his bony backside, this way, then that.
‘Sometimes,’ he continued finally, ‘I wonder if I know more about these fashionable individuals than they even quite know themselves . . . We are quite the fast set at The Box, you will discover. Oh, you will be most amused.’
‘And if you’ll excuse me for asking,’ interjected Madeleine, suddenly, ‘only I’m wondering – what’s the mistress like?’
–Ha. And if I had known the answer to that – would I have stopped the car?
Would I have thrown myself out onto that racing drivers’ rejected MotorParkway right there and then, hitched a lift with whatever vehicle came along, hauled my father from his delightful lunch at Sherry’s, and taken whatever employment anyone offered me? Perhaps.
She destroyed my father – what there was left of him to destroy. And she haunts me still – there’s barely a day goes by I don’t think of her, of the part I played or didn’t play, of what I saw and said, and didn’t see and should have said . . .
On the other hand, without her, I would never have befriended Rudy. Or ever have travelled to Hollywood. Nor Rudy either. Imagine that! Then who would the readers of Photoplay be drooling over at nights? Perhaps, in spite of everything, I should be grateful to her. Well, and maybe I am, but I hope she burns in any case – if not at Sing Sing, then in Hell when she finally gets there.
– – –
‘What’s the mistress like?’ asked Madeleine.
And I swear Mr Hademak blushed.
Dear God – three in the morning already, and still too damn hot to sleep! I have been writing all night so my arm is swollen. And my head is burning and my eyeballs ache . . . but I can’t stop. Not yet. Not until I reach the moment where Rudy and I are there in the garden, and we are standing in silence together, listening to the music, and I am wondering about Papa, and where he is, and worrying a little about his newest infatuation, but not as much as I ordinarily would because how can I when Mr Guglielmi – Rudy – is standing so very close beside me? And I don’t believe I have ever glimpsed a more handsome, more dazzling man in all my life.
And then he turns to me and he says, ‘It’s beautiful music, isn’t it?’ And his voice – his Italian accent was much stronger then but his voice was the same: that low, dark, beautiful voice. I can feel it through me. I didn’t recognise the music. I’m not sure that I had even fully noticed it was playing. And he smiled at me, and I thought how sad he must have looked before because the smile had such an effect, as if his face had been illuminated by a thousand million electric light bulbs, and he said, ‘Do you like to dance, Jenny?’
You made me love you . . . I didn’t want to do it . . . You made me want you . . . And all the time you knew it
Rodolfo Guglielmi was a professional dancer then: a dancer-for-hire. When the papers wrote about him – because of the divorce – they called him a lot of hateful names, and of course they still do. And of course he was no angel then. He is a long way from being an angel now, I suppose. But, Hell, which of us isn’t?
When he danced it was as if he moved through a different space from the rest of us: as if the air carried him; as if he had no weight at all. So I danced with him, still in my travelling clothes, in the moonlight, and with the music seeping through the warm night air. And I thought – I remember it so clearly – I thought, This is Life! Now I am truly alive . . .
What a gorgeous, magical place is this America!
– – –
Justin Hademak said it again, as we were turning into its long drive: ‘We are quite the fast set at The Box you will discover.’ It didn’t surprise me, knowing my father and the people he normally consorted with. Actually I would have been surprised if they had been anything else.
Nevertheless there certainly wasn’t anything very fast about Mrs Blanca de Saulles that afternoon. We arrived by a side door – Mr Hademak made us tiptoe into the back lobby, and he closed the door behind us as if a lion and her cubs were sleeping on the other side.
‘Sssh!’ he ordered. We hadn’t made a sound.
Just then Mrs de Saulles herself tripped past us, like a ghost. We stood there, the three of us, fresh from our journey, huddled together in a knot. And maybe she didn’t see us. She was a vision, at any rate; quite out of place in our whitewashed servants’ lobby. Quite out of place – and a little lost, possibly, since it was the one and only time I ever saw her there.
She was dressed in the palest lilac: a shirtwaist of lace and voile and a silk skirt, ankle length, with tiny mother-of-pearl buttons. I can see her now, floating by in that ghostly way, only five or so years older than I was, with that thick, black, shiny hair pinned demurely at the nape of her neck, and those vast, dark, unhappy eyes. She looked as pale as death, as feminine and fragile as any woman I had ever encountered. I knew right then how my father would adore her.
‘Oh! Mrs de Saulles!’ whispered Mr Hademak, his great big block of a body rigid, suddenly, with the dreadful possibility of interrupting her. She continued regardless, slowly, vaguely . . . ‘Mrs de Saulles?’ he tried again.
‘Yes, Hademak?’ she said. Sighed. It was the softest voice you ever heard.
‘We are back!’
‘So it appears.’
‘This – this one – this is Miss Doyle,’ he said, pointing at me, looking at Mrs de Saulles’s feet. (Little, little feet.) ‘The portrait painter’s daughter. Just arrived from England.’
I think I bobbed a curtsy. God knows why.
‘And this is the new maid, Madeleine,’ he added. ‘She’s Irish. We took her from Ellis Island this morning.’
Mrs de Saulles spared us not a glance. She released another of her feather-sighs: a sigh I would grow quite familiar with. (She was tiny. Did I mention how tiny she was? Hardly above five foot, I should think, and so slim that if she stood sideways you could honestly hardly see her.) ‘How lovely,’ she murmured. She sounded more English than I did. ‘Lovely, lovely . . . ’ and then, slowly, she turned to continue her journey.
She was, there is no doubt about it, a truly exceptionally beautiful woman. And that, by the way, even after so many years, and whether I’m grateful to her or not, is about the only pleasant thing I have to say about her.
The Box was near Great Neck, on the Long Island Gold Coast, not far from many of the finest houses of the richest folk in America (and just directly up from where handsome Mr Scott Fitzgerald has set his new novel, of course, which I have by my bedside as I write.)
The Box was a frame house, large and quite important and very graceful, but not vast. Not quite like Mr Gatsby’s. It was painted white. There were wooden porches along the front, framed all round by wide, trellised archways which had been designed for flowers to grow along, I suppose, though there were none while I was there.
