Nothing was untouched. Nothing was left. Papers that added to the train of history curled and crackled into ash. Paintings shimmered and crackled on the walls before they caught fire and fell into the inferno. Whole sets of French porcelain cracked and slid off their burning shelves. Everything that could burn did burn, and everything that was inflammable melted into lifeless lumps, unrecognizable.
And all it took was three dollars’ worth of gas and one kitchen match. So cheap, Armageddon.
The firemen stood by, smoking, as the roof beams caught and cracked and the giant roof collapsed. It was no longer a house, or even a building, just a patch of smoke and flame that could be seen all the way to Port Royal.
It burned all day, through the magnificent sunset, the winds sending fire everywhere. Fire companies came from as far away as Richmond, but there was nothing, nothing to do except smoke cigarettes and talk about other fires, and companions lost to flames, and children burned to death in tenant farmer shacks, after which a silence fell, for the children, for their brave companions, heroes who lived forever in their hearts, myths made entirely of fire.
In Richmond, Clarence and Priscilla sedately shimmied in a coloreds-only nightclub, and then went back to their hotel and made love the way people do who’ve been married for twenty-seven years, gently, sweetly, with complete knowledge of each other’s bodies.
Diana, the debutante of the century, eternal widow to a boy she hardly knew, stood in her big window in Tiny House and watched it all. Occasionally a fleck of ash or fire would land on her roof, and she would panic that her little house would go up in flames, but they bounced off, lost their heat, and fell harmlessly to the ground, and she knew she was safe.
The fire burned for three days, and smoked for three weeks. After that the scavengers came. She watched as they picked through the ashes, hoping to find a fork or a teaspoon or a plate. Scattered in the ashes were Rose’s big rings, and pins, and these were the prizes, and big shouts went up as each one was found. The others looked for weeks, and for years people would come occasionally to look for things that were not there. For things that had been consumed by a fire beyond heat, an inferno that left nothing in its passing.
They were looking at her, her family. Their faces asked only this: Why? And she had no answer except this: It was time. She was the daughter of time, and all the clocks had stopped. It was too much to bear. The grief. The weight of history.
She could live in luxury for the rest of her life. Clarence and Priscilla, their lips sealed, would take care of her. They would ask no questions, and tell no tales.
No tales. No tales except this: It begins with a house, and it ends in ashes.
And this: Love burns.
Epilogue
COLOR AND LIGHT and dirt and water. But mostly water. That’s what everything is made of. And you poke through these to find some undiscovered remnant of the past, a hopeless task. The house burned down more than fifty years ago. Hundreds, even thousands, have picked through this sodden landscape of ash. How could there be even the slightest remnant left?
In New York, where you live and work, people are sitting down to lunches composed mainly of hope, matter created out of nothing. They glitter. They do deals with a flutter of an eye. Their clothes fit smartly; every woman’s wrist glitters with expensive bangles, watches that cost as much as cars, while you bat away black flies, hoping that you will find something, anything.
The only way to find something in the well-trodden battlefield of tragedy is to turn over every stone until the scorpion sinks its curved stinger into your wrist. You have to leave the part of the earth that everybody else has looked at, hoping to find the famous emerald, the essential Meissen. Because what you’re looking for is not here, hasn’t been here for decades.
Ash had the area fenced off, locked, that was the first thing, while the smoke still rose, burning the eyes, and sent in a team of private investigators to look for something, anything, that might have survived. Looking, of course, for her, the sizzled corpse of his mother. But she wasn’t there.
The ash was so hot it melted the firemen’s boots. It curled the random silver fork that was left behind, curled it into grotesque shapes that bore no resemblance to anything that might have revealed its original purpose.
Ash kept his guilt hidden, and stood silent as the bones were found. There had been people in the house, but who? How many?
And he raged. She didn’t have to do what she did. The last of her cruelties, her crimes.
He forgot his own crimes. He wanted only money. Her money. His father’s money. What should have been his. He sought her lawyers, her accountants, but there was nothing, no note to give him any comfort. Then the big shock. Almost all the money Ash had given her had disappeared along with her. There was no trace of the fortune that he had given back to her.
His rage became unbearable; the last of his love turned to hatred, a light switch suddenly switched off. He abandoned Saratoga and never went back. He moved to Richmond for good, a lawyer now, seeking love in dark alleys in the dead of night. He bought the most magnificent house on Monument Avenue. In the course of his ordinary life, he became prosperous in his own right and amused his friends by saying frequently, after his second old-fashioned, “Someday I’ll be very, very rich,” after which his friends would howl with glee.
Ash did manage to marry, in his forties, one of those mariages blancs so common in the South, and even produced two boys, Powell and Page, who grew up completely ignorant of the past and their place in it, but at least he had done his duty in making sure the line did not end with him.
But you haven’t come about Ash, whose history you have learned through dozens of phone calls, whose name suddenly took on an ironic twist that his friends never failed to remark on. He died of a sudden aneurysm about ten years ago, not long after he finally had Diana declared dead.
She is here, somewhere. You can feel it. You know it beyond knowing. She is off the beaten track, here, deeply here, everywhere around him, but with so much land, five thousand acres, which track do you follow?
Then you see it. It’s not a path. Most people would never have spotted it. It’s just a place three feet wide that’s less overgrown than the land on either side. It could be deer, but you follow it anyway. Then you smell it. Something living. Somebody cooking. Somebody moving from room to room. The smell of color and light and water and dirt. The path disappears. You hack through with your machete knife, swinging wildly with excitement.
It can’t be her. It’s somebody, but it can’t be her. She would be ninety-nine years old.
Then it’s in front of you, surrounded and concealed by a high hedge of privet. A slate roof, still wet from the night’s drizzle. Beneath the roof, there is life.
There is an opening in the privet, a mazelike way through the density of the shrubbery, and you follow it, until it opens on a solid, square brick house with a woman looking out of the window, a pistol pointed straight at you.
You feel foolish, but you raise your hands, just like in the movies. She motions with the gun to move to the right, around the side of the house, and you do, until you come to a thick door, where you wait while the three dead bolt locks are laboriously opened, and then the door springs wide, and there she is, the famous Diana Cooke Copperton Cooke.
She is calm, and incredibly old, although her face is almost unlined. You feel as if you have found the Hope Diamond.
“Good afternoon. I’m—”
“I know exactly who you are. You’re a reporter come to find me, like so many others. Except you have. They never did. That’s worth something. For what it’s worth, which isn’t much, if you ask me. I have a gun pointed at your head. I have no idea how to use it. Where does that put us?”
“Is it loaded?”
“I think so. I don’t really remember.”
“Is there a lot you’ve forgotten?”
“I remember everything. Everything. The tiniest detail. Like in a photograph. I remember everythin
g.”
“Will you tell me?”
“I guess so. Perhaps. But you have to make a promise.”
“What’s that?”
“First come in. Where are my manners? I haven’t seen anybody in so long I don’t know how to act anymore.” She turns and leads the way into the spectacular yellow room, fallen into disrepair now, but still remarkable.
She is wearing jodhpurs and riding boots, a white linen shirt, and a tattered Chinese court robe, bloodred, embroidered with gold dragons; the peculiar smell of age fills the room. Her long gray hair is worn in two braids down her back. She sits grandly in what is clearly her favorite chair, surrounded by books and Turkish cigarettes and an ashtray from Hermès.
You sit across from her. “It’s a beautiful room,” you say.
“It’s the most beautiful room in America. Nothing has changed in fifty years.”
“Who takes care of you? Cleans? Makes dinner?”
“I thought I would learn to cook, after Clarence and Priscilla died. A tragic mistake. I don’t know. There’s a girl from town. I don’t even know her name. She comes. She does what I want. And she keeps her tongue in her mouth. She knows it’s the most important thing. I pay her an exorbitant amount, mainly for that reason. She broke so many things I told her to keep away from cleaning. Her food is horrible. Nobody knows how to cook anymore. I would kill for a ham biscuit. But she knows how to keep a secret, as I hope you do. Give me your word.”
“I promise.”
She has been twirling the pistol in her hand when it suddenly goes off, causing you to scramble behind the sofa.
“Oh, that’s how it works. Put the promise in writing.”
“First put the gun away.”
She does, stiffly, in a drawer, and you write your pledge, and you both sign it.
“I’ll tell you the whole story, but you have to know it’s rather long and rather complicated, so you have to listen closely, because I’m not going to repeat so much as a single word. It’s about love and beauty and death. But then, isn’t everything?
“Poor you. You come all this way to find the thing that everybody’s been looking for all these years—debutante of the century, hah!—and you find it, her, me, and you leave with nothing, not so much as a teaspoon.
“People have always wondered how it happened, but I did it. I burned down the house. I was possessed with a cruelty so immense it wasn’t even a choice. And I buried Gibby’s medals in the family graveyard, along with that library fellow.”
“Lucius Walter.”
“Was that his name?”
She talks through the brilliant sun of afternoon, the jeweled brilliance of the late sun on the river, the blue mist of evening’s approaching.
At sunset she rises, and makes two stiff old-fashioneds, never slowing her narrative as the ice cubes clink in the crystal glasses, the color of the bourbon matching the shining amber of the moon’s rising and its settling into the night, the sky pocked with stars, her voice strong, pausing from time to time to absorb what she is saying, as though she has never heard it, showing you the ring and the key on the golden chain, and the jeweled child’s eye, making more cocktails before leading you through the house, room by room, explaining every artifact, showing you her bedroom, the black-green she so long ago demanded, showing which side of the bed she sleeps on and which side is Gibby’s. She tells her story, and the story of her love for Gibby, two hearts entwined, the rose-colored lightbulbs turned on one by one as they pass, and you are aware of the cruelties of being left alone in time’s boat, and the actual one you hope is still waiting for you at the ruined dock.
Her voice is tender, another layer of softness wrapping itself around a grief that has never faded or left her for a single moment in half a century.
Sometimes, you think, even in the midst of the color and the light and the water and the earth, in the greenery and the flutter of the bird’s wing, sometimes there is no appeasement. Sometimes you are left in a small life made of genius and sadness, and that’s all you get.
It’s late. She is ninety-nine years old. She will live out the century into which she opened her eyes. Her sins will be forgiven. You forgive them, right this minute. Your silence will be unbroken. You will not splash it in the paper or whisper it in your lover’s ear.
You will not talk about her exquisite house. You will not talk about her standing firm at the doorway, gun in hand. You will not talk about the fact that, at ninety-nine, she looks sixty, or how she keeps the Olympic pool heated year-round and swims fifty laps every day.
You will, in fact, not talk about her at all, not even at your own clever dinner parties over the caviar soufflé.
Some secrets are born secrets, and they’re meant to stay that way. She has built a completely invisible life, possible for her only because she’s enormously wealthy. You couldn’t build this life. Only millions of dollars can build it.
What will you write about? The tragedy of love and its aftermath, nothing that hasn’t been explored before. The ladies on Park Avenue with their lapdogs and breakfast trays, opening first to the style section in their morning newspapers, will think they have learned something new, something tragic. They will never have heard of Diana Cooke Copperton Cooke and her mysterious disappearance. They will marvel at her archived pictures, the cloche hat with the diamond swallows, the famous jewels, the magnificent graduated pearls, unavailable today, the Beatons, the Horsts. The Man Ray. The iconic pictures, the one sad fallacious novel that was written about her in the sixties. But nothing of her today, two days ago, with her girlish braids, her genteel, still gamine, boyish ways, and the Persian rug covering the safe in the floor in which all the unbelievable jewels lie. The tea dress she changed into, Chanel, a dress older than most of your readers, priceless. You will describe the pin—the child’s eye surrounded by diamonds—and they will come back into vogue; you have that power.
But they will have learned nothing, even though your editor, who never has a kind word, will think it a masterpiece of journalism, and miss the story that floats right before his nose before it’s gone. It will be the most e-mailed story for two whole days, and then he will find some new way to make you miserable.
You stand at the door. On a whim, you take her hand and kiss her ring. You adore her. You’ve never seen, there has never been, anyone like her. And there never will be again. It is no longer possible to be Diana Cooke Copperton Cooke. You ask if you can come again. She pauses, and thanks you, but says she doesn’t think that’s such a good idea.
You start to leave, into the starlit darkness.
She says, very softly, “No, please. Forgive my rudeness. Come whenever you like. As long as you remember I am an invisible old woman. I am a ghost. Even to myself. ” And then she softly closes the door and locks it.
And for the days and months and years and decades following the great fire, you, who live in your safe house that will never catch fire, with your glowing children who sleep safe in their beds and get into the college of their choice, you who marry and lead a married life of adoration and then betrayal, of longing and eventual comfort, with your two immaculate cars in the drive, who go on vacations to the same place every year, you want to go, but you don’t.
You want to go because you want to ask what happened after, even though you know the answer.
There is no after.
Acknowledgments
SO MUCH KINDNESS. So many coronets. This is for them. For Richard Abate, agent superior, and Lynn Nesbit, dear friend and helpmate. For Sara Nelson, who made me work harder than I thought possible, and cherish every minute. She is both diligent and brilliant, and she has my eternal thanks.
For Ruth Geer and Anna Fugaro. Ruth for generosity beyond what should be legal, and Anna for fifty years of unwavering friendship and cheer. We’ll be together in heaven.
For Chuck Adams, who has turned more scribblers into writers than any man in America. Our gratitude stretches from here to the far Antipodes.
For
Joe Nelms, a brilliant writer and a dear friend.
For Lynn Grossman, without whom I would never have written a word.
For all those who reached out a generous hand in kindness when my circumstances were dire, you have my heart.
For Dana Martin Davis, who never lets me stray from the biblical way. Except in Paris, when she made me buy those sneakers.
For Stephen Carriere, my real father, and Marie de Premonville, my brilliant translator.
For all these, and so many more, I wish I could have been stronger, braver, kinder.
But I promise you this, as I put a coronet on every head, I did my best for you.
About the Author
ROBERT GOOLRICK is the author of the bestselling novels A Reliable Wife, Heading Out to Wonderful, and The Fall of Princes, and the acclaimed memoir The End of the World as We Know It. He lives and works in Baltimore.
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Also by Robert Goolrick
The Fall of Princes
Heading Out to Wonderful
A Reliable Wife
The End of the World as We Know It