A Hamptons Christmas

by James Brady

  Venison (local, you understand, part of that culling of the herd up at North Haven) with yams and cranberries was the main dish and that wasn’t bad, either, especially with the wine stewards trotting out the vintages without even being summoned. Over the mince and pumpkin pies and coffee Jesse confided that he might be stepping down from one of his multiple leadership roles in the Shinnecock Indian Nation.

  “We’re appointing a new shaman if things work out. I got enough to do being sachem and war chief without also being medicine man, and going down to Washington and up to Albany to lobby for recognition as an official tribe. As well as getting them to ease up on minimum lengths for striped bass and the poaching laws.”

  “Who’s this new shaman?” my father asked jocularly, “not Ulf den Blitzen, I trust.”

  “No, one of the Latham boys, old Hamptons family. He’s almost all Shinnecock and a hell of a lad, Admiral. Claims he can see right into your soul. And to prove it, he’ll look into a man’s eye and tell his age within a year and his exact weight within two pounds. And he’s got one of them aluminum baseball bats he keeps handy in his pickup if anyone objects to being looked in the damned eye, I swear!”

  “Wow!” said Emma, “Could you bring Mr. Latham to Geneva sometime, Jesse, so he could meet Mother Superior and look all the nuns in the eye and tell their age and how much they weigh. There’s nobody like that in Switzerland at all that I know about.”

  “I shouldn’t think so, miss. These are rare gifts few has.”

  As the coffee was served and the dancing began, here came Sister Infanta de Castille. Had I been more alert I would have inserted myself between our young Emma and this formidable and somewhat intimidating figure. Too late.

  Ignoring the rest of our table and holding out a hand, staring down with piercing eyes from her great height, the nun made immediate eye contact with the girl. “I am Sister Infanta de Castille,” she announced.

  “Yes, Sister,” Emma replied, inclining her head slightly in a show of manners, “and I am Miss Wanderly Luxemburgo of the Canary Islands.”

  “Of course you are,” said the nun, eyes piously lowering, and not believing it for an instant. And then, eyes flicked again upward and blazing, she was off, headed back to her own table, as Emma, totally unperturbed, spooned up a dollop of pêche melba. A pair of genuine fakes they were, those two, and mutually recognized it.

  “Well,” said the Admiral, “and what was that all about?”

  “A passage at arms, father,” I said, “antagonists measuring each other in advance as they wait in the lists, just before the shout goes up, ‘Let the games begin!’”

  “Mmm,” Her Ladyship remarked, “most curious.”

  And it was, I thought. But then, Christmas parties at the Maidstone, what did one reasonably expect?

  Alix flirted with the West Point cadets, George Plimpton’s twins and Emma became acquainted (getting along swimmingly), Ulf den Blitzen told stories of grand old times up there at base camp in the Himalayas, “casting about for a glimpse, trying to get a photo of the dreaded Yeti.”

  “What’s that, sir?” Emma inquired, a bit restive at having Ulf telling stories while she hadn’t been asked to recite.

  “Also known as the Abominable Snowman. A great, red-headed rascal that leaps out at one.”

  “Oh,” said Emma. I could hear Jesse murmur under his breath, “I’ll be goddamned!”

  Ulf told a good yarn but was tight-lipped about the cult (and climbing pine trees without underwear). While Sister Infanta de Castille so charmed everyone that the chairman of the dinner committee (certainly not a Catholic himself, I assure you) got up and asked her to close the evening by giving a blessing.

  So we never did get around to having a recitation of “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry, or Mr. Porter, but I think that may have been just as well since, as I recall, it’s a pretty sad story to have recited at you on the night just before Christmas.

  Especially after a few drinks.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Sister Infanta is repudiated privately by the order of Mother Teresa …

  “Reds come ashore. Reds’ body washed up!”

  That was how the next morning began, and a cold one it was. The thought of Reds Hucko’s corpse making an appearance, so shortly after Sister Infanta de Castille and the Baymen prayed over him, was eerie. Of course East Hampton people wanted the poor fellow’s body found. You don’t want to think of a good man out there in the winter ocean being fed upon by cod. Even if Reds did take a drink. And owed money. But here on shore, in divided East Hampton, as long as Reds was missing at sea, the hostile confrontation between the Marley estate and the Baymen over his gravesite was on indefinite hold. And a good thing. Sis Marley was Mean Jake’s sister, and you know what that meant, how mean. And the Bonac Boys were already angry and getting angrier.

  The body was pitched into the bed of a pickup and sped to Southampton Hospital for an autopsy, but long before they had the cadaver on the coroner’s table, Sister Infanta de Castille had called on Peanuts Murphy to console him.

  “Hey, Sister, ain’t your fault. Don’t sweat it personally.”

  “Monsieur Murphy, faith, if truly genuine, endures regardless of these occasional setbacks. And indeed, the sea does give up its dead.”

  “Just like I always say,” said Peanuts insincerely. Somehow, he did not find this sentiment all that comforting. And after declining to join the nun in further prayer, he went off to Wolfie’s Tavern to organize another Bonac Boys demonstration before the locked gates of the Old Churchyard. With Reds back in town, and being carved on at Southampton Hospital, the question of his burial place couldn’t much longer be deferred.

  “Maybe we oughta steal Jake again,” one of his cronies suggested over the beer. A nice symmetry, Jake out of the cemetery and Reds in, if they could pull it off.

  “We might,” said Peanuts, jaw clenched. They’d stolen Jake before, with Peanuts prominent among the Boys, and they knew how to do it. They could do it again, even with a dead bolt on the mausoleum, “sure as hell, by God!”

  “Yeah, to hell with the Marleys! Maybe we’ll just take his mausoleum for Hucko.”

  It never got to that.

  “It ain’t Reds!”

  The good, if mystifying, news spread rapidly through East Hampton. Peanuts Murphy, who’d taken on the role of chief mourner (Reds owed Peanuts a few bucks; it was no secret), was called upon to issue clarifying statements (much in the style of White House press secretaries confronted by embarrassing gaffes and disclosures): “The sawbones who did the autopsy says the stiff got stainless-steel teeth. Probably fell off a Russki trawler. The fish been working him over for considerable time but they’re sure. Reds was six-two. This fellow’s a foot shorter. But the big thing is, Americans don’t do steel teeth.”

  Not everyone was convinced. Suspicion still lay heavily on the Marleys, damn them!

  “Who knows about Hucko’s teeth? Anyone check his dental records, just to be sure?”

  “Oh, hell, if Reds had steel teeth don’t you think we’d all remember that? I punched him myself in the face more than once at Boaters. Or here at Wolfie’s. Didn’t you? Didn’t all of us? Reds was always begging for a shot in the mouth.”

  “Sure, and if Reds had steel teeth, he would of showed them around. Reds enjoyed making an impression. Always did.”

  “Sure, he would of had pictures taken, that bastard.”

  If others were disappointed Reds’s body was still missing, Mademoiselle Javert was not among them. She was by now so deeply into the persona of Sister Infanta de Castille that she was attending early mass every morning and watching the Sister Angelica show on cable TV. To have thought Hucko dead and his body recovered one day, then the very next to be informed the corpse was a party of the third part, and with steel teeth at that, was simply too good an opportunity for Sister Infanta to let slip. So rather than regret Hucko was still missing, she prayed in the streets of Montauk, and aloud, raising Te De
ums of gratitude that Reds Hucko might not yet be dead. Or at least not proven so.

  One mourner was so enthused by her message he shouted, “Hucko lives! Hucko lives!”

  Women of the village didn’t go that far, but they and a few small children followed her about, chiming in on the prayers, less well on the Te Deums, since they knew no Latin. But Sister Infanta was certainly building a following and at least two hundred people turned out when her thanksgiving prayers were offered in all solemnity just outside the Old Churchyard. By now there were two TV crews and reporters from Newsweek and the Times. We drove up out of curiosity and because Emma wanted to see the churchyard from which Jake Marley’s bones were occasionally stolen.

  Sister Infanta was standing on a sturdy milk carton and addressing the troops when we got there.

  “Let’s be grateful and not mourn. The man can yet turn up. I’d prefer to pray on the beach, at the water’s edge, closer to where Monsieur Hucko met his fate, whatever that may yet turn out to be, but it’s too cold.”

  Admiral Stowe, going impatiently foot to foot and feeling the cold in damaged fingers, grunted assent.

  “The woman may or may not be a genuine nun, but about that, she’s right. Too damned cold! Finally, the pond’s freezing.”

  “Will there be skating?” Emma asked.

  “Looks good. One more night like this, I’d say.” We’d need skates, of course. I had a pair, so did my father. Inga was practically a pro. Being Nicole’s daughter, Emma would have the genes but still would need a pair of skates. As for Her Ladyship, Alix didn’t travel light (the only person of her generation still toting a steamer trunk), and you never knew what might turn up when she unpacked.

  Alix was all for a good cold spell. “I can’t wait to try out my Hummer on ice and bolting through snowdrifts, sounding the klaxon and crying, ‘Yoicks!’”

  As the frenzy over Reds’s “body” calmed and faded, young Miss Driver’s introduction to Sis Marley again moved to the front burner. When the date came, the Admiral was determined to deliver the child himself.

  “Wouldn’t miss it. Sis Marley’s not my cup of tea, never was. And can’t blame Sis for being reluctant, for setting ‘tentative’ dates, with this bad blood between the Marleys and Dick Driver. Not that Sis will hold it against the kid. But after all, Emma is Dick’s daughter. Still, knowing how hard-shell Sis is, and getting the chance to see her with young Emma …”

  This genial interlude was not to last. A lengthy E-mail now arrived (in code) for the Admiral from his “man” in Geneva, the hotel concierge Marcel.

  Decoding as he went, the Admiral read the message aloud:

  “The nun known as Sister Infanta de Castille is repudiated by the order of nuns founded by the late Mother Teresa. They wish no unseemly publicity so will confirm this only privately or not at all. Nor can any formal links to the Couvent de la Tour Sacrée be established. All nuns there are incommunicado (one elderly sister seems to be drunk), either skiing or buying clothes in the Paris couture until January 5.”

  “The drunk one, that’s got to be Sister Euphemia,” Emma interrupted.

  The Admiral continued: “Independent inquiries say ‘Sister Infanta’ may be in actuality a French investigator named Javert.”

  Well, we’d all been assuming her “nunship” was a pose, and she was probably a private eye. But this was the first time any of us had heard the name Javert.

  Which got Emma started again: “Doesn’t that raise your hackles more than slightly, mon vieux Beecher?”

  “Well, I …”

  “Javert, in Les Miserables,” the girl announced, “was ‘an inspector of the police,’ and, in point of fact, the bloodhound who ran poor Jean Valjean to earth. Sister Infanta clearly derives from someplace other than the Convent de la Tour.”

  “Damn!” Alix responded, embarrassed that a child seemed better informed than an Oxonian with a double first. “Mightn’t this simply be a coincidence of names?”

  It took the Admiral to bring her back to reality. “Hardly likely, Alix. The French have a good deal of respect for lineage. A policeman named Javert will spin off children who become policemen, and they in turn have children of their own, who become policemen. Much in the way that Mafia godfathers beget Mafia sons and grandsons.”

  Picking up on that line of thought, Alix added, “And let’s not overlook Sherlock Holmes’s brilliant brother Mycroft.”

  I wasn’t quite sure I followed either my father’s logic, or Alix’s, but he now resumed reading the E-mail from his agent in Geneva.

  “Mademoiselle (or Madame, there’s a suggestion here the woman has been or is married) Javert is widely respected by the Sûreté and especially by the Deuxième Bureau (they’re the French federal cops who wiretap everyone, including foreign correspondents, as I happen to know from firsthand experience). Mlle Javert is said to be relentless in pursuit, fearless, and quite adept at disguise. Several years ago she solved, and single-handedly so, the famous case of the missing Andaman Islander and was instrumental in running to earth the jewel fence in the affair of the Beryl Coronet.”

  “Golly!” Alix said, having read about the Beryl Coronet in her pa’s copy of the big English Sunday paper, News of the World, to which the Earl of Dunraven had a subscription for life. “Wasn’t she also the sleuth who caught on to the Three Garridebs?”

  I shook my head:

  “No, that was definitely Holmes and Watson.”

  “Oh.”

  But while, thanks to the Admiral’s man in Switzerland, we were now clearly able to see through “Sister Infanta’s” act, she was playing exceedingly well elsewhere in the Hamptons. As I say, not only a strong following among the Baymen and the tabloid press, but in more exalted circles, namely 60 Minutes and the Catholic Church. People really were starting to believe Reds Hucko could still come back. (And pay his debts? Anything was possible.) But for us who knew her true identity, critical questions remained:

  Who was paying her? One of the parents? A third party? Was she a rival of Lefty Odets or an ally? Just what were her instructions? And was she any threat to Emma Driver, a child who had, after all, been kidnapped before?

  “So what do we do now?” I asked. “Confront the woman? Or what?”

  My old man replied, “Whatever we do, we may have to get Emma out of here and tucked away somewhere else.”

  “A safe house, Herr Grosseadmiral,” Emma interjected with considerable anticipatory delight. “Olé! And cut both ears and tail! That’s the ticket.”

  “I’ve an idea,” said Alix. “The Shinnecock Reservation. Why doesn’t Beecher ring up Chief Maine and see if they can make the arrangements?”

  The Admiral shook his head. “People know how close we are to Jesse. Suppose Emma were concealed temporarily not among friends. But with apparent … enemies?”

  I think we all, even Emma, knew what he was thinking.

  Sis Marley.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  With Emma, not as a guest, but as a member of our family …

  You know how the Bob Cratchit line goes: “There never was such a Christmas.” Well, there hadn’t been, not at our house, that I could remember.

  Not even the looming menace of Mademoiselle Javert (aka Sister Infanta) could spoil things. Once the holiday was over, we might be moving Emma to “a safe house” with Sis Marley or someone else, but not yet. Here was a child who deserved to have a decent Christmas with an actual family and not, as in past years, to be ping-ponged between a self-absorbed pair of sparring litigants. Let Emma celebrate Christmas here with us first.

  On the plus side, a big snowstorm was coming, Alix was here, my old man was recovered from his wounds, my new book was shaping up, and for the first time since I was a little kid, there was a child in the house at 130 Further Lane.

  And maybe that was the best thing of all. The Admiral, who had his glacial moments, was so excited he wanted to go out and buy her an electric train.

  “That’s what you always wanted, B
eecher. A Lionel train set, as I recall, with crossing gates that went up and down, and two switches. We were living in Paris and your mother and I went down to Au Train Bleu on the rue St. Honoré and bought one. Damned expensive, too. Bright red, O Gauge, I think.”

  “Yes, father. I remember it as if it were yesterday. Great trains. But she’s a girl.”

  “Nonsense! All children love electric trains. Unfair to little girls to limit them to dolls and sets of dishes instead of a proper Lionel train. That’s where the trouble starts between men and women, over the electric trains at Christmas and a crossing gate where the arms go up and down. The girls are always shortchanged and are smart enough to realize it, sensitive enough never to forget it. Years later, married and with children of their own perhaps, the resentments still smoulder. Many a time a couple will break out bickering and the husband shakes his head and asks, what the hell did I do now?

  “And it could well be the missing set of electric trains.”

  Yes, my father does tend to beat a theory to death. I’d hate to have served under him as a mere ensign or lieutenant, junior grade, and have to keep saying, yessir, right, sir, aye aye, sir. But in the end Alix and I, with moral support from the sensible and pragmatic Inga, got the Admiral to shelve his electric trains pro tem.

  Emma began making her presence felt a few days before Christmas. Her appalling parents had sent agents (we were by now assuming they were paying Odets and Sister Infanta) to the Hamptons to keep an eye on her, make sure the rival claimant wasn’t gaining advantage, but were otherwise indifferent toward their only child. It said plenty about the kid’s resilience that she was able to shrug it off. I don’t mean she wasn’t hurt, but she didn’t limp or let it show. “I’m sure my parents’ll be here at some point in the holidays, Alix,” Emma kept assuring us, making excuses for Nicole and Dick, “you know how difficult it is to get airline reservations at this time of year.”

  She usually had a project into which she poured her energies. Good therapy, I suppose, though I don’t believe ten-year-olds, even one like her, would define it as such.