A Hamptons Christmas

by James Brady

  Her mother also took her to lunch. Not tunafish this time. “Mostly like finger food. Salads. Greens. Shrimp and chilled lobster. I don’t know the name of the place, but it was pretty nice. I had a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich. With lots of chips. And low-fat milk, though I don’t know why. I’m skinny enough as it is. The count kept ordering wine. My mom had to speak sternly.”

  “She do that a lot?” the Admiral asked.

  “Well, she makes her point of view known. I think that was one of the problems with her and Daddy when I was little.”

  They drove around, too, as Dick Driver had done. Visited Shelter Island on the car ferry. Emma was a bit vague as to the geography. “But we saw some deer grazing on trees.”

  “Browsing,” my father put in. “Deer graze on grass but browse on trees and bushes. Especially the lower limbs.”

  “Merci bien, mynheer. I’ll straighten out the girls on that back at the convent. A middle former always enjoys scoring a point of grammar or vocabulary with the upper form.”

  Then, in her enthusiasm, Emma told us about visiting the aquarium. Sharks, octopi, sardines, a porpoise, jellyfish, and some frisky seals.

  “Well,” Alix said when Emma finished and went upstairs to change out of her party clothes, “at least in the end her parents did the correct thing. She really did seem to have had a grand day, didn’t she?”

  “Tunafish sandwiches. A Ferrari she saw but didn’t get to ride in? A country club that was closed? A ride on the Shelter Island ferry? Short rations, those, don’t you think?” The Admiral wasn’t cutting Mr. and Mrs. Driver much Christmas slack. Not when measured against a set of electric trains.

  “What do you think, Beecher?” my father asked.

  “Oh, sure. The kid seemed happy, didn’t she?”

  “Well, yes. I grant you that.”

  “Yeah,” I said. Letting it go at that.

  Alix sensed I was going to say more. “And … ?” she asked.

  “Well,” I said, “only there’s no aquarium in the Hamptons.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  “Not a child’s fault, of course. Your choice of parents.”

  So we’d caught the kid in a lie. So what? Alix figured it all out pretty well. At least I thought so. Alix knew about lies (or, as she put it, “the versions, so to speak, of the same truth”), part of her stock in trade, always had been:

  “Emma doesn’t want to be a victim. To be pitied. She’d guaranteed her parents wouldn’t let Christmas pass without seeing their daughter. Promised us they’d be here. So in the end she had to arrange her own outing, her own idyllic day with the loving parents, and ordered up a stretch limo with her credit cards. Invented the whole day …”

  “But why the deuce would a child — ?” the Admiral protested.

  “Don’t you see, sir,” Alix said quietly, “she had to protect her own parents’ image. Couldn’t permit the world to see them as the self-absorbed and thoughtless people they apparently are. She was protecting Nicole and Dick.

  “And, at the same time, she didn’t want you and me and Beecher to pity her and be sad. She didn’t want to spoil our Christmas with her disappointments.”

  “But as adults we can’t encourage this sort of, well, mythmaking, can we?” the Admiral objected.

  “We can if the myth is crafted not of malice but out of love,” Alix said quite firmly.

  “Should I speak to her?” my father asked.

  Alix’s response rather keenly indicated what she thought of that particular notion.

  “Only if to agree the local aquarium does indeed sound a super place.”

  Then we had a fright, uncomfortably close to a kidnap. Thanks to Jesse Maine, it was short-circuited. And though it turned out to be more opera buffa than genuine, it put all of us, especially the Admiral, on the alert.

  “That Odets,” Jesse reported. “He’s telling me her daddy wanted young Emma to visit him in Manhattan for a few hours today. Except that it’s got to be hush-hush. Don’t want the wife to know about it. Or you and your daddy, Beecher.”

  “But that’s absurd,” I protested. “Driver’s her father. If he wants to see his daughter over Christmas, that’s grand. It’s what we’ve been hoping for. Let him send a car or fly out here and pick her up. So long as Emma doesn’t object, why would we?”

  “Beats me. But Odets says he’d like to sort of spirit her away, get her to New York and back, all in the same day with no one the wiser. I told him I was sure we could handle that for him.”

  “Jesse, you can’t do that.”

  “I know I can’t. And I ain’t. Have a little faith, Beecher. I’m playing this boy like a big bass on light tackle.”

  The reason Driver wanted his daughter in Manhattan turned out to be a photo op. The Regis and Kathie Lee Show (she was still there) was doing a holiday special during the Christmas school break at the Rockefeller Center ice rink and at FAO Schwarz. They wanted some celebrity parents and their kids and had asked Driver (Madonna’s and Trump’s and the Giulianis’ kids were also on the producer’s wish list).

  Jesse went on, “Lefty says the kids’ll get free teddy bears and such. I told him, ‘Teddy bears? The kid smokes.’ Says Lefty, ‘Don’t matter. Driver says a Christmas video of him with the daughter is just what them judges need to see over there in that World Court in Belgium.’”

  “Holland,” I said.

  “Teddy bears,” said Alix. “Regardless of motive, it’s a charming idea. Very old-world. Y’know, Beecher, I still have a favorite teddy bear myself.”

  “I’ve met him. Name of Nubar,” I said.

  “Precisely. Named for that delightful chap Nubar Gulbenkian who used to sue Fleet Street regularly for one shilling in damages. Enjoyed court proceedings. Had Fortnum & Mason send in lunch in hampers during the trial. Chilled champagne, potted shrimp and pheasant.”

  “A photo op indeed!” my father thundered. “I’ll be damned if we’ll play cat’s-paw in a custody fight.”

  “Shouldn’t we ask Emma? Maybe she’d enjoy a day in town with her father.”

  “Then let him contact us directly,” the Admiral riposted, “and not send around snoopers!”

  I don’t know why Jesse was grinning so broadly. “Well, you can stop arguing. About five A.M. this morning me and Odets met down by the Reutersham parking lot and I told him the deal’s off. Security’s so tight along Further Lane, with all them rich Protestants, no one’s borrowing Miss Emma for the day. Not even me with all my Native American wiles. But as disappointed as his boss is going to be, Admiral, might not be a bad idea to keep a close lookout in case they try again.”

  My father thanked Jesse and told him we’d “secure our flanks with all hands on deck.”

  Jesse admitted he had toyed with the idea of sending a ringer into Manhattan in Odets’ limo just to embarrass Lefty and annoy Mr. Driver.

  “Where do you find a ringer for a ten-year old girl?” I asked.

  “I was going to tog out Phil Swift Rabbit in a stocking cap and woman’s coat and send him. He ain’t got nothing better to do and enjoys a nice ride.”

  “Phil Swift Rabbit’s forty and he’s got one eye,” I protested.

  “I know. But he’s small and skinny and there ain’t much light at five A.M.”

  “Jesus, Jesse” was all my father could say, and we all agreed not to tell Emma. Though Alix argued it was the kind of devious plot the kid would love.

  Jacob Marley’s home, the big house vaguely recalled by young Emma Driver, had been sold when they settled the estate. The unmarried Sis had never lived there in any case, only filling in on occasion to play hostess for her brother. She had her own place, a house on the east bank of Three Mile Harbor, overlooking a small marina she owned and, as something of a hobby, managed.

  “I like boats, the smell of salt,” she told the curious, “I like boat people. And from this house I look out on a pleasant body of salt water, into which the sun sinks each evening at dusk. If your tastes are anyth
ing like mine, what better place to live? Anywhere?” To intimates she admitted there was another, tongue-incheek motive:

  “And I may be the only ‘marina operator’ listed by the Vassar Alumnae bulletin.”

  The Admiral drove us over in his car. There was plenty of parking. Few people went boating at Three Mile Harbor in the cold December. A weathered old man scratching himself manned the naval stores and bait shop at the head of the marina property. Glancing out through a streaked and frosted window at us, and calculating shrewdly that we weren’t going to buy bait or shop for tarred line and turnbuckles, he ignored us. Alix and I returned to the car while my father and Emma walked up the path to Sis’s house.

  “This isn’t it,” Emma said flatly, “this isn’t the house I remember.”

  “No,” said my father gently, “you’re right, that was another house, Jake’s place. That’s been sold.”

  The Admiral called out, alerting Sis to their arrival, not wanting to startle her. After a moment or two, a tall, physically impressive woman came out onto the broad veranda hung with its faux gaslamps, unlit now of course in the gray but bright winter morning. My father hadn’t seen Sis for a time, but she was a familiar figure in her gum boots, wide-wale corduroy pants, and an oversized man’s denim shirt, with red workmen’s suspenders, a cigarette in her crimsoned mouth, and a man’s felt hat cocked jauntily over one eye, topping off the ensemble. There was a lean, rangy elegance about her despite the odd getup. Even the snapbrim gray fedora looked right. The look was Roz Russell out of Kate Hepburn, with overtones in the husky voice of Jean Arthur, of the Mr. Deeds days, the era of Jefferson Smith.

  As my father made the introductions, pleased to see Emma curtsey nicely and extend a firm hand to her hostess, he stared into Sis’s face, looking for any indication her hostility to Driver was carrying over to his daughter.

  “If there had been,” he told me when he got back, “I wouldn’t have left Emma there alone with Sis. I would have found some excuse to stay, discuss the weather, hint I could use a cup of coffee against the chill. But there wasn’t. So I issued ‘good day to all here’ and left.”

  “And Emma didn’t seem intimidated?”

  The admiral gave me a look.

  “Not our Emma. She said, ‘va bene,’ and went off with Sis, like a couple of sorority sisters.”

  I was less confident about Sis, the keeper of her brother’s flame. As heiress and executrix, she knew what her brother had done to secure the happiness and well-being of the child of his worst enemy. You could have written novels about it; stage plays; Proust crossed with Faulkner by way of Ibsen. Old Marley, betrayed by his protégé Driver, still the benefactor of the rogue’s only child. Sis could have been forgiven a natural resentment.

  Here’s what Emma herself, and later Sis, told us of their meeting.

  Sis, who never had a child, never even came close, wasn’t famous for tact:

  “Not a child’s fault, of course, your choice of parents.”

  “Mo, ma’am,” the girl said, having been thoroughly coached by the Admiral to try being agreeable.

  “Come sit by me, dear.” They were in a wonderfully cluttered living room with overstuffed furniture, ship models, highly polished brass sextants, compasses, and ships’ bells, with oil paintings of ancient sea battles, British and French men o’ war mostly, firing broadsides. It was a glorious room such as children love, and Emma stared at the paintings and ached to get up and touch the ship models. Beyond vast picture windows, boats’ masts and rigging stood out against an expanse of water.

  “Merci bien, dear lady.”

  “Chocolates?”

  “Danke.”

  “What the devil language do you speak?”

  “Several tongues. Our school in Switzerland is known, humorously, as the Tower of Babel.”

  When the kid was seated and munching, Sis started up, her language to the point, clipped and salty, but not vulgar:

  “Your father, I need not inform you, killed my brother Jake.”

  “I understood Mr. Marley took a pleurisy, lingered for a time, and passed away peacefully though coughing.”

  “Stuff and nonsense. It was murder. Murder two, manslaughter at the very least.”

  “If that’s a fact, Fraulein Marley, they kept it from me, I assure you, chère Mademoiselle.”

  “Don’t wonder. Dick Driver killed him surer than hell, as if he’d pulled the trigger. Devoured the man’s company, stole his good name, accepted credit for great projects and enormous monuments he hadn’t built. Did this to a man who took your father in as a novice draftsman and taught him the ropes, promoted him to junior partner. And did Dick Driver thank his benefactor, express his gratitude, demonstrate loyalty? The hell!”

  Emma thought it was time to say something.

  “My father always spoke highly of Mr. Marley in my presence.”

  Sis bounced nimby to her feet, very much still the sailor and a quick mover despite age.

  “A hypocrite as well. Murder and hypocrisy both, which is the greater sin, eh? Have another chocolate.”

  Emma tried to recall which were the seven capital sins (gluttony, envy, sloth, and covetousness being among them) the nuns at La Tour were forever drilling into them, but couldn’t recall hypocrisy being among them nor its relative rank. “I have no idea, Signorina.”

  “The square ones are especially fine. Coconut meat insides.”

  “I do like coconut insides. Muchas gracias.”

  “Well, then, on the assumption you can walk and chew chocolates at the same time, girl,” Sis wisecracked, grinning widely at her own stab at humor, “get yourself off that couch and I’ll show you around the place. Those ship models are something, aren’t they?”

  Marley’s marina was a pocket-size but professionally rigged operation on the eastern shore of Three Mile Harbor, directly across the water from Tony Duke’s Boys’ Harbor. “Tony puts on a dandy fireworks show every Bastille Day,” Sis said enthusiastically. “Gets George Plimpton to set them off. About ten years ago some rockets went screwy and landed among the picnickers and boaters, damned near killed people. You could hear the cursing and cries for help all the way over here on the other shore. That was a night to remember, by God! You would have loved it, girlie.”

  “Ach du lieber, I’m sure, Fraulein.”

  The marina tour was brief but included an onboard inspection of Sis Marley’s own personal pleasure craft, a sleek cigarette boat she piloted herself. “It ought to be pulled by now and cocooned in plastic for the winter. But so long as the harbor hasn’t yet frozen solid, I keep it in the water and take her out codfishing of a clear morning if the wind is down. Down in Miami, if you ever get there, this is the sort of boat they run drugs in through Biscayne Bay from the Bahamas. Gun battles night after night, you’d think we were back in Prohibition with Al Capone and the Untouchables fighting it out with machine guns. Get them to teach you girls about those days at your school. Part of history, and don’t you forget it.”

  “My word,” said Emma (now sailing under her own name), delighted to get off the subject of her father’s penchant for murder (or manslaughter) and hypocrisy. And onto violence and mayhem blamed on others.

  They were getting on so well by now, Sis and Emma (not Sis and the rest of the Drivers) that the old woman said, “Can you swim?”

  “Yes, though the water must be pretty cold, don’t you think?”

  “Cold as a well-digger’s ass, girlie. But we’re not going swimming. It’s only when I take someone out in a boat, I like to know about their survival skills, see? That makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes ma’am. And are you taking me out? Che bella cosa!”

  Sis bundled Emma into a huge yellow life vest, a personal-flotation device that fastened over her Bogner skiing anorak, and they sped out of Three Mile Harbor to bounce around Gardiners Bay for an hour or two, the big cigarette boat easily exceeding whatever speed limits they had in summer, but which were conveniently ignored in winte
r.

  “How’s that, kiddo?” Sis shouted, spitting to leeward and watching Emma, who was briefly permitted to handle the wheel. “Isn’t she a corker?”

  Emma assumed Sis meant the speedboat and responded with enthusiasm:

  “Formidable! Wunderbar! and Olé! as well!”

  Sis tucked a fresh cigarette into a corner of her mouth and grinned broadly when the Zippo lighter set it aflame. Having a kid around was fun.

  Even one that was Dick Driver’s whelp.

  Then Emma asked the question she’d been waiting to ask, swallowing hard first:

  “Why is it the fishermen keep stealing Mr. Marley’s bones?

  “What are you talking about? What fishermen?”

  “A gentleman named Bob White told us about it at the Candy Kitchen over thick shakes.”

  “First of all, Miss Smartyboots, they’re not fishermen. They’re Baymen, a hard but highly honorable profession. And a true profession, not just buying a subscription to Field & Stream and getting togged out in Ralph Lauren hipboots and little hats with flies stuck on, and playing at fishing. Releasing-live and that crap. Baymen keep their catch. Sell it at market price, or clean, cook, and eat it at home. Read Peter Matthiessen. He did a book about them, Men’s Lives. Hell of a book. Eloquent and a heartbreaker.”

  “I’m sure,” Emma said, wanting to appear agreeable.

  “Yeah, but you don’t appreciate what that title means.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Matthiessen quoted somebody from long ago saying that when people went to the market and bought fish, ‘It isn’t fish you’re buying, it’s men’s lives.’”

  Emma nodded, solemn, as Sis continued.

  “And they don’t really steal Jake’s bones, y’know; they sort of borrow them.”

  “Oh, then that makes a difference.”

  “Sure does. They’re making a point of sorts. An illegal point is my contention. That even if I bought the graveyard fair and square, pursuant to brother Jake’s last will and so on, they think they’ve still got squatters’ rights.”