The Whiteness of Bones by Susanna Moore Page A

seeming sophistication was really a kind of crude expediency, she did see that Alysse was a woman who would get her way.
    Perhaps she believed that she might take on some of Alysse’s audacity during those cozy winter nights when Alysse was not engaged and she invited Mamie into the library and opened bottle after bottle of champagne and instructed Mamie in the fundamentals: “never, ever let your maid work for a friend and do not be overly familiar with the help, for example, you should not have introduced yourself the other night to Mrs. de Coppet’s chauffeur; never sit on
any
toilet seat,
anyone’s
, I don’t care whose, besides, it’s great for the thighs to pee three inches above the seat; try to use the old form of a word, looking-glass, for example, or frock; do not ever get caught changing the place cards at someone else’s dinner;
do
under-dress, it makes the other women look older and vulgar;
do, do
flirt, with everyone, children, husbands, wives, especially wives as they’re the ones who invite you back; try to remember that having a child is nothing better than giving birth to a living insurance policy, you never can tell, it might come in
très, très
handy; never, never underestimate anyone—you can never be sure just who they are. You paid not the slightest attention to Louise Hathaway at lunch, but you must remember it wasLouise who was singlehandedly responsible for bringing the sport of water-skiing to France.”
    She was really the first mature woman ever to pay any attention to Mamie. Her own mother had never really had a conversation with her. How could she help but sit mesmerized at Alysse’s knee, drinking the champagne, taking it all in? After the drudgery of her day at Deardorf’s, Alysse was funny and titillating. Mamie was flattered by Alysse’s interest in her. She didn’t realize, of course, especially when Alysse began every conversation with the warning, “Don’t dare tell anyone this,” that Alysse had just had the same conversation with her masseuse or one of her best girl friends, and one might say, looking back, that it was unfortunate that Mamie was so naïve as to think that Alysse really favored her, but how could she have thought otherwise?
    Although Alysse was not very curious about Mamie’s life, correctly assuming that there was little there to interest her, she did not hesitate to tell Mamie about her own. She had married a Mr. Buddy Klost, an industrialist from Detroit, with whom she lived in New York and Islamorada, Florida. Mr. Klost, an ardent sportfisherman, set the world record for black marlin, caught in the waters off Peru. He worked hard and played hard and fucked hard; a real man, in Alysse’s words.
    “We were married in an old church in Birmingham, Michigan. It was a very famous church with catapulted ceilings, and I wanted awfully to impress his grandmother, who really ran the show and controlled everything, so I rented the bridesmaids. That’s when I first met Dodo. She was seventeen and I said she was my younger sister.”
    “You rented her?” Mamie laughed.
    “It
was
funny. But it worked. I just called a modeling agency in Chicago and I picked the girls, and the dresses were madeto order, divine white organdy from Dior, with little vine baskets of lily of the valley and white French roses and old Mrs. Klost, who wasn’t too happy about Buddy’s choice, me, took off her famous pink pearls during the reception, you haven’t seen them yet, they’re in the safe, and put them around my exquisite white neck and everyone applauded.”
    On other nights when there was too much champagne, Alysse would succumb to a little sentimentality and sniffle into her handkerchief, careful not to smear her mascara, genuinely moved by the beauty and drama of her own life. Buddy had been beheaded in a head-on car crash in Georgia.
    “All they gave me when I flew down to identify the body was a gold sailfish he used to wear on a chain around his neck. I gave it to