Read Online Everybody Rise by Stephanie Clifford - Free Book Online

guess why?”
    Evelyn, feeling like she had not done the reading for third-period history, shook her head.
    â€œLiquor bottles,” he said, enunciating. “They would throw bottles over the edge of the railing and shoot them.”
    â€œOh.” Evelyn looked back down toward the dock, but couldn’t see another path; she looked higher up, and saw another house, about three hundred yards above the first one, looming red and large on the hill. “That’s the main house, then? Up on the hill?”
    â€œNo,” Mr. Hacking said, now pleased with his student, “though that’s a good guess. That’s known as the chalet. The Hennings were, of course, great rivals of the Bluestadts, of the barbed-wire fortune, and the Bluestadts had a place just east of this, on East Lake. From the Bluestadts’ house, one could see the top of the hill at Sachem, which at the time held servants’ quarters—the servants were on the hilltop because it was farthest from the water, of course. Well, the Hennings were infuriated that the Bluestadt guests would have a view of the servants’ quarters, so they built a chalet façade for the servants’ quarters just so the Bluestadt guests would not think badly of them.”
    Charlotte had caught up to them by now. “The egos of these guys. Jesus,” she said. “A Potemkin village. Or, I guess, a Potemkin chalet.”
    â€œVery good,” Mr. Hacking said happily.
    â€œSo the main house?” Charlotte asked.
    â€œWe came in through the servants’ boathouse. Easier to find space there during parties. There’s a path to the main house from just off of there. Quite well hidden, really,” Mr. Hacking said.
    â€œYes, God forbid the servants be able to find their masters,” Charlotte said.
    The rest of the group had already taken off along the path. After a short walk through the woods, the path petered out, with hostas marking the edge of what looked to Evelyn like a fancy Girl Scout camp.
    On the water’s edge was a huge wooden lodgelike structure, three or four stories high, that was made out of the typical Adirondack-camp logs with bark peeling from them. Across a piece of bright green grass marked with croquet wickets was a similar building, this one smaller and squarer, with a sort of rotunda at one end looking out over the water. Behind that was a tennis court, then more structures—Evelyn counted six in all. The huge red door in the middle of the lodge was open, and there were a few dozen people streaming in and out, leaning over the porch, running down to the water. Children, adults, laughing, talking, moving with ease. She stood for a moment, her sandaled feet tickled by the grass on the side of the path. She had guessed wrong on the dress, as had her mother when Babs had pushed the Lilly. This wasn’t Vineyard tennis club; this was Adirondack sensible. One woman was in a fisherman’s sweater. Another in a skort. The women looked as rustic as the houses they had come from, in clothes that dirt and water would only ameliorate. Evelyn decided she’d need to rely on her instincts more.
    Scot and Mr. Hacking had also paused, though for a different reason.
    â€œIt almost looks Swiss,” Scot said, sotto voce, to Mr. Hacking as they studied the main lodge.
    â€œOh, yes, at the time, really the only idea Americans had of the wilderness was what the Swiss were constructing, and from the beams to the small peaked roof, you can see that influence,” said Mr. Hacking. “You see this in our camp as well. Notice all of these rustic elements.” Evelyn looked at the porch railings, made of branches arranged in pretty crossed patterns using their natural curves, and the planters of hollowed-out tree trunks that flanked the doors, and the peeling-bark logs stacked to make up the house.
    â€œLetting the wild in,” Scot said.
    â€œPrecisely. This was really a new idea at the