by James Brady
The message to Alix from Random House: “Bring back Hannah’s book or don’t come back yourself.” Put more tactfully, of course. Book publishers are polite folk.
“Oh, dear, they do sound cross.” Usually, she shrugged things off. Now she actually looked concerned and sat down at the Louis Vuitton laptop to rattle off some more E-mail to Harry Evans, telling him God knows what in, I assume, six-figure code signed with the names of horses.
I was sore myself and not for the first time at Leo. “Community activist,” indeed. I’d activate him! But I was also aggravated at Page Six and realized how dumb that was. I was a newsman letting my feelings for Alix get me in a mood to kill stories and suppress rumors.
Then next morning, by what seemed extraordinary coincidence (until I thought about it), a car pulled up and Warrender’s manservant came to the door. Our invitation to dinner was on creamy cardboard, handwritten, as these old WASPs do. Very last minute, Royal’s note admitted apologetically, but they were juggling dates with the hurricane coming.
“Want to have dinner with Royal Warrender?” I asked Lady Alix, being very cool.
“Oh, you are the clever one.” Had to say this about Alix, she didn’t brood, and was already quite cheery.
“Yes, aren’t I?”
The truth was that Royal hadn’t suddenly dived headlong into the Hamptons’ social scene but was simply carrying out an annual ritual of the Maidstone Club, which one of its governors would as likely have flaunted as a member of the College of Cardinals would have snubbed the Pope.
Whatever she’d E-mailed Random House seemed to have resonated with Evans, who now phoned her directly. And instead of reacting to the Page Six business and fobbing the editor off with excuses, she attempted to distract him with tantalizing hints of another book entirely:
“… I realize all that, Harry, and you’re entirely right to be miffed. But not since the Sepoy Rebellion has there been someone like this fellow Crispus Attucks. A Gandhi of his time, a Mandela or a Bishop Tutn, and we shot him down there in the snows of Boston. Shocking, I say, Harry, even at the remove of two centuries. Had he lived, he might have been a Jefferson or Washington even if, as a gentleman of color, he might not have gotten due notice. But Chief Maine has all the data, chapter and verse, and I beg to suggest that, given the proper editing, a book on Mr. Attucks could make him bigger than your chum Salman Rushdie.”
There was a substantial pause. After which, Alix said:
“No, no, Harry. Mr. Attucks is dead. Jesse Maine is our chap. Put him together with one of your finest young editors and I’m reasonably sure we’ll have a best-seller that may, given the proper promotion, succeed in…”
I don’t think Evans was buying her act anymore. When she hung up she was chewing her lower lip as if wondering, where do we go from here? But it wasn’t only her failures with Random House that were eating at her.
“Beecher, these are desperate moments.”
“Oh?”
“Yes; at Princeton, did you study ethics? I’m in something of a dilemma and I could use a little ethical counsel.” It occurred to me she was a bit of a nut on ethics but didn’t say so.
“Harvard. I went to Harvard, not that other place.”
“Oh, I am sorry.”
“It’s okay. As to ethics, my old man’s the one. He always knows right from wrong. But try me, I’ll tell you as best I can.”
What happened was that London had called. The Times. Murdoch owned The Times of London as well as the Sun with its Page Three Girls and the book publishing house of HarperCollins, where Alix was an editor. Murdoch also owned the Post in New York with its busybodies of Page Six. The pieces were falling into place and now someone over there was pressing her for a first peek at Hannah’s manuscript, if and when. Why should some Yank reporter get there first? Wasn’t as if Alix were an employee of Random House. Her firm was HarperCollins. The Random House business was pro tern and honorary. She had sacred responsibilities and loyalties to London, not to New York.
“As if I were a leftenant in the First Fusiliers and had been seconded to the King’s Own Scottish Borderers,” she said. “Or at least that was how they put it to me. My primary allegiance was to the old regiment.”
“To Rupert and The Times.”
She looked gloomy.
“That’s what they were telling me. But what would you do, Beecher?”
I’d never been very good at such questions and admitted as much. “Do what you think is right, Alix. To whom do you owe professional loyalty? To HarperCollins or Random House?”
“Oh, God, I dunno.” She loved HarperCollins but was proud of her Godwin Award and grateful to people in New York, who’d been welcoming and gracious.
When she froze up and didn’t answer, I said:
“Tomorrow, when you wake, and before you think or make cold, rational judgments, are you a Brit or a Yank? The First Fusiliers or the King’s Own? Who pays your salary, Rupert Murdoch or Harry Evans?”
She regarded me in agony. An ethical quandary on top of Page Six and threats from Random House.
“Oh, shit,” she said.
TWENTY-FIVE
It made the turn! The hurricane made the damned turn!
Desperation inspires rash acts. So does too frequent the rereading, at an impressionable age, of books like The Thirty-nine Steps.
Buchan’s thrillers are meant to be read and enjoyed but not acted upon as practical guides to conduct in the waning years of the twentieth century. I don’t mean that Alix Dunraven followed literally the example of Sir Richard Hannay and his World War One-era chums as they confounded and battled The Hun, but the accounts of their adventures and defiantly gorgeous gestures in the face of adversity and peril surely planted seeds. So that now at a moment when she should have been keenly focused on the recovery of Hannah’s unfinished manuscript, Her Ladyship decided admirably, if not prudently, to do a Madeleine Albright and negotiate peace between the warring factions.
Without letting me in on it, she drove up to meet Claire Cutting to see if between the two of them, something might be sorted out to prevent Leo Brass and me from damaging each other. Though, as she later confessed, Alix wasn’t nearly as concerned about Leo’s health as about mine. Which didn’t say much for her confidence in my “Nixons” but was nonetheless very sweet.
To this moment I don’t know precisely what went on between the two women but when Alix and the poodle got back to Further Lane and skidded to her usual racing stop on the gatehouse gravel, she was smiling broadly.
“My watch says nearly four, Beecher. We’ve not much time. She insists you and Leo foregather on neutral ground and we’re to be down there on the beach by five.”
Alix was wearing olive green corduroy jeans, sneakers, and a “Smashing Pumpkins” T-shirt so she didn’t have much changing to do.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
It rushed out of her then.
“We’re meeting Leo Brass at five down by The Gut. Claire said that’s where he wanted it to be and when. Quite precise about it, she was, five P.M. at The Gut. I said, I suppose Beecher will know where that is and she laughed. Rather rude of her, I must say. You do know where it is, don’t you?”
Yes, I knew where The Gut was. What I didn’t know was whatever possessed Alix to …
“Well, I drove up to see Claire and I laid it right out. If Beecher comes up here again and Leo’s at home, there’s certain to be ill-feeling and all sort of difficulty. Even violence. I told her that in plain language. Much as in The Three Hostages Dick Hannay told off that cad Medina after he’d spit in Sir Richard’s face while Hannay was pretending to be hypnotized. I told Claire we knew Leo was behind that midnight prowl and the stake of privet through my car seat and the cudgeling of your poor head and we simply weren’t going to stand for it anymore. What with my Random House connections and yours with Parade magazine and that nice Mr. Anderson of yours, we were anything but helpless. And you have various police officers as chums, b
esides.
“I suggested you and Leo meet and talk it all out like civilized people and not go bashing each other like angry children. Or rugby players in a pub. Negotiate an armistice of sorts, the way the Germans and Russia met at Brest-Litovsk and hammered out a truce. Your only interest was writing a story about the late Hannah Cutting’s remarkable life and times, and mine was in retrieving a manuscript she’d sold to Random House and that now was missing. Neither you nor I was the least bit interested in trashing Hannah or discomfitting Mr. Brass. We had, in fact, and I told her this with considerable emphasis, even attended his recent speech at what was the name of that hall?… and had sat there most attentively and in agreement, to a great extent, with his defense of the wetlands and so on from those dreadful geese flying down from Canada that have him concerned. And rightly so.”
Okay, I said. She hadn’t left me much choice, had she, dammit? Refusing to meet Leo now would brand me either a coward or mulishly stubborn.
We drove down Lily Pond Lane to West End and as close as we could get by road and then drove along the beach another half mile and parked the Blazer and shucked our shoes. I showed her the pond and The Gut and the jetties they have down there. We don’t have many East Hampton jetties and a good thing, too. Jetties cause all that erosion there along Dune Road in Westhampton. Or so most people believe. There was a fisherman out on a jetty surfcasting and west of The Gut you could see people strolling or a kid throwing pebbles into the surf. We walked along, the water washing against our feet and ankles, still September warm. It felt good. No Leo Brass, no Claire Cutting. I looked at my watch.
“What time did you say, five?”
“Yes. She was crisp about it, ‘five, precisely,’ Claire told me, ‘at The Gut.’ Though to tell the truth, I had no idea where it might be but knew that you would.”
Good. Maybe they weren’t coming. Maybe I wouldn’t have to fight Leo after all. I was here and he wasn’t. I began to feel pretty good when Alix said:
“Splendid, and right on time. Here they come.”
Great. I watched Leo’s pickup roll along the beach toward us with only marginal enthusiasm.
“Remember now, Beecher,” Alix whispered as they got out and came toward us, “be patient. They didn’t sign the Treaty of Versailles the very first day of the conference.”
Brest-Litovsk and Versailles; she thought large, in global terms, you had to admit.
It was reasonably polite if not exactly chummy to start with handshakes and hellos. It was a nice day with the sun still up and a fairly good surf but metronomic, no chaotic chop or crosscurrents but nice big waves coming in and breaking, and the four of us stood there at the edge, water lapping at our bare feet where the waves washed up and then fell back down the slope. But once we’d gotten past the pleasantries, as was his style, Leo started in, Mister Bombast.
“Let me tell you, Beecher, I’m not a man to be pushed. Not a bit of it. I saw plenty of your kind up there in Cambridge the year I spent at MIT, all you WASPs secure and smug in your frayed button-down shirts and old tweeds and flannels, your properly worn cordovan shoes. And I was the outsider trying so hard to do the right thing and shined my shoes and wore a proper suit to class just to show respect. What good did that do me? The suit was polyester and my shoes wrong and you snickered at it. At me…”
Not me, I said, I never …
Brass waved a large, dismissive hand. “Oh, hell, I know that. Don’t be so literal. It was guys like you, Harvard men. I’d see you around, people like you and Plimpton in the old school tie, meeting with a wink and a nod and exchanging the secret handshake. ‘Penn State? Penn State? Oh, dear, he must be a coal miner, the ruffian…’”
Even now, and sore, Leo’s gift for mimicry was pretty good. I could hear nasal Boston in his tone, see Harvard Yard in his gestures. And could sense class resentment that went deeper than either words or gestures.
“I know all about the media, too. You fellows looking for dirt, hassling people, stealing the photo of the dead kid right off the grieving goddamned mother’s night table. I’ve seen plenty of it and right here in East Hampton. Bunch of phonies, preening and posturing about their bylines, while all the time they’re…”
Claire stood next to him with Alix a few yards off from me, toying with a bare foot in the sand, moving a seashell around aimlessly. For once she was silent. Claire looked sore but she, too, kept her mouth shut. Let Leo and me paw the ground and snort. I guess that’s how the women felt. Some summit conference. Leo picked it up again.
“That’s another thing about Boston, me slaving over the Bunsen burner in labs, carrying a full academic sked, working nights behind a Cambridge bar, and driving a bulldozer weekends on construction sites for rent money, and you a hotshot on the Globe, hanging with the Kennedys.”
“The hell I…”
“Sure you did. I read all about it. With the pull you had, you should have stayed in the navy. You’d be halfway to admiral by now.”
“I wasn’t in the navy. That was my old man.”
There was an edge to our dialogue now and Alix stepped in brightly, looking to defuse it. “I met an admiral once,” she said. “Pa had him to dinner at the house. Randy old chap. I wasn’t sixteen and he had a hand on my leg before the savory was served. I told all the girls at school and they were agog. The admiral and I were quite the topic for about a week.”
Claire knit her brow and Leo stared for a moment. Then he picked up again:
“Well, your Ladyship, I can tell you and your pal Stowe here there are mighty changes coming. A time when family connections and school ties don’t matter. It’ll be the new men, not old admirals but the technocrats who know all this shit, that’ll take over and run things. We’ll…”
“Oh, tosh,” Alix said. “I’ve heard all that rubbish before about ‘the new men.’ The Labour Party trots it out every election and then the Tories win again. I’m sure Tony Blair will be standing there in Commons and droning on about ‘the new men’ until the very moment the government changes again.”
Well played, Alix, I thought. But Claire reacted.
“You’re not in England now. This is the United States where…”
Leo didn’t let his girlfriend stop him either.
“Clear, clean water, protected wetlands, an end to pollution and acid rain, reasonable limits on striped bass, liberalized rules for the haulseiners. More snapping turtles and fewer ducks in the ponds. A genuine crackdown on Canada geese that goes far beyond what…”
I let Leo go on for a bit more and then I’d had enough.
“Leo, was it you who came skulking around my place the other night? Who walloped me over the head and vandalized the Jag?”
He just looked at me, furious. Leo wasn’t used to being challenged. And certainly not interrupted while in full oratorical flight. I didn’t feel great about doing it but at some point you’ve got to call the guy on this stuff. Instead of answering, he went to his best pitch—the Brass bluster.
“Don’t you try pushing me around, Stowe. I know your old man’s a big deal and you’re this big foreign correspondent. But I ain’t answering questions when how the hell do I know if you’re wearing a wire or your girlfriend here. I know my rights and won’t be bullied.”
“I can assure you, Mr. Brass, as I told Claire earlier today, my sole objective in all this is…”
“You talk too much,” Claire said.
Alix turned to her:
“Why, Claire,” she said sweetly and not meaning it, “and how loudly you talk. I hadn’t noticed until just now.”
That was when Claire flew at her and both Leo and I stepped in to break it up. The women were fighting while Leo and I attempted to make peace and just then, a shout stopped us all.
“HEY!”
It was Jesse Maine in his pickup, racing toward us across the sand. We all four swiveled toward him, hostilities temporarily suspended.
“Hurricane’s comin’!” Jesse shouted. “Hurricane’s comin’!”
The pickup skidded to a stop and he jumped out.
“It made the turn!” he shouted. “The damned hurricane made the turn!”
Then, more quietly, “Well, hello there, Your Ladyship, Claire, Leo, and Beech. You folks better break up this little tea party and start getting ready. We got a couple of days but Hurricane Martha’s headed for East Hampton.”
Alix shook her head in admiration.
“You and The Weather Channel, Jesse. You’re amazing.”
I was staring out at the ocean and the sky. Was it my imagination or had a veil already insinuated itself between earth and the lowering sun? I glanced over and Leo, too, was looking out with an eye far more practiced than my own, looking up, gauging the wind, scrutinizing the sky.
“Come on,” he said, to Claire I guess but maybe to all of us, “there’s work to be done.”
“Here at The Gut, Leo?” Claire said.
“Here and elsewhere. Lots of places, lots to do. But yeah, here at The Gut.”
TWENTY-SIX
The Survivors Supper was that night …
It was something of a tradition, one which I’d forgotten, ever since ’38 (with time out for the War), for the Maidstone to host a “Survivors Supper” after Labor Day. Evening dress, of course.
This year it was Royal Warrender’s turn to play host. He was too young to have endured the Great Hurricane of 1938, “a wind to shake the world” as one contemporary witness called it, but he knew the stories. And older members, such as Miz Phoebe Allenby, who’d actually survived the big blow, could weigh in with personal and often thrilling anecdotes. This year, with another huge and potentially dangerous storm working its destructive way through the Bahamas, heading for Florida and then, as Jesse Maine had just reported, making that classic turn up the Atlantic coast toward Hatteras, Long Island, and New England, the survivors supper took on a special piquancy. But the Maidstone did not permit things that hadn’t yet happened to dilute the evening’s pleasures. Nor had the recent death of a neighbor, Hannah Cutting of Further Lane, done more than layer over the affair with a small irony.