Montauk

by Nicola Harrison

  “You don’t think it’s too…”

  “Too what? Womanly, feminine, beautiful? Yes,” she said. “Now, to the Surf Club let’s go.”

  We sat at a cocktail table and had barely finished our martinis before an announcement came over the loudspeaker that the entertainment was about to begin. We settled up with the barkeep and made our way toward the activity. Chairs were set up in a large rectangle around the swimming pool and a fenced-off grassy area next to it. The crowd was a curious mix of city folk from the Manor and Gurney’s Inn, men in tuxedoes and women in pretty, elegant dresses, as well as locals in their canvas work pants and shirts and women in cotton frocks. But the two crowds stood apart, the locals standing behind chairs, while the dressed-up summer guests, like Dolly and me, took seats in the front row.

  “The first event will be the much-anticipated greasy pig contest!” the announcer said with great enthusiasm over the loudspeaker.

  “Oh my,” Dolly said. “This should be fun.”

  One by one, the announcer called the names of eleven boys between the ages of ten and eighteen and they walked out into the fenced-in area, took a bow and lined up. The final boy, no more than eleven, looked familiar, his hair shaved, his body skinny, and when he turned in our direction to take a bow I got a good look at his face. He looked exactly like Elizabeth’s younger son Gavin, whom I’d met in the fishing village, but taller with more chiseled features. I was sure he was her eldest son. I searched the crowd for Elizabeth’s face on the other side of the lawn but didn’t see her.

  “And to do the honor of greasing the pig, please give a grand round of applause to one of Montauk’s most loved business owners and employers, Mr. Dick White!”

  A man walked out onto the lawn in a white pharmacist’s jacket as the crowd roared with applause.

  “Who’s that?” I asked Dolly.

  “He owns White’s Pharmacy and most of the other shops in town.”

  He held a large can of Mazola oil in his hand and waved it around in the air creating even more applause, while another man walked a smallish pig, on a leash, to the center of the lawn. The pig received even more attention than Mr. White, who then covered the animal with oil and rubbed it in. The boys took off their undershirts, taking their positions and clapping their hands with anticipation.

  “On your mark,” the announcer called, “get set. Go!” The pig was released from its leash and after trotting a little in one direction, then another, it seemed to pick up on the excitement and began running furiously. The boys chased it around the lawn like a bunch of lunatics, leaping for it and hitting the grass on their bare bellies as if they were playing a game of competitive football. The crowd was screaming with delight and the pig looked like it was in on the fun, too. About ten minutes into the spectacle one of the boys took a dive for the pig and crashed into the temporary fencing that had been erected for the event. A flurry of tuxedoes and chiffon clambered to get out of the way as the pig made a run for the downed fencing, away from the green and straight toward the pool. The crowds were no longer separated as the entire audience left their chairs and standing posts behind and swarmed, en masse, to follow the boys who were following the pig. I grabbed Dolly’s arm and joined the chaos, both of us howling with laughter.

  There were suits up against fishing slacks and caps, ball gowns rubbing with work clothes, all chasing the action. The pig was fast—a horde of sweaty, dirty boys behind it. The pig was running for its life and the boys were running for their dinner. It kept heading for the pool and the boys followed. I didn’t think the pig knew what it was getting itself into—it just kept running. Its little legs took it straight over the edge of the pool, splashing into the water, and the boys leapt in after. The water splashed back onto all of us who were at the front.

  “Catch that pig!” cried one man who looked like he’d come straight from a fishing boat. “Get him by the back legs!” called out another. A few men even jumped in to be part of the madness, and even the women were giddy with excitement.

  A couple of the boys swam to the edge of the pool and caught their breath while the others ducked and swam and chased until one successfully grasped the swine around its chest right under its two front legs and swam, like a lifeguard saving a drowning child, to the stairs at the corner of the pool and struggled to hold the pig up to show his victory. The crowd roared.

  “And it looks like we have a winner!” the announcer called out.

  I strained to see if it was Elizabeth’s son who’d won the prize. I pushed my way through the crowd to get a better look, desperately hoping he’d won, but I couldn’t tell.

  “Come on,” I said to Dolly as I worked my way toward the front to get a better look, but I’d lost her in the hustle.

  By the edge of the swimming pool the winner was being announced, drying off and getting ready to receive his cash prize, as well as the pig, which a local family nearby seemed particularly excited about. The winner wasn’t Elizabeth’s boy, though. I searched the crowd and saw him and two other boys; one of them was Gavin, Elizabeth’s nine-year-old whom I’d met at the fishing village, standing with a tall, slim man who had his arm around the boy’s shoulder. I inched my way closer. My martini had given me a warm feeling of confidence and courage, so I walked around the edge of the pool toward them.

  “Congratulations, that was wonderful entertainment,” I said to the boy.

  He looked at me a little oddly. “I didn’t win, miss; he did,” he said, pointing to the winner.

  “Yeah, he didn’t win,” the younger boy chimed in.

  “Oh, but you were very close,” I said.

  “No I wasn’t.”

  “Okay, that’s enough, lad,” the man said. “No need to be rude to the lady.” He looked at me as if waiting for me to move on.

  “I’m Beatrice,” I said. “I know Elizabeth; you must be her husband, Patrick?”

  “I am,” he said, still skeptical.

  “I know her from the Manor,” I said. “She does our laundry.”

  “She does, yes.”

  “She’s wonderful; I mean she does such a fantastic job taking care of our clothes.” I knew I should stop talking, that it wasn’t exactly customary for me to walk with Elizabeth and the laundry cart the way that I had, but I couldn’t seem to find the right words to justify it so I kept trying to come up with something better. “Actually, I visited the village yesterday and I think I may have seen you and your friend walking up to your house.”

  “I remember,” he said. “She mentioned there was a guest at the Manor who was being very kind to her.”

  “Oh no,” I tried to object. “She’s the one who’s been kind.…”

  A man approached with two beers in his hands, giving one of them to Patrick.

  “Who’s this then?” he said. He was taller than Patrick and muscular, with tanned skin. His hair was chestnut brown, speckled with grey, and he desperately needed a shave.

  “She’s a summer guest; she’s been very good to my wife.”

  “Hello,” I said. “I’m Beatrice Bordeaux.”

  The man stared at my face intently and gave me a strange look. His eyes were quite shocking—an uncommonly bright shade of blue, so intense it made me glance away for a second.

  “And you are?” I said with a forced laugh. He continued to stare; it began to feel uncomfortable, and with those eyes I didn’t know where to look.

  “Thomas,” he said quietly, his expression unchanged. He ran his free hand through his hair, sweeping it back from his face.

  “Oh, that’s right. I saw the two of you walk by Elizabeth’s house yesterday; you called out to me and asked if I needed any help.” I looked to Patrick to confirm this and he took a drink of his beer. “She mentioned that you work at the lighthouse.”

  “Yes, I’m the keeper. But why are you … what are you doing here?” he asked.

  It was an odd question and Patrick seemed surprised by it, too.

  “Tom.” Patrick nudged his arm.
/>   Thomas shook his head. “Sorry, I thought for a minute, I thought I recognized you.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so.” I shrugged, trying to act normal, but his intensity was unsettling. I should move on, I thought, go back and find Dolly—yet I rambled on, strangely rooted to the spot, intrigued by his fascination. “That must be exciting, to work at a lighthouse. I was just telling Patrick his boy put in a great effort with the hog, really great.” I saw him glance down to my dress and I instinctively brushed out some imaginary creases. “I’m a bit too dressed up really; I didn’t know there would be a pig.”

  “No, you look very … grown-up.”

  I felt my cheeks blush and I looked to Patrick again.

  “He means, you probably don’t have greasy pig contests in the big city,” Patrick said, stealing a sharp look at Thomas.

  “We don’t.” I realized that the rest of the crowd had separated again into city folk and locals and I was definitely on the wrong side of the club. When I looked back, the keeper’s eyes were on the ground; he looked saddened all of a sudden. It was all quite odd.

  “Well, I’d better get back.” I nodded to them both. “It was a pleasure to meet you.” Then I made my way back through the crowd looking for Dolly.

  I couldn’t find her anywhere, but I felt a wave of strangeness. The interaction with the lighthouse keeper had been so peculiar and yet I couldn’t pinpoint what I had said to make him act that way. The pig contest had been such a wild and unexpected treat, but then that conversation had had a sobering effect. I walked past the bar, waited a few minutes, then turned and walked the other way looking for Dolly. I didn’t want to wander aimlessly alone or to be seen wandering alone, so I gave up and took a car back to the Manor.

  * * *

  That night I wrote my first article for Mr. Rosen—the way the pig was ceremoniously greased, the way these boys, some of them just a few years from manhood, had bared their chests, chests different, perhaps, from those of well-bred New York City boys. These were arms that had been pulling up lobster traps from the ocean floor since they were old enough to swim, backs that knew how it felt to shovel snow from the pathways in winter just so they could get outside and make the mile-long walk to school. Boys who, rather than learning how to sit quietly and read in the library, had been told to get outside and amuse themselves for hours, to navigate the docks, to untangle fishing nets for their fathers, to rip out the mussels and seaweed and anything else caught from the day’s catch. In the summer the beach was their playground, they’d surf on anything that would float, they’d swim until they were ravenous and of course they’d work. They were ball boys, they were skippers, they were caddies and at night they chased greased-up pigs around a fenced-in green to make a buck and maybe they’d win and enjoy the pride of feeding their family a whole pig for a week.

  I wrote about the contrast of tuxedoes and work clothes, simple cotton frocks against embellished gowns. Many summer guests had enjoyed cocktail hour at the Surf Club followed by dinner and dancing. The greasy pig contest had been a brief source of entertainment. For the locals it was the main event. I wrote about the flurry of excitement as the pig escaped and the sudden blurring of high fashion and hopeful fishermen moving together toward an unknown outcome.

  Most likely this wasn’t the Montauk Mr. Rosen was after, but it fascinated me; it sent my imagination soaring, to picture these lives, filling in the missing pieces with snippets Elizabeth had told me and glimpses I had seen. I scribbled it all down fast, put it in an envelope and sent it to Manhattan.

  10

  Harry and I ate an early dinner with a small group he’d sat with on the train ride to Montauk. It was Winston, his college friend, and his wife, Betty, and two other couples whom Harry knew from the business. We dined at The Claw, an outdoor deck overlooking the water next to Duryea’s Lobster Wholesalers, near the fishing village, before you crossed the train tracks. We ate lobster dipped in drawn butter with napkins tied around our necks. We watched the sun set over the Long Island Sound, the seagulls circling overhead waiting for scraps. Harry ate the coleslaw from my plate and still had the glistening of butter around his lips when he reached over and kissed me.

  “I missed you, Beatrice,” he said, toying with my freshly curled hair, pulling one ringlet down to my shoulder and letting it bounce back up to my chin. He topped up my wineglass, then sat back, draping one arm around my shoulders, tapping a cigarette out of the box with the other.

  I can’t honestly say I missed him through the week, but I did need him on weekends. During the week I started to enjoy the freedom of staying up until the early hours of the morning reading, and wearing loose frocks and nightgowns around the room for as long as I wanted, no rushing to dress. And yet when the Friday evening train arrived I felt relief. Even after just a few weeks in Montauk it was becoming too easy to forget how it felt to be part of something, part of a couple. Alone among acquaintances who felt like strangers, it was easy to wander aimlessly from luncheon to afternoon tea. When Harry arrived on the weekends it gave me purpose again, a duty to be dressed and ready to attend this function or that, to be made up for my husband, to accompany him to dinners.

  I’d taken a fancy to wilderness walking on the weekday mornings before many of the women were up for breakfast. Some might call it hiking, but I didn’t seek out the trails that had been cleared and labeled. I liked to push through the brush, climb over fallen trees, wrestle my way through branches and come back with brambles in my hair. Sometimes I’d find blackberries or raspberries and fill myself up on them. I saw wildlife I didn’t even know the names for, things that I knew none of the other women would see. I marveled at the contrast of wooded areas so close to the sea; I could be staring down a family of deer in one instant and picking up sand crabs in the next. I’d never been to a place so alive with a kind of nature that could be so different.

  Harry would have thought I was crazy going out there alone, but there was something serene about being alone in nature when the rest of the Manor was still sleeping. It reminded me of being a kid when Charlie would wake me up early in the summer and we’d go down by the train tracks with buckets and come home hours later with more blueberries and blackberries than Mom could ever use. We’d eat cobbler and pie for weeks and jams for months after that.

  There were others in the Manor, of course, who were early risers, but they were mostly the nannies, getting up with the kids and taking them to breakfast while the ladies still slumbered. Gossip traveled fast at the Manor, between nannies and the other ladies, so I made a point of carrying extra change in my pocket to tip the waiters and busboys as I came and went through the service exit in my long trousers, Wellington boots and tousled hair.

  * * *

  After our lobster dinner and after the gents each had a whiskey and cigar downstairs back at the Manor, Harry and I went up to the room, turned on the radio and listened to Roosevelt’s fireside chat. Even in the heat of the summer Harry liked to light a fire when we listened to the President talk. I could tell the bellboys thought it absurd when they came to the room with kindling and logs. It was something his father liked to do and now Harry was adamant about it, a tradition of the previous six years of FDR’s presidency that he felt he needed to uphold, as if it were a superstition that if he didn’t light a fire things would a take a turn for the worse, a turn in which the depression would not just affect the farmers and the laborers and the middle class and the working class but ruin us all.

  “Hear, hear,” Harry said, when Roosevelt spoke of “a restoration of confidence,” raising his double old-fashioned to the flames dancing in the fireplace.

  “It is because you are not satisfied, and I am not satisfied, with the progress that we have made in finally solving our business and agricultural social problems that I believe the great majority of you want your own government to keep on trying to solve them,” the President spoke to us in his elegant, down-to-earth tone. “In simple frankness and in simple honesty, I need all the help
I can get—and I see signs of getting more help in the future from many who have fought against progress with tooth and nail in the past.”

  And that was what I loved about him, this President of ours; he needed us, he needed our help and our feedback and our optimism and our get-back-to-work attitudes, to pull this country out of the trenches. We felt good when we listened to him speak; we felt his confidence; we believed in it. We all just needed a little hope.

  “He’s a good man,” Harry said, the way he did after most of the chats we listened to, “a good man indeed. You know he could have just coasted through this second term; that’s what some people in politics told him to do.”

  “But he didn’t,” I said, feeling Roosevelt’s power to unite us, me and Harry, us and the rest of the country. “He’s making changes for the better.”

  Harry changed out of his clothes and into a robe and started brushing his teeth in the adjoining bathroom.

  “So I was thinking I might pop into the city on the train this week with Dolly,” I said, lingering at the bathroom door. “She has a few meetings at the factory and, well, it would be nice for us to spend our anniversary together,” I said, not entirely certain that he remembered. “Just for the night, or maybe two.”

  He didn’t speak right away, but his body tensed as he brushed remnants of tooth powder into the sink and rinsed. He stood up straight and ran his hands through his hair, noticing a few greys and pulling at them.

  “Unless you’re busy with work,” I said.

  “It’s a hectic week, so I won’t have much free time. It’s probably not worth the trouble.” He kept on with his bedtime routine and I let the silence be, feeling utterly rejected. This time in Montauk didn’t feel like it was good for us, as Harry had promised; we weren’t getting any closer. Being here made me feel like we were moving further apart.