The Last Summer of the Camperdowns (14 page)

“Oh, just one of those things, probably, the tricky business with your mother, that’s what I always thought anyway. As it turns out, just as well, look at the tragedies that have dogged Michael. Polly MacLeish, the heiress to the Salinger fortune, the girl he eventually married, died prematurely: a brain aneurysm. Went just like that! Died on the kitchen floor going over a dinner party menu with the cook. Shocking. The Lord works in mysterious ways, doesn’t He? Thankfully she never lived to see this terrible business with the younger boy. Something to be grateful for.” She paused, searching her conversational treasure trove for more bric-a-brac. “If you think about it, had your mother married Michael it could have been you that disappeared!”

“What?” It was as if she had flipped a switch and I had no control over the automatic response it generated.

“Oh, I’ve upset you . . .”

“Still scaring livestock and children, Mirabel?” My mother, noticing my distress from across the room, came up from behind Mrs. Whiffet and took up a spot directly in front of me.

“Oh, Greer, I feel terrible. It seems I’ve upset Riddle talking about the Devlin boy, the one who has simply vanished. It wasn’t my intention at all.”

“Riddle’s at a stage of life when feeling affronted is a biological imperative.” She stared skyward, appealing to the heavens for patience before turning around to face me. I found myself in between the two women. “Pull yourself together, Riddle. It’s not as if you knew him. Don’t worry, it’s not an epidemic. Even if he was abducted, fortunately for you, your father’s bank balance would discourage all but the most bush-league kidnapper.”

“Oh, my, you don’t change, Greer,” Mrs. Whiffet interrupted, face flushing.

“Something you and I share, Mirabel.”

“How long has it been, my dear?”

“Too long, darling.”

“You’re more beautiful than ever, I see.”

“How kind of you to say. And you are looking . . . well . . . So, tell me, what else were you two talking about?”

“Nothing,” I said, fighting for composure, as Mrs. Whiffet heaved a loud telltale sigh. My mother’s brows creased, her ears twitching like antennae. “Nothing worth mentioning anyway, I suspect,” she said.

“Not to flog a dead horse—cover your ears, Riddle—but isn’t it simply awful about Charlie Devlin, Greer? I was just saying to Gin this morning, that child is long dead and buried, you can be quite sure.”

“How can you be sure?” I couldn’t stand one more moment of this. “How do you know what happened to him? Nobody knows for sure. Maybe he’s fine. He could be fine. Just because you’re missing doesn’t mean you’re dead. Why do people always think they know everything?” I was panting by the end of my little speech.

“What in God’s name is wrong with you?” my mother demanded. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think Charlie Devlin was in our freezer in the basement.”

“Now who’s crazy?” I sputtered. “Can’t I have an opinion?”

“No, you can’t. It’s illegal, like drinking under age,” my mother said.

“It’s not the opinion that’s the problem, dear. It’s the intensity of the emotion. As I always say, emotion is the great enemy of conversation. Did you have some sort of crush on this boy?” Mrs. Whiffet said.

“No! How many times do I have to say it? I never met him!”

“You never need to say it again. You need to stop talking entirely. I keep telling her father, this is why boarding schools were invented.” My mother offered up her best falsely conciliatory gaze—imagine a spitting cobra composing a thank-you note written in venom.

“You never listen. You never pay attention to anything I say or think. You’re too busy showing off.” My desperation was bouncing off the walls. I was audibly pinging.

My mother searched the room with her eyes. “My kingdom for a kidnapper! Please carry on, Mirabel.”

“Oh, it’s all right. Hormones are bedeviling, or so I seem to recall.”

“Oh, my God,” I groaned, reaching for the edge of the buffet table to steady myself. I pulled a daisy from the centerpiece and begin to pluck nervously at the petals.

“Now. Where was I?” Mrs. Whiffet questioned herself. “Oh, yes. Recklessness no doubt played a role in what’s happened to Michael’s boy. And entitlement. Sometimes money and prominence can be a curse.”

“Spoken like someone who has never worked for a living. That aside, it’s a tragedy. He was a nice-looking boy,” my mother said. “Michael must be devastated.” From the incidental way she tacked on that last remark it was obvious she was conducting her own little intelligence mission.

“I’m sure he is, but you know Michael, stiff upper lip and all that. He never lets on. Oh, but they’re all like that, aren’t they? The ones that went to war, I mean. I think it did something to their emotional barometer, what they saw over there.”

I struggled to listen, hoping to distract myself from all that made my teeth chatter and my body shake. “What’s he like?” I asked, more blunt than considered. “Michael Devlin, what’s he like?”

“Why do you care?” my mother said, exasperation in her voice.

Mrs. Whiffet snapped to attention, drawing herself up in grand fashion, flaunting her equatorial circumference, bust the disconcerting size of a ship’s prow. The coiled tendrils of her hair bounced up and down, skirting the fleshy part of her ears. Forgetting herself, she stepped out of her heels, scratching her right ankle with her left foot. She was as excited as if someone had just announced the discovery of a new planet where the inhabitants dealt exclusively in the currency of small talk and gossip.

“Would you like to hear about him? I’ll tell you.”

My mother jabbed me in the ribs with her elbow, but I ignored her and nodded. Hear about my mother’s lost love? You bet I would.

Mrs. Whiffet laughed and licked her lips—she was about to dip her fingers into her favorite gooey dessert. “Greer, dear, would you mind passing me a pastry? I never could resist an authentic Sicilian cannoli.” She took a bite, flecks of confectioners’ sugar dotting her lips.

“Ricotta impasata! I’m in heaven! Now, where shall I begin?”

Chapter Thirteen

“M
ICHAEL DEVLIN WAS ONLY TWO YEARS OLD WHEN HIS PARENTS
got divorced. It was 1928. I remember clearly because that was the same year that Mr. Whiffet and I bought the property they owned next to the Cormorant Clock Farm. Or was it 1927? The Devlins owned several prestigious properties in the area. In those days, it was the fashion to buy up surrounding lands, the idea being that you make your own best neighbor. After the divorce, they sold some of their holdings. It was Mr. Whiffet’s idea to call the place Settlement House. Very wicked, I know. Eventually, of course, we bought the horse farm for Gin. He always had such issues with his teeth—not to mention his nervous system—he could never undertake the demands of a profession.”

Mrs. Whiffet was clearly relishing her turn onstage and didn’t appear to notice or care that my mother had begun to turn blue.

“Please do not resuscitate,” she said, leaning back and whispering in my ear. “Get to the point, Mirabel,” she urged unpleasantly.

“Never you mind, Greer. This is my story and I will tell it the way I want to tell it.”

This was a tale she had told more than once; Mirabel Whiffet was obviously invigorated by repetition. “Michael was a very rich boy, monogrammed by fate, as it were, famous by accident, yet most people still insisted on referring to him by the hated nickname, the Devlin baby.”

“It drove him crazy, being called the Devlin baby. Makes him sound more like a movie title than a person,” my mother said, unable to resist making her own contribution to a story they both knew by heart.

“They fought over him like jackals over a piece of meat,” Mrs. Whiffet said, poised like a vulture to pick over whatever remained. “People of that era chatted about him the way people talk about Leopold and Loeb or the Scopes trial or the Fatty Arbuckle scandal. I can still see him, his picture in all the papers, this dear little boy with the curly black hair and the fat cheeks. Of course, most people don’t know him in any meaningful way, which suits him just fine. He keeps to himself, doesn’t he, Greer?”

My mother shrugged her shoulders. “I suppose. I don’t pay that much attention to anything concerning Michael Devlin.”

We all knew that was a lie, but my mother’s little deceit only fueled Mrs. Whiffet’s zeal to continue. “His peers inhabited the world’s elite registries.” Mrs. Whiffet paused to look around the room, as if she were waiting for some sort of public acknowledgment of her own place among the socially anointed. “But you would need a divining stick to find him most of the time. Such an insular man, Michael. But deep. Very deep.”

She made it seem as if getting to know Michael Devlin was a form of lonely, perilous descent, like abseiling into Low’s Gully.

“He’s a tricky one to navigate, Michael, all those sharp angles. The Devlin baby isn’t exactly the Gerber baby.” Mrs. Whiffet was really enjoying herself.

“More like Rosemary’s baby,” my mother quipped.

“Of course there was his military service. He has quite a distinguished record, and with his money he could easily have avoided active duty. Give credit where credit is due.” Mrs. Whiffet was proud of her generous spirit and rewarded herself by reaching for a glass of champagne from a passing waiter. She took a noisy sip and returned to her captivated audience—me. “He and your father signed up right away. I always say, give them full marks. I mean, I liked both of them, Michael and Camp, though God knows, they were both difficult boys, but then people with money are expected to be temperamental, though I myself like an easier-going person when it comes to companionship.”

“Farmers are easygoing, Mirabel,” my mother said. “Conviviality is highly overrated.”

“How would you know?” I couldn’t resist.

“I beg your pardon?” my mother said.

“It can’t be easy, after all, to be a cultural phenomenon,” said Mrs. Whiffet, ignoring our skirmishing. Her conversation traveled an uneven road, sputtering one way, lurching another.

Michael Devlin, it was beginning to seem to me, wasn’t a man at all. He was an event, a circus performer, a figure of speech twirling in the lexicon like a poodle in a tutu.

“Well, but what did he expect?” my mother said in obvious agitation, waving her cigarette in the air, smoky fingers curling around her neck like a ghostly vise. “Mirabel, you know as well as I do, the rich and the famous can do many things. The one thing they can’t do is whine. Apparently someone decided that God should give Michael Devlin something to complain about.”

“Oh, dear, really, Greer, you go too far. The things you say. You have no heart.” Mrs. Whiffet fanned herself with her plump hand, batting back my mother’s words as if she were attempting to make her way through a sticky canopy of flying insects.

I was attempting with some difficulty to digest my mother’s pagan logic—her mordant philosophies, almost sadistically rancorous, tended to leave a bitter aftertaste—when a loud burlesque whooping went up from the other side of the ballroom, the sudden burst of exuberance pushing aside the topic of Michael Devlin.

Three cheers for Godfrey Camperdown! Hip hip hooray! Huzzahs all round followed by great spurts of laughter. My father was addressing the crowd, bottles uncorking and squeals of excitement as women in their little black dresses ducked to avoid all that was overflowing.

My mother looked pained. “Why your father is willing to work so hard for hoi polloi is beyond me.”

“Oh, Greer, you don’t mean it,” Mrs. Whiffet said, digging in to a slice of Black Forest cake that was roughly the size of the Black Forest. “Everyone loves him so.”

My mother was astonished. “You’re really not so silly as to believe that, are you?”

Then it went quiet except for an aroused ripple of expectation accompanied by soft amused murmurings and a smattering of applause as Camp began to sing “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” in that familiar confident tenor of his, the joy he took in performing for others so irresistible that it caused a spontaneous moment of reprieve, as if both sides in a battle had decided to lay down their arms.

Such sweetness, such a genial moment, golden candles flickering, swaying to the music, warm tones of my mother’s hair shining like the sun, the ballroom walls intimate as a honeycomb, dripping with pleasure, sticky with happiness. I listened to my father sing, delight like honey oozing from everywhere, from everyone, happiness, smiles, grace, everywhere glistening. My mother, in an unprecedented show of sentiment, reached for my hand and held it in her own, though she never once took her eyes off my father as he sang. Following her lead, I did the same, focused on Camp even though it was Greer who gave me cause to wonder.

Even when he’d finished singing—resisting, but just barely, everyone’s calls for an encore—the overall feeling of affability persisted. My mother gently withdrew her hand and struck up a lighthearted conversation with a couple of women who came up behind her. Camp, meanwhile, looking surprised, was extending his arm to someone who had emerged from the crowd, but the man seemed uninterested in the formalities, ignoring my father’s outstretched hand in favor of immediate engagement. Gesturing, he was talking animatedly, Camp leaning in and listening intently, brow line creasing. Glancing away for a second, I turned to see what was making my mother laugh.

Somewhere in the near background, vague and unformed, I heard the sounds of excited voices, hollering, shouting, giving orders, excitement rapidly turning into alarm as the velveteen party chatter gave way to chipped sounds of skirmish, pandemonium.

“Jesus Christ!” a male voice hollered.

“Oh, my God,” my mother said amidst a backdrop of shrieks and screams, covering her mouth.

“What’s happening?” Mrs. Whiffet cried, clutching my forearm as I stood on my tiptoes and watched my father disappear into a sudden sinkhole, an intense pocket of energy exploding in the center of the room, the crowd receding and then flowing back into place, chairs and tables overturning, crash of glass and cutlery, dishes shattering.

I walked and then ran, ignoring my mother’s orders to come back, come back here right now, and pushed my way through all those people, someone’s elbow ricocheting off someone’s shoulder and into my jaw as I squirmed and wiggled my way to the center of it all where my father stood over Michael Devlin who half sat, half lay on the floor, one hand partly covering his right eye, which had already begun to redden and swell. He was staring up and sideways at my father, watching him, shaking his head slowly back and forth, not talking, as arms from everywhere appeared like tentacles, pulling him up to his feet and away, arms on his shoulders, his neck, around his waist as he fought to free himself.

“Take your hands off me,” he said in the manner of someone unaccustomed to restraint, blinking profusely, involuntary tears pouring down his cheek, his hand to his wounded eye.

“They were talking privately. Quite an intense conversation, it seemed, when Camp hauled off and socked him right in the face,” the woman beside me said to her friend. “Imagine!”

The man on the receiving end of my father’s memorable left hook gradually took form in front of me, in vivid drifts of active color: tall, slim, black hair, ivory skin, navy blue eyes, dark blue bespoke suit.

I knew who he was right away. I recognized Michael Devlin from newspaper photos, from the recent cover of
Look
magazine, from the spread in
Life
magazine, from the distant view I had of him that afternoon in Wellfleet. He was one of those men who could change the weather in the room just by showing up.

A young man, college age, eighteen or nineteen, pushing and pulling, winding in and out, made his way to the front of the crowd.

“Dad!” Stunned, he confronted his father. “Holy shit, what’s going on?”

“Michael!” my mother said, gasping, finally reaching my father, standing at his side. “Camp, what’s the matter with you? How could you? Have you gone mad?”

“Dad, what the hell?” Michael’s son gestured helplessly as I moved in closer to get a better look. His face obscured, I noticed with a start his russet hair and lean athletic build. The boy I had seen on horseback.

“Ask him. Ask the candidate. He’s in a better position to answer you than I am.”

Everyone regarded my father expectantly. Camp scanned the room, took its temperature and opted against any sort of public explanation. He ignored the rest of us and spoke directly to Michael Devlin, talked to him in low tones as if there was no one else in the room, as if they were all alone on a boat in the middle of the ocean. The water was ominously calm.

“There’s a butler’s pantry off the kitchen,” he said. “Why don’t we take this to someplace private?”

Ignoring his son’s protests, hand cupped over his eye like a patch, Michael Devlin headed toward the kitchen area, followed by Camp.

“Stay here, Harry,” Michael instructed his son. “Don’t worry. It will be fine.”

“Jesus, Dad . . .”

Michael walked past my mother, his arm brushing against her arm. She stiffened; her cheeks temporarily lost their color as the crowd parted to let both men pass.

“Hello, Greer,” he said. “It’s been a long time.” Swerving slightly, he leaned into her. “You’ve still got it, I see.”

“How dare you?” she said as I looked on, fascinated.

“Oh, my! Whatever happened to decorum?” Mrs. Whiffet was stuck in a loop. Like a farm collie with an ungovernable compulsion to goose stray sheep, she was restricted by breeding to a specific narrow range of reactions that caused her to alternate between feeling overwrought and feeling overwhelmed.

“Told you there was a story,” a reporter mumbled aloud to the photographer standing next to him, camera in its holster. “I think I’ll leave it to the Hedda Hopper crowd. Trite is their bailiwick, not mine.”

My father studied both Michael and my mother from across the room as everyone else watched him, trying to chart his response. His expression gave away nothing. It struck me, despite his volatility, just what a cool customer Camp could be. He stood off by himself, waiting for an aide to find the key that would unlock the door to the butler’s pantry.

Harry Devlin looked on in disbelief, shifting his gaze back and forth between his father and my mother, squinting, forehead furrowed in his quest for interpretation, shielding his eyes with his hand as if he were staring directly into the sun. His father looked mildly embarrassed and a little bit amused. Next to his son’s athletic intensity, there was something vaguely dissolute and of the country club about Michael Devlin, smoky scent of the indifferent American expat.

I wanted to look away but it was riveting. I was conscious of staring at Michael but I couldn’t help myself. Pulverized by events, all I could do was gawk. Unable to contain my curiosity, embarrassed but thrilled—my parents had never been so interesting to me as they were in that moment, to say nothing of the Devlins. As I moved in for a closer look at his father, Harry glanced up at me. Boom! I recoiled from the impact. I had seen that face before in newspapers, in magazines, on TV. Charlie Devlin was wearing it.

“This has been the most extraordinary evening!” Mrs. Whiffet exclaimed, overheated and perspiring, licking caramel sauce from her pudgy fingers, a dusting of pastry on her upper lip.