The Father Hunt

At half past three Wednesday afternoon I sat in an all-weather chair under a maple tree on top of a cliff in Dutchess County. To my right was a scenic view of three or four miles of the Hudson River. About a hundred yards to my left was an ivy-covered end of a mansion or palace or castle which must have had between thirty and fifty rooms, depending on their size. In every direction there were bushes, trees, flowers, things like a statue of a deer eating out of a girl's hand, and grass. Lily Rowan's glade had never seen grass like that. Eight feet in front of me, on a chair like mine but with an attached footrest, was a lean, lengthy man with a long bony face, an ample crop of white hair, and a pair of gray-blue eyes so cold that, taking them straight, you got no impression at all. At half past three I was saying to him, "That was just a dodge. I have no silver abacus. In fact, I have never seen one."

Having spent the morning at the public library and the Gazette

morgue, I knew enough about Cyrus M. Jarrett to fill a dozen pages, but you don't care or need to know that it was his left leg he broke when he fell off a horse in 1958. Here are a few items. His grandfather had paid for the palace; Cyrus M. had been born in it. He had had one wife, who had died in 1943, one daughter, now living in Rome with her husband, who was a count, and one son, named Eugene E., forty-three years old, one of the nine vice-presidents of the Seaboard Bank and Trust Company I had seen listed in the International Bank Di

rectory.

Cyrus M. was a member of nine boards of di-

rectors, topping Ballou by one. During the Second World War he had been a member of the Production Allotment Board. And so forth and so on.

The one essential item for me was that he used six of the rooms in the palace to house one of the three finest known collections of Colonial handiwork; that was the one I had used to get to him. At the library, after spotting that in the Fortune piece, I had consulted the library files and got a book, and in half an hour I had realized it would take a month to learn enough to put up a front for five minutes, so I created a piece of handiwork then and there, in my mind, went to a phone booth, and dialed area code 914 and a number.