Free The Last Supper by Charles McCarry Page A

“He asked if you swam with a friend. These clothes obviously don’t belong to Hubbard.”
    Paulus held up the shirt Zaentz had been wearing. It was an old shirt, one he had worn while working in his studio, and it was smeared with paint.
    “The Dandy held this shirt up to his nose,” Paulus said. “ ‘Do you know,’ he said to me, ‘that Jews smear themselves with goose grease at the beginning of
winter, and then their women sew them up in their underwear, not removing it until spring? Even turpentine won’t kill that smell,’ the Dandy said; ‘it penetrates the skin and
squeezes out through the sweat glands.’ ”
    — 5 —
    Paul spent the following summer in the Berkshires. His American godfather, Elliott Hubbard, met him in New York and drove him in a yellow Chrysler convertible to the Harbor, 150
miles to the north. Elliott never drove at less than sixty miles an hour, leaving a huge plume of dust behind as they roared over the dirt roads that led to the Berkshires.
    They arrived at midnight. In the morning, Paul asked Alice Hubbard, Elliott’s new wife, to show him Indian Joe’s grave. They climbed together through the pasture above the Harbor to
the Hubbard burial ground, a mossy plot surrounded by a tumbling stone wall. Five generations of the family were buried in a circle, feet pointing inward.
    “When the Hubbards arise at the Last Trump, they’ll be facing one another,” Alice Hubbard said. “Opening their eyes upon the elect of God, they’ll see nothing but
Hubbards. No boring outsiders. That’s called the Hubbard heaven.”
    “What about Indian Joe?”
    “Here he is.”
    Paul found the granite boulder, marked with the words the second Aaron had chiseled into it.
    “Very advanced about Mahican Indians, the Hubbards were,” Alice said. “It must have been guilt; they never got over the shame of stealing their land from the poor savages. They
name everything for them. Is your father that way, too?”
    “Our boat is named Mahican .”
    “Of course it is. Imagine! Indian Joe’s ghost, sailing around in the Baltic.”
    Alice thought that her husband’s family, so close-knit and so proud of its history, was comical.
    “What you really must understand, in order to understand the Hubbards, is the Hubbard brides,” she said. “They’re all here.”
    Moving from one tilted headstone to the other, Alice read off their ages. “You see?” she said. “All the Hubbard women die young, right down to the last generation. They were
buried every one before they were forty—here’s your grandmother, snuffed out at thirty-four, and Elliott’s mother, dead at twenty-five. What a tragic history, what a mystery, or
so I thought until Elliott shanghaied me into this summer in the country among his pals. Now I understand: all these women died of boredom.”
    As she spoke, the pure silence of the country morning was shattered. One of Elliott Hubbard’s houseguests, an Italian tenor, had come onto the lawn of the Harbor to sing his morning
scales. Alice and Paul could see him, far below them, his portly body wrapped in a white bathrobe, as he projected his voice against the stony mountainside. The Harbor, a sprawling white clapboard
structure with innumerable ells and wings, stood on the banks of a brook in a mowing between two mountains. The brook was cold and as gray as a trout’s back; the mowing, planted in timothy
and redtop, was silvery green; the mountains were blue. Before the tenor began to sing, it had been possible to hear the sound of the brook. Now, as he sang the first few bars of “Una furtiva
lagrima,” a whitetail deer that had been grazing among a herd of Jersey cows lifted its head. Its horns were in velvet.
    Elliott Hubbard was a collector of houseguests. Everyone was interesting to him, and he invited everyone who interested him to stay at his country house. In the room next to Paul’s, a
playwright composed dialogue, reading his lines aloud far into the night and