A Hamptons Christmas Read online

  “That, and other things. You should feel enormously guilty, Beecher, especially for a chap descended from all those famous preachers.” But she didn’t sound terribly stern and lifted her head to kiss me again while one hand …

  “I realize it’s naughty of me, but I do love your body.”

  Hers wasn’t too shabby, either, I thought. She was still wearing my nipple ring, the one Ralph Destino at Cartier helped me pick out a year or so back. I stroked it gently with my forefinger. “You ought to have another of these.”

  “One is perfect. I’m not frantic about symmetry.”

  “I know.”

  “Except,” she continued, “that I do like being kissed all over and not simply on one side. Or t’other.”

  Being an amiable fellow, I kissed her in any number of places, lingering a bit here and there.

  “Ohhhh,” she said softly. And then when I kept up, a bit noisier.

  “Yes, darling,” I said, knowing she liked encouragement.

  Alix Dunraven and I had been in love, on and off, for just over three years. It was more “on” than “off” on my part, I guess it’s fair to say. And I realize there’s something absurd about nipple rings. A silly fad. And one your bluestockings and truly liberated women find ridiculous. But it was the only ring I’d ever given her, the closest we’d yet come to a ring of another sort, and so it meant a good deal. To both of us, I hoped.

  She occasionally strayed, got engaged to chaps without actually meaning to, and when caught (an item in Nigel Dempster’s column in the Daily Mail, or still worse, an engagement notice in the Times—soon to be rescinded—might alert me), she was always sweetly repentant. Problems rarely came up when we were together; but give Alix time, opportunity, and three thousand miles of ocean between us, and situations tended to arise. It was one of the reasons I wanted her here with me having Christmas on Further Lane. Her Christmas two years ago had been a young viscount and skiing off-piste at Gstaad. Last year, the German race-car driver and midnight swims on Tahiti. Nothing serious, of course. As she herself put it: “An innocent little flirt, darling. You know how I get in the moonlight. Or on islands.”

  “Of course,” I said, recognizing that England itself was an island, but not arguing the point, knowing she admired cool.

  That evening, to make up for skipping lunch, I took everyone to dinner at the Maidstone Club, a quiet night with the rooms near empty. After cocktails in the library and before we’d ordered at the table, the Admiral again brought up the subject of Susannah’s godfather and just which of the neighbors he might be. But he was no longer probing as aggressively or demanding answers. A cocktail or two invariably relaxed my father, and he enjoyed a good martini, no denying that. But credit the kid as well; she played him like a violin, sort of how Alix manipulated me, and it occurred to me that instead of resuming the argument, Susannah was subtly recruiting the Old Gentleman to her side.

  Although he does take a stiff line ethically, and you might expect a man of his age and reputation to be stuffy and veto unconventional behavior, my father is by nature and training a born conspirator. As such, he was soon falling in enthusiastically with various of the child’s schemes, especially when Susannah expressed great interest and admiration in how, even missing fingers, he could do card tricks, perform simple feats of magic, and manipulate gadgets. “Quite amazing, mon cher amiral, and very well played,” she solemnly informed our country’s former Chief of Naval Intelligence, as he entertained us by tugging this or that small puzzle or gadget from his pockets during cocktails.

  “Granted, granted,” the Admiral conceded gruffly. He enjoyed showing off, always had.

  Later, over chilled Dom Pérignon and steamed lobster, he revisited the subject. “But if we fall in with your program, just how do we explain you away to the neighbors, the shopkeepers, the authorities? Or even here at the club? A small girl doesn’t just descend on East Hampton from her Swiss convent school the fortnight before Christmas, alone and unchaperoned, tossing about noms de guerre and declining to share, even with her hosts, the identity of a mysterious local godfather and benefactor. Quite possible we Stowes ourselves might be suspected of having abducted you when all we’ve done is provide hospitality. Ever think of that, young lady? … You demand a great deal of us but don’t give very much on your part. Shouldn’t trust cut both ways? Eh?”

  “At your service, mein herr. But I have an idea. At least, I think I do.”

  Susannah shared the Admiral’s fondness for costume and disguise, and instead of addressing his pointed question about trust, she now deftly moved the conversation back to his field of expertise, suggesting that, given a few props, wigs, false mustaches, and spectacles, and following his expert coaching, she might pass herself off as any number of characters: a dwarf, an aged crone, a retired governess, or a victim of some mysterious shrinking disease caused, perhaps, by recent nuclear fallout from Indian and Pakistani atomic tests. I noted that with her short hair and slim, tomboyish manner, and togged out in jeans and sweater, Susannah might play a boy.

  Alix absolutely opposed that idea. “Cross-dressing at too young an age can damage one’s sense of identity and self-esteem. Later on, with the personality formed, it’s quite all right. Might she instead be passed off as my firstborn?” Alix asked vaguely.

  “You’re just slightly too young. And aren’t married,” I pointed out.

  Alix knew my tendency to stuffiness and gave me a look, as if to say, Have you never heard of single parenting? So I attempted to look pensive, studying the situation.

  “I know!” Alix said, “Susannah can be my ward. Wards are all the rage these days. In Belgravia, the better families all have one.”

  So young Susannah le Blanc got her way. She’d be Lady Alix’s “ward” for the moment. For how long? Well, we hadn’t really settled that, had we? And there was the matter of yet another nom de guerre. If her passport were in the name Susannah le Blanc, and if there truly were enemies out there, potential kidnappers, we’d better call her something else.

  “Could I be called Jane?” she inquired.

  Why Jane?

  “Jane Eyre,” of course. “I had thought, in haughty moments, of wanting to be Estella, who was Miss Havisham’s ward in Great Expectations, and called Pip, ‘boy,’ and made him cry. I enjoy stories where girls make boys cry.”

  “I liked her, too,” said Alix.

  “You liked Cathy in Wuthering Heights,” I said.

  “No, in Wuthering Heights, I identified with Heathcliff.”

  Talk about cross-dressing and identity.

  The Admiral looked thoughtful at all this transgender chat and said he preferred something French – Gabrielle? I proposed Anastasia, but Jane carried the day. Though there was one dicey moment over dinner when an elderly member, somewhat deaf, was told by Alix, “Jane is from good Shropshire stock; they make by far the best wards, y’know. Very much in demand,” and the old man said, “The child herself just told me she’s from London,” only to have “Jane” salvage the moment: “No, pas du tout, monsieur. London was our pied-à-terre, you see. Shropshire is the true bone and sinew of the line.”

  The “ward,” possessed of one of those “ears” that swiftly commandeers an accent and picks up on another’s speech cadence or verbal tic, making it her own, was starting to sound like a younger edition of Her Ladyship.

  “Might I taste your Dom, Alix? I love the bubbles.”

  “Well, just a sip.”

  “No, you cannot taste Her Ladyship’s champagne!” I said firmly.

  Alix kissed me lightly on the cheek.

  “Forgive me, Admiral Stowe, for these displays of affection in your club. But I do love Beecher when he draws decisive lines in the sand, don’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I confess I do.”

  So between the two of them, Alix and the girl had captivated my stern, dignified, and even intimidating old father. By the time we were back at the house with its roaring fire and a warming brandy, and Ing
a serving coffee and petits fours, they had him discussing various of Captain Marryat’s sea stories for boys (on which Alix was practically brought up, along with John Buchan and Sherlock Holmes), and had him promising one day to sing the old sea chanteys (learned half a century ago at Annapolis). As well as answering queries: “Just what is keelhauling? And does it hurt?” Before long the Admiral was threatening in his own house to dance the hornpipe, which no jolly tar had danced for a hundred years or more!

  Though I think that might have been the brandy speaking.

  Only once that night did Susannah/Jane give him pause, with his old-world courtliness and Episcopalian reserve, when the topic of wish fulfillment and ambition arose.

  “We all, when we’re younger, have our soaring, long-term ambitions. Sometimes they work out, usually not,” the Admiral remarked. “Have you thought yours through yet, Susannah?”

  Short-term only, she said: “I can’t wait to be an adolescent so I can wear a bra and have improper thoughts.”

  “What?” the old gentleman thundered.

  “Yes, I know it’s wicked. But the nuns are forever going on about improper thoughts, warning us off, so they make the whole business sound delicious. The upper-form girls are said to be having them all the time.”

  Alix wasn’t much help.

  “Odd, I felt that way myself at your age, though far too shy to bring it up in mixed company. But we girls certainly exchanged confidences. As, for example …”

  My father gave Her Ladyship a look and called upon Inga to put the child to bed.

  Chapter Nine

  When Jackson Pollock crashed and burned, they planted him there …

  The Admiral took me aside next morning. Something about needing to have the main house roofed in spring and did I want my cottage reshingled at the same time.

  “Amazing about that child’s father,” he said when we were out of earshot and gazing skyward, as if entranced, at roofs. “To make a corner in soybeans on the mercantile exchange and then just drop it all to go off to the Himalayas.”

  “What Himalayas?” I demanded.

  “Nepal. The monastery at Kathmandu. Studying to be a monk.”

  “A monk?” I realized I was sounding sappy, but this was all news to me.

  “Yes, a Zen adept hoping for admission to full monkhood and busily turning prayer wheels. She gets the odd postcard from her dad but little more. The merchant bankers at Rousselot Frères pay for her schooling and send an allowance. The father’s apparently put the whole bundle in trust and taken vows of poverty.”

  “Mmm,” I said. I hate to spoil anyone’s good story or to disillusion my old man. But Susannah had confided in me her father was a geologist wintering (it was summer down there) at McMurdo Sound in Antarctica, taking salinity readings from ice cores in a study of global warming. This was when she wasn’t blaming his being a riverboat gambler for her failure to be awarded holy cards by the nuns. Or recalling that, although he used to send her gaudy postcards from distant climes, these days he kept her abreast of his commercial dealings with mailed clips from Fortune, Business Week, and Forbes.

  “I am proud of him, y’know,” she’d assured me. Too proud, apparently, to keep her stories straight.

  It occurred to me I was spending entirely too much of what the trendy (and the child psychologists) call “quality time” thinking about this appealing, but probably spoiled and surely confused, runaway child, when the woman I loved and was plotting to marry was here under my roof for the first time in half a year.

  So rather than choose between them I took Alix and Susannah to Main and School Streets in Bridgehampton for thick shakes at the Candy Kitchen. I’d been an only child and knew nothing about how youngsters these days wanted to be entertained, but reckoned you couldn’t go too far wrong with ice cream.

  “Did you know her mother dances with the Kirov Ballet?” Alix asked when Susannah had excused herself to go to the ladies’ room.

  “She told me she was at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, advancing Madame Curie’s research into molecular structures and the halflife of certain isotopes.”

  Alix’s brow knit. Though prettily. “She can hardly do both, can she?”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  We ordered the thick shakes. But before I could tug out my wallet, the kid slid her credit card at the waitress.

  “My treat, messieurs/dames,” she said firmly. “The ice cream in Geneva is grand, too, especially the chocolate. But everyone says American ice cream is the best. Why is that?” Susannah asked.

  “Jane,” she corrected me when I used her name.

  “Yes, Jane. It’s the buttercream content,” I said, not having the slightest idea but suspecting that sounded pretty good.

  Bob White, who used to tend bar next door at Bobby Van’s, came in, and we reminisced about the place, which was where Willie Morris drank. Willie’s dog, Pete, was popularly accepted as the “mayor of Bridgehampton,” since he spent so much time on Main Street, sleeping in front of Van’s while his master drank. Capote drank there as well. And Jim Jones, who wrote From Here to Eternity. And George Plimpton. Jones was dead now, as was Willie, and of course Truman, who was forever losing his license in Bridgehampton for driving under the influence. So instead of serving drinks to drunks, Bob White was now selling cars to the sober. These days he is one of the star salesmen at Buzz Chew Chevrolet. In fact, he sold me my last two Chevy Blazers. And good, reliable cars they turned out to be.

  I introduced Bob to Her Ladyship and to Susannah, whom I identified vaguely as “ … and of course Lady Alix’s ward, Jane, as you know.”

  The kid promptly stuck out a hand and shook Bob’s, identifying herself as, “Jane Pendragon, a sus ordenes, signor.”

  Where the hell did she get that, the Pendragon part, I mean?

  “Sure, I guess,” Bob said, probably wondering why this kid thought he was Italian, or was it Spanish? He ordered a coffee and slipped into the booth with us, being right at home. After a few remarks about the weather and Christmas shopping, Bob asked, “Did you hear the latest about the Old Churchyard then?”

  “Only that another lawsuit was thrown out.”

  Like most of us in East Hampton, I knew how Jacob Marley’s estate bought up all the gravesites. On a small, parochial scale, there hadn’t been anything like it since the Louisiana Purchase. It was the kind of yarn you might long ago have argued about half-drunk at Bobby Van’s with Capote and Willie and maybe Irwin Shaw if he were in town and drinking. The kind of story that belonged in nouvelle vague movies by Renoir or Truffaut, with film noir subtitles.

  But I’d been back in town only a few days, Alix hadn’t been here since last summer, and young Jane (Susannah) was a convent schoolgirl from Switzerland. So none of us was really up to speed on cemetery happenings. Bob White filled us in.

  “They stole Mean Jake’s bones again. Got into the mausoleum.”

  “So that’s twice now!”

  “Three times,” Bob corrected me.

  “That is rum,” added Alix, not at all sure who Mean Jake was or why anyone kept stealing his bones. “Is this a sort of Dr. Frankenstein affair?” she asked. “Trafficking in body parts?”

  “Frankenstein and Dracula,” said her dutiful ward, Jane. “Those are the chaps. I dearly love those stories.”

  Since my father had briefed me already with that clip from the Times, I picked up the thread, explaining about the Old Churchyard. “There are forty-five cemeteries in East Hampton but only this one’s controversial.”

  “Why’s that?” asked Alix. Jane/Susannah was listening carefully but not saying much. Maybe she was measuring Bob White, who again took up the story.

  “Because of a rich guy people called Mean Jake, now dead,” Bob began. “They set up the churchyard early in the 1800s, about two centuries back, mainly for local blue-collar people, Baymen and other fishermen and farmers mostly, and the nonconformists. There never was a church there on the property, but still they called it the
Old Churchyard, because that sounded nice, holier even. Then when Jackson Pollock crashed and burned, they planted him there, which was quite okay since he lived right down the road and was considered local for all his fame. Except that after they buried ol’ Jackson, the place got trendy. Frank O’Hara and A. J. Liebling were buried there, Elaine de Kooning, Jean Stafford. A big advertising noise on Madison Avenue, guy named Ad Reinhardt, even told a joke about it just before he croaked, ‘The place is so famous people are dying to get in there.’”

  “Ha!” said Jane brightly, “that’s pretty good.” Kids like it when they get the punch line right away.

  Bob gave her a grin, pleased that she appreciated his yarn. Then he resumed. “That was thirty or forty years ago. And when Ad died, sure enough, they planted him there.”

  I didn’t rush Bob. Let the story come out. He’d tell it better than I could.

  “So when Mean Jake died they brought a marble mausoleum into the Old Churchyard and moved him in. No problem. He lived half the year in Palm Beach, but he had a big house here and people knew him. Didn’t mean they liked him. But he wasn’t an outsider. The trouble came when they read Jake’s will. And named his only kin, his sister, executor as well as sole heir.

  “There were one hundred and ten plots vacant in the churchyard when Jake died, which made it one hundred and nine, and by God! didn’t Sis take out her checkbook and write a check to the cemetery trustees for the whole damned one hundred and nine? Said that was what Jake wanted her to do, writing it into his will, so he wouldn’t be bothered for all eternity by having anyone ’round him that he couldn’t stand. Or put up ornate monuments that blocked his view of the bay.” To his few intimates, and with irritating frequency to Sis, Mean Jake had made his wishes apparent with a brisk, if crotchety, candor. Bob White filled us in on Jake’s dislikes, ticking them off in a gruff voice supposed to be the dead man’s:

  “Jerry Della Femina, that sourpuss Paul Simon, Helen Rattray (she edited the local weekly paper), Ron Perelman of Revlon, Macklowe the real-estate man, and Peter Maas (who once wrote a piece about him in New York magazine). Do I need them planted next to me over the centuries?”