Authors: James Brady
“What time did you say, five?”
“Yes. She was crisp about it, âfive, precisely,' Claire told me, âat The Gut.' Though to tell the truth, I had no idea where it might be but knew that you would.”
Good. Maybe they weren't coming. Maybe I wouldn't have to fight Leo after all. I was here and he wasn't. I began to feel pretty good when Alix said:
“Splendid, and right on time. Here they come.”
Great. I watched Leo's pickup roll along the beach toward us with only marginal enthusiasm.
“Remember now, Beecher,” Alix whispered as they got out and came toward us, “be patient. They didn't sign the Treaty of Versailles the very first day of the conference.”
Brest-Litovsk and Versailles; she thought large, in global terms, you had to admit.
It was reasonably polite if not exactly chummy to start with handshakes and hellos. It was a nice day with the sun still up and a fairly good surf but metronomic, no chaotic chop or crosscurrents but nice big waves coming in and breaking, and the four of us stood there at the edge, water lapping at our bare feet where the waves washed up and then fell back down the slope. But once we'd gotten past the pleasantries, as was his style, Leo started in, Mister Bombast.
“Let me tell you, Beecher, I'm not a man to be pushed. Not a bit of it. I saw plenty of your kind up there in Cambridge the year I spent at MIT, all you WASPs secure and smug in your frayed button-down shirts and old tweeds and flannels, your properly worn cordovan shoes. And I was the outsider trying so hard to do the right thing and shined my shoes and wore a proper suit to class just to show respect. What good did that do me? The suit was polyester and my shoes wrong and you snickered at it. At me⦔
Not me, I said, I never â¦
Brass waved a large, dismissive hand. “Oh, hell, I know that. Don't be so literal. It was guys like you, Harvard men. I'd see you around, people like you and Plimpton in the old school tie, meeting with a wink and a nod and exchanging the secret handshake. âPenn State? Penn State? Oh, dear, he must be a coal miner, the ruffianâ¦'”
Even now, and sore, Leo's gift for mimicry was pretty good. I could hear nasal Boston in his tone, see Harvard Yard in his gestures. And could sense class resentment that went deeper than either words or gestures.
“I know all about the media, too. You fellows looking for dirt, hassling people, stealing the photo of the dead kid right off the grieving goddamned mother's night table. I've seen plenty of it and right here in East Hampton. Bunch of phonies, preening and posturing about their bylines, while all the time they're⦔
Claire stood next to him with Alix a few yards off from me, toying with a bare foot in the sand, moving a seashell around aimlessly. For once she was silent. Claire looked sore but she, too, kept her mouth shut. Let Leo and me paw the ground and snort. I guess that's how the women felt. Some summit conference. Leo picked it up again.
“That's another thing about Boston, me slaving over the Bunsen burner in labs, carrying a full academic sked, working nights behind a Cambridge bar, and driving a bulldozer weekends on construction sites for rent money, and you a hotshot on the
Globe,
hanging with the Kennedys.”
“The hell I⦔
“Sure you did. I read all about it. With the pull you had, you should have stayed in the navy. You'd be halfway to admiral by now.”
“I wasn't in the navy. That was my old man.”
There was an edge to our dialogue now and Alix stepped in brightly, looking to defuse it. “I met an admiral once,” she said. “Pa had him to dinner at the house. Randy old chap. I wasn't sixteen and he had a hand on my leg before the savory was served. I told all the girls at school and they were agog. The admiral and I were quite the topic for about a week.”
Claire knit her brow and Leo stared for a moment. Then he picked up again:
“Well, your Ladyship, I can tell you and your pal Stowe here there are mighty changes coming. A time when family connections and school ties don't matter. It'll be the new men, not old admirals but the technocrats who know all this shit, that'll take over and run things. We'll⦔
“Oh, tosh,” Alix said. “I've heard all that rubbish before about âthe new men.' The Labour Party trots it out every election and then the Tories win again. I'm sure Tony Blair will be standing there in Commons and droning on about âthe new men' until the very moment the government changes again.”
Well played, Alix, I thought. But Claire reacted.
“You're not in England now. This is the United States where⦔
Leo didn't let his girlfriend stop him either.
“Clear, clean water, protected wetlands, an end to pollution and acid rain, reasonable limits on striped bass, liberalized rules for the haulseiners. More snapping turtles and fewer ducks in the ponds. A genuine crackdown on Canada geese that goes far beyond what⦔
I let Leo go on for a bit more and then I'd had enough.
“Leo, was it you who came skulking around my place the other night? Who walloped me over the head and vandalized the Jag?”
He just looked at me, furious. Leo wasn't used to being challenged. And certainly not interrupted while in full oratorical flight. I didn't feel great about doing it but at some point you've got to call the guy on this stuff. Instead of answering, he went to his best pitchâthe Brass bluster.
“Don't you try pushing me around, Stowe. I know your old man's a big deal and you're this big foreign correspondent. But I ain't answering questions when how the hell do I know if you're wearing a wire or your girlfriend here. I know my rights and won't be bullied.”
“I can assure you, Mr. Brass, as I told Claire earlier today, my sole objective in all this is⦔
“You talk too much,” Claire said.
Alix turned to her:
“Why, Claire,” she said sweetly and not meaning it, “and how
loudly
you talk. I hadn't noticed until just now.”
That was when Claire flew at her and both Leo and I stepped in to break it up. The women were fighting while Leo and I attempted to make peace and just then, a shout stopped us all.
“HEY!”
It was Jesse Maine in his pickup, racing toward us across the sand. We all four swiveled toward him, hostilities temporarily suspended.
“Hurricane's comin'!” Jesse shouted. “Hurricane's comin'!”
The pickup skidded to a stop and he jumped out.
“It made the turn!” he shouted. “The damned hurricane made the turn!”
Then, more quietly, “Well, hello there, Your Ladyship, Claire, Leo, and Beech. You folks better break up this little tea party and start getting ready. We got a couple of days but Hurricane Martha's headed for East Hampton.”
Alix shook her head in admiration.
“You and
The Weather Channel,
Jesse. You're amazing.”
I was staring out at the ocean and the sky. Was it my imagination or had a veil already insinuated itself between earth and the lowering sun? I glanced over and Leo, too, was looking out with an eye far more practiced than my own, looking up, gauging the wind, scrutinizing the sky.
“Come on,” he said, to Claire I guess but maybe to all of us, “there's work to be done.”
“Here at The Gut, Leo?” Claire said.
“Here and elsewhere. Lots of places, lots to do. But yeah, here at The Gut.”
TWENTY-SIX
The Survivors Supper was that night â¦
It was something of a tradition, one which I'd forgotten, ever since '38 (with time out for the War), for the Maidstone to host a “Survivors Supper” after Labor Day. Evening dress, of course.
This year it was Royal Warrender's turn to play host. He was too young to have endured the Great Hurricane of 1938, “a wind to shake the world” as one contemporary witness called it, but he knew the stories. And older members, such as Miz Phoebe Allenby, who'd actually survived the big blow, could weigh in with personal and often thrilling anecdotes. This year, with another huge and potentially dangerous storm working its destructive way through the Bahamas, heading for Florida and then, as Jesse Maine had just reported, making that classic turn up the Atlantic coast toward Hatteras, Long Island, and New England, the survivors supper took on a special piquancy. But the Maidstone did not permit things that hadn't yet happened to dilute the evening's pleasures. Nor had the recent death of a neighbor, Hannah Cutting of Further Lane, done more than layer over the affair with a small irony.
“I have the suspicion this evening was arranged entirely to get us here,” Alix whispered over cocktails. She was wrong, I knew, but it was curious that we'd been placed at Warrender's own table, set by the pool amid lighted tapers. He and I were hardly friends and Alix was an outsider, though in an ankle-length floral silk sheath bought off the rack at St. Barth's on Newtown Lane, surely a welcome one. The other guests, all perfectly respectable WASPs, might have been sent over by central casting as representative of the Episcopal Church and Brown Brothers Harriman. At least that's how impeccably well-bred they looked; the impression a stranger might get.
At dinner (our table numbered eight), Alix was placed at Royal's right at the head of the table. The conversation was good, the sort of table talk that makes a party. Hannah's death figured in it, of course, plus hurricanes and the upcoming film festival, which most agreed had been artificially created by local merchants to hype business in slow October. “I don't see why we need a festival at all,” Miz Phoebe complained, “if there's one at Cannes and another at Paul Newman's place out west (âRobert Redford's,' someone hissed), why must East Hampton be plagued?” There was considerable debate on this. “They're not the A-List, I admit. But hardly riff-raff ⦠except maybe for that Felton man, with his twin doxies.” Pam Phythian thought the O'Leary sisters good for East Hampton. “Some of us, and I include myself, are at risk of becoming terminally stuffy. A roue like Felton and a couple of tarts make for a nice change of pace.” Miz Phoebe and several others harumphed at this astonishing notion.
Also hotly debated, if a really major hurricane, a category five, say, hit our coast today, what would go; what would survive?
Warrender was pretty good on this. “Take my place. Built 1910 or so. Fairly well constructed but awfully close to the dune. I suppose if the ocean came full across the dune and not just spray and wind, but actual big waves, nothing would stand up to it. Not my place or Phoebe's or the (he may have hesitated imperceptibly) ⦠the Cutting house. But if it's just wind and not solid green water, well, we might lose shingles or a brick chimney or two, maybe lose the whole damned roof. But I think the houses would stand.” He paused. “They did in '38.”
There were many theories about what happened to Hannah, none of them terribly convincing. I noticed Royal offered very little.
An odd thing. Claire Cutting was there at another table. But then, why not? She wasn't a Maidstone member but owned property along Further Lane and such folks were asked as well. With her, looking surprisingly smooth in a rental shop tuxedo, Leo Brass. He avoided my eyes but Claire was gracious. She, at least, hadn't been trespassing on my lawn the other night and perhaps Leo had. Except when doing his James Cagney impersonations, I could take Leo or leave him and preferred the leaving. I liked Royal Warrender the more we all drank, the later the evening wore on. He had manners, bearing, brains. Would make a helluva Fed chairman. Could he have been involved in Hannah's death? Or the theft of her book? What possible reason could there have been that â¦
“Stowe.”
“Yes?”
“You and Lady Alix, we've had a good talk over dinner about this part of the world. Would it amuse her to see another of the old Further Lane cottages? She's been asking about my place.”
“That's fine, yes.”
Warrender was being uncharacteristically expansive. He and I were standing a bit apart from the others waiting for Alix to get back from the ladies' room. Then, getting swiftly to the point, and talking low, almost in a whisper, and not at all that chummy, “You've been asking a lot of questions. You and Jesse Maine. You have him on the case now, too, don't you? You and Lady Alix. I want to know what you're up to⦔
“We could talk about it right here, do it tonight,” I said, not going to be bullied.
“No, not tonight. Not in front of everyone. Let's talk at my place. Where there won't be interruptions or eavesdropping. Call me in the morning. We'll set something up before the damned hurricane hits. If that's what we're in for.”
After Royal dangled that tease about calling tomorrow to set up a tour and a full and frank face-to-face, Alix and I went dancing. By now much more talk of Hurricane Martha. Perhaps it was the hour, perhaps the growing tension, perhaps the drink, or the coming storm, but when we got home she asked if I'd take her swimming.
“Will you take me swimming?”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
We changed into swimsuits and walked down over the spindly catwalk to the stairs and the beach and dove into the black ocean and a surf already building before sprinting back up the beach to grab big terry towels and wrap ourselves against the chill to hurry to the gatehouse. Then, without bothering to shower, Alix Dunraven and I made love for the first time.
“Golly, Beecher, let's do that again,” she said with unfeigned enthusiasm.
“Why, yes, let's.”
Except that she tasted of salt and the ocean, the touch and the feel of her was everything I'd imagined.
She liked my bedroom better than hers, she said, and before I was awake had moved her things in from the smaller room she'd been using. Only trouble with that was that Mignonne came along, the poodle, who didn't at all like my being in the same bed with her (temporary) nurturer and growled menacingly. I began to feel like Roland the bartender's dog, Little Bit, and wondered if I were about to be attacked.