A Hamptons Christmas

by James Brady

  It was my turn now, and I toasted her. “We had a good driver, father. King Richard Petty couldn’t have done better. Or A. J. Foyt. No one could have.”

  “Well, now,” Alix said, “don’t overlook Ascari and John Surtees and those chaps,” pleased but blushing, “and let’s not talk rot, shall we?” At the tall french doors she pulled back draperies to look out onto the Admiral’s snow-covered lawns into the darkness, pleased but embarrassed by compliments.

  It was still snowing when we undressed and got into bed, moving fast against the chill and tugging the down comforter over and around us.

  “Oh, Beecher,” Alix said, “East Hampton out of season is super. How could you possibly think I’d be bored?”

  “Underestimated both you and East Hampton,” I said, pulling her closer, determined not to be boring, either.

  In the morning the snow was nearly two feet deep but except for a few last vagrant flakes, the storm had ended. A thin sun struggled to brighten the gray sky and welcome a glistening, sparkling new world, and as I looked out at it, there along Further Lane came the day’s first cross-country skier, making the first lovely tracks in the season’s first lovely snow. And then, as I savored the stillness and calm, there came bursting from my father’s front door a small whirlwind in the shape of a little girl in a Willy Bogner anorak and red mittens, who braked abruptly to a stop, looked all about, until, with a gleeful shout and a huge grin, she threw herself backward through the air to land fluffily in the fresh, new, untracked East Hampton snow.

  Where, flat on her back, Emma Driver then proceeded to flail arms and legs this way and that, joyously crafting angels in the snow.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Then Peanuts and the lads raised their voices a cappella with the Marines’ Hymn …

  Well, it was some funeral. Maybe the best ever out here, though a few archivists held out for 1919, when Captain Chelm came home from France and the Great War and shot his wife’s cousin, Ruggles, for cuckolding the captain while he was off fighting the Germans. There was a tremendous turnout back then, the entire Maidstone Club en masse, Ruggles being both popular and a scratch golfer.

  But they at least had a body; Reds Hucko’s funeral was on its own, so to speak.

  By ten on Wednesday morning they were still shoveling out a footpath into the Old Churchyard and plowing Abrahams Path and Old Stone Highway and the roads that got you there. So the plows came first, almost in echelon, clearing the way. Then the fire engines of three companies—Springs, East Hampton, and Amagansett. Reds had done time in all three fire companies, and each had its proud claim on him.

  Then the fleet of Schwenk oil-delivery trucks, the Hampton Jitneys, the cop cars, Doc Whitmore’s tree-nursery trucks, and the Tortorella Pool people for whom George Plimpton did commercials.

  Plus every pickup in town. They were double-parked for half a mile down Old Stone Highway to the wrought-iron gate of the Churchyard. Even the preacher, fetched by a Suffolk Country police cruiser, had to drive the last five hundred yards along the shoulder to get there at all. Sister Infanta de Castille was on hand, loudly (some felt, “showily”) telling her beads, and in full regalia, having been trucked in from Sag Harbor by pickup.

  The troubled Old Churchyard itself, buried silent and tranquil under a white shroud, was no longer a municipal battlefield. Peace on earth, good will toward men.

  Once we were through the gate and inside the white board fence (some of the spillover crowded just outside), along came a Marine Corps color guard (Reds had served, and gallantly, several wars ago) and a sort of receiving line, where Wyseman Clagett, who despised Hucko, mysteriously presided and thanked people for coming. The preacher was asked to be brief, making no mention of rap sheets or money owed. And there was but one true hymn, and Emma Driver was asked to sing it, which she did in a thin, high voice and in Latin, “Tantum Ergo.” Neither Reds nor the Marleys, and certainly not the Unitarian preacher, were Roman Catholics, but that was okay. It was the only genuine church hymn Emma knew by heart and she sang it pretty well. “For a girl without a voice,” as she herself admitted. And after the preacher preached and got Reds’ name wrong, calling him Red, Sis Marley read, fleshing out scripture with allegorical references to “shipmates” and bringing in “a good catch,” much as Father Mapple did in the opening pages of Moby-Dick. Toward the end, Peanuts and some of the lads raised their voices a cappella, in a chorus of the Marines’ Hymn. Then, when Reds was properly planted in absentia, Bonackers and everyone slogged along in the drifted snow to form a straggling line of mourners, men and women both, tossing their flowers atop the snow covering Reds’ grave. Or what would be his grave, if and when. I noticed that a lot of them, maybe most, then went over past Jake Marley’s mausoleum to give the chill, polished marble a touch for luck, a rub of the relic, so to speak. Or maybe just signaling regrets for having stolen his bones.

  They were still shuffling past and headed out toward their pickups when yet one more police cruiser came speeding up, siren wailing, lights spinning madly atop the roof, brakes pumping, tires skidding across the lane and the car itself nearly sideways. Before it was fully stopped, the passenger side door was thrown open. What was this? Didn’t the cops recognize the solemnity of the moment?

  Out stepped a hulking, red-headed fellow with a bowl haircut, wearing traditional Bayman’s sea boots, overalls, and an incongruously luxuriant full-length sable fur coat that might have seen better days under a previous owner.

  “Well, boys,” called out Reds Hucko, tugging a liter bottle of Stolichnaya from the fur coat’s pocket and leaping nimbly a foot or so off the frozen ground to click his heels together before descending to announce: “Ain’t the first funeral I ever missed and won’t be the last. But here I am back in Springs, too late for Christmas but just in time for a helluva New Year’s.”

  Chapter Thrity

  “Small blue sharks and dogfish was biting chunks out of me.”

  Well, of course Reds hadn’t drowned at all. Not that it wasn’t a near thing. In deference to the cold and a lowering gray sky, and because the pickup trucks were obstructing local traffic, the cops moved the mourners, all of us, by motorcade down Old Stone Highway to Springs-Fireplace Road. We parked our vehicles at Ashawag Hall to hear Reds’s story and to welcome him back from the dead. Even Sis Marley went along, too curious not to. When we were all jammed into the hall, dozens standing out in the corridor looking in and listening through doors ajar, or standing atop snowdrifts outside the opened windows, Reds lit a stinking yellow cigarette I suspect was Russian, and spoke his piece.

  “I don’t know just how I went overboard, but I did,” Reds began, “standing the midnight-to-four A.M. watch and hugging close a pint of rye, to stave off the cold and raise my spirits, and next thing you knew I was over the rail and under; green water atop of me and all around and six hundred fathoms below, and the good trawler Wendy Engel vanishing fast. I must of slipped on an icy deck because I was drunk but not that drunk. Which, I told myself at the time and bitterly, was a damned shame because I wasn’t going to last very long out there in the north Atlantic in November, and it might be a considerable relief, in a situation like that, to be thoroughly stewed.”

  He was wearing cold-weather survival gear, which was a rule on the Wendy, and that helped. But even a survival suit can keep you alive only so long in a November ocean. It was the survival suit’s electric light that saved him, switching on automatically on immersion, blinking on and off, on and off, drawing a Russian eye when they were close enough to …

  “It was blowing a half gale and I was almost out of it, shivering hard and swallowing seawater, trying to stay awake. They say if you just fall asleep, that’s the easy part of freezing to death. Don’t feel a thing. But when did I ever take the easy way on anything, even dying? So I kept cursing and swearing, clenching and unclenching my fists and kicking my feet underwater, not willing yet to die and trying not to freeze. And this Russian trawler’s lookout, and a good man he
is, I can tell you for sure, must of seen the survival light blinking just about the same time I was snagged by their net and damned near jerked out of the water, the speed they was moving along, and a good break, too. Because next thing I knew I was in no danger whatever of falling asleep, but wide-awake in a damned dragger’s net half-drowned along with maybe ten tons of halibut and cod and big squids, and if the lookout hadn’t seen me in there amongst the fish, I would of either drowned or been bitten to death, the way those bastards were working on me out there in the north Atlantic, being towed along at eight knots with cod and halibuts and the occasional small blue shark and dogfish biting chunks out of me, out of sheer cussedness, or maybe seizing the chance to get back at a Bayman.”

  Reds paused.

  “I wouldn’t choose to do it again if I had my druthers, but riding a fast dragger’s net through the ocean amid a load of fish, do give you an appreciation of how your average cod feels. Or a poor, damned halibut.”

  By the time the Russians got Reds aboard, and not too happy about being saddled with him either, maritime rules being what they were, the law of the sea and all that, the captain was swearing and cussing, resentful of being distracted by rescuing Amerikanskis when all he wanted was to fill his holds with fish. But they got Reds Hucko thawed out, sitting up and taking borscht, and until the morning three weeks later they nosed up to the wharf at Murmansk, to hear Reds tell about it, you had a regular Two Years before the Mast brought up-to-date. Though not so up-to-date that anyone, including Reds, thought maybe someone ought to send a radiogram to Montauk to inform friends and fellow barflies that their pal Reds wasn’t dead after all, and maybe it wasn’t really necessary to steal Jake Marley’s bones yet again in protest.

  Asked about that, Reds shrugged. “Well, I got no family. And I owe a little money to several around here. Being a month at sea ain’t no novelty and the Russkis was feeding me steady, sharing the Stoli and not working me too hard. One of their boys broke his shoulder the week before, and they was shorthanded and I was healthy and knew the work. The skipper had no reason to put in at any port just to accommodate me, and I saw his point of view, so I shipped on as a member of the crew. Plus, they had three women on board, a nurse, the cook, and the radioman, none of them Cindy Crawford, but one that spoke American. And two that washed regular. So I got along pretty well.” He pulled at the Stoli to clear his throat and continued. “You know, boys, I never before considered a woman at sea worth a damn, but out there with them Russkis, I began having second thoughts.”

  When they paid off the crew, Reds got a half-share, which he accepted as fair, and bought this secondhand sable coat and some vodka, and took passage aboard Moskva Air to Iceland, where he picked up an Icelandic Airlines flight to JFK after a short delay. “I lost two days at Reykjavik in the company of a frisky forty-year-old blonde widow woman named Hjalmarsdottir.” The East Coast blizzard diverted his flight to Atlanta, then Boston, and for the past eighteen hours he’d been on trains getting back to Long Island.

  He shook his head as if in amazement at the odd ways in which the Lord worked, and he allowed that he was a grateful and fortunate man. It was then that someone, I don’t know who, shouted out that they ought to give a hip-hip-hooray for Sister Infanta de Castille. Or at least move an official vote of thanks.

  Not being in on the joke, Reds asked, “And who in hell might she be?”

  So they told him how she led them down to the sea, looked out across the waters and prayed, and urged the Bonac Boys, “Pray without ceasing.” And how they might have doubted it then, but look how it worked out. And brought Reds back alive.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Reds Hucko said, impressed despite himself. And jumped up again to click his heels together.

  Later on Sis Marley and some of the Bonac Boys took Reds back to the Old Churchyard and showed him his headstone and Sis reiterated her promise that Reds would always have a place there, quite near brother Jake.

  Reds was not a man easily moved to tears, but at that, he rubbed a big knuckled fist into his right eye and cleared his throat aloud. Murphy, alarmed at how emotional Hucko had become, announced tersely, “I don’t like that cough, Hucko,” and suggested they drop by Wolfie’s Tavern for a glass to cut the phlegm.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  The Danube, ferocious mit cannons, und Turks! Dose bastards!

  Considering Christmas and other distractions (Her Ladyship in residence for one; burying Reds and then welcoming him back from the dead; the blizzard; aiding and abetting Emma’s schemes, including a phantom “day” spent with her missing parents at aquariums that didn’t yet exist; negotiating a cease-fire between Sis and the Bonac Boys), I marvel that I got anything at all done, cutting and editing my Parade magazine pieces into something resembling a book.

  But by waking early and slipping out of bed before Alix stirred (and stirred me!), I got in a couple of hours at the computer most mornings. Once Alix came down and started to read over my shoulder, issuing pithy commentary and offering constructive criticism based on her double first at Oxford (“Oh, Beecher, the subjunctive in that sentence? Mightn’t the conditional be more appropriate?”), getting anything done was a challenge. Especially since she continued to be clothing-challenged and habitually edited naked, leaning against my back, tousling my hair and licking an ear before tiring of her copy-reading chores and going off to shower and dress. All of which left me pondering the literary advantages of a monastic life, where there are very few naked women hanging about. I began to understand how Thomas Merton, once he became a Trappist (more precisely a Cistercian Monk of the Strict Observance), was able to write so many fine books so swiftly.

  And now at last, on top of everything else, Dick and Nicole Driver actually arrived in the Hamptons. Not a “virtual” visit this time invented by their kid but a genuine one, though it took the connivance of Sis Marley, the most respected merchant banker on the Street, and two private eyes to get them here.

  Nicole and Count Vlad (in deference to the seashore, even out of season, he was gotten up in a double-breasted navy blazer, with an ornate crest of sorts, and a yachting cap) arrived first, landing in a chartered executive jet at East Hampton Airport. It was here that Odets, still lurking, picked up their trail and tracked them into Sag Harbor, where they checked into a chintz-covered suite just down the hall from their private eye, Madamoiselle Javert, registered as Sister Infanta de Castille. Before they’d unpacked, Odets had reported in by cell phone to his client, Driver, in Manhattan, and Dick was soon speeding east on the Long Island Expressway, being chauffeured out in one of his limos in something of a frenzy. Could he allow Nicole and the Impaler to appear more Christmas-spirited than he, to register prior claims of doting on their daughter, while he remained in Manhattan bilking clients? Don’t be absurd. Driver’s secretary called ahead for rooms at the Meadow Club in Southampton.

  “Are you a member, Mr. Driver?” she thought to ask her boss.

  “They’ll certainly know who I am. Tell the club to check with Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt or one of the Whitneys if there’s any question.”

  Wasn’t Mr. Vanderbilt dead? And which Whitney, and were they members? the secretary wondered but was too intimidated to ask. Though by then, Dick was out the door and bundled into the limo with cell phone at the ready.

  Meanwhile, Sister Infanta briefed the “anxious” mother and her boyfriend, telling them about us, the Admiral and me and Her Ladyship, and about the Further Lane house in which, ever since her disappearance, Emma seemed to be staying with a quite unsettling contentment.

  “Get those people on the phone,” snapped Nicole.

  The Admiral took the call and was very cold. Quite nearly frigid by the time he hung up.

  “You deal with these wretched people, Beecher,” he told me. “You know when I don’t like the cut of a man’s jib, I can’t help showing it.”

  Nicole had apparently attempted to throw her weight around. And in so doing, issuing instructions and demanding in
formation, never bothered to inquire after the well-being of her only child.

  But of course I did know how my father got. In fact, it had long mystified me that he’d been so effective a spy. Espionage was, after all, a métier where one was forever running into people the cut of whose jib one didn’t like! So I agreed to phone Nicole Driver as the go-between and find out what she and the Impaler were up to. Maybe I could even shame her into some sort of maternal gesture toward her own kid before Emma flew back to Switzerland and the Brides of Christ.

  After making the call, Alix (at the controls) and I drove up to Sag Harbor over snowy roads for a talk with the former Mrs. Driver, but before we could reach them, there was something of a dustup with Sister Infanta de Castille onto which we would shortly stumble.

  Mademoiselle Javert had spent half her life, and successfully so, as a private investigator, though in rare moments of introspection, she permitted the odd self-doubt to creep in. A week of enforced inactivity here in the Hamptons, kept on a short leash by clients she’d barely met in Paris, and she’d begun to lose patience. And wasn’t patience the policeman’s greatest ally?

  So that when Nicole Driver got into her hectoring mode, Mlle Javert took it for only so long. Did she really need this? She’d been a “nun” for only a week, but already she found the religious vocation so enriching, so emotionally satisfying, so … significant: praying at the winter ocean for dead fishermen, grief-counseling his comrades, welcoming back from the dead a man who arrived in a police car at his own funeral, all to the accompaniment of inspired tears and raucous laughter.

  As Nicole railed about Dick and about her daughter’s mischievousness, and these East Hampton people named Stowe that she was going to have to deal with, Sister Infanta de Castille cried “Assez! Basta! Enough!” Pacing dramatically up and down the oriental carpets of the American Hotel’s best suite, she had her little say.