A Field of Darkness

by Cornelia Read

  Ellis jotted it down on her little notepad while we stood on line at the bar.

  Egon whipped us up a pair of Southsides, rum and soda and lemonade and mint.

  We thanked him, knocked those back, and asked for two more.

  Ellis held up her watch. Eight-fifteen, time to meet Lapthorne at the dock.

  We limboed and wiggled through the crowd, struggling toward the terrace.

  Dealie Van Couvering’s gang plugged the French doors.

  “Don’t you think,” he was saying, “that what we all have to do is join Piping Rock and take up drink?”

  Poppy Cochran blinked three times, working through a stammer. “Oughtn’t we rather take up drink and forget Piping? Hm? Hm?”

  Edwardia Crow wheezed out a cackle at that, orange lipstick smeared across her teeth and the rim of her glass and the entire filter of the cigarette in her spotty hand.

  “Good God.” She frowned at Ellis. “That’s not a haircut, that’s birth control.”

  Ellis smiled, muttering, as we sidled through the last clot of boozehounds, “Can’t wait to shit on her grave.”

  “Take a number,” I said.

  We finally made our way out into the cool quiet of the evening beyond. A harvest moon rose over Cooper’s Bluff, scattering jewelry on the bay. The lawn was bedizened with fireflies, and cicadas thrummed in the trees around us.

  We walked across the grass, sweet and newly mown, past the black-powder cannons, and down the old wooden stairs to the edge of the dock. Everything was still, though we could hear the party humming and tinkling behind us, like an orchestra warming up. It reminded me of summers at my grandparents’, when I’d sleep in my mother’s old room and hear the sound of crowd chatter and satiny Lester Lanin tunes wafting down from tented parties up the beach.

  We strode out onto the dock, feeling it sway and dip in time to our footsteps, and both sat down cross-legged when we got to the end. Bonwit’s boat was tied off to leeward, and we had an unobstructed view across the water to the town of Oyster Bay.

  “Gatsby believed in the green light. . . .” said Ellis, toasting the great black hump of Long Island.

  I raised my glass, but couldn’t help adding, “Like a good little nouveau riche.”

  “Hey, better nouveau riche than no riche at all.”

  For that I clinked her drink with mine. When we’d drained them, we pitched the glasses out over the moonlit water, hard as we could.

  For a while the only sounds were small waves collapsing rhythmic on the beach behind us, the occasional chime of halyard against aluminum mast. The 8:21 gave a lovesick moan as it pulled out of Oyster Bay, headed for Penn Station. When that died away, I could hear an outboard motor in the distance.

  Despite the cushioning Southside haze, a pizzicato of dread plucked along my skin. The engine noise drew closer, and moments later we were making the bow and stern lines of Lapthorne’s beautiful old Chris-Craft fast to cleats at the dock’s end.

  He put a foot on the rail and jumped neatly over.

  “Chère cousine,” Lapthorne said, leaning down so he could graze my cheek with that superb mouth.

  He straightened up, took his time looking us over, like he wanted to savor the visuals.

  And there he goddamn was, all sly and lax in ancient whipcord breeches and polo boots, glint of buckle marking the length between ankle and knee, skin so summer-dark against the white of his shirt you ached for a taste.

  No help for it. The fact of him generated its own pizzicato, one of an entirely different order. Everything else wiped clean away—Kenny and Dean and even fear. This moment hooked irrevocably back to the last time I’d seen him, negating all that fell between.

  He grinned then. “To what do I owe the honor? Being met by a pair of such lovely women . . .”

  “Two if by sea,” said Ellis, voice all silken cool.

  But her eyes glittered, taking him in—set of her jaw making its own proclamation: one for all and all for me.

  I was stripped back so pure to lizard brain that I hated her for it.

  “I’d like to introduce my friend Ellis Clark,” I said.

  He took her offered hand and bowed over it, Ellis licking her chops.

  “Cool costume,” I said.

  He smiled, teeth glowing white in the moonlight. “These aren’t the greatest deck shoes, though.”

  “They make you look charming . . . well worth the trouble,” said Ellis, placing her hand through the crook of his elbow and leading him back toward the house.

  The party had escalated since we’d been gone. As we came up over the lawn, we could hear echoing guffaws and gin-imbued shouting. The guests had spilled out onto the terrace, and several people greeted Lapthorne. The three of us were the only people there under sixty.

  Trip Harcourt announced, “I’m taking penicillin, you see, and alcohol deteriorates it or something, so in consequence I’m drinking lightly.” He waved his glass for emphasis, causing its contents to slop over the rim.

  “Lightly?” his companion asked, twitching back the sleeves of her Chinese imperial robes.

  “Light rum,” he assured her. “Have to stay away from the dark stuff. Dark stuff’ll kill you.”

  We pushed onward, Lapthorne walking point. When we broke through to the bar, he leaned in and said, “I see they’re keeping you busy, Egon.”

  “Guten Abend, Herr Townsend,” said Egon, ducking his head.

  I was reminded of Peter DeVries’ observation that the German language was like dozens of steamer trunks falling down stairs.

  “Six Southsides, please, my good man . . .” said Lapthorne, “and make them ‘Race Committee,’ won’t you?”

  Egon nodded, topping them off with a floater of Myers’s.

  When we each had a pair in hand, Lapthorne asked, “Anywhere we could go to escape our ancestral paucity of culture, so as to drink in peace?”

  “The green room,” I said, leading the way.

  We fought our way out of the living room, across the marble floor of the formal entry and past the building’s most elegant staircase. There was a buffet laid out beyond the next doorway. Here the crowd thinned considerably, WASP parties never being about food. Mom could have put out rats with the fur on and not heard a single complaint.

  The three of us trekked onward into the pantry, past a second staircase, and through the empty kitchen and bierstube. The green room was just beyond the third staircase, but when I cracked the door we were greeted by a blast of bagpipes.

  Bonwit had beaten us there.

  CHAPTER 27

  Bonwit was sitting alone on the sofa, his back to us, waving a bottle of ouzo in time with his favorite record, Strathspeys, Pipes, and Reels of the Highlands.

  “He always puts that on when he wants people to leave,” I said, as loudly as I could without actually yelling, “but of course they can’t hear it at the other end of the house, so it doesn’t work for big parties.”

  “I take it it’s quite effective for the more intimate gatherings, though?” Lapthorne said, straining to be heard. I shut the door.

  “Pretty soon he’ll switch to Railroad Whistles of the World and Harry Lauder,” explained Ellis. “Sends them home in droves.”

  Lapthorne smiled at her. “You’ve enjoyed Bonwit’s hospitality before?”

  “Ellis and I go way back,” I said. “But this doesn’t look like such a great place to hang at the moment.”

  “Why don’t I run you out to my boat?” Lapthorne linked an arm with each of us, mindful of the Southsides, and steered toward the terrace door. “Got the old yawl moored off Seawanhaka, thought I’d sleep aboard.”

  “Excellent,” said Ellis as we stepped out onto the dusky flagstones.

  I was going right along and then I thought of the dog tags again, of Ellis’s last question when we were getting dressed. She and Lapthorne were laughing, all cozy, and the glittering water beckoned, but I just had this weird little chill.

  We stepped onto the grass, and
I tried to tell myself I could just relax, that even Kenny thought this was about Schneider now.

  But Bonwit hadn’t seen the three of us together tonight. Nor had Mom. Only Egon knew we were in Lapthorne’s company, and he wouldn’t have a clue when we’d left or where we’d gone.

  I slowed my pace, and Lapthorne turned to look at me, wondering.

  “Let me just, um . . . make sure Mom doesn’t need anything,” I said.

  I pulled my arm free and started to back away. Ellis sidled in a little closer to him.

  “Meet you on the dock,” I called back over my shoulder. “Only be a minute. . . .”

  “Madeline,” my mother enthused, “just who I wanted to see.”

  “Hi, great party,” I said. “Listen . . . Ellis and I are going out for a boat ride with Lapthorne.”

  “Wonderful. Find out if he did it. Any of you have a joint?” she asked brightly.

  I shook my head. “Sorry, I—”

  “You know,” she said, “weren’t for all of us in the sixties, life would be totally different—”

  “Do you need anything else? Because I should—”

  “Wouldn’t have Chicken McNuggets, for instance,” she continued. “Got to be stoned to think up all those little sauces. . . .”

  “Absolutely, Mom,” I said, patting her on the back, edging away, and generally wondering why I had bothered filling her in. I mean, like she’d really notice anything before we’d been gutted and filleted, if it came to that. “They’re waiting on the dock for me. Thanks again for the party.”

  Mom twinkled her fingers at me and then flashed a peace sign. As I stepped back outside, I heard her call out her traditional farewell, “Talk to strangers!”

  Lapthorne pulled smoothly away from the dock as soon as I’d jumped in. When we arrived at his mooring a few minutes later, we helped him grab onto the lifelines at the stern of his boat.

  Beautiful. An old Herreshoff, for God’s sake, the name Stray Lamb picked out in an arc of gold letters above us.

  We climbed aboard and I watched the smaller boat coast aft, tugging on its bowline like an elephant calf on its mother’s tail.

  “Let’s go below and grab a little ice,” he said. “I’ll give you the five-cent tour.”

  Ellis was first down the companionway to the main saloon.

  “Oh my God,” she said, surveying the cluttered landscape. “Madeline! We’ve found your spiritual homeland!”

  A bottle of rum held down messily unfolded charts on the central table, alongside the silver porringer containing a spent cigar. Dozens of books spilled crooked along one bench seat, next to an explosion of laundry.

  He was my style of slob, however. All the brightwork was highly polished, little needlepoint rugs were laid along the floor, and a pair of Sargent sketches in thin gold frames—Dodie and Jake—were affixed on either side of the entrance to the galley.

  Lapthorne led us forward, stopping to fill a silver bucket with cold shards chipped from a block in the icebox, and then we passed a pair of single cabins and the head. There was a double tucked into the bow, and the bunk’s tangled sheets were Porthault, same pattern as Bonwit’s toga.

  “That’s beautiful,” said Ellis, ever the art history major, eyeing a small tropical seascape hung above the bed. “Winslow Homer?”

  Lapthorne stayed down below, freshening drinks and selecting music. Ellis and I lounged topside like inebriated Egyptian princesses barging up the Nile.

  “I could get used to this,” she said, her hand making a slow balletic sweep across the vista of moonlit water.

  We could see a few dark figures walking along the covered porches of Seawanhaka, backlit by the bright glow of another party inside the old wooden clubhouse. Every few minutes, someone blasted a little air horn, calling the launch so they could come in for the night.

  “The wages of sin,” I said.

  “Don’t be tiresome.”

  “Don’t forget why we’re here.”

  She sat up. “What, because you’re so busy investigating? You haven’t asked him a single goddamn thing. Opportunity practically yawning in front of you . . .”

  I looked away.

  “I mean, come on . . .” she said, “I saw Schneider, too. I was right there with you. You can’t tell me you think this guy is involved . . . even if you did, we both know you’d be lying your ass off.”

  There was a clatter from down below.

  I dropped my voice. “You’re the one who said—”

  “—You would totally jump his bones if he wasn’t your cousin.”

  I didn’t answer that.

  “Look at you,” she said. “You’d totally do it anyway, if I wasn’t here. That’s how come you’re all pissed.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “Oh for chrissake,” she said. “Don’t think for a second you can give me that Grace Kelly attitude. That Ingrid shit. I know you. Not a chaste bone in your body. Not a pinkie fingernail’s worth of moral fiber.”

  “Quit it,” I said, trying not to sound petulant. Unsuccessful.

  “—You’d be down there right now, mucking up those pretty sheets. . . .”

  “Yeah, and Dean wouldn’t mind at all.”

  She laughed. “Like he’d know. Like any of them ever do.”

  “I’d know.”

  She cut her eyes at me and smiled. “And wouldn’t that give it an all-the-more-delicious edge . . .”

  The sound of Lapthorne’s steps below cut her off.

  She shook her head. “How did you end up married? Goddamn crime against nature, all I can say.”

  “What’s that?” asked Lapthorne, head popping up from the companionway.

  “Madeline being monogamous,” said Ellis. “I find it quite disturbing—my former partner in debauchery redeemed by a dashing young man. Breaks my heart. The Berkshires are still in mourning. Left rear wheels of all the cars painted black, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “I can see why,” he said, taking a seat between us, barefoot now.

  I blushed, thankful for the dark. Ella Fitzgerald’s voice swelled from speakers hidden around us.

  “‘Never a Dull Moment,’” he said, “the family curse.”

  “Indeed,” I answered.

  “Your branch got off lucky,” he said, “escaped to exotic California. I’ve often envied you.”

  “Well, I envied the trappings you guys had, but being a kid here always seemed like such an ordeal, never any time to just ride a bike, you know? Don’t let your back touch the chair and thank-you notes and God forbid your elbow made contact with the table, because somebody’d stick a fork in it . . .”

  Lapthorne chuckled at that. “Still,” he said, “it sounds so dopey to whine about my childhood—oh, poor me, with my nanny and my boat and my great big house . . .”

  Ella sang, “Sponges they say do it/Oysters down in Oyster Bay do it . . .”

  “Synchronicity,” I said.

  And then we were quiet, just listening to her voice and the small waves sliding along the hull.

  “Getting awfully late,” said Lapthorne when the song was over. “I should run you back to Bonwit’s. You both down for the weekend? Be great to meet for dinner in the city tomorrow. . . .”

  “We’d love to,” answered Ellis, before I could say a thing.

  Ellis and I walked up the dock as Lapthorne’s boat chugged off into the distance.

  “Dinner?” I asked. “What are you, nuts?”

  “And here I was, expecting at least a ‘thank you,’” said Ellis.

  “Thank you?”

  She stopped and put her hands on her hips. “If you want to find out anything from this guy, you’ll need bait. Plus, of course, if it turns out that he’s not ‘your cousin, the sexual-predator-psycho,’ but just ‘your cousin, the single, handsome, and heterosexual owner of a boat, some art, and a no-doubt tastefully appointed brownstone on the Upper East Side . . .’”

  “This doesn’t strike you as a peculiar way to get dates?”
>
  She rolled her eyes. “Marriage has made you soft in the head.”

  CHAPTER 28

  I didn’t sleep for shit that night—just lay in my old lumpy bed up under the third-floor eaves of Bonwit’s house, fretting in the darkness. Around two I got up, suddenly driven to call Kenny, thinking he’d still be at the Crown and that maybe he could coach me on what the hell I should do when we got to Lapthorne’s.

  I tiptoed out to the sitting room, but the ancient wall phone was gone, nothing left but cloth-wrapped wires dangling from a crooked hole.

  I pictured Egon chuckling as he’d crowbarred jack-plate from plaster, Uncle Bonnie’s proud lieutenant in the grand campaign to ensure our misery.

  I skulked to the head of the stairs, all ready to sneak down those moon-blue treads for the pantry extension, when I froze at the twang of protesting metal.

  Bedsprings.

  Ellis tossing, murmuring in her sleep.

  “I promise,” she said, her voice tiny and sad in the darkness.

  She thrashed again. “Please?”

  Then she was still, her breathing soft.

  I considered the stairs again, the moonlight coming weak through small panes of old glass.

  Kenny would only tell me not to go.

  The sky went gray, then pink, before I fell asleep.

  On the way off Centre Island, I parked outside the cemetery.

  Ellis sighed. “Aren’t we late enough?”

  I’d made her wait until Mom came home that afternoon, so I could tell someone our plans, that we’d be catching the last train back out of the city.

  “I just want to bring something for Lapthorne,” I said. “You don’t have to come in.”

  She followed me anyway.

  It was an acre of land, brick-walled and copper-beech-shaded, quiet and cool even on the hottest day. The cast-iron gates were always crisp with glossy black enamel, the myriad rosebushes Dodie had planted always deadheaded, pruned, watered, and artfully fed in summer, then carefully wrapped in straw and burlap to hibernate through winter.

  Though it was Jake Townsend’s financial acumen that gave these roots “meaning” in the eyes of most, the true family patriarch, Joseph, had lived two hundred or so years earlier. He was buried beneath a large boulder, in a nod to Gethsemanean tradition. If you stood on top of it, you could see water in both directions, which fulfilled the burial instructions in his will.