The Dying of the Light by Robert Goolrick
Dedication
For Ameena Meer
With my love forever
.. بحثتُ عن ملاكا في الجن
فوجدت واحدا بجانبي هنا على الارض
And for Peter Kahn
Without whom, this would not have happened
.וכל המקיים נפש אחת, מעלים עליו כאילו קיים עולם מלא
Epigraph
There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most High.
God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her, and that right early.
The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted.
Psalm 46:4–6
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part I: Copperton
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part II: Gibby
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Robert Goolrick
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
IT BEGINS WITH a house and it ends in ashes. There’s your opening, you think. You can wrap it up and go home now. Phone it in. And you haven’t even set foot on the property. But it’s true. That is the complete family history. Except. Except. Between the building, in 1748, and the burning, somebody, or a number of people, people who weren’t supposed to die, died in this house in a disastrous fire on December 5, 1941. This is all you know, all anybody knows, all there is to be known. The rest is detail, just local color. Of course, that’s why they sent you, to sift through the ashes, to somehow find a bone in the ash, a bone that would unravel a mystery that has stood silent and unbreakable for almost sixty years. You are standing at dawn on the prow of an oyster boat you’ve hired for the day, moving, trailing a wide wake in a calm black river, under a sky the color of unpolished silver, to get there, the only boat on the lazy river, the fish running somewhere else, finally to reach the house, the remains of history, the remnants of her life. You are trespassing, even now. The house, barely glimpsed from the prow of the oyster boat where you stand, making its slow way down from Port Royal, the house, even in silhouette, is huge, unimaginably large, foursquare. Saratoga, the name coming from the old Indian language, means the hillsides of the quiet river, the hunting grounds by the water. It’s not as though you haven’t done your homework.
The house had been modeled after the gigantic house of the Earl of Shaftesbury, St. Giles House, and though slightly smaller, it was still the biggest house in America, with uncountable rooms and a grandiosity that quickened the heart of all who saw it. The cost was enormous, the first and greatest of many folies de grandeur that left the owners in a state of bondage and near poverty only redeemed by the labors of, at the most, nine hundred slaves who picked the cotton and cured the tobacco and boiled the peanuts and, for generations, cleaned up their messes in a silent, sly rage. Robbed of their humanity, these nine hundred looked at the house from the start and envisioned it in flames, hearing in their wistful hearts the terrible screams of their oh-so-white masters. Not able to flee, sold like dogs in the street, robbed of their children, babies ripped from their mother’s arms in Natchez or Memphis.
It was a house built on tears.
Did four die? Three? Or just one—Diana Cooke Copperton Cooke?
Was it accidental, or arson, as the inept sheriff’s office proclaimed?
Whoever was there, the fire burned flesh to bone and bone to ash and the ash blew into oblivion.
If she had somehow lived, she would be ninety-nine years old now. Unlikely, but not impossible. And, in the unlikely event that she was alive, where would she be? She was declared dead after seven years, in 1948, and the son took control of what was left of her money, not much, which he used occasionally. But where did the rest go? There was supposed to be a fortune. Fortunes like that don’t just disappear, and she couldn’t have spent it all.
So perhaps there was no arsonist except herself.
But inside the doll of her life, there was another, and another and another and another, smaller and smaller, all fitting together, and somewhere in the tiniest box was her soul and her affections. There was her son, Ashton, far away, never forgotten for one minute, the only thing that made her heart continue beating.
Mostly she dreamed of Ashton, her only boy, his handsome face and infinite charm. Because he had spent so much of his life apart from her, his face appeared as a slide show, not a movie. Ash at eight, getting on the train, weeping at the window of his compartment, and then after that, jumping from vacation to vacation, his growth a shock every time, pretending at affection during these short visits when in reality she knew less and less about him. Even the bills for his clothes went to his trustees, so that when he arrived in a new coat, it was always a shock.
You are speculating from what you know. You are seeing it for the first time, and yet it is not new to you. Hours spent poring over books and articles and stacks of photographs have led you to expect exactly what you are now seeing, and you are both satisfied and disappointed that there is nothing more than this, making you wonder why you have come all this way, and yet it is new, it is somehow unexpected, perhaps simply by virtue of the fact that you are here and it is larger, wider, than you had thought, the wind more brisk, saltier, everything surprising, the way it feels when you first see Niagara Falls, expecting only tourists and disappointment and finding wonder, wonder at the power and the size of it, a child’s delight. And here, as there, everything else washes away, the crew of the boat, the flights of gulls, the expectation of thunder, lost in the mystery of the attainment of this one small goal, and the mystery, the thing that made you get out the magnifying glass and study the pictures under a light, all that wakes up in your heart, and your heart beats in your jaded throat, just for a minute, until you remember that it is only this, only a job, a job that will get done, as they always do, done and left behind, measured by the number of Internet hits, the number of shares. You have nothing new to add. That much seems certain.
You had felt you knew her, as much as could be known. Now you see you know nothing.
There it is, a silhouette in the distance at the end of what was once a long yard edged by gardens. Some say she still lives there, ancient, in the gatehouse, but there is no movement, no sign except the white tail of a deer flashing as it breaks into the bracken, nothing but the ruin of the house that was built three centuries ago and was called and still is, even in its ruination, Saratoga.
You have come a long way for this, and you have come by water because that’s how they came, the first ones, and because the mile-long drive to the road that leads to Port Royal, the nearest town, is so overgrown as to
The blackened house, almost unrecognizable as brick, sits in what was once a grant of fifty thousand acres from George I to one John Cooke—King Cooke, they called him, call him still around here, the first of three. The first men who came with him had come here, come to nothing, and cleared the land with mules and blacks and sweat and lived in lean-tos in the winter months, barely surviving, Americans before there was an America, strong backs and legs, and they fought the red men who owned the land since time began and they cleared the trees with mules and sweat and opened one acre after another until they could build the first house and farm the first fields and send for the women from whom all the rest of them descended. Blood was everything to them, cousin and kin, a line of Cookes who went on to found the great capitals and name the nation they had ripped from the land and its native owners. They signed documents, and their signatures are under glass in museums; they made speeches, and some of their words ring in the mouths of patriots even today, often misunderstood, misused, vicious, and vindictive, when it had all begun in such hope, such stitching, and then waving of flags and banners.
There are no banners now, not here. There is no sound except the wind, and the water lapping at the boat, no sound, no human cry, no laughter or weeping or speech, just this, this monument to a family’s life of work and folly, to their joys and struggles inside the four walls when the house was still standing, endlessly gossiped about in the town, before the awful fire, the fire that melted the silver on the sideboard, that turned the mahogany and damask to ash. The pickers came after; nobody stopped them, once the embers were cool enough to walk across with stiff boots and still it was hot, almost too hot to bear, burned the soles of your feet all to hell, and the rest they took, the ivory from the piano keys, the shreds of Oriental rugs and, here and there, a sterling candlestick, a punch ladle, a baby cup with initials, a Canton platter.
Landscape diminishes as we approach. First the vast line of green, indistinguishable, seen from out at sea, then the particularities of coast and tide, and the trees themselves, pines and magnolia and dogwood, the elms and maples fallen into the dull sand, giants toppled by time and neglect, and then what would have been the lawn, the long flat up to the house where she may or may not still live, for there is no way to know; if she lived, no one would see her, if she died, no one to mourn, unless they, the two servants left to her at the end, now long dead, had not moved on, but had found a way to cling to the land, to wrest copper pots and vessels from the ash, for carrying water and for cooking. Had she lived, she would be ninety-nine, and the servants, all of her contemporaries, would be long dead.
And you, here, now, 1999, before the century’s turning, with your lined notebook and your Nikon, in your Top-Siders, new, what were you thinking, knowing more about this house, and about her, than almost anybody, but still not knowing the thing, the core of the mystery. You’ve seen the house, ghostlike, in the museum in town.
There is a plan, a group of men and women who are raising millions, although they are millions away from what they need to do what they want to do, which is to build around the ruins of the house a glass model of Saratoga as it was, every staircase, every fireplace, and a cruel magnificent thing it would be, this jewel box, if they were to get their millions, but they never will. Not enough people care enough to get them what they need to build their glass dollhouse of one of the most important Georgian houses ever built in this country. Nobody cares about history now. Nobody gives a shit.
On the table, in the museum, there are even tiny people, in their frock coats and sweeping silk dresses, strolling the lawn, dancing a minuet in the first ballroom in any house in America, thirty by fifty feet given over to graceful pleasures and nothing else, giving a synecdochic idea of the vastness of the rest of it all, if that much space could be devoted simply to the pleasures of the dance. There was a huge columned downstairs hallway, watched over by a butler, with a double staircase that led up to a gallery and the sleeping quarters. Upstairs there were twelve bedrooms, downstairs an orangery, facing west, with oranges and lemons and limes in profusion even in the winter. There was a dining room that could seat forty, a sitting room for the women, a study for the men and their cigars, a study with a pool table, every stick of furniture brought in crates from England and hauled up from the river on the backs of slaves and polished by them every day, watched over them by the women who became more wan, more etiolated, as every generation passed, and, on every side of the huge house, the rich fields that produced the tobacco and the peanuts and cotton and pigs that made it all possible, cash crops that thrived, that thrived for generations, that finally began to rob the soil of its nutrients, the earth growing as wan as the women, producing just that much less every year.
The broad round of the treacherous trees, giving no purchase, provides the only access to the land, the long, broad yard where she may or may not still live. Once, you are told, there were two docks, and a long sloop with brass fittings, polished every day, the brightwork, gliding, lit, up the river on summer nights to catch the breezes, people drinking and dancing on the mahogany deck, and a more rustic boat for the fishing and oystering. As you walk the tree, balancing with your arms, batting away the eternal infernal mosquitoes and vicious black flies, crabs scuttle, gliding sideways, and jellyfish float, ghostlike in the shallow water, and then you take a great leap and you are on the land and already fighting brambles, feeling them tear at your clothes, grabbing for your shoes, but you have come all this way for this, this end, and, blood soaking your pants where the thorns have torn the skin, you push on because you have to see it, this wreck, this history of one family in one nation that is called America, in this one state that is called Virginia.
This was just an assignment from the paper, the style section, reviving, as they did about every ten years, the fragile, tissue-like memory of her, best in show, one of the century’s extraordinary beauties, fabled Diana Cooke Copperton Cooke, and the unsolved mystery of what became of her, her son Ashton living out a full life and dying alone at seventy, his liver the size of a football, without once mentioning her name, except perhaps in his nightly prayers, as though there were any more to know, as though you could glean one final scrap of information from the rubble that would make it all make sense. That rubble has been pored over time and time again, just as the photographs, the famous photographs, by Hurrell against draped brocade, by Horst, she alone in a forest of white cubes and a single calla lily, casting its shadow, she in a simple white crepe evening dress, diamond bangles up her arm from the wrist to above her elbow, white light so bright her face is almost in flames. Cecil Beaton, who saw in her something of his own sister, Baba, photographed her in her suite at Claridge’s, the Prince Alexander Suite, the one she took for six weeks every winter after her marriage. She is wearing a flimsy ankle-length real silver dress, almost transparent, an agony to wear, cut low to the waist down her beautiful athletic back, down which hang two strands of gigantic fourteen-millimeter natural smoky gray pearls, held at the throat with an enormous diamond rose spray. The pearls had been called the Linley pearls for generations; they had sat in a vitrine in the Victoria and Albert for eighty years, except on three occasions, when they were taken out by the family to be worn to court or, once, to a wedding, until Diana’s husband bought them for her at auction, only the second time they had ever been sold, still in their original leather and satin box, and promptly renamed them the Copperton pearls, an act that stunned and embarrassed both all of London and Diana herself with its vulgarity and disrespect. She had, in her way, shown the spirit of the new age by wearing them languidly down her back. Hoyningen-Huene, so courtly and correct, pictured her in the best of the new collections every year for Vogue, and Man Ray made the trip all the way to Virginia, even though he feared the country, the wilderness that startled him and filled him with dread and an unbearable, almost sexual excitement at the same time.
She was a darling of the camera. So many pictures of her had filled your nig
There she stood as debutante of the year in 1917, at the Bachelor’s Cotillion in Baltimore, the International Debutante Ball in New York, the deep bow, forehead touching the floor, and still later, pictured in fur at the Ritz in Paris, at Claridge’s in London, crossing on the Queen Mary, the famous diamonds, the parure from Cartier, the swanlike neck, the inquisitive eye, the utter calm that comes from knowing that you can have anything, from knowing that you can invite anybody to dinner in the certain knowledge that they will eagerly come. The enviable Diana, whose name, you must point out in parentheses, was pronounced Deeana, was named and raised for one single purpose: to marry brilliantly and revive a family’s fortunes, gone through overplanting and various forms of careless and licentious behavior. The article would be accompanied by the inevitable interactive slide show, portraits of Diana, Diana riding sidesaddle to hounds, Diana at Lakewood with her Langhorne cousins at their marvelous house Mirador, Diana with the movie stars who visited to sail the Rappahannock in the twilight, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, champagne glasses in hand, music from a crank phonograph playing, the sound spreading across the water in waves all the way to Urbanna, to play croquet in white wool slacks, the house itself, and, finally, the blackened, skeletal remains of the house after the great fire that burned for three days, during which there was no sign of Diana herself, as there was never to be any trace of her ever again, no trail, no obituary, no movement of money, nothing to indicate either her life or her death.
You are not the first to have looked for her and come up empty-handed. The paper you work for expects more, some shred not found yet, some scrap of history that would shed a laser beam of light on the mystery, that would bring Diana Cooke Copperton Cooke out of the darkness and the grave and into the light. This is your forte, your métier, to turn over every rock, each turned over time and time again, until you feel the scorpion’s sting, the searing truth that makes the fable undeniably real, that makes the dead move again with the jeweler’s loupe of your own insight. Perhaps you have already seen it, in the photographs over which you have pored for hours, watching her expression as it changed over the years, watching as the jewels slowly came to outshine her eyes, as a kind of desperation crept into the calm, so that her serenity became merely a sort of freeze in her features. Maybe it was her marriage, by all accounts not a happy one, Captain Copperton, sportsman and drunk. Whatever it was, somewhere along the way, the green lawn of her life had turned into acre after acre of bracken and thorn.