“We were told it was safe up here?” one man called out as he came in with his family. “Is it?” We all assured him that it was. Then George’s car pulled up and everyone raced to the window to see who he’d managed to bring to safety. His wife staggered out of the car and two men from the Manor ran to bring her into the lobby. Elizabeth was with them, too, holding baby Jake in one arm and gripping little Johnny’s hand with the other. Five more men fought the wind to get outside where they formed a tight circle around them and escorted them inside. Both boys were crying hysterically when they arrived.
I ran to her and hugged her and when I did she started sobbing. “The boys are at the school,” she said. “A whole bunch of the older kids went in today to volunteer and paint. I couldn’t get to them! I had to get the little ones to safety.”
“Oh God.” I felt my stomach flip and thought again of my own baby. “They are going to be okay,” I tried to reassure her. “They have to stay where they are; they’ll be safer there.” More empty promises when all we could do was hope.
“Patrick’s delivering mail today; he could be anywhere.” She began to sob again.
I picked up Johnny and walked him over to the chairs, trying to soothe the little boy, but he was too worked up.
“The houses in the village are coming apart like sheets of paper,” Elizabeth said. “We were all in Gerry Dock’s house because it’s bigger and stronger, but I dread to think what we’ll have to go back to.”
Another woman from the fishing village had arrived with her husband; she was delirious, soaked to the bone and walking around in circles, pulling at her hair. “My house was swept out to the Sound!” she wailed. “A huge wave of water hit my street and the house just slid right into the water!” Her husband sat at the bottom of the staircase with his head in his hands. “It’s gone; everything we had is just gone. We’ve got nothing. Nothing.”
I wanted them to stop. It was horrible, just horrible, for them, but I wanted the woman to calm down so that Elizabeth would be calmer, too. Several people went to the woman and tried to get her to sit down, but she couldn’t; she kept pacing, ripping at her hair.
“There were other houses, too, that just slid away and crumbled.”
“You’re safe now. You’re here with us and your husband’s here,” one of the Manor staff was telling her.
“If we’d stayed five more minutes we would all be underwater right now!” she shrieked.
“Yes, exactly, but at least you got to safety.”
“We have nothing; everything is gone.” It was as if she couldn’t hear anyone. “We don’t even have a fork, or a cup, or a pencil or a pair of socks.…” She began listing every mundane item from her house that she would no longer have and it made everything so real and devastating. I wondered if by the end of all this Elizabeth would have anything left either. I just wanted the woman to stop talking so we could all pretend this wasn’t happening.
George’s wife clung to him and didn’t let him go. She hadn’t spoken a word since she arrived, but she was clearly shaken up. George had his arms around her tightly.
* * *
We passed whiskey around in mugs to calm our nerves, but when a chicken hutch, its chickens and debris flew past the window, followed by what looked like part of the roof from the maids’ quarters, which slammed into one of the cars and then off the side of the Manor, we knew whiskey wasn’t going to be much help. There were about sixty of us at that point, including the Manor guests, the staff, the fishing village folk and everyone else who’d been smart enough to come up there early for safety. We all took swigs and passed the mugs on anyway.
Around 6:00 p.m. the wind abruptly died and the air grew cold. Clark organized teams of men who went out to survey the damage and look for those who hadn’t made it back yet. The first team went to the school. By that point, baby Jake and Johnny were sleeping in chairs and it was all we could do to get Elizabeth to stay with them and not join the rescue teams to find Billy and Gavin. A doctor gave the hysterical woman from the fishing village and Elizabeth each a pill to calm their nerves, but this just seemed to make Elizabeth more anxious.
“I’m not taking a sleeping pill; my boys and my husband are missing!” she shouted.
“It’s not a sleeping pill; it’s a barbiturate,” the doctor said in a soothing voice. “It will stop you from being so upset and you will be able to concentrate more on getting your family back.” Eventually she gave in and took the pill, which seemed to make her lethargic but no less upset.
I couldn’t stand being in the Manor lobby a minute longer waiting helplessly, so I went outside and walked around the property. It was an ugly mess. Smaller trees running along the side of the Manor had toppled like bowling pins. The lawn, usually so neat and perfectly manicured, was thick with debris, branches, leaves, a huge wooden beam and planks of wood that must have been ripped from someone’s barn or home. The fence surrounding the tennis courts was flat against the ground as if it had been steamrolled and the tree near the service entrance where I’d so often sat and waited for Elizabeth to come up the hill to collect the laundry had been ripped from the ground, its roots exposed and raw like hair pulled from a scalp. The tree had landed in the middle of the picnic bench where we always ate lunch after tennis, slicing it in half, right down the center.
Around 8:00 p.m. a pale and half-dressed man in a state of shock stumbled into the Manor.
“It’s all gone,” he said as he entered the room. “The fishing village is washed away.”
People from the village began to cry; one man fell to his knees and wept. Elizabeth sat with her boys and covered her face with her hands. We still had no news of her two older boys or Patrick and now she had no home to go back to.
Slowly, others trudged into the Manor in various states of shock, many of them with injuries. Bedroom windows in the Manor had been left open that morning and many were ripped off their hinges by the wind, leaving several rooms severely flooded, so the women made beds on the floor of the Manor’s lounge area out of sheets, towels and bedspreads.
Clarissa, Mary Van de Coop, Kathleen and I set up an assembly line of sorts. Clarissa and Mary received the injured and brought them to a “hospital” area where we had also set up makeshift beds. There Kathleen and I helped people out of ripped and bloody clothes; we cleaned and wrapped their wounds if they were minor and sent them to the doctor’s corner if they were more serious. The doctor was a guest from the city and the only one at the Manor, so we sent the most serious injuries to him and tended to the others ourselves. One man walked in supporting his arm at such an unnatural angle we all knew it was badly broken, but when we tried to remove his shirt he passed out cold, so we padded the floor for him and gave him a cold compress until the doctor could see him.
* * *
While we recorded who had arrived safely, Clarissa’s husband started a list for all those who were missing family members, including possible places they could be so the rescue teams could be more efficient in finding loved ones. People crowded around him shouting out names. “My Andrew was out on the boat with five other men; they went out for striped bass. Oh God,” one woman sobbed. “My boy was working the kitchen at John’s Pancake House; please go there. Please go and get my boy and bring him back.”
“Jeanie’s not back yet!” Kathleen called out. “Jeanie and Cecil.”
“They’ll be with Harry; I’m sure of it,” Clark said.
I had a horrible thought that Jeanie might be in trouble; she had been so adamant about staying at the Beach Club when all the other women piled into the car.
By ten o’clock I was physically and emotionally exhausted. It was as if my body and my mind were already asleep and I was forcing my eyes to remain open.
“You need to get some rest,” Dolly said. “We all do.” She took me by the hand and made a little bed of towels and pillows from the chair. “Just lie here and close your eyes. It’s the baby taking up your energy.”
“But what about ev
eryone who’s still missing, Dolly? Harry’s still not back and I’m worried about Thomas; he went to Connecticut this morning,” I said.
“He’ll be fine; Connecticut will be just fine,” she said. “Anyway, you should be worried about your husband.”
“I am worried. I’m just so tired.”
She brushed my hair back from my face and as soon as I let my eyes close I must have fallen asleep, because when I woke I heard Harry’s voice.
“Beatrice.” He was crouching down next to me. “Beatrice, are you okay?”
I instinctively sat up and put my arms around him. He was cold and wet and shaking and he held me tight. “Thank God you’re okay,” he said. “Thank God the baby is okay. It was all I could think about!”
I looked around. It was black out and the place was lit with candles; people were sleeping on the floor or in chairs, wrapped in blankets or towels. If Harry was here then everyone else should be here, too, the kids, Jeanie, maybe even Thomas would have come back early, but I didn’t see anyone else.
“What happened?” I asked. “Who else came with you?”
“We got as far as the church when the car stalled.” He was shivering as he spoke.
“Who?” I stood up and led him to a pile of dry towels.
“Me and the rest of the guys.”
“Jeanie and Cecil weren’t with you?”
“No, they went a different way, I think; it all happened so fast. The water was up past the wheels of the car. It was so deep on Main Street we had to fight our way out and waded over from the car to the church and we climbed up to the highest point we could get to, the choir balcony.”
I wrapped a towel around Harry’s shoulders, noticing the familiar small patch of hair in the center of his chest.
“How did you get back?” another woman asked, bringing more rags and clothes.
“We walked over the golf course and through the cattle fields to get here. There are too many downed power lines and flooded roads in town,” he said.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” I said once he was in dry clothes.
Elizabeth was sleeping with her two kids, thank God. She was frowning in her sleep and had her arms around both boys.
Word seemed to have spread that the Manor was a safe haven and there was food and drink available. Maybe a hundred people made their way there. They came in throughout the night and we fed them, gave them dry clothes and blankets and updated the list of the missing, and as the men came back, bringing the wounded and the scared, we learned more about the devastation that this storm had caused.
“All the windows are blown out of Dick White’s store and the front wall came down,” one of the men in Clark’s group said.
“Main Street is a river,” someone else said. “Office desks and restaurant tables and living room furniture were all bobbing down the street. There are abandoned cars everywhere caught in the flood; we saw one with its headlights shining up from underwater—it’s really eerie.” We listened entranced and devastated, all the while we had our eyes on the door waiting for others to walk in.
At some point in the early morning about thirty kids came through the Manor doors looking for their mothers and fathers and falling into their arms or the arms of strangers. Billy and Gavin ran to Elizabeth and clung to her. Except for scrapes and bruises, all of the kids from the school were fine. When the rains started pounding the rooftop and the first window shattered Mr. Farrell had made sure all the children in the school filed into the auditorium and instructed them to climb onto the stage that had been assembled that very weekend, to wait it out. They were on higher ground, and though many of the classrooms suffered damage and one wall collapsed, the auditorium held up fine. They had left as a group, though, looking for home, and that’s why it had taken them so long to make their way to the Manor.
“It was so scary,” Gavin said.
“I wasn’t scared,” Billy said, but the look on his face gave him away. He put his arm around his mother’s waist and didn’t leave her side. “Do you think Dad’s safe?” he kept asking.
“He’ll be fine, Billy,” she said, some of her strength back now that she had all four boys around her. “You know him; he’ll be helping people right now; that’s just how he is.”
But Patrick was still unaccounted for and none of us would be at ease until he walked through the doors. Elizabeth and I kept going to the window, opening the door, seeing if someone was walking up the driveway.
I should have felt a small sense of relief knowing that Thomas was in Connecticut, but until I heard from him I couldn’t rest easy. What if he had gotten caught in the storm on his way there? The ferries probably weren’t running if the damage was as bad as they said, and the roads sounded like they were undrivable, so he might be stuck out there until the mess was cleared up. I imagined different scenarios over and over in my head all that day, longing to get any word of his safety.
At sunrise the next round of men had gone out, Harry included. Two cars were sent to East Hampton, the nearest town with sufficient resources, to bring back supplies and much-needed medicine, including morphine, but when they reached the narrow Napeague Stretch they had to turn back; it was completely underwater and Montauk had become an island. No emergency vehicles or supplies could get in, and no one could get out.
* * *
That day the school auditorium became the morgue. Five bodies were taken there, laid out and identified. Later in the afternoon the news came that one of the Manor guests, a female, had been brought into the school. We all gasped. Jeanie was the only woman from our group unaccounted for. Cecil had made it to the Manor in the early hours of the morning, frantically looking for Jeanie, and since then he’d been out repeatedly searching for her. He had returned briefly to the Manor for water before heading back again when the news came. He let out a loud wail and collapsed to the floor sobbing. We all tried to reassure him that it couldn’t possibly be Jeanie, that she’d be smart enough and strong enough to make it, but he just kept shaking his head.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “She wouldn’t leave; she was acting like it was all going to blow over; she was being very brave about the whole thing.” He sobbed again, then took a deep breath. “Then this wave just came out of nowhere, this huge wave hit the beach and everyone started running and we made it only as far as the next street and I pulled her into that little lunch place, it was raised up off the ground, and we ran straight up the few stairs. It was the stupidest thing we could have done because then we were trapped inside.”
“No,” I said, holding his hand, trying to calm him. “No, you did what you thought was best.” He was shaking and freezing cold. “Can we get more blankets over here?” I called out to no one in particular.
“There was an explosion of water; it knocked the door down behind us and chased us inside. I told her we had to grab something that might float; we were getting pulled by the flooding water.” He sobbed again, loudly. It was all so awful. “She wrapped her arms around this floor-to-ceiling beam as if it would keep her safe, keep her grounded, but the water was rising. She was so frightened. I started to climb out the window and I thought she was right behind me, but when I turned around she hadn’t let go. I held on to the window shutter and reached for her, but it ripped off its hinges and we were pulled apart!” he cried out, and we all kept saying the same thing over and over, but even as I tried to reassure him I didn’t believe it myself. I was terrified of the truth.
He looked up at me with a strange expression of surprise. “She was talking about you when the rain started to pour,” he said.
I looked around uncomfortably, hoping he meant someone else. “Me?” I said.
“Yes.” He took my hand, hopeful almost, as if I might be able to provide some insight into her whereabouts. “She said she had something to tell me, that it was something about you and her, and that’s when everyone started running.” He dropped his head and began to sob again.
I didn’t know what to say. “She’s
going to be fine, Cecil,” I said, releasing my hand from his grip and placing it on his shoulder. “She’s going to be just fine.”
Later Cecil returned from the school ashen. A few of his friends led him directly upstairs to one of the dry rooms. We had all been wrong with our fake assurances. It was as if he had died himself. Jeanie, we were told, was brought in with just shreds of clothes and full of seawater. No one could believe that she hadn’t made it. People began to cry quietly for a woman who many disliked, but others looked up to, even idolized. At that moment it didn’t matter what anyone thought of her, it didn’t matter what had happened in the past, because it was all over now. Nothing could be taken back, fixed, smoothed over. Jeanie Barnes was gone.
Elizabeth joined the other women and me; we all rolled our sleeves up and got on with it, side by side. I think she was trying to distract herself. Every few moments she’d stop and look out the window. I kept telling her that Patrick was probably helping others, I repeated back to her what she had told her boys, but the more time passed the harder it became to reassure her.
Harry worked with the rest of the men, city folk and locals working side by side, coming back briefly with updates, then trekking back out, sorting through debris and rubble to find those still missing. The list was constantly amended.
Someone reported that the post office had been torn from its foundation next to White’s Pharmacy and ended up in one piece all the way at the other end of town by the grocery store. The mailbox and all its contents had been seen bobbing through town in the flood. The spiteful letter I’d mailed to Mr. Rosen would be drowning, too, thank God. The thought of my vengefulness, exposing people and their secrets and lies, now seemed so despicable. I felt ashamed for ever writing it. And now, Jeanie gone. The fragility of human life laid out on the floor of the school auditorium.
That night Patrick walked through the front door of the Manor with cuts on his face and arms and tears in his eyes. He wore drenched, ripped, filthy clothes, looking as if he hadn’t slept for days, searching for his wife and his boys, and when he set his eyes on one, two, three, four, all five of them he crumbled.
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