by Paul Monette
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu …
Aye, in the very temple of Delight
Veiled Melancholy has her sov’reign shrine.…
Keats, I promptly recognized. The “Ode on Melancholy,” though I’d never much given it any thought since college, and certainly couldn’t figure why she recalled it now. I would’ve guessed we’d come to the perfect place for
… on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains.
Except this auction would be the woman’s version—Ozyman-dia, queen of queens.
But the poetry lesson was over. We hastened back downstairs and out the door, as if Megs had been holding her breath the whole time we’d been inside. “It’s quarter to twelve,” she said. “We’d better go fetch the hamper.”
As we came around to the side again, we could see that a safe had been brought out under the trees, the cast-iron kind with a double combination dial, the one that used to advertise how it survived the Chicago fire, or was it Hiroshima? A uniformed guard stood on either side.
“The jewelry,” Megs remarked sardonically, and we headed back to the car to retrieve the picnic. She let me carry it, the wicker nicely creaking against my thigh, and led the way down a garden alley that ran below the house. I saw where we were bound for now: a white gazebo on the point of the bluff, not visible from the house. It could’ve used a paint job, and the ceiling corners were caked with mud, swallows’ nests. But the wrought-iron table and chairs were sturdy, and the first thing out of the hamper was an embroidered linen tablecloth, with napkins to match.
Then the heavy silver and the Wedgewood china—we were worlds away from a Glennie’s picnic; thirty-five hundred milk stoppers would’ve barely covered a spoon in Megs’s kit. We opened a bottle of Mumm’s and clinked a toast, though Megs took only the barest sip, on account of her missing stomach. But I was happy to drink the rest, toasting the yachts below and the anxious swallows who flew in and out above our heads. I don’t even recall what we ate, only the sensory overload of the service, the sterling tines against my tongue.
“So what should we bid on?” I asked. “The bridge table?”
Megs frowned in distaste. “Nothing at all. I don’t want any more things, do you?”
Oh, I did, but I lied. Nicely parroting back her breeziest air: “You’re right. It’s all just baggage, isn’t it?”
“Exactly. Besides, haven’t you learned your lesson yet? There are never enough milk stoppers.”
We sat silent a while in the shady pavillion. Then—I must’ve had half the bottle by that point—I began to wax sentimental. “I promise to write when I get home,” I declared with vinous fervor. “Maybe we can start on the Brontes together. And I’ll be back, of course. We’ll see each other again.”
She paused for what felt like minutes, though the smile—her ineffable smile, as always—never wavered. “No, we won’t,” she retorted at last. “You have all your other things to write. And anyway, you’ve got to go be a buccaneer. Somebody has to.” It was all very playful, of course; but even I, with my head full of bubbles, knew we were saying goodbye. Without rancor, without even melancholy. It was just what it was.
She didn’t go with the rest of us to the airport in the morning, but she made an appearance as we packed our gear into Grandmother’s Rover, saronged again but well before noon. She went around the half-circle of us and pecked both our cheeks in the French manner. I was the last and got no different kisses from the others. But she held my shoulders a moment longer and met my eyes.
“Maybe someday,” she smiled, “you’ll write an ode for me.”
And that, as they say, was the long and the short of it. The end of Megs and me, of Bermuda and me, and the closest I ever came to an Empress in the flesh. That last spring term at Sutton Hill was as dingy as ever, cruel and stupid bureaucrats making all their administrative fuss, picking at nits, as they sent their overprivileged charges out into the world. Meanwhile the entire lot of us young Turk drudges quit en masse, dispersing to the four winds. I kept up for a while with my friend who was Megs’s nephew, but then he and his wife split up, and he married the high school babysitter who’d gone along on our mid-ocean Easter jaunt. I had no connection left to Grandmother’s pirate kingdom, hadn’t even taken down the address.
And what was I supposed to send a letter about? My crazy years at Canton Academy, struggling out of the closet like a chrysalis? When Megs would cross my mind, I’d think: she’s probably gone by now. I’d never quite believed the cancer while I was there, but afterward I put it all together—the fateful things she always said—and couldn’t believe otherwise.
I remained in the Keatsian family business for another half-decade, but I never did write Megs’s ode. Not good enough to, among other things, and not exactly gasping like Keats and coughing up blood. As for Megs’s fond prediction that I would go into the buccaneer trade, surely I’d have disappointed her there as well. As fate would have it, I’ve written her story instead; and as fate would have it double, I’ve written it moored in the coral lagoon in Bora Bora, and now under sail to Moorea. Buccaneer country, no doubt about it, but I haven’t a cutlass and don’t wear a headrag, not even a gold hoop earring. Back home I live in a pirate’s shark pit, but these are pirates in Armani suits, no coral harbor to anchor in, no sea breeze to muss their hair.
But I’d like to be able to tell her I finally got her lesson on things. It took me a couple of decades, and too much time among the gross excesses of people with a great deal more loot than consciousness. And it isn’t that I don’t like presents, both the giving and the getting, especially at Christmas—still silently counting how many. But things that are anvils tied to the ankles while a body is trying to swim—enough of those. I don’t need any more evidence that riches end up in bank vaults.
And I’d like her to know how free she seemed on that long-ago Easter break—despite the gutting of her insides, and an air of otherworldly strangeness and isolation that must have left her feeling quite alone. And yet the glimmer in her eyes when she was quiet affirmed, it seemed, a deep core of liberation somewhere in her heart, like a white bird soaring. Maybe I’m not so free as that, but I have to say I’m as rid of chattels as I can be, here in the sailing lanes of an earthly paradise. Nothing in vaults. Even if it’s an illusion, experience alone feels like the one thing slightly ahead of mortal, sometimes a bare footfall ahead. The rest is baggage. And Megs was the one who taught me that.
In this respect, especially, Winston’s my ace in the hole. One thing’s sure, there won’t be a yard sale after I’m gone. I like giving stuff away. We haven’t quite reached the stage where if you tell me something’s pretty—picking it up off an end table—it’s yours, and over your protests I will be wrapping it in tissue and tucking it into a bag. Not quite yet; but the notion is appealing, placing all my things like orphans, finding them good homes.
And yet, perversely, I can’t imagine leaving behind my Dorothea Lange and my Ansel Adams, or the pebble on my desk from Delphi, fetched from the icy bed of the Kastalian Spring. Or even my gray Italian cardigan lined with satin—so threadbare, so worn in, it makes me look as seedy and eccentric as any old Boston Brahmin coupon-clipper. These things aren’t just mine, these things are indistinguishable from me.
Well, we’ll see how far I get with my dispersal of the goods, and otherwise Winston will keep what constitutes a home, not including some few pieces to be carted off to my brother and sister-in-law. Intact enough, my furnishings, that they won’t be picked over by estate-sale sluts. Not that Mrs. Hamilton Harbor could have cared in her last draconian year, mostly confined to her bedroom and hospital gear at the end. The last of the line, no children, with maybe a scant third cousin who could summon neither a sigh of regret nor a grasping
lust for all that post-Victorian clutter. Who needs eighty doilies? Let them go to the highest bidder, with the ghosts and carriage-trade etiquette in the bargain.
Inexorably, somehow, the moral of that story transports me into the thick of another parable, twenty years after Bermuda and seven years into AIDS. The barony in question was on the Gold Coast of Long Island, so-called by the robber millionaires themselves as they built their Norman chateaux and Tudor manors, their Grand Trianons and Scottish castles. A thousand of them, constructed in the heady years between the century’s turn and the Crash, once lined Long Island Sound. Thirty years of Gatsby-itis, including the model for the Old Sport’s place itself, Fitzgerald’s dream vision of ultima Thule.
And when the fuck-you money disappeared, the houses became just so many white elephants, requiring staffs of sixty or eighty and sit-down dinners for half a hundred. Abandoned to taxes, boarded up and vandalized, the Tiffany cathedral ceilings shattered, the stone-carved balustrades carted off piecemeal to a later suburban hell, the marble gods and goddesses at the center of the mazes rendered headless, an age of property stripped of gilt like the statue of The Happy Prince in Oscar Wilde.
Some stand in ruins still, recorded in all their rotting splendor by Monica Randall in The Mansions of Long Island’s Gold Coast.4 Of that thousand in their prime, perhaps a few dozen are left, inhabited by think tanks and cloistered religious orders and the random secret diplomatic corps. In the eighties Randall identified only eight still held in private hands. And one of these, on a marsh-rimmed island just off Glen Cove, is the subject of our sermon here—an AIDS sermon, as it happens, though we’ll come to that twist presently. As they say in the picture business, first we have to fill in the backstory.
Originally constructed for a Midas banker of the Morgan class, a titan who struck a deal with the City of New York to construct the Holland Tunnel and keep the excavated stone. Which was barged in giant slabs worthy of the Pyramids to this thirty-acre island forty minutes from Manhattan. (Forty minutes today; the weekend guests then would arrive more languidly by water.) From the iron-gray bedrock they built a house of fifty-five rooms, walls three feet thick, with wings extending from an earldom of public salons, embracing two acres of lawn that front the Sound, shaded by oaks and sycamores. From the dock one proceeded across the lawn, trailed by bearers with steamer trunks to a fountained formal entrance.
The landscape architect was Olmsted, late of Central Park, who laid out the thirty acres with an eye to what effect they’d make a quarter century later. The vast English garden lay on the inland side of the house, with a triple allée of hedges and borders and blossoming trees. Including the largest weeping bee’ch on Long Island—or was it North America?—with a suite of outdoor furniture in the shady tent of branches reaching to the ground. Ideal for a summer tête-à-tête out of Edith Wharton. Stables and kennels and greenhouses and barns and a folly, all manner of cutting gardens and vegetables, all out of sight of the house.
Midas and Missus entertained in twenties ducal style, five-day weekends, all that. They even kept their assets through the thirties, when everyone else’s bankers were leaping out of windows and selling apples on street corners. Midas died in the seventies, fat and gouty, leaving the place to his wife—who promptly had a stroke or two and ended in a nursing home eating off paper plates. Her own three golden children had long since ceased to speak to Ma and Pa, and as for inheritance wanted no part of a white elephant. Either sell it whole or tear it down and subdivide. For some years there was a standoff, as the stone edifice in the salt marsh grew emptier and emptier. When a prospective buyer decided to offer a bid, he’d only seen the place from a helicopter, and understood there were certain conditions to the sale.
He visited the shriveling widow in her tiny private cell at the Golden Crest convalescent facility, from which no one escaped alive. She was sipping her Postum from a styrofoam cup, she who’d had a dozen different china patterns in the old days, service for a hundred right down to the fingerbowls. A photograph of the mansion—which only she called by its proper name, East Wind—was perched on the tray table between the Kleenex and the bedpan. Though more than slightly balmy, speaking garbled words out of the side of her mouth, she told him the house needed lots of work. But she wanted it saved so badly that she’d bargain-basement the price.
“But it’s not East Wind itself that matters now,” she said, and fixed him with rheumy eye and the clutch of a palsied hand. “Mr. Hall, say you’ll take care of my dogs till they die, and East Wind is yours.”
More than the china and the Gobelin upholstery and the Coromandel screens, she missed her brood of Labradors. When Arthur Hall said yes, he didn’t know the black Lab population was forty-five; but he saw a shiver of near ecstatic relief transform the old lady’s face, the very last thing finally settled.
“May you be as happy as we were there,” she managed to choke through tears. Having outlived happiness for what must have seemed like a century. And no, the head nurse curtly informed Arthur on his way out, they didn’t allow their ladies to be visited by dogs.
So. The very same cautionary tale as Bermuda, right down to the fingerbowls and the bedpan. Not as if one really needed to hear it again. There is of course the additional twist of Mrs. Midas’s final throes, something I was spared at the Hamilton Harbor rummage sale. And of course the dogs themselves—the old ones gone within a year, the young ones penned in their kennel runs, or walked in packs along the shore, baying in unison like a hunt—for close to a decade. What had they outlived exactly, assuming the kibble and scraps were up to par?
Or is that just more of the simpering bathos of Western culture, that envies a dog for needing no possessions and, in the next breath, scathes the human dispossessed for causing all their own misery? It surely needs no pointing out that everyone here—from Harrington Sound to East Wind, indeed all the way to Cook’s Bay in Moorea—has more than enough of everything. Mountains more.
But that only makes the cautionary tale more pertinent to the global tidal wave of poverty and genocide, economic slavery and genital mutilation. For the victims—for virtually everyone, that is—the proper response to all of this is Shelley’s gloating sneer:
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and …
… have a good laugh. The problems of doilies and knuckle-sized emeralds, even of cardigan sweaters, are fodder for a cosmic joke.
And yet the fall of the high and mighty satisfies some fundamental human need—as Sophocles and Shakespeare knew, masters of the art of Schadenfreude. We have to believe the rich will get theirs, their things picked over by jackals and buzzards, or we could scarcely bear the pitiful cache of milk stoppers that constitutes the sum of our earthly goods. Because we resist believing that riches are next to godliness, despite the huckstering of the God squad, who could easily find some Jesus-y use for the eighty doilies, but who much prefer negotiable securities—the ticket of priestly commerce that ensures a rich man’s passage through the needle’s eye, and all his camels besides.
We resist it, all right, even though the evidence is so much on the other side—the trappings of their baronies, the ceaseless banqueting, the platinum credit cards, and themselves as likely as not to reach their eighties and nineties still possessed of everything. Republican thieves especially (talk about pirates), and shahs and caliphs and despots, in the banking trade or otherwise. No, we have to believe they’ll die alone, un-mourned, in agony, their useless diamonds glittering through their seizures, splashed with the blood they cannot keep from coughing up. We need their bad deaths writ very large, or how could we ever let go ourselves?
But back to East Wind and the sermon in its stones. It was my friend Craig, freelance pauper and journalist, who stumbled onto it. At his AIDS support group meeting in a West Village vestry hall, he struck up a friendship with one James Merion—the two of them having established that they had about the same number of immune cells left (basically none)
and a more or less equal body count of KS lesions and dead friends. Thus equally far along the road, they sat to a cappuccino. Craig was hating New York in the summer, and was too penniless for a stint in the Pines.
“Well,” offered James, “then you should come out to Glen Cove. We have a big house there.”
To put it mildly. As soon as Craig saw the scope of Midas’s gold he turned into the man who came to dinner, spending nearly every four-day weekend at East Wind, and usefully besides. For the owner, Arthur Hall, supported his and James’s life in the castle harbor by means of weekly business jaunts to London, Rome, and the Persian Gulf, where he was a major buccaneer in the oil trade. And he genuinely worried over leaving his lover alone, even in a mansion crawling with help, no matter if James protested he was happy just tending the garden—that is, overseeing an outdoor staff of eight and a resident botanist besides. Craig had therefore found his situation, as a semi-permanent AIDS buddy.
Through the whole of 1986 Craig waxed delirious about East Wind, playing it for all it was worth like a lifesize game of Clue—Miss Scarlet in the conservatory with the lead pipe. I was happy for him, unambiguously so, knowing how his lust for a taste of baronial life had never been quite assuaged. That is, he’d never had his Bermuda. Regrettably, though, his weekly reports from the island coincided with Roger’s last six months. I was in a frenzy of throwing out books whenever I wasn’t occupied pumping Roger with IV meds or with the endless round of doctors’ appointments—unless we were actually doing time in solitary on the tenth floor at UCLA. Vanity of vanities … all is vanity was more or less my take on the bulletins from the Gold Coast.
“You and Roger just have to come out here!” Craig would wax enthusiastic without thinking. Roger was all but blind by that point, and stricken by the loss of his own hillside patch of garden. We needed thirty acres like a hole in the head. Sardonically, in my own pre-mourning desperation, I privately disdained the pleasures of East Wind, doubting they would make a day of difference to the speed of all our dying.