Further Lane (2 page)

Except for gloomy people with long, Old Testament faces who stood to windward of the bloody, stinking sand, and prophesied unprecedented and awful things.

Some of which would come about. Though not quite yet.

Instead, we had a season of relative peace and tranquility. The annual running of the au pair girls on the fairways of the Maidstone Club produced the usual number of adulterous liaisons between married members and the summer's crop of nymphets; but only a handful of broken marriages. Doc Whitmore the tree surgeon got back onto his rickety old bike following a hip replacement. Half-a-dozen chic new boutiques opened on Memorial Day, went bust, and were shuttered by September. A resurgence of the “brown tide” suggested the October scalloping wouldn't be much. Dunemere Real Estate huffily denied they were the agents for grunge singer Courtney Love, rumored to be buying a place. Two neighbors on Huntting Lane, one Old Money, his woman neighbor indisputably New, feuded over her dogs and he was suspected of shooting at them with a BB gun. Although, with the privet hedge masking his line of fire, little damage was done; another recommendation for growing a good privet. Deer ticks swarmed once more. Which was why, they said, Billy Joel bred and raised guinea hens at his spread on Further Lane, to keep down the ticks. Guinea hens like a nice tick. There were few unexpected personal bankruptcies and not a single front-page suicide. A wealthy husband, known locally and disparagingly by various epithets, suspicious his celebrity third wife was gathering evidence of abuse, verbal or otherwise, met her private jet with bodyguards and had her “patted down” to determine whether she might be wearing “a wire.”

She was.

Decent people tut-tutted such yarns as tabloid inventions and piously hoped the couple might work out their differences. Even the season's resident charlatan, a New Age guru, who described himself, with deadpan solemnity, as “The Swami,” maintained a discreetly low profile. Although he, at least, had amusement value.

Imported, lavishly housed, fed, and watered at the considerable expense of rich, foolish women who got their names in the columns simply for going to lunch, the Swami affected caftans, working his magic largely in private, levitating and chanting, going into trances, prescribing enemas and a diet of wheat germ, all the while smelling up a lovely, old, borrowed house with incense. Thoughtfully, he promoted his scams, if that was what they were, behind thick and sheltering privet hedges rather than on village streets, where he might frighten leashed dogs or roller-skating children.

“Conspicuous privacy is a big deal in the Hamptons.” Or so wrote someone terribly decorative and designery in a summer's issue of the
New York Times.
And he was right. We're as subject to the usual seasonal crazes as the next place. An obsessive toting of bottles of Evian water, for one. To stroll the three hundred yards from Hither Lane to Middle Lane, people feel it essential to stock up on designer water as if they were setting out to cross Arabia's Empty Quarter with T. E. Lawrence. But otherwise, we're pretty sensible folk, sheltered and insulated from such foolishness by all that boxwood and privet hedge out here, why we seem so happily screened-off as well from the cruel, more substantive realities that plague less fortunate places.

But even in East Hampton, the harsh world occasionally intrudes.

In mid-August, the whale washed up. A few days later, Leo Brass, a brawny local Bayman who'd somehow gotten himself educated (Penn State and then grad school at MIT!), was arrested for igniting a minor riot over wetlands protection (Leo personally bulldozed a police barricade erected to keep Baymen from blowing up a dock constructed in Accabonac Harbor by Krantz, the wine baron). East Hampton was unaccustomed to such loud posturing and some locals were offended, literally, by Leo's “brass.” Nor had MIT been an enormous success for Leo. At Penn State he'd been welcomed, nurtured, lionized as a track and field star who narrowly missed making our Olympic team in the decathlon (the javelin his best event). While at MIT, lost amid the Cambridge crowd, he drank too much and in a Harvard Square bar one night punched out a Ph.D. candidate over an arcane point of ecology, and ended by being first busted and, eventually, sent down by the institute.

No one, except possibly the unhappy Ph.D. candidate, questioned Leo's instinctive feel for country, for earth and water, the fragility of wetlands. There was no denying his expertise no matter how erratic and surly he could turn. Leo didn't like me very much but what did that matter? When in the mood, Leo was fun but there was a nervy edge to him and he could go mean in an instant; despite his schooling, he enjoyed playing the crude rustic. Nevertheless, he was on the side of the Gods ecologically and claimed to know more, and perhaps did, than anyone else out here about the vulnerable nature of our sprawling, boggy wetlands. Contemptuous of critics, whom he dismissed as effete “tree huggers,” and hostile to the New Money men putting his precious wetlands at risk, Leo was not at all bashful when it came to taking contributions of their “conscience money” and bedding their women; both activities he characterized smugly as “screwing the rich.” To his adherents, Leo just might be, in many ways, “the new man” people were waiting for.

People who understood such things stroked their chins and predicted the demagogue Brass might have quite a future out here, Huey Long on a Caterpillar tractor.

And finally, as if Brass and his militant Baymen had mischievously whistled it up, a mostly tranquil summer would end, melodramatically, with a storm right out of
Lear,
a great hurricane that came at us, deadly, destructive, unforgiving, boiling, raging and writhing out of Africa, through the Antilles and then the Caribbean, bouncing off Florida and bounding up the coast past Hatteras to target East Hampton, tearing at our barrier sandbars, lashing our dunes, ripping into our shores, splintering our great elms, swamping our roads.

That was the threat. But would the tempest actually get here or veer off out to sea? No one yet knew.

By mid-September in a village whose Main Street had been labeled by the
National Geographic
as the “most beautiful in America,” with its miles of gorgeous ocean beach and scores of bays and ponds and inlets and snug harbors, its pine barrens and green fairways and golden sand, no longer did things seem quite so comfortable and predictable. Instead, everything … and even East Hampton itself … seemed as vulnerable as anyplace else to change, and not always for the better.

As, in a macabre sort of entr'acte, on the beach just east of the Maidstone Club, there washed up one dawn a famous woman's naked, skewered body.

THREE

A battered upright where Billy Joel might play a few tunes …

My name is Beecher Stowe.

There are plenty of richer people here but our family's been in East Hampton since the time of the Rev. Lyman Beecher and his children, Harriet Stowe, who wrote
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
and her “amorous” brother Henry Ward Beecher. We don't go as far back as the Phythians or Buells or Hunttings or Gardiners, some of whom can count back eleven or twelve generations, but long enough. And like Ms. Streisand and Martha Stewart and the others, I spent last summer in East Hampton, at my old man's place on Further Lane, recuperating from that nasty business with the Muslim Fundamentalists in Algiers, and working on a book about terrorism based mostly on my dispatches to
Newsweek.
And since I'd been a guest at that final cocktail party and knew the victim, it wasn't entirely unexpected that when her body was found, the cops came to seek me out. Not only might I know something, but with my father having been for so long the chief of naval intelligence, a sort of super spy, a bright cop could be excused for imagining I might possess some potential for information.

I'm a working newspaperman. Have been since Harvard when I got a cub's job at the
Boston Globe,
writing about traffic accidents and garden parties and high school football and knifings in the black neighborhoods and drunken brawls in the Irish. Then in my second year on the
Globe,
driving back from covering a “naughty choirmaster” case in Chatham, I saw a turnoff to the Kennedy compound at Hyannisport and pulled in. I was a nothing reporter on a nothing story but as I rolled up the historic gravel drive and stopped, not knowing just what to do or say, a small, shrunken, and very old lady opened the front door. I'm from the
Globe,
I said.

We take the
Globe
already, sonny, Rose Kennedy said, thank you very much.

I explained I was a reporter and not selling subs but was pleased she took the
Globe
as it was the best newspaper around. Rose Kennedy liked that, confirming her judgment as sound, and she asked me in for an iced tea. Which was how I got what's believed to be the last rational interview the old girl ever gave. The
Globe,
delighted to have the story but uneasy with a cub, played it big. If cautiously—good newspapers are always cautious—in the second, metro section, instead of out front, where it belonged.

It was that Rose Kennedy story that inspired Garfein, the assistant city editor (dayside) and a devout man, to inform the staff, “People talk to Beecher. They tell him things. You don't learn shit like that at Harvard. Nor even here in the city room of the
Boston Globe.
It's a kind of gift from God and Stowe has it.”

Now, a dozen years later, as Labor Day neared, I was fully recovered from my injuries and with my book's first draft nearly wrapped. I'd already resigned from
Newsweek
and in September was scheduled to join
Parade
magazine to write six pieces a year at a handsome figure. The
Parade
editor, Walter Anderson, had read my dispatches, knew I'd tangled with Algerian zealots, had seen my file out of Baku and some of my stuff on Bosnia.

But it was the pieces on Princess Di that I did for
Newsweek
from their London bureau that drew Walter Anderson's eye. Not that they were all that difficult to do. After all, my girlfriend at the time was a member of the young royals' set, like Diana Spencer herself except younger, a Sloane Ranger, one of those chic young people who lived in or about London's Belgravia and Sloane Square, forever popping up in Nigel Dempster's column in the
Daily Mail
—Dempster who styled himself “scourge of the upper classes,” yet lived off their droppings. I'd been born in Paris when my father was stationed there as American naval attaché (my late mother was French, a mannequin for Chanel, and maybe one of the first bulimics) and for the past five years I'd been back there in Europe, working as a correspondent. So I had news sources and hung out in the right places, with a membership at the Hurlingham Club, where I played tennis on grass and rated elbow space in the Connaught bar. Nights I hung at Vingt Quatre and Kartouche's Basement and other trendy joints along the Fulham Road but could still get into Annabel's and Tramp and book a table at Langan's. I'd interviewed the elegant Armani in Milano, the new Prix Goncourt novelist in his atelier on the Left Bank (he enjoyed a Turkish waterpipe; I stuck to Gitanes), and General Lebed in the Kremlin before he was sacked (“A de Gaulle in the making or a future dictator” ran the headline), and spoke pretty fair French. Anderson liked writers who knew stuff like that, had been there and done that, and knew their way around.

You know how Clint Eastwood ducks the press and doesn't do Letterman or sit still for a lot of interviews? It was Anderson who came up with the idea of sending Norman Mailer out there to Carmel to do the interview. Eastwood was so delighted he drove down himself to welcome Mailer at the airport, drive him out to the house. The most macho writer in America meets Dirty Harry! That's how they played it; that's how it was. It was stuff like that that was special about
Parade,
the Sunday magazine that's the biggest in the world with a circulation every week of something like forty million, and now its editor had dangled a big money offer. Plus the whole summer off to finish the terrorism book I was doing for Tom Dunne at St. Martin's Press.

You couldn't ask for a better deal. And most appealing of all, it would get me out of London, overnight no longer a town I enjoyed, not since an admirably kinky (though very well brought-up) young woman, whom I was convinced was mad about me, ran off with a chinless, but titled, wonder.

So I took Walter up on his offer, and sailed back to the States aboard
QE2
to spend July and August out on Further Lane doing the book, before starting work at his magazine. Two months to wrap up a hardcover book wasn't all that much time and I plugged away pretty diligently, starting each day with a brisk swim in the surf off our own patch of beach, getting fit again after Algiers. But I tried to duck the East Hampton dinner and cocktail party circuit. Not that even if you wanted, you could go totally into hiding.

One morning on Newtown Lane a small black convertible, very nifty indeed, honked at me. Peggy Siegal, the PR woman. I waved instinctively before realizing it was Peggy. Coming back from Dreesen's with my newspapers, I saw her again, parked at the curb this time and talking animatedly into her cell phone, all the while very carefully detailing the dashboard of her convertible with a long sort of quill, a very precise feather duster indeed, getting into, and meticulously so, every nook and cranny. Quite industrious she was.

Hello, Peggy, I said, who's on the phone?

I don't know why I did that. Causing mischief, I suppose.

But Peggy took me literally. Claudia, she said, say hello.

So I said hello to Claudia Cohen, who was a gossip columnist and very rich and for about an hour and a half had been Senator Al D'Amato's girlfriend. Which no one who knew either of them understood.