The Last Summer of the Camperdowns (4 page)
Money was the thing we never talked about publicly but never stopped discussing privately. Money was the crazy aunt we kept locked in the attic, our lives measured in food trays and inelegant deceptions. “Aunt Loretta? Oh, she’s decided to stay on in Palm Beach. Sometimes we wonder if she will ever make her way back here.” In a way, it was part of the shared delusion of our household, this idea that we were broke. We didn’t have the kind of money needed to maintain a position of tribal significance, which was an ongoing source of frustration, especially to my mother. She had a generous annuity and could still have commanded a big salary if she decided to perform again.
Camp wasn’t interested in money, maybe because he’d grown up with it and took its advantages for granted, or maybe because he viewed money and its pursuit with a combination of artist’s disdain and Teamster’s suspicion. He was a cultural schizophrenic who responded to any number of competing voices in his head. He wrote a prizewinning biography of James Riddle Hoffa—yes, that’s how I got my name, Riddle James, and my nickname, Jimmy—along with several respected volumes about industrial relations, trade union formation, strikes and the working class, but his true love was songwriting and composing. A failed songwriter and composer, as my mother never tired of reminding him. A warrior with a melody in his heart and a hole in his pocket, she mocked.
No one spoke.
“Oh, look at Vera,” I said in a vain attempt at distraction as the puppy clamped her teeth onto Dorothy’s ear and tried to drag her across the floor. Anything to disperse the unaccustomed silence.
My father stood up, chair tumbling to the floor, mercury rising, totally eclipsing me as he confronted my mother. Hopelessly intimidated, I receded back into my chair.
“Greer Foley,” he thundered, “whose side are you on anyway?”
Caught up in the whirlwind of his anger, I looked on simultaneously riveted and detached, as if I were watching a tornado touch down, caught up in his swirling colors as they engulfed me, so much like the natural world, sea-green eyes, chestnut hair, ruddy skin. I was being swept away by forces over which I had no control.
I’
M THIRTY-THREE YEARS OLD
and the memory of that long-ago summer remains as alive to me as something I can reach out and touch, a secular rosary upon which I frequently meditate. I run the tips of my fingers over their firm smooth surfaces, feeling each individual sphere, cool and detached, fiddling with ideas and scenarios and endless possibilities in the hope that things could somehow have been different. If only. If only I could somehow poke a hole through time and space and reach into that old house and shake that girl, slap her silly, tell her to shout out from the rooftops what she knew.
There was time. I had the time. It only takes a moment to do the right thing. But maybe that was part of the problem. I took my time. All those hours devoted to thinking about what to do were just a prelude to letting myself off the hook.
Something I’ve learned: once you postpone doing what’s right, you become a big part of what’s wrong.
W
HISTLING FOR THE DOGS, I DARTED OUT THE FRONT DOOR
, the crashing of the waves and the wind obliterating the last remnants of staccato bickering emanating from the dining room. I rubbed the back of my neck, joints sore from swiveling from one point of view to the other. To spend time with Greer and Camp was to experience firsthand the effects of a ping-pong marathon between two warring countries.
Breathing deeply of the ocean air, my sighs of blessed release mingling with the sweet music of songbirds, I chased Vera to the far reaches of the garden, to the grassy tree-lined area near the little barn, the horses watching from the paddock. I threw a ball for her, the only one of the bunch young enough to still see the value in fetching.
“Riddle!” My father appeared from around the corner of the house and called out to me from several yards away, clearly annoyed. “Do you have any idea what’s happened to my navy blue socks? Dozens of socks and I can’t find a matching pair.”
I shook my head and waited for what I knew was coming next.
“Did you notice the cobwebs in the living room? It’s like we live in some neglected Romanian castle. Why in the hell I’m spending valuable time looking for socks and knocking down cobwebs . . .” He turned around, cheeks flushed, and headed back toward the house. He was more upset than I suspected. Whenever Camp started looking for socks or complaining about cobwebs, it was time to seek refuge in the nearest underground shelter.
I flopped down in the long grass, the basset hounds panting and jolly and curled up around me, cocooning me with their warmth. Sometimes, alone with my dogs and my horse, I felt as if I was the only person in the world. It wasn’t an unhappy feeling. The puppy licked my face and thumped down on my chest as I thanked God for being wise enough to withhold from dogs the gift of speech.
An hour later, the dogs passed out and snoring in the shady grass, I was hanging above them, upside down in a hammock, squinting up at my toes, floating and inaccessible, in that prepubescent realm harrowingly located somewhere between heaven and earth and Kraft dinner.
Way up in the tree canopy, perilously high off the ground, sun shimmering through the leaves, hair in my eyes and red paint on my toenails, rosy and glowing, a ripening peach in a cotton-string pouch anchored between two ancient chestnut trees, I watched an endless parade of navy blue cars arrive one after another as the house filled with campaign staffers, my father laughing and greeting them loudly. So much for our family day.
The door snapped open. A flock of grackles blew up around me in an indigo swirl of noise and panic. My mother appeared on the side verandah. Cheeks pink, hand at her brow, she called out, “Riddle, would you come in here please and smile for these idiots? If I have to perform like a trained seal, then so do you.”
“What do you want me to do?” I groused. “Bounce a ball on my nose or devise campaign strategy?”
“Don’t be a wisenheimer. Just get in here and be pleasant and polite and serve some cookies. What are you doing up there anyway?”
I shinnied down and was almost at the bottom of the tree when a solitary crow landed in the branch beside me, a baby bird in its beak, still alive, tiny chest rising and falling, otherwise motionless. That captive terror! That expression! The very thought of it all these years later is still enough to catapult me into the open arms of the nearest exclamation point.
It was my first personal experience of certainty. Horrified, I lost my grip and then I lost my balance. I let out a single yelp. That’s when my foot began its long irreversible slide. The sharp edge of a broken branch scraped my flesh, making a shallow surgical incision that started at my ankle and came to searing conclusion along my inner thigh. It hurt like hell. I hit the ground standing but with a mordant thump.
“Shit!” I hollered, blinking back tears.
“Riddle! Honestly. I’ve had enough of your feral word choices,” my mother said, her smoky shadow unsympathetically blocking out the sun.
Yeah, well, I’ve had enough of your bullshit. Why can’t you talk like a normal human being for once? I let the thought go unexpressed, savoring for a change the rebel joy of keeping something secret. I swallowed a whimper. No bawling in the Camperdown house.
“Once a person starts crying, they never stop,” Camp liked to say.
It wasn’t until we reached the door to the house that we realized the puppy was missing.
“Honestly, Riddle, one thing I asked of you. All you had to do was watch the puppy. Where could she be?” My mother couldn’t conceal her annoyance with me as we searched for Vera, conducting a thorough sweep of the inside and the outside of the house, guests be damned. From the foyer my father started to speak before stopping himself. He knew better than to interfere with my mother’s relationship with her dogs, watching in silence as we headed back outside.
From where I crawled among the dense undergrowth in the wet wilderness outcropping at the outer limits of our property, I could see my mother standing at the top of the dune overlooking the ocean. She had her hand to her forehead, an awning for her eyes as she surveyed the empty beach below for any sign of the missing Vera.
I stood up, my palm gripping a fallen log for support. “Shit!” I said, as the top of my head skimmed along the surface of an encroaching bush and I realized that my hair was congested with nettles. I was officially at the end of my ability to absorb setbacks. That’s when I walked into a sticky web roughly the size of Tanzania. In its center, a monstrous black and yellow spider indicated its intention to bind, torture and kill me.
“Vera, where are you?” Darting into the relative safety of a tiny clearing, I tried to banish my growing suspicion that I was a complete and utter fraud, a hopeless girly-girl in combatant’s gear. I searched my immediate surroundings in a mindless effort to somehow prove my manhood. Pissing seemed out of the question—I lacked the equipment. In desperation, I spit on the ground. A grasshopper sprang from the long grass and landed on my shoulder. I sprinted toward my mother, who was already walking in my direction.
“This is terrible,” she lamented. “Awful! Where is she? Could she have wandered across the road and over to Gin’s?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Gin Whiffet owned the former Devlin estate, vast lush acres of woodland trail, open pasture, wet marshland and dense forest. The Devlins had bred some of the finest thoroughbred horses in the country on that land. Part of what was now Gin’s property extended to the point at the end of the road where the beachfront met “civilian” ground. He operated a private riding stable for elite equestrian students who came from around the world for advanced instruction in eventing, dressage, jumping and steeplechase.
Gin and my mother had been friends since childhood. She treated his land as if it was her own, and for his part, he seemed to enjoy her abuse and her trespass as well as her cultish celebrity. Gin taught me early the true meaning of reflected glory.
When I was growing up, people said that along with being one of the country’s great celluloid beauties, my mother was the finest horsewoman in New England. It was a clear case of form triumphing over function—an aesthetic victory for Greer, who longed to be taken seriously as an equestrian without doing any of the work. She never competed in a show ring but created the impression that she did. Her real achievement lay in her talent for looking good on a horse, glamorous for sure, and sophisticated. Remote, detached, stylish—she made Audrey Hepburn seem like Minnie Pearl. How she detested naïveté! If Cole Porter’s music could be taught to ride a horse, it would capture some of what my mother evinced in the saddle.
W
E WALKED BACK TO
the house together, not talking, sand filling up my running shoes, the specter of Vera’s disappearance becoming a sadder reality as I tried unsuccessfully to banish thoughts of whatever hideous fate she might have met as a result of my negligence.
“Camp!” my mother called to my father through the screen door at the front of the house. “Riddle and I are going to Gin’s to see if Vera found her way across the road.”
“If you’re not home in an hour I’ll alert the Coast Guard,” my father said, aides at his side where he stood in the doorway.
“Honestly, that’s not the least bit amusing. Can’t you see how worried I am?”
“Greer, worry is a way of life for you. I’d be worried if you weren’t worried.”
“Don’t be absurd. You make me sound like one of those women in a housedress with nothing better to do than wonder if everyone has had a proper breakfast.”
I heard a round of nervous laughter from campaign staffers inside the kitchen. Greer, rippling with exasperation, was midway down the flagstone walkway before I’d stepped off the verandah. I was busy pouring sand from my shoes onto the ground.
“Riddle!” she called back. “Keep pace!”
“Release the hounds!” My father playfully unlatched the door.
The screen door banged open then shut as the three basset hounds spun past me and set out in braying pursuit of my mother. Reluctantly I followed them down the walkway as she waited for me farther down the path.
“Oh, Jimmy . . .” Camp called out in a singsong voice.
I paused and turned to face him.
“Look out for Gula!” he teased.
If he was looking for a dramatic response, he got it. Without thinking, purely reacting, I stopped altogether, my feet riveted in place.
“Camp, stop behaving like such an ass,” my mother ordered. “You, too!” She pointed, calling me out, turned around and kept right on walking as I dashed after her, Camp shaking his head in the doorway. I marched along in silence, my father’s taunt reverberating in my head.
“It’s your own fault. I told you not to tell him,” she said. “But you won’t listen to a word I say.”
A few weeks earlier, I had made the mistake of confiding in Camp that Gula gave me the creeps. Why did I say anything? Knowing my parents, I would soon be reading about it in the
Saturday Evening Post
. I still had the scorch marks from Greer’s interview in
Ladies’ Home Journal
when she talked about buying me my first bra.
“He’s a bloody janitor. Your fear of him is an embarrassment,” Greer said by way of ongoing rebuke. Gula Nightjar was Gin’s caretaker and stable manager. A European immigrant, he had only been in the States for a few months when he came to work for Gin the previous fall. He knew a lot about horses and running a stable, as Gin never stopped reminding everyone. Soft-spoken, well-spoken, gentle in his demeanor, Gula was considered charming by some people who admired his composure, his self-containment.
I didn’t like Gula. There was something unsettling about his watchfulness. He made the earth beneath my feet rumble, as if he was spreading underground. Quiet as nightfall, his unctuous attributes of mannerliness and humility were better suited to the saloon than the drawing room, seeming less like social graces and more like weapons that he used to disarm others. He had this way of speaking to me—as if I were an adult, as if there were no distinctions between us. Of course, I thought that’s what I wanted until the moment I got it.
My parents and Gin dismissed my uneasiness, seemed entertained by it, attributing it, in the jaded way of adults, to the affliction of adolescence.
A loud yodeling sound went up as Dorothy picked up a fresh scent, running in frantic circles, trailed by Hilary and Madge, before deciding on a course of action, booting away from the beaten path and heading out across the field.
“Dorothy!” Greer shouted after her, to no avail. The hunt was on. I watched as my mother, not hesitating for a second, took out after her rogue posse, dashing purposefully across the open pasture to corral the runaways, who finally, tails wagging in good-natured apology, reconciled themselves to her will and trotted along obediently, forming an honor guard around her.
My mother had made a halfhearted attempt to breed basset hounds—her kennel was called Jolie Laide—in an era when breeding dogs was still considered a genteel aristocratic pastime, a sort of cultural imprimatur, like wearing a strand of pearls or a pillbox hat. That morning, surrounded by her horizontal hounds, striding across the fields as if she were anointing the ground with every confident step, she was eminently vertical, sheathed in riding breeches and herringbone jacket, black boots eschewing vulgar shine, blonde hair trailing like a keffiyeh in the dry wind, an icon of privilege so recognizable she was almost self-parodying.
I trundled along like one of the pack. Basset hounds and I have lots of things in common. Short legs for one. Friendliness. Nosiness. A distinctive bray. Spots. Red hair. Big ears. An obsession with gravy. The desire to please, despite evidence to the contrary. We also have our differences. Basset hounds have a good sense of humor. They’re easygoing. Earnest would be a charitable description of me.
Greer ordered the dogs back home as we crossed the rarely trafficked road that divided our two properties, me struggling to keep up with her as she briskly negotiated the uneven ground, easily outstripping me as we started the arduous upward climb. Gin’s big pink house sat on the other side of a steep hill. I hesitated. So much work for so little reward.
