Vineyard Deceit

by Philip Craig

  “She still doesn’t see the warts, eh?”

  “Only mine. Aunt Amelia sees mine too, but she knows that everybody’s got them, so I came down here where I could be with her if I needed to. And I did need to.”

  “As you no doubt are aware,” I said, “before my modesty obliged me to forbid public use of the name, I was known as J. Wartless Jackson.”

  “Are you sure they weren’t saying ‘Worthless’?” asked Zee, discovering a large conch in her rake. “Whoops,” she said and tossed the conch in a high arc so that it landed right in front of my nose and splashed me with a goodly splash.

  It seemed a fair response. I spat out some salt water. “So your mother’s still in love. Are you?”

  “I was, but it seeped away. I was glad when it was gone.”

  “Love is good for you,” I said.

  “It can be pretty awful.”

  I thought of my own divorce. “Yes, it can.” I had not thought of myself as a particularly loving person or as someone needing a lot of love, but when my wife left me I felt very bad for a long time. It had taken a while for me to find much joy in things. Probably, I thought, that’s why, after being shot in Boston, I had taken my police disability money and moved to the Vineyard. Down here I knew I could do simple things that might heal me: fish, keep my garden, hunt ducks and geese and deer, be on the beach at sunup or sunset or midnight. And I didn’t have to talk to people about the turns my life had taken: the loss of my wife, the addition of a bullet near my spine, my private encounters with the void.

  And the island magic had worked. Prospero had waved his wand and made me better. Not perfect, but better. The sea is a great redeemer, after all. And then I’d met Zee and had gotten better still.

  But now Aunt Emily thought it was time for Zee to start mingling with “proper society.”

  “What do you mean ‘proper society’?” I asked, trying to act as if I didn’t know.

  “Aunt Emily thinks it’s time I started mixing with men and women again. That it’s time to leave Paul behind and get on with my life. Aunt Amelia thinks so too. She’s had to do the same thing since Uncle Ray died, and she says that divorces and deaths are a lot alike for the survivors. I think she’s right.”

  So did I, having experienced both kinds of loss. Joy was still possible, but you had to seek it and then open yourself up to it. You had to take a chance on suffering other losses, because that was better than living in old sorrows. I believed that the Buddha was right when he said that life is suffering, but I had never liked people who dwelt on their own. They had some kind of self-pity in them that was distasteful to me. I considered myself an expert on self-pity, having engaged in more than my share from time to time.

  Zee said, “Of course Aunt Amelia and Aunt Emily don’t agree at all about who I should be mixing with. Aunt Emily wants to introduce me to some very proper people who will be at the big event on Saturday. Aunt Amelia thinks that you’re more the type for me.”

  Good old Aunt Amelia! I brightened inside.

  “You’ve helped me more than anybody,” said Zee, surprising me. “You and Aunt Amelia. You’re both proliving, antideath people. A lot of women like me feel guilty when things go wrong in our lives; we think we’re to blame. My mother’s that way, but Amelia doesn’t think that and neither do you. Because of you two, I’m beginning not to think it either.” She turned her head and smiled at me. God, she was beautiful.

  But I was uneasy with such talk. “Everybody gets knocked down sooner or later,” I said. “Some get up again and some don’t. You did. Your Aunt Amelia’s right. Now it’s time for you to forget Dr. Jerk and move on.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Tell me about the emeralds.”

  “Ah yes, the emeralds. Well, the fact is, I don’t know much about them. Aunt Amelia never talked about them, really, maybe because Uncle Ray, being the good Azorian man that he was, didn’t have much place in his life for a wife with an emerald necklace. He and Amelia were both more interested in gardening and each other than in her past or his. She does have an old scrapbook with newspaper clippings and photos of when she was a young deb in Boston. That was before she left the debutante society to marry a Vineyard farmer. I never saw the scrapbook until after Uncle Ray died. There are some pictures and articles in there about the emeralds. Would you like to see them? I’m sure Aunt Amelia wouldn’t mind. She likes you.”

  I liked Amelia too. She was one of the people to whom I took bluefish when I was catching them. I’d never thought of her as the owner of an emerald necklace.

  “Yes,” I said, “I would like to see that book.”

  “When we finish our tea, I’ll phone her and find out when would be a good time.”

  “Meanwhile, I’ll just ogle you,” I said. “After Saturday night you’ll be too sophisticated to mix with us hois and pollois.”

  “I’ll be kind,” said Zee. “Sometimes I’ll think of you while I’m on my yacht. I’ll have the prince bring the boat into Edgartown now and then.”

  “Of course you’ll be anchoring in the outer harbor because it’ll be too big to bring inside.”

  “Of course. But I’ll send crewmen ashore with the launch and insist that they buy our fresh bluefish from only you. And now that you’re a special policeman with a badge and everything, I’ll insist on having you be part of the security that protects us from the common people.”

  “The autograph hunters and all . . .”

  “That’s right. And if we meet by accident in one of the finer shops downtown, I’ll be sure to speak to you.”

  “You’ll remember my name?”

  “Of course. What was it again?”

  4

  Amelia Muleto owned a small truck farm off the West Tisbury road. When her husband had been alive the two of them had worked it and sold their vegetables at a farm stand, getting by in the good years, scrambling in the bad ones. My father had bought his vegetables there when I was a boy, and Amelia had delighted me with small, surprising gifts such as a seemingly normal apple that broke in two in my hands to reveal an apricot instead of a core, and within the apricot, where the pit had been, a strawberry. Her humor was the witty kind that had delighted both me and my father.

  My father had liked the Muletos and had made a practice of taking fish by their house when he’d had luck with the blues or bass. Ray Muleto, like every Azorian I’ve ever known, and there are a lot of them and their children on the Vineyard, loved fish. His farm kept him too busy to catch them himself, so he was particularly happy to get them when they came his way. In exchange, he would give my father wine that he’d made. It was strong, red stuff. “Vigorous,” my father had called it. The first alcohol I ever drank was Ray Muleto’s vigorous wine. I sneaked it straight from the bottle and almost choked to death. After my father died, I took fish to Ray and Amelia and got red wine in return. Now that Ray was gone, I still took fish, but there was no more of that rich, dark wine.

  Amelia now leased her farm to another truck gardener and worked at his stand part time. When not at the stand, she was at her small, neat, gray-shingled house, where she grew wonderful flowers and entertained her grandchildren whenever she could pry them away from their parents, Amelia’s son and his wife, who had abandoned the island to live in America, across the Sound, way out west in Worcester, in fact, where, in the modern style, they both worked to support their family.

  “The grandchildren have gone home,” said Zee, as we drove up. “Pre-school shopping and all that. Their mom must take them to the malls, and there are no malls on Martha’s Vineyard.”

  Amelia Muleto was a tall, slender, Yankee-looking woman whose silver hair was cut short and touched with blue. She was in her gardening clothes when we arrived: jeans, a loose shirt that had no doubt belonged to her late husband, and sandals. She came walking from her front rose bed as we pulled into her driveway. She and I had aged together. Long ago when, as a boy, I’d first come to her house with my father, when I’d been five, she’d been
in her mid thirties and I’d thought of her as old. Now she was in her mid sixties and seemed pretty young to me.

  She kissed Zee and gave me her hand and we went into the house. Amelia sat us down on her couch. On the coffee table in front of it there were scrapbooks and photo albums.

  “There you have it,” said Amelia. “There’s a Stonehouse family genealogy too, but I think Emily has it. That sort of thing means much more to her than to me, I’m afraid. Look those things over while I bring us some coffee. Or would you prefer beer?”

  Coffee would do. She went into the kitchen, and I opened the first of the photo albums. It was filled with pictures from the late twenties and the thirties, many of two little girls growing up. The adults seemed to wear a great deal of white, and there were large houses and lawns and lakes in the shots. As Zee and I turned the pages, the girls and their parents grew older. Photos of early formal dances in large halls appeared. Nowhere was there any evidence of the Great Depression which had swept the world. The people in the pictures were happy and attractive. Uniformed servants could be seen in attendance. Young men were also on the scene, in sporting or formal clothing as the occasion demanded. There were pictures of healthy young people sailing, rowing, playing croquet.

  The next album was more somber. A severe-looking father, serious young women. Young men in uniform. Fewer pictures of lawn parties. World War II had taken center stage. The girls, the Stonehouse sisters, Amelia and Emily, now in their late teens, were shown in the uniforms of nursing aides. The family was doing its share.

  Then it was the mid forties and the young men had come home from the war and there were parties. Debutante balls in Boston. I recognized the old Copley Plaza. Then there were photos, some in color, of the emerald necklace, magnificent against a bed of silk, glowing against the skin of Amelia and Emily’s mother as she stood with her daughters in their daring, low-cut gowns at the foot of a great stairway, seeming to shimmer as she danced with her husband and the girls danced with perfectly groomed and formally attired young men at some ball.

  Then there were photos of Martha’s Vineyard in the forties, and suddenly the young face and form of Raymond Muleto began to dominate the pages of the album. Raymond leaning against a fence, Raymond grinning, with an arm across Amelia’s shoulders, dozens of pictures of Raymond. Then a single snapshot of Amelia and Raymond standing with a man in shirtsleeves before a building, a house, perhaps, upon which there was a sign which, I guessed, read JUSTICE OF THE PEACE. Later, a series of pictures showing stiff-looking Stonehouses seated with an equally stiff-looking Raymond Muleto. In the last pages of the album there were pictures of a pregnant Amelia laughing as she sat at the beach, wearing a maternity bathing suit. And then there were baby pictures.

  “I thought you might be interested in the sort of life my family led before I was married, but I didn’t think you’d want to look at ten thousand pictures of our son.” Amelia, who had brought in coffee and said nothing until I’d finished looking at the albums, smiled. “Let me help you go through the scrapbooks. Most of what’s there has nothing to do with the emeralds. It’s just more family stuff.”

  She came and sat between Zee and me and opened the first book.

  Yellowed articles from newspaper society pages; notes of business successes with references to Eugene Stonehouse, the latest Stonehouse entrepreneur; clippings of weddings; of the birth of the Stonehouse sisters; of balls and travels. Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Stonehouse home from Africa, home from Paris, home from a world cruise.

  “This is what you’re after,” said Amelia.

  An article from the society pages of the Boston Post, complete with blurry photographs, about the fabulous Stonehouse Emerald Necklace. I read it carefully, noting the breathless style of the writer, the strategic vagueness with respect to just exactly how the jewels first came into possession of Jacob Stonehouse, the discreet fawning over the then-current Stonehouse family and its social set.

  It was a more detailed version of the summary tale given to me by the Chief. While the American colonies were separating themselves from England between 1776 and 1783, Jacob Stonehouse, an ex-officer in the British army described in the Post as a “gentleman adventurer,” was employed by one Mohammed Rashad to train and lead a rebel army against the then-Padishah of Sarofim. Here the writer provided a parenthetical description of a Padishah as a king, more or less.

  Sarofim was a small kingdom mostly consisting of sand but commanding a strait that lay on the sea route between East and Middle East. The Padishah’s fortresses overlooking the strait and his corsairs roaming it brought considerable wealth back to the Padishah, if not to his nomadic people, who benefited little if at all from their ruler’s commercial successes. Mohammed Rashad, an intelligent and ruthless camel herder with lofty aspirations, noting that the Padishah’s cannon and parapets faced the sea, where his enemies could be found, attacked from the desert, his ragtag army trained and led by Jacob Stonehouse.

  Here the narrative became diplomatically obscure. The revolution was a success. The old Padishah’s head was placed on a stake outside the main city gate. Mohammed Rashad became Padishah, and his sons and grandsons followed him to the throne. The Rashad dynasty still ruled Sarofim.

  Jacob Stonehouse, ever an opportunist, reappeared in England with mysterious wealth, which he invested in companies producing goods for the British army and navy. During Napoleon’s wars he made magnificent profits and earned a minor title from a grateful monarchy. It was at this time that the famous emerald necklace first came to public view. Stonehouse adorned the neck of his wife with the emeralds on the occasion of a royal ball and, when pressed for the story of the jewels, hinted that they were the gift of an Eastern potentate, given in thanks for a “bit of work” he had performed.

  Stonehouse, already wealthy, added to that wealth by shrewd investments in land and in ships carrying on the East India trade. Then, suddenly and without particular fanfare, he moved to America, where he continued his investments in trade but added whaling to his business interests. He grew old and richer and built his great New England houses. The now-famous emeralds dazzled New England society on the necks of Stonehouse women.

  Jacob Stonehouse’s grandson, upon inheriting the family fortunes, was the man who hired a Dutch jeweler to make the almost equally famous pastes of the original emeralds and to duplicate their setting. He, Nathaniel Stonehouse, was a New England Yankee in every sense, frugal and farsighted. He did not fancy risking the real jewels to some low ( or even high) thief, what with the migrations of “foreigners”—the Irish in particular—to Boston.

  The emerald necklaces, both the real one and its copy, were placed in the vaults of a great, gray Boston banking and insurance company (Stonehouse, Chute, Cabot, and Adams) and thereafter, save for very rare, very special occasions, the Stonehouse women wore only the pastes, which, in time, took on a fame of their own.

  The real jewels appeared so rarely that one generation passed without their being worn at all. Unwilling for that to happen again, the Stonehouse women prevailed upon the men and the representatives of Stonehouse, Chute, Cabot, and Adams to produce them for social events at least once every decade.

  There was a dim photo of Mrs. Eugene Stonehouse before a large vault. Beside her, looking owlish and humorless, were four men in severely conservative suits. In front of them on a table were two wooden cases lined with silk, one holding the emerald necklace, the other the paste copy.

  “Mom,” said Amelia. “With Stonehouse, Chute, Cabot, and Adams, I imagine. No . . . Actually, I think all of them were dead by then. She was like me. She didn’t really care much for jewels. Here’s the next generation.” She took a second scrapbook and leafed through it. “Here we are.”

  The photo was of her and her sister in front of the same great vault, flanked by four different but equally solemn men. The same cases and necklaces lay on the table.

  “It’s our official introduction to being Stonehouse women,” said Amelia with a little laugh. �
�We get to go down and be photographed with the keepers of the sacred jewels. I think Emily’s daughter did the same pose several years back.”

  I thought two of the men looked familiar. They were the youngest of the four.

  “I saw their pictures in your photo album,” I said, pointing.

  “You have a good memory. I imagine it came in handy when you were a policeman in Boston. Yes. The tall one is Willard Blunt and the short one is Jasper Cabot. Willard and I actually dated a time or two before and after the war. We were both considered a bit wild, if you can imagine that. Rebellious youth, our parents thought. We had been exposed to dangerous views. I at Radcliffe, he both at Harvard and off in the Middle East, where they posted him in the war. They considered our political and economic views to be absolutely radical. Of course to our parents, Roosevelt was somewhere left of Lenin and Marx. Willard and I both later became rather stodgy, I’m afraid. Still are, for that matter. He has informed me that he’ll be down this week to see to it that arrangements for the transfer of the necklace are proper. You will meet him Saturday night, I’m sure. Jasper Cabot and Mr. Willard Sergeant Blunt have been guarding the Stonehouse emeralds for almost fifty years; Willard insists upon personally overseeing their transfer to the Padishah. Good riddance of them, I say. I am no admirer of the Padishah of Sarofim, despicable man that he is, but there may be some justice in the emeralds going back to the place where old Jacob stole them originally.” She rose and went to her mantel. “If you really want to know something about Sarofim and the Rashads, you should probably have read this.” She brought back a book and handed it to me. There were also letters in her hand.