A Hamptons Christmas

by James Brady

  “You have no faith. Pray without ceasing, that’s what the saints tell us. And the mystics. You don’t just rattle off an Ave or a Pater Noster and retreat into despair. Think of St. Sebastian punctured by arrows. Or the Jesuit Isaac Jogues skinned alive by Iroquois. Did they despair? Or Peter, our first Pope, crucified upside down. This Reds of yours, well, who’s to say he’s lost. Really lost?”

  There were shrugs and a few mutters, then the Frenchwoman clapped her hands.

  “Bien, now, let’s kneel, here at the margins of the sea, and pray for Reds Hucko …”

  One of the women knelt first, following Sister Infanta’s lead, and then another, and then two or three of the men. Then they all knelt, including, Sister was surprised to note, Peanuts Murphy.

  Who had earlier told her of prayer, “I ain’t much for it.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sis drove a powerful Range Rover with the logo altered to read “Deranged Rover.”

  I would shortly learn of these dawn prayers (they were all the talk that night at the Blue Parrot, where Don Hewitt of CBS heard the story and started the reportorial ball rolling even more powerfully at 60 Minutes), but not until later would I hear what else Sister Infanta was up to.

  Lefty Odets’s progress, or lack of same, I knew all about and quickly.

  Dick Driver had given Lefty roughly the same instuctions as Mademoiselle Javert’s agency got from Nicole. Find his daughter, sure, but find out what Nicole (and the Impaler) were up to and how she planned to use the kid at The Hague. Lefty, who thought he was more clever than most, decided he wouldn’t just camp out watching for young Susannah (Dick gave Lefty her passport name). Easier to find two high-profile jet-setters than some skinny schoolgirl.

  So Lefty Odets started his search for Nicole and her boyfriend by hanging out at East Hampton airport, scrutinizing the private jets coming in. And paying a local fellow a few bucks to check the railroad station. And limos, if any.

  The local fellow was the Indian chief, Jesse Maine. And before another day and a half was out, Jesse had one-third of the population of the Shinnecock Indian Reservation on Lefty’s payroll, working per diem, looking for a beautiful blonde who once skated in the ice show and a dashing European gent named Count Vlad. My father knew Joe Coffey pretty well from various undercover assignments.

  “Ask him if this Odets is as dumb as he seems,” I prompted.

  My father gave me a look.

  “I can think up the questions all by myself, thank you,” he said.

  “Okay, okay.”

  When he got Coffey, they talked for a time and then the admiral thanked him and hung up.

  “He says as far as Odets goes, if confidence was brains, he’d be a genius. Otherwise, except that he talks a good game and tries to get himself on some radio show …”

  I called Jesse. “It’s like taking candy from babies. You ought to be ashamed.”

  He was, a bit, Jesse admitted when he came by the house a bit later. “But with Christmas just about here and the little ones sending their lists to Santy, we Native American fellows can use a few dollars that ain’t otherwise working.”

  In addition to taking Lefty’s (or rather Mr. Driver’s) money, the Shinnecocks were leading him seriously astray. Up the Peconic River from Riverhead in a canoe. Over to the North Fork to scrutinize a perfectly innocent potato farm. Out to Gosman’s Dock in Montauk to study fishing boats. Surveillance of an abandoned house on Dune Road in Westhampton Beach. To watch deer grazing over in North Haven. Odets put hundreds of miles on his odometer and hours on the car’s cell phone. In Manhattan Dick Driver cursed him out and told him he didn’t want any more negative reports. Until he found Nicole and what she was actally doing with the kid, and where, Lefty should observe radio silence. “You don’t know who the hell’s listening in,” Dick said angrily. “If I’m running for president, I don’t need People magazine sniffing around or a story on Entertainment Tonight!”

  When Odets demanded a closer accounting of the Shinnecocks, Jesse Maine looked grave and told Lefty that the Great Spirit worked in strange ways and that Odets would be rewarded for his patience.

  “Strangers often become confused out here in the Hamptons, among our fens and bogs, Lady Alix,” Jesse reminded us. “Remember that Kuwaiti fellow, the archery champ who fell among turtles in Hook Pond?”

  Did she not, Alix shuddered.

  “Which turtles were those, chief?” Emma asked, coming into the room.

  When I failed to shut Jesse up, he was off and running. “They got snappers out there, Jane, snapping turtles go a good sixty pounds. Maybe more. Take a man’s foot sure as look at him. I won’t pull one into the canoe with me, not a big one. Them bastards scurry around so and bite at your damned Nikes and go for a bare ankle if they can reach one. You get distracted and start to lurching about the canoe and whacking at the turtles with your paddle, and next thing you know you’re capsized, flailing about the pond or worse, bogged down.”

  “What’s bogged down? Sounds awful.”

  “Oh, it is, Emma, er, Jane,” Alix assured her. “Don’t even think about it. You’ll have nightmares.”

  “Do tell me, Beecher, do!” Emma protested. “Not at all fair teasing innocent children with little morsels, and then not telling all.”

  By now, I was on the cusp of concluding she was about as innocent as Jesse’s killer turtles.

  There’d been a couple of nights of hard freeze, and you began to hear talk we might have good ice for skating before Christmas. I hoped so. Even if the kid did attend school in Switzerland, skating here was something. The village had begun filling up for the holidays. Not summer-filled; you could still get a seat in the movie house and a table at Nick & Toni’s or the Laundry. But the Christmas people were here and more coming in each day as the prep schools and Ivy League closed down. Is it okay to call them that, Christmas people?

  The Admiral took us to dinner at Gordon’s in Amagansett, and at the next table a sleek young man, in-between cell phone calls made and received, was busily trying to convince a very beautiful young woman she ought to go someplace with him that he had to go. Or was he attempting to convince her?

  “Look, I really, really, really want you to go with me. But not if you’re going to hate it and be miserable.”

  “You really want me there?” She was quite fine to look at and sounded sincere.

  “You know I do. But I also want the right thing for you. And for you to be at ease and enjoy yourself.”

  There was a bit more of this. Until Emma, sort of sotto voce but not quite, if you know what I mean, said:

  “I don’t think he wants her to go at all, do you?”

  “My thinking precisely,” agreed Alix, her voice even less sotto and more voce.

  “Let’s have a look at the card then,” said my father loudly, passing around menus and talking over the others in deference to the young couple at the next table.

  “Swell idea,” I said, falling in with his strategy. “And wait till you see the desserts …”

  “Because,” Emma picked up again, “if you really want someone to do something, you can always tell. At least I can.”

  “The swordfish steaks here are unusually fine, Jane,” said the Admiral. “Have you ever had swordfish?”

  “I’m not sure. Do they serve it with the sword on or off, cher Admiral?”

  “Off, usually.”

  “And is there gravy? If I don’t like a new dish but there’s gravy, I can usually get it down without barfing.”

  “There’s a good deal to be said for that theory,” Her Ladyship remarked. “I’m told the secret of contemporary French cuisine, their savory sauces, derives from the siege of Paris by the Prussians in 1870. Parisians were reduced to eating dogs and rats, and the great chefs of the three-star restaurants saved the day by concocting and ladling on the most delicious and savory of sauces.”

  “Ugh, Alix! Eating rats? Phooey on that.”

  “They were parlous times, I assu
re you. Desperate moments, born of necessity.”

  Over dessert Emma asked my father, “Grand seigneur, considering that Mr. Marley is dead, so there’s no way I can ever thank . him properly for his kindnesses when I was a little kid, do you think it might be possible for me to call on his sister and thank her?”

  The grand seigneur cleared his throat. “Well, you know how she is. Or perhaps you don’t. But she—”

  “Sometimes I think I remember her. But then, maybe there was another lady at Mr. Marley’s house with the verandas that I remember. I can’t be sure.”

  My father sought an analogy.

  “You know the film The Wizard of Oz.”

  “Bien sûr. One of my faves.”

  “Well, young Dorothy had an aunt, Auntie Em, I think was her name, very much like your own, and she—”

  “Oh, I do hope she’s like that, like Auntie Em, Herr Grosseadmiral.”

  “Yes, yes. Except that I was about to say, Ms. Marley is sort of an anti—Auntie Em, if I can make the point. There are times when Sis Marley may remind one more of, well … .”

  “Oh, you mean the Wicked Witch of the West,” said Emma, making a face.

  “Not quite that bad. No flying monkeys. But she has her moments.”

  Emma thought for a time.

  “I’d still like to pay my respects, mein herr. And if she’s in a testy moment, I can always drop a swift curtsey and back off, no?”

  Alix shook her head in admiration.

  “Precisely the posture I’d take, Beecher. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. To curtsey on departing Sis Marley, or not to curtsey, wasn’t the sort of thing you want to debate with the aristocracy.

  In the morning the Admiral made the phone call, looking sour about it. “I don’t get on with that woman. All very well that she’s the keeper of the flame for brother Jake. But she is a piece of work.”

  I knew that much for myself. Sis was locally reconizable for driving, and driving fast, in a powerful Range Rover with huge oversized tires and a souped-up engine. Above the reinforced front bumper where the brand logo is located, she’d had the printing professionally altered so that it now read “Deranged Rover.”

  “Mind, now, I’m only doing this for you, Beecher,” my father said.

  “For me? Not my idea!”

  “Well, you’re forever bringing these waifs home.”

  “Waifs? Waifs plural?” He was never going to allow me to forget it.

  Sis Marley, the Admiral said, sounded reluctant at best. “Perhaps after Christmas. I’m occupied until then.” And hung up. He reported this to Emma, who didn’t seem to feel snubbed, and said that after Christmas would be fine.

  Chapter Twenty

  He’ll look into a man’s eye and tell his age within a year.

  The Maidstone is a very old club sitting atop the East Hampton dunes, with the ocean as a backdrop. It has a carefully culled membership with a long waiting list, and it is managed and operated by intelligent people. One of their more prescient decisions, long ago, was to take into consideration the frenetic hubbub of an American Christmas-shopping season. And to try to do something about it.

  Slowing it down, for one.

  The annual pre-Christmas dinner took place on December 22. The next evening but one, clearly, was unsuitable, being Christmas Eve. A night or two before, members were still at their chores, their office parties, their shopping and errands. The twenty-second, three nights before Christmas, seemed a sensible time to sit and draw breath, to chat, eat and drink, perhaps exchange, though not open, a few small gifts.

  The Admiral traditionally took a table. A large one. Not quite large enough this year. We ended with several tables, moderately proportioned. By now half the winter population of East Hampton had joined in our plot to protect and conceal Emma Driver. The Admiral understood where his bread was buttered, I assure you. Consider just who was there at the club that night (either members in good standing or as invited guests):

  The mayor; artist Julian Schnabel; Uma Thurman with her baby (now sitting up brightly in a youth chair); Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.; painter Childe Hassam, Jr.; Rudy the grocer; Councilman Zenk from Southampton; Budd Schulberg; Netterville the sturgeon king; Calvin Klein’s estranged wife, Kelly; Annacone the tennis pro; Billy Joel and his daughter, Alexa; Peter Maas; Valerie Heller; Joe’s widow; young Dr. Willard the opthamologist and his pretty wife; George Plimpton with Mrs. P. and their twin girls; and the de Menils from Houston, the oil people. From a nearby table, oldtimer Schuyler Quackenbush III waved at my father, saluting him, I guess, for putting together a first-rate group, which now included, having arrived a bit late, Jesse Maine in his brand-new Ralph Lauren (authentic Native American) togs. There were rumors Martha Stewart might actually come down from Connecticut to flog a servant or weld a burst pipe in the pool house, and that both Ben Bradlee and Wasserstein the Wall Streeter planned cameo appearances. Jerry Della Femina and wife, Judy Licht, hosted a table of their own, having long since come to accommodation on such matters, Jerry celebrating the Jewish holidays with Judy, she marking Christmas for him.

  “Golly, Admiral,” said Her Ladyship, “this is a corking group.”

  “May I have some, Beecher?” Emma asked when the wine steward came around to take the drinks orders.

  “You certainly may not,” said Alix, determined to be on the right side of the Admiral with the holidays looming.

  Sister Infanta de Castille was the center of a hub of admirers at one of the better tables near the windows, overlooking the ocean. By now her working of miracles at the surfs edge had passed into local legend. Several local clergy and one fellow in ecclesiastical purple jabbering Italian (I suspected he might be the famed Papal Nuncio) were in attendance, and considerable wine was being consumed. Sister herself was doing her part.

  “Are nuns supposed to drink?” my father inquired of Emma, who’d been fobbed off with a Shirley Temple. “Don’t they take vows?”

  “Not of abstinence, sir, pas du tout. Chastity, yes, those are the serious vows. No licky face or carrying on. But a cocktail or afterdinner brandy, pourquoi pas?”

  He made a stern Episcopalian face. “I’d have thought drink might also be on the list.”

  I wondered if we should approach the nun (Alix having previously made Sister’s acquaintance) or if she possibly might head for us, curious to see her quarry (if that’s what Emma was) up close. As the table organized itself, and nearby tables called hullo and exchanged kisses, Emma was variously introduced. Some knew her as Alix’s ward Jane Pendragon, others as Susannah le Blanc, while she was simply Emma to the rest of us. I fretted over the inconsistencies, but sufficient drink had been taken on by most guests that I don’t think the confusion of names was even noted.

  Nor, by now, did I believe it mattered. Sister Infanta surely knew not only precisely who the Drivers’ child was but which of her aliases she was using.

  A tall, ruddy fellow of fifty or so stopped by to chat. “This is Ulf den Blitzen,” I said, introducing him to Alix. There was some brief chat and then Ulf passed on to the next table, calling out hearty “Merry Christmases!”

  “Who’s he, Beecher?”

  “Used to be a noted alpinist. Made all the usual eighth-degree ascents in the Himalayas, scaled the toughest Chamonix needles. Perfectly normal lifestyle until a few years ago, when he joined a cult. Signed over half his money to them. They go on outings in the Adirondacks, chant and dress up, all that male bonding nonsense. Then they climb pine trees without underwear. No one knows quite what to make of it, but I’ve got to admit, Ulf’s never looked fitter.”

  “A good club wants a few eccentrics on the membership roles,” my father offered, “so long as they don’t frighten horses or children.”

  “Why would they climb pines trees without their underwear?” Emma asked. “I should think the needles prick, wouldn’t you?”

  “Part of the mystique, I’m sure,” said Her Ladyship at her most nonchalant. “Not pol
ite to ask.”

  Over the entree Emma nudged me. “I’ve learned a piece. ‘The Gift of the Magi.’ Can I recite it? It’s very seasonal. Quite in keeping with the occasion.”

  “Yes, very famous American short story. O. Henry.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Fellow wrote the story.”

  “I’m sure not. A Mr. Porter. William Sydney Porter, 1862 to 1910,” Emma informed me.

  “O. Henry was his pen name. You know, like you. Sailing under false colors for good reason, I suppose.”

  “Did he keep getting kidnapped, too?”

  “No, but I think he was in jail. Though briefly.”

  “What for?”

  My God, the kid could ask questions. I hushed her up by promising if things got dull later, she might recite over the brandy.

  “Oh, Beecher, you are good!”

  Jesse Maine seemed to enjoy himself. “By damn, this is a dandy club. I’d join here myself if I had the dough and thought I could get the votes.”

  “I can’t speak to the money, but the votes might well be there, Jesse,” the Admiral said. “You know half the men in this room, I’d wager.”

  “Trouble is, Admiral, half of them know me.”

  And there was, he went on to remind us, the matter of his arrest record, mostly for poaching but with a few fistfights and a DWI or two thrown in.

  “What’s DWI?” Emma wanted to know.

  “Hush!”

  A minichorus of West Point cadets came on then and sang carols, very nice in their gray uniforms, and the singing not bad either. And on the final, traditional pieces, we were all urged to join in. And did, my father especially loud and occasionally on key.

  “By damn!” Jesse said again, even more enthusiastically, “this is one hell of a club you got here, Admiral.”