Читать книгу Awake and Rehearse - Louis Bromfield - Страница 5

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WHEN I knew her she was an old, old woman with a face that was lined, white and transparent. There seemed to be a kind of illumination behind the thin high cheek-bones, but it must have been a purely material illumination, for there was never anything spiritual about Miss Wannop. She was dry as an old bone.

All her life she took the most exquisite care of her skin. Her toilette frequently took as long as two hours, and even as a very old woman she treated herself as if she had been a great beauty whose duty it was to guard the treasure God had given into her care. Yet she was not a beauty and never could have been, even in her youth. Her nose was too thin, her temples too pinched and her mouth too small and narrow. She did have the look of what one expects a lady to be and she took pride in that look of breeding and in the end it helped her more than all her money to deceive people and so to gain those things which she valued to the exclusion of friendship, of blood relationship, even of human warmth.

All these things I learned after her death, from the woman who for eleven years was her maid and who is now the wife of my maître d’hôtel. With this woman Miss Wannop has remained a kind of obsession. She would rather discuss Miss Wannop than talk of any other subject on heaven or earth.

The odd thing was how Miss Wannop came by that queer, pinched, ladylike look, for one grandfather had been a butcher in Brooklyn and the other a ship’s chandler on the wharves of West Street. It was the butcher who, having embarked late in life upon a wholesale trade in meat, laid the foundations of the great fortune which in the end was put to such strange uses by Miss Wannop.

I met her through a creature called the Marquis de Vestiglione. He is a shabby, threadbare little man, whose only claim to celebrity lay in the fact that he had once been the husband of a famous beauty of the Seventies in Paris. The lady married him because she needed a cocu who would provide a certain screen of respectability in return for the notice that came to him as the consort of so notorious a character. That fact rather explains the gentleman. He was the kind of weak man who enjoys being seen in the company of well-advertised strumpets. He lived upon money given his wife by her lovers, and when she died he dropped out of the world, completely forgotten, a penniless and cuckold nonentity.

He had many rather shady ways of finding money to feed and lodge himself, and one of them was to go about the country picking up bits of old furniture which later he sold to shops or, through the medium of one or two ancient acquaintances of his late wife, to rich Americans. My father collected porcelaine de Saxe and so he came to know the Marquis de Vestiglione. It was after my father’s death that I received a note from him written in a mincing and servile style with all the flourish of handwriting that was genteel and elegant in the Seventies. He wrote that a friend of his, a certain Miss Savina Wannop (an American lady who had lived so long in Paris that she was really French) had an interest in porcelaine de Saxe and had heard of my father’s collection. She was very rich, he added, and in case I cared to dispose of the collection, I would be able to sell it to her at an excellent price.

“I believe,” he continued, “that I am the person to aid you, as I have had some experience as a connoisseur of these things [he carefully avoided using the obvious term “dealer”] and would know the true value of your collection. The commission could, of course, be arranged later.

“Miss Wannop,” he wrote, “knowing your position in the world, is eager that this should not be simply a commercial affair. Having lived so long among us, she understands the delicacies of such a transaction between people of our class. Therefore, if you are interested, she asks if you would care to join us at the Ritz for tea on Thursday, so that she may be presented. She lives at the Ritz. I will be waiting for you in the hall on the Place Vendôme side at five.”

The affectation of the note amused me as well as certain of its observations, especially the one concerning the delicacy of transactions between people of our class, because in affairs of business there is no class in France. When it comes to buying or selling something, duchesses and concierges in France are exactly the same.

And it struck me as odd that I had never encountered a lady who had lived so long in Paris and who was so rich and had so great a respect for the amenities of the best society. My mother was American and in my youth we had many Americans in the house. The name of Miss Wannop did, however, have a faintly familiar ring, and its sense of familiarity grew more tormenting as the day of the tea approached. It would not leave me in peace and I found myself repeating in the night, “Miss Wannop, Miss Savina Wannop, Miss Wannop ...” And then suddenly in the middle of the night I knew why I knew the name but not the lady. It was one of those names which appeared regularly in social columns of the Paris Herald.

While my mother was alive the columns had been a source of amusement to us. Day after day there had always appeared the same list of names. Their bearers appeared to live always in a round of mad gaiety. To judge from the columns of the Herald, these same people went from one entertainment to another, sometimes to as many as four teas or receptions or charity bazaars in a single day. We knew all the names, yet we knew none of the people. It was a strange world made up of my mother’s country people and French people like the Marquis de Vestiglione. It was a world that seemed to exist in a vacuum, and each individual in it appeared to have what you would call a press agent. They were always present at paid entertainments.

One of the names had been that of Miss Savina Wannop. We remembered it because it was such an odd name. I could not recollect having seen it lately, but since my mother died I had given up reading the column. The next morning I picked up the Herald, and there miraculously I found it at once.

Among those present at the unusually brilliant entertainment and ball given last night at the Ritz for the Benefit of the Russian Orphans in the Crimea were the Marquis de Vestiglione and Miss Savina Wannop.