Further Lane (19 page)

“Can't say I didn't warn you,” Jesse reminded the drenched interloper. “I dislike pretty much everyone. And that especially includes lawyers.”

Then, “Howdy, Beecher. Your Daddy catch any fish over there yet? Tell him I said hello.”

“Surely will, Jesse,” I assured him. “Say hello as well to Alix Dunraven. She's here from London.”

“Well, isn't that fine, Miss. Think of that, all the way from London. One of many places I've never been. You must have grand times there, with the Queen and all, and the way they carry on in that family.”

“Oh, England's quite often jolly. I think you'd like it, Mr. Maine. Except perhaps for the weather. It's usually raining.”

Jesse nodded, very thoughtful. Rain meant certain crops might thrive better than others. He wondered if there were muskrats to be trapped and inquired about the fishing. I explained about Alix's daddy, the title and all, his being an Earl, all of which fascinated Jesse. “We got some sachems and chiefs and the like in our eastern tribes. But no earls. Do they have gainful employment or just laze about?”

Alix felt she ought to defend the aristocracy, at least in the abstract, before moving on to more parochial concerns. “They are useful, or so Pa insists, voting in the House of Lords and keeping tabs on those chaps in Commons. But what about your tribe, Mr. Maine, is there a casino?” Alex asked, wanting to be polite. “I've been to the one at Deauville and to Monte, of course.”

“No,” Jesse said. He was opposed to casinos. On principle.

“And I thought all the Indians had them.”

“No, ma'am. You never hear of a Sioux casino. Or a Commanche. Or Cheyenne. It's all these half-assed local eastern tribes got them. Fellas with rusty pickups up on cinder blocks in the front yard but they're too good to pump gas or work in the 7-Eleven.”

“Mmmm,” Alix said tactfully, unsure of the polite response and not wishing to denigrate one Indian in front of another. I tried to help out. “Jesse works hard himself, Alix, hunting muskrat for their pelts and catching fish for market and growing a little corn and working on house repairs and such. Done fine work for my father who swears by him.”

“Correct,” the Indian said, pleased at my father's compliments, even secondhand, “I freelance, I consult, and I am available on proper notice for assignments of varying sorts. For a fee, of course. But some of these fellas 'round here, they'll have you convinced they're Shinnecock aristocrats and such just like you Brits, bragging on about ancestors with portraits in gilt frames all over the walls, that their great-granddad on one side was Sitting Bull and on the other, Crispus Attucks…”

Alix shook her head, said she knew of Sitting Bull and his enormous exploits, but not of the other man he mentioned.

“Who was he?” she asked. Jesse looked startled.

“Why, you of all people, Your Ladyship, you ought to know. He was a black gentleman who was shot by your Redcoats hundreds of years back at the massacre.”

“What massacre was that?” she asked. “We've had any number, regrettably.”

“Boston. The Boston Massacre. Attucks was the fellow who practically got the American Revolution started all by hisself. Just by getting shot and killed. A great hero and role model for the rest of us people of color, ever since.”

“I should say so, Mr. Maine,” Alix said. “And our chaps shot him? You mean that literally?”

“I do.”

“Then on behalf of Great Britain, I
am
sorry.”

We all paused for a brief silence in memory of the late Crispus Attucks of Boston.

Driving back to East Hampton Alix said, “Will they arrest him?”

“Don't think so. Hope not. But Jesse doesn't make it easy.”

In the end, Knowles told Jesse to come in the following day and make a statement. But to come in on his own; the cops wouldn't bring him. That seemed to mollify the Indian, his precious dignity intact and immeasurably pleased by having thrown a lawyer into the water. If Jesse hated anyone worse than the late Hannah Cutting (and most cops), it was lawyers.

We stopped at Sam's, on Newtown Lane. You like pizza? Alix shook her head. No?

“No, I like pizza fine. It's just all too much, you and the Red Indians and African-Americans in Boston being massacred by Englishmen and whether there ought to be casinos, and then that detective fellow, and Claire Cutting and her boyfriend trying to drown us in the speedboat. Mr. Evans will be terribly out of sorts. And my failures reflect badly on HarperCollins as well, back in London. And even on the Tony Godwin Award jury. By this time I'm supposed to have found Hannah's manuscript buried under the floorboards or somewhere and fetched it back so we can get on with producing yet another best-seller that quite conceivably might be optioned by Hollywood as a potential major motion picture. At the very least I ought to be E-mailing daily or even hourly messages in cipher to describe what progress if any I was making in cracking the case. Instead, I feel absurdly guilty, buying new clothes and sporting about with you in canoes and meeting these fascinating people and driving along these lovely lanes, dining in restaurants with sailboats in the bar and now eating pizza and…”

“East Hampton ought to retain you to do Chamber of Commerce promos. You make it sound pretty nice.” Her being here made it pretty nice as well, though I caught myself and didn't say so.

She liked all our windmills as well.

“I feel a proper Sancho Panza trailing about after you on all these noble quests seeking manuscripts and jousting with chaps.”

I liked that, as well, being Don Quixote. But instead of my squire, shouldn't she be the Don's lovely Dulcinea? But I didn't say that, either. Episcopalian reticence.

Alix might be growing impatient but I was getting used to having her around and less uneasy with the dissonance of “houseguest.” I was even beginning to hope we wouldn't find Hannah's manuscript all that quickly so that Alix wouldn't be hurrying back to Manhattan. Back at the gatehouse I opened a chilled Julienas from Georges Duboeuf that was only two years old but went down fine with sausage and pepper pizza from Sam's, while listening to some John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald on the old stereo.

“Y'know, Beecher,” Alix said, “I haven't been here two full days and don't know a bloody thing. But it seems to me that what counts most here in East Hampton isn't really money or celebrity. What counts is roots, how long you've all lived here. The old families, the old land, the traditions and customs. In ways, Beecher, it's rather like Britain, all those stately homes and people who can't pay their bills but they keep up those justifiably storied lawns.”

“… rolling them every day for a thousand years. Yeah.”

She nodded, as if trying to figure out what she'd say next and wondering if it made even the slimmest sense.

“Seems to me that if you want to find out something in a place like this, in the Hamptons and along Further Lane, you get hold of someone who's lived here a very long time, centuries, millennia, and you enlist his assistance.…”

“No one lives centuries. They…”

“Oh, don't be dense, Beecher. I mean a family that's been here that long. Or longer.”

“Well, there are the Warrenders. And Tom Knowles's folks. And Pam Phythian. Even my people. And the Spaeths and Gardiners and Cuttings and…”

“Longer than that.”

I was starting to see how Alix's mind worked.

“Jesse Maine and the Shinnecocks, right?”

“May I have a little more of that wine?” she asked, not quite coy but offering me a half smile. Jesse might not know it yet but Her Ladyship's net was about to be cast wide on the local waters.

The eleven o'clock news said Hurricane Martha had come ashore and violently so in the British Virgin Islands and was zeroing in on Puerto Rico. No threat yet to the East Coast but the Hurricane Center in Miami was watching it to see if it gave sign of making that classic right turn to come north.…

TWENTY-TWO

$2,400 for a collie to chase the sonuvabitching geese …

Even though the official season ended with Labor Day, once Her Ladyship took up residence in my quarters, the invitations came flooding in. Suddenly, I was enormously popular. You'd think Princess Di and Fergie, both!, were bunking in my spare bedroom and entertaining the gentry with their carnal favors. Enormous wealth or being a partner at Skadden Arps or helming the America's Cup winner was one thing; having a British title was something far more likely to impress the local rustics. Most invitations were shrugged off. Not all.

“Do you want to see Leo Brass up close?” I asked.

“I've seen him, too bloody close in fact.” Alix wasn't a romantic about the realities.

“He was in a cigarette boat; we had a canoe. This time we're on land. Both of us. Much better odds.”

Every year it seemed the Green Peacers had a new cause. Locally, this time, it was Georgica Pond. And … The Gut.

“What's ‘The Gut' if it's not pushy to inquire?” Alix wanted to know.

Good question. Even in East Hampton people were vague, confused, about The Gut. I was anything but expert. But I was game.

“Georgica is a gorgeous pond, with wonderful homes and a number of great estates bordering its shoreline, one of the bigger ponds in East Hampton, couple of miles long and a mile or so wide. At its southern end it comes up against the ocean beach so that a narrow sand barrier no more than one hundred yards across separates the pond from the ocean. Every year, usually twice a year depending on a ruling from the town trustees, bulldozers cut a breach through that sand barrier at a narrow place called The Gut. Leo Brass usually does the bulldozing, being something of an artist with a tractor. He gouges out a channel so that the brackish water of the pond with all the sediment and fertilizer and rain runoff and such that gets in there can be flushed out into the ocean and the pond can refresh itself with an influx of clean seawater. It's something to see, the pond water rushing out and then, at the next high tide, the ocean rushing in, with all sorts of big and little fish and crabs and shellfish flailing about, with Leo up there atop the 'dozer, waving and taking bows, and people shaking hands with the trustees and snapping photos and lifting a glass to toast The Gut and otherwise carrying on. Like when they have the grunion run in Southern California.”

“The what?”

I was getting in deeply enough with Georgica Pond and The Gut to start explaining about grunion. Especially since I knew nothing of grunion beyond what I'd read in
The Last Tycoon
and had never even seen one.

“Never mind.” Alix didn't say anything, but did award me the highest raised eyebrow of the week.

There was a problem about the timing of the flushing of The Gut. Some of the big shorefront landowners were pushing for an earlier opening since Georgica Pond was high this summer and lapping at their lawns if not precisely at their front doors. And they were clearly aware a hurricane could be coming this way. Even a modest hurricane meant drenching rains that disastrously might force the Pond out of its banks and into their homes. The Baymen, led by Leo Brass, hadn't yet said anything but were expected to hold out for a later, more traditional date, and to hell with the rich people who had property fronting on the Pond. Those were the wealthiest people, theirs the most valuable land. So you understood their position. But there was something ecologically to be said on behalf of the Baymen's as well. I had a sneaking feeling that Brass so loved a fight that if the rich were demanding The Gut be left alone until winter, he'd be leading the battle to have it flushed yesterday afternoon. Ornery, he was.

The Baymen's rally was scheduled for eight at Ashawag Hall on Old Stone Highway. That must have sounded impressive to Alix because she asked, “Must we book?” I said we'd get in, don't worry, and would in fact have time to drop by first for a glass at Pam Phythian's. Since both Pam and Leo Brass were sworn enemies of Hannah's (as well as having clashed themselves with considerable ferocity over some ecological point of dispute or other!), we'd be touching several bases in the one evening.

“And who's she?” Alix wondered.

Pam was easier to explain than grunion and The Gut.

“She's a Phythian, which out here is pretty important stuff. Real old family, lots of Old Money as well. There's even a Fithian Lane in the village that runs behind the Post Office down to Egypt Lane. That's how some of the family spells the name, with an
F.
Pam's forty or so; I always thought resembled Anouk Aimee without the accent. Damned attractive, tall, lean, and athletic. She was the one who got Hannah Cutting started climbing mountains.”

Pam had never married, I explained. Oh, there'd been opportunities, suitors, affairs. It was just, people said, that no one man measured up to Pam's needs and expectations.

“I like her already,” Alix said, delighted at having such a vigorously independent female role model as our hostess.

I was about to say, “and she'll like you, too,” but didn't. There were vague stories about Pam and other women, including even Hannah. But they were only stories and you know how people gossip.

As one might have expected, given her lineage, Pam handled things superbly. While other of her guests were practically curtseying to Alix on being introduced, Pam stuck out her hand and shook Alix's firmly.

“Any friend of Beecher's,” she murmured, “and especially one so lovely and having come so far.”

They were about the same height, both of them lean, but Alix less rangy, not as broad in the shoulder. Both were wearing ankle-length wrap skirts not showing much leg (last summer's trendy look but a shame, I thought). Pam was much tanner except for her hands. A gardener, of course, who habitually wore gardening gloves; and who in East Hampton wasn't a gardener? As we stood there chatting, Jerry Della Femina joined us. He was the big noise on Madison Avenue who owned a smashing home on the dunes and several businesses including restaurants and a small but chic shopping center. Busy man. In his spare time he was suing the town over a freedom of speech issue and had also run for East Hampton town elective office earlier in the year and lost badly. But then, in every election, there are losers. What left a bad taste behind was Jerry's loud complaint that traditional old members of the Maidstone Club ganged up and defeated him and his blue-collar supporters. He was especially irate over one superannuated old gent who'd been rolled into the polling place in a wheelchair while hooked up to a breathing device. How dare these people?