April in Paris

by John J. Healey

  Executions at Sing Sing were traditionally carried out at 11 p.m. on Thursdays. Condemned prisoners would be brought into the execution room escorted by seven guards and the prison chaplain. Already waiting in the room would be the warden of Sing Sing, the state electrician, two doctors and twelve state appointed witnesses. After the condemned prisoner was strapped into the chair and the electrodes attached, the warden would step forward and read out the final decision on the sentence. The prisoner would be asked for any last words or for a benediction. With a signal, the execution would then begin. Witnesses would leave once both doctors had confirmed that death had occurred.

  In its seventy-five years of operation, a total of 695 men and women were executed by the electric chair in New York State— 614 at Sing Sing alone. From 1914, all executions were conducted at Sing Sing prison using “Old Sparky.” Eddie Mays would become the last person to be executed on August 15, 1963. Two years later New York State abolished capital punishment.1

  1 Wikipeia, s.v. “Old Sparky,” last modified March 8, 2021, 18:34, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Sparky#New_York

  – 37 –

  After passing the Shinnecock Golf Club I got off Route 27 onto Tuckahoe Lane and drove to Hill Street and then onto Halsey Neck Lane to Dune Road. I drove her by the Beach Club and then I took her into the Fair Lea driveway to show her the house we had for so many summers. The property had been subdivided since then and there were new houses where once there’d only been the great lawn leading to the beach. Everything looked smaller. Chastened by what had happened at the apartment in New York, I kept my commentary to a minimum. Then we took Gin Lane to Old Town Road and on to Wickapogue until we came to the Cuddihy-Woodward compound.

  On the portion of their land nearest to the driveway’s main gate, Caro’s nieces, nephews, and their children had broken up a good deal of the estate building their own cottages, with swimming pools and access lanes. Caro lived in the original house, what had been her parents’ house. It was by far the biggest and grandest house, the one closest to the dunes with the most land around it. Many a Kennedy, FDR once, Al Smith, numerous children, and various pink-bellied New York cardinals from St. Patrick’s had splashed around in its swimming pool. Away from the pool there was a flower and vegetable garden and then the large garage where Edwin Anderson had lived and where I had stayed in exile during my senior year of high school.

  Caro was waiting for us on the front porch. I hadn’t seen her since Thanksgiving. That past Christmas I’d selfishly stayed away. I was with someone in Morocco, a liaison that ended up going nowhere. She wore a pair of white sharkskin slacks, navy Belgian loafers with black trim, and a quince-toned Mexican shirt. Her hair was pulled back into a smooth white ponytail. She thought Carmen was beautiful and told her so and then told her I hadn’t brought another woman to meet her for as long as she could remember, “And that is a very long time.” Once inside I put Corru in her lap and gained some extra points there as well. I introduced Carmen to the maids and the cook, all of them Irish. While I walked Corru around the grounds, Caro took Carmen by the arm to give her a tour of the house.

  I chose a guest room for us I didn’t normally use, a bigger room than the one I usually stayed in. It was at the very far end of the upstairs hall, as far from Caro’s as possible so that we’d have maximum privacy. The bathroom had an old standalone cast iron tub with lion claw feet, and we could see the ocean from bed.

  On the following day I drove into town alone to get some things and on the way back I parked by Old Town Beach and made some calls. I spoke with a lawyer I use and to the woman who handled most of my real estate transactions. I asked her to put the apartment at 820 Fifth on the market and to look into buying the lot on Ogden Avenue. In the afternoon we had tea with Caro and then took a walk down the beach with Corru and went for a swim in the ocean. Drying off in the afternoon sun, Carmen told me she’d had a rather intense conversation while I’d been doing my errands. I was pleased that Caro felt so at ease with her, said so, and was about to go in the water again when Carmen said, “She told me things I promised not to repeat.”

  “Really,” I said, stopping and coming back.

  “I was shocked, because I’ve just met her, but I guess it was something she was looking to get off her chest.”

  “Well, she’s a perceptive lady who’s been around a long time, and I suspect she knows you’re a keeper with a capital K.”

  “That’s sweet of you,” Carmen said. “She put it differently. She said she’d not had a proper woman to talk with for a long time, that all her friends were dead. She said that when you mentioned Edwin Anderson on the phone many memories flooded back that, as a good Catholic girl, she had repressed for a long time. What she told me was a bit like a confession, a ribald one. You know, the way the elderly just stop caring sometimes about certain kinds of propriety, and just tell it like it was.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “It started when she said, ‘I noticed he brought you to see the room over the garage last evening, where he lived on his own the year he finally finished high school.’ That’s right, I said to her. ‘You were up there for some time,’ she said, and I must have blushed, because then she said, ‘I bet he took your clothes off.’”

  “She actually said that?”

  “She did.”

  “I should have warned you. For the past decade or so all kinds of unfiltered stuff comes out of her mouth when you least expect it. What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘He did.’”

  “My god.”

  “And then she said, ‘What is it about that room?’”

  “Wow.”

  “That was nothing compared with what came next.”

  “Anything to do with Edwin?”

  “Yes. But you can’t give even the smallest hint, ever, that I told you this.”

  “I won’t.”

  “She made me promise not to tell you until after she was dead.”

  “I understand.”

  “She had an affair with him.”

  I stared at her, then turned my head and stared at the ocean.

  “Are you sure you want to hear this?” Carmen said.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a bit kinky.”

  I looked back at her again.

  “My stepmother had a kinky affair with Ingrid Anderson’s brother? You don’t think I want to hear about that?”

  She laughed. “Okay, okay.”

  “How kinky?”

  “She wasn’t overly explicit and I’m not sure I understood everything, but she was with him often, before and during the time she was married to your father. It was an important relationship to her. She said that in a perfect world she would have married him.”

  “Maybe that’s why Edwin left,” I said. “Maybe my father found out and fired him.”

  “Not according to her,” Carmen said. “She told me he and your father always got along, and she told me what she told you, that Edwin left when his mother got ill and wanted to go back to Sweden, late in life, and he felt obliged to take her and care for her there, until she passed away, and after that, according to Caro, he stayed there as well. He never returned to the United States.”

  I was looking out at the ocean again as she said all this. Waves ideal for riding were rolling in. Just before they crested light shone through them.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “She said she had certain tastes, certain proclivities she discovered and fantasized about, and could never tell anyone about, including your father because he was, in her words, excessively normal. And there was this one day when she came back from riding a horse she had.”

  “Rocio,” I said.

  “Rocio?”

  “That was the horse’s name. I used to ride her too.”

  “It’s a Spanish word. Do you know what it means?”

  “No idea.”

  “It means ‘dew.’ Anyway, she came back from riding and got into a conversation with Edwin while he w
as changing the oil or doing something with one of your family cars. She said she told him she felt bad because the horse had misbehaved at some point, refusing to do what she wanted, and she’d given it some whacks with her riding crop and she felt very guilty about it and thought she should be thrashed herself—and that when she said that—he looked at her in a certain way.”

  “Whoa.”

  “And that’s how it started,” she said.

  “With a riding crop?”

  “She said it drove her crazy. That she’d go up to his room and bend over the couch so that he could whip her behind, not viciously she said, but not gently either. And then she would get him to touch her, you know, like fondle her, immediately afterward, and that it gave her tremendous orgasms.”

  “Whoa.”

  “She said that undressing for bed at night she sometimes had welts on her bottom, and that your father never noticed.”

  “Jesus.”

  “She said she got him to do other things to her too.”

  “Like what?”

  “I didn’t press her. She was excited as she was telling me, but then she got embarrassed and pulled back. She made the sign of the cross, clammed up, and had me swear not to ever tell anyone, especially you.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And then she asked about our sex life.”

  “What is she on?”

  “She said Edwin didn’t have any girlfriends from what she could tell, or boyfriends either, but that they gave each other a lot of pleasure and that after he left he wrote her letters to a PO box she opened in town here and in New York just for that purpose.”

  “I can’t believe it,” I said. “I wonder if he ever spoke to her about Ingrid.”

  “She said that after he left, she used to go to his room to get away from everyone, until you moved in, and that she found the riding crop one day hanging in his closet. He’d left it for her. She still has it.”

  “So, she was in love with him.”

  “She didn’t say that. Just that they had a special bond, something she had never found with anyone else.”

  “I’m astonished.”

  “She’s an amazing woman.”

  “You have these fixed ideas about people,” I said, “and then . . . I feel bad for my father.”

  “She said she didn’t think he knew, or if he suspected anything, he was okay with it, because it never came up.”

  “Who knows?”

  – 38 –

  820 Fifth was assessed and put on the market. The empty lot on Ogden Avenue was available at a reasonable cost. The permits to build replicas of what had been 1075 and 1077, while allowing their interiors to be connected for multipurpose use, would require a lot of paperwork, but it was doable. I told my lawyers to go ahead and I phoned a small architectural firm I trusted and told them to find plans and pictures of how the buildings originally looked. At the very least it would prevent the construction of another anodyne apartment building.

  I took Carmen to the Beach Club and ran into friends I’d known since I was a boy. It always took a few seconds to make the adjustment from the way I had them fixed in my mind, from how they had looked many years before, and I’m sure the same thing happened to them upon seeing me. The club, encumbered by all manner of environmental regulations since my youth, had continued to steadily neuterize itself, making it a “safer,” more practical place for its members. It had more personality during my tenure there. The pool had a high and low diving board. I don’t recall there being a lifeguard. There were no signs listing do’s and don’ts. Across from the shallow end, gracing the bottom of the façade of the “big cafeteria,” there’d been a small fountain where the water came out of a lion’s mouth. The “little cafeteria” was relaxed and open and served you in your bathing suit; delicious hamburgers and pieces of pie and chocolate layer cake. I remember being wrapped in a towel after hours of riding waves, the taste of the burger mixing with the scent of ocean water in my sinuses. There was no fine print on the menu about allergies or gluten. Members drank and smoked. Nobody wore clothing with brand name labels except for the little alligators on Lacoste polo shirts. For me, the definitive decline of the club coincided with the summer when I noticed people wearing shirts with the Ralph Lauren logo on them. It was life imitating art, Ralph Lifshitz from the Bronx, like me, getting the real bluebloods to buy into his fantasy of what their culture was like.

  And of course there were no cell phones, so it was normal to hear amusing, richly phrased conversation. There was a feeling back then that the members, no matter how conservative and superficially straitlaced, were into love affairs and fooling around. All the changes, physical and sociological, that had taken place bothered me, but I kept my mouth shut about it and we had a nice day at the beach chatting with buddies for whom art history and structural biology were so alien they weren’t worth mentioning. We had lunch outside by the bar, littlenecks on the half shell with a bad chardonnay improved with lots of ice. We sat in the same little corner, now Sanforized, where my father and Caro had been introduced.

  We preferred staying at home, swimming in the pool, and in the ocean in front of the house. But one morning toward the end of our stay Caro expressed a wish to go to the club, where she hadn’t shown her face for many summers. We helped her into her own car, a beautifully preserved Mercedes coupe from the 1960s, and drove her there. We got her up the front stairs where decades earlier she’d posed so many times for Irving Cantor, the Eastern European freelance photographer with a thick accent who hung out at the bottom of the steps all day every summer. We got her up to the pool level, and then up the second flight of stairs, settling her in a chair on the veranda facing the ocean. Many of the most elderly members stopped by to chat. She seemed to really enjoy herself. She held on to Carmen’s arm much of the time, giving her a running commentary about who was who, each tale spiced up with its darkest and most scandalous backstory. I would have killed to record it. Carmen would wink at me now and then and I fell in love with her all over again, grateful for her poise and patience, and I resolved to find a way for Caro to get to the club more often.

  So it was a surprise when, having drinks at home that evening, she declared it to have been a perfect day, just as she had hoped, but that she would not be going back there again. For dinner we had her and my favorite dishes, a green salad and rack of lamb with mint jelly and mashed new potatoes with a side of Irish soda bread and lots of butter. I opened two bottles of a 2005 Romanée-Conti. She regaled us with stories about my father, some of them new to me, and stories about her father, the man she loved more than any other, who had probably spanked her too. When Carmen asked her about her mother she pretended not to hear. We kidded her about Javier the gardener, who only the week before had run off with a maid who worked for one of our cousins down the road.

  We—all three of us tipsy—helped her up to her room and Carmen stayed with her as the nurse got her ready for bed. Carmen told me the last thing Caro said to her before she left the room was that we should stay together and never leave each other and that she had tears in her eyes when she said it. She relayed this to me as we got into bed.

  While she had been with Caro in her room, I’d gone back downstairs and outside with Corru and stripped down and dove into the pool. I floated on my back looking at the stars, listening to the waves breaking on the other side of the dunes, smelling the moist Atlantic air and the honeysuckle damp on the night hedges. I left my clothes in the changing cabaña and returned to the house wrapped in a big terrycloth robe feeling like a king, feeling the way I most enjoyed, lucky and getting away with murder.

  I wondered if that was what I as the girl in my dream had been doing—getting away with murder. If only I/she had been able to cut those wires around her ankles and run up Woodycrest Avenue filled with joy, instead of the deathly fear we had of being caught and punished.

  – 39 –

  The following morning, we heard the nurse cry out. Instinctively, we both knew why. We got ou
t of bed and made our way along the hall with reluctance. Caro was dead. She looked peaceful but I had to close her eyes. Her skin was still warm. Carmen began to cry. I asked the nurse and a maid who’d come in to leave us and inform the staff. I put the empty pill containers in the pocket of my robe and picked up the note left on her bedside table.

  Shaun,

  Please forgive me. I did not want to go alone. That you and your wonderful girl are in bed together down the hall gives me the comfort I require. Call Dr. Cranley and Father Donleavy, both of whom have helped me with this and already forgiven me this final sin. Call my lawyer Jimmy Emory who has my will and burial instructions. I insist you have a bottle of Pol Roger in my honor this evening. Do not cry for me. Though I have done nothing of any importance or been of any real help to the world, I have had a long and wondrous life. Je ne regret rien!

  Love,

  C

  We sat there for a while. I slid open the door to her balcony, letting in scented morning air and ocean sounds that Caro could no longer smell or hear. I stepped out and observed another calm summer sea, then made the calls she asked of me.

  We had breakfast in the kitchen where I made additional calls to some of my cousins on the compound to let them know. The doctor—who looked to be close to Caro’s age—arrived, bringing along a gentleman from the local funeral home. The death certificate was filled in, signed, and witnessed just before Father Donleavy arrived driving a Mini. He was young and very kind. He blessed her and got on his knees next to her and silently prayed.

  I wrote, filed, and paid for her obituary with the New York Times, the Southampton Press, and the East Hampton Star. She was buried two days later in the Southampton Cemetery next to her parents, not far from where my father and Scarlett’s coffins rested under the sandy loam of eastern Long Island. During the ceremony I couldn’t help noticing a Burger King, way too close by, just off the Montauk Highway.