Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (35 page)
Then at seven o’clock—I think the train leaves at seven-thirty for Klosters—the telephone rang and it was Barbara saying, “I’m going ski-i-ii-i-iiiiiing,” and then there was silence and I knew something terrible had happened, I just knew it, and I screamed, “Barbara, what have you done, what have you done?” Then I
ran
—it’s about, you know, three blocks—and I guess she’d left the door open and I burst in and there she was—she’d got herself dressed up beautifully in a nightgown and her beautiful beige robe—and she was absolutely gone. She looked dead. I really thought she was dead. I started to scream and I couldn’t, I’d lost my voice, so then I started jumping up and down for the lady underneath to hear, and finally I was able to scream. And then I dialed my house and said to my daughter Kaylie, “Tell Daddy to come as fast as he can.” And then the lady downstairs ran up and we called the H
tel-Dieu, the public hospital on the Île de la Cité, which is just around the corner, and we also called the American Hospital in Neuilly, and they said they were on their way, too. But the H
tel-Dieu got there right away. The doctor ran in and he said, “Well, there’s no heartbeat—nothing.” So he jabbed her with a needle—I think in her chest—God believe me, I don’t know—and then by that time Jim was there and we both went in the ambulance with her.
From
The Merry Month of May,
James Jones, Delacorte Press, New York, 1971
She called me again that evening, around about eight-fifteen….
There was a peculiar sing-song to her voice, a flat quality.
“Louisa? Louisa? Louisa, are you all right?” I said.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Oh, yes. Oh, yes, I’m fine. I’m going to
Switzerland.”
“You’re what?” I demanded. “Switzerland?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Switzerland…. St. Moritz. And you can meet everybody. At least, everyone who is anybody. And you can ski.
You can ski off the tops of the mountains there. You know. Right off the tops of them, and you can float forever. I’m going skiing….”
“Louisa,” I said. “Louisa? You’re going skiing?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Oh, yes. I’m going skiing. I’m going skiing,
Jack. Oh, it’s so beautiful, skiing. Right off the tops of them. And down below there is nothing but the pure, white snow. Pure. And white. No evil, no dirt, no filth. A few cottages of faithful villagers, who love their cows and their land. Don’t want to kill…. Oh, yes,
I’m going skiing, Jack. Good-bye….” She hung up and the phone went cold stone dead.
I was in a panic. I didn’t know whether she had flipped her mind or what, but I knew instinctively something bad had happened somewhere…. I ran all the way to their apartment, which was more than three blocks.
Well, it was a pretty awful scene. A bad scene. In the time it took me to get there after her phone call she had become unconscious and her maid had found her….
She had left the front door unlocked, so that I was able to barge right in. Had she calculated that, also? So she could leave herself room for me to come and save her? At that moment I thought so.
Later on, when I saw what she had taken, I changed my mind.
She had dressed herself for the occasion. She was wearing one of her sheerest, flimsiest robes…. She would do that. Under it she had on a fine-textured white bra through which the two dark spots of her nipples showed like two dark eyes, and below a very brief, very low-waisted pair of panties through which the dark of her triangular bush made itself visibly felt….
I put my ear to her mouth and nose, but if there was any breathing at all it was very shallow and light….
On the bedside table there was a large aspirin bottle, totally empty, and there was a large tinfoil plaque of sleeping suppositories, empty also, eight or nine of them. There was also a Nembutal bottle, empty too. I had already noticed that there was a glass and a half empty bottle of vodka on the floor beside her beside the couch. Apparently she had taken enough stuff to kill a whole army. That was when I changed my mind about the unlocked door….
A French doctor…darted into the apartment carrying his black bag. Apparently he lived around the corner, and the faithful Portuguese had gone to get him….
“Her heart has stopped,” he said. “I don’t know for how long. I’m giving her a shot of Neosynepheraine. That may start it again. But we must get her to a hospital very fast…. If her heart has stopped for over four or five minutes, she could have serious brain damage. Even if we save her.”…
The doctor was working over Louisa. And suddenly I became furious. Why are we trying to save her? I thought. If some stupid bitch wants to die, why not let her?…I wanted to go to the big couch and turn her over and kick her in her unconscious ass. What was she doing to us, and how dare she?
Michael Edwards
I was meant to be there that night. That’s why I don’t think she ever intended at that stage to commit suicide, because she could have chosen another moment which would have been less likely to be interrupted. I mean, she was expecting me that night. I was flying over from London to see her, we were going to talk about the flat—replacing curtains or something like that—and my plane was late, and when I finally got to 45, quai de Bourbon, I saw the concierge, Madame François, and she said,
“Madame est morte, Madame est morte,”
and I went up there, and there she was lying rather like
The Death of Chatterton,
all pallid and everything, on the carpet. Gloria and Jim Jones were there, and the
pompiers,
the ambulance men, were just about to take her away, to the H
tel-Dieu.
Gloria Jones
They took her into the hospital and while she was being pumped out, the doctor came out and he said,
“C’est très mal.”
He said, “What could she have taken?” He told me to go back to her place as fast as I could and bring back every bottle, everything. So I did.
Dr. Jean Dax
She had taken a large dose of Nembutal, which is always a bad medication to take, and also vodka.
Gloria Jones
It looked very bad for, I don’t know, eight days. Really bad. She was in the—it’s called the
chambre de ressuscitation,
where they have everybody under cellophane, you know. She was under total—what do you call it? intensive care? She was hooked up. So here was this beautiful red-haired thing, absolutely naked, under the cellophane, you know, with this red pussy—she really had one! So white and so beautiful and it was so awful to see her like that.
From
The Merry Month of May,
James Jones, Delacorte Press, New York, 1971
I had never been inside the H
tel-Dieu before. It faced on the square called Place du Parvis Notre-Dame just in front of Notre-Dame, which is where they used to pull people apart with horses for having committed some crime or other. The assassin of Henri Quatre was dismembered that way there. H
tel-Dieu had a medieval look about it, at least from the outside, and I believe it had been started, a long way back, as a maternity hospital….
They told me that her condition was very grave. She was surviving, in the new intensive care unit, but she was not showing any signs of recuperating….
For some reason it seemed this case had been taken on by all the young nurses and doctors of the intensive care unit as a personal challenge….
They had her under this plastic tent, completely nude. A young nurse was constantly in attendance. Louisa’s body (I hesitate to say
Louisa) was constantly sweating profusely, and the nurse was constantly mopping her off. There were tubes up both her nostrils, and her arms were strapped down to the bed. Above her left arm hung a glucose bottle, its needle taped into a vein in the arm. If I had ever wondered about her nipples and her bush, I did not have to wonder any more.
Telegram from James Jones to Antony Baekeland, Undated
1.45 P.M.
TONY BAEKELAND CADAQUÉS SPAIN IMPERATIVE YOU CALL ME
JAMES JONES
Clement Biddle Wood
Jim called me and said, “Do you have any idea how I can get hold of Brooks?” and I said, “
Now
what’s the problem?” and of course he told me, and I said, “Well, maybe he’s left some sort of forwarding address at his bank.” And then Jim said, “How well do they know you at the Morgan Bank?” and I said, “I have quite a good friend there, he’s a vice-president or something.” So I went to him and I said, “I’ve got to find Brooks Baekeland fast,” and he said, “Well, he’s left very strict instructions that his whereabouts are not to be given out to anybody,” so then I said, “Here’s what’s happened,” and he said, “Well, under the circumstances, we’ll tell you where to reach him, but just keep the bank out of it. And if he has to be called,
you
do it, not some third party.” And so, although I did not know Brooks Baekeland well, it was I, not Jim Jones, who called him in Rome—Jim talked to him later. I said, “Listen, Brooks, I know this is an intrusion on your privacy, but Barbara has tried to kill herself.” And he said, “Oh God—again! Clem,” he said, “this is the fourth time that she’s done this. She pulls this on me every time. It’s one reason I didn’t leave an address. It’s an obvious bid for sympathy. She wants me to come running back, but this time I’m not going to budge.” And I said, “Listen, I think it’s more than a bid for sympathy, because if that’s what she intended it to be, Brooks, she’s overdone it, because she damn near died,” and I gave him what details I knew about that—I told him she was in a coma. And he said, “Well, if she dies, you know where I am.” That chilled me, and I said, “Listen, Brooks, for Chrissake, I understand how you feel about this, but I think you might
be
here because they really think she may be dying.” He said—and this is what
really
chilled me—he said, “When I met Barbara she was nothing, she was just this sort of redheaded Irish kid. I practically picked her out of the chorus line,” and, well, after that, there really wasn’t much to say.