Part I
The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. . . .
—Walt Whitman
Preface to Leaves of Grass
One
I first met Frank Bellarosa on a sunny Saturday in April at Hicks’ Nursery, an establishment that has catered to the local gentry for over a hundred years. We were both wheeling red wagons filled with plants, fertilizers, and such toward our cars across the gravel parking field. He called out to me, “Mr. Sutter? John Sutter, right?”
I regarded the man approaching, dressed in baggy work pants and a blue sweatshirt. At first, I thought it was a nurseryman, but then as he drew closer, I recognized his face from newspapers and television.
Frank Bellarosa is not the sort of celebrity you would like to meet by chance, or in any other way, for that matter. He is a uniquely American celebrity, a gangster actually. A man like Bellarosa would be on the run in some parts of the world, and in the presidential palace in others, but here in America, he exists in that place that is aptly called the underworld. He is an unindicted and unconvicted felon as well as a citizen and a taxpayer. He is what federal prosecutors mean when they tell parolees not to “consort with known criminals.”
So, as this notorious underworld character approached, I could not for the life of me guess how he knew me or what he wanted or why he was extending his hand toward me. Nevertheless, I did take his hand and said, “Yes, I’m John Sutter.”
“My name’s Frank Bellarosa. I’m your new neighbor.”
What? I think my face remained impassive, but I may have twitched. “Oh,’’ I said, “that’s . . .’’ Pretty awful.
“Yeah. Good to meet you.”
So my new neighbor and I chatted a minute or two and noted each other’s purchases. He had tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and basil. I had impatiens and marigolds. Mr. Bellarosa suggested that I should plant something I could eat. I told him I ate marigolds and my wife ate impatiens. He found that funny.
In parting, we shook hands without any definite plans to see each other again, and I got into my Ford Bronco.
It was the most mundane of circumstances, but as I started my engine, I experienced an uncustomary flash into the future, and I did not like what I saw.
Two
I left the nursery and headed home.
Perhaps it would be instructive to understand the neighborhood into which Mr. Frank Bellarosa had chosen to move himself and his family. It is quite simply the best neighborhood in America, making Beverly Hills or Shaker Heights, for instance, seem like tract housing.
It is not a neighborhood in the urban or suburban sense, but a collection of colonial-era villages and grand estates on New York’s Long Island. The area is locally known as the North Shore and known nationally and internationally as the Gold Coast, though even realtors would not say that aloud.
It is an area of old money, old families, old social graces, and old ideas about who should be allowed to vote, not to mention who should be allowed to own land. The Gold Coast is not a pastoral Jeffersonian democracy.
The nouveau riche, who need new housing and who comprehend what this place is all about, are understandably cowed when in the presence of a great mansion that has come on the market as a result of unfortunate financial difficulties. They may back off and buy something on the South Shore where they can feel better about themselves, or if they decide to buy a piece of the Gold Coast, they do so with great trepidation, knowing they are going to be miserable and that they had better not try to borrow a cup of Johnnie Walker Black from the people in the next mansion.
But a man like Frank Bellarosa, I thought, would be ignorant of the celestial beings and great social icebergs who would surround him, completely unknowing of the hallowed ground on which he was treading.
Or, if Frank Bellarosa was aware, perhaps he didn’t care, which was far more interesting. He struck me, in the few minutes we spoke, as a man with a primitive sort of élan, somewhat like a conquering soldier from an inferior civilization who has quartered himself in the great villa of a vanquished nobleman.
Bellarosa had, as he indicated, purchased the estate next to mine. My place is called Stanhope Hall; his place is called Alhambra. The big houses around here have names, not numbers, but in a spirit of cooperation with the United States Post Office, my full address does include a street, Grace Lane, and an incorporated village, Lattingtown. I have a zip code that I, like many of my neighbors, rarely use, employing instead the old designation of Long Island, so my address goes like this: Stanhope Hall, Grace Lane, Lattingtown, Long Island, New York. I get my mail.
My wife, Susan, and I don’t actually live in Stanhope Hall, which is a massive fifty-room beaux-arts heap of Vermont granite, for which the heating bills alone would wipe me out by February. We live in the guesthouse, a more modest fifteen-room structure built at the turn of the century in the style of an English manor house. This guesthouse along with ten acres of Stanhope’s total two hundred acres were deeded to my wife as a wedding present from her parents. However, our mail actually goes to the gatehouse, a more modest six-room affair of stone, occupied by George and Ethel Allard.
The Allards are what are called family retainers, which means they used to work, but don’t do much anymore. George was the former estate manager here, employed by my wife’s father, William, and her grandfather, Augustus. My wife is a Stanhope. The great fifty-room hall is abandoned now, and George is sort of caretaker for the whole two-hundred-acre estate. He and Ethel live in the gatehouse for free, having displaced the gatekeeper and his wife, who were let go back in the fifties. George does what he can with limited family funds. His work ethic remains strong, though his old body does not. Susan and I find we are helping the Allards more than they help us, a situation that is not uncommon around here. George and Ethel concentrate mostly on the gate area, keeping the hedges trimmed, the wrought-iron gate painted, clipping the ivy on the estate walls and the gatehouse, and replanting the flower beds in the spring. The rest of the estate is in God’s hands until further notice.
I turned off Grace Lane and pulled up the gravel drive to the gates, which are usually left open for our convenience, as this is our only access to Grace Lane and the wide world around us.
George ambled over, wiping his hands on his green work pants. He opened my door before I could and said, “Good morning, sir.”
George is from the old school, a remnant of that small class of professional servants that flourished so briefly in our great democracy. I can be a snob on occasion, but George’s obsequiousness sometimes makes me uneasy. My wife, who was born into money, thinks nothing of it and makes nothing of it. I opened the back of the Bronco and said, “Give me a hand?”
“Certainly, sir, certainly. Here, you let me do that.’’ He took the flats of marigolds and impatiens and laid them on the grass beside the gravel drive. He said, “They look real good this year, Mr. Sutter. You got some nice stuff. I’ll get these planted ’round the gate pillars there, then I’ll help you with your place.”
“I can do that. How is Mrs. Allard this morning?”
“She’s very well, Mr. Sutter, and it’s nice of you to ask.”
My conversations with George are always somewhat stilted, except when George has a few drinks in him.
George was born on the Stanhope estate some seventy years ago and has childhood memories of the Roaring Twenties, the Great Crash, and the waning of the Golden Era throughout the 1930s. There were still parties, debutante balls, regattas, and polo matches after the Crash of ’29, but as George once said to me in a maudlin moment, “The heart was gone from everybody. They lost confidence in themselves, and the war finished off the good times.”
I know all that from history books and through a sort of osmosis that one
experiences by living here. But George has more detailed and personal information on the history of the Gold Coast, and when he’s had a few, he’ll tell you stories about the great families: who used to screw whom, who shot whom in a jealous rage, and who shot themselves in despair. There was, and to some extent still is, a servants’ network here, where that sort of information is the price of admission to servants’ get-togethers in the kitchens of the remaining great houses, in the gatehouses, and in the local working man’s pubs. It’s sort of an American Upstairs, Downstairs around here, and God only knows what they say about Susan and me.
But if discretion is not one of George’s virtues, loyalty is, and in fact I once overheard him tell a tree pruner that the Sutters were good people to work for. In fact, he doesn’t work for me, but for Susan’s parents, William and Charlotte Stanhope, who are retired in Hilton Head and are trying to unload Stanhope Hall before it pulls them under. But that’s another story.
Ethel Allard is also another story. Though always correct and pleasant, there is a seething class anger there, right below the surface. I have no doubt that if someone raised the red flag, Ethel Allard would arm herself with a cobblestone from the walkway and make her way toward my house. Ethel’s father, from what I gather, was a successful shopkeeper of some sort in the village who was ruined by bad investment advice from his rich customers and further ruined by the failure of those customers to pay him what they owed him for goods delivered. They didn’t pay him because they, too, had been financially ruined. This was in 1929, of course, and nothing has been the same around here since. It was as though, I suppose, the rich had broken faith with the lower classes by going broke and killing themselves with alcohol, bullets, and leaps from windows, or simply disappearing, leaving their houses, their debts, and their honor behind. It’s hard to feel sorry for the rich, I know, and I can see Ethel’s point of view.
But here it is, some sixty years after the Great Crash, and maybe it’s time to examine some of the wreckage.
If this place doesn’t sound quite like America, I assure you it is; only the externals and the landscape are a bit different.
George was talking. “So, like I was saying the other day, Mr. Sutter, some kids got into the Hall a few nights ago and had themselves a party—”
“Was there much damage?”
“Not too much. Lots of liquor bottles, and I found a bunch of those . . . things—”
“Condoms.”
He nodded. “So, I cleaned it all up and replaced the plywood on the window they got in. But I’d like to get some sheet metal.”
“Order it. Charge it to my account at the lumberyard.”
“Yes, sir. Now that spring is here—”
“Yes, I know.’’ The hormones are bubbling and the local bunnies are in high heat. I used to get into abandoned mansions myself, to be truthful. A little wine, some candles, a transistor radio tuned to WABC, and maybe even a fire in the fireplace, though that was a giveaway. There’s nothing quite like love among the ruins. I find it interesting that condoms are back in fashion. “Any sign of drugs?”
“No, sir. Just liquor. You sure you don’t want me to call the police?”
“No.’’ The local police seem very interested in the problems of the gentry, but I find it awkward standing around a deserted fifty-room mansion with cops who are trying to look sympathetic. Anyway, there was no damage done.
I got into my Bronco and drove through the gates, the tires crunching over the thinning gravel. It will take five hundred cubic yards of crushed bluestone at sixty dollars a yard to get barely an inch of new topping on the winter-ravaged drive. I made a mental note to write my father-in-law with the good news.
My house, the guesthouse, is about two hundred yards up the main drive and fifty yards from it, via a single-lane spur also in need of gravel. The house itself is in good repair, its imported Cotswold stone, slate roof, and copper-sheathed sash and drainpipes virtually maintenance free and nearly as good as aluminum siding and vinyl plastic windows.
We have ivy on the walls, which will be in need of cutting as its new pale-green tendrils begin to creep, and there is a rose garden out back that completes the image that you are in England.
Susan’s car, a racing-green Jaguar XJ-6, a gift from her parents, was sitting in the turnaround. Another merrie-olde-England prop. People around here tend to be Anglophiles; it comes with the territory.
I went inside the house and called, “Lady Stanhope!’’ Susan answered from the rose garden, and I went out the back doors. I found her sitting in a cast-iron garden chair. Only women, I think, can sit in those things. “Good morning, my lady. May I ravage you?”
She was drinking tea, the mug steaming in the cool April air. Yellow crocuses and lilies had sprouted in the beds among the bare rose bushes, and a bluebird sat on the sundial. A very cheering sight, except that I could tell that Susan was in one of her quiet moods.
I asked, “Were you out riding?”
“Yes, that’s why I’m wearing my riding clothes and I smell of horse, Sherlock.”
I sat on the iron table in front of her. “You’ll never guess who I met at Hicks’ Nursery.”
“No, I never will.”
I regarded my wife a moment. She is a strikingly beautiful woman, if I may be uxorious for a moment. She has flaming-red hair, a sure sign of insanity according to my aunt Cornelia, and catlike green eyes that are so arresting that people stare. Her skin is lightly freckled, and she has pouty lips that make men immediately think of a particular sex act. Her body is as lithe and taut as any man could ask for in a forty-year-old wife who has borne two children. The secret to her health and happiness, she will tell you, is horseback riding, summer, fall, winter, and spring, rain, snow, or shine. I am madly in love with this woman, though there are times, like now, when she is moody and distant. Aunt Cornelia warned me about that, too. I said, “I met our new neighbor.”
“Oh? The HRH Trucking Company?”
“No, no.’’ Like many of the great estates, Alhambra had passed to a corporation, according to county records. The sale was made in February for cash, and the deed recorded for public view a week later. The realtor claimed he didn’t know the principals involved, but through a combination of research and rumors by the old guard, the field was narrowed down to Iranians, Koreans, Japanese, South American pharmaceutical dealers, or Mafia. That about covered the range of possible nightmares. And in fact, all of the above had recently acquired houses and property on the Gold Coast. Who else has that kind of money these days? The defenses were crumbling, the republic was on the auction block. I said, “Do you know the name Frank Bellarosa?”
Susan thought a moment. “I don’t think so.”
“Mafia.”
“Really? That’s our new neighbor?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Did he say he was Mafia?”
“Of course not. I know him from the newspapers, TV. I can’t believe you never heard of him. Frank ‘the Bishop’ Bellarosa.”
“Is he a bishop?”
“No, Susan, that’s his Mafia nickname. They all have nicknames.”
“Is that a fact?”
She sipped her tea and looked distantly into the garden. Susan, not unlike many of the residents in this Garden of Eden, excludes much of the outside world. She reads Trollope and Agatha Christie, never listens to radio, and uses the television only to play videotapes of old movies. She obtains her weather reports from a recorded phone message. Local events are learned through the good-news weekly newspaper and from a few upscale magazines that serve the affluent Gold Coast communities. Regarding hard news, she has adopted Thoreau’s philosophy: If you read about one train wreck, you’ve read about them all.
I asked, “Does this news upset you?”
She shrugged, then asked me, “Are you upset?”
As an attorney, I don’t like people turning questions back to me, so I gave a flippant reply. “No. In fact, Grace Lane will now be well protected
by the FBI, joined by county detectives on stakeouts.”
She seemed to be processing that information, then said, “This man . . . what’s his name . . . ?”
“Bellarosa.”
“Yes, well, I’ll talk to him about the horse trails and rights of way over his land.”
“Good idea. Set him straight.”
“I will.”
I recalled a silly, though appropriate, joke for the occasion and told it to Susan. “Christopher Columbus steps ashore in the New World—this is a joke—and he calls out to a group of Native Americans, ‘Buenos dias!’ or maybe ‘Buon giorno!’ and one of the Indians turns to his wife and says, ‘There goes the neighborhood.’”
Susan smiled politely.
I stood and walked out the rear garden gate, leaving Susan to her tea, her mood, and her potential problem with explaining equestrian rights of way to a Mafia don.
Three
One of the local traditions here says that if you’re crossing an estate on foot, you’re trespassing; if you’re on horseback, you’re gentry.
I didn’t know if Mr. Frank Bellarosa was aware of that as yet, or if he was, if he was going to honor the tradition. Nevertheless, later that Saturday afternoon, I crossed over onto his land through a line of white pine that separated our properties. I was mounted on Yankee, my wife’s second horse, a six-year-old gelding of mixed breeding. Yankee has a good temperament, unlike Zanzibar, Susan’s high-strung Arabian stallion. Yankee can be ridden hard and put away wet without dying of pneumonia, whereas Zanzibar seems to be under perpetual veterinary care for mysterious and expensive ailments. Thus the reason for Yankee’s existence, just as my Ford Bronco fills in when Susan’s Jag is in the shop every other week. But I suppose there’s a price to pay for high performance.
Coming out of the pines, an open field lay ahead, a former horse pasture now overgrown with brush and various species of saplings that aspire to be a forest again if left alone.