A Hamptons Christmas

by James Brady

  “You fetched her home from the railroad station,” my father pointed out inaccurately.

  It was the Blue Parrot where I found her. But never mind. You didn’t win arguments with the Admiral by splitting hairs.

  When Susannah came down, not actually smoking a cigarette in deference to her hosts, but slightly reeking of a covert puff, my father did a cowardly thing, putting the blame on me. He’d gone into North Korea by night in a rubber boat and stood up to fiendish tortures by the Dreaded Taliban. But this kid intimidated him.

  “Beecher insists we contact your parents. Through the convent, if not directly.”

  I insisted? I? I gave him a look. Before I could say a word, Susannah had sprung to her own cause.

  “But, my dear Admiral, you can’t. You just can’t. I’d so looked forward to Christmas in the Hamptons. Martha Stewart’s accounts in her magazine are irresistible. I’ve never been so thrilled. And moved, as well. Not even Good King Wenceslas, on the feast of Stephen, felt more enthusiastically about Christmas than Martha Stewart.”

  “I thought you had grandparents here,” I protested, sensing the Admiral’s smirk at my naïveté.

  “That was just a tall tale, Beecher. We’d barely met and I was still sizing you up. Never show your hand early in the game. Even the Brides of Christ preach that.”

  “And Martha Stewart? Do you know her?” Could we believe anything this kid said?

  “Only through her TV show and magazine. But I suspected that if a young girl arrived on her doorstep just before Christmas, there was no way she wouldn’t be asked in, served cookies and hot chocolate, and shown about. The Christmas issue of her magazine surely is an accurate reflection of the warm, loving nature of the woman herself.”

  “I’m sure,” the Admiral muttered, sarcastically I thought.

  “But when I got there, instead of a light in the window and the Yule log on the fire, carolers in the snow, a smiling and aproned Martha flinging open doors and ushering me into a snug kitchen smelling of bakery, roasted chestnuts, and stuffed turkey, the house was shuttered and dark in the December gloom. The cab driver told me she has another house in Connecticut and was probably spending Christmas there. So I returned to the Village to puzzle out my next step. Which was where Beecher found me.”

  The Admiral listened but held firm.

  “Child, someone your age can’t just go off. Think of your own dear mother bringing you into this world, the morning sickness, no cocktails or cigarettes, all that painful labor, and then the nursing and nurturing.”

  “Sorry, Admiral, I was bottle-fed. Mummy was terribly liberated, having skated in the Icecapades. And I know the other way is better, but she had reservations. Concerns about having perky breasts. My father was very particular about his wife’s having perky—”

  “Well, we needn’t go into all that,” the Admiral said hurriedly. “The point is, once we notify them, you’re more than welcome here until they can come and get you. But …”

  She was spunky. “Gruss Gott!” she said, slapping her forehead, “You must think I’m a runaway.”

  “No, we don’t. It’s simply that …”

  I love to see my father disconcerted like this; it happens so rarely.

  “Au contraire, mon amiral, that’s precisely what you think. But I’m not. Look, here’s my return ticket to Paris on the Concorde. My Eurorail ticket to Geneva, first class. Both dated, January 3 and January 4. Classes resume at La Tour January 5. I shall be there, back with the nuns, in whatever habit they happen to be wearing. And on time, I assure you. And as for” – this with a cutting glance at me – “your turncoat son.”

  Ooof, that was a shot. Even my father felt constrained to stand up for me.

  “That’s a bit stiff, Susannah, and not at all called for. We’re simply trying to act properly in this matter. Your best interests are our sole concern. And to call Beecher a ‘turncoat’ –”

  “My dear sir, he has, as the French put it, tourne sa veste.” Then, to me, “Can you deny your betrayal of a trusting child, senor?”

  Furious, I spoke for myself. “Did you or did you not tell me your parents had just fallen from a Peruvian bridge in the Andes?”

  “A celebrated journalist that gullible? I may have floated a colorful story or two. But like so many children my age, I happen to be a victim, the pitiful flotsam of a broken marriage. My parents, alas, are divorced. And not amicably.” She raised a dainty chambray hankie to her upturned nose.

  The Admiral gave me a withering look for badgering the poor girl. Inga saved me.

  “Car coming.”

  It was at this critical juncture, with a young girl’s immediate fate undecided, that Her Ladyship Alix Dunraven arrived from London. And, as was customary, her lean, insouciant, but essentally joyous presence sent a fresh breeze through the old house and up and down Further Lane, invigorating us all, even my old dad, who pretended to disapprove of her but, like me, was putty in her hands. And why not, with Alix greeting him with kisses and small, laudatory gush:

  “But how splendid you look, Admiral. Absolutely fit, with a high color and clear eye. Shades of Drake, Frobisher, and Hawkins! There’s not a sea dog to match you even marginally these days in the entire Royal Navy. No wonder your chaps rule the seas.”

  My father grinned, still boyish at seventy and clearly smitten. Though not precisely as smitten as I, nor anything like as randy. As good as Alix looked right now.

  Her car was something, too, once we got a close look at it.

  Air kisses exchanged, introductions made, refreshments served, I was hardly surprised that Her Ladyship and Susannah were nattering on like old chums, heads together and conspiring, kindred and mischievous spirits.

  In all fairness to her, Alix’s briefing had been pretty fragmentary.

  “But how dreadful,” she told the child, “I’ve trekked across some of those Peruvian bridges myself, the chasm far below, with its snow-melted streams rushing icy toward the sea. Your parents clinging desperately to each other. Sheer terror.”

  “Far, far below,” Susannah confirmed, “jagged rock and a rushing stream.”

  “Her parents are divorced. Not amicably,” I said.

  “Oh, dear,” Alix said, “before or after the bridge went? It means everything in the law courts, y’know, and to the estate, if the parents were still married when they … well, plummeted from that horrid bridge.”

  “Oh, they’re alive,” Susannah said, pulling out a Gitanes. “Injured but alive. Saved by fierce Incan tribesmen using forest poultices and native remedies of all sorts.”

  Susannah seemed to be taking charge. Especially with Alix reflexively holding out to her a gold Dunhill’s lighter.

  I attempted to reestablish a factual tone. “No one fell off a bridge. In the Andes or anywhere else. It’s just ‘a colorful story she floated.’ Susannah attends a Swiss convent school,” I said somewhat desperately.

  “Convent school, my. Just imagine,” Alix said with enthusiasm.

  “Where the nuns are changing habits,” Susannah said brightly. “The old dowdies favor Dior; the younger, trendier sisters are all for Ungaro. As are most of the girls.”

  “But of course you are. Ungaro’s the only one,” Alix declared. “That innocent yet knowing spirit inherent in his work. Don’t you agree, Admiral?”

  There was a brief impasse when my father suggested Alix ought to stay in the big house rather than with me in my gate house.

  “Lest our young visitor be scandalized,” he suggested in hushed tones. Since his wife, my long-dead mother, had been a Paris cover girl, and in more recent years, his and Inga’s relationship clearly went beyond that of master and servant, this seemed to me disingenuous.

  It was Alix who began to winkle out of the girl just who she really was and whence she came.

  “First of all, this ‘le Blanc’ business. That’s made up as well, isn’t it?”

  Susannah answered quite directly for a change.

  “A nom de g
uerre. But not my idea, I assure you. My parents didn’t want me put down under my actual name. Kidnappers, y‘know. Prey on the children of the rich. The Red Brigades. The Black Hand. The Lindbergh baby all over again. So I’m a little nobody labeled ‘le Blanc.’ A blank page. Even my passport bears the pseudonym. Though just how that was arranged with U.S. authorities, I haven’t the foggiest.”

  “There are ways,” the Admiral said murkily, knowing something about bribery and blackmail in the intelligence trade.

  “And not to belabor the point,” Susannah went on, “but I’ve already been kidnapped twice.”

  “Actually kidnapped?” I demanded, suspicious by now of the kid’s every other statement.

  “Yes, but it was during the custody stage of the divorce, and one parent was stealing me away from the other. And vice versa. The courts didn’t take it all that seriously.”

  “Oh.”

  Leave it to Alix to bring up obscure political-science lectures at Oxford, the sacred right of sanctuary, of political asylum.

  “But those hardly obtain in this case,” I protested. “A marital custody dispute in which –”

  “Don’t be so literal, Beecher. Deal in large issues, not the picky detail. Consider the Barons at Runnymede with Prince John. The Magna Carta. English common law and all that. Those chaps didn’t nitpick, not a bit of it!”

  “We’re not in England, Alix. We’re in New York State, where different laws –”

  She didn’t let me finish.

  “If you’d read at all deeply in law at Princeton –”

  “Harvard!”

  “ … you’d know that much of your American Constitution is clearly founded on its British antecedents. Chaucer and his Tales. Beowulf. Piers Plowman. I could go on.”

  “Plus, of course, the Napoleonic Code,” my father put in, even at the risk of pedantry, unwilling to be entirely bypassed in the debate.

  “And, as your father the Admiral rightly points out, the Napoleonic Code,” she said, anxious to please, and then quickly tossing in, “as well as Malory’s Morte d’Arthur.”

  “Please, please, please let me stay,” Susannah wheedled, returning the argument to her predicament. And persuasively, at that.

  She swiftly explained that since each parent believed her safely to be with the other, and the school was closed down, no one was alarmed or concerned. “Nor should they be. Classes resume January 5 in Switzerland. I have my return tickets and would dearly love to stay until then here in the Hamptons, experiencing a true American Christmas.” One that by her vivid description would be by Norman Rockwell out of Martha Stewart.

  “Dammit, child!” the Admiral thundered at flank speed and in tones traditionally reserved for the chewing out of midshipmen, “a girl your age can’t simply move in with total strangers, including two grown men, as if we were running a bed-and-breakfast. Just not done. Nor should it be. Quite improper. An offence to the village mores. We’re Episcopalians, I’ll have you know. Not at all accustomed to having underage females running about.”

  As he broke off momentarily, perhaps having run out of steam, I offered a proposal.

  “Father, you suggested I phone the convent. Why don’t we do that right now and see if anyone’s raised the alarm?”

  A bit reluctant and uneasy, Susannah gave me the telephone number and I rang through directly.

  A man picked up. “Yes, Igor,” I said. “This is Beecher Stowe in East Hampton. May I have the Mother Superior?”

  “Igor’s the caretaker,” Susannah informed us in an aside. “And not to be trusted.”

  “Oh, all right. Thank you.” I asked a few more questions as Susannah continued to fill out the caretaker’s resume for us.

  “A randy old fellow, Igor. Always trying to peek at the upper-form girls in the ladies’.”

  When I hung up, both Alix and the Admiral said, “Well?”

  “Nobody home. Closed for the holidays. The sisters out of town visiting shrines or out taking brisk walks, I suppose …”

  “Mens sano in corpore sano,” Alix put in piously.

  “ … which still doesn’t justify the child’s staying here.”

  “Grand seigneur, s’il vous plaît …” Susannah addressed the Admiral, quite collected and calm, as she played her trump card.

  “I won’t be talked ‘round,” he protested stubbornly.

  “Of course not. But I’d thought all this through in advance, mein herr. And if it turned out that Martha Stewart was abroad … or had gotten married, or for some other legitimate reason was unable to offer me her hospitality, I did have a fallback position, y’know.”

  That halted my father in midcourse.

  “Oh, you do, do you?”

  “Yes, suppose I told you my godfather has a house in the Hamptons?”

  I guess my mouth fell open and my father’s certainly did. Alix was the first of us to recover.

  “But that’s capital! What a splendid development,” Alix enthused.

  “If true,” I murmured.

  “I knew you’d think so, Your Ladyship,” Susannah said, ignoring me. “I haven’t seen him since I was a mere infant, but he’s a wonderful man. My parents asked him to sponsor me at baptism. They were associated in business at one time, he and my father. A patrician and philanthropist, world-famed for good works. He has a big old shingled house out here. I can just barely remember its wide verandas and shaded porches with swinging gliders, fruit orchards with a big pond beyond. There were golden carp swimming about, as I recall. Very fat, very golden. I was only two or three, but I can still see the carp.”

  Does she just make this stuff up? I wondered.

  “That sounds like half the houses in town. What’s his name?” the Admiral growled skeptically. “We probably know the fellow.”

  “Ce n’est pas possible, messieurs/dames. To reveal that would surely tip you to my own identity. Within the hour my parents would be flying in aboard chartered jets in considerable alarm. To say nothing of kidnappers.”

  “Natural thing for parents to do,” remarked my father.

  Susannah shook her head.

  “Por favor, maestro …” she said, snuffing out her cigarette in the ashtray and looking innocent.

  “Don’t wheedle, child.”

  “ … and that would not only locate me precisely for the kidnappers but be the end of my holiday, ma petite aventure. Over before it ever really began. Zero à gauche.” She looked around at us, her big eyes gone liquid, focusing on each face in turn. “You’ve made me so happy here. Not knowing me but taking me in. The generosity of spirit, the warmth and good humor. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever—”

  “Oh, damn!” my father swore. He resented being burdened with guilt not truly deserved.

  Despite myself, I was enjoying this depiction of the Admiral as a saintly old Father Flanagan of Boys’ Town, but I limited my remarks to a final, pressing question. “If le Blanc is a pseudonym, what about Susannah? Is that your actual given name?”

  “No, I lifted it from Shirley Temple, ‘Susannah of the Mounties.’ It was one of my favorite flicks when I was small, and I’ve used it ever since in tight places. Che bella cosa, che bella ragazza.”

  Alix, who by now was firmly allied with the kid, snuffled into a tissue.

  “Oh, Beecher, think of a little girl watching Shirley Temple and wanting to be her. You can’t just coldly turn her out into the storm.”

  There was a brilliant sun and no storm, and I gave her a look. “You’re a pair, you two,” I murmured. Both she and Susannah looked exceedingly innocent. But not overplaying their hand, neither rubbed it in or said a word.

  Chapter Eight

  “Just what is keelhauling? And does it hurt?”

  I hadn’t seen Alix since summer, and so no matter how intriguing was young Susannah’s story, you can imagine I was pretty eager to be alone with Her Ladyship. To talk. And so on. If you know what I mean.

  “Come on,” I said. “We’ll get your bags in from the
car.”

  In deference to the lateness of the season and winter coming, instead of her accustomed rental of an open sportscar, she had a dramatically husky Humvee in camouflage paint with rallye headlights mounted and a ski rack, lacking only a machine gun and siren. It looked like that command car George C. Scott rode across Tunisia in the opening reels of Patton.

  “Are you competing in the Iditarod?” I inquired.

  “It is impressive,” she conceded with pleasure. “Does everything but desalinate water. And I got it on tick.”

  “Oh, no, Alix.” She was notorious for getting otherwise cynical corporations to lend her things.

  “Well, Beecher, I did suggest, without actually lying, that I was the motoring correspondent for the Times of London. One of Mr. Murdoch’s star byline writers. They practically forced me to take the car on a fortnight’s trial. The chap at the Hummer shop provided all variety of manuals. I still don’t know where half the controls are or what they do. And I’ve yet to find a cigarette lighter,” she said. “Even has a global-positioning device as an option, and it certainly does draw the eye. All the way out on your Long Island Motorway.”

  “Expressway.”

  “Chaps in huge lorries kept peering down at me, waving and blowing their klaxons and staring at my legs. Jolly good sports, those fellows. Not at all surly, like the lorry drivers one encounters in Britain.”

  “That’s your legs, darling, not the Hummer.”

  “You are sweet, Beecher. Do kiss me properly, won’t you.”

  I did.

  “Mmmm,” she said, sort of leaning against me and moving slowly in that appealing way she has, “can we go to bed or are you expected to lunch or something?”

  I looked at my watch. Only eleven.

  “Let’s go to bed.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said.

  About an hour later we were sitting up in my bed propped against down pillows, getting our breath and smoking my cigarettes. “Did I tell you I’d quit again?” she said.

  “Am I to feel guilty about getting you back on them?”