The Gold Coast (22 page)
Authors: Nelson DeMille
Susan asked me, “What beach do you want to make love on?”
“One without razor clams. I had a serious accident once.”
“Did you, now? That must have been before my time. I don’t remember that. What was her name?”
“Janie.”
“Not Janie Tillman?”
“No.”
“You’ll have to tell me about it later.”
“All right.’’ In our pursuit of fidelity within a twenty-year-old marriage, Susan and I, in addition to the historical romances, sometimes talk about a premarital lover as part of our foreplay. I read in a book once that it was all right to do this, to get the juices going, but afterward, as you’re both lying there, one partner is usually sullen and the other is sorry he or she was so graphic. Well, if you play with fire to get heat, you can also get burned.
I asked, “What did you do today?”
“I planted those vegetables that what’s-his-name gave us.’’ She laughed.
“In the rain?”
“Don’t they like the rain? I planted them in one of the old flower terraces in front of Stanhope Hall.”
I thought old Cyrus Stanhope, as well as McKim, Mead, and White, must be spinning in their graves.
I turned into an unmarked road that I don’t think I was ever on before. A good many of the roads on the North Shore are unmarked—some say on purpose—and they seem to go nowhere and often do.
A modern map of this area would not show you where the great estates are; there is no Gold Coast version of the Hollywood Star Map, but there did once exist privately circulated maps of this area that showed the location of the estates and their owners’ names. These maps were for use by the gentry in the event your butler handed you an invitation reading something like, “Mr. and Mrs. William Holloway request the pleasure of your company for dinner at Foxland, the seventeenth of May at eight o’clock.”
Anyway, I have one of these old estate maps in my possession. Mine is dated 1928, and I can see on it the location of all the estates, great and small, in that year along with the estate owners’ names written in. I said to Susan, “You never met the original owners of Alhambra, did you? The Dillworths?”
“No, but they were friends of my grandparents. Mr. Dillworth was killed in World War Two. I think I remember Mrs. Dillworth, but I’m not sure. I do remember when the Vanderbilts lived there in the fifties.”
It seemed to me that the large Vanderbilt clan had built or bought half the houses on the Gold Coast at one time or another, allowing realtors to say of any great house with fifty-percent accuracy, “Vanderbilts lived here.’’ I asked, “Then the Barretts bought it?”
“Yes. Katie Barrett was my best friend. But they lost the house to the bank or the tax people in 1966, the year I went to college. They were the last owners until you-know-who.”
I nodded, then said to Lady Stanhope, baitingly, “My grandfather once told me that the coming of the millionaires to Long Island was not looked on very favorably by the people who had been here for centuries before. The old Long Island families, such as my own, thought these new people—including the Stanhopes—were crass, immoral, and ostentatious.’’ I smiled.
Susan laughed. “Did the Sutters and Whitmans look down on the Stanhopes?”
“I’m certain they did.”
“I think you’re a worse snob than I am.”
“Only with the rich. I’m very democratic with the masses.”
“Sure. So, how will we treat Mr. Bellarosa? As a crass, unprincipled interloper, or as an American success story?”
“I’m still sorting it out.”
“Well, I’ll help you, John. You’re as relieved as I am that Alhambra will not become a hundred little haciendas, which is very selfish but understandable. On the other hand, you’d have rather had someone next door whose crimes were not so closely associated with his fortune.”
“There are people out there who earn their money honestly.”
“I know there are. They live in Levittown.”
“Very cynical.”
Susan changed the subject. “I heard from Carolyn and Edward today.”
“How are they?’’ I asked.
“Fine. They missed us at Easter.”
“It seemed different without them,’’ I said.
“Easter certainly was different this year,’’ Susan pointed out.
I let that alone. As for my children, Carolyn is a freshman at Yale, my alma mater, and I still can’t get used to the fact that Yale has women there now. Carolyn went to St. Paul’s, also my alma mater, and that’s even harder to picture. But the world is changing, and for women, perhaps, it’s a slightly better place. Edward is a senior at St. Paul’s, which appeals to my male ego, but he’s been accepted at Susan’s alma mater, Sarah Lawrence. I suppose I should be happy that my children have chosen their parents’ schools, but how my daughter has wound up at Yale and my son at Sarah Lawrence is beyond me. In Carolyn’s case, I think she is making a statement. Edward’s motives, I’m afraid, are a bit more base; he wants to get laid. I think they’ll both succeed. I said, “I came home every holiday when I was at school.”
“So did I, except one Thanksgiving I’d rather not discuss.’’ She laughed, then added seriously, “They grow up faster now, John. They really do. I was so sheltered, I honestly didn’t know a thing about sex or money or travel until I was ready to go to college. That’s not good either.”
“I suppose not.’’ Susan actually went to a local prep school, Friends Academy here in Locust Valley, an old and prestigious school run by Quakers. She lived at home and was driven to school in a chauffeured car. Many of the rich around here favor the austere atmosphere of Friends for their children, hoping, I suppose, that their heirs will learn to enjoy simple pleasures in the event the market crashes again. Indeed we all try to raise our children as if
our
past experiences are important for
their
future, but they rarely are. Anyway, I’m glad Susan learned austerity between nine
A
.
M
. and three
P
.
M
. on school days. It may come in handy.
our
past experiences are important for
their
future, but they rarely are. Anyway, I’m glad Susan learned austerity between nine
A
.
M
. and three
P
.
M
. on school days. It may come in handy.
Susan said, “Your mother called. They’re back in Southampton.”
My parents are not the type to call to announce their movements. They once took a trip to Europe, and I didn’t know about it until months afterward. Obviously, there was more to the phone call.
Susan added, “She was curious about your Easter behavior. I told her you were just having a few bad days.”
I grunted noncommittally. My mother, Harriet, is a rather cold but remarkable woman, very liberated for her day. She was a professor of sociology at nearby C.W. Post College, which was once the estate of the Post family of cereal fame. The college has always been somewhat conservative, drawing its student body from the surrounding area, and Harriet was usually in some sort of trouble for her radical views in the 1950s.
She didn’t have to work, of course, as my father did well financially, and there were people at Post who wished she didn’t work. But by the 1960s, the world had caught up to Harriet, and she came into her own, becoming one of the campus heroes of the counterculture.
I can remember her when I was home from St. Paul’s and Yale, running all over the place in her VW Beetle, organizing this and that. My father was liberal enough to approve, but husband enough to be annoyed.
Time, however, marches on, and Harriet Whitman Sutter got old. She now disapproves of four-letter words, loose sex, drugs, and sons who don’t shave or wear ties at Easter. And this is the same lady who approved of co-ed streaking. I said to Susan, “I’ll call her tomorrow.”
Susan and my mother get along, despite their social and economic differences. They have a lot more in common than they know.
We slipped back into a companionable silence, and I turned my attention back to the scenery. It seemed to me that a traveler who put down his road map and looked out his window as he drove along these country lanes would not mistake his surroundings for some west-of-the-Hudson backwater, but would in some socially instinctive way know that he had entered a vast private preserve of wealth.
And as this traveler’s car navigated the bends and turns of these tree-lined roads, he might see examples of Spanish architecture, like Alhambra, half-timbered Tudor manors, French châteaux, and even a white granite beaux-arts palace like Stanhope Hall, sitting in the American countryside, out of time and out of place, as if the aristocracy from all over Western Europe for the last four hundred years had been granted a hundred acres each to create an earthly nirvana in the New World. By 1929, most of Long Island’s Gold Coast was divided into about a thousand great and small estates, fiefdoms, the largest concentration of wealth and power in America, probably the world.
As we drove along a narrow lane, bordered by estate walls, I saw six riders coming from the opposite direction. Susan and I waved as we passed, and they returned the greeting.
She said, “That reminds me, I want to move the stable now that the good weather is here.”
I didn’t reply.
“We’ll need a sideline variance.”
“How do you know?”
“I checked. The stable will be within a hundred yards of you-know-who’s property.”
“Damn it.”
“I have the paperwork from Village Hall. We need plans drawn up, and we’ll have to get you-know-who to sign off on it.”
“Damn it.”
“No big deal, John. Just send it to him with a note of explanation.”
It’s hard to argue with a woman to whom you want to make love, but I was going to give it my best shot. “Can’t you find another place for the stable?”
“No.”
“All right.’’ The idea of asking Frank Bellarosa for a favor didn’t appeal to me in the least, especially after I had just told him to take his business elsewhere. I said, “Well, it’s your property and your stable. I’ll get the paperwork done, but you take care of you-know-who.”
“Thank you.’’ She put her arm around me. “Are we friends?”
“Yes.’’ But I hate your stupid horses.
“John, you look so good when you’re naked. Now that the weather is warm, can I paint you outdoors in the nude?”
“No.’’ Susan has four main passions in life: horses, landscape painting, gazebos, and sometimes me. You know about the horses and about me. The Gazebo Society is a group of women who are dedicated to the preservation of the Gold Coast’s gazebos. Why gazebos? you ask. I don’t know. But in the spring, summer, and fall, they have these elaborate picnic lunches in various gazebos, and they all dress in Victorian or Edwardian clothes, complete with parasols. Susan is not a joiner, and I can’t fathom why she hangs around with these ditsy people, but the skeptic in me says the whole thing is a front for something. Maybe they tell dirty jokes, or exchange hot gossip, or aid and abet marital infidelities. But maybe they just have lunch. Beats me.
As for the landscape painting, this is for real. Susan has gained some local notoriety for her oils. Her main subject is Gold Coast ruins, in the style of the Renaissance artists who painted the classical Roman ruins, with the fluted columns entangled with vines, and the fallen arches, and broken walls overgrown with plant life: the theme being, I suppose, nature reclaiming man’s greatest architectural achievements of a vanished Golden Age.
Her most famous painting is of her horse, stupid Zanzibar, who if nothing else is a magnificent-looking animal. In the painting, Zanzibar is standing in the moonlight of the crumbling glass palm court of Laurelton Hall, the former Louis C. Tiffany mansion. Susan wants to do a painting of me, in the same setting, standing naked in the moonlight. But though Susan is my wife, I’m a little shy about standing around naked in front of her. Also, I have the bizarre thought that I will come out looking like a centaur.
Anyway, Susan’s clients are mostly local nouveau riche who live in those tract mansions that cover the old estate grounds. These clients buy everything that Susan can paint and pay three to five thousand dollars a canvas. Susan does two or three landscapes a year and supports her two horses with the money. Personally, I think she could do another two or three and buy me a new Bronco.
“Why won’t you pose in the nude for me?”
“What are you going to
do
with the picture?”
do
with the picture?”
“Hang it over the fireplace. I’ll give you another three inches and we’ll have a cocktail party, and you’ll be surrounded by admiring women.’’ She laughed.
“Get hold of yourself.’’ I headed in the direction of Hempstead Bay, where there are a few secluded beaches, on most of which I’ve had at least one sexual experience. There’s something about the salt air that gets me cranked up.
I thought about Susan’s paintings of the old estates and wondered why she chose to record and preserve this crumbling world in oil, and how she makes it look so alluring on canvas. It struck me that a painting of an intact mansion would be dull and ordinary, but there
was
an awful beauty to these fallen palaces. On the lands of these estates one can still see marble fountains, statuary, imitation Roman ruins such as Alhambra’s, a classical love temple such as we have at Stanhope, gazebos, children’s fantasy playhouses such as Susan’s, teahouses, miles of greenhouses, pool pavilions, water towers built to look like watchtowers, and balustraded terraces overlooking land and sea. All of these lonely structures lend a whimsical air to the landscape, and it seems as if someone had built and abandoned a storyland theme park many years ago. Susan’s paintings make me see these familiar ruins in a different way, which, I suppose, is the mark of a good artist. I asked her, “Have you ever painted a man in the nude?”
was
an awful beauty to these fallen palaces. On the lands of these estates one can still see marble fountains, statuary, imitation Roman ruins such as Alhambra’s, a classical love temple such as we have at Stanhope, gazebos, children’s fantasy playhouses such as Susan’s, teahouses, miles of greenhouses, pool pavilions, water towers built to look like watchtowers, and balustraded terraces overlooking land and sea. All of these lonely structures lend a whimsical air to the landscape, and it seems as if someone had built and abandoned a storyland theme park many years ago. Susan’s paintings make me see these familiar ruins in a different way, which, I suppose, is the mark of a good artist. I asked her, “Have you ever painted a man in the nude?”
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