‘‘You’re not going to tell me what kind of material? Or what it is to be used for?’’ Baker asked.
‘‘No,’’ Captain Douglass said. ‘‘But I’ll tell you what I want you to do: indulge your imagination and make guesses. Come in here at nine in the morning and tell me what you’ve been thinking.’’
SEVEN
Summer Place Deal, New Jersey 10:30 A.M., December 7, 1941
Chesley Haywood Whittaker, Sr., had built Summer Place in New Jersey in 1889 because the senior Whittaker did not like Long Island or Connecticut or Rhode Island, where most of his peers had their summer places. He was neither a Vanderbilt nor a Morgan, he said to his wife, just a simple bridge and dam builder; and he could not afford to copy in Newport or Stockbridge a Florentine palace. So she would just have to deal with Deal. The play on words amused him.
The names his wife suggested for the new summer house (twenty-six rooms on three floors, sitting on ten acres that sloped down to the beach of the Atlantic Ocean) also amused him. She proposed Sea View and Sea Breezes and The Breakers and Ocean Crest and Sans Souci (and the English translation, Without Care).
‘‘ ‘Careless’ would be all right, Mitzi,’’ Chesley Haywood Whittaker told his wife. ‘‘It would memorialize my foresight in hiring Carlucci.’’
Antonio Carlucci and Sons, General Contractors, had built the house, graded the dunes, and laid the grass, drive-ways, and a six-hole putting green for what Chesley Haywood Whittaker, Sr., considered an outrageous ninety-seven thousand dollars.
Esther Graham ‘‘Mitzi’’ (for no good reason) Whittaker was alone with the father of her three sons in the privacy of their bedroom in their brownstone on Murray Hill in New York City. There were no children or servants within hearing.
‘‘Call it what you damned well please, you ass!’’ she flared. ‘‘But there had damned well better be a sign up by next week!’’
The house, not quite two miles from the railroad station in Asbury Park, could not be seen from the road. Mitzi’s sister and brother-in-law had ridden in a hack for two hours up and down the road before they found it. It was, Mitzi pointed out to her husband, the only one of more than two dozen summer places nearby that had neither a gatehouse nor a sign.
A sign was up when next Mrs. Whittaker went to Deal. The senior Whittaker had ordered a brick wall six feet high and eight feet long on the sand beside the road. Mounted on it was a bronze sign, cast as a rush order and special favor to Whittaker by the Baldwin Locomotive Wo
rks:
SUMMER PLACE WHITTAKER
‘‘It would have taken six men and God only knows how much money to take it down, and your father knew it,’’ Mitzi Whittaker had often told her sons. It was one of her favorite stories, and every time that Chesley Haywood Whittaker, Jr., passed the sign he thought of his mother telling that story.
He remembered the sign when it stood alone on the sand. Now there was a fence, brick pillars every twenty-five feet, with pointed steel poles in between. The road had long ago been paved with brick, and Summer Place had become the year-round residence of Chesley Haywood Whittaker, Jr.
After the death of first their father and six months later their mother, Mitchell Graham Whittaker, the older brother, had taken over the brownstone in Manhattan and lived there unmarried (but, it was reliably rumored, seldom without female companionship) until his death.
And the house on Q Street had gone to James Graham Whittaker, the baby brother, who had been killed with Pershing in France four months before his wife delivered their only child. As Chesley Haywood Whittaker often thought, young Jim Whittaker became the only chance the family had to perpetuate its name and fortune. For Chesty and his wife—to their deep regret—were childless.
James’s wife, a Martindale girl from Scarsdale, had remarried a couple of years after his death; but she had been extraordinarily kind to Chesty and Mitch about the boy, who had been christened James Mitchell Chesley Whittaker at Saint Bartholomew’s on Park Avenue with his uncles and Barbara as his godparents. She had shared the boy with them more than they had any right to expect she would.
Her second husband, a lawyer on Wall Street, was a Yalie by way of Phillips Exeter. Little Jimmy had followed the Whittakers through St. Mark’s and Harvard. Every New Year’s, they had sort of a delayed Christmas for him at Summer Place, and Jimmy’s mother and her husband and their children always gave them the boy for a month in the summer.
It had been planned that when Little Jimmy graduated, they would take him into the firm, but he had instead elected to go into the Army Air Corps and learn to fly. At the time, it had seemed like a good idea. Let him sow a few wild oats before he settled down. But now that Roosevelt had extended his service for a year and he had been sent to the Philippines, it obviously hadn’t been such a good idea.
Chesty Whittaker missed Jimmy very much, and so did Barbara, and Chesty was also worried about what the war that seemed imminent would mean for Jimmy. Today he would get some answers. Or thought he would. He was going first to a Giants game, and then to Washington, with his lawyer friend Bill Donovan. Donovan was already doing something very hush-hush for Roosevelt—so hush-hush that the normally cheerful and expansive Donovan changed the subject every time Chesty tried to pry out of him what it was he was doing for Franklin, though it was obviously related to what he and Commander Ian Fleming had been cooking up together last summer.
Donovan, nevertheless, had better access to what the future had in store for him and for Jimmy than Chesty himself did, and Chesty knew that except for those matters covered by secrecy, Donovan would give him straighter answers than he had got from Franklin the night he and Jimmy ate with him at the White House. When he’d asked him for straight answers, Franklin just grinned his enigmatic grin. ‘‘If you want to get in the game, Chesty,’’ he said, ‘‘you’re going to have to join the team.’’
Chesty Whittaker was damned if short of war he would join Roosevelt’s ‘‘team.’’ If the man wasn’t a socialist, he was the next thing to it.
When he went into the breakfast room to say good-bye to Barbara, she asked him if he had any money. When he looked, he found he didn’t, and she shook her head at him, took two hundred dollars in twenties from her purse, and gave it to him.
Barbara was his best friend, he thought, far more than a wife. And whenever she was kind to him, which was often, he was ashamed even more about Cynthia. If Barbara ever found out about that, she would be deeply hurt. Chesty Whittaker would rather lose an arm than hurt her. Mother Nature was a bitch, he thought. If she had caused Barbara to lose interest in the physical side of life, it seemed only fair that she dampen his urges too. And she had not. Cynthia kept him as randy as he had been as a young man.
He left the house by the kitchen door. Chesty squinted against the sunlight. It was so painfully bright as to cause pain. The last damned thing he needed was a headache—or rather another headache. For he’d had a few lately. And this sort of surprised him, because he was otherwise in perfect health.
At fifty-three Chesley Haywood Whittaker, Jr., carried only twenty pounds more than the one hundred eighty-two he had carried as a tackle at Harvard. He played golf at least once a week, squash at the New York Athletic Club every Thursday afternoon, and had given up the boat only when he marked his half century of life. He was, his doctor told him, in as good shape as he’d been at twenty-one.
Edward, the chauffeur, had the Packard waiting. He got behind the wheel and pushed the starter button and ground the damned starter gears. You actually could not feel or hear that the Packard engine was running, but that did not keep him from feeling foolish. He put it in gear and moved away.
Chesty saw Barbara wave at him from the breakfast room. He waved back, and he considered again that she probably sensed he had a woman somewhere. But if she knew, she hadn’t said anything, or done anything. There had not been so much as a hint or a pointed remark.