McNally's Secret Read Free

moved his family to Palm Beach. He had been admitted to the Florida bar and knew exactly how he wanted to live. Had known, as a matter of fact, since his first days as a Yale undergraduate.
    The world my father envisioned—and this was years before Ralph Lauren created a fashion empire from the same dream—was one of manor homes, croquet, polo, neatly trimmed gardens, a wine cellar, lots of chintz, worn leather and brass everywhere, silver-framed photographs of family members, and cucumber sandwiches at tea.
    That was the life he deliberately and painstakingly created for himself and his family in Palm Beach. He was Lord of the Manor, and if this necessitated buying an antique marble fireplace and mantel from a London dealer and having it crated and shipped to Florida at horrendous expense, so be it. He believed in his dream, and he realized it beautifully and completely. Gentility? It was coming out our ears.
    That made me not merely a son but a scion. (Lords of the Manor had heirs or scions.) And if I recognized my father’s spurious life-style at an early age, that didn’t prevent me from taking full advantage of the perks it offered.
    I recalled a conversation with comrades at Yale Law before I was booted out. We were discussing how sons often followed in the footsteps of their fathers, not only adopting pop’s vocation, but frequently his habits, hobbies, and vices.
    “The apple never falls far from the tree,” someone remarked sententiously.
    To which someone else added, “And the turd never falls far from the bird.”
    I didn’t wish to brood too deeply on how that latter aphorism might apply to me. But I want you to know that I was aware of what I considered my father’s masquerade. And although I might regard it with lofty scorn, I was willing to profit from it. Perhaps I was as much an actor as my father.
    I put all these heavy ruminations in a mental deep six and resolutely turned to making suitable entries in my daily journal. To accomplish this, I was forced to don reading glasses. Yes, at the tender age of thirty-six-plus, the peepers had shown evidence of bagging at the knees, and I needed the hornrimmed cheaters for close-up work. Naturally I never wore them in public. One doesn’t wish to wobble about resembling a nuclear physicist, does one?
    I made notes regarding the recovery of the Clarence T. Frobisher letters. Then I jotted down what little I had learned from my father regarding the claimed theft of the Inverted Jenny stamps from the wall safe in the bedroom of Lady Cynthia Horowitz. I scrawled a reminder to phone Horowitz and set up an early appointment.
    Then, staring at my diary, I made a final note that amazed me. It read as follows:
    “Jennifer Towley!!!”

Chapter 2
    I OVERSLEPT AND BY the time I trooped downstairs my father had already left for the office (we usually drove in together), and my mother was pottering about in the potting shed, which seemed logical. I learned all this from Olson, our houseman, who was seated in the kitchen smoking a pipe and working on a mug of black coffee to which he may or may not have added a dram of aquavit. He also told me his wife, Ursi, had taken the station wagon to seek fresh grouper for our dinner that night.
    You would think, wouldn’t you, that a man with the red corpuscles of the Vikings dancing through his veins would have a given name of Lars or Sven. But Olson’s first name was Jamie, and it was not a diminutive of James; it was just Jamie. He was a wrinkled codger, about my father’s age, and he and his wife had been with us as long as I could remember. They were childless and both seemed content to go on working at the Chez McNally for as long as they could get out of bed in the morning.
    “Eggs?” he asked.
    I shook my head. “Rye toast and coffee. I’m dieting.”
    He set to work in that slow, deliberate way of his. Both the Olsons were good chefs—good, not great—but neither would ever qualify for a fast-food joint. They