The Summer We Read Gatsby (30 page)

“If he walked in here now I’d kick him right in the balls,” I said. I was angry and I meant it, but Peck burst out laughing.

“Listen to you,” she exclaimed as Hamilton let out a chuckle too. “Miss Tough Guy. Didn’t I say she was going to come out of her shell this summer?”

“I’m rather afraid.” He made a comic face as he covered his crotch with his hands. “Balls. It sounds so . . .”

“ ‘Kick him right in the balls,’ ” Peck repeated with a laugh. “I didn’t even think you knew that
word
.”

“What?” I said. “Balls?”

“Enough,” Hamilton cried out. “You’re making me want to cross my legs. And we must go.”

“Okay, then.” I held up the practice sheet and waved it in the air. “I’m taking this with me. We’re going to have to get that guy out of here.”

We filed back down the stairs behind Hamilton and came out of the gloom of the garage into clear sunshine that threw everything into sharp relief. In unison all three of us pulled our sunglasses back over our eyes to block the glaring light.

We were all in high spirits, with snacks and outfits (at least theirs) carefully considered, and a sense of infinite possibility in the air as we got into the ancient station wagon. Peck slid into the driver’s seat, Hamilton took the passenger side, and I went in the back with Trimalchio on my lap. The dog, with his permanently jaded facial expression, was the only one who didn’t seem caught up in the adventure, and he peered out the window like one of those tedious city people who make a big show of hating “the Hamptons,” complaining about the traffic and the social anxiety and the crowds.

“I’ve brought sustenance,” Hamilton said as he held up the cooler to show us before tucking it in between the two front seats. “But we shan’t fill up. I’m taking us all to lunch.”

Peck gunned the old car into reverse. “Literally to Lunch,” she said over her shoulder in my direction, in the tone of the know-it-all forced to explain yet again. “It’s a place out on 27 toward Montauk. It’s really called the Lobster Roll, but the sign out front says Lunch and everybody just calls it that. They have the
best
lobster rolls.”

Everything Peck liked was always the best. This was one of the ways she distinguished herself, by having the most discerning palate. She presented her opinions much the way an old-fashioned magazine editor like Diana Vreeland would have done.

“Pecksland, you’re quite an expert on
everything
,” Hamilton noted drily. It was the sort of thing only he could get away with saying to her. From him she heard it as a compliment.

We drove through Southampton on our way to East Hampton, to pay a call on an art dealer Hamilton knew who specialized in discreet private sales and who was the type of person who would know if there was an unauthenticated Jackson Pollock being shopped around and if the one we were missing was actually painted by Pollock or not. As Peck drove, Hamilton entertained us with stories of old Southampton, and how much better it used to be. This was a favorite theme, how it used to be the quietest old place where you’d just go to the beach and everyone knew one another and you’d get around on a bicycle.

“On a regular bicycle,” Hamilton clarified. “Not like these idiots in spandex racing along Gin Lane like they have to get somewhere.”

Peck agreed with him about old Southampton, as if she too had known it then, as if she’d grown up here. In some ways, of course, she had. We’d both visited Lydia several summers during the course of our childhoods. But to hear Peck talk, she’d spent every minute of every summer at a house in the country with a pony and a bicycle and lemonade stands at the beach. She never modified her stories in my presence and I would never correct her. I enjoyed them too much. In fact, that morning in the car, I almost believed she
had
grown up in Southampton.

“It was so much better then,” she said, allowing a wistful tone to seep into her words. “Everybody knew one another. Nobody locked their doors. And the creativity in the air was so thick you could cut it with a knife.” She paused to look out the window. “You’d actually see people setting up their easels on the dunes,” she said in a pensive tone as she glanced out at the passing hedgerow. “Like in the days of William Merritt Chase and the Shinnecock School of Summer Art. People were painting
everywhere
. There were actors and writers and creative people doing their thing. There was all this
spontaneity
.”

The privet hedges were intimidating, keeping sentry and offering total privacy for the denizens of the vast palaces, old and new, hidden behind them. We couldn’t see many of the houses from the street but Hamilton had juicy tidbits of information to share with us about each one, and he made Peck take a less direct route through what is known as the “estate section” so he could point out the places in question through the car window. He’d given this subject, the houses of the Hamptons, much passionate study and could speak with authority. He knew about the old places and also about the new ones, which shingled manor had been lost in a divorce, which stucco villa had been in a family for generations, which gargantuan new construction had been built with no regard to how a family would actually inhabit the enormous space, and which tiny, older house was slated to be ripped down and replaced. He knew prices and names and secrets. He knew about the clubs and their members, and he knew about the locals too and their equally messy lives.

“Each one of these houses,” Peck said as she took her eyes off the road for far longer than felt comfortable, “is the realization of someone’s dream.”

“Or someone else’s nightmare,” Hamilton added, pointing to a slightly dilapidated white place barely visible through an overgrown hedgerow. “I believe that’s the place Laurie Poplin was trying to sell when she first met Biggsy, who was then Jonathan.”

“Finn said Lydia met him at Schmidt’s Market,” I said, as Hamilton passed around tiny blinis with sour cream and smoked salmon.

“It depends on whom you ask,” Hamilton said, glancing back at me. “I once heard her say he just appeared at the end of the driveway one day. She told me he answered an ad on Craigslist.”

“That’s so random,” Peck exclaimed, narrowly missing a bald-headed man in a tiny toy sports car. That morning there seemed to be a preponderance of miniature vehicles driven by follicle-challenged men on the road as we passed the farm stands and the cornfields and the cashmere shops.

Peck changed the subject to one she’d been revisiting several times with increasing intensity: she wanted to turn Fool’s House into a retreat for creative people. “Kind of like Yaddo,” she explained earnestly.

“Have you ever
been
to Yaddo?” Hamilton asked her, stretching the word—
beeee-eeee-innn
—into three syllables to enunciate how preposterous he found her idea.

Peck was forced to admit that she hadn’t been to Yaddo, or anywhere like it. She didn’t even know exactly what Yaddo was.

“Yaddo’s
enormous
,” he told her. “You could only house three or four artists in Fool’s House at a time. That’s not at all the same.”

“We can add on some rooms,” she exclaimed with increasing petulance. “I just think we were meant to keep the place in the family, and I think we should find a way to do that. Now, I read something this morning on the Internet about a whole bunch of potential Jackson Pollock paintings that were discovered in a storage bin out here somewhere. But they weren’t signed. And the article pointed out that he always signed his work.”

“Yes. In fact he rather famously insisted that his wife, Lee Krasner, sign her work, when she never had before,” Hamilton added. “Or it was a scene in the movie.”

“Maybe ours was one he didn’t like,” Peck speculated. “And that’s why he didn’t sign it.”

“He was known to throw canvases into the town dump,” he said as we snaked slowly along Route 27 behind an endless line of sun-baked cars. “Right in East Hampton. I doubt he would have signed those.”

“It did say ‘From J.P.’ on the back,” she mused. “I wonder if someone could authenticate that.”

It took a long time to get to East Hampton. The sun was high in the sky and it was hot by the time we pulled up to the neat shingled bungalow with window boxes where the art dealer—Giles Moncrief was his name—spent his weekends. Everything about the small place, including its owner, was well-tended. The paintings on the whitewashed walls were all small and abstract, subtle in hue. The furniture was stylish and subdued as well, and the effect was soothing. There was iced tea garnished with lemon slices in a tall pitcher and the very stylish Giles poured us each a glass.

He wore narrow gray trousers and a fitted purple shirt and he looked only at Hamilton. Like Scotty, he appeared to be infatuated with our white-haired friend. He had a
Masterpiece Theatre
accent and a thin mustache that he kept touching as he fired questions at him. “Oil on canvas? Black, white, and brown abstract, you say?” he asked with a carefully contained eagerness that seemed at odds with his sleek demeanor. “Small? And it’s been missing how long?”

I’d brought the photograph Finn had given me of Lydia and his mother in front of the mantel with the picture in the background, and I pulled it out to show him the painting we were there to discuss.

Giles Moncrief sighed heavily as he held the photo as close to his eyes as he could, examining it carefully. “ ‘For L.M. From J.P.’? That’s on the back? And it disappeared when?”

He spent quite a bit of time staring at the photograph and looked a few things up on a laptop computer while we explained what little we knew of the painting that had been hanging above the mantel at Fool’s House for so long, and about Biggsy, the artist whom we suspected of stealing the painting.

“He lives there, rent-free, in exchange for fake vomiting on your floor?” he asked, looking up from his computer.

“Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that,” I tried to say.

He nodded with an annoying smirk, but he seemed to be trying to get all the facts. “Yes, I suppose it is, as he may or may not be in possession of a painting that belongs to you that may or may not be a Jackson Pollock.” He looked for confirmation to Hamilton, who was happily fanning himself and enjoying his iced tea in one of the too-small chairs.

“You’ve heard nothing more from him?” Hamilton asked him. “We’re certain this is the fellow who texted me?”

Giles shook his head. “He hasn’t responded again. Very often stolen paintings never resurface, you know.”

“How d’you mean?” asked Peck, growing more British by the minute.

“People steal paintings for all sorts of reasons,” he explained. “It’s awfully hard for a thief to sell a high-profile piece. Certainly a potential Pollock, even one that could be impossible to authenticate, would attract a lot of attention. Not everyone wants that attention.”

We talked for a while longer, but Giles could not confirm that the painting in the photograph could have been painted by Pollock. He could also not definitively say that it hadn’t. But he promised to let us know if he heard anything, and we left him gazing thoughtfully up at one of the paintings on his wall, no further along in our search for information than we had been when we pulled in. “I’ll text him again,” he said. “I’ll tell him I have someone interested.”

Over lunch—the most delicious lobster rolls, as promised, at a photogenic roadside shack—Hamilton told us what he knew about the author of the love letters in Lydia’s safe. “I don’t know much at all. It was before my time. But she always said he was the most beautiful man. Lydia and I always did have a weakness for handsome men.”

He paused to heavily salt, for the third time, his side of French fries. “I never met him. But I was under the impression from what little she told me that he was neurotic. An artist, of course. She wouldn’t have been interested in him if he weren’t. A hypochondriac. And his wife was worse, always nearing death and then recovering, so he couldn’t leave her. He checked himself into Silver Hill every other week.”

“She did eventually buy the house from him,” I said.

He nodded his head. “She worked hard. In some ways, your aunt was very practical.”

“Then why all this mystery around the will?” I asked in frustration.

Hamilton shrugged. “I haven’t the foggiest.”

“But you knew her better than anyone,” Peck protested, picking the celery out of her lobster salad.

He pursed his lips together before answering. “How well can we really know another person? People can be in your lives for years—they can fill your lives. But all you really know of them are the stories they tell you. And then they die. They always leave a mystery behind.”

We were quiet for a bit after that. I was thinking of Lydia, with her white hair that hung in thick waves around her shoulders, and the gypsy rings she always wore. She was always dressed for a party, even when she was tending the hydrangeas around her property, or reading on the porch. Even, I supposed, when she’d been at the front of a classroom, lecturing a roomful of boys on Gatsby’s green light. She’d always carried herself very erect, a commanding presence. I remember going to meet her plane at the airport when she’d come to visit my mother and me and being surprised to see, when she emerged from baggage claim in a rush of much larger passengers, that she was actually quite small, because I always thought of her as such a big presence. She’d been a model at a time when a pretty face could earn some money, even if she wasn’t that tall.

“She would tell us to make an effort to get to know each other,” I said. “ ‘You’re sisters,’ she would say, ‘you should
know
each other.’ Didn’t she say that all the time?”

“She did,” Peck acknowledged. “She said it all the time.”

“Drove my mother crazy,” I said. “She’d never admit it, but I think it bothered her. She always seemed like she wanted to forget there was a first wife and a daughter whose father had moved out.”