The Claimant Read online

  Or would they send the claimant to jail?

  Would DNA settle the issue? Could the judge mandate it?

  And wouldn’t the claimant have offered a DNA swab unless he had something – the blood-print of his actual paternity – to hide?

  Not necessarily so, argued law professors from Columbia and NYU in letters to the editor of the New York Times. The paternity test is not absolutely conclusive, but depends on the number of chromosomal locations investigated. The statistics generated with too few locations are not definitive and in some cases can result in wrong conclusions, such as the father being excluded when, in fact, he is the true father. The claimant’s lawyers will want to rule out the possibility of a false negative being introduced into court, legal experts opined.

  Could le Vicomte Gwynne Patrice de la Vallière Vanderbilt – as the claimant was styled by the Vanderbilt widow’s lawyers in court documents – actually be a direct descendant of Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, great-grandson of Cornelius, the so-called Commodore, the original nineteenth-century steamship and railroad robber baron, the first mega-millionaire? Alfred Gwynne was a dandy and a horseracing man and a high-stakes gambler who inherited one fortune, made another one, married into a third one (this first wife divorced him on the grounds of adulterous goings-on that did not even try to be discreet), then married again into a fourth fortune. He had houses in Newport, Rhode Island, in New York, and in London. He was a lucky man. He had actually booked passage on the Titanic but changed his plans on the eve of the trip. He did sail on the Lusitania and, after a fashion, his luck still held. He went down with the ship in the best possible way, immortalised as a hero, calm, charming, cool to the last, giving up his life jacket to a woman from a second-class berth. He’d had time before the Lusitania sailed to run through his two marriages, various affairs, and one particularly high-profile and scandalous liaison staged in transit and in luxury in his private railroad car. The woman was the wife of the Cuban attaché in Washington D.C. and the tabloid publicity was such that she killed herself one year later. Alfred Gwynne had by then floated on, unscathed, to other attachments. He had three legitimate sons from his two marriages. The number born on the wrong side of the sheets is unknown.

  Could the claimant possibly be the carrier of all this genetic brio? Could Alfred Gwynne really be his great-grandfather?

  That Australian cattle hand? diners said with polite disdain over lunch at Jean-Georges and in the restaurant at the Carlyle. A Vanderbilt? Please.

  Various opinions drifted up from the babble of Manhattan.

  I’ve heard he looks good on a horse.

  He does have charisma. I mean, in that still from the video that Time magazine ran. My daughter tells me it’s been pinned to her high-school bulletin board. All the girls swoon over him, she says. Cleaned up, I can’t help thinking he’d look good in a tux.

  But once he opens his mouth …? Could anyone who went to a New England prep school sound like that, even with acting lessons?

  Well I read somewhere that the young Vanderbilt – the real one – was an incredible mimic. In French, he could do peasant or aristocrat. In English, he could do New York, he could do Bronx and Brooklyn, he could do Boston Brahmin and Boston Irish. So maybe, you know, this Crocodile Dundee thing is not such a stretch.

  But can you imagine a cowboy in the Vanderbilt box at the Met?

  There were journalists at distinguished newspapers who reminded readers that Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Commodore, the original maker of the fortune, was a brutish, foul-mouthed, ruthless thug of a man, rigidly harsh with his own children and utterly devoid of social graces; that the next generation and the one after that were equally disreputable, equally despicable, equally inclined to vicious family litigation, though massively more mega-rich. Who, in Mrs Astor’s day, could forget the nefariously opulent ways by which Alva Vanderbilt clawed her way to the pinnacle of Newport and Manhattan society and dragooned her daughter into a miserable marriage with the Duke of Marlborough? But that, of course, had been aeons ago and the art of becoming couth and kempt always lagged a few generations behind. Any living Vanderbilt had prep school, the Ivy League, the Upper East Side, racehorses and the Hamptons behind him.

  Scratch a Vanderbilt and the Commodore bleeds out, countered bar-room pundits and late-night comedy shows.

  The claimant never actually appeared in court but was represented in surrogate form by his mother – that is to say, by la comtesse, Lawrence Gwynne Vanderbilt’s widow, who swore under oath that her son was alive and well in Australia. Thus his image and personality were constructed from the jigsaw pieces of conflicting memories and testimonies and from lawyers’ briefs and from that single brief sensational video interview. Gossip and rumour and garbled word-of-mouth took off from there, so that the claimant grew like the Golem and stood over Manhattan with one foot in Brooklyn, the other in the Bronx.

  Many noted that the claimant, known to the press as Christy McLew or the Down-Under Butcher, known as ‘Gwynne Patrice Vanderbilt so-called’ to the court, was about as far as it was possible to be from a dandy like Alfred Gwynne, his putative great-grandfather.

  Was class a factor in the stance that opposed factions took?

  Absolutely nothing to do with the matter, insisted the family lawyers.

  But an editorial in the Village Voice disagreed. Purely, obviously, indisputably, the case is about class and nothing but. It is about the last great taboo in American political discourse. DNA evidence proving the claimant was a Vanderbilt would change nothing. The minds of the richest one percent are made up and their judgment is fixed: He’s simply not one of us.

  Oh, it was open season and non-stop festival time for a professional eavesdropper like me. I use the phrase ‘professional eavesdropper’ both ironically and literally because that is the essence of my dual careers, both of which (though conducted simultaneously) I have been obliged to keep secret.

  I wish I could flatter myself that you, dear reader, feel a sudden frisson of recognition, that you think you may have identified me, but I am all too aware that even notoriety has only its little moment on the stage. My name and my photograph were much in the news not long after the Vanderbilt trial. At present, however, I live far from the madding crowd, sequestered, in a safe house so to speak. The accommodation is temporary but congenial. I have time to meditate. I have time to reflect. I have time to write.

  I happen to have a family name that falls as trippingly off the tongue as Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Whitney, Waldorf and Astor, though mine is a Southern name, accorded more reverence south of the Mason–Dixon line. At the time of my own trial, you would have read the rumours about my family, all of those predictable left-wing Yankee smears. If you search the archives of my trial, you will know that I am not only a gifted listener – a discerning and vigilant eavesdropper – but I am everywhere. I mingle. People are fond of me, they like me (and that includes, for the time being, the brethren with whom I am sequestered, as well as our keepers). I was always as comfortable and inconspicuous in a coffee shop on Broadway and West 116th as at the Gramercy Tavern or in the watering holes around Wall Street.

  Wherever I was, you thought I was one of you.

  I am one of you.

  Perhaps I should adopt Chameleon as one of my many names? I take on local colouration wherever I am, without even thinking about it. This is an aspect of intelligence not much examined, I think.

  I grew up in a house with white Corinthian columns, live-oaks, Spanish moss, and domestic help who arrived before breakfast every day. We had a summer place up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We had a pied-à-terre in New York. But there’s also this: I was closer to my black nanny and our black domestics than to my own mother, so I know both sides of that fence. I am intimate with both sides. (You may make of that what you will.) Summers, while my parents were up in the mountains, it was our black domestics and their menfolk who cared for me. Their menfolk fixed our cars and mowed our lawns. I sat with them under the trees and fish
ed with them and ate lunch with them and heard their talk. I raced cars with them on country roads and crashed a few vehicles: driving under the influence, driving over the limit, driving during licence suspension. I was free to kick over the traces, the local sheriff always paying my family due respect.

  My father subjected me to many stern and sorrowing speeches, but never failed to post bail or pay my fines. Boys will be boys, was what he always said to my mother.

  Later, he said, It’s time to stop sowing wild oats.

  I was sent north, naturally, for straightening out and for the requisite trappings. One of the rules in our family, across generations, was Know your enemy, and so, like Faulkner’s Quentin Compson, I was shipped across the Mason–Dixon line. Unlike Quentin, I saw quickly I had nothing to learn, and also unlike Quentin, I couldn’t be bothered to offer extenuating explanations for the South. Within a month, I could see through Yankees, right through. They were gossamer-thin. I could see they were thigh-deep in hypocrisy. I understood I’d been plunked down mid-field in a Puritan colony of consummate self-righteous suckers who were mine for the taking.

  Yankee dimwits, you are asking for it, I thought.

  I am proud to say they got what they asked for.

  Bostonians love to disapprove and their disapproval was as sweet to me as a heavily sugared mint julep. Take those recent headlines. A second cousin by marriage, a rising star in political office, was convicted for snorting cocaine. There was nothing covert or underhand about it. He flaunted his coke at the opening of the new bridge across Charleston Harbor, a fact which made headlines in the Boston Globe and the New York Times. I loved it, though I do have to admit this is the sort of foolish publicity-attracting thing my family does when not gainfully occupied. Such public indiscretions always enraged my father, who was straight as a die, a regular churchgoer, a deacon and Bible-study leader, and a sincere believer in the values that made this country great. Boys will be boys, he would say. That’s a given. But if they don’t respect family honour, they deserve to be pistol-whipped. God gave them the intelligence to be discreet.

  I myself have always been gainfully occupied and I do not mean this purely or only in the personal financial sense. We – my family – have been patriots since the Revolutionary War. We have always been patriots, both when this was costly and when it was advantageous. Our history of devotion to a cause, along with my natural skills, led me into my second profession, about which I am under oath not to speak (though I will admit that my father, stunned on his belated discovery of my brilliant financial sleight-of-hand, had the foresight to rescue me – as he believed – and the requisite contacts to be the procurer of my covert secondary career).

  Even though the very mention of my name possibly now makes you tremble with rage, you cannot help but feel a sneaking admiration. How did I do it? How did I so easily herd you over my cliff like lemmings? You cannot suppress a secret desire to meet me one more time in a wine bar or at a black-tie gallery opening. Isn’t that the way it began? With champagne? This time, you convince yourself, your antennae would be out. You’d know the promised returns were far too good to be true. This time the outcome would be different.

  The outcome would not be different.

  That is our genius. (I speak as one of the Masters of the Game.)

  Eventually, from my point of view probably only posthumously, you will understand that all this dazzling and seemingly corrupt manipulation was deployed for a higher cause. You will understand the sacrifice of reputation involved. But here is the crux of the matter: it takes one to know one, and we recognise each other, we charmers who never get caught. (Almost never.) We have a sixth sense, an intuitive awareness of other chameleons who have changed name or have sloughed off earlier selves or have filed other editions of themselves under tabs such as: To be shredded or To be resumed between midnight and dawn or To be revisited later.

  Maybe it’s pheromones. Whatever the reason, we can tell. We know. We share a high mutual respect, especially for the riskier and more flagrant metamorphoses. So yes, under assorted aliases, we knew each other, I and the real Vanderbilt heir and his lover, that shapeshifting woman with whom I have played cat-and-mouse for so many years. I recognised them as members of my tribe before I knew who they were.

  Gwynne Vanderbilt was McVie when I met him, but McVie didn’t look like the claimant or act like him, a detail that is neither here nor there. All those front-page and evening-news photographs that the entire nation became so tired of seeing (Vanderbilt heir as slightly built Harvard nerd side by side with claimant as muscle-man Australian jackaroo), they mean absolutely nothing in the long run. Body type is as changeable as dyeing one’s hair or switching the colour of one’s eyes with contact lenses. I read an article recently about an anorexic teenager who ate her way through depression, ballooned up to two hundred and fifty pounds, was treated kindly by a documentary filmmaker and ended up in her late twenties as a willowy model in love with the man behind the camera.

  So. Bodily metamorphosis means zilch.

  I had a different means altogether for determining that the claimant was a fraud: gut instinct. Once an imposter, always an imposter, remember that. It’s a condition akin to malaria; it lurks in the blood and erupts whenever the fancy takes it.

  But how exactly, you want to know, did the three of us meet: the real Vanderbilt heir, the love of his life (and the temptress of mine), and myself? Answer: By happenstance, the way all of life comes at us. Well, perhaps not completely by happenstance. I was already deployed, you might say, in the fields where subversive weeds were cropping up.

  So. And this may or may not surprise you: we met first in a Harvard summer-school class in the late sixties, 1968 to be precise, The Sociology of Power, which we all aced. After the class, we’d go drinking in Harvard Square and we’d talk until we’d solved the world’s problems. You may remember that this was a turbulent year, that this was shortly after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and shortly before the violent Democratic Convention in Chicago that August. In Da Nang Harbor the Australian naval vessel HMAS Hobart, supporting the American cause, had come under ‘friendly fire’ from US pilots in June with the result that Australians were killed and wounded by their allies. The death toll of American troops in Vietnam had risen to thirty thousand.

  The Vanderbilt heir was calling himself Patrick McVie at the time; his girlfriend was calling herself Lilith Jardine; and I can’t remember for certain what I was required to call myself on that detail. We drank too much and confessed to each other that we did not know where we were headed or even where we wanted to go. I remember (with embarrassment) rambling on about how I had caused anguish to my father. I’d hated my prep schools – first Dryden, then Phillips Exeter – had been kicked out, was transferred a couple of times, dropped out of Yale my first year, was finagled into West Point by my father, then finagled out in the nick of time.

  The other two made more guarded confessions, even when drunk (even when apparently drunk), which was one of those early-warning signals that triggered my attention. There were several things I intuited very quickly: that Lilith was alarmingly acerbic; that if she had official transcripts they were not under the name of Lilith Jardine; that she may have somehow scammed her way into New York University, from where she claimed to hold her primary degree; that McVie had not been born into a Boston Irish family as he claimed, had not been an altar boy at St Ann’s, did not have a father who ran a butcher shop in Somerville, Mass. On the other hand, as far as I could initially tell, McVie was definitely an adjunct professor on several campuses (Boston College, Regis College, those solid and respectable private Catholic institutions of higher education) and he was taking the summer-school course because the topic interested him. So he said. McVie was a puzzle I had yet to solve.

  Lilith was another puzzle. As far as I could ascertain, she had an unpaid internship at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and she also worked several hours a week at Harvard’s Fogg Museum
, for which she was paid the usual low internship rates.

  We all claimed to be Democrats.

  We all claimed to be against the Vietnam War. To be honest (not a trait that comes naturally to me), I didn’t care one way or the other. I knew there was no risk that I would ever be drafted (my dropping out of Yale and West Point and the loss of my student deferment notwithstanding) and besides, I had already been recruited for a loftier cause. Keeping my eye on the people who enrolled in Harvard Summer School was one of my tasks.

  I should stress that when I was busy dropping out of prep schools and the Ivy League, my parents had not the slightest notion of my burgeoning and lucrative parallel career as an investment broker – a business I began as a student, hiding under my first corporate name, a witty one, that was shelved with some regret after my first bankruptcy – but they were deeply uneasy about my official CV. School counsellors and psychiatrists (the latter privately hired) had reassured them of my sky-high IQ. My father, devastated by my expulsions (which he felt now exceeded the leeway of Boys will be boys), believed that my natural talents could be put to patriotic use. He arranged for me an interview and an offer. I signed on, especially once the salary was mentioned. I was given a cover story which required that I change my name and temporarily sever all contact with my parents, an unlooked-for blessing. I cannot recall the name I was to use at the time – there have been too many of them – but for the sake of convenience let us say I was Lucifer then. Lucifer Investments: For returns that are fiendishly fine. My choice of that first company name seemed very clever at the time and I did fancy myself as a bit of a devil. Yale and West Point were rich hunting grounds for my start-up business, you will not be surprised to learn.

  Lilith and McVie were both overachieving polymaths, which is another way of saying that they were pre-eminently equipped to be first-class con artists. We continued to cross paths intermittently in other classes in the fall of ’68. McVie’s focus was moral philosophy, of all the pointlessly dead-end trails, going back to St Augustine and the theory of the Just War, blah blah blah, moving on to the medieval morality plays, which is why, for a while, we called him Sir Gawain. Well, I called him Sir Gawain. He had that air about him, the air of a pure knight and true, not self-righteous exactly, in fact not at all, which made his earnestness all the more irritating to me. Contemplative, I suppose, would be the word. An introvert. Anxious. Always fearing himself to be morally in the wrong (which is, I’ve come to realise, a condition genetically inherited by Catholics). You can imagine how this drove a Southern Protestant like myself up the wall at the same time as it made me extremely watchful. He had the air of someone thinking about the priesthood, which, at that time and place, was something to keep an eye on. There were priests treating the burning of draft cards as sacred obligation. There were priests who broke into local draft boards and poured blood on the files. You’ve probably either forgotten all this, or never known about it, but I can assure you that a white dog-collar put you on the watch list back then. Remember the Berrigans?