Savage Grace - Natalie Robins Read Online Free Page B

really knew how to dress, you know—she always had the real Chanel. I guess Muriel had gotten the dress from Mrs. Daly. I was in Haiti, staying at the Oloffson Hotel, and Muriel asked Bill Styron, who was on his way there, to deliver this package to me. I opened it and put the dress on and it was bloodstreaked all down the back. It was the kind of dress you would wear to be stabbed in. Later I asked Muriel, “Why did you send this dress to me?” And she said she hadn’t noticed the bloodstains. I was so freaked that I buried the dress, I actually dug a hole in the ground out in the back of the hotel. That dress is buried in voodoo country, in Haiti behind the Oloffson Hotel.
    William Styron
    I didn’t know exactly what was in the damn package. I knew it was some kind of garment, but I didn’t have any idea that it had any bloodstains, nor was I present when Gloria opened it. But I’m sure Gloria is accurate.
    I remember in Ansedonia that summer there was a lot of partying, a lot of going out on boats, and Brooks had one of those Mercedes sports cars, and there were a lot of drives in the Mercedes sports car with Tony around. And Tony was an absolute young Adonis—if you can be an Adonis at that age. I mean, he was a beautiful kid, he was just charming, and I had no inkling certainly at that time of anything potentially weird. I do think possibly I sensed a “Mother’s darling boy” relationship—not a terribly uncommon relationship with an only child. But I thought he was terrific. Bright. A little withdrawn, maybe. But he was just a figment to me, because I never really got to know him outside of this vision of this beautiful lad—great swimmer and that sort of thing. And a serious young man.
    I had the sense of a small little family, a couple and their lonely boy, who were sort of misplaced out of some Scott Fitzgerald novel. Barbara and Brooks seemed a bit like Daisy and Tom Buchanan but in a different era and somewhat fish out of water for that reason.
    I remember exactly where I was when I learned about the murder. I’m in the room right now, up here in Roxbury, Connecticut, where I was that Sunday, whatever date it was. And I was just leafing through the Sunday Times, as we all do, and there was a column of print that said something like “Young man stabs mother in London” and of course the names were right there, and it just shocked the hell out of me. Had I known more about them, their connection, I probably would have been less astounded. But I knew nothing of any stirrings or rumblings psychologically.
    God, it’s a fascinating story, and the horror of that kid is classic Greek. I do think that the terrible quality of the whole story has got some resonance about our period in some curious way. It has some very large metaphorical meaning.
    Brendan Gill
    I was trying to remember when it was I first met Barbara and her husband and it was a night when Rose and Bill Styron were there and I think it was at Tom and Sarah Hunter Kelly’s house in New York, on Seventy-first Street. I remember talking with Brooks about the fact that he had jumped into the Peruvian jungle. He was a true adventurer, the opposite of an adventuress. I was fascinated by his account, also because of my interest in his grandfather and Bakelite—that’s just my kind of thing: inventions, making good in America. Brooks seemed tall and heroic because—well, it would be like Lindbergh. My definition of a hero is a man who tests himself by a series of ordeals, each more difficult than the last; he’s not competing in the world at all, he’s competing only against himself. And that’s what it seemed to me Brooks was doing—testing himself.
    Barbara was a very good-looking girl. I also liked her spirit. She was of an affirmative disposition. She always made you feel good, so that made her a wonderful hostess, of course. I think one of the reasons a great partygiver like Ben Sonnenberg liked her so much is that he liked women who