A Hamptons Christmas Read online

  As I watched, the little girl lit a Gitanes and puffed smoke at the railroad timetable she was studying. You weren’t supposed to smoke in the restaurant, but no one complained. Hell, even in season the Parrot is pretty casual about rules. I scanned the rest of the room, taking note of who was around and who not—you know, was Gwyneth Paltrow in town? Brad Pitt? Senator D’Amato? Bill Murray practically made the joint his HQ during the October film festival.

  Mellish was at the bar with a margarita in his oversized paw. He had a place in Hampton Bays and was the smartest man I knew but was forever getting screwed. You know the sort. Whatever he did went wrong. I said hi and moved my stool next to his.

  “Easy for you to be cheerful,” he said. “You’re not putting an addition on your house.”

  “Well, I guess. Who’s your architect?”

  “That’s where you delude yourself, Stowe. You buy a software package for seventy-five bucks and short-circuit all that.”

  “I’m sure,” I agreed, knowing nothing in the Hamptons gets people so aroused as real estate. Better than Viagra. I called for another cerveza.

  “Except they insist on a new survey before you start.”

  “Well …” I said, somewhat out of my depth, “what does a survey cost?”

  Mellish slammed a big hand on the bar. “There’s the heart of the matter. There are two local surveyors, a WASP and a guinea. Do you prefer to be cheated by the Establishment? Or by the Mafia?”

  “I’m not sure that –”

  “No one’s sure, Stowe. That’s where they have you. I got the WASP. Seven hundred fifty dollars was the fee he quoted …”

  “Sounds about right.”

  “But when I told him I was scrapping that little wooden deck out back and asked him to omit it from the survey, he grew difficult. ‘Can’t do that, Mr. Mellish. If it’s there, by law I have to include it.’ … Christ almighty! I was demolishing the damned deck to build a new bedroom on the footprints.”

  “And?”

  Mellish just shook his great head.

  “To get a permit, you need a contractor. He gave me a September completion date. And hasn’t yet begun! ‘My digging machine broke.’ Then two of his best men were in jail, Shinnecock Indians for rioting at the CATV station about rock versus rap music.”

  See what I mean about the Hamptons out of season? I turned to chat about Bali with Lee the owner, who’s big and handsome and known as Surf God.

  Other people drifted in now, and Surf God was distracted, so I went over to the little girl. Reporters are like that, curious.

  I told her my name and asked how old she was. “Twelve,” she said, “practically a teenager.”

  She was pretty small, and I’m not much good at ascribing motivation or guessing age. She was a skinny little kid with a Dutch Boy haircut, huge gray eyes, a freckled snip of a nose, and straight teeth, but, to me, she sure didn’t resemble a teenager, and I must have looked skeptical. “Well, I’ll be eleven soon,” she conceded, finally admitting to ten. I was still betting nine. She offered me a Gitanes before providing an entertaining song & dance about grandparents mysteriously absent from their East Hampton estate. When I informed her the last train back to Manhattan had left and the first one next morning would be at six, she inquired as to which were “the better hotels” in town.

  “The Maidstone Arms,” I recommended cheerfully, since we have very few hotels good or bad, and the Arms served an excellent Sunday brunch, “None better.”

  “In the Guide Michelin?”

  “I’m sure.”

  She jotted a note with an impressive gold Mont Blanc.

  “Shouldn’t you call your parents to tell them of your change in plans?”

  Not possible, she said. They’d been injured in a recent suspension bridge collapse in the Peruvian Andes. I wasn’t buying much of that and had begun wondering, was I doing the right thing and ought I instead just call the police?

  She asked me what work I did, and I was soon telling her stories about being a correspondent as other Blue Parrot regulars began to join us. Mellish was especially good, cursing and swearing at a great rate about contractors and surveyors. The kid seemed to like that and told us her name, Susannah le Blanc, and said that since she was being educated in Switzerland, a country with three official languages, she was blessed with “the gift of tongues.”

  “Oh?”

  “Bien sûr, monsieur le journaliste,” she assured me. “I’m understood in most major tongues and several of the lesser.”

  “Wow!” said Kelly the barmaid, who only spoke English but had now joined the small knot of idlers and the curious around the kid’s table.

  “Absolutely, fraulein, danke.” To me, “Avec plaisir, mon capitaine, yawohl!” To a delighted Mellish, “Ciao, mon vieux.” To Lee the owner, “Che bella cosa, old top!” And to other drinkers and employees, “Du bist ein fine fellow, mon vieux … . Mein gott! Mon dieu! … Tout va bien, mein kamaraden … . Quel dommage, dear chap … . But, and I ask this politely, por favor, can you cut the mustard, monsieur le patron?” And so on, much of all this punctuated with an enthusiastic, “Olé!” or “Hoch! Hoch! Hoch!” from time to time.

  Not even Mellish attempted to provide counsel or advice, one of those rare occasions he was outtalked!

  And when Susannah started to yawn, thanked us all for our time, and opened a purse to pay her bill, I saw impressively neat wads of francs (both Swiss and French), pounds sterling, deutsche marks, lire, dollars (all purchased at the bureau de change at Charles de Gaulle airport, thanks to her unlimited credit card, it turned out). And when paying her tab in dollars, she left precisely the appropriate fifteen percent tip.

  A young child with an old head.

  I still had no idea who Susannah really was or why she was here, but I found myself worrying. Could a ten-year-old already be this knowing and world-weary? Outside, a light snow fell, the first of the season, and, for the first time, I caught her offguard and vulnerable as she stared sleepily through the window. I realized her poise was, at least in large part, a pose. Were there really grandparents she’d expected to welcome her? Could she actually have been here before? And was remembering, and hoping to revisit, happier times? Or was it simply that she was a child a long way from home and over her head among strangers? And was, well, sort of scared.

  I called the Maidstone Arms, confirmed that they had available rooms, and helped the kid and her luggage out to my car and drove her to the hotel. But when she thanked me for my courtesy and I asked if I could be of additional service, she shook her head briskly.

  “Pas du tout and not at all, monsieur le journaliste. Vous êtes très gentil. And also quite considerate, danke.”

  “Well, I just …”

  “Basta, signor. I shall be quite well, merci bien.”

  I carried the bags in, got a very firm handshake (for an instant there, I thought she was going to tip me), and then left. The snow had stopped, leaving only a brief coating on the lawns and trees that would be gone by morning but which, in the meantime, looked very nice.

  I hoped Susannah le Blanc had enjoyed our very first flurry and would recall our simple, little village with pleasure when she left us on what I assumed would be the morning train back to New York.

  Chapter Six

  Bit of trouble scrambling about in small boats in the Yellow Sea …

  Over breakfast with my father, I told him of the strange child at The Parrot, and his housekeeper, Inga, more sensible than either of us, angrily broke in. How could I send a small girl to a hotel? Was I mentally defective? How could the Admiral’s only son behave so cloddishly?

  “Well, I …”

  Thoroughly chastised by both Inga and, subsequently, the Admiral (on such matters he wasn’t too proud to take his lead from her), and expecting severe critiques from Her Ladyship whenever she arrived (with Alix, ETAs were poetically vague: when she arrived, she was there. You expected nothing more), I phoned the Maidstone Arms.

  “Sorr
y, nobody registered named le Blanc,” I was informed.

  “Nonsense! I delivered her there myself. A young girl from Switzerland. She may have already left but she checked in last evening.”

  “Oh, you got the name wrong. I know the kid. That’s Miss Wanderley Luxemburgo, of the Canary Islands.”

  When Inga (included as chaperone for propriety’s sake) and I got Susannah thoroughly checked out of the hotel and into the car, I said, “Who’s this Wanderley whatever-she-is?”

  “It’s a man, actually. Coach of the Brazilian national soccer team. Isn’t it a glorious name? Especially for a Brazilian. You’d expect those fellows to be called Ronaldo. Or Joaquin, wouldn’t you?”

  “But why not register under your own—?”

  “I use pseudonyms quite frequently. Throws people off your trail.”

  This is not your usual, everyday generic kid, I thought. This is an original. Alix is going to love her.

  Whatever the hell her name is.

  Yesterday’s flurries had been a tease, and the day was fine, with sun and temperatures climbing into the fifties. At Further Lane the Admiral, nervy and unaccountably so, stood anxiously on the gravel as we drove up. He wasn’t accustomed to children in the house. And from my disjointed account didn’t know what to expect from this one. I made the introductions, not at all sure I had the genuine name yet.

  “She uses pseudonyms,” I told my father in an aside. “Says it throws people off the trail.”

  “It does, y’know,” Admiral Stowe agreed. With all his years in naval intelligence, he was a great one for tradecraft.

  But when they shook hands, he winced.

  “Oh, dear,” Susannah said. “Je regrette bien, Herr Grosse-admiral.”

  “Nothing serious,” he said. “Bit of trouble last month scrambling about in small boats in the Yellow Sea. I’m missing a few digits and aren’t as nimble as I might be.”

  “Mon pauvre amiral,” she said solemnly. “One of our nuns at school has only one foot. A tram ran over the other just outside the Kronenhalle restaurant in Zurich, the establishment owned by Frau Zumsteg, the silk king’s late mother. She gets around quite well.”

  The “late mother of the silk king” or the injured nun? I wanted to ask, but didn’t.

  As we went into the house, Inga leading the way, my father asked, “What order of nuns are those?”

  “Madames of the Sacred Tower, old top. They’re very quelque chose. Prefer French to Latin. Don’t pay all that much heed to the Pope. Respectful to the Vatican in their dealings, but nothing more. Maintain a cool though cordial distance. Quite fond of reminding you they’re Brides of Christ. They don’t accept poor girls. As nuns, I mean. Nor as students, either. You’ve got to have ‘a little set aside,’ as they say. Rather like a dowry.”

  “I’d been told nuns took vows of poverty.”

  “Oh, hardly that. Mother Superior subscribes to Barron’s and the Financial Times. On-line, as well, to Charles Schwab. She’s forever lecturing us girls on investments, price/earnings ratios, on appreciating ‘the value of a safe nine percent.’”

  “I see,” the Admiral said, not being all that fond of the Roman Catholic Church and suspicious of the papacy, and happy to see his anticlerical biases so nicely confirmed. And by a functioning Catholic straight from a convent school at that.

  “What’s the place called?” he asked.

  “Couvent de la Tour Sacrée. Which means—”

  My father interrupted her. “Convent of the Sacred Tower. We all speak French here, my dear. My late wife was French, Beecher was born in Paris, bien élevé and so on. And why is this tower of yours so sacred?”

  “They say it’s named for a historic old stone tower that stood on the spot back in the Dark Ages. A famous hermit of enormous piety was chained for thirty years to a wall in its dungeons for having insulted the emperor.”

  “I don’t believe Switzerland had an emperor,” my father objected.

  “No, of the Holy Roman Empire. His name was Charlemagne. Difficult sort.”

  “And what could a mere hermit do to insult Charlemagne?”

  “He prayed and sang hymns in the streets and didn’t change his underwear. Ever. All of which offended decent authority. And, in turn, the emperor himself. That’s how the social order worked in those days. Or so we’re told by the Madames. Who are quite firm on such matters.”

  I didn’t think hymn singing or soiled underwear were precisely hanging offenses, but still. My father looked thoughtful, wondering if we were being gulled, as Susannah went on.

  “But we girls believe the tower’s either a phallic symbol or is named for the Tower of Babel, what with all the lingos spoken by the student body. ‘Polyglot,’ that’s the word, isn’t it?”

  “I’m quite sure,” my father said, discomfited by the child’s casual use of “phallic symbol,” and not sure how to proceed. Until, somewhat weakly, he said, “But everyone’s a Bride of Christ?”

  That got her talking about life at the convent. “Mondays we have primes. French for the first day of the week. We all wear white gloves and Mother Superior hands out holy cards and badges to wear all week, to the best girls. I very rarely get either a holy card or a badge. I think it’s that I curse and they’re forever catching me smoking. Or because they resent my father; his being a riverboat gambler and all.”

  She paused. “Though on the occasional good week, I’ve been awarded a pas mal card, which means I seem to be trying.” Then, rapt in thought, she went on to analyze further her difficulties with the Brides of Christ.

  “Or it could be the poker games. I find girls from the Third World to be especially vulnerable. They can handle draw poker but fall to pieces when we play stud, five card or seven. Daughters of maharajahs and sultans. They have the most generous allowances, much of it in cash, and absolutely no card sense. Ready for the plucking, those girls. Mon dieu! I almost feel guilty about it sometimes. Because of race relations being as sensitive as they are. Still, you can’t imagine how hapless the Third World is at poker. You can bluff them with a simple pair.”

  “I’m sure,” I attempted to reassure the girl, if vaguely. “We all have our regrets. Young as you are, next term will be better, you can count on it.”

  There was, Susannah reported, ignoring my patronizing assurances, considerable stir this past term at the convent, which had nothing to do with holy cards or illicit poker sessions with the dusky progeny of the fabled East. All of which had my father kneading his wounded hands in considerable agitation.

  No, this crisis was fashion-based. The Madames of the Sacred Tower were pondering a fundamental, even revolutionary change in the design of their religious habit. A heated debate raged, with nuns divided and bitterly so, into cliques. The Old Guard wanted to retain the status quo; the silent majority favored the Maison Dior; the New Wave rebels and the younger nuns preferred Emanuel Ungaro.

  I thought Alix would side with that bunch, being a good customer at Ungaro.

  The Admiral found this preoccupation with fashion incompatible for nuns bound by vows to be Brides of Christ. And questioned Susannah closely.

  “Isn’t there a priest or monsignor of some sort to keep these dreadful women under control? How can they be spending church funds in the Paris couture when the poor are—?”

  “We do have a chaplain who drops by to hear confessions.”

  “Thank God for that. I hope he takes a stern line with the Mother Superior.”

  “He’s very devout, Père Henri, a beatification in progress,” Susannah said assuringly. “But since he is so young, Mother Superior bullies him dreadfully. We girls even have a pet name for him.”

  My father looked distracted. Pet names for priests? The Episcopal Church wouldn’t tolerate such nonsense.

  “Yes, Henri Dansant. Dancing Harry, as it were. Grand at sermons and leading a rousing hymn. But a bit light in the loafers, if you get my drift.”

  Everything bad my father wanted to believe of the Roman Cathol
ic Church was coming true. As he shook his head in condemnation, reflecting on the historical inevitability of the Protestant Reformation, young Susannah realized she might have gone a bit too far and had better speak up, and quickly, for the convent.

  “But fierce social activists at the same time,” she insisted. “Last term the nuns had the entire convent whipped into a frenzy about the ‘fallen women of Luzon.’”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, we all contributed to a fund to rescue young Filipinas from the streets of Manila. Even the Brazilian girls pitched in, and you know how they are. Hate to spend money on something other than bikini waxing. We tithed from our allowances to buy back young girls, some as young as seven or eight, from establishments of ill fame, which is what the Madames of the Sacred Tower call whorehouses.”

  “Inga, why don’t you show Miss Susannah her room,” the Admiral said hurriedly, glancing showily at his watch as if to justify haste. For a career navy man, he had his reticences.

  And so it was, almost before we knew it, that Susannah had been installed, without our yet knowing precisely who or what she was, in a spare bedroom of my father’s snug old house on the dunes overlooking the great, gray Atlantic. It wasn’t Ron Perelman’s place, the Creeks, or the deMenil mansion, or Martha Stewart’s house, but it wasn’t bad either.

  Chapter Seven

  A randy old fellow, always trying to peek at girls in the ladies’ …

  It was about then, without our yet fully realizing it, that the house lights suddenly dimmed. The Playbills were passed out and the better seats filled. The orchestra swung into the overture and the curtain slowly rose as, on our modest Further Lane set, the play began. All because Susannah le Blanc was now onstage.

  “Clearly she can’t stay here,” the Admiral announced sternly over breakfast the next morning. “You’d best call this convent place and have them contact her parents.”

  “I?”

  I can’t recall ever having spoken to a nun in my entire life, and dealing in an adversarial manner with the Brides of Christ held little appeal for me.