of the little buzzings in your head. This was not your garden-variety midlife crisis. This was no crisis at all. This was Revelation, Epiphany, Truth. Unfortunately, like most middle-aged men, I had no idea what to do with the truth. But I was open to suggestions.
I stopped at the gatehouse and looked in on the Allards, who were listening to the radio and reading. Ethel was engrossed in a copy of The New Republic, which may have been the only copy in Lattingtown, and George was perusing the Locust Valley Sentinel, which he's been reading for sixty years to keep abreast of who died, got married, had children, owed taxes, wanted zoning variances, or had a gripe they wanted to see in print.
I picked up Susan's and my mail, which is delivered to the gatehouse, and riffled through it on my way out. Ethel called after me, 'There was a gentleman here to see you. He didn't leave his name.'
Sometimes, as when the phone rings, you just know who's calling. And Ethel's stress on the word gentleman told me that this was no gentleman. I asked, 'A dark-haired man driving a black Cadillac?'
'Yes.'
Ethel never says 'sir', so George chimed in, 'Yes, sir. I told him you were not receiving visitors today. I hope that was all right.' He added, 'I didn't know him, and I didn't think you did.'
Or wanted to, George. I smiled at the image of Frank Bellarosa being told that Mr Sutter was not receiving today. I wondered if he knew that meant 'get lost'. George asked, 'What shall I say if he calls again, sir?' I replied as if I'd already thought this out, and I guess I must have. 'If I'm at home, show him in.'
'Yes, sir,' George replied with that smooth combination of professional disinterest and personal disagreement with the master. I left the gatehouse and climbed back into the Bronco.
I drove past the turnoff for my house and continued on toward the main house. Between my house and the main house, on Stanhope land, is the tennis court, whose upkeep Susan had taken on as her responsibility. Beyond the tennis court, the tree-lined lane rises, and I stopped the Bronco at the top of the rise and got out. Across a field of emerging wildflowers and mixed grasses, where the great lawn once stretched, stood Stanhope Hall.
The design of the mansion, according to Susan and as described in various architectural books that mention Stanhope Hall, was based on French and Italian Renaissance prototypes. However, the exterior is not European marble, but is built of good Yankee granite. Spaced along the front are attached columns or wall pilasters with Ionic capitals, and in the centre of the house is a high, open portico with freestanding classical columns. The roof is flat, with a balustraded parapet running around the perimeter of the mansion's three massive wings. The place looks a bit like the White House, actually, but better built. There were once formal gardens, of course, and they were planted on the descending terraces that surround the great house. Each year at this time the gardens still burst into bloom, wild with roses and laurel, yellow forsythia and multicoloured azaleas, the survival of the fittest, a celebration of nature's independence from man.
For all the European detail, there are distinctly American features to the house, including large picture windows in the rear, a greenhouse-style breakfast room to capture the rising sun, a solarium on the roof, and an American infrastructure of steel beams, heating ducts, good plumbing, and safe electricity.
But to answer Lester Remsen's question, there is nothing architecturally significant or unique about this misplaced European palace. Had McKim, Mead, or White designed a truly new American house, whatever that might have been in 1906, then the landmark people and all the rest of the preservationists would say, 'There is nothing like this in the whole country.' But the architects and their American clients of this period were not looking into the future, or even trying to create the present; they were looking back over their shoulders into a European past that had flowered and died even before the first block of granite arrived on this site. What these people were trying to create or re-create here in this new world is beyond me. I can't put myself in their minds or their hearts, but I can sympathize with their struggle for an identity, with their puzzlement which has troubled Americans from the very beginning – Who are we, where do we fit, where are we going? It occurred to me that these estates are not only architectural shams, but they are shams in a more profound way. Unlike their European models, these estates never produced a profitable stalk of wheat, a bucket of milk, or a bottle of wine. There was some hobby farming, to be sure, but the crops certainly didn't support the house and the servants and the Rolls-Royces. And no one who was hired to work the land here could have felt the sense of wonder and excitement that comes with the harvest and the assurance that the earth and the Lord, not the stock market, has provided.
Well, what do I know about that? Actually, my ancestors were mostly farmers and fishermen, and fishing I do understand, but my ability to coax things from the ground is limited to inedibles, as Mr Bellarosa pointed out. I recalled his red wagon filled with vegetable seedlings, purchased at top dollar from an upscale nursery, and I decided he was a sham, too.
This whole silly Gold Coast was a sham, an American anomaly, in a country that was an anomaly to the rest of the world. Well, no one ever said the truth would make you happy – only free.
Of course, there were other yet undiscovered truths, and there were other people's truths, but that was yet to come.
I looked out at Stanhope Hall and beyond. The large gazebo, another American accoutrement, was visible on the back lawn, surrounded by overhanging sycamores, and in the distance was the English hedge maze, a ridiculous amusement for young ladies and their fatuous beaux, all of whom should have spent more time in the love temple and less time running around hedge mazes. The land fell away beyond the hedges, but I could see the tops of the plum orchard, half of whose trees were now dead. The orchard, according to Susan, had originally been called the sacred grove, in the pagan fashion of nature worship. And in the centre of the grove is the Roman love temple, a small but perfectly proportioned round structure of buff marble columns that hold up a curved frieze carved with some very erotic scenes. In the domed roof is an opening, and the shaft of sunlight and moonlight that comes through at certain hours illuminates two pink marble statues, one of a man or a god, and the other of a busty Venus, locked in a nude embrace.
The purpose of this place mystifies me, but there were a number of them built on the more lavish estates. I can only conjecture that classical nudity was acceptable; Greco-Roman tits and ass was not just art, it was one of the few ways to see T and A in 1906, and only millionaires could afford this expensive thrill.
I don't know if young women, or even mature ladies, ventured into the plum grove to see this porn palace, but you can be sure that Susan and I make good use of it on summer evenings. Susan likes being a vestal virgin surprised by John the Barbarian while praying in the temple. She's been deflowered about sixty times, which may be a record.
The temple may be a sham, but it is a beautiful sham, and Susan is no virgin, and I'm an imperfect barbarian, but the heart-stopping orgasms are real, and real things happen to real people even in Disney World. I knew right then that despite my recent disenchantment with my enchanted world, I was going to miss this place.
I got back into my Bronco and headed home.
CHAPTER 8
Lester Remsen showed up at my Locust Valley office on Monday afternoon to take care of Mrs Lauderbach's ten-million-dollar problem. The actual figure according to Lester's research department was, as of three P.M. that day, $10,132,564 and a few cents. This included about sixty years of unpaid dividends on which, unfortunately, no interest was given.
Mrs Lauderbach had a hairdresser's appointment and could not join us, but I had power of attorney and was prepared to sign most of the brokerage house's paperwork on her behalf. Lester and I went to the second-floor law library, which had been the study of the Victorian house on Birch Hill Road. We spread out our paperwork on the library table.
Lester commented, 'This is one for the books. Good Lord, you'd think she'd be interested in this.'
I shrugged. 'She had grey roots.'
Lester smiled and we began the tedious paperwork in which I had less interest than Mrs Lauderbach. I ordered coffee as we neared the end of the task. Lester handed me a document and I handed him one. Lester seemed not to be focusing on the task at hand, and he laid down the paper, stayed silent for a moment, and said, 'She's how old? Seventy-eight?'
'She was when we started.'
Lester seemed to miss my drollness and asked, 'And you're also the attorney for her will?'
