by James Brady
I liked that, as well, being Don Quixote. But instead of my squire, shouldn’t she be the Don’s lovely Dulcinea? But I didn’t say that, either. Episcopalian reticence.
Alix might be growing impatient but I was getting used to having her around and less uneasy with the dissonance of “houseguest.” I was even beginning to hope we wouldn’t find Hannah’s manuscript all that quickly so that Alix wouldn’t be hurrying back to Manhattan. Back at the gatehouse I opened a chilled Julienas from Georges Duboeuf that was only two years old but went down fine with sausage and pepper pizza from Sam’s, while listening to some John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald on the old stereo.
“Y’know, Beecher,” Alix said, “I haven’t been here two full days and don’t know a bloody thing. But it seems to me that what counts most here in East Hampton isn’t really money or celebrity. What counts is roots, how long you’ve all lived here. The old families, the old land, the traditions and customs. In ways, Beecher, it’s rather like Britain, all those stately homes and people who can’t pay their bills but they keep up those justifiably storied lawns.”
“… rolling them every day for a thousand years. Yeah.”
She nodded, as if trying to figure out what she’d say next and wondering if it made even the slimmest sense.
“Seems to me that if you want to find out something in a place like this, in the Hamptons and along Further Lane, you get hold of someone who’s lived here a very long time, centuries, millennia, and you enlist his assistance.…”
“No one lives centuries. They…”
“Oh, don’t be dense, Beecher. I mean a family that’s been here that long. Or longer.”
“Well, there are the Warrenders. And Tom Knowles’s folks. And Pam Phythian. Even my people. And the Spaeths and Gardiners and Cuttings and…”
“Longer than that.”
I was starting to see how Alix’s mind worked.
“Jesse Maine and the Shinnecocks, right?”
“May I have a little more of that wine?” she asked, not quite coy but offering me a half smile. Jesse might not know it yet but Her Ladyship’s net was about to be cast wide on the local waters.
The eleven o’clock news said Hurricane Martha had come ashore and violently so in the British Virgin Islands and was zeroing in on Puerto Rico. No threat yet to the East Coast but the Hurricane Center in Miami was watching it to see if it gave sign of making that classic right turn to come north.…
TWENTY-TWO
$2,400 for a collie to chase the sonuvabitching geese …
Even though the official season ended with Labor Day, once Her Ladyship took up residence in my quarters, the invitations came flooding in. Suddenly, I was enormously popular. You’d think Princess Di and Fergie, both!, were bunking in my spare bedroom and entertaining the gentry with their carnal favors. Enormous wealth or being a partner at Skadden Arps or helming the America’s Cup winner was one thing; having a British title was something far more likely to impress the local rustics. Most invitations were shrugged off. Not all.
“Do you want to see Leo Brass up close?” I asked.
“I’ve seen him, too bloody close in fact.” Alix wasn’t a romantic about the realities.
“He was in a cigarette boat; we had a canoe. This time we’re on land. Both of us. Much better odds.”
Every year it seemed the Green Peacers had a new cause. Locally, this time, it was Georgica Pond. And … The Gut.
“What’s ‘The Gut’ if it’s not pushy to inquire?” Alix wanted to know.
Good question. Even in East Hampton people were vague, confused, about The Gut. I was anything but expert. But I was game.
“Georgica is a gorgeous pond, with wonderful homes and a number of great estates bordering its shoreline, one of the bigger ponds in East Hampton, couple of miles long and a mile or so wide. At its southern end it comes up against the ocean beach so that a narrow sand barrier no more than one hundred yards across separates the pond from the ocean. Every year, usually twice a year depending on a ruling from the town trustees, bulldozers cut a breach through that sand barrier at a narrow place called The Gut. Leo Brass usually does the bulldozing, being something of an artist with a tractor. He gouges out a channel so that the brackish water of the pond with all the sediment and fertilizer and rain runoff and such that gets in there can be flushed out into the ocean and the pond can refresh itself with an influx of clean seawater. It’s something to see, the pond water rushing out and then, at the next high tide, the ocean rushing in, with all sorts of big and little fish and crabs and shellfish flailing about, with Leo up there atop the ’dozer, waving and taking bows, and people shaking hands with the trustees and snapping photos and lifting a glass to toast The Gut and otherwise carrying on. Like when they have the grunion run in Southern California.”
“The what?”
I was getting in deeply enough with Georgica Pond and The Gut to start explaining about grunion. Especially since I knew nothing of grunion beyond what I’d read in The Last Tycoon and had never even seen one.
“Never mind.” Alix didn’t say anything, but did award me the highest raised eyebrow of the week.
There was a problem about the timing of the flushing of The Gut. Some of the big shorefront landowners were pushing for an earlier opening since Georgica Pond was high this summer and lapping at their lawns if not precisely at their front doors. And they were clearly aware a hurricane could be coming this way. Even a modest hurricane meant drenching rains that disastrously might force the Pond out of its banks and into their homes. The Baymen, led by Leo Brass, hadn’t yet said anything but were expected to hold out for a later, more traditional date, and to hell with the rich people who had property fronting on the Pond. Those were the wealthiest people, theirs the most valuable land. So you understood their position. But there was something ecologically to be said on behalf of the Baymen’s as well. I had a sneaking feeling that Brass so loved a fight that if the rich were demanding The Gut be left alone until winter, he’d be leading the battle to have it flushed yesterday afternoon. Ornery, he was.
The Baymen’s rally was scheduled for eight at Ashawag Hall on Old Stone Highway. That must have sounded impressive to Alix because she asked, “Must we book?” I said we’d get in, don’t worry, and would in fact have time to drop by first for a glass at Pam Phythian’s. Since both Pam and Leo Brass were sworn enemies of Hannah’s (as well as having clashed themselves with considerable ferocity over some ecological point of dispute or other!), we’d be touching several bases in the one evening.
“And who’s she?” Alix wondered.
Pam was easier to explain than grunion and The Gut.
“She’s a Phythian, which out here is pretty important stuff. Real old family, lots of Old Money as well. There’s even a Fithian Lane in the village that runs behind the Post Office down to Egypt Lane. That’s how some of the family spells the name, with an F. Pam’s forty or so; I always thought resembled Anouk Aimee without the accent. Damned attractive, tall, lean, and athletic. She was the one who got Hannah Cutting started climbing mountains.”
Pam had never married, I explained. Oh, there’d been opportunities, suitors, affairs. It was just, people said, that no one man measured up to Pam’s needs and expectations.
“I like her already,” Alix said, delighted at having such a vigorously independent female role model as our hostess.
I was about to say, “and she’ll like you, too,” but didn’t. There were vague stories about Pam and other women, including even Hannah. But they were only stories and you know how people gossip.
As one might have expected, given her lineage, Pam handled things superbly. While other of her guests were practically curtseying to Alix on being introduced, Pam stuck out her hand and shook Alix’s firmly.
“Any friend of Beecher’s,” she murmured, “and especially one so lovely and having come so far.”
They were about the same height, both of them lean, but Alix less rangy, not as broad in the shoulder. Bot
h were wearing ankle-length wrap skirts not showing much leg (last summer’s trendy look but a shame, I thought). Pam was much tanner except for her hands. A gardener, of course, who habitually wore gardening gloves; and who in East Hampton wasn’t a gardener? As we stood there chatting, Jerry Della Femina joined us. He was the big noise on Madison Avenue who owned a smashing home on the dunes and several businesses including restaurants and a small but chic shopping center. Busy man. In his spare time he was suing the town over a freedom of speech issue and had also run for East Hampton town elective office earlier in the year and lost badly. But then, in every election, there are losers. What left a bad taste behind was Jerry’s loud complaint that traditional old members of the Maidstone Club ganged up and defeated him and his blue-collar supporters. He was especially irate over one superannuated old gent who’d been rolled into the polling place in a wheelchair while hooked up to a breathing device. How dare these people?
Jerry’s annoyed protest at allowing an invalid to cast a ballot ignited a furious backlash on behalf of the elderly man’s guts and public spirit. Jerry was holding forth now on another matter, brilliant and persuasive in his trademark style.
“These Baymen have the right idea. Get a tough like Leo Brass up there to put a scare into the Establishment…”
“Brass?” Pam said. “What’s he up to now?” She’d hardly been listening to Jerry, almost rudely ignoring his rant, or that was my impression, but now she seized on Leo’s name.
“Oh, I dunno,” Jerry Della Femina said, “something about emptying ponds and changing the water. Turtles eating ducks or vice versa. And the red tide and the green algae, or have I got that confused?” Jerry knew very well what it was all about but enjoyed playing the simpleton and then, having lulled an opponent, pouncing!
Alix picked up on it:
“It’s all a matter of duck feces,” she said, “imperiling fish and crabs and oysters and the like, causing the aggressive growth of algae and raising coliform counts. That’s what chokes out the shellfish,” Alix offered, “or at least so I’m given to understand by Native American and other expert ecological sources.”
Della Femina had not yet met Her Ladyship so I made the introductions.
“Duck feces? Native Americans? Coliform counts? What would an English duchess know about all that?”
“Well, firstly, I’m hardly a duchess but I happen to be a personal friend of Mr. Jesse Maine who…”
Pam’s face was still intent on something else. On Jerry’s mention of Leo Brass? What was this all about? She’d battled and publicly with Leo even more fiercely than Hannah.
Over a glass Pam asked Alix if she played tennis. Having earlier underestimated the English myself when it came to personal floation devices, I was half-hoping Alix would tell her, “Why, yes, I reached the round of sixteen at Wimbledon before twisting my knee against Sanchez-Vicario.”
Instead, Alix demurred. “Oh, you know … I’m really not match-fit, much more caught up these days in Native American efforts to gain recognition for Crispus Attucks. And about flushing Georgica Lake into the sea.”
“Pond,” I hissed, “Georgica Pond.”
“Well, we’re all aware it’s hardly Loch Ness.” She shot a hostile look at me.
Ashawag Hall was just about filled and we squeezed into seats upfront, which I didn’t like because they made it harder to slip out if you were bored. The crowd was Baymen, mostly, plus some serious New Money landowners who didn’t trust rabble-rousers like Brass and feared their wine cellars might be flooded or their taxes would go up. There were also the usual wealthy layabouts and retailers and accountants and mergers & acquisitions specialists and Manhattan dentists who’d done well in the market and thought they owed it to America to espouse causes. Even ones they didn’t precisely understand.
George Plimpton had been called in to moderate the rally. He did that sort of thing very well and was also available, it was said somewhat mockingly, to tape TV commercials for a local pizza parlor or swimming pool contractor. I admired George immensely. But as a fellow Harvard man I secretly wished he were more discriminating in the enterprises he took up. The Paris Review was one thing; pizza parlors quite another. But there were lots of people here who liked George and, because he was quasi-official pyrotechnic adviser to East Hampton, they hoped he might set off a few. People enjoy a good fireworks show.
Billy Joel, as well, showed up. If the Baymen had an event, you could count on Billy. And there were just lots of people who liked Billy and hoped maybe he’d play a little piano during the evening. East Hampton was a village that enjoyed piano music and a good fireworks show. But this was September and we had to be satisfied with Leo Brass and The Gut. If that’s what he genuinely had on his mind; you couldn’t always tell with Leo. Charisma he had; consistency? Well, now that was something else. Maybe there was a hurricane coming but right now, we had dry brush, dry scrub pine, and most folks were more nervous about that than a tropical storm and heavy rain. If the brushfires ever got started again as they did Labor Day weekend a year ago, it didn’t really matter which side of the snail darter debate or flushing The Gut you favored.
Leo was good. Like all effective demagogues, he conveyed an absolute sense of believing everything he said, especially the rubbish. Brushing Plimpton aside (you’d think Leo, too, had a Harvard degree), he addressed, not a few fishermen in an echoing little hall, but a larger constituency. Channel 12, the local community TV station, had its camera there; there was a reporter from Newsday, a woman from the Times, and Larry Penny, the naturalist who wrote for the East Hampton Star, busily taking notes. And Alix and me upfront. He saw us, all right, and nodded, giving us a tight smile. Not saying hello but just marking that we were there.
Before he started to speak, Alix hissed at me.
“You’re right, you know.”
“About what?”
“Hitler. He does look like ‘a tall Hitler.’”
I hoped her voice didn’t carry.
Leo’s agenda? Just listen:
“Disaster is good.
“Nature’s way of kicking us in the ass and balancing the scales. You summer people don’t understand that. Last year’s Labor Day pine barrens fire in Westhampton Beach cleared the land. There are seeds that need heat to burst open and germinate. Five years from now we’ll have a better forest there. Let the whole damned place burn next time. This hurricane they’re talking about? Good. We ought to have a Great Hurricane like ’38 every generation. Scour the beaches, rinse the air, renew the ponds, knock down the dead trees.
“This isn’t the Sierra Club. The Hamptons Baymen aren’t tree-huggers, we’re not amateurs. We’re serious, professional, hardworking people, who live every day with nature, work every day with nature. If we don’t collaborate with nature, sometimes nature gets up on its hind legs and kills us. We understand that, as well. Every few years a Dayman’s boat goes down, a man drowns. We know, as dilettantes can’t and tree-huggers won’t, that when you rape the sea, when you rape the land, when you rape the sky, there’s nothing left to reap or harvest or bring to net. Nature doesn’t have to kill you to get even; it can starve you. Practical working people understand this. Farmers, ranchers, commercial fishermen. Spending a few weeks here in summer or dropping by weekends doesn’t qualify you. You can’t know. We know.”
The audience, which he’d just insulted as dilettantes who couldn’t possibly know, loved it, breaking into applause.
“Here is our agenda for the year two thousand,” Brass continued.
“He thinks long term,” Alix said quietly, “got to give him that.”
“The Unabomber thought long term as well.”
“Hush,” someone behind us said, hearing Alix and reading meaning into my verbalized thoughts. Alix smiled, sensing support for her point of view. But Leo was already talking, listing his priorities:
“The wetlands are at risk. Swimming pools seem to come first. We cannot permit the East Hampton wetlands to be crucified on a cro
ss of chlorine. The following steps are essential and the very first of them involves foreign affairs and a need for the State Department to become vigorously involved.”
He paused, and I must confess, we all leaned forward anticipating his next words. What was this all about, “foreign relations”? This was East Hampton, not Bosnia. What the hell did other countries have to do with chlorine in our swimming pools and whether they were overflowing into the local wetlands? Leo waited until the buzz fell. Then,
“Canada geese! There they are, in their thousands, shitting all over the fairways of the Maidstone Club, befouling the saline inlets and bays of the town, our precious freshwater ponds. Shitting on your lawn. And mine. Foreign birds, crossing our national borders to foul the playgrounds and ballfields of our small children.” Leo threw a small bone to moneyed, older folks in the audience, people who had no small children and resented the level of school tax.
“Shitting on your Cadillacs and Mercedes. I studied this problem at MIT, how the acid content in their droppings is eating through nine coats of the finest factory paint on the best automobiles the industry can build.”
He paused. We again leaned forward. I could hear Alix’s breathing. It did nice, pneumatic things to her blouse and those young breasts within, Leo resumed:
“Washington does nothing about these lousy fowls. A totally supine reaction. No severe representations made to Ottawa. And why not? We didn’t take this crap from Noriega? Why let the Canucks dump on us? Has someone been bought off? Or is it racism? Quite possibly.” He rolled his eyes a bit, suggesting more than his words. Then, changing pace deftly, he came down a degree or two in fury and went on. “And when Americans, decent people, our countrymen, stand up to the threat? What happens then, when they resist the invading birds? Upstate in Rockland County, Supervisor Charles Holbrook of Clarks-town, rather than shoo away the damned birds, had them shot, and the fresh meat, tasty at that, donated to the poor. What happened? Two hundred pounds of goose meat was seized by the state on grounds it was contaminated by feathers, dirt, and traces of lead pellets. Starving Americans forbidden to eat a free meal of roast goose.