Nelson DeMille: The Gate House

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.

Istared 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.