FrostLine (8 page)

She did not go so far as to tell me to enjoy myself, though she did agree that King had lucked out with a perfectly beautiful day. A Canadian high-pressure system had slipped into the region under a crisp blue sky and the light was so pure that every painter in the state could dream of being Constable.

I banished the Olds to the barn and fired up the 1979 Fiat Spyder 2000 my mother had left when she moved back to her farm. The roadster, a rich Italian shade of British racing green, had been a love gift from my father. But Mom was too shy to drive something so “flashy” around Newbury. So its body was in mint condition, the engine barely broken in. Top down, reflections of trees undulating darkly on its shapely hood, it conveyed me in splendor appropriate to a lake-christening at Fox Trot.

Julia Devlin was the first person I saw. She was guarding the gate with a guest list and party smile and made a vastly better first impression than the Chevalley boys. She looked sleek in a sleeveless blouse. Her long arms rippled with a hint of muscle and her skin tanned by the summer sun. A Liberty floral skirt fell straight to her sandals. The filmy cloth, slit to her knee, hinted at legs as sleek as her arms, and I found myself hoping it would be the sort of party where everyone threw off their clothes and jumped into the lake.

“I like your car,” she greeted me.

“Nice to see you again,” I greeted her.

She smiled welcomingly. “And you are Mr…?”

Oh, wonderful. “Ben Abbott,” I helped her. “Real estate. Last March?”

“Of course. Drive on up the drive. There's valet parking.”

“Are you stuck on gate duty all day?”

“I'm not stuck. I get to meet our guests while they're still sober.”

“How about I bring you a glass of champagne after everyone arrives?”

“Oh, that's nice. But I'm afraid they'll be dribbling in all afternoon. Have a nice time.” Her eye drifted to her clipboard. “Mr. Abbott.”

The phrase “struck out” seemed inadequate.

Henry King's lake, first visible when the drive emerged from the gentrified woodlot, was big enough to be blue. It was a startling sight that tore the eye from the new house, taming that structure and somewhat reducing its enormousness. Yet another example of landscape designers pulling overblown architects' irons out of the fire.

A gigantic bright red hot air balloon was soaring above the house, tethered to a windlass in the motorcourt. The high school kids parking cars told me it was to show Mr. King's guests Fox Trot's just-completed landscape design. A prancing fox adorned the bag.

“Ben!”

I looked up.

Newbury's first selectman leaned from the wicker passenger basket waving a champagne bottle, which, when our smiles met, she slipped between her lips. An on-again-off-again “item,” to use Henry King's word, Vicky and I were still off—thanks to transgressions on my part, and a new, less-forgiving attitude on hers—and the tenderly ministered champagne bottle was a message:
suffer.

“Let down your hair.”

Vicky had the hair for it, yards of beautiful Rapunzel tresses curled and heaped and framing her delicate features like a baroque picture frame carved of chestnut. But it was Tim Hall, my lawyer and Vicky's ever-hopeful beau, who instructed the balloon's operators. The winchman dragged the balloon out of the sky and I clambered into the basket. Tim looped a steadying arm around Vicky's waist. The burner roared and belched fire and we floated swiftly into the blue, whisking over the house's slate roof.

Fox Trot lay under us, the strict geometry of the house and gardens in orderly contrast to the sprawling farms and woods, and the whimsically natural shore of the lake. The field north of the lake had been planted in lawn, the lower ground to the south left wooded. The dam at the far end was still bright with raw concrete. Over the spillway bowed a bridge that looked like enterprising burglars had helicoptered it in from Central Park.

It was darned near perfect. The only flaw, if one could call it a flaw—and those who felt art must concede
something
to fate would regard it more benevolently than control freaks—was the long, narrow pasture that cut, to use King's word, into the manicured lawns like a knife. A rusty knife, as Mr. Butler had been using it to dump old refrigerators and tractor tires.

***

Seeking out my host and hostess, I bumped into friends from Newbury—Scooter and Eleanor MacKay, Ira Roth, Al and Babs Bell, and some of the country club crowd, appropriately dazzled—and various megabucks New Yorkers, including a couple of wary erstwhile colleagues from the Street, who looked afraid I'd ask them for a job.

Bertram Wills, King's tame former secretary of state, greeted me vaguely. He was hovering near Mrs. King and looking grandly statesmanlike in a splendid linen suit. When Al Bell, whose namesake ancestor had married into social prominence after inventing the telephone, asked whether Henry King had negotiated the weather with the Pope, Wills gripped his side and chuckled, “Very funny, Al. Very funny.”

King's retired CIA pet was there, too, muttering orders to the waiters from the side of his mouth. Sunlight wasn't kind to Josh Wiggens: Scotch was bloating his chiseled face. I gave him a nod and was not surprised when he snubbed me.

I
was
surprised, however, to see the handsome butler King had fired last March. “Welcome back, Jenkins.”

I offered my hand. He returned his stiff bow. “Thank you, sir, Mr. Abbott.” With the caterers running things, he looked edgy as a general reliant on his predecessor's colonels.

“I'm a little surprised to see you here. That was a memorable exit.”

Jenkins gathered himself with brittle dignity. “Madame insisted I return.” Tearing reverent eyes from “Madame,” who was flitting about prettily, he beckoned a waiter to refill my glass.

I climbed to the highest terrace where Henry King was surrounded by guests. He looked tired, pouchy under the eyes, and somewhat overdressed in a blue suit. He seemed nervous. His eyes were skipping everywhere, like an impresario counting the house. His champagne glass, filled with sparkling water, slipped from his hand. An agile waiter caught it and returned it gracefully, only to be chewed out for spilling a drop on the diplomat's sleeve.

King remembered me, if not fondly. His greeting, a pointed inquiry about Connie's health, made it clear that my invitation had come on my aunt's Blue Book coattails. But it was far too happy a day for my presence to blunt his pleasure. Everything he had ever worked for had come together in Lake Vixen. No expense had been spared to celebrate, no generosity overlooked.

Servants were legion, passing hors d'oeuvres in quantities to satisfy Catherine the Great and delicacy to delight Marie Antoinette. Had the July rains not filled his lake, it would have brimmed from spillage of champagne: magnums of Veuve Clicquot—no mere Moët at Fox Trot—poured liberally by staff wandering the terraces; more magnums stationed strategically about the walks in shaded ice buckets in the event a glass went suddenly dry while a guest was lost in a boxwood maze or deep in the sunken garden. But I do not suggest that my New England eye was offended by ostentation, for the choice of Veuve Clicquot, like the lovely food and the imaginative balloon ride, seemed determined by generosity as much as display.

Mrs. King proved to be generous, too, introducing me to her friends, including the wife of the British Ambassador, whom I had been coveting from a distance. Tall and slim, she had silver-gray hair and the level gaze of a woman who enjoyed what she wanted.

I think we surprised each other. We were both reading Trollope that summer—
The Way We Live Now
—I for the first time, Fiona for the third. She had children about to enter university, and when the subject of little Alison came up we discussed horses. Occasionally she checked that the ambassador was happily occupied.

“Do you know the young woman talking to my husband?”

“Vicky McLachlan. Our first selectman. Would you like to meet her?”

“No. No. He looks content.”

Smitten was the more accurate word, but here I was smitten too, so who was I to talk?

Henry King bustled over repeatedly with guests in tow. He seemed miffed that I was monopolizing a star guest, and finally inquired, “Has Mr. Abbott sold you a house, yet, Lady Fiona?” proudly stressing the very “Lady” that she had invited me to abjure.

“Why ever would he?” she asked coolly.

“Didn't he tell you he's a real estate agent?”

“Of course not.”

But King was persistent—and no slouch at the manners-as-power game—dragging personage after personage over to be introduced. The subtext, I began to scope out, involved British patents for a ceramic engine. The Japanese wanted to manufacture it. The British preferred to establish the factories in Britain, with Japanese money.

Aware that for the wife of the ambassador this was a working party, I started to ease out of it, to make room for an Osaka industrialist accompanied by a New York publicist whose name had been synonymous with 1990s gluttony. Fiona laid her hand on my arm and smiled a clear message that I was free to leave her if I cared to spend the rest of the afternoon with ordinary women.

The thump-clack of an old diesel Farmall interrupted King's introduction of yet another industrialist. “Oh look!” the publicity lady cried.

The bright red tractor came rolling down the long, narrow, sloping pasture that Mr. Butler had leased from Mr. Zarega. Mr. Butler was driving, dressed in blue overalls and a dirty tee shirt, his long hair flying in the breeze. The flatbed trailer he was towing was piled high with green silage.

“Our local farmer,” Henry King explained in a hearty voice debunked by a tight smile. As Mr. Butler drew near, preceded pungently by whiffs of exhaust, King walked toward the fence and waved, “Hello neighbor.”

Mr. Butler never looked up. He stopped the machine, tipped the trailer to dump the silage, blew three long, loud blasts on a horn, and thump-clattered back up the hill.

“Oh Henry,” the publicist gushed. “It's so picturesque.”

Indeed it was. The tractor was red as kindergarten crayons, Mr. Butler as long-haired as a nineteenth century agrarian, his overalls as blue as the star field of the flag. The stink of diesel and silage weren't so picturesque but the breeze was dissipating it somewhat.

“I abhor flies,” muttered Fiona, “and I rather doubt old Henry's thought to lay on insect repellant.” A country girl from Essex, the British Ambassador's wife saw what was coming long before King did.

“I've got a little in the car,” I said. “Would you—”

“Quickly.”

We hurried around the house to the motorcourt and found my mom's Fiat tucked among the Mercedes and Land Rovers, looking as bored as an Italian countess at a suburban country club. I got the mini can of Deep Woods
off
! I keep in the glove compartment for swamp showings, and sprayed Fiona's arms and spritzed her fingertips so she could do her face. Then I sprayed my hands and did my face and rubbed a little in my hair.

Our eyes met. We were well protected now—excessively so for a minor fly invasion, a prejudiced observer like her husband might say—with one major exception that neither was inclined to ignore. I'd had just enough champagne to answer the dare in her gaze with, “May I?”

“Please.” She lifted her skirt.

I knelt and sprayed. She eeked that it was cold, much to the amusement of the parking kids who seemed to think I was taking advantage of the situation. I asked her to turn around, then back again, and after awhile, she said, “I think that's quite enough.”

I rose reluctantly and we walked back to the party, arriving on the terrace just as the woman who thought Farmer Butler picturesque cried, “Oh look! Cows!”

Mr. Butler was urging them through the gate at the top of the pasture. He needn't have bothered. Ordinarily they'd mosey in, slowly, while their leaders sampled the grass. But either the sniff or sight of the silage, or the chow-time signal of the horn bore them down the long meadow like steeds of the Light Brigade.

Vicky drifted our way, eying the ambassador's wife like a candidate for a flogging. I reached out quickly and whisked her cheek with my hand.

“What are you doing?”

“Fly,” I said, holding its body up for inspection. “Here, put some
off
! on. And spray Tim, while you're at it. He's looking vulnerable.”

Vicky shook the can dubiously. “I'm surprised there's any left. Her pantyhose are soaked.”

“Stockings.”

“What?”

“She's not wearing pantyhose.”

“You should not be allowed out with adults.”

“The British Ambassador seems to like you.”

“We were discussing the English roots of New England government.”

“
I
shouldn't be allowed out with adults? Benedict Arnold ran that line on Betsy Ross.”

Here and there around the terrace, conversation faltered and guests waved the air as a swarm sated on cow arrived to sample human. It was a minor annoyance, hardly noticed at first, even when a bare-shouldered lady ran indoors and others herded after her. But when the Osaka industrialist stalked toward the motorcourt, pressing an ice cube to a welt on his cheek, Henry King started yelling at the caterers.

I drained another glass of champagne and admired the cool waters of Lake Vixen. Fiona glided alongside, inquiring, “Do you suppose that old farmer did that deliberately?”

“Very.”

“Poor Henry,” she said. “Such a gift for antagonism—
What's that
?”

She had turned deathly pale. I had felt it too, an urgent thump up from the ground, like the shockwave of a distant explosion.

Fiona flung a frightened look at her husband, saw he was all right, and recovered with a nervous laugh. “I thought we were back in Jerusalem—good Lord! Look!”