A Hamptons Christmas (8 page)

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Authors: James Brady

BOOK: A Hamptons Christmas
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Corny cards, silly notes. “You shall have great expectations .
. .”
It was my father who innocently (not trying to be clever or con the girl, not a bit of it) finally got out of Susannah just who she was. A thin morning rain was falling, but the huge, walk-in fireplace in his den threw out a dry, toasting warmth and soft light. I was having a second coffee while she and the Admiral played speed chess (fifteen seconds between moves), when Susannah, who was actually holding her own, asked apropos of very little:
“At the ice-cream shop Bob White told us the most extraordinary story,
mon cher amiral,
all about a gentleman called Mean Jake. And how enemies keep stealing his corpse. Right out of the graveyard.”
“True,” said the Admiral. “Every word of it. Odd story, though. I agree with you on that.”
“And did you know him? Mean Jake, I mean?”
“Surely did. Everyone knew Jacob Marley.”
“Oh.”
That was all. Just “oh.”
But men who run Naval Intelligence are trained in the nuances
of a simple “oh.” The Admiral sensed a shift in body language, in tone of voice, even as his young opponent was pulling off a rather sophisticated rook to king's pawn.
“Damn!” he said, annoyed to be caught by the move even as he admired it.
“Thank you,” she said, flattered by the admiration and not at all nettled by his annoyance.
“Quite.” He continued to watch her without seeming to do so. Then she spoke, very quietly, articulating the words carefully. Because they were important.
“My godfather's name, the one I wouldn't tell you; it was Jacob Marley. I suppose that's he, Mean Jake, I mean. Whose old bones keep getting stolen.”
My father inhaled, his eyes on her face.
“I'm sorry, child. I had no …”
What can you say? The Admiral threw me a glance as if to say, “help me out, Beecher, for God's sake.” He had murdered the Cold War enemies of his country and had fought several hot wars in addition. But he'd never had a daughter and was terrified by the idea of a child's sobs.
I got up and went to her, touching her shoulder, half-pat, half-stroke of, I dunno, support? Understanding? She nodded and reached up to pat my hand in response, then said quietly, no tears, no sobs, to both of us or neither of us, “I suppose I knew he was dead. The cards for my birthday stopped coming two years ago. I continued to get statements from Mr. Rousselot at the bank. But nothing from Mr. Marley. No corny card or little note. No more stock certificates.” She paused. “I miss those silly cards, those little notes. Especially a scribbled line that always came at the end, ‘You shall have great expectations.' The first few times I didn't know what that meant and then a girl at the convent told me that was what the convict told Pip, when they met in the graveyard in
Great Expectations,
which inspired me to read the book and learn about Estella and Miss Havisham.”
So she missed Marley's corny birthday cards, his scribbled notes,
his Dickensian assurance of “great expecations.” No regrets over the stock certificates that stopped coming.
“And no one told you?” I said. “Not even your parents?”
She looked up at me.
“They'd be the last ones to keep me up-to-date on Jacob Marley. My father is Dick Driver, who took Mr. Marley's company away from him.”
She pushed back then from the chess table and went to the window, with her back to the room and to us, looking out at what was left of the rain and at the morning sun struggling to get through. Finally, having pulled together conflicting memories—Marley's generosity to her, his antagonism toward her father, the sudden shock of learning he really was dead—she faced us and said: “They didn't speak. My father and Mr. Marley. Business differences of some sort. Terrible things happened. A big fight. Like breaking up Ma Bell as the government did years ago.”
“They teach that in convent school? To ten-year-olds?” the Admiral asked, rather beside himself.
“Not really teach. More like every so often during primes Mother Superior regrets aloud various investments made or not made by the convent. She bet wrong on the Baby Bells versus AT&T.”
“Oh, I see.”
She went on about the Marley-Driver feud. “They didn't speak of him in my house. It was about the same time my mother and father were starting to divorce. So the two of them didn't speak at all. I was at the convent by then and was shy about asking there about Mr. Marley. After a year without having been told, I just assumed he was dead. I knew he loved me in his own way and wouldn't just stop writing. Not unless something terrible had happened.”
“Poor kid,” I said, thinking about being shunted off to the convent and her parents getting divorced and her godfather's dying all lumped together, and now without warning to find out people were stealing his body. Kids didn't need that, did they? But Susannah wasn't feeling sorry for herself, not at all. Just moving on.
“I still don't like it, Beecher, that they steal Mr. Marley's bones. No one dead should have his bones stolen, I don't believe.”
The Admiral answered. “Of course they shouldn't. It's why sailors get buried at sea, the proper way. No vandals or graverobbers in the ocean, I can tell you. In any event, don't concern yourself, child. Ghoulish though it is, it's stupid local feuds at work. Don't mean anything by it. And, besides, no one can touch Jake anymore. Not really. Not the Bonac Boys. Not …”
“ … not my father.”
“No, not your father. Just a shame Bob White had to tell the story in your hearing. Not that he realized there was a connection. None of us did, of course. Not until now. But it wasn't something you should have had to hear.”
Alix came in then.
“Rain's over. Just look at that sky.”
I gave her a high sign.
“You wanted to take Susannah shopping, didn't you?”
“Jane,” Susannah corrected me.
“Silly Beecher,” Alix offered, “can't keep the noms de guerre straight. Good thing his old dad's the spy and not Beecher.”
“A spy? Are you, sir? Really?”
“Well, of a sort,” the Admiral said. “Years back, when we and the Russians …”
“Tell me, do tell me,
kleine herr grossadmiral.
”
“Yes, yes, of course I will. Soon as you and Her Ladyship buy out the stores and come home.”
Had I been prettier, my father would have spent more time with me …
If you read the newspapers at all, you knew about
Driver
v.
Driver
, the only divorce/custody case anyone ever heard of that ended up being adjudicated in the World Court at The Hague. That's how complex it was and how corrosive it became. It involved a variety of jurisdictions; for sheer bitterness it echoed
Kramer
v.
Kramer
; for bitchy infighting (and number of mentions in Page
Six of the New York Post
) it promised to challenge
Duff
v.
Perelman
; and for longevity, it threatened to be as enduring as
Jarndyce
v.
Jarndyce
in
Bleak House
, which went on for so long no one on either side could remember what the case was all about. Not even the lawyers or the Court of Chancery itself!
Prenups were part of the problem, of course, as was the wedding site, aboard a privately chartered yacht of Panamanian registry, owned by a Société Anonyme in Monaco, temporarily leased to a Baltic syndicate, which was sailing in international waters (the ship, not the Baltic syndicate). The ceremony had been performed by the ship's captain (himself a stateless person for reasons too complicated to spell out here), now missing and presumed dead in a subsequent Indian Ocean typhoon. Until the unfortunate captain's body was found, no finding of his competence or lack of
same could be made. Whose was the jurisdiction? The sides couldn't even settle on a hemisphere, never mind a country, state, or Canadian province.
Nicole was a Mittel European with dual citizenship, Dick an American incorporated in the Bahamas. Those questions had had to be answered before a court and a judge could be assigned. Getting at Colonel Qaddafi and the Libyan terrorists was simpler. Long before the case moved on to The Hague, a lower court had denied both parents custody, deciding instead in favor of the prominent Wall Street merchant bankers Rousselot Frères as guardian pro tem, with the bankers in turn selecting the Couvent de la Tour Sacrée in Geneva to act in loco parentis. But only during term—not in school holidays or vacations. When the kid wasn't attending classes, guardianship reverted to the bankers. Trouble was, Little Miss Driver occasionally went missing.
What had the court especially cross was that Dick and Nicole seemed to take turns in having the girl kidnapped. Their own child. First by private detectives retained by her father, the second time by private detectives retained by the mother. Each parent was innocent, of course, denying culpability; they were acting out of love, simply intent on rescuing the child from fates worse than … well, you get the picture.
Now, several years later, child custody and child support remained the real sticking point. As with little Gloria Vanderbilt generations before, money was at the bottom of it, both cash and a mysterious trove (no one knew precisely how many shares there were!) of Microsoft stock certificates presently in the care of her guardian Rousselot Frères chairman Henry Rousselot. But those certificates were the property of a little girl who might or might not—depending on rumors and on that day's stock market—be one of the wealthier people in town. Was that possible? Or had her godfather's largesse been limited to a thoughtful few hundred thousand shares? Mr. Rousselot knew and wasn't saying. Nor was “the child.” The child, of course, being “our” Susannah. Our “Jane.” “I'm a plain girl,” she said, neither apologetic or self-conscious, just a simple statement of fact. “And my mother being
a great beauty, she's slightly embarrassed by me. And had I been prettier, I'm sure my father would have spent more time with me. He likes having pretty young girls around.”
“But you're very …” I began. She ignored my politesse.
“I don't believe either of them actually wants me, Beecher,” she assured me. “It's just that neither of them can stand the idea of the other winning anything, including me.” All this with an extraordinary placidity and little, if any, hint of feeling sorry for herself. Then why would Dick and Nicole battle so tenaciously to retain or at least share custody? Could it be as Jane suggested, sheer bitchery? Was it those substantial custody payments that bothered him and drew her? Or was there a motivation we didn't yet understand? Real money, for example? Where would a ten-year-old child get serious money, unless it was those shares Jake Marley used to send on birthdays?
The Drivers were such dreadful people, one could only guess.
Nicole had her own concerns (beyond suing and being countersued by Dick), which very decidedly included her current beau. A child, well, kids got in the way, didn't they? But yet … Nicole was finding Count Vlad a somewhat expensive toy, and the child support all by itself was a major chip in the legal poker game she and her former husband were playing. The divorce had been granted (in but one court, there were multiple challenges elsewhere), but the final amount of child support (several million a year, in dollars) was still being haggled over (the World Court was not known for haste). Of course the money, whatever the figure, was earmarked for Susannah. But there was always a wink and a nod of understanding that the parent granted custody decides precisely how support payments are to be spent.
So far, quite normal in a messy divorce. Though, with Susannah Driver, there was the additional matter of that Microsoft stock.
Now that the secret of her actual name and parentage was out, Susannah was surprisingly eager to fill us in on just about everything. Which she did that night after dinner to a rapt audience of the Admiral, Her Ladyship, Inga the housekeeper, and me. Rather enjoying the role of pivotal figure, the child spun her tale. How
accurate it was (given her penchant for the deft lie), or how complete, we had no way yet of knowing. But you had to admit it was a yarn worth listening to:
Her actual given name was … no, not Susannah. Nor Jane. It was Emma. Emma Driver.
“Yuckie, isn't it?” she asked rhetorically, before doing a bit of stage-setting, then diving straight back into her account, a narrative right out of Chaucer – “The Convent Girl's Tale.”
I can assure you we were all listening as Emma began by telling us she was indeed ten years old (“virtually in my teens!”). The gorgeous Nicole, at seventeen an Olympic figure skater, now in her thirties, lived mostly in Europe, sleeping with and largely supporting Count Vladimir, a handsome, dashing, but dubiously titled playboy from Bucharest. The construction mogul Dick (no, he was not a riverboat gambler or a monk slaving over the prayer wheels) had a string of centerfolds. He was a ruthless real-estate developer (his speciality: the eviction of widows and orphans) with a vast ego (Ibsen's Master Builder might well have been about him, Dick modestly suggests; although he didn't know the story but loved the title!) and ambitions to match (in 1996 he attempted to lease Vancouver; more recently he'd bid on Governor's Island for a theme park and casino. Dick also suspected any day now someone will float his name as a future presidential candidate (never mind third parties, a second party was sniffing around, he hints).
Nicole had a career as well. She wrote (well, a ghost did the actual writing) treacly books on child rearing which, despite their transparent piety and hokum, had been enormously successful. Or were until the divorce got into the newspapers and gullible readers learned Nicole's own, and only, child, Emma Driver, aka Susannah le Blanc, had been from the age of five bundled in and out of a succession of boarding schools (the books rather quickly stopped selling!), finally settling more or less permanently at the Swiss Couvent de la Tour Sacrée and rarely seeing either self-absorbed parent except in court or when being kidnapped. (The lawyers insisted that “placed in protective custody” was the more appropriate term.)
One parent, Nicole, needed money; the other parent, Dick, needed to burnish a playboy's image. And their child seemed the key to both. To escape the reality of her predicament, Emma began to live largely in a world of books (Dickens, Hemingway, J. D. Salinger) and old films (Shirley Temple and horror movies were special favorites), and had become a convincing and very practiced liar. When asked about her parents (especially why they almost never bothered to visit her), she would concoct Walter Mitty-esque identities for each of them.
Despite their chill disinterest (if the kid couldn't be used, then what possible use was she?), Emma was proud of her parents. They truly were beautiful people, both of them, and she wasn't. So she kept scrapbooks. Two cover stories in People, one in Newsweek (more about her father than about Nicole), and numerous
National Enquirer
coverlines. Some girls at the convent had no press clippings at all about their parents.
Perhaps her most winning invention was the identity of her mother's lard-headed, if sexy, latest—the count, whom Emma explained was a linear descendant of Vlad the Impaler, the literary inspiration for the original
Count Dracula
and known familiarly to her and her mother (though not in his hearing) as the Impaler. When a schoolmate would ask, “What's an ‘impaler'?” Emma would plunge without hesitation into detailed, deliciously gory descriptions. But a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Especially inside the head of a precocious child.
Emma was drawn into an even more pernicious habit than card playing, lying, or smoking Gitanes: the careful reading of American magazines to remind her of what home was like. And to remind her that she was still a Yank. In the boarding school's library, she came across a dog-eared copy of
Martha Stewart
Living: The
Christmas Edition
, which had an enormous impact on the impressionable child, and as the Christmas holidays were approaching and the other girls packing to go home until the New Year, Emma evolved a romantic, if not very practical, scheme, starting with a convincing and quite plausible E-mail message to each parent suggesting she would be spending Christmas with the other.
And a third E-mail to Rousselot explaining she would be visiting with a classmate's family in Tuscany. By court order, Dick and Nicole were observing a sullen truce, and neither felt free to raise a voice in protest. And in an instance of slovenly staff work, nobody at Rousselot Frères bothered to check with the “host family” in Tuscany. Once Emma's falsehood was established, she set off for East Hampton, where childish memory recalled a happier time when her parents were still together and she herself was innocently happy. And where she intended to present herself at the front door of … ta dah! Martha Stewart herself!
But there was another, naive though fiendishly clever agenda at work here. As with all children whose parents have split, she hoped that Nicole and Dick would one day get back together. No matter that the Impaler had moved in with Nicole or that Dick was sporting with his tootsies. For kids, the world presents endless opportunities and infinite wonders. And Emma came up with a scheme: If her parents thought that she had vanished over the Christmas holidays—not kidnapped yet again by their respective private eyes but by unknown third parties preying on the offspring of the rich—and that she might be in actual peril, wouldn't they make every effort to track her down? And, as both parents galloped to the rescue, arriving dramatically in the Hamptons amid falling snow and holiday cheer, they would forcibly come together once again as a family?
So off she went, leaving behind a few cleverly planted clues (plus a few false leads) so that her parents could pick up the scent, just not too quickly. The clues, her bread crumbs, were easily traced credit-card charges and E-mail messages. And being mischievous (and undeniably a bit spoiled) Emma did what kids do in such situations: She played off one parent against the other, sending Nicole and Dick highly imaginative and provocative E-mails: “Just imagine where Daddy's taking me tomorrow—to a taping of the Letterman show! Then dinner at Le Cirque 2000.” And, “Mommy and I lunched at the Paris Ritz in the Espadon Grill (where, as you know, Princess Di ate her last meal!) and we went shopping on the Faubourg St. Honoré. She bought me an Hermès scarf and the most delicious party dress at Lanvin Jeunes Filles!”
Armed with her very own platinum card, Emma entrained for Paris, where she boarded the Concorde to New York, a crude map of the Hamptons (and directions to Martha's house) having been provided by a schoolmate. One transatlantic crossing and Long Island RR train ride later, she got off at East Hampton, hailed a cab to Lily Pond Lane and Martha Stewart's house, only to find it shuttered and dark in the chill gloom of late afternoon.

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