The Gold Coast

by Nelson DeMille

  I didn’t realize it then, but I was ready for a great adventure. What I also didn’t know was that my new next-door neighbor had decided to provide one for me.

  Seven

  Saturday morning passed uneventfully except that I had a slight headache brought on, no doubt, by the Vandermeers’ hot air. Also, the Allards both had the flu, and I paid them a sick call. I made them tea in the gatehouse’s little kitchen, which made me feel like a regular guy. I even stayed for half a cup, while George apologized six times for being sick. Ethel’s usual surliness turns to a sort of maudlinism when she’s ill. I like her better that way.

  I should mention that during the Second World War, George Allard went off to serve his country, as did all the able-bodied male staff at Stanhope Hall and, of course, the other estates. George once told me during a social history lesson that this exodus of servants made life difficult for the families who had managed to hold on to their huge houses through the Depression, and who still needed male staff for heavy estate work. George also tells me that higher wartime wages lured many of the servant girls away for defense work and such. George somehow associates me with this class of gentry and thinks I should feel retroactively saddened by the great hardships that the Stanhopes and others endured during the war. Right, George. When I picture William Stanhope having to lay out his own clothes every morning while his valet is goofing off on Normandy Beach, a lump comes to my throat.

  William, by the way, did serve his country during this national emergency. There are two versions of this story. I’ll relate Ethel’s version: William Stanhope, through family connections, received a commission in the Coast Guard. Grandpa Augustus Stanhope, unable to make use of his seventy-foot yacht, The Sea Urchin, sold it to the government for a dollar, as did many yacht owners during the war. The Sea Urchin was outfitted as a submarine patrol boat, and its skipper turned out to be none other than Lieutenant (j.g.) William Stanhope. Ethel says this was not a coincidence. Anyway, The Sea Urchin, with a new coat of gray paint, sonar, depth charges, and a .50-caliber machine gun, was conveniently berthed at The Seawanhaka Corinthian. From there, Lieutenant Stanhope patrolled up and down the Long Island Sound, ready to take on the German U-boat fleet, protecting the American way of life, and occasionally putting in at Martha’s Vineyard for a few beers. And not wanting to take up government housing, William lived at Stanhope Hall.

  Ethel is probably justified in her opinion that William Stanhope’s wartime service symbolized the worst aspects of American capitalism, privilege, and family connections. Yet most of the upper classes, from all I’ve read and heard, did their duty, and many went beyond the call of duty. But Ethel excludes any realities that upset her prejudices. In this respect she is exactly like William Stanhope, like me, and like every other human being I’ve ever met, sane and insane alike. Needless to say, William does not regale his friends or family with war stories.

  Anyway, George returned from the Pacific in 1945 with malaria, and he still has episodes from time to time, but this day I was sure it was just the flu. I offered to call the doctor, but Ethel said cryptically, “He can’t help us.”

  George and Ethel had been married right before George shipped out, and Augustus Stanhope, as was the custom at the time, provided the wedding reception in the great house.

  A few years ago, during a chance conversation with an older client of mine, I discovered that Grandpa Augustus, who would have been in his fifties then, also provided Ethel with some degree of companionship while George was killing our future allies in the Pacific. Apparently this small investment of time and effort on Ethel’s part paid dividends, the Allards being the only staff not let go over the years. Also, there was the generous gift of the gatehouse, rent-free for life. I often wondered if George knew that his master was dipping his pen in George’s inkwell. But even if he did, George would still be convinced that it was his loyalty, rather than his wife’s disloyalty, that was responsible for the old coot’s generosity. Well, maybe. Good help is still harder to find than a good lay.

  I don’t normally listen to gossip, but this was too interesting to resist. Besides, it’s more in the category of social history than hot news.

  As I drank my tea, I looked at Ethel and smiled. She gave me a pained grimace in return. Above her head on the wall of the small sitting room was a formal photograph of her and George, he in his navy whites, she in a white dress. She was a very pretty young woman.

  What interested me about this story was not that a lonely young war bride had had an affair with her older employer; what interested me was that Ethel Allard, the good Christian socialist, had done it for the lord of the manor and had perhaps blackmailed him, subtly or not so subtly.

  A place like this is rife with interlocking relationships that, if explored, would be far more damaging to the social structure than depression, war, and taxes.

  The Allards, by the way, have a daughter, Elizabeth, who looks enough like George to put my mind at ease concerning any more Stanhope heirs. Elizabeth, incidentally, is a successful boutique owner—a shopkeeper, like her maternal grandfather—with stores in three surrounding villages, and Susan makes a point of sending her acquisitive friends to all of them, though she herself is not much of a shopper. I saw Elizabeth’s name in the local newspaper once in connection with a Republican Party fund-raiser. God bless America, Ethel; where else can socialists give birth to Republicans and vice versa?

  I took my leave of the Allards and reminded them to call me or Susan if they needed anything. Susan, for all her aloofness, does have that sense of noblesse oblige, which is one of the few things I admire about the old monied classes, and she takes care of the people who work for her. I hope Ethel remembers that when the Revolution comes.

  • • •

  I spent the early afternoon doing errands in Locust Valley, then stopped at McGlade’s, the local pub, for a beer. The usual Saturday crowd was there, including the pub’s softball team, back from trouncing the florist’s ten pathetic sissies, who were there also and had a different version of the game. There were a few self-employed building-trade contractors who needed a drink after giving estimates to homeowners all morning, and there were the weekend joggers who all seemed to have a suspicious amount of tread left on their hundred-dollar running shoes hooked around the bar rails. And then there were the minor gentry in their Lands’ End and L. L. Bean uniforms, and the major gentry whose attire is difficult to describe, except to say you’ve never seen it in a store or catalogue. The old gentleman beside me, for instance, had on a pink tweed shooting jacket with a green leather gun patch, and his trousers were baggy green wool embroidered with dozens of little ducks. I was wearing the L. L. Bean uniform: Docksides, tan poplin trousers, button-down plaid shirt, and blue windbreaker. Many of us were perusing wife-authored “to do’’ lists as we sipped our beer, and our wallets, when opened for cash, revealed pink dry-cleaning slips. On the restaurant side, well-dressed women with shopping bags were chatting over cottage cheese and lettuce. It was definitely Saturday.

  Good pubs, like churches, are great equalizers of social distinctions; more so, perhaps, because when you approach the rail in a pub, you do so with the full knowledge that talking is not only permitted but often required.

  In fact, as I was having my second beer, I saw in the bar mirror my plumber, leaning against the wall behind me. I went over to him and we talked about my plumbing problems. To wit: I have a cracked cast-iron waste pipe, and he wants to replace it with PVC pipe, at some expense. I think it can be soldered instead. He asked me about the procedure for adopting his second wife’s son, and I gave him an estimate. I think we were too expensive for each other, and the conversation turned to the Mets. You can talk baseball here.

  I chatted with a few other acquaintances, then with the bartender and with the old gentleman with the pink tweed jacket, who turned out not to be major gentry but a retired butler from the Phipps’ estate who was wearing the boss’s castoffs. You used to get a lot of that around here,
but I see less of it in recent years.

  It was too nice a day to spend more than an hour in the pub, so I left, but before I did, I gave my plumber the name of an adoption attorney whose fees are moderate. He gave me the name of a handyman who could try a weld on the pipe. The wheels of American commerce spin, spin, spin.

  I got into my Bronco and headed home. On the way back, I passed my office and assured myself it was still there. I thought about the ten million in stocks stashed in the vault. It would not be a problem to have Mrs. Lauderbach—that’s my client’s name—sign the necessary papers for me to liquidate the stocks, and for me to hop on down to Rio for a very long vacation. And I didn’t need Lester Remsen’s help in this at all. But I’ve never violated a trust or stolen a nickel, and I never will. I felt very pious. What a day I was having.

  My mood stayed bright until I approached the gates of Stanhope Hall, when my brow, as they say, darkened. I’d never really noticed it before, but this place was getting me down. The truth, once it grabs hold of you, makes you take notice of the little buzzings in your head. This was not your garden-variety midlife crisis. This was no crisis at all. This was Revelation, Epiphany, Truth. Unfortunately, like most middle-aged men, I had no idea what to do with the truth. But I was open to suggestions.

  I stopped at the gatehouse and looked in on the Allards, who were listening to the radio and reading. Ethel was engrossed in a copy of The New Republic, which may have been the only copy in Lattingtown, and George was perusing the Locust Valley Sentinel, which he’s been reading for sixty years to keep abreast of who died, got married, had children, owed taxes, wanted zoning variances, or had a gripe they wanted to see in print.

  I picked up Susan’s and my mail, which is delivered to the gatehouse, and riffled through it on my way out. Ethel called after me, “There was a gentleman here to see you. He didn’t leave his name.”

  Sometimes, as when the phone rings, you just know who’s calling. And Ethel’s stress on the word gentleman told me that this was no gentleman. I asked, “A dark-haired man driving a black Cadillac?”

  “Yes.”

  Ethel never says “sir,’’ so George chimed in, “Yes, sir. I told him you were not receiving visitors today. I hope that was all right.’’ He added, “I didn’t know him, and I didn’t think you did.”

  Or wanted to, George. I smiled at the image of Frank Bellarosa being told that Mr. Sutter was not receiving today. I wondered if he knew that meant “get lost.”

  George asked, “What shall I say if he calls again, sir?”

  I replied as if I’d already thought this out, and I guess I must have. “If I’m at home, show him in.”

  “Yes, sir,’’ George replied with that smooth combination of professional disinterest and personal disagreement with the master.

  I left the gatehouse and climbed back into the Bronco.

  I drove past the turnoff for my house and continued on toward the main house. Between my house and the main house, on Stanhope land, is the tennis court, whose upkeep Susan has taken on as her responsibility. Beyond the tennis court, the tree-lined lane rises, and I stopped the Bronco at the top of the rise and got out. Across a field of emerging wildflowers and mixed grasses, where the great lawn once stretched, stood Stanhope Hall.

  The design of the mansion, according to Susan and as described in various architectural books that mention Stanhope Hall, was based on French and Italian Renaissance prototypes. However, the exterior is not European marble, but is built of good Yankee granite. Spaced along the front are attached columns or wall pilasters with Ionic capitals, and in the center of the house is a high, open portico with freestanding classical columns. The roof is flat, with a balustraded parapet running around the perimeter of the mansion’s three massive wings. The place looks a bit like the White House, actually, but better built.

  There were once formal gardens, of course, and they were planted on the descending terraces that surround the great house. Each year at this time the gardens still burst into bloom, wild with roses and laurel, yellow forsythia and multicolored azaleas, the survival of the fittest, a celebration of nature’s independence from man.

  For all the European detail, there are distinctly American features to the house, including large picture windows in the rear, a greenhouse-style breakfast room to capture the rising sun, a solarium on the roof, and an American infrastructure of steel beams, heating ducts, good plumbing, and safe electricity.

  But to answer Lester Remsen’s question, there is nothing architecturally significant or unique about this misplaced European palace. Had McKim, Mead, or White designed a truly new American house, whatever that might have been in 1906, then the landmark people and all the rest of the preservationists would say, “There is nothing like this in the whole country.”

  But the architects and their American clients of this period were not looking into the future, or even trying to create the present; they were looking back over their shoulders into a European past that had flowered and died even before the first block of granite arrived on this site. What these people were trying to create or re-create here in this new world is beyond me. I can’t put myself in their minds or their hearts, but I can sympathize with their struggle for an identity, with their puzzlement, which has troubled Americans from the very beginning—Who are we, where do we fit, where are we going?

  It occurred to me that these estates are not only architectural shams, but they are shams in a more profound way. Unlike their European models, these estates never produced a profitable stalk of wheat, a bucket of milk, or a bottle of wine. There was some hobby farming, to be sure, but the crops certainly didn’t support the house and the servants and the Rolls-Royces. And no one who was hired to work the land here could have felt the sense of wonder and excitement that comes with the harvest and the assurance that the earth and the Lord, not the stock market, has provided.

  Well, what do I know about that? Actually, my ancestors were mostly farmers and fishermen, and fishing I do understand, but my ability to coax things from the ground is limited to inedibles, as Mr. Bellarosa pointed out. I recalled his red wagon filled with vegetable seedlings, purchased at top dollar from an upscale nursery, and I decided he was a sham, too.

  This whole silly Gold Coast was a sham, an American anomaly, in a country that was an anomaly to the rest of the world. Well, no one ever said the truth would make you happy—only free.

  Of course, there were other yet undiscovered truths, and there were other people’s truths, but that was yet to come.

  I looked out at Stanhope Hall and beyond. The large gazebo, another American accoutrement, was visible on the back lawn, surrounded by overhanging sycamores, and in the distance was the English hedge maze, a ridiculous amusement for young ladies and their fatuous beaux, all of whom should have spent more time in the love temple and less time running around hedge mazes.

  The land fell away beyond the hedges, but I could see the tops of the plum orchard, half of whose trees were now dead. The orchard, according to Susan, had originally been called the sacred grove, in the pagan fashion of nature worship. And in the center of the grove is the Roman love temple, a small but perfectly proportioned round structure of buff marble columns that hold up a curved frieze carved with some very erotic scenes. In the domed roof is an opening, and the shaft of sunlight and moonlight that comes through at certain hours illuminates two pink marble statues, one of a man or a god, and the other of a busty Venus, locked in a nude embrace.

  The purpose of this place mystifies me, but there were a number of them built on the more lavish estates. I can only conjecture that classical nudity was acceptable; Greco-Roman tits and ass was not just art, it was one of the few ways to see T and A in 1906, and only millionaires could afford this expensive thrill.

  I don’t know if young women, or even mature ladies, ventured into the plum grove to see this porn palace, but you can be sure that Susan and I make good use of it on summer evenings. Susan likes being a vestal virgin surpri
sed by John the Barbarian while praying in the temple. She’s been deflowered about sixty times, which may be a record.

  The temple may be a sham, but it is a beautiful sham, and Susan is no virgin, and I’m an imperfect barbarian, but the heart-stopping orgasms are real, and real things happen to real people even in Disney World.

  I knew right then that despite my recent disenchantment with my enchanted world, I was going to miss this place.

  I got back into my Bronco and headed home.

  Eight

  Lester Remsen showed up at my Locust Valley office on Monday afternoon to take care of Mrs. Lauderbach’s ten-million-dollar problem. The actual figure according to Lester’s research department was, as of three P . M . that day, $10,132,564 and a few cents. This included about sixty years of unpaid dividends on which, unfortunately, no interest was given.

  Mrs. Lauderbach had a hairdresser’s appointment and could not join us, but I had power of attorney and was prepared to sign most of the brokerage house’s paperwork on her behalf. Lester and I went to the second-floor law library, which had been the study of the Victorian house on Birch Hill Road. We spread out our paperwork on the library table.

  Lester commented, “This is one for the books. Good Lord, you’d think she’d be interested in this.”

  I shrugged. “She had gray roots.”

  Lester smiled and we began the tedious paperwork in which I had less interest than Mrs. Lauderbach. I ordered coffee as we neared the end of the task. Lester handed me a document and I handed him one. Lester seemed not to be focusing on the task at hand, and he laid down the paper, stayed silent a moment, and said, “She’s how old? Seventy-eight?”

  “She was when we started.”