“Oh—no. I don’t suppose I do.”
He continued to search my face for several seconds, then—evidently not finding what he sought there—sighed. “It’s pretty swell, I guess. Lots of good folks from old families.” He tipped his chin sunward and closed his eyes. I dared myself to make a quick inspection. I had never seen a man in a bathing suit before, and although I knew on instinct Teddy was less of a man and more of a boy, I’ll admit I was curious nonetheless. His shoulders were quite narrow under the tank straps of his bathing suit, and he was lanky all the way from his ribs down to his legs. His brow furrowed briefly, and he shifted as though uncomfortable, causing me to worry for a moment that he could feel me looking at him. I looked away. Soon enough, the friendly drone of his voice resumed as he continued his summary of Newport. “Big houses. No crime to speak of.” The putter and spat of a motor-boat engine moved nearer to us, and then just as quickly repelled into the distance. Teddy opened his eyes and sat up with a sudden air, as though an idea had just come to him. His whole body had gone rigid with tension. I discerned there was something very serious he wanted to tell me and he had struck upon his opportunity. I could also tell he wasn’t going to come right out and say it.
“Well, as I said, no crime. But that’s not to say there haven’t been some rather serious . . .
incidents
.” He was looking at me with ferocious intensity now. I almost believed I could feel the pupils of his eyes beating down on my face, trumping the strength of the sun’s rays. “In fact,” he continued in a very slow and deliberate voice, “one of the most tragic incidents in the town’s recent history involved my cousin and a very memorable debutante.”
I was intrigued and somewhat baffled by this new line of chatter, but I said nothing. Although I wasn’t exactly sure how or why, I felt as though I was being baited. But Teddy was not to be dissuaded. He took a breath and plunged forward.
“She was
something,
that debutante. People in town never saw anything like her before—and I’d be willing to bet haven’t seen anything like her since. I only saw her once or twice myself, mostly in passing, too, but somehow you just don’t forget a girl like that.” He gave a low admiring whistle, but didn’t smile. “Wide blue eyes with the brightest look of curiosity in them all the time. Long dark hair.”
There was a pause, and it struck me there was an air of false casualness about it. When he spoke again, I knew why.
“Course she’s probably bobbed it by now. Her hair, that is. She’s the type who would.”
A sudden comprehension tingled in my veins and I felt my pulse quicken. I sat up straighter. My body inclined itself toward Teddy by unconscious volition. For a brief moment he wore an expression of satisfied accomplishment; he knew the implied meaning of his statement had not gone unnoticed. It was clear there was more to his tale, more he wanted me to know, and he could take his time now recounting the details.
It didn’t end so well for my cousin,
he warned me, just before starting at the beginning of the story.
I have since, of course, replayed the narrative Teddy told me that day several times in my head. It remains to be seen whether I’ve become its most accurate transmitter or its greatest distorter, but I will paraphrase here to the best of my ability.
Ginevra Morris was the ebony-haired, wide-eyed only child of a wealthy banker from Boston. Her father, some twenty-eight years her mother’s senior, had retired when Ginevra was five and moved the whole family out to a very large and stately house on the shores of Newport so he might pursue his favorite pastime of building model boats while looking out the window at their life-size counterparts passing on the eastern horizon. By the time Ginevra was ten, she had discovered that with the slightest frown she could make her father return the velvety-eyed chestnut mare he’d bought for her birthday and exchange it for a dappled Appaloosa stallion. More amazing to her still was how with a second frown she could provoke him to turn around the next day and return the Appaloosa in order to repurchase the chestnut mare at twice the price. Ginevra was thoughtfully raised in the spirit of Victorian traditions to excel in music, poetry, and art, and by the time she turned fifteen she made it clear she’d had quite enough of Victorian traditions. In an infamous standoff with her mother, just days before her sixteenth birthday and consequent debutante ball, Ginevra took a pair of scissors and, in one deft, coldhearted gesture, sheared the skirt of her ball-gown clean through in protest of something her mother was saying. Her mother, thinking it would humiliate and therefore teach Ginevra a lesson, made her wear the dress as it was: savaged, the hemline falling barely to the knee.
But her mother, a fairly young woman herself but already the high-collared relic of a bygone era, had severely miscalculated. The night Ginevra had her coming-out debut, her cowl-necked gown draped in an especially Hellenic manner, and she floated down the stairs in her scandalously scissored skirt with her head held aloft, causing a rippling murmur throughout the audience. That evening, she went from knock-kneed tomboy to Greek goddess in the space of twenty-two short, red-carpeted steps. One boy in particular, Warren Tricott Jr., the son of a mining magnate and a member of the wealthiest family in Newport at the time, took special note of her seemingly effortless transition. He pulled around her drive in his silver roadster the very next day, and every day after that for the next two summers.
Of course, Teddy said, he was quite a few years behind his older cousin. At eleven, Teddy’s adolescence had not yet ripened fully enough to attune him to the subtleties of courtship, much less cause him to care very much, but even at that age he nonetheless understood how special and exciting everyone thought Warren and Ginevra were, and he noted how a hush crept into people’s voices whenever they discussed what a wild, striking pair Warren and Ginevra made. Teddy was away at boarding-school for the larger part of the year, yet whenever he came home to Newport the first gossip delivered to him was often about his cousin Warren and the mesmerizing young lady Warren took around on dates. Folks often spotted them motoring around town together, or taking the Tricott family yacht out for a sail. It was not uncommon to see the glossy black streak of Ginevra’s long ebony hair fly down a town street or country back road, trailed by her musical, haunting laugh. Together they appeared to find a reason to delight in everything. Even the harshest winter to hit Newport in twenty years could not put a damper on their merriment. That Christmas, Warren gave Ginevra a little draft pony and a gold-painted sleigh, and together they sat upon the embroidered cushions with furs tucked over their laps and giggled uncontrollably as they searched out the highest hill to drive down.
The war was in full swing by then. Some defect, the specifics of which Teddy wasn’t exactly sure—bad eyesight, flat feet—had kept Warren out of the Army. (There were those in town who suspected the defect in question was in fact Warren’s overbearing mother.) However, whatever it was that prevented Warren from dying in an anonymous trench in a farmer’s field in France also caused him to feel undermined. By the spring of 1918, Warren had watched all his classmates enlist and board a train bound for a southern state (Kentucky, Tennessee—Teddy could not recall exactly) to attend boot camp. All of them were given a hero’s farewell despite the fact at that particular juncture in time they had done little more than visit the Army doctor in Boston, turn their heads, and cough. With each train that pulled out of the station, Warren felt a little more deflated.
Warren and Ginevra knew how to have a lot of fun together, but their relationship was also often stormy, to say the least. When they quarreled, they did it with a variety of dynamite otherwise monopolized by rail barons for the purposes of blasting away bedrock. Ginevra in particular had a ruthless way with words. She knew precisely what to go for—the jugular, that is—and how to get at it most swiftly and efficiently. When Warren displeased her or made her cross, she wasted no time reminding him what people likely thought of men who sat on the sidelines of the war and let others do all the fighting. Folks who overheard these arguments guessed this was surely the reason Warren took up with other women on the side.
The other women never bothered Ginevra much. She knew about them in a vague way. Warren’s dalliances were mostly confined to the other side of town, which is to say to women of a different class, who hadn’t attended Ginevra’s debut, let alone their own. And so, being the only proper lady with a claim on Warren’s heart (not to mention on his trust), Ginevra didn’t feel terribly threatened. Besides, it was a well-known fact Ginevra liked to have her fun, too—it was a constant effort to be the belle of the ball, and with Warren sometimes on the other side of town she felt free to maintain the affections of her numerous other admirers. As far as Ginevra was concerned, it was all wonderful and fun, and not even an inch of it was serious. When Warren asked her to marry him the next summer, she accepted his proposal without hesitation. After all, they were the ones who mattered. Warren set about picking out a ring.
What came next in Teddy’s story changed everything. It marked yet another point of no return.
Details are such funny things. Having witnessed more than my fair share of criminal confessions now, I can tell you it’s true what they say: A lying criminal always trips himself up (or
herself,
I suppose, rare though that alternate scenario may be) by either giving too many details or else revealing the wrong ones. See, the thing about details is they’re nearly impossible to fabricate with any plausible success. If you’re telling the truth, you’re telling the truth, and you’ll get the details right, especially the queer ones. That afternoon Teddy recounted a rather unusual detail I don’t think he could’ve made up. After all, we humans lack the graceful capacity the gods have for total chaos. We are unable to come up with a pattern so free of obvious categorization; instead we know the world by types, by only the most common chains of cause and effect, by the rote and the familiar. There is a reason they say God is in the details. It is the precious details that can prove your innocence, and it is the vicious details that can get you hanged.
Of course, I did not have all this ambitious philosophy in mind at the time. I simply sat and listened to Teddy as he told the rest of his story, which, with Warren headed off to a jeweler in Boston, I’d already guessed was ultimately heading toward the engagement of Ginevra and Warren. And it was. In a thoughtful gesture, Warren not only purchased a ring, but also had a special diamond bracelet made to give to Ginevra as an additional engagement present. Warren’s thoughtfulness, not to mention his extravagance, had never been a handicap for him. In fact, he was so thoughtful, he even had an identical second bracelet made for a woman named Pearl who lived on the other side of town and who, if he’d been a married man instead of merely an engaged one, might otherwise be called his mistress.
Unfortunately for Pearl, Warren never got around to giving her the second bracelet. Out of a somewhat ironic and misplaced sense of loyalty, Warren insisted on presenting Ginevra with hers first, and on the night he did so, a terrible accident occurred.
By all accounts, the evening in question had been one of those balmy, grass-scented summer nights. As was so often the case on such nights, Warren and Ginevra had spent the evening motoring around in his little roadster with the top down. The trouble happened when they took a road that ran through a switchyard a few miles outside of town and crossed over several sets of train tracks. The car stalled, and the tires somehow got stuck on one of the tracks that usually carried the nighttime freight train. By the time the engineer was able to make out the silvery flank of a roadster parked perpendicular on the track, it was already too late to stop. The freight trains that ran at night clipped along at a good pace and almost never had cause to slow up as they entered Newport.
The tragedy was not a complete holocaust. Ginevra had managed to get out in time and was saved. But Warren—poor, misguided Warren—had died attempting to throw the gear in reverse and save his treasured roadster by freeing the tires. There was a lot of talk around town that the two of them had been drinking, and that the whole thing had been a criminal act of recklessness. Some repeated the rumor of what the coroner had told his wife: that Warren’s body—or what horrific gruesomeness was left of it—smelled suspiciously like whiskey. A few folks even suggested that Ginevra had gotten Warren drunk on purpose and that being on the train tracks was no accident. After all, it was no secret they’d argued at the restaurant where they’d dined earlier that evening. In a moment of dramatic flare, Ginevra had even thrown a drink in Warren’s face. But when Ginevra gave her statement to the police officer who attended the scene she was as sober as a judge, and with very somber eyes, she swore Warren had been, too. Of course, it wasn’t just her word. There was a witness—one of the switchmen who worked the night shift in the yard. The switchman (a tall, swarthy man with a rather pockmarked complexion) had seen it all and had given a statement to confirm Ginevra’s story: There had been no negligence involved, and certainly nothing malicious. It had simply been a freakish and terrible accident. Case closed.
At this point in his telling, Teddy heaved a burdensome sigh. “It was sad for the whole town, but it was especially sad for my aunt and uncle.” He squinted at the opposite shore of the Sound and frowned. “They don’t speak of it, not ever. My own folks tried to keep it from me, too; I suppose to protect me. But I wish they hadn’t, because it only left me with questions. Questions and a rather uneasy feeling about the whole business. You see, I’d grown up admiring my cousin so much—I was an only child, and he was like a brother to me—and then . . . then he was suddenly just gone. It took me quite a few years to finally lay hands on the newspaper clippings and to get people in town to tell me the details about it.” He spoke in a frank tone and ran a hand through his hair, separating the clumps of strands where they had dried together. “I suppose it’s a good thing she’s so memorable—Ginevra, I mean. Because that’s probably why people can recall the details. In fact, just the other day, I was talking to the police officer who attended the scene of the accident, and he remembered something. A detail I’d never heard before.”