Everybody Rise (7 page)

“Wait, sorry, Rutherford like Rutherford Rutherford? As in, she probably owns founders' shares in J. P. Morgan?”

“Sssshh,” said Evelyn, indicating her head toward the Hackings. “Yes.”

“And our heroine couldn't even get through Camp Trin-Trin?”

Evelyn had dropped her voice to a whisper. “She ended up getting her degree in Hawaii or Ecuador or someplace. She fled town after the parents' divorce. I looked up the details—apparently it had to do with Fritz's refusal to support the Guggenheim.”

“I can't hear you. What was the divorce about?” Charlotte seemed to be increasing her volume on purpose.

“Fritz's refusal to support the Guggenheim,” Evelyn hissed, again casting a look over her shoulder to see if Mrs. Hacking had heard her.

“We all think we have our problems, but thank God we don't have husbands who don't support the Guggenheim.”

“Charlotte, keep your voice down. She does events for
Vogue
. I think even the heads of PLU will be impressed if I get her.”

“I'm not quite sure what to say, Beegan, but I like your moxie,” Charlotte said.

Mrs. Hacking slowed the boat as they approached Sachem, which was on a private island in the middle of the lake. Scot and Charlotte began peppering Mr. Hacking with questions about how, exactly, provisions for a private island were supplied, but the wind carried their words past the bow of the boat and the American flag whose wake-wetted fabric slapped against Evelyn's head.

When Mrs. Hacking downshifted again and the boat made grunting leaps toward a dock, Preston sprang out and tied up the Chris-Craft with a few quick knots. The dock was less elegant than Evelyn was expecting, just a wooden roof making a V over a platform with some benches on it, and a long, thin dock bobbing next to it where a variety of motorboats and rowboats were tied up.

Evelyn had gotten out of the boat ahead of everyone else and, trying to look like she knew where she was going, started up a path to an A-frame structure that seemed to be made of giant Lincoln Logs. She heard a whistle from behind her.

“Wrong way, Ev,” Preston said.

“Isn't that the house?”

“That's the teepee.”

“That's a teepee?”

Mr. Hacking, who had overtaken Evelyn on the uphill path and was studying the house like it was a rare raptor, stepped in. “It's called the Typee. After Melville. Where the men would carouse. Far enough away from the main lodge that they could have their liquor and smoke cigars without the women knowing. The whole hill below it is, legend has it, covered in glass. Can you guess why?”

Evelyn, feeling like she had not done the reading for third-period history, shook her head.

“Liquor bottles,” he said, enunciating. “They would throw bottles over the edge of the railing and shoot them.”

“Oh.” Evelyn looked back down toward the dock, but couldn't see another path; she looked higher up, and saw another house, about three hundred yards above the first one, looming red and large on the hill. “That's the main house, then? Up on the hill?”

“No,” Mr. Hacking said, now pleased with his student, “though that's a good guess. That's known as the chalet. The Hennings were, of course, great rivals of the Bluestadts, of the barbed-wire fortune, and the Bluestadts had a place just east of this, on East Lake. From the Bluestadts' house, one could see the top of the hill at Sachem, which at the time held servants' quarters—the servants were on the hilltop because it was farthest from the water, of course. Well, the Hennings were infuriated that the Bluestadt guests would have a view of the servants' quarters, so they built a chalet façade for the servants' quarters just so the Bluestadt guests would not think badly of them.”

Charlotte had caught up to them by now. “The egos of these guys. Jesus,” she said. “A Potemkin village. Or, I guess, a Potemkin chalet.”

“Very good,” Mr. Hacking said happily.

“So the main house?” Charlotte asked.

“We came in through the servants' boathouse. Easier to find space there during parties. There's a path to the main house from just off of there. Quite well hidden, really,” Mr. Hacking said.

“Yes, God forbid the servants be able to find their masters,” Charlotte said.

The rest of the group had already taken off along the path. After a short walk through the woods, the path petered out, with hostas marking the edge of what looked to Evelyn like a fancy Girl Scout camp.

On the water's edge was a huge wooden lodgelike structure, three or four stories high, that was made out of the typical Adirondack-camp logs with bark peeling from them. Across a piece of bright green grass marked with croquet wickets was a similar building, this one smaller and squarer, with a sort of rotunda at one end looking out over the water. Behind that was a tennis court, then more structures—Evelyn counted six in all. The huge red door in the middle of the lodge was open, and there were a few dozen people streaming in and out, leaning over the porch, running down to the water. Children, adults, laughing, talking, moving with ease. She stood for a moment, her sandaled feet tickled by the grass on the side of the path. She had guessed wrong on the dress, as had her mother when Babs had pushed the Lilly. This wasn't Vineyard tennis club; this was Adirondack sensible. One woman was in a fisherman's sweater. Another in a skort. The women looked as rustic as the houses they had come from, in clothes that dirt and water would only ameliorate. Evelyn decided she'd need to rely on her instincts more.

Scot and Mr. Hacking had also paused, though for a different reason.

“It almost looks Swiss,” Scot said, sotto voce, to Mr. Hacking as they studied the main lodge.

“Oh, yes, at the time, really the only idea Americans had of the wilderness was what the Swiss were constructing, and from the beams to the small peaked roof, you can see that influence,” said Mr. Hacking. “You see this in our camp as well. Notice all of these rustic elements.” Evelyn looked at the porch railings, made of branches arranged in pretty crossed patterns using their natural curves, and the planters of hollowed-out tree trunks that flanked the doors, and the peeling-bark logs stacked to make up the house.

“Letting the wild in,” Scot said.

“Precisely. This was really a new idea at the time, you'll recall; while the Astors and Belmonts and Vanderbilts were building European-style houses in Newport, these hunting lodges promised something quite different. Inside, you'll see a real tour de force of architecture, with spruce beams made of a single tree supporting the great-room ceiling. And look at this exterior—this is white cedar. It's more than a hundred years old and it still looks fine. It's really expert craftsmanship.” Mr. Hacking explained that the Rutherford house had been built in 1880, though it had burned down twice, as every house worth living in on the lake had, and that this version dated from “'aught-nine.”

“Wow,” Scot intoned. “And the croquet green?”

“That's a story. It would've been, let's see, the great-grandmother, I think, Frances Henning, of course the main heiress to the Beech-Nut fortune. She was the doyenne of the place until her death in 1950—what was it, 'fifty or 'fifty-one? She insisted her guests arrive by sleigh in winter, even after the other private islands were using cars to drive across the ice. She was a serious croquet player, as you can see. Of course, it's a terrible croquet green, but she knew all its bumps and proclivities and would handily beat anyone who dared to play against her.”

Evelyn could see all of it in front of her—the croquet games, the sleighs with fur blankets atop, the era when everyone knew who they were supposed to be. She heard a shriek of laughter as a tall girl loped up from the water with a croquet mallet in hand, and Evelyn wondered for a moment whether the ghost of Frances Henning had decided to attend. As the girl got closer, though, Evelyn saw Nick approach and kiss her cheek, and Evelyn knew that she knew that long caramel hair, and she recognized that voice, sun-soaked and deep gold.

“Camilla,” she said quietly, watching as the girl threw herself over a red Adirondack chair at the side of the croquet green.

“We have to check out this house,” Charlotte said, starting to head for the door. “This is seriously historic-preservation status.”

Evelyn's eyes were fixed on the croquet green. The light was strange, silvery and still, and the air smelled rich and wet, of cinnamon and dirt and leaves. Camilla was now playing croquet with Nick.

“They know each other?” Evelyn asked.

“Who? Nick? Oh, shit, that's your girl?”

“Camilla, yeah. Do you know how Nick knows her?”

“Ev, I barely know who this girl is. I definitely don't know how Nick knows her. I want to go to check out the inside. Mr. Hacking was saying it was awesome.”

“Great,” Evelyn said, watching Camilla lean on her mallet. It was not so much Camilla Rutherford's looks, which were pretty, or her body, which was toned and long limbed and moved elegantly. It was that Camilla Rutherford was eminently comfortable. She had not thought twice about what to wear or what to say, Evelyn could tell, unlike her.

Evelyn heard a rattle of ice cubes behind her. Preston was surveying the croquet with amusement. “Fine romance, eh?” he said.

“You mean Nick?” Evelyn said.

“Oui. Et Mademoiselle Rutherford.”

“They're not…”

“They're doing the dance of love, et cetera.”

“Nick and Camilla Rutherford? Really? How did they meet?”

“At a benefit. Kidney Cares, I think. Or Liver Cares. Whichever is the popular organ that all those girls are involved in.”

“Is the liver an organ?”

“Do I look like an anatomist?”

“So they're hooking up? Or dating?”

“Good God, woman, I don't know. Do you think you should have The Talk with them?”

Evelyn took Preston's drink and sipped from it; then, when he cried out in protest, handed it back. She followed Preston indoors but kept glancing back at Camilla.

Inside, Evelyn understood what the lines and logs and decor of the Hacking camp were drawn from. Sachem's central room could legitimately be called a great room, versus the marketing-speak used to sell condos, wherein a “great room” meant a single living/dining room. It smelled of library-book pages and peaty smoke. Broad horizontal windows looked out over the lake, and all the coffee-table books and Navajo pillows and thick blankets looked so casually strewn about that Evelyn suspected they probably were, not carefully placed just before the party.

An antler chandelier hung from above, and a giant fireplace made up of flat, broad gray stones hulked over the side of the room. Mr. Hacking was squatting in front of it.

“Very good, isn't it? You see a lot of these fireplaces, but the masonry here is hard to match. Do you see why?” he said. Evelyn looked to Scot, the straight-A student, to answer, but Mr. Hacking beat him to it. “The mortar!” Mr. Hacking said. “It's very thin. It shows skilled work. Most fireplaces like this have mortar of a centimeter or more. This, no. Fine work.”

Charlotte was eager to go see the dining room, in a separate building from the main house, and she, Scot, and Mr. Hacking hurried off. Evelyn turned toward the room. People were milling, talking. She heard one woman say that she would never touch turnip, and another say how much she hated Portland. It wasn't just Camilla who had that sense of belonging. All of these people did. Everyone knew what to do, what to drink, what to talk about. They knew what they liked and what they did not (Portland and turnip the beginning of a no-doubt long list). There were other things Evelyn couldn't see that were surely going on, she knew—alcoholism here, an affair there—but their rules protected them and kept everything running so smoothly. Adjustable-rate mortgages? Why had Evelyn been reading about adjustable-rate mortgages? These people didn't care about that. She had no idea what she was supposed to say to any of them, and she was going to return to PLU a total failure because she couldn't manage to think of anything that would interest these people and she certainly couldn't sign them up. Evelyn felt as if there were a large neon arrow over the thin-mortared fireplace pointing down to her and blinking O
UTCAST
—O
UTCAST
—O
UTCAST
.

The warmth of fingertips on her elbow made Evelyn start. She snapped her head to see the woman she'd been watching minutes ago who'd been dissing turnips, a brunette in a gray pearl necklace. She looked familiar in that way that Evelyn found rich white women did; perhaps she'd seen her in one of Barbara's
Town & Country
back issues, or her doppelgänger had umpired at an Eastern Tennis Club match Evelyn had played in. “I always think the opening moments of a party are the hardest, before everyone has had enough to drink,” the woman said.

Evelyn knew a life rope when she saw one and clutched on gratefully. “So true,” she said. “Though I'm not sure we can safely say that everyone here has not had enough to drink.”

The woman laughed, a rich, cigar-smoke sound. “I'm Margaret Faber,” she said, extending her hand.

“Evelyn.”

“It's nice to meet you, Evelyn. And how do you know the Rutherfords?”

“I'm staying with the Hackings, on West Lake. I went to Sheffield with Preston, one of their sons,” Evelyn said, watching Margaret closely to monitor her response, and saw Margaret's mouth turn up.

“Sheffield,” said Margaret. “Marvelous place.”

Open sesame, thought Evelyn, and continued, “Everyone at camp is very excited for the Fruit Stripe. Mrs. Hacking is quite determined that we'll make a good showing.”

“Knowing Jean Hacking, I can assure you that the camp had better make a very good showing. Are you racing?”

“Ah, no,” Evelyn said. “I'll be spectating.”