A Hamptons Christmas

by James Brady

  No! And these were all, for better or for worse, Jake’s neighbors. And on whom, he was turning a dead back.

  According to Bob White, Mean Jake was concerned that East Hampton’s Old Churchyard was becoming a tourist attraction. “Like that place in Paris.”

  “You mean the Cimetière Père Lachaise?” I said.

  “Oh, I adore Père Lachaise!” Alix enthused. “Where Colette and Proust sleep alongside Baron Haussmann, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, Lalique, and Proust’s lover, Reynaldo. Did you know, Jane, Sarah Bernhardt had only one leg?”

  “Like our Sister Euphemia?”

  “I dare say,” Alix agreed, not knowing yet about the sister and the tramcar, but forging ahead with more on Bernhardt.

  “Only one leg, but did it give ‘the divine Sarah’ pause? Not a bit of it. Had scads of lovers, well into her sixties.”

  I got back into it then, knowing how explicit Her Ladyship could be. “But today Père Lachaise is where they bury rock stars and actors, with groupies trampling the other plots, weeping and lighting candles, all the while littering the grounds with scrolls of bad poetry.”

  Bob White nodded knowingly. “Yeah, that’s the kind of stuff drove Jake nuts.”

  As we talked, you could almost hear Alix’s mind working.

  “Mmm,” she said now, “just think. Now that he’s a neighbor of yours and the Admiral’s, Beecher, you might have Puff Daddy in there one day as well.”

  “Wow!” said Jane. “Does he live here too, Puff Daddy?”

  “Cut a certain figure last summer when I was visiting,” Alix responded. “He and that lovely Miss Lopez he squires about.”

  “Beecher?”

  “Yes, Jane.”

  “If Puff Daddy ever dies and they bury him out here, will you let me know? I’d love to pay my respects on school break.”

  This was some kid, or maybe it was typical at her age, thrilled by both a Martha Stewart Christmas and a rapper’s grave.

  “Police called in to find Jake?” I asked Bob.

  “You know Bonackers, they’re being pretty hush-hush about it. And Sis doesn’t want any more bad publicity. The other two times they stole Jake’s bones, they brought ’em back. Besides, a couple of the Bonac Boys are on the force.”

  The Bonac Boys were locals, contemporary equivalent of the Sons of Liberty up in New England just before the American Revolution, patriotic fellows who tarred and feathered Tories or anyone else who objected to their bullying tactics. A Bayman named Peanuts Murphy was their leader.

  Mean Jake’s will cut his sister some slack. She could parcel out the plots at her discretion, admitting people she thought brother Jake would have tolerated. “I’d go through eternity anytime with Tony Duke,” her brother had allowed. Okay, too, was Gordon Vorpahl, the genius mechanic who used to tune Jake’s cars and who died in the pits at an auto race.

  Maybe the Admiral would qualify. I resolved to ask Sis one day. If she was in a good mood, that is. Jake wasn’t the only “mean” one in the family.

  When I went to get the car, I just barely heard Susannah’s (Jane’s!) question:

  “Alix, do you happen to know the family name of the gentleman whose bones they keep stealing? Mean Jake, I mean.”

  “Haven’t the foggiest. Why, did you know someone like that?”

  “Oh, no. Just curious.”

  Chapter Ten

  He drank hard and drove fast. And died trying not to hit a deer …

  My father had known Jacob Marley; I hadn’t. But I knew about him. You couldn’t live in East Hampton and not know about Jake.

  Maybe wherever you lived in America, you knew.

  Marley’s father had been in the Cabinet, Eisenhower’s, because of his wealth and connections. And when he found bureaucracy a stifling bore, he resigned and began giving away his money. The money came from real estate and construction. He put up some of the first shopping centers in America, and the rich man became even richer. And so he shared the wealth: museums, universities, research hospitals, beach erosion, cancer, regional theater, libraries, his alma mater, worthy causes, you know the sort of thing. Marley senior died before he’d spent all the money, and from there on, Marley’s daughter, Sis, and his son, Jake, assumed the burden. She took her half and put it in municipal bonds and treasury notes; Jake used his to make more and gave still more away to the right causes. There was still plenty to go around; this was back in the fifties, before inflation, before prices went up.

  Here in East Hampton people, some of them, came to think of Jacob junior as the meanest man in the world (meaning, he wasn’t a soft touch and turned away spongers). To the country and the world, he was seen as an enlightened philanthropist who gave away plenty. Such people paid him homage, thought of him (with his second-generation money) as a patrician.

  Marley was also a warrior who had enemies, both locally and around the States. He was contemptuous of most of them, gave grudging respect to a few even as he baffled them. “It’s my money and it’s my land, my property,” and in the end when he died, “my graveyard.” That was his style. The classic face-off here in East Hampton was between the glacial patrician and the local riffraff, the trailer-park white trash. Or that’s how it’s been seen. Only his sister and a few others knew the injured heart at the core of the man, old and vengeful, who bought the churchyard for reasons maybe no one fully understood.

  It wasn’t always like that. Sure, he was tough; he hadn’t always been bitter. Jake fell in love and married spectacularly. After two years and one son, she ran off with a cultivated adventurer. The son was raised by nannies and good prep schools. Jake doted on his boy. But one year out of Princeton young Marley also ran off with an adventurer. This one, female and not all that cultivated. She gave him a fun year or two. And left. Couldn’t be bothered, I gather. Jake must have wondered if his line was cursed.

  Jake’s son made an effort, give him that. But he also drank hard and drove fast, and he was killed on Route 114 in North Haven, near the ferry slip, trying to avoid a deer and hitting a fieldstone wall instead.

  Oddly, he was sober that time. And died saving a damned deer. On North Haven that November they voted to have a hundred local deer shot because they were pests and there were too many of them, and Jake’s kid died trying not to kill one.

  Jacob Marley was never really the same after that. Oh, he functioned. But he lost focus, permitted a young protégé to take on more and more of the work at the office, and began leaving small and eventually large decisions to the young man, whose name was Dick Driver. Marley was a great construction man. Driver wasn’t much of a builder but an instinctive genius at dealing. The company called Marley Inc. became Marley & Associates. When Driver married a European glamour-puss named Nicole, Marley attended the wedding, sent lavish gifts. People who knew Jake said he’d begun thinking of Dick not merely as a protégé but a surrogate son. The firm became Marley & Driver. Then Marley/Driver & Partners. When the Drivers’ child, a daughter, was born, Marley sent a corny card and an almost as laughable stock certificate for a few thousand shares in a promising new outfit called Microsoft. His own company was now Driver & Marley Associates. Then … well, you get the picture. There were tensions building, but despite them, each year, on her birthday, Dick and Nicole’s daughter received a birthday card and stock. Not the kid’s fault her father was manipulative and a user. Jake had plenty of the folding; money was never a problem. Control was. Jake just didn’t have the muscle anymore. Driver turned out to have a gift. He made deals and the company grew even bigger, richer, more powerful. Never mind about construction; Dick could always hire architects and men who knew structural steel and reinforced concrete, contractors who understood the building codes. He encouraged Marley to indulge himself a little. Winters in Palm Beach. No need to come in to the office. Leave it to Dick. Play a little golf. Leave it to Mr. Driver. No, Mr. Marley hasn’t retired; he’s just not here very much. Mr. Marley? Not here, sir. He’s abroad, traveling, ill, on vacation. But Mr. D
river’s here; he makes those decisions … .

  Mr. Driver makes all the decisions.

  Dick Driver was the final straw in turning Marley antisocial. The roots of Jake’s bitterness lay elsewhere and earlier. But Dick helped. Oh, yes, how he helped.

  Alix, being English and of a family with a long genealogical tree, wanted to see the Old Churchyard, so I took her up Three Mile Harbor Road next morning for a quick gaze. Too cold to hang about. The Admiral was teaching Susannah/Jane speed chess. Fifteen seconds between moves. She seemed content enough, and I don’t believe in pushing cemeteries when it comes to little kids. We took Alix’s hummer and she drove.

  I’d not seen the place for years, not since I was a schoolboy and cemeteries were places where you played and hid on dark nights, scaring hell out of passersby and, incidentally, yourself. I remember it in summer, all abloom, the grass greener than anywhere else, function of the fertilizing effects of moldering bodies, we all supposed. Now, in winter, pretty nice still. There wasn’t a locked gate or anything, only a faded white board fence in need of fresh paint, and I led the way in, reading off the stones the old East Hampton names: Bennett, Talmage, Lester, King, Miller, Vorpahl, Osborne, Schellinger, Mulford, Gardiner, Price, Duryea, Gerard. And the dates, most of them in the 1800s, a few even earlier.

  From here, you could smell the sea. Three Mile Harbor just to the west, Accabonac Harbor, and beyond that, Gardiners Bay and the ocean, just to the east. Maybe it was forty degrees, but there was wind and the damp was in it. You know that feeling. “Cold?” I asked, looking over at Alix, snuggled deep into a fur coat of some sort. Ocelot? I wondered but didn’t ask. She shook her head.

  “No. Well, a bit. Just the wind, actually. As I told your friend Mr. White about Père Lachaise, I like graveyards. The one up at Scarborough in Yorkshire is wonderful. Ever so many Brontes. Going there and walking between the stones, looking at the names, the dates, it’s like carrying a small, leather-bound book of your favorite poems, and reading them aloud when you’re all alone and not at all self-conscious, because no one’s listening.”

  I slung an arm around her furred shoulder and hugged her close.

  “That, too, is nice, Beecher. Both the Brontes and you.”

  “You can share me with the Brontes anytime.”

  She kissed me lightly. But very well. Then, brightly, “Do show me where Mr. Marley is, the chap whose bones they’re always stealing. Do they just leave an empty hole or what?”

  I remembered it was a mausoleum but had no idea where they’d sited it, nor was there any sort of rational layout that I knew of. But the Old Churchyard isn’t very big, and there were only three or four aboveground structures, so we found Mean Jake without much trouble.

  “Carrara marble,” Alix said with some assurance, “you can always tell good Carrara. It’s the bluish gray tint, y’know. Leonardo insisted on it, they say. No matter how distant the Tuscan quarry.”

  “Oh?” I’m not much on tombstones or marble. Though if it were good enough for Leonardo … But I recognize fresh hardware when I see it.

  “Jake must be back. They wouldn’t have put on a new deadbolt and lock if he weren’t.”

  “I wouldn’t think so,” she agreed removing a sheepskin-lined glove to run a hand lightly over the lettering. Then, “I always like the stone to be a bit softened by age. You know, the way a good saddle doesn’t feel precisely right until it’s been ridden a bit.”

  Not being a rider I limited myself to, “I’m sure.” And then, both of us feeling the chill, we got out of there and made our way back to the Hummer.

  “Will there be snow?” Alix asked, regarding the gray sky.

  “Not according to the Weather Channel, not yet. But sooner or later, sure. We always get snow out here.”

  “Oh, good. I do love snow.”

  Snow, the Brontes, graveyards, and me. To say nothing of Carrara marble. Alix had her enthusiasms. I looked over, enjoying and admiring her profile as she drove. God, she had a lovely face. Sensing my look, she half turned her head and smiled.

  “Almost no one else takes me to graveyards the way you do, Beecher. I do love you for it.”

  “Almost” no one? “Almost”? Now what the hell did that mean?

  Chapter Eleven

  “Thats’s the honey wagon. John K. Ott’s cesspool service …”

  Back in Manhattan, the summer people and subscribers to New York magazine are sure there’s naught going on out here in the Hamptons in winter. Or, being contrarian, they imagine it’s all very picturesque, precious even, the “nobs” roughing it in the cold.

  And they’re both wrong. They don’t know about bodies being stolen out of churchyards or about the Bronte sisters or strange kids like Susannah le Blanc using pseudonyms or about Willie Morris’s dog, Pete, or my old man playing speed chess and doing card tricks even without all his fingers. In our winters, much like the Season itself, people are born and die, they fall in love, go to the hospital, contest wills, are arrested for DWI, play the lottery, catch the flu, and get into fights at Wolfie’s Tavern. Kids attend school. Even go to college in Southampton. And now and then there’s a shooting in Montauk. The railroad issues a new timetable. Last winter two locals were busted for jacklighting deer behind the high school. In the damned parking lot! And local teens beat up a nice old gay man at Two Mile Hollow Beach just because he got excited and asked them home with him. Or a couple of Central Americans, who mow lawns in season, get into a knife fight over … well, dinero or a muchacha. Or up in Springs a deer loses a collision on Old Stone Highway, and three local fellows come out of the woods almost on signal to sling the carcass into a pickup. If there’s no work and you’re too proud to go on the welfare, or just wary of putting your name down on any sort of rolls, a properly dressed-out deer, roadkill or no, provides pretty good venison for a time. Or a hardworking young guy OD’s on drugs and everyone agrees it’s an aneurysm to spare the family. Or a fisherman named Reds Hucko falls off a dragger.

  December in the Hamptons. Well, maybe it wasn’t quite Pigalle with Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril. But it wasn’t Harold Ross’s famous “Dubuque,” either. So that next morning we took our visitor from Switzerland, whatever alias she was now using, for a little tour of the town.

  With my father at the wheel of his old Packard touring car, intent on showing Susannah (or Jane) the Christmas decorations and other village sights, we turned into Main Street from Huntting Lane, passing a shiny white truck idling by the curb. Women, emerging from the Ladies Village Improvement Society, hurried by, stepping up their pace, their heads haughtily tilted leeward of the shiny white truck.

  “Wow! What’s that stink, Admiral?” Susannah inquired. You had to like that about her, a girl who spoke her mind clear and plain, no mincing about.

  The old gentleman half turned to check. It was a chill, bright early-winter day, and you could see for miles. Painted colors stood out crisply against the polished white. Couldn’t mistake the lettering.

  “That’s the honey wagon. John K. Ott’s cesspool service. See their slogan on the back, ‘There goes the poop-pee.’”

  “Oh.”

  “You do know about cesspools, don’t you?” he asked.

  “Bien sûr, cher amiral.” Pause. “Merde. Caca. Sheit. But what do they do with it in the Hamptons?”

  My father cleared his throat.

  “I’m not quite sure how it’s disposed of. Or where. But you can bank on John Ott. Provides an essential service in a courteous, professional manner. Reliable and discreet in such matters. It’s solid, serious men like John Ott emptying cesspools, that make a town work, count on that, girl.”

  “Oh, look at what’s on at the cinema. The new Liam Neeson film,” Alix intervened, knowing about all she wanted to about Mr. Ott and the cesspools. “They say it’s splendid.”

  “I’ve seen it,” Susannah responded. “The nuns insist on the firstrun releases.”

  “Jolly good!”

  We pulled up in front of
Village Hardware and crossed the lane to Dreesen’s, the grocery store. Even out on the sidewalk you got the sweet smell of baking doughnuts, cleaning the stench of Ott’s honey wagon from memory. Rudy, who owned the place, was at his accustomed station behind the meat counter in a white butcher’s coat and apron, cutting lamb chops, while Raymond and Jimmy parceled out doughnuts, and idlers paged through the morning papers with no intention of wasting good money by actually buying them, half watching the stock futures over CNBC on the tube. My father rubbed his hands briskly. He liked Dreesen’s, the loafers and the small-town bustle both, what we had in place of the village pump. And rubbing his hands stimulated circulation in those scarred and shortened fingers. Like the rest of us, he licked at his fingers as we shuffled along in line, lest the best of the doughnuts go to waste.

  As we waited to pay, the Admiral explained just who Alix and her ward were. Only trouble, he introduced the kid to some people as Susannah, to others as Jane. Did the Pentagon know their senior spy was beginning to get names confused? Hardly a son’s business to turn in his old man, I concluded.

  Rudy, the owner, was all smiles. He never got anyone’s name quite right and saw nothing amiss.

  And now as we resumed our stroll, along came Jesse Maine, chief of the Shinnecock tribe, window-shopping.

  “On my way to pick up a few things from Ralph Lauren. One of them genuine northwest-woods logger’s shirts they got, all flannel and such,” Jesse explained to my father, “like them pioneer days of yore we all claim to miss. If we Shinnecocks ever gonna be recognized as a genuine nation by the feds, we got a responsibility to start dressing the part. Ralph Lauren’s flannel shirts, that’s a dandy starter kit.”

  The Admiral nodded his agreement, but by now Jesse was in full flight:

  It seemed, he explained, that the Shinnecocks had recently come into something of a financial windfall. Punitive taxes had hiked the price of a pack of cigarettes to nearly five dollars, while here on the tribal reservation in Southampton, the Indians were permitted by law to sell an entire carton, tax-free, for about twenty.