The Gate House Read online

  I’d made no phone calls and saw no one. I would have seen my daughter, Carolyn, but she had fled her apartment in Brooklyn right after 9/11 to stay with her mother in Hilton Head, South Carolina. My son, Edward, lives in Los Angeles. So for three days, I walked the quiet streets of the city, watching the smoke rising from what came to be known as Ground Zero.

  Heartsick and drained, I got on a plane and returned to London, feeling that I’d done the right thing, the way people do who come home for a death in the family.

  Over the next few months, I learned that I knew eleven people who’d died in the Twin Towers; mostly former neighbors and business associates, but also a close friend who left a wife and three young children.

  And now, nine months after 9/11, I was back again. Things seemed to have returned to normal, but not really.

  I sipped my coffee and cognac and looked around at the piles of paper. There was a lot to go through, and I hoped that Ethel would hold on a while longer, and that Mr. Nasim wasn’t planning on getting his encumbered gatehouse into his possession the minute Ethel’s life tenancy expired. I needed to speak to Mr. Nasim about that; speaking to Ethel about hanging on until I tidied up my papers might seem insensitive and selfish.

  Because the night was cool, and because I didn’t have a paper shredder, I had a fire going in the dining room fireplace. Now and then, I’d feed the fire with some letter or photo that I wouldn’t want my children to see if I suddenly croaked.

  In that category were these photos of their mother whose nakedness revealed a lot more about her head than about her body. Susan was, and I’m sure still is, a bit nutty. But to be honest, I didn’t mind that at all, and that wasn’t the source of our marital problems. Our problem, obviously, was Susan’s affair with the Mafia don next door. And then to complicate things further, she shot and killed him. Three shots. One in the groin. Ouch.

  I gathered the photos and turned in my chair toward the fireplace. We all have trouble parting with things like this, but I can tell you, as a lawyer and as a man, no good can come of saving anything you wouldn’t want your family or your enemies to see. Or your next significant other, for that matter.

  I stared into the fire and watched the flames dancing against the soot-blackened brick, but I held on to the photos.

  So, she shot her lover, Frank “the Bishop” Bellarosa, capo di tutti capi, boss of all bosses, and got away with it—legally, at least—due to some circumstances that the Justice Department found mitigating and extenuating.

  Fact is, the Justice Department took a dive on the case because they’d made the mistake of allowing Mrs. Sutter unobstructed access to don Bellarosa, who was under house arrest in his villa down the road, and who was also singing his black heart out to them, and thus needed to be kept happy with another man’s wife.

  I’m still a little pissed off at the whole thing, as you might guess, but basically I’m over it.

  Meanwhile, I needed to decide if this trip was a death vigil, or perhaps something more permanent. I had kept up with my CLE—continuing legal education—and I was still a member of the New York State Bar, so I hadn’t burned all my bridges, and theoretically I was employable here. In my last life, I had been a partner in my father’s old firm of Perkins, Perkins, Sutter and Reynolds, still located at 23 Wall Street, a historic building that was once bombed by Anarchists at the turn of the last century, which seems almost quaint in light of 9/11.

  For the last seven years in London, I’d worked for the aforementioned British law firm, and I was their American tax guy who explained that screwing the Internal Revenue Service was an American tradition. This was payback for me because the IRS had screwed up my life, while my wife was screwing the Mafia don. These two seemingly disparate problems were actually related, as I had found out the hard way.

  I guess I’d hit a patch of rough road back then, a little adversity in an otherwise charmed and privileged life. But adversity builds character, and to be honest, it wasn’t all Susan’s fault, or Frank Bellarosa’s fault, or the fault of the IRS, or my stuffed-shirt law partners; it was partly my own fault because I, too, was involved with Frank Bellarosa. A little legal work. Like representing him on a murder charge. Not the kind of thing I normally did as a Wall Street lawyer, and certainly not the kind of case that Perkins, Perkins, Sutter and Reynolds would approve of. Therefore, I’d handled this case out of my Locust Valley, Long Island, office, but that wasn’t much cover when the newspapers got hold of it.

  Thinking back on this, I couldn’t help but know I was committing professional and social suicide when I took a Mafia don as a client. But it was a challenge, and I was bored, and Susan, who approved of and encouraged my association with Frank Bellarosa, said I needed a challenge. I guess Susan was bored, too, and as I found out, she had her own agenda regarding Frank Bellarosa.

  And speaking of Susan, I had discovered through my son, Edward, that, quote, “Mom has bought our house back.”

  Bad grammar aside—I sent this kid to great schools—what Edward meant was that Susan had reacquired the large guest cottage on the Stanhope estate. This so-called cottage—it has six bedrooms—had been our marital residence for nearly twenty years, and is located about a quarter mile up the main drive of the estate. In other words, Susan and I were now neighbors.

  The guest cottage and ten acres of property had been carved out of the two hundred sixty acres of the Stanhope estate by Susan’s father, William, who’s an insufferable prick, and deeded to Susan as a wedding gift. Since I was the groom, I always wondered why my name wasn’t on the deed. But you need to understand old money to answer that. You also need to understand pricks like William. Not to mention his ditsy wife, Susan’s mother, Charlotte. These two characters are unfortunately still alive and well, living and golfing in Hilton Head, South Carolina, where Susan had been living since the unfortunate gun mishap that took her lover’s life ten years ago.

  Before Susan left for South Carolina, she’d sold the guest cottage to a yuppie corporate transfer couple from someplace west of the Hudson. You know your marriage is in trouble when your wife sells the house and moves to another state. In truth, however, it was I who ended the marriage. Susan wanted us to stay together, making the obvious point that her lover was dead, and thus we needn’t worry about bumping into him at a party. In fact, she claimed that was why she’d killed him; so we could be together.

  That wasn’t quite it, but it sounded nice. In retrospect, we probably could have stayed together, but I was too angry at being cuckolded, and my male ego had taken a major hit. I mean, not only did our friends, family, and children know that Susan was fucking a Mafia don, but the whole damned country knew when it hit the tabloids: “Dead Don Diddled Lawyer’s Heiress Wife.” Or something like that.

  It may have worked out for us if, as Susan had suggested, I’d killed her lover myself. But I wouldn’t have gotten off as easily as she had. Even if I’d somehow beaten the murder rap—crime of passion—I’d have some explaining to do to don Bellarosa’s friends and family.

  So she sold the house, leaving me homeless, except, of course, for the Yale Club in Manhattan, where I am always welcome. But Susan, in a rare display of thoughtfulness, suggested to me that Ethel Allard, recently widowed, could use some company in the gatehouse. That actually wasn’t a bad idea, and since Ethel could also use a few bucks in rent, and a handyman to replace her recently deceased husband, I’d moved into the extra bedroom and stored my belongings in the basement, where they’d sat for this past decade.

  By spring of the following year, I’d made a financial settlement with my partners and used the money to buy the forty-six-foot Morgan, which I christened Paumanok II. By that time, my membership in the Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club had been terminated by mutual consent, so I sailed from the public marina where I’d bought the boat and began my three-year odyssey at sea.

  Odysseus was trying to get home; I was trying to get away from home. Odysseus wanted to see his wife; maybe I did, too, but it
didn’t happen. I’d told Susan I would put in at Hilton Head, and I almost did, but within sight of land, I headed back to sea with just a glance over my shoulder. Clean break. No regrets.

  I threw the nude photos of Susan on the table, instead of in the fireplace. Maybe she wanted them.

  I poured more cognac into the dregs of the coffee and took a swallow.

  I looked up at a large, ornately framed, hand-colored photo portrait of Ethel and George Allard, which hung over the mantel.

  It was a wedding picture, taken during World War II, and George is dressed in his Navy whites, and Ethel is wearing a white wedding dress of the period. Ethel was quite a looker in her day, and I could see how Susan’s grandfather, Augustus, who was then lord of Stanhope Hall, could cross the class line and fiddle with one of his female servants. It was inexcusable, of course, on every level, especially since George, a Stanhope employee, was off to war, protecting America from the Yellow Peril in the Pacific. But, as I found out as a young man during the Vietnam War, and as I’m discovering with this new war, war tears apart the social fabric of a nation, and you get a lot more diddling and fiddling going on.

  I stared at Ethel’s angelic face in the photograph. She really was beautiful. And lonely. And George was out of town for a while. And Augustus was rich and powerful. He was not, however, according to family accounts, a conniving and controlling prick like his son, my ex-father-in-law, William. I think Augustus was just horny (it runs in the Stanhope family), and if you look at a picture of Augustus’ wife, Susan’s grandmother, you can see why Augustus strayed. Susan, I guess, got her good looks from her mother, Charlotte, who is still attractive, though brainless.

  And on the subject of brains and beauty, my children have both, and show no signs of the Stanhope tendency to be off their rockers. I’d like to say my children take after my side of the family, but my parents aren’t good examples of mental health either. I think I was adopted. I hope and pray I was.

  Actually, my father, Joseph, passed away while I was at sea, and I missed the funeral. Mother hasn’t forgiven me. But that’s nothing new.

  And on the subject of children, paternity, and genetics, Ethel and George had one child, a daughter, Elizabeth, who’s a nice woman and who lives in the area. Elizabeth gets her beauty from her mother, but looks enough like George to put my mind at ease about any more Stanhope heirs.

  I’m taking the long view of this in terms of my children inheriting some of the Stanhope fortune. They deserve some money for putting up with Grandma and Grandpa all their lives. So do I, but a probate court might find my claim on the Stanhope estate—to reimburse me for years of putting up with William’s bullshit—to be frivolous.

  In any case, there is a history here—my own family goes back three hundred years on Long Island—and this history is entwined like the English ivy that covers the gatehouse and the guest cottage; interesting to look at from a distance, but obscuring the form and substance of the structure, eventually eating into the brick and mortar.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, sitting not too far from where I was now, had it right when he concluded The Great Gatsby with, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Amen.

  As I reached for the cognac, I noticed a stack of old greeting cards held together by a rubber band, and I slid a card out at random. It was a standard Hallmark anniversary card, and under the pre-printed words of love, joy, and devotion, Susan had written, “John, you don’t know how many times I wake up in the morning and just stare at you lying beside me. And I will do this for the rest of my life.”

  I gathered the stack of cards and threw them in the fireplace.

  I got up, went into the kitchen, and poured another coffee, then went out the back door and stood on the patio. I could see the lights of the guest cottage, where I used to live with my wife and children. I stood there a long time, then went back inside and sat again at the dining room table. I didn’t think this would be easy, but I certainly didn’t think it would be so hard.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I stared at the fire for some time, sipping coffee and cognac, my mind drifting between past and present.

  So, I thought, I’m here in the gatehouse of the Stanhope estate, partly because Ethel Allard had an affair with Augustus Stanhope during World War II, and partly because my wife had an affair with a Mafia don. As Mr. Bellarosa himself would say, if he were alive, “Go figure.”

  And now, according to Edward—and confirmed by my daughter, Carolyn—Susan, a.k.a. Mom, had shown up on the doorstep of the yuppie couple and made them an unsolicited and probably spectacular offer for their home, convincing them, I’m sure, that they’d be happier elsewhere and that she, Susan Stanhope Sutter, needed to return to her ancestral roots.

  Knowing Susan, I’m certain this couple felt as though they were being evicted for using the wrong decorator. Or maybe they knew that Mrs. Sutter had killed a Mafia don, and they thought this was an offer they shouldn’t refuse. In any case, it was a done deal, and my former wife was now back in our former house, within the walls of the former Stanhope estate, and a five-minute walk up the drive from my temporary lodgings. It was as though someone had turned back the clock a decade and captured that brief moment in time when Susan and I were still living within walking distance of each other, and all it might have taken for us to be together was a phone call, a knock on the door, or a note. But that time had passed, and we’d both written new chapters in our histories.

  Susan, for instance, had remarried. The lucky man was, according to Edward, “an old guy,” and with age comes patience, which one would need to be married to Susan Sutter.

  Edward had also described the gentleman as “a friend of Grandpa’s, and really boring.” The boring old guy’s name was Dan Hannon, and he had lived down in Hilton Head, and as per Edward, played golf all day, and had some money, but not a lot, and as per Carolyn, “Mom likes him, but doesn’t love him.” Carolyn added, “She kept our last name.”

  My children apparently thought I needed to know all of this, just in case I wanted to go down to Hilton Head, smack Dan on the head with a golf club, and carry Susan off to an island.

  Well, before I could do that, Dan Hannon played his last round of golf and dropped dead, literally on the eighteenth hole while unsuccessfully attempting an eight-foot putt. Edward said that Mr. Hannon’s golf partners gave him the shot, finished the hole, then called an ambulance. I think Edward is making up some of this.

  In any case, Susan has been widowed for almost a year now, and according to Carolyn, Susan and her hubby had very tight prenuptial agreements, so Susan got only about half a million, which is actually not that bad for five years of marriage, boring or not. My own prenup with Susan Stanhope gave me the wedding album. The Stanhopes are tough negotiators.

  And so here we are again, and we can see the lights from each other’s house, and the smoke from our chimneys. And I’ve seen Susan’s car pass by the gatehouse and out the big wrought-iron gates. She drives an SUV (these things seem to have multiplied like locusts in my absence); I think it’s a Lexus. Whatever, it still has South Carolina plates, and I know that Susan has kept her Hilton Head house. So maybe she intends to split the year between here and there. Hopefully, more there than here. Though, on second thought, what difference does it make to me? I’m only passing through.

  My car is a rented Taurus that I park beside the gatehouse, so she knows when I’m home, but she hasn’t stopped by with home-baked brownies.

  I don’t actually follow her movements, and it’s rare that I’ve seen her car passing by in the last week. The only other car I’ve noticed is a Mercedes that belongs to Mr. Nasim, the owner of the mansion. What I’m getting at is that I don’t think Susan has a boyfriend. But if she did, I wouldn’t be surprised, and I wouldn’t care.

  As for my love life, I’d been totally abstinent during my three-year cruise around the world. Except, of course, when I was in port, or when I had a female crew member aboard.
In fact, I was a piggy.

  I suppose there are all sorts of complex psychological reasons for my overindulgence, having to do with Susan’s adultery and all that. Plus, the salt air makes me horny.

  But I had calmed down considerably in London, partly as a result of my job, which required a suit and a bit of decorum, and partly as a result of having gotten rid of the sailboat, and not being able to use clever lines like, “Do you want to sail with me on my yacht to Monte Carlo?”

  Anyway, for my last year or so in London, I’ve had a lady friend. More on that later.

  I stoked the fire, then freshened my coffee with cognac.

  Regarding the former Mrs. Sutter, as it stands now, neither of us has called on the other, nor have we bumped into each other on the property or in the village, but I know we’ll meet at Ethel’s funeral. To be honest, I’d half expected that she’d come by to say hello. Probably she had the same expectation.

  This place is heavy on etiquette and protocol, and I wondered how Emily Post would address this situation. “Dear Ms. Post, My wife was fucking a Mafia don, then she shot and killed him, and we got divorced, and we both moved out of the state and met other people whom we didn’t kill. Now we find ourselves as neighbors, and we’re both alone, so should I bake brownies and welcome her to the neighborhood? Or should she do that? (Signed) Confused on Long Island.”

  And Ms. Post might reply, “Dear COLI, A gentleman should always call on the lady, but always phone or write ahead—and make sure she’s gotten rid of that gun! Keep the conversation light, such as favorite movies (but not The Godfather) or sports or hobbies (but not target shooting), and don’t overstay your visit unless you have sex. (Signed) Emily Post.”

  Well, I think I’m being silly. In any case, my children are bugging me about calling her. “Have you seen Mom yet?” I’m sure they ask her the same question.