Further Lane (27 page)

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I was home from Yale that summer, he began, very full of myself. A Warrender, of course, with all that conveyed both here on Further Lane and in a broader context. With a few dollars. Captain of the swim team. Just tapped for 'Bones. Practically engaged to a swell girl named Rockefeller. And here came along this little Czechoslovak kid from Polish Town in Riverhead, working for my family, right off the potato farm, cutest thing you've every seen, a little blonde swishing her bottom and her ponytail both, and looking wide-eyed at me as if I were something special. I guess I thought I was. But then so did Hannah. She had a big crush on me, she said. “Crush” was an okay term to use then, I guess. I came home early in June and by the Fourth of July had forgotten all about Miss Rockefeller, even about Skull and Bones. I was twenty-two and Hannah was fifteen and I knew it was wrong but couldn't stop, couldn't keep my hands off her. And she wasn't making it easy, working around the house and the garden in a little cotton dress and no bra. I couldn't let my old man know and especially not my mother. The usual class distinctions, y'know, the old school tie and all that.

I took her swimming nights. She'd sneak out of the house and meet me behind the old cabanas. I'd come down from the Maidstone Club and we'd get undressed and do the usual things, and a few unusual, and then swim way out. She was a strong swimmer and I was very good. We'd hold onto one another out there, bobbing up and down, kissing and wrapping our legs around each other, and then swim back in and make love all over again, using one of the cabanas. Just about every night, neither of us could get enough. She said she was nuts about me and I guess I was crazy, too.

Then, the end of August with Labor Day coming and classes beginning at Yale, she told me. She was pregnant. “Preggers,” that's what sophisticated people say. Not Hannah. “I'm going to have your baby, Royal.” That's how she told me and she was happy. Not upset or hysterical or making threats or demands or anything. Very very happy. And when I started to mumble something about paying for an abortion, she hushed me. “No, Royal, I'll have your beautiful baby.” Sure, I thought in a panic. That means I'll have to marry her and it's bye-bye Yale for me and hello Park Avenue for her. But that wasn't Hannah Shuba. Not then it wasn't …

Alex and I were leaning forward now, caught up in Warrender's narrative. All around the growing storm twisted and boiled and churned and pummeled his big old house atop the dune.

I agonized for a day or two, Royal resumed, then I knew what I had to do and went to my father and told him. Told him about the baby and that I was going to marry Hannah. I didn't realize how naive I was. My father went into a cold rage, telling me the bitch was a little gold digger playing me for a sucker. If I had to sleep with her why didn't I use something? “I'll hire private detectives,” he said. “That girl probably slept with half the Baymen in East Hampton and every potato farmer in Riverhead and you announce it's
your
baby? Didn't they teach you anything at Yale, Royal? She's a Catholic, isn't she? I'll have her name read out from the pulpits of every Polack church on the East End.”

I started to say they were Czechs and not Poles and that she …

He shut me up pretty fast. “I'll ruin this girl and her bastard.”

It was all very J. P. Marquand. No way was he going to let me marry Hannah. The whole Warrender clan sprang up protectively around me, the way the Shinnecocks gathered 'round your pal, Jesse Maine. It's how primitive tribes behave; it's how the Warrenders behave.

Hannah, on the other hand, he said, still impressed by the Warrenders' place in society rather than repelled by their chill cruelty, and slightly dazed at age fifteen by what had happened to her, reacted very well. No tantrums, no screams of outraged virtue, no demands for my name or even for money. The sexy little teenager with a potato farmer for a father behaved as Warrenders were supposed to do: with class!

She returned to Riverhead, where her mother “arranged” things; she married an older man, the cesspool digger, had “their” baby, a girl she named “Claire” because it sounded “classy,” sounded nice and WASP, and she kept her mouth shut. No appeals, no tears, no whispered confidences about just who Claire's father “really” was. The cesspool man died in that accident and Hannah remarried. This time, more “suitably.” To Andy Cutting. He had a little money and a good name. He was a WASP and Hannah had begun to understand they were the people who ran the world.

Andy Cutting was mad for her. He was also a weakling. And Hannah by now realized that she was anything but …

Royal was winding up his tale.

Hannah learned from Cutting. And since she knew something about food and came from a family with a tradition of service to the Moravian aristocracy in the old country, she started a small, freelance catering service and within a few years had a Manhattan operation as well, a caterer and a good one, to corporate clients and society affairs and, eventually, to the rich and famous. And by then she was rich and famous herself. And no longer so sweet or so simple.

And in all the intervening years Royal and Hannah never spoke. They found themselves on the same street, even in the same room at times, they passed on Main Street and occasionally in Manhattan. Yet they never spoke, never did more than nod. Neither seemed to want to bridge gaps. Nearly three decades passed. And then Random House announced Hannah Cutting was writing a book in which she was going to “tell all.”

“But you know the story from there,” Royal Warrender said.

TWENTY-NINE

The rest of it was pure venom … settling scores …

After his yarn had played out, Royal looked almost chipper, vivacious, as if weights had been lifted. Alix sat there, brow creased, thoughtful. I think she felt as I did; it was a wonderful narrative intelligently told. But did it get us any closer to the mystery of Hannah's death or the whereabouts of the famous manuscript and, perhaps, its unfinished symphony of life along Further Lane? It was up to me to ask:

“Royal, do you have any notion of where Hannah's book is now?”

“Yes, Beecher,” he said so quietly that at first I didn't grasp what he was saying, “I have it.”

I would not have been as surprised had Royal informed us he didn't own a house on Further Lane and had in fact never been to East Hampton. But he was going on:

“I knew she worked on the book in her Further Lane house and even where she was writing it, in which room, and how for the first time she was using a word processor. So it was the simplest thing in the world to drop by and grab it.”

“But how did you know all that?”

“Hannah told me. Bragged about it. Taunted me with nasty little hints. She had the goods on me and on lots of others and once she had it all down in book form between hard covers we'd realize it. She went on and on, saying she wrote for an hour or two every morning without fail in the little changing room she had out in the pool house, that she had a new IBM computer, and wasn't bothering with frivolities such as floppy disks. She was getting back at everyone who'd been hard on her or put her down. She worked right off the hard drive, instead of a disk, though she didn't use the terms.”

“But you just said you and she never spoke. Not a word.”

“Not until last year. Then, things changed.”

“And after all that time, after all her success, she was still sore at you?”

“Hostile's more the word. And it was a hatred that grew through the years as she matured and grew more resentful of my youthful failures. But only intermittently so. That's the puzzling thing. When my wife died last year Hannah wrote me a note. The usual polite condolence and when I got around to sending out those printed acknowledgments I scrawled a line at the bottom about how much I appreciated hearing from her. Well, that broke the ice. We saw each other a few times. She wasn't a hot little teenager anymore but in ways she was just as desirable. I would have been drawn to her if she'd been more stable. But there were these violent mood swings and outbursts. One moment she'd laughingly, rather cleverly be musing on what a good wife she'd make to an ambitious man like me. That it was true that behind every great man there was a great woman. The next she'd be snarling resentment for my having amused myself with a naive kid, toyed with her and then walked away from responsibility because I was in awe of and afraid of my father, obsessed by family and position. Next thing you know, she'd be in what she used to call her ‘angora sweater mood,' sexy and open and vulnerable. I suppose it's hard for people who don't really know Hannah to think of her as either naive or vulnerable. But there were times…”

Alix and I waited for him to resume the narrative.

“Late Saturday night of Labor Day weekend, early Sunday morning actually, I walked down Further Lane to her place. She was leaving for Nepal any day now on that Mount Everest foolishness and this might be a last chance to find out what she'd written about me and what steps I might take, legally or otherwise, to protect myself and avoid a scandal. I was under strict orders from Washington to keep my nose clean for these next couple of months or the job at the Fed would be out the window. Not only that, anything foolish on my part would redound against the President, hurt his chances for a second term. I knew her house and property and the outbuildings as well as she knew them. But only the East Hampton place; once she was back in Manhattan in her apartment or at the house in Vermont, I'd be helplessly out of my depth. Further Lane was my turf; it was now or never. As I expected, the back door to the pool house was unlocked and I let myself in, wearing cotton gardening gloves to avoid leaving prints, moved quietly, paused now and then to be sure she wasn't there working late over the book, but the place was empty. So I nipped into the changing room, which she'd fixed up like a rec room of sorts, and sat down to work at the computer. With a magnet it didn't take long. There was only a single, quite lengthy entry in the directory…”

“… some hundred and eighty thousand characters, I believe,” I put in, unable to resist interrupting his rather smug account.

Warrender looked at me, his brow wrinkled. Then he resumed, not permitting me to draw him into an exchange.

“When I'd done what I came to do, I left, wrapping my knuckles inside the glove in a handkerchief to avoid being cut and breaking a pane of glass to leave behind the suggestion of a break-in and thinking myself a crafty fellow indeed. It was then I heard Hannah's voice.”

Alix and I both sat up. Were we about to hear the story of her death?

“It came from down at the beach somewhere and I couldn't make out the words, only a few words, a sentence or so, but it was Hannah. I knew the voice, recognized the tone, rather put out. There was no response, not that I could hear, but I didn't hang about. I got going. If Hannah was up and about no reason why she mightn't head this way. So I took off and fast and walked home along Further Lane, twice dropping back into the hedge when headlights approached.”

“But Hannah? You can't recall anything more?”

“No, just that she spoke. Sounded annoyed…”

“There's a difference in how a woman speaks to a man and to another woman,” Alix put in. “Could you sense if it were one or the other…?”

Royal shook his head. We'd gotten out of him all we were going to get. “That's why I didn't say anything to the police about it. Wouldn't have helped their case and would just have gotten me into a mess trying to explain what the devil I was doing on her property at two in the morning, breaking and entering her pool house.”

He still hadn't gotten to the heart of the matter so I said: “So you went home, turned on your computer, and read her book.”

“I did. That very night. Starting off, of course, with the early chapters. Those which might, and from her warnings,
would
indict me as the worst breed of sunovabitch for having seduced and abandoned an underage girl employed by my family. And then lacking the guts to stand up to my old man and marry her.”

Neither Alix nor I said a word. He went on:

“There was a good deal of stuff about Further Lane and the house and rich people in general and the Warrenders in particular and her youthful response to it all, her first sustained exposure to wealth and privilege. But as for a love affair, only a few sentences. I have them committed to heart by now.”

Alix nodded. He was the sort who would remember. Warrender waited a moment and then, after running a tongue over dry lips, he said:

“She wrote only that, ‘In that summer when I was fifteen, I fell very much in love with a handsome young man of wealth and good family. For me, a dream; for him, unsuitable and impossible. I was, as young girls are, heartbroken when September came and he went back to college, leaving me forever.'” He paused. “That's about it. I went on and read the rest but she was dealing with other times and other places, with a first marriage to an older fellow and a child, with people other than my family and me.”

“So despite all her threats…” Alix began.

“At least in this draft, Hannah wrote nothing to damage me, nothing to get back at or disgrace the Warrenders.”

“And as for the rest of it?” Alix said.

“Some of the rest of it was pure venom. When people said Hannah was writing the book to settle scores, they were right. If and when that book ever comes out, it'll be the Crash of '29 all over again, with distinguished people we all know going out high windows.”

I had one more question and I asked it now.

“Where's Hannah's manuscript now? I assume you kept the disk you downloaded onto and didn't just toss it away or erase the memory.”

“Correct.”

“Have you plans for it, something to suit your own purposes?”