Murder on the Cliff (4 page)

Had Connie been about twenty years younger, Charlotte suspected it would have been she who was making the play for Shawn instead of her daughter. Though she had settled down in her later years, it was no mystery from whom Marianne had inherited her inability to control her reckless impulses.

As they watched, a photographer approached the couple. As he aimed his camera, Marianne grinned and draped herself over Shawn. They made a striking picture, and she knew it.

Leaving Connie to Spalding, who had worked out the Tanaka problem with Mori, Charlotte headed inside to the gallery, where there was an exhibition of the famous Black Ships Scrolls. The long scrolls were arrayed around the room with translations of the Japanese inscriptions underneath. Charlotte started at the right of the longest one and worked her way to the left. Backwards by Western standards, but from beginning to end by Japanese. The depictions of Perry’s expedition had been executed by Japanese painters on the spot. The first boats to greet Perry’s expedition had been filled with artists who had recognized the market for paintings of the foreign barbarians and their awesome ships. The scrolls were far from fine art, but they had a primitive charm. Charlotte was amused by the depictions of Perry as a comical swaggerer with slanted eyes and a huge nose, of the dragonlike black ships belching clouds of steam and smoke, and of drunken crewmen with copious body hair consorting with courtesans, perhaps Okichi—pre-Townsend Harris—among them.

A voice interrupted her thoughts. “I like this one, don’t you?” it said.

Charlotte looked down into the deep blue eyes of a very old woman. She had a marvelous face: fine and old and lovely, as if it had been carved from ivory. It was framed by a white kerchief, which was tied behind her neck. She gave the impression of being not of this century.

The drawing she referred to depicted the telegraph and the miniature steam locomotive that Perry had bestowed on the Japanese commissioners as a gift. Unlike the human figures, which were whimsically portrayed as strange and comical, the mechanical objects were rendered in painstaking detail.

“Prophetic, isn’t it?” she went on. “From their first contact with Western technology, they were fascinated.” She pointed to the translations on the wall next to the scrolls. “I did the translations. My name’s Lillian Harvey,” she said, extending her hand, “but you can call me Aunt Lillian—everybody else does.”

“Charlotte Graham,” said Charlotte, returning her handshake. “Very nice to meet you. Do you speak Japanese, then?”

“Oh yes. I lived in Japan for many years. I used to teach English at a Quaker girls’ school in Tokyo. I first went there in 1914—it seems such a long time ago now. I went back again in the late thirties, just before the war.”

Charlotte did a quick mental calculation. If she’d been a teacher when she first went to Japan, she must have been at least eighteen, which meant that she was now well into her nineties.

She looked up at Charlotte intently, with her clear, sparkling eyes, which were like sunlight on a deep blue sea. “You’re the actress who played Okichi in
Soiled Dove
, aren’t you?”

Charlotte nodded.

“You did a beautiful job. Of course, you never could have played her on stage.” Leaning back, she eyed Charlotte’s height. “I never realized how tall you were. Much too tall for a Japanese. The man who played Uncle Townsend was
a fright
. He should have stuck to Westerns.”

She was absolutely right. Linc Crawford had been all wrong for the part—he had all the diplomatic subtlety of a cattle rustler. She could still hear his Texas drawl ringing in her ears.

“Are you related to Townsend Harris?” asked Charlotte.

“Oh yes,” Aunt Lillian said. “The Harris descendants are legion. He was my great-uncle. He had no children, of course. Or rather,” she continued, “no
legitimate
children. But he had four brothers and a sister, all of whom had children.”

“Aunt Lillian’s the matriarch of the family now,” said a voice from behind.

Charlotte turned around. The voice belonged to Paul Harris.

“She’ll be joining us for the geisha party this evening as the eldest representative of the Harris family.” He gave her a peck on the cheek. “How old are you now, Lillian dear?”

“As old as the earth, and you know it,” she replied with a twinkle.

Along with her host and hostess, Charlotte had been invited to a geisha party at Paul’s house that evening. Actually, Paul and Marianne’s house.

The house on the Cliff Walk, which had been built by Townsend Harris upon his return from Japan, had been left in trust to Connie and Paul by a great-aunt. Connie had wanted nothing to do with it. She had her own house in Newport, or rather Spalding had. For years, she and Paul had let Townsend Harris’s house out. Then Paul started taking an interest in it. His mother, with whom he had lived for years, had died, and he was looking for a summer place of his own. He began pouring money into the place. Under the guidance of a team of architectural historians, he spent hundreds of thousands restoring it to its original pre-Civil War condition. It was no wonder that he was resentful when Marianne decided to assert her claim, or technically, her mother’s claim, to it.

Paul now occupied the place for half the summer. Half, because he shared the house with Marianne—by court decree. Under a court order of occupancy and use, each had use of the house for alternating two-weeks periods: Wednesday to Wednesday, all neatly spelled out in court documents. Each party had the right to decorate certain rooms, with the dining room divided between them: Marianne could decorate the north and east walls, Paul the south and west walls. Certain rooms were to be left as they were; certain rooms were reserved exclusively for one party or the other. The expenses were shared; any failure to pay meant a forfeiture of that party’s right to occupy.

Charlotte wondered how much money the state had spent over the years adjudicating the case. As a taxpayer in New York, where the aunt’s will was filed, she was appalled that her tax money was being used to mediate such an infantile dispute.

“It’s been a long time since you’ve gotten the family together, Paul,” observed Aunt Lillian. “Fifteen years or more.”

Her comment reflected Charlotte’s own thoughts. It was a mystery why Paul had proposed this little party. Especially since there was no end in sight to the bickering. According to the will, when Connie and Paul died the trust ceased and the house passed to their descendants. But since Paul had no heir, the house would eventually go to Marianne’s daughter, Dede. To prevent Dede from inheriting the house, Paul was trying a new tactic. Arguing that his great-aunt had intended to leave the house to him and Connie and not to their descendants, he had offered to buy it from the trust and turn it over to the Preservation Society of Newport County, the non-profit foundation that operated many of Newport’s mansions. The outcome was still undecided. Though Marianne had the authority of the will on her side, Paul had assembled a lot of high-powered talent on his: namely, the trust department of the prestigious New York corporate law firm in which he was a senior partner, and the resources of the politically powerful Preservation Society, which was anxious to acquire a house that had already been restored. For a while, Paul had even talked about adopting Nadine’s sons as his heirs in order to prevent the property from ending up in Dede’s hands. The idea made Marianne livid, of course.

“Believe me, I’m not burying the hatchet,” Paul replied. “It’s all in the service of the festival. I want to introduce Okichi-
mago
to the family. After all, she is a distant relative.”

“I suppose she is, isn’t she?” said Aunt Lillian. “I’m looking forward to meeting her. Is she as beautiful as everyone says?”

“Even more so. It may be my imagination, but I think I can even detect a resemblance to the Old Tycoon.” The Old Tycoon was the name that Harris was known by after his return from Japan, he explained. He turned his attention back to the scrolls. “Are these your translations, Aunt Lillian?”

“Yes. From fifty years or more ago now.”

Their conversation was interrupted by a Japanese man who greeted Aunt Lillian. They chattered away in Japanese for a few minutes and then she excused herself. “Someone needs a translator,” she explained.

“Ninety-six and still going strong,” said Paul after she had gone. “I hope I’m as sharp at that age.” He turned back to the section of scrolls in front of them, which showed a row of cannons on deck. “I think they should have called this exhibit ‘Trade Talks the Old-Fashioned Way.’”

Charlotte smiled. “I think there are some people here who would just as soon see the United States send out the black ships again,” she said. “Especially after Mr. Tanaka’s speech this morning.”

“Well, at least it kept everyone from falling asleep. How do you like the scrolls?” he asked. “Of course, they’re hardly Utamaro, but they’re fun.”

Utamaro was a Japanese artist who was famed for his woodblock prints of the everyday life of the geishas. Charlotte had first come across these colorful prints when she was filming
Soiled Dove
in Japan. A display in a Tokyo art dealer’s window had caught her eye. They depicted the geisha dancing, singing, putting on their makeup, preparing for the bath. She was so entranced that she had eventually become something of a collector.

“Are you a collector?” she asked, sensing a shared interest.

Paul replied that he was. Not only a collector, but a very knowledgeable authority. He worked as a consultant for various auction houses and art galleries on the Japanese woodblock print, or
ukiyo-e
.

Charlotte explained how the
ukiyo-e
had helped give her insight into the customs and manners of the floating world: the world of wine, women, and song that was the province of the rich merchant-class. Barred from government and forbidden from the material display of wealth (such privileges being restricted to the aristocratic samurai class), the rich merchants turned their energies to the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure.

In many ways, the floating world reminded Charlotte of Newport. Except for a few survivors of the old guard like Spalding, there was little sense of the obligation of wealth among Newport’s mansion dwellers. Public achievement, service to one’s community, charitable contributions—all these had little or nothing to do with power and prestige. The index of social standing was money—or, if not money itself, an appreciation for the social prerogatives of wealth.

For a few minutes, they chatted away about Japanese woodblock prints with the fervidness of fellow enthusiasts who have discovered one another. Then Paul checked his watch. “Do you have some spare time this afternoon?”

Charlotte replied that she did.

“If you’ll risk associating with the other side of the family, I’d like to show you my collection. Plus I’d like to show you something else, something that only you can appreciate.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“A surprise.”

3

After a sandwich at a luncheonette, Charlotte headed down Bellevue Avenue toward Paul’s house. Although she had a car, she preferred to walk. She had looked forward to this moment. Much of Newport’s appeal for her lay in the romance of this elegant avenue, which was lined with the grand mansions of the Gilded Age. She loved the ornate wrought-iron gates, the glimpses of mansions behind high brick walls, the expanses of sun-dappled lawn. But most of all she loved the trees. Just as the Newport socialites had vied to build the biggest mansions, to host the most lavish parties, and to wear the most stylish gowns, they had also vied to grow the most exotic trees. A century ago teams of oxen could be seen hauling young trees up from the harbor, trees that had been gathered from around the world to grace the grounds of these elegant mansions. Now these trees had come into their full maturity. She had once heard it said that this single avenue boasted one of the finest collections of specimen trees in the country. As she left the shops of central Newport behind, she reacquainted herself with her favorites: the pollarded beeches on the lawn of the The Elms, clipped to form dense, erect columns; the London plane tree on the lawn of Chateau-Sur-Mer, with a trunk that was seven feet around; the forty-foot-high rhododendrons; and everywhere enormous specimens of the graceful fern-leafed beech, Newport’s most elegant tree.

At Narragansett Avenue, she turned left toward the ocean. On her right was another famous mansion, this one still in private hands: Bois Doré, another replica of a French chateau. And again, the trees: a double row of pollarded planes lining the long approach to the door. The trees at Bois Doré were the subject of one of her favorite Newport stories: for a party, the then-owner of the mansion, a Harrisburg millionaire, had hung them with artificial fruits that were plated, like the faucets in his bathrooms, with fourteen-carat gold. She could imagine how they must have glittered in the lamplight. It was decadent, yes, but it was also magical. Not unlike Hollywood, not unlike the floating world. Newport was full of stories like that: the notorious dogs’ dinner, in which a hundred dogs in fancy dress were served stewed liver and shredded dog biscuits by English footmen in full livery, or Mrs. Astor’s jewel party at which five hundred guests dug in sand piles with miniature sterling silver shovels for diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, and rubies—theirs to keep as party favors. It was also Mrs. Astor, the high priestess of Gilded Age society, who was the subject of one of Newport’s saddest stories. The lavishly gowned queen of the Four Hundred spent her last days in her mansion on Bellevue Avenue giving elegant parties for imaginary guests at which no rule of etiquette, no nuance of fine manners was ignored. It was a pathetic end for a woman whose husband’s grandfather had made his fortune skinning beavers.

Such had been the fate of many of Newport’s fortunes: the robust wealth that had come from trading furs or mining coal or laying rails had ended up in the hands of people who, treating their inheritance as their admission pass, had spent their lives denying admission to others, until, undermined by their lack of contact with reality, they degenerated into madness or dissipation.