by James Brady
“Of course you think I’m beautiful, everyone does, but let’s speak of important things.…”
Instead, she was really saying, “I’ve called ahead to this bed and breakfast thingie for a room, the Mauve House I believe, d’you know it? I do hope they won’t be difficult about dogs and how do I get there from here? But may I freshen up first? That’s a bloody long drive and not many petrol stations where one might hazard a pit stop.…”
She let the poodle out to romp on my father’s lawn for a bit while I showed Ms. Dunraven into the gatehouse to the downstairs john. The one upstairs was nicer but I hadn’t yet made my bed and you know …
When she came out, looking splendidly “freshened up,” I gave her coffee and told her where the B & B was, some number Buell Lane, and how to get there, and we sat there on my old Adirondack chairs in the sun while the poodle sported about and then I said:
“Just why again did Harry send you to me? I don’t understand exactly what I’m to…”
“Oh,” Alix Dunraven said airily, “it’s about Hannah Cutting’s book. I’m this year’s Tony Godwin laureate.”
“Tony Godwin?”
“Yes?”
“Who’s he?”
She was generously patient with me.
“Each year in London book circles there’s a ferocious competition among young editors. The winner gets to spend a season in New York, working for Doubleday or Simon & Schuster or Putnam’s, much as you Americans send Rhodes scholars to Oxford or a promising undergraduate to spend a junior year abroad at the Sorbonne…”
“And you won this year’s Godwin competition?” Before she could respond, I corrected myself: “Ferocious competition?”
“Well, yes, not to be pompous about it, but yes. I work for Rupert Murdoch’s publishing house in London, HarperCollins, but now I’ve been dispatched by Random House to pick up the Cutting manuscript and fetch it to Mr. Evans. Very simple, actually.”
“And my part in all this?”
She frowned. I liked it very much when she frowned, how it crinkled her nose and made those eyes seem even bluer. Was she even old enough to be the most brilliant young book editor in London? What the hell were they feeding child editors these days? Wheat germ? Straight gin? Speed?
“Well, I thought it was pretty clear. You called Mr. Evans about Hannah’s book, seemed to know quite a bit about it, and he gave me your name.…”
“You were at Hannah’s party.”
“Yes,” she said, “rotten timing that. I’d never been to your Hamptons and was desperate to get some sun and, just coincidentally, have a few encouraging words with our hot new author Hannah Cutting. Thought I might impress Mr. Evans if I did. So I came out with a man I know whose mistress was unavailable with root canal and I begged him to take me along. Then it turned out he was frantically anxious to dump me and get back to his girlfriend in the city to soothe her pain—God knows how, a randy business indeed, I suspect. Barely gave me an indecent tumble. That Miss Foley of his must be quite something. He had his plane waiting at your darling little local airport and we left even before the party ended. So I missed the murder. Hard cheese on me. When Harry, Mr. Evans, realized I’d actually been there all the time at Hannah’s, practically a material witness, and got nothing out of her and left before she was killed, he was quite cross. Sent me right back out before dawn this morning in a regular fit of pique.”
I liked that. She’d gone to the party “with a man I know.” Who had a “mistress.” Didn’t sound as if she and Teddy Crossman were, well …
“I’d attempted to talk with Ms. Cutting about the book project at her lawn party but she gave me short shrift. I was at a disadvantage, besides, not having read even that first best-seller of hers, The Taste Machine. I’d seen the magazine she spun off, Hannah’s Way, and rather enjoyed it. But that was it; I was no expert on Hannah Cutting. She must have sensed it and cut me dead. Neither the time nor the place, that sort of thing. Still, I kept after her. Even stressed the significance of the Tony Godwin Award and how it meant so much to my career and to United Kingdom prestige, ‘Buy British’ and all that. At Random House they stress we’re to take initiatives, never be discouraged or flag in the quest, that in a great symphony orchestra even the second cello is important.”
“I’m sure,” I agreed, knowing little of cellos, first or second.
“But I got bloody nil out of Hannah about the current manuscript. Very stiff she was. She was ‘accustomed to dealing with Mr. Evans himself,’ she’d have me know! and no snip of a girl or slip of a girl, I’m not sure which it was she called me … And if Harry weren’t available, she’d ‘be delighted to chat with his boss, Mr. Vitale. Or his boss, Mr. Newhouse.’ If there was anyone superior to Mr. Newhouse, she’d contact him as well. Told me off, right and proper.”
I agreed that Hannah could be stern. But resisted a wisecrack about there being no one “superior” to Si Newhouse. Then Alix Dunraven gave me a big smile.
“But I know you! At the party, over where they were ladling out the D.P., and I made Teddy get me some. You were there knocking back the champers yourself.”
“Yes,” I said, unreasonably pleased that she remembered me, recalling how she’d looked then, enjoying how she looked now.
“Well,” she said, suddenly very businesslike and efficient, “I’d best be off to the Mauve House … what a curious name … and get at it. Can’t let the side down. Mr. Evans will be expecting reports every hour on the…”
When she and the poodle, who, despite the odd growl, I must admit was awfully well behaved, were back in the car I repeated directions to Buell Lane and told her to phone me if she got lost. We were in the book. Stowe, Beecher, on Further Lane. Phone number 324-something-something. I’d have tattooed the number on her wrist (or other places) if she’d let me.…
As she turned around and drove slowly up the gravel toward the Lane, she adjusted her rearview mirror.
To look at me? If I were pondering such possibilities, I must be more hung up on that lost girl in London than I thought, and feeling sorrier for myself.
Or was Alix Dunraven simply checking out her hair?
I returned to my coffee and paper in a pleasant daze. The coffee had gone cold but I found it extraordinarily bracing, even tasty, and reread with enormous interest dull stories I’d long since digested. I was even feeling more tolerant about dogs. Here I’d called Harry Evans to pick his brain about Hannah’s book and he’d turned around and sent this honey to pick mine. And I’d been admirably shrewd, not simply caving in while confronted with Alix Dunraven’s beauty. I hadn’t told her that I knew what her employer Mr. Evans didn’t seem to know. That there might not be an actual paper manuscript. Only an IBM laptop on which Hannah was working assiduously when she died. Information I knew and Alix didn’t.
What a fine name she had. Alix Dunraven … Sounded like something out of Noel Coward. Or Waugh. And what a delicious morning this was turning out to be.
TEN
Higgins educated Liza Doolittle; Hannah pretty much educated herself …
When you want information in a small town you see the clergyman, the cop, the editor of the weekly paper. When the small town is someplace like East Hampton, you also drop in on the current guru.
I called ahead. Sure, he said, come on over. The Swami was living near the Amagansett end of Further Lane in a house that an admirer had provided for the season. It was where he worked his wonders. He spoke fluent, unaccented English. I don’t know quite what I’d expected, an ascetic Tibetan, a wild-eyed dervish, a scrofulous towel head, Richard Gere. He didn’t sound like any of those.
There were already a dozen or so cars parked on the gravel, Beamers and Benzes and Jags mostly. Ragtops predominated. From around behind the house came noises. Screams, actually. I thought primal screaming went out years ago with Peter Max paintings but I must have been wrong. Swami came to greet me, a smallish, very neat, and well-conditioned-looking gent in a tank top and shorts, both pristinely
tennis white, with blond-dyed hair and piercing violet eyes. No caftans currently in sight, no Jesus hair. He was probably thirty-five.
“I am Mr. Kurt,” he said. “Some call me ‘Swami.’ You must be Beecher Stowe.”
We shook hands. Nice firm grip. I like a firm grip. Behind Mr. Kurt twelve or fifteen quite attractive women in their thirties or forties danced about the lawn in a loose circle, alternately grunting and letting out screams, keeping time to a big old wooden metronome he had set out there on the grass, its wand going back and forth, back and forth.
“They’re testing the fluidity of the doors of perception,” Mr. Kurt whispered an aside, so as to let me in on the secret but not break the mood. From what Jesse said, I expected diaphanous gowns, incense, “the beat beat beat of the tom-toms,” and sexual excess of every manner and sort. But these women were sensibly dressed in workout clothes, as if this was a Health & Fitness Center like the one Martha Stewart’s daughter operates. I wasn’t sure whether to call the guru “Swami” or by his name. And would have felt foolish doing either so I took refuge in cop-speak, addressing him as “Sir” and asked about his run-in with Hannah. Angry, was it? Belligerent? Threats exchanged?
“I’ve been questioned about that earlier. By the authorities. It was very simple. I’d provided her a precis of our devotions, snorting ketamine off each other’s bodily parts and, as you’ve just witnessed, testing fluidity of perception, looking into the fundamental meaning of tie-dye and studying the clouds.”
Swami looked skyward and I murmured, soothingly, “Sounds reasonable.” He went on.
“But Hannah seemed unable to distinguish the mountain trail from the celestial track. The rest of our little congregation, most of us, were blessed with the gift of being able to find the humor in death and in human excrement oozing between the toes. Not Hannah Cutting. When I quoted the wizened old Hindu baba and asked Hannah to submit to having a lactating woman squirt breast milk into what I reckoned to be her otherwise unseeing eye, Hannah flailed out in anger, turning viciously upon me. It was a stunning rejection, I must admit, nearly violent. I’d asked her to join our little group, suggested an appropriate donation, and she told me to go away, she said she’d been to the carnival before. Not a very respectful or reasoned attitude, but of course I backed away and accepted it without argument. A tranquil soul needs no additional angst.”
Sounded like Hannah to me, telling him to fuck off, I thought, but didn’t say so. Swami must have sensed his devotees were slacking off so he wheeled angrily to face them, stuck out his tongue, and growled, “Yaaaaaaauuugh!” Or that’s how it sounded.
They all stuck out their tongues then and growled back, “Yaaaauugh.”
Mr. Kurt was that summer’s “consensus guru” and he assured me all these sweaty women swore by him. He said he’d seen Hannah only two or three times after that, around the town or at a cocktail, and they’d not spoken again.
Donna Karan, on the other hand, he told me, was a great supporter, introduced to him by Peter Guber’s wife. They all went on retreats together in various shrines and holy places and prayed on cliffs and along the shore and had grand times indeed. What was going on here now on the lawn was sort of summer school, relaxed and outdoorsy. Swami explained he had a small staff, a juice-fasting expert, a psychospiritual counselor, a choreographer, and a chap he described as a veterinarian cum body-piercer cum astral-surfer. Mr. Kurt handled the vital stuff himself, the meditation and primal screaming and other chores. As well as private consultations after hours. He didn’t offer anything about enema treatment and I was too shy to ask.
When I thanked him and turned to leave he pressed on me a business card (curled at the edges as if he’d handed it around before or used it to clean his fingernails or floss a stubborn tooth). “If you ever feel in need of a spiritual renewal,” he said, “or some excellent hash cookies.”
I was on the verge of telling that, as a Protestant, unlike more pliant people, I rarely felt such needs. Instead, I held my tongue, promising insincerely to give him my business, when and if, and then I turned the car ’round and headed west on Route 27 for Riverhead, where I had appointments.
A little juice-fasting and astral-surfing goes a long way with me.
* * *
The hottest controversy in Riverhead in recent years was a proposal to sheathe the historic Polish church in vinyl siding. Some parishioners were holding out for aluminum and others insisted a simple traditional paint job would do (the pastor wanted vinyl). Now a poor daughter of the parish, grown enormously rich and celebrated, lay dead.
The priest was a skinny young man, slightly addled, who thought I was there about the vinyl siding. When we got that straightened out (I made a point of not telling him I was an Episcopalian), he showed me the register, birth through death. Hannah’s family were Czechs but on settling down in pre-war Riverhead’s Polish Town were instantly tagged as “Polacks” along with the rest of them. Hanna (no terminal h yet) Shuba. Born 1953. Baptized. Confirmed. Married. To a forty-year-old, Pilsudski. Hanna was then sixteen. Five months later, a child born, baptized. The father looked at me.
“It is not unknown for there to be premature births. There are occasionally viable five-month pregnancies,” he said, shrugging.
“Of course,” I murmured softly, not wanting to appear cynical and slander the dead. Or scandalize a man of God.
Two years later, the priest said, came the funeral for Pilsudski, leaving Hannah (she had the h now) a widow at eighteen with a small daughter. She paid for a high mass, even a tenor. God knows where she found the money. That was the extent of his information as he’d been here only a year. I wished Father well in the unfortunate matter of the vinyl siding dispute and got directions to the police station.
Tom Knowles had provided the name of a tame River-head cop, an older man who remembered the family. And young Hannah Shuba. Wild, he said, shrewd, too, but wild. Was known to have spent the occasional evening in the backseat of a car. Local boys were all hot for her but when she had options, Hannah went for summer people and rich kids. Long before she ever lived there she had East Hampton tastes. The old cop had no idea who might have wanted her dead. But he sure remembered she had the cutest little bottom in the Hamptons and that she swung it around.
He sent me on to the old man who used to own the shop where she clerked later on, after Mr. Pilsudski died. The man was retired and might no longer be all that cogent, the policeman alerted me. Good thing, too. The old gent, Mr. Ober, lived these days with his sister in a big old frame house on a scruffy, weedy plot near the stone bridge where the Peconic River cut through the old town. The sister hadn’t known Hannah when she worked in the store; her brother had, but she gave gave me fair warning. “He’s not the man he once was. Keen, he was. You didn’t skin Elmer Ober. Not in a deal, not in business. Oh, but he was keen. No more. Just sits there in his hat talking to the dog about television.”
“Oh,” I said, not knowing what all that meant. I shortly was to find out. Mr. Ober was inside the house in the cool gloom some old houses provide even at midday in summer. And wearing a hat. Otherwise, just his underwear, old-fashioned underwear, what they used to call a union suit. He sat there on a sofa, an old man in his underwear with a Panama hat squarely set on his head while a big dog sat next to him on the couch. Both man and dog were focused on a large television console on which an old black-and-white movie was showing. I thought I recognized George Raft but couldn’t be sure. Mr. Ober was talking. To the dog.
“Don’t trust that feller on the right. He’s not a reliable sort. Keep an eye on him. The feller that just left, with the raincoat, now, he’s okay. You’ll see. They hold back clues in the first few reels. Catch you up in the story without revealing all. Too early to reveal all. It comes in later reels. Build the tension, there’s the secret. You have to watch for it. Uh oh, look at this one. What’s she up to? Nice pins, though…”
Mr. Ober might no longer be keen, as the sister warned, but he knew his movies
. And appreciated a well-turned leg. The dog listened to the old man, tongue lolling damply, pointed ears reacting to his voice, and seemed to be watching the screen with equivalent concern.
Mr. Ober’s sister made the introductions, including the dog.
“That’s the neighbor’s dog, not ours. He comes over every day to visit my brother and watch television with him. They like to watch together.”
“Oh.”
Mr. Ober and his dog stared at the TV with enormous interest, and obvious pleasure, as James Cagney got out of a big car with running boards, chauffeured by Frank McHugh, and nipped nimbly across the sidewalk to a nightclub, moving as he always did with that dancer’s grace. Mr. Ober was telling the dog, “That’s Jimmy Cagney now. You watch, he’ll straighten this bunch out.…”
After I’d asked a few questions and wasn’t getting through, to either the old gentleman or the neighbor’s dog, I thanked them all and left. As the living room door closed behind me, the dog’s tongue was out, lolling.
The newspaper editor was fuzzy-cheeked, too young to have known the Shuba family, but when I gave him dates he pulled out the dusty bound volumes. Pilsudski died grotesquely, suffocated when a cesspool he was digging caved in. You live in shit, you die in shit. Who was it said that? A year or so later Hannah married again, to Andy Cutting this time.
Driving home from Riverhead didn’t take long and I thought I’d better stop to see Andy. He was drunk. Only late afternoon but he was already soused. I can come back some other time, Andy, I said.
“No, Beech, draw up a pew. If I can’t talk to old friends…” And then, boozily but cogent, he talked to me:
The Cuttings were a fine old East Hampton family. Old Money, as well, except that Andy was apparently the one member of the family who never learned to count. His business acumen was zero and his share of the family fortune was eroding rapidly. Hannah must have seen something in him. To raise her daughter and pay the bills, she’d clerked in Elmer Ober’s shop and moonlighted cleaning houses. Her mother baby-sat and Hannah worked hard with energy and lavished attention on good wood and china and silver and glass. She never stole. Or broke things. Or skipped a cleaning day. A Hannah-cleaned house shone, sparkled, shimmered. She appreciated the fine things she came across in the great houses she cleaned, things she didn’t have, and cared for them as if they were hers. She seemed to have some primitive notion that marriage to Andy would provide, if not the things themselves, a passport to getting them. I’m afraid I’m a disappointment to you, darling, Andy told her. I don’t have the knack; I keep losing money whatever I do.…
