The Burnt Orange Sunrise (3 page)

Mitch walked Big Sister’s beach every morning, no matter the weather. There was a desolate, windswept beauty to the beach in the winter. And he felt it was a precious gift to be here. After he’d lost his beloved wife, Maisie, to ovarian cancer, Mitch had promised himself he would never again take a moment of happiness for granted. And he’d kept that promise.

The water was choppy this morning and the tide was going out, leaving a crust of ice behind on the sand. Blocks of ice as big as manhole covers had floated down the Connecticut River and washed ashore like so many pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle. Mitch had to navigate his way through them as he made his way along the water’s edge. A dozen or so giant tree trunks had washed up, too, encased in ice, looking very much like dinosaur bones. A few hardy gulls and mergansers were poking along for their breakfast. Supposedly there
were eagles around, although Mitch still hadn’t seen one. As he passed the old lighthouse, he came upon the broken remains of a Hobie Cat that someone with too much money and too few brains had left behind on the town beach at summer’s end. Each morning now, it turned up in a different place out on Big Sister’s beach, its mast long gone.

Mitch shared Big Sister with the surviving members of the blue-blooded Peck clan, who had held title to it since the sixteen hundreds. There were five houses in all, not counting the decommissioned lighthouse, which was the second tallest in New England. When he reached Bitsy Peck’s mammoth shingled cottage, he dutifully climbed the snow-packed wooden steps to her door and poked his head inside to make sure her furnace was running. Then he retraced his footsteps and continued on to Evan Peck’s stone cottage. The Pecks didn’t believe in shutting their island houses down over the winter—sometimes they felt like using them. The furnaces had to be kept running or their pipes would freeze, so someone had to keep an eye on the places. A caretaker, in other words. Mitch had happily volunteered.

His daily rounds completed, Mitch arrived at the island’s highly compromised wooden causeway, which had so many planks and railings missing it reminded him of a suspension bridge in an Indiana Jones movie. As he stepped gingerly across it, mindful of the frigid, choppy surf directly below, he hoped that his cottage’s 275-gallon fuel tank didn’t run dry before he was able to get the causeway repaired. Because no oil truck could make it out there right now. If he was careful, he had enough oil to last him for another month. But if he ran short in March, he’d have to tote emergency supplies out in five-gallon cans.

His bulbous, kidney-colored 1956 Studebaker pickup was parked by the gate under a blanket of snow and ice. Paul Fiore, Dorset’s plowman, hadn’t been by yet, so the dirt road that curved its way back through the Peck’s Point Nature Preserve to Old Shore Road was invisible save for the slender guide poles that Paul used. The Preserve was a windswept peninsula that jutted right out into the Sound
at the mouth of the Connecticut River. The Pecks had donated it to the Nature Conservancy for tax reasons. During warm months, it was very popular with local bird-watchers, dog walkers and joggers. There were footpaths along the bluffs. A meadow tumbled down to the tidal marshes, where osprey, least tern and the highly endangered piping plover nested.

Mitch kept a scraper, an ice pick, a can of W-D 40 and a shovel in the back of the truck under a tarp. He scraped the snow and ice from the windows, grabbed hold of the driver’s side-door handle and tried to yank it open. No chance—it was frozen solid shut. He carefully chipped away at the ice with the pick, sprayed W-D 40 in the crack and tried again, putting every ounce of his considerable weight to the task. The top third of the door pulled open, the bottom two-thirds remained stubbornly shut. More W-D 40, more big boy pulling… and success. Mitch jumped in and tried the ignition. The engine kicked right over on the first try. The battery was brand new, plus his Studey was steadfast and true, aside from the fact that it had no heat. He stamped his feet on the floorboards to warm them up, found first gear and went roaring off, skidding on the sparkling blanket of virgin white snow as he slalomed his way between the guide poles. He did have snow tires, and two sixty-pound bags of sand over each rear wheel. But when there was ice under the snow, traction was not easy to come by.

Old Shore Road had been plowed and sanded already. But the Dorset Street historic district, with its majestic 250-year-old colonial mansions and towering sugar maples, still had not. Mitch chugged his way slowly through it, windshield wipers swatting the snowflakes to one side as he gazed out in wide-eyed wonder at the steepled, white Congregational Church, at John’s barbershop with its antique Wildroot sign, the old library, town hall, the Dorset Academy of Fine Arts. He could not believe how beautiful, how
calm
it all was. And how much he felt as if he’d been magically transported to a place far, far away from the real world. A kindly place where no crazed suburban commuters were scrambling their way to and from their snap-together modular homes built around a cul-de-sac one-half
mile down the road from the newest on-ramp to nowhere. A contented place, a place where people led happy, meaningful lives.

Paradise, in other words.

Not that Dorset was. Mitch had been here long enough to know that a lot of good, generous people lived inside the village’s picture-postcard colonial mansions. But they were real people leading real lives, lives that routinely spun out of control. In short, Dorset was just like everywhere else, only prettier.

Because there was no such place as paradise. Not if people were living in it.

School had been canceled. As Mitch rounded the bend by Johnny Cake Hill Road, he saw that dozens of pink-cheeked neighborhood kids were already using their freedom to sled down the hill by way of the Dorset Country Club’s third fairway. Mitch could hear their joyous laughter as he drove past. Part of him, a big part, wanted to pull over and join them. But he was all grown up now, or at least his body was, so he kept on going toward the Big Brook Road shopping district, watching them wistfully in his rearview mirror.

He stopped first at the post office to pick up his mail and that of his three elderly charges—Sheila Enman, a retired school teacher well into her nineties; Sheila’s girlhood friend, Tootie Breen; and seventy-eight-year-old Rutherford Peck, a distant cousin of the Big Sister Island Pecks who had recently dozed off behind the wheel and lost his driver’s license. Mitch honestly didn’t mind running errands for them. It was no trouble. Besides, Mrs. Enman made him chocolate chip cookies, Mr. Peck supplied him with bottles of his excellent home-brewed stout and Tootie paid him each and every day with a shiny new quarter. Already, he’d earned almost six dollars this winter.

During the summer, when Dorset’s population doubled to nearly fourteen thousand, the A & P would be packed with hyper, sunburned fun-seekers shouting into their cell phones and scratching at their mosquito bites. The aisles were utterly deserted now as Mitch clumped his way along, earflaps up, shopping lists in hand. His grocery cart, which hadn’t been serviced since the Ford administration,
kept driving hard to the left and slamming into the shelves. Elton John’s “Benny and the Jets” was playing over the store’s tinny sound system, a bit slooowwer than usual, it seemed. It sounded way more like a lullaby than it did a rock anthem. Actually, the scattered handful of aimless store workers seemed to be living in slo-mo as well.

Yesterday’s leftover rôtisserie chickens were on sale—he got one for each of his elders. A box of Pilot crackers and three cans of chicken noodle soup for Mr. Peck. Clamato juice and Cream of Wheat for Mrs. Enman. A one-week supply of butter-pecan-flavored Ensure for Tootie. For himself Mitch collected the closely guarded secret ingredients to his American chop suey: one large jar of Ragu, one pound of ground beef, one pound of spaghetti, an onion, a green pepper and a package of frozen mixed vegetables. Garlic salt to taste.

It was in the frozen food aisle that Mitch ran smack into a local innkeeper named Les Josephson, who was not exactly Mitch’s favorite Dorseteer right now—for reasons that had to do with this upcoming weekend and with Les’s famous mother-in-law, Ada Geiger. Les, who operated Astrid’s Castle with his wife, Norma, had talked him into participating in something that Mitch would never in a million years be caught doing were it not for the fact that Les had, well, lied to him.

“Mitch, I am so glad I ran into you,” Les exclaimed, smiling at him radiantly as he stood there, cradling a gallon jug of milk under one arm. “I was
just
going to call you.”

“Is that right?” Mitch noticed that Les was not only blocking his path but had a firm grip on his left-leaning grocery cart as well. “What about, Les?”

“I want to throw myself on your mercy. I feel as if I got you involved under false pretenses.”

“Only because you did, Les.”

“You’re absolutely right,” he agreed readily. “You couldn’t be more right.”

He was a most agreeable fellow, Les Josephson was. Outgoing, friendly, helpful—everything you could ask for in an innkeeper.
Although, in fact, he had been one only since he latched on to Norma a few years back. Les was actually a retired Madison Avenue advertising executive, which Mitch felt explained a lot about him. Because this was a man who was always selling something, always on, and never totally on the level. Les was in his early sixties, not quite five feet nine but very chesty and broad-shouldered, with a big head of wavy silver hair that he was obviously very proud of since he never wore a hat, not even in the snow. Taking good care of himself was clearly important to Les. He held himself very erect—shoulders back, chin up, feet planted wide apart. His smooth, squarish face had a healthy pink glow to it, his teeth looked exceedingly white and strong. He wore a Kelly-green ski jacket with the Astrid’s Castle tower insignia stitched on its left breast, corduroy trousers and L. L. Bean duck boots.

“I’m hoping I can make this up to you, Mitch,” Les went on, as the sound system segued into “Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen, the funeral dirge re-mix. “I’d really like to, if you’ll let me.”

Mitch tried to pull away, but Les wouldn’t let go of his cart. “If you don’t mind, Les, I really have to get these groceries delivered.”

“But Ada really wants to meet you.
Before
this weekend, I mean.”

Mitch immediately felt his pulse quicken. “She does?”

“Absolutely. She’s most insistent. After all, you’re the man who dubbed her The Queen of the B’s.”

“No, that wasn’t me. That was Manny Farber, years and years ago.”

“Ada’s very grateful to you, Mitch. She wants to thank you personally.”

Norma’s legendary ninety-four-year-old mother, Ada Geiger, was one of the twentieth century’s most illustrious, controversial and remarkable cultural figures. Also one of Mitch’s absolute idols. It was safe to say that Ada Geiger was the only person, living or dead, who had been a colleague of both Amelia Earhart and the Rolling Stones. The beautiful, fiercely independent daughter of millionaire Wall Street financier Moses Geiger, Ada had captured America’s imagination back in the Roaring Twenties when, at the age of sixteen she became the youngest woman ever to fly solo from New York
to Washington. That feat earned her a charter membership in the Ninety-Nines, a group of daring young female pilots whose first president was Earhart. After brief stints as a socialite, fashion model and Broadway actress, the spirited young Ada bought herself a Speed Graphic and stormed the rollicking world of New York tabloid journalism as a crime scene photographer. Soon she was writing the news copy that went with her uncommonly lurid photos. By 1934, she’d moved on to penning politically charged plays that were being staged by a band of upstarts called the Group Theatre. Among the Group’s founders were Harold Clutman, Lee Strasberg and Clifford Odets. Among its discoveries was the brilliant young Brooklyn playwright Luther Altshuler, whom Ada would marry.

When World War II came, Ada Geiger served as a combat correspondent for
Life
magazine: Her collected dispatches and combat photographs,
To Serve Man
, became America’s unofficial scrapbook of the war. Practically everyone who made it home owned a copy. It was the top-selling book of the post-war era, an era that found Ada and Luther out in Hollywood raising a family and producing low-budget movies together. Ada directed several of the films herself, making her the only woman besides Ida Lupino and Dorothy Arzner to crash through the industry’s concrete gender barrier. Her films were reminiscent of her photographs—shadowy, gritty, and unfailingly bleak. And while they attracted only very small audiences at the time, she began to develop an ardent cult following through the years among critics and film buffs. Mitch stumbled on to her work at the Bleecker Street Cinema when he was a teenager and was totally blown away. For him,
Ten Cent Dreams
, her taut, twisted 1949 love triangle about a conniving dance hall girl (Marie Windsor), a consumptive bookie (Edmond O’Brien) and a crooked cop (Robert Mitchum) ranked right up there with
Out of the Past
as one of the greatest noir dramas ever filmed. And he thought that her seldom-screened 1952 melodrama about big-city political corruption,
Whip-saw
, totally eclipsed the universally overrated
High Noon
as a parable about the dangers of the Hollywood blacklist. When he became a critic, Mitch championed it as a lost American classic. And hailed
Ada Geiger as “the greatest American film director no one has ever seen.”

She might have achieved genuine Hollywood greatness had it not been for that blacklist. Both she and Luther were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify about their Communist Party affiliations back in their Group Theatre days. They refused to name names. Both were jailed for a year. Upon their release in 1954 they fled the country for London, where they wrote and produced plays, and where Ada went on to direct documentaries for the BBC, including
Not Fade Away
, her electrifying 1964 Rolling Stones concert film. Later, she and Luther moved on to Paris. Ada’s films had long been beloved there. Her work was a huge influence on Clouzot, Melville and Godard. François Truffaut called her his favorite American director. She acted in a pair of Truffaut’s films, scripted another with Luther, and spoke out loudly against the Vietnam War. When Luther died, she retired to a solitary villa on the Amalfi coast.