The Last Summer of the Camperdowns (5 page)
Huffing and puffing from resentment and physical effort, I felt thin lines of sweat run down my cheeks. My mother, on the other hand, looked crisp as a white blouse fresh from the clothesline as I stood next to her at the top of the hill and looked down at the house, abloom in lavender wisteria and nostalgia, its faded rosy exterior aglow in the soft sunlight.
“Gin’s house is so old-fashioned-looking. The same color as pink lemonade,” I said.
“More like Pepto-Bismol,” my mother replied, starting down the incline. I lingered before descending, watching her make her surefooted way down the path. My lunchtime session with Camp and Greer had been exhausting. I’m sure people have gone to the gallows feeling more lighthearted than I did at the prospect of now spending social time with my mother and Gin.
A long, wide driveway cut a meandering swathe through the property, dividing the land into forest and marshes on one side and open field and fenced pasture on the other side. The hill conquered, it was a healthy walk to reach the house, which was positioned in a fertile clearing surrounded by informal gardens and a splendid range of enormous weeping willows.
Built in 1700 in New York, the original house had been moved to Wellfleet in the early 1900s by Michael Devlin’s father. With its exposed beams, coffered ceilings, antique furnishings and imported cherrywood floors, the pink house shone with the slightly tarnished patina of days gone by.
A corridor of dead trees lined the last part of the route to Gin’s house. All the bark was gone, every tree stripped bare by the cormorants, hundreds of them, winged undertakers, perched in the twisted branches of all those looming gray ghosts. Among them, there was a distinctive giant tree, thick and contorted, its living identity erased long ago. I could see it rising up in front of me, poised way above my mother’s head as it stretched its long surrendering limbs across the sky, dozens of cormorants positioned on its branches like hooded points of time on a Gothic clock face. Unnerved, I broke into a run, and propelled by the power of my short legs, I raced ahead of my mother and directly into the heart of the Cormorant Clock Farm.
G
IN, AS USUAL, MET US AT THE GATE, DUTIFUL AND DUPLICITOUS
as a seventeenth-century eunuch lining up for his daily beating from the empress. He never had to wait long.
“Oh, my, Greer, I’ll keep my eyes open. We’ll find her. Don’t you worry. Poor little thing. Lost in the woods. It’s not safe in these woods, you know. She could drown in the kettle pond. What about the predators? Coyotes, owls and don’t even think about the fishers. Oh, the fishers! People say there aren’t any in the area but I’ve heard them crying out in the night. Horrible. Why did God make fishers, do you think? For that matter, why create mosquitoes? Well, that’s why I’m an atheist. Mosquitoes propelled me into agnosticism. Fleas were the last straw.”
“Oh, heavens, Gin, I stopped believing the first time I saw pleather.”
Gin shrugged and nodded, pushing his dark hair away from his forehead. Slim and narrow, looking like something Evelyn Waugh might have doodled on a napkin during a lull at a dinner party, he wore his traditional daily uniform of classic black riding breeches and Dehner field boots in aesthetic lockstep with my mother, a tasteful pair of matching lamps. Ha! How my mother would detest that description! “There is nothing tasteful about matching lamps, Riddle,” she would protest. “Good taste occurs in odd numbers.”
I cleared my throat and coughed. Gin’s house was immaculate—he had staff to make it so—but it always felt as if there were particles in the air, soot or sand, as if it was forever Ash Wednesday in that big old house, with its dead rooms filled with uncirculated air and no pulse beating. His collection of Victorian taxidermy, on display throughout the house like an overdose of rouge, inflamed the intimation that you had somehow stumbled into the perverse past as it played out on a slightly off-kilter planet. Gin had spent the last two decades putting his indelicate fingerprint on the pink house, and the result, in especially florid evidence in the living room where we stood, an ungainly trio, my mother humming in agitation, waiting for him to get going, was roughly akin to what the bastard offspring of a forced union between a bordello and a funeral home might look like.
I stood in the middle of the room and looked up as I had done a million times before, one of the rituals of my childhood. An Empire-style antique chandelier hung from the ceiling, a gilt bronze and cut-crystal centerpiece with beaded chains and crystal drops dangling. If you positioned yourself directly beneath it, you could see a large emerald and ruby star glowing on the bottom.
Gin and Greer continued to bicker back and forth, the moist pettiness of their mutual complaints beading on my skin like an oily drizzle. So it went. Around and around. Small circles. Big circles. The circuitous chatter of the damned, my father called it. He nicknamed my mother and Gin the Sisters.
I left them to navigate the fog and the mist generated by their conversation—between them, Gin and Greer produced all kinds of weather—as I tiptoed across a threadbare Persian carpet and over to a large antique display case positioned in front of a vast casement window. Kneeling down to examine its familiar contents, I saw dozens of exotic stuffed birds posed in static impersonation of the natural world. Beautiful in its own way, but grotesque. Maybe becoming an ornament was the animal equivalent of being consigned to hell. Everywhere I looked there was another example of living death—a zebra’s head mounted on a plaque, a feisty border terrier encased in glass confronting a hissing, scratching calico cat, and, on the mantel over the fireplace, a baby rabbit in Edwardian costume playing an oboe.
“Zombie memorabilia,” my mother called it. Sinking down into a plush purple velvet chair, I reached for a diorama crammed with butterflies and birds, every one as recognizable to me as my own face. I had been analyzing each captive still life since I was a little girl, and it never failed to induce in me a sense of brooding nihilism.
“Honestly, Gin, you should mothball this stuff,” Greer said, surveying the immediate vicinity, her scorn picking its way through the room. “It’s disturbing. I swear you’ll have your mother stuffed and under glass, tarted up like Queen Victoria, before you’re through.”
“How many times must I tell you, Greer? It’s an art form. An authentic slice of Victoriana. I find it transporting. Then, I’m different from most people—I have no fear of mortality. My only real dread is a world devoid of the creative arts and culture. I would happily donate my body in the service of art.”
“If only you could be disposed of that easily. I’m trying to imagine the kind of artist interested in working with you in life or death,” my mother said, calling after Gin as he disappeared into the kitchen. “Someone who enjoys the idea of dogs playing poker, no doubt.”
Gin emerged carrying a tray with a ceramic pitcher filled with some kind of sparkling fruit punch and three tall glasses. He offered my mother a drink. She reached for it, then hesitated. “I trust this isn’t formaldehyde,” she said as I hastily gulped down my juice.
“Let’s get going,” I urged, frustrated by their relentless sparring. “What about Vera?”
I spent the next hour calling for little Vera as Gin and my mother searched together. They combed the area at the back of the property, bordering a large tract of forested land navigable by a man-made trail that wound through the woods from one end to the other. It was covered over by cedar chips. Alone, and grateful for the reprieve, I wandered through the early summer gardens, diminished tulips and narcissus, brilliantly colored poppies and fragrant orange and pink honeysuckle robustly clinging to ancient wood.
“Puppy! Puppy! Vera!” I called out as, in the background, Gin and my mother did the same.
“M
AYBE SHE’S SHOWN UP
at home,” I said wanly as the three of us met in the pasture, surrounded by curious horses, my distress growing in direct proportion to the level of guilt I was feeling over having lost Vera.
“Oh, I hope so,” my mother said. “I can’t stand to think of that little thing being on her own. When you think of the awful things that could happen to her.” It wasn’t unusual for my mother to become emotional about one of the dogs, though she rarely extended the same feeling to the people in her life. Gin read my mind. “Too bad we walk on two legs instead of four, isn’t it, Jimmy?” he said in rueful aside.
She smiled defiantly and lit a cigarette as Gin recoiled and fumed. He had a stable owner’s instinctive dread of fire. “Greer, you are wicked with those stinking things. I swear you do it just to be, well . . .” He looked around, searching the summer faces of a separate clump of horses as they stood next to one another beneath a trio of apple trees, his arms waving so wildly that a bay filly shied sideways and kicked the air with her rear hooves. “Jimmy, what word am I looking for?”
“Inflammatory,” I supplied. “Incendiary.”
“Exactly.” Gin snapped his fingers and laughed. “Someone’s been hitting the books. Inflammatory. Incendiary. She sure has your number, Greer.”
My mother, irritability levels percolating to the point of steamy overflow, brought the flattened palm of her hand down on the show jumper Delano’s rump, the loud plain slap scattering the small herd that had settled around us. “Gin, it’s a cigarette. It’s not nitroglycerine. Not another word, please.” She reigned over the compliant silence until she decided we had been sufficiently subdued. “Anyway, on to more interesting matters. Where’s the poor woman’s Heathcliff?” Specializing in getting to the wicked point of it all, she grinned and glancing downward, used the toe of her boot to dig a hole in the clay.
“You tell me where he is,” Gin said, staring at the delinquent cigarette. “I haven’t seen him for the last couple of days. Gula is a regular phantom. Here one moment, gone the next.”
“I’m confused. I understood that he was working for you, not the other way around.”
“He is my employee, Greer, not my slave. He asked for a few days off. He never takes a holiday. I could hardly say no under the circumstances.”
“Getting any closer to revealing the glorious secret?” My mother had such an arch delivery that someone once asked her at a funeral if she was being sarcastic when she expressed her condolences to the family. When she intended sarcasm, she peeled the bark off trees.
“Never you mind.”
I couldn’t quite decide whether Gin spoke with a Southern accent or a British accent. In the end I decided it was a defeatist hybrid.
“Ha!” My mother laughed. Her laugh sounded like mockery in any language.
“What glorious secret?” I asked, unable to resist such a tantalizing tease despite my worry about the puppy and my exasperation with current company.
“Gin’s not talking. He and Gula are in cahoots on some special project. I suspect it has something to do with a horse.”
“You’ll see,” Gin said.
She rumbled with impatience. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Gin, what are you hiding? You act as if you’re planning to invade Turkey. You’ve been downright surreptitious since Gula arrived on the scene. There is something about this man that you aren’t telling me. Out with it—or perhaps you’re embarrassed. From what I’ve heard, he’s nothing more than a low-rent gigolo.”
“Greer, that is a terrible way to talk about a man with such an unhappy past,” Gin said, looking instantly regretful for responding to her bait. If Gin had fins, he would have been one of those hapless fish that gets instantly hooked again the moment he’s thrown back into the water.
My mother pounced. “What’s this? What unhappy past? Since when do you keep a confidence?” She looked over at me as if she suddenly remembered my presence. “It’s when your uncle Gin stops talking that he has something worthwhile to say,” she added confidentially. “Maybe Riddle’s instincts about Gula are right after all. She’s terrified of him.”
I looked up sharply. “I am not,” I protested. Surely, Gin would recognize a compliment directed at me as the ultimate manipulation.
“He’s got the thousand-yard stare, all right. Why wouldn’t he, with all he’s seen? The horror of war and all that sort of thing. Man at his worst et cetera, et cetera,” Gin said. “But look, Jimmy, the man is harmless. I would go so far as to say he has a gentle soul. He’s interesting, too, in his way. He takes a little knowing, that’s all. I wouldn’t have him around otherwise. My God, but he is an absolute magician with horses. I think he is quite brilliant, really I do.”
“Enough!” My mother was impatient of any conversation that did not feature her at its epicenter. “Where did he come from? You’ve evaded and obfuscated forever. Time to tell, finally.”
Gula’s professional and personal background was mysterious and malleable, highly changeable. I heard so many stories: that he had gone from being a stable boy at a number of European racetracks after the war to supervising the breeding program at a racing stable in Saudi Arabia for a member of the royal family.
“He trained polo ponies for one of the Rothschilds!” Gin said. He was especially enamored of the Rothschild connection.
“A Rothschild! Oh, my, you don’t say. Did he wear sunglasses to protect his eyes from the glare?” Greer’s contempt for others was not dependent on class or race. The whole world was her killing field. “I don’t care if he shoed horses for the Holy Ghost, however has he become such a fixture around here? He’s like some sort of Rasputin knockoff.”
“First, Heathcliff, now Rasputin. Greer, you are positively melodramatic in your judgments about people. God knows how you describe me.”
“Topo Gigio,” I said. “She calls you Topo Gigio.”
“It’s a term of endearment,” my mother said, vibrating with annoyance, giving me a quick pinch, unmoved by Gin’s sharp, shocked exhalation of breath and my exclamation of pain.
“Anyway, don’t change the subject. I swear you’re frightened by the man, though I can’t imagine why.” She glanced over at Gin, eyeing him peripherally.
Gin was sputtering. “Now that is the most spectacular lie! Afraid! The idea! There’s no great mystery. Why must you make theater where there is none? The poor man grew up during the war in France, or was it Belgium? Some godforsaken place. He’s practically a refugee. His family suffered terribly, and yet he pulled himself up from all that depressing reality, got an education, and used his talent with horses to work among the world’s great stables.” He paused. “I’d like to think my little enterprise here has made its own mark in that regard.”
“I’d like to think that Riddle’s hair color is just a bad dream, but then garish reality intrudes. Really, Gin, if you truly believe what you’re saying, you’re an even bigger fool than your advance publicity suggests.”
I could almost see my mother sharpening her blades. Gin was a butter knife, no match for her serrated edges. “The truth is the man is a two-bit Porfirio Rubirosa wannabe whose riding skills aren’t confined to the stable. Marion Bingham swears she witnessed him climbing out of Myrna Stevenson’s bedroom window, shoes in one hand, riding crop in the other. Rumor has it he taught Holly Laidlaw dressage by day and the Kama Sutra by night and then extorted huge sums from her to keep quiet about it.”
She glanced over at me. “Slack jaw isn’t a good look for you, Riddle.”