FANNY OF THE CITY

“Her father drew a picture of her as a ballerina in mid pirouette, only he made her look like the hippopotamus in Disney’s Fantasia.  Ponderous but graceful.  Her belly followed her hips, you know? in mid swirl?  She never forgave him for that.  Later, all us grandkids and great grandkids loved it and preferred that drawing to all the others he did.  Prized possession.”

     “Who has it now?  I’ve never seen it.”

     “All those drawings, along with his other work, have been collected and stored at the museum.”

     “Will they ever be shown?”

     “I suppose so.  They keep about half a dozen of his pictures up and rotate them I think about once a year, maybe every other year.  The drawings go up in groups of ten to fifteen every once in a while.  I haven’t been there in a long time, so I don’t know when was the last time that particular drawing was shown.”

     “Too bad, I’d love to see it.  Brrr, it’s getting cold.  We should step in somewhere.”

     “There’s the coffee shop just ahead.  Want to step in there?”

     “Sure, a cup of hot cocoa would be just what the doctor ordered.  How about you?”

     “Good for me.  Here, let me get the door, and I’ll take those packages.”

     “Always the gentleman.”

     “Born that way.”

     “There, now that we’re out of the cold, tell me more about your aunt.  She wasn’t fat when the world knew her.  Whatever happened to her, I mean, for real?  We know only the legend.”

     “Oh, it was a long time ago, tragic story.  Killed herself over a man.  You know, though she was the butt of family jokes, she had no lack of men.  Men admired her.”

     “I know.  I know that story.  Everybody knows it.  What was his name?  Wasn’t he one of the City’s ‘most eligible’ bachelors?”

     “Graham Ellison.”

     “Yes, yes, I remember him.”

     “She was quite the beauty, then.”

     “That’s why I’m surprised about your telling me of that drawing.  I mean, how did she leave the family, how did she get involved with that man?  Tell me about her.  Why did the family laugh at her?”

     “Mostly because she was fat when she was a kid, and then because of her obsession with thinness.”

     “I don’t get it.  Others were heavy, too.  Your grandmother was.  Nobody laughed at her.”

     “Yea, my grandmother was the brain of the family, the ruler, the matriarch.  Everybody listened to her.  She governed.  But Fanny, now.  Her fatness was only one part of what made her brothers and sisters so cruel towards her.  I have to think how to put it without sounding like them.  You know, it wasn’t that she was slow or retarded or anything, because she wasn’t.  It was that she misread or misinterpreted just about everything just about all the time.  She seemed to live perpetually in a kind of fog.  She was, how can I say it?  Innocent?  Naïve?  Unsophisticated?  Uncynical and trusting?”

     “That’s probably what so attracted the men.”

     “I guess so, she evoked their protectiveness.  Men wanted to protect her.  She had that vulnerability, and it wasn’t an affectation.  It was real, and that’s what leant itself so much to mockery, and what got her into trouble with the family all the time.”

     “Like what kind of trouble?”

     “You know, like, when someone says something that everyone is supposed to keep hush-hush or risk hurting someone else’s feelings?  Fanny could be counted on to blurt it out if she knew about it.  But not out of meanness, you know, but just out of sheer lack of understanding.  Oh, she couldn’t be faulted, everyone knew that.  So they had to keep things from her.  Fanny knew absolutely no family secrets.”

     “She became the outsider?”

     “Oh, absolutely.”

     “Right up to the time she died?  I mean, no one intervened on her behalf?  Helped her, or tried to?

     “No, much to everyone’s shame.  Not that they felt it, you know, shame.  They didn’t.  It’s only in retrospect, when we think about her now, that we say it, you know.  Yea, they’re all gone now, so we can say it in judgment of them.  Shame on them.”

     “But the old man, the father, he was as much to blame as anyone?”

     “He was an artist.  Half the time his mind was somewhere else.  His studio was in the back of the house, and its door to outside opened on the meadow.  He used to set his easel up either near the opened door or just outside it, and that was where he lived, wearing that big floppy hat of his.  It was my grandmother who raised the kids and grandkids, who did all the chores.  My grandfather was as much one of the kids as we, the grandkids, were, though to tell the truth, he did dominate everybody and everything in that household.  His wish was law, and every need of his was tended to by someone, either by my grandmother or my mother or one of her brothers and sisters. 

     “I remember one time that tells the story perfectly.  Fanny was still a teenager, and skinny as a broomstick.  It was her job that day to wash the clothes.  In those days they didn’t have washing machines like we do today.  The machines they had had to be hooked up to the faucet at the sink to get their water, and they didn’t have a spin cycle, so the clothes had to be removed and squeezed over the sink between rollers to get the water out of them.  Fanny was filling the machine from the sink in the kitchen and had gotten distracted.  The machine had filled and water began running over the top of it.  She was gone a long time, and when she remembered what she had been doing, she ran back to the kitchen to find a flood on the floor, and it was running through the doorway and into the hall.  Well, grandfather, dressed as always in those worn black trousers held up by those idiotic yellow suspenders, comes up the hall, fresh from his studio, which didn’t have a bathroom in it.  He’s sloshing in the water and not noticing.  He goes into the bathroom, stands half an inch deep in water, sloshes out again, and back up the hallway to his studio, and never notices the flood.  Fanny watches him from the kitchen, waiting for him to explode, because grandfather did have a temper, and when he marches up the hallway to the studio, she breathes a sigh of relief and begins to mop up.  My mother was there and helped her clean up and used to tell that story so that everyone laughed themselves silly.”

     “I can’t imagine being that wrapped up in something.”

     “He was an artist.  He lived in the worlds he created, I guess.  But he was that way, you know, all the time.  He was just as unaware of the critics and the public.  He’d haul a year’s worth of work to the gallery and when the admiring crowds gathered, he was just as lost to them as he was to us.”

     “Fanny must have been a lot like him.  Did she have any talent as an artist? 

     “Funny you should say that.  No, I don’t think she had any of her father’s artistic talent, but she did have his imagination, I think.  I often said that she was her father’s daughter.  My mother used to get angry when I said that.  She didn’t like her sister, you see, and she didn’t want to think of her in any positive way at all, and saying that, you know, connected her to the ‘great man’ in a more intimate way than any of the others could claim.  I mentioned that to my uncle Harry once and he got so angry I had to skip away.”

     “I’m surprised!  From what you say, I can see why they might want to keep Fanny from family secrets, but why did they dislike her so much?”

     “Oh, you should know the answer to that!  She was her father’s daughter in the popular mind.  Her escapades made the news.  Her men were not the invisible, undistinguished clods of the masses.  She was always in the society columns, first with this guy then with that one.  Her siblings regarded her as the handicapped one, you know, the one who needed help getting through the day.  And here she was, living in a kind of glamour and notoriety that none of them could have hoped for for themselves.  That was Fanny.  Men loved her.  As her father’s daughter, she was genuinely distinguished, and my aunts and uncles hated her all the more for that.  Maybe ‘hate’ is too strong a word.  ‘Resented’ seems more like it.  They resented her notoriety and pretended they cherished their privacy.”

     “But the whole world knew Fanny.  Her suicide was a blow.  I can remember the fuss the media made over the circumstances of it.  She was a kind of icon.  I was young then, but I can remember how women wanted to look like her, have their hair done like hers, wear the kind of clothes she did.  Even now people talk of her.”

     “Yea, I find all that kind of ironic.  You know, she never did know how to dress or how to have her hair done.  She used to take my mother with her to buy clothes, and to the salon when she had her hair done.  Another reason for the resentment, I guess.  She was at least in that way a creation of my mother.  Funny, isn’t it?”

     “I didn’t know that.  I guess we shouldn’t pry into these things.  The reality is so dull in comparison with the legend.”

     “Now you’re sounding like my aunts and uncles, ha!”

     “But you, you had a special relation with her, didn’t you?”

     “I did.  I was too young to be anything more to her than someone to talk to, a mere teenager.  But she took me seriously enough to confide in.”

     “Really?  I’m all ears!  Tell me what she told you.”

     “Well, you know, I was the only one among her nieces and nephews she actually invited to her rooms in the hotel where she lived.  My brothers and my cousins, all of us, were taught to be ashamed of her, so we all mostly shunned her.”

     “But you didn’t?  You must have been a lifeline for her.  Did the family have anything to say about that?  About you being on good terms with her?”

     “Sometimes.  They’d mostly poke fun at me.  She was a source of humor for the family.  No one took her seriously.”

     “Did you like her?”

     “Of course I did.  She was really a dear, sweet lady.  She really was an innocent.  I don’t believe she ever felt a negative emotion toward anybody, and don’t you know my aunts and uncles, and even my mother, gave her no reason to feel anything but ill will towards them.  But she never once let on, to me anyway, that she felt anything but care and concern for her family.”

     “What about her father?  Did she have good feelings toward him?”

     “He really didn’t favor any of his kids.  When Fanny was young, she was fat, and he used to poke fun at her, like he did in that drawing.  But when she grew up, I think he felt a certain affection for her.  She was the only one he let take things from his studio.  She would slip in and lift something, like a thief, and sneak it to her bedroom.  He’d let her have it.  If anyone else tried that, he’d explode like a box of dynamite.”

     “Curious.  Tell me about her, about her life, about what you know happened to her.”

     “No.  I can’t tell her story like that.  Some of it is just too intimate.  And some of it I will have to imagine, though I don’t think I’d stray too far from the truth.”

     “Do you mean write it?  I hope that’s what you mean.  Yes?”

* * *

Her rooms in the hotel on Fifth Avenue were stunning.  The parquet floor of the large central room was accented with white throw rugs, and the corner couch with its rounded center piece was also white.  Behind the couch, on both walls, hung reproductions of her father’s paintings of the meadow behind her house, and in the corner, on a pedestal, was a small bronze nude she had literally stolen from her father’s studio and which her brothers and sisters would have revolted over if they knew she had it.  But they never came there, so they never knew.  In the center of the living room, situated diagonally and draped with a white yarn afghan sat a love seat, both arms curled gently upwards and padded with a golden brocade.  The doorway to the bedroom was framed by a pair of miniature fluted columns, appearing to be embedded in the wall, supporting a lintel above which was a triangular tympanum holding an image of Aphrodite.  Tables, mirrors, and her sentimental bric-a-brac filled the other spaces. 

     She was lazing in her satiny bed, luxuriating in the sensations of ease and the body of the man sleeping beside her, against which her own leg leaned.  She felt the heat of his body against her own, tended to the sensation of it, and sighed for so much happiness.  She would not get up and spoil the richness of the moment.  She would wait for him to wake, to rustle about, and throw his legs over the side of the bed.  Then she would rouse herself.  She thought of the two of them going down to breakfast and then leaving the hotel, going about whatever they planned to do that day. 

     Since she had been seeing him, they had planned their days at breakfast.  She loved the spontaneity of it, and she loved the gusto he threw into thinking about the day.  He hated being bored and had an endless supply of ideas for things to do.  She was smitten by him as she had never been by a man before.  But more, he took her seriously as a companion, a partner, in pursuing the experiences of the day.  And that lent an air of reality to what otherwise would have seemed too dreamlike, too fantastical, to be real.

     But it was the way he spoke to her, the way he had of understanding what she was thinking and continuing, almost, out loud what had been going on in her head, that opened her for the first time to the feeling of love.  She marveled at him when he divined what she was thinking.  And she marveled even more at how seriously he took her—so unlike the other men, so unlike her own siblings, who could do nothing but smirk at any idea she ever offered.  She didn’t hate her brothers and sisters.  So long as she didn’t have to think about them, she felt she could love them.

     He asked her what she thought about this or that, about the evacuation of Dunkirk or the Germans entering Paris, about the bread lines that used to run up the block and had now disappeared from all over the city, about the Brooklyn Bridge, and she always had something to say.  In spite of two years of college, she herself never realized she had opinions, but she had, and for the first time here was someone who wanted to know them, who respected them, and who shared his own with her.  He made her feel like she belonged in this life, and that her being here and now was very much the right thing.  She had always felt so out of place before, so wrong, when she was with others.  She knew, when she thought about it, that that feeling she had of being wrong in the world was caused by her siblings.  But even the men who sought her and courted her made her feel that way.  Now it was different.  She was in love.

     “Are you awake?” she heard him whisper beside her.

     “Yes,” she whispered in reply.

     He stretched and twisted himself onto his back and let his arms fall across his chest.  She felt a wave of coolness along her side as he had shifted in the bed and, in turn, shifted herself closer to him. 

     “Shall we get up?” she said in a normal tone.  “Have you thought of what to do today?  I have an idea.  I’ve been lying awake for a long time now thinking about it.  I know what I’d like to do for the rest of the week.”

     He yawned and turned on his side toward her.

     “What would you like to do for the rest of the week?” he asked softly, looking at her.

     It was that that made her love him.  That way he had of listening to her, of considering her, changed her, matured her, began, almost, to transform her into another person.

     “I thought we might go to Saratoga Springs today.  I haven’t been there since Skidmore.  I’d love to visit again and especially go stay at that old hotel.  Wouldn’t that be fun?”

     “Don’t know about the hotel.  They’re racing up there now.  But it would be fun.  We could go to the track, dressed to the nines, pick a winner, and have dinner in the clubhouse.  Sure, why not?  Let’s go.”

     He turned on his other side and threw his legs out of the bed.  As he rose and headed for the bathroom, she watched him.  Elation and the anxiety of anticipation kept her motionless, even though she wanted to run into the bathroom with him, to watch him shower and shave, put his underclothes on, then follow him out and watch him get dressed.  That was one of the things he didn’t like, but she did it anyway, and his annoyance always yielded to smiles when he caught her wide eyed stares.  But not this time.

     “Do you think it will be so crowded that we couldn’t get a room?” she shouted from the bed.

     “It usually is,” she heard him reply through the open bathroom door. 

     “Every day?” she queried.

     “No, not every day, but it often is,” he said.  “I’ll call the clerk downstairs and have him try to get rooms for us.”

     He came out of the bathroom with a towel around his neck and splotches of shaving cream on his chin and cheeks.

     They had breakfasted and talked excitedly about the races and about how lucky they were to get rooms in the Grand Union Hotel after all.  Outside, on the street in front of their own hotel, the doorman loaded their luggage into a taxi, which would take them to Grand Central for the trip to Scarborough, where they would get a car for the leisurely drive north to Saratoga.  

     “The taxi and the train are the hard part,” he said as they got into the cab.  After they got comfortably seated, he continued, “but once we have the car, we’ll be free.  We can go at our own pace, and we can share the driving.”

     “But I have never driven a car,” she laughed.

     “There’s nothing to it.  You’ll love it.  Just steer and push the gas peddle.”

     “And what about the clutch and the brakes and the gear shift?  No, dear, you do the driving, and I’ll do the looking out the window.”

     He laughed along with her and assured her she could do it if she tried. 

     Driving!  She thought about herself driving a car on the way to Saratoga.  If only her father were still alive.  She couldn’t wait to tell her nephew all about it.  She loved her nephew more than anyone, certainly more than any of her brothers and sisters.  It was not that he was an admirer, not that only, anyway.  She did appreciate it when  he expressed his feelings toward her, but there was more.  He was family.  Too often she felt like she had no family, only siblings who ridiculed her, who never spoke to her without sarcasm in their voices, sarcasm and resentment.  But her nephew dismissed them and encouraged her to dismiss them too.  Even though he was young, his being her nephew grounded her, connected her to her own history.  She was thinking about him when the taxi arrived at the station.

            A porter handled their luggage and led them to the ticket booths where they paid their fares.  Then he led them to the track.  He kept their bags on a cart which he stood beside as they sat on the bench.  Graham had bought a newspaper to fill the time while they waited for the train to come in, and she glanced at the pages along with him.  Air battles and daylight raids had begun over Britain, and Hitler had declared a blockade of the British Isles.   He put the paper down and folded it, and they talked about bombs falling on London and what they would feel like if they were falling on New York.   When the train came in, the porter took their bags up into the car and they followed.  They paid him after he stowed their bags overhead and then they took their seats.  The ride would take just under two hours once they started rolling.     

     The time passed quickly.  He asked her about her time at Skidmore, and she reminisced uneasily about the people she met, the things they did together, and the studies she poured herself into.  She studied French but had no interest in going to France or in teaching the language, so, although she succeeded at it, there came a time when she felt the futility of the whole enterprise.  And now, with the war on in Europe, she was glad she was never seduced into going to Paris, which was the goal of virtually all the others studying French at that time.  So she left Skidmore, and that part of her life came to a close.

     “How do you feel about that now?  Any regrets?” he asked.

     The gentle rocking and the clacking of the train made it seem as though she spoke from a trance.  She wore a white hat that curved over the top of her head, beneath which her brown hair curled richly upwards.  A phosphorescent green feather at the side finished the look. 

     “Maybe,” she replied, thinking about it.  “Maybe losing touch with a few people.  I regret that,” she said thoughtfully.

     “Was there a guy in your life then?  Are you thinking of him?”

     “There were guys,” she said smiling, emphasizing the plural.  “But I had a friend with whom I had become close.  She was also studying art, you know, and wanted to go to Paris in the worst way.  She latched onto me, and at first I thought she only wanted to get to know my father and was using me.  But it wasn’t so.  We became best of friends.  She was my first real friend,” she said, looking up into his eyes and putting her hand on top of his, “and until now, my only friend.  I used to think of her now and then.  She wrote me from Paris, telling me about all she was doing.  That was before the Germans marched in.  I think of her all the time now.”

     They had called ahead for the car, and a four-door touring car, a black DeSoto, glinting with chrome, was waiting for them at the station in Scarborough.  When the bill was paid, he put their bags on the back seat and they drove off, taking Route 9 north towards Albany.  Once out of town, he asked her if she wanted to try driving, and to his surprise, she said she did.

     She got behind the wheel and shifted into first gear as he told her.  The car bucked and stalled as she let up on the clutch, but she was determined, and after several more tries, she managed to get the car rolling, and he laughed and said well done.  Once she shifted into third, the car needed no other handling than what he said at first, just steering and pushing on the gas peddle.  She liked speeding up, but when cars came in the other direction, she tensed and let up on the gas.  But after a while she got used even to oncoming traffic and drove all the way to Peekskill, which took over an hour.  There, at Peekskill, they took their lunch. 

     At the rate they travelled, and with the frequency of their stops, it took them the rest of that day and most of the next to get to Saratoga Springs.  Getting around the city of Albany was a confusing nightmare, and she was glad he had taken over the driving on the second day.  But once heading north again, it was a quick drive.  Late that Friday afternoon they checked into the Grand Union Hotel, that relic of 19^th Century opulence, which they both loved, and spent a leisurely hour changing clothes, chatting about what they might do, or whom they might run into, or where they might go for the evening. 

The marble floor of the huge chandelier-lighted lobby clicked under her shoes as they entered.  In the warm yellow glow, Fanny’s slender form and impressionable face radiated such charm even the women’s glances lingered.  She wore a dark green silken shift with thin shoulder straps, which bared her shoulders, but these were partly covered by a sleek white ermine stole.  Her brown hair was curled over her ears and waved over her forehead.  She also wore long white gloves and carried a matching green leather purse.  Her arm was hooked around the elbow of her man who was dressed like all the other men in a white dinner jacket and black tuxedo trousers.

     It was early evening and the races were long over for the day.  People had been gathering in the lobby, as was the custom before dining.  Waiters carried Champaign on silver trays to the socializing couples sitting or standing in small groups.  The men, smoking cigars, scanned the twosomes or foursomes as they entered, inviting to join them those whom they knew, and the women, smoking cigarettes, scanned the other women. 

     Fanny and Graham stood for a moment, looking around for familiar faces, and at that moment a waiter presented them with the tray.  They each lifted a stem glass.  Graham sipped, his eyes peering over the rim at the faces of the men grouped casually around the room, many of whom were also looking at him.  He knew almost everyone.  No one, however, gestured to them to join them.  Instead, a huge silence loomed as people stared.  Fanny held her glass and didn’t sip.

     Just as the question mark began to form between her brows, the chatter recommenced, and three men strode towards them, two of them extending hands in greeting toward Graham, who beamed smiles at them, shook their hands, and introduced Fanny.  The men knew who she was and had come to be introduced to her.  The third man, a good deal older than the others, took Fanny by the elbow and turned her towards the first of the marble columns on the east side of the lobby where a woman stood alone. 

     “That’s my wife,” he said gesturing towards her.  “She desperately wants to meet you.  Won’t you come and say hello?”

     “Of course,” Fanny replied graciously, glancing at Graham who was talking with the two other men.  He seemed unaware of her at the moment, so she tapped him on the shoulder as she allowed the older man to lead her to his wife.

     He glanced at her as she glided across the lobby and tried to note the face of the man who was with her, but he didn’t know him. 

     He had asked the two with whom he had just shook hands  how the races had gone that day.  They were long-time acquaintances, liked each other, though never had been intimate.  One of them, the short thin one, whose name was Tom Lowry, struggled in his father’s business, which before the war broke out in Europe manufactured bearings for the auto makers, but which now had been retooling for the U.S. defense industry.  His struggles were fruitless, because he lacked not only talent for business but interest in it as well.  He was not aimless, however, as his father accused.  He was dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure, which meant women, gambling, alcohol, theater, art. 

     The other, a good looking, slick-haired tenor, had made a name for himself as a crooner, and had two records to his credit already.  One could hear him now and then on the radio.  His name was Frank Andreotti, though everyone called him Frankie. 

     Lowry had picked a winner in the Grand Union Hotel Stakes race that afternoon.  His horse had placed and paid him sixty dollars.  

     “So, we missed the Hotel Stakes?” Graham asked.

     “Yeah, that’s why their passing the Champaign around.  But not to worry, my friend, tomorrow they run the Travers Stakes.”

     “Listen for the bells,” Frankie interjected.  “Hey, when they open the dining rooms, let’s the three of us go together.  The girls saw you come in with Fanny and just about fell over.  Hey, Graham, I knew you two were dating, it’s all over the newspapers, but, hey, why not let your friends in on a little of it?  What’s the harm?”

     “Maybe he’s got other plans, you oaf,” Tom laughed.

     “No, no,” Graham laughed in response.  “No plans.  Fanny hasn’t met any of my friends yet.  You are my friends, right?”

     “That’s sporting of you, old man.”

     “Now where has that girl of yours gotten herself to?”

     Graham glanced in the direction he had seen her walking when she tapped him on the shoulder.  He spotted her across the lobby talking with an older woman and her husband.  

     The Grand Union Hotel Stakes race had been run that afternoon, and this evening the celebrations would be long and cheerful.  But he and Fanny had not missed the biggest race of the season, the Travers Stakes, which would be run the next day, Saturday.  After that, the train station would fill and the roads clog, Saratoga Springs would empty, and the locals would once again take possession of their town, making the Sunday that followed a quiet Sabbath.   They would relish that quiet time, because they would get along quite intimately with those who stayed.  He hoped Tom and Frankie and their girls would be among them.  The Grand Union was never entirely empty during racing season, and they still had weeks to go before labor Day.

     He was anxious to tell Fanny about their good fortune, having come this particular weekend of all weekends of the summer.  The bells began to chime, signaling that the dining room was opened.  People began to shuffle off, leaving in groups of four, six, and eight.  As the chatter died, Fanny could hear the music drifting out of the spacious dining room.  Turning, she caught sight of Graham coming toward her, and, smiling, lifted her hand as he neared, and grabbed his arm.

     “Would you mind, Fanny dear, if we joined a couple of people I know?”

     “Those two men you shook hands with?”

     “And their dates.”

     “Oh?  Not spouses?”

     He laughed as he turned her away from the dining room and towards Tom and Frankie and their women, stopping and waiting for them to approach.  The men were eager to introduce their dates to Fanny, who graciously took their hands and said hello.  Their names were Anna and Flora, and they were flattered to meet her.

Having Fanny on his arm made Graham Ellison the most talked about man in New York.  But his luck at the track the next day added money to glamour, and the society columns lapped it up.  The Sunday papers were filled with stories about Fanny and Graham, about Graham’s betting on Fenelon to win in the Travers Race, about who was seen talking with them, or dining with them, or sitting with them at the track.  When Fenelon took the Man O’ War cup, Graham whooped and gave the tickets to Fanny so she could redeem them.  People crowded them, photographers on every side shot photos of Fanny collecting the winnings, and they had to push through the crowds to get back to the Grand Union, their four friends in tow. 

     As expected, however, after the big race the crowds began to dwindle, and the lobby of the hotel was empty the next morning when Fanny and Graham came down to wait for their friends before going in to breakfast.  A waiter came and they ordered coffee.  He returned with a tray and a small fold up table which, with a flick of his hand, he set up beside them.  He placed their cups of coffee on it and a creamer and small bowl filled with sugar cubes, gave a short bow, turned on his heels and disappeared.

     “Would you like to soak in the springs today?” Fanny asked, noticing the absence of people.  She took up her cup and dropped two sugar cubes in it, then lifted the spoon and stirred, looking at Graham and wondering what he was thinking.

     “I’ve never gone to the springs,” he said, sipping his coffee black.  “Is it nice soaking in them?”

     “Of course.  It was all the rage for us Skidmore girls when I came to college.  But I never soaked with mixed couples before.”

     “Something new.  I’m game.  But one can soak for only so long before one feels soaked, you know.  What then?  Shall we take a ride around the country?”

     “I don’t care.  Whatever you wish.  We’ll see what Anna and Flora have to say.  Maybe they won’t want to soak.”

     “Then we’ll go for a ride.  After breakfast.  We’ll let the day get on a bit and warm up.”

     “There was a place where girls could ride horses.  I suppose it’s still there.  Men could ride too.  There were lovely trails, lots of trees and hills.”

     “Let’s not let Anna and Flora decide.  Let’s us decide what we’ll do, and they can tag along or not.  I want to soak and ride.  I like your ideas this morning, Fanny.  You know more about what to do here than I do.  You lived here once.  Maybe we’ll even take a ride up to the college so you can see the place again.”   

     When Tom and Frankie and the girls came into the lobby, the only people they saw at first were a couple at the far end at the desk apparently checking out, and one other couple sitting at the sofas in the middle of the lobby under the chandelier, the husband reading a newspaper, the wife rifling through her purse, unsuccessfully looking for something.  They found Fanny and Graham sitting beside a huge cadenza on top of which rested a showy floral display.  The cadenza was against the wall adjacent to the entrance to the dining room.  They were dressed for Sunday morning, Graham in a brown suit and dark blue tie and Fanny in a gauzy light dress with a sash at her waist and a matching hat.  The other four were informally dressed in sport clothes.  Anna and Flora whimpered when they saw Fanny and turned as if to flee, but Fanny rose and declared how hungry she was.  The two girls relented, returned, and let themselves be consoled, and they all went in to breakfast together.

     “Soak and ride?” Tom Lowry said in a tone of sarcasm.  “Don’t you have it backward, Graham?  You mean ride and soak, old pal, get both your sweat and the horse’s off you.” 

     Graham could see how squeamish he felt about horse sweat.

     “I suppose you’re right.  I wasn’t thinking.  Ride and soak.  Whose up for it?” Graham asked again, looking from face to face.

     But he could plainly see that none of them seemed eager about the prospect of horseback riding or soaking in the springs.

     “Fanny and I have decided already.  We’re soaking and riding—ah, right, right, riding and soaking.  Quite right, Tom.  But that’s our plan for the day so far.  Maybe later we can take a drive into the countryside.  You all up for that?”

     Tom and Frankie and the girls reluctantly decided to tag along with Fanny and Graham, that was, after all, the reason why they stayed, but that was only after they had settled the matter of the girls not having riding clothes.  After a quick trip to the hotel’s shops, they all returned to their rooms. 

     But Fanny had other things on her mind when she began to take off her dress in the bedroom.  She looked keenly through the door across the outer room at Graham’s back as he placed his suit jacket on a hangar and reached to put it in the closet.  His shoulders bulged under his shirt and she could feel their hardness under her hands as he unbuttoned and removed it.  The rooms in the Grand Union that Graham and Fanny took were elaborate and luxurious. The bedroom was carpeted but otherwise furnished in Nineteenth Century elegance.  The parlor was furnished more modernly with sofas and easy chairs, tables with electric lamps, and a fireplace.  It was in this room that Graham had hung his coat.  There was no fire in the fireplace, it being summer and warm enough to keep windows open.  But there was a heavy rug in front of it, and Fanny, tossing her dress across the recently made bed, stepped through the door and walked seductively to the rug, catching Graham’s eye.  She gracefully lowered herself on top of it and beckoned to him.

     “Ah,” he intoned smiling, as he knelt beside her, “horse sweat!  We’re gonna need a good soaking even before the soaking, and the riding and the driving.”

     He kissed her.

     She twisted into his arms, the white silken slip she wore under her dress making her feel slippery against his bare skin.  She breathed heavily, closed her eyes, and leaned the side of her head onto his shoulder, her lips almost touching his cheek.  The moment was gloriously sensual, and he was as lost to it as was she.  He looked at her, her eyes closed, and kissed her cheek, then touched her lips with his own.  But then, knowing how way leads on to way, and how lost to the whole day they would become if they gave in to what she wanted just then, he took her shoulders and gently pushed her from him, and, smiling, said, “Let’s save this for tonight.  It’s what we’ll look forward to all day.  It will be so fantastic, won’t it?”

     “No!” she said, frowning.  “It will be so—     anticlimactic!”

     He guffawed.  She tried not to smile.  But the moment had passed, and they both got up and dressed for the horseback riding.  Then they packed a bag each for changing after the hot springs.  Just as they were getting ready to leave, there came a knock at the door.  Fanny opened it, and, seeing the other four, all looking gay and eager, she yelped that they were ready to go, too, and, the two of them stepping into the hall, they all left together amid excited chatter.

The horseback riding was a disaster.  Neither Anna nor Flora had ridden before, and their dates were so unskillful as riders that they were no help to them.  Fanny had some considerable skill with horses, having spent a good deal of time while at Skidmore in the college’s equine program.  Graham was an experienced rider himself, and so the two of them left their friends behind to struggle with horses that, once they had established their dominance, would not stray far from their stalls.

     A couple of hours after starting out, Fanny and Graham returned to the lots where they had mounted, dismounted, and found Anna and Flora standing all wilted by the pen where the horses they had tried to ride were meditatively working at a bale of hay.

     “Tom and Frankie had the good sense to get off their horses and lead us all back to where we started,” Anna said as they approached.

     “The ugly beasts wouldn’t go,” Flora said.  “I kept saying go, go, go, but they wouldn’t budge.  The fat old mules.  I never want to ride a horse again!”

     Suppressing a smile, Fanny looked at the two women, clad in their new jodhpurs, glanced at Graham, and then soothed them by saying that there were some horses that just nobody could ride.  She commiserated with them for their lack of success, and the women began to perk up and lose their wilted looks.

     They found Tom and Frankie up front where they parked their cars.  Neither of them liked the stalls and paddocks where the horses were kept.  Expecting that the riders would be gone some time, they had taken the girls to an inn where they had refreshments while waiting, and when they had returned, the two men stayed by the cars, and the women went round back by the trailhead to watch for Graham and Fanny.

     The horses being disposed of, they walked together, Anna and Flora chatting about the inn, and came round to the little gravel lot in front of the barn, where Tom and Frankie were standing, smoking cigarettes, in the shade of the trees.

     Graham was all smiles as they approached.  He wanted to get close to see if they could smell horse on him.  He asked Tom for a cigarette, took one from the proffered pack of Luckies, and Tom lit it for him with a match.  Neither of them remarked about the smell of horses, so Graham said, “Let’s head to the springs for a soak, shall we?  I’m afraid the girls think we smell, and they don’t want to be reminded of those horses.  Do you, girls?  Don’t you hate horses now?”

     “In France they eat horses, don’t you know,” Flora said.

     “That’s about all they’re good for anymore,” Anna said, making a face.  “Though I don’t think I’d ever want to eat one.  What about you, Tommy?”

     “Horses stink.  I don’t want to think about them anymore,” he said, flicking his cigarette butt into the gravel behind their rented car.

     Graham and Fanny smiled at each other, she holding onto his arm as they neared their two cars.  They enjoyed their ride and talked about coming again sometime to Saratoga Springs just for that.  They tried not to let the attitudes of the other four spoil it for themselves.  They were glad when they got into their DeSoto, all dusty now and looking very unlike the car they started out with.  Fanny felt that riding out into the forest, alone as it turned out, with Graham, and being so far away from the cares of the world in such a glorious wilderness, was the most romantic thing she had ever done.  She leaned over and kissed Graham on the cheek as he started the car.  Then he backed out, and Tom and Frank and the girls followed behind.

     On the road heading back to town Graham was silent.  He seemed far away in a meditative mood, and Fanny felt like that also.  They sat side by side, Fanny closer than she normally would have been because of her kissing Graham’s cheek.  They felt each other’s presence, and the silence itself became like one of them.  Fanny rested her hand on Graham’s right thigh, and the silence remained.  He didn’t look down at her hand.  But his response to it was to push a little harder on the gas pedal.  Fanny then gave his thigh a light squeeze, as though to provoke him into greater speed or to dispel the silence that had settled in the narrow space between them.  Graham’s response was to push even harder on the gas pedal, and they were now speeding.  They heard the car behind them honk its horn, and Graham, transfixed by the emotional intensity the speed itself induced, pushed the peddle to the floor.  Fanny sat unmoved, her hand still lightly kneading Graham’s thigh.  It was as though both of them had become fey, had left the ordinary world and entered a private world of their own.

     The car behind them was falling back, its horn now one continuous but diminishing blare.  Graham didn’t even look into the rearview mirror, where he would have seen that his friends were falling almost out of sight.  As they reached maximum speed, the road began to enter a long curve between two hills, heavily forested on both sides.  It was too late for them.  When Tom and Frank and the girls came upon them, the dust and debris had already settled.  The scene was utterly silent and still.  Tom left the girls and Frank with Fanny, who was alive and whom they had extracted from the car.  Graham was dead.  An ambulance and the police were needed, and Tom set off in their car to bring them.

The doings of Fanny and Graham were often the subjects of New York’s scandal-scooping gossip columnists, among them Walter Winchell, who held forth at the Stork Club, a frequent haunt of the two, and Ed Sullivan, who headquartered at the El Morocco, and to whom Fanny and Graham gave equal time by stopping there in the evening before returning to the hotel.  When gossip about the couple was all the rage, they loved Fanny, who never took offense at anything they said about her and whose graciousness never failed to disarm them, to their delight.  News of the accident, now, and of Graham’s death came as a shock, and a blackness of mourning sat upon the city, and its voices stilled, but only for a while. 

     The first accounts of what had happened came from their friends, and these accounts were vague and indistinct.  Continuous hounding by the press in the end induced both Anna and Flora to speculate about the two, about what was going on between them, and about what had prompted them to speed away from their friends.  Inevitably, the scent of scandal began to arise, and though both Tom and Frank denied that anything of the sort had been going on, speculation became frenzied.  Graham’s family, high up in the city’s social pyramid, looked with anger upon the survivor, as though they could exact vengeance by laying blame.  Winchell and Sullivan, trying to outdo each other, both served as conduits for the family’s retributive venom, reporting how they snubbed Fanny at Graham’s wake, how his two sisters escorted her from the funeral home and commanded her to stay away from the cemetery. 

     The two columnists condemned her mercilessly for two days, until the morning on which Fanny’s sister announced to the press that Fanny had killed herself.  And thus it all came to an end.  There were admirers at her funeral, and her family in the end did their duty to the dead.  But it was, the wake and the burial, an intimate affair, an interment of a reputation as well as a life: Fanny was thoroughly forgotten.  We were so much on the edge of trauma in those days that it is hard to recall how a city  could care so much about one woman and her man.

“I’m not so certain she was forgotten the way you imply, that it became as though she never were.  I remember her.  I’m sure others of our generation remember her.  Oh, of course, those who came after don’t.  But that’s only to be expected.  Tell me, now, how much of this is your own invention?  It’s a real story, a story probably no one but you, and now me, knows.  Oh, there are many places where I wish we had more details.  That old hotel, The Grand Union!—is gone now, oh, gone a long time.  Such a shame a hotel like that had to be torn down to make place for something new.  I had been in it when I was young.  It makes me feel like I had something in common with her.  We shared that.” 

     “Pretty much everything in the story came from Fanny herself, except the intimacies between her and Graham, which she didn’t dwell on, though she didn’t hide anything.  I could say more about the night she killed herself, and the days just before, but that would not be right, I just feel.”

     “What do you mean?”

     “I mean, I was with her, she had told everything to me.  But there are things we ought not to talk about.”

     “Oh, you can’t get away with that.  You have to finish it.  If you don’t want to write it, that’s fine, but you have to tell me it.  After all, it’s because of me that you have written what you have!”

     “It’s a record for the family, now.  Anyone who wants to can read it.”

     “Tell me!”

     “Well, you know, when Graham’s body was recovered from the scene, the news went out over the wires that he was dead and that Fanny was in the car with him and was unhurt.  There was a kind of frenzy of gossip, and the radio everywhere was fixated on the story.  My uncle Harry together with my mom went up to Saratoga Springs to get her and bring her home.  There and back again, to sequester her, get her out of the public eye.  They sheltered her at the family home on the Island.  That’s where I found her.  I was so young, but I was, in spite of that, the only one she could talk to, and so we talked. 

     “News came to her of what Graham’s friends were saying, or what the newspapers were making out of what they were saying.  She could do nothing but stalk the rooms of that old house.  I’ll never forget her during this time.  She was an education for me in all the things a young person should never know.  The frantic anxiety, the guilt, the sense of loss and emptiness she expressed in her eyes, the pacing, her thinness, the intense energy her bodily motions conveyed—these were all so plain even to me.  It took three days to get Graham’s body prepared for the wake, and Fanny insisted on going into the city to attend.

     “It all happened so fast.  It makes my head swirl trying to recall it.  I remember very distinctly how distraught she was when Graham’s sisters literally threw her out of the funeral parlor, and their threatening her about staying away from the cemetery.  I wasn’t with her.  I had come to the City with her, but I had stayed at her rooms in the hotel when she tried to go to the wake.  She had gone by herself, though she returned with Anna and Flora, who stayed with her for half an hour attempting to calm her.  She faked enough calm that they left, but she again could do nothing but stalk the room, her hand on her forehead, the other over her heart.  I tried to calm her and did get her to sit down and take a little brandy.  I asked her to tell me what happened, which I could not get her to do on the Island, and that helped, because the effort to recall took her away from the moment, and I kept asking questions to get her to dwell on details.  We sat together a long time.  This is how I learned the story you read.

     “After a while, it became apparent that I was going to have to spend the night with her, because it had become so late that my catching the train anymore was out of the question.  Talking about me, then, helped even more to take Fanny away from her grief.  She called down to the hotel manager and explained about me, and he had a fold up cot sent up with sheets, pillows, and the rest.  This Fanny set up in the outer room, and when it was ready, she told me she wanted to retire for the night, and that I should just go to sleep myself. 

     “Well, I did get into the bed, and Fanny turned out the light and shut her bedroom door on me.  I lied still for a while, giving her time to settle in, then I got up and took the phone and called my mother.  She was home and answered.  I told her I was worried about Fanny.  I told her I was afraid for her.  I was too young to explain what it was I was afraid of, but I really felt Fanny was going to kill herself that night, and I tried to tell my mother that.  I’m pretty sure my mother understood.  All she would say, though, is that Fanny is going to do what she wants to do, and that that was how she always lived her life, and on and on, which is the complaint the family endlessly made about her.”

     “That was cold, cold and feelingless.  You tell me that about your mother?”

     “Yes.  Like I said the other day, she, they are all gone now, and we can say the judgment on them out loud.  It is what they deserve.  Their memory, anyway.

     “But to get back to that night, I hung up the phone feeling helpless.  I went to her door and stood there listening to see if I could hear her, hear anything, tossing and turning, breathing, anything at all, but there was nothing but dead silence in her room.  I went reluctantly back to the cot and slept.  In the morning, as usual, I had to go to the bathroom, so I got out of the bed, put on my pants, and went to the bedroom door and knocked.  There was no answer, and I hoped she was asleep.  I would slip into the bathroom and out and not disturb her.  So I opened the door and peeked in.  She wasn’t in her bed. 

     “I stepped over to the bathroom door, and I could see a light at the floor.  She was in there.  I was undecided what to do, wait for a while, or knock and let her know I was outside and needed to go.  I decided to knock.  But there was no answer.  I knocked again.  Then I turned the knob and pushed on the door.  I had my eyes closed.  I knew what I was going to find.  My heart was racing.  It really was terrible. 

     “Fanny had filled the tub, I guess, with hot water, though it was cold for a long time before I found her.  You remember the new Gillette razors of that time? The stainless steel kind that had the bottom that turns and opens the top in two halves so one could slide a razor in?  Fanny had taken the razor out of such a Gillette and sat in the water.  She was fully dressed.  I have thought about this often over the course of my life, thought about seeing her there, the water all red with her blood, her fully clothed, her face looking whitish blue and empty, so unlike herself in life.  She must have known I would be the one to find her.  She could do nothing to soften the blow.  I think, though, that is why she kept her clothes on.  She must have let her arms rest in the hot water for a while, then opened her veins, and put her arms back in the hot water so the blood would continue to flow. 

     “I really loved my Aunt Fanny.  At that time, though, I blamed her, I blamed her hard for doing what she did with me there, for the hurt that what she did would cause me.  But I long since have forgiven her that. 

     “I called my mother again, and told her.  She told me to stay there, do nothing, and she and Uncle Harry would come in right away.  I did what she told me.  I will never forget my mother, when the ambulance people were taking Fanny away, talking to reporters, whom she called to come to the hotel, and telling them that Fanny had killed herself during the night.”

     “After all these years!”

     “Yes, just another story, now.”