A Hamptons Christmas

by James Brady

  “It’s a wonderful thing, democracy,” said Jesse. “God bless America and all here assembled.”

  “Amen,” murmured Susannah/Jane out of sheer good manners and convent teaching.

  “And Sir Walter Raleigh, too,” Jesse added, “the fella got white folks first hooked on Lucky Strikes and don’t you ever forget it, kiddo.”

  “I shant,” the child promised, though she’d not yet even been introduced. But Jesse didn’t pause.

  “A year ago we would have settled for Eddie Bauer flannel shirts. Maybe the Gap. Look at us now, patronizing Ralph Lauren.” He shook his head in wonderment.

  “You just consider that Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell of the Northern Cheyenne down there in Washington sashaying about, casting vetoes, and going on Meet the Press, with society hairdressers competing to comb out his ponytail. That’s what we Shinnecocks need, a genuine Native American look. Trouble is, most of us Shinnecocks is half to three-quarters African-American, and with hair like mine, it’s hell doing ponytails.” Then, having justified his window-shopping, he addressed me. “I heard you was back in town, Beecher. And Your Ladyship, too? Well, I’ll be damned. This is a pleasure.”

  We all shook hands, with Jesse staring down from his great height at Susannah/Jane, as if to ask, “And just who might you be giving out ‘amens’?” I made the introductions, giving Jesse his full due as far as titles and honorifics were concerned.

  “I never met a Native American war chief before,” the girl informed Chief Maine solemnly.

  “Few do, Miss,” said Jesse, “we are a reserved and careful bunch.”

  “But in history we studied the French and Indian Wars. The nuns are very big on wars in the middle form.”

  “Does them credit,” Alix put in. “Were our chaps in that one?”

  I assured her they were. “It was the French and Indians versus the Brits.”

  Jesse had his say, as well.

  “I have read up on that war myself, Miss. But don’t know many Frenchmen personally. Only Pascal the pastry chef at that joint in Water Mill.”

  “Miss le Blanc attends school in Switzerland,” I explained absentmindedly.

  “Pendragon,” she corrected me in a hushed whisper that Jesse ignored.

  “That’s a place I never been. Not being all that much for scaling nor falling off Alps.”

  “There are flat places, too, Chief. And unlike what many believe, not all that much snow. In Geneva, for instance, there are palm trees growing along the lakeside.”

  Jesse shook his head. It wasn’t that he doubted the child; simply that a war chief and tribal sachem withheld judgment until he had time to ponder the matter. Then, noncommittal but wanting to be genial, he assured Susannah: “You can check with Her Ladyship, miss, but what we lack in the Hamptons in palm trees and Alps, we make up for in grand times. Our Christmas out here is pretty special. Even the summer people trek enormous distances just to see it.” He shook his head at memories of Christmas Past.

  “I am so looking forward to it,” Jane/Susannah assured him. “Christmas, that is. I’ve saved Martha Stewart’s Christmas issue from last year as a sort of guidebook.”

  “My, my,” Jesse said, “just think of it.”

  “Come along,” said the Admiral as Jesse made his farewells and ducked inside Ralph Lauren’s store to price the flannel shirts, “I believe that’s Wyseman Clagett coming along, and I don’t like that man.”

  Alix leaned down to alert our youthful guest.

  “If Mr. Clagett does approach, avert your gaze. Try not to look directly into his face.”

  “Oh?”

  “He has a monstrous tic that gives him the appearance of attempting to eat his own ear.”

  “I would dearly love to see it,” Susannah said mildly. “We have nothing like that in Switzerland that I know of. Goiter among the peasants. But no tics of Mr. Clagett’s sort.”

  Clagett had turned into one of the shops and was safely out of sight.

  “Gone in to frighten the shopgirls, I suppose,” my father remarked sourly.

  That afternoon Alix and I were finally alone back at the gate house drinking tea, something I hadn’t done since last she was in East Hampton. The tea wasn’t very good, but that Alix bothered to brew it made it all right. More than right.

  “Jane’s quite something, Beecher,” Alix informed me. “We chatted a bit last night at bedtime. She told me she prays every night, on her knees, that her parents will get back together somehow.”

  “I had the impression she felt herself well rid of them.”

  “No, she loves her mother and father; it’s their current lovers she can’t abide. Her mother has a chap called the ‘Impaler.’ And her father, I take it, has a serial relationship with any number of interchangeable young cover girls that Susannah dismisses as a group. Calls them Gidget. Wasn’t that a cinema series, Gidget Buys a Bikini? That sort of thing.”

  “I believe so. But she still doesn’t hint who the parents are?”

  “No. Just goes on and on about how she wouldn’t mind if her pa were involved with someone serious, intellectually weighty. A Brooke Shields, for example. And not these strumpets.”

  “She calls them ‘strumpets’?”

  “Well, no, that’s my term, actually. Susannah refers to them as chippies.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Corny cards, silly notes. “You shall have great expectations . . .”

  It was my father who innocently (not trying to be clever or con the girl, not a bit of it) finally got out of Susannah just who she was. A thin morning rain was falling, but the huge, walk-in fireplace in his den threw out a dry, toasting warmth and soft light. I was having a second coffee while she and the Admiral played speed chess (fifteen seconds between moves), when Susannah, who was actually holding her own, asked apropos of very little:

  “At the ice-cream shop Bob White told us the most extraordinary story, mon cher amiral, all about a gentleman called Mean Jake. And how enemies keep stealing his corpse. Right out of the graveyard.”

  “True,” said the Admiral. “Every word of it. Odd story, though. I agree with you on that.”

  “And did you know him? Mean Jake, I mean?”

  “Surely did. Everyone knew Jacob Marley.”

  “Oh.”

  That was all. Just “oh.”

  But men who run Naval Intelligence are trained in the nuances of a simple “oh.” The Admiral sensed a shift in body language, in tone of voice, even as his young opponent was pulling off a rather sophisticated rook to king’s pawn.

  “Damn!” he said, annoyed to be caught by the move even as he admired it.

  “Thank you,” she said, flattered by the admiration and not at all nettled by his annoyance.

  “Quite.” He continued to watch her without seeming to do so. Then she spoke, very quietly, articulating the words carefully. Because they were important.

  “My godfather’s name, the one I wouldn’t tell you; it was Jacob Marley. I suppose that’s he, Mean Jake, I mean. Whose old bones keep getting stolen.”

  My father inhaled, his eyes on her face.

  “I’m sorry, child. I had no …”

  What can you say? The Admiral threw me a glance as if to say, “help me out, Beecher, for God’s sake.” He had murdered the Cold War enemies of his country and had fought several hot wars in addition. But he’d never had a daughter and was terrified by the idea of a child’s sobs.

  I got up and went to her, touching her shoulder, half-pat, half-stroke of, I dunno, support? Understanding? She nodded and reached up to pat my hand in response, then said quietly, no tears, no sobs, to both of us or neither of us, “I suppose I knew he was dead. The cards for my birthday stopped coming two years ago. I continued to get statements from Mr. Rousselot at the bank. But nothing from Mr. Marley. No corny card or little note. No more stock certificates.” She paused. “I miss those silly cards, those little notes. Especially a scribbled line that always came at the end, ‘You shall have great
expectations.’ The first few times I didn’t know what that meant and then a girl at the convent told me that was what the convict told Pip, when they met in the graveyard in Great Expectations, which inspired me to read the book and learn about Estella and Miss Havisham.”

  So she missed Marley’s corny birthday cards, his scribbled notes, his Dickensian assurance of “great expecations.” No regrets over the stock certificates that stopped coming.

  “And no one told you?” I said. “Not even your parents?”

  She looked up at me.

  “They’d be the last ones to keep me up-to-date on Jacob Marley. My father is Dick Driver, who took Mr. Marley’s company away from him.”

  She pushed back then from the chess table and went to the window, with her back to the room and to us, looking out at what was left of the rain and at the morning sun struggling to get through. Finally, having pulled together conflicting memories—Marley’s generosity to her, his antagonism toward her father, the sudden shock of learning he really was dead—she faced us and said: “They didn’t speak. My father and Mr. Marley. Business differences of some sort. Terrible things happened. A big fight. Like breaking up Ma Bell as the government did years ago.”

  “They teach that in convent school? To ten-year-olds?” the Admiral asked, rather beside himself.

  “Not really teach. More like every so often during primes Mother Superior regrets aloud various investments made or not made by the convent. She bet wrong on the Baby Bells versus AT&T.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  She went on about the Marley-Driver feud. “They didn’t speak of him in my house. It was about the same time my mother and father were starting to divorce. So the two of them didn’t speak at all. I was at the convent by then and was shy about asking there about Mr. Marley. After a year without having been told, I just assumed he was dead. I knew he loved me in his own way and wouldn’t just stop writing. Not unless something terrible had happened.”

  “Poor kid,” I said, thinking about being shunted off to the convent and her parents getting divorced and her godfather’s dying all lumped together, and now without warning to find out people were stealing his body. Kids didn’t need that, did they? But Susannah wasn’t feeling sorry for herself, not at all. Just moving on.

  “I still don’t like it, Beecher, that they steal Mr. Marley’s bones. No one dead should have his bones stolen, I don’t believe.”

  The Admiral answered. “Of course they shouldn’t. It’s why sailors get buried at sea, the proper way. No vandals or graverobbers in the ocean, I can tell you. In any event, don’t concern yourself, child. Ghoulish though it is, it’s stupid local feuds at work. Don’t mean anything by it. And, besides, no one can touch Jake anymore. Not really. Not the Bonac Boys. Not …”

  “ … not my father.”

  “No, not your father. Just a shame Bob White had to tell the story in your hearing. Not that he realized there was a connection. None of us did, of course. Not until now. But it wasn’t something you should have had to hear.”

  Alix came in then.

  “Rain’s over. Just look at that sky.”

  I gave her a high sign.

  “You wanted to take Susannah shopping, didn’t you?”

  “Jane,” Susannah corrected me.

  “Silly Beecher,” Alix offered, “can’t keep the noms de guerre straight. Good thing his old dad’s the spy and not Beecher.”

  “A spy? Are you, sir? Really?”

  “Well, of a sort,” the Admiral said. “Years back, when we and the Russians …”

  “Tell me, do tell me, kleine herr grossadmiral.”

  “Yes, yes, of course I will. Soon as you and Her Ladyship buy out the stores and come home.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Had I been prettier, my father would have spent more time with me …

  If you read the newspapers at all, you knew about Driver v. Driver, the only divorce/custody case anyone ever heard of that ended up being adjudicated in the World Court at The Hague. That’s how complex it was and how corrosive it became. It involved a variety of jurisdictions; for sheer bitterness it echoed Kramer v. Kramer; for bitchy infighting (and number of mentions in Page Six of the New York Post) it promised to challenge Duff v. Perelman; and for longevity, it threatened to be as enduring as Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in Bleak House, which went on for so long no one on either side could remember what the case was all about. Not even the lawyers or the Court of Chancery itself!

  Prenups were part of the problem, of course, as was the wedding site, aboard a privately chartered yacht of Panamanian registry, owned by a Société Anonyme in Monaco, temporarily leased to a Baltic syndicate, which was sailing in international waters (the ship, not the Baltic syndicate). The ceremony had been performed by the ship’s captain (himself a stateless person for reasons too complicated to spell out here), now missing and presumed dead in a subsequent Indian Ocean typhoon. Until the unfortunate captain’s body was found, no finding of his competence or lack of same could be made. Whose was the jurisdiction? The sides couldn’t even settle on a hemisphere, never mind a country, state, or Canadian province.

  Nicole was a Mittel European with dual citizenship, Dick an American incorporated in the Bahamas. Those questions had had to be answered before a court and a judge could be assigned. Getting at Colonel Qaddafi and the Libyan terrorists was simpler. Long before the case moved on to The Hague, a lower court had denied both parents custody, deciding instead in favor of the prominent Wall Street merchant bankers Rousselot Frères as guardian pro tem, with the bankers in turn selecting the Couvent de la Tour Sacrée in Geneva to act in loco parentis. But only during term—not in school holidays or vacations. When the kid wasn’t attending classes, guardianship reverted to the bankers. Trouble was, Little Miss Driver occasionally went missing.

  What had the court especially cross was that Dick and Nicole seemed to take turns in having the girl kidnapped. Their own child. First by private detectives retained by her father, the second time by private detectives retained by the mother. Each parent was innocent, of course, denying culpability; they were acting out of love, simply intent on rescuing the child from fates worse than … well, you get the picture.

  Now, several years later, child custody and child support remained the real sticking point. As with little Gloria Vanderbilt generations before, money was at the bottom of it, both cash and a mysterious trove (no one knew precisely how many shares there were!) of Microsoft stock certificates presently in the care of her guardian Rousselot Frères chairman Henry Rousselot. But those certificates were the property of a little girl who might or might not—depending on rumors and on that day’s stock market—be one of the wealthier people in town. Was that possible? Or had her godfather’s largesse been limited to a thoughtful few hundred thousand shares? Mr. Rousselot knew and wasn’t saying. Nor was “the child.” The child, of course, being “our” Susannah. Our “Jane.” “I’m a plain girl,” she said, neither apologetic or self-conscious, just a simple statement of fact. “And my mother being a great beauty, she’s slightly embarrassed by me. And had I been prettier, I’m sure my father would have spent more time with me. He likes having pretty young girls around.”

  “But you’re very …” I began. She ignored my politesse.

  “I don’t believe either of them actually wants me, Beecher,” she assured me. “It’s just that neither of them can stand the idea of the other winning anything, including me.” All this with an extraordinary placidity and little, if any, hint of feeling sorry for herself. Then why would Dick and Nicole battle so tenaciously to retain or at least share custody? Could it be as Jane suggested, sheer bitchery? Was it those substantial custody payments that bothered him and drew her? Or was there a motivation we didn’t yet understand? Real money, for example? Where would a ten-year-old child get serious money, unless it was those shares Jake Marley used to send on birthdays?

  The Drivers were such dreadful people, one could only guess.

  Nicole
had her own concerns (beyond suing and being countersued by Dick), which very decidedly included her current beau. A child, well, kids got in the way, didn’t they? But yet … Nicole was finding Count Vlad a somewhat expensive toy, and the child support all by itself was a major chip in the legal poker game she and her former husband were playing. The divorce had been granted (in but one court, there were multiple challenges elsewhere), but the final amount of child support (several million a year, in dollars) was still being haggled over (the World Court was not known for haste). Of course the money, whatever the figure, was earmarked for Susannah. But there was always a wink and a nod of understanding that the parent granted custody decides precisely how support payments are to be spent.

  So far, quite normal in a messy divorce. Though, with Susannah Driver, there was the additional matter of that Microsoft stock.

  Now that the secret of her actual name and parentage was out, Susannah was surprisingly eager to fill us in on just about everything. Which she did that night after dinner to a rapt audience of the Admiral, Her Ladyship, Inga the housekeeper, and me. Rather enjoying the role of pivotal figure, the child spun her tale. How accurate it was (given her penchant for the deft lie), or how complete, we had no way yet of knowing. But you had to admit it was a yarn worth listening to:

  Her actual given name was … no, not Susannah. Nor Jane. It was Emma. Emma Driver.

  “Yuckie, isn’t it?” she asked rhetorically, before doing a bit of stage-setting, then diving straight back into her account, a narrative right out of Chaucer – “The Convent Girl’s Tale.”

  I can assure you we were all listening as Emma began by telling us she was indeed ten years old (“virtually in my teens!”). The gorgeous Nicole, at seventeen an Olympic figure skater, now in her thirties, lived mostly in Europe, sleeping with and largely supporting Count Vladimir, a handsome, dashing, but dubiously titled playboy from Bucharest. The construction mogul Dick (no, he was not a riverboat gambler or a monk slaving over the prayer wheels) had a string of centerfolds. He was a ruthless real-estate developer (his speciality: the eviction of widows and orphans) with a vast ego (Ibsen’s Master Builder might well have been about him, Dick modestly suggests; although he didn’t know the story but loved the title!) and ambitions to match (in 1996 he attempted to lease Vancouver; more recently he’d bid on Governor’s Island for a theme park and casino. Dick also suspected any day now someone will float his name as a future presidential candidate (never mind third parties, a second party was sniffing around, he hints).