by Louis Begley
Harry said he was delighted. There are people in the Hamptons you ought to know, he told me. A number of them will be at your book party. The Labor Day party will be a rehearsal for the real McCoy in October.
I got to Sag Harbor that weekend on Friday morning. The house was as beautiful as I remembered it, and in spectacularly good order. That is Mary’s doing, Harry told me, and, introducing me to a small and pretty young woman, explained that she had immigrated from Ireland, married, and divided her time between her and her husband’s pet shop on Route 27 in Wainscott and what she called the care and grooming of Harry.
And watching your uncle Harry play with Plato, she chimed in. Those two are really something.
We had a quick sandwich in the garden and drove to Gibson Lane, the Sagaponack ocean beach that was Harry’s favorite. It too was unchanged, splendidly white and endless under a sky of unbearably intense blue. Even though it was the beginning of the busiest weekend of the summer, and the weather was glorious, we didn’t need to walk more than a hundred yards east from the entrance where Harry had parked to be completely alone. Harry put down our beach bag, and we took off our shirts and ran into the waves. He was a great swimmer, and it was he who taught me, when I first started to visit him, to play safely with giant breakers. The key, he had told me over and over, is to be watchful but relaxed, watchful but relaxed. They’re not out to get you. It’s just that they’re infinitely stronger. You have to outsmart them or go with the flow. We bodysurfed together that afternoon and each of the following three days. Then I swam alone eastward as far as Peter’s Pond Beach and back. That was a swim that Harry and I used to do together. This time he demurred. I get winded, he said. Otherwise, he was in good shape, and in excellent spirits. I was to go right ahead and take as much time as I liked. He didn’t mind waiting. Or he might walk along the shore in my direction, so as not to miss me.
When we got back to the house Harry said that he’d made no plans to go out on Saturday or Sunday or to have people over. He was tired of the Hampton weekend madness and looked forward to trying out his new pasta recipes. That was just fine with me. I was finding it hard to keep the new book out of my thoughts and welcomed being able to devote to it and to playing with Plato the hours we did not spend at the beach or at table. In order to be able to let Plato out without worrying that he’d dash into the street and get hit by a car, Harry had the entire plot in back of the house—lawn and garden—surrounded by a six-foot stockade fence that not even the most enterprising Burmese tomcat could dream of scaling, and no marauding deer could jump. There was only one opening in it, a door leading to the adjoining garden. Harry explained that way back in the nineteenth century that garden and the house to which it belonged, as well as his house, had been the property of two sisters, and tradition required that the entrance be maintained.
It’s fine with me, he said. The other house belongs to my dear friend, the wonderful Sasha Evans, and as you see we’ve made the door Plato-proof. He only goes to Sasha’s garden when he’s invited.
Until then I had taken with a grain of salt Harry’s claims that his Fifth Avenue kitty would arrive in Sag Harbor, have a snack of dry food and a drink of water, and, so refreshed, roll up his sleeves and start killing. Now I saw that he hadn’t been exaggerating. There were no mice left on the property, but it was still home to a population of chipmunks. Plato outthought and outran them, an achievement that had consistently eluded my parents’ cats, themselves no slouches. In spite of Harry’s declared intention, we did have a dinner guest on Sunday, that same Sasha, Harry’s next-door neighbor. She’s a fine landscape painter, Harry explained before she arrived, born and bred in Boston, widowed some years back, with one daughter living in Oregon. She’d called to invite him to dinner that evening at the last minute, explaining she was alone and blue. Naturally he’d yielded to his better nature and asked her to dine instead with us at his house. They’re made for each other, I kept saying to myself while we were having a drink, after I’d taken a good look at her and listened to their conversation, and later over Harry’s gnocchi. They’re the same sort of people; she’s his age; they could have a good life. Why doesn’t he go for it? I could think of one reason only. If the element of strong sexual attraction was missing—I couldn’t detect even a whiff of any such thing—would Harry or she risk having a marriage or a liaison go sour? Or even risk an exploratory gesture, with the potential for embarrassment and disappointment it entailed? I didn’t think it likely. They preferred to leave things as they were, to be the best of neighbors and friends, and would recoil from anything that might put that easy and comforting relationship in peril.
The Labor Day weekend weather continued to be superb, with sunny skies and low humidity, and the mini-book party took place on the lawn behind Harry’s house. I had always thought of Sag Harbor as the Hampton haunt of Upper West Side writers, editors, literary agents, and journalists accoutered in all seasons in L.L. Bean camp gear. In fact a great many of them gathered at the party, as did an even larger population of elderly quintessential WASPs, who I supposed—wrongly, as it turned out—were all investment bankers and their second or third wives, spectrally thin women arrayed in white, yellow, and lime silk and once-husky and now frail men in white linen and cotton, whom Harry must have drawn from precincts of Sag Harbor I hadn’t previously explored or from East Hampton, Bridgehampton, and Southampton. The two populations mingled noisily and in great harmony. I remained at Harry’s side, as he had instructed me, until the garden was filled to overflowing, and Harry said it was time to circulate. I took that as permission to make a beeline for Sasha. She led me by the hand to a pair of unoccupied chairs, and we remained there until Harry, smiling from ear to ear, came to take me to task for monopolizing the most irresistible woman at the party and to say that in half an hour we three would be having dinner at the American Hotel. He had hoped that Kerry Black, an associate working for him, would join us and balance the table, but she’d called earlier to report she was stuck in the office, trying to meet a deadline. It’s really too bad, he said, particularly since the deadline is one that I imposed!
—
The official party Harry gave for my book took place at his club on the publication date, which was Wednesday in the second week of October. The only personal guests invited by me—real people, is how I described them to Harry—were Scott Prentice and my Third Avenue gym trainer, Wolf. My agent, Jane, and my editor had suggested to Harry the professional types to put on his list. They were so numerous, and so expertly chosen, that after I had shaken their hands I could truthfully claim that out of the class of New Yorkers who could be normally found at a fancy literary party, complete with French champagne and the best hors d’oeuvres, there was not one I had not met. The others were, of course, Harry’s old friends, some of them from his firm, Simon Lathrop and his wife among them. I want to show you off, he had told me, as though you were my son. Indeed, talking to some of those grand lawyers and their wives, I discovered that they knew a great deal about my exploits at Yale and in the Corps. My uncle Harry had been boasting about me!
Among the handful of younger J & W lawyers I was immediately drawn to an athletically built girl almost as tall as I with a delicate pale face, eyes that were more green than blue, and a huge chignon of curly black hair. She turned out to be Harry’s protégée, Kerry. I told her how sorry Harry had been when she had to miss the Labor Day invitation in Sag Harbor, and how eager he had made me to meet her.
I’ve been pretty eager to meet you as well! she replied. Most of my conversations with Harry are about client stuff and all the things he wants to get done or redone before the end of the day. But, if there is ever a pause, he talks about you.
That must be a real bore, I said.
She shook her head so vigorously that her chignon was in danger of coming undone. She raised her hands to fix it, giving me an opportunity to admire her toned and sexy arms.
No, she said, it makes me happy because recounting your adventu
res and accomplishments has the best effect on him. You may not realize it, but he’s under a lot of pressure and works too hard. It’s a real tonic for him to know that you’re out of danger and that you’ve written a book that he thinks is so good and so genuine.
I think you like him, I said.
That’s an understatement!
With that she shook my hand and said she was going back to work—guess for whom!
I told Harry about my brief chat with Kerry and that I wished she hadn’t hurried back to the office. He nodded and said there was no one like her—she was, quite simply, the brightest and most conscientious associate he had ever worked with. She’d be up for partnership soon, perhaps the following year, and he intended to put his heart and soul into making sure she was taken in. A most unusual case, he added, a first-class litigator who cuts through the most devilishly intricate corporate structures and, on top of that, has innate business sense. She knows what’s important! She came to us fresh from law school—Harvard, as a matter of fact—then put in three years prosecuting white-collar criminals of all stripes as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District, and, fortunately, returned to us.
Are you now also doing litigation for Abner? I asked.
The firm is, he replied. I don’t handle it personally, but I’m in overall charge of everything we do for them, and having her at my side on litigations as well as on corporate work is a godsend. You could say she’s my chief of staff.
There seemed no end to the care Harry took of me. I had said, about the time Jane sold the film option on my book, that much as I loved living with him I should probably try to become a real grown-up and get a place of my own. Far from protesting, he told me I was right. As it happened, the daughter of one of his partners was a crackerjack real estate agent. He thought I should put myself in her hands. I took his advice, and very quickly she found a small apartment just off Park Avenue, a few blocks north of Harry, with exactly the space and layout I needed. Harry’s one complaint was that the building had no doorman. Just two locked doors at each of which you had to ring and wait to be buzzed in.
Not a good idea, he said. The city isn’t dangerous now, but you don’t want to have to worry about that sort of thing, or about deliveries. Especially if you travel.
Harry, I replied, I’m a trained killer! No mugger’s going to mess with me or my .45.
The little apartment was absurdly expensive; that was my only complaint, I told Harry and asked whether I should really spend all that money.
Look, Jack, he said, this is the Upper East Side. Prices are crazy. But you’re a rich man now, and the way things are going you’ll only get richer.
I stopped arguing. The film of the first book was already in production, and I’d gotten paid for the rights. Coming on top of the option money, it put me in possession of more money than I had ever dreamed of having.
—
I saw less of Harry over the next year and a half or so while I was finishing the new book, revising it, and seeing it through the editing process. We did have dinner at least once a week, and sometimes, if he spent the weekend in the city, we went to the movies together. On a few weekends I joined him in Sag Harbor. There was another source, in addition to my work, of demands on my time. I had made a play for an unattached young Englishwoman working at my publisher’s. In and out of bed, she reminded me of Felicity. It was the way she talked and dressed and, to tell the truth, her scant regard for certain aspects of personal hygiene. I liked her well enough to introduce her to a somewhat-skeptical Harry but not to have her move in with me. Our initial arrangement, dinner at one greasy spoon or another followed by a sleepover at my apartment, suited me just fine. I could tell that she’d interfere with my work, and that, if our romance soured, she’d be difficult to evict. The more sensible course was for her to hang on to her share of the East Village apartment convenient by subway to the publishing house, which was near Union Square, and to the Eighty-Sixth Street stop of the Number 4 or Number 6 train. She took that badly, apparently unable to understand my need to safeguard my working space and my new book. We broke off, without undue acrimony, shortly before I handed in the manuscript.
Once again, I showed my book to Harry, even more nervous than about my first because, being a story with echoes of my years at prep school and Yale, it inevitably included allusions to my parents that he could not fail to recognize. And once again, he delighted me by reading with all the sympathy I might have wished for. My publisher was pleased too and, repeating the pattern established with the first book, decided to rush into print. This time the book party was given by the publishing house, a fact that in this day of shrinking promotion budgets for anything but soft-porn blockbusters could be taken as a feather in my cap. The gathered literati were even grander than at my first party, but very few of Harry’s law firm colleagues were in attendance. Perhaps my publisher had suggested that Harry prune that part of the list. Kerry Black, of course, was there, as well as Scott Prentice and my trainer, Wolf. Harry had understood that my publisher’s giving the party signaled the commitment of the house to my book and, as he put it, had resigned himself to not being the host. He insisted, however, on his right to give a small dinner afterward. The guests, in addition to my editor, were my agent, Harry’s country neighbor the beautiful Sasha, and, of course, Scott and Kerry. Kerry had become a partner, an event that I had been invited to help celebrate at a dinner also given by Harry. After dinner, I took Kerry home.
She lived on Fifty-Seventh Street, in the last block before the East River. As I hoped, she asked me to come up and have a drink in her apartment. It amused me to see that it was very much like mine: the same security system judged so irritatingly inadequate by Harry, painfully neat—presumably a permanent condition since she had no reason to expect a visitor—and full of books. I told her that I had agreed to do a few readings and interviews spread over the next couple of weeks and that, once those obligations were discharged, I was going to travel in South America, part of the time with Scott, whom she had just met. If possible we’d get as far as the end of Tierra del Fuego, mostly hiking and cycling. Scott was sorting out the details.
That’s the trip of my dreams, she said.
Come with us, I told her. We’d love it, and we’re both pretty good at camping. You won’t have to lift a finger.
I’d come in a heartbeat, was her answer, but there are two problems: Harry, who needs me at his side, and work for him that has to be done. There isn’t a chance of my going on vacation before next summer, and even then I doubt I’ll be able to take more than a week or two at a time.
Then she asked me how long I’d be in South America.
Three months, I told her, give or take a week.
I see, she said. Harry will be very glad when you return. Please don’t take what I say amiss, but you and Plato—she laughed—yes, Plato too, are very good at taking the weight off his shoulders or heart or wherever it lies, so I hope that between these speaking engagements you’ll find some time for him. It would make him so happy!
I thanked her and made two resolutions. The first was to be with Harry as much as possible before I left for Belize, which was to be my first stop. The second was to see a great deal of Kerry when I returned.
I kept the first resolution, as well as, in circumstances I could not then foresee, the second.
III
Our exploration of Tierra del Fuego over, Scott and I caught a TAM flight to São Paulo at the Ushuaia Airport. From there he went on to D.C., and I flew to Cuiabá. I was met at its airport by an employee of Pedra Negra, a huge cattle ranch deep in the Mato Grosso savanna, who drove me to the fazenda in an immaculately clean white Range Rover. Pedra Negra’s absentee owner, Dirk van der Sluyten, a Dutch industrialist client and friend of Harry’s, had bought it in the 1980s, with Harry’s assistance, in consequence of an imbroglio that Harry said was melodramatic, from the patriarch of an old Brazilian Carioca family that owned half of downtown Rio de Janeiro. The Dutchman had
been begging Harry ever since—unsuccessfully—to stay at the fazenda, which he had visited only once, overnight, before the closing, and use it as if it were his own. Harry had never gotten around to it, but, when I told him that Scott would have to rush back to D.C., and I would be wandering around alone in Brazil, he remembered the invitation.
Go to Pedra Negra instead, he told me. It’s like no place you’ve ever seen and no place you’ll ever see. You’ve been saying you want to put in a few weeks working hard on your book. Do it there. It’s the ideal place. So far as the climate is concerned, this is the best time of the year. Hot, but you won’t mind that. There will be no distractions and no temptations. Who knows? If everything breaks right, perhaps I’ll come out and join you, and Lord knows I’ve never interfered with your writing.
I said it was a great idea and I would think about it. But Harry didn’t wait for my decision. He wrote to his friend about me, and two days later a letter arrived addressed to me, expressing delight at my forthcoming arrival and enclosing photographs of a vast brown wooden structure, which was the fazenda’s main house, as well as an introduction to Alberto Ferreira, the ranch manager. My hand had been forced. I sent an email to Mr. van der Sluyten gratefully accepting his invitation. The next day I had lunch with Harry. When I told him what I had done, he said he was delighted, and it wasn’t until the end of the meal that he told me he had a disclosure to make. There were complications in his dealings with Abner Brown that made it absolutely impossible for him even to think of a vacation, however brief, anytime soon. He hoped his absence would contribute to my productivity.
Alberto, who was waiting for me at the main house when I arrived, and apologized time and time again for not having come to the airport, showed me around. I was to be the sole inhabitant. Dona Marisa, the woman who would cook my meals, and her husband, Seu Wellington, a gardener doubling as a houseman, lived in a small structure down the road. They had a working landline telephone connection, and there was one in the main house as well, a necessity, Alberto explained, if I wanted to reach them or him, there being no cell-phone reception in this part of Pedra Negra. Likewise, there was no Internet connection either at the main house or at his, Alberto’s, office or house. One of Mr. van der Sluyten’s peeves was having to communicate with him by fax instead of email. Was that going to be a problem for me? Alberto asked. If it was he could look into the availability of a dial-up connection. I laughed and said that if it had been possible to get online in the house I would have disabled that function on my laptop. When I congratulated him on his English, which was completely fluent though occasionally embellished by unusual locutions, he told me that he had attended Purdue University’s school of agriculture.
