by James Brady
“I’m sure, Emma,” my father agreed, relieved to have gotten off the subject of Brett Ashley, and not wanting to field questions about hangovers, not from a ten-year-old.
Chapter Thirty-five
The Brides of Christ have a mail-order account at Bloomie’s.
I believe we were all relieved when Dick and Nicole Driver fell again to bickering on the morning their daughter was about to depart for Europe and return to the Brides of Christ.
It would have been anticlimactic, a terrible shock to the system, if either or both of these monsters had miraculously become likable. You’d have to shift emotional gears and be pleasant. Ask them to cocktails. Actually spend time with them, hear their prattle, meet Miss Lithuania, and exchange banalities with the Impaler. And God knows how poor Emma would have reacted. After all, in the past few years she saw her mother and father only rarely, and then usually while being kidnapped.
Little chance of a dramatic rehabilitation, however. Dick was especially out of sorts, the FAA having just been upheld by the courts in its ruling against his Sutton Place high-rise on grounds it posed an aerial navigation hazard to jet traffic in and out of LaGuardia Airport. Frustrated in Sutton Place, Dick’s grandiose projects had been reduced to the bullet train from Montauk and its bothersome trackbed. And financing an improved trackbed (Driver had absolutely no intention of risking his own capital) depended on formal agreements not yet signed with several different and feuding (damn the confusion!) Indian tribes.
Nicole had her own irritations: still in a snit over Mademoiselle Javert’s religious conversion and having lately been blackballed by the Sag Harbor Yacht Club (The Impaler had become the club’s barroom bore with his war stories about the Royal Romanian “Coastal Guards”). So in mid-spat, both Drivers announced they would depart East Hampton in his and her limos. Each then showily offered a ride into Manhattan to their daughter.
Who, by now, sensed their insincerity and instead showed her return ticket on the Long Island Railroad.
“The 11:45 A.M. will have me in the city by mid-afternoon,” said Emma. “Lady Alix’s taking me to Bloomingdale’s. The Brides of Christ have an account. Even our chaplain, Père Henri, ‘Dancing Harry,’ dotes on Bloomie’s. Says on Saturdays it’s wall-to-wall interior decorators, especially in housewares and the bath shop. And Alix’s offered me the couch in her room at the Carlyle. Bobby Short’s playing the dinner show. Since we’re flying morning Concordes to Europe, hers to Heathrow, mine to Charles de Gaulle, we’ll have the evening together and share a cab to JFK in the morning.”
“It ought to be jolly,” put in Her Ladyship. “We might stop by Elaine’s. I’m sure dropping Beecher’s name will get us a decent table,” said Her Ladyship. “Elaine being partial to hard cases.”
“Your title will be more than sufficient,” I assured her, once again pleased at being endorsed as a “hard case.”
Nicole looked toward the Impaler before informing Alix brightly, “We prefer Bernadin, don’t we, Count?”
“It’s very gutt,” he remarked. “Many fishes. In Bucharest we got wunderbar fishes also. Yanked bodily, even fresh, from der Danube, no?”
Nicole echoed him, “Very, very good.”
Dick Driver, a man who might soon be running for President, wasn’t going to let these two dominate the gourmet talk.
“Susannah might like the new Russian Tea Room,” her father said carelessly, forgetting his daughter’s actual name and using the protective pseudonym. “Samovars, gypsy violins, Cossack doormen, and the blinis with red caviar aren’t half bad,” he put in, delighted to have the opportunity to disagree yet again with his former wife on anything, even the Zagat ratings.
“Yes, well …” Her Ladyship said, not really responding.
By now the Drivers, both of them, had kissed their child and were being reverentially handed by concerned chauffeurs into their respective back seats. They’d shown us the sort of people they were.
But as cool and independent as she was, their kid was more difficult to categorize.
Children do love unconditionally.
And Emma was not quite ready to let go, running up to each sleek and idling car for yet another, final, parental kiss, a child hungry for love.
“See you next summer, Mommie.”
“Ta, ta, dearest.” And then Nicole had turned again to her Count, slipped an arm through his, and seemed ready to be off. Dick was a vast fake; Nicole didn’t even pretend to be terribly interested. And now their daughter turned from her mother to Dick one last time.
“Daddy?”
“Yes, Emma.” You sensed he very shortly would be shooting his cuffs, consulting his Rolex. Emma certainly saw the signs.
“I know you’re in a rush to get away. But there’s one thing I hoped we might do for Christmas. One thing. You and me and Mommie. All of us.”
He glanced toward Nicole’s car and said, “I’m afraid it’s a bit late for …”
“No, not living together again. Something else.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, you have money. And Mommie, from her books. And if I really do have all that money Mr. Rousselot was talking about …”
“Emma, you’re a bit young to be worrying about such matters. Everything will be worked out. The courts, the bank, the lawyers, all of us will—”
She shook her head, angrily I thought, her hair bouncing.
“No, no!” Her big eyes widened.
Where was she going with this? Even Dick tensed.
And then Emma Driver told us, not just Dick and Nicole, but all of us:
“Can’t we just give some of our money away? Yours, and Mommie’s royalties, and my stock?”
“Give it away? But to whom?”
“I dunno. You’re smarter than I am. But we might start with Reverend Parker’s pensioners’ list at the Methodist Church.”
“But we’re not Metho—”
She shook her head angrily. “It doesn’t matter. It’s only that we should do something, y’know. Like the original Jacob Marley warned Mr. Scrooge about on Christmas Eve when he came clanking up the stairs with his chains. All those keys and locks and cash boxes.”
Dick Driver seemed out of his depth.
“Well,” he said, “the nuns certainly have been putting ideas in your head, Emma. Much of it nonsense. You know, the taxes that we pay, your mother and I, and that you’ll soon be paying, they help the poor. Welfare, Medicaid, organized charities, and such; they’re not our business. It’s enough for a man to understand his business and not to interfere with other people’s. Before you do good, you’ve got to do well. We’ll talk about it one day. I’ll explain things. You and I.”
“I guess,” she said, temporarily giving up a lost cause.
“Sure,” he agreed.
“Next summer, Daddy?” she said.
“Grand,” Dick said, “that’ll be grand. You’ll be taller then. And …”
Emma waited, hoping for … something. Then, throwing herself at him, head back so she could stare up at him, and hugging her father about the middle, which was about as tall as she could yet reach, she said:
“I’ll try to be pretty next time, Daddy. I promise.”
For an instant I thought Driver’s handsome face, his immense self-assurance, the entire smug facade, crumpled just slightly. Then the moment passed, and, custom-tailored shoulders squared, Dick pried himself gently—give Driver that!—from her grasp, to board his limo.
The kid stepped back, proud to have a beautiful, if distant, mother and such an important father, with their wonderful cars and men opening doors and saluting, but realizing her parents were anxious to be gone. A ten-year-old’s subtly crafted, if childishly hopeful, scheme to get her mother and father together again, hadn’t quite worked, had it?
Although, for a few hours there, even the Drivers had managed to bicker briefly about her, as real mothers and fathers are supposed to do … .
Emma dutifully waved a small hankie as the two limos, jous
ting for advantage, nearly collided in their haste at getting out of our driveway and onto westbound Further Lane.
“Touching, their concern,” my father said contemptuously.
“Oh, yes. Touching,” Alix agreed.
By now each of us fully understood why their only child had sought Christmas elsewhere. With a stranger named Martha Stewart. Or with people named Stowe. Or among Shinnecocks or at Sis Marley’s marina. Whoever would take her in. And not with either of them. Or their absurd lovers, Dick’s latest arm candy, Nicole’s Impaler.
Emma sniffled briefly and blew her nose, just the once and possibly, even then, only for effect, before concluding she might as well again enhance the exchequer, and asked my father if he thought they had time for a final hand of poker.
“NO!”
So for all our good intentions, we hadn’t done much for the kid, had we? But when I stammered out a sort of apology, Emma cut me off brusquely.
“Mon cher Beecher, that’s simply rubbish. All I really missed was hot chocolate and cookies with Martha Stewart. Why, what other convent girl ever spent a better Christmas? Hanging out with you at the Blue Parrot and the Maidstone Club, and visiting the Shinnecock Indian Reservation with Chief Maine, and speeding about with Auntie Sis in her cigarette boat, and throwing snowballs at George Plimpton’s twins, and rescuing the pensioners on Reverend Parker’s poor list with Alix driving the Hummer through the blizzard, and attending Reds Hucko’s funeral and then welcoming him back from the dead, and being given hip boots by the Baymen, and meeting Sister Infanta de Castille, and the Admiral teaching me about honey wagons and about being a spy? The other girls will be chartreuse with envy!”
“Green?” I suggested.
“Whatever. And Mother Superior as well.”
I wondered if anyone else, even Emma, had recognized the words Dick used in rejecting her appeal for the poor: “It’s enough for a man to understand his business and not to interfere with other people’s.” Or recalled just who spoke them so long ago in London.
Jacob Marley’s first partner.
Chapter Thirty-six
“You’re not at all a plain girl. You’re a thin girl. Quelle différence …”
The snow hadn’t yet melted in the New Year’s cold snap, and with plenty of sun glinting off the drifts, you needed shades driving one last time to Old Beach at the Maidstone Club and then down Two Mile Hollow to the gay beach, where they had that party for the Clintons a year or more ago at Liz Robbins’s wonderful old shingled house atop the dunes. I threw the Blazer into park and sat there with Emma, watching the surf for a few minutes, wanting to give her something to remember as she flew back to Geneva, what winter had been like out here in the Hamptons. Then, in a last benediction, we drove over to Lily Pond Lane for a final look at Martha Stewart’s place. I tried to see if there remained in Emma’s face a slim regret that things had turned out as they had. And not according to Martha Stewart’s magazine.
No, she just looked happy. As a kid should.
The packing had principally been done the night before, but there are always a few memories to be tucked away in side pockets, passports to be relocated and positioned, currency and airline tickets secured. Or perhaps we simply invent such chores to distract us from the ache of separation?
Sis Marley came down to the railroad station as she had threatened to do. Elegantly turned out in a wolfskin parka over tapered, lean gray flannel slacks and Eskimo boots, Sis was good as her word, hugging the child to her bosom.
“That’s an astonishing fur,” Emma informed her, quite impressed.
Sis grinned her pleasure. “For all his poaching, Jesse Maine never trapped and skinned a fur like this one, sweetie.”
“I’ll say not.”
Then, blowing her nose loudly into a red bandanna and climbing nimbly back into the “Deranged Rover,” Sis Marley was swiftly away with considerable burning of rubber and controlled skids, narrowly avoiding George Plimpton’s car. Plimpton, who’d just recently sold the backfiles and outtakes of his Paris Review for sixtyfive million to somebody, had also dropped by the station—without his tape recorder but with his twins, Emma’s only friends of her age in town.
“Hi, ho!” he called out heartily. The three schoolgirls nattered on at a great rate about significant projects and improbable reunions. Then, having been appropriately briefed by George’s twins, Emma suggested, “Another thing we might do in New York, Alix …”
“Oh?”
“Might you take me dancing?”
Her Ladyship shot the Admiral and me a prudent glance before answering.
“Absolutely not, Emma!” she said sternly, having seen no encouragement in our faces. “Not until you’re at least twelve.”
“That’s hard cheese, Alix,” Emma responded in Her Ladyship’s lifted phrase. “The Brazilian girls at the convent all say the best dance clubs north of Rio are all in downtown Manhattan. Look, I even have a list.”
Jesse Maine was there as well, just missing by minutes Sis Marley’s wolfskin.
“Gotta be an import,” Jesse said. “There ain’t been wolves out here since the original Gardiners in sixteen-ought-something. Plenty of wolves back then and they had a bounty on ’em.”
Jesse and Emma, guided by trustee and lawyer Bryan Webb, had their heads together over the possibilities of her establishing a small foundation of her own, this one dedicated to the education of Shinnecock children. If Dick and Nicole had opted out, their daughter surely hadn’t. The paperwork, Counselor Webb was assuring everyone, would be completed shortly and copies dispatched to the convent for her scrutiny.
There was also a half squad of Bonac Boys, plus Tom Knowles of the Suffolk police, and Raymond, who made the doughnuts at Dreesen’s and had children of his own. The miraculously restoredto-life Reds Hucko came in a pickup, happily hungover from yet another in series of welcome-home parties at Wolfie’s.
“I prefer trains to limos, don’t you?” Emma announced to us, “you can get up and stroll about, go to the bathroom and change seats, look out big windows and chat with interesting people from all over.”
Jesse had been briefed and was painfully aware the kid’s plot to reunite her parents hadn’t worked. Not quite.
“Well, as I always say …” he began, trying to console her.
“ … ‘sometimes you eat the bear. And sometime the bear eats you,’” she completed the thought, quoting and delighting Jesse. Who was less pleased with the disappointing turnout in the child’s honor of his “entire Shinnecock Nation, in full and official tribal outfits and regalias,” which in actuality meant Jesse and three other fellows with a few feathers and a slack drum, there to say goodbye in their new wool flannel shirts from the Polo Shop on Main Street, purchased as Christmas gifts by Jesse out of his bribe money from Lefty Odets.
“New Year’s must of been too recent for most of them, wore out like they was,” Jesse said apologetically of the missing Shinnecocks.
Wanting to cheer him, Emma said, “but you all do look awfully nice in your new Ralph Lauren shirts, Chief. Like an official Native American tribe and all, just as you said.”
Jesse looked down at himself. “Not too shabby,” he agreed.
“And, Jesse,” Emma said, “Mother Superior will want to know—as she always says, ‘God is in the details’—were you a shaman or a sachem of the Shinnecocks? I get mixed up.”
He launched yet again into an explanation, which ended, “In peaceable seasons I may be the one thing, in times of war, if the Pequots is in the neighborhood, I may be t’other.”
Alix, wanting to console Jesse for the poor turnout of Shinnecocks, also had her say, delivering a small lecture.
“New Year’s is a time for hangovers everywhere, Chief. I assure you, in Scotland, they play a huge soccer match New Year’s Day between Celtic and Rangers, the Papists versus the Presbyterians. There’s always a riot and next morning’s Glasgow papers run a frontpage box: THE DEAD INCLUDED …”
I didn’t th
ink it was precisely the appropriate note on which to say farewell, but my father filled in, somewhat more helpful.
“I’d be pleased to dance a final hornpipe, Emma, if you wish.”
“Oh, would you, please! Merci bien. That would be most agreeable, mon amiral.”
We were all trying our best to say good-bye. And do it properly. And not break up crying or anything, the way you tend to be especially at Christmas with the holidays ending and friends going off all in different directions. In the end the kid we’d taken in, took us.
Completely.
She was better than her own people, had Nicole’s brass and Dick’s guile, and more heart than either of them.
We all stood back to watch my father dance to the beat of the Shinnecocks’ drum while Emma grinned and clapped hands, then, when he was finished and somewhat winded, she ran to him and he leaned down to be hugged.
“Now you keep working on your chess game, Emma. Fifteen seconds between moves. Be firm on that. Fifteen and not a second over!”
“Aye aye, sir. And do practice poker when you have time. You could be quite good at it, I believe. Especially at stud. Just takes a little work.”
“Yes, yes,” the Admiral said impatiently, turning away to stare off down the track so she couldn’t see his face.
The shame was, I concluded, her mother and father didn’t appreciate the pure gold they had here.
She was a child to be held close, to be loved, enjoyed, and treasured. As I myself was painfully aware that I should be holding close, enjoying, and treasuring, and not again letting go, Alix Dunraven.
“The train!” a boy down the platform shouted. And others picked it up. “The train, the train.” In winter, East Hampton values its small distractions.
You could see it now coming at us out of the cold, clear winter morning from Amagansett way, the big headlight in the nose of the locomotive shining even in full daylight. You could hear the horn blowing and, just east of the station, the bells sounding as the crossing gates started down, their red lights lit and blinking, their big striped white-and-black arms descending across the roads to halt traffic. You could see the engineer high up staring straight ahead, chin up, eyes piercing, and fiercely so, until, catching sight of a couple of small boys on the platform waving up at him in the cab, he gave them a jolly return wave, sounding his whistle as he did, causing us all to jump back a few feet from the edge as the train rolled, rather fast still, into the East Hampton station, ready to pick up passengers and take them the hundred miles into Manhattan, into Penn Station, and to trains and planes and destinations beyond.