I don’t know where my mother got her obsession with the upper crust. Sure, her family was an old one in Sag Harbor, and to hear her you could practically 70 / SUSAN ISAACS
see portraits of bearded Eastons in the brass-buttoned uniforms of whaling boat captains. But there were no portraits; I’d biked up to the Sag Harbor Library in eighth grade and learned there was absolutely no basis for ancestor worship.
Early Eastons might have gone to sea, but they’d obviously been ordinary sailors: guys with bowlegs and black stumps for teeth. Her old man, who died before I was born, had sold tickets for a ferry company that had the Sag Harbor and New London, Connecticut, route.
Still, my mother was convinced, despite all hard evidence to the contrary, that she was a gentlewoman. She didn’t give a damn about the local South Fork female elite, the wives of lawyers, doctors, successful farmers, or even the moneyed Yanks—maybe because they all knew who she was, or wasn’t.
No, she lived for Memorial Day, when her “friends” opened up their summer houses out here. Even when we were kids, she’d sit at the supper table and talk about her New York
“friends.” Quality People.
Her friends, of course, were not her friends but her customers, summer women who came to the grand old houses,
“cottages” in Southampton—like the one Sy bought—for the summer. She’d go on and on about Mrs. Oliver Sackett’s hand-embroidered-in-England slips (“Divine, teeny stitches!”), or the thirty-one (“Norell! Mainbocher! Chanel!”) dresses Mrs. Quentin Dahlmaier had ordered from the main branch in New York, one for every night of the month of July.
Bottom line? My mother felt fucked every single day of her life because she didn’t have a driver (“Never say ‘chauffeur’!” she warned Easton; “it’s nouveau riche”) and a maid and a sable coat. She didn’t even have a roof that didn’t leak.
And I think that’s why I got out from under her roof as often as I could. Sitting over a plate of her MAGIC HOUR / 71
spécialité de la maison, macaroni and undiluted Campbell’s Cheddar Cheese Soup (which, of course, she knew was not Quality, but which she announced was Great Fun), listening to her go on to Easton in her throaty voice—she was a heavy smoker and wound up sounding like Queen Elizabeth with laryngitis—Jesus. She’d talk about how Mrs. Gabriel Walker (“one of the Bundy sisters, from Philadelphia”) was mad for nubby linen, absolutely mad…. Her conversation was directed to Easton, never to me. But then she knew and I knew that would be a waste of time.
I did not belong in that house. Like my old man, I was not Quality.
“Had Mr. Spencer to the best of your knowledge received any threatening messages or phone calls?” Robby Kurz was asking Lindsay Keefe.
You could tell Robby had gotten up extra early to get spiffy. He’d arranged a yellow handkerchief in the breast pocket of his brown plaid jacket into points. The smell of his double dose of hairspray overpowered the scent arising from a huge bowl of white roses on the table in front of the couch he and I were sitting on.
“Of course there were no threats.” Lindsay exhaled, a sharp, pissed-off breath between pursed lips. She was trying very hard to be patient. “What do you expect? That his killer went up to him and announced: ‘You’re a dead man’? And there were no heavy-breather phone calls either.” For a woman in shock, Lindsay sounded clearheaded. In fact, completely self-possessed, not a hint of hysteria. The batshit, Valiumed, sensitive artiste her agent had described could have been some other person.
Even though I’d caught a glimpse of her the night before, in the back of my mind I must have been 72 / SUSAN ISAACS
expecting a fifteen-foot-tall Goddess of Film, a gargantuan babe with enormous, glistening lips and colossal legs that could crush any man caught between them. But Lindsay, standing by the window, fingering the sheer white curtain, was of ordinary height, although so small-boned and petite (except for her world-famous tits) that she looked as if she’d been created solely to make men feel big, important. In her daintiness, she must have been a perfect match for Sy. Two exquisite pocket-size people: a separate species.
But Sy had been an ordinary-looking man. Lindsay Keefe’s looks were extraordinary. No wonder she’d gone from doing Greek tragedies in little theaters in little midwestern cities to making avant-garde films in Europe to being an American movie star. Her features were beautiful. Okay, they didn’t add up to perfection, but they came damn close. (Movie stars usually have one annoying flaw—a wen, a strawberry mark that you can’t ignore, one defect that makes you wonder why they couldn’t pop a few thou for a plastic surgeon. Lindsay had a black mole on her neck, at the spot where a guy’s Adams apple is. It was a thing you’d never think about on a regular person, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off it.) Her skin was the palest possible, the kind where you can almost picture the whole blood vessel network underneath.
Her hair was some miraculous white-blond, but with half silver, half gold overtones. And the eyes: pure black.
She’d gotten herself up all in white. A long, filmy skirt and a plain, schoolgirl blouse. The living room was all white also, like a stage set designed solely to flatter blondes. There were a lot of what I’m sure were antiques, but solid stuff: fat couches and chairs covered in different materials—but all whites too, various shades of it, so it became a kind of color.
“If you want to know the truth,” Lindsay went on, MAGIC
