Free A Hamptons Christmas by James Brady

ferry slip, trying to avoid a deer and hitting a fieldstone wall instead.
    Oddly, he was sober that time. And died saving a damned deer. On North Haven that November they voted to have a hundred local deer shot because they were pests and there were too many of them, and Jake’s kid died trying not to kill one.
    Jacob Marley was never really the same after that. Oh, he functioned. But he lost focus, permitted a young protégé to take on more and more of the work at the office, and began leaving small and eventually large decisions to the young man, whose name was Dick Driver. Marley was a great construction man. Driver wasn’t much of a builder but an instinctive genius at dealing. The
company called Marley Inc. became Marley & Associates. When Driver married a European glamour-puss named Nicole, Marley attended the wedding, sent lavish gifts. People who knew Jake said he’d begun thinking of Dick not merely as a protégé but a surrogate son. The firm became Marley & Driver. Then Marley/Driver & Partners. When the Drivers’ child, a daughter, was born, Marley sent a corny card and an almost as laughable stock certificate for a few thousand shares in a promising new outfit called Microsoft. His own company was now Driver & Marley Associates. Then … well, you get the picture. There were tensions building, but despite them, each year, on her birthday, Dick and Nicole’s daughter received a birthday card and stock. Not the kid’s fault her father was manipulative and a user. Jake had plenty of the folding; money was never a problem. Control was. Jake just didn’t have the muscle anymore. Driver turned out to have a gift. He made deals and the company grew even bigger, richer, more powerful. Never mind about construction; Dick could always hire architects and men who knew structural steel and reinforced concrete, contractors who understood the building codes. He encouraged Marley to indulge himself a little. Winters in Palm Beach. No need to come in to the office. Leave it to Dick. Play a little golf. Leave it to Mr. Driver. No, Mr. Marley hasn’t retired; he’s just not here very much. Mr. Marley? Not here, sir. He’s abroad, traveling, ill, on vacation. But Mr. Driver’s here; he makes those decisions … .
    Mr. Driver makes all the decisions.
    Dick Driver was the final straw in turning Marley antisocial. The roots of Jake’s bitterness lay elsewhere and earlier. But Dick helped. Oh, yes, how he helped.
    Alix, being English and of a family with a long genealogical tree, wanted to see the Old Churchyard, so I took her up Three Mile Harbor Road next morning for a quick gaze. Too cold to hang about. The Admiral was teaching Susannah/Jane speed chess. Fifteen seconds between moves. She seemed content enough, and I don’t believe in pushing cemeteries when it comes to little kids. We took Alix’s hummer and she drove.
    I’d not seen the place for years, not since I was a schoolboy and
cemeteries were places where you played and hid on dark nights, scaring hell out of passersby and, incidentally, yourself. I remember it in summer, all abloom, the grass greener than anywhere else, function of the fertilizing effects of moldering bodies, we all supposed. Now, in winter, pretty nice still. There wasn’t a locked gate or anything, only a faded white board fence in need of fresh paint, and I led the way in, reading off the stones the old East Hampton names: Bennett, Talmage, Lester, King, Miller, Vorpahl, Osborne, Schellinger, Mulford, Gardiner, Price, Duryea, Gerard. And the dates, most of them in the 1800s, a few even earlier.
    From here, you could smell the sea. Three Mile Harbor just to the west, Accabonac Harbor, and beyond that, Gardiners Bay and the ocean, just to the east. Maybe it was forty degrees, but there was wind and the damp was in it. You know that feeling. “Cold?” I asked, looking over at Alix, snuggled deep into a fur coat of some