—we went backstage afterward, Christina and Alexandra and I, to see Joanna. The first thing Christina said to Joanna was, ‘We forgot the white, didn’t we, Joanna?’ I wondered what she meant. I asked Joanna; I remember she looked nervous. ‘The white pencil,’ she told me, ‘I always use it to line the inside of my eyes—it makes them look bigger.’ She’d forgotten to do it that night, you see, but there was Christina to remind her!
“And then, another time, I think it was Hedda Gabler, we went to see Joanna afterward. For once she was happy with her performance. ‘It really worked tonight, didn’t it, Tina?’ she said. ‘Yes,’ Christina said. ‘But can you do it again?’ I’ll never forget the expression on Joanna’s face. It was the only time I almost felt sorry for her.
“But in a way Christina’s hold on Joanna got stronger after the acting stopped—then she was really indispensable! ‘If I ever return to acting, it will be because of Tina,’ I remember Joanna saying. Then came the New York life with David—you know, Christina helping Joanna with all the things that didn’t come so naturally to her.” A pause. “I mean, the plotting came pretty easily—for men, for money, for fame—but not the other stuff. The houses, the clothes—‘That’s Christina’s domain,’ she’d say. ‘She’s so refined in that way.’ She was very big on refinement, Joanna was. At least at a certain stage of her life.” Here R. smirks; then an aside as she crushes out her cigarette:
