Authors: Nelson DeMille
I guess that was quicker than doing pantomime. I said, “They’re great kids.”
“They were so happy they were able to do this for their father.”
I was getting a little emotional, so I joked, “Where’s my tie?”
“Oh, it didn’t look as good here as it did in the store. I’ll bring it back.”
I wonder why things look different in the store for the ladies. Lighting? Well, it must have been really awful. I said, “I’ll take the boat. Give the tie to your father.”
“Good idea. As soon as the kids get here, we’ll go out and see these boats.” She added, “They want to help.”
Well, it was their money. Actually, it was William’s money, which made this a really great gift. I couldn’t wait to tell Cheap Willie that he’d helped out with my two-hundred-thousand-dollar Father’s Day present—at least with the down payment. We’d need to finance the rest, and I wasn’t sure if everyone’s allowance and the trust fund distributions would be rolling in after today. This was a very appropriate and heartwarming gift to me, but it was also pure folly. Nevertheless, it’s the thought that counts.
Susan said, suggestively, “Finish your breakfast, and I’ll give you another gift.”
The hell with breakfast. Well . . . maybe one more sausage.
She hopped out of bed and said, “You have to keep your hat on.” She explained, “You’re a sailor who’s washed ashore in a storm, and I’m the lonely wife of a seaman whom I haven’t seen in years. And I’m nursing you back to health, and I just came in to take your breakfast tray.”
“Okay.” Don’t take it too far.
She moved to the side of the bed and asked, “Is there anything else I can get for you, sir?”
“Well—”
“Oh, sir, how is that tray rising by itself?”
I smiled. “Well . . .”
“Let me take that, sir, before it topples.”
She put the tray on the dresser, then came back to the bed and said, “With your permission, sir, I will massage ointment on your injured private parts.”
I tipped my hat and said, “Permission granted.”
S
o I didn’t get much breakfast, but I don’t have a lot of trouble choosing between sex and food.
Carolyn and Edward came in on the 9:28 train, and Susan picked them up at the station.
They gave me a kiss and hug for Father’s Day, and a nice card that had a picture of a sailboat on it. I thanked them for the real sailboat, and they were beaming with the pure joy of giving.
Edward said, “Welcome home, Dad.”
Carolyn said, “You are
our
Father’s Day present.”
Susan got weepy, and so did Sophie, and even Carolyn, usually tough as nails, wiped her eyes. Edward and I, real men, just cleared our throats.
I didn’t share with the children my thoughts that their funds to pay for this could soon dry up. Realistically, we’d have the answer to that before anyone wrote out a check, so I wasn’t too concerned. The worst scenario was that they’d be disappointed that they couldn’t follow through with their gift. And they’d know whom to blame for that. On that subject, I did
not
remind them, “Be very nice to Grandpa and Grandma.” I said, however, “Let’s sail to Hilton Head in August.”
Susan advised me, “Let’s not mention this to my parents today.”
“Right. We’ll surprise them in August.” Susan did not second that. Bottom line here, it was still the Stanhope money that colored what we did and said. Well, hopefully, that would end soon.
Anyway, we got into the Lexus and went out to look at a few boats.
The first two, an Alden forty-seven-footer and a Hinckley forty-three-footer, were in public marinas, and we inspected them from the dock.
The next one, an old forty-one-foot Hinckley, was docked at a private house on Manhasset Bay, and we called ahead, and the owner showed it to us. The fourth boat, a forty-five-foot Morgan 454, was moored at Seawanhaka, and we had a club launch take us out to it, but we didn’t go aboard. The fifth, a 44 C&C, was also at Seawanhaka, but the launch pilot said the family had taken it out for the day. He did tell us it was a beautiful boat.
Back at the club, there was a barbecue being set up on the lawn for Father’s Day, and I suggested to Susan, out of earshot of the children, “Why don’t we take your parents here instead of having dinner at home? Then your father and I can take that Morgan out later and see how it handles.”
She reminded me, “We don’t want to mention this to him.”
“I think he and I can have a very productive man-to-man talk in the middle of the Sound.”
She must have misunderstood me, because she said, “John, threatening to drown my father on Father’s Day is not nice.”
“
What
are you talking about?” I wondered if he was still a good swimmer.
We all sat on the back porch and had Bloody Marys. Susan asked me, “So, did you see anything you liked?”
I replied, “They were all great boats. We need to make some dates to take them out and see how they handle.” I added, “And I want to see that C&C that was out.”
Edward said, “I liked the Morgan. It reminds me of the one we had.”
Carolyn agreed, “That would be big enough for Dad and Mom to take to Europe.”
So the Sutters sat there on the porch, sipping Bloody Marys and watching the sunlight sparkle on the bay, and the sailboats at their moorings, their bows pointed at the incoming tide, talking about which yacht we liked best. It really doesn’t get much better than this, which was probably what the passengers on the
Titanic
were thinking before they hit the iceberg.
B
efore we went home to get ready for the Stanhopes and my mother, we stopped at Locust Valley Cemetery.
Susan, Edward, and Carolyn had been here for my father’s burial, but maybe not since then, so I checked at the office for the location of the grave of Joseph Sutter, while Susan bought flowers from a vendor who had set up shop near the gate.
We walked on a winding, tree-lined road through the parklike cemetery. The headstones here were no more than a foot high, and not visible among all the plantings, which created the illusion that this was a nature preserve or a botanical garden.
The Stanhope cemetery off in the distance was sectioned off by a hedge and a wrought-iron fence, and the tombstones and mausoleums in there were more grandiose, of course—unless you had been a servant—and there was no mistaking that you were walking among the dead. Here, I felt, you had been returned to nature. This is where I wanted to be—at least five hundred yards from the closest Stanhope. Maybe I could talk Susan into breaking a family tradition—or maybe we’d all be banished to a public cemetery anyway.
There were a number of people in the cemetery on this sunny Father’s Day, and I could see bouquets of flowers on many of the graves, as well as small American flags stuck into the earth beside the headstones of those who’d been veterans.
Susan said, “We need to come back here next week with a flag for your father’s grave.”
I hoped we weren’t back here next week for eternity. But maybe I should stop at the sales office just in case.
We found the grave of Joseph Whitman Sutter. Like most of the others, it was a small white granite slab, about a foot high, and except for the engraved lettering, it looked more like a low bench than a gravestone.
In addition to his name and dates of birth and death, it also said,
Husband and Father
, along with the words,
In Our Hearts, You Live Forever
.
To the right of Joseph’s grave was an empty plot, no doubt reserved for Harriet.
There was already a bouquet of flowers resting on my father’s stone, and I assumed that was from my mother, notwithstanding her aversion to cut flowers—though maybe it was from a secret girlfriend. That would be nice. I had to ask Harriet if she’d been here today.
As I looked at my father’s grave, I had mixed memories of this man. He was gentle—too gentle—a loving husband—bordering on uxorious—and a decent, though somewhat distant father. In that respect, he was a product of his generation and his class, so no blame was attached—though I’d have liked him to have been more affectionate toward Emily. As for me, well, we worked together, father and son, and it wasn’t easy for either of us. I would have left Perkins, Perkins, Sutter and Reynolds, but he’d really wanted me to stay and carry on the family name in this old, established practice. If that was meant to be his immortality, then I’m sure he was disappointed when the other partners forced me out. He’d been in semi-retirement by then, but after I left he returned full-time, and died one night in his office.
Anyway, my brief criminal defense career was behind me—unless I gave Carmine Caputo or Jack Weinstein a call—and more to the point, Joseph Sutter’s whole life was behind him. And basically, it had been a good life, partly because he and my mother had had an oddly good marriage. They never should have had children, but they had sex before birth control pills, and things happen when you’ve had one cocktail too many. That was probably how half my generation was born.
One time, when Joseph was in an unusually reflective and candid mood, he’d said to me, “I should have been killed in France about ten times—so every day is a gift.” Indeed. I felt the same way after three years at sea.
Susan had her arm around me, and Edward and Carolyn stood off to the side, staring quietly at Grandpa’s grave.
I placed the bouquet of flowers beside the other bouquet and said to him, “I’m home, Dad.”
M
y mother arrived first, and I could see that she and her grandchildren were honestly fond of one another. Too bad it wasn’t Harriet who had the hundred million.
We sat on the patio with a pitcher of sangria, which was as close to a third world drink as I could come up with for Harriet. I said to her, “For every bottle of wine we drink, a rice farmer in Bangladesh gets a Scotch and soda.”
Susan and Harriet are on the same page when it comes to organic food, so we snacked on bowls of bat shit or something, and chatted pleasantly.
I was actually starting to like my mother, which was easy to do if I blotted out everything from my birth until about ten minutes ago. But seriously, she was a person who, if nothing else, cared; she cared about the wrong things, or cared about the right things in the wrong way, but at least she was engaged in life.
On that subject, I wondered what she had spoken to Father Hunnings about. And who actually approached whom? Harriet, like Ethel, seemed to care more about the oppressed people of the world, whom she’d never met, and about animals and trees that never hugged
her
, than about the people around her, such as her son and daughter. But there seemed to be a new Harriet taking form—one who cared about her grandchildren, and who also spoke to her priest about her estrangement from her son. What was she up to? Well, maybe with Ethel’s death, Harriet had caught a glimpse of her own mortality, and she’d realized that the route to heaven began at home.
Harriet was asking Carolyn and Edward about their jobs, and she seemed genuinely interested, though with Carolyn she had some problems with the criminal justice system. And on the subject of criminals, I wondered if Anthony Bellarosa had come out of hiding to be with his family for Father’s Day. Most probably not, but if he had, I’d know about it because, as per my suggestion to Felix Mancuso, the FBI or the NYPD were staking out the Santa Lucia church cemetery in Brooklyn where Frank Bellarosa had been laid to rest.
Anna would be at the cemetery, and as per Anna, so would Frank’s other two sons, Frankie and Tommy, and maybe Megan and her kids as well. Although Megan never knew her father-in-law, one of the conditions of marrying into an Italian family was the requirement to visit the graves of every family member who’d died in the last century.
According to Mancuso, Mom’s house in Brooklyn and Alhambra Estates were being watched all day. Personally, I didn’t think Anthony would come out of his hole, especially today when he knew the FBI would be watching his and his mother’s house. But Anthony
might
visit his father’s grave. And if Uncle Sal had the same thought, Anthony might be dead in the cemetery before he got arrested.
Anyway, Harriet and Carolyn had exhausted the subject of a bachelor of arts degree in humanities for serial killers, and Harriet asked me, “Why are there armed guards at the gate?”
I explained, “Mr. Nasim thinks the ayatollahs are after him.” I concluded, “I blame our government for that.”
Harriet knows when I’m being provocative, and she never rises to the bait. More importantly, according to Susan, Harriet didn’t know about Anthony Bellarosa living next door; if she had, she’d insist that we share that disturbing fact with Edward and Carolyn. When we were young, Harriet used to say things to me and to Emily like, “Your father has a bad heart, and he may die at any time, so you should be prepared for that.” I think, perhaps, she’d gotten hold of a very strange book on how to raise children.
In any case, Edward and Carolyn and everyone else just assumed that the armed guards had been hired by Nasim for his stated reasons; no one, so far, had thought there might be a second explanation for the security.
Nevertheless, I changed the subject to Ethel’s wake and burial, which led me into telling Harriet, “We all went to visit Dad’s grave today.”
My mother looked at me, but did not reply. Well, this was still a sore subject with her. I’d missed the funeral, and my reason for that—I was at sea and didn’t know my father had died—was not cutting it. As far as she was concerned, this was just another example of her son never missing a chance to cause his mother hurt and pain.
I asked her, “Were you there today?” Say no. Please say no.
She replied, “I left a bouquet on the headstone. Didn’t you see it?”
“We did. But I know how you feel about cut flowers.” So I thought Dad had a girlfriend. “So I wasn’t sure that was you.”
“Who else would leave flowers on his grave?”
Maybe Lola, the receptionist with the big jugs, or Jackie, the hot office manager. I replied, “I don’t know. I’m just pointing out that you don’t approve of cut flowers.”