A Hamptons Christmas (21 page)

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Authors: James Brady

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“Even though, sadly, Jake Marley and his protégé, Emma's father, Richard Driver, had by now become estranged.”
When he dropped his voice and paused after that, you didn't hear a sound in Sis Marley's living room. Rousselot resumed:
“After his death, as per his wishes, Sis continued the annual contribution of Microsoft stock. The birthday cards, the little notes from Mr. Marley, stopped coming. Emma, as we now learn, eventually realized something must have happened. It was the notes she missed, the birthday cards (Jake having a weakness for gaudy, rather corny greeting cards), and not the stock certificates. She was, after all, still a child. Not yet infected with greed.
“Maybe she'll never be infected with greed. Let's hope so. And now, I'll ask Mr. Webb to touch on a point of law. Bryan?”
Webb got up again. “Mr. and Mrs. Driver will surely want to consult counsel on this. But Henry asked me to remind them that
precedents exist. There are cases in which a minor divorces his or her own parents.”
He started to sit down, thought better of it, and added, “I can supply the appropriate citations, of course.”
Then he sat.
Wow! You should have seen Dick and Nicole. But before they could say a word, Rousselot again took the floor.
“If Emma's parents have a scintilla of good sense, they will stop this endless bickering and costly litigation and work out a simple custody-sharing agreement. One month each summer with each, a third month visiting here with Sis Marley, learning to sail and catch fish, the rest of Emma's year to be spent at the convent in Geneva, with Mother Superior acting in loco parentis. Meanwhile, Ms. Marley, Mr. Webb, and myself will continue as trustees.”
I don't believe I should here reveal what Mr. Rousselot told us about Emma Driver's precise worth or the number of shares she holds through the foundation, except to say that by rough calculation, Emma is now the twelfth largest shareholder in Microsoft. And by other reckoning, pending further rulings by federal judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, she is the eighty-first richest American.
Jake and Brett are perfect together, always having cocktails and meeting bullfighters …
It was our last night together, and we were glad of the respite. No Dick and Nicole Driver, disputed cemeteries, Sister Infanta de Castille, Reds Hucko, Nuncio, Professor Wamba, or the rest. We were passing a quiet evening at home before the great fire in the Admiral's book-lined den.
“Beecher,” said Emma.
“Yes?”
She looked up from my father's bearskin rug, where she lay on her belly, elbows propped, reading one of her bibles,
The Sun Also Rises.
“Weren't you disappointed when Jake Barnes didn't marry Lady Ashley?”
“More properly, Emma, it's ‘Lady Brett.' The title was her husband's, not hers.”
She gave me a look. “To be sure,
Herr Oberst, absolument.
But getting back to why they couldn't get married, huh?”
“I dunno. There were … problems.” Not wanting to say more, I left it at that.
“Yes, I know. His wound and all …” She broke off then, only to resume:
“ … and you've been wounded as well. The Admiral said so. In a place where it didn't hurt all that much.”
My father started to protest this line of inquiry, but Emma was at the stage of answering her own questions and beat him to it.
“I mean, Jake and Brett are really perfect together. Always having cocktails and going dancing and catching trout and meeting neat people like Count Mippipopolous and the bullfighters. I like Jake so much better than Robert Cohn or Mike Campbell. And I'm sure Brett did, too.”
“Yes, as do most of us,” the Admiral threw in.
“What's an undischarged bankrupt, Admiral? Does it hurt?”
“Only your credit rating,” he growled.
Emma returned to me. To me and Alix, more properly. “I think of you and Alix a lot, Beecher. How you get on so well but you don't get married, either. Even though you're a newspaperman like Jake and like cocktails, too. Though I don't know about Pamplona and the bullfights.”
“Well, we think about it from time to time. At least I do,” I said, wondering if I were making a sap of myself being all this candid in front of an audience of those I loved.
“I as well, on occasion, think of marriage,” insisted Alix, being a good sport.
“But you keep going off,” Emma said. “Like Brett.”
“There is that,” she conceded. “Though never with bullfighters.”
The kid finally relented and gave us a break and said she thought when she were older, she'd like to
be
Brett Ashley. “You know, breaking everyone's heart all the time and going dancing and not having to work or attend classes, but just sporting about and living in Paris.
We were still mulling all that when Inga came into the den. “Callers, sir,” she informed the Admiral, an eloquently raised eyebrow conveying her assessment of the “callers.”
Peanuts Murphy and a small delegation of Baymen.
When they were ushered into the den in their boots and pea jackets, watch caps tugged off respectfully, the Admiral, who understood the distinctions between wardroom and fo'c'sle,
exchanged a few words with Murphy to put him at ease, letting the Bayman himself set the pace. Finally, Peanuts spoke.
“We're here, Admiral, for the little girl, Miss Driver. We know how she spoke up for us with Sis Marley in the matter of the Old Churchyard, planting dead Baymen and such. And want her to know it was appreciated. So we brung along a kind of New Year's gift, Christmas being well past. A souvenir of the East End and its Baymen for her to take back over there to the Alps and all.”
He was handed a brown-paper shopping bag by one of the other Bonackers and Alix shoved Emma forward toward where my father and the half dozen large men stood awkwardly, boots shuffling on the thick carpets.
“It's yours, Emma. They fetched it here for you,” Alix said quietly.
“Why, that's awfully nice of you, Mr. Murphy. But it was all Auntie Sis's idea to bury Mr. Hucko. I only wondered aloud from time to time. She made up her own mind on account of she likes Baymen and doesn't want her brother's bones borrowed again.”
Peanuts had his own view of that, recalling that Sis Marley hadn't budged a damned inch on the question of cemetery plots until this kid showed. But in the holiday spirit, he said only, “Sure, sure, girlie. I know. But we brung this anyhows. Making you an honorary Bub. Which is what we call local people out here. And so you'll remember this here Christmas in the Hamptons, okay?”
As he held out the shopping bag to Emma, she asked eagerly, “Oh, do tell me what it is,
je vous prie, mon capitaine,
tell me, tell me!”
What it was, was a pair of hip boots and a billed cap such as Baymen wore at sea when they weren't sporting watch caps.
“Probably they ain't seen nothing like them hip boots in the Alps,” Peanuts remarked with a big grin.
“I'm sure they haven't. And the cap is handsome as well. The other girls and even the Brides of Christ will be totally floored.”
“Hucko would of been here, too. But he was, well, he ain't feeling so good.”
“Hungover,” offered one of the other Baymen pleasantly. “We closed Wolfie's last night.”
“Quel dommage,”
Emma said, “probably took a chill on the Russian trawler. Or while he was in the net with halibuts and the sharks biting him.”
“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.
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, jousting 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.

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